During the Perl Foundation charity auction tonight, a Yet Another Perl conference attendee paid $1,500 for the first copy of the first page of Damian Conway’s upcoming Perl Best Practices. That’s one thousand five hundred dollars. That’s not a typo. This is the same book I recently interviewed Damian about.

The title page, signed by Damian Conway and certified by editor Allison Randal, will be bound into the first copy of the book to come off the press. The book should hit the streets in the next couple of weeks, although you can pre-order it on Amazon (or your favorite bookseller).

Think of it this way: you’ll get a bargain even if you pay full price (and you’ll get all the pages!).

In honor of the tenth anniversary of Java and the 10th annual Java One conference, I’d like to share the legend of Nacho Queso Picante, Duke’s little known clone from Puerto Rico.

We all know the story of how Duke was born 10 years ago to help illustrate the animation capabilities of Java. But as we also know, when there is a legend behind the story, well it usually involves much more than meets the eye. This legend is no different.

Yes it was 10 years ago when James Gosling first introduced Duke and taught him to do somersaults across the screen. The software development and Internet communities welcomed Duke with open arms. Duke was going to be the one language to run on them all. Finally, the days of tranquil portability between platforms had arrived. And had they ever. Ten years later, Duke’s Master claimed that Duke was being used by more than 4.5 million programmers and on over 2.5 billion devices. Duke’s Master was very happy. The millions of programmers were also happy. The owners of all those Java enabled devices were happy too. But what about Duke? Was he happy? Had anyone ever bothered to think about poor Duke?

Can you imagine living a life like Duke’s? Every time Duke’s Master needed to demonstrate the heritage of Java they would trot Duke out and make him do cart wheels across the screen. Oh sure, the first hundred times or so, it was fun. Duke liked it - he thought it was fun to get out and be seen. He liked to see the programmers squeal with delight when he did his little dance. As the years dragged on, Duke began to feel differently. He began to believe that he was capable of much more than what his Master was allowing him. He began to resent his little dance, finally he felt cheap, degraded, and humiliated every time they pulled his strings and made him dance.

Duke had become a slave. He was trapped within the walls that the SCSL and JRL licenses erected around him. So no matter how much his fans wanted to help Duke become more than who he was, they were helpless. His Master was resolved in his view that Duke was vulnerable. He was vulnerable and they had to protect him and ensure he did not get torn apart. As more called for his freedom, and demanded that he be let go, Duke began to change. He began to dream of a world that would allow him to fulfill his potential. For even though he hoped that his programs could run everywhere. They did not. His Master was holding him back. There were thousands of different platforms and hardware that his Master and friends (the “licensees”) did not support. He wanted so much to be everywhere, he wanted to free.

As the cry for Duke to be let go increased, Duke’s Master knew he had to do something. The pressure to talk about the situation was growing, people wanted to hear what Duke’s owner had to say. Not wanting to be seen as cruel and unfeeling, Duke’s Master began talking. The more he talked, the further he involved himself. There was just no way to escape from this problem. Then, the idea came to him. “What I need to do is demonstrate to everyone how caring, sensitive, and supportive of property rights I am. Yes that’s the ticket!” He thought to himself, “if I show everyone that I have many free workers, just like Duke (there was OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, to name just a few) within my different systems; well then everyone would see how open I could be. Later Duke’s Master thought “if I change the license to give more freedoms to the community, they’ll leave me be.” Duke saw this and became very excited, maybe his freedom was not far off. Duke remained in chains. He was not going to be let go. As his co-workers were freed, he remained behind the walls of the SCSL and now the almost-free-but-not-quite JRL.

As time went by, Duke became more and more restless. As his owner kept taking him closer and closer to freedom, he remained in chains. He could almost taste his freedom, but yet he still remained a slave. Duke was, is, and remains to be owned by his Master and will probably never become free. If you listened closely, even as he went on stage to celebrate his tenth birthday there was a a faint whimper and sob from within Duke’s soul.

Little did Duke know that his plight had not gone without notice. For out in the world of open source, there were many scientists plotting, and planning, and working. and coding to find out how to free Duke. Unfortunately, even though some of the best minds in the world were examining Duke’s tortured life, they could not find a way to make him free. So they decided, if they could not free Duke, then they would clone him and fight to ensure that his clone enjoyed all of the freedoms that poor Duke would never experience. So they set out on the long path of decoding Duke’s DNA and recoding him piece by piece. Some worked on his libraries, some worked on his virtual machine, and some worked on his compiler. Some worked together, but mostly they worked alone or in small independent communities, with limited communication between them. Many of these cloning efforts were successful; many of them were providing close approximations of the capabilities of Duke. A free and open clone of Duke was slowly emerging, but he was still in pieces. The time was coming for some aspiring open source scientists to bring all of the pieces together.

Finally, from the most unlikely place, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, a young group of scientists took it upon themselves to bring the best pieces together. With the goal of creating a completely free implementation of the Java standard, the SNAP Development Center decided to be the first group to join the pieces together. They were going to finish the cloning of Duke. So it was, back in November of 2004 that Nacho, Nacho Queso Picante was born. Integrating together the SableVM virtual machine, the GNU Classpath Java libraries, and the Jikes Java compiler; Nacho represents the most complete integration of the cloned Duke pieces. Since his “birth” in November, the mad scientists in Puerto Rico have been slowly filling out the capabilities of Nacho. He now supports the Eclipse IDE, the Tomcat Java Server Container, the Jython Interpreter, and Ant.

So goes the legend of Nacho, the Puerto Rican clone of Duke. As Nacho roams free on the Internet, especially on Sourceforge.net where he enjoys unprecedented popularity and attention, Duke sits in his chains within the walls of the SCSL and the JRL licenses. On occasion, late at night when his Master is fast asleep, Duke looks out onto the Internet and his soul rejoices in knowing that his little known clone is enjoying the freedom that he long craves. Who knows? Maybe one day a community might come along and bring harmony between Duke and Nacho. Until that day, there are many scientists dedicated to improve Nacho’s pieces and make everyone know that he is Duke’s equal. It’s the least we can do for poor little Duke!

So without further delay, may I present to you Nacho Queso Picante:

Are you eating this up?

Related link: http://del.icio.us/

In my continuing survey of tags, tagging, and folksonomies, I now turn to del.icio.us. (Previous posts on the Googleplex Blog and O’Reilly covered Technorati, universal tagging, Folksonomic Discovery, and Gataga.)

First, the domain name del.icio.us is clever beyond belief. In fact, it is delicious. Whether or not tagging is important, these people should be given credit for cool word play.

To use del.icio.us, you need to register for the service. Once logged in, you can add “bookmarklets” to your browser. In Internet Explorer, the bookmarklets sit on the browser’s Links menu.

Adding these bookmarklets to your browser lets you tag web pages - meaning, you can add one word descriptors. You can view your own tags for pages, and those of others, usin another bookmarklet in your browser. Tags can also be discovered in quite a few other ways: by URL for tag, or author (and more) and sliced and diced via RSS. For example, each web page that has been tagged in del.icio.us has an RSS feed (the tags are the items in the feed).

There’s also a nice API in del.icio.us, and quite a few programming hacks already out there that use this folksonomy.

Finally, each user has a home page which is an easy way to access del.icio.us tags, users, and categories they’ve bookmarked.

So why should one bother with this? First, there’s an appeal to self-interest. It makes sense to appropriately tag one’s own pages in del.icio.us. Good tagging should lead to more traffic in much the same way that developing good meta information helps webmasters with the search engines. Second, it is fun to categorize our worlds. Since del.icio.us tags are used as part of the core library of other web folksonomies (for example, Technorati), efforts tagging via del.icio.us contribute to the common welfare. Finally, browsing popular tags is a good discovery mechanism - both ad hoc serendipity, and also following people who are interested in a research question similar to something you may be looking into.

If I am missing something important, please let me know!

Related link: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/38800/index.html

Tom Adelstein writes that a subtle but visible trail connects Bill Gates and Microsoft to the scandals Tom Delay has been fending off. Backroom deals are usually carefully buried and very extended, so it’s hard for a member of the general public to judge what is significant and what isn’t. But certainly there’s material here the press and the Congress should be looking at.

Kim Polese is a veteran of several key development projects and startups. At Sun Microsystems she was involved in the Oak project which eventually became the Java language. As an entrepreneur, Polese was CEO of Marimba, a company that pioneered automated change and configuration management of distributed computing components.

Her current job is CEO of SpikeSource, a startup that provides support services for open source software. Dan Woods asked her to respond to key questions that IT departments will ask about open source support companies. (Note the Reducing the Risk of Using Open Source: New Tools, Services, and Approaches panel at the Open Source Business Review conference (which is part of this year’s OSCON in Portland, Oregon from August 1 through 5) will address the emerging landscape for support and other services.)

Q. What sort of open source projects will lend themselves to commercial support services?

A. Frankly, any that are being used. Commercial organizations want to reduce their costs, and want to know that their deployments are covered in case of trouble. Cost reduction isn’t about doing eveything yourself, it is about finding a solution that provides the right mix of services you need at a price point that makes sense.

Q. Are Linux and Apache too mature and stable to require commercial support?

A. No. One might as well ask the same of Windows and Solaris. The fact is, customers want support and maintenance of any deployed solution. And even if a solution appears mature, the world around it changes. This reminds me of the story of the professor who didn’t change exam questions from year to year because the right answers changed. Reality changes.
Needs change. Risks change. Customers need service.

Q. How early in the open source lifecycle can support be offered?

A. That will vary by the supporting vendor and that vendor’s precise mix of service offerings. Consulting services are frequently concerned with customizations and tuning, and so may be offered relatively earlier in the open source lifecycle while the code is less complete. By contrast, traditional telephone support will become cost effective through economies of scale. Different vendors will probably start offering this service at different times, but we should expect this to follow consulting services offerings.

Q. What sort of bundles will be offered to IT departments?

A. The bundles will be familiar, because the commercial vendors designed their bundles around the business needs of their customers. So you’ll see maintenance, which provides software upgrades over time, support to assist with questions and problem resolution, and consulting for assistance with application development, product configuration and customizations.
Where things will differ is in pricing models. Commercial vendors almost invariably charge a maintenance fee based on the license fee. Support fees may also be tied to this metric. This was an easy model to understand. With open source components, other benchmarks will be tried in an attempt to serve customer and vendor needs more precisely.

Q. Will supported open source bundles be application-specific or be more likely targeted at providing infrastructure?

A. Both. This question is really asking whether customers will build their own applications or deploy prebuilt solutions. Some customers will install complete solutions, others infrastructure on which they build their own applications, and some will do both in different projects. In each of these cases, IT personnel will look to acquire services to reduce their deployment and maintenance and support costs.

Q. What skills will an IT department need to use commercially-supported open source?

A. This depends on the open source component’s lifecycle and the project underway. A later question asks regarding early adopter, early majority or late majority. The skills required will depend in part on this determination. Early adopters, by definition, are using the open source project before it is fully baked. There will be problems. Features won’t be fully implemented.
An IT shop will get involved with the project at this point in time because they have a specialized need and can derive commercial advantage through using and helping to develop this technology.
In this situation, the IT shop will need good development skills, either in-house or through services engagements. Being open source, the rest of the ‘team’ is remote, so strong communication skills and a different sort of problem solving that works with remote team members and distributed information sources will be important. It is also critical for developers to avoid temptation to make improvements for the sake of improvements - the value of open source is that a large community is working on it, so if your codebase diverges from the mainstream then it will become just another in-house product.
Once an open source product reaches mainstream use, the need to extend or correct the code is reduced and the skillset comes back to communication, remote interaction, and the ability to seek and utilize diverse external information sources.
In all cases, there is an additional need to be keenly aware that your team-mates work for other companies, frequently competitors. It is therefore important in using external information sources like discussion fora and mailing lists to be aware of the difference between public and private information. Debugging problems in public while protecting sensitive corporate assets and proprietary information requires forethought and tact.

Q. Will it appear to IT departments exactly the same as commercial software?

A. In many cases yes. In some cases it will appear better.
If using an ‘early adopter’ package it may appear much worse. A real strength of open source is the sensitivity to customer requirements. Because the users can and frequently do extend the product to meet their own needs, users of mature open source will frequently find it solving problems their commercial vendors never got to.
The risk in open source is that it is source, and there may be developers in their organization who want to take advantage of the source to “improve” the code. As mentioned above, this runs the risk of diverging your codebase from the public one, and both introducing errors as well as making it more difficult to pick up improvements from the community. The decision to modify the code is not one undertaken lightly. If a fix is really important, you should factor in time to contribute it back to the community.

Q. How much of the traditional productization of open source, item such as install scripts, documentation, configuration tools, will have to be provided by the provider of support services?

A. This is one of the weaknesses of several open source projects, and strengths of commercial support organizations. The developers of open source frequently don’t feel the need for good documentation, or the desire to devote the time required to write it. This is one of the parts of usual product release management that is lost by this development model. Similarly install scripts, configuration tools. Open source support organizations will be evaluated in part on how well they assist in this area.

Q. How can IT departments get this right?

A. Don’t go it alone. Getting anything right depends on information and planning. Open source deployments are no different. Support organizations are there to aggregate users to provide the economy of scale that is necessary to make good benchmarking, documentation, and best practices development worthwhile.

Q. Which sort of IT departments will find commercially supported open source most attractive? (early adopters, early majority, late majority)

A. It is less about the organization than the project and the status of the open source component being used. As described more fully above, those using early versions of new open source products will find consulting services more valuable. those using more stable, tried-and-true products will get more value from traditional support and the tooling and best-practices knowledge that comes with experience.

Q. What is SpikeSource’s business model and how does it address the issues raised so far?

A. SpikeSource will focus on integration and certification of well established open source components, and will offer periodic updates and support services around those integrations. Because of economies of scale, SpikeSource will provide better certification, documentation, and configuration tooling than end-users can justify developing on their own. The product updates we provide will follow a product management process and bug or security fixes will be provided in a separate stream from feature improvements to permit customers to better determine which upgrades they want to adopt when. Most of these updates will be sourced from the community, through active monitoring of development activity, but some will be developed in house in response to important problems that the community hasn’t yet addressed. SpikeSource will substantially reduce the cost and uncertainty of integrating open source products into IT applications.

SpikeSource, SourceLabs, Optaros, and a few other companies are pursuing this model. What is the likely effect of these service on the open source community, if any?

Related link: http://www.technorati.com

I’m going to be survey the world of tagging on the web, because I think this is an important (and occasionally obscure) area. Tagging has been dubbed the process of creating a folksonomy because it creates categorization schemes from the ground-up, rather than imposing heirarchies based on the opinion’s of experts.

Let’s start with Technorati. Technorati bills itself as the leading authority with what is going on in weblogs.

A little less nebulously, Technorati offers three important facilities:
- You can claim a weblog
- You can mark a post with a tag
- You can contribute your own tags

For these services to be meaningful, Technorati needs a library of tags and associations. This compendium comes from photos tagged in Flickr, links tagged in Delicious and Furl, and tags suggested by bloggers.

To claim a blog, you create a Technorati account, enter the URL for your blog, click the Claim Weblog button, add a little JavaScript code to the front page (or sidebar) of your blog, and ping Technorati to tell them you’ve added the code. (Here are instructions and discussion in the Technorati blog.) The code on your blog front page adds a link to all the blogs that link to yours. For example, I followed this process for Photoblog 2.0; you can see the Technorati logo and link part way down the sidebar on the right.

To add a blog entry of yours to the Technorati discussion “about” a given tag, search in Technorati for the tag, and then add the generated HTML code for the tag to your blog entry. For example, I am adding the Technorati link code for the tags Technorati, Tags, tagging, and folksonomy to this entry. In my opinion, this process and facility is the most important Technorati offering - it’s a great way to direct traffic interested in an area of discussion to your blog. This makes for high-quality traffic, because the content is relevant, and it makes it in the interest of bloggers to extent the Technorati folksonomy.

To add tags to the Technorati collection, you can add a tag to one of the sources Technorati uses, such as Flickr. Alternatively, you can tag your tag in one of two ways within your blog page (more information). Creating a category within a blog tells Technorati to treat the name of the category as a tag.

If I’m missing anything important, please let me know…

Related link: http://geovisualisation.com/WordPress/?p=36

Jeff Thurston writes, “If Google and Yahoo and others can make most of their profit from advertising by simply opening the vaults to spatial data and letting regular folks build, share and use geospatial information, why can’t national mapping agencies?” Good question!

Related link: http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2005-06-21/Fedora_and

This is a repost of an entry from Copia. I’ve been meaning to do this sort of thing, but it’s taken some time for me to wrap my head around the entire world of personal Weblogging.

My Fedora Core 4 upgrade has been remarkably smooth so
far. Here are the first two complaints
about Fedora Core 4. One big one and one little one.

The little one is that inkscape is useless in FC4, it seems. Segfaults
when you blink at it. So just use apt or yum to update, eh? Well, then
there is the big problem.

Fedora needs to fix its repository politics. All the following is my
perspective as a user, not as a packaging expert. Just anticipating the
nitpickers, let me say that I might be wrong on the factual background
of of some things I get from my impressions, but I know for sure what I
go through as a user. Third party apt and yum repositories for Fedora
Core comes in two divided worlds. On one hand there is Fedora
extras, considered the official
repository, with FreshRPMs and
Livna loosely certified as compatible. On the
other hand there is the group of repositories coming under the banner of

RPMForge (Web site still under construction),
led by Dag and including others
such as ATRPMS and
Dries. You usually cannot mix
these two worlds without screwing up your system.

This is the sort of thing that makes Debian folks laugh their heads off,
and they’re right to do so. (Of course my experience with Debian was so
miserable that I’m not in the least tempted to give it another try).
Worse than the lack of repository integration is the fact that the
various parties have spent energy flinging mud at each other that might
have been better spent in integration.

Most of the time, this doesn’t matter to me. I choose one side of the
fence and chug along. Every Fedora Core release I give yum and the
Fedora extras world a try for a couple of weeks. I can never stand it
longer than that. Yum is terribly slow. Fedora Extras and friends are
terribly slow to incorporate new software. As an example, when I run a
script to count the number of RPMs I’ve for from Dag, AT or Dries
because I can’t get reasonable fresh versions from Fedora extras and
friends, I come up with 89. This is a sure sign that Fedora extras
needs to work better with RPMForge. If I were happy with being six
months behind the software curve, I would have had one less problem with
Debian (I could have stuck with “stable”).

So I go on to Dag and friends, and actually, I’m fine from then. Those
guys do an amazing job of keeping up on new and updated software without
constantly breaking my system (the constant breakage was my other
problem with Debian when I went with “testing”). This big repository
split only really smacks me in the face on one occasion: at the point
after upgrading Fedora when I’ve been trying yum and Fedora extras for a
couple of weeks and realize it’s time to jump to apt and RPMForge. At
that point I have to do all the apt set-up for the right repositories
and co., and deal with the initial wave of conflicts. I’m about at that
point now, and hence this rant.

How does this schism serve anything except ego? Fedora extras and co
say the other side is uncooperative and will not submit to their
hard-core QA. Dag and co say say the other side is uncooperative and
insist on stomping on his repository all the time. Couldn’t something
be worked out so that in effect Fedora Extras is the equivalent of
Debian stable and RPMForge the equivalent of Debian testing? I don’t
know if that makes sense, but surely some form of compromise is
possible. The message boards are full of confused users and something
really must change.

We’ve just added del.icio.us tags to our articles. These are single keyword categories generated by the O’Reilly readers as they bookmark our articles in del.icio.us. The sum of these tags is a taxonomy (some say folksonomy) of articles that emerged from our readers rather than being handed down by our editors.

There’s value in both types. One’s authoritative. The other’s flexible and dynamic.

Getting Started

Look in the upper-right corner of articles for related tags, then follow each tag to other articles with the same tag. Here’s an example article that’s tagged with ruby rails programming tutorial web

Rolling with Ruby on Rails

If you want a better way to keep your bookmarks (and also contribute to the O’Reilly categorization system), head over to the del.icio.us site.

Beta Thoughts

We’re calling this Beta because we’re still experimenting with it. We’ll be releasing early and often. And keeping a diary of the results here.

We were tempted to self-populate our articles in del.icio.us. Only 22% of our article content has been tagged. It’s hard to leave so much good content
out of the categorization.

However, the numbers look much more encouraging when viewed by year. Here’s percentages of articles with del.icio.us tags: 2005 - 71%, 2004 - 51%, 2003 - 23%, 2002 - 16%, 2001 - 10%, 2000 - 6%. The article coverage is rising with the popularity of del.icio.us.

We’ve gotten two deliveries of data so we’re already able to say which tags are on the rise. The top three gainers (over the course of a week) map exactly to the buzz around the office, ajax (+469 tags), ruby (+378 tags), rails (+333 tags).

Our editors were concerned about innapropriate tags. We can live with typos or synonyms, but you’re not going to be seeing naughty words get through. That’s
because we’re moderating new tags before they get incorporated into the site. So far there’s been 1174 tags, plenty of typos, and no obscenities.

Joshua Schacter, founder of del.icio.us, gave us data for all our pages (like weblogs)- so there’s a lot more to work in. I have a feeling that he’d like to offer this data to all sites. Thanks Joshua!

Stay tuned.

What do you think of folksonomies?

Related link: http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/damian-bpp-20050622.html?orm

The Perl Review interviews Damian Conway about his soon-to-be-released O’Reilly book Perl Best Practices.

Related link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596101058/theperlreview-20?creative=3276…

Learning Perl 4th Edition is just around the corner, and it has my name on the cover! That probably isn’t a big deal to most people, so you’ll have to forgive my glee. I actually learned Perl from the first edition of Learning Perl (the “pink llama”), and now, ten or so years later, I worked on the latest edition of it.

It’s actually a bit odd for me. I work with Randal Schwartz at Stonehenge, the original and sole author of the first edition, and I still feel like he’s The Man. Maybe that’s a good reason for my name to be in all lower case next to his (well, next to Tom’s, really, since I’m the last of the authors).

This also means I get to take part in an O’Reilly book signing event at OSCON. All three of the authors of the newest Learning Perl will be there so you can get the signature trifecta if you stop by.

Related link: http://advogato.org/person/jayakumar/diary.html?start=7

Comparing ideas to physical property is usually a mistake, but Jaya Kumar goes one better and asks why the Chestertonian fence of legal protection of physical property is important. If ideas lack those types of limitations, perhaps they don’t need similar protections for the public good!

I just finished Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, and like pretty much everyone else who has read that book, I was awestruck and inspired. Like a couple of other authors before me (see end of blog for list), I’m seeking to apply Diamond’s analysis to the question of which type of software will prevail: open source or commercial software.

The book is a mind-expanding journey through Diamond’s analysis of why certain societies in the world dominated others. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” refers to the proximate causes of the domination. The book, however, is a detailed analysis of why certain societies developed “Guns, Germs, and Steel” that enabled them to prevail, while others didn’t. The book is framed as a long answer to a question that Yali, a tribal chief in New Guinea, asked Jared Diamond about why Europeans had all the “cargo”, Yali’s term for technology. (If you haven’t read the book, a rapid-fire summary has been prepared by Michael McGoodwin.)

For the past two years I have been writing a book entitled, Open Source for the Enterprise that will be published by O’Reilly later this year and I have been thinking quite a bit about when open source has and advantage over commercial software and when the reverse is true.

I have come up with my own version of Yali’s question: When we look back on the landscape of software twenty or thirty years from now, which type of software will cross the ocean to take over the other? Will open source be the conquering force? Or will commercial software contain the growth of open source to small islands? Or will the map of the software landscape look like a complicated mosaic with each type of software owning certain territory?

To Diamond, winning societies are those that developed food production through farming, supported by domesticated animals, which created surplus food and enabled a sedentary lifestyle as opposed to hunting and gathering. This extra food and time allowed technology to develop because a division of labor led to the creation of specialists. Living in larger groups with animals in close proximity led to lots of germs and diseases being passed around, which created a population of people that evolved to have resistance to certain sorts of diseases and carried germs that were lethal to other societies. As the fundamental causes of who developed food production, Diamond points to preconditions for agriculture, such as the number of wild crops that could be adapted to farming, the number of species available for animal domestication, an east west continental axis that allowed for expansion of crops along the same climate conditions.

One of the interesting things about Diamond’s analysis is how he uses linguistics to track the path of how certain cultures have dominated others. In two chapters, How Africa Became Black and How China Became Chinese, Diamond presents two maps (Figure 16.1, and 19.2 for those who have the book) that show how pockets of languages have sustained themselves in certain areas. Diamond suggests that languages in the pockets used to dominate, but were enveloped by the conquering languages and cultures.

Diamond also presents an interesting analysis of why New Guinea resisted being enveloped by invading Austronesians who landed on their shores but didn’t dominate the island as they did on other lands such as Indonesia, which were populated by hunter gatherers. When the Austronesians invaded, the New Guineans already had farmer powered cultures which enabled them to resist domination, unlike other islands that were still in their hunter gatherer state.

So, which will it be? Is open source vs. commercial software a case of a farmer power vs. hunter gatherers in which the farmer powered culture will dominate? Let’s call this Open Source Wins All. Or will the battle be more equal, farmer-power vs. farmer power? (Lengthy Standoff) Or is the assumption that open source has the farmer-power-like advantage just plain wrong? (Open Source Contained)

Open Source Wins All represents the conventional wisdom among open source advocates. If we think of a map like those in Guns, Germs, and Steel, then in the Open Source Wins case it will look like open source has captured most of the territory leaving commercial software in only remote islands. Byron Sebastian, CEO of SourceLabs, is an articulate advocate of this view. He argues that the “era of extortion is over” and that the “enterprise software business model is dead.” Sebastian sees the software industry as ready to fall prey to a Napster sort of disruption. Commercial software companies will no longer be able to sustain a model of charging a large amount for copying and selling CDs. Sebastian points out that software has become cheap to manufacture because of highly skilled, low-cost workers in countries like India, China, and parts of Europe. Customers for enterprise software are tired of being locked in and would prefer to have choices. Open source will offer those choices and companies like SourceLabs will provide the missing support, quality control, and packaging services to make open source ready for enterprise use. Other companies like SpikeSource and Optaros have been founded on this premise.

But to me, this is a version of bubble thinking which ignores much of the reality of the nature of open source and the nature of enterprise software companies. Commercial software is farmer-powered and has many strengths that open source lacks, which will lead to a Lengthy Standoff. Open source has mostly provided general purpose infrastructure of interest to developers, such as the ability to create a solution for businesses not developers and to combine many solutions to solve the specific needs of an industry. This happens through the product management/product marketing process which looks not to scratch an itch of the person creating the software but to solve the needs of someone else, a potential customer. Commercial companies also are able to create ecosystems of expertise, documentation, and other forms of productization that open source projects do not offer most of the time. I argue in my book that IT departments must over come what I call the productization gap in order to successfully use open source.

Sometimes, some sort of product marketing/product management has brought many different pieces of infrastructure together to create a larger solution. Geronimo is a great example of this. But most of the time open source provides infrastructure that a developer wanted to build. Where is the viable replacement for MS Exchange? Commercial software provides solutions to businesses that solve problems that are of little interest to most developers. Open source is contained by the range of passion that developers have for creating a solution. This range of passion is not as universal as some open source advocates would like to think. Developers are not excited about creating advanced replenishment algorithms for the consumer products industry. They are not going to get peer recognition about writing interface drivers for RFID controllers and then linking them to all of the different warehouse management systems in use.

What about open source companies like Compiere, which is focused on ERP and SugarCRM, which has created products that are well outside the range of passion? These companies are actually commercial software companies that use open source as a marketing tool. They are not open source communities in the same way that Apache is.

So, what will the map look like in the Lengthy Standoff scenario? My view is that large areas of infrastructure will be conquered by open source, but there will be huge area of applications that the farmer powered commercial companies will maintain. Neither side will conquer and many pitched battles will be fought. Byron Sebastian’s arguments about development becoming cheaper apply to both commercial software and open source. Perhaps they mean that commercial software will be subject to more competition, not that commercial software will cease to exist. The commercial software business can learn lessons that open source teaches about software development without having to change the fundamental business model.

In the Open Source Contained scenario we must answer questions such as? What are the advantages of open source vs. commercial software? What is the range of passion? What are the product management/product marketing limits of the open source community process? and other related questions. I leave these to a later blog.

If you want to see a rip-roaring debate of this issue, please come to this session of the Open Source Business Review in which Byron Sebastian, Phil Moore, and a representative of the commercial software industry will debate the Open Source Wins All scenario.

Guns, Germs, and Steel inspired software articles:

• Geeks, Germs, and Software
  http://jdj.sys-con.com/read/49096.htm
• Guns, Germs, Steel and Open Source
  http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=326
• Guns, Germs, and Steel Summary
  http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/gungermsteel.html

I would love to hear from both the “Open Source Wins All” camp and from those in commercial software companies who have thought about this issue.

Related link: http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2005

The conference kicks off with a full day tutorial on “Advanced Networking Configuration” from Steve Whitehouse, Dave Miller, Jamal Hadi Salim and Patrick Caulfield; or two half day tutorials on “Advanced Shell Skills” and “Advanced Editing using Vim”.

Friday through Sunday runs the main conference, with streams on Applications, Case Studies, Desktop usage, Embedded Systems, Filesystems, Productivity, Networking and Security , Virtualisation and the Kernel (more info).

The conference is a good chance to meet others interested in the linux and unix in the UK, and a great way to broaden your knowledge and keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the world of linux. This low-cost event is for anyone with a interest in linux. And for people who have any serious interest in Unix and cross platform applications. While there are many talks discussing in depth the linux kernel, there are far more which sit above the kernel level and apply to the software, whatever OS you are running.

For those who book before the 30th June, the conference fee is only £40 (standard early bird rate; concessions avaiable).

See you there.
linux 2005 website

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/

Just a note about the
O’Reilly Open Source convention,

which you can get a discount on if you sign up over the weekend (early
registration ends Monday, June 20). I love attending this every
year–the energy really crackles–and it’s got more variety and a
bigger scope than ever this year.

Nevertheless, the core of O’Reilly’s examination of free software is
what free software always has been: a bunch of hackers having fun in
the knowledge (or pretense) that there are no boundaries. The Open
Source convention started many years ago as the Perl Conference, when
Perl was the locus of so much of that experimental and
get-it-out-the-door activity. This year,
Ajax
and
Ruby on Rails
are major topics. These have a lot in common: they’ve become prominent
in just the past few months, they build in derivative ways on
existing, well-established technologies, and they disdain highly
structured approaches to reward quick-and-dirty rapid application
development.

Further examples of this kind of happy hacking are href="http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/">Greasemonkey–which lets
users extend their Web browsing with a little coding, leaving behind
the corporations that have spent millions of dollars trying to combine
and extend the browser through Web Services–and Sprog, which lets
users filter and pipe data between programs using a graphical user
interface. So the original spirit behind Perl in the 1990s is still
very much alive.

Perl is still a big part of the convention, and other topics in open
source are getting increased attention there: the Linux track, for
instance, and a new subconference called the Open Source Business
Review, which gives practical advice to managers who want to make open
source work in the workplace.

The team has done a great job of bringing you the technologies
everybody will be using next year. I hope to see you there.

In a previous entry, I wrote about 43 Things and Flickr. These are two interesting, trendy, and (in least in the case of Flickr) extremely useful applications. (I think that 43 Things may be powerful in its own way, too.)

Both applications are well worth a look if you don’t know them. You use 43 Things to create a list of personal goals (here are some of mine, and a further discussion of the application). Flickr, in contrast, is used to share photos with a global community of photographers - and also for off-site image management, as in my Photoblog 2.0 and Digital Field Guide.

Flickr and 43 Things have in common that they provide a self-tagging mechanism. In 43 Things, you can apply tags you create to goals. In Flickr, you tag photos. A context in which everyone can freely tag (and categorize things) has come to be called a “folksonomy”. Put differently, a folksonomy is a bottoms-up taxonomy created by the people for the people rather than a top-down hierarchy constructed by experts - the usual model for a taxonomy.

These folksonomies are very useful for sorting, searching, categorizing, and making relevance determinations within an application. Both 43 Things, on its home page, and Flickr, on the Flickr Tags page, make use of a common visual metaphor in which the larger the font size of the tag, the more people have applied it (and the more important it is).

“Social bookmark” manager del.icio.us lets you tag and categorize web links, creating a web folksonomy competitive with web taxonomies like that of the ODP. (Technorati provides a somewhat reverse service which allows you to track usage by tag in weblogs.) So del.icio.us and Technorati have created folksonomy-related services that distribute across the myriad sites in the web.

But what about aggregating folksonomic discovery across applications (as opposed to sites)? Why shouldn’t I be able to cross-correlate 43 Things tags with Flickr tags?

A beta application named Gataga uses a frankly Google-esque user interface to aggregate social bookmark tags from del.icio.us, blogmarks, blinklist, jots, spurl, furl, simpy and connotea.

Gataga will display its folksonomic search results as an RSS feed (just as Technorati does), which is very useful: you can subscribe to stay updated. But there are big missing pieces in this application. For one thing, it doesn’t include 43 Things and Flickr, off the beaten track of social bookmarking spanning web content, but far and away my favorites for fun and utility as self-tagging folksonomies.

There’s also the issue of what you do with the folksonomic information to make it easy to grasp and genuinely useful. There has to be more than the font size = number of instances visual metaphor. I’d like to see graphic representations of similarity, relevance, occurence, and connection using dynamic link maps. This stuff has ways to go.

Still, it is a big mistake to underestimate the power of bottoms-up technology movements (witness Linux and open source). An apparently humble concept, self-tagging and the folksonomy, has the potential for toppling the hegmony of indexed search as the predominant way we find information on the web.

What are your favorite examples of self-tagging folksonomies?

I downloaded and installed Fedora Core 4 two nights ago. I wiped my hard disk clean (60 GB, not the 10 GB one), allocated approximately 16 GB for Windows XP, installed that first, and then I did a clean install of Fedora Core 4 using all the remaining disk space.

It took me several tries to successfully install Fedora Core 4 (using 4 CDs). Several times, the installation froze on me when I used my CD-RW drive. Then I switched to use my DVD drive and the installation was successful. I noticed nothing glaringly different with the installation process between FC4 and FC3, except the customized option to now install Java and Eclipse. I did a customized and beefed-up workstation install (no server), and I decided not to install Java and Eclipse from the CD.

The dual boot Windows XP and FC4 worked well. I booted Windows XP first –no problems. Then I booted FC4 for the first time. Again, I noticed nothing glaring different with the boot process, maybe it was slightly faster. When I was asked to configure my display, it still could not recognize that I was using a Dell FP1503 (Digital) display.

As for initial user experience, I again noticed nothing glaring different except that the “Settings” menu was now on the top horizontal menu bar. The graphics and the Gnome interface seemed to be sleeker, which I liked.

Now for the fun part –installing software packages I need. Prior to installing Windows XP and FC4, I made a CD of all the software packages I need. In short, I experienced a few problems with several packages. I installed and executed the following packages without problems:

• chkrootkit (.tar.gz)
• Eclipse 3.0.2 (.zip)
• f-prot (.rpm)
• Sun’s Java SDK and JRE 1.5.0_03 (.bin)
• John the Ripper 1.6 (.tar.gz)
• Mesa 3D 6.2.1 libraries (.tar.gz)
• EDITED (6/22/2005, 9:31 PM EST) Mono 1.1.8 (.bin) –despite popular rumors, Mono is not included in FC4. BEWARE, monodevelop is not perfect, errors on load and exit.
• Snort 2.3.3 (.tar.gz)
• Wine (.rpm)

I encountered problems with the following packages:

• Blender 2.37 (.bz2) - Installed without problems, but it could not find python installed on my machine (on opening the program).
• R 2.1.0 (.rpm) - Did not successfully install.
• VMware Workstation 5 (.rpm) - Installed without problems, but after configuring it via /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl, NAT failed. Then my machine crashed.
• xine-lib (.tar.gz) - Died on make.

ADDED (6/22/2005, 9:31 PM EST) up2date is very flaky. Normally, the up2date icon on the top would turn red every other day to notify you of updates. I found it very strange that did not turn red for days. I ran yum update (as root) and there were at least two dozen updated packages available. Hence, your best bet is to run yum update constantly.

Despite the problems and some shakiness with now using FC4, I am sure that all the problems will be resolved soon.

Any problems with your installation?

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/38/register.html

Here’s a gentle reminder: OSCON early registration ends on Monday, the 20th. Now’s the time to talk to your boss, reserve your tickets, and save a few hundred dollars on admission. (At the very least, you can come to my talk and heckle me about what didn’t make it into the new book.)

The fourth print issue (one full year! woo hoo!) of href="http://www.theperlreview.com">The Perl Review is going into
the mail this week (most of them today). TPR is the only print
magazine devoted to Perl. and you can subscribe href="https://www.theperlreview.com/cgi-bin/subscribe.cgi/orm">on our
website. You can get it as a PDF, on paper, or both. Current
subscribers can href="http://www.theperlreview.com/Subscribers/ThePerlReview-v1i3.pdf"
>download the PDF right now (and you should have received mail with
new credentials).

title="The Perl Review, Summer 2005" alt="The Perl Review, Summer 2005">

In the Summer 2005 issue (You can see the first page of most articles for free):

• Array Anti-Patterns — Alberto Manuel Simões
• Test::Randon — David Golden
• Building GTK applications in Perl — Grant McLean
• TPF Grants: pVoice — Jim Brandt
• Parser Combinators in Perl — Frank Antonsen
• Serious Perl — Henning Koch
• plus Perl News, Perl Mongers and Perl Foundation reports, book
  reviews, and more.

Subscribers get immediate access to the href="http://www.theperlreview.com/Subscribers/?orm">online PDF
versions, including al back issues.

Related link: http://whurleyvision.blogspot.com/2005/06/self-defending-networks-aggressive.htm…

William Hurley has just put up a justification of the field of network
security countermeasures (a term he clearly prefers to the term
critics like to use–”vigilantism”) along with a
brief history.

Like most people interested in pushing forward technology, I have
often been interested in those who try things that other people say
shouldn’t or couldn’t be done. That’s what led me to
investigate

early P2P filesharing systems
in 2000, for instance. I was interested then in the technical and
social movements Gnutella and Freenet represented, not the particular
usage of avoiding the legal ramifications of sharing files.

Countermeasures of the types Hurley describes (rather than some of the
crude and immature attacks promoted by others) look like another such
fertile area. The social interaction component, as with P2P, is
fascinating. Hurley is trying, through the open-source
OpenSIMS project,
to develop a completely transparent way to identify and protect
against attackers, and to get people around the world to collaborate
on this project. He’s even approached the Apache Foundation for help.

There’s a lot of talk about who can ensure security in our
society–and it’s not generally the authorities. I put forward the
idea in 1998 in an article titled
Cyber
Hygiene, Not Cyber Fortress Protects Our Networks. Isn’t OpenSIMS
thinking along the same lines?

Open source software offers many benefits over traditional proprietary software. However, many of these benefits may be beyond the reach of a majority of people that have the interest and the motivation, but may lack the time and ability to reap the benefits. Thanks to the dedication and unrelenting passion of many contributors around the world, open source software is advancing at a rapid pace. Unless we devise strategies to minimize the ramp-up time required to start learning and using open source software, we risk excluding a large portion of the computing community.

Now perhaps I should clarify this assertion. I think I can best illustrate my point with a story. Earlier this year I was preparing my laptop for an article I was researching. I tried the installation of this particular development language and environment myself several times with no success. I enlisted the help of a good friend and we started making progress. Then after about three weeks and about 40 or so hours of effort invested in the installation process, my Linux filesystem was made read only and I lost all of my time when my only recourse was to reinstall Linux and start over. This would be devastating under any circumstance, but imagine this happening to someone new to the open source project. What do you think their motivation might be like to continue investigation? What do you think their perception of the open source project might be?

Certainly, you could chalk this up to experience and keep pressing forward. I am typically not a glutton for punishment. Fortunately for the greater computing community there are just such people. While they are willing to invest hundreds of hours learning and mastering a new technology. This is not a realistic expectation for most within the greater computing community. I think this goes beyond plain usability. This includes the whole experience itself. What we need are strategies that help soften the dramatic impact to new enthusiasts from the trails and tribulations of installing, configuring, and learning new software. We need to reduce the burden necessary to manage the ever changing software builds and dependencies required for some software to function correctly

This article will present one such strategy, it provides an easy to use alternative for learning about open source software development, with special attention focused on open source Java. With the recent announcement and incubation approval of the Apache Harmony project, many Java developers around the world have a new found curiosity about open source Java. We at the SNAP Development Center believe that we have an alternative to satisfy their curiosity.

A little over a week ago, the SNAP Development Team released SNAPPIX 0.7. SNAPPIX is the first of its kind Linux Live CD focused on easing the tasks necessary to begin learning and using open source Java, Perl, and Python. Future versions of SNAPPIX will also include integration of PHP and Jython. Using SableVM, GNU Classpath, and Jikes SNAPPIX is the first Live Linux distribution with a fully open source implementation of the J2SE standard. This Live Linux CD contains full support of the Eclipse integrated development environment as well as support for the Apache Jakarta Tomcat servlet container. Finally, the CD includes KDevelop with full support for the Perl and Python programming languages.

SNAPPIX inherits from the Knoppix 3.8 release full support for floppy drive and USB Flash drive read and write capabilities. Think of it as a lightweight learning laboratory that you can take anywhere with you. With minimum operating requirements, the Live Linux CD will boot from most modern personal computers. The biggest requirement to use SNAPPIX is the ability to boot from the CD Drive. Once you have booted SNAPPIX from the CD Drive, and assuming your machine has the capacity, you can optionally install SNAPPIX to your hard drive.

So, are you like me? Have you struggled installing, configuring, and never really getting around to learning and using different open source software development tools. Have you wandered lost within the maze of dependent libraries and packages? Have you struggled to figure out how to make and configure the endless supply of libraries to get your tools fully operational? How has this affected your productivity? How has it affected your motivation? Did you continue to feel optimistic banging your head against a configuration issue that remained elusive. Have you also felt that sinking feeling that you get as you finally grokked what was happening with a new library and felt near completion only to discover that there was yet another dependency or new piece of software needed? Would you be interested in an alternative way to get started and stay productive as new releases continually appear? Well, if you have ever felt that way about open source Java, Perl, and Python, then would you consider trying SNAPPIX?

We in the SNAP Development Center believe that SNAPPIX provides a new approach to this problem. By using a Live Linux CD, we remove many of the obstacles that appear when attempting to use open source software development tools. We believe that SNAPPIX ushers into the community a more easy alternative to learning and using these tools. By simply using the latest version of SNAPPIX, an aspiring open source software developer has only to boot from the latest SNAPPIX CD or simply install the latest CD on top of a pre-existing SNAPPIX partition. SNAPPIX eliminates the hours of wasted time trying to install, configure, and maintain the leading open source software development tools. With future plans to add additional tools, more documentation, sample programs, and tutorials, learning to use these tools may never be the same.

To learn more about the SNAPPIX Live CD, please visit the SNAPPIX Product home page at http://www.snapplatform.org/snappix. To download the latest release visit our Sourceforge project home page. From the summary page you can download navigate to the latest release by following the links to the files list. From the SNAPPIX package, you can find the SNAPPIX 0.7 “FISL-Brazilzle” release. The release is available as an ISO CD image and as a BitTorrent seed. For information regarding the SNAP Platform please visit the SNAP Platform home page.

What else should we include in SNAPPIX?

According to SiliconValleyWatcher, Google is planning to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital mapping software to create realistic 3-D maps from the ground. There’s already an experimental truck cruising San Francisco, which is running into some problems with line of sight measurments due to pedestrians and vehicles.

Apparently, second and subsequent passes by the trucks through the city could eliminate erroneous data due to moving objects. But Google is looking for a way to 3-D map a city with a single pass.

I’ve been wondering for a while about the arms race into very cool mapping software - wonderful stuff to play with (interesting anomolies and all), but without a clear path to monetization (at least to me). A glimmer of where this is going is beginning to dawn on me: a very sci-fi world of realistic virtual mapping of local information truly would be a yellow pages killer, and Google has the resources and smarts to maybe pull this off.

What commercial uses do you see for this fancy, wonderful mapping stuff?

You don’t want to run out of camera memory on a once in a lifetime trip. That’s the advice I got before heading to Tibet. This was my second trip to China and I wasn’t expecting more in the way of computer access than I saw last time, occassional outdated computers with slow internet access. It certainly never dawned on me that Lhasa, Tibet’s largest city, would be overrun with large internet cafes, each cafe stocked with USB-capable computers and often even with CD burners.

This meant that the second 512MB memory card I’d bought was wasted money. I would have saved money by downloading and burning my photos to CD. I ended up buying a USB cable on the trip, but not without a lot of searching. Save yourself that hassle (and some money) by bringing yours.

The USB cable also lets you download and burn CD’s for your travelmates before the trip ends. My friends have busy lives and I wouldn’t want to be stuck hassling/begging for copies of their photos after the trip.

Having USB access also let us see our pictures on a computer in order to make adjustments and see which techniques were working. You don’t see enough detail to do this on a Camera LCD.

However you do it, make sure to take lots of pictures.
Here’s mine

Do you have more digital photography travel tips?

http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/ claims to be the world’s longest domain name. But is it? It turns out that this is a matter of definition. According to the domain registrars, the longest legal domain name is 63 characters starting with a letter or number.

If you included subdomains (which precede the primary domain name and are followed by a period) you can get longer, probably up to some limit supported by individual browser software.

If you include domain suffixes in your character count you also can get longer (+4 for .com and +6 for .co.uk, for example).

I don’t think either subdomains or suffixes should be included in the search fro the world’s largest domain name, meaning the best you can do is tie for first with 63 characters.

As Esther Dyson notes, nobody will type in these long names - they are opened by clicking links or selecting from a list.

Some other fun long domain names:

http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/: the 3 is a subdomain, I like the photo of Dr. Evil

http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/: a free email service

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/: named after a Welsh Village, claims to be the world’s longest domain name (of course, by my definition, it is at best tied) and in Guinness records as the world’d longest domain name (turns out the title is for world’s longest domainnamed after a real place)

Here are more longest domain names according to the Internet Book of Records (a strange name for a web site). Thanks to comments on Google Blogoscoped for getting me started on this trivia.

Any fun or interesting long domain names?

Related link: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/

Jorrit Tyberghein from Crystal Space and CEL recently announced that the Linux port needs more attention. The project is soliciting donations to buy a new Linux machine with decent 3D capabilities. I’m sure the project would welcome interested developers with their own hardware too. If you’d like to see Linux (and other free Unix platforms) have more game support, here’s one place where you can make a difference.

Before my WWDC presentation, I met Joe Maller who has an AppleScript to update the dates and times of photos in iPhoto. This is very cool, since I had tried (and failed) at a Perl solution.

The problem is that iPhoto’s dictionary claims the field is read-only. However, a user can change it in the Info pane of iPhoto. Joe simply scripted this through GUI Scripting.

I’m having a good time at WWDC. I can’t say much about what actually goes on, but I will let you know that in the morning there was a really cool talk with a great speaker, the fudge brownies that came with lunch were divine, then the afternoon had more cool talks by more cool people.

Randal gave his “Perl as a Glue language” Brown Bag session and it was well attended. People even knew what Perl is. I give my “Advanced Scripting” session in a couple of hours.

The O’Reilly store is selling books like gangbusters, and I hadn’t realized they had a lot of new stuff available. I have a long list of books to get now. Make magazine is the big hit, and I got the chance to talk to one of the Make editors for a bit. They have some cool marketing ideas for the future.

I’ve also seen a lot of Powerbooks with property stickers on them; you know, those things that assign everything a number and scream out “this is given to me by work”. Stickers on the silber Powerbooks just seems wrong, even though on the dark-cased G3s it seemed okay.

Tonight there is a party at the Apple Campus. Oh yeah!

What happen to colons in Google searches? As a Perl person, I used to be able to search for module names, such as “Term::ANSI”, and get back meaningful results. Now I get back results for “term ansi”, which is not the same thing.

Google’s become a lot less useful to me all of a sudden.

SEO (search engine optimization) contests take nonsense phrases such as (most famously) nigritude ultramarine, seraphim proudleduck, and loquine glupe. At the time the contest begins, the nonsense phrase (which may consist of “real” words) generates no results when entered as a query into Google. After the contest ends, of course, this is no longer true. For example, nigritude ultramarine currently gets about 116,000 results in Google.

The contest ends after a specified amount of time, usually six months. The Webmaster whose site is ranked first in Google’s search results for the contest phrase wins. Here’s the FAQ for nigritude ultramarine, probably the best known of the completed SEO contests sponsored by DarkBlue and SearchGuild.com. (There are good SEO forums at this last destination.)

How does a site get to the top of the results for one of these bizarre phrases? Almost anything goes, but the key points are getting inbound links, arranging for an ODP listing (or even two) and keyword stuffing. For an example of rather hilarious keyword stuffing, check out the winner of the loquine glupe contest.

At a time when Google’s market capitalization has passed Time Warner’s (as of June 8, 2005), it’s worth remembering that Google is built on stuff such as nigritude ultramarine, seraphim proudleduck, and loquine glupe - not to mention text ads for Mark Felt, the real “deep throat”.

Are there any oddball Google searches that you’ve done lately?

I finally made it to a WWDC. I’ve always wanted to go to one of these things, and now that I’m a “Guest Speaker” I can actually afford it. I can’t talk about the conference content, but there is plenty that happens in the hallways and outside of the conference schedule.

I got in last night, so I missed the first two days, which makes me the stupid kid in the back asking “Why’s everyone talking about Intel” with everyone else saying “That’s so Monday”. I like seeing so many Powerbooks in the audience. I’m still waiting to see some Windows machine since I figure there has to be one odd duck, but so far it looks like we’ve all drank the kool-aid.

I got to catch up with some open source people at dinner last night. Apple bought a very nice dinner for the Brown Bag speakers. Although I got to say “Hi” to Nat Torkington, Betsy W, Derrick Story, Guido van Rossum, and others, I spent most of the evening talking to Brian Jepson and Gordon Meyer since I was sitting next to them.

It turns out that Gordon just moved to Chicago, so maybe I can get a chance to see a fully automated home, or get him to sign my copy of his Smart Home Hacks. Heck, maybe he’ll start a business educating homes: I’ve noticed a lot of new condo developments in Chicago advertising things like networking closets and built-in Cat5 wiring.

Brian Jepson confirmed my suspicions that T-Mobile’s family plan account really isn’t any savings, so now I can rationalize ditching my current account so I can get a new Motorola Rzor. We talked about interfaces for a while. Randal Schwartz brought up that he thought TiVo is the best interface Man has ever created (or something close to that), and I figured that the Nokia interface on my 3650 must be the worst. When I first got my 3650, I didn’t like the interface too much but also figured that maybe I just needed to get into the mindset of a Finnish company. That never really happened. The Nokia phone is otherwise fine, but not enough to make me that loyal. In an earlier entry I outlined what I was looking for when I bought the Nokia.

Other than that, I haven’t done much at the conference yet (at least that I can talk about). Everything looks very nice though, and I really mean that. Everything looks fluid and clean and spacious like you’d expect from the people who win industry design awards.

It is my firm belief that in the coming years, the Information Technology industry will feel ever more sharply the impact of globalization, offshore out-sourcing, and open source software. I further believe that these three factors will force many companies and individuals out of that industry. Therefore, it follows that the competition within the industry will intensify. So if we want to remain competitive in the coming hyper-intensive IT future, we must be sure that we continue to improve the quality and timeliness of our product deliveries.

With the recent emphasis in software development on process-related software testing, it is clear that test driven software development, and other processes that emphasize testing will be critical in maintaining that competitiveness. We all must actively manage the quality of our products and we should seek out and master any tools that attempt to ease or improve our testing efficiency.

SpikeSource, Inc. has brought to market just such a set of tools. The recently announced availability of an automated testing service should prove to be an irreplaceable tool in our effort to remain competitive. If you believe as I do, then any opportunity to better understand these new tools shouldn’t be missed.

Well, you are in luck. Well you are in luck if you happen to be in the San Francisco area next Friday afternoon. On June 17, 2005 at 3:00pm SpikeSource will host their first TestFest in their Redwood City Headquarters. With free food, free drinks, and free presentations it seems like a great combination.

During the TestFest, SpikeSource will offer the opportunity to hear more about how you can use Open Source testing tools effectively to make your life easier. With specific tracks about interoperability testing, testing with Simpletest, PHPCoverage, and HTTPUnit, and an introduction to participatory testing there should be something for just about anyone interested in improving the quality of their open source software. They are even offering to help you get started testing your project with their tools and services. Once again, if we want to remain competitive, then we must seize every opportunity to differentiate and improve ourselves. That seems like an opportunity waiting to be seized.

So if your into getting other people to make your software better for you, and aren’t most open source software developers, then make sure you register ahead of time to secure your space. With the participation of some of the leading open source projects and project leaders, this promises to be a great opportunity to prepare for the future, get your geek on, and geek out with some great folks.

Are you planning to attend?

New languages always have to prove themselves. Listen to some old
programmers, and there was never a need to go further than MUMPS. (But
luckily, no one listens.) Others claim that no text processing
language can outdo Icon or Snobol. I never thought I’d be editing
material on Forth for an O’Reilly book, but danged if author John
Catsoulis didn’t decide it was just the ticket for an embedded systems
designer in his new edition of
Designing Embedded Hardware.

Stop it, Andy! You’re not here to sell books today. You’re
here because your buddy Zak Greant let you know that PHP is seeing
its tenth anniversary today, and is coordinating a worldwide movement
to

honor and thank
its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf.

Anyway, new languages have to prove themselves, particularly because
they usually borrow from the past and represent incremental
improvements. Was Java a necessary improvement over C++, and was C# a
necessary improvement over either of those? Did Python build on the
best of Perl or was it blind to Perl’s charms, and is Ruby the final
installment in this succession of scripting languages?

The old folks always feel resentment at the success of the new
platform, and this certainly goes for me and many Perl programmers
since the advent of PHP. But evolution means a change in both the
organism and the environment: the organism that thrives is the one
that adapts to its environment. And since the major forum for
exercising a scripting language in the 1990s became the CGI Web
interface, PHP represented a near-ideal evolutionary adaptation to
that environment. (SOAP has not challenged CGI’s dominance as the
paradigm for interactive Web programming.) Use the Web and CGI, and
you’ll want PHP.

(Hint: it integrates with Web pages very much like all the other
frameworks for embedding dynamically executed code in a Web page.)

That’s why .php is one of the most common suffixes now in
URLs, and why PHP’s PEAR repository of useful packages has in a short
time grown to enormous dimensions.

The experts say Java or .NET is a more robust framework. If you’ve got
the time, go right ahead and use them. PHP is the disruptive cousin in
the technology family. It makes it easy for ordinary folks to set up
Web pages the way users want them these days: interactive, responsive,
and customized. PHP helps keep the Web democratic.

We are still benefitting from grass-roots Web innovation–scruffy,
unpretentious, and just plain fun–thanks to Rasmus’s modest but
highly insightful scripting innovations. And he even wrote a

book for O’Reilly. (Stop it, Andy!)

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/38/osbr.html

Every year at OSCON, Tim O’Reilly gives a speech about his latest views on technology, publishing, and whatever else is on his mind. At every speech that I’ve seen, at some point he stops to explain that one thing he wishes more people would understand is that what the company does, how it creates value, is not primarily by publishing books, but rather by helping communities come together and communicate with each other. Publishing is one way that that happens, so are conferences, so are web sites, creating developer communities, and FOO camps. The point that I have always taken away from Tim’s observation is that it is important to look deeper into organizations to understand what really makes them tick. The essential processes may be obscured by the visible evidence.

So it is, in my opinion, with open source when applied by Information Technology departments. The visible evidence that is typically the focus of discussion is the “free as in beer” lack of license fees, the ability to thumb one’s nose at vendors, and the innovative uses to which many companies have put open source. What is less visible, but I believe the main event, is the surrounding skills and processes that IT departments have had to acquire and manage in order to make open source successful.
What makes open source a nightmare at one company and a victory at another? It’s not the software. What interests me about open source is the way that it forces IT departments to address the issues that are central to making the essential processes of IT work better. Here are a few examples:

Using open source forces conscious management of the skills of an IT department. With most commercial software an ecosystem of support and consultants exist to deliver expertise for a fee. This allows an IT department to effectively ignore the question of determining the right level of skills and learning how to institutionalize them so they are not focused in one person. With open source, the ecosystems for support and consulting are usually weak or non-existent, although a host of new startups is attempting to change this for certain types of open source. Using open source requires an increase in skill levels for most IT departments. The point is to use open source an IT department must consciously decide what skills such as expertise in certain languages, infrastructure, or applications that it is going to develop and leverage to the greatest extent possible.

Open source forces attention on designing a hybrid architecture. With most commercial software, the architecture at many levels comes with the products. That is, the way everything fits together and the qualities that are created, such as an emphasis on flexibility or performance or ease of use is all determined by a product designer. With open source, the IT department must create a hybrid architecture to make things work, and in doing so must examine the question of what is the right architecture for the company’s specific needs. This is a question that is not asked enough in most IT departments. In creating an hybrid architecture, an IT department generally improves its architectural skills and its ability to understand how to integrate all of the components in its infrastructure together.

Governance is another issue that must be managed carefully by IT departments adopting open source. Governance can mean many things, but in this context, I mean the rules by which management exerts control over the department. For most IT departments that use commercial software, governance happens through the purchasing process. You have to pay money for commercial software, so to get access to that money, a strong case for the software must be made. There always is a limited amount of money, so only so much commercial software can come in the door. Open source makes governance more challenging. Anyone can download open source and install most programs quite quickly, which distributes the power to consider which software to use. Because there are no license fees, the purchasing process cannot be used as an effective governance mechanism. The lack of license fees means that the size of the budget is not a constraint on how much open source can be used. Adopting open source forces companies to think about how to extend their governance mechanisms to encompass a larger group of people and address a broader set of issues.

Open source forces companies to improve their game when it comes to evaluating how well software meets its requirements. With commercial software, a vendor usually has all sorts of mechanisms such as case studies, white papers, customer references to explain what a piece of software does. Too often, an IT department must rely on these mechanisms or is not able to install the commercial software and determine its capabilities and how well they meet the requirements. With open source software generally the software is all there is. To determine what it does and how well it works and how well it meets requirements, an IT department must install it and perform experiments. While this is a burden in one sense, it usually prevents any surprising requirements mismatches later on.

With commercial software, support is a monopoly, only one vendor provides support for each product. While for open source, a market is forming. A variety of companies are competing to offer various kinds of support services. Adopting open source means that an IT department has to go beyond taking comfort in that there is one throat to choke, and must decide what support tasks it will take on and which will be outsourced. This generally means the issue is given more consideration.

Using open source forces an IT department to understand its relationship to intellectual property. Intellectual property with commercial software is pretty straightforward. The vendor usually warrants that it owns the intellectual property in the software that it is selling and the buyer is protected. With open source, an IT department must determine how it is going to manage the risk that the intellectual property in an open source project is not going to create liability. This is especially complicated when building software using open source.

With all of these issues, adopting open source in a thorough and responsible manner raises consciousness and forces an IT department to address fundamental issues in a more complete manner than is common practice. The higher skill an organization has, the more likely it is to be a heavy user of open source. What makes such organizations effective, though, is not just technical skill, but the better management processes that must be put in place to manage the use of open source. This is the essential underlying gift behind the visible manifestations of open source.

Of course, there is no reason that any of the sort of consciousness raising that is described here couldn’t happen without adopting open source. And using open source is no guarantee that all these things will happen. But for an IT department that is really paying attention, adopting open source where it makes sense can be like a management fitness program that results on the sort of empowerment that Doc Searles envisions in is prescription for Do It Your Self IT.

If you like thinking about these sorts of issues and you think that you might like to talk with others who find them interesting, I hope you take the time to check out the program for the Open Source Business Review, a new premium conference that is part of this year’s Open Source Conference. The conference program is aimed straight at teaching IT departments how to address the issues raised above.

I look forward to hearing from fellow travelers who have experience addressing these issues in IT departments.

Related link: http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-Prelude.ht…

I’ve long believed that Google’s ranking of responses to search rankings–the famous PageRank algorithm, now with more than 100 variables–is manipulated by human editors working for Google under an algorithmic facade. (See related posts on the Googleplex Blog and in my O’Reilly blog).

Now, there’s some hard evidence that this is true. Dutch investigative reporter and search expert Henk Von Ess blogs about what he calls Google’s Secret Evaluation Lab.

The real name for this secret part of Google is Rater Hub Google. It’s staffed, mostly on a temp basis, mostly from international universities. Google calls these hires “international agents” or “quality raters.” Here’s a help wanted ad for the position from Monster.com.

Quality raters apparently spend their time checking search results, deprecating spam, moving the best results to the top of the search result stack, and (possibly) testing experimental Google features. This sounds like a kind of fun job!

Seriously, it isn’t really surprising that Google has found the need to inject human editors into the equation. My objection is to the false pretence that Google’s results derive from some purely formulaic (and supposedly objective) measure (likened in my previous posts to the Wizard of Oz hiding behind a screen while he makes a show for Dorothy and the others).

The Henk Van Ess blog item is really worth checking out. He promises more information to come. By all means review the Flash presentation on his site that shows some of the Rater Hub Google software - very interesting indeed!

Like Inspector Raynaud in the film “Casablanca,” who was shocked, simply shocked that gambling was going on as he pocketed his share of the take, are you shocked that Google uses humans to tweak search results, or did you know it all along?

If you were wondering where I’ve been for the last few weeks, here is the answer. Got out of it alive, but ended up in a hospital:

The guy who drove into me did not stop at the ‘Give way’ sign. It’s his third crash in the last 3 months since he got his driver’s license. He’s 19. Who gave him the license?

I must say these dinky little Toyotas are built like elephants, the other guys Ford Mondeo estate is heading for the scrapyard. The next car I buy will be a LandCruiser with bull bars… No, don’t teach me about protecting the environment. There were over 1,4 million old, mostly post-crash cars imported into Poland since we joined the EU last year. Everyone and their dog wants a cheap car and the roads are full of inexperienced fools behind the steering wheels.

How do we use technology to spot dangerous drivers before they ram into us?