Category Archive for ‘open source’ at Ted Leung on the Air

Archive for the 'open source' Category

CommunityOne

Published on May 7, 2008 in Sun and open source. 2 Comments

Live or semi liveblogging conferences has been getting more and more difficult for me to do. The combination of meetings, networking/parties, and photographs means that it takes longer to assemble the requisite material. Here’s a bit on CommunityOne, which took place on Monday.

Many people (mostly Sun folks) have been asking me if this is my first JavaOne. My answer is, “it’s not, but it is my first one in ten years”. It’s been quite some time since I’ve been to a conference run by a big company like Sun (as opposed to an O’Reilly or open-source community conference). Even though the basics are the same, I definitely feel a kind of culture shock. I was asked to be on a panel during the general session, first thing in the morning, in order to get miked up and to run though the flow. Production values are much higher than I am used to. I keep thinking of CommunityOne as a small event, but in reality it is huge. I am told that registration was around 5000 people, which is twice the size of OSCON, which is the largest conference that I’ve been to in the last 4 or 5 years. Some pictures might help with the scale and production values:

The panel was on community models, although the content was closer to the edge where companies and open source communities meet/collaborate/fight. I think that I had two or three chances to speak, including the final set of remarks before the close of the panel. I have some more thoughts on that topic, but they are deserving of their own post, so that will be showing up after JavaOne is over.

Probably my favorite thing that happened at CommunityOne was the demonstration of ZFS’s reliability in the face of hardware failures. Sun Fellow Jim Hughes has demonstrated this a few times at Sun Tech days, and I’ve been meaning to write about that. I got to meet Jim before the keynote, and I had a very good seat to observe the hardware failure.

Jim usually destroys 2 of the drives in the ZFS pool, and it looked like Rich Green (EVP of Software) was going to get to smash the other one, until Jeff Bonwick, the inventor of ZFS, showed up to do the honors himself.

Smashing things makes for cool demos - you can watch the video replay if you like.. I’ve been paying more attention to ZFS ever since Theo Schlossnagle sat with me and a few other people in a bar at ApacheCon in Atlanta last year. We were talking about the voracious storage needs of photographers, and Theo was really singing the praises of ZFS. There were so important things that happened to ZFS for OpenSolaris 00805 (which was launched at CommunityOne). The most important is that you can now boot off of a ZFS volume. I hope (but don’t know for sure) that the work that made this possible will make it possible for Macs to boot off of a ZFS volume. My photo storage is getting all fragmented, and I could really put ZFS to good use. I suppose that I could build a ZFS storage appliance based on OpenStorage, but at the moment that is more work that I want to do.

I spent much of the rest of CommunityOne at the Redmonk unconference. I was drafted for an impromptu discussion on dynamic and other programming languages, which included a drop in from David Pollak, developer of the very cool lift framework for Scala, and organizer of the Scala liftoff which is happening on Saturday, right after JavaOne. There was also a very active session on Twitter - probably the biggest of the unconference. Jim ~~Evans~~ Edwards from Twitter came along to participate in that one

I have a bunch more photos from CommunityOne. At the rate that things are going, I will probably just do a single post on JavaOne. There are plenty of other people doing liveblogging, for those who need a bigger information flow.

Update: corrected Jim Edwards’ name. Thanks to @monkchips

Speaking at OSCON 2008

Published on April 24, 2008 in community and open source. 0 Comments

This year at OSCON, I’ll be giving a talk called Open Source Community Antipatterns, which is all about the many ways to mess up an open source community.

Python at CommunityOne

Published on April 21, 2008 in Sun, community, open source, programming and programming languages. 1 Comment

CommunityOne is a free and open developer conference that is run by Sun on the day before JavaOne. This year, there will a space at CommunityOne dedicated to the Python community, complete with whiteboards and wifi. If you are in the Bay Area for JavaOne, or in the Bay Area, or just plain interested in Python, please register for CommunityOne — space is limited.

Registering for CommunityOne gets you a bag of swag, a free lunch the day of CommunityOne, access to all the CommunityOne events and sessions, and a free pass for Day 1 of JavaOne. When you register, put “Python/Jython” in for the referral code.

I will be on a panel on community models during the general session from 9:30AM - 10:45AM, and Frank Wierzbicki and I will be doing a Python/Jython panel. In addition to the usual developer stuff, there will also be a two day Startup Camp, and the folks from RedMonk will be back to do their day long unconference thing.

PyCon: Open Space with Sun folks

Published on March 14, 2008 in open source and python. 2 Comments

For those of you at PyCon, Frank Wierzbicki and I will be hosting an open space session on Saturday (tomorrow) at 2pm for people to come and tell us what they think Sun should do in the Python space. We are definitely interested in input and feedback from the larger Python community. If you aren’t at PyCon but have ideas, you can drop either of us e-mail. Our Sun e-mail addresses are <firstname>.<lastname>@sun.com.

Stefano is looking for a job

Published on March 12, 2008 in apache and open source. 1 Comment

My good friend Stefano Mazzocchi is looking for a job. If you are looking for a good person for your organization, you should definitely take a look before he’s taken.

Google Contacts and CardDAV

Published on March 6, 2008 in internet and osaf. 1 Comment

Earlier this week Mark Nottingham wrote about CardDAV and DAV based protocols:

All of this led me to mutter ‘DAV WTF?’ at the IETF APPS Architecture Workshop the other week. Do we really need to give folks the opportunity to mint more application-specific methods and headers?

Interestingly, Lisa Dusseault — one of the core folks in the DAV world — blogged about this the other day;

Were I to propose CalDAV today it would probably be CalAtom — some things would be easier, some harder, but it would catch a wave instead of drifting in the tail of something that was never much of a popular wave. Oh well, we needed something then, and WebDAV gave the most leverage at the time.

I gave a big sigh of relief when I read that, and I hope that the CardDAV folks take this to heart. Some parts of WebDAV (e.g., properties; see Yaron and Larry on this) deserve to be taken out back and shot — although, as Lisa says, they were necessary because of the state of the art at the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t do better now.

Almost as if in answer, yesterday Google announced the release of the Contacts API, which is AtomPub/GData based. Unlike CardDAV, it’s not based on vCard, which is both a blessing and a curse, since lots of popular contact systems (like the Mac address book) know how to export vCard information, and because vCard provides a very rich model for information about people. I’m not sure whether this is progress or not.

Twitter, meet Planet…

Published on February 26, 2008 in community, internet and open source. 7 Comments

So Cote thinks that it’s time for organizations and companies to aggregate Twitter:

In theory, this whole pulse idea could be packaged up to be as easily deployable as ‘planet’ sites. Here, ‘pulse’ is the operational brand-name of aggregating Twitter accounts, where as ‘planet’ is the tried and true operation brand-name of aggregating blogs.

Last time I looked, There was an RSS feed for every person on Twitter, and the code for Planet is available (I’m pointing to Sam’s Venus version). About the only thing missing here is a nice web based UI that lets you put in people’s Twitter user names….

Today was my last day at OSAF

Published on January 15, 2008 in open source and osaf. 0 Comments

My first day at OSAF was odd because I just walked into my home office and bam, there I was, at work on my new job. My last day was correspondingly odd, with a round of e-mail and IRC goodbyes, and my exit interview over the telephone. Such a difference from the normal way of work. This is also true of my nascent job search. I’m going to wait until that has come to its conclusion before I write about it, but already the experience has been very different from every other time I’ve looked for a job.

OSAF 2.0 and Me

Published on January 10, 2008 in open source and osaf. 2 Comments

On Tuesday, OSAF announced a substantial restructuring of the Chandler project. We’ve accomplished quite a lot on Chandler over the last 12-15 months, and I am particularly proud of what the Chandler Server/Cosmo team has accomplished during that time. The project is entering a new stage, with a much smaller staff. That staff will not include me — I felt that the project would be better served by letting me go and keeping one more engineer on staff. It is likely that I will remain involved with the Chandler community, although I’m not sure what form that will take at the moment.

I am looking for a new opportunity, and am open to lots of possibilities. I have done a wide variety of things in recent history: development work (server side Java, client and server side Python), open source community work, and engineering management. Depending on the opportunity, I’m able to do any of those things, on either a full time or consulting/contracting basis. My contact information is on the about page of my blog, as is my LinkedIn profile, which is a pretty good summary of my credentials.

Prism App for Photophlow

Published on January 5, 2008 in flickr, internet, open source and photography. Closed

I’ve been using Photophlow a fair amount over the last few days - It’s been pretty fun, although the real value will come if we manage to use it for shoot planning or review, which hasn’t happened yet.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that having Photophlow open in a browser while I’ve got other webapps running tends to make the overall experience a bit less nicer. So taking a page from Travis Vachon, I created a Prism (Webrunner) application for Photophlow. This lets you run Photophlow as a standalone application, in a container which is essentially a custom version of Firefox. You can get the webapp here. You will also need a copy of Prism to make this work.