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Open Source Sharing the Open Source Love
Things are busy down at Innova, but I wanted to share the Open Source love.
A friend of mine sent this link to me, and I would be bereft of my duties as Open Source Evangelist if I didn't pass it on.
Open Source Alternative — Find Open Source Alternatives to well-known commercial software.
You have now heard. Go, and spread the word of Open Source.
General Office Ninjutsu
We had a very successful COLUG meeting here at the office last night, and we'd first like to thank the COLUG for meeting here once again. In preparation for guests we do what any security-minded company does: we lock our offices!
So this morning, when Chip (our Chief Network Wrangler) comes in and finds his office locked and his keys safely on his desk inside, he panics a little. We can't even pop the hinges or anything, all the screwdrivers are inside their office!
Apparently Kent, our Master of Things Visual, is also a ninja-in-training. He hopped up on a table, lifted himself through the hole above the door, and dropped safely to his feet. Once inside, he opened the door for the outside world, saving the day.
Kent denies it, but I'm also pretty certain he took out some security guards, disabled some tripwires, and assassinated a feudal warlord. These are things ninjas do, after all.
Culture, Software Developing on a Mac
When my last laptop — a Toshiba M35x given as a graduation present — died six months ago, I needed a replacement fast. After much inner turmoil, I shelled out for the 15″ MacBook Pro. This is the first Mac machine I’ve ever owned for my own use, but I have to say it’s been a welcome change from working professionally with Windows (which had become a complete pain), or working personally with Linux (which can be awesome if you take the time to get it to work right.)
If you’re going to make the switch, here’s a list of software I’ve found indispensable:
Culture, Open Source COLUG at Innova Partners
We have the pleasure of hosting COLUG (the Central Ohio Linux Users Group) again this month.
It looks like it's an open forum this month. I've been to a few of these before, and they are generally lively discussions of the recent happenings in the open source community and Linux in general.
Come one, come all. It should be fun, and we'll have some food waiting for all.
Culture On Meetings
Every Friday at Innova we have a meeting. This is a traditional, sit-down style meeting, where for a few hours we all re-sync with each other about projects, and show off anything cool that we’ve found in the past week. (The picture is of Keith Avery, our resident Python-guru, talking about how cool “INSTEAD OF” triggers in SQL Server 2000 are.)
Apparently, this is shocking to some. Earlier this month the community was abuzz about “Stand-Up Meetings,” where meetings are held standing up in order to shorten the time spent on non-essential agenda items. The original article (here) said that their company achieved great success by wheeling all of their chairs out of their conference room! How bad of an idea is this?
First, meetings are held so that the company can communicate. If you create artificial barriers to effective communication, you shouldn’t be surprised when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, so to speak. If we mandated that the Friday meeting was standing-only, we’d miss out on a lot of casual communication, which are the best and usually most informative parts of the meeting.
Second, programmers (at least here) already hold their own “Stand-Up” meetings! I’ll go and bug Eddie about a layout design decision for some PDFs we’re generating. We’ll stand around and discuss things, and in a half-hour I’ll have all the information I need. These are informal — I don’t have anyone arbitrarily telling me I can’t sit down and I have a very loose agenda.
Finally, I love our Friday meetings. Traditionally us code-jockeys are supposed to hate meetings (because anything that takes us away from our terminals are a bad thing), but I find it’s a good way to relax on a Friday afternoon, learn some things that maybe I was too busy during the week to understand properly, and discuss the homoerotic subtexts of Top Gun.