Thought and Freedom

Sun Microsystems announced on October 25th that they are on the fast track to making Java an open source product.

Sun has been on an open source soapbox since their new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, took over the company.

Open source software has paved the way for rapid development of great software throughout the world. Projects such as Mozilla’s Firefox, or OpenOffice.org have been shining examples of success in the open source movement.

Making a language opensource is a completely revolutionary idea. It should be interesting to see how Java can maintain stability and long term effectiveness with a less centralized development team.

This could develop into a perfect language, a bloated language, or somewhere in between. My hope is for perfect! We will just have to wait and see what comes of it.

Investing is something that everyone should do, but people put it off until later, or they feel too uninformed to actually carry out the the act of making an investment.

Potential investors run in to the problem that they want experience before investing, but in order to get that experience, they must invest. So the end result is procrastination. Putting off the investment experience until a later date. The unfortunate part is that years pass by and no investments are made; resulting in lost income and lost experience.

One solution for the weary investor is to provide a means to “practice” investing. There are several good sites that have stock market games.

A common scenario in these games is that you start with certain ground rules such as starting with $100,000, trade only certain types of stock, etc.

These games then actually follow the real markets. If you buy a share of this stock at a given price, it is sold to you at the current market price. You buy the share with your virtual dollars. Then the share goes up or down in price with the markets.

I just started playing a virtual stock exchange game at investopedia. It not only gives the ability to trade stocks, you can trade bonds, mutual funds, and options as well.

This will definitely give an new person a leg up on investing. Be sure to check it out and possibly join the investing game as well. My user name is TerryPearson if you want to check out my stats!

It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I guess we still have a month or so. You would not know that considering I have already seen Christmas decorations for sale in a couple department stores (Walmart and Shopko)!

I am sure that you do not want to start thinking about Christmas shopping just yet, but remember that when the Christmas season hits, you will find many more ‘rebate’ deals at stores across America.

I admit that a rebate is not my first choice when it comes to getting good deals. It seems like they only actually get sent in about half the time. If you do remember to send in the rebates, you will surely get a great deal.

Last year, I planned my morning after Thanksgiving by going to a site called “Black Friday @ GottaDeal.com.” They had a very good listing of deals that were coming up. It was much better than going through the newspaper on Thanksgiving in hopes of finding a good deal.

They even had stuff listed weeks before. Some of it was only “rumors” but they were fairly accurate with these. The site lists deals for a lot of different stores in advance. Think of it as a deal forecasting site.
So, definitely start checking the site. You may find some excellent deals on items that are listed on the site.

Since the first personal computers, games have been an intrical part of the system. Computer games were used to break the ice, and show the potential user the “fun factor” in their potential purchase.

In the 90′s, the computer became a vital business tool. It’s connectedness to information allowed business process to be streamlined, and research and collaboration to be made more efficient.

The PC makers lost sight of the potential of a gaming machine as the primary use for their powerful computing equipment.

That has all begun to change. Major PC vendors such as HP and Dell have teamed up with gaming companies to release computers designed for the high end graphics and processing that the latest games require.

“I think what you’re seeing over the last 18 months or so is a kind of realization that the market has shifted towards gaming being a very general part of entertainment for consumers and not a niche play,” said Phil McKinny in an article on TheStreet.com.

Gaming PCs have the potential to become what notebooks used to be for the computer industry. The notebook market used to be the “premium” aspect of the computer industry. It would offset the low profits made on desktop systems.

Today’s competitive market for small computers has had a negative affect on PC vendors. They can no longer turn large profits on these computers.

Today, the vendors are looking for other sources of revenue. The game market cares little about price. They want high quality products, and are often willing to pay top dollar. After all, how else do you stop the lag on your World of Warcraft Game?

Throughout my time at the SMSU Web Office, I have worked on a number of different project. Some, were simply learning experiences, others were actually implemented.

Everyone at the web office begins with an introduction to web programming through a variety of tutorials. I was first instructed to read an HTML tutorial from WebMonkey. I then went through the Macromedia ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit book. I used the 5.0 version of this book, but they are now on the MX 7 version.

After the introductury lessons, I had my first project. The project was a photo browser application. I spent a lot of time just getting my feet wet and did not move very fast on that project. It was an ‘album viewing’ system for organizations on campus.

My next, and much bigger, project was to create an online voting system for student body elections. This is what really got me excited about my job. It was fun to figure out the details of such a system.

I have worked on many other projects as well. Tim Kortsmit and I focused on a couple big projects including implementing standard systems of development and design for the entire SMSU website. These standards will come to fuition on September 15, 2006 when the new XHTML Strict Compliant website is brought online. He and I also created a graduation project in which we automated almost the entire graduation process (we did not get through automated commencement procedures ).

This year, I have been researching how to use our new Microsoft SQL Server. It has been a challenge to get used to the interface (we previously used MS Access). Once I get through all the differences, I think that I will start to fully realize how useful this Enterprise Class Database server really is. I think that it has the potential to make the University Data much more useful, and much less redundant.

So to summarize, I have three aspects to my job:

• Research
• Plan
• Code

In case you are wondering about a good resource to use for Database Administration, check out the book below. It is the one I used today, and it is great!

I just happened to come across a very interesting tool today. Until recently, desktop publishing was an expensive trade (it still is if you don’t use the right tools.) Yet, there could be many good uses for desktop publishing tools for the home/work/school user.

One very good use would be to create professional looking newsletters for your club or organization.

I came across just the tool for that. It is called Scribus. Scribus is liscensed under the GPL, so it is opensource and free to use. I think I may mess around with it some more this summer, and see what I can learn about it. It may be a great tool to publish newsletters or mini newspapers about the student association. Also it could be used as a way to develop recuriting materials for a club.

You can find Scribus at http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=specs.