Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

I just sat down and wrote about (most of) the podcasts I listen to, in response to a friend's request.

Here it is.  I should probably do this once a year, just to see how my tastes change over time.

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Thanks to my business colleague, Steve Quan of Sun's Market Development organization, I am at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) at the San Jose Convention Center.

I'll be here for the rest of the day, and am snapcasting the event.  It's public, so anybody can join and give me feedback as I capture what I'm seeing and hearing.

Come on in and join for the rest of the day; I'll be here.

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Here are some web sites and apps that I learned about during the 1st of two days of the Community Leadership Summit at the San Jose Convention Center this weekend.  I'll add commentary later; this is just to clear my head and get ready for a second day of learning.

• Get Satisfaction: community-powered support
• Stack Overflow: look at how they do reputation management in an open-ended community (site is for collaboratively asking & answering programmer questions)
• IceRocket: real-time search of blogs
• DjangoPeople: show who around the world (on a Google map) is a Django web framework developer
• CiviCRM: open source Customer Relationship Management for the civic sector.  Mozilla is using it to build web site that shows how contributors are contributing to different parts of Mozilla (work in progress).
• ThisNext: social shopping site
• Gobby: collaborative text editor (somebody mentioned it's similar to a different editor, but I forget its name)
• Zemanta: helps you improve your blog posts by watching what you're writing and suggesting related tags, photos, links, etc.  I gotta see how they do this.
• Posterous: this sounds like the simplest way to blog ever.  I gotta try this, too.  Somebody mentioned it sounded similar to tumblr.

Okay, gotta go!  It's getting late and there are people to meet and communities to lead.

Twitter tag for the Community Leadership Summit: #cls

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Today was a special meeting of Sun stockholders.  The question on the table: whether to approve the merger whereby Oracle acquires Sun.

I decided to "snapcast" the event live, using a free web-based application call G-Snap!  I've blogged about g-snap! before but in the last few months they've done a fair amount of improvement to the interface.  It's really slick and full-featured now.

Click here to view the event log for the snapcast, so you can see what I typed and the comments people made.  Password: sunvote.

There was good news and bad news about the snapcast.  The good news: over 50 people joined the event with only about 30 minutes' notice, and the interface worked like a charm.  I was able to upload photos to the event live, so people could see what the auditorium looked like, the meeting agenda, and a bomb-sniffing dog outside the premises.

The bad news: I was approached by an official in the auditorium who nicely instructed me to turn off my computer during the meeting.  I was assured the meeting would be brief, and indeed it was.  Total elapsed time: about 8 minutes.

Nonetheless, I came away from the event eager to try G-Snap! again for something like this.  I thought of using my twitter account to tweet as the event went along, but I would have lost the sense of community.  By snapcasting, I was able to send live updates just as I would with twitter, but I also had the benefit of others being able to "tweet" live as well, bringing everybody together.  It's a lot more cumbersome to try to arrange that via twitter, but with G-Snap! it was trivially easy to do.

Maybe the Oracle stockholders meetings will allow photos and live blogging.  We'll have to see about that.

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I listen to a lot of podcasts, usually when during my runs or while I'm driving.  One of the podcasts I've been listening to over the past few years is This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte.

Well, he's got a network of podcasts on the TWiT Network and I recently found a new one that I think is pretty good: FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software).  It's a weekly show in an interview format; each episode is about a different open source topic or person.

Recently, FLOSS interviewed Sun's own Glynn Foster to discuss OpenSolaris.  Not a bad introduction to OpenSolaris if you haven't checked it out yet.

Another Sun-related FLOSS Weekly is the ZFS podcast.

I also enjoyed the interview with Jono Bacon of Canonical; it looks like there are plenty of other FLOSS episodes worth a listen.

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I just saw this short video talking about how Sun's cloud computing platform lives at a fascinating datacenter called the SuperNAP in Las Vegas.

Maybe you've just read that sentence and asked yourself two questions:

1. "fascinating" and "datacenter" in the same sentence?  Dude, you've pegged the nerd-meter at 100.  What happened to you?
2. A datacenter in Vegas?  I thought datacenters try to keep machines cool, not toasty.

Well, the story about how Switch Communications keeps the SuperNAP cool is actually pretty interesting; here is their own video that talks about it.  And here's a story from The Register talking about the SuperNAP as well.

And Vegas had me scratching my head as well, but it turns out that many of the big Internet carriers have endpoints in Vegas.  So if you have a datacenter that sits where all those endpoints meet, you have the opportunity to offer huge bandwidth at great prices to your customers.  That's what the Switch people do.

Check it out; it's actually pretty interesting reading and watching.

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Okay, this blog entry is one of the "note to self" kind; I should probably create a tag for that or something.

Here's what I'm trying to do: I have a spreadsheet with data I've gotten from a table in a web page; the table happens to be data from a twiki that our organization uses to track the projects we do.  I'm looking at data trends, doing so by creating a data pilot table (in Excel land, a pivot table) of my spreadsheet data.  The results are nice, but now I want to see the same results without all the entries that have the string "SSE" in the keywords column of my spreadsheet (many columns in this spreadsheet, one of them contains keywords for the projects we track).

Creating the data pilot table is easy.  Creating the filter is easy (on the data pilot, click on the "Filter" button to bring up a dialog that lets you choose your filter parameters).  Getting to the regular expression part is easy (in the Filter dialog, click on the button labeled "More >>" and check the box labeled "Regular expression").  But what to type in the "Value" text field?  I tried typing *SSE*, but that didn't do anything.

I found the solution in this great blog about OpenOffice tips.  The solution: type a period before each asterisk, i.e., .*SSE.*, instead of *SSE* as Excel does it.

It worked beautifully; whew!

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I recently learned about a company that's been around for a couple of years called spigit, and a fascinating piece of software they produce.  If you're familiar with the term "decision market" or with the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" then you have a great headstart understanding what they do.  If you haven't encountered the term or read the book, I'd explain it like this: the problem they solve is how to harness the brainpower any large company or community has in solving problems.  I'll use an example to try to explain what they do.

Suppose you are running a record company and you want to pick next year's musical artists to produce.  There are thousands of musical acts you could go with but you want to make the best few choices you can, because you can only fund a relatively small number out of those thousands.  In your record company, you've got all kinds of people who know a lot about their piece of the music industry.  So what you do is to use spigit to create a sort of a game: anybody can suggest an artist for the company to produce.  The person who suggests an artist posts to the spigit collaboration site with whatever info she wants to post that will get people to vote yes on that artist.  Other people can vote yes or no on that artist; they can post additional information about that artist (maybe a reason why to support or not support that artist).  Anybody can participate; you end up getting a wide variety of opinions from all around the company, ultimately ending up in a ranked list of artists that the company can produce.

In the meantime, people are voting on artists but also on the opinions and suggestions of other employees, so that employees build up a reputation within spigit.  The higher your reputation, the more your votes tend to count.  Reputation can go up or down; you can build up your reputation but you can also ruin it.

There's a lot more to spigit, but this is the basic idea.  The application does a nice job of combining current web 2.0 kinds of technologies and adding the concept of prediction / decision markets.  It's worth checking out if you want to make the best use of the collective intelligence of a community of people.

It looks like there are some open source prediction market packages as well; I'll have to check those out and see what they can do compared with spigit.

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