Auction Podcast Episode 11 – Open source auctioneer

Logo Open Source Initiative

Image via Wikipedia

One of the reasons AuctioneerTech exists is to make life easier for everyone, including auctioneers. One of the ways this goal is accomplished is by reviewing software that performs a novel or important function. Most of the software covered is open source, and in this episode, we’re going to discuss open source software, explain why it doesn’t necessarily mean free software, and argue why there is an imporant difference.

What is open source?
At the heart of all software lies a programming language. For web programs like phpList, WordPress or Gallery, this language could be a scripting language like PHP or Perl. For programs on your computer, like Notepad++, OpenOffice or the GIMP this language could be Java, C, Visual Basic or .NET. There are many, many more. For programs on your computer, for the most part, they have to be compiled before they are executed. That simply means that a program reads the source code and produces an executable program that your computer can understand.

The concept of open source derives from the user having direct access to the goods and knowledge of a product. What this concept means for software is that you, as a user, can acquire the source code and read it to see exactly how a piece of software works. What this concept means for hardware like routers is both that you can install your own software or firmware on the device to chance its functionality as well as access the design schematics and plans to make changes to produce different devices.

Now, before you start with your email client or the feedback form on the website to tell me how this is another netcast that is too technical, let me say that we’re pretty much done with the complicated part. I think it’s safe to assume that noone listening to this podcast, nor I would argue the vast majority of users of open source software, has any interest in changing or modifying in any way the source code for any software. What we’re interested in is the other aspect generally found with open source software, the price.

Open source is free, but some of it costs money to buy or use. To understand this concept, we look at the difference between the latin words gratis and libre. In English, we use free for both of these terms, but there really isn’t a word to distinguish between free as it relates to liberty and free as it relates to not costing anything. Because of this, the open source movement has adopted the two phrases free as in speech and free as in beer as way to concisely describe the concepts behind the two uses of free.

Free, as in beer, software serves a purpose. It lets us perform tasks that would otherwise be significantly expensive. Most of us initially turn to open source software because we’re looking to get away from paying for Microsoft Office or Photoshop, for example, and we turn to OpenOffice and the GIMP, respectively. Neither OpenOffice nor the GIMP costs any money, but neither is very easy to modify as ameteur programmers.

Free, as in speech, software also is important. Commercial open source products, such as KnowledgeTree document management and SugarCRM customer relationship management, allow access to the source code but have a fairly high monetary cost. Most of these commercial open source products offer a free, community-supported edition that works for non-commercial applications and offer a premium business product to companies who can pay for support and advanced features. The advantage is that you can purchase a piece of software and hire someone to make customized changes to that software so that it works better for you. You can’t make changes to proprietary software like Microsoft Office because the source code simply isn’t available.

The one other distinction that’s important to make is that there is proprietary software that is free as in beer. Products such as Google Picasa and the Opera web browser fall under this category. The advantage of this approach is if you can monetize your product through alternative means to outright purchase price such as advertising, and an increase in product adoption caused by offering it for free means an increase in revenue.

How can open source software improve your business?
It is possible to be 100% effective as a computer user and use completely open source software. You can use Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. Use the GIMP instead of Photoshop, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, Scribus and Inkscape instead of Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator, Evolution or Thunderbird instead of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Notepad++ or Nvu or BlueGriffon when it’s released instead of Microsoft Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver. Many of these open source products are arguably superior in functionality than their proprietary counterparts. Most have release cycles much faster than their counterparts, so they’re improving more rapidly. They all have price tags that are superior to their counterparts.

There are a couple of places you can go to find open source software that performs a specific task or serves as an alternative to your current proprietary solution. Two sites I frequent are sourceforge.net and osalt.com. SourceForge serves as a repository, or central storage and meeting place, for a large open source development community. There are thousands of products there that can be downloaded or  discussed. osalt.com, which is short for open source as alternative, provides simple comparisons of software by function. For example, when I look up the commercial package Steinberg Cubase, a popular multi-track music editing package, I see that the open source Cubase alternatives are Rosegarden and Ardour. When I look up the open source finance application GnuCash, I see its commercial equivalents listed as Microsoft Money and Quicken.

That’s it for episode eleven. I’m sorry I’m running a little behind with this episode; things are a little hectic in my world. I’m going to try to have another episode ready to release next week while I’m in Baltimore for the Auction Technology Specialist course.

One change I’d like to note is that the podcasts and their transcripts will now be included on the main page of the website. They will still be available on the auction podcast page, but I think the content is also appropriate for inclusion in the main feed.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

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AVG flags FlashUtil10a.exe as Trojan horse virus

This morning, I began getting reports that AVG antivirus on multiple machines on multiple networks began flagging FlashUtil10a.exe as the PSW.Generic6.AQPD Trojan Horse virus. I’m assuming this is a false positive, even though I would equate anything made by Adobe as a virus. I’ll update this post as soon as I learn more about this condition.

UPDATE

The Register now has a story about this being a confirmed false alarm. Update your definitions and the warnings should go away.

UPDATE

Today’s false-positive comes after AVG recently offered a free, one-year license to customers affected by another recent false-positive.
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Hard drives fail, protect your data with a Drobo

Image of a Western Digital 250Gb SATA Hard Dri...

Hard drive image via Wikipedia

Hard drives fail. I want a Drobo.

I guess I’m probably not going to get much Google play out of those two statements, so I’d better keep going.

Hard drives fail. As hard drives keep getting bigger at an absurd rate, they become more complex and more fragile. There are so many moving parts in conventional, platter-based drives that it’s a miracle they work at all.

Is this stance simple fear-mongering? I know I hear it mainly from Steve Gibson of GRC when he’s hawking his Spinrite product on Security Now!. While I don’t necessarily believe that Gibson’s Spinrite is all it’s cracked up to be, I will say with certainty that I’ve had hard drives fail causing me to lose data recently and the $90 purchase of Spinrite will be my first action to try to recover my data.

Having said that, what I would much rather do is have a policy in place that is tolerant of drive failures. RAID stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. Essentially, a RAID system lets you use multiple drives to either increase speed or increase reliability. I have a Netgear ReadyNAS configured so that any one of its four drives can fail and be replaced without having to turn off or lose access to the data on the drive. If two drives fail, then everything is lost, but the odds favor only one drive failing at a time. The problem with RAID is that each of the drives must be identical in size and speed, meaning that an array of 4 500GB drives must have each of its drives replaced in order to upgrade the storage capacity.

Drobo

Drobo from Data Robotics

Drobo is different. Drobo’s hardware design is as cool as something made by Apple and the software is as intuitive as something open source. Like RAID, the Drobo is an array of hard drives. Unlike RAID, those drives can be any size. It uses software, rather than hardware, to store the files on the drives in a redundant way so that at any time a drive can fail without data being lost. Where its functionality is superior to RAID’s is that, like the example above, if you have four 500GB drives you can replace one of them with a 1 TB or 1.5 TB drive and increase your available capacity without having to replace all the drives.

The original Drobo, which I have at work, sports a USB interface and software that lets it show up as an external drive on Windows, Linux or Mac as well as report its condition. For network access, the DroboShare is an additional device that connects to the Drobo and offers Gigabit ethernet port to put the Drobo directly on your network.

Data Robotics, the company behind the Drobo, recently released both a new version of the Drobo that supports FireWire 800 as well as Drobo Apps, which are community applications that allow you to turn your Drobo and DroboShare into an FTP server, iTunes media server, web server and more.

The Drobo does have some downsides. The original Drobo, priced at $349, has been discontinued. The new Drobo, priced at $499, doesn’t have enough features to justify the extra $150 for me. Security is also a problem. As far as I know, there is no way to encrypt the entire device as you can with a normal external hard drive. The Drobo uses a proprietary file system, so any one of the drives is useless when removed, but should someone take your Drobo and plug it in somewhere else, the contents would be accessible. I supposed you could create an encrypted partition with previously-mentioned TrueCrypt, but it would be nice if there were support for AES encryption directly in the Drobo software.

All in all, the Drobo is one of the coolest devices I’ve ever seen. The hardware and software design makes it something that you want to play with. I rarely get excited about messing with my RAID. It makes it easy to protect against losing data due to hard drive failure, it’s less expensive than a RAID of similar size and its incredibly easy and fun to use.

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7-zip hands down winner in compressed file management

7zip

7-zip open source compression utility

The concept of file compression is fairly simple. You take a file or group of files and you make it or them smaller and save them as a single, compressed file. The actual mechanisms can be complicated, but the simple way I always think of it is like an index. If you had a 1000 word document and replaced each occurrence of the word and with a *, you would reduce the size of the document. When you wanted to read it, you could uncompress it by replacing each * with and and you’ve got your original file back. Obviously this is the crudest example, but imagine taking a hundred-page book and compressing it to fit on a page or two without changing the font size and you begin to get the idea of how impressive modern file compression can be.

We use compressed files every day. Have you ever listened to an MP3 or downloaded an audio book? Have you ever taken a picture with a camera that saved its files in JPG format? The same song or picture that is 3.5 MB might be somewhere in the 30 to 50MB size range when uncompressed.

The ZIP file has been the standard in file compression for PCs for as long as I can remember. I used to use PKZip when I first began using compression on MS-DOS 5. I had a 200MB hard drive and much more media than would fit, so I would compress my games into smaller, single files for storage. When I wanted to play them, I would uncompress them into a temporary directory to run them.

While hard drives are bigger, so are files. The need may not exists to compress files for simple storage on our machines, but we sometimes have cause to save an entire directory as a single file. Perhaps we want to encrypt the contents of that directory before we email it. Microsoft Windows has had ZIP compression support since Windows XP, and that support has really made the use of ZIP files commonplace. There are other compressed formats, many superior to the ZIP, and it’s important that we be able to deal with these using free, secure, open source and spyware-free solutions.

Other examples of compressed file types are RAR, tar.gz, and BZIP. Many programs exist that will handle many different kinds of archives. WinZIP and WinRAR are probably the two most common, though I would argue that both are commercial, for-pay products and both are bloated. The one solution that I have found that is light-weight, completely open-source and free is 7-zip.

7-zip is small. 7-zip offers industry standard encryption across its archives. 7-zip offers seamless and transparent integration with the Windows UI, which means that all you have to do is right-click on an archive and select ‘extract here’ or ‘extract to…’ to put the contents of the compressed file wherever you want it.

7-zip offers its own compressed format which offers better compression that the standard ZIP file and I’ve been using it for quite some time. Because it’s open source, and it works on Windows, Linux and Macintosh, I don’t have to worry about having difficulties getting to my files.

I’m not the only one who likes 7-zip. 7-zip recently won an ask-the-readers competition for file compression utilities over at Lifehacker. 7-zip won two community choice awards at SourceForge in the categories of Best Project and Best Technical Design.

Do you use 7-zip? Have you found something else that works better in some aspect? Let us know in the comments.

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Hosted Exchange allows users to share Outlook without headache

Exchange-2010logo

Image via Wikipedia

Microsoft Outlookis the best corporate email and scheduling tool. That’s a tough statement to make as an open source advocate, but until the open source equivalent called Evolution matures, Outlook will remain the corporate standard for email, calendar and scheduling.

For personal and small-business email, Outlook sucks. It’s bloated, expensive and has a problem with IMAP. Mozilla’s Thunderbird is far superior, allowing for better IMAP support as well as nice integration with Gmail. For the personal user, a cocktail of Thunderbird and Google Calendar is recommended.

For the corporate user, however, Outlook can be a powerful tool when combined with Microsoft Exchange. Exchange allows multiple users to use Outlook to share calendars and schedules, as well as use the same pool of contacts. Exchange allows for the synchronization of those calendars, emails and contacts with mobile devices like Windows Mobile phones and the iPhone without the hassle of plugging your phone into a computer to sync with Outlook.

I’ve run a Microsoft Exchange server in the past. It comes with Windows Small Business Server and is fairly expensive. It’s a pain to configure, as it pretty much requires a separate server installation, as well as mapping a myriad of ports through the router. Dealing with security certificates, port mapping and user accounts through Windows Server is only slightly more entertaining than pouring lemon juice on a paper cut.

Enter hosted Exchange. My experience is with a company called AppRiver, though there are many providers. These providers charge a nominal monthly fee per user to provide access to a control panel that lets you configure everything through an easy web interface.

Your monthly fee of somewhere between $10 and $30 per month, depending on the provider, provides you with a license for Microsoft Outlook so you’re spared the abhorrent fate of actually purchasing Microsoft Office or Microsoft Outlook separately. After you download and install it, the hosted Exchange provider will configure it to access Exchange through HTTP, which means that wherever you are you can get your email and access your calendar and contacts.

There are alternatives. Evolution was mentioned earlier in this article and offers cross-platform integration with Exchange. Google Apps provides a complete solution for sharing emails and schedules as well as documents and spreadsheets. Google Apps works great if you don’t have any Windows Mobile devices in your company. For geeks with a time surplus, there’s always open-xchange which offers an open source clone of Microsoft Exchange, but you’re still left with the headache of certificates, port mapping and user configuration, not to mention the initial installation and configuration of open-xchange on a stand-alone computer. Zimbra offers a comparable solution to Exchange, but the price isn’t much different and Yahoo! recently purchased Zimbra, so who knows how long they will even exist. If Microsoft finally puts Yahoo! out of its misery with what is now surely a mercy bid, Zimbra’s chances of remaining on open source architecture are pretty slim.

I struggled for many years to try to get multiple installations of Outlook to work together, and I’m pretty resourceful with available add-ons and utilities. Only through Exchange can this functionality be truly achieved. Only through hosted Exchange can this achievement come without a headache or a large financial expenditure. If you don’t have Windows Mobile, Google Apps is a fantastic solution. If you need collaboration with multiple users of Outlook with Windows Mobile devices, Exchange is currently the unfortunate solution.

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