A day in the blog’s life.

It’s not a 04-01-joke, it’s like the Slashdot effect looks. Someone mentioned my old article (“Anicent tags museum“) in a comment to the Slashdot post and it resulted in a traffic that Chronicles usually have during a whole month.

http://shipit.kubuntu.org

Thanks, Ubuntu!

I told I was not going to upgrade to Gutsy so far. Now I’m thinking that perhaps, I will need to do so because an important thing is going to happen soon – KDE 4 has been announced to be finally released in January, 2008. I am not sure it will be available through the Feisty repo’s.

Regarding the Gutsy received: It’s nice to see that you’ve got what you’ve ordered. Before, I’ve received Ubuntu (without “K”) disks instead of Kubuntu (with “K”) I needed. Also, it was delivered really quickly – about two weeks (yeah, quickly for my geographical location, of course). I was waiting for Feisty a month or so.

But hmm… they forgot the stickers! My Kubuntu (with “K”) box is still decorated with Ubuntu (without “K”) sticker :-)

/**
 * HelloWorld
 */
public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello world!");
    }
}

See also this and this examples of Java code, this example of Python and this XML. Actually 12 programming/markup languages are supported by the syntax highlighter.

What’s good

• It’s an eye-candy
• Language-dependent syntax highlighting, of course
• Horizontal scrolling of the code block, if it’s needed. Now I don’t have to bother how the lines are long
• You can copy my code into your clipboard by a single click

What’s bad

There was a bug when HTML-reserved characters (“<“, “>“, “&“) were displayed as HTML entities (“<” etc). It has been fixed just today. I also noticed that the single backslash chars (“\”) are not displayed and must be escaped with another backslash (“\\”) – hi, PHP geeks!

[upd] The problem with backslash has also been fixed. Thanks to Joseph Scott from WordPress for fast responding and fixing it![/upd]

Sadly enough, code posting is incompatible with WYSIWYG, if you bother about indentation of your code. TinyMCE visual editor will eat all your leading spaces and tabs.

This decision seems to be related with recent turn of portal orientation towards a community-oriented service. As SourceKibitzer’s CEO Mark Koffman told me, “we are moving from software towards the people behind it”. Recently, the portal has launched new features to support this direction, namely online resume for Open Source community members (Bio) and series of interviews with OSS developers.

I think, it has good chances to grow into a real social network for the FOSS folk.

At the moment, the portal code is published under GPL v3 Draft. An exception is the proprietary libraries implementing the benchmarking algos, which are know-how of the company running SourceKibitzer. The portal invites everyone to join the development by subscribing the mailing list , participation in TRAC Wiki and contributing the code into SVN repository. The portal technology is based on Java Spring framework.

http://shipit.ubuntu.com/

Thanks, Ubuntu!

[Upd]
Actually, I’ve requested Kubuntu disks :-) but, as I downloaded and installed it already, it doesn’t matter what to have as a souvenir… Thanks anyway!

Contents of the Desktop CD is not too rich but enough as a basic kit for the most of home/office tasks. Now I am in the process of installing all extra stuff I need and moving all my environment from old (Fedora) installation. So, my system is dual-booted until this process is done.

Unfortunately, I have a business trip next week so I will not be able to get into its installation quickly. The problem is to backup everything and invent optimal partitions scheme, ‘coz I don’t want to loose my working Fedora installation until new system is ready. Maybe, I even have to get a new harddrive.

So far, trying it from the CD. Looks good.

Numbers.

77 posts (yeah, I’m a quite lazy blogger) in 32 categories (but I like order and structures!) visited 2,879 times. Wordpress.com has no ability of installing Google Analytics or such, but I did some basic monitoring with free StatCounter to see from where are the visitors and which browser/os they use.

The top countries in a list are US, UK, Germany and Russia. 47% of visitors browse with Firefox (of various versions), 31% use MSIE, and 11% was identified as unknown “Mozilla 5.0″. Other browsers (Konq, Safari and Opera) are below 5%. So, Fox rocks and beats MS browser down, at least on my site (even if 11% of “mozilla” were MSIE’s actually).

Systems. 52% of visitors are on Windows, 35% on Linux and 5% use MacOSX. There are 8% of “unknown” OS (have no idea what is it).

What people read

Statistics on specific posts is a good way to know what people looking for when visiting other’s blogs. Unsurprisingly, motivation in whole is mostly the same as my own, when I’m surfing the blogosphere.

People want to solve their own problems. There are a lot of people who came to me via the search requests like “how to bla-bla-bla”. So, my “practical” articles like, e.g. this, this and this enjoy the stable popularity. My software reviews are also among them.

People are interesting for personal opinions. This is why the blogs are the great things – there are real alive people behind them, who are not restricted by corporate, political etc. rules and can freely explain their own thoughts and opinions. Even if a blogger is wrong and subjective, there are a lot of people who will read his opinion on a subject just because this is a living voice in an ocean of a carefully filtrated, neutral and politically correct official information.

I think this is why my old post on my position in Kowari row is number 1 in the top hot hits list. And it is still popular, though almost an year is passed after that incident.

For open source software users the developers blogs are the additional support channels. My Memoranda posts have a stable and considerable audience and I suppose they are the users who want to see how the project is going on from developers point of view.

I plan to launch a Memoranda community blog in the new year, so I and everyone would have a specialized place to write about the software and discuss it.

Conclusions

I’ve got mixed feelings on my year of blogging. I still believe that Chronicles is a right thing and I am neither disappointed nor bored of it. On the other hand, I regret that I missed so many chances to write because of my business or laziness.

So, what is in my blogging agenda in 2007? First is to keep promoting open source software as much as possible. Second is to be on the bleeding edge of new exciting things in our fantastic times. Third is to be a bit more active blogger than I was in 2006. And fourth, fifth and so on is to keep having fun and let my readers to have fun too.

Thank you all, my dear readers.

Merry Christmas!

After long period of indistinct reassurances and promises and, finally, the triumphant announce on open-sourcing Java SE platform before the end of this year, it is the first interview that sheds some light on the details of this topical question.

The people who concern both Java and OSS development were, of course glad to hear that hopeful news from Sun although there was a lot of questions, as legal as well as bare technical. In this interview, James answered to some of them.

Likely the most mind-blowing issue is a license of the future Java platform releases. James has emphasized its importance and even stated that “The difference between what we do now and open source has mostly been around the license”. Although, no of the specific license types had been mentioned. But without doubt, it will be a OSI-approved license and apparently, the same as of Solaris (CDDL, based on Mozilla Public License). It was declared by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz at his October’s “open-sourcing Java announce” (see above), but later Sun stated officially that “We’re not ready to talk about the licenses”. So I suppose, consensus on this question is still not reached in the company and James politely left it aside.

[Upd:] Earlier (after May’06 JavaOne), Jonathan wrote in his blog that “using a GPL license is very much *on* the table”, so the choice seems between GPL and CDDL. However, the results of the Java.net poll shows that the Java developers community also would like to see Sun’s JDK under Apache license (30% against 22% for GPL, 14% for LGPL and only 6.8% for CDDL).

The motivation of open sourcing Java is stated briefly and clearly:

We want better conversations with the developer community, a more collaborative relationship. We want to have better relationships with many of the Linux distributions…

I think, taking care of compatibility with Linux distros is remarkable and it confirms the fact that more and more of the leading corporations cannot ignore this platform anymore. Indeed, it is oddly enough that Sun is selling their machines with Ubuntu preinstalled, but Ubuntu developers cannot include Sun’s JDK into the distribution by licensing reasons. On the other hand, the results of heroic efforts on the alternative open-source implementations are still far from the “original” Java to be useful at any rate.

An important thing is how the project will be organized. It is looking like that the development model will be far from a “bazaar-style”. The process of defining the specifications will be kept by the Java Community Process (as it is now), that is general direction and major design decisions will be still somehow controlled by Sun.

So it shouldn’t give anybody any concerns as far as fragmentation. We’re not just going to let random people check random code in. Just like every other open-source project, we will end up with a set of rules for who’s allowed to check in a lot. Everything will get checked and rechecked and debugged.

It is noteworthy also that the project will use Mercurial for source-code management, instead of conventional CVS which was said “don’t work well for large-scale projects”.

Indeed, not too much of info but it’s looking like nobody in Sun doesn’t know more at this moment. The web-page of Open-Source Java Initiative now contains only the list of persons behind it.

[Upd:] I’ve found that the home of open-source JDK community is actually here.

So, I think I will be offline from 06/02 to 06/10.