Today is election day in America. As we go to the polls we have been drowned in rhetoric from both sides for this past two years. (As a Canadian, I still don't see why it can't be reasonably put to bed in 45 days, but there you have it.) I came across this brilliant Stephen Fry essay on the sheer joy of language and its diversity and evolution in my feeds this morning. The close was perfectly political enough to warrant blogging on Election Day, despite being off topic for this blog's norm. Much has been made about the slow erosion of rights and freedoms in this country under Bush Republicans. Fry tackles it from a linguistic and British perspective:

"One final thought I should leave you with which only occurred to me the other day. Sometimes, by accident, language fails to provide and when it does the results can be hugely detrimental to the human race. Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’. Neither of these assertions would sound nearly as good if substituted with those lame letters ‘CCTV’, would they? Well, whether Scunt or SS surely there really should be a memorable and punchy new designation for CCTV – at the moment it is simply too greasy to wrestle. I wonder what other enemies lurk in our society that need names to bring them out into the light?"

The entire essay is full of such gems as it dances about from thought to thought. A little dense in it's beginning due to typographical convention, it's worth the effort. Please get out and vote!

It seems Sun Microsystems is continuing to support Drizzle. Drizzle is the MySQL fork that was announced at OSCON this past Summer. That said, Sun has been continuing to move developers to work on it internally (Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor). This is all good news. Based on the strength of the MySQL brand and history, drizzle stands to evolve into the next interesting database and Sun has a front row seat to best capture the upside.

Drizzle can be found on LaunchPad and has an active discussion community.

[Update 11:20, 22 Oct 2008: Brian Aker just posted his assumptions on possible directions for Drizzle.]

"A PHP interface to a web services layer that allows users to federate and orchestrate functionality from other services, applications, and data stores." That's how Damien Howley, Mindtouch evangelist, described the current DekiWiki release. I was spending a couple days on the show floor at ZendConf helping Bitrock who had a pedestal in the Microsoft booth. Mindtouch had the pedestal next to us in the booth, and during one of the slow periods on the floor Damien gave me a demo of their latest technology.

I wasn't going for it. It's an open source wiki, developed by MindTouch who then provides enterprise support. I'd seen the demo a few years ago, and it was essentially some nice touches on a wiki for the enterprise user like a good WYSIWYG editor. Then Damien gave me the new demo. Mindtouch has added Dekiscript as a programming language within Dekiwiki. Think Javascript added to HTML pages and dynamic content development only applied to wiki pages. Now I'm NOT a wiki sort of guy but I couldn't help to be amazed by what I saw.

I wanted to explore the idea of what this might mean for enterprise applications development a little more. I signed up for a free account on their Deki On Demand hosted service. It took me a few minutes to get going with the user guide, and I thought I'd try something simple like pulling together a dynamic "bio" page. I grabbed content from my existing bio, and then using the WYSIWYG extensions environment, I quickly added the embedded DekiScript extensions for photos from Flickr, the last few blog posts from my feed, and a Twitter widget.

So the following fragment from the page:

Recent Photos: {{ flickr.Badge{tags: "Stephen Walli"} }} Recent Blog Posts: {{ feed.List{feed: "http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnceMoreUntoTheBreach", max: "6"} }} Recent Tweets: {{ twitter.current{name: "stephenrwalli"} }}

Produces the following:

There's a complete security model embedded in the wiki as one would expect. There's support for writing your own templates, and site wide CSS, etc. There's support for writing your own extensions (and sharing them in the developer community). There are also large scale adaptors (e.g. SugarCRM, Microsoft SQLserver). So this is where it gets interesting. How fast could an enterprise IT developer with a little Dekiscript knowledge and the toolkit of extensions and adaptors start to build interesting applications. I don't mean a more interesting content management system. I'm thinking of complex content-centric multi-departmental work-flow environments like patient or legal case management systems. Is it still enterprise IT development if they install DekiWiki and develop dashboards with some simple scripting and drag-and-drop goodness? How soon before enterprise business people step around the IT department to do their own "development"?

I have an idea for a web property and wanted to explore Django as a way to create a prototype. I grabbed the two basic Django books and they each take you through the "how to install Django" bit. They start the discussion about setting up MySQL (assuming of course that you remember how that works), and then they each get to an innocent line that effectively says: You'll need the Python MySQL package (MySQLdb).

Now the fun begins. There's sometimes a wee bit of a problem building it on a Mac due to a confusion between 32-bit and 64-bit and PPC and Intel and which MySQL and which Python you might be using or have installed. I learned this much by poking about for awhile on Google. It took me a bit to realize I hadn't updated my developer Xtools world when I upgraded to Mac OS Leopard so that I was at least seeing the errors that others have reported. [The best summary is here if you want to do this the hard way.] A friend cautioned me around messing with the stock MySQL and Python worlds on the Mac, as it's a good way to make the shipped tools unusable if you don't get the builds right. I'm now a couple or three hours into the problem.

Then I have a brilliant idea. I'm an adviser to Bitrock, and on Bitnami they support a large collection of open source technology packages for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX (and Solaris). The packages are single-click installers that deliver the open source technology and all of its dependencies. The technology is installed in separate trees such that they do not interfere with the stock installed Mac packages. (There are easy ways to combine the packaged technologies if you don't want multiple instantiations of MySQL, Apache, etc.)

Sure enough, there's a Django stack for Mac OSX. A few minutes of download, a few minutes of install (and the autoconfiguration prompts for MySQL user setup before the install), and it's time for the big test. But wait: there's even an executable file in the install root called use_djangostack that seems to set my environment correctly. NOW it's time for the big test:

/Users/xxx> /Applications/djangostack-1.0-6/use_djangostack bash-3.2$ which python /Applications/djangostack-1.0-6/python/bin/python bash-3.2$ python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Sep 11 2008, 12:40:30) [GCC 4.0.0 20041026 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 4061)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import MySQLdb >>> bash-3.2$ python /Applications/djangostack-1.0-6/apps/django/bin/django-admin.py startproject testproject bash-3.2$ cd testproject bash-3.2$ ls __init__.py manage.py settings.py urls.py bash-3.2$

That was a lot less painful than any of the alternatives. Now I can get back to exploring Django. If you want to explore open source software technology in a sand box or easily set up an application like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or MediaWiki, I would encourage you to take a look at Bitnami. There's lots of goodness hiding there.

Caution: There was one other small configuration issue I needed to make in the next steps of configuring and synchronizing MySQL not covered in the books or [yet] in the README.txt file, and that was to ensure your Django project settings.py file contains:

DATABASE_HOST=[Django stack install root]/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock

The first videos are up on InitMarketing.tv. Sandro interviews Bruce Perens in the kick-off video with fun commentary on open source software and the long-tail. There are also interviews with Oliver Nachtrab from Open-Xchange and Florian Effenberger from OpenOffice.org. There's an RSS feed for the site, and Sandro has interviews in the pipeline with Andrew Rodaway (Director of Marketing, Canonical), Fabrizio Capobianco (CEO, Funambol), Shane Martin Coughlan (FTF Coordinator, Free Software Foundation Europe), Stormy Peters (Executive Director, Gnome Foundation), Boris Kraft (CTO, Magnolia), and more. Enjoy!

Initmarketing partners Sandro Groganz and Roberto Galoppini taught a day long workshop entitled "Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy" in Berlin at the Open Source in Mobile conference. I was unfortunately unable to attend (and I love Berlin), but I contributed to the materials. It is essentially our combined experience and expertise wrapped up into a one day how-to seminar.

Roberto has posted a great summary of his presentation on his blog.