The Sect of Rama

In just under four years since the inception of blogs.sun.com, we've reached another major landmark: 100,000 total blog entries. Growth has been exponential- nearly 40% of that is just in the past year, according to the site statistics captured by the Wayback Machine.

What's next? I fully expect to see continued growth with blogs.sun.com, but I'm also really excited with the rate wikis.sun.com is growing. In the first 8 months, we've seen 12k registered users and 5500 pages created. This is roughly increasing 30% month over month, with March showing 63k visits and 220k pageviews. I fully suspect wikis.sun.com will follow in the blogs.sun.com footsteps, as far as exponential adoption- and will be an equally major shift in how Sun communicates with the world.

Recently implemented a Feedburner wrapper to my existing RSS and Atom blog feeds and thought I'd share the data- as of January 14, 2007. Interesting to see nearly all Bloglines subscribers use RSS rather than Atom. My guess is these are the some of the first subscribers, before Atom (and Google Reader) were available...?

RSS feed: 36 subscribers



Atom feed: 61 subscribers

Just catching this 43folders entry on managing feeds with groups. I recently recategorized and/or unsubscribed my entire subscription base myself, after looking at the feed reader (Google Reader) as my nemesis rather than ally. It started with an "At the Top" category, but as I realized one "important" bucket was insufficient, I broke down and redid them all on order of importance rather than subject matter. Organizing based on subject can be done via tags anyway.

Old groups: At the Top, Blogs, Brew, Buy, Code, Food, Gadgets, Listen, News, Photo, Read.
New groups: 1, 2, 3, 4, ephemeral. "1" means read today, "4" is the bitbucket- I don't read it, but want to keep a link to the feed. Ephemeral is whats called "news" in the 43folders article- stuff you can mark all as read if you get behind. (Geeky name I know, blame Will. :))

So far so good. I'm doing my best to keep the categories at 5 tops...

This marks my 500th entry to this blog (along with 711 comments)! My first was on July 30, 2004. I'm disappointed to see Google's math expressions couldn't sort out how many days have elapsed. Alas, I'm too lazy to figure out the exact math, but it works out to be about 0.40 entries/day, or about 2.5 entries a week and 1.4 comments per entry.

On a side note, I've discovered that certain Google queries get blocked, like this one, because they look similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. Pretty neat to see the "don't be evil" mantra in practice.

Via Chris H: WikipediaVision (beta). Anonymous edits to English Wikipedia (almost) in real-time.

I just watched this twice back to back:



There's some background on the commercial, but alas the uncompressed version seems to be missing. If someone with more patience tracks it down, be sure to leave a comment.

Ooooohhh... a new blog for the ol' feed reader: The Champagne of Blogs (man, why didn't I think of that blog name first?), a fellow homebrewer and meat smoker. You gotta check out this whole pig roasting session.

A quick scan of more recent entries revealed a familiar name: The Horse Brass. My wife and I hoisted a few pints there about 3 years ago. Nice place- don't remember much about the beer selection. I guess it was good. ;)

I don't know much about Cenqua or their products, but BileBlog's entry on their purchase by Atlassian (WARNING: explicit language, NSFW) bashes Atlassian, which I do have recent experience with. In a nutshell, his statement:

[Atlassian is a] company whose informal motto is ‘make it pretty, sell it, then maybe ponder making it work if some turds pay enough for it’.

is not at all our experience. In fact, I've exchanged email with the president of Atlassian and offered to pay to have some refactoring of the user schema completed sooner. Rather than bilking us for cash- as BileBlog suggests would be their character- their director of engineering has been in touch with our engineering team and all agreed it was an important change that they will take on themselves in the (tentative) 2.7 release. This has also been true for many other bugs and RFEs we've reported and/or voted on, which have already been fixed in the 2.5.5 and 2.5.6 releases- all of which were functionality related, not eye candy.

Of course YMMV, but thought I should share our positive experience with Atlassian, and am looking forward to what will come of the Cenqua acquisition.

After lots of blood, sweat and tears- we've finally made wikis.sun.com GA! This is part of our internal announcement:

As of this morning, Aug 3, wikis.sun.com is now accessible to the world. Our goal was to follow the blogs.sun.com model, and allow any Sun employee to create their own wiki "space". The space owners can choose to invite people (Sun employees, partners, customers, or anyone) to contribute within their space and build a community.

If you're a Sun employee, I encourage you to check out the FAQ and sign up. If you're not, but are interested in collaborating with Sun on any wiki suitable fodder, please get in touch with with your Sun colleagues and have them sponsor you through the creation of a new shared wiki space. And if you have questions, feel free to get in touch with me.

Let the wikification begin!

Every once in a while I've got a thought/issue for our company that needs action from someone, but I don't know who- and have no way of efficiently and effectively communicating it upwards. Ah the joys of working for a 30k+ employee company...

Take for example this morning: I'm trying to convert a contractor to a full-time employee (a belated but much-deserved move). Part of the process is making the job posting public, and having the candidate apply for it formally. This application must be submitted as a PDF or Word document only. Thats right: StarOffice/OpenOffice documents are not supported. I saw this was the case about 8 months ago during my last hire, but assumed it was a temporary thing while we worked out the kinks with a new system. Well, its been at least 8 months now, and it appears we're still telling all our potential hires that SO/OO documents aren't good enough.

Clearly this is asinine. However this is a P2 in my mind, I wouldn't feel sufficiently justified to email Jonathan about it directly. Besides, we all know how distracting it is trying to work in an interrupt-driven mode. Phones are the worst, IM is a close second, and email is not far behind. Non-P1 issues are best handled via a queue. But who the heck do I bring this up to? And how do I know this person is in a position to take action?

Enter the "Executive Board Queue", where you could fire off items with priorities and know that someone with clout will follow-up on it, even if the response is "we acknowledge receipt of said issue and chose to take no action." At least then I would know our execs are aware of it and aren't of the same opinion of me. Thats cool.

So how is this built? Maybe its another category in our internal ServiceDesk. I don't really care, as long as there's guaranteed delivery, guaranteed reply, and some sort of structure (read: not email). Igor mentioned one of the topics at the last Atlassian users meeting was interesting uses for JIRA. Sounds like Joshua Wold did a preso on it, although I couldn't find anything concrete. Regardless of the implementation, it would be awesome to be able to see all the outstanding concerns all Sun employees have, and how they were addressed. Real [internal] transparency. Just like what we have for facilities requests now, but instead of seeing burned out light requests, we've got potential "burned out customer" requests instead.

I think that'd be pretty neat...

Nice keyboard shortcuts. Guess it pays to RTFM for once. ;)

I've taken lots of panoramics, but rarely 360 degrees (there are so few places that are interesting in every direction and I happen to have my tripod with me. Perhaps that will change after some of these inspirational views: The product of eleven years of hiking, exploring, and VR photography, VirtualParks.org is a successful proof of concept that showed high quality panoramas could excite people about our wild places. Since 1995, millions of people have visited this site and gotten a glimpse of what it's like to visit incredible wilderness locales such as Kings Canyon, Crater Lake, Yosemite, Banff, Zion, Arches, Big Basin, Mono Lake and hundreds of other parks & preserves.

I've been using 103bees for about 6 months now, and the weekly reports are still as interesting and humorous as ever:

Here is this week's 103bees keyword report for each of your projects, including a selection of randomly
picked search queries, the latest question search queries and your todo list.


THE SECT OF RAMA (http://blogs.sun.com/rama)
> how to make prison brews
> gadgets+analog clock
> how do unsmooth rocks turn smooth?
> cat bow golf
> gprs camera
> bendito machine
> growing marzano roma tomato
> charbucks
> macbook netinfo manager
> pc powersupply calculator


THE SECT OF RAMA QUESTIONS
> what shrinks 6 inches in winter time?
> how do unsmooth rocks turn smooth?
> how to make banana pruno
> how to build a smoker
> how to reformat usb thumb drive

By way of Levi, this TED talk, Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo:



Very slick stuff. I hate to be curmudgeonly, but my first thought was wondering how technology advancements like this will erode privacy. Combine:

1. the backlash to Google's map street view

2. the fact that you can find some of my usenet posts from the early 90s, long before people were thinking in terms of search engines and data permanence (or at least long before *I* was!)

And you get data mining of people's photos (or other multimedia) in ways they didn't think would be possible, and potentially wouldn't have shared would they have known. Moore's Law is a double-edged sword...

I didn't start blogging at Sun until July 2004, so my 'blog anniversary' isn't for another few months. But on this day three years ago, our group launched the blogs.sun.com site- the success of which is partly responsible for the formation of my team, Community Software (which is really an eclectic mass of services in its current state: ad server, mediacast, wikis*, blogs, forums, search, planets*, developers, bugs. (* = work in progress))

I don't have anything new to add to what others have said already (1, 2, 3). So here's to another 3 years of pioneering (as far as big companies go) community software at Sun!