Last week Sony open the doors to a new web site, as well as a new approach for the organization, called Sony Developer . Sony Developer is meant to become a hub for Open Source development efforts for Sony Electronic products.

Currently, Sony has enabled the community for “SNAP” which is an application framework for consumer electronic devices. From the SNAP site;

“SNAP stands for Sony’s Networked Application Platform and is part of an emerging new ecosystem for making downloadable applications available to networked devices like TV’s, Blu-ray Disk players and other Consumer Electronic products. SNAP is in the very early stages of development and has a lot of room to grow”

This will open an avenue that will allow developers to get their applications onto SNAP enabled devices such as televisions. SNAP is based on the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.) which also implements the extensions added by Apple in the form of Cocoa. The main language on GNUstep for SNAP is ObjectiveC and the SNAP development web site points a lot of great resources on ObjectC from beginners guide to optimization.

Sony offers a guides and a SDK for download to start with your development efforts. It’s mentioned on the SNAP web site that some good examples of applications would be “Games, Widgets (weather, news, traffic, etc), remote controls, social apps, media sharing apps, media players, home automation”. Also according to the web site Sony will be hosting contest in the future for SNAP developers with prizes ranging from Sony televisions to Sony Walkman.

Another section of the Sony Developer Web site will be the dash section, which is currently unavailable but from what I’ve heard should be opened in the coming weeks. dash is the Sony new Personal Internet Viewer. Developed with Flex, Sony is hoping to encourage and foster application developed on the dash product.

Update: @nanderoo on Twitter informed me the latest release of Pidgin addressed the Yahoo issue and in fact if you go to the Pidgin site there is a message “Yahoo issues are fixed in 2.5.8.” I’ll keep my post up for future reference but it doesn’t look like its needed anymore.

Have had a couple friends come to me and tell me they’ve been having a problem getting Pidgin to connect to the Yahoo service. I don’t typically use Pidgin but fired up my Pidgin and confirmed there was a problem connecting to Yahoo. I was outside any corporate firewalls which help narrow down what the problem could be. Didn’t have a problem logging into my Yahoo service using other IM clients like Adium so the problem wasn’t the account.

Did a little digging and found an old post talking about how you needed to configure the “Yahoo Pager Server” in Pidgin using an IP address instead on the URL of scs.msg.yahoo.com. The Pager Service can be found on the Accounts Screen->Yahoo Instance ->Edit Account->Advance Tab.

I ran the command host scs.msg.yahoo.com and got all the IP addresses associated with that URL and did a check on the IP address I had configured and it was no longer in the list. I played around and replaced the IP address I had with a new one from the current list. Pidgin seems to like the new IP and stopped giving me the message that it was unable to connect to service but still didn’t display my buddy list. As good measure I shut down Pidgin and restarted it and everything seems good now. Connect to Yahoo service again and able to access my Buddy List. Hope this works for you too.

Here is the last output I got when I the command;

$ host scs.msg.yahoo.com
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.33
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.34
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.35
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.36
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.37
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.6
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.7
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.8
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.9
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.10
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.11
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.12
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.13
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 68.180.217.14
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.29
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.30
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.31
scs.msg.yahoo.com has address 76.13.15.32
scs.msg.yahoo.com mail is handled by 0 .


Imagine if the Declaration of Independence was written in “Word 1776.” What are the odds that we’d be able to open that original document today?

Great quote by David Egts, Principal Solutions Architect at Red Hat, Inc., in a interview on the WashingtonPost.com web site Viewpoint. He was highlighting the importance of not only Open Source but Open Standards in everything from business to government. There is a lot of talk of companies that are struggling through these rough economical times and the Open Source road maps that can help them through. Those exact “road maps” are also being explored for government implementation which I personally think is long over due.

The discussion with David Egts was a great forum that allowed the public at large to ask direct questions. David Egts covers a wide range of topics. It’s a good read. Suggest you go over to the web site and check it out.

http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/05/dlt.htm

Ok, sensative subject I know. It can be tough to mention Microsoft and Open Source in a positive sentence that doesn’t talk about one hammer on the other. However that is where we find ourselves today. In a blog post on MSDN blogs, Sara Ford the Program Manager for CodePlex which is Microsoft’s open source project hosting site, talked about the CodePlex websites growth over the past year.

In just about every category Sara touches on shows an increase of over 100%. This includes things like visits, unique visitors, and new projects. Maybe this will inspire Microsoft to invest more into their open source initiatives. Yeah, that was probably pushing it a little.

CodePlex Weblog : CodePlex 2008 – A Year in Review.

During this time of financial “belt tightening” we are all feeling the pinch and probably no one more than the IT organization budgets across the corporate map. IT is typically the first to get hit, and hit hard, by cut backs. It’s during this time that CIOs and VP’s who wouldn’t have given Open Source Solutions much of a look start to turn to Open Source as some sort of magic bullet to allow them to get what they need and stay within budget. I wish to throw out these words of warning to both the afore mentioned group and the Open Source enthusiast who have been working to get Open Source into their environments and might be thinking this is the opportunity they were waiting for.

Yes, there are financial benefits to having an Open Source architecture and those people who have one will be able to manage the rough waters moving forward a lot easier but if you have not already established this environment then chances are you’ve already missed the boat this time around. It should be made very clear that there is a cost to implement any environment, including an Open Source environment, and more so if you are attempting to replace an existing environment.

For my fellow Open Source brothers (and sisters) who long to hear the phrase “let’s move our environment to Open Source” please proceed with a great deal of caution. Make sure the spirit of the initiative to move to Open Source is one of genuine architectural decision making and not one of financial desperation. In the latter scenario, organizations have already conceded to needing to “cut corners” and see Open Source as a way of doing this. The message should be made clear that Open Source is not a corner cutting solution. Furthermore, there are no substitutes for best practice and common sense, so do not sacrifice your architecture for the opportunity to implement a piece of Open Source you’ve wanted to put in place, make sure it’s put in place correctly. It will do more harm to your environment, and the efforts to establish Open Source as a better solution, if your implementation is done poorly and without enough forward thinking and ultimately fails.

Final suggestions:
Where Open Source fits, IMPLEMENT! Accept there will be cost.
Where Open Source needs to replace another solution, plan out the implementation carefully and try not to sacrifices any current functionality you may have now.
Nothing replaces best practices and having clear, well defined standards.
Good Luck!

Recently I got my invite to try out the new Dropbox service. I am a long time Folder Share user and had heard some good things about Dropbox. I have to say, I am very happy with the performance of Dropbox and was even more pleased when I found out there was a Open Source Linux client. Figured I wouldn’t be a good geek if I didn’t do a quick install and see how it performed. Here is a video of that effort.

Dropbox has clients that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux
http://www.getdropbox.com/

I had made mention last week to a couple of friends how I got a few Adobe Air applications up and running on my Ubuntu install. I walked one person through how I did it and decided to also make a quick video tutorial on the process.

A couple disclaimers, first one is that I use my Ubuntu laptop on a daily basis and I have had it up and running for awhile so I am not sure if I installed some supporting packages that make this work. I haven’t tried this on a fresh default install of Ubuntu. Second, I was trying to keep the video somewhat short so I didn’t get into some of the corkyness that I see in the applications, like on Pownce you don’t get the embedded video feeds. Remember, this is Alpha software and it seems like how well the applications are written also factors into how well they are going to run under Linux.

Hope you enjoy the video. Here are the links from the video encase you miss them.

Adobe Labs – http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
Tweet Deck – http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
Twhirl – http://www.twhirl.org/
Pownce – http://pownce.com/download/

UPDATE: I mentioned in my video how you don’t need to save the .air file but can instead just launch it with the “Open With” in the dialog box. This works fine on my Gutsy box but doesn’t seem to work on my newer 8.04 Hardy box. Even though Hardy recognizes that the file should be launched using the “Adobe Air Application Installer”, I still get the error that “the associated helper application does not exist” when I trying using it. You can however save the file to disk, right click, and select “Open With Adobe Air Application Installer” and it works fine. Not sure why I have this behavior.

UPDATE (2008-Sept-16): Adobe moved the Linux version of AIR to beta (link) and this has fixed a couple of things. First, the issue from my last update doesn’t appear to be a problem anymore on Hardy. Second, now AIR Applications have their pretty icons. And finally, and most exciting, Pandora AIR client now works!!

I posted my first question on Linkedin Q&A service and I have to say the speed and quality of the replies are wonderful. So the question went like this;

Is a closed source solution with good APIs a better approach than an Open Source solution?

I went on to explain;
Would you rank a “closed source” solution with a great set of easy to use APIs on the same level as a good Open Source solution?

So for example, let’s say your company needed a blog. You could go and download any number of Open Source blogs and customize it to your company’s needs, or you might spend money on a proprietary blog system that forces you to do things a certain way, or would you rather a closed source (still a proprietary) solution that “out of the box” had you do things a certain way but also offered APIs that allowed you to build you own interface or feed your blog to another solution?

Here are a couple of the great replies I got back:

Having access to the source code is fantastic, since it gives you a great way to – in theory – take matters into your own hands and diagnose any issue, and extend with any feature, you so wish. If you’re in a large corporate environment and you need to build in a custom extension to make it acceptable to your users (eg. integrate with your company’s proprietary SSO solution) then this can be invaluable.

I think most times the decision will come down to supporting the application and overall cost. Sometimes bigger business needs to have an expert to call when things go south. In smaller businesses, sometimes you wing it.

Each solution has its place. You just have to make that decision in the best interests of your business and your goals.

Its not a question of open or closed and its definitely not a question of Hosted versus SaaS. Its about whether the solution is component based, tailored, scalable and replaceable.
For instance if you opt for a closed solution with really great APIs – that works so long as everything you need to do has been anticipated by the API provider. Unless you use a standardized api (like open-social) or an api that is so dominant that the market provides good adapters to standards (like Facebook ) you will always be dependent upon the development and deployment plan of the closed system you’ve selected.

I think you actually answered the question yourself, Eric. In my experience, the answer to this always comes down to the two main points you mentioned. Do you NEED the flexibility of an OSS solution? If you have the resources, and the need for true customization, then OSS is always a great option.

Regarding patches and security, a well maintained OSS project with an active community and a wide install base is generally going to be ahead of the curve when it comes to bug fixes, etc.

You can see the question hosted here