Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1043_3-1021692.html

According to CNET, a group of X-Box hackers have figured out how to run Linux on the X-Box without a mod chip — and claim they’ll publicize the technique if Microsoft refuses to discuss releasing an officially signed Linux boot loader. Anyone think MSFT will bite?

Related link: http://oscon.kwiki.org/

Ingy’s generously created a new Kwiki to keep track of all of the incidentals that fly through the air at a conference. The Wiki’s a place to talk about everything from sharing rooms to getting rides to and from the airport to what’s going on right now in a talk.

This is the best place to talk about OSCON as it’s going on right now. Find out the best places to eat from Portland natives. Meet up with like-minded people at an off-the-cuff BOF. Keep notes on speakers and sessions. Post links to your journal and weblog entries.

Based on the success of the YAPC::NA Wiki, you’ll kick yourself if you don’t keep an eye on what’s happening!

My friend, Glyph, pointed me to a post on Joel on Software — Joel has issues with this dialog box:

When you follow a bookmark in OmniWeb 4.5 to a site that issues you a HTTP 301, a permanent redirect, OmniWeb puts up this dialog box to give you the option to "fix" your bookmarks.

Joel on software:

… I think it’s a nice feature that shouldn’t be advertising itself, it should just happen automatically and silently. It’s a permanent redirect, that’s what it means, and designers of web browsers know that a lot better than users, so why should users be inflicted with the need to make a complicated decision about something they don’t understand as well as the software designers? Especially in the form of a modal dialog that interrupts whatever the user is trying to accomplish.

Putting aside the statement "…designers of web browsers know that a lot better than users…", I think Joel is wrong on this one. The permanent redirect is a notification, it is not an authenticated and verified statement; HTTP can’t live up to the "burden of trust" necessary perform destructive actions behind a user’s back. This is not a valid, authenticated, and secure transaction between the web site’s designer and the web site’s viewer. Where is the protection for spam and hacking?

Software should not do anything destructive without asking me first. What would happen if Windows’s or OS X’s software updates just installed without asking you first? How confused would you be when your favorite scanning application stops working because of the latest software update that was installed in the background?

I would agree that this is a UI problem — the dialog box might be a little confusing if you don’t understand what the phrase "permanently redirected" means, but software should not be doing things behind my back. Its not the job of the software engineer to make choices for me, its the job of the software engineer to properly explain to me the choice I have to make.

Related link: http://www.quantuminsight.com/_MSB/index.html

Random notes from last nights Nanotechnology Forum:

Steve Jurvetson, in his usual fast paced talking, led the evening and the panel discussion. (It’s great that he will be at the ACC2003 too, just crank up the mic a bit.)

The best lines came from Stan Williams of HP:

“Every information is going to be electrons and all communications are going to be photons, and I am talking about everything going beyond one millimeter.”

He often gets asked what are the courses that one should take if you want to succeed in nanotechnology.

His advice is to major in journalism. Communication is a real big problem. It takes years for the people coming from different fields to arrive at a common language, then this common language is created within that lab and outsiders still can’t understand.

He also said that it is an advantage if English is not your native language (which of course was sugar in my ears), because with the experience of learning a second language you are far more sensitive to communication problems. Of the last 26 people he hired, 25 were non-native English speakers.

Teramac is a massively parallel crossbar computer that he and his team are working on. Stan is confident they will exceed the hyperbolic growth of Moore’s law by 2005, and with cost savings of a factor of 1000, because they can contact print these chips.

Intellectual Property is a problem. HP has almost as many patent lawyers as they have researchers. He says it is a defensive measure, they don’t want to be fenced in by someone else’s patent.

Nowadays to bring out a product you have to negotiate licenses all over the world, because so many people are working on nanotechnology and generating IP. His recommendation for a startup that does not have the patent bargaining chips is to create a diamond product. It does not help the big company to just patent your idea, if you have a great product out.

There are no good tools available for the kind of computers that they are creating. Lots of work ahead that will keep the software guys busy. To reach the defect and fault tolerance that they are looking for you have to work with redundancy, which in the current programming model is something that gets stomped out. Therefore everything has to be rewritten for this new model.

He also recommended, and he is not the first one to do so, the Feynman Lectures on Physics. I once read that Richard Feynman taught these freshman classes and every year more advanced students and even faculty colleagues would come to hear him.

You can buy nanotechnology today, for example drill bits at Orchard Supply Store. They are created out of composite material. The sales people don’t know about this and marketing has not picked it up yet either. He calls it stealth nanotech.

Are you ready to sign up for journalism classes?

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/opinion/25GIBS.html

Cyberpunk lit hero William Gibson opines on the difference between the broadcast-centered media world envisioned in Orwell’s 1984 versus the reality of today’s more multifaceted, Internet-based multimedia. His conclusion? “[To] every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.”

Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59359,00.html

So finally, after about three tries, Congress gets a censorship law past the Supreme Court. The narrow tailoring and careful wording that made possible this victory for John McCain and other supporters fails to filter out a host of difficulties, partly because blocking software does a lousy job, and partly because the definition of the banned content is subjective. (That’s why censorship has traditionally depended on local “community standards.”)

This law is a bit like a ban on “partial-birth abortions,” targeting such a broad and poorly defined range of practices that it causes everybody to shy away from the risk of prosecution.

But what it all comes down to is the question: who determines what is permitted and what is blocked? Some would say, “Wait till you’re eighteen and then ask for sites to be unblocked.” But we also know that the FBI wants to record the books we’ve read–tracking someone who accesses a controversial web site is likely to follow. After all, some of the September 11 flyers used public library Internet access.

An important precedent has been set. With the legal and technical infrastructure in place, all the government has to do is add more and more to the banned content. I fully expect Attorney General Ashcroft to decide it’s ridiculous to prohibit access to cavorting nudes but permit access to sites that advocate acts of violence against the United States. And thus the merry ride begins.

Many European countries ban hate speech. We have not taken that route yet in the United States, understanding how it muddies the discourse about free speech, but the sword is poised above us.

Is this a turning point?

Related link: http://yapc.kwiki.org/index.cgi?DayThree

Day three started by sleeping even later than usual and rushing to the campus in time to catch Piers Cawley flying by the seat of his pants to discuss “Perl Refactoring”. Schwern tried to give the same talk a couple of years ago, but it seems to be cursed — it’s really hard to get an automatic refactoring program working during a talk. Piers instead demonstrated test-driven development, including the refactoring step at the end. It worked pretty well, though I really do think this talk is cursed.

Helen Cook next previewed a yet-to-be-released module called Video::Manip. She and her company are working on automatic detection of interesting events in media files. She identified a couple of interesting algorithmic techniques to detect the start, climax, and end of interesting events in a video stream. With Perl. Hopefully this module will end up on CPAN by next Wednesday (she promised).

Ken Williams spoke about Machine Learning with Perl. In particular, I’m interested in document categorization which he’s discussed before. His big example was processing SpamAssassin’s example corpus to build a decision tree of the most effective rules. He was quick to point out that the Bayesian rules weren’t even present on most of the trees until they went several levels deep.

Ken mentioned Search::ContextGraph which looks like it just might fit some of my needs.

After a short break, junior pumpking and newlywed Artur Bergman discussed the optimizer.pm module which allows you to replace Perl’s optimizer with one of your own, written in Perl. This is in the class of things you either shouldn’t ask about or, if you know exactly what you’ll do with it, the only way to understand it is to read the source and example code. Later, I asked Artur if the optimizer had access to the source of the lines being optimized. He didn’t think so. Pity, though I can get at it anyway.

Lunch came next, including a Perl 6 BOF, where we discussed a proposal to put sources and sinks and data filters in the core language with syntax. I don’t see the need as generators, iterators, and co-routines will make it easy and subclassing (or implementing the protocol of) filehandles is already possible in Perl 5. I could very much be missing some subtlety though.

Mark Overmeer concluded the morning with a discussion of his OODoc system that extends and enhances POD. I wish for such a system every time I dig through LWP’s docs.

After lunch, Damian presented nine modules, written in a 23:53 period, inspired by National Geographic’s Swimsuit Edition. (To quote, “I am not making this up.”) The point, of course, is to find something useful, solve it once, and never worry about it again.

Nat Torkington just about worried himself sick trying to film yet another movie, but the results are impressive. Yes, he was giggling during Damian’s talk; I watched him edit the whole thing.

YAPC always concludes with a town meeting. The hot topic this time was the question of multiple conferences hot on each others’ heels stealing thunder and attendees from each other. Outgoing president Kevin Lenzo has said “The more the merrier”, but there are so many variables no one can say what will happen.

The best idea I heard was a combination of smaller, day or weekend workshops and free Perl tutorials for interested community members. Portland or Seattle could find a local campus or business, gather a handful of speakers, and teach people how to write Perl from scratch or how to write better Perl. Winter seems to be a good time for these as it’s out of the conference season. It’s worth thinking about.

There was random assorted lunacy afterwards, involving bars and parties and the like. One of those conversations sparked the idea for Acme, Incorporated, which works about as you’d expect from the old Road Runner cartoons.

As YAPC day four involves nastiness with cars, buses, and airplanes, we’ll skip it. See you all at OSCON in a few weeks!

Richard Lippmann, a system administrator for the city of Zindorf in Germany, sent in this Perl Success Story about Findus, a search utility he created as a personal project to help cut down on his family’s late fees at their public library. Now that “personal project” has evolved into a program serving more than 2 million books, CDs, DVDs, etc., and about 500,000 reader’s accounts in approximately 90 libraries on the web.

Findus Helps Finding Books in German Public Libraries

It all began as a project to help me pay less to my own library. My whole family reads books like mad and we paid a lot of money for “late fees” at our public libraries. So I had the idea to program a search machine for our libraries that could ask for our reader’s accounts. Three years ago there were only solutions available running a public webserver in the library. This is too expensive in Germany these days and too dangerous for me as system administrator for the city. So I decided to write my own better solution.

Two pieces working together: Feedfindus and Findus

The program called Findus consists of two parts:

1. Exporting the data from the libraries database. Compact, encrypt and send it to the webserver (called feedfindus). This runs as a “compiled” *.exe at the library’s server so I don’t have to install Perl at the server.

2. Put the whole data into the database and make it available for the readers (findus). The following questions should be answered from the reader’s home: which books does the library own (search), can I get the book at once (availability) and what did I lend (reader’s account)?

MySQL as Backbone

Since I am German I wrote the whole thing in German language and certainly Perl. The database is MySQL which is working great for this task. I love that I can connect to it lightning fast and when having set the right indexes everything works great. I work with one MySQL-database and every library has its own tablenames there beginning with the library’s name. This was a good idea because it’s very easy to separate each library’s data by tablenames which is important when having nearly 1200 tables, about 13 for each customer.

CGI as the Running Horse

The whole thing is running as CGI-script and this tended to be a problem after some time. There are 12000 lines of code and about 400 KB of Perl-code to be compiled every time. I decided to divide the program into several modules that are loaded only when needed for the immediate task at hand. Since the program should run at “nearly every webserver” mod_perl was not an option. Although mod_perl-envrionment would be nice: it saves about 2 seconds of starting time for every user’s call. But I saw that you have to develop the program in mod_perl when running it later there because the persistent environment brings a lot of surprises with global variables.

Eternal development as usual

I thought that development for Findus would last a year or so (after-work development in my spare-time). But I found some really good libraries with librarians who had many wishes and ideas, which helped Findus to get better and better. And now readers get warning-emails before exceeding the time-limit, a monthly newsletter with new bought books, email-reminders when a book is available and the program speaks russian (as I do not :-) and other languages.

What began as a personal project is now serving more than 2 million books, CDs, DVDs etc. and about 500,000 reader’s accounts in about 90 libraries into the web. Automatically, daily, and with no work for my librarians. And they love this. :-)

Don’t be afraid of a German Findus Internet-OPAC? Take a look at Findus.

Richard Lippmann from Bavaria, Germany

To learn how large and small companies are using Perl to meet their goals, check out Perl Success Stories.

If you have a Perl success story of your own that you’d like to share, please let me know. You can reach me at: todd@oreilly.com.

Related link: http://yapc.kwiki.org/index.cgi?DayTwo

Day two started with recent grant recipient Artur Bergman’s talk on Perl’s new ithreads. Artur’s clearly the expert, since he’s written the bulk of threads in Perl 5.8.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of limitations in threads as they exist in Perl 5.8.0. Fortunately, Perl 5.8.1 will be released soon with many, many fixes. Artur also pointed out the impressive amount of threading modules that Elizabeth Mattijsen has written.

Lunch came next, and I sat with some of the smart kids and discussed good programming technique. Adam Turoff played the semi-famous I Am Canadian commercial and a William Shatner parody.

After lunch, I caught the first half of Ingy’s Extreme Programming talk. Ingy and I hang out in Portland sometimes and see Ward Cunningham occasionally.

If you’ve ever seen Brian speak before, you know that he’s always trying new things. This time, he stored his talk on a public Kwiki and gave the audience its address. (Schwern and I are planning to do something similar at OSCON, though it’ll likely be set to annotation mode, not public change-my-slides mode.) He handled the slides changing beneath him with a fair amount of grace. “Why I like WindowsXP — it reminds me of another XP….”

Brian’s goal is to make life easier for module writers, especially people who’d like to write modules but haven’t yet written them. I ducked out a little early to hear Leon Brocard discuss Little Languages in Parrot. Last year, he gave several talks at various conferences about targeting Parrot. This year, he’s talking about the little languages that actually run on Parrot: BF, Befunge, and, notably new, BASIC.

Meanwhile, Ingy was just finishing explaining how CGI::Kwiki works. When I returned, he started explaining “Power Tools for Module Authors”, including Ken William’s Module::Build.

(As a Perl module author myself, I really recommend writing plenty of tests beforehand, shipping them with your module, and asking people to run them all the time. You’ll save your sanity.)

The day’s schedule ended with lightning talks which I shall not attempt to describe, suffice saying that there was a singalong.

Supper was a little odd — the catering company thought they were providing food on Wednesday, not Tuesday. They rectified this misunderstanding by shipping in dozens of pizzas.

Before and after the food, YAS held an auction that raised much money. Several sponsors donated quite a bit of swag, including books, shirts, and aprons. As well, several hackers donated their services: Leon to do anything within reason, Artur to make any module thread-safe within reason, and myself to write tests for any given module on the CPAN, save Meta.

YAS will probably announce how much they raised. All I know is that Kurt DeMaagd needed to find a bank very quickly to make a deposit to the YAS account.

The night’s entertainment was a special showing of the Matrix Reloaded. YAPC had rented a theater and gave out around a hundred tickets. As you’d expect, the best part of the movie was the heckling. I sat near Randal Schwartz and the Fotango folks. There was a lot of heckling. Personally, I think Neo should be called MagNeo at some points, but that’s a story for another time.

Tomorrow, there are a lot of smaller talks. They’re harder to summarize, but I’ll do my best.

Related link: http://yapc.kwiki.org/index.cgi?DayOne

Damian Conway lead off with half of his “What’s New in Perl 6″ talk (perhaps not the official title). As you’d expect, he got halfway through. Most discussion seemed to be related to Apocalypse 6. Presumably, there are other changes based on the not-yet-released Exegesis 6.

As you’d expect from a Damian talk, there were spots where people in the audience were frightened and other spots where they couldn’t wait for Perl 6 to be released. I’m personally waiting for a map construct that can pull more than one scalar at a time.

Next up was David Wheeler, speaking about Bricolage, a Perl CMS that’s received a lot of favorable press lately. At first, it seemed like just about every other CMS out there (and I’ve worked on and with a few), but about halfway through the talk I was sold.

The latest version added a couple of really nice features that make Bricolage much handier for editors. Filling out lots of little forms and textareas on a web page is painful, especially if you’re not running a server instance on your local machine.

After the talk, David pointed out that Bricolage’s publishing mechanism was designed to support synchronization between instances. I could run Bricolage on my laptop and “publish” to the live server. Very nice.

Up next (after a nice long lunch), Allison Randal discussed the Perl 6 design philosophy. There were initial similarities to my What I Hate About Your Programming Language. Piers Cawley pointed out that Larry has the amazing ability to mix and match from a bunch of different approaches to find the best solution. He said something like “it’s like remembering something you’ve always known”.

R. Geoffrey Avery
won a “Practical Utility” award from gnat for ExtUtils::ModuleMaker. If you’re creating new modules that need to be distributed — whether publicly or not — you really ought to consider this module instead of h2xs. As Geoff expected to upload a new version of the module last night, a potential buglet caught my eye during his talk, so I worked up a patch during the next break. “Thanks, applied!”

Perl’s full of lots of little nooks and crannies that work in one case but have been pushed into other places where they don’t quite fit. Cooking can be messy if you don’t wash the dishes as you go. It’s nice to see things like ExtUtils::ModuleMaker and Module::Build that add new features and make the simple things easier and more difficult things possible.

Chris Winters then presented an interesting talk about generating Java code with Perl. The Pragmatic Programmers talk at some length about code generation in their book. It’s well-worth considering in cases where you’d otherwise write a lot of boilerplate. (J2EE defines “boilerplate” in new ways. I hope to talk Chris into writing an article or two on his technique for ONJava.

After that, I caught the second half of another Damian talk, “Everyday Perl”. It sounded a lot like another talk called “What’s in Damian’s ~/bin/“. It wouldn’t do to spoil the surprise but the moral of the story is “If you can automate a task in 30 minutes to remove frustration or to save yourself a minute a day, it’ll pay off very soon”.

After ending uncharacteristically early, Damian then returned to his Perl 6 talk for the morning, getting most of the way through changes to the regex system. There’ll be more on this later in the week, I suspect.

Dinner-wise, I went out with some of the YAS people, including gnat, Allison, Kurt Demaagd, Adam Turoff, and Lisa Nyman. (Piers also came along.) There wasn’t much YAS talk, but it was a good time anyway.

Back at the hotel, I did a bit of e-mail and a little hacking on one of my projects. It seemed the thing to do, though it was after 9 pm my time (oh, jet lag!) when I finally turned in for the night.

Tomorrow’s highlights include the YAS auction and a screening of the new Matrix movie. See you then!

This is the text of an e-mail that Glen Daniels of Macromedia just sent out over a number of web services lists:

Hi all:

The Apache Axis team is pleased to announce that version 1.1 of the Axis SOAP toolkit is now available for download at:

The 1.1 release includes many improvements from 1.0, including:

* Better support for doc/literal WSDLs, more schema types, etc.

* Vastly improved SOAP 1.2 support

* Improved documentation

* More transports (including JMS and email)

* Basic support for COM/CORBA/RMI objects as backends

* Many bugfixes, including bulletproofing against cross-site scripting and XML entity inclusion attacks

1.1 has been a long time coming, and we’d like to thank everyone who’s worked on the code, submitted bugs, and participated in the community discussions on the mailing lists. We’re going to try to do more frequent releases into the future, and we have a lot more improvements to make to the codebase - expect to see 1.2 in a much shorter timeframe.

Thanks, and we hope you enjoy Axis!

–Glen

For more information on Axis, check out the Apache Axis home page or download this leading edge web services platform at:

http://ws.apache.org/axis/dist/1_1

Phew, we did it. Today at noon (MEST) we launched Orixo, a consortium of 6 European software companies all active in Open Source projects. Although our companies are quite different, both in size and in served industries, we felt that the Open Source support and services we already provide for our customers could be expanded and enhanced on if we banded together using the methodology of Open Source communities. People from the six companies have known each other for some time now and through the power of Open Source communities we have also become friends.

The story actually starts at last years Cocoon GetTogether - a conference that started out as a small gathering of Apache Cocoon fans but then grew into a 100+ strong, day of presentations and Cocoon chat.

The six companies (from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and UK) now involved in Orixo have already been in contact with each other in the Open Source projects they work in - but had never met until the first face-to-face meeting at the GetTogether in Gent, Belgium. At the conference, the individual companies discovered that their way of thinking about how businesses can both work in Open Source projects and yet still maintain the necessary commercial interests, was shared by the other members. And so the idea was born, that perhaps the Open Source community philosophy could be adapted for a commercial network.

Each of the companies already provides training, support and implementation services to customers who want to use open source solutions such as Cocoon to build their own applications. However, many of the large European companies are multi-national so they are interested in receiving the same type of services in each country they are located.

In addition, the six different companies that make up Orixo work in different industries such as finance, media, telecommunications, aerospace and education. By joining together, the group can provide the industry specific knowledge in addition to the open source specific know how through the network.

At the same time, the goal of Orixo is to maintain the different companies commitment towards the Open Source projects and communities themselves.

Over the past six months, the way towards Orixo became clearer. Discussions on a joint mailing list and using a Wiki as a medium of discussion led to a further meeting in
Ghent where the structure of the consortium was discussed in earnest. Of course the most memorable part of the day was the search for a name that had a nice ring to it, had
something to do with the Web and wouldn’t get us shot for saying it in one of the respective countries. Most of the favorite names were also long gone when it came to domain names. And so the hunt ended when the Japanese word for weaver was chosen and slightly adapted. Orixo was born.

The following weeks saw us digging through stuff like a legal form and deciding what we needed to actually go public. The mailing list we had set up became our communications medium with our notes going on the Wiki. Two weeks ago we began work on the website using CVS to synchronize the content and an irc channel for real-time communication.

This weekend saw us drawing up press releases and casting a last critical eye over our website.

And so, a couple of minutes ago - after a few last minute glitches - the emails went out - announcing to the world that Orixo is in the house.

Because i work on small IP things, I’m constantly asked — “Will they do IPv6?” “You know, 32-bits aren’t enough for light switches… What about IPv6?” “You’re not cool until you can do IPv6!” I know, I know. IPv6, whatever. Yes, of course they will do that.

But, what ever happened to IPv5?

IPng, Internet Protocol next generation, was conceived in 1994 with a goal for implementations to start flooding out by 1996 (yeah, like that ever happened). IPv6 was supposed to be the “god-send” over the well-used IPv4: it increased the number of bytes used in addressing from 4 bytes to 16 bytes, it introduced anycast routing, it removed the checksum from the IP layer, and lots of other improvements. One of the fields kept, of course, was the version field — these 8 bits identify this IP header as being of version “4″ when there is a 4 in there, and presumably they would use a “5″ to identify this next gen version. Unfortunately, that “5″ was already given to something else.

In the late 1970’s, a protocol named ST — The Internet Stream Protocol — was created for the experimental transmission of voice, video, and distributed simulation. Two decades later, this protocol was revised to become ST2 and started to get implemented into commercial projects by groups like IBM, NeXT, Apple, and Sun. Wow did it differ a lot. ST and ST+ offered connections, instead of its connection-less IPv4 counterpart. It also guaranteed QoS. ST and ST+, were already given that magical “5″.

And now as the Internet clock ticks, our PCs don’t use IPv5. So we’re moving onto 6.

Related link: http://www.vircon.com/events/JavaUserGigOne.htm

Sun’s Jeff Suttor (JAXP guru) just dropped a hint about an underground party tonight, the first night of JavaOne. He assures me there’ll be plenty of food, music, and chat with the people behind Java technology. It’s free, so don’t miss your chance to buy the disturbingly hard-working Daniel Steinberg a drink.

I’ve just attended the Geostorytelling session at the PlaNetwork conference at the Presidio in San Francisco, and all I can say is: Wow. The session was opened by Joshua Arnow from the Buckminster Fuller Institute. He describes the aim of “geostorytelling” as “an effort to make the invisible visible.”

Arnow quotes Fuller as having once said, “There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis. There is only a crisis of ignorance.” Fuller conceived of a “Geoscope” which might serve to ameliorate humanity’s ignorance of its own condition. “Consequences of various world plans could be computed and projected using the accumulated history-long inventory… of data,” he wrote. “All the world would be dynamically viewable and picturable and radioable [sic] to all the world, so that common consideration… of all world problems by all world people would become a practical everyday, hour and minute event.”

Towards this goal, Arnow says, the BFI has been building the EARTHscope Library, a free access, low bandwidth interactive online library, to promote whole systems understanding from global to local, to advance a standard for web-based geo-storytelling, and to allow users map and animate change over time, and explore future scenarios.

Arnow then turns the mic over to Joe Skopek, lead architect of the EARTHscope Library. Skopek’s first demonstration, plotted on Fuller’s Dymaxion map of the Earth, is entitled “Impact on Natural Habitat: 1700 - 2100.” He shows off EARTHscope’s shiny user interface, which allows a user to display features like global biodiversity, human population, critical habitat, human development, and more, as GIS-like layers. The user can then select a development scenario — sustainability vs. business as usual — and then pull a slider along a timeline from 1700 to 2100 to experiment with the effect that the chosen scenario has on the chosen variables. The difference between the two projected futures is clear: Environmental destruction can be stopped, rolled back — if only we have the wit and the wisdom to see to it. Other demos include the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Atlas of Population and Environment; a Green Maps “Lomap” demo of Lower Manhattan “as seen by youth”; and a USGS temporal mapping of the SF Bay Area showing urban sprawl (ugh) from 1800 to 1990. “You might think a community is getting crowded,” Skopek says, “But once you can it on a map, only then you can really see the trends.”

Next, Todd Helt, of Telemorphic presents his company’s work on Maplicity, a Java-based network-capable GIS browser, for which they provide layers from a huge variety of sources. Some demos on their site include multi-layered, detailed maps of Afghanistan and of Iraq, provided as a public service to help people understand and research these places and the prominence they’ve recently held in the news. The truly eye-popping bit of Helt’s presentation were, however, the demos based on David Rumsey’s historical map collection. According to Helt, Rumsey approached them wanting to make some of his collection of 150,000-plus historical maps available online, and georeference them, so one could overlay historical maps with modern maps. Helt’s demo showed maps of the San Francisco Bay from 1850 overlaid with modern digital raster data, fading from one to another at will, showing very vividly how the historical coastline of the Bay differed from today’s — in particular, the progressive landfilling of what are now Alameda and Treasure Island. Cooler still was the ActiveX-based 3D fly-through of an 1870 map of the Yosemite Valley, stretched over modern topo data — very impressive! Another similar fly-through of San Francisco.

Finally, Ben Discoe of the Virtual Terrain Project, takes the podium to steal the show with VTerrain — a free, MIT-licensed 3D GIS browser, written in C++ and OpenGL, and designed for portability. His demo of VTerrain starts with a 3D spinnable globe using NASA’s 1 km scale “Blue Marble” data, which morphs in real-time into an icosahedron, and then unwraps and flattens into a Fuller projection of the Earth; the view zooms in, out; plots points of light across the world representing first 2,000 users of VTerrain. The display zooms in on a detailed portion of Hawaii; Discoe highlights models of individual buildings and vegetation; he adds, deletes, moves them around the 3D terrain; then smoothly zooms the display all the way back out to the whole globe. Damn.

Impressive as these demos are, the work is still far from complete. Beyond the systems presented, free or inexpensive tools are few and far between, and the level of technical expertise needed to make them do useful and novel things is still a fairly high barrier to entry. More importantly, even when useful and useable tools are available, they depend on the availability of accurate data. In some places, like the US and Denmark, this data is free from a variety of governmental sources. In other places, like Canada and the UK, activists are still lobbying their governments to open the taxpayer-funded government survey databases, and make them available on a broader (i.e. inexpensive or free) basis for non-profit projects.

Despite the hurdles, the dream of the Geoscope - or, really, today, a thousand little Geoscopes, almost forty years after Fuller’s initial conception of it, is now slowly but surely, becoming a reality.

Are you or your organization building your own Geoscopes? What kinds of applications are you finding for this technology?

What happened? You don’t pay attention for a couple of days and the whole ERP competitor chess board gets rearranged?

Invensys sells Baan.
If you remember Baan was a rising star in
the 90s. Some say they promised the world to Boeing and getting that deal opened
the US market for them. Delivering the world was very taxing on their resources
and they got into financial
trouble too. Invensys bailed them out in 2000 for $708 Million. By then
they were not the up and coming queen anymore and no one wants to bet his game
on a player that needs cash infusions to survive. Consequently the market wasn’t
very favorable to them and this week Invensys
sold Baan to another investment group for $135 Million. But compared to
the other moves this week this one is more like a pawn play.

PeopleSoft is
buying JD Edwards, which would make them the number two ERP software provider
with combined revenues of $2.8 billion. Just to bring this into perspective
SAP’s revenues for 2002 were $7.8 billion. With PeopleSoft’s strength in the
HR area and JD Edwards’ in manufacturing there are possible synergies in that
marriage. James Governor writing for The
Register has an interesting angle to the story. He thinks that the merger
is mainly driven by the desire to be the number one player on the IBM platform.

Then on Friday Oracle is banging on the chess board with a $5
billion offer to buy PeopleSoft. What is fascinating is, that
Larry Ellison is not interested in the software or the
people but in PeopleSoft’s customers. Larry
is seen in the industry as a bully so it is open, whether the
loyal PeopleSoft customers will play with him. Even if he is not succeeding,
this offer freezes PeopleSoft’s market. Every prospect will wait and see how
this plays out. PeopleSoft’s CEO Craig Conway who used to work for Oracle is
understandably not amused: "atrociously bad behavior from a company with
a history of atrociously bad behavior."

While all the competitors are duking it out in the dangerous and uncertain
area of mergers and acquisitions, SAP
shrugs all that off and is calmly executing his moves on a different board,
on solving the customers problems, being their trusted innovator and the save
haven in these tumultuous times.

The Portland Linux/Unix Group meets tomorrow night, 5 June, at 7 pm. Some of the folks from Helix DNA will dicuss their software.

MOSS, a new gathering of open source developers and afficionadoes, holds its second meeting this Saturday, 7 June, at 1 pm. The first meeting drew people from Perl, Perl 6, Python, Ruby, Personal Telco, XFree86, Extreme Programming, Freepan, hardware hacking, colocation services, open source in government, and more. This meeting will likely be a chance to show off individual projects; I’ve one or two new things to demonstrate.

Powell’s Technical Bookstore is hosting a Hack Fest next Wednesday, 11 June. Rael and Rob will discuss their favorite Hacks and may let fly on some of the upcoming books. I’ll say a few words about OSCON.

Immediately following Hacks night, I’m speaking to the Portland Perl Mongers about the evolution of a program from idea through several implementations. For the buzzword-watchers: test-driven development, mail filtering, refactoring, customer tests, design patterns, programmer tests, incremental design.

Next week? I sleep.

Did I miss anything interesting in the Portland area? Let me know.