Mobilis in Mobili

All Quiet on the Western Front

2008-01-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

There will be even more quiet on this blog: I started a fulltime position as a Project/Product Manager at a local firm in early January. I'm still learning what I can and can't discuss about what we do behind the scenes, but will pop in now and then with PM related stuff to share.

2007: "Most Influential" Writing

2007-12-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

Looking for some good reading over the holiday break? Try starting with John Bracken's blog posting on The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007, and continue on to the source material he's so helpfully linked into the post. I'd not heard of John's blog before this post was mentioned on Farber's IP list, and many of the authors and blogs he cites are unfamiliar to me. This is, in my world, a good thing, as I'm always seeking to expand my repertoire of context. Every social circle is going to have its own "Most Influential" list-- what's yours?

APODizing the Cosmos

2007-12-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

Saturn's Rings and the moon Tethys (via APOD) I've been getting tired of the Cosmos lately. No, not the actual Universe, but the lovely yet small set of astronomy pictures in the Mac OS X (Tiger) screen saver "Cosmos". I knew that there would be gorgeous images like I'd like to branch out, see more nifty stuff... like the image above, of Saturn's rings and the moon Tethys, Astronomy Picture of the Day page, and even more at APOD's archive site. Enceladus' Ice Volcanoes (via APOD) If I were into scripting on the Mac, I could have written a script to fetch new content from APOD, but instead I simply grabbed a few dozen of my favorites via the archive site. Now, how to get them into my screensaver? The net is mighty-- I soon found out how to diddle with /System/Library/Screen Savers/Cosmos.slideSaver to get what I wanted. Copy it into another directory (after authenticating to unlock it), and rename it APOD.slideSaver. Select it, right-click for a menu, and choose "Show Package Contents". The "Contents" folder contains a "Resources" folder full of slides. NGC 68888 (via APOD) Remove the ones in there, substitute your own, and then copy back into /System/Library/Screen Savers/ to deploy it. You'll get a dialog about not being able to copy it, with an "authenticate" choice to let you do so. Or just use the command line and sudo. Ta-dah, I get an APOD option in the Screen Savers section of the System utilities. And now I have more shiny galaxies to watch, and to light my livingroom with when I'm sitting quietly and petting the kitties in the evening.

Chalup PM Book in Progress

2007-12-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

Over the past 6 years I've taught literally hundreds of sysadmins, network admins, and other IT professionals the fundamentals of a streamlined project management process that I call "Practical Project Management". For the past 3 years, I've also taught "Project Troubleshooting". All this time, the folks in the classes have said, "This is really great. You should put all this into a book!" I'm very pleased to announce that, in partnership with the excellent folks at NoStarch Press, that's exactly what is happening. We'll be substantially expanding the material I've been teaching, as well as adding material on enhancements such as web-based PM tools, so-called "agile" and "lean" methodologies-- which, oddly enough, bear a strong resemblance to what we already do! We'll also be incorporating some of the great feedback I've gotten from my tutorial students over the years. I'll be putting out a call to senior colleagues early in the coming year for peer review of some of the chapters and topics. If you're interested, please drop me a note. [Please include a brief CV or resume, if we're not already well-acquainted.] In the meantime, you can pick up a copy of TPOSANA for light reading over the holiday break! The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition (Limoncelli, Hogan, Chalup)

Liveblogging LISA'07

2007-11-13T14:36:00.000-08:00

So here I am in Dallas TX, at the annual LISA conference for systems administrators. It's been a great conference so far, even though I haven't gotten out of the hotel since I arrived on Sunday evening. Heck, I haven't gotten off the lobby/2nd/3rd floor zone! I love it when I can do all my teaching early in a conference and then just relax and enjoy myself. I did two half-day sessions on Monday, and both went really well-- interested and involved participants, and compliments afterwards. I started off with my tried and true favorite Practical Project Management, that I 've been teaching and refining for several years now. I estimate that I've trained over 200 IS professionals in project management at this point, with typical class sizes of 45 - 50, and in one case, 89 or 90 attendees. This year we didn't do the advanced class, Project Troubleshooting, although we had a great session of that in June at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference. The afternoon tutorial was a fairly new class that I developed in 2005, Problem-Solving for IT Professionals. We had a really spirited class discussion, and I was pointed to a great resource after class, a book (and Wikipedia entry about the book) called How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, by Gregor Polya. It has a set of rules for generalizing problems, and looks useful in building more problem-solving processes. In the class I teach generalized processes, which I hesitate to call "patterns" as they're not sufficiently rigorously expressed yet, such as server-client interactions, and introduce modified process taskflow diagrams that aid in debugging. It's possible to debug applications that you have never seen before if you have a strong understanding of fundamental patterns of design and interaction in computer applications and systems.

Both books are now shipping!

2007-11-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

It's been a long year, but the fruits of various labors are now available for harvest! I co-authored one book and contributed a chapter to another: The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition (Limoncelli, Hogan, Chalup)

Handbook of Network and System Administration

That TransCon Rails Ta(il|le)

2007-11-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel Talbott is really rocking my world with his recent essay comparing the transcontinental railroad with the ruby-on-rails phenomenon. As he points out, there are some surprising similarities in enabling markets and disintermediation-- the physical railroad opened up new territories and new markets, and the rapid development cycle of ROR is enabling software customization of previously unaffordable (in time or money) types.

They [the co-op members trying to use a wacky uber-customized spreadsheet macro that breaks when you look at it cross-eyed] have little to no means of affecting the software that they use, and no real choices to use something else. And there are literally millions of others like them out there—small business owners, hobbyists, clubs, families and civic groups. But that’s the other, more profound thing that I think is changing and will greatly change how our kids think about software—one day we’ll look around and see everybody commissioning software, not just people with lots of money or people who can do it themselves. Tickets to the interior are suddenly affordable, and everybody’s buying one.

Everybody wins. Cool stuff happens. Ma and Pa Kettle can get custom software written affordably while GoogroSoft is still polishing paisleys on monolithic software applications. OK, that last one is a bit Strata-filtered, but you know what I mean. Go read it, and if you're not familiar with some of the background, such as the original Long Tail essay, NT is a nice guy and scattered links throughout his essay back to some of the prequel material. Why, you may ask, is this tagged for sustainability? Because, in my opinion, the cottage-industry model of programming offers a lot of options in that area: telecommuting, bespoke efficiencies, disintermediated access to change, etc.

"But will it scale?"

2007-09-03T21:28:00.001-07:00

Doing some remedial reading on this summer's Great Twitter Scaling Kerfuffle, found a great quote from Phil at Progressive Data Solutions, in his writeup on Railsconf: "To me, this question is a "shark-attack" question. Sure, you could get attacked by a shark if you go swimming in the ocean, but you should probably worry about other things first, like rip-tides, water temperature, etc. If you ask me this question, I will usually respond with numbers. It's hard to argue with concrete numbers, and that's what the Joyent presentation did a good job with. If Twitter is getting 11,000 requests per second at peak, they need roughly 32 cores to handle the traffic. Is your app going to be getting 11,000 requests per second? How about 1000?" Nice!

Strata Travel Schedule

2007-08-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Bootcamp

Burning Man

Permaculture Intensive, OAEC (tenative)

LISA Conference

New Network, New Value

2007-06-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

Energized buzzword particles are flying ahead of the ripples in Riemann space of Supernova 2007, Wharton's little slice of FooCamp Heaven. Fortunately for those of us whose thinking (deep) doesn't match our pockets (shallow, ah shallow), there's the Supernova Unconference being held concomitantly.

My contribution to the seed ideas for possible sessions is included below. I hope to have an opportunity to elaborate on this prior to the unconference. I'll be teaching my IT problem-solving and project management classes at Usenix Annual Technical right before the event, so I'll be in conference mode anyway. :-)

The New Network, even in its present alpha form, can make certain kinds of valuable connections and transactions at rates almost too cheap to meter. These value marketplaces are the hidden unpriceable glue that ties social networks and e-commerce sites together synergistically, the way mycelium act as a resource transport network in a succession forest.

Most social networking sites succeed based on these hidden networks, in which the ability to import connections serves as the equivalent of beneficial nitrogen-fixing bacteria in soil. How can we enable emerging Value Marketplaces purposefully, rather than by accident? Even better, how can we enable value transactions in such a way that everyone wins?

Some starting points are:

transactions are flexible,
interfaces are extensible
serendipitous discovery is facilitated (including cross-correlation of data sets)
privacy granularity is controlled
trust/reputation is inherent

Discuss, please!

Isolated in Nature?

2007-05-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

Lecture 1 of the Notre Dame open courseware materials for Architecture 50611: Architecture and the Built Environment. Part One. Do you see yourself as a part of nature, or as separate from it? I see myself as being artificially separated from it. Compare, for instance, our globalized sense of nature and the world today with what it must have been to early Neolithic peoples: Picture small villages huddled within their encircling walls, isolated in the utter vastness of nature. While people must have feared the consequenced of unfettered interaction with nature, I take exception to the idea that they felt a sense of isolation in a vastness. Only when one has experience of the antithesis, namely vast areas in which the entire environment has a sense of the created-by-man, can one feel a contrast. One might feel lonleliness or fear at being without other people, especially in an untamed nature where large carnivores roamed, but nature itself would be (in my opinion) simply "what is" and the Natural order of things.

A small slice of firsthand experience in this: growing up in a rural environment consisting of neither extensive farmland nor managed timber, but simply woods and fields and pastures, one simply accepts that this is the natural world and moves through it. The most grevious culture shock one finds, coming from such an environment, is a landscape in which everything is owned as personal space. One did not generally cut through the backyard areas of other homes without a good reason, nor their driveways and front yards. However there were, quite literally, acres and acres of intervening spaces through which one might freely travel. Fenced pastures had wide, wide borders; forested land had trails, and low, crumbling stone walls marking property lines, easy to step over or spend the afternoon rebuilding. Other than frightening chasms between cityscape buildings, or alleyways that are essentially public streets (and may not be loitered upon or otherwise trespassed), there is no public space. There are parks, certainly-- little chunks of space kept boringly manicured for the purpose of DOING things in them, such as playing sports, but no inviting and diverse ramblings to be had. Why do we seek order in our world? I'm reluctant to even approach this without defining 'order', as neither of the two proffered 'customary' viewpoints seem plausible to me, namely Locke's tabula rasa, and Aristotle/Kant/Arendt's innate humanness. The latter I expect will come even more severely under fire when I finish watching the TED Susan Savage-Rumbaugh lecture and video.

I don't claim to know the answer, but other possibilities seem more plausible. Boundaries tend to be areas of immense productivity and opportunity. The intertidal zone, the forest edge onto meadow or grazing, and so on. Perhaps as little monkeys, we created productivity zones with early agriculture, and merely kept doing it, recursing over mimicry and incorporating elements of the natural world's boundaries into our created ones.

Mind the Gap

2007-05-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Go watch Hans Kessler presenting his mind-blowing data visualization of world health, economy, and myth debunking at TED 2006. Using the nonprofit GapMinder Foundation site's tools and database access, it should be possible to create similar correlations between results of conservation efforts like acquisition of permanent easement land by conservation trusts, annual bird and wildlife counts, water and wetlands analysis, and localized life expectancy, cancer, and economic data. I want to see this. If it correlates the way I *hope* it will, it could be an extremely powerful tool for conservation, right-sizing, and healthy sustainability. If you get to it before I do (likely!), can you please comment here or email me? Many thanks!

RubyonRailsCamp Redux

2006-11-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

Absolutely excellent, with the usual agonizing decisions of which sessions to attend because there were so many that were relevant. I'm looking forward to next year! And what the heck were the odds I'd end up at a table at dinner with two other people who have enjoyed the goodness that is a Lisp Machine?! Yow! It's still a tiny little world, too, as one of the folks I met at dinner turned out to be a good friend of a couple of old friends of mine.

Highlights for me:

Getting a handle on the nuances between REST and SOAP, in the Web Services session
Discovering another reason why having a Mac rocks: SubEthaEdit Collaborative note-taking, anyone? Pair programming over the net? Woot!
Catching up on OpenID
Being blown away by the realtime coding demo of SimplyRESTful. Oh, and SimplyHelpful is not exactly chopped liver either!

The best part of the conference, though, was getting to meet my Rails dev guy, Matt, face to face after several months of working together. He rocks! Our Virtual.Net app is still under wraps, but take a look at the great app that he's been developing for his own company, an online scrapbooking site called Scrap Ease, now in open beta. Nice stuff!

Event: "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Nov 9, Stanford

2006-10-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

This ought to be very interesting; I'm hoping my workweek schedule allows me to attend! Sorry, kids, blogger can't handle the PRE tag with pasted text for some reason. Sheesh.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog

A symposium featuring Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold and Fred Turner

Thursday, November 9 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM

Cubberly Auditorium, Stanford University

http://www.stanford.edu/~shyeo/wholeearth.htm

During the 1960s, student marchers chanted "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate!" as they railed against computers and the Cold War-era military industrial complex computers seemed to represent. But within just three decades, computers had become emblems of countercultural revolution. This symposium will feature a conversation with three people who played key roles in that transformation: Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and New Rules for the New Economy, and Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. The discussion will be moderated by Fred Turner, assistant professor of communication at Stanford and author of the new book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

This event is sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries, the Department of Communication, and the American Studies Program.

It will be introduced by Henry Lowood, of the Stanford University Libraries, and followed by a public reception.

Strata at RailsCamp San Jose

2006-10-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

Strata will be joining the interesting folks at IBM Almaden's Ruby on Rails Camp in early November in San Jose. Also onsite will be Matt Petty, Virtual.Net's primary Rails developer, who has been implementing Virtual.Net's skunkworks Rails project from his Riverside CA location. We hope to be demonstrating the application at the (un)conference, and may have it ready for release in Gem form by then. Matt will also be giving a demo of his ScrapEase project, an extremely nifty online scrapbooking application, in his role as lead developer and founder of KizMeta LLC. Virtual.Net will host a 'Remote Rails Development: Tips, Tricks, & Caveats' session if there is interest onsite. We've developed some useful protocols and would like to share them with the community and get info from others on what's worked (or not!) for them. Will post any slides here, after the event. Rails developers-- interested in working with a firm with experience in scaling, designing for data *and* code re-use, and a good understanding of the real bones of Web 2.0, the skeleton under the hype? We are looking for 1 or 2 folks interested in collaboration & contracting. West Coast/PST preferred. If you are too 'expert', we probably can't afford you. If you are too junior, we can't afford the learning curve. Have some solid app-building experience in Rails or another language, a willingness to learn scaling and do collaborative design, and a belief in writing conduits, not portals. Drop us a note if you're intrigued. No reposting or forwarding, please.

Distillations from Day One

2006-10-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

First day at Office 2.0 definitely did not disappoint. I was unable to attend the morning sessions, due to a client meeting in the South Bay, but the afternoon panels were excellent. In addition to my usual 3x5 card notes on individual sessions, I was keeping a set of cards for particularly useful bits of wisdom bubbling up from the panels. There is a lot. Here are a few.

Ensure that the value proposition can withstand the pressure of easy data import/export.
Enable backups of data without requiring all O20 companies to become backup experts; service & data are separate value propositions.
This + web 2.0 = O20: Enable end-users to solve workflow problems by assembling applications.
"Mashup" is just a euphemism for EI (Enterprise Integration). [panelist on Enabling Mashups panel]
Technology should supplement business decisions, not substitute for them (good enough vs automatic '5 9s').
Security goes out the window when folks want to get things done.
Why do majority of KMS fail? They separate 'documents' from 'interactions with documents'; wiki & collaborative dashboard apps become de-facto KMS when they focus on workflow while allowing categorizing, searching, & tagging. KMS 2.0?
Worried that a recruiter will find your blog? Maybe now they think you're weird for blogging, but in a few years they'll think it weird that you don't have a digital trail of blog/etc material. (SRC: shades of usenet!)

It was particularly interesting to hear that vendors are going after the large companies. One panelist said that you see most firms competing for the same 50K companies' business, and ignoring roughly 38 million others-- but then went on to say, getting agreement from fellow panelists, that O20 apps weren't going to be sufficiently mature to tackle the non-enterprise market for quite some time. One symptom of this that I encountered multiple times in the vendor demo area was the structuring of apps into 'free, personal use', 'small group', and 'enterprise' pricing & functionality tiers. This creates a problem for a typical small business, as the features needed most (generally, roles, fine-grained permissions, & delegated authority) are only available at the 'enterprise' pricing level. Talking to several vendors about this, the story I heard again and again was 'in our experience, this is how it works'.

The trouble is, my specialty is dealing with startups and small businesses, and this contradicted my experience. This morning, I realized a possible explanation for the disconnect. Another part of the story I heard had been that the 'small group' services were based on departments or workgroups within larger enterprises. These folks are all on the same team (literally) and really don't need the kind of role and auth structures needed by a business of the same size. Small businesses and startups are all about control and delegation-- even in 2-person startups, there are clear areas of responsibility. For a profitable small business trying to simplify with O20, the price structure will keep them away, because what they need is for the role & auth features of the app to *replace* the personnel costs of having strict department roles, and to echo the hierarchy in their workplace.

If one says, 'yes, but our monthly cost for this is a fraction of personnel cost', the small businessperson will reply, 'yes, but I currently do this by taking some time from each of N employees, I would not be staffing a person to do this fulltime'. The first O20 app to service small businesses in the ways they need will clean up bigtime. Intuit was brought up as an example, in one panel, of consumer apps driving business apps-- Quickbooks for home use drove the creation of Quickbooks for business, and the development of Quickbooks Pro and other higher-return tools for Intuit. Including Web 2.0 apps, which brings us full circle.

Right now the vendor model seems to be that personal/free users will drive adoption by workgroups which will drive adoption by the enterprise. We need an additional model, that will be fundable and sustainable, while addressing the issue of how we get this great functionality out to the folks who need it most, the small business owner. Ideas?

Office 2.0 Update

2006-10-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to meeting folks at the conference. Unfortunately a prior committment prevents my attending tonight's cocktail reception, but I will be onsite for the afternoon sessions tomorrow (Weds) and most of the day Thursday. Trevor of Transmutable.com has created a handy iCal calendar for the conference sessions. See you in the Open Technical Sessions at 3pm on Thursday! Get a heads-up on some of the challenges and tradeoffs in making Office 2.0 deployable, scaleable, and rock-solid enough to attract a wide customer base. Fellow speakers can get a preview of the issues we'll tackle in the Open Technical Sessions. Anyone wanting to start the discussion early is welcome to drop me a comment and we'll do lunch on Thursday.

Office 2.0: A Paradigm or a Product?

2006-09-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

With plenty of time to get the thinking caps rolling, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on Office 2.0. I'm approaching it from the standpoint of designing a next-generation redefinition of the office paradigm, essentially breaking enterprise collaboration out of the fixed document format into an XML-based, schema-driven world. Here is my first-pass list of key issues in creating an Office 2.0:

Define data formats so that Office 2.0 can do mashup-style integration with next-generation web tools.

Get away from 'document' formats like RTF and instead go to a markup-interpretive model with full support for XSLT, microformats, and schema templates.

Set up schema registrars and data interchange registrars, integrated into a PKI-like system that allows transitive trust in EDI.

Attempts to define functionality, formats, and features from 'on high' are an outdated legacy-- move to a purely data-driven, schema-centric model where 'Office 2.0' is an interoperability suite rather than a suite of programs with a captive user population.

Where Office 2.0 'wants' to go is to a place like where Apache, Mozilla, and Firefox are today; nobody's going to make a lot of money on that, so it's not a popular destination in the business world. Yet I believe that only an Office 2.0 effort that goes there has any real chance of succeeding. Small pieces, loosely joined-- in this case, via the data model.

Being able to mix templates within a document, and interpret them with Office 2.0 gives one essentially embedded application abilities.

Software as a Service and/or ASP model would be revenue drivers, but applications would certainly arise for independent access. One might pay licensing for use of licensed templates, ASP usage (software as service), custom development of schema, proxying/brokering service with escrow of trust, etc.

Establishing Service Level Agreements for levels of interoperability with current tools will assist in driving adoption of Office 2.0. Leveraging today's database-driven dynamic information models and using database as CRM provides the foothold necessary to get traditional enterprise to consider the new model.

For a schema-centric model such as I'm proposing, we might explore the SLA requirements for interoperability and translation between Office 2.0 document templates and traditional office formats such as RTF. A barrier to adoption of Open Office in many environments has been formatting and display problems when going between document formats.

The widespread success of Adobe's PDF as an information transmission model suggests that there is also a requirement for an SLA for document anti-tampering, whether the tampering is benign or malicious.

The beauty of a schema-centric approach is that one can essentially 'skin' an Office 2.0 editing and manipulation environment to suit a wide range of customer experience and preference. Some of the potential user groups have such differing UI expectations that a universal UI design is, in my opinion, a red herring which will only serve to distract attention from the underlying mechanics of building Office 2.0.

Will you be at ISPCon?

2006-09-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

Coming up practically in my parking lot, ISPCon will be at the Santa Clara Convention Center from November 7 - 9. Exhibits-only passes are free with pre-registration-- the site says "until Sept 29th" but the registration process says "until Sept 15th". Hmm. Which is it? If you think you might drop by, today (the 15th) is a good day to register!

Office as Community

2006-09-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

I'm somewhat buried in a deadline through this week, but want to get folks' creative juices flowing. My model for Office 2.0 is "the office as a community". What would it mean for productivity if the same kinds of social-networking software that allow individuals to find each other and trade goods, ideas, and services, were available within an organization? Many companies of under 500 people are organized such that it can be difficult to find expertise within your own organization, or access to resources considered spare or scrap, etc. These solutions could scale across an individual office location, a department, a campus, or even the whole company's virtual presence. What would a Craigslist for your company do/have? What if it were integrated into your document-building tools? What if those tools allowed you to categorize a document as you were writing it, showing similar documents in your knowledge base and assigning a proposed taxonomy location within your enterprise tag cloud, document repository, or other classification structure? The real future of Office 2.0, in my opinion, is to integrate document creation tools with document management tools within the context of a classification system. Ideally, a reputation-building system would be part of the mix, but doing that too soon could create some serious volatility wrt office politics. Interestingly, in 20+ years of working with cutting-edge Internet collaboration systems, from early mailing lists and Usenet through gopher, archie, the web, and now wiki's and social aggregation sites, I've seem some ideas repeated and repeated but never quite integrated so they 'stick'. Let's do it so it sticks this time! Please discuss. :-)

Strata Update

2006-09-08T09:46:00.000-07:00

I will be speaking and/or teaching at the following additional conferences in 2006; thanks again to the great folks who attended my tutorials at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference, and were so complimentary on the evaluation forms.

Office 2.0, Oct 11 - 12, San Francisco
LISA 2006, Dec 2 - 8, Washington DC

It's been a busy summer, and it's not over yet. Look for the unveiling of a couple of major projects before the close of 2006:

Publication of the Second Edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration.
Release of a stealth Rails application currently in development; of course we are open-sourcing it! :-)
Virtual.Net websites come out of the Stone Age with a modern look

Secret Sauce Explanation to Web 2.x

2006-05-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a particular reference to help a Unix-centric friend deal with some new Windows requirements at his employer, and found Joel Spolsky's excellent article on Biculturalism in Software. In the article, Joel talks about the cultural differences between Windows programmers and Unix programmers, and concludes that their target audiences and metrics of excellence have a key difference: Windows programmers program for the end user, and Unix programmers program for other programmers. Don't return anything unless there's an error, make your output textual, eschew the GUI, use command-line switches, etc. The Unix pipe culture of sending one program's output to the next program's input. I think this explains why Web 2.x is taking off like gangbusters, particularly the mashups. It's XML and regularized schema. The "this output will be someone else's input" folks *and* the "I want it to be readable and pretty" folks can be happy at the same time. Just sayin'.

we who aren't posting salute you

2006-05-10T23:47:00.000-07:00

I've decided not to post until I have something to say about something I'm actually USING or WRITING MYSELF, so things are going to be pretty quiet around here for a while, given that all my paying work is non-programming right now. Just so ya know.

Beta, beta, who's got the beta? Everybody!

2006-04-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Web 2.x bubble machine is turning out betas faster than you can say "Lawrence Welk". Somebody decided it was time to keep track of them all, and lo, the Museum of Modern Betas was born.

Naturally the mere existence of a beta would be meaningless without a way to rank them (oh, let's!), so the MOMB folks have obligingly provided frequently-refreshed lists of the Top 100 and the "Hot 100". Metrics are based on bookmarks registered into del.icio.us, itself listed as a 'beta', along with Flickr, Google News, and some other rather long-lived 'beta' sites. If you wonder what all the hoopy froods are up to, there's also a list of invite-only and alpha sites.

Looking at the rankings of beta sites, I'm moved to suggest that perhaps after the first year of non-invite-only site participation, sites should consider themselves 'post-beta', eh? I am a huge fan of some of these sites, especially del.icio.us and Flickr, but calling them beta sites just seems very wrong somehow. There's an emerging generation of betaware, long-lived and extremely functional sites and software that stay perpetually in pre-release mode. Hearing myself saying that like it's a bad thing, I realize that it's time for a cultural reappraisement. Because I think it's a good thing, and a good process, but with a bad name.

We've seen an evolution in project management from 'milestone meetings' where changes are bad things to a feedback-loop process that's based on the idea of constant re-engineering. Nobody's prescient enough to predict everything that a release will need. By creating these sharp release-cycle plateaus, organizations create a culture where the drive for new features is a hugely competitive process within engineering, and the impetus to fix bugs is very, very small after 1.0. When a site like Flickr or Google News is perpetually in beta, it sends a message to engineering that fixing bugs is still important. It also sends a message that adding features is something that can still be done with a bit of spontaneity and playfulness, rather than being like an episode of Survivor: whose feature will make the cut?!

I think there's still a sweet spot waiting to be found out there between 1.0 and perpetual beta. It combines the agility of the beta culture with some of the rigor and dependabilty of the release-driven process. Not enough to strangle it, but enough so that you don't feel like things will change out from under you on a week by week process. I think that to discover it firsthand, I'll need to get more involved with development-- which would be why I'm out there learning Ruby and AJAX.

Useful Miscellany

2006-03-28T10:17:00.000-08:00

SDForum and RubyCentral are putting on a joint conference on Ruby in the Bay Area during the weekend of April 22-23. Unfortunately I've already committed to being out of town that weekend, though it's possible that I could reshuffle some plans.

I've received several invitations to check out the 30 Boxes shared calendar, but haven't had time to play with it. Initial poking at it looks like there's no easy import/export with iCal, so I'm unlikely to use it. If you're looking for a shared alternative to Yahoo's calendar, though, and aren't dependent on push/pull of events to/from a mobile device, it's a good bet.

Most of my time during the past couple of months has been spent attempting to clear out my schedule so that I can work on a book revision (still pending contract, but looking good) and start learning Ruby. I expect things here to be mostly quiet for another few weeks, at which point I'll be setting up my development system for Ruby on Rails and blogging about the experience as it unfolds. I'm an old-time C programmer, now a bit rusty, but I like what I've seen so far of the syntax and conventions for Ruby. I'm really looking forward to getting my decks cleared enough to sit down and start learning it.

I'll be in Boston next week for LinuxWorld, stop in at the Usenix/SAGE booth and say hi. Other conference plans are:

LISA Regional Training Event, May 8th, San Jose (come learn project management from me!)
Usenix Annual Technical, Boston, last week of May
BlogHer'06, San Jose, July 28 & 29
LISA '06, Washington DC, first week of December