…scary

Is Google taking over the web? It seems so. Lately Google launched its own services to compete with other companies / open source associations on all fronts – DNS, source code hosting, url shortening, instant messaging, email. You name it and Google has it. Of course, not all Google’s services are top of the line in their field, but, if you look at it as a whole, Google is slowly taking over the word.

I’ve compiled a list with all the stuff I usually do online, presented Google’s service and the service I’m using:

As it turns out, I’m not addicted to Google! I use some of Google’s services, but the only one I couldn’t live without is the search engine. But my question is what will happen when/if Google will control most of the services on the web? I mean when 90% of the users will use Google’s alternatives, will Google become the new Microsoft? Or they will keep to their “don’t be evil” creed?

What Google services do you use and what are the alternatives?

As you probably know, the most popular Open Source RDBMS, MySQL, is being acquired by Oracle, which – some say – will most likely mean the end of the open source project. MySQL has been eroding Oracle’s profits for quite some time now, and there’s a fat chance that Oracle will kill MySQL in order to keep its high profits.

Why should we care? Well, without MySQL, the web would be much different than it is today. Popular open source applications like Wordpress and Drupal, millions of websites and applications rely on MySQL. A lot of start-up companies use MySQL in order to cut down costs and not invest in expensive, proprietary RDBMSs.

But we, the people, have the power to stop it by writing to the EC in order to block the transaction. Read what Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL’s creator, has to say on the matter: Help saying MySQL.

PS: Do you know the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God knows He’s not Ellison…

I wanted to write this post for quite some time now, but I just didn’t had the time. Okay, I admit it. I was too lazy to do it. As almost everybody knows now, Finland has declared broadband access to the Internet a human right. This means that the Finnish Government will guarantee you can access the Internet no matter where you are on Finnish ground. I wonder if they’ll have an emergency service, like the Police or Ambulance which you can call and they will come in great hurry, with sirens and everything, to bring you a modem so that you can go online. That would be cool! The Finnish “Net Squad”.

With a population of about 5 million – the same as a medium sized Chinese village – and GDP per capita above that of Germany or France, Finland can make this move quite easy. It’s already a highly industrialised country, which places great emphasis on technology. As society is relies more on the Internet, a right to an Internet connection derives from other “older” human rights. Just have a look over the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and see how many of those rights we exercise online nowadays: information, education, free speech, and so on.

Unfortunately I live in Romania, were people have more bronze age preoccupations than broadband access to the Internet. For instance, these days we have a great religious festival, the days of Saint Demeter – protector of the country or something – and people stand for days in queues that stretch for kilometres to get to kiss the saint’s earthly remains. Yes, you’ve read it right. They endure the cold for days at a time to kiss a several hundred years old corpse. The Internet is still being frown upon as a tool of the Devil in some rural areas.

I’m waiting to see with country will be next. Perhaps another country of the Nordic Council? Japan, Dubai? We’ll see…

What do you do while programming? And more important, what kind of music do you listen while programming? My habits are:

• Starting a new project: Rammstein – Sonne
• Taking over a project originally started by a junior programmer: Nightwish – Wish I had an angel
• I’m assigned to 5 years old project that uses really old technologies and frameworks: Weird Al Yankovich – Amish paradise
• Looking over a Perl script written by somebody else: Prodigy – Voodoo people
• After a long meeting with the project manager: Zebda – Hasta siempre
• Debugging (first 30 minutes): Rammstein – Ich will
• Debugging (after 30 minutes): Prodigy – Fire starter
• Looking for security flaws: MC Hammer – Can’t touch this
• When I see a QA guy heading for my desk: Nana – He’s coming
• When the project goes online: Britney Spears – Ops, I did it again (just kidding ) I’m having a brew and listen to Orthodox Celts – Star of the county down

What do you listen to while coding?

This is the very definition of cool…

How will the future look? Here is Microsoft’s point of view:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

I consider Microsoft’s point of view to be very optimistic. I’m not sure that in only 10 we’ll reach that level of technology, and even if we do, there will be a lot of people that will reject it, due to traditions, personal convictions that it “was better back in the days”, religious beliefs and so on. And, before developing that technology, we should figure out some new energy sources, to have enough juice to power it all. But the ideas expressed in the movie are impressive, not the less…

Credits for finding the movie go to Radu.

As previously stated, I intend to get my bachelor degree this year. And I have to chose from a variety of projects. I have 2 options, either choose a PHP project, that will be ready in no time and get rid of it fast or choose to do a project with a technology I don’t know yet and learn that technology in the process, so that I can honestly that I’ve learn something useful while in school. I decided to give AIR a try, for one possible project, a RSS aggregator and a RSS reader (desktop app). I if get along with AIR, this will be painless. I’ll develop the browser based application and use AIR to build the desktop one on top of this one.

Installing AIR on my Ubuntu box was a piece of cake, it worked right out the box. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about Aptana, which kept poping errors and I had a hard time installing the AIR plugin. But I get this type of problems a lot when dealing with Eclipse based software and I got used to it in time…

So I’ve the gas and tried out some code examples. Copy/paste, monkey style, see how well it does. Well, what can I say…I’m impressed. If this was a gaming blog, I would have to say “AIR pwnz”. Really! AIR is a much developer friendly platform that I initially thought. So today I’m starting my AIR learning quest for 1 week and at which end I’ll decide if I’ll go forward with AIR for my project. As I’m a seasoned web developer, I want to see how easy it is to port an web application from a browser based app to an AIR one. Yes, I know AIR does that by default. And not quite. For instance, in order to send something to the server, in Javascript you use Ajax, like such

new Ajax.Request( url, options);

…while in AIR you have to write…

var request = new air.URLRequest( url ); 
var loader = new air.URLLoader(); 
loader.load( request );

If I were to use a design pattern like MVC, it will be a lot easier to port a browser application to AIR. I’ll have to rewrite the model and probably the view. No meddling with the controller, the application’s logic would remain unchanged (parse some feeds and display them to the user). This would be a big plus. So first of all I’ve wanted to try AIR with Javascript MVC and make some sniffing in the controller, see if the application is running inside the browser or on AIR, load a different model and a different view for each case. But after giving it some thought I’ve realised that I also have to read the Javascript MVC’s documentation, try it out and get used to it. And I just don’t have enough time for that, because those South Park episodes aren’t going to watch themselves. Or do I? I’ll post some code examples as things go forward. This is a plead to my readers, if any of you is familiar with AIR, please leave a comment. I would appreciate having someone to share my problems with

Motto: I’m not fat, I’m just big boned. Back to South Park…

I’ve seen this video today

…and it made me think a lot about my life and my career. Most of the technologies I’ve studied in a classroom are now obsolete. Or were already obsolete at the time I was studing them. It’s very morale damaging knowing that you’re studing something just to pass an exam and that you’ll never use that knowledge ever again. But I wasn’t discouraged by the educational system and I’ve spent a lot reading and experimenting on my own and that’s how I’ve got a pretty good programmer. Really! I was always appreciated by my work colleagues and considered to be the guy that they could always ask for help. But still, I can’t even write a louzy string comparison in ASM without using Google. That’s not because I didn’t want to learn that or that I consider ASM knowledge to be useless and obsolete like other people do, but because there is simply to much information out there and not enough time to learn it all. And it multiplies at an ever increasing rate. Ajax as we know it -- with the XMLHttpRequest object -- was coined in 2005, less than 4 years ago. Now it’s impossible to find a job description in the web programming field that doesn’t include Ajax. Today’s experiments will be next year’s job requirements. Our generation will always have to adapt to world that’s changing like never before.

So I’ve decided to expand my education and skills and I’ve made a list with things I want to do this year:

• improve my knowledge of the Zend Framework -- the target is to pass the Zend Framework Certified Engineer exam
• improve my knowledge of the Linux operating system -- the target is to pass the Comptia Linux+ exam
• improve my command of the English language -- the target is to pass pass the Cambridge exam
• learn a little bit of German -- no ambitious target here as I can’t really set a target, now that my level in German is below zero
• get my bachelor degree -- after all these long years, it’s about time
• take a race driver course -- a hobby for now, but one can never know what the future holds;)

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to complete the list, but I’ll try hard and I’m going to look back to this post on the 31 of December and see how much I’ve accomplished. And of course, start a new list with “to-learn”s for 2010.