Last week was a frustrating one. I downloaded and installed a module that was supposed to provide some sort of integration with a Jabber server. It basically provides a user interface and a bunch of functions that I can call from within the toolkit I am using. It was a pain to install due to the lack of documentation and the documentation that did exist was badly written. After spending way too long getting everything up and running things didn’t work as they should have. But I have the source code. No problem right? Wrong! Going through the source code didn’t particularly help either. Why not? Not a comment in sight. Just a large amount of undocumented C code.

After spending a bit of time thinking about it I figure I have two choices: try to figure out what is going on or rewrite it. There is a fairly large amount of code so rewriting it could take me a long time. On the other hand because of the lack of documentation it could also take a long time to (fully) understand how everything works, which would be necessary before I could start fixing things.

I guess this could apply to any open source project. If the code is badly written but there’s lots of it and there’s no documentation, what should one do? Reuse or redo? I would be interested to hear from anybody who has had similar experience with open source software and what you did about it. As always, feel free to leave any comments.

Windows Live now supports Firefox. I have been playing around with it in Firefox and it’s pretty slick, particularly the drag and drop stuff. So far I’m quite impressed. Thumbs up to Microsoft for playing ball this time around. Still doesn’t work in Safari though. Maybe that’s asking a bit too much 🙂

“There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and those who can’t”

Now you can get Google on your mobile phone. Google Local shows you how to get to where you want to go and will also show you what’s there e.g. cinemas, restaurants. The service is free but is currently only available in the US.

This is a follow-on to the first acronym of the day that I posted a while back:

WAG — a wild-assed guess.

I found this one in an article about absinthe in Wired magazine.

Humans are much better at certain tasks than computers; identifying objects in a photograph for example. This is the fundamental premise behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. You get paid for helping out a computer! For each Human Intelligence Task (HIT) you complete successfully Amazon credits your account. Interesting idea.

I had a brief look through the list of tasks and most of them involve choosing a photograph from a list that best represents a particular object; storefronts seem to be quite popular. Presumably this has something to do with Amazon’s Yellow Pages service. As well as searching for a particular business you can “walk” down a block and look at the shops that are located there; this probably explains why there are so many HITs involving identifying storefronts.

I gave up building my own computers a while back after a particular nasty incident involving a Windows 2000 installation. Anyway, what I am looking for is a pre-built machine with Linux already installed that I can use as a development server at home. Nothing fancy. I can install the operating system myself having done it many times before, I just don’t have the inclination to do so. I had a brief look at Shuttle but they don’t appear to provide a fully-configured machine. Dell are no good either because I don’t want or need Microsoft Windows.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Today Microsoft announced a new collection of online applications. It’s live.com. You can view some photos of the event here.

Apparently Gates repeatedly used the term “live software”. If software isn’t live, what is it? “crashing all the time software”?

The site doesn’t work at all in Safari and there’s actually a notice at the top of the page telling Firefox users to be patient as support is coming soon.

I signed up for Windows Live Mail. It’s Microsoft’s new web mail replacement for Hotmail. When I get an invite to the beta release I’ll have a play with it and will post something about it here, assuming I can find a Windows machine of course.

Just a quickie. The best kind of course (I am referring to the short length of this post by the way).

Have you ever wondered where the word “Skype” came from? No, then you probably have a social life. Well I have wondered about the name, being a user of their software, and if you have too, here is the answer.