Dugongs

A quirky animation by the makers of Magical Trevor: dugong

Bombs on request

What is my country doing?

Unlikely visits to Narnia and Hogwarts

As a demonstration of my continued existance, if not my exact location, I have taken some quizzes.

This one made me burst out laughing. I never really identified with Puddleglum, but my family found many ways to appreciate him, and he is a bit likeable, at that.


Well, I suppose I could have guessed I would be stuck with the stereotype: I should just start telling the quizzes that I am very, very, stupid. With a certain comma kept for demonstrative purposes. Also that I am brave and adventurous, which I may just be when I actually need to. I don't like to play with risk, though.



Intelligent and insightful, you are a gifted individual, who although may sometimes be buried in academic affairs, is friendly and welcoming.

Well, I decided to take it again, incredibly stupid, (I really couldn't have gotten any stupider), but ready to run out the door and play the hero at a moment's notice. The result made me laugh. Sadly, if I hadn't been Viktor, I would have been Dumbledore, according to the listed ranks, and I would hardly call him stupid! Maybe Viktor was the only stupid one they had. What about Crabbe or Goyle?



As Viktor you are brave, daring and have a thirst for adventure, with a particularly fondness for all things sporting.

Hunting Stardust!

It's called Stardust@Home, but it's not like Seti@Home, at least not to my mind. Seti@Home let you watch your computer produce data analysis graphs looking for something you half-believed would never be found by anybody. Stardust@Home is not as well-tuned to the busy person, admittedly, but it does let you play a much more meaningful part. You get to use what they call a "focus movie" to examine amazingly small squares of "aerogel", looking for stardust collected by a satellite. They'll have thousands if not millions of squares to search, and they're only expecting around 40 particles. So yeah, your chances are still not too great. But they have a very good interactive tutorial on the site, and its actually kind of fun. It's not checking to see whether or not the square has a dot. It's adjusting the focus so you can see the very messy surface of the gel, and then adjusting down below the surface to look for tracks that might lead to particles. If you find a previously-unknown particle, you get to name it!

Mind you, I won't have time to do more than a dozen of these once they have it up and running, but it does look like fun. Here's some other notes:
- I read about the Stardust project on the BBC
- Stardust@Home seems to create its virtual microscopes entirely with JavaScript. Not really hard, but somehow neat all the same. My favorite Javascript app so far, even if I do find Google Maps more practical for day-to-day use.
- Stardust@Home uses S3, an Amazon service geared at letting developers have large amounts of web-accessible space. Yay for my employer doing cool and useful things! Though I must admit, it's much cooler coupled with Stardust@Home than in isolation.

Ohloh

Abigail made a post linking to this article and asking how a company could make money on open source. Before I read the article, I thought that the company probably sold a product to evaluate free software, a bit like RedHat selling a distro of free software. However, it looks like Ohloh is a free service, not only in public beta, but even after release. What, then, do they plan to do?

First, you will notice near the end of the article that they plan to make a for-pay service for evaluating proprietary software. The free one, I suppose, will serve as a demo for the one that is not. Also, I notice that the founders of this company are, at least largely, from Microsoft, two men who were pretty high up in Microsoft's decision-making processes, and two "development managers"—for all I know, a development manager is one step above a developer, but I really don't know. Perhaps a someone can enlighten me. At any rate, Microsoft's upper management is not well-known for its tender love of all things open source. I've been told that Microsoft developers are forbidden to touch it. It seems unlikely to me that Ohloh would be a boon to the open source movement, just based on that.

So Ohloh offers a free service for evaluating open source projects, and a for-pay service for evaluating propreitary solutions. Now, if they can move you from the free service to the paid service, they score, I think, two points, and not just one. Not only do they get you to pay them money, but they move you away from open source and towards proprietary solutions, the territory where Microsoft feels the most comfortable.

How would they accomplish that? Somehow, they would need to build confidence in the service itself, while at the same time pushing customers away from any open source offering. A good example strategy involves numbers: a ranking service is quite likely to offer scores of different options, not only in the composite, but in specific figures such as "Reliability" or "Support". They can show a client several different open source projects, the top picks from all the rankings, and point out how one product shines in Reliability, another in Support. However, they can also point out how slight the difference is, and how low the numbers are compared to what might be desirable. "With a reliability ranking like that, they would take at least 3 weeks to help you. Can you imagine having your production servers go down and waiting 3 weeks for some hobby programmer to get around to helping you?" Then, as a sort of free bonus, they show the ratings on one or two proprietary programs. "Look at this one. The reliability score is 3 times higher than the highest one you saw there. And that isn't even the best one. If you'd like, I could go over some of the proprietary options that are available." For a fee, of course. In fact, the proprietary service could be quite profitable, especially if it involved a commission. Now, the client has got a good explanation of where the numbers came from, and the service seems trustworthy enough to him, and it's even predictable enough to try to get him to spend money. Having been honestly offered a choice from among several open source projects, he may feel that he has been narrowly saved from making a dangerous mistake, and gladly pay for the service so that he can take a proprietary option.

That's what Ohloh looks like to me. Drawing people from a free demo to a paid service is a standard business practice. Drawing companies away from open source software to proprietary software is just the kind of thing Microsoft would want to do. Perhaps I should be more trusting of these brave entrepreneurs, but the explanation that I've given makes a lot more sense to me.