Month: March 2007

Open Source is my day job

On Monday I gave a talk at the University of Michigan School of Information on what it’s like to run an open source project and things to think about it you’re going to do it as part of a business. They sort of got the shaft — Jon Phillips is CC’s resident expert on community building and open source management. But Jon doesn’t like “in the middle”. So they got me.

I thought the talk went well. For once even though I talked too fast I had enough content to fill the time. Usually I talk too fast and run way under. And it felt like I had a good idea what the “story” was I was trying to tell, so that made it easier to put everything together. Putting the talk together reminded me that I’ve been really insanely lucky; for the past six years of my life, I’ve been at jobs where I’m paid to either consume or develop (or both) open source software. That beats the hell out of MCSE bullshit[1]_.

Slides, links, etc available here.

[1]In my humble opinion, of course.
date:2007-03-22 16:30:28
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category:cc, michigan, open source, talks

The Gym

I’ve taken up running over the past month and a half. Partly because I want to be in better shape, and partly because running is a great sport for gadgets: iPod Nano, Nike+, Polar heartrate monitor. The mind boggles. Of course, the gadgets are a hell of a lot more fun than the gym itself. “Gay Prof”: hits it exactly right with his thoughts while at the gym. I completely concur,

I wish this gym had a liquor license.
date:2007-03-22 11:46:19
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category:gay, gym

Fiesty MacBook Update

I wrote earlier about my initial experiences of putting Ubuntu 7.04 on my MacBook. I’ve received a few comments and offline requests about that post asking for help, so I just wanted to let people know that I can’t provide assistance. The ndiswrapper approach isn’t stable for me using either the Lenovo or D-Link driver, and I can’t deal with kernel panics when I boot up if it detects a network it doesn’t like. So no wi-fi means no Linux; when MadWifi fixes support for the Atheros chipset (see ticket 1001), I’ll be back. In the meantime, it’s all OS X all the time on the MacBook.

date:2007-03-22 11:42:52
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category:fiesty, linux, macbook, ubuntu

For Some Definition of “online”

Starting yesterday afternoon I found that I couldn’t commit code to Creative Commons’ Subversion repository at Sourceforge. “Just another intermittent outage,” I thought. I even took a look at the site status page, saw that Subversion was “online” and figured it’d be resolved by the morning.

Well this morning it’s still down, so I took another look. Yup, still online:

And then you scroll down and find the truth:

So can someone explain to me how “completely inaccessible due to a massive DDOS attack” (my words) is in any way equivalent to “online”?

date:2007-03-06 09:08:27
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slug:for-some-definition-of-online
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category:annoyance, development

links for 2007-03-01

date:2007-03-01 17:24:56
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slug:links-for-2007-03-01
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category:Links