I am a gmail user. I love gmail. It’s 102 degrees in my apartment, my computer is overheating, and I’m writing to tell you about a bug. It’s that important to me.

Running Windows XP, Gmail does not seem to function on Firefox anymore. Maybe this is a bug. Maybe it is a virus. I really don’t know, but it’s too hot to care.

I want to present you with a link that will tell you more. It’s a thread on a Mozilla blog. Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox. I posted on it.

It’s baffling because I had so much love for Firefox. Now… well, now… now I just don’t know anymore. I’ll have to revert back to 3.5.10.

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/715725

(By the way, this doesn’t seem to affect my Mac running Snow Leopard.)

Update: Friday, July 9, 2010

I tried reverting back to 3.5.10 and the problem persisted.

I’ve made the switch to Chrome and so far have been quite pleased except for the ‘new tab’ stubbornness–that is, you can’t customize what page you see when you open a new tab. Highly annoying. There’s an extension to redirect this, but that isn’t exactly authentic and seems rather flakey to have to do.

So. No more Firefox for me, or so it seems. We’re talking about migrating our entire office to Chrome now, as well, to prevent further suckary on behalf of the once noble Mozilla project.

Update: Saturday, August 7, 2010

It’s been a month since I switched from Firefox to Chrome. In general I’m very pleased with it. It’s much faster than Firefox or IE, which is as nice as it is curious. I will have to look into how they do this.

There are tons of plugins, just like FF. The screen real estate is handled well. It’s all very thin. There are also lots of themes, but I don’t usually get into that for the sake of saving a few megabytes of memory.

The one thing I really, REALLY don’t like about chrome: When you hit the new tab button, you get a very lame history page that looks quite terrible. It is poorly designed and incredibly ugly–despite its being rather useful. What I would prefer is my own option of setting the new tab page to be Google, ironically, which I can do with a plugin, but it isn’t an elegant solution.

I’m convinced I went to bed sometime in 1991, woke up in bizarre-o land, and never quite managed to get out of it.  And stories like this don’t help.

How the hell is Open Source software a menace to all mankind?

I don’t get it?  I use open source software everyday.  If I had a business, I’d find an open source solution at every turn I could. If I ran a government agency, I’d be trying to spend as little of the taxpayer’s money as possible and OSS is a pretty good place to start.  And let’s not forget the INSANE predatory pricing that certain software companies inflict on poorer nations at the threat of hauling them into court.

While, yes, some OSS is started by those who naively want to keep the internet pure of that nasty money thing, I don’t think they will start hoisting digital pitchforks and shutting down traffic in online towns and villages.  I know I haven’t seen one of them while playing L4D online.  Oh wait, maybe I have… it’s a game about zombies.  Bad example.

Anyway… For some people (like me) OSS is a way to save money, it’s not a political statement.  It’s a way to have reasonable operability on my home computers and not paying ridiculous business oriented pricing or break the law by using pirated software.

Let’s change the battle field of this argument for a moment.  Let’s say we have two bars.  Both have a Happy Hour from 3 to 6 (why is Happy Hour always more than one hour??).  One serves a loss leader of free chips and salsa and the other serves kettle corn.  Well one day a third bar opens up and serves a loss leader of a full free buffet.  You don’t have to buy anything, the owner just likes the way he cooks and is willing to take a hit.  His business model is so bad that he probably will be out of business by next week.

But a funny thing happens.  Mr. Buffet gets so many people coming in that really love his food and they don’t want it to stop so they buy his beer.  Some even donate.  Some supply the food to be cooked.  Finally others offer him jobs on the side to cook for them for large events.  His food takes off and now Mr. Buffet makes tons of cash.  So, instead of having a loss leader item, he has a loss leader BUSINESS.  The other two bars can whinge about it all they want and petition for laws and such and call it predatory pricing.  But getting laws passed is not the same as the truth being upheld.  For some, that is OSS.  And that, my friends, is good capitalism.

For others, OSS is a passion (the above scenario and this one are NOT mutually exclusive).  For you who don’t understand, a real programmer is an artist.  They will program just as a painter will paint.  You can’t stop them.  Little apps that show up on the Google Market or The App Store for free are a programmer’s doodles, as it were.  Of course, some of these works may even be a grand labor of love between two or more programmers.  Governments and companies that seek to destroy OSS are, basically, trying to destroy an art form.  Good luck with that.

And don’t worry about Microsoft, et al…   they will always make programs that do things that no others can do.  Or make them with an interface or setup that makes those programs accessible to people who don’t want to tweak and troubleshoot.  OSS will not tear down the walls of capitalism; it will just force companies to do business a little smarter.

I finally got one, thanks to Joe Franks, developer genius and all-around good guy. Just to give you a timeframe of what all of this is about–he sent my request two weeks ago. I got it last night.

This morning, after a round of emails about an iPhone app from my bed, and after my first round of too many morning coffees, I finally was able to log in. Here’s what I saw:

At first glance, you will immediately see that I have no one to actually communicate with except Joe. And Joe doesn’t typically wake up until after lunch. Since he’s on CST and I’m in NY, that leaves us about 3 solid hours to Wave at each other during the day. But we won’t because we already chat through AIM. Furthermore, we just don’t chat that much unless we’re collaborating on a project or he’s trying to get me to migrate off of his server.

I tried adding some of my other friends under Contacts, but Google said they didn’t have Wave accounts. Ok, that makes sense. But when I tried adding a few colleagues from work who share the same Google Apps account, success! Wave allowed me to add them. Their photos showed up and everything. But… they never received an email notifying them of anything. Here I am the loneliest Waver. Or, perhaps, everyone on Wave right now feels the way I do.

Here’s another screenshot for your edification, since that’s pretty much all you can do with Wave right now–take screenshots of it:

This week Google announced that it would be inviting 100,000 people to test drive the new Wave platform. When I found out about this exciting new technology about three months ago, I instantly signed up to try it out. This video will probably help explain why.

If you have a Wave account and an extra invite, I would be really, really, really, really, really, really, really thankful if you would think to send it to me. dhaddock at storycorps.org. I have been pining for this to come out for several months, and although I don’t like that video very much, it’s clear to me that this is going to be a very powerful platform for communication. Here are the two main reasons I think so. Maybe this will make you want to invite me:

Communication: Right now the two best mediums for collaborating on a project in real time are in person, on the phone, email and chat. In-person communication is my favorite, because despite my IT profession, I’m really a people-person. A personable person. A purple people eater. On the phone is a nice substitute, but it’s always awkward when people end up pausing or talking over each other. Email is really good because it can be direct, and there is time to think before responding. Chat’s probably the most difficult because it’s the closest thing to a phone conversation, but minus the inflections of voice, not in the very least confusing during moments of sarcasm, right?

Google Wave seems to have many features that are focused on sharing information amongst fellow Wavers. For instance, there are already extensions available for SalesForce, Google Maps, Lonely Planet, and more. (See this page.) Sure, we can use Wave for a friendly chat or playing a game together, but these extensions refocus the medium on sharing information. Wave seems to combine the best aspects of email and chat, allowing me to pass links and otherwise share things with collaborators, supplementing message with actual data. No more pasting 250 character urls in a chat window, maybe? No longer wondering if the url I pasted in that email will work.

Collaboration: As IT manager, it’s highly inefficient for me to meet with my team. We do meet, of course, for weekly check-ins, but outside of that I’m planning for the next steps, filling in gaps, and meeting with other departments and our directors to orient our technological infrastructure with our goals and budget. It’s wizard’s work, to be honest. I love it. Basically we communicate like this: if we don’t need a fast response–email. If we do need a fast response, we either chat or get up and walk to someone’s desk.

But how awesome would it be to have my entire team on the same chat-like platform, sharing links and picking up and putting down the conversation as we work in the background? Say I’m working with an intern to develop a PHP script for our SugarCRM site. We could be chatting about the script while at the same time collaborating on the code. Now that can be extremely powerful. Wave is another feather in the cap of distributed programming, and also any other type of distributed project that requires multiple inputs. How cool would it be to work in real time with our development department contributing to tech grant language as they write the meat of the text?

So, if you have a Google Wave invite available, I’d absolutely love you for sharing it with me. I realize the platform will be available to the public soon, but I want to get my hands on it now to see if it can really do everything I think it can. I’m also familiar with several of the Google APIs, and I’d like to explore the extensions.

Thanks! I promise I won’t break it!

Enter WordPress and Drupal. The latter officially became an opensource project in 2001, but despite being first to market, it trails behind WordPress in functionality and ease of use. Let’s begin with a comparison of administrative consoles. Drupal’s is boxy, and it feels a little thrown together. As I click around the interface I feel as if I’m waiting for a broken link. I also found myself clicking forward and back several times to navigate my posts. WordPress offers a very refreshing interface, which I feel epitomizes the Web2.0 revolution of the last few years. WordPress is clean and efficient, and it is clearly designed to be easy enough for a neophyte but powerful enough for advanced users.

Aside from administrative consoles, the most important features to me are themes, plugins and PHP/MySQL integration. Both of these systems are community based, and there are scores of freely contributed themes for each. I’ve scoured the internet to find what I consider to be the best themes for each CMS, but I found the selection a little lacking. Admitedly, this is one of the reasons I’ve stayed away from out-of-the-box CMS solutions in the past: without substantial tweaking, you are stuck with a theme that someone else–and probably thousands of people–are using for their sites. One of the appealing things about the internet, after all, is the ability to completely distinguish your website to make it stand out in your market. Anyone who is about to pick a CMS needs to be aware that they will probably start with a theme and then customize it to fit their needs. I found this easiest in WordPress because it separates the CSS style sheets cleanly. With Drupal I would have had to dig into a theme’s folder and edit it in TextPad (my editor of choice), but with WordPress i can just go into the theme editor and make changes in the very nice interface. I changed the header image and the height of the top white bar on this site in about 10 minutes. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to manage content placement though, and I found this to be an inherent limitation of CMS in general. For instance, I’d like to have blog-type posts on multiple pages, but neither platform supports this at the outset. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for deanhaddock.com.

Plugins are probably the neatest thing about a CMS. Let’s say you have a website that has an FAQ or an instruction manual. And let’s also say for argument’s sake you are using Drupal. You can download and activate a “books” pugin that will let you easily compile your content in a book form, complete with a table of contents and clean forward/back links at the bottom of each page. Or, for instance, if you are using WordPress and you want Google AdSense on your blog, then you can download and install the AdSense plugin and begin monetizing your site in minutes. Plugins are myriad, from quotes-of-the-day to maps to RSS feeds. Both WordPress and Drupal offer much in terms of feature-rich plugins and modules, and you can generally find parallel plugins for any functionality you seek in either platform. I found that plugins were easier to install and configure on WordPress, but only because their administration console is so clean an reliable. I didn’t have any specific issues with Drupal, but it took me a few minutes to figure out how one module can depend upon others that you may also have to install first. One other important difference to note about Drupal is that there is no initial support for rich text editing. I had to search for a WYSIWYG text editor and install it before I could post blog entries without manually editing my HTML. In WordPress, this works very nicely from the beginning.

The most important plugin/module for me, however, is one that integrates my own custom PHP/MySQL code within the CMS. To be frank, I’m a little tired of developing my own content management systems because the end user will always figure out a way to complicate their own data entry. Users will inevitably insert characters into a database that will break a site, so I have to write routines to scrub data and use them on just about every field. This isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s annoying. I’ll still have to scrub the data for forms I write, but all of the content management (pages, posts, links, text, etc.) is taken care of. This is amazing stuff, too! I can simply write PHP code, interface with MySQL, and insert it into a page from a centrally content-managed environment. All I had to do was install the exec-PHP plugin for WordPress. It was working in minutes. And yes, all of this is free and open to the public.

Ultimately Drupal may give you more customizability and control because it’s so bare-bones. If you’re willing to tweak their code, I’m sure you could get a lot of mileage out of it. Additionally, WordPress is really made for blog management, and any attempts to use if for a serious website may come into some difficulties. I’ll be sure to provide updates to document any such obsticles I encounter, but I’m hoping they will be few. I’m sticking with WordPress for now, though. I’m excited to see how it all works out.