The title was bait; I do not feel bad admitting it. There are no over-bearing and intellectually stunted managers of free and open source software projects. However, I want to point out that this is one of the most appealing aspects of FOSS participation. The people who are working on these projects are often working on them of their own volition. And I’m postulating that those lucky few who get paid to participate in the development and maintenance of open source software a) work in organizations that tend to avoid micro-management and impractical timelines/release dates; and b) are self-motivated, so they tend to push themselves more effectively than any manager could.

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Oracle is a huge organization, and they are immensely successful with their commercial software endeavors (probably because they’re absurdly expensive). I have to admit that like most in the open source arena, I felt a bit like Atreyu when the Sun acquisition was first mentioned.

I probably should have gimped the blue to red, but you get the point.

There has been a lot of chatter about project forks and alternative open source options to the newly acquired Oracle/Sun products. Initially I was concerned, and – just like the masses – my biggest fears were Java, MySQL and OpenOffice. There is still a fair amount of FUD floating about the tubes, and I think it’s about time for it to recede. Oracle has already announced that they plan to maintain OpenOffice and MySQL community edition as the open source products that they are. There are few strings here and there, and I’m sure that Oracle will sneak a few gotchas into these products, but at a high level, these products will remain free and open source.

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This article is more about general Linux than it is about Amazon Web Services or EC2. Nonetheless, quite a few people seem to be getting their fingers dirty with Linux servers as a result of the AWS free usage tier, and this question pops up regularly in the context of AWS. I think more people using Linux and open source is awesome, so I want to cater to this crowd a bit.

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During the course of troubleshooting why my Samsung Captivate could not update its software and could not stay turned on, I encountered several posts about possible issues with LauncherPro. LauncherPro is an excellent application, and although it has some minor issues on a few devices, it receives regular updates and has an active community of users. In fact, it’s applications like LauncherPro (and 8pen) that are the primary reason I like the Android operating system. Now, if we could just get carriers to stop stuffing crapware into the OS before shipping devices, and to allow side-loading without rooting and romming, we’d be in business - but that’s a different discussion.

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I come from a world where databases are less SQL standards compliant. So as I was getting into PostgreSQL, I remember spending a lot of time learning about time. One of these time-consuming time investigations was troubleshooting my functions to figure out why I couldn’t seem to get more than one current timestamp value. I recently made some updates to a few procedures with logging, and could not remember the preferred way to accomplish current timestamps, so I went digging again. Since it always takes me more than a few moments to find this information, I thought I would post it here. This way I’ll remember it, and hopefully it will save some people the agony of searching the docs for a simple function or two.

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