that’s whacked

OSCON 2007 wrapup

Monday, Jul 30. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos

Wow, last week at OSCON was a blur. Between booth duty, the Sun party, and all the talking to people, I was thoroughly exhausted. I spent most of the weekend recovering from sleep deprivation.

anyway, all my photos are up. we had a great time, talked to a ton of people, and learned many important life lessons. one of which is:

Rearranging the letters of OpenSolaris spells ‘penis’.

Sun OSCON BOF

Tuesday, Jul 24. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris at OSCON

Sunday, Jul 22. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

I’m in Portland for OSCON this week; looking forward to going to a bunch of sessions and talking to people about OpenSolaris. Glynn posted a nice summary of the various OpenSolaris related events going on at OSCON.

If you’re in Portland and interested in chatting about OpenSolaris, drop me a line.

ooma-riffic

Thursday, Jul 19. 2007  –  Category: Linkage

So the cat is out of the bag now.

Some of my friends know I’ve been beta-testing this for the past few months…. I gotta say, I’ve been really happy with it.
The voice quality is great, and the voicemail features and smart 2nd line are really nice. It seems to work well with my home network setup (including being behind my router so I can continue to have port forwarding), etc. etc.

Anyway, I’m psyched to see it out of beta now.

San Jose Earthquakes back in 2008!

Wednesday, Jul 18. 2007  –  Category: Football

woohoo. this just brightened my day. it’s confirmed, the San Jose Earthquakes and major league soccer will be back in the bay area in 2008.

a rant on social network dilution

Monday, Jul 16. 2007  –  Category: Musings

I stumbled across TopLinked.com, a site listing the top linked people on LinkedIn this morning.

Am I the only person who finds this sort of dilution of social networking annoying? It’s the reason I stopped using Orkut, Friendster, and all the other gazillions of social networking sites. LinkedIn is the one site I continue to actually use because of the value of professional networking; but this value is derived from what I thought was from an actual network.

People with thousands of connections and notes like “(accept all invitations)” are pointless. What value are they adding to the network? Clearly they can’t actually professionally (or even personally) vouch for everyone. If I meet someone who is connected to one of my friends (who actually maintains a proper known network on LinkedIn) then I know there is some value in that connection. I know I can talk to my friend who can vouch for that person (or maybe they won’t vouch for them - either way the information is useful to have). What can I derive from seeing someone who is a 2nd degree connection through someone else who has 20,000 connections? Absolutely nothing. They can’t tell me anything since they don’t know anything. Their node in the social network quickly becomes “fluff”…. it’s the equivalent of the highly connected MacArthur Maze of highway junctions: it’s inevitable that you will have to pass through it at some point, but you’ll hate it and curse aloud the time you spend there.

Amazon Unbox on Tivo…

Friday, Jul 13. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

…. is so freaking cool.

Yes, I realise it’s probably not unlike what was previously available from Comcat’s inDemand or whatever - but I never played with that. This was my first experience at renting a movie from my TV, and it was neat, and whizzy, and cool, and more importantly it was a perfect demonstration of technology that just worked.

Why it’s not (necessarily) “Linux-like”

Thursday, Jul 12. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

A lot of the recent articles and press have been about how with Project Indiana, Sun is trying to make OpenSolaris (and by extension, Solaris) more “Linux-like”.

OpenSolaris would like to be more approachable and usable to Linux users; but this doesn’t make it necessarily “Linux-like”. Would you claim Ubuntu is “Windows-like”? I doubt it, but yet it is more approachable to Windows users.

I am looking forward to seeing the results of Indiana… the new release model will be a great vehicle, if nothing else for delivering exposure to some of the great work happening within OpenSolaris engineering. Certainly I think not enough people were aware of the already existing work going on within the Install group with its new Dwarf Caiman installer, or ON’s new packaging work happening, modernisation project, and power management group. This was all work to bring OpenSolaris up to modern standards with any OS, not necessarily Linux.

I think Linux has been a great catalyst for pushing OpenSolaris to adopt these features, and I think Indiana will be a great delivery mechanism for bringing these new features to everybody…. but I certainly don’t think that makes OpenSolaris “Linux-like” anymore than Linux is “Windows-like” for adopting those same features.

really? can you?

Monday, Jul 9. 2007  –  Category: Musings

Got a postcard in the mail the other day from Team in Training saying they could get ME into the sold-out Nike Women’s Marathon.

I’d be impressed if they could. It’s tempting to try.