The Paradox of Open Source Lock-In
publicado: 2012-08-29
How open is Open Source, and how free is Free Software?
Making decisions about the implementation of Open Source software in an organization is not easy, and misconceptions still abound to this day. The security that is offered by support contracts, often seem to be worth the money. However, for many small and medium enterprises the licence and support costs can be prohibitive, and it is most often these companies that either dare step into the open source field, or would be well advised to look into it.
Actualizacion de FrontAccounting de version 2.3.9 (2.3.x) a 2.3.11
publicado: 2012-07-30
FrontAccounting a esta bajo desarrollo durante mas de diez años, y tiene una traducción razonablemente buena al castellano. Ay una breve historia del proyecto aquí en SourceForge y en mi experiencia es una buena plataforma con código abierto para uso por PYMES.
Updating FrontAccounting from 2.3.9 (2.3.x) to 2.3.11
publicado: 2012-07-26
FrontAccounting has been in development for many years, and is the choice I made for my accounting software. There is a short piece on the history of the project here on SourceForge and in my experience it is a very nice platform to work with. There are a lot of things that you will not be able to do, or that I have not found out how to do. But if you are reasonably able to install an application on a server, or have someone to manage it for you, it works perfectly for small and medium enterprises.
Steve Jobs: Mind, Big Mind and Brain
publicado: 2012-04-08
In 1985 my father bought the original Macintosh computer, with 128Kb RAM. Since then I followed mac rumours in various incarnations over the years. First reading Tidbits faithfully and in the last couple of years reading the various mac rumor sites. That Mac in many, many ways shaped my love for technology, but also my expectation that technology products should ‘just work’.
Guided tours of Complexity and God
publicado: 2012-03-10
These two books are oddly complementary. I read them one after the other by chance, they just happened to be in that order on my reading pile. First was the guided tour of complexity, by Melanie Mitchel. A well written and accessible book that only lost my interest in the chapter on Mitchel’s own work. Her erudition and grasp of the topic is outstanding, but her own research is simply not on a par with that by, say, Szilard, Shannon, Hofstadter, Feigenbaum et all. She is particularly good at describing the development of our understanding of complexity starting with the work of Aristotle.
Video editing with Blender
publicado: 2012-02-19
Although I have followed Blender and played with Blender for a number of years now, I have only now moved to the Blender Video Sequence Editor (VSE) for production. The reasons were twofold, one the one hand I got stuck in iMovie when I tried to sync my audio tracks precisely to the video. And on the other hand my main PC now runs Ubuntu Linux, and no longer OSX.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right
publicado: 2012-02-09
This book, originally published as an article in the New Yorker still reads like an essay. And that is all good: It is well written and one of those books you could take with you for entertainment on a week-end somewhere with a good chair or couch.
Setting up a development environment in Plone
publicado: 2011-12-22
I’ve found the learning curve for Plone to be steep. And in the beginning even the basics lead to endless unexpected results, even when following the documentation. A typical example is my attempt to follow Martin Aspeli’s book to set up a development environment.
Copying a Plone website with SVN
publicado: 2011-12-16
For a new project I quickly setup a website with webshop in Joomla. But then the specifics of the requirements came in:
And this I was not able to do with Joomla, and there was too much bad press for PHP on the security side at that moment, whether that should have been a realistic concern or not. So after digging into the CMS options at hand in the summer of 2011 we choose Plone.
Modelación de Casos de Uso
publicado: 2011-08-04
Este libro ese un clásico, publicado por primera vez en 2003, que vale la pena leer. Hasta donde pude encontrar no hay una traducción al castellano, y en parte considero la facilidad de leer este libro para alguien que tiene el ingles como segundo lenguaje.
También es un libro que es difícil de reseñar. Por un lado es un excelente tratado del proceso de la definición de requisitos en organizaciones que siguen un método RUP hecho a medida*. El libre cubre el proceso entero de la definición y documentación de requisitos, y lo describe bien. Conozco mas de una empresa que sigue este método al pie de la letra. Así que no hay forma de evitar leerlo si quieres saber si estas siguiendo una metodología bien definida, o si te estas preparando para un nuevo proyecto y quieres prepararte para asumir el trabajo con una metodología y un proceso consistente.