O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5330698.html

People think that XM Radio is somehow to blame for discontinuing their XM PCR, a PC-controllable Satellite radio reciever that could be used for MP3 harvesting.

People need to understand pressure they recieve from the source of their music (RIAA) is the only source of their policy actions. It’s really beyond their control unless they just want to lose any access to content.

Related link: http://www.mcn.org

Well, it’s official. After two years of being my own boss, and learing how difficult that is, I accepted a job as the senior network guy at a small ISP.

This should be really interesting. I’m looking forward to getting back to supporting new technologies and building infrastructure. It also means that this blog will hopefully be a lot more active as I intend to write about what I encounter. I’m already gearing up for spam, DOS and other fun security issues.

Wish me luck!

The recent Open for Business article “The MySQL License Question brings up the issue of MySQL strongarming users into purchasing commercial contracts from MySQL if they are not an 100% open source project:

The information on MySQL’s commercial license page also seems to be a bit far reaching when it suggests that one’s program must be licensed under the GPL or another Free Software license if MySQL is distributed with the product. A good analogy here is that it is legal for a proprietary web browser to communicate with a GPL licensed web server, and vise versa — the programs are communicating to each other, but not actually combining code together. In the same way, it is theoretically possible to communicate with the MySQL server either using a third party Free Software tool that allows linking to proprietary packages, such as one licensed under the LGPL or BSD licenses or by developing a proprietary program that can communicate with MySQL through networking protocols.

I understand MySQL’s motivation — making a good database available to the open source community is not free and the MySQL employees want to get their paychecks. And there is nothing wrong with that. But, there is a fine line between who is a commercial customer and who is not. Interpreting this fine line will be as difficult as Google sticking to their mantra of “Don’t be evil!”. I wish (both of) them good luck in interpreting this line…

However, should MySQL start pushing too hard to get commercial licenses, there will be a backlash from the open source community. And if that happens, guess who the overall winner will be?

PostgreSQL!

I’m not intending to start a religious war between MySQL and PostgreSQL, so please skip those comments. But if you have any thoughts about how MySQL can balance running a commercial enterprise and still be a good open source player, please speak up!

The upcoming release of ISO Schematron (if ISO votes yes for it!) seems to be putting a fire under implementors.

Uche Ogbuji seems to have been the first implementer into
the pool with "http://uche.ogbuji.net/uche.ogbuji.net/tech/4Suite/scimitar/"
>Scimitar, his Python implementation.

Brian Ewins emailed about a
>rewrite of JAXEN optimized to support
Schematron better in Java. Schematron seems to expose some
particular performance issues that may be hidden
by more “typical” stylesheets or document tests:
I was told MS use or used Schematron as part of the
regresion tests for MSXML for this reason.

>Daniel Cazzulino
has mentioned he has been working on ISO Schematron upgrades for
>Schematron.NET. Schematron.NET can be used with Mono
as well as MS’ .NET.

IBM have added Schematron to their
>Alphaworks technology
>Business Integration Information Conformance Statements.

I have not tested any of these, so I cannot say how
well they conform to the draft ISO Schematron: I expect
they are closer to Schematron 1.5 (the baseline pre-ISO
version that people settled on).

I had missed that the Open GIS (Geographical Information
Systems) people added Schematron as a constraint language
to their
>Geography Markup Language.

Finally, the Schematron Love-In mail group has been
down for the last two weeks, at the same time as I have
also been down with with flu (or out-of-town doing some
training). I am contacting Source Forge to figure out
what happened, and I hope we can restore it ASAP. So apologies to Uche, Brian and anyone else with Schematron announcements in that time.

Last week I spent two different days at LinuxWorld down at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is a much different conference in feel and scope than OSCON. LinuxWorld is a business conference and trade show. It’s all about companies who “get” Linux and want you to buy their products and services.

You can tell this show is different from OSCON by the sheer amount of swag. At OSCON, the free goodies were very limited, and the exhibit hall was small. LinuxWorld is the exhibit hall, and there is free stuff for you to carry away from every booth.

Wednesday morning I drove down to San Francisco with Jim Rosenbaum, my friend and occasional benefactor. Jim has bought me more lunches than I care to admit. He’s also one of the NoCat illuminati.

LinuxWorld does have sessions, but I scanned through them beforehand and decided none of them were worthwhile. Again (and there’s nothing wrong with this), the sessions are about why Linux makes sense for your business and why you should use some particular vendor’s implementation of this or that. Not my idea of a good time.

Wednesday, therefore, was swag day. Wander the floor, look for interesting vendors, and see what kind of stuff they’re giving away. In no particular order, I got a Novell hat, another hat I’ve already forgotten, a Firefox browser t-shirt (Front: “Firefox - The Browser Reloaded Back: “Take Back The Web”), an Apache t-shirt (”Trillions and Trillions Served”) and a shirt from the guys at Barracuda Networks (”Eat Spam”).

During the morning we ran into our friend Adam Flaherty, who was there with a couple of cow-orkers. We all ended up going to Bucca di Beppo for a gut-busting Italian family style lunch. Woooof. It was good food - the bruschetta and canneloni were delicious - but you just can’t avoid overeating at that kind of place.

Off in one corner of the exhibit hall was the .ORG pavilion, where they hide the community booths. This is where you could find EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, Fedora, X.org and others. One place with great eye candy was the Enlightenment booth. It’s been a while since I used Enlightenment as a window manager, but they were demonstrating how little overhead it uses, and how flexible it is. It’s time to check out this window manager again.

Another really cool demo was something from Sun called Project Looking Glass. Okay, it’s Java-based technology, but it was still pretty cool. It was a 3D interface for a GNOME desktop, allowing you to shuffle windows like a deck of cards, and giving your workspaces the perspective of a cube. Boy, if they could cross this with the lightweight interface from Enlightenment, that would be really nice.

The second day at LinuxWorld I was only at the conference for a couple of hours. I gave a presentation in the O’Reilly booth on “Hacking The Linksys WRT54G”. I think it went pretty well, although the battery in my cordless mic died halfway through and I had to yell the rest of the time.

The conference was the first public place I was able to use my new toy, a Casio Exilim EX-Z40 digital camera. I had hoped to have it in time for OSCON, but the discount place I ordered it from wasn’t able to understand the need for overnight shipping.

After having a chance to use it, though, I’m really happy with the camera. It takes pretty good pictures, it has a nice 3x Pentax optical zoom lens, and the display is nice and bright so you can see it well even in full sun. Also nice is that the tiny optical viewfinder is coupled with the zoom lens, so when you zoom, the viewfinder zooms also.

I found Erik Dasque manning the Mono section of the Novell booth. Well, booth may not be the right word. Pavilion perhaps? Novell had a lot of space right in the center of the exhibit hall. They had lots of people waiting, wanting, willing to tell you all about SuSE Linux 9.1 and the whole host of open source projects that Novell is working on.
Here’s a candid shot of Erik hard at work:

To wrap things up, a few other photos taken at LinuxWorld.

Sarah Blackman, the Novell conferences coordinator. It’s her fault that I drank so much beer at OSCON:

Marsee Henon, O’Reilly’s user group manager:

Besty Waliszewski, O’Reilly product manager (including Linux Unwired):

Were you at LinuxWorld? What were your impressions?

Two weeks ago today I was in Portland, Oregon, into my second full day of sessions at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference.

I’m not a compulsive blogger, nor am I a good note-taker. While I had my notebook with me during most of the conference, I spent most of my time in IRC sessions with other attendees. So my thoughts here are going to be short on details.

Some comments on the conference logistics:

• Obviously the attendance was greater than expected. The hotel overbooked their rooms (tell me why again that hotels and airlines are allowed to do this?) so many attendees had to stay somewhere else.
• Again due to the high attendance, the wireless network was at times virtually unusable. Some Kismet scans I took during the conference showed a grand total of 8 access points with the OSCON ssid. Personally I would have installed more APs, and I certainly would have used some sort of bandwidth throttling at the internet gateway. Check out the conference Wiki 2005 suggestions page for more gripes in this area.
• Something that is probably very hard for conference organizers to get right is how to know what size room to book for a session. I attended some sessions that were in rooms much too small, while others were vastly oversized for the number of attendees.

The Tuesday night extravaganza was fun. While Larry Wall’s State of the Onion was mildly interesting, I was much more taken with Paul Graham’s talk on “Great Hackers”. If you’ve read his book Hackers & Painters, some of the things he talked about would be familiar, but to me it was food for thought. I’ve worked with great hackers, and it’s true: they are unique folks and they can be hard to retain in one place for long.

I had not experienced a Damian Conway performance/presentation before. What an entertainer this guy is! Somehow being able to tie together Perl 6, Klingon, and cellular automata togther into a cohesive, laughter-filled speech, well you had to see it to believe it.

There were really only two keynote speakers that I was really impressed with: Tim O’Reilly and David Rumsey. I attended all of the keynotes, but these were the only two that could hold my attention. In a room that big, if the speaker is not dynamic, and doesn’t have a compelling presentation to give, you lose me in about 5 minutes. I was really disappointed by the keynote from Weta Digital on Lord of the Rings. That really could have wowed the audience, but it was a real sleeper.

One of the most interesting sessions I attended was with Dan Gillmor from the San Jose Mercury News. He has a new O’Reilly book out called We The Media about grassroots journalism. He had a lot of thought-provoking ideas, and some news sites that are entirely staffed by volunteers. The most compelling site that he showed us was the Center for Cooperative Research and their complete 9/11 timeline. This is a very cool site and you should definitely check it out. A neat feature they have is the ability to view the timeline by theme, allowing you to see in color various aspects of the politics surrounding the news.

Another very good session was called Building A Spam Firewall. It was hosted by someone from Barracuda Networks. They sell a managed solution using these boxes, but it’s a completely open-source deal. Basically it’s a box running Linux, Postfix, and a package called amavisd, which calls any number of anti-spam and anti-virus programs. Your incoming mail comes into port 25, postfix sends it through amavisd for spam/virus processing, and then out a second postfix port that you define. Then it goes to your real MTA for your organization. Pretty cool.

I totally missed out on the Stonehenge party Wednesday night. Even if I had managed to get one of their neon green shirts to be admitted, I was in need of some rest by the time the O’Reilly author signing was done.

One bonus of being at OSCON was that I finally got to meet my Linux Unwired co-authors: Edd Dumbill and Brian Jepson! It’s an amazing world we live in where you can write a book with someone and never meet them in person.

Thursday evening I had a very enjoyable dinner with Edd and 3 people from Novell/Ximian: Miguel de Icaza, Erik Dasque and Sarah Blackman. We went to a restaurant two blocks from the conference called Veritable Quandary. The food was amazing! On Erik’s recommendation I had the osso bucco, which is a slow-cooked veal shank. You eat the marrow out of the bone with a special little fork.

My whole impression of Novell has changed. I grew up in Utah and I’ve had a dislike of that company for years, primarily because I had to support NetWare installations and it was a giant pain from a sysadmin perspective.

The new Novell (SuSE & Ximian) is young, interesting and full of ideas. Plus they throw really good parties! The Free Speech & Free Beer party at the bar in the Marriott was really fun.

I got to spend a while sitting on a couch in the corner of the bar talking to George Dyson. He was just sitting there by himself when I walked by! Maybe people were afraid to talk to him, I don’t know. It was a nice conversation. We talked about NASA and why he thinks they’re obsolete.

It wasn’t until the conference was over and I was on a flight back to Oakland that I had an epiphany. It was a culmination of several memes I picked up from the conference plus some conversations I’ve had with friends recently. I’m going to have to put that in another entry, though, because it’s a whole different topic.

Did you go to OSCON? What did you think?

Related link: http://news.com.com/Sharp+brings+3D+to+PCs%2C+without+the+funny+specs/2100-1042_…

“The [3D] monitor can be thought of as a thin film transistor, or TFT, sandwich. It contains two TFT panels separated by a parallax barrier. The barrier causes the monitor to create two slightly different pixel images–one for each eye. This tricks the brain into thinking that any objects displayed are three dimensional.”

Now that I’m back from OSCON and had a chance to catch up on sleep, its time to look back on OSCON and comment on some of the trends I observed — imagined or otherwise.

OSCON attendees and speakers tend to be easy going and there is a lot of good natured ribbing and poking going on. What was strange this year was that people were more frequently picking on Java than any other piece of software represented at the conference. I heard quite a few unrebutted Java insults — whenever someone picked on Java, there were no responses sticking up for Java, just a general amused reaction from the audience.

And the perl camp seems to be feeling the heat from the python hackers — I heard several comments from perl leaning speakers acknowledging python. And Dan Sugalski losing the Python-on-parrot-is-faster-than-python bet is another indication of the increasing rivalry between the two camps. I’ll be curious to see how this shapes up next year.

My next observation was that it appeared that more female attendees were present this year. I asked Gina Blaber if O’Reilly kept any statistics on this, but alas they don’t. I can see why — I would probably be put off being asked my gender when I sign up for a conference. So, I only have my intuition to go on, but it certainly seemed like there were more women at this conference. It was also mentioned that general attendence was up — I wonder if that influences the (im)balance of the genders.

This year’s OSCON was the most intense so far (at least for me) — judging by the number of session conflicts (more than one cool session per time slot) I had experienced and the number of attention grabbing keynotes and presentations I enjoyed. Big kudos to the conferences team for lining up a great variety of speakers!

Did you make it to OSCON this year? If so, do you have any reading-between-the-lines observations?

George Dyson’s presentation about John von Neumann’s role in the development of the ENIAC was the first presentation at OSCON to get a standing ovation — and it was the least technical presentation of the entire conference. And this year O’Reilly’s OSCON team managed to find another presentation that was light on the technical details, but heavy on how the open source philosophy can be applied to other areas of life.

In his presentation “Open Content: How Online Digital Libraries will Provide Access to Cultural Information in the 21st Century” David Rumsey talked about his vast collection of maps that he has collected over many years. When he broke his habit of collecting more maps, he decided to donate them to a university so that people could enjoy his vast collection. Upon reflecting on that decision, he changed his mind and decided to use the Internet to make the maps available to a much greater audience. And with that decision he embarked on a journey to digitize his entire collection of maps.

The result is for everyone to see at davidrumsey.com — however the result is not just a collection of images slapped onto a web site. David and his crew worked hard to create a set of tools that allows the Internet community to access the maps in a meaningful manner. Visitors can choose to use a browser based viewer to browse the maps, or download various Java applications that enable a host of advanced features.

All of the images are scanned at a high resolution, which enables vistors to zoom into maps to get much more detail. The Java based viewer has a nifty feature that lets the user view the relative size of the maps and to view multiple maps at the same time. All of these tools have features that emulate what you might want to do with a collection of real maps in a library. You can tell that David and his team worked hard to make his collection of maps useful, going much further than simply providing scans of the maps.

David’s presentation kicked into high gear when he started showing his GIS viewing application — with this application multiple maps can be overlaid for better examination and comparison. David overlaid maps of San Francisco spanning 100 years and then showed how marshes were filled in over time and how the city grew. The application that he used to show these maps is simply stunning — the controls allow the visitor to change the opacity of maps to view multiple maps simulteanously. A slider allows the user to overlap a portion of one map over another — as if the user was manually overlaying one physical map on top of the other. The images were simply stunning and brimmed with information, ready for any Internet visitor to enjoy.

Finally, David showed an image that overlaid one map onto a GIS elevation map to give the old map a 3D defintion. That alone was amazing, but when David demonstrated a tool that allows the user to do a virtual fly-through an old map, the audience was stunned.

I like maps a lot — studying geography and learning about little nuances of our planet is fun. I’m halfway scared of sitting down and taking a closer look at the site, because it’s likely to go suck my available time for a few days. I didn’t think that maps could be quite so cool or that a relatively non-technical presentation could get another standing ovation.

I’m really pleased that the O’Reilly Conferences team continually manages to find a wide diversity of speakers ranging from detailed technical discussions to high level philosophical keynotes. I’m also pleased to see that open source ideals are starting to permeate other layers of culture — personally I am a big fan open source, but I think the philosophy and concepts pioneered in this space have a lot of applicability in other fields. Open data, open content, open geneogy — we’re just getting started exploring this space!

Go take a look at davidrumsey.com and let me know what you think!