It's Fixed in the Next Release - It's a Code, Code World

On Development Teams

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:52:00 -0500

Earlier today Amy Stephen and I had an interesting discussion on development teams, I thought it worth organizing and preserving. Because it's a bit of a threaded conversation it takes a little work to follow the flow, but there's no easy way to sort it out.

One of the most interesting things here is that even though I tend to take a bit of a hard-ass "no prisoners" approach to the problem, and Amy is fairly close to my polar opposite, we actually look at the fundamental problem in nearly the same way.

AmyStephen	Wondering about the market potential of the promise of a 1 day workshop that can turn a dysfunctional group into a high performance team. It's puzzling to watch a dysfunctional group where members keep barriers to entry high and engage in intense, private battles within.
FxNxRl	Lets see... the seminar starts with a real-time attitude and teamwork survey, then lists who should be retained and who fired.
AmyStephen	That might do it – if management would so empower. Typically, you'll find spineless leadership behind dysfunction.
FxNxRl	Indeed. I have done consulting assignments where I had to tell the person who hired me that they were the main problem. Awkward.
AmyStephen	So, how would you sort out the understandably frustrated's from those who might be, shall we say, squelching innovation?
FxNxRl	Most of the time it's pretty easy to tell one from the other by simply talking to them face to face.
AmyStephen	I used to think that I could tell quickly but now I am doubting my early instincts. It's a bit unsettling, in fact. I can't tell.
FxNxRl	What's difficult is to unmask the passive-aggressive ones. Usually high-value team members who kill things by "contributing".
FxNxRl	It is impossible to tell when there's distance involved, and it can be difficult in person too.
FxNxRl	I once managed a team where I had to use source code control metrics to track project progress. Every time a project was really doing well, the lead developer would step in to "help" and the project would nearly stop. There was no way to fire him...
AmyStephen	Yes, it's tricky when the one causing the problem has a great deal of authority. You have to control the process to figure it out.
AmyStephen	Source code control can be a great tool for lots of challenges simply because people who are traumatized can see justice/hope
AmyStephen	That is, provided they can commit to it, of course. Otherwise, it's just another situation where they have to face this barrier.
FxNxRl	Yup, and it's hard data in an environment where everyone has some emotional involvement no matter how hard they try not to.
FxNxRl	Development without revision control is art, not engineering.
FxNxRl	The very first thing is to put proven development methodologies in place. If there's strong resistance, fire the dissidents.
AmyStephen	lol - I definitely do not agree, but I understand. Many times, your skeptics are simply people who think for themselves.
AmyStephen	In fact, you can bag anyone who's onboard with change too quickly. Everyone should resist process changes if they are moving forward.
FxNxRl	I realized, at about age 45, that I had become the "asshole manager" I loathed at 25. Team results trump individual brilliance.
AmyStephen	In general, I think it's a bad idea for mgmt to plunk a set of "productivity tools" on an engineer's desk. Best to let them pick.
FxNxRl	Well yeah, you can't say "effective Monday everyone is using SVN and methodology X". The method of change is critical.
AmyStephen	I'm a HUGE believer in team. I think, though, the strongest teams are built from a complementary collection of individual brilliance.
FxNxRl	But the guys who say "never did it that way, ain't gonna start now" and then dig in? Well they can do it "their way" elsewhere.
FxNxRl	So am I... and I have seen effective teams operate in mayhem. It's all about getting complimentary characters.
AmyStephen	That's why it's important to involve them. Good engineers know what productivity aids are needed and welcome it. They resist "silly"
FxNxRl	I have seen highly effective teams with vastly different cultures. You could NEVER take a person from one of those teams and put them in the other. It's all about getting people who work well together.
AmyStephen	Absolutely! I've worked on a team like that 2 times in my life. When you have tasted it, you know what it is & why it's worth having
FxNxRl	I've also become friends with people who I've let go as a "parachute in manager/jerk". They found teams where they fit & r happy
AmyStephen	Yes - there's a chemistry that cannot be ignored. In MBTI, it's the middle 2 indicators that can sometimes predict compatibility
AmyStephen	Yes. That's best. A self-directed work team w clear boundaries and focus and empowerment. It's how "grown-ups" should be treated.
FxNxRl	Dated though it may be I'm a huge MBO fan. Here's what we need to do, tell me what you need to do it, then get it done.
FxNxRl	as long as it's legal and ethical I don't care how it gets done, just that I can measure progress and that there is progress.
AmyStephen	I don't think common sense is ever dated. Keeping a focus on "what this is really about" is always good.

Amazing Code Repository Visualization (Joomla)

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:55:34 -0500

This is amazing stuff. The description from the YouTube page says it best: "This Code Swarm provides an animated visual representation of the changes made to the Joomla! source code since 2005. The names that appear are the users who have made changes to the source code. The stars/highlights represent commits made to the Subversion repository. The histogram to the bottom left displays activity. Look out for the date displayed in the right hand corner."

That "instance" floating around in there is me. Even without the "holy cow, that's me!" factor, this is a wonderful visualization tool.

MySQL's Post-Oracle Future

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:29:06 -0500

One of the oddities of Sun's acquisition by Oracle is that Oracle now owns the MySQL trademark. They also employ the largest concentration of developers who are familiar with the code base. What they don't control is the code, and who they no longer employ is a lot of the key people who got MySQL to where it is. So what's next?

From Oracle's viewpoint, there are three likely scenarios:

Ignore MySQL, let the remaining team go, hope it dies.
Try selling it off.
Embrace Open Source and continue to improve mySQL.

Consider each of these options.

Oracle Ignores MySQL, Hoping for a Withering Death

There's revenue associated with MySQL. It might be a trickle from Oracle's perspective, but it's more than enough to keep a good medium sized company running smoothly. Tens of millions of sites have absolutely no interest in moving to a new database manager, and there's heaps of MySQL specific expertise out there now. The MySQL revenue stream isn't going away soon. If Oracle tries this strategy, the MySQL code will soon emerge under a different name, and the resulting business will probably be all the more nimble for it's passage through Sun and Oracle. Not a likely scenario but good for MySQL nonetheless.

Oracle Sells MySQL

Good luck. Can you say embarrassing writedown? Sun's billion dollar acquisition of MySQL is right up there on the "WTF" scale, ranking with eBay's purchase of Skype and Google's acquisition of YouTube, all for stupid money. [Side note: M&A groups should refrain from hiring people who come out of the derivatives world.] Even then, name a buyer at any reasonable price. I can't think of one.

Oracle Embraces FOSS

Initially this looks like we're getting into geek porn fantasies. What can Oracle actually give MySQL that aligns with it's corporate interests?

There are some patents, well past the end of their productive life, that Oracle could release. This could give MySQL a few neat features that would improve performance. But these are small incremental gains at best. There's also no selective release here. Once those techniques are in a GPL code base, they're up for grabs by any open source project.

They could dump lesser versions of various core technologies into MySQL in order to set up a smooth transition to their proprietary products. This would introduce a lot of the "bloat" that made MySQL so popular in the first place. I think we'd see more nimble forks appear in no time. Not a great strategy.

Then there's the philosophical differential. The one thing that's evident from my work with Joomla, and my observation of other solutions in the same space, is that success in open source is all about building a strong collaborative culture around the product. While this isn't incompatible with running a profitable business, it is incompatible with the traditional "destroy the competition" approach. On the surface, capitalism in open source is not going to mix well with the capitalism as warfare.

Then there's the culture clash of Alpha Geek versus Alpha Capitalist. For a good example of this we need look no further than a blog post from Michael Widenius. He writes "Mr. Ellison, you are undoubtedly a master tactician. However, thinking two moves ahead in the open source world is not good enough. You need strategy. Long term, meaningful, viable strategy. You need to think years ahead, not just to the next fiscal quarter." There's nothing quite like a bonehead mix of arrogance and ignorance for your first move. Anyone who thinks Oracle got to the position it's in by purely tactical moves that look "two moves ahead" is clueless. Then the icing: Widenius closes with "I'd love to speak with you about it". Well, consider condescending to picking up the phone, buddy. If you think Larry's going to read your blog and give you a call, you might consider getting back onto your meds (or off of them, either way a state change is in order).

Beyond Strategy, what About Mission?

If you take a step back and look at the mission behind Oracle's numerous strategic moves over the years, you see their overarching mission: destroy Microsoft.

What's most interesting about this is that this ethos is also deeply ingrained in the thinking of many open source developers. It's a small step from "freedom from proprietary software" to "freedom from Microsoft" because Microsoft is the biggest, most obvious first target.

So there is a possibility that despite the cultural differential, Oracle may be viewing open source as a strategic weapon. It's also worth noting that along with Sun, Oracle gets the services of Johnathan Schwartz, who has demonstrated a crystal clear understanding of the open source model. As Mitchell Ashley notes in "Converging on Microsoft", Oracle is now in a good position to strike at Microsoft at a time of relative weakness.

If Ashley is right, Larry Ellison will become an active evangelist for open source, using Oracle's position to drive at the core of Microsoft's space. I'm sceptical of this. I don't think the enterprise world is ready to accept the idea of mission critical applications as open source, and I don't think Oracle's enterprise business is served well by this just yet. That won't slow Oracle down one bit. Johnathan Schwartz can become Oracle's open source advocate, speaking for that part of the business. Open source is walking its way up from the bottom, from compilers to operating systems, through servers and databases. At each stage it takes a little time to gain credibility and foothold, but the value proposition is compelling. If Oracle backs MySQL and proves that it is a viable solution in Oracle's original space, then it not only helps them advance their mission, it helps advance open source.

Predictions

Either way MySQL – or at least the code that is currently MySQL – is going to come through this just fine. That's the GPL in action: it's simply not possible acquire and kill good code.

I think we're going to see the third scenario. Oracle's support of Sun's open source technologies will be strong and unconditional. But this support won't extend to their enterprise applications. Not until the market is ready.

Whether I'm right or wrong, we'll see something happen quickly, within two quarters of the closing of the acquisition.

On the Enforcability of the GPL

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:49:32 -0600

A comment from my last post asked me to back up the claim that settlements have lent weight to the validity of the GPL. I got some feedback from a friend and did a little research of my own and here's a summary of the stuff that's easy to find.

The developers of Busybox have been busy indeed:
March 6, 2008 BusyBox Developers and High-Gain Antennas Agree to Dismiss GPL Lawsuit
March 17, 2008 BusyBox Developers Agree To End GPL Lawsuit Against Verizon
July 23, 2008 BusyBox Developers and Supermicro Agree to End GPL Lawsuit
October 6, 2008 BusyBox Developers Settle Case With Extreme Networks

The GPL Linux Kernel has been defended in a European court verdict.

Many other successful settlements in favour of the GPL are available at gpl-violations.org.

Groklaw's article "A GPL Win in Michigan" discusses how the US courts have found the GPL enforceable.

Sun Microsystems gets the GPL, even if it doesn't suit them. in a CNET article from 2005, Jonathan Schwartz is quoted as not liking the GPL because of "the GPL provision that says source code may be mixed with other code only if the other code also is governed by the GPL". Sun's rather formidable legal team gets it: you can't mix non-GPL code with GPL code and still comply with the GPL.

This is just the beginning. The SFLC has launched a suit against Cisco on behalf of the FSF. SCO descends further into bad joke status by attacking the GPL, with IBM on the other side. Any bets on who will take that one?

On the flip side, there's nothing I could find where a challenge to the GPL was successful.

More Controversy: the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) and the GPL

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:49:33 -0600

Back in June of 2007, the Joomla project generated a community firestorm by announcing that, based on legal opinion, it felt that all Joomla extensions were required to be released under the GPL and that it would start to encourage third party developers to comply with that interpretation.

Detractors tried to paint this as some sort of policy decision. Somehow they never quite grasped what was being said, so I think it bears being repeated. Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM), the non-profit charged with protecting the interests of the project, sought and obtained an opinion from legal experts well qualified in this area. Their opinion was specific, clear, and — this is critically important — while not based on precedent set by court decision, was based on several lawsuits that were settled just before going to court.

This needs some elaboration to make it as clear as possible: businesses who thought that this interpretation of the GPL was wrong, and who distributed proprietary attachments to GPL products, backed down when faced with going to trial. In my opinion, the only reason why a commercial enterprise would elect to settle a case of this nature just before going to trial is because they knew that they were likely to lose. When several suits get settled this way, all in favour of the GPL, they begin to carry significant legal weight.

So OSM had two choices: communicate the requirement that extensions be GPL or adopt another license. Considering that Joomla formed as a direct result of the actions individuals who believed in the GPL, there was really only one alternative.

Free Software — as defined by the GPL — may embrace open source, but it is not the same as open source. It is designed to give users rights and freedoms that go well beyond access to the code. For developers the interpretation is simple: get on board or use code that has a different license, period.

At the time of the GPL announcement, I had decided that Joomla was the best CMS for my web development business. I had just begun to get involved with the project, and had at best contributed a patch or two. As a small business, source code is our biggest asset and I will admit I had some concerns about giving up the ability to protect that asset. But at the same time I am not so hypocritical that I think somehow we have the right to protect our code, while using hundreds of thousands of lines of code written by others without compensation.

A few days ago, the project announced that the Joomla Extensions Directory was only going to list extensions released under the GPL (JED to be GPL Only by July 2009). Predictably, this has created another round of controversy.

The difference here is that while the original position was based on legal opinion, this decision is more one of policy. The project is choosing to not promote extensions that violate the terms of the GPL.

When the first announcement was made, my Joomla involvement had just begun. Now, I'm one of the more active members of the project and part of the Development Team. While not part of the Core Team or OSM Board, which are the bodies responsible for the governance of the project, I have made some significant contributions. Every time someone downloads and installs Joomla, they benefit in some small part from my work.

It is in this context that I'm going to respond to several reactions to the JED announcement:

Reaction	Response
Joomla needs commercial extensions in order to survive and gain acceptance from business customers.	Similar dire claims of the project's demise were made when the GPL compliance announcement was made. Not only have they not come true, Joomla is more active and vibrant now than it has ever been, so FUD to that. The vast majority of extensions are already GPL, including some of the best extensions for 1.5. I successfully use the argument that the GPL protects a business from the failure of a small development shop without introducing new risks. Any business that backs away from GPL software as a user simply hasn't been sold to properly.
I can't make money if my extension is GPL.	Leaving aside the fact that there are many companies that disprove this, anyone making this argument is saying that they can't make money without ripping me off! Start paying me and others for our contribution to your success and then I might be slightly sympathetic. Maybe we need an alternative licensing model. Pay OSM US$50,000 to $100,000 for a Non-GPL Joomla site license and feel free to install as many commercial extensions as you like. Don't install one single third party GPL extension without paying them, though! Find an extensible commercial CMS and go write proprietary code for it. If your business is capable of paying for the development licenses and the training and certification courses you'll need to get started, then you might in fact have a viable proprietary software company. If not, stop whining. If you're that great, you don't need Joomla. Go write your own CMS.
Policy makers in the Joomla project are out-of-touch idiots and something should be done!	Fork it. Go on, I dare you. Everybody who is currently working on the code base understands and supports the GPL. The people who didn't left shortly after the 2007 announcement. If you like the code, but don't like the policies, go do it your way. Personally, I think people who think they can get fair value for their work without also giving the project similar value (say, based on revenue per line of code) have ethical problems. So not only do you want to rip off the users who buy your extensions by denying them their legal rights under the GPL, but you want the Joomla project to help you do that. Good luck. The site www.extensionprofessionals.com (running Joomla 1.0 (snicker) way to innovate, guys) offers proprietary extensions. This site is sponsored by the "Joint Commercial Developers Association" (jcd-a.org), comprised mostly of people who found Joomla's GPL interpretation unacceptable. In a year or two, we'll be able to measure the success of this extension site by comparing it with the JED. Should be good for a laugh or two. Take a look at the frantic activity on jcd-a.org for a peek at the future. The word joint comes to mind, but not in the context of a collective effort.
Someone will fork my code and release a better version three weeks later.	If your business model is predicated on code that's so weak that someone can make significant improvements on it in three weeks, and that someone isn't you, then maybe you should consider either a different business model or another career. Let's make it very clear: the GPL makes it difficult to earn a living by flaunting mediocre code without some other kind of value add. If you can't come up with a proposition to add value, consider another business. Really. It's just not going to work.

From my viewpoint, a great part of Joomla's success has been as a direct result of its commitment to empower the end user via the GPL. Moreover, the principles of the GPL have attracted much of the talent that the project currently has. I see companies that don't embrace these values but who continue to earn a living thanks to the project as nothing more than parasites. I'm certain that once the leeches have been pried from the JED, it will grow more quickly and become more vibrant than ever before. Time will tell.

Simplifying Joomla Template Layouts

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:40:30 -0600

Since the early days of Joomla 1.5, component layouts have bothered me. First there's the problematic nomenclature (which I'm probably using incorrectly). Layouts are component-specific snippets of HTML and PHP logic that generate the actual code (usually HTML) that goes to the target device. A template can override the default layout, which is just one of the many powerful features that give Joomla sites so much flexibility.

My biggest problem with layouts is that they typically embed too much logic. Why should a layout be determining what to do if a category description isn't present? Worse yet, why does it have to check access to see if an article body should be displayed or not? Surely the actual view should be responsible for this sort of thing, and the layout should be strictly concerned with how to present the information that's available.

The other problem is that layouts are ugly beasts. Most layouts need to flip between HTML and PHP dozens of times, just to do the most simple thing.

I'm not exactly a patient person. Maintaining the existing layout code in the Joomla core components is bothersome enough, but recently I started doing extensive work on a third party component, adding my own view in the process. That's when that familiar snapping sound resonated in my head. Always a sucker for diversions, I decided to follow the tangent and see if I could improve Joomla layouts.

It took about triple the expected effort, largely because the initial results were pretty exciting, and I decided to do more than a hack job. The result is JTML, and the results are described in the white paper Simplifying Joomla Template Layouts.

Every once in a while, the idea of creating a simple language for creating Joomla extensions comes up, but that is a very big job indeed, and there are many, many other things to do in the project. So it remains a bit of a dream. I'm hoping JTML is one small step in that direction.

How to: Ubuntu PHP Remove Suhosin

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:54:54 -0600

One of my projects for the "holidays" is moving one of my servers from Gentoo to Ubuntu. During planning for this, I noticed that the Ubuntu version of PHP5 includes Suhosin. That's a problem.

The problem with Suhosin is that it's designed to stop sloppy applications from doing bad things. I'm sure it does a reasonable job of that, but in the process it can interfere with good applications (see examples for Joomla). Since I'm in the business of writing good applications, Suhosin is a bad idea. Worse yet, it can provide a false sense of security, since it can't deal with anything except typical PHP errors. As far as I'm concerned, this class of "security blanket" provides false comfort and is no replacement for auditing and testing.

Continue reading "How to: Ubuntu PHP Remove Suhosin"

Joomla 1.5.8 is... is what??

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:06:10 -0600

Shortly after the release of "Joomla!" 1.5.8, I found myself in this release announcement on techcebu.net. It appears to be a bad case of double-translation, from English to Italian (or perhaps Hebrew) and back to English again. The text was just too hilarious to not repost.

11Nov JOOMLA 1.5.8 RELEASED

Joomla 1.5.8 Released

The Joomla Project is entertained to foretell the unmediated availability of Joomla 1.5.8 [Wohnaiki]. This promulgation contains a sort of fault fixes and digit moderate-level section fixes. It has been around digit months since Joomla 1.5.7 was liberated on Sept 9, 2008. The Development Working Group’s content is to move to wage regular, regular updates to the Joomla community.
Download
Click here to download Joomla 1.5.8 (Full package) »
Click here to encounter an update package. »

Instructions

New installation and technical requirements
Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version
Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x

Want to effort intend Joomla? Try the online demo. Documentation is acquirable for beginners.
Release Notes

Check the Joomla 1.5.8 Post-Release Notes to wager if there are essential items and adjuvant hints unconcealed after the release.

View instance release notes for Joomla 1.5.7 or release notes for Joomla 1.5.6.
Security

Two moderate-level section issues were immobile in this release:
o Default filtering for content
o Filtering for Web Link descriptions

For additional information, visit the Joomla Security Center.
Components

Articles: Remove brackets around Last Updated fellow and time, Start Publishing fellow corrections for another than UT1 00:00, impact counts precise for Articles, adding a expanse after a draped telecommunicate address
E-mail addresses: Correctly draped when presented in Section and Category descriptions
Categories: Edit picture aright shows for Articles without Title links, Print picture precise today on prototypal tender for Blog Layout

Sections: Plural and signifier modify correction, Category unification right ended, Router changes reverted to edition 1.5.6 so Article ID does not attach to the Article slug
Frontpage: Article naming correction, rectified sort of Links
Contacts: Image pass rebuke when Image Directory is configured
RSS Feed: Corrected spelling of Category in Category feed
User: Added isInternal checking on referer values
Weblinks: Language strings

Modules

Feed: Target concept validation, module progress correction
Login: ItemID is cured on redirect
Menu: Changing Menu Link Type today functions properly, Section Language string, Article Reset fix working
Related Items: Keyword matched functions aright and filters characters appropriately
Stats: Corrected Time
Sections: No dominance constant entireness correctly
Search: Form validates aright for Transitional xHTML

Legacy

Return evidence additional for Legacy Menu Check

Templates

Beez: Lengthened E-mail Content Popup, Search fix today entireness when pressed, countersign set entireness correctly, corrections to Beez HTML folders, User info tender corrected
JA_Purity: Added absent module strings

Administrator

Console: Added “Welcome to Joomla!” aggregation and Joomla Security RSS feeds to Administrator Console
Installation: Proper redaction of factor directories, choice entries for Templates and Languages are today precise for uninstall
Media Manager: Changed choice for newborn sites to alter Flash multi-file uploader cod to contradictoriness with Flash 10
Installation: Remove unclear nonachievement communication most module files for spreading installations, Administrator Modules today aright uninstall INI files
Sample data: Updated programme feeds to saucer to liberated code accord sites, comprehensive corrections and updates to distribution content

System

API: JFolder::files and JFolder::folders corrections for Search, absent Method additional to JRecordSet, Database Class aright quotes obloquy not using extend notation, JTableUser matches using the precise sort of fields
Cache: Correct undefinable uncertain in Cache Class
Language file: Corrected wording, precise artefact of PDF fonts autarkical of module choices, individual module progress corrections in en-GB.ini
Menu: Performance improvements for sites with some schedule items
Users: Temporary Users are today healthy to logout, bonded prescript crapper today be utilised when redaction statement details
Added PHP 4 sympathy for isInternal checking

Statistics

Statistics for the 1.5.8 promulgation period:

Joomla 1.5.8 contains:
o 71 issues immobile in SVN
o 26 commits
Tracker state resulted in a gain modification of 4 astir issues:
o 65 newborn reports
o 130 closed
o 66 immobile in SVN
* At the instance the 1.5.8 promulgation was packaged, the tracker had 114 astir issues:
o 44 open
o 44 confirmed
o 24 pending

Joomla! Bug Squad

Thanks to the Joomla Bug Squad for their sacred efforts work reports, sterilisation problems, and applying patches to Joomla. If you encounter a fault with Joomla, find discover more aggregation here on how to inform the bug.

Active members of the Joomla Bug Squad during this terminal promulgation wheel include: Ian MacLennan and Mark Dexter co-leads; Airton Torres, river Zijlstra, Akarawuth Tamrareang, Alan Langford, suffragist Ferrara, Amy Stephen, saint Eddie, Elin Waring, Ercan Ozkaya, Charl camper Niekerk, Gergo Erdosi, Hannes Papenberg, Jennifer Marriott, Jens-Christian Skibakk, Jonah Braun, carpenter LeBlanc, Kevin Devine, Marijke Stuivenberg, Mati Kochen, Mickael Maison, Robin Muilwijk, prophet Moffatt, Shantanu Bala, Toby Patterson, and Wilco Jansen.

A hearty recognize to the newest members of the Joomla Bug Squad: Dan Walker, Eduardo Diaz, and Tibor Toth.

"IBM May Quit Technology Standards Bodies" WSJ Screams

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:06:45 -0500

Some days I wonder about the entire field of journalism. The quoted phrase above is from an article headline in the Wall Street Journal (September 23, 2008, they don't deserve an actual link). The headline is not inaccurate, but it is close to the most ludicrously sensational interpretation of the facts that is possible.

This is what the actual IBM press release has to say on the point: "The tenets of IBM's new policy are to: Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies."

Thus an equally useless headline might be "IBM May Join Technology Standards Bodies." I thought Journalism was supposed to add value for the reader, but it seems that even for otherwise reputable organizations, it's really all about sensational headlines that add value to the advertising department. "Reputable" in this context is now officially meaningless. Sad.

I've noticed a lot of general criticism of standards processes over the past few weeks, and I think this release from IBM is largely responsible for firing up the discussion. For the most part, the criticism is justified. It seems that standards processes are either needlessly academic and somewhat out of touch with reality, or deeply buried in corporate politics and patent complications, which has a tendency to result in crappy standards. IBM's policy release sort of touches on this with another tenet: "Collaborate with standards bodies and developer communities to ensure that open software interoperability standards are freely available and implementable." The problem with this is that IBM seems to want to set itself up as some benign intermediary between the standards process and the people who need to use the standards. Call me silly, but it seems more appropriate that the developer communities should be an integral part of the standards process, not some second-hand "collaborative resource".

The essence of the problem is funding. Participation in the standards process isn't cheap. Not only does membership cost, but participants typically absorb the costs of time, travel, and communications. Standards bodies need a funding model that ensures accessibility based on merit and relevance, rather than dollars. I don't know what that model is, but is can't be based on revenue from selling standards documents, either. The prospect of having to pay real money in order to ensure compliance with a standard is, in most cases, equally ridiculous and stupid.

In Search of an Application Framework: PHP GTK Python XULRunner

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:48:27 -0500

Lately I've been thinking about starting yet another project. This one needs a rich GUI that runs as a thin client, as well as more limited support for a web browser (or so I thought initially). I've gone through a bit of an eye-opening exercise while looking at the implementation, and I thought I'd record the line of exploration just in case someone else is looking at the same sort of problem. Maybe this will save a little time.

The original idea was to replace an interesting but quirky application that will remain nameless. It's a fairly large project that implements its own thin client. As I started looking at it, I realized that a lot of what it does is more related to providing the application framework than the application itself. Sometimes I still suffer from the closed-source way of thinking, and I soon began listing requirements for my own framework. A few minutes into defining my XML markup for laying out simple interfaces, I remembered that there is already a pretty good standard for that: XUL.

At the time I was thinking of using GTK+ for the GUI. I've grown somewhat fond of various GTK+ applications that I've installed over the years. These applications have offered nice rich interfaces and have been pretty reliable. A lot of them are written in Python, and the bridge between GTK+ and Python, PHP-GTK is the way to go.

The search is for something that lets me bridge XUL and GTK, be it in PHP or Python. This leads me to Gul, a fairly complete implementation of XUL for PHP-GTK.

Let's try adding the GTK to PHP. I go to the PHP-GTK site and try to figure out whether to download the binary package or the binary extensions package, read confusing and incomplete install notes, search about a bit, and as best I can tell, the easiest way to run PHP-GTK on Windows is to install a complete copy of PHP with the GTK extensions. This truly fails the cross-platform and easy-to-install tests — I can manage it, but an end user? No way. Then I take a look at Gul 2.0: lots of procedural code that relies on passing things through obscure globals with two characters. Next!

On to Python. Searches for XUL and Python lead, at best, to half-developed projects dating from 2004. Not good. Now the thinking is that maybe a fairly basic XUL module for Python won't be that much work. I look more deeply into XUL. Obviously, it's pretty capable, after all it's the base for Firefox and Thunderbird. But this makes the scope of a full implementation quite a lot bigger than I'd like.

Maybe there's something in XULRunner. Wow. It doesn't take much looking around to realize that XULRunner is pretty compelling. It's obviously got the GUI with a full XUL implementation. It's got scripting in Javascript, Python, even Java. It has network interfaces and support for XML-RPC and SOAP. It's extensible: all the features that make it easy to plug extensions into Firefox are part of XULRunner. It's got localization and custom skins. It's got an integrated web browser. That's about 90% of the core requirements and several bonuses right there.

Now the kicker: if you have Firefox 3.x installed, then you have XULRunner installed. Firefox knows how to do its own updates, which means the framework updates seamlessly too. Perfect.

So that's it. Forget GTK+, nice as it is. XULRunner is a fantastic way to do GUI application development.

Now all I need is a good way to map objects back to a relational database...

Why I Love Open Source

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:08:41 -0500

Every user of an application has run into small but irritating characteristics of that application. Most of the time, they can be easily ignored. But sometimes they are part of a repetitive task, and then they become problematic. They have a disproportionate effect on both productivity and the user's overall impression of the application.

Just about every enterprise makes nice noises about how they listen to their customers and how customer service is important to them, but the odds are very low that comments about small irritations will result in code changes. This is partially because most companies don't actually care as much about customer service as they pretend to, and partially because tracking these small things and then sorting through them, removing duplicates, and distilling them down to something that can be easily understood is a very complex and expensive task. Most of the time the effort involved simply doesn't justify the results.

This is something that always attracted me to open source. As a developer, the odds are pretty good that I can find a fix for that thing that irritates me. Then I can change the code to fix my version. If the irritation is idiosyncratic — basically if I'm the only one who doesn't like it the way it is — then that's where the process ends, and I'm happy.

The first credo of open source is that you try to give back to the community. So even as a non-developer there is an incentive to find the bug tracker or support forum for the project and to suggest a change. Sometimes that works[1], but a lot of the time good comments and patches simply fall through the cracks. After all, if tracking details like this is difficult for a for-profit corporation, it's not going to be any easier for a project run by volunteers!

What is really satisfying is getting sufficiently involved in a project to be able to have a direct influence on it, as I am with "Joomla!". It's great to be able to identify a minor irritation, to fix it, and to get it to a production release. This has been my experience twice in recent weeks. I've implemented small changes to the system that make it just a little easier to use[2, 3]. Not only will I enjoy the product more as a result, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that thousands of systems administrators out there might think just for a moment, "oh, they fixed that – great!"

It is an interesting experience. These small tweaks and fixes that I get to make aren't the biggest contribution I make to the project in terms of lines of code or hours of work, but they're tangible and real. The direct impact on the user is visible and easy to understand. Implementing unit testing and contributing to the building of a "Culture of Quality" in the project are more complex and significant contributions, but they're also more abstract. The small tweaks are actually kind of fun, and it's nice to know that here and there, they is me.

Notes:

If you're an Eclipse user and noticed that v3.1 puts the entire file path in the window title... that was my suggestion. In the web development world where you can have many files called "index.php" open, this helps you quickly figure out where you are.
Add a new module to a "Joomla!" site from version 1.5.4 onward, and the list of available modules is now sorted alphabetically down the columns, rather than split across rows. We still have an issue to sort out with international characters, but it's an improvement.
Starting in version 1.5.5, all panes in the parameters block can be collapsed. Before this change, if you had a long list of parameters that ran off the screen, you would need to scroll down to the bottom in order to expand a panel below. Now you can collapse the long block, which lets you see the panels below, and then expand the one you want.

Web 2.0 and the One Page Web Site

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:34:47 -0500

I'm busy working on my first major web site using "Joomla!" 1.5. One of the things I did for the site was to install a simple component that provides an index of articles in a side panel. Simple enough, you click on the index link and it fetches the page with that article.

The problem is that it's quite a page. There's a nice graphics-rich template that wraps the site, then there's the Javascript. A full copy of mootools comes with every page. Sure the browser has most of this stuff cached, and Joomla has the actual page content cached, but still the browser has to do a lot of work to reload the page and recompile mootools, just to change a relatively small portion of the page. The user gets to watch as everything is (re)displayed, most of it exactly the same as it was before the request.

The obvious solution would be to have the index link send an AJAX request for the relevant content and then to simply repaint the area that needs to change, but that only works in this specific case and it deprives the CMS of the ability to update other parts of the page in response to the request or to other events at the server.

I'm big on generalizing ideas like this, so why not make the entire site a single page? The first time the browser requests something from the site, send the structure of the template, and most of the Javascript needed to run the site down to the browser. Then make every internal site link send an AJAX request. The server can respond with a list of the areas of the template that need to be updated, along with either the HTML or the data needed to perform the update.

Now my index request could respond with a new menu, any updated news items, the content I requested, or even a completely new page layout. The client-side application then applies these updates, possibly issuing secondary requests. Only the data that's changed comes back from the server, and most of the Javascript loads just once with the first request, so the page updates much faster than it did before. Best of all, the user doesn't have to watch the template being regenerated, which is visually disturbing no matter how quick it is.

Now the page is an application in itself, and the browser is playing the role of the operating system. The user gets a platform independent, end-device sensitive interface that can be rich, intuitive, and more interactive.

It's an idea worth implementing. Not for this particular site, but it would be nice to build this capability right into Joomla!

Microsoft Security Fix Clobbers Two Million Password Stealers

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:06:48 -0500

Normally I'm no fan of the "blog by repeating news" style, but in this case I have to make an exception. The headline above is from a Computerworld Security article dated June 20, 2008. Discussing a recent upgrade to Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool, this excerpt caught my attention:

One password stealer, called Taterf, was detected on 700,000 computers in the first day after the update. That's twice as many infections as were spotted during the entire month after Microsoft began detecting the notorious Storm Worm malware last September.

"These are ridiculous numbers of infections my friends, absolutely mind-boggling," wrote Matt McCormack, a spokesman with Microsoft's Malware Response Center, in a Friday blog posting.

This may be mind-boggling to someone who lives deep in Microsoft culture, but to everyone else, it's barely a surprise. The missing part of McCormack's quote should have been "The Linux/Unix guys are right, Windows security still sucks at a deep structural level." Good thing regular doses of Microsoft Cool-Aid prevents that.

Firefox 3 is Ready, Bug 183689 Intact. Duh.

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:16:24 -0500

The good news is that Firefox 3, one of the best web browsers available, is set to release version 3 in a few days.

The weird news is that it's shipping with Bug 183689 fully intact. Under mysterious (or at least elusive) circumstances, Firefox fails to close a file that the user uploads to a web site. The file is locked and unusable until Firefox is restarted.

This has the ring of familiarity. Any user of Firefox 2.x who has lots of extensions installed will have noticed that it tends to get more and more sluggish over time. A quick look at the process will reveal that memory consumption continuously rises until the best thing to do is restart it.

That's not really a problem that the Firefox developers had a lot of control over. If an extension is leaking memory, there's not much the core can do to stop it. In fact this is one of the major improvements in Firefox 3. A new, sophisticated memory manager now finds a lot of these unreferenced data structures and cleans them up. On my system, the memory footprint for Firefox 3 is nearly 200Mib smaller at start up, and if it grows, it doesn't grow very fast. That alone is reason to upgrade on June 17, 2008 – Firefox Download Day.

The point of this digression is that I've become used to Firefox losing track of resources. But losing a file handle? Really. Can that be too hard to find? Apparently the answer is "yes", since Bug 183689 has been open since December, 2002! There are some good reasons why the browser needs to keep track of the file, for example if you refresh the resulting page, the file is part of the Post data that needs to be re-sent.

But eliminating memory leaks is hard, and it's easy to just rely on increasingly sophisticated garbage collection tools instead of finding the cause. Unfortunately, a garbage collector has no way of knowing that something it's cleaning up represents an open file, so the memory leak is fixed, but the file handle leak remains.

Five-plus years is far too long for a major bug to remain open, even for an open source project. But don't go updating that bug! Despite the fact that there's no explanation that the issue is independent of the user's specific circumstances, any provision of additional information will be considered spam by Jonas Sicking, the fellow who has been assigned the bug. Considering that the bug seems difficult to reproduce, the contradiction is obvious. One would think that more examples might lead to the discovery of a pattern, but that seems to not be the case as far as Mr. Sicking is concerned.

Hopefully he was just feeling a little stressed with a major release coming up so quickly, and his comment will be clarified or withdrawn. If not, I'm guessing this one is going to remain open for quite some time to come.

[Note: it has since been determined that an extension, LiveHTTPHeaders, is the culprit for this bug. My "duh" is withdrawn. My disdain for Mr. Sickling's response remains unchanged, however.]

Ubuntu is an African Word...

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford (developer blog)) — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:39:52 -0500

...that means "Gentoo is too hard for me."

This line came from a chat with another developer, and I had to write it down. It has a lot of truth to it, as I watch my system compile the latest point release of KDE, while telling me I need to compile a new kernel and rewrite my MBR with the latest version of grub. Sigh.

Maybe it's not so much "too hard", but just "too much trouble." Don't get me wrong, I love Gentoo. I've made my Gentoo box do some really neat things, and most of the time I know I have the latest and greatest installed and ready to go.

On the other hand, my Kubuntu laptop is a lot easier to maintain, even if it's not right up there on the cutting edge. An Ubuntu maintenance update takes minutes; KDE will be compiled in 5 hours or so, and there will be manual steps to be done after that.

Then there's the matter of "not by me" maintenance. If I put Gentoo into a production server, how long will it take me to train someone else to take care of it? What are the odds that they'll fail? If they quit, how easy will it be to find a replacement? It used to be that I planned to build a stable binary build on a stand-alone machine, then use it to send binary packages to production servers, but even that still needs someone willing to deal with Gentoo's quirks and complexities on the back end.

Tossing Gentoo and moving to Ubuntu may be copping out, but it's a lot simpler. It's not the "best" solution from a bit-head's point of view, but from the management side, it's "Keep It simple, Stupid" in action.

The biggest problem will be moving all the development tools and demos across. Switching distributions isn't something to be taken lightly. It's a job for when I have a few days to play... like that's about to happen.