Marla Parker's Weblog

Community Corner 2007
It is more than a month until JavaOne, so I'm happy that there are so many mini-talks proposed for the third java.net Community Corner on the wiki already. At the moment, there are ten or more talks from one very active project, but I've contacted that team and asked them to spread their talks out a bit across all three days, instead of having most of them on Wednesday, and maybe move a few talks into demos at the three pods in the Community Corner.

If you are a member of java.net, you can propose a mini-talk yourself, or volunteer to help staff the three demo pods in the Community Corner, all on the wiki. Just be sure to follow the directions, please!

Here is a picture from last year (courtesy of Aaron Houston, who send pictures out so conveniently that it is easier for me to borrow one of his than to find one elsewhere):

Come to JavaOne, and come meet other java.net members, project owners, community leaders, staff and volunteers, hang out and listen to the mini-talks.

What a change...
The big news today is of course a change but I'm personally more delighted with the internal change. Sun's senior management have been on the open source path for a long time, and lots of other staff throughout the company have been with them all the way. But a lot of other people, the majority at first, were too busy with their own jobs to pay attention to the early open source movement.

So when Danese Cooper, who often told me her goal at Sun was to get Java released as open source, would say something provocative, there really could be lively discussions that started with something like: what is she talking about? Open Source software is like Communism, isn't it? It was pretty entertaining.

Danese is long gone from Sun, but she is celebrating today with this timeline in her blog.

And wow, have times changed. Everyone, really everyone I know, within Sun gets it now. Schwartz and the rest of his team are effective communicators. No more fear and confusion, just a lot of positive energy and excitement.

Grabbing Opportunities
One of my interns, Sonya Barry, has started the assignment that I thought would be most interesting when I wrote the job description: to pick a java.net project of personal interest to her, try to join it and make a contribution, write about the experience, identify any obstacles along the way, and work with the infrastructure or community leaders teams, as appropriate, to remove the obstacles.

java.net is a site for collaboration, so we wanted to run an experiment to see just how easy or hard it is for a random developer to come and collaborate. The java.net Editors decided that Sonya's experience could best be shared through a new blog.

The project she is working on is Mifos and I am sooooo jealous. I've been a fan of MicroFinance since reading The Price of a Dream : The Story of the Grameen Bank, by David Bornstein many years ago. Mifos is in fact a project of the Grameen Technology Center. What could be more cool - microfinance plus open source?

extra intern candidates
I have filled both my intern reqs!

Thank You LinkedIn. This is the first time I've seriously used linkedin for anything other than keeping track of friends who switch companies and/or change their email addresses. I did not use my extended network on linkedin, though now that I think about it perhaps I should have... But what I did do produced 6-8 resumes, most of them good, and including the two interns that I have hired, both from Mills College. Did you know you can export your contacts list from linkedin? So that is what I did: exported my direct contacts and sent them all the same email via bcc. Ellen Spertus forwarded my mail to a grad student candidate, who has accepted the offer, and she in turn forwarded it to an undergrad student candidate, who accepted the offer for the undergrad intern job.

Two candidates that I did not get to interview in person, though I would have if things had spilled over into January, you might consider if you have a need for a part-time intern during school, full time during the summer.

They are Son Pham, a senior at SJSU graduating December 2006, with work experience at four different companies and a long list of language and technology skills; and Khanh Nguyen, a MS/CS student (May, 2007) also at SJSU, who has some open source experience.

My recruiter only sent me four resumes directly, but she was very helpful when it came to generating the offer and associated adminsitrivia. And she did indirectly generate a few resumes more from job boards where the req was posted at local universities. Overall I only got sixteen resumes, and screened maybe a dozen, but I'm very happy to have hired two.

netbeans 5.0 beta and java.net projects

Last night I finally downloaded netbeans 5.0 beta. It was pretty quick - I walked away and when I came back some 15-30 minutes later, it was done. I have a 586 Tadpole running JDS 2, so I'm always aprehensive about installing software, but netbeans installed perfectly easily and quickly.

I ran it, checked out a web page from http://stipends.dev.java.net, edited it, checked it in again. It all just worked!

Hiring update: Still looking for intern candidates. See 544778 (grad) and 544713 (undergrad) at Sun Jobs.

interns wanted
I missed a call this morning at 7:36am, and when I checked it was from Josie Martinez, the recruiter assigned to my intern reqs that were just posted on Friday. Wow! I'm going to enjoy working with this recruiter! I have too many things to do today at work, but happily all of them are good. But all of them take second place after recruiting. I've been at Sun for almost 20 years and I know the rule about a req: use it or lose it. And hiring the wrong person is far worse than not hiring at all. So when I have a req open, I spend time filling it, at the expense of everything else.

I'm looking for an undergrad and a grad student, CS majors or related, in the SF Bay area, because it is during the school year and I'd like to be able to meet face to face on a somewhat regular basis. The work is all on or related to www.java.net, so there is no need to do the work in a Sun office. But there is a need to have regular face to face meetings.

Sun's job posting has changed since I last posted a req. I liked it when I could pass around the url to an actual job. It seems no longer possible, but you can find the reqs 544778 (grad) and 544713 (undergrad) by filling out the search field at the bottom of this page: Search Jobs.

java.net Community Corner

I am really looking forward to JavaOne this year because of the way the community has come together to plan the java.net Community Corner on Mon/Tue/Wed in the Pavilion.

It is a 20x20 booth containing three pods and in the fourth corner, a little 10 seat presentation area where we will be running presentations every half-hour by members of the community!

You can see the schedule of mini-talks, and lower on the same wiki, the staffing schedule for the three pods: java.net in general, JDDAC, featuring Networked Bay Environmental Assessment and Monitoring Stations, and a third pod that will show off different communities at different times, including Global Education and Learning, Embedded Java, Java Tools, our newest community, Robotics, and others. These are four communities on java.net that are lead by non-Sun staff.

One reason for having this Community Corner outside of the larger Sun booth is so that non-Sun staff can volunteer to work in the booth. Other communities that are primarily Sun-lead, such as Java Desktop and the JDK community, will be represented at pods in the Sun booth. Not doubt they will stop by to hang out in the java.net Community Corner some of the time, too.

In between talks, in our mini-theater, we will have a slide show running so that the screen is never blank. We'll be adding pictures all the time, and we'd especially like to put names with faces of community leaders and project owners. See the Picture section of the wiki for information on how to upload your pictures to be considered for the slide show.

Hope to see you at JavaOne.

Discovering Make: technology on your time

I met with Dale Dougherty and a couple of the other cool folks from O'Reilly a few weeks ago, before ETech. Before the end of the meeting, Dale proudly handed me and my boss a copy of the new magazine Make: technology on your time. It is small, thick, colorful, with a busy cover. I tossed it in my bag and forgot about it.

I work from home. Last week my husband noticed the neglected magazine sitting in my home office and picked it up to browse. I kept working.

"What is this?" (I told him.)

Later: "This magazine is weird."

Later: "Where did you say you got this?"

Later: "This magazine is GREAT! It totally rocks!"

Later, after laughter: "I have to have this magazine. You have to get it for me! Listen to this..." (He summarized some articles, including the Urban Camouflage and the homebrew Apple II story.)

By now, I've more or less read (guiltily at first, and then gleefully) practically the entire magazine. I skipped the longer how-tos of the things I have no intention of doing. (We planned the route of our backyard monorail over dinner. Kids were disappointed that it cannot go up or down hills, but they like the idea of bridging the "ravine.")

Besides the many, many detailed bits of the magazine that I love, I mean specific content in this issue, the best thing is an overall feeling of wild optimism.

OK here is a short list of what I loved in this issue: Backyard Monorails, Fab Lab, Heirloom Technology, the kids' books recommended at the end of Heirloom Technology (I'm getting two from the library, two from Amazon), Gauss Rifle.

So I'll get Mike the magazine, and maybe someday he can contribute to a how-to build an owl box with video, a subset of the larger subject of nest cams.

Nest Cams?

We've had a live feed to an owl box for the past six years, with 4-5 baby owls hatching every year. This year, as an experiment, we let the squirrel who tried to move in last year stay. Results: we now have a squirrel cam instead of an owl cam. The baby squirrel was really tiny when we first noticed it. We are sort of surprised the owl did not chase the squirrel away. Not sure what will happen next year! I think we'll chase away the squirrel and see if the owls will return.

New Tadpole

As of the new year, I got a new laptop: a Tadpole Talin running JDS. Unfortunately it was running JDS 1, but it came with a DVD and instructions for installing JDS 2, which worked just fine in the few hours it said it should take. Did not require much attention from me, either.

I'd been using JDS 1 for some time, but had my old PC as dual boot. The only time I would boot Windows was when I wanted to be wireless or, even more rare, print something.

To my delight, after installing JDS 2 on my new Tadpole, wireless works! I should get some client software to tell me what wireless networks are available and stuff like that, but for now it seems to be good enough. I configured our home WAP to connect to the ethernet device address for eth1, which is easily accessible when I double-click on the second network icon on my screen. I have to su to root and type ifup eth1 to get the wireless working. I'd like to have it boot wired, when there is a wired network available, and try wireless after that. But not enough to figure it out so far. The wireless works wherever it can find a WAP to connect to that is open.

I wanted to switch to Firefox and Thunderbird, too, but conservatively chose to avoid changing too many variables at once. So now they are relegated to the world of round-to-its, as in "I'll get around to it eventually..."

Also not sure I will be able to make it print to my home printer, a Brother MFC-3420C. It eats expensive ink though, even if you never use it to actually print, so maybe I'll get a new printer that is known to work with JDS and has lower maintenance costs, hopefully.

I love being on linux.

Boy Takes Bath

Nicky turned 9 yesterday. Conversation this morning:

Me: Nicky, did you remember to take a bath?

N: (groans, and he has a cinnamon and sugar smile from breakfast that extends right across his cheeks)

M: Go look at yourself in the mirror.

N: I'll wash my face.

M: Take a bath! You're having a sleepover tonight and there wont be time for a bath after school and I don't want you to be stinky.

N: But Mom! I just took a bath recently!

M: When?

N: Like, 5 days ago!

M: Take a bath!

Of course he obeyed me. Next chapter could be titled, "Did you use soap?"

Future of Work meeting

On Monday I spoke to a group of a dozen or so Human Resources execs from large companies attending a meeting called Great Employers: The Future Perspective, hosted by the Institute for the Future. They asked about new cooperation models and ways of organizing work that might be learned from the open source movement.

I gave them some quick basics about open source: Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) means Libre (free speech) not Gratis (free beer); FSF and GPL; OSI, Open Source Definition; Linux is F/OSS but not the other way around; community matters most; the type of community and the types of possible business models depend on the type of license.

The community aspect is the part that relates directly to the future of work. I told them about Coase's Penguin, and the third mode of production described by Yochai Benkler as "commons-based peer production". (The other two modes of production being markets, with transaction costs, and firms, with managerial hierarchies, described in 1937 by Ronald Coase.)

In The Success of Open Source, Steven Weber talks about distributed innovation: there is no weakest link because there really is no chain. Innovation happens on the edges, then gets incorporated into some core if it has value, and sometimes new cores or centers are created.

Weber also coins the term "antirival" goods. If you Google that, it says "Did you mean antiviral?" Rival goods (e.g. a pizza) and nonrival goods (e.g. a park) are defined in economics. Weber calls open source software an antirival good because, paradoxically, the more "free-riders" (users) the better. Unlike with pizza or parks. This assumes there is a core of actual developers, and also that some non-zero fraction of the free-riders will complain or otherwise give useful feedback.

So at the future of work meeting, we talked about ways to make cross-organizational communities happen within a corporation, or across the firewall between the employees and customers, too. We talked about blogging, and how all their companies are way too full of strict secrets for that, even just internal blogging.

I talked a little about iWork at Sun, and the fact that one reason I'm reluctant to leave is that I doubt the infrastructure could be this good anywhere else. They asked how my work is measured, since I work from home full-time now. I gave my stock answer: I'm not paid to do the things I can do, I'm paid to choose the right things to do. I have way, way, way too many opportunities for one person. I could keep a staff of 10 people busy, no problem. But I don't get a staff of 10, so I have to carefully pick what I'm going to do, what will have the biggest impact for Sun, and then do it really well. They seemed to buy that, repeating it back to me as getting paid to make the right bets.

Portlet Community on Java.net

Just before the American Thanksgiving break last week, we launched a new community on java.net: the Portlet Community. There are two hosted projects and a linked project there already, plus one in the queue of new project requests.

I have a backlog of about forty new project requests to tackle today, even after sending ten or so to community leaders for their approval last night. None of those forty are for Portlet, but may be portlet projects we need to rediscover in the general projects area and move into the Portlet Community.

The leader of the Portlet Community is Navaneeth Krishnan, a Sun employee who works in Bangalore, India. I've enjoyed working with Navaneeth on the community, in spite of the twelve hour time shift. I'm glad that I've been to the Bangalore office once, because it always helps to be able to visualize, at least somewhat, where on earth an otherwise virtual person actually is living and working. Navaneeth is a great addition to our community of community leaders on java.net.

You can read about the Portlet Community in Navaneeth's blog.

Question about Kyoto

A popular guest pastor preached a great sermon at LGUMC this morning. He went over five points, which I've mostly forgotten but one of them stuck: it was about taking care of the good earth. He went off on a bit of a tangent and got so worked up I thought of fire and brimstone, except the subject was Kyoto and Global Warming.

I've just finished reading The Success of Open Source, by Stephen Weber. The last chapter is called: The Code That Changed the World? As the question mark indicates, it is an interesting question, not a claim. But the sermon reminded me of that chapter, where Weber writes on p. 264,

"...The war against terrorism, the relationship between open source and proprietary models of software production, and the politics among transnational NGO networks and international organizations share characteristics that make them diverse cases of a similarly structured political space. I am certain that some of the most interesting processes in international politics and economics over the next decade are going to take place in this space, at the interface between hierarchies and networks (rather than solely within either one)."

So I wonder: is there an international organization that is tracking, or actively seeking, corporate commitments to Kyoto by multinationals that span multiple countries? Is there a website somewhere with the stories of the battles to sign up different companies, wins and losses, success stories of unexpected savings and nightmares of lost opportunities? (Well, here is a November 2004 report that might be close.)

It seems that if you could get enough corporations in the US to sign up, for example, it would not matter that the government refuses to do so. That is purportedly what the Bush administration has called for: industry should take steps to address global warming, but voluntarily.

And that reminds me of the children's moment back in church this morning, delivered by our regular pastor, not the visitor. He explained that volunteering is doing something that you want to do. Serving is doing something that simply needs to be done.

JDDAC little adventure

The JDDAC community on java.net is quite small, but it is very cool. A project under development by corporate, academic, and non-profit organizations has plans to deploy sensor arrays in the SF Bay and show the data realtime on the web...but for now, they have a little demo I decided to try to run. It monitors memory usage of my jvm.

I downloaded it and ran it on my linux laptop and it asked me questions I could not answer: name of the probe? activation key? Hmmm. Darn, guess I have to read something.

Found the getting started doc. Went to the Measurement Server, made an account, ran the client right into (not through) the firewall. Ran it outside the firewall; it worked! At least it is doing something every 10 seconds or so.

Next day: back to the server to see my probe! But the page now just shows me javascript code. Now that I actually have a probe, the page is broken. I send a question to the forum and got an embarassed email back saying the page had been done for IE and it would work on IE. Recall that I'm running linux. But my daughter (happy to be missing a day of school due to a sore thoat) opened up a 19th IE window (she said she was too lazy to close all the popup ads from the game she was playing) and got the graphs to show there. Kinda cool, it shows the data for the 4 hours I ran the client on my laptop the night before.

I'll try this another time and see if they've got it working in mozilla and maybe have a way for the client to run inside a firewall. I'll need that when they deploy their sensors into the real world so I can watch the data from the Bay someday, while working inside a firewall.

remember summer

It is fall and the weather is mixed but mostly nice yet I cannot help looking back fondly on summer.

Here is a picture that I took months ago in Maine.

I love this picture because the little urchins are so absorbed in fishing for crabs, which they can see clearly on the bottom of the harbour, and even a small lobster. The dock and jumble of boats are quintessential Maine to me.