Tag Archives: open source

Planets, planets, and more planets

Blog aggregators based on the planet software are a staple of open source projects these days. Nonetheless, there are little gotcha’s here and there.

Thom May and I have run the PlanetApache blog aggregator for Apache Software Foundation committers for some time now. It looks like that planet is finally going to move onto official ASF infrastructure where it belongs (in my opinion). If you want a preview, point your aggregator at planet.apache.org/committers. This planet is using Sam Ruby’s refactored planet code, which is known as Venus.

Over in Python land, there are two different and non-overlapping planets: http://planet.python.org/, and http://www.planetpython.org/, as a reader of both of these planets, I would love to see them consolidated so I could stop seeing the articles that are on both planets.

In any case, planets are a great way to get a sense of what is happening in the various communities. If your project doesn’t have one, you should think about starting one. If you have one, make sure it is working super smoothly.

Py3k sprints

The call for sprints at this year’s PyCon 2009 is now up.

If you are involved with a Python project and you are going to be at PyCon this year, may I suggest that one topic for your sprint be porting your code to Python 3000? This is the perfect opportunity to work with other people who will likely be doing the same, while having access to the Python 3000 developers. Transitioning to Python 3000 is one of the opportunities/challenges for the Python community in the next two years. More about that at the conference.

Sun Folks on the loose: David Van Couvering

David Van Couvering is another Sun person who is looking for a new adventure after last week’s layoffs.

I first met David at ApacheCon, several years before I came to Sun. At the time he was working on JavaDB, also known as Apache Derby. Lots of projects out there include an embedded version of Derby, so if you are working on one of those, here’s your chance to hire one of the authors of that code. One thing that always impressed me about the Derby community is how the people from Sun and IBM were able to work so well together. More recently, he’s been the architect for the database functionality in the NetBeans IDE.

David is looking for a hands-on architect/team lead role. His background is mostly server-side Java technology, with a focus on distributed services and databases. If you are looking for that skill set, and need someone who has real experience with open source software development then you ought to be talking to David. In addition to his profile on LinkedIn, you can see how effectively he’s used his blog to describe the work that he’s been doing recently.

CommunityOne 2009 CFP

CommunityOne is not as well known as its older brother, JavaOne. 2008 was the first year that I got to go. The event is going to be a bit bigger in 2009 — in fact, the event will be held both on the west coast and on the east coast. The conference is focused on “open source innovation and implementation”, and this year the conference planners are looking for talks on “cloud computing and virtualization, dynamic languages and scripting (PHP, Ajax, Python, Ruby, JavaScript), databases (MySQL, postgreSQL), web and application servers (GlassFish, Apache), operating systems (OpenSolaris, Linux), mobile development (Java ME, Android, Symbian), and tools (NetBeans, Eclipse, Sun Studio)”.

Here are the details:

CommunityOne East – March 18-19, 2009 – New York City
CommunityOne West – June 1-2, 2009 – San Francisco
Deadline to submit speaking abstracts: Dec. 11, 2008

For more information on these events: <http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/>

If you are interested in submitting a talk: <http://www.eventreg.com/sun/communityone09/cfp>

Olio – a web 2.0 benchmark?

So there’s a new project in the Apache Incubator called Olio. It’s a “toolkit that can be used to evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of web technologies”. There are already implementations in Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Here are some additional versions that I would like to see:

  • Django (Python)
  • Turbogears (Python)
  • Lift (Scala)
  • Seaside (Smalltalk)
  • Erlang
  • Clojure
  • Haskell
  • Common Lisp
  • ASP.NET

If I’ve left out your favorite language, framework, feel free to add it in the comments. Or better yet, show up to the project with an implementation. Wide Finder this ain’t, but the results could still be pretty interesting.

My personal story on the Sun Storage 7000 series

Today Sun is announcing a new line of storage appliances. I haven’t been involved with this product at all, but I do have a personal angle on them. Shortly after I joined Sun this year, I took a trip to California to meet various people in person. Amongst the people that I met up with were Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and Adam Leventhal, the inventors of DTrace. I was a graduate student at Brown when Bryan and Mike were undergraduates. I was mostly interested in talking to them about DTrace, because DTrace is an important part of your toolkit if you are building web applications using dynamic (and other languages).

During a break, Mike took me aside and asked if anybody had shown me what they were working on. I said that they hadn’t, so he took me back into a server room and showed me a prototype of the Sun Storage 7000 product. There’s lots to write about regarding this project, and there will be a veritable storm of blog posts about it today. The two things that stood out to me when I saw the prototype were:

a) the innovative use of flash memory as part of the storage hierarchy, and the work that has been done to ZFS in order to manage flash in an intelligent way. If you are interested in the science/engeineering behind this, you should look at Adam Leventhal’s article in the first issue of the revamped CACM on this topic. The impact on both cost and performance is very impressive.

b) the AJAX based UI that the Fishworks team has created for interacting with monitoring tools like DTrace.

You can read Mike and Bryan‘s blogs for the full story of how the products came to be, and you can go to the launch and product pages for the details the specific product offerings.

Well done Mike, Bryan, and team!

ApacheCon US 2008

ApacheCon US has come and gone for 2008, and here’s the roundup.

Talks

I’ve known Simon Phipps since we worked together at IBM in the late 1990’s. He’s always been great at finding and articulating trends in the computer industry, and I had read his post on the Adoption Led market. I expected him to talk about just that one issue, but it turned out that he had five points to make. Besides the adoption led characterization of open source, he talked about substitutability as preferable to interoperability, with a corollary of standards body reform. He also made the point that effective marketing messages for open source will be either first or second derivatives of freedom. I’m still doing some pondering on some of these.

Kevin Crowston from Syracuse University has been coming to ApacheCons for five years now, and I was very interested in his talk summarizing some of the things that he and his students have learned. I had a very extended in person conversation with Kevin, and it’s hard for me to remember what content came from where. Kevin and his students have really become a part of the ApacheCon community – I always look forward to talking to them and seeing what they are finding interesting. As I’ve written in other posts, the social/cultural/organizational lessons of open source development will likely turn out to be more enduring than much of the actual software.

ApacheCon US 2008

It’s fashionable for some company to be controlling the ASF. Every year it is a different company. Over the years this honor has been held by IBM, Google, and Joost. This year, I would say that the honor belongs to Yahoo. There was an entire track dedicated to Hadoop, which originated with Yahoo. Many of the Hadoop sessions were jam packed, so Hadoop contributed substantially to the attendance at ApacheCon this year. I predict that nextt year’s Hadoop Camp will be double or even triple the size of this years’ track. The talk that I got the most out of was Dhruba Borthakur’s description of the way that they use Hadoop at Facebook.

The conference

I think that I’ve only missed a single US ApacheCon (I’ve never made it to an EU ApacheCon) since 2000. This year, there were some changes to the conference structure. In addition to the Hadoop Camp track, there was also a track for OFBiz. I didn’t attend any of the talks, but from talking to people, it seems that the OFBiz track also contributed heavily to the attendance. ApacheCon’s program is determined pretty much by who submits and that can lead to a very haphazard program. I think that the success of two well planned coherent tracks is something that should influence the direction of the conference. The conference needs whole or half day tracks which are technically coherent and which accommodate the skill levels of the various Apache user bases.

ApacheCon US 2008

Another experiment was the decision to run a BarCamp during the second day of the Hackathon. I think that this was very successful. We had a very good discussion on git versus subversion, a topic that is generating a lot of interested within the foundation. There was a session on dynamic languages, which wasn’t very successful because the organizer ran through a long slide deck rather than engaging the participants. I ran a session on digital photography, and the people who participated seemed to get some value out of it. I would love to see a BarCamp, Open Space, or similar track be included in the main conference, rather than being limited to just the Hackathon.

ApacheCon US 2008

The lightning talk session is always well attended. The ApacheCon lightning talks are decidedly biased towards the light hearted (like Aaron Farr’s hilarious portrayal of Apache world domination), in contrast to the PyCon lightning talks, which tend to be more serious. I think that the Python community is gettting more bang for the buck when it comes to the lightning talks. There’s much more dissemination of information that might be hard to get accepted as a conference talk, either because it’s a tidbit, or it’s very new work, for example. The demand is so great that there are multiple days of lightning talks – a sign that something is working really well.

There were two other unusual features of ApacheCon this year. The first was that it took place during this year’s historic U.S. election. I’ve never watched election returns much, and never with a group. The whole experience of sitting in the Sheraton bar/lobby and watching the events on a huge TV screen is one of those memories of a lifetime.

ApacheCon US 2008

The other unusual happening took place at the end of the lightning talks, where a few of the sponsors got together and organized a “death of proprietary software parade”, complete with brass band and a police motorcycle escort as we marched through a few New Orleans streets. The parade’s final destination was a local club for the ensuing “celebration”.

I really love ApacheCon, but it was impossible for me to ignore the difference between this year’s ApacheCon and PyCon. At over 1000 people, PyCon was easily twice the size of ApacheCon, and the level of energy just seemed higher at PyCon. I also continue to be impressed by the PyCon sprints, which are just blowing things off the map in terms of attendance, productivity, and ability to engage completely new people in the various Python projects. From talking to a number of people on the ASF ConCom, I know that some changes are in the works, and I am hopeful that next year’s ApacheCon will be revitalized and energized.

Photography

I talked with people more about photography this time than any other conference that I’ve been too. Several people told me that my previous photo coverage had made it possible for them to “attend” ApacheCon even though they didn’t physically attend. It’s gratifying to feel that the picture making is doing some good beyond indulging my need for an artistic release. Beyond the aforementioned BarCamp, I had a number of gear related discussions with people, and on the basis of those, you’ll probably be seeing some gear postings from me in the next little while.

ApacheCon US 2008

Shane Curcuru, the conference lead made it a point to give me a spare key to very nice suite that the hotel gave him. It was up on the 48th floor, and you could get a pretty decent view of New Orleans, which made it pretty hard to turn that offer down. I took two trips up there and shot a bunch of frames to turn into panoramas. That was a relatively new experience, and I didn’t pack a tripod, so the result is somewhat less than optimal, but it was fun nonetheless.

As usual there is a set of photos for the conference on Flickr.

Travel

ApacheCon US 2008

I had a pretty smooth travel experience – the “worst” part was missing a ferry because of a delayed leg. This was my first time to New Orleans, so I’m not sure how to judge it. All the meals that I had were fantastic, right down the the Jambalaya that I got from one of the airport restaurants. I’ve been messing around with BrightKite on my last few trips, wondering if it would really amount to much. Shortly after touching down in Denver on the way home, I got a phone call, and several directed Tweets. That seems like some thing useful, so I’m probably going to keep playing with it. I don’t have any more trips scheduled for the rest of 2008, so that experiment will have to pick up sometime next year.

Next year ApacheCon is in Oakland, where we’ll be celebrating the 10th birthday of the ASF. That’s one birthday party that I am really looking forward to.

PyConUK 2008

I am slowly recovering from the transatlantic flights for PyCon UK, so I think that I’m ready to give a report.

The conference

PyCon UK 2008

In Europe, at least, the Python community seems to be sprouting more regional conferences as opposed to having the single EuroPython conference. This probably makes it easier for people to get to a conference, but it also means that people like me have to travel more in order to attend all these meetings. PyCon UK, also takes place over a weekend, again to facilitate people being able to attend without the hassle of getting time off from work and so forth. The conference was roughly the size of EuroPython, with attendance in the 230-250 range.

As usual, I did some of the regular program and some hallway track. The top three talks that I went to were Jacob Kaplan-Moss‘s update on the new stuff in Django 1.0 (that’s Jacob in the picture above). Chris Withers did a good talk on the problems with Python package management. The basic answer there is that a lot of stuff layered on top of a shaky foundation, in this case, distutils. Chris discussed some (partial, in my opinion) solutions to the problems, the virtualenv and buildout packages. Perhaps one day there will be a really good solution. Micheal Sparks from BBC research described the Kamaelia project, which includes a Software Transactional Memory (STM) module. I am neutral on the benefits of transactional memory, so I am glad to see that someone in the Python community is exploring how STM might fit with Python. Slides for some of the talks are being posted on the conference wiki. In the hallway track, I attended a BOF for Python Bloggers, and a PGP keysigning. I also had some excellent extended conversations with Holger Krekel and Maciej Fijalkowski of PyPy, Adewale Oshineye from Google, and Michael Foord from Resolver Systems.

I was invited to give one of the two keynotes for the conference, and my topic was “Challenges for Dynamic Languages”. I tried to step back from the specifics of Python and look at some of the challenges that face all of the dynamic language communities if we want to gain broader adoption of dynamic languages. I was somewhat concerned when Mark Shuttleworth covered some of the same topics during his keynote the day before, but maybe it’s a good sign when people from two different organizations and backgrounds can come to similar conclusions about the future of Python and related languages. My presentation is very picture oriented, without a lot of text or bullet points, so I am not sure whether posting the slides will actually help anyone or not. This was my first time giving a keynote, and it seems like it was well received, despite some laptop/projector interaction problems. Thanks to Jacob Kaplan-Moss for saving the day by lending me his MacBook Pro, remote, and memory stick.

Travel

PyCon UK 2008

This was my second transatlantic flight since June, and it seems that I really can’t sleep on long airplane flights. This turns the 10 hour flight from Seattle to most Star Alliance hubs into a pretty long ordeal. I did manage to finish a book and read a few papers, but I spent way too much time using the in flight entertainment system (I prefer Lufthansa’s to SAS’s). I also experienced my longest wait (1 hour) in passport control in the Birmingham airport. During that wait, I listened to the two American women right in front of me discovering that each of them was moving to the UK to marry an Englishman. Ten people or so before I reached the inspectors, a passenger collapsed in an epileptic fit (no previous history apparently), just to make sure things were memorable.

I was only in Birmingham for two and a half days, and spent almost two days inside of airplanes. Several people commented on the jet lag, which didn’t seem that bad until it caught up with me when I finally arrived home.

Photography

Photographically, perhaps the bigger story is the pictures that I didn’t get. The D3 does not fit in my camera/computer bag with a lens mounted on it, which means that it is hard to get shots where you just need to pull the camera out, point and shoot. I had a flight leg from Seattle to Frankfurt, and on the Frankfurt end we took busses from the airplane to the terminal. While we were waiting for all the passengers to board the bus, I realized that I was staring at a great view of the rear left quarter of an Airbus A330-300. Perfect for a wide angle shot, but there wasn’t enough time to get the shot.

When I arrived on Thursday, I went over to the Pycon UK social, had some dinner and hung out. I left a little early when the noise level got to be more than I could handle. As I was walking back to the hotel, I saw some beautiful artwork that was being projected on the side of a building in Paradise Circle as part of Birmingham’s Light Night and Artsfest. I had left the camera at the hotel because I didn’t want to have to haul it around, but I was so taken with the display that I went and picked it up. Here’s some of what I saw:

PyCon UK 2008

PyCon UK 2008

PyCon UK 2008

This is a shot as I walked back to my hotel via one of Birmingham’s canals.

PyCon UK 2008

Here‘s the rest of the set. There are not many pictures of the conference proper — I go to a lot of conferences now, and I’ve shot enough pictures of people sitting in rows or giving a talk. There’s an entire group on Flickr for PyCon UK if you want better coverage of the conference.

Get Windmill

If you are working on web/AJAX based user interfaces, you owe it to yourself to go and check out the Windmill web testing framework/tool. Windmill was originally developed at OSAF for testing the very AJAXy web front end of Chandler Server. Adam Christian and Mikeal Rogers, the core developers of Windmill, have gone on to other efforts, but Windmill lives on. In fact, this summer, Adam was fortunate enough to land a job where he is able to spend significant amounts of time working on Windmill. That effort has paid off with the latest version of Windmill, which should be ready for serious use. It’s got a bunch of cool features, including nice integration with Firebug Lite.