Podcast Update

• Robert Lefkowitz, VP Enterprise Systems & Architecture, AT&T Wireless, talks about The Semasiology of Open Source. Before you ask, semasiology refers to the study of the development of words and their meanings. Robert does an excellent job of dividing the term "open source" into a variety of possible connotations and such. This very interesting presentation includes consideration for how an IT organization might view open source from an accountant's perspective. For those of you familiar with FASB 86, this is quite interesting. Robert also notes the changes that have occurred in how we diagnose problems with systems and how this has changed over the last 20+ years. In this context, logging has become perhaps more important then being able to use a debugger. A very interesting idea indeed, when was the last time you, if you are a techie, checked the contents of a register. Robert also talked about what constitutes source for open source. His discussion would apply to closed source too. In this context, he builds a good case that it isn't just the code. In fact, it starts with the requirements. This is a rich presentation with great analysis and wonderful historical references. ITConversations includes a link to a transcript of the presentation too.
• David Ritter, VP Boston Consulting Group, delivered an inspiring and information packed presentation about Making Connections. I recommend listening to this one while viewing the slides which ITConversations provides. This presentation talks about how networking has changed the dynamics of many industrial processes including, but not only, software. Networking, in this context, while enhanced and aided by technological capabilities like the Internet, is more about how organizations and people connect with each other. David's presentation includes a good selection of examples including what happened with a single provider of a critical component for ALL Toyota cars burned to the ground. Many other Toyota providing vendors worked together with the original provider to bring Toyota plants back online (an amazing story). David drives home the importance of transparency and offers some interesting tidbits about network analysis in this regard. I highly recommend this presentation. ITConversations also provides access to a transcript of this presentation.
• Steve Gillmor (ZDNet), Glenn Reid (Five Across), Dorée Duncan Seligmann (Avaya), David Sifry (Technorati), and Linda Stone (Apple) talked about Attention. My first glance at the description of this session made me think I wouldn't find this presentation interesting. To the contrary, this interesting panel discussion brought to light the real essence of what my everyday is like in many ways. The whole notion of continuous partial attention is so apt. I highly recommend this presentation.
• Jonathan Schwartz, President of Sun Microsystems, was interviewed by Kevin Werbach. Jonathan offers some very interesting perspectives about open source and the importance of decentralizing the control of technology. Jonathan is insightful and outspoken. This is another presentation I would highly recommend especially if, like me, you share an interest in software development and open source from a software vendor's perspective.
• Kartik Subbarao, Hewlett Packard, talks about embracing Open Source within an enterprise. Particularly, he uses an interesting analysis incorporating a metaphor of water (open source) and earth (closed source) and Venice. He talks about the characteristics of both are necessary to support Venice's existence (and yes he addresses the fact the Venice is still sinking). His examples include HP's use and contributions to OpenLDAP. I highly recommend this presentation. The world of enterprise software today is not just choices between buy and build. Open and closed source. Great, fast, short presentation.
• John Smart delivered the opening presentation at the Accelerating Change conference. This presentation was predominantly an overview of the other presentations to come and at first swipe, this may sound uninteresting. The contrary is true. I am actively seeking the podcast of the presentation on technical singularity to which John referred now. Go listen. :)
• Several lawyers, Lauren Gelman and Wendy Seltzer, participated in a panel discussion moderated by Jennifer Collins about the legal rights and responsibilities of bloggers. This is a very informative and interesting discussion that any blogger would find value listening to. They provide good coverage of the issues surrounding borrowing text, using music, and talking about others.

Podcast Update

• I listened to Dr. Moira Gunn interview Robert Kaplan about his book Imperial Grunts. He talked about the experience of doing the research to learn first hand about the experience of American soldiers in the field. He described much of our work as imperialistic. I was surprised until he defended why he applied that definition. In fact, we do spend a lot of time consulting and training troops in other countries. To do otherwise would require us to have to strong of a presence in the host countries. Very interesting interview and I have added his book to my desired reading list.
  
• I listened to a panel moderated by Liza Sabater. The panel included Debi Jones who blogs as mobile jones, Ellen Spertus a computer science professor, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez who blogs and writes. It was very interesting to listen to this group of women talk about how to manage and react to those who would flame, shame, or blame (this was the title of the panel) others via blogs, email, and such. It was fiery and very interesting. My wife and I listened to this and a few other podcasts while driving on a long trip. This is the only one my wife liked. My wife does find IT as interesting as I do.
• Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo, led an interesting presentation about the infrastructure of some of the software at Yahoo. He particularly addressed open source used at Yahoo. A good and thorough presentation.

Anonymous Posts Not Welcome

I suspect this blog is read by few. And that is ok, I am using this as a personal log and if someone finds my ramblings interesting fine. But, clearly anonymous posts that are not related to the log entries themselves are not really welcome. The few I get seem to be spam. I wonder if there is a different word for them when they are posted to blogs like this. Hum.... Probably so.

The Dark Tower - Finally or No, Not Yet!

Stephen King has written the last of the Dark Tower series and I have been reading them as they have come out since the 1980's. What a long time! I thoroughly enjoyed the journey through the books. I have found it difficult to read other books of this type (read as Tolkien and such). Yet, I was attracted to this story and its main characters. It has been a great read.

First, I was excited to learn the last one was done. Finally, we get to the tower! Second, I was sad to think the journey was to end. Roland and his ka-tet traveled far, fought hard, and shared their souls.


Thanks for the trip, Stephen.

Rave - I Figured Out How to Use My Zen Sleek

I have had my Creative Zen Sleek for a few months now, and finally I have learned how to use it correctly. My major mistake was to somehow get my music loaded on to the player where each artist and album was treated as a folder. Thus, the desktop software seemed to suck when it came to looking at all songs for sorting and such. I reformatted and loaded anew. This time I selected all the tracks on the PC tab after selected the various directories within which I may have music and drug them to the "Music" tab on the player. Now, I can slice and dice 'em. Don't know how I started down the folder path, but it sucked. I can also look for the most recently loaded on to the PC. Thus, noticing what needs to be moved is now easy. Yeppee!

Podcast Update

• Andrew Zolli, Z+ Partners, participated in an interview as part of Globeshakers with Tim Zak. During this interview, Andrew talks about the impact of demographic distribution changes on the world and domestic economy. This is a very interesting presentation that I would recommend. Unfortunately, I listened too long ago and didn't take notes so I can't state an specifics about the interview. But, I know I liked it.
• Anne Thomas Manes, APS Research Director for the Burton Group, talked about The Advent of Superplatforms. This information packed and insightful presentation is well worth listening to if you are an architect. Anne correctly notes that the major platform providers like Microsoft with .Net and IBM with WebSphere are including 100's of support applications with their suites. Thus, while the promise of web services, open source, and industry standards would lead you to think that a new world of plug and play is on the horizon, we may in fact, be seeing something entirely different emerge. I can't help but think this is sort of more of the same. That is, the IDE and infrastructure providers build in features that help lock you in to their solution (and their problems). I don't read this as good or bad. It is the nature of things. Anne also notes that Open Source is essentially an alternative choice. One that on a feature basis may not compete directly with the comprehensive suites of the commercial providers. My primary concern with implications of her analysis is that continuing notion of vendor lock-in at the platform level. But, her analysis definitely has merit and for many companies, the information she provides is surely of high interest and value. Thanks Anne for a very thought provoking presentation.

Judith Miller has Balls

Well, not literally. Judith Miller, N.Y. Times reporter that has been in jail for almost 90 days because she chose not to reveal her source for information related to the leaking of Valerie Plame's name as a covert CIA operative. She only relinquished when her source offered his release to do so and the court agreed to limit the questions to the information from this particular source.

Clearly, Judith held her personal principles and her promise to her source paramount. That's integrity! You go Judith! But, I gotta say I hope we never release an agent's name in a context that leads to their death or some other horrible outcome as a result.

Podcast Update

Still catching up on Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn:

• The interview with Dr. David Stretavan about the knifes that cut axons for the purpose of neural graphs was interesting. I assume I don't need to tell you just how small that is.
• Daniel Liebowitz talked about Henry Stanley's last expedition to Africa in the 19th century. Daniel got his insight writing his book The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey Through the Congo. This interview made Henry's experience sound exciting and surprising and I am sure the Daniel's book is equally so. Given time, I will be reading this one.

Not Running Update

Given the multiple sprained ankles I have suffered over the last few months, I met with a podiatrist for the latest injury. I will be going into physical therapy for 6-8 weeks staring in about 2 weeks. The intent is to build up my ankle strength. At the end of the therapy, I will be fit with an orthorotic and will likely run with some form of support specifically for my left ankle. Not running sucks, but at least there is hope.

Meanwhile, I will log my podcast listening and an occasional rant or rave.

Podcast Update

Well, I guess if I don't run, then I listen to podcasts! Well, I have also traveled a bit lately which offers great opportunities for listening. Here's my latest listening log:

• Sigmund Solares, CEO of DirectNIC, is interview buy Doc Searls about keeping their operation running in New Orleans during Katrina. This is an extremely interesting story. Sigmund talks about how the internet and helpful technicians helped his team configure and manage software to help manage updates, changes, and such. He talks about what they had to go through to get fuel for their generator. This interview is just packed with interesting experiences and highlights how many aspects of today's openness enables technical operations despite adversity.
• I listened to a panel discussion (several times actually) while driving around in New Jersey and New York. The panel discussion was titled Distributed Business and was held at Supernova 2005. I highly recommend listening to this information packed podcast. My favorite part was Dick Hardt's discussion of Identity 2.0 and implications for today's identity management (1.0). Particularly, he describes today's notions as site based and more specifically based on what you have said and done on particular sites. In this context, you can't really take your identity with you.
• Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, talks about his teams creation of Basecamp. This very interesting project (and it sounds like most of 37signals' projects are interesting) brought fresh and insightful perspectives to project management. Some attributes are Extreme Programming like and others are not. I would have to admit that I share many of Jason's views about the false sense of control many traditional development methodology artifacts provide (especially to senior management). Today, agility and comfortably managing change are more important than proving conformance to dictates recorded on paper. Great presentation that I would recommend listening to. It would be interesting to hear Jason and Joel Spolsky discuss methodology.
• Getting through a bunch of Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn too:
• Interview with Andrew Fraknoi, Chairman of the Astronomy Program at Foothill College talks with Dr. Gunn about planets. Particularly, he addresses why we are finding so many and the ambiguous label planet. The label is ambiguous now as astronomers are trying to distinguish between objects that may or may not be planets. For example, is a large object that is not round a planet? We have discovered that at least 14 stars have multiple planets! This is a very interesting podcast. He also noted the startling observations that objects in the universe are speeding up not slowing down as we have suspected for a long time.
  
• Dr. Gunn interviewed Robert Shelton, Managing Director for Innovation at Navigant Consulting. No surprise, the topic was innovation. He talks at length about 7 characteristics of innovation and it is well worth listening to.
• I also recommend these from Tech Nation:
• Doug Kaye interview. Doug Kaye is doing a great service to the IT and podcasting community via ITConversations and this interview is very good.
• Daniel Imhoff interview. Daniel talked with Dr. Gunn about how we should think about our current use of plastic for shopping bags and product packages. For those of us (includes me), that are and should be concerned about human impact on environment, this is an information packed podcast. Good job Daniel.
• More to come....

Podcast Update

I was listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code recently when I heard a song titled: MY BACK'S ACHIN, MY BRA'S TOO TIGHT, by the Stepford Wives! I gotta tell you, I think this song is way cool.

Thanks Adam

Podcast Update

• Nathan Torkington and Tim O'Reilly talked about Trends in the Open Source Marketplace. And, in the process provide lots of good fodder for the rest of us. As a result, I will be checking out GreaseMonkey. They did ask an interesting concept about the impact of software as a service on the open source movement. If you are not actually loading or even seeing the source.... Good presentation.
• David Rumsey, President, Cartography Associates, talked the Past and Future of Mapping. If you are into maps or history, this is an excellent presentation. It would be greatly enhanced by access to the pictures, charts, and maps he referenced during the presentation. I thought the most interesting bits were those about the differences in the maps from different periods of history and from different perspectives. David points out how the biases and such of the chartographer are evident in his charts.
• Asa Dotzler talks about why or should Linux find its way to the desktop. Asa builds the case that if Linux is to take significant desktops from Microsoft the time is nigh (before Vista). However, he notes the importance of ensuring a good experience for the user to enable this to occur. Things like making things simple, not moving buttons or changing fast keys from the settings which most users are acquainted. He further says that we should reduce the choices users have to install and use an operating system. Good and interesting presentation.
• Bob Wyman, PubSub, talks Denise Howell about syndication, RSS and copyright. He builds the case that the law is not a far behind technology as many would have us believe. He goes on to talk about some of the practices (good and bad) that are visible today that are taking advantage of opportunities to respect and use the content of others and those that are violating copyright. A very interesting presentation that I would highly recommend.
  

Podcast Update

• Alan Ganek, IBM, talks about Autonomic Computing Systems. This brief, but very interesting presentation outlayes a lot of information about self-healing and such that is made possible using the nervous system metaphor. Very worthwhile listening.
• Lisa Williams and Ryanne Hodson talk about Audio and Video Blogging at BlogHer 2005. I only listened to part of this podcast before my schedule interrupted me. It sounded like it was going to be interesting, but I am battling a hectic schedule and a lot of podcasts I haven't gotten to yet. Since it is focused on women blogging and such and I am a man, I will get to it later. From the little I heard this podcast will NOT be boring.

Aborted 9 Mile: Shades Creek Greenway

Well, I started off with Lito and a whole host of others on the first training day for the Mercedes Marathon. At the half way point, my damn ankle gave out and I scraped my knee again. I can't believe my poor luck. That makes 2 major sprains and 2 minor sprains this summer. All on the same ankle. Something is WRONG and this SUCKS. Went to the doctor and the xrays don't show anything. She is going to refer me to a specialist and I asked for one that understands sports medicine.

Before the fall, I was cranking and running strong. I just can't believe my bad luck.

3 Mile Run: Myrtle Beach

Well, I did my presentation yesterday and all went well. Interesting since my presentation included a hip-hop number using music I cut from a Beastie Boys, Creative Commons covered song "Now Get Busy?. I saw a guy walk by that looked a little like Emenim. So, I asked him if he would be willing to participate. As it turned out, he is in a band that does rap. Well, he was great and it really added some pow to my presentation.

The run today was good. The weather was dry and in the 70's.

Data:
Distance: 3.173 Miles
Time: 27:38
Heart Rate: Not measured
Pace: @8:42 (Cool, first time under 9:00 in a long while!)

5 Mile Run: Myrtle Beach, SC

Hurricane Ophelia is just off shore; it is raining; it is windy;it is dark. But, the run was good. Myrtle Beach is getting prettier and prettier based on my periodic visits. I remember from years ago as old and ugly. But, I never really came here as a tourist and it may have just been related to where I accidentally traveled.

Data:
Distance: 5.029 Miles
Time: 47:26
Heart Rate: Not measured
Pace: @9:25

3 Mile Run: Myrtle Beach, SC

I am at a business conference on the east coast during another hurricane. Fortunately, it has stayed off shore and hasn't impacted Myrtle Beach in any large way and appears that it will not. Looks like it will cause some havoc north of here, but hopefully nothing too critical. I did get rained on a little during this run, but not bad.

I skipped my long run on Sunday as I had a sinus headache on Saturday night that just knocked me out. So, I skipped supper and last time I tried to run the day after this, I suffered enormously. A break every now and then is good.

Data:
Distance: 3.056 Miles
Time: 28:02
Heart Rate: Not measured
Pace: @9:10

3 Mile Run: Neighborhood

Still running with the "Time and Distance" system since the bridges are broken and I am taking alternate courses. Totally enjoying the new Mp3 player, Creative, Zen Sleek.

Data:
Distance: 3.009 Miles
Time: 29:10
Heart Rate: Not measured
Pace: @9:41

5 Mile Run: Neighborhood

No time to smell the roses this week as I am just swamped with work. But, I am getting my runs in. I am a bit distracted by all of this Katrina stuff. I am just so disturbed by so many aspects of this whole disaster including:

• The sluggish response to get help to New Orleans
• The disgusting behavior of some of the folks in the Superdome (rapes, murders, and such)
• The obvious contrast between various groups of our society
• The thin veil of civilization
• The notion that perhaps scarce resources will create a situation where people turn to violence on a much larger scale in general
• The notion that we might be aiding this phenomenon through global warming
  

I hope I find that this was just a huge mistake from which we learn to behave much better.

Data:
Distance: 5.354 Miles
Time: 51:46
Heart Rate: Not measured
Pace: 9:40

3 Mile Run: Neighborhood

Back home. A crew is working on the bridges over the coves in our neighborhood lake, so I had to pick an alternate course. I found a very minor modification requiring me to follow a path between 2 of the houses along the lake up to a road that skirts the lake near the bridge.

Data:
Distance: 3.205
Time: 31:09
Heart Rate: Not measured
Pace: 9:43