Hacker news recently turned my eyes to opensource.com, which I review occasionally, but admittedly do not track as closely as I should. The article is Introducing students to the world of open source: Day 1, and at first glance I thought, What a great idea?! I let that steep, and increasingly found myself more frustrated with higher education than impressed by the ingenuity and motivation of the author and team.

First, I must admit that the last thing I want to do is cast a dim light upon the efforts of the author and others who are working on this event. It is a great idea, and we absolutely need more efforts like this. With that caveat, I have to move quickly to the question of why are these efforts so necessary?

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I spotted the 8pen Android app a couple days ago, and thought it was an interesting twist on the standard mobile keyboard. The video (linked above) highlights some interesting history and raises the abundantly obvious question of, “why do we use a standard keyboard on a device that is only a few inches wide?”. I have seen a few reviews, and thought I would offer my two cents.

Initially, I was a little frustrated that the application is not free, but each time I scoff at paying for an application, I try to think of it in terms of “coffee-trips”. “How many cups of coffee is this application worth to me?”. It’s priced at or below the cost of a single cup of coffee (in most restaurants and coffee shops). So, I decided to go for it.

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I am excited for the AWS Free Usage Tier to officially become available. To their credit, Amazon already offers much of the Free Usage Tier to its existing customers (SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, and Simple Notification Service are all free to a certain limit for all customers). Also to their credit, Amazon’s marketing team did well pushing the Free Usage Tier, because in a lot of the write-ups I read, there was no mention of the fact that it is ONLY available to new customers, and after one year, the Free Usage Tier evaporates, and you pay the normal, pay-as-you-go amounts.

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Recently I worked with a client who wanted to secure a number of his servers and services. I found that he was using a combination of notebooks and Firefox “remembered” passwords as his password management technique. From the start, I will announce that my worst password manager award goes to the “Firefox remembers my passwords for me” technique (although Firefox isn’t the only browser guilty of this…). For anyone reading this who has not yet seen the light -

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This is not an instructional for beating your strange Aunt at backyard croquet during her annual summer holiday picnic. If you want to win that game, all you need to do is wait until no one is paying attention, pick up a couple of balls, and hide them. I doubt that anyone will know the difference.

I’m not trying to sound as though I do not respect backyard croquet, I suppose it offers a productive introduction to the game for individuals who may otherwise never play. But I do not respect backyard croquet, and once you have transitioned from backyard croquet to croquet, neither should you. I’ll try to illustrate the difference with the following images:

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