Hell Week

Well after a weekend spending hours setting things up, demonstrating how things work, things blew up in my face. Suddenly the application I was demonstrating to a user disappeared from their PC. Then Sunday, spent the entire day (til 7:30 PM) fighting a series of viruses, adware and malware on a house full of 3 PCs, just to have them all drag to their knees. Damn I'm in for the long haul correcting that one.

So I trudged forward on Monday just to have an odd amount of little crap go wrong for me. I know this will be like this for the next few days, as I have been here before. Not sure if it's karma, the sun, the moon or the stars, but life is dumping on me as I blog.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to inherit a great laptop, for free. An IBM ThinkPad (StinkPad), so today I endeavored to install XP and Ubuntu Linux as dual boot. I have a desktop PC at home that tri-boots, vista, xp and ubuntu. The laptop wasn't having it with regards to XP. The CD boots, as soon as it says starting Windows, it turns the whole laptop off. Tried bios settings and other fixes, older XP cds (w & w/o Service packs) to no avail. Then I tried Linux. Linux worked like the champ it is. Even Ultimate Boot CD worked, but not an installation. So forward I went with Linux.

I've used linux on my web servers for years, even accessing with a terminal (putty) and I'm pretty comfortable with working within Linux. My one failing point is hardware and troubleshooting. So today I get a nice taste of some raw Linux via ubuntu. Oddly enough a lot of the documentation begins with, OK now you've got ubuntu installed, lets begin working. Not sure of any other Network Administrators, but whenever I get a fresh install of an OS, the FIRST thing I do, is grab hardware drivers. The laptop has a built in WiFi card. Ubuntu found the sound card, all controllers, the video, I think it even found bluetooth. Not the WiFi card, It's an intel something or other.

The Forums tell me to find wlan-ng, I did, I popped it onto a usb stick, copied to the laptop, untarred, and there sits the driver. How the heck I install them, No Clue. The version of Ubuntu I have is a couple versions behind, so I started grabbing the latest. Perhaps it will have the drivers included, but that does not step me any closer to troubleshooting and installing new hardware. Oh well.

So now I'm checking out all the Open Source apps available, and I am impressed. Ubuntu will be far better than the other MS OS's (Vista or XP). The small setback? No MS Office, no Windows apps really. I will try Wine, to run them, but im not confident, Yet. So here I go, setting the example of Open Source operating systems, and the plethora of applications available. This DEFINITELY includes LAMP (Linux of course, Apache (webServer), MySQL (powerful database engine), PHP (programming language), and Perl (another Programming Language).

I plan to use the laptop as a development platform for rich web applications. I'm kinda glad XP didn't work like it does on thousands of other PCs. Sometimes a weekend from hell, can turn into a shining light at the end of a tunnel.

I will be posting code to my sourceforge project, well commented so that others may learn how to create web apps. I'll also include a list of tools I install from the open source repository, there's so many I want (30gb HD says I won't get em all). So until my next post, remember there is no good or evil, simply the yin and the yang.

The Long Tail

Just what is the long tail ?
The long tail is that elusive marketing component that says the big money is in letting something ride for a time (like an investment). The big money isn't in Britney Spears, it lies in the long tail of misspelled and uncharacteristic keywords. What's this got to do with a blogger or a community developer ?
Consider Google, they are in the heated battle of their lives. They have all the MPAA and RIAA execs at their door begging them not to go forward. Yet they will. Why?
Consider the mix differential. I can take a video off youtube, that has been designated Public Domain and do with it whatever I like. I can derive it to anything I like. I can mix it with other videos, I can include it in my own, unique production, I can use it for commercial purposes. Most of all, I can use it without fear of retribution. I can use it to make something new, and unique, I can stand on a shoulder of Giants !
Contrast that with something I cannot use, say Britney Spears Music. I can take a video off of youtube and mix it to something new, and re-release it as a new work of my own. You juat cannot do that with closed, copyrighted content.

Response to Mark Cubans Blog Post

They (Google) sure aren't hurting for money though, are they? I think their mission is far more noble than the posts I read here. Seems like many here think from the standpoint of what would benefit ME would be..... which seems to be all about MONEY ! so that is one perspective but there is another. That free content is better than locking it up and giving it to one soul/corporation for the rest of their lives. They will make more money off future videos and they know quantity is king there. Standing on the shoulders of Giants if you will. The boat these posts seem to miss is that, over the long term their collection of free content (especially if filtered) will continue feeding itself. People who make vids for the heck of it will continue do so, and they can release them under any license they choose. Releasing to the public domain allows them to be used in other more creative works and it's perpetual from there. People now have a creativecommons.org to go to and finds a huge amount of media to incorporate into their own, new, creative works. What happens as google makes pennies off their trillions of videos while others seek a $5 to view? Locking things up for the interests of few was nice while it worked, but we can benefit as a society and perhaps build a far more diverse representation of the human experience if we embrace freedom as well as capitalism. Perhaps watching a video is not a criminal activity because someone tells us so. Perhaps its a matter of respect and given the choice, many will involved in both sides. One thing is sure, with the ability to release my creative works to the public domain, I feel better as a human for sharing without a toll. I prefer to make money providing something with more value, such as a service or a trinket, perhaps a meal or some lodging. Placing a tax on every piece of media under the sun, I have no interest in that at all. Balance will prevail, and I believe ultimately Google (and others in the Open community) will trump the old ways of business I see here.