Open Source

Do you have a bunch of idea and have no way to sort them out? Then might I suggest you take a few minutes (read: NOW) to go to FreeMind homepage and install it on the platform of choice (Windows, Linux, OSX, anything that can run Java,...). I'm using it on Debian currently, but the Windows and Mac versions ran fine at work.

You do need to have Java installed (duh) and it is pretty damn amazing of being able to on the fly setup new branches, child nodes.... Here is an example of an export that you can create that is web browseable (requires java) and here is the HTML export.

In addition to using Civicspace for biohabit.org and two non-profit organizations, I'm now using Civicspace at work as an inventory database using flexinode and the wonderful table view. An upshot of using civicspace at work is I'm now using mysql and for the first time in an admin role, and by extension supporting php and apache which is a direction I have been wanting to go for a while.

I have been an Oracle DBA for two years and while Oracle is very stable and can handle massive amounts of data, I have been finding that the massive abilities of Oracle sometimes get in the way. As I've pointed out to the senior DBA at work many times, for a few tasks mysql is a much better tool for the job then Oracle is. Having said this it would be really, really nice if Civicspace/Drupal supported Oracle but I know there are many conflicts with Civicspace/Drupal tables and column headers and Oracle reserved words. For that matter, I wonder if anyone is running Civicspace on Postgres? ...

This weekend I migrated my primary home computer over to Debian 3.1 and it only occurred to me today that I'm now running the OS on my desktop, the server that hosts biohabit.org and the UML (user mode linux) that hosts the beta version of thedirt.org. The really nice part about this arrangement I can use my home computer as a practice environment that is directly applicable to two of my servers. So now if I want to experiment with Apache or if I want to mess around with the mysql backends to civicspace I can safely do so on my home computer.

I have been fairly impressed by Fedora (core) 2, but I have stumbled onto a "feature" where you can't edit the menus. You can add items to your dock/quicklauncher, but the main menu is not modifiable by any magic that I have scene. So my question for Redhat and the Fedora developers is what the hell are you thinking? Granted, Fedora is not yet an officially released product but you have been working on this for many, many months and you still can't edit the menus? If this isn't fixed is short order I think I will have to install my own version of KDE or switch to another distro. Is there some wonderful reason for this? Is there a grand feature that is not yet viewable on the horizon or is this just a train wreck that you created by trying to get gnome and kde to look and feel the same?

While running into problems with a few of my computers (or ones I support for non-profits) where I was not be able to get it to boot or a piece of hardware wasn't working quite right, the name Knoppix popped into my head, which is a linux distro that runs quite nicely off a bottable CD. All that is need is to go to their website, download a .iso file and burn it to a CD.

In every case Knoppix worked flawlessly when I tried it;