Chris Moates’ adventures in the land of Mox

I will admit, I almost didn’t go, due to a combination of things, only a small part of which was my lack of interest in the topics this month. Even when I don’t think I’ll get anything out of a topic, I still try to show up in order to support the speakers and the LUG.

The first topic was about LimeSurvey, which is an OSS survey product designed to compete with surveymonkey.com and the like. It actually looks like a pretty decent survey tool, but is severely lacking in the admin UI as well as built in reporting. That’s a real shame, because not everyone wants to export their data to SPSS or Excel just to see how popular feature X vs feature Y is. Seems like there could be some improvement there. But, that’s probably true of nearly any OSS application; it’s always a work in progress. Once it hits “good enough” it stalls; that’s a topic for a different post.

The second topic was split between Magento, which seems to be a reasonably nice looking piece of software for a shopping cart. Bob seemed to like it, which is great, since he runs an online store and needs something that works for him. But their source control and QA is awful, and even he admitted having issues with it. It seems like it’s an osCommerce just waiting to happen. So I’m kind of confused as to why Bob selected it, considering that his primary reason for leaving osCommerce was that it was horribly unmaintainable. Lack of QA and lack of documentation of code changes just seems destined for that same endgame.

The latter half of Bob’s talk centered around VirtualBox, which is apparently a competitor to VMware Desktop, as best as I can tell. And like VMware, it has a lot of the same problems and limitations; it requires all this machinery to build custom kernel modules for your system, and it uses a proprietary disk format. It also apparently comes in a reasonably crippled “free open source” version and a full features “free closed source” version. Everyone at the meeting who had used VirtualBox said they had converted to the closed source version after having problems with the OSS version. That’s really sad, not atypical of Sun, and the fact that people are falling for it really saddens me. KVM is a powerful, wonderful solution, for modern hardware. Xen is a bit tired now, I understand. But really, if you’re dying to do VM stuff, and you don’t yet have a Core 2 Duo (at least) does it make a lot of sense to be running VM’s? Maybe it does to someone, but that someone is certainly not me.

Both talks were well thought out, for the most part, and while there were small glitches, it was good to see a new speaker as well as two people who genuinely cared about the quality of their presentation.

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Fluff by cmoates