Bryce on Technology

More information can be found at the links provided, but Microsoft is not starting the year off strong. Most media outlets led with a story about how the Zune, Microsoft’s digital music player, was hit with a glitch in how its internal clock accounts for leap year. Then, it’s industry leading web browser, Internet Explorer, lost some major market share. An unfortunate start to 2009 for Microsoft.

Zune article: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/the-day-microsoft-zunes-stood-still/

IE losing market share: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123092719894149695.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments

business/entrepreneurship, had to share, technology business/entrepreneurship, Consumer Technology

I recently read this article at FastCompany’s website about Linux: the open source, freely available operating system. While it technically competes with Windows and Mac OS X, most users have probably never heard of it. Most data center admins probably couldn’t live without it. It has a commanding lead in the enterprise hosting space and is responsible for hosting most of the websites on the Internet today. This website, for example, is hosted on a Linux box somewhere in Texas.

The article was profound in explaining Linux’s potential power play in the netbook arena; netbooks are small low power laptops. They’re great for surfing the web, doing emails and many other normal, everyday, tasks. Their low power makes them very affordable but has a major shortcoming when it comes to loading an operating system. Without a lot of memory (Ram) or hard drive space, large operating systems with many background processes would cripple the tiny netbook and render them useless.

Enter Linux. Linux is a highly configurable dream of an operating system that technologists love to play with. Because of its configurability, it’s a perfect candidate to run on a netbook. Processes that are never used can be shut off automatically. Shutting down processes means 1) more memory to do web surfing 2) more processor cycles for web surfing and 3) less space taken up on the hard drive.

Another very important consideration is spyware/malware. Linux is a very secure system by its very nature. The kernel (the brains of the OS) is more protected by its very design. Because of its seemingly insignificant market penetration, spammers and malware developers don’t have any incentive to develop their bugs for this OS. Linux wins again.

Finally, slapping Linux on the netbook follows a bigger trend in the commodization of hardware. Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper as business processes become more efficient and components become less expensive. The operating system has become a bigger slice of the total purchase price of a system. As hardware continues to become more of a commodity, vendors like IBM, HP and DELL will look for ways to jettison the proportionately higher cost of the OS.

As netbooks become more popular, Linux will become more familiar. This familiarity will enhance a seemingly insignificant player in the consumer operating system battle and that could really change the game.

original link:

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/2009-year-linux-revolution

business/entrepreneurship, technology business/entrepreneurship, linux, technology

Over the last several weeks, Google has been announcing snippets of information related to their mobile phone endevor: Android.

Google announced today it will also be releasing a Android Market, a service designed in the image of the iTunes Store with YouTube functionality. An interesting market shift is taking place which could quite possibly be looked in hindsight as the great mobile revolution. First, it was the laptop, coming up next the mobile phone that acts like a laptop?

Mobile developers have been going nuts over development of iPhone applications and they have been making a mint doing so. Some reports have the Store making $1M per day. Wow. Google joins the fray today in their announcement albeit with a slightly more open source bend. They will at first accept only free applications with the paid-for apps coming at a later date.

Expanding the development of mobile apps from a few scattered developers, say, on Research In Motion’s Blackberry devices to many many developers all over the world on Android and the iPhone are setting up a potential for a Brave New World of mobile phone functionality.

Telephony, technology Android, Telephony

I’ve been fighting my Leopard installation recently with getting the IMAP libraries compiled correctly. I wanted the IMAP features so that I could use my sugarCRM application better. After a lot of fighting, compiling and adjusting, I finally got a stable installation of Apache 2.2 and PHP-5.2.5 with IMAP. Here’s how I did it:

I didn’t want to ruin the installation of Apache2.2 that comes native on Leopard, so I started from scratch:

cd /usr/local
mkdir src
curl -O http://www.mirrorgeek.com/apache.org/httpd/httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz # a bunch of output will fly by; that’s normal
cd httpd-2.2.8
./compile –enable-so –prefix=/usr/local/apache2 # a ton more output will fly by
make
sudo make install

Now we have a new apache install in your /usr/local directory. If you want to connect this installation to your usual web directory on your mac, you need to edit your httpd.conf to direct your web root folder to /Library/WebServer/Documents. You do this by executing the following commands:

sudo vi /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
Change DocumentRoot “/usr/local/apache2/htdocs” to: DocumentRoot “/Library/WebServer/Documents”
Next, change to
issue the vi command :wq

Your Apache Installation should be set to go now.

Before we can install php, we need to cimpile the IMAP c libraries. Go to and download these libraries at ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/ . Then, move them to your source directory with the following command:

mv ~/Downloads/[your-imap-download] /usr/local/src
./compile –prefix=/usr/local/imap
make
sudo make install

When this finishes, you can install php

PHP Installation:

Go to http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.2.5.tar.gz/from/a/mirror and download a package
On Leopard, you would issue the following command to move the package to our source directory:

mv ~/Downloads/php-5.2.5.tar.gz /usr/local/src

Now, we compile:

tar -zcvf php-5.2.5.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.5
./configure –prefix=/usr/local/apache2/php –with-apx2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs –with-imap=/usr/local/imap –with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql
make
sudo make install

Following the completion of this install, you should be able to issue the command:

sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

and your installation is complete. SugarCRM should recognize the imap libraries and php should run smoothly.

Please note that this is not a particularly secure installation, but will work great for local intranets to keep your users involved with the crm.

Please post comments if you run into trouble.

HowTo, technology

I’ve been using Skype now for quite awhile. It’s an excellent way to keep in touch with others without using your cell phone minutes. It’s also a free way to video conference, chat and make voice calls.

HowTo, technology