Wednesday July 27, 2005
Wednesday July 27, 2005 OpenSolaris Goings-On at OSCON next week
and 
My midsummer night dream is about OSCON. In which OSCON = the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. In Portland, Oregon. Next week. August 1-5, 2005. O'Reilly conferences do not disappoint. And since things OpenSolaris and Open Source are near and dear to my heart, well, I'm awaiting the gathering with bated breath.
For those of you who will be in Portland, please join us for food and drink and lively discussion at the Birds-of-a-Feather session about OpenSolaris on Wednesday night Aug 3rd. Last year's BOF was super memorable - standing room only starting at 9pm and running until almost midnight! It was great fun, and I look forward to an even richer discussion this year - because it's no longer just about our intentions but about the reality that is the OpenSolaris project. Liane Praza is hosting the BOF and she'll by joined by other members of the OpenSolaris community as well. Who knows what colour Liane's hair will be - but I guarantee it will be colourful.
OpenSolaris Technologies BOF Wed Aug 3rd at 8:30pm PT
For those attending the conference - there will be 2 sessions to choose from on OpenSolaris DTrace - although I fully expect some developers to attend both. DTrace slices and dices and whirls and twirls. Well, almost. At JavaOne last month, 900 people came to hear Adam talk about it and demo it- particularly since it's useful for analyzing applications and Java code and not just operating system software. The first is a 3-and-a-half hour session on Tuesday with both Bryan Cantrill and Keith Wesolowski (called a tutorial, but you do not have to register for it or pay anything extra for it - a conference pass is all that is needed, it seems) and the other is a 45 minute Opening the Kimono session with Bryan on Thursday.
Tutorial: "OpenSolaris Development with Dynamic Tracing (DTRACE)
Bryan Cantrill and Keith Wesolowski
Tue Aug 2nd 1:30-5:00, Room D140
Open Session: "DTrace: Opening the Kimono"
Bryan Cantrill
Thu Aug 4th 4:30-5:15 Portland Room 255
And - for those of you are wondering what in the blue moon this OpenSolaris gig is about - well, Keith will be answering that very question in a What-is-OpenSolaris session. Come and join us.
Open Session: "What is OpenSolaris"
Keith Wesolowski
Wed Aug 3rd 2:35-3:20 Portland Room 255
And if you like to listen to agile minds converse, the one and only Jonathan Schwartz will be live and on stage to talk to the O'Reilly conference chair Nat Torkington (a great guy) about - well, whatever the two of them end up talking about. If you've been to an O'Reilly conference before, you know these things are generally not scripted. They'll be talking. About something interesting.
Jonathan Schwartz Fireside Chat
Wed Aug 3rd 9:45-10:15 , Portland Ball Room
And I'll be on a panel discussed titled Women in Open Source on Fri morning Aug 5th, too.
And there will be BOFs about other Sun open source projects as well - a JXTA BOF (Wed at 7:30pm), a Java.net BOF (Wed at 7:30pm) and a GlassFish BOF (Wed at 8:30pm). If you've not heard of GlassFish yet - they're one of the newest Sun open source projects to join the party - and yes, they do have a thing or to do with the application server. Find out more about Project GlassFish here.
Oh - and if you're interested in tools and NetBeans, Tim Boudreau is giving a 3.5 hour NetBeans Tutorial titled NetBeans IDE 4.1 Development on Tuesday morning Aug 2nd at 8:30am.
See you there, I hope! And please check out our somewhat unusual booth as well!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: OSCON
(2005-07-27 01:58:06.0) Permalink
Monday July 25, 2005 Tim's got it right, Feed the Feeds by Shelley Powers is a tour de force. A must read for bloggers with a healthy sense of humour. Here's another cat that Stephen and I made friends with in Tokyo in June, on many a subway. So finally, Stephen, I'm sharing the photo. On flickr, of course. Beware, though - this cat won't link!
(2005-07-25 02:20:29.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Sunday July 24, 2005 Michael Lewis is one of my heroes. He wrote a book that I love. But that's not why. He's my hero because he described something that was previously invisible to me - in such a compelling, eloquent way that I felt like I'd been hit by a Mack truck.
At OSCON, I'll be part of the Women in Open Source panel, organized by my friend Danese Cooper. When I said "yes" to the invite, I felt obliged to point out that in my 16 years in software, I've steadfastly tried to be gender-blind, so that I wasn't sure what value I would bring. Sure I'm a woman, but so what? I've deleted invites to all "Women in Technology" meetings and I've never attended a WITI or Hopper conference. So, big uh-oh. What to say? The wheels in my head began to turn.
Tim Bray got me thinking with his Analysts and Sex writeup - where he paraphrased the bold question he and the other 11 Sun CTOs were asked by an analyst: "Why am I looking at twelve middle-aged white guys?" I'm sure this triggered much private discussion, but not much visible public debate. Too delicate an issue, perhaps? Tim went on to blog, "But the gender thing hurts. Obviously, it’s not just Sun; I get to sit in a lot of rooms-full of senior people trying to do industry leadership, whatever that means, and there are lots of times when there aren’t any women, or just one or two, and THAT SUCKS. Even if there weren’t the ethical issues, in case you hadn’t noticed we’re still suffering from a general talent shortage in this business, and it’s not very smart to only draw from half the population."
A bit later, I was deciding what job to take next and I considered leaving Sun. Tim Bray and I chatted about ideas and he later sent me an email (presumably with the 12-middle-aged-white-guys thing in mind): "I am tempted to impose on my relationship with Jonathan and Greg to say 'uh guys, I think we have a problem here.' It occurs to me that if I were giving that narrative, something along the lines of 'And then there's Claire, who just finished delivering us a major miracle, and who is casting about and could easily be picked off by a competent outside recruiter' would fit in very smoothly. But of course I won't without your say-so."
Well, I said no. I didn't want special attention because I was a woman. I went on to share with Tim the story about a compliment I'd received years before - my then-VP said I was the "one of the best female managers." What kind of dumb left-handed compliment is that? I strive to be a good manager, even a damn good one, and wanted gender to be irrelevant. I ended up doing myself no favors by asking if I was the best brown-eyed manager or brown-haired manager...
Next, I remembered my freshman year at Brown when a bunch of the guys on my floor told me, point blank, in a mean, ugly, condescending way - to drop out of engineering because "girls weren't smart enough". Then I flashed forward to one of my first CS classes on data structures and algorithms - the putdowns gently spinning in my mind, not yet purged - and I wondered if the class would be too hard. Well, one of the head TAs in that class was a woman, and when I saw her, I thought, if she can do it, then so can I. So I kicked butt. And I TA'ed the class the next 2 years as well.
So what did Michael Lewis say that hit me like a truck? Yes, it was in Moneyball - which I've talked about before. It sounds even better read out loud:
"The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job."
Where is this stroll down memory lane going? That you can't ignore the gender biases. Nor should you, if you want things to get better. (I have a daughter and I want things to improve before she grows up.) We need to talk about the failures of imagination - rather than sweep them under a rug. And it's not just about being fair, it's about being competitive.
So there. I do have something to say. The OSCON panel is about Women in Open Source, though, not Women in Technology. Should be interesting.
Technorati Tag: OSCON
(2005-07-24 23:45:32.0) Permalink Comments [3]
Saturday July 23, 2005 Google and Avogadro En Route to Penguins
I took 4 children to
see the March
of the Penguins today by National Geographic. What a
beautiful film. Although, it's about life with a little bit of
death thrown in for good measure, so the youngest one got a bit
teary-eyed toward the end. The cinematography was a wow and
the logistics must have been imposing. According to the scuba
gypsy blog, the penguins were filmed at "penguin eye-level for six
to seven hours a day in 13 to 22 below zero
Fahrenheit in order to capture character-like qualities of the
creatures." Imagine what kind of quads those cinematographers
must have.On the way there, the 4 children had a little chat about numbers. I stayed out of it. For context, they are 8, 7.5, 6, 5.5 - two are mine, two are someone else's. Why am I sharing this? It was just so darn amusing... To the best of my recollection, they said:
- Why did they have to cut down that beautiful old shade tree at school?
- It was old and was sick. They had to.
- How old?
- Really really old.,
- Yeah, but how old?
- One thousand million years.
- No, a google.
- Google plus!
- Yeah, google plus years.
- Definitely google plus.
- Isn't Avogadro's number bigger?
- Infinity is the biggest. It's because there are always more numbers to count. The numbers never stop counting.
- That's right, there's no stopping point for numbers. Just a starting point - zero.
- No, zero is not the lowest number.
- Yes it is.
- No, it's not.
- Yes it is!
- No it's not! When we drove back from Tahoe last winter it was so cold it was in the negative numbers.
- What's a negative number?
- Negative one, negative two - it was negative twelve degrees that day - all the way down to negative infinity.
- You're right I guess - numbers don't have a starting point either. Of course.
[Pause]
- Are we there yet, Mom???
(2005-07-23 22:48:06.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Monday July 18, 2005 Stats for OpenSolaris - First 4 Weeks
I get several questions a week about what the stats are for OpenSolaris. Since the Opening Day was just about one month ago, people are naturally curious. Heck, I've been curious, too - ever since I read Moneyball - which I've talked about before - I've looked at metrics and statistics differently. Beyond the obvious reasons for caring - metrics can show adoption and activity (or lack thereof) - I'm also interested in how metrics can influence perception, since perception can trigger word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth conversation can help to create interest and drive adoption. And of course - metrics can directly influence behavior. I use the "Top Blogs" list and daily hit counts on blogs.sun.com as one example that's rather close to home for Sun bloggers - obviously Top Scorers is another example from video games - there are legions of exampes in the sports world.
I'm also intrigued by the increasing transparency into the site stats for various websites and communities, too - such as the "Viewed 1342 times" and the "5 people call this photo a favorite" on this Harry Potter photo from the Flickr blog. I'd like to see more and more of this on OpenSolaris.org.
So, here are some initial OpenSolaris stats. What do they mean? Given the conversation happening on OpenSolaris.org, not just on the mailing lists but also on the IRC channels, I think it means that a community has rallied around this technology and that folks are conversing and chatting and coding and collaborating to figure out what this community can become, and - to use one of my favorite phrases - how to make sure that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
We've got tons of work to do to grow this ecosystem. As I was reading David's loud thinking about growing an open source ecosystem tonight (about the Ruby on Rails project - great project, great post), I wondered where OpenSolaris will be in one year's time. Given the nature of the people I hold in high-regard on Team Solaris - who have just become part of a bigger, more diverse team - I know it will be an exciting ride.
I mailed the opensolaris-discuss mailing list on OpenSolaris.org some stats for the Opening Week titled "OpenSolaris Launch Highlights" several weeks back. Here are more stats covering the first 4 weeks (which I will cross-post in an email to the opensolaris-discuss mailing list as well.). Expect to see more stats in the future coming from Patrick Finch (who just started on my team a few weeks ago but immediately turned around and asked for vacation - something about getting married. I guess that's a reasonable excuse...) Thanks to Patrick for gathering these numbers for us.
Some OpenSolaris stats - the first 4 weeks (measured since the Jun 14 2005 Opening Day):
OpenSolaris.org page views
Week 1 1,048,077
Week 2 227,411
Week 3 147,137
Week 4 140,316
4 week total: over 1.5 million page views
New non-Sun registered community members on OpenSolaris.org
Week 1 5,423
Week 2 469
Week 3 184
Week 4 150
4 week total: 6,305 non-Sun registrants, PLUS 843 Sun employee registrants
Note - you don't need to register on opensolaris.org to browse or download - it's quite possible that even more people have been exploring and lurking. I certainly hope so!
New postings to discussion groups
Week 1 1,145
Week 2 674
Week 3 520
Week 4 494
4 week total: 2,815 postings on 543 different topics
OpenSolaris Blogs
Week 1 324 OpenSolaris postings from 150 different bloggers
Week 2 140 OpenSolaris postings from 40 different bloggers
Week 3 99 OpenSolaris postings from 37 different bloggers
Week 4 86 OpenSolaris postings from 29 different bloggers
Question: Are that many OpenSolaris bloggers really on vacation? Hmm...
Blogs.sun.com site
Traffic to blogs.sun.com is also up 21% in 4 weeks since Opening Day (vs the 4 preceeding weeks)
Top Referrers to OpenSolaris.org Weeks 1-4
google (all domains) 17.8%
slashdot.org 13.3%
osnews.com 4.5%
yahoo.com 4.0%
com.com (cnet) 3.4%
Corrections
There were 2 inaccuracies with the figures published for week 1. Sorry. Mea culpa. Oops.
- I had said that new non-Sun registrations was 5700 for Week 1. Really it was 5423.
- I had said that postings on discussion groups for Week1 was 990. Really it was 1145.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-07-18 02:00:01.0) Permalink
Friday July 15, 2005 Atom 1.0 and other items Ongoing
Congrats to Tim Bray and to all the contributors he thanks in this writeup - Atom 1.0 is on its way. Cool! While I'm talking about Tim and the ongoing blog, I have to point out two of his recent blogs. Tim's thoughts on the New Public Relations are great reading for a marketing newbie like me (or anyone paying attention to how communication in the business world is a'changin' - the blog has definitely stirred some controversy!) and then Tim's story about Iron for Drupal is well worth a read as well. I do love it when a good turn floats all of our boats. Thanks, Tim. And congrats again.
(2005-07-15 01:24:53.0) Permalink
Thursday July 14, 2005 I just love what folks are doing with greasemonkey mash-ups.
Perhaps we can use this to make it easier for folks to find all the new OpenSolaris User Groups that are cropping up. We already know that people are busy and it helps to populate the the blog announcements and/or User Group webpages with super-easy maps and directions. Most of us don't want to have to go get a pdf or download a file or look up the map ourselves. E-z is good.
Look at the attached screenshot of what's called a greasemap (courtesy of Steve O'Grady, who picked it up from a recent Slashdot discussion). Don't you love the way the google map info is injected into the page?
Steve's a big fan of mash-ups and blogged about the google maps + craigslist mash-up when he was househunting in Colorado.
Also, gotta love that OpenSolaris favicon that jumps out at you when you zoom the screenshot in Flickr - here.
Technorati Tag: opensolaris
Technorati Tag: greasemonkey Technorati Tag: greasemap
(2005-07-14 19:30:34.0) Permalink
Wednesday July 13, 2005 true
open
from mozilla
thumbs-up (says osi)
e-z-er
protections
court-configurable
goalposts-fixed
4 commonz
mid-in-dle
of b(sd) and g(pl)
choice::good
cuddle
fud can be annoying. so I wrote a poem about you-know-what. alas if only i were better at poetry. oh well, it was fun even if corny.
for the record, i'm damn proud of the work on this license. and i send a big thanks to the many who contributed.
technorati tag: opensolaris
(2005-07-13 01:12:40.0) Permalink
Tuesday July 12, 2005 After talking about the coolness of the Art of the Start cover design contest last week, I poked around on istockphoto a bit more. And here are some interesting things I discovered about the istockphoto stock photography community - a few of which might prove useful for those of us in OpenSolaris-land.
The photo on the front page changes with most reloads. Needless to say, I reloaded the page, um, well, more than a few times. What can I say - it was fun discovering which photos the editors had decided to promote. My favorites - Blue Moon, Gorilla and buzzard roost. Oh, and I have to give an honorable mention to Female Gremlin.
Next - I like the articles section. I read through several of the articles (White Balance, Underwater Photography, and yes, even Efenzi) and each was conversational. If you'd read my earlier blogs, you know I'm a big fan of authentic voice. More than that, I like that there's a clear process for submitting articles, and given the number of authors it certainly seems like articles are written by community members. As we move forward with OpenSolaris, I want to see more community contributed content. Jim mentioned this earlier today as well.
I also like the use of statistics - number of uploads, downloads, most popular art for each designer, the public view into each designer's "creative network" of designer friends which makes it easy for me to go exploring and follow links to friends-of-friends, top designs, most popular files, highest rated designs. Bottom line - multiple different views are presented so that I can effectively "browse" when I'm not sure what I'm looking for. It isn't too hard to find the interesting parallels for OpenSolaris here - while we've got a wicked source browser on the OpenSolaris website, we can still make it easier to browse other aspects of the project. And - the member profiles on istockphoto are way more useful than they are on opensolaris.org - we've got some work to do to make it e-z for people to provide more useful (and personal) views into who they are.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris Technorati Tag: istockphoto
(2005-07-12 01:04:52.0) Permalink
Monday July 11, 2005 Thlinking (no typo) and del.icio.us
Recent thlinking I've done at del.icio.us.
And yes, you're right, Alan. Steve O'Grady and John Fowler had pointed out that the del.icio.us database server now runs on Sun V20z opteron machines, and I'm kicking myself for not blogging that sooner. Cool stuff. Thanks...
Jon Udell: Screencasting strategies
Gotta make screencasting easier and easier - it's such a powerful learning technique for users...
Drawn: The Illustration Blog
How cool is this - well worth a peek... (thx to Udell for the link)
Jon Udell: More del.icio.us collaborative filtering
Some gems found as Jon explores the long tail of those with similar bookmarks and tags on del.icio.us
Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us
The interesting things that you can do with del.icio.us (trust Jon to explore them!)
ONLamp.com: ESR: "We Don't Need the GPL Anymore"
Very interesting read. And as I said - choice is good - and it's not about the license anyway, it's about community...
tecosystems: How Important is the GPL?
Triggered by ESR interview - is GPL necessary to ensure survival of open source?
The Blog of Ben Rockwood: OpenSolaris Code Browser for Firefox
Very cool enhancement to an already wicked source browser - thanks Ben
Transcript of Guy Kawasaki talking at Art of the Start Conference
Gotta love the mantra section - I agree with him - and the Ask a Woman piece is certainly controversial...
James Gosling on the Java Road: T Shirt Contest Trivia
Worth a smile - 6 years of Latin study is actually good for something...
Modern Marketing: Open Source Marketing Goes "Outside-In"
inside-out, outside-in, great "converse gallery" idea, notion of "lead consumers" vs. "hackers"
Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris Technorati Tag:del.icio.us
(2005-07-11 23:14:11.0) Permalink
Saturday July 02, 2005 
My husband read Guy
Kawasaki's "The
Art of the Start" the other day, and I clumsily knocked the book
out of its dust jacket. Lo and behold, I found treasure. On
the inside of the book's dust jacket - cover art. Lots of
it. All from different artists, created as part of a cover design
contest. Printed on paper that is usually empty and void - I
don't think I've ever found an easter egg of any kind on the inside of
a dust jacket before. Cool.And it's certainly good idea fodder for budding writers out there (who probably haven't thought about their dust jackets yet!) What I like about this contest - not only did people get to try their hand at creating the actual cover art, but the contest produced collaborative art that has its own place in the world - on the inside of the dust jacket. I prefer the inside cover to the outside, actually. And - it's further evidence of the benefits of community development. And as folks in the OpenSolaris community talk about running a mascot contest, well, clearly the Kawasaki collaboration here caught my eye.
Here's a 30%-sized snapshot of the inside of the dust jacket. You can find the real deal on Guy Kawasaki's website in pdf here.
An excerpt of Guy's description of the contest is on his website.
Apparently Guy received 150 entries from approximately 70 people.
Most of the cover designs are here
(complete with names of submitters and everything.) My favorite image
- 4 cyclists against a red backdrop, starting a race.
Kudos to Guy for having such a whacky idea, and to his friends at iStockPhoto - "the fastest
growing royalty-free collection in the world."
Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris
(2005-07-02 00:52:38.0)
Permalink
Friday July 01, 2005 Thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes about the Opening Day for OpenSolaris. There were, of course, many wonderful blogs on Opening Day and ever since. In the interest of space, I've selected just a few quotes that caught my eye. Can't believe more than 2 weeks have passed. If any of you see any radioactively passionate quotes about Opening Day that you think I would like (or that I should include in my "favorites" collection below), please let me know. I've been a bit distracted and I know I haven't found everything yet. Thanks. And here's a toast to tripped out geeks.
Sun deserves credit for the geek-centric approach, said RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. "The best aspect of it for me is seeing a rather large software organization actually recognize the audience they want to be speaking to--in this case the developers."
- RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady in an interview with Stephen Shankland
"They've lit up the Open Solaris community inside Sun to light up the community outside Sun. You need to be a tripped-out geek to get some of this but the mobilization of the Sun team to provide different views on the product is great."
- Andy Lark, "Blogs play key role in launch of Open Solaris" blog entry
"A prolonged round of applause from this old geek! 43 years of programming, everything from vacuum tube computers to 'Transistorized' computers, mainframes, micros (4004 anyone?), and of course, the Mighty Sun! Please indicate a very positive reaction to the Open Solaris news!"
- billg@radix.net, mail to whatshappening@sun.com alias
"We predict, that in the long run, OpenSolaris will contribute more to the IT universe than Windows or GNU/Linux. It will take time, but backed up by a consistent corporate strategy, Java, the Sun Grid and a pantheon of bloggers, Sun is destined 'to boldly go where no one has gone before.' We are extremely proud to have be part of the OpenSolaris Pilot Project. To all our fellow Pilot Project participants and Sun: Salute!"
- Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck, OpenSolaris Pilot Members
"[The OpenSolaris launch] may also be a historic day for blogging. It's not a 'normal' product launch, that's for sure. Instead of launching OpenSolaris with a media splash, press releases and a carefully crafted message, the OpenSolaris crew has taken over blogs.sun.com and let the bloggers loose. They're blogging (blogs.sun.com and opensolaris.org) and tagging (technorati, del.icio.us and flickr) and chatting (#opensolaris at freenode.net) and badging and getting the word out in their own imaginative and personal ways. I'm proud to be even a small part of that and I can't wait to get my hands on the code."
- Dave Johnson, "Go OpenSolaris!" blog on his Blogging Roller page
"It was such a surprise when I logged onto the Sun Blog to find other nerds like myself wondering where the t-shirts were. Seems such trivia amongst such an historic annoucement. It takes all types to make a village....."
- antonypayne@yahoo.com, email to opensolaris-marketing@opensolaris.org
"You guys are too frickin? cool! A reply from a person. Novel. Thanks and good luck! ?D:)"
- djones@laga.com, email to whatshappening@sun.com alias
Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag:Solaris
(2005-07-01 21:46:25.0) Permalink
