You know what happens when you get a new boss who’s been working for 11 years at Sun? He starts sending out OpenOffice documents, that’s what ;).
I think I should be happy that he’s not sending MS Office documents, and cannot really in good conscience recommend the exclusive use of Apple products like iWork, in preference to a true Open Source solution, no matter how much I love Keynote. Moreover, we still need to get him a Mac.
The only problem I had, to be honest, was that I didn’t have Open Office installed on my MacBook Pro, and didn’t want to install and run X11 just to open a few documents. So I thought of using NeoOffice. After all, I’ve seen Simon Phipps use it on his Mac when he did his presentation at OSBA, so if it’s good for Simon it must be good for me.
Problem is, the main download site for NeoOffice appears to be down. Looking for an alternative location, I came upon a torrent for NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3 for Intel Macs which led to a speedy download and now I can open ODF files without having to suffer X11.
To make this post a little less self-serving, I’m linking to the torrent here, for the benefit of those that might be searching for it. Personally, though, I think I will continue to use Keynote for doing my own presentations.
Technorati Tags:
openoffice, neooffice
Starting today, Giovanni is our new boss. If you wonder what happened to Gianugo, don’t worry: he’ll be moving higher to be the head of our European operations. I’m not sure what this mean in practice. I think he doesn’t know either, exactly ;). We’ll have to figure it out as we move along, as things here are happening at an incredible pace, which just makes it all more exciting.
Back to Giovanni, he’s one of the leading figures in the Italian Java landscape, having started with it while at Sun, back in 1995. I’m sure working with him will be a great source of motivation and knowledge, while we could teach him some of the ins and outs of the Open Source landscape.
So here is my most heartfelt welcome to him, together with an invitation to start a blog. I need someone to link to.
The first edition of the Open Source Business Academy was a resounding success. We had a good audience, considering it was the first public event we organized, and the speakers didn’t disappoint. Kudos to everyone who contributed to make this possible, in particular to Sun Italy for their sponsorship and to our CEO Gianugo, who dived into this with all his energy and more.
I’ve uploaded some pictures to Flickr, but they aren’t particularly good: my camera is lousy when the lighting is bad. Andrew took more pictures with a Canon DSLR and I’m sure they’ll be uploaded later. More media, like presentation slides, audio and probably even video, will be posted in the coming days to the event’s website or to ours.
If you weren’t able to make it this year, I hope to see you at next year’s edition.
Just a gentle reminder that tomorrow we, together with Sun, will be hosting the first Open Source Business Academy in Milan. Hope to see you there, if you can make it.
It’s not easy to find a company that is so keen on giving back to the community as it is on taking from it, even when the code is at the heart of its business. I guess it’s just natural that this happens, when you staff a company with some of the best minds of Open Source.
Leo Simons: “Since everyone is inventing roughly the same wheel at the same time, and some people have re-invented it several times now, it is obvious it is about time for an open source project that does RDF-over-HTTP, properly. I’ve been talking to various people about this for a while now, and a bunch of us are almost ready to approach the Apache Incubator with a proposal for a project to build a ’sparql endpoint’. And the venice project will be donating some code (and developer time!) to seed this effort. Hopefully we will go from annoyingly secretive to actively open (and open source) in the scope of a few weeks.”
Nice feelings aside, you should also consider Queso, Leo. I would have posted this as a comment on your blog, but there’s no comment system there, so here it is.
Technorati Tags: theveniceproject, rdf, semweb, queso.
In the end all rumors have been confirmed and today will mark the day when Java source code has been opened, under the GPLv2. Details to follow at www.sun.com/opensource/java, where a live webcast with Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green will be held at 9:30AM PT (that is 6:30PM CET, so it means I will probably be traveling at that time).
With respect to the fears I have expressed about the core libraries being GPL as well, it looks like—according to Tim Bray— that they will use the Classpath Exception clause to avoid code using them to be infected by the GPL. I can’t even begin to wonder what the actual legal consequences of this are, but the spirit—if not the wording— of the clause seem pretty clear to me.
Technorati Tags: gpl, lgpl, open source java, simon phipps, open source business academy, classpath, tim bray.
So it looks like Sun might decide to license Java SE and ME under the GPL. I sure hope that doesn’t include the core libraries, otherwise once your code does something trivial like implements java.io.Serializable it will be GPLed as well, and the LGPL is not going to be safer in this respect.
In any case, if you want to hear the story directly from the man who is overseeing this, i.e. none other than Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, you’d better join us at the Open Source Business Academy, where Simon will deliver another one of his Zen of Free talks, this time aptly subtitled “The Philosophy behind the Open Sourcing of Java”. What better occasion than this one to get answers to this one and many other questions about Sun, Java and Open Source?
Technorati Tags: gpl, lgpl, open source java, simon phipps, open source business academy.
Web 2.0 Conference: Flash and Firefox to unite - ProCreative - Macworld UK: “Adobe will contribute source code to the Mozilla Foundation as the two organisations aim to establish a standard scripting language that developers can use to create interactive applications for Flash Player and Firefox.”
I think this has the potential to be seriously cool, and on several aspects:
It’s cool for Mozilla and the Open Source community in general, to have such a powerful and ubiquitous web client platform as Open Source software.
It’s cool for web developers and users alike, in that it paints a future of convergence between Ajax, the HTML DOM and the ActionScript object model.
Of course, Adobe thinks it’s going to be cool for their baseline, as this will allow them to sell more server-side solutions and authoring tools.
This is not cool at all for Microsoft and IE, though.
The standard scripting language that Tamarin will implement in Firefox is ECMAScript 4, now being developed by standards body Ecma International. Sun Microsystems’ JavaScript and Microsoft’s JScript are both based on ECMAScript, which is currently in its third version.
Actually, JavaScript has nothing to do with Sun Microsystems, who own the Java trademark, but was invented at Netscape.
Technorati Tags: adobe, mozilla, ecmascript, javascript, actionscript, flash.
Mark November 21 on your calendars: Sourcesense and Sun Microsystems Italia are organizing the first edition of the Open Source Business Academy.
This is a one day event aimed at business managers and decision makers who want to evaluate the costs and benefits of the adoption of Open Source in their company.
Confirmed speakes, so far, are:
- Mark A. Brewer: Chief Executive Officer, Covalent
- Simon Phipps: Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems Inc.
- John Powell: President and Chief Executive Officer, Alfresco
- Angelo Solari: Director, Software Factory, Telecom Italia
I don’t know the other speakers, but I’ve heard Simon Phipps speaking already, and he’s great.
All of us are totally psyched by this, as this is the first instance where Sourcesense is really coming to the forefront in a high-visibility event and presenting itself as one of the highlights of the business-oriented Open Source landscape. You can also read this post by Gianugo if you want to know more of what we’re up to.
The event will be held at the Enterprise Hotel, Milan, Italy and will comprise a plenary session in the morning and a series of parallel workshops in the afternoon. So, if you’re interested in making sense of Open Source, go register yourself and drop by on the 21st.
Eureka! Your own search engine has landed!: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily build a search engine on your blog or website tailored to the topics and areas you know and love the most? You’re not alone if you’d like that — we’ve heard from partners large and small, and users across the web who want access to the Google search platform, and want to customize and make it their own.”
Now, this is fucking cool (yes, I dropped the F-bomb too, Tim)! I’ve been wanting this for ages, mostly to build a search engine for all matters Open Source to go with The Open Source Zone. Now in just about five minutes I was able to set up a very basic search engine and prime it with just a handful of sites. I will be adding more sites in the future, but right now all visitors can have a look here (what’s up with that hideous URL? Can’t we have a simpler one?) and click on the Volunteer to contribute to this search engine link to add more sites to include in the search (you need a Google account for this though; is this part of Google’s evil plan to collect all of our lives online? 
)
Next step will be integrating the custom search site into The Open Source Zone (which badly needs reviving, I know), maybe using the Ajax API.
Picture courtesy of Ted Leung.
Technorati Tags:
google coop, custom search engines
Democracy - Internet TV Platform - Free and Open Source: “Stop squinting at tiny web video. Instead, download and watch all the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.”
Democracy is one cool app. The latest version (0.9.1) is wads better than the previous one, and already much better than iTunes’ video section. The fact that it now supports BitTorrent and Flash Video is a big plus: I can now download and watch the Technology Evangelist videos in all their full-screen, 480p glory from the same application!.
Add to this that it is available for OS X, Windows and Linux, it is free and Open Source. What more can you ask for?
Well, actually it could benefit from some UI improvements. For instance, a history function would be welcome, and it should remember the video you were playing and the position you were at, when you move around, so that you can go back and resume playing. As it is now, when you click on a channel, playing stops and you have no way to go back there.
We can be confident that these UI issues will be fixed before the 1.0 release, though. You can hear Nicholas Reville say that most of the work towards their first release is going into UI polish in this interview.
Technorati Tags: democracy, iptv, television, bittorrent, video.
About 70,600 times, according to Google Code Search, the latest product of the fertile Google Labs.
But it only sucks 6,511 times, according to Krugle, and a meager 1,910 times according to Koders.
I think Krugle and Koders are going to face some tough competition. Is this a signal to all the companies that are offering vertical search products: “Be warned, your business might be eaten by Google.”?
And now, for another silly statistic, if you were looking for a confirmation that Open Source developers are really sloppy, you can find about 327,000 instances of the string “FIXME” in comments, even limiting ourselves to languages that have a comment syntax like the one of C, C++, Java, etc.
Technorati Tags: google code search, google labs, krugle, koders.
Today marks an important milestone, as the Spring Framework 2.0 has finally been released, after a long period of beta testing.
What I expect from it is a mostly painless upgrade of several projects I have running on Spring 1.2 and the usual commitment to quality and excellence. As far as new features are concerned, I’ve got at least one good use case for scoping beans to an HTTP request. The other new features can be adopted gradually.
Spring rocks!
Technorati Tags: spring, springframework.
Arrangements have finally been made, so I can tell you that I’ll be at the following conferences:
Since I also cannot spend all my time traveling and attending cool conferences, this means I’m not going to attend the annual Cocoon GetTogether in Amsterdam, which is actually a pity. I will certainly regret not meeting all the nice Cocooners once again, but looks like quite a number of them will be at ApacheCon too, fortunately.
OSCON 2006 was a blast! Lots of great speakers, flawless organization, nice location. As always, the best part of technical conferences is meeting people. I’ll briefly list the ones I had the opportunity of exchanging some words with: James Duncan Davidson, Ted Leung, Dave Thomas, Mike Clark, John Lam, Garrett Rooney, Jim Weirich, Sam Ruby, Tim Bray, J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Susan Wu, David Welton, Stuart Halloway, Matt Raible, Greg Wilkins, Matt Asay. It was my pleasure to meet you.
A special mention for an old friend: Alex Martelli, who I first met many years ago, completely lost contact with, and met again at OSCON. It’s been a pity I couldn’t attend any of his talks: one was scheduled at the same time as mine and another one was in the last slot on Friday, when I had to leave to board my plane. Maybe next time.
As for talks, of notable interests were the one by Stu Halloway on Streamlined—I think Streamlined is going to do much towards the acceptance of Ruby on Rails in the “enterprise”— and the presentation of Google’s Open Source project hosting service: Sourceforge, be alarmed. Both were packed with paople being refused entrance at the door when there wasn’t even standing room anymore.
During the last keynote session, we were treated to another show by Damian Conway. If “The Da Vinci Codebase” was dubbed the best presentation ever, this one could aspire to the title of “Best presentation ever, ever. No, seriously”. The guy should be given a show on Comedy Central, together with Jon Stewart. He’s that good.
Technorati Tags: oscon06, oscon.
This post is just to provide a pointer to my slides: they are here if you’d like to have a look at them. I’m not going to write anything more about the OSCON today: my head is exploding with all the things I listened to. Plus I need to decompress after the tension that always goes with speaking in front of an audience, especially in a tongue that is not your own. I’m just looking forward to the exhibit hall reception that is going to kick off at 6. Hope they have lots of beer.
Technorati Tags: oscon06, oscon.
The first two days at OSCON 2006, filled with tutorials and some keynotes, have gone by. Here’s my wrap-up.
- Businesses Partnering with Open Source Communities: Opportunities, Perils, and Pitfalls, James Howison.
- Nothing that I hadn’t already heard, or read. Still, James is a good speaker and knows his subject.
- Rails Guidebook, Mike Clark and Dave Thomas.
- Again, nothing new to me, apart for something about RJS, which I never used before. Useful for not letting things slip out of memory when you’re not practicing them daily, and Mike and Dave are very good teachers.
- Ajax on Rails, Stuart Halloway.
- Stu is a captivating speaker. Brilliant tutorial. I’ve marked his talk about Streamlined on my calendar. That’s one presentation you don’t want to miss if you’re using Rails.
- Open Source Clue Training: How to Market to People Who Hate Marketing, Doc Searls.
- We all know and love Doc, at least since the Cluetrain Manifesto. Still his talk left me with many “huh” moments and few “a-ah” moments. I guess I was again too jet-lagged to be able to really grasp it all. Note to self: find the slides and go over them once again.
In the evening we had a plenary session with three keynotes that would have been worth the ticket price alone.
First, Larry Wall delivered hist tenth “State of the Onion” talk. It was the second time I heard it—I think I my first one was at the 2002 ApacheCon— and sorry, but Larry isn’t my kind of speaker. It could be because I don’t care about Perl much anymore, but the parallel between language design and raising kids was just, hmmm… lame. Anyway, it had some good moments and I have heard much more boring stuff in the past. Plus, Larry is very human and likable.
Then it was Kathy Sierra and her “Cognitive Seduction” talk. Kathy is one terrific speaker. I found her speech funny and thought-provoking. What more can you ask?
The evening closed with Damian Conway delivering not a keynote, but an incredibly funny parody of “The Da Vinci Code”. You have to be a real geek in order to appreciate that kind of humor, but then that’s what the audience was made of, and we sure got lots of laughing out of it. He got a standing ovation at the end.
Today I get to present my talk, which is making me a bit nervous. I have the feeling I have too few material to cover 45 minutes, but that is something you always feel and it usually turns out not to be true. Luckily I have some demo material that I can choose to present or not, depending on the remaining time.
Technorati Tags: oscon06, oscon, larry wall, kathy sierra, damian conway, doc searls.
Looking at the map where OSCON 2006 attendees can (literally) pinpoint their origin, it looks like there are at least four other Italians here. I wonder who they are. If you are one of those and are reading this, please get in touch. We might have a beer together and stop talking and listening to English only for a while.
Technorati Tags: oscon, oscon06, italians.
OSCON actually started today, but yesterday evening a bunch of geeks with a penchant for photography met for a walkabout around Portland. If you were in the vicinity of Portland’s Steel Bridge at that time you could have spotted this group of people pointing cameras around, shooting at the weirdest objects and taking pictures of someone taking pictures of someone taking pictures of someone … ad infinitum.
One of the most interesting aspects of it all was that you could have seen the whole gamut of equipment, ranging from very professional cameras, lenses and tripods, down to compact point-and-shoot models. But I bet that, by looking at the results here, you’d be surprised to learn that some of the most intriguing shots were taken with the least expensive equipment.
Earlier on the same day, I did lots of walking around Portland, mostly in downtown and across Washington Park, which I walked through from the MAX station up north to the Japanese Garden and the International Rose Garden, then back down to Pioneer Courthouse Square. I stopped only when the heat really started to be intolerable (I spotted 95F on a display in downtown) and my feet started developing blisters. Then I jumped on the MAX and got back at the hotel for a few hours of rest and refreshment.
My sightseeing is chronicled by a bunch of Flickr sets that you can find here, here and here. Now, what I would like some digital photography guru to explain me is why my shots of red flowers—roses in particular—come out with the reds completely saturated, giving them a very “flat” and unnatural look. What can I do to avoid this defect, besides changing my camera?
Technorati Tags: portland, oscon06, oscon.
Great news on the Atom front! The ARI project I mentioned a few days ago has changed its name to Abdera. This gives it a new fancy name while at the same time removing any ambiguity around its “reference” character. I’m really looking forward for it to come out of incubation.
As I had anticipated, I changed my code to use Abdera instead of ROME and it was a relatively quick and painless process. Just changing all Java package names and keeping references to “Entry” and “Feed” classes was enough to get most of the code to compile cleanly.
Last but not the least: James Snell suggested on the ROME developers’ list that Rome could use Abdera instead of its own Atom implementation, and he was met with loud cheers, as Pat reports. Personally, I’m all for dropping ROME’s feed model and replacing it with one based on Atom, as Atom can do everything that RSS does, and much better.
There’s also been talk of moving ROME to Apache, a move which I would personally applaud.
Technorati Tags: atom, ari, incubator, james snell, syndication, rome, abdera.
