Marla Parker's Weblog

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.

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.

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.

new projects

There are just a ton of new projects to approve every day on java.net. I don't actually approve them, I check them to see if they have enough content to make sense, then put them in the inbox for the appropriate community. The community leader then approves or disapproves the project for their community.

Some project requests don't make sense, or are incomplete. I ask for more info and if I don't get it, I disapprove the project.

My favorite in that category so far is one that had exactly 2 words of content. The name of the proposed project was ecommerce. The description: shopping. So far, no response to my request for more info.

I wonder if I should be doing this, or if I should get an intern to do it. It is almost just clerical. But, I think it is worth it. If I stay on top of the requests, it is only a half dozen a day, on average. Including the weekends. The reason I am doing it is so that I'll have some idea of the new projects that are being created in each community, and also to act as a sort of gatekeeper against garbage, though that is the job of the community leaders, also.

In this way I was happy to find the new2java project, submitted by a friend of mine at Sun and currently approved in the edu-incubator.

java.net hours in the day

So much for the month of July. I've been the community manager of java.net now for over two weeks, so here is "what is easy, hard, interesting, and hopefully fun about this new assignment" so far.

easy: working with my primary contacts at O'Reilly and Collabnet, Sarah and Helen, respectively.

hard: shifting gears to work on anything that is not related to java.net, and shifting gears out of work mode and into life. (That's why I could not work all weekend, we took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Pine Mountain Lake, near Groveland, CA. Had a great time, kids' first time on a knee-board, big grins. I thought about logging on, but they only had dialup...I'd neglect my family a bit for high-speed access, but not for dialup.)

interesting: problems that need to be solved, e.g. how can/should we make free stuff available from self-promoting commercial entities that in fact is of interest and value to java developers without messing up the non-commercial community space we have worked hard to build? (I think the answer is: carefully, and with as much community involvement as we can get.)

fun: getting to know the community leaders and dispatching new projects to the appropriate community inbox. I just took this over from Sarah on Thursday, when there were four new projects, about what I expected. But on Friday there were eight! I only got through two before taking off for the weekend, and the second one looked really interesting. I'd blog about them but that would be tantamount to pre-announcing them, which they may or may not appreciate, I have no idea. Better to wait and blog about projects that are through the approval process so you can go check them out directly.

So far so good, great in fact. I could easily, easily immerse myself in this work like an underpaid grad student tricked into working more than any sane person would, if only I wasn't so committed to loving my family as best I can and taking care of myself, physically, etc. etc. I wish I did not have to take my son to the orthodontist in the morning, and I wish there wasn't a in-person staff meeting in the late afternoon tomorrow, but other than that, I'm really glad tomorrow is Monday!

At last, a blog of my own...

I've been waiting to start this until I was sure of my good fortune in landing a new assignment of community manager for java.net. It was officially announced to the community leaders of java.net this week, so I'm in! Yeah!

Now if you go to java.net and look around, say in the model project called java-net (ok that is slightly confusing, but it is a better name than "model" isn't it?), you may note that it still says Jbob is the community manager. Well, so I just need to update that page. I already know that is easy, but I'll be sharing here what is easy, hard, interesting, and hopefully fun about this new assignment, as well as my other work.

Marla