Serious, commercial and paid software development is all about requirements. But if a student, for example, wants to practice good software development practices, or for a small company to track all project/product requirements, what is the best tool for these group of people to use for capturing requirements, track them, analyze, etc…?

If I have a startup company, for example, should I build my own requirement tracking tools or should I invest in good products like one of those Rational tools?

Generic RSS/ATOM/Feed aggregators are (almost) dead. Unless they start to innovate.

RSS/ATOM/whatever feeds are ubiquitous. Back when I started contributing Straw, their usage wasn’t that popular hence only a few select sites are “RSS enabled”, hence it makes sense to have a separate application for these feeds so people can follow and view them. But things have changed and almost every information that can be syndicated and aggregated will be syndicated and aggregated. And generic RSS aggregators like Straw, etc… either of no use today or their use is of no practical value to the user (unless of course you have a specific need for it, which I don’t).

I don’t really have a specific idea of how this should be done apart from having applications being “feed-aware”, which is what modern desktop applications already have: Podcast subscriptions, news subscriptions, etc… But as a feed aggregator developer, how do you innovate?

Yesterday I played my first game of cricket and watch my first full-featured bollywood movie.

Cricket
Cricket is a much tougher game than I expected it to be. Although I bowled really well (4 wickets in like 4 overs), getting the ball bounce and hitting it requires a different set of skill as well as upper-body strength.

Bollywood
I also watched my first full-featured bollywood film called Metro. It’s not that different from Filipino movies. But I guess one of the big differences is that movies like these feature good looks and good acting, compared to some filipino movies i’ve seen before where acting is sometimes appalling.

But anyway, there goes my culture-oriented-and-not-so-usual weekend. =)

A few days ago I bought an iPod Touch to accompany me during long hours of travelling. I listen a lot to lectures from Berkeley as well as various podcasts and vidcasts, mostly about tech stuff, so i’m hoping that i’ll get a +ROI for this. Before I bought it I thought it’s just another (non-open source using) gadget, and although it would be fun to get it to work in Linux. It turns out that not only you can use it in Linux, you can also third-party apps in it (e.g. games, themes, python!, etc..)! Plus there are also places where you can get a SIP-VOIP mic to make the iPod Touch more of a mediocre^^cheaper iPhone.

Another thing that I realize is that interfaces using gestures and touch are very powerful not only for ease of use but also for kids to learn. An example of this is when my little 4 yr old cousin wants to use youtube, he just points to the youtube icon, me doing the search (he can’t read nor spell yet ;), and the rest is him playing, clicking, doing whatever he wants to do there.

P.S.
There’s still an issue where after using GtkPod, the Touch uninstalls the BSD subsystem package which means you have to reinstall the application everytime you exit GtkPod so you can still mount or ping the Touch.

Wisdom from the way-out edge

A very inspiring quote:

“There are no longer Muslims and Christians. Manny is a great Filipino today. Today, there is no war. We are busy celebrating,” Kabalu said from his base in southern Mindanao island.

Philippines celebrates Pacquaio victory, from Inquirer.net.

After years of using Gnus, I am moving to using web-based email.

When my laptop’s fan died, it took my email with it. Although that is still in the hard drive, I won’t be able to look at it or even search it until I get the laptop fixed. And even then, I’m still going to have a problem with indexing those emails and incorporating that in GMail. It’s one of those annoyances with desktop-based email - sync with multiple computers, security, indexing, etc… With a web-based email, there’s an accountability when it comes to reliability, integrity and making sure that user’s emails are being taken care of wrt storage and securing these emails.

And retention is longer. I would love to read some really important emails after N years without having to worry about software incompatibilities. The only problem I have with GMail atm is that it takes a while to get used to labels instead of folders. But that’s trivial compared to the problems I have to deal when using desktop mail clients.

Lenovo,

I ordered a new laptop last Monday, paid it last Tuesday and faxed the remittance on the same day, and now you tell me that you haven’t received the remittance!

Do I have to chase this up to you, people at Lenovo? Don’t you folks have reminders to remind people to pay for their orders so at least I know you haven’t received the remittance slip? I can’t believe how awful your customer service is. If I didn’t leave a message to your voice mail you wouldn’t even bother following it up!!!

Shame. I don’t care if Thinkpads are the best laptop atm if you treat your customers this way.

Pfft..

My laptop is currently dead. I’m getting a Fan Error after POST and it just go off. So it’s either a sensor problem or fan is really dead. Should I DIY fix it? I can’t really afford to f*ck it up more but at the same time I need a computer :-\

Anyway, i’ll be off the net for a while. But I’ll be checking my email maybe twice a day.

I am a bit concerned with FLOSS not getting the amount of attention it deserves. Sure, it comes up in conversations at times but to go beyond those conversations and having people actually do something about it is another question. One thing I’ve noticed is that we, FLOSS users and developers, should go beyond spreading the word because (1) the word is already out there, and (2) words doesn’t speak much. Action does. I am more interested on how FLOS software create profit for companies, save lives, plays well in the IT ecosystem, etc… you get the drift.

Software being free doesn’t matter much to companies if it doesn’t solve any of their problems or if it creates more problems that it can actually solve. Ditto with end-users. Consumers are willing to pay for software that makes them sleep at night. Some consumers are ok with using pirated software as long as it runs their software - games, friend’s softwares, etc…

For companies, it has to integrate well with their existing infrastructure - servers and desktops. One reason why Microsoft is still in business is because of Microsoft Office. If you have ever worked for a company or a client that uses Microsoft Office extensively, you’re pretty much in awe how much effort Microsoft has put into seamless integration between the different Office components - Word, Excel, Access, InfoPath, Outlook, etc…, not to mention how good it integrates with the Windows environment.

Most people and (windows) developers don’t really care. They just want stuff that works, and works well for their particular environment. Maybe we should start improving software integration[0] within the linux ecosystem, not to mention integrating with MS Windows, just like what Microsoft started doing lately.

One of the keys to get people to actually use Linux in their desktops is integration and that’s where current and future FLOSS devs should work on rather than the next-killer-app, whatever that means, because frankly, most people don’t really care.

[0] We already have. But we’re not there yet.