Category: Geek

In the last Achewood comic strip, Roast Beef not only looks like me, he’s doing the sort of reading I’m doing.

But really, Beef, white briefs? Not boxers with pictures of polar bears on ’em?

Nearly two-thirds of your base are belong to Apache

While doing some research in my capacity as Tucows’ TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator, a cool mish-mash of developer relations, Open Source Nerd Wrangler and playing the part of “The Cheat” to Ross Rader’s “Strong Bad”), I hit the Netcraft site to see how the server market was divided.

The latest Netcraft Web Server Survey — the August 2003 edition, which marks the 8th anniversary of the survey — says that Apache HTTP Server has its biggest share of the market ever, with 63.98% of the nearly 43 million servers surveyed. That’s about 27.4 million servers.

(For comparison’s sake, the first Netcraft survey back in August 1995 found less than 20,000 sites. That’s three freakin’ orders of magnitude’s difference in less than a decade.)

According to Netcraft, Apache has a bigger than two-to-one lead over Microsoft’s server offerings — they have 23.75% of the servers, or 10.2 million servers. When counting Microsoft servers, Netcraft lumps all the various flavours of IIS (Internet Information Services) and PWS (Personal Web Server) together. This is a 2.2% drop in IIS’ market share that is attributed to Network Solutions’ migrating the rest of their domain parking system back to Solaris from a Windows based system hosted at Interland.

No! Over half your base are belong to Microsoft!

I mentioned this to Boss Ross (who reports to Boss’ Boss Noss):

Me: Hey, Ross. Seen the latest Netcraft survey? Apache has its biggest-ever share of the server market.

Ross: So who did Microsoft take their bigger share from?

Me: Bigger share? They lost almost a million servers from their July numbers!

Ross: Check out Scoble’s blog. He said IIS is on the upswing.

I hit the Scobleizer, and sure enough, he links to a guy quoting the Port80 survey of the top 1000 corporations’ web servers. According to that survey, IIS has the lead, with 53% of the share, easily trouncing Netscape at 18.6% and Apache at 16%.

So who’s right?

Probably both.

The Netcraft survey is Internet-wide, which accounts for anyone running a server, which ranges from my neighbour Hector all the way to Amazon, while the Port80 survey is restricted to Fortune 1000 companies.

In other words, if you limit your scope to the suits, all your base are belong to Microsoft. However, if you expand your scope to include the suits and everyone else, including Google, the Internet Archive, a zillion blogs, hosting services, DNS, and anything else that doesn’t wear a tie and say stuff like “That’s not on my action item list!” and “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes!”, things are quite different.

Suddenly I’m reminded of Danny O’Brien’s recent remarks:

Also the Microsoft stuff continues to have its head stuck right up the ass of corporate America. One of my big bones with MS stuff is that it always makes me feel like I’m eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm. All of their software is designed to help busy executives plan their lives. Everyone I know uses it to try and write birthday cards and chat with their friends. When people use Microsoft Office they use it anywhere but in an office. Microsoft knows this – but it also knows that the money comes from their corporate clients, so there’s a limit to how much it can bend its software toward a wider customer base. Ultimately when you use MS software, you’re not the end user MS perceives at all: we’re just living off the scraps Microsoft leaves out after feeding its big customers.

Yes, Microsoft has its games division, but I get the feeling that games are for the gaps in the borth-school-work-death cycle of good little consumers.

Where’s the software that lets you create — and no, I don’t just mean slideshows covering your ass for last quarter’s losses? I don’t think it’s coming from them.

And speaking of cubicle farms, I have a TPS report to file. Later!

Recommended Reading

Ross’ take on the whole stats thing. “Personally, I’d love to see a number that quantifies, in absolute dollar amounts, the percentage of ecommerce that each platform is responsible for faciliating. Or maybe, total HTTP gets…or how about security patches per second? Segfaults per month? ”

The Adventures of Action Item. D’you think anyone in Redmond dresses up as him for Hallowe’en?

All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Oh, the memes of early 2001…

Every now and again, I reserve the right to taunt a friend mercilessly. This is one of those times.

My friend Danny O’Brien was trying to decide whether to use Perl or Python for a project. He was originally leaning towards Perl; I blame the fact that he might have been living in California too long, or perhaps he’s inhaled too many fumes while changing his lovely daughter’s diapers.

He writes:

I’m utterly torn between Perl and Python. My first choice in this case would be Python, because bad Python code doesn’t seem to be quite so personal. I’ve seen people spit blood at other coder’s Perl, just because it’s not the way that they would do it. Perl demands rather more sympathy with your predecessor than does Python. With Python, it’s just more code to stare at.

This sort of statement makes me imagine Danny at an electrical engineering class: “But professor, how does Kirchoff’s Voltage Law make you feel?”

Danny’s statement seems to imply that Perl requires you to know the previous programmer’s “headspace” in order to be able to maintain his or her code. In other words, the language alone does not communicate the author’s intent without the kind of exegesis usually reserved for studies of the subtext of inside jokes that might have appeared in the Gnostic Gospels.

You wanna get all touchy-feely and sympathetic with the previous developer’s “inner child”, don’t read their code. Instead, why don’t you two curl up in front of the TV and watch Oprah, then go hop in the hot tub and kiss?!

What is this, the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck school of coding?

That said, your successor does need to actually know the language. Most of the people I can imagine maintaining this code will know Perl but not Python. Python doesn’t take that long to learn, but reading Python to take on someone else’se project just isn’t much *fun*. Sitting down to learn someone’s Perl, while tough, does teach you about the way they were thinking when they wrote the application. Python’s clarity, I think, cuts down on its expressiveness in depicting why certain decisions were made. When I had to hunker down and learn POE or Moveable Type, for instance, I came away with a very deep understanding of how it was supposed to work. It was fun, albeit time-consuming. I sometimes have problems doing the same with slabs of Python code, just because they can be very lacking in personality.

What you call personality, I call distraction. Yes, I’m probably bound to find out more about the previous coder’s approach to programming by their Perl code. I might even able to ratiocinate their astrological sign or whether they’re dominant or submissive. But damned if I can figure out what the hell they were trying to get the code to do.

Python’s clarity is what I like about it. My first Python project — an actual paying one with an actual deadline for an actual system to be used by actual users — required me to pick up where the original developer, who had to work on other parts of the system, left off. The clarity of Python actually allowed me to see his design decisions; the obscurity of Perl would’ve been a hindrance.

That said, I’m not paid to be a programmer. What is fun is a hobby can be skull-crackingly frustrating in a job with a deadline.

Even when I have plenty of time to kill (hah!), I’d rather have a language that let me concentrate on my task and less on the language’s idiosyncracies.

Danny, being the kinesthetic sort, learned his lesson by peeing on the electric fence:

Now, a couple of days into it, I’ve begun to seriously reconsider. I’m nowhere near the Mason bit of the application, and I’m getting continually bogged down in Perl style issues that really don’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to write.

To be honest, I think this is my Perl rustiness kicking in; and I think it may go away after a few more days hacking. Worse, though, is the effect of something I thought would be a real boon – CPAN. There’s a bunch of useful utilities there that I’d love to suck in and use in my program. But they all have different idioms – all of which I have to sit down and learn. Plus there’s the whole dependency issue: sooner or later I’m going to have to install all of this on the working server, and there’s a real penalty to be paid for being dependent on a lot of scattered Perl modules. Will they work? Will they still be maintained? Which of alternative implementations should I choose?

Not into the touchy-feely thing anymore, are we, John Gray?

Oh, I’m being cruel now. Group hug!

(I’m kidding, Danny.)

Luckily, he eventually made the right decision, and I’m happy to report that things are working well for him.

Otherwise, I might have to mock him even more.

I’m a little late in writing this. I meant to write this before moving over to Blogware, but as they say, “better late than never.”

I’d like to say “thank you” to Blogger.

Blogger got me started in the blogging game in the first place. Although I could thrown together my own “content management system” or simply done things the hard way by hand-coding HTML, Blogger was there, and it saved me the trouble of having to worry about technical issues and concentrate on what it is that makes a weblog: the writing.

The nice people at Blogger have impeccable taste; quite early on in the history of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century (remember, in the Blogger blog it’s “AccordionGuy”, here it’s “Accordion Guy”), they declared it a “Blog of Note”. Remember, this was well before some of my better-known, wilder entries.

How many applications can you say changed your life in ways both subtle and extreme? In my case, I can’t think of any other than Blogger. Blogging most certainly saved me from a big world of misery: you might recall the story about the New Girl, in which my effusive blogging about a new girlfriend prompted a reader (who became a reader because she liked an earlier post of mine) to warn me that this new girlfriend was not whom she claimed to be. Through blogging, I widened my circle of friends; I’m sure it also played a part in landing me a very nice job at Tucows.

Blogging encouraged me to write daily, which improved my writing, gave me more discipline, and acted as a way by which I get a better perspective on myself. I understand that line about the unexamined life not being worth living more clearly now — since I write about what I do and who I am, I give more thought to what I do and who I am. That has paid off in spades.

As you know, I switched tools.

At Tucows, we’re rolling out Blogware, our own blogging tool, and as part of the Research and Innovation Group, I’ll be making my small contributions, giving direct feedback to the developers and of course, “eating our own dog food”. Blogware’s a good tool with a lot of neat features, and I like it a lot. For all these reasons, I made the switch from Blogger.

However, I wanted to express my gratitude to Blogger for giving me my start. Let me pay Blogger the biggest compliment I can: blogging — which I did via Blogger — has been just about as life-changing for me as the accordion has been.

To Evan, Steve and the rest of the crew, I’d like to express my thanks.

Hey, I got email from Steve Mann! Cool!

He wrote in response to the posting about my photography experience at IKEA. He tells me that the Thursday evening panel discussion that I mentioned in this posting is going to cover the issues of surveillance versus sousveillance — where surveillance is turned upside down and the watched watch the watchers — and matters related to public versus private.

Thanks for the heads-up, Steve!

And double thank you for taking my “MISTER CYBORG” ribbing in the good-natured spirit in which it was intended. After all, who am I to talk? The present-day version of the rig he carries everywhere is less bulky and probably weighs a tenth as much as the accordion I carry everywhere.

(And as I take off my backpack and empty my pockets to change to dress up for tonight’s stag party for a friend, what do I see? In the backpack, a 12″ G4 Powerbook, power supply, Logitech MX500 mouse, spare power bar, small ethernet hub and power supply, USB ultra-bright LED reading light, USB hub. Ahem. In my pockets: Nikon Coolpix SQ camera, Samsung N370 cell phone, Mandylion password-memorizing/generating key fob, Handspring Visor Platinum, Planet Bike flashing ultra-bright LED bike light. Dammit, I may as well be a loosely-coupled cyborg myself.)

I extend a filet mignon on a flaming sword to the professor!

Maybe he’ll record the next Friday accordion video with me. The song I have in mind is Gary Numan’s Are “Friends” Electric?

Recommended Reading/Viewing

Steve Mann’s page on sousveillance. Who watches the watchers?

This is not “The Softer Side of Sears”. An MPEG video in which Steve asks Sears staff about their surveillance equipment. The whinging that the Sears staff do is quite something, and the way they react when they realize that they’re on camera is priceless.

Thanks to Steve Mann for the links!

That new version of Flight Simulator must be really good, ’cause Scoble’s got it on the brain.

(I’ll probably pick it up. I said I was lowering my reliance on Microsoft-based stuff, not ditching it outright. But first, there’s Star Wars Galaxies, and I don’t dare touch that until I’ve got my freelance coding work off my plate.)

In a recent blog entry of mine, Getting pragmatic, part 1, I talked about what Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas in The Pragmatic Programmer refer to as “The Power of Plain Text”. Scoble, in response to that part of my entry, writes:

I think I should be able to do more than just plain text on my computer. For instance, I wanna play some Flight Simulator (seen the latest version, it’s freaking awesome).

I wanna use my Tablet to write in ink. That ain’t plain text.

My friend built a system to run a Pistachio factory. That ain’t plain text.

It would appear that our wires are getting crossed. When I speak of plain text, I’m not talking about plain text interfaces, but plain text data formats:

• Flight Simulator’s interface isn’t plain text, but the data files used to describe the “world” in which you fly might be, allowing third-party world-builders — yourself included — to create virtual worlds to fly in, real or imagined.
• Same deal with the tablet — you write in ink, and perhaps your pen-strokes are saved, but the real data is the text that your handwriting represents.
• As for the pistachio factory, the gui may be what the line controller sees, and bits over RS232 might be what the line machines “hear”, but the data — instructions to the line, settings, logs — could be stored as plain text.

That’s what I was talking about.

Hey, if I wanted plain text interfaces, I wouldn’t have paid the “Apple tax” and bought a Powerbook. I would’ve gotten an off-brand notebook, covered it with skateboard stickers and saved myself a lot of dough (and spared myself the trouble of having a life, too).

Of course it would be silly to make Flight Simulator a plain text game, although imagining it is fertile ground for a laugh:

> MAINTAIN COURSE

Your course remains unchanged, but you are approaching the point where you will be "handed off" to the flight control tower at Gander, Newfoundland, Canada. "Good," you think. "I'll annoy them by saying 'over and oot. Stupid Canuckleheads."

The stick feels a little sluggish today; you find yourself constantly arm-wrestling with it as the 737's nose insists on pointing downward. The pedals don't feel right, either. There's a bit of yaw to the right, and the crosswind isn't helping make things any easier.

Airspeed remains constant at 340 knots.

There is an exit to the aft.

There is a stewardess here.

> LOOK STEWARDESS

She's hot.

I’ll elaborate more on plain text and how it serves interoperability later.

Going as Microsoft-free as possible

When it comes to computer religions — Mac OS vs. Windows vs. various Linuxen — I tend to be rather ecumenical, always preferring to pick what suits both me and the job. As a result, I get called a Mac zealot, Bill Gates sellout (especially since I made a living as a VB programmer for years) or Linux weenie by various parties.

I’m especially suspicious of knee-jerk Microsoft-bashing, and this is in spite of the fact that yes, sometimes Microsoft products will drive you crazy. Microsoft may not be original, but they’re pretty good at taking good ideas and turning them into mass-market products, sometimes pretty good ones at that.

I prefer a pragmatic approach. If a customer’s systems are based on a particular operating system, you develop stuff that will work on that OS. Back in my consulting days, I ended up writing custom “productivity software” — stuff that people in offices use — for customers who were running Windows. My business partner, a very rabid Mac-head kept trying to convince the customers to purchase a Mac version in spite of the fact that they had no demand for a Mac version and would double the development time. “But the Mac is better!” was pretty much his standard retort. While I do agree that the Mac experience is considerably more pleasant, a more pleasant experience that will never be experienced by your customer base is not an experience at all.

So, after all this preamble, it might seem strange that I would declare that I’m attempting to go as Microsoft-free as possible. However, it’s not politics or religion that led me to take this initiative, it’s interoperability. I’ve got three OSs on the go, my main machine is now a Mac, and I work for a company that sells Web services. “Interoperability and universality” is my mantra.

Microsoft products, by default, save their data in binary formats whose details are not generally known to the world outside the Redmond campus. You can, of course, save your files in less proprietary formats, but this approach is a pain for one or more reasons:

• Oftentimes, you lose things like formatting. It makes one suspect that it’s their way to lock you into doing things their way.
• The format is tainted with all sorts of extraneous Microsoft-specific junk. Try exporting a Word document as HTML and look at the junk that gets thrown in. It can look like crap on non-IE browsers.
• Saving is painless, exporting is not. To save, you just hit “control-s” or “command s”. Exporting usually takes you to a dialog box, where you must exporting options.

The Pragmatic Programmer — it should be required reading for anyone who writes code — strongly encourages programmers to embrace plain text. It’s readable by humans, all present platforms and will be readable by future ones. Written properly, it has meaning, even when it is separated from the application that created it. It can also be crunched by simple utility scripts without having to resort to any translation magic.

Hence, I’m choosing applications that embrace The Power of Plain Text. I’ve listed the ones I’m currently using below.

• Mail

  The Mail application that comes with Mac OS X is pleasant to look at, nice to work with, integrates with the Address Book app and has a pretty good junk mail filter. I’ve been working with it steadily since buying my 12″ G4 Powerbook a couple of weeks ago and have been pretty pleased with it.

• Thunderbird

  I’ve also got Mozilla Thunderbird installed on my Powerbook, as well as the Linux (Red Hat 9, if you must know — the more hardcore of you can feel free to start hurling tomatoes) and Windows XP partitions of my Athlon 1500-based HP desktop computer at home. It’s a pretty good mail program — my boss Ross uses it — and I used it for a while when the HP was still my primary machine. I switched to Mail because it integrates very well with two other apps on the Mac: Address Book and iCal.

• Address Book

  Address Book is a wonderful little app for keeping track of people. I love its three-pane format, where the first pane is categories of people, the second lists the people in the currently-selected category, and the third shows the currently selected person’s “business card”, complete with photo.

  The photo feature is great for remembering people whom you don’t know very well or with whom you’ve had only brief real-world contact. In my line of work — developer relations, which involves networking with other computer geeks — this is incredibly valuable. That, and the “notes” section, where you can keep write things like “This person’s significant other’s name is so-so”, “Big fan of this particular author”, “Allergic to peanuts” or “Avoid at all costs”, are incredibly useful to me.

• iCal

  iCal is a pretty decent calendar, but it ran too slowly on my iBook (the 500Mhz dual-USB model) to be of any use. On the Powerbook, which has a G4 running at a higher clock speed and twice as much memory as the iBook, it runs at a decent speed. Once again, I’m using it because it integrates nicely with Mail and Address Book.

  I do have a gripe with iCal — it’s still a little buggy. Resizing an event on your calendar sometimes causes it to be stuck permanently in “resize” mode, and the only way to deal with it seems to be quitting the program. When you relaunch the program, the event you resized has vanished.

  Apple seems to be under no illusion that iCal doesn’t need work: it’s the only Apple app I’ve seen so far with a Provide iCal Feeback… item under its application menu.

• OmniOutliner

  Whenever I do note-taking or scribble down design ideas, either by hand or on a computer, I tend to organize things hierarchically. This is especially true for programming; consider this condensed excerpt from my notes for the back end of an application I recently worked on:

  Stored Procedures

  • People
  • Add
  • Edit
  • Delete
  • Get people in booked in seminar x
  • Get person’s seminar attendance history
  • Seminars
  • Add
  • …
  • Bookings
  • Add
  • …

  When using a computer, I used to do this sort of thing in a text editor or word processor. With a text editor or word processor, you get the advantage of universality, but the contexts of different points — that is, which item belongs to which — is all in the formatting and not really part of the document. With Word’s outline tool, you get a document stored in a format that can’t be read by anything but Word. You might be able to get a script to read it too, if you invoked the right ActiveX magic.

  Thankfully, there’s OmniOutliner, a program that got bundled with Mac OS X. It’s a handy little outlining tool that can saves its outlines in XML and exports to a standard XML format called OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) as well as clean non-Microsoft-tagged HTML or plain old text.

  There’s all kind of potential for a tool like this, from plain old note-taking, to building the skeleton of applications. I’ll have to write more about in a later entry.

• BBEdit

  BBEdit is by far the best text editor out there, period. Oh, yes, you can play Tetris and Adventure in Emacs and compose open source haikus in vi, but it has what you expect from a programmer’s text editor, including multi-language syntax colouring, auto-indent, indenting/unindenting/tab-i-fying/de-tab-i-fying/multifile search and replace/regex-based search and replace and so on.

  If you want to get work done on something that feels like a Mac and not too concerned about getting geek cred while working on your computer in Mom’s basement, get BBEdit.

• Emacs

  After pimp-slapping all the other text editors, I will say that my favourite 1970’s-flavoured text editor is Emacs. Introduced to me by my professor (and software engineering keeper-of-the-flame) David Alex Lamb at Queen’s (a.k.a. Crazy Go Nuts) University, I find its command structure and relative modelessness more comprehensible than vi (I write this as I don my vi-flame-retardant underwear).

  If you’ve got Mac OS X, you might be interested in these GUI versions of Emacs, meant to close the XEmacs gap.

• OpenOffice

  Sooner or later, you’re going to be cranking out or reading someone’s TPS reports, and more often than not, they’ll be in some Microsoft Office format. You have two options: get your paws on Office, or get your paws on something that can read its hidden and ever-changing formats.

  OpenOffice does this, and presents you with a nice Office-like GUI. I haven’t had too much of a chance to take it for a test spin, but my housemate Paul, who’s cranking out docs for the next incarnation of Peekabooty, swears by it.