Project to save the WORLD

What do I (as a hacker) think of FB ?  Let me explain a bit.

In the past Americans believed the 'whole Internet' == 'Yahoo welcome page'! The problem continues with different starting pages to the present days.
Now the whole mankind seems to think FaceBook's NewsFeed is THE INTERNET.

I'm pissed off. To me, it has become a big mess of all kind of stuff mostly from sources of news and commercials. I can't find there much messages from my friends any more. I know, my own fault.
I gradually has begun to go back to news-readers, chat, skype, irc, and so on, which I newer gave up.
    
But there is a possibility that FB can save the world. Or at least the information technology from disaster. You know: software bugs, viruses, trojans, mailspam, intruders, rootkits, sniffers... and mobile phones !

This is my proposal:

1. Since most people think FB is the INTERNET and FB is able solve any problem and has answer to any question, we must remove all other applications from the world. By doing that, we have only FB bugs left.
By my theory, nobody will notice this small change :)

2. FB's status field must be changed to Telnet-window which accepts only characters echoed to backbone system. This cleans up the mesh of multimedia and font chaos. The FB gets even more rewards for the improvements to clean up information flow. The users are forced to learn reading and writing skills, though.

3. Status update field will be chanced to accept only hexadecimal characters which forms SQL-command clauses through the system just right to the database directly. This may cause some resistance in some novice users, but hackers can sell consultation courses to those beginners. Half of the facebook application code (and troubles) are gone.

4. Mobility users are closed down by the new feature: The status updates from mobile devices are printed out by so small font that friends are not able to read. Commo'n.. mobile users can blame themselves, they have bought too small devices anyway, even without keypads.

5. Newsfeed-window can also be Telnet-frame. There are only textual information anyway (if nothing). And of course the Newsfeed-window could be the same window as the status field. Most IT-problems solved.

6. An improvement could be that irc, news-messages, chat and mail-messages could be redirected to different frames. And FINALY the users reach the level they always wanted. Everybody knows who to send and where the messages are from in controlled fashion.

7. Last step: Rest of the Facebook can be removed from the system.

quod erat demonstrandum

br.
   "A hacker - looking for the project manager for a new OpenSource project"

SCM

The migration from CVS to SVN (Subversion) and Git wasn't that hard. Git is the way for me to go on. Working with Git in parallel with SVN is not a big problem, but I wish to find better UI-applications for Git, something like TortoiseSVN. And better Git integration into Eclipse & Netbeans is needed.

Git, as distributed version control, have a cool branch / merge functionality to the level, where the writer is encouraged to do branches on the fly voluntarily and often. Especially private local branches are handy just in case of testing different variations e.g. of the source code.

One of the great findings was GitHub, where a lot of OpenSource projects are hosted with Git. It's easy to start up your own project there by commands push/pull/fork and clone. The only thing to remember is, that _free_ GitHub is a public repository like Google Code (http://code.google.com/hosting/).
Anyway, it is as easy to manage GitHub repository and fetch projects down as it is to manage local repositories on your own drive. Eric Berry's GitHub presentation.

And the most interesting function in GitHub is to find out the most popular Open Source projects by number of forks and how many people are watching the status of each projects. Awesome tool :)

The most challenging step will stay just the same: merge. If there are lot of changes into same files made by several distributed team members to merge at once, problems are the same. Git only can help in this case by making frequent merges to HEAD-branch easy.
Making frequent merges a standard approach the release management can be much straightforward. At the same time it will be a standard procedure to communicate division of work and architecture frequently to avoid overlapping changes. One way is to divide merge in lower level to be done in stages like in Linux-kernel project. Git supports agile way to work. Let's see, how much companies can utilize Git.

Hubs, Switches, Bridges and Routers

What a confusing old network there is at my my wife's workplace! She asked me to connect their intra into public net in order to allow e-invoices sent to the customers. It took long hours to illustrate and figure out cabling, DHCP/IP-settings and network component configuration options and methods.
I felt myself quite stupid because I couldn't get neither D-Link router nor various other boxes laying around to work. So I resolved the problem by installing a Linux box with two network adapters as a router. The old unused workstation easily run IP masquerading (NAT) and firewall. It might be shooting a fly with a cannon, but this is a way I have solved these problems for years. Thanks to Harri A., my former Nokia colleague, who once taught me to manage firewalls with Redhat5.

Software version control update

Few days ago I delivered some software and realized the urgent need to update my Linux-boxes, again. One of the systems I needed to upgrade and learn more was SCM (Source code management).

I ended up to copying project folders all over again and give them names after the backup date or to make some zip-files trying to remember which one was the latest working version. Anyway, I work with several computers all the time. One motivation to learn SCM-systems is the open source world, where the essential skill is to checkout and download software from CVS or SVN quite often. Also, I have been asked in job interviews, if I have ever used these tools.

In these private projects I have used CVS, but I decided to migrate to SVN (Subversion). Installation and configuration was not the problem. Subversion works now fine in Linux and Windows, both by command line and GUI and with Apache and Svnserve.
The main work is to gather together all CVS projects and go through dozens of CD's in order to be sure all potentially important projects and documentation is there. And of course the current project and various web-pages in the first place.

One of the Open Source version control is offered by Google (http://code.google.com/hosting/), but hosted projects needs to meet the Open source licensing options. I have one real candidate into that category in my mind.

Just, when I got everything working, I ran into Linus Torwald's presentation about Git (http://git-scm.com/), a quite new distributed version control.
It looks like I have to go further and give Git a try. Especially in case we get more developers around those Midlets.
Well, the installation continues ;-)

Test drive of the new Google sites page

Occasionally I get excited to publish some homepages without any particular reason, like I have done all the way bask to Redhat 5.0 times - I guess from year -95.
Since I now have a quick draft visible again (raimoj.com), I opened couple of Google sites pages, too. And once again, I got trapped to go further in this blog-hosting service, tough I swore once not to start any blogging :)