Podcast Update

• I listened to Ed Amoroso, Chief Security Officer at AT&T, talk about Frontline Security. This was a good podcast with an excellent write up at The Conversations Network (see link just referenced). I found the most interesting idea introduced by Ed to be the notion of moving some of the protections now managed on the edge of our networks closer to the center. In other words, more enforcement at the ISP and less at the firewall.
• David Heinemeier Hansson, Developer for Ruby on Rails, talked about the Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails. After listening to this presentation, I found myself wishing I had more time to investigate Ruby. Many of its goals match those of much of the software development I see. I wonder if Ruby is ready for enterprise scale deployments? I love the basic ideas introduced by David as the core competencies for Ruby. A framework of frameworks that makes development easier to do and learn! Yeppee. Good presentation.
  
• Mark Orttung, VP of Products and Engineering at Rearden Commerce, talked about SOA Build Best Practices. Again, The Conversations Network has an excellent write up. This presentation definitely highlighted what can be possible with SOA and the ubiquity of the web. The idea of being able to schedule appointments with commercial vendors and have my calendar updated all through a single user experience is just too cool. Check it out.
• Tim O'Reilly (CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc.), Mitchell Baker (president and general manager of the Mozilla project), Jonathan Schwartz (president and COO of Sun Microsystems, Inc.) talked about Can Open Source Stay Open? This fast paced presentation discusses much of the modern landscape within which innovation for software is being created. Most specifically, as the title suggests, they focused on the culture around open source. The discussion includes consideration for some of the issues faced by commercial enterprises as they try to determine how to embrace open source given their history of managing IP as a private and protected domain. The panel correctly notes that the traditional methods include significant overhead for just maintaining centralized control of IP. Highly recommended.
• Ayn Lavagnino (Environmental Manager for Hewlett Packard's Imaging and Printing Group), Jill Kauffman Johnson (Executive Director of the Chemical Strategies Partnership), and Timothy Taylor (President and CEO of Environment Home Center) participated in a panel discussion on Clean Products at Stanford's 2005 Net Impact Conference. This was an interesting presentation that talked about a number of significant actions some organizations are taking to treat our environment more responsibly. Excellent! I was most impressed with Ayn's discussion of how HP has not introduced a lot of reuse of printer based hardware, but simplified the infrastructure from some 2500 to 250 parts.