Elsewhere in Dreams

I know Amarok and Deluge and Firefox are the glamourous children of the packaging world, but there are a few packages I’d like to see added to Hardy. Packages that would make my professional life just a little bit easier.

1. Zimbra: PHPgroupware and OpenGroupWare don’t cut it. Zimbra — I’ve seen a functioning system! — is nice, and has risen almost to the point of competing with MS Exchange. It would be simply wonderful to be able to apt-get this sucker.
2. OpenBravo: Such an impressive piece of software. One of the few OS ERP projects with a nice website, a nice interface, and a lot of great features.
3. VMWare Server: It was in the repos, then it disappeared. I have exactly two programs I need Windows to run, and I’d like to host one of our ageing Win 2000 servers as a virtual machine running in an actually stable environment.
4. Bugzilla: Okay, this one is in the repos, but I simply can’t set it up properly. Maybe it’s just me.
5. ERP5: Apparently pretty powerful, I bet there’re quite a few people who’d want to give this a whirl.

That’s it for now. But I will be back with more…

After not getting much sleep last night — and not for any good reason, I just couldn’t sleep for the longest time — I got in to work this morning to find our webserver completely out of space.

Eventually I worked out that the transaction log was, well, gargantuan. Enormous. And even though we have 2TB of storage just sitting around, we can’t use any of that because it’s a perfectly good Debian RAID server that came along after the initial investment in… Windows 2000, MSSQL 2000, a commercial mail server, ISS, Visual Studio and who knows what else.

This is why you don’t let your bosses make technology decisions for you. We’re not doing rocket science here. This isn’t a high-load database context, or some complex thing that needs a heavy-duty solution. What we need is a hang-glider. What we have is the Deathstar.

What really bothers me is we could have, with a tiny bit more investment in personnel, and a lot less invested in buying software, have done this all for, essentially, free. Apache is used around the world, as is Postfix, as is MySql or Postgre, as is PHP (or any of the other up-and-comers). We could have done it for an up-front cost of zero dollars in software and used the money saved to hire a competent person to administer the servers and do some simple web programming.

But no, we went the comfortable, half-assed route, and instead of creating a site that just works, we have a site that half-works, sometimes, and is tied in to proprietary programs that will chain us to an upgrade cycle that we either submit to and pay the price over the long term, or escape and pay the price in the short term.

At least you can say, if you’re chained to Linux or BSD or Solaris, that your upgrade cycle is essentially free, barring hardware costs. You can, at least, say that.

This morning, to get back to the original thing, I had to wade through a tide of screens, logins, and all that sort of thing, and figure out a horrible GUI just to manage a database. And then figure out the command syntax, which makes no sense whatsoever. And then finally, after two hours of research, the entire task took five minutes to execute.

Insultandinjury.

And, to top it off, the beyond-ridiculous antipathy of some of my former compatriots to body modification has reared its head again, if only on my periphery. Still, I won’t say anything about that, lest I say something stupid.

They really do. Let me ask you a question:

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?