Wicket In Action almost done

Honestly, the book - Wicket In Action - is aaaallmost done. We’re doing the very last edits, and most of the chapters are in the production stage. Incredible, what a huge amount of work goes into writing a book. Without the help of Manning’s excellent staff, I would have been very close to giving up tbh.

The good thing about being done (well almost) is that for the first time in two years, I’ll actually be able to have some spare time without feeling guilty. And what I’ll do with that? Play music of course! I’ve played guitar forever, and have been singing for a few years (which finally is getting a bit better, thanks to my awesome coach), and I recently bought a bass guitar, keyboard, couple of mics and a decent multitrack recorder. Man, I’m ready to have some fun! :-)

Anyway, for all of you who bought the early access version and/ or have been patiently (very patiently I might add) waiting until the book is done, thanks for hanging in there, and thanks for supporting Wicket!

Open Source software has nothing to do with communism, and it is not free either

This line caught my eye (and I have no idea how I got there in the first place):

Open source just looks like the future to me. Who would’ve thought, but it is pure communism! If people are willing to give such sophisticated solutions away for free, businesses are going to adopt them and there’s no way commercial products will be able to compete.

There is so much wrong with those sentences that I need to let this rant out or I won’t sleep tonight. :-)

First there is the assumption (which is repeated several times in that article) that open source software is ‘free’. Wrong.  Open source means that the source is publicly available. It has nothing to do with pricing. And, even though you can download software without paying for it, using that software is not necessarily free. You need to take into account what the cost of things like maintenance, education and customization are, and heck, you might even end up paying more for using open source software than would for using proprietary software.

More disturbing is his use of the word: ‘communism’. Communism is classless - at least in theory. Open source software is not classless, not in theory nor in practice.  Open source software has nothing to do with project organization. But if you’d had to say something about it, you could say that many open source projects are meritocratic and community driven. People are encouraged to participate, and it is this shared effort that often makes projects great, but people earn official positions (i.e. get commit and voting rights) through demonstrated talent and competence.

Also, for an open source project to reach adulthood, it typically needs lots of input (bug reports, feature requests, patches, discussions, promotion) from hundreds or even thousands of users. But ultimately the project owners decide what to do with that success, as they have got the legal and physical rights (access to servers etc) to do so. Regular users can suggest and complain or they can even branch the source code (in which case they could run into trouble with the license) into a new project, but usually have no final say in the project. Hence, the ownership of the means of production lies in the hands of a few, which is contrary to the communist ideal.

For the companies that I worked for, cost was hardly a decisive factor when evaluating open source vs proprietary software products (except for choosing MySQL maybe). Not being dependent on a single vendor for bug fixes, the often better quality of open source projects (coded by motivated professionals, peer review, many test hours, transparency) and the option of having a say in the direction the software is going, are often more important.

Bought a new phone

I bought a new phone yesterday. Until then, I had still been using my Nokia 9300 with a Dutch subscription, but I finally decided it was time to get a phone in the US. And yeah, you guessed that right, it’s an iPhone. I was a little bit scared of what might be the waiting lines at first, as the media did an excellent job in hyping the hype. But after standing in line for about 50 minutes (I arrived at 5:40) I walked out with one. No problem.

It’s a very sweet toy. The screen is amazingly bright and sharp, and the touch screen works very well. And everything works very inituitive and fast. My expectations are by far exceeded - and they were high from the outset!

The key pad of my Nokia 9300 *does* work a bit faster; if you intend to use your PDA for word processing this might be a consideration for you. That said, the iPhone’s keypad works well enough for me (better than most phones I’ve tried), and I’m glad that the pad is out of the way when I don’t need it.

Here are two pictures comparing the Nokia 9300 and the iPhone.

Ray Joel wins Dutch Grand Prix for magicians

While on vacation in The Netherlands last month, we met with one of my best friends, Ray Joel. We know each other from our home town, where we used to play in a band together, but we lost touch for a couple of years. In those years he went from leading a white goods store, to being a AS/400 system administrator and computer programmer to the point where he finally decided to fully dedicate to his life-long passion: magic.

He amazed us with some tricks in the Spanish restaurant we ate; Kay still has a hard time to accept she couldn’t figure out what he was doing, even if it was so up-close. But we weren’t the only ones left in awe with Ray’s magic. Turns out, he just won the Dutch Grand Prix for magicians! Dude, I’m proud of you and I hope you can make it to our little party next year!

For anyone reading this: you want to make your special occasion a magical one? Get this guy, you’ll be amazed!