Adventures in home working

In my last update I was fairly up beat, my pain had declined a lot and I was feeling pretty positive in myself.  I was getting lots of exercise, sleeping ok, and coping well with the fatigue.  However just after that update I got a chest infection, this is what happened:

1. Very quickly, as soon as I noticed that I was starting with a cold, I felt an increase in muscle and joint pain
2. I went to the doctors 2 days after the cold started and he said I had a chest infection, probably as a result of my steroid suppressed immune system.  I started on Antibiotics that day
3. The antibiotics got to work quickly and my muscle and joint pain subsided in perfect step with my chest infection
4. However my fatigue levels did not subside, in fact they increased
5. After a week the chest infection was gone, but the muscle and joint pain started to come back
6. After two weeks all of the chest/cold symptoms have gone but the fatigue is very bad and the joint and muscle pain still comes and goes through the day.  My concentration is appalling. 
7. I went back to the Doctor and he suggested going back to 20mg of Steroids rather than 10mg.
8. The increased steroid dose has not helped, if anything my fatigue is even worse.  Whereas previously on 20mg of steroids I could not get to sleep before 2:00AM and was awake by 7:00AM.  I am not easily falling to sleep by 11:00PM and struggling to get up by 8:00AM.

The following chart gives you an idea of my ups and downs:

However the good news is that I have continued to work 4 hours a day through this latest episode with the following challenges:

1. I can only concentrate for about 30 minutes at a time
2. I have to take a break every 30 minutes, or do something different
3. I make many mistakes, and have to do a lot of rework
4. To get 4 hours done I am finding extended day best, starting at about 8:00AM and finishing at about 8:00PM with lots of breaks in between and gentle exercise.  However fatigue and pain mean I have had to reduce walking to 15 minutes a time rather than 60 minutes, and 10 lengths of the pool rather than 40.

Jenny, my second eldest, just completed her first week at Drama Summer School.  She was part of a great performance of Blood Brothers one of my favourite musicals.  Jenny had quite a few small parts and did very well although she did get rather over-heated as she was wearing two outfits for the whole performance.  The cast overall were great and there is some real talent in the little group. 

We get to see probably 4 performances a year by this youth group and we are really getting to know the actors quite well now, its a special plus looking forward to seeing the best of them develop and trying to spot some of the talent that we are going to enjoy in the years to come.  I was also lucky enough to get to see the individual talent show last Thursday, some of the group shows were very funny, and one of the singers was amazing, she certainly had no problems with projection!

Stephie my eldest is at the school this week, doing the rather more academic Richard III, which she is enjoying, she has spent 3 weeks researching it on the web and creating a project folder so she is well prepared.  She is busy making a coffin in the back garden at the moment!

http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2004/08/08/2238.aspx

These video’s are pretty good examples of some of Microsoft’s integrated innovation ideas.  Illustrated by the connected car concept

Although not strictly contradictory, it makes for a nice title.  This article is about one of Microsoft’s reactions to Open Source and one way in which it is delivering on its “integrated innovation”, marketing strategy.  

The basic concept is that Microsoft takes a collection of their products, and applies them to the solution of a particular business need.   They publish for free standard architectures, processes, templates etc.  You can populate these architectures with some products of your own choice.  In a way whilst this is not Open Source it’s a sort of Open Solution. 

The concept is quite interesting to me because one of the challenges with Open Source software, due in the main to the way it is created, is how to build a coherent solution from the many different components, without some over-arching architectural vision.  Where does this vision get created in the current Open Source development model?  It happens within IBM, Red-hat and Novel etc and it probably happens in a proprietary way.  Even if all of the source for the components in the architecture are Open, the architecture itself is likely to evolve in directions specific to the motivations of its creator and be effectively proprietary.

So I am left thinking should the emphasis shift from Open Source to Open Standards and Standard Architectures.  Maybe this in the long run is more important.  If the software that implements the standard happens to be Open Source then that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day possibly of only transient importance.   In their own way, (Microsoft always do things their own way), Microsoft is giving us an example of Standard Architectures, implemented increasingly with Open Standards.  Not quite what I had in mind, but it’s what got me thinking in this direction.

This may seem like a simple question to answer, i.e. is written, just like any other software!  It also might seem a strange sort of question to ask, but you will hopefully get my point if you read on!

NOTE: No thorough analysis supports the observations I report here.

It seems to me that the vast majority of the important Open Source Software comes to be through the following mechanisms:

1. Cloning or reproducing in some way an existing design specification or similar.  Examples of this route being Mono(.NET), Linux(Unix) and Wine(Win32).  This technique is usually to force a product or interface into the open, by creating an alternative.
2. Donating, i.e. some third party gifts pre-existing Closed Source to the community, examples of this being OpenOffice, Zope and Niku.  This route is often taken by closed source product companies with an old product that is not generating much revenue.  The closed source community uses this old product line to, improve their image, generate services revenue, stimulate demand for optional closed source products, kill off a competitor etc.  In some cases the original developer continues to have some involvement in the development, in other cases not.
3. Sponsorship, i.e. some third party, usually a commercial company, for reasons of their own, sometimes benevolent sometimes not, sponsors the community to develop a product or improve it in some way.  Perl and Python are examples of this.  Most often those sponsored are development leads.  This is often taken by companies wishing to safeguard investments that depend on the continued evolution of the Open Source product, or to stimulate demand for a relate product like training or books.
4. Academia, i.e. some academic project deliverable evolves or develops some Open Source software.
5. Community demand, the final and by far the rarest mechanism is that the community sees a need, appoints a leader and builds a community to solve the need.  The best examples of this are extensions to the four categories above, for example a driver for Linux or a filter for OpenOffice.  I believe the most important example however is Apache.
6. Individual demand, i.e. a person pursues an interest, or a personal need, programming languages are a good example of this for example boo and pylon.  The passionate individual becomes the leader by default and may gather around then a small band of co-developers who share the interest.

I hesitate to put them in order of importance, because of the importance of the exceptions, however if we set aside Linux, then Donating seems to be the most important way for “market shaping” software to become Open Source.  The order of importance is then probably:

1. Donating
2. Cloning
3. Sponsorship, (because it funds the community leaders)
4. Academia
5. Community demand
6. Individual demand

Of course these mechanisms are not the sole domain of Open Software, Free Software, (i.e. free to use), has also been developed extensively and uses all of the same mechanisms to come into being.  An additional very important mechanism for Free Software being bundling, i.e. its free with this book, magazine, operating system, training course, paid for product etc.

Future posts will reveal why this analysis is important, in my view at least.

Johnathan Schwartz writes a nice article about Sun’s dilema, now resolved, about how to compete against Linux.  Linux is not a product, its a social movement that Sun applauds, so how can they compete?  He goes on to explain that in reality Linux is delieverd as many incompatible distributions, and that its not viable to test against them all.  Out of this confusion, in the server space especially, Redhat have appeared as the clear leader.  Now says Johnathan, Sun has someone to compete with, and their relationship can be a normal business competition without the complexity of the social movement.

He talks a little about Open Source Solaris, gives a download link for Solaris and I provide a link to a Whitepaper that provides more details on Solaris.

This video of Microsoft Reasearch into large screens and multiple monitor support, shows some of the cool things that you can start to do with all of that screen real-estate.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14162#14162

My previous two posts gave two examples of projects that would have benefited from having been Open Sourced.  They happened a long time ago, when I worked for a different community and both have disappeared so there’s no problem with discussing them.  When these products were developed Open Source was just an emerging concept.  I am not going to discuss the history of Open Source, that’s been well documented already, and I am not qualified.  However I am going to start to build up a series of articles that describe some of concerns and the challenges I think the Open Source model faces in the future.  I am going to assess some of the established beliefs as documented in Open Source bibles like the Cathedral and the Bazaar and I am going to do my bit to try and help.

In a previous post I described a simple networked or standalone, (depending on data definitions), document imaging processing project I led.  This system would have been perfect as an Open Source project for the following reasons:

1. The need for such capability to be provided as infrastructure was universal.  The main constraint at the time to this happening being the high cost and complexity of the current applications.  So adoption would probably have been quite rapid
2. The target user community tended to be very network centric, as they were often charged with distributed access to large central collections of information.
3. My company had no interest in the software,  its interest was in an efficient way to capture and distribute its image data as efficiently as possible
4. The system was very extensible, allowing additional storage drivers, scanner drivers, printer drivers, viewers and databases to be added by other developers.  The automatic maintenance of these components in line with new hardware advances and the increased deployment reach would have been very valuable
5. There were many areas of potential improvement.  Some of the concepts were not fully realised, and many functional/feature improvements such as OCR were missing

 It’s also likely that the community would have seen the natural evolution of the product to a web application, and created that UI and made the necessary database access module changes, saving my company the need for that re-write.  Finally vendors of specialist image viewers, scanners and printers/plotters may have sponsored development as it would have enabled them to provide a working system, rather than a component. 

In addition to the raw savings in development cost for my company the potential benefits for the community were greatest. The provision of document imaging capability, a truly universal need on every device and in every business, has never happened at the infrastructure level, but rather in an ad-hoc way at department level in most cases. This system not because it was the best, but because it was very simple, made few assumptions about its data, and few assumptions about its environment could have been the start of making this happen.