Process64Curried thoughts

This blog is moving to http://fromshell.com. And from ThinkJot to WordPress. This also means that I will not be working on ThinkJot actively anymore. Interest in ThinkJot has been waning, mostly because I did not have much time to work on it. However, ThinkJot was download more than 6000 times from the Google Code repositories.

Meanwhile, I will still help out people who want to use, or are using ThinkJot. Mail me at jeswin@gmail.com

Right now, I am more interested in writing. And what better software to do that than WordPress. When ThinkJot was concieved, WordPress what what I wanted to emulate.

Do these:
1. sudo apt-get install vim
2. add "syn on" to ~/.vimrc. (without the quotes)

These guys are awesome. I can't imagine how a complex project like SilverLight could get implemented over Mono in 21 days!! Miguel has this great piece on Implementing Moonlight, which he posted from an airplane en-route to Paris to show the first MoonLight demo! All I can say is ..... WOW!

All this is good news for Linux. It means yet another breed of Windows Applications will run on Linux. More compatibility is always better. Earlier, Microsoft had released SilverLight betas only for Windows and the Mac.

We have been waiting for this day for 6 months. Skillda India just went BETA. Think of it as a a mashup of Orkut, Linked-In and Naukri. There are lots of differences, mostly functional and a few which are much more important.

We have a lot of cool technology that is still to reach the live site, like our new Resume Analysis tools which try to semantically analyze all those cryptic resumes people have. :) And we are building our own little version of Google Map-Reduce, so that we could offload processing load off the main server to other hardware we can "afford" right now.

We would like to thank the world of Open Source for everything we have online. There is not a bit of proprietary technology involved in Skillda. We are eagerly waiting for the day when we can contribute back on a big scale.

There is still a _lot_ of work to be done, but this is like the end of the beginning. Right now, and until we stabilize our operations we are limited to users in India. After that, well... who knows. They are all just plans for now.

We have also started the Skillda Blog .

Meanwhile, enjoy the site...

Jes

Original CNN Article

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt -- more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

Interesting Comments on Slashdot:

The speartip recovered from the 1890s was an explosive harpoon too. ;) There's pretty much no 'humane' way of killing a whale - they're too big to kill quick unless you blow them up with a depth charge. The basic method of modern whale hunting hasn't changed in over 100 years. You harpoon 'em with something big and explosive, then let them drag themselves to exhaustion and death. It usually takes a few hours. That's one of the reasons why whale hunting is in a special category all by itself.
--
-EvilMagnus

The reason to stop hunting whales isn't that there are few of them, but rather that they probably have legitimate claim at the second most intelligent life from on earth, and more importantly, probably above the threshold of intelligence where we shouldn't hunt them at all. Whales, dolphins, elephants, and primates -- they are all probably above that threshold. As humans, we respect our own first, then other highly intelligent animals (which all happen to be mammals), then other mammals, then other animals, then other forms of life. People differ on where along that spectrum we should stop the killing. Vegans put the line right under all animals, I put it right under intelligent life.

If you really care about whales, then rally against their biggest problem, which is (and for 150 years has been) boat engine noise, which fucks up their ability to talk to one another.
--

Myopic

We just started a new blog for skillda. We will be posting our thoughts about skillda and information about new updates and fixes.

Check out the Skillda Blog.

Here is an early preview of what we have been working on for the last 5 months. It is called skillda (skill-da, if you will). It is a social networking powered job site. Sort of like Linked-In, but more oriented towards jobs.

Right now we are exclusive to India. ;)

Alrite, check out our skillda alpha release .

Thanks - Jes

Pandora was a truly amazing service. And it is really sad for Pandora and a lot of listeners around the world that they have to stop broadcasting outside the US.

The Pandora Team has promised to keep working towards making the service available again. Here is from their blog, a touching entry - Breaking Pandora's Heart. "Tonight we began the heartbreaking process of blocking access to Pandora for listeners outside the U.S...."

Thanks, and see you soon.

Great post on changing the Orange Ubuntu theme to look like OSX from Lauri Taimila blog. The fonts in the OSX theme aren't too readable, but you could change that. Personally, I never liked the Orange too much.

* This post is updated. There are some corrections, since the licensing terms on the website seems to have changed. There is now an 'Express' license, which is not included in the License Matrix (as on 17.04.07) which I checked for writing the post earlier. It might be that the matrix in not updated for Community Server 2007 yet. Thanks to 'anonymous' for pointing out that there is such an Express license.

I have been seeing Community Server for a long time now, since it is possibly the most widely installed Content Management System (CMS) in Asp.Net. Among the big plusses are ease of use and simplicity in deployment and maintenance. You could argue that it is the best CMS available on Asp.Net, and most of Microsoft's own community sites (like asp.net, netfx3.com) are now running on Community Server.

All good, until I visited their site today morning.

Last time I checked out Community Server (v2.0), it allowed full commercial usage if the Community-Server logo and its link back to the parent website was provided in every page. Even if that was not ideal, you could live with it since the image was sitting at the bottom and generally harmless. The license also does forbid you from creating a derivative work.

Here is the old FREE license:

For the instances where I suggested Community Server earlier (2005-06), these restrictions seemed OK. It was better than closed source, you could use it free-of-cost and the source was available, though you could not re-package and sell it. I respected their business model; I thought it was just different. It was cleanly somewhere between a fully Closed Source application and an Open Source application.

Today morning, I had another requirement for a community site (with a Microsoft platform restriction) and Community Server was the first thing that came to mind. When I checked out the new Community Server Edition (Community Server 2007), I noticed there were some licensing changes. The version comparable to the old license is now called ‘Personal' edition (Personal License), but it fully excludes commercial use. The new ‘Express' version allows commercial use (Express License), but only on the intranet. It also has a limitation on the number of blogs (limited to 10), and number of forums (limited to 15). This means you cannot use it on a moderately sized intranet as well.

While I can stop whining and choose an alternative for the new website, I am wondering what the older Community Server users (who do not prefer to buy a commercial license) will do. They have no upgrade path, and are stuck with an unsupported version. That is bad.

License changes screw customers.

There is a lesson to be learnt from the Community Server story, that Open Source is not Open Source until it holds true in ‘spirit'. Unless it gives full modification and re-distribution rights to the users, it is not much better than Closed Source. In some ways it is even worse, because when you are buying Closed Source you know it is closed and that you are screwed if the company wishes to do so. With Restricted-Open-Source, we tend to lean comfortably on the ‘Open'ness, willing to live with its restrictions. It might bite back hard.

To restate the obvious, if this was a real Open Source application and there is such a license change, a fork would have evolved in less than a week.

So, that's how I learnt to trust only _REAL_ Open Source.

*The licensing restrictions may have been introduced in any version after v2.0, and not with the latest version.

Update: My concern is not with a restrictive License, it is with the License _change_. I totally appreciate a company's right to choose any license it wants to. Or the larger lesson from this is to never take anything for FREE unless it is a true Open Source license.