Innova Partners / Loosely Typed in Ohio

Open Source, phpSprockets Coping with toxic code

Posted by Eddie Bowen on April 24th, 2007

Wordpress code Regular readers of this blog will notice how we've spruced the place up a little recently. A little Photoshop here, a little CSS there, a nod to contemporary design mores, it all works wonders. We should have a party to celebrate. We really should. As you may know, this blog uses WordPress, so the redesign delivery consisted of a WordPress theme. And since Innova is very much an eat-your-own-dog-food kind of place, we wanted the new theme to use our open source offering, phpSprockets.

And there begins a cautionary tale. Continue Reading…

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Open Source SVG and Open Source

Posted by Kent Broestl on April 20th, 2007

Linux has had widespread acceptance and adoption of svg files for a while now. (Gnome has had svg support since 2000, and then there is this program, which has the most recent news from 1999). What I find odd, is that with open source developers working on the problem, why are there so few good solutions? Continue Reading…

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Culture, Software Missing the Point

Posted by Jon Canady on April 19th, 2007

Yesterday, Andrew Cowie fawned over the OpenMoko mobile phone, how revolutionary it’s going to be because it runs Linux, and how it does things right. Now, I agree with most everything he said. Let’s get that out of the way right now: this is an awesome looking phone! Just between the little shot of the phone on that page, and the description of the open standards they’re using, I’m excited! The problem is not with the phone.

The problem is with this little gem Andrew stuck in near the bottom:

And as a personal note, I especially respect the fact that the device does not have a camera in it. After all, any self respecting photographer already has a real camera, why waste space and power in my phone for it?

That line sums up the general attitude of Linux geeks. Andrew’s completely missing the point here. The point of a cameraphone isn’t to have an awesome production-capable camera inside your phone, it’s about taking a quick picture of a celebrity when you see them in a mall.

Little holy wars are fun for people that are already in the “in-crowd” — personally I love debating with our CSS guru Kent about the merits of vim vs. emacs — but if you’re throwing that crap at the public, do you really expect them to warm up to the product? Furthermore, if you seem proud that your product doesn’t have a feature that I want, why the devil should I look twice at it?

if we at Innova suddenly posted a page hyping our new web application, and specifically mentioned at the bottom that “it doesn’t have Internet Explorer support, but that’s okay because anyone seriously using the web isn’t using IE anyway” we’d lose business hand over fist. Why do some people seem to miss this point?

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Culture, General Sigh

Posted by Eddie Bowen on April 11th, 2007

Sigh. Sigh sigh sigh. yahoo_1 Sigh. yahoo_2 Sigh.

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General New muse

Posted by Matt Scantland on April 8th, 2007

I’ve been running a ThinkPad for the past year or so. Until recently, I’ve always considered IBM’s machines to be the nicest x86 hardware around. But with the new Intel Macs, that isn’t the case anymore.

And with Vista being what it is, I knew I was going to kick Windows into a VM and run a Unix host. Ubuntu looked promising until I was talked into looking at Macs by our resident zealots.

So I went out to Easton to visit the Apple Store today, and am now the proud owner of a 17-inch MacBook Pro and a 30-inch Cinema display. And holy crap, this is some nice hardware.

Here’s what I like best so far:

The Cinema display is absolutely stunning. I’m now running 2560 x 1600 on the display, 1680 x 1050 on the monitor. This is bar-none the best you can do with a laptop. I still think there is an opportunity here with VNC (or hardware I guess), but until you can run two LCDs at better than 1280px, this is it.
The uber-MDI user interface for all programs.
Automator. A super-high level scripting tool for automating tasks.
The Terminal. It’s the Bash shell.
TextMate. An exceptional text editor.

<ul><p>And just a few complaints:</p>
    <li>Command (the Apple Key) needs to be swapped with the Caps Lock key.  I'm going to look at how to do this.</li>
    <li>Home and End don't work properly.  Instead, I'm using cmd-arrow.  This is annoying for heavy text editing.</li>
    <li>I wish more software was written to use an Alt menu</li>
    </ul>

I have a feeling we’re going to be getting more of these around Innova soon.

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