Don Marti

Tue 05 Oct 2010 08:15:41 AM PDT

Rich Bodo on the IT Kitchen

At the Linux/Microsoft interoperability miniconference at last year's OpenSource World, Rich Bodo talked about the IT department at Kiva, which has lots of challenges. Low budgets, lots of client platforms, faraway offices without local support. (The one good thing is that the company can't afford an IT "department of no.")

Here's the latest from Rich: IT as a Kitchen. "Kivans were solving problems with Google services on their own that our old mail systems could not." Full of good material on moving from legacy email to Google's hosted services, including a recommendation for email migration service YippieMove. Looks like some "Big Switch" in action.

In other news, here's a thoughtful piece on Productivity from Russ Allbery. "We work long hours because that's what we're measured on and rewarded for. We work unproductively for many of those hours partly because it's impossible to be productive for that many hours." (So why not design work spaces and collaborative software to make it more difficult for managers to measure presence than to develop and use other metrics? Joel Spolsky, IIRC, did this with his bug tracking software. Making it easy for managers to blame bugs on programmers would create an incentive for programmers and testers to circumvent the BTS.)

Some of the readers of this blog were complaining about missing the "MLP" or "close a bunch of tabs" sections, so here you go:

I got a chance to learn more about using US Customs to enforce the GPL: Fusion Garage speaks, but stalls on code release. Basically, Customs needs either obvious infringement or an order from the International Trade Commission to act on infringing imports. So the next step to follow this strategy seriously is for someone to file a Section 337 complaint with the ITC.

resty: Piping hot REST client for bash or zsh

Jeremy Fishman on reading unbuffered subprocess output in Python: the simplest solution is to open a pseudo terminal.

How Do I Convert A SysV Init Script Into A systemd Service File? (Hey, kids, pretty soon you'll be able to stop putting that "daemonize" incantation in server software.)

Marvell and OLPC have now signed an agreement in which OLPC is to develop XO-3 Tablet(s) based on one of Marvell's ARM System On Chip processor solutions.

* Making GitHub More Open: Git-backed Wikis.

This good old-fashioned Linux advocacy post from Greg Laden: Linux in Schools links to a interesting report: "A major staffing firm in Pakistan provided survey data that found that Linux IT professionals with three years of experience earn 12.5% more than Microsoft professionals with the same number of years of experience." Also on the subject of keeping more of your IT spending in local pay packets and less in outgoing payments: Open Source Policy Map.