Related link: http://ospedia.osdir.com
In the last couple of months I’ve fallen in love with the wiki as a collaborative tool, as a fun tool, and as a community tool.
I started playing with them after using the one that was set up for the Emerging Technology Conf. this spring. What was facinating was there was no barrier to participating. No logins required, no fancy coding skills required and everyone is invited to participate. And everyone did.
In a wiki everyone has permission to change any page. Sounds a bit scary, but since everyone can have their say there really is no incentvie to “own” a page or site. You already do. It comes that way.
Over the past month I had the privledge of working on the newly launched Java.net Javapedia. While the project had a benevolent dictator, as any good project has, we were invited to start the javapedia from scratch with whatever we wanted.
As it started to come together it was a great community builder as I started going through what others were adding to the wiki & discovered what my fellow wiki contributor’s interests were. I started with open source apps written in Java. Big surprise, but everyone stuck to their thing and most are still contributing.
Then, the “unofficial” OSCON 2003wiki popped up.
Now, I don’t pretend to be brilliant, but I recognize good ideas when I see them. I find “A”s to add to “B”s and make “C”s.
“A” is the JavaPedia, “B” is the unofficial OSCON wiki, and for me this equals “C”: OSPedia - The Open Source wiki.
Everyone and anyone is invited …and, it’s official.
Lawrence Lessig asked us all in his OSCON 2002 speech, “What have we done?”
The new Google AdSense campaign has made a lot of ripples throughout the blogging world. Let me make a proposal. If you feel so inclined to ad GoogleAds to your personal or hobby weblog why not send the cash to the Electronic Frontier Foundation?
If you have a readership that prizes freedom on the internet, and what greater freedom is there than speech, why not support the EFF with an effortless act that, en masse, could help them fight for your freedom online?
Need some incentive?:
- RIAA Plans Lawsuits Against File Traders
- Hatch Takes Aim at Illegal Downloading
- Hacker hero, Hollywood nemesis on trial
The list goes on…
I think you always hurt the ones you love. So let me send out a little love to Apple this time.
Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developer’s Conference) has me pumped up. When Steve Jobs used the words “user centric” I though I was going to spill my coffee. I was watching the WWDC keynote over a quicktime stream in my housecoat this morning. Something I might not do when my iSight arrives!
“user centric”. Quite a mouth full isn’t it? A lot of companies say it & don’t mean it. Some say it and outright disgrace it. Everything I saw this morning made me reel in the fact that Apple really, truely gets it and delivers.
It was so obvious that everything that Apple was showing off was more of a display of having listened to users than crooning about their own achievements. I can’t even imagine what happens at Microsoft HQ when they watch and hear about events like this. Apple’s people experience the same pain or frustrations as their users when something doesn’t work quite right and they fix it or improve it or whatever. I had to wrestle with a windows box this morning to get a simple mp3 player to be recognized over USB. Shshh.
They even have the guts to say that Microsoft beat them being to being able to change (I won’t use the word switch) users easily. Then they just changed so they could. No bitching. No excuse making. They just did it. What a refreshing change from the companies I usually have to deal with.
Aside from user centricty those new improvements in Panther look supurb. The new finder, audio/video conferencing that actually just works (I only got to try the audio, but it was from Canada to Germany!), iSight… The new iSight is designed to sit on top of your laptop screen so people don’t have to look at the side of your face, but into your eyes…, faster search, & the automatic sync’d backups to idisk, built in fax sending… like this is a money maker? It’s in there because users needed it in an OS.., and encrypted file access via FileVault.
I won’t harp on the G5. I’m trying not to think about it. Wow.
Anyway, I’m quick to condemn & try to be equally quick to praise. Kudos.
Related link: http://www.computerwire.info/brnews/448B94DB6CEB5D0B80256D4B003C37ED
“Red Hat Inc is in discussions with Sun Microsystems Inc about launching an open source version of Sun’s Java environment, according to Red Hat chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik.
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux distributor is also lining up a slew of product launches including its new Red Hat Linux Desktop operating system and new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Network.
Szulik said that Red Hat has been working for five years on open source versions of Java technologies such as Just In Time compilers and Java Virtual Machines in a clean room environment, and has requested the sponsorship of Sun to go ahead with the full-scale project.
“There’s always been an interest in an open source implementation of Java developed in a clean room that adheres to the Java standards,” Szulik told ComputerWire. “We’re in discussions with Sun. We’d like to do this with their support.”
Sun has shied away from calls to launch an open source version of Java in the past, but has contributed other technologies to the open source community, such as the OpenOffice office applications suite and the NetBeans Java development environment. The company has also made it easier for open source Java 2 Enterprise Edition implementations to be tested against the official Test Compatibility Kit without being required to also accept official J2EE code.
Sun might be persuaded that an open source version of Java would help it to compete with Microsoft Corp’s .NET and C Sharp, especially since the Mono project is developing open source implementations of the .NET development framework for use on Linux and Unix.
Szulik said that discussions between Red Hat and Sun had reached a “very serious stage”, but he would not estimate a timeline for the delivery of an open source version of Java.
Would you like to see this happen?
Related link: http://www.cio.com/archive/031503/opensource.html
An excellent report on Open Source from the magazine CIO was brought to my attention over the weekend. for anyone with a doubtful CIO you may want to send him/her a copy of this.
The executive summary:
The open-source movement is helping turn significant chunks of the IT infrastructure into commodities by offering free alternatives to proprietary software. The promise of the past several years has begun to materialize as one by one the hurdles to open-source adoption have dropped away. Major enterprises are running mission-critical functions on open-source IT. Big vendors have lined up to support it or port their applications to it. CIOs who have implemented it report significant reductions in total cost of ownership. Our conclusion? CIOs who don’t come to terms with this revolution in 2003 will be paying too much for IT in 2004. To avoid getting stung, CIOs should pursue as least some components of this 2003 open-source agenda: Get your feet wet with relatively low-risk Internet applications. Investigate the new support offerings from Dell, IBM, Sun and others. Start replacing proprietary Unix hardware with less costly Intel systems running Linux. Standardize infrastructure, including Web servers and desktop systems. The more daring will move enterprise level apps like SAP to Linux platforms.
The rest of the article only gets better. It is perfectly tuned for your CIO.
Related link: http://craphound.com/canterreboot.txt
“The people’s mesh” struck me like lightning.
Marc “MacroMedia” Canter’s talk at reboot as blogged by Cory Doctorow mentions:
“Things need to be small and modular: programmers working nights, little companies. The VCs pushed us to head for IPO, so entire companies were based on one feature. In my world, companies have multiple products.
I’m going to talk about Longhorn and how we can compete with
MSFT.
Open source: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. With the right standards,
we can equal Longhorn by building a people’s mesh.”
Not mind blowing, but put into words, “The people’s mesh” sounds so powerful. I’m not so sure about the standards thing though.
Related link: http://home.earthlink.net/~wifi-shootout/
The hackers convention is holding its first wi-fi shootout with the aim of shooting wi-fi signals the longest distance between the roof of the Alexis Park Hotel and the outlying areas of Las Vegas without relaying. Categories of competition include using “non-modified”, “homemade” and, “enhanced” wi-fi gear.
“The Guinness World Book of Records distance for a wi-fi link is 310 kilometers, and was set by the Swedish company Alvarion”
310 kilometers????
On my continuing journey of reintroduction to Instant Messaging I’ve found it a bit of a downer that I can’t grep iChat logs. Well that changed today with a hack called iChatexporter.
With installation, a restart of iChat, and a batch conversion I’m now happily grepping those iChat logs and finding info that would otherwise take me forever to find again.
iChatexporter info.
Does this not make your life better?
Related link: http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/osx.asp
Andromeda is a super easy way to get your iTunes streaming back. The functionality anyway.
OS X ships with everything you need to run Andromeda: Apache (or “Personal Web Sharing”) and PHP. You can even configure Andromeda to serve files downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (see bottom).
Remember, I would never encourage you to break the laws of your land. That’ll just get you in trouble. Or maybe me. Anyway, have fun streaming again.
What do you suggest for streaming from your OSX box?
