Michael Koby

Blackberry Phones Rock

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Michael Koby

I have had my Blackberry for over a month now and the more I carry it around, the more I love the device. For one thing it does email incredibly well. And since I got my wife one, we have been using the heck out of them to communicate. If you have not joined the millions of Blackberry users out there, I recommend getting one. Especially if you stay connected via email or text messaging.

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Bush, the GOP, and Party Politics

Posted on November 5, 2007 by Michael Koby

As I find myself moving away from the republican side of things and more towards the libertarian views on the political line, I find that I still do not really like the democrats way of thinking. However, it is “lefters” like Arianna Huffington that give me hope that not all democrats are mindless drones of their party. Today, Arianna wrote a nice little editorial on the state of the GOP and Bush politics. While I don’t agree with everything she has to say, she does make a couple of good points when it comes to the numbers what people think with regards to the track this country is currently headed down.

While there are some areas I feel that this country is doing right, I can’t agree with our foreign policy as of late. We seem to have gotten away from our isolationist point of view which kept us on many people’s good side for a long time. However, I do not believe Bush to be entirely at fault on this. I think he will be nothing more than the fall guy for Cheney’s idiotic politic-ing. But this is merely an opinion at the moment and only history will really reveal if my foresight on that matter was accurate.

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RE: Squandering one of the industry’s best open source talents

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Michael Koby

If you have not read Matt Asay’s article on Miguel de Icaza I encourage you to do so before reading the rest of this post.

Now, one thing that Mr. Asay seems to either a) forget or b) fail to recognize is that the concept of rapid application development (RAD), was pretty much completely non-existent on Linux prior to the Mono stack. Engineering a .Net solution for Linux desktops, Miguel and the rest of the Mono team has successfully brought RAD to Linux in a big way. Several of the more popular Gnome applications are Mono based (Banshee, Tomboy, and Beagle).

Until Mono, developing an application for Linux was something that took a lot of time, energy, and C/C++ code. While C/C++ are two of the more popular languages around, C# has picked up some massive steam since it came out and a lot of developers only code in C#. When you can increase the number of potential developers for your platform just by simply giving them the libraries and tools to do the development, that is a really big deal. That is why Mono is a big deal. There is a reason that Microsoft has not taken Mono out yet. It is because even they recognize the benefits of having .Net be cross platform. To say that Miguel’s talents are wasted because he is trying to bring a development platform that will increase the number of potential developers for Linux 10-20 fold, is ludicrous at best.

Linux needed developer tools that would allow people to develop software quickly and more easily then was available. With Mono, any C#/VB.Net programmer can write code that will work on Linux, and if they take their time they can have it be 100% cross platform. That is something to consider when making blanket statements, Mr. Asay.