I had a nice “lie in” this morning and after a wonderful breakfast and a couple of cups of tea we went off to “Barton on Sea” to wander along the ocean with Archie, the Johnson’s terrier. When we got back Sue had prepared a Sunday roast, and when we had finished Craig showed up to drive us up to London.

It is amazing what a wrong turn or two will do to you in a city like London, but we managed to make it to Camden Lock and to find our hotel. This is David’s first trip to London, so after checking in we did a real quick site-seeing tour and we ended up at a Chinese restaurant near Leicester Square (it was just okay, but the company was nice). The picture is of me at Trafalgar Square with Lord Nelson in the background.

Then we went back to the hotel to prepare for tomorrow’s OpenNMS seminar. Should be fun.

This morning we spotted the very first blue grosbeaks ever to grace our feeder! The blue grosbeak is a stunning dark blue color. It looks similar to a cardinal - only blue. They seem to be a bit shy, too: flying away whenever anyone inside walked past the door. We’ve been birdwatching for years now. Hard to believe it took this long to see blue grosbeaks!

I’ve set up the camera in the hopes of capturing a photo or two. They are amazingly beautiful birds!

I had forgotten how unpleasant the flight to England could be. I swear that American has removed another inch of legroom in coach (although business class now has “lay flat” beds), or maybe it was because the seat next to me had a person in it (which is rare on this flight), but I was pretty uncomfortable. The fact that the video service was unavailable was a pain too.

But we managed.

We landed at Terminal 3 in Heathrow. I thought since the service was new that it would be Terminal 5, but I assume that BA has taken all of those gates and thus American was able to get one of their older ones. It literally took less than 10 minutes for David and I to get through customs and to get our bags (I guess that getting our bags is a plus about Terminal 3). Martin met us at the airport and drove us to his house in Lyndhurst.

Lyndhurst is in the “New Forest,” and since it was founded in 1066 by William the Conquerer, “new” is a relative term. It’s a delightful place, and a great way to get acclimated to England.

We wandered around the village for a bit, and visited the grave of Alice Liddell, the “Alice” of Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland“. We also stopped by one of the two automobile dealerships in town, this one specializing in Ferrari and Maserati. I haven’t decided which one I plan to buy when OpenNMS becomes a large company with hundreds of millions in revenue (grin). We also stopped by a tea shop called the “Pages of Lyndhurst” where I tasted “scrumpy” for the first time. It’s a carbonated cider-like beverage made from apples.

Then we had time for a light lunch and even though I’d been downing copious amounts of tea it was time for a nap.

That evening (after watching Doctor Who) we went down the road to Bank and The Oak. I really like this pub and the combination of great company, good food and nice beer made for a perfect evening. Along with Martin and his wife Susan, we were joined by their son Tom, Bob Potter and his fiancé Wendy, and Craig Gallen (OGP). Bob and Martin both work at Arqiva, which is a large communications company in the UK that we work with (and is how I met Martin in the first place).

Tom, Bob, Wendy, Me, David, Martin, Sue and Craig

We watched a little television when we got back - a show called “Have I Got News for You“. It was sort of a televised version of “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me“. The host, Bill Bailey, reminded me a lot of Chris Dibona. Then it was time for bed.

Separated at Birth? Bill Bailey and Chris Dibona
Images yoinked from the web

Do you know what Moore’s, Metcalfe’s,and Reed’s Law are and how they are related? Have your read Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation, Free Culture, The Long Tail, and Small is the New Big? Find out why in this excellent video of Paul Jones talk to TriLug last month. Do you know that iBiblio that hosts some of the world’s coolest archives and communities (Groklaw, free Roger McGuinn music, Project Gutenberg)

I am very bummed I didn’t make it home from Annapolis in time to see the talk.

Technorati Tags: Ibiblio, Paul Jones, Sunsite

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"Overuse of certain tools in Photoshop can result in your image having an unnatural appearance."

Indeed.

If you are developing a top secret device do you have to honor patents? What if you wanted to patent the top secret device? Is that even possible?

OpenQabal 0.0.3 has been released and is now available from the SVN repo. As with previous releases, there are not yet pre-built binary releases available... you will have to check the code out from SVN and build it. Thankfully this process is now *much* easier as a result of massive work on the build system and the addition of scripts to automate most of the tedious stuff. You can now essentially build and install OpenQabal with 4 commands.

Changes in this release include:

• New, more modular build system using Ivy for dependency management and incorporating useful tools such as FindBugs, JDepend, PMD, TestNG, Cobertura, etc.
• New "User Dashboard" component that provides the main point of entry and ties the various components together visually
• Concordantly with the introduction of the new User Dashboard, all of the old Sitemesh stuff has been ripped out
• New configure and install scripts to automate most of the tedious parts of building and installing OpenQabal
• Addition of many unit tests (we still don't have 100% test coverage, but progress has been made)
• New "IdentityEngine" component introduced (more on this later)
• Posting blogs using MetaWeblogAPI now works with the OpenQabal IdentityEngine component
• Various minor bug fixes and tweaks

This release is a huge step in the direction of having a really usable system, but there is still a LOT of work to be done. Some things that had originally been planned for this release had to be deferred to 0.0.4, with OpenID support being the most notable such item. And of course there are still plenty of ideas on the roadmap that we haven't even gotten started on yet. But we're now in a lot better position to be able to start on some of the more interesting stuff, such as the "distributed conversation" support, tools for building a managing the "social graph," etc.

Look for a new post soon with more discussion of what the roadmap will look in the near future, as well as some discussion of some of the important changes that did make it into 0.0.3. And with any luck, the long-awaited "demo server" will be coming soon, as well as some screencasts and other ways of exploring OpenQabal.

Exactly who hired the B players then?

“A players hire A players,” he said. “B players hire C players. Do you get it?”

[From Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: How to Hire Insanely Great Employees]

Ursula at Jordan Lake, NC
Sent from my Blackberry

Thanks to Geek and Poke for a great cartoon.

Technorati Tags: Cluetrain, Enteprise 2.0, Insincerity

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It’s been a busy yet fun week in OpenNMS-land. We got 1.5.91 out the door, one of our old clients is doing really well with their on-line business, and we signed up a record number of new ones.

So now David and I are off to Europe for two weeks. Ah, the jet-setting life of an open source maintainer: first class all the way.

Not. (grin)

There are two ways to increase the money you make in a business: sell more or spend less. We’ve always taken the “spend less” bit to heart, so when we decided to attend the TM Forum’s conference in Nice, France, we decided to maximize the value of the plane ticket to Europe by adding on a week of seminars. Travel within Europe is pretty inexpensive, even in US dollars, so it was just an incremental cost to do this.

It will be a lot of coach-class air travel and sharing hotel rooms (apparently in Europe if two men share a hotel room it means they are gay - we’re not gay [not that there's anything wrong with that], just cheap).

The “first class” part will be seeing many old friends and making new ones. It was only through the OpenNMS community that we were able to get this thing together in first place, and it is due to their kind nature that we’ll be able to have a really fun trip.

The first stop will be Lyndhurst, Hampshire, England. My friend Martin is picking us up at Heathrow and driving us down (train service from LHR sucks - I wish American still flew into Gatwick). The weather looks grand, and we’re getting a bunch of people together at my favorite pub in the whole country.

My plan is to keep the blog updated as much as possible, but time and Internet availability may limit that to some degree. If you’re coming to one of our seminars, hope to see you then.

Honestly I haven’t read enough of the WSJ’s editorial page to pass judgment, but this article definitely doesn’t fit the picture that had been painted for me by others. It’s a happy dissonance for me, though I do have to say that the headline is really misleading. The casual observer will not take away the same message that someone reading the entire article will.

Oh well… I left this as a draft long enough that TPM already beat me to it.

The view outside work
Sent from my Blackberry

I bought a five-pound bag of Jolly Ranchers at BJs a few months ago. They mostly languished untouched in the pantry until one day Kelly packed them in my bag and I hauled them off to work. They’re now a big hit with the office, though even five people aren’t enough to put a dent in a five-pound bag of candy.

I remember walking over to Charlotte’s “The Little Store” on Park Road with my brothers and becoming transfixed by their open bins of Jolly Ranchers. We would stop there many afternoons to get the candy and joke with the guy behind the counter. Good times.

So, Gentle Reader, do you know where the Jolly Rancher gets its name? Bet you didn’t know they’re made in Canada now, eh?

There’s something quite soothing after a storm. Its not simply that its no longer raining, or that its just like it was before the storm. A storm reorders things somehow. It fixes something we may not have even noticed was broken.

I went to the prosthodontist yesterday and received the skinny on the mouthpiece. The mouthpiece is made from a mold of the patient’s mouth, then sent to a technician who builds it to fit. The appliance looks exactly like the picture on the Wikipedia page, with two little piston-looking things holding the jaw slightly forward. The dentist says it extends the jaw to 2/3rds its maximum.

She also examined my mouth and declared that I was growing new bone! She asked if I grinded or clenched my teeth and when I reported that, yes, I’d noticed myself doing that, she said that that can stimulate new bone growth in the jaw.

“If ever you need new bone for anything,” she joked, “you’ve got it right there!”

Part of her exam included poking my jaw muscles behind my molars. For someone who clenches his mouth, these muscles will be painfully sore. Fortunately for me my muscles were fine, as were my teeth.

Everything looked great until she mentioned the price of the appliance, at which point I definitely needed something to keep my jaw from dropping: $1,125! That’s a lot of money for something so easily crushable, especially since the dentist doesn’t do the insurance filing. While I might get my insurance to cover part of the cost, I wonder if it would pay for all of it. Should I not like it or it doesn’t fix the problem, I don’t want to buy a $1100 paperweight. On the other hand, what’s the cost of constantly not sleeping well?

I left with the documents and codes needed to follow up with insurance and headed back to work. Once I got home, I was pleased to see my $30 mouthpiece had arrived in the mail. After about 30 minutes of fitting, I could get it ready to tackle the problem. If it works, I may decide to upgrade to the Cadillac model. Right now I’m not ready to bite that off, so to speak.

Today I am attending Blog Carolinas a social media conference being held in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park (that’s halfway between Raleigh and Durham). I am particularly interesting on hearing Andy Beal’s session on Online Reputation Management. Andy recently launched Trackur, an online reputation monitoring service (which I am interested in using for Zenoss).

Here’s what I expect to get out of today’s conference (paraphrased from their website)

• How Social Media is impacting Marketing and Communications Strategies
• How Community can serve as a model to improving organizational productivity
• Network with experts in the fields of On Line Reputation, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0 Technology and On Line Community Building

Not sure what the program will be like but just the fact I get this kind of content five minutes from my house seems very cool to me.

Technorati Tags: Andy Beal, BlogCarolinas, online communities, RTP, Social Media, trackur

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It turns out that some changes to the Linux kernel — Ubuntu 8.04 uses Linux 2.6.24 — have introduced some issues that make running Ubuntu in a VMWare virtual machine difficult. Ubuntu will install just fine, but you won’t have access to VMWare Tools, which provides some nice features like shared folders and clipboard syncing.

[From Ubuntu 8.04 Causes Problems With VMWare Tools, Open Source to the Rescue | Compiler from Wired.com]

It isn’t just VMWare. Mac Parallels has likewise bitten me and many others judging by the considerable forum angst. My peeps have been telling me to cutover to Fusion. I’d say if VMWare fixes their tools issues before Parallels, I’ll consider it.

Always know when to use The Flash.

I host this blog, as well as e-mail for dragonstrider.com and a host of other services on an old PC behind my cable modem at home. This has served me well for the most part, but it requires onsite maintenance when it goes down. This is bad when I'm at work, or vacation, as happened this week. So, I bit the bullet and researched some Virtual Priate Server (VPS) hosting providers.

I ended up choosing Slice Host as a no-frills, just the tech if you please, Linux/Xen-based VPS host. Their entry level plan (slice) gives you 256 MB RAM, 10GB storage, and 100GB of bandwidth for $20/month, and you can scale it with a reboot up to 4GB/160GB/1600GB for $280. /proc/cpuinfo shows that the host for my entry level slice is a two way "Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2212" operating at 2.0 GHz. There's a separate swap partition (so swap doesn't count against the 10GB limit), as well as web based management tools for rudimentary Name Services, starting, stopping and rebuilding your slice, a web console (in case ssh isn't working for some reason), some statistics and reporting, and my favorite part, a rescue mode.

Rescue mode lets you boot your slice in a rescue environment, mount your root file system in an alternate location, and do what you want (or need) with it. This makes it pretty easy to run your appliance from rBuilder Online on a hosted slice. Here are the steps to get this working. Choose a Xen Appliance Image (32 or 64 bit, though 64 bit is preferred) that is a single file system image.

• Create a slice (doesn't matter what kind, we're going to blow it away anyway).


• Reboot your slice into rescue mode


• SSH or console in using the password mailed to you (yes, rescue mode gets started with a randomized password)


• wget -O - <link to the rBO image> | tar -xz # This downloads and extracts the filesystem image


• dd if=<path to filesystem image file> of=/dev/sda1


• e2fs.ext3 -f /dev/sda1 # This forces a file system check, without this check the next step will fail.


• resize2fs /dev/sda1 # Resize the file system image to match the available size


• mount /dev/sda1 /mnt


• copy the following networking configuration files from your rescue image to your new slice image mounted in /mnt
  
  
  
  • /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 /etc/resolv.conf


• Edit /etc/sysconfig/network to fix the hostname to the desired value


• chroot /mnt


• passwd # changes the root password since the rBO images ship with root's password blanked

At this point you can do any additional configuration you wish, such as adding additional users, making sure that openssh-server is installed and configured to start on boot, etc.

When that's done, shutdown, exit rescue mode from the Slice Host panel, and log in to your new appliance.

There is quite a bit of noise when the slice boots up with an rPath Linux based appliance because the kernel in the image isn't used for booting, and modules.dep isn't located for the booting kernel, but that seems harmless.

Now to build an appliance to run on the thing... I used the rPL 2 beta 3 text devel image as my image while developing this HOWTO.

I’m intrigued by the number of casual conversations lately that have touched on the theme of embracing constraints as a gateway to creative solutions. Are artists as constraint infected as their tech world brethren? There seems to be an awareness that unrestricted composition is a daunting task and that introducing constraints can get you to the downbeat.

Instead, someone says, “Write me a piece of music using only a flute, saw, and this broken toy piano. You can only use the notes D, E, and B - but never all 3 at the same time. It has to be in 3/4 time, start quiet, get loud, then get quiet by the end. Go!”

Aha! Now you’re cookin’!

[From Restrictions will set you free | Derek Sivers]

Recently, I’m hearing folks talk about their timed dashes. Duff says Nokahuna was a 48 hour burst effort and Nathaniel is crafting his weekly schedule to create artificial calendar constraints.

There, I did it. A blog post constrained to three paragraphs, a quote plus six links that associate 37signals with a broken toy piano. How’s that for a creative solution?

I remember when the big open source debate was whether a piece of software was really open source, meaning it was released under an OSI-approved license. The tides are shifting, debates now center around which open source license to use. Adding to the complexity of the debate is proliferation of OSI-approved licenses. Now discussions are rising over the open source licenses that are in the best interest of all stakeholders of an open source project. In the case of collective software works there is also the added intricacies of license compatibility.

Part of the problem is that companies are trying to drive their own vanity licenses that reinforce their branding and leverage the goodwill associated with the open source seal of approval. SugarCRM once mounted an offensive asking for acceptance of their Sugar Public License (a derivative of the OSI-Approved Mozilla Public License) that for a brief time was gaining popularity among commercial open source developers. The license was rejected and Sugar has since moved to the GPLv3. Ironically the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) submitted by Social Text, which bears many similarities to the Sugar Public License, was accepted by the OSI. Even Microsoft has successfully lobbied the OSI-board for approval of two licenses. The Microsoft Public License (M-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) which are very similar to the BSD and GPL licenses.

The number of open source projects has grown considerably over the last ten years, actually exponentially according to a paper delivered by Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle in March of this year.

According to Black Duck Software knowledgebase the most common open source license used by open source projects is the GPL version 2.0. According to that same source 94% of open source projects use 10 licenses.

License	% usage
GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0	58.69%
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1	11.39%
Artistic License (Perl)	7.46%
BSD License	6.50%
Apache License 2.0	2.92%
MIT License	2.58%
GNU General Public Liense (GPL) 3.0	1.64%
Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1	1.37%
Common Public License	0.83%
zlib/lippng License	0.64%
	93.92%

Currently the decision to move from GPL v2 to GPL v3 is being hotly debated by many open source projects. According to Palamida, a provider of IP compliance software, there have been roughly 2489 open source projects that have moved from GPL v2 to later versions.

(source Palamida)

Apparently there are many people thinking about using the AGPL because unlike the GPL it also extends its requirement from software redistribution to networked services like those provided by ASPs (see Section 13 of the license - Remote Network Interaction):

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.

SpringSource is causing a bit of a ruckus within the Java community releasing their SpringSource Application Platform under the GPL v3 license (Commentary by JBoss founder Mark Fleury).

Ubuntu is considering the use of the AGPL for their Launchpad service but the jury is still out.

In the case of Launchpad, we do view you as a co-owner of the data, so the resolution of this problem is important to us. As you point out, there’s no really clear best practice that works well and has been shownto be commercially sustainable. That’s different to the GPL (even v3). I think the Affero GPL is a strong candidate for the front line of thinking on the subject, and that’s what I am inclined to use when we publish Launchpad’s source code.

Google has refused to allow AGPL licensed on Google code, citing license proliferation as the issue.

In fact we do not support the AGPL on code.google.com. We are actively trying to fight the proliferation of licenses that are considered open source and the AGPL both has very little market share and has not been certified as being open source by the OSI.

However, AGPL provisions for hosting services doesn’t exactly jive with their business either. For example, any modifications Google makes to AGPL code would require them to provide source code when delivered as a service.

Software licensing is complex open source or not. I suspect that most users are not well versed in the license for the software they download. I find it somewhat disheartening that while I feel strongly that open source development is superior the licensing of open source software for the most part is no easier to understand or apply.

Technorati Tags: AGPL, BlackDuck, CPAL, gpl, Launchpad, Licensing, Open Source, Palamida, SocialText, SpringSource, SugarCRM, Ubuntu

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Like many people, I work for an under-staffed segment of a remarkably under-staffed company.

Before transitioning to professional services, I worked for support, and they are even more under-staffed.

I see a simple solution to this problem, but the company is too short-sighted to implement anything like this, sadly.

Problem: We need new people. Desperately. Especially in support, though we will need more in professional services, too.

[My] Solution: Establish an on-going co-op/intern program to bring new ideas, young people, and energetic minds to bear on the issue of handling customer service.

How can this be done? I think it’s a combination of trust and energy on the part of the management of the company: they need to be willing to trust people without “experience” to learn how to do the job, and that means they need to expend energy on agressive recruiting of new talent.

I think the best way to start this is to go to local colleges and trade schools (including tech and community colleges) and look for people who actually want to work. There are certainly a lot of students who don’t want to work. And there are certainly a lot of students who won’t want to do what you need them to.

But I will maintain that there is a notable subset of students (even if they are not in “related” majors) who are both willing and able to handle the high-stress, interupt-driven environment of technical support. And those are the folks you (we) need to find and recruit to handle your (our) technical support backlog.

One way to do this would be to hire them on as full-time, but hourly workers, and pay for up to 9 or 10 credits per semester at the school they are attending. This will give them an incentive to continue their education (after all, their employer is paying for it), and to want to stick around with the company when they’re done with school. Pay them, say, $20k per year, but cap their weekly hours at 40. Make sure they go home when the day is done so they don’t burn out. With the company paying for their school, it might take an extra year for them to graduate, but when they do, they’ll have both experience, and - probably - a desire to continue working for the company that helped them through.

The big selling point on this, though, needs to be that you only recruit outstanding sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Too many freshmen don’t know what they want to do, nor do they tend to have the drive - yet - to get to where they want to be.The other component needs to be to at least annually, if not semi-annually, issue 5-10% raises for those folks who are performing well - as a further incentive for them to want to continue.

The big advantage for the company is that when those students graduate, they’re very well trained of the company’s product(s) and procedures. This makes bringing them onboard as “real” technical support personnel much easier as their need not be a long orientation and familiarization period.

Unfortunately for where I work, though, the company is too focused on this quarter to worry about how they can improve the next decade.

Matt Asay spun up a cool video just like Soylent Green, open source software is people.

Technorati Tags: Matt Asay, Open Source, People

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It must be math day. My buddy Greg shows us a pie chart we all can understand, while my friend Chris points to some word problems for future hedge-fund managers.

Might as well throw in this pie chart Jeff found that shows what Rick Astley will never do (and no, there’s no Rick Roll here).

Christina Medlin, ex-girlfriend of Wake County’s deputy county manager Joe Durham, was recently busted for allegedly checking Durham’s work email for signs of an affair. Wake County announced today that steps have been taken to prevent such security breaches in the future.

The irony of the whole situation is that Medlin could’ve legally obtained every email sent to or from Durham’s account through the state’s open records laws. The N&O and other news outlets routinely pick up on trends and tips by mining these and other important public records. Can one really be prosecuted for obtaining something one could legally obtain anyway?

Bonus link: The N&O’s public editor Ted Vaden printed my quote on the matter:

“I would think our justice system has far bigger fish to fry. Let’s take a deep breath, give Ms. Medlin some community service, and move on.”

It seems like every day I find out about a new company or new organization that is using OpenNMS, and whether they purchase services for it or not I am just happy that people find it useful.

A lot of the advocacy for the project comes from the community itself, and that is one reason why we strive to keep the project side of OpenNMS separate from the commercial side. To me a user is a user, someone finding benefit from our work, whether or not they actually pay any money. The power of free and open source software is only realized when the software is truly free and open.

It is probably that attitude that also keeps us from sending out a press release every time we get a new commercial client. I am humbled by the pedigree of our client list, and I just feel a little uncomfortable advertising it. This doesn’t mean we won’t - I thought it was pretty cool when IdleAire chose OpenNMS mainly because I really like their product - but on the whole we prefer to be discreet.

This morning I was reading the news and I came across an article on CNN about Papa Johns Pizza. They just reached a milestone of US$1 billion in online sales. They were the first major chain to set up online ordering and it has really paid off.

And they use OpenNMS to insure it works.

Papa Johns has been an OpenNMS client for over three years. I really like those guys, and I’ve even been out to Louisville once. I can’t talk too much about their network (NDA) but they’ve really thought out this whole online ordering process and they can even deal with remote areas without broadband. Plus, I like their product, and I assume they like OpenNMS since they have been using it for so long.

Now if we can just get oven temperature into OpenNMS we’ll be set (grin).

While I was very much aware of how important online ordering was to their business, the “one billion” number was still a bit shocking to me. But even more shocking was the thought that we are indirectly responsible for protecting that service. It kind of brings home the fact that network management is just not some nice add-on but is integral to the bottom line.

OpenNMS often doesn’t get the respect I think it deserves, but the fact is that the project has been around for over 8 years and has reached a certain level of maturity and robustness. Enterprises trust it, and they trust our company to support it. Since commercial support is available, it can be (and has been) deployed in mission critical situations.

So congratulations to PJI for hitting this milestone. I hope that OpenNMS will insure they reach two billion quickly. Now if they would only open a Papa Johns in Pittsboro I could help with that.

[UPDATE: Similar story on Yahoo.]

Math I can understand.

Tomorrow I visit a local prostodontist for an initial consultation to discuss how a mandibular advancement device (a fancy name for a mouthpiece) might help with my mild sleep apnea. This custom-made mouthpiece is designed to prevent my jaw from sliding back at night, blocking my airway. Its a good, inexpensive first approach to correcting my apnea.

Actually, the cheapest and easiest approach is to try a sports-type mouthpiece. I ordered one of those the other day for 25 bucks. We’ll see if that is enough for a restful night.

Amen.

Marc Andreesen, founder of the company that I worked for before it was bought last year, has recently commented on some of the benefits of a dual-class stock structure: http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/05/in-praise-of-du.html

After reading this, and another of this recent posts on the MS-Yahoo proposed merger (see here) - I wonder why he (as a major stakeholder) would’ve been interested in the acquisition of his “baby” last year.

Mo, you are awesome.

The next task: putting together DEAD SIMPLE instructions for manufacturing these stickers. Like:

1. Go down to the local office store and buy Avery white sticker paper.

2. Put that sticker paper into your inkjet printer.

3. Fire up (program of choice). (Is it just "print from Inkscape"? How about "print from Evince"? Which is better?)

4. Print!

5. Cut out stickers, and cover your laptop with your very own Fedora witticisms!

I love it. Love it, love it, love it.

Oh, and one more thing: you should really put the URL for the sticker page itself on the very bottom of the sticker page, in small print.

Oh, and another thing: a similar set of sticker pages with all of the hackergotchis of Fedora peeps would be *unbelievably awesome*. I want to be able to print off the head of our fearless leader and put filthy, filthy words in his mouth.

Fairly inspiring, here's Obama's speech in Raleigh last night (planet trilug readers, click the link to see)

It was an exciting evening last night as the results came in from yesterday’s primary election. As I predicted, Barack Obama rolled in North Carolina, 56% to Hillary Clinton’s 42%. Perdue won her race against Richard Moore as Democratic gubernatorial candidate, 56% to 40%. I was not happy with either campaign, but wound up not liking Moore more than Perdue. So I’m glad she won.

Janet Cowell easily won her State Treasurer’s contest, beating David Young and Michael Weisel, 47% to Young’s 36% and Weisel’s 17%. I spent time at her campaign party at Mitch’s last night, visiting with my good friends from the campaigns I worked with and congratulating Janet on her victory. Good people, and Mitch’s has Redhook Long Hammer IPAs on tap. Mmmmm.

I left work around 5:15 yesterday to meet my neighbor, who had volunteered to help move our sofa. By doing so I missed my chance to meet Barack Obama, who stopped by the Raleigh Times bar outside my office fifteen minutes later to mingle with the crowd. I had my camera in my bag, too, so I could’ve gotten a picture. Oh well.

When I returned home last night, I briefly chatted with my neighbor. His wife had apparently met Obama at her office earlier in the week. She was in some of his pictures from the event … only she had been Photoshopped out because she was blocking an Obama sign! Hillary gained at least one vote thanks to that little stunt!

Apparently someone at Sun agreed with my sentiments about moving to a more closed-source model for MySQL.

While my original comments are self serving, apparently Sun believes that it will make better business sense in the long term to keep these components open-source. Hopefully this is a vote of confidence for the quality of product the open-source model has helped MySQL create.

I waited 2 weeks to see if I really wanted to do this post. In a discussion list that is not public but should be X decided to insult me rather than the position I was advocating.

X's insults:

• My opinions are "BS, heaping steaming" BS
• I'm a "moron" or at least my congressman thinks so
• I do not know or understand anything about the organization and require "teaching" and to "empty my cup"
• I need to "buy a clue"
• My perceptions exist in an "alternate universe"
• I'm "uniformed"
• I'm "clueless"
• I'm "ignorant"
• I'm "lying" a/o a liar

From me:

• Your position speaks of arrogance ("arrogant")*
• You're "REALLY arrogant"
• Discussion with you is pointless so long as you begin every message with an insult

* the first one wasn't really aimed at him but the position that a self elected board speaks for the community because of "who" they "are". I regard that position as arrogant-sounding and elitest, but had not addressed X in the conversation at this point (don't take "elitest" in context of the election reporting).

To the final set of insults I replied "you win". X thinks (or chose to think) that "you win" means that I now agree with him. Actually, I recognized that X "scores points" rather than have a discussion. This is a disfunctional communication pattern that I used to fall into myself because I find email discussions prone to frustration. One day I woke up from this misbehavior because I realized how silly it was to attack the person I was trying to convince and that no one kept score anyhow. So I decided to keep score and at 9-2 (or 3 depending), X WINS! Congrats X! You won my disrepect. Previously, you had the opposite.

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay along with well-known Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that Microsoft doesn’t need open source. Asay contends that Microsoft’s open source activity has more to do with regulators than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft’s open-source charade is not about customers. It’s about regulators. Until Microsoft can convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind expressions of openness.

Hence, Microsoft “opens” up its protocols (i.e., lets everyone read but not touch…without forking over cash). It inks “open” interoperability agreements with Novell and others, which actually do nothing more than bind otherwise open-source success to Microsoft’s proprietary technology. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith acknowledges the shift, or lack thereof:

“It is (a change in philosophy) in some significant ways and yet it has also other aspects that are a continuation and we’re probably thinking a little bit about both pieces,” Smith said, explaining Microsoft’s twin thrusts of promoting intellectual property rights by encouraging interoperability among various software platforms.Business as usual. Just under the openness guise.

I suspect that’s a reasonable assumption. Though the folks working in open source software from Microsoft like Sam Ramji seem pretty sincere. With Bill Gates retiring and Microsoft’s initiatives on open source wouldn’t it be a sardonic turn of events for open source spread like a virus inside the walls of Redmond (especially since that’s how detractors likes to describe open source software).

There are a number of ventures run by ex-Microsofties who are seeing success. Maybe the the question real question is, “How far does the apple fall from the tree?”

Redmond Refugees Driving Open Source

Last week Black Duck Software run by a former Microsoft employee, Doug Levin, acquired Koders an open source repository and search engine. Likewise Software, the maker of an open source unified authentication product was started by some ex-Microsoft employees. Starting as a proprietary software maker they eventually moved to a open source development model and have gotten involved with the popular open source Samba project. Finally, MindTouch an open source wiki developer is run by ex-Microsoft employees and has seen great success with their open source project. All the companies mentioned above are run by ex-Micrsoft employees and all seem to be having decent success in open source.

Deki Wiki and Application Collaboration

One of my favorite open source projects is Deki Wiki by MindTouch. The product solves many of the same problems as Microsoft Sharepoint. More so than Sharepoint, DekiWiki extends its collaboration beyond people to the application layer. Rather than striving to be an all-in-one solution Deki Wiki boasts a robust web services API that allows for integration between other applications. Already Deki Wiki supports authentication via LDAP and Active Directory as well as authentication systems from popular open source content management systems like Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla!.

Today was the release of MIndTouch’s v8.05 (codenamed Jay Cooke) which was largely driven by requirements from the Mozilla Foundation (who will be relaunching their developer community using Deki Wiki). I like to see open source projects use open source software when they get the chance. Sometimes I think we do that because of solidarity among free software developers. However, in the case of Deki Wiki I think that it’s safe to say that Deki Wiki is not only open source, but also best of breed. I have raved about Deki Wiki before but this release has some very cool new features. Through web services you can enable real time chat, embed Google spreadsheets, query databases, and include interactive maps from Google and Windows Live.

One feature that really caught my eye was the new polygot feature that give you the ability to provide language support at the page and user level. I suspect this feature is especially useful to companies who want to easily provide content in a number of different languages. It’s also a very nice platform for collaborative content localization.

Another variation on the theme of application interactivity, Deki Wiki v8.05 now supports, OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a collection of simple open formats for sharing search results originally developed by Amazon and A9. Beyond these features MindTouch’s newest version includes an improved file uploader and content transforms to allow users to specify selections of text for syntax highlighting, SVG, LaTex and graphs. All and all a big step forward.

Summary

The jury is out on how significant Microsoft’s open source ambitions will affect their future plans. Many people are skeptical for the obvious reasons. In the meantime I think their is a lot of cool technology being created by these Redmond Refugees.

Technorati Tags: Black Duck Softwware, Deki Wiki, Koders, Microsoft, MindTouch, Open Search, Open Source, sharepoint

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work
ugh.

It looks like the MythTV front-end can be run on a Nokia 810 tablet. While it’s still and alpha-level port it’s still very cool.

You can also use a Nokia tablet as a remote using Mythtomer. At $400 bucks that’s a little salty for a universal remote but still it’s wicked cool.

(via Packrat Studios)

Technorati Tags: Front-End, MythTV, Nokia, Remote, Tablet

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Have you ever tried to embed a video in Wordpress and have the embed code get mangled or not render at all. That’s been a problem for me lately. That’s until I found VideoEmbedder Plugin for Wordpress. Video Embedder allows you to specify the video id enclosed by the tags for the video and you can embed a video in a web page.

You can see the list of video types in the Video Embedder Settings. Over 20 Types including the most popular like YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, BlipTV, Viddler, etc.

Technorati Tags: Embed, video, WordPress

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