Having taken this course once before I’m quite familiar with blogging. I actually continued blogging the rest of the year. I started a Toronto Raptors and America’s Best Dance Crew blog which is now down and out-for-the-count. IRC, on the other hand, was a technology that I never really got the hang of.

It’s now week three and I’m finally posting up my first blog post for this course. Having been away on vacation during week one (my birthday week), it took a little bit of time to get back into the swing of things. I figure better late than never…

Our first task in our course was to comment on our readings:

Reading #1 was “Cathedral and the Bazaar” this was the same reading we read last time I took this course and I remembered this reading fairly well. It basically compared two programing “styles” (if you’ll allow me to use that term) by using the structure and traditions of a cathedral and the productive-chaos of a bazaar. This was an almost perfect metaphor in comparing closed and open source programming. We’ve spent 3 years (4 for me) learning the structure that’s in closed source programming and with one (two if you take the second open source professional option) we are introduced to the mystery that is open source programming. This is much like how it took many years for the Catholic religion to build their structure and tradition and with in months, weeks or even hours a bazaar (or I suppose a flea market) can be set up and run successfully with its own structure and “tradition”.

Reading #2 was “For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Get Tricky”. This was basically about the “browser wars” of this age. It mentions that it will not be the same as the browser war between IE and Netscape but Google’s Chrome is pushing things to the next level. Before reading this article I didn’t know how connected Google was with Mozilla. I never actually thought of Chrome or how it would affect other Firefox uses or Mozilla as a corporation for that matter but I guess this move matters a lot. Google and Mozilla has quite an interesting relationship. Google now becomes Mozilla’s friend that it loves to hate. It will be quite interesting to see what happens with Chrome and Firefox in the near future.