CRN is running an article this morning, ThinkFree Sees Opportunity From Dissatisfied Microsoft Office Users that says the folks at ThinkFree are looking to grab users from those who don't want to make the jump to the new MS Office 2007 user interface. As someone who thinks the new UI sucks tennis balls through a garden hose, I can certainly sympathize with this marketing tactic; I suspect they should be able to grab a decent niche from companies that don't see any need to absorb massive retraining costs just because Redmond got attracted by something shiny. On the other hand, I'm still not especially convinced of the utility of online Office suites myself. That still seems like the sort of software that should live on my local hard drive.

Making the Case for ColdFusion

unixaumonde.com looks to be another Rails-based blogging site (via HappyCodr)

Review: Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 Adds New Look And Feel -in CRN

OK, I'll click on Yes to go to bed

- Thomas Gunderloy

I'm not entirely sure yet that Ruby is going to be my next computer language, but it's time to collect a few links in one place:

• Ruby Programming Language - The main language site


• Ruby Central - All sorts of links and resources


• Ruby QuickRef - Cheat sheet


• Whys (Poignant) Guide to Ruby - Cute online book with cartoons.

Programming Today Is Too Hard: Shouldn't It Be Getting Easier? (via dzone}

Aptana offers an alternative for editing CSS (and lots of other things) on Linux (and other platforms). Good: built-in help and much other flexibility. Bad: still gotta know enough to type everything in by hand, as far as I can tell. Would be nice to have some sort of visual style builder for those of us who are basically CSS idiots.

Looks like the Rails Live CD (via Sean McCormack) would have been a way easier way to get started dabbling with some of this stuff than the "build a new box from scratch" approach I took. Then again, I probably learned way more by forcing myself to do it the hard way.

Given that I would like to wean myself (for essentially political reasons) from my current dependency on Microsoft software, the question becomes, what next? Over the last quarter century I've done quite a few things in the computer universe, so I have lots of directions to think about.

One thing I can rule out immediately is a lateral move to Java or Delphi or whatever other programming language within the Windows ecosystem. That doesn't get at the heart of my issues; if I'm going to do this, I want to leave behind not just the one part of the Microsoft universe, but, to the greatest extent possible, all of it. That pretty much means finding a way to make a living with Mac or Linux (or leaving computers entirely).

Hardware

I've been in white box hardware sales before. It requires a fair amount of capital, and the profit margins stink. I don't want to go there again.

Sales, Management, Administration...

Been there, done that. I have plenty of sales and managerial experience, both within and without the computer industry, in my background. I suspect that if I tried I could land such a job again. But this isn't a good fit with homeschooling our kids, working at home, or generally staying sane.

Training

Yup, been there done that too. And I'm never going to do that much travel again.

MicroISV

The siren song of becoming a MicroISV, writing, and selling my own software product is always there. But realistically, I doubt this is practical. Even on the Windows platform it's a crapshoot. On Linux, no one pays for software, and on Mac, the potential sales numbers are lower than on Windows. I might do some software writing as self-promotion but I don't see it as a cash cow.

Writing

Put this one in the self-promotion category too. Writing computer books hasn't been a viable career for several years. Articles bring in some extra cash but they don't pay the rent.

Web Sites

There's some potential here. The Larkware site brings in a decent second income from advertising. Potentially I could replicate that in a new realm; I know how to digest and present information.

Consulting

Always the fallback...I suspect there will always be Web sites or line of business apps to be written, and some of those can be written on non-Windows platforms (especially when we're talking about Web delivery). I wouldn't get rich doing this, but I wouldn't starve either.

No Conclusion...yet

Decisions, decisions...one thing I do know, though: if I don't put time into Vista/Office 2007/.NET 3.0/"Orcas" then my current income streams will dry up within 2 or 3 years. So there's a definite time limit to figuring this out.

I've been using Outlook plus Omea Pro to manage my huge e-mail and RSS load for years. But having looked at Outlook 2007 and decided that there's nothing there for me, and with Omea Pro going open source (and therefore, I suspect, remaining in development limbo for some time to come), I'm actually starting to contemplate a change. Right now Thunderbird looks like the most likely candidate, so I was interested to read this review of Thunderbird 2.0 beta 1.

Making a change means throwing away several years worth of archived RSS, and I'm skeptical that my gigabytes of saved e-mail can be successfully converted, so it's a big risk.

Taking ARes Out For a Test Drive (via Riding Rails)

Apollo is Adobe's coming "cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills" to build Webbish apps on the desktop. Maybe they can recreate the pervasive reach of Acrobat and Flash, but I'm skeptical.

Analog setup for Apache

Mephisto looks like the software I might be using here if I hadn't tripped over ozimodo first.

So, after on and off effort for four days, I've managed to get this site up and running. Installing ozimodo and playing with Rails on a Ubuntu client was easy, and I'm impressed with my initial spelunking in Rails.

Deploying the solution to a Ubuntu server was a bitch. I persevered, and got through all the problems, but I definitely would have given up if this was my first computing experience. All the information I needed was somewhere, but some of it was in one place, some in another, bits and pieces were pulled from my own experience, and so on. It seems to me that there are some opportunities here to make this part of the deal easier.

Of course, opportunities don't necessarily equate to market opportunities.

The folks over at Explorer Destroyer want you to encourage people to switch from IE to Firefox. They'll help you code a special notice or splash page that only nags IE users, or even blocks IE users from your site entirely. I'm not ready to go that far, but I give them points for dedication.

I've tried a batch of Linux distros in the past. This time around I'm using Ubuntu; it seems to be well-designed to just work for most things. I'm also poking at Ruby on Rails. The two do not seem to be a perfect match in that the Ubuntu folks are not fond of the Ruby gems installer, and the Ruby packages in the Ubuntu universe aren't always the latest. Install Ruby Rails on Ubuntu Edgy Eft was a big help in getting a working client side combination going.

ozimodo is the software I'm using for this site. It's a self-proclaimed tumblelog, though as far as I'm concerned, that's just the original weblog form that we few, proud, lunatic pioneers were using back around 1999. Whatever you call it, it was easy enough to get up and running.

(note 1/20/07: I've since migrated the site to Mephisto)

(note 1/6/08: And now to WordPress)

Ruby on Rails API with comments and examples (via HappyCodr)