DivaBlog

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

After the flurry of stories on Friday and over the weekend (my favorites being Jim Grisanzio's lovely farewell, Matt Asay's surprising testimonial and the original blog written by David Berlind), it will come to no surprise that I'm leaving Sun. I'm off to see if I can have any influence at Intel, a company which has benefitted hugely from the increased popularity of Free and Open Source software around the world. I'm quite sad to leave the many good friends I've made over the years at Sun. Change it always hard.

I'm excited to be going to Intel, though! There will be fascinating challenges (like seeing if I can run my Intel life from a computer running open source software), new people to make friends with (84,000 of them) and hopefully good work to do for the open source movement.

Ciao for now, Sun! Although global, the internet makes this is a very small playground of an industry and I know I'll be seeing you continue to shine!

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

On the last day at eTech we were treated to the incomparable Larry Lessig speaking about the Future of Culture. He'll be at OSBC in early April doing a whole hour, and I highly recommend listening to him.

Also yesterday was also the "LifeHacks" talk. Cory Doctorow took better notes than I did. These guys are interested in helping make people more productive, and the talk focused on all the distractions that can come with some of the new technologies. I found myself disagreeing with much of their advice, however (although they did have some cool sites to talk about like 43 Folders) . Call me a weirdo, but I actually like having more than one thing going in my brain at a time. I am often seen knitting at conferences because it helps me listen for instance. So I have little friction from "context switching" on the computer or in my life (although increasingly my husband would take issue with that characterization). Okay, maybe I do need to focus more...:-)

Last (but not least), my pal Chris DiBona was there to launch the new Google open source site ! Chris and others have been working really hard on this for awhile and its so good to see it up and running. Open Source is just bustin' out all over the place :-)

And before I wrap up my notes on eTech 2005, I must commend my very good friend Duncan Davidson for his outstanding photo coverage of the event. It was so much fun watching him work (and checking the photostream to see what he'd captured). Hope he does a repeat in future!

But the absolute high point of Duncan's participation at this eTech (to my mind anyway) was his question to Larry Lessig. Duncan has been studying up on Creative Common's Licensing and he wanted to know whether they would develop a license that only grants rights to creative content to licensees who modify that content...except Duncan had a more shall we say graphic way to express it (and Larry's first response, "...I don't think I've ever heard it said quite that way...and if people choose to, ahem, do that with your content...that would be an interesting way to enforce remixing, yes..."). Duncan's an original all right :-)

And as long as Creative Commons is coming up, congrats are in order to the very cool Paula LeDieu who has evidently snagged the Executive Director job there. She'll continue to work for the BBC part time on the Creative Archive project that she has been directing for the last couple of years, which is a very good thin for them as well. Go Paula!

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

Floor space only at eTech the last couple of days...but its such a great conference that I don't mind sitting on the floor :-)

Last night was the Make! party at eTech. For those of you who haven't yet seen the fabulous Make! magazine, check it out.

So yesterday there were lots of opportunities to meet people who tinker. Like the fantastic Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and Natalie Jeremijenko from the Feral Robotic Dog pack.

The dog thing was perhaps my favorite thing from yesterday. Its not just a geek project, its an environmental activism project. As my only brother is an environmental attorney, I'm always interested in work that supports the Sisyphian task of fighting the good (environmental) fight. The modified robodogs that Natalie and her students build are fitted with a new nose that sniffs for environmental contaminants. They build a bunch of them and then release them into the "wild" at sites where people are concerned about pollution. The dogs roam around (on wheels...they are robots after all) and when they find pollution they stop and "do something cute". Some of them are networked as well and those send data back to collectors. How cool is THAT?

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

Just listening to Cory Doctorow speaking at eTech.

"...We eTechers are the rich hummus on the floor of the technology rain forest...we're the tiny frogs in the bromeliads."

You gotta love those images!

Best sessions from yesterday (for me)...first was George Dyson on "Von Neumann's Universe" telling us about the earliest days of computing at Princeton Institute, when Von Neumann and Kurt Godel were leading literally pouring the foundations for what we call the tech industry today. I'm a sucker for historical pictures, and this talk is chocked full of pics of people from that time (including a very cute picture of George and Esther as tiny children) and wonderful pages from journals and logs which were consigned to the archive where George works now. If you get a chance to hear him, by all means GO!

My other favorite session from yesterday was "How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change" by Annalee Newirtz from the EFF. Really fun and thought provoking session. I was reminded of my time at Apple working on QuickTime Conferencing. We were sure that videoconferencing via IP would really take off as soon as the porn industry got onboard. I loved the conclusion of this talk, where Annalee exhorted all of us to begin to support annonymizing technologies such as Tor (which she thinks will be increasingly useful for safely obtaining legal sex content in appropriately private ways, but which is even more important for people working to overcome opressive information control regimes). If everyone starts running and using annonymizers, then it will be impossible or at least much more difficult to kill freedom of information on the web. So you can do well (for the free world) by doing (yourself) good (as in Good Vibrations)!

I'll try to post more about todays sessions at some point.