Mark Pilgrim moved his parents to Linux because their Mac experience was souring.:

I had originally chosen Kontact/Kmail for their email needs, but I ran into some strange bug where Kmail refused to send messages. Basic functionality, right? You’d think someone would, you know, notice. I realize email standards are wide and complicated, but still. An email program that can’t send email is pretty fucking useless.

my father threw me for a loop and asked how he could realign the print heads and check the ink levels. I have owned printers for many decades and I have never done this, but apparently it’s a regular occurrence for him, and the Mac printer driver let him do it. So OK, I poke around Google, and lo and behold, there’s a package for that. But it doesn’t work. Oh wait, I need to install gimp-print too (God knows why). Now it aligns the print heads, but it gives an error message while checking ink levels. But it works from the command line. But only as root. Weird. Unresolved. Grr.

Sounds like they’re off to a great start!

Here’s the scenario: you’re writing a green field web application. This application will be used to power more than one e-commerce site, which means that it must be easily tailored. You can use any toolset you like, and the requirements are fairly standard (e.g. exporting data to CSV, modern UI, payment gateway, etc.). What do you choose?

1. Off-the-shelf e-commerce engine
2. Open-source e-commerce engine
3. Build your own

So, it seems you’ve got three options (anyone think of a 4th?). Of course within each of these options there are any number of competing solutions, especially in “build your own”, where you could potentially use any language, web server, etc.

I think with any software developer, the preference is to build one’s own. That way you get ultimate flexibility and intimate understanding of the code, which makes it easier to expand and customise. The downside is that you have more work up-front in order to get running.

Off-the-shelf (i.e. commercial) software tends to have a lot of features that your accountant and fulfillment department would like, and often gives you the ability to customise using one of a few popular languages or their own pseudo-language. The real advantage is that you can have a store quickly, or so you might think. Often, shoe-horning your data into their proprietary and closed-source format makes this option longer and more expensive than building it yourself.

All of which leaves open-source engines. You can be up and running quickly (like with commercial apps) but you have access to the source code if you decide you need to change things the way you want them. Potential downsides are lack of support and lack of particular features you might need (e.g. a particular payment gateway).

So, which would you choose?

I met my co-conspirator Aidan in person for the first time today. He's over here in sunny Belfast for a while and is working up on the third floor of the same building as myself, so we had a bit of lunch and got chatting about our plans for the future, our experiences of working for $BIG_CORP and life in general.

It was good to finally put a physical person to the online persona and apparently neither of us looks like the photos we use as avatars

Go team Infurious!

David Brin writes for EDGE on their 2008 question:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

I agree that social networks are trivialising communication, the quality of the human species which really sets us apart. Our ability to formulate ideas would be wasted without the ability to share them. It’s therefore unfortunate that the vast majority of FaceBook conversation seems to be in comparing trivia knowledge, attacking each other with virtual werewolves or using the platform to spread the latest YouTube hit about some girl baring her breasts on webcam when her dad walks in (and I certainly believe that each and every one of those was staged).

I ache for meaning in conversation. Some old fashioned conversation about The Selfish Gene or the Null Hypothesis of Alien Life. Conversation where my preconceptions might be challenged, firing my imagination and igniting something in my poor brain long thought dormant.

Funwall? Fuck off.