Prototype period ends

I set up this blog as a prototype for the IEEE Oregon Section’s blog. I’ve sinced moved the prototype blog to http://ieeeoregon.wordpress.com/ . My own blog remains at http://www.markcasimer.com . I’ve recently updated it (http://www.markcasimer.com ) to describe the efforts myself have others have put into building an automated build system (CruiseControl and Ant) for Eclipse’s ECF project. This blog (http://markcasimer.wordpress.com/) will remain for another couple of weeks and then I’ll delete it.

OSCON — CruiseControl and the Dashboard

Here’s one of the good things that comes from conferences like OSCON. I was having trouble bringing up CruiseControl’s dashboard. Thoughtworks (the company that makes CruiseControl) has a booth here. I stopped by and asked for help. The guy I talked to was not technical but said they had a talk coming up and so I went to the talk. The talk didn’t help me (it was interesting though) but I met afterwards with one of the speakers (Andy Slocum, who’s worked for Thoughtworks in Chicago for about 7 years). We set up a my laptop in the lobby, tried to make a dashboard.war file (the build failed), but Andy showed me how to get an already built dashboard from the CruiseControl site at sourceforge. We did that, and I saw the dashboard for the first time. Whoppee. We also talked about how to control CruiseControl remotely. Along with many others, he suggests vpn. We have to figure out how to do this.

Here’s a photo of Andy.

Photo of IEEE Booth at OSCON

Here’s our IEEE booth at OSCON. Also, over to our right was a neat booth that was demonstrating what a new toy. It’s a Tux that connects wirelessly to your computer and reads your email (it speaks it to you) and plays Internet radio, and a bunch of other stuff.

Speakers Tonite! Thursday at PSU

It’s a big deal … we got a bunch of good speakers. Look at our web site http://www.ieee-or.org for details. Talks start at 6:45 PM at PSU. I’m personally hosting David Recorden who is talking about OpenID. David just got the Google-O’Reilly opensource award at OSCON 2007 for “best strategist.” He’s part of a research group at Verisign, looking at emerging technologies and OpenID is an example of that — how to do authentication in the collaborative, non-hierarchical, decentralized world of the Internet. David works in Mountain View but is originally from Portland … has folks live on the Coast, not far from me it turns out.

1.
Women in Information Technology and Computer Science
Speaker: Anna Ravenscroft, Stanford University
Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007
Time: 6:45-8pm
Place: PSU Unitus Building, Room 505, 2121 SW 4th Avenue, Portland

2.
Technical Management of Software Development
Speaker: Alex Martelli, Uber Technical Lead, Google, Inc.
Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007
Time: 6:45-8pm
Place: PSU Engineering Building, Room 102, 1930 SW 4th Avenue, Portland
Cost: Free, open to public

3.
Open ID
Speaker: David Recordon, Innovator, Verisign
Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007
Time: 6:45-8pm
Place: PSU Unitus Building, Room 507, 2121 SW 4th Avenue, Portland
Cost: Free, open to public

OSCON — the IEEE booth

The IEEE booth at OSCON got a lot of traffic in spite of the fact that we had no treats … food or T-shirts or free software. I was surprised that so many people that stopped by really did not know what the IEEE was! We did have one senior guy just moved from London who offered to give a talk … John’s got his contact information.

Basically, we tried to listen as much as talk. What do people want from us? We often act like a users group, but can we be more than that? We didn’t get a lot of specifics, but a common theme was that if we could provide insight into what is happening in engineering in our area, that would be appreciated. “What is happening” means what local companies are doing, what skills are they searching for … long term, meaning if a member wants to prepare him or herself for local employment, what would be an area to study or gain experience in? Sounds like something Industrial Relations might provide. Also, if a member wanted to volunteer, either for fun or to gain some real-world experience, can we help them do that? Is it too far-fetched to think that if a company wanted interns or opensource volunteers, we might be able to hook them up?

I went to a couple of talks … the one that stuck with me was Intel’s talk on UbuntuMobile. Check out http://moblin.org/ There’s the opportunity for some good volunteer software work here … primarily for up-and-coming software engineers, nearing their degrees and thinking about the real world.

Thoughts, anyone?

360|Flex Conference

Ah, yes … Flex … if you’re doing web applications, you need to keep track of what’s happening in the Flex World. Here’s some information about a conference called 360|Flex. It looks like an interesting conference (http://www.360conferences.com/360flex/), but it’s more than a conference. Have you ever participated in a “charity code jam” and won prizes for doing so (http://www.flexilicio.us/blog/). Check it out.

Here are some quoted  paragraphs from the folks putting on the conference …

360|Flex is the premiere conference for Adobe Flex developers. 360|Flex started in San Jose, and was the first conference in the country solely aimed at increasing the Flex Developer Community.The goal of 360|Flex is to be more than ‘just another conference’, by offering sessions in tracks from Application development to custom component creation and use, offering all day hands on trainings, for multiple skill levels, offering the biggest names in development, and promoting a community feel, where developers, hiring managers, and startups, can mingle and relate to each other. By keeping costs low, we’re able to offer conferences that are more affordable, so more developers can attend, even without corporate expense accounts.

Community is the key aspect of 360|Flex, our goal is to bring to Flex developers to the marketplace and help the Rich Internet Application space grow.360|Flex is a marketing free, or at least marketing clear zone. Speakers who wish to present their commercial product must sponsor the conference at a Silver level to support the community and future events. Sessions around commercial products carry a disclaimer so that attendees know in advance that the session is about something they may need to purchase. Attendees don’t like being blindsided with sessions that turn out to be sales pitches, and at the same time, knowing it could be a sales pitch makes those in attendance, interested in the product, the speaker and attendees benefit.

Ubuntu Live — tutorials on Asterisk and LDAP

I went to two tutorials today (each was several hours long). I was somewhat disappointed in both of them, although in retrospect I feel better about them. I knew essentially nothing about the two topics and left knowing more than I did before, just not as much as I had hoped.

Asterisk is an opensource sw PBX. Now I could have said that before, but I didn’t really understand what that meant. I brought Ubuntu up under VMware and downloaded asterisk during the talk. I tried to follow by looking at the config files. What you do is run asterisk and then you have a phone (this can be a soft SIP phone called XLite) that registers itself with asterisk. Then you call another SIP phone. This doesn’t have to be a SIP phone but that’s the easiest way to get started.

Getting a PBX from a telephone company is expensive and unreliable … unreliable because the hw and sw are closed to you. The new aircraft carriers use asterisk. Not only are replacement phones cheaper, it’s easier to test and maintain. Actually with the old tip-and-ring method, you had to have people dedicated to trying out each phone and saying “can you hear me now” literally every day.

The afternoon tutorial was on LDAP. Now I had only a vague idea about what LDAP was … I had thought it was kind of like an opensource replacement for Microsoft’s Active Directory. It’s not. Be nice if it was, but it’s not. Basically it’s a way of managing global stuff in a network. Like a global group … if you got many users (let’s say hundreds of workstations) how do you add a new user to a group. If the group is local you do it on every machine … not very practical. Define the group as global and managed by an LDAP server. The example in the tutorial dealt with LDAP authentication … using LDAP to authenticate users for ssh.

Ubuntu — Ruby on Rails

Ruby gems installed with Feisty. Has a common user that apps run under.

Talks to db thru database.yml. best practices … use revision control (subversion), automated deployment (capistrano), which integrates well with Ruby. Also consider puppet which can get a list of sysadmin tasks that capistrano then implements. Capistrano can also help with staging deployment.

Ubuntu Live — hallway

I missed some of the early talks because I got involved in some hallway conversations. I was manning the IEEE booth which was next to the Sun booth so I talked with Ken Paulsen from Sun a lot … generally we talked about Adobe and Flex and Adobe’s resistance to opensource. I also talked with a prof at Washington State whose group is doing seismic monitoring at St. Helen’s. They use TinyOS, which is often used for sensor networks.

I also talked with Mike Anderson who is a consultant on embedded systems. He has worked with a lot of foreign programmers and had ideas about outsourcing and what it means to American engineering. Why do our schools teach Web programming when that skill is so easily outsourced? Why not teach something like hw embedded design which is not so easily outsourced? Good question … no good answers.

Talked with Ed Perkins a bunch about our own IEEE Web site.

Ubuntu Live — Chris Dawson

Webcast in a box … used by CNN for conventions. Has about 600K revenue.

Example Ruby on Rails has expanded. Advertising …web development without pain. Look at the Ubuntu page … 5 year support for Dapper. Compare with Debian. Ubuntu and Canonical have expanded by focusing on problems/solutions not technology. Customers want support, long-term, roadmaps, cost, oss.

A talk not so much on the product. But on the business model of an appliance. Basically their product is software, but they can put it on hw if asked … they use the shuttle PC. Generally goes to universties. Prof comes to podium, plugs in a thumb drive, gives lecture, takes thumb drive away with him.