Here’s a listing of the major components that are included in this FOSS (Free Open Source Software) stack.

• Ruby 1.8.7
• Ruby 1.9.1
• RubyGems 1.3.4
• Rails 2.3.2
• ImageMagick 6.5.2-9
• Subversion 1.6.2
• SQLite 3.5.1
• MySQL 5.1.30
• Apache 2.2.11
• PHP 5.2.8
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.4
• Git 1.6.3.1
• Nginx 0.7.59

Lot’s of great choices and options make this “a very powerfull stack.”  Bitnami’s latest RubyStack (RubyStack 1.5-2) goes above and beyond to give you a full Ruby environment (for the two latest stable releases of Ruby), a PHP environment, two SQL database servers, two web servers, and two version control services. Wow! All that, and it only takes a few minutes to configure and install.

I’ll be using the Bitnami stack (with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1) as a test environment while working on the Ruby and Rails book reviews I mentioned yesterday.

Here’s a brief summary of some tasty new treats in the Ruby lineup:

1. Learning Rails (Rails from the Outside In) by Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill, published by O’Reilly Media (See Learning Rails book cover and O’Reilly catalog description here.)
2. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts (Useful Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems) by Steve Pugh, published by No Starch Press (the Finest in Geek Entertainment). You can download a PDF of chapter 1, “General Purpose Utilities”.
3. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails by Maik Schmidt, published by Pragmatic Programmers
4. Programming Ruby 1.9 (The newly updated Pragmatic Programmers Guide, aka the Pick-Axe book), by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, published by The Pragmatic Programmers
5. Agile Web Development With Rails (Third Edition) by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Justin Gehtland, James Duncan Davidson, and Andreas Schwarz

I hope you are enjoying your summer reading as much as I am.  What new books are you reading?

VOS, VoS, V.O.S., Voice of Soul

FAQ – Frequently Asked Question:

Question: Who is VOS? and is VOS related to the Vos Virtual Network?

Answer: V.O.S, “Voice of Soul” is a Korean R&B group that is made up of members Choi Hyun-joon, Park Ji-hun, and Kim Kyung-rok. The group debuted in 2004 under record company, Star Empire Entertainment. In year 2007, V.O.S released a special single album and the title track called ” Everyday” has become very popular to most of the Korean public, leading to an increasing number of fans.

VOS is also the acronym for Virtual Operating System.

The Vos Virtual Network is a fast growing online magazine (blog) published by Douglas Vos from the Detroit (Michigan) area. The Vos Virtual Network covers a variety of topics… including anthropology, biology, musicology, theology and technology.

How to combine SEO, blogging, and social media for powerful marketing results.

Contact me (Doug Vos) via email, or via my Facebook profile, or my LinkedIn profile (or leave a comment at the bottom of this blog post) — if you want to exchange ideas on how to take advantage of new business opportunities, or talk about new IT job listings as we roll into 2009 — and as the Obama administration begins implementing their new ideas.

While I personally do not favor government handouts (or any new policies that might create more government bureaucrats – drunk on tax dollars and lying sideways in the public trough)  — if these policies can be introduced in a way that create more private sector business, and efficiently upgrade the Internet and broadband access to the World Wide Web, it would obviously be great for the USA. The question in my mind is if Obama’s ideas will stimulate private business investments, and perhaps re-ignite private capital investments on Wall Street. Or will it just be a temporary solution that might make us feel good (for a short time), but ends up drowning the country in debt, and suffocating our children and grandchildren under the load of trillion dollar tax increases? ( My friend Jack Hoogendyk always talks about returning to Core Principles, and the things we really want: less government, lower taxes, and individual responsibility).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in 2009.

President-elect Barack Obama

Here are some recent quotes describing Barack Obama’s policy ideas/plans for the next 4 years:

Schools: “My economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.”

Broadband: “As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m president – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.”

Electronic Medical Records: “In addition to connecting our libraries and schools to the Internet, we must also ensure that our hospitals are connected to each other through the Internet. That is why the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives. We will make sure that every doctor’s office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.”

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd ed.

Behind virtually every web application, there’s a database management system.

Ever used Facebook? Guess what? It runs on a (huge!) database. What about your favorite discussion forum? Are you into auto maintenance, fly fishing, or (if you’re like my wife) do you like to swap recipes, trade amusing anecdotes about your kids, or post blog articles? All database-driven.

Many of the most popular, thriving websites are database driven. Behind the scenes many Web 2.0 websites are running MySQL, Sun Microsystem‘s open source database. (There are other popular databases from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM — but that’s another story.)

MySQL is the M in LAMP — the very popular Open Source web site platform/framework (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python). MySQL is the database used with WordPress (the software that runs this VVN blog). MySQL is the default database server used with Ruby on Rails.

If MySQL is the world’s most popular open-source database, then MySQL in a Nutshell (2nd ed.) by Russell J. T. Dyer is the Encyclopedia Britannica of MySQL. Weighing in at 545 pages, the book is divided into five parts:

1. Tutorial – A brief tutorial on installing MySQL and performing basic database management tasks (35 pages).
2. Statement and Function Reference – A comprehensive reference to SQL statements, clauses, and functions implemented by MySQL. (SQL is the standard language implemented by all major database management systems, but MySQL, Oracle, MS SQLServer, and the rest all have their own quirks.) This section weighs in at nearly 300 pages, and covers database user administration, data manipulation, and database replication, and more. String function, date and time functions, mathematical functions, and flow control functions are described here, too.
3. Client and Server Administration – A guide to MySQL server and client configuration and administration (90 pages). This is where you will learn the difference between mysqld (the database server) and mysql (the command-line client), and the configuration options of each. A reference to command-line utilities such as mysqladmin, mysqlcheck and mysqldump is also included.
4. Programming APIs – A 100-page guide to three popular programming language APIs – C, Perl, and PHP – which websites or programs use to interface with MySQL.
5. Quick Reference – A 15-page set of appendices with a quick reference to the data types, operators (arithmetic, relational, and logical), and environment variables used by MySQL.

If you are an absolute beginner to MySQL and database management systems, this book might not be the best first choice for you. A good place to start instead might be here. But if you know that MySQL is in your software development or web site development future, MySQL in a Nutshell deserves a place on your bookshelf.

The news about Microsoft’s Open Source Web Platform Installer probably took a few people by surprise this week. Game plans and strategies are changing quickly, and enterprise open source governance policies (PDF) may need to be reviewed or revised to keep up with the rapid pace of change. Projects like FOSSology and FossBazaar are designed to grapple with governance issues.

Open Source in the Enterprise – 2008, an O’Reilly Radar Report starts with the question/premise: “It’s no longer IF, but HOW?”  O’Reilly’s new report is for CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, and business owners who want to make smart decisions about deploying open source. (Disclaimer: O’Reilly makes money selling books about open source software.)

So how do you use open source software in your business? How do you define policies for using open source? How do you govern IT? What are the best practices in the industry today?

The O’Reilly Radar Report, Open Source in the Enterprise – 2008, is authored by Bernard Golden (CEO of Navica).

Mr. Golden starts out by telling us that open source is “growing at a compound rate of 55%”. The number of projects hosted at SourceForge has grown from around 12,500 in 2000 to nearly 200,000 by year-end 2007. However, Mr. Golden also reminds us that Open Source adoption statistics are not very reliable at this point:

It is extremely challenging to assess how much open source is being used within enterprises today. One of the traditional methods of use identification (vendor reports) is missing, as most open source software is downloaded anonymously and copied/redistributed extensively. Self-reporting by enterprises cannot be relied upon, either, as many companies are unwilling to self-report in the interest of avoiding conflict with existing vendors or keeping competitive information confidential.

He goes on to explain his method of research, which involved examining job posting data — looking for tell tale markers of Open Source adoption in various enterprises.

The report lists 6 drivers for Enterprise Open Source Adoption, and follows each with case studies, and analysis of best practices:

1. Agility and Scale ( case study – PayPal)
2. Quality and Security (case study – Coverity)
3. Breaking Vendor Lockin (case study – Kaplan test services)
4. Cost (case study – Big Lots)
5. Sovereignty (case study – open source in Brazil)
6. Innovation (case study – AMQP at JP Morgan/Chase)

The O’Reilly report concludes with details on how to create an Open Source Action Plan.

The critical task at this stage of open source use is to bring it into the open and recognize that it will be an important part of IT initiatives going forward. Don’t underestimate this issue: a recent CIO magazine survey found that about 50% of enterprises claim that they are currently using open source, while 45% cited support concerns as a reason restricting its use—whereas the reality is that nearly every IT organization has open source running today. The first step to solving a problem is confronting it, and the challenge for early open source users is to be honest about their actual circumstances.

I found the report to be well researched and written in a non-technical, jargon-free manner. The case studies are helpful. You might find the report helpful also.

Disclaimer: The values, viewpoints and opinions expressed are totally my own, and do not necessarily reflect the values, viewpoints, or opinions of my employer, clients, suppliers, or any other affiliation.

Under the overpass after an autumn rain, by the railroad tracks.
I-96 at the Southfield Freeway. Detroit, Michigan. October 2007.

From G. S. George’s Flickr Photostream.

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CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `clients` (
 `id` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `email_address` varchar(72) character set ascii NOT NULL,
 `firstname` varchar(16) character set utf8 NOT NULL,
 `lastname` varchar(20) character set utf8 NOT NULL,
 `date_added` datetime NOT NULL,
 UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`),
 UNIQUE KEY `email_address` (`email_address`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

What’s up with IS?

I guess IN and IS are considered key words in MySQL and the Geshi Generic Syntax Highlighter colorizing library. Is that a bug in the parsing routine, or what?

FBML Essentials – Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals, written by Jesse Stay, published by O’Reilly Media, July 2008, 167 pages, ISBN:0-596-51918-6,  $29.99

FBML Essentials - Facebook Markup Language - book cover

Facebook is the world’s largest and fastest growing social networking website (with 132 Million unique vistors in June of 2008).

FMBL Essentials, the new book from O’Reilly Media, is all about learning the essential markup elements and fundamentals of Facebook application design.  FBML (like HTML)  provides the basic markup tags for building a Facebook application.

According to the author Jesse Stay, this book is essential for anyone who wants to be a part of Facebook’s future. “FBML is only the beginning of your adventure in Facebook Development. Reviewing and knowing what tags are available will help save you time as you develop on Facebook.”

Whaaoo there Jesse, let’s not go-a-galloping on that horse so quickly. Some people might need to sign-up for Facebook first.  Or maybe read Facebook, The Missing Manual,  and get familiar with the Facebook blog and FAQ.

Somewhere along your journey of joining Facebook — and finding your first 20 or 200 friends –  you might have started thinking about becoming a Facebook application developer.  Perhaps you stumbled across the Facebook application developer area, and said to yourself – hmmmm, that would be fun to try. You might be  a curious technology geek like me, or “social geek” like FBML Essentials author – Jessy Stay.

OK, cowboy! Are you ready to ride? Buy this book. Read it. Learn FBML fast.

You’ll discover:

• A sample Facebook application – with explanations of how it works
• Design rules for images, CSS, Javascript, and forms – related to FBML
• An introduction to FBJS, Facebook’s version of JavaScript
• Concise explanations of all the FBML tags – logic tags, user tags, profile tags, etc.
• How to create forms with FBML
• Dynamic FBML attributes, including MockAJAX
• Tips on testing your FBML code

You can tell Jesse Stay is a very sharp guy when you read his blog.  He wrote his first FBML application in just one week, and sold it 2 months later. Jesse has consulted for several of the top 100 applications on Facebook. Now Jesse’s working on an iPhone Interactive entertainment application that will help cowboys change gears faster, or something like that.