Archive for the Category ◊ Open Source ◊

At OSCON, again
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 | Author: kevin

Through great blessings and a wonderfully understanding family, I find myself once again in Portland for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. It’s just such an honor to participate in such a cutting edge conference.

I’ve posted the results of my first day over on the O’Reilly Broadcast blog. I’ve also uploaded a new set of photos from the OSCON Cloud Summit over on Flickr.

Overall, it was great to see some old friends and in general be in the company of a lot of really smart hackers. Today, the conference officially kicks off with Tim O’Reilly’s keynote speech, which is always intriguing to witness. Then it’s into the maul of the beast with hundreds of sessions anf the always jam packed exhibit hall. Sounds like a great day ahead of me.

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LinuxWorld – ABCs of Desktop Linux
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 | Author: kevin

Next week I’ll be in Boston attending my first LinuxWorld conference. were I’ll be giving to presentation/demonstrations a day, plus plenty of public and vendor meet and greet. It should be insane. I’m pretty excited about doing a good job, but as usual I’m still not quite prepared. I’ve got to go through my slides and demonstrations a few times. Plus on Monday we have to install Linux on some loaner machines and test some tricks I have planned.

Then over all of that, I have to try to do some serious on-the-spot journalist stories to help cover some of my costs. Looking forward I want to cover:

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Category: Internet, Linux, Mono, Open Source, Opportunity  | Comments off
Lose the sandals and ponytail!
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 | Author: kevin

A long time friend of SNAP and Puerto Rico, Peter Quinn rips the open source community a new one. In this article “» Open source community needs a haircut and to dress for success | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com” he is quoted as saying that “If you want to get traction in commercial environments, lose the sandals and ponytails.” A pointed quip indeed! He goes on to say “Open source has an unprofessional appearance, and the community needs to be more business-savvy in order to start to make inroads in areas traditionally dominated by commercial software vendors. (Having) a face on a project or agenda makes it attractive for politicians (to consider open source),”

I can relate to his perspective. However, it brings up something that I address a couple of times in the upcoming issue of TUX. For me, one of the biggest challenges open source software faces today is the dilemma of whether it is for engineers, open for business, or a wide spectrum in between.

What Peter is trying to bring out is that if we want more companies to choose FOSS, then we need to join the corporate world. I’m not suggesting IBM Blue suits and white shirts. I guess it’s the old saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. There are certain expectations corporate America expects. Variance is acceptable, outright contempt and challenge will limit our success. Is that selling out, conforming to authority, or however you want to characterize it, I call it pragmatic.

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It’s just the right thing to do…
Monday, March 27th, 2006 | Author: kevin

I believe in computers, so when I heard about the One Laptop Per Child project, I got really excited. Then after reading the background of the project, I got even more excited. While these laptops are computers, the first intended use for them is not as a computer, but as an e-book reader. In the initially targeted countries they have a problem in acquiring textbooks, keeping up to date, especially in their native tongue.

This article by the highly respected Robin Miller, “Commentary: Gates wants poor to spend $600+, not $100 or $200, for computers” is disappointing. While properly skewering Bill Gates and his recent comments about the OLPC project, he throws in some FUD of his own. The bottom line is this: something close to 1 out of every 6 people in the world have never even seen a computer. The first one they do see, I want to run Linux and be full of other FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Any deeper analysis than that, frankly, I don’t care to hear about. I believe in this project in my soul. I know it is the right thing to do. This is not a zero sum game. If this project wants to try and put a computer into the hands of millions of people, it doesn’t mean instead of providing people sustainable water and food. Who know? Maybe providing computers to more people will help us find out how to provide water and food; by none other than the people that receive these computers and most need it.

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Stupidest Use of a Religous Debate Cliche
Monday, February 27th, 2006 | Author: kevin

In an interview for Open Business Esther Dyson included this in an answer about whether Yahoo or Goolge are open businesses: “In many ways, Yahoo! believes in smart, “intelligent design” and careful strategies, while Google follows blind evolution and operates a Darwinian fitness landscape within its development organization.”

P.S. I’m back and there’s going to be hell to pay….

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Category: Business, Computer, Internet, Open Source  | Comments off
A journey of a million miles…
Wednesday, September 07th, 2005 | Author: kevin

Here is something new for me. Let’s call it a core dump. For the none geeks, a core dump is what happens when a computer encounters an ABEND, or abnormal end. Any one who has ever witnessed a “blue screen of death” is familiar with a core dump. In the unfortunate event that this happens, the computer will list all of the contents of the registers and the call stack (”the memory”) to aid in troubleshooting the problem. In short, this is just a random dump of things that I’ve been meaning to blog further on, but probably won’t get the chance to expand on. So I want to share (document?) them while these thoughts are still relatively fresh.

Huh?

The other day driving to work I saw a work truck from the water and sewer authority with the following slogan in bumper sticker form: “Work is sacred, Don’t touch it!” Some one once asked me if I was a linguist, because I get upset when words are used incorrectly. This was slightly confirmed by a Tickle test that I once did that was for my Intellectual Type, an “Insightful Linguist”. The driver of the vehicle is most obviously a member of a water workers union or whatever, so I know what he means. However, in our short, sweet lives there are many things that are sacred, but I don’t believe that “your job” is one of them.

Woo Hoo

I saw today that the Director of the El Nuevo Dia, Luis Alberto Ferré Rangel, has started what he calls “el primer blog de cualquier medio de prensa en Puerto Rico”, the first blog from any news media in Puerto Rico. The blog is featured under a banner that states that “El periodismo es una conversación”, journalism is a conversation. All I have to say is “welcome to the conversation! Your voice has been long over due.” I hope that this helps build momentum for our conversation and we see many other businesses, government officials, and leaders join with us.

Business 2.0 Business Ideas

It’s not every day that a smart group of people get together and share ideas for companies that they would like to see built, so they can give them money (invest in them). The current issue lists 11 different ideas that a group of venture capitalists will fund if they receive the right business plans. Here are the ideas:

  1. Mobile ID for Credit Card Purchases
  2. Back-Office Bank Syndicate
  3. The Ultimate Online Upsell
  4. Subscription PCS for Seniors
  5. An even Smarter Smartphone
  6. Open-Source IT Center
  7. Social Networks Meet The Town Crier
  8. Customer Service Over IP
  9. Plug-And-Play Mobile Services
  10. Home Patient Monitoring
  11. A Killer App for Convergence

For me, the product recommendation, open-source IT management, and the social networking opportunities seem very achievable and realistic. What I also like this list is that it is written from the investors perspective which is invaluable, especially for non-business oriented innovators.

EnterPRize

I feel really fortunate for believing in Grupo Guayacan and participating in the current Business Plan Competition workshops. Today I attended the latest workshop Technology Entrepreneurship: A Silicon Valley Perspective with Henry Sang Jr., from HP Palo Alto, California. I’m sure that what I learned today will help guide me as I begin ramping up my entrepreneurial activities. HP is offering up their IP backlog for entrepreneurs to develop the ideas. A couple of eye-openers from the session. If an opportunity does not represent a business capable of generating more than $860 million, HP is not interested. Don’t try and hit the $1 billion dollar grand slam start-up, go for one hundred $10 million singles. I think you can continue to scale this down until it becomes achievable. Wanna have a million dollar company? Try creating 10 $100 K businesses.

…begins with the first step!

Finally, tonight I took my very first step towards becoming a Web 2.0 entrepreneur. I bought a few new domains, secured a new web host, and installed Mambo, courtesy of GoDaddy, my apologies to 1 and 1 hosting. For free, they have been decent hosts. I would of preferred Drupal, but installing Mambo was just a click away. I guess we’ll see if it is up to the challenge. Within the next year I’ll probably have to deal with leaving or moving x-cito.com and snapplatform.org. So far, all I have to say is that it will be hard to beat GoDaddy’s prices and convenience.

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Irish TechCamp, Puerto Rican CollabCamp
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 | Author: kevin

I got this link in one of the many feeds that I receive. It seems if you compare Ireland to Puerto Rico, as it has been done very many times before, that Puerto Ricans are just like the Irish in something else. This quote is from a wiki announcing the plans to host TechCamp:

“Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be as much tech innovation coming from grassroots-tech in Ireland. The US is doing some great work in Web 2.0 and Blogging; having loads of conferences and blogger-dinners; while all we have here is a few very business-like events, and seemingly very few new projects. What’s needed is for us to CONNECT and SHARE and maybe a few companies will get started as a result!”

Here is an interesting exercise. Where ever it mentions Ireland you replace it with Puerto Rico. I really couldn’t have said it any better. So first, things first. My initial gut feeling was right. Just as the founders of TechCamp realized, I now realize. Yes, I want to participate next year and setup a simultaneous BarCamp in Puerto Rico, but we can’t wait! There is no time to waste. We have to kick start our Web 2.0 economy and I can’t think of any better activity than a collaborative, get things done, have fun event like this.

So second things second. Where to conduct the event? We need a comfortable meeting place, with ample room, whiteboards, projectors, wireless high speed Internet, and preferably 1 large meeting room and two smaller (or a large room that can be divided). That’s not too much too ask? Some sponsors for breakfast, lunch, and after event drinks would be nice too! :D

Finally, I need to pick a date. I’ll be very busy through September, so October looks good to me. How about mid-month, October 15, 2005. That gives about 6 weeks to get everything ready. I’ll start asking around for a location and hopefully within a week, I can announce the availability of the CollabCamp Wiki.

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Category: Internet, Open Source, Opportunity, Puerto Rico, Web Development, Writing  | One Comment
Heading to Portland
Friday, July 22nd, 2005 | Author: kevin

One of the extra special benefits of attending the O’Reilly Open Source Convention is arriving a day early to attend the Oregon Brewers Festival. Last year we attended and had an absolute blast. The beer was freaking fantastic. I can’t wait till this years event. I hope to take a lot more picutre, because it is total craziness.

Oregon Banner

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ITHET Trip Summary
Friday, July 22nd, 2005 | Author: kevin

In an effort to get back “in shape” for OSCon, I really got to pump this out. If I head into Portland with my current habits, it will be tough to keep up. So here it goes.

Well, my participation in my first ever scientific (or should I say academic) convference was a mixed bag of experiences. As mentioned in the brief posts I made while I was there, not having consistent and reliable Internet access was a shock. I think it was such a shock that I never really recovered my balance and established a rhythm. I mention this because I believe that it is very important while attending a conference to have a smooth rhythm. It’s all about habit and accustom. In different environments some people refer to this as being in the flow or in the zone. When behavior is second-nature we are more productive. So without the Internet I lost my rhythm and never really recovered.

Additional factors also kept me off balance. My expectation was that because the conference was about Information Technology, that most of the participants would be software related. This assumption was wrong, because most of the speakers were engineers. I’m totally believe that mixing different areas of specialties together it creates a more powerful team, however in this situation I felt like the odd man out. This feeling was amplified by the fact that I am from private industry and everyone else was from academia. I know, duh, it was an academic conference.

One of the things that further disoriented me was the disorganization of the conference. The president of the Domincan Republic opened the conference and that screwed the schedule for the whole first day. Unfortunately this trend continued on the second day, even though there were no major disruptions. Finally some minor irritations added fuel to the fire: the food sucked, the conference facilities were divided, the Internet at the conference went out for almost 24 hours, and a bunch of speakers never showed up at the conference which caused the organizers to move speeches

I’ll stop my whining now and share my take aways. Despite everything I still managed to meet some fantastic people. I came away inspired by the great passion most of the educators there had for their students and areas of research. A couple of themes kept appearing in speech after speech. First, globalization is also influencing the academic arena. This most definitely dove tails with my research and observations. Something to consider when my daughters get ready to begin their higher education is the recommendation by some speakers to internationalize their education. The basic premise is that it will be easier to understand globalization if you witness it first hand. A second trend was the emphasis on collaboration. Again, I say right on brother. Collaboration, competitive cooperation, sharing, and partnering I believe will become “steroids” (As Thomas Friedman calls certain world flatteners). They will make small and medium sized business bigger and better able to compete with multinationals. It will also make the lone researcher or entrepreneur reap the very same benefits. The final trend was the coincidence of multiple projects reaching the same conclusions, but from different perspectives, environments, and objectives A curiosity indeed, but also proof, for me, that research and investigation is an endeavor this connects us all. Regardless of the differences we insist we have, we are all basically the same and we are all moving in the same basic direction.

In the end, attending the 6th International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training was extremely rewarding. I met someone from the Domincan Republic that would like some Linux training and others that represent future collaborators from around the world. Preparing the SNAP Development Center’s paper “Using Open Source to Enhance Learning” was a great experience. In addition, it ensures that the legacy of the project will always be available from the IEEE archives.

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Category: Business, Computer, Open Source, Opportunity, Puerto Rico, Software Development  | Comments off
It just wasn’t meant to be, I guess
Wednesday, June 01st, 2005 | Author: kevin

My trip to Brazil by the numbers:

Number of times I packed my suitcase 2:
Number of times I went to airport: 1
Number of visas obtained from the Brazilian consulate in Miami: 0

Ultimately, even though I tried to reschedule my trip to fly through Miami, I didn’t make it out of Puerto Rico. What a huge disappointment. We really felt that we were going to take off with our SNAPPIX product.

Never in my career have I seen things come together so well, but still get ruined in the end. Those who knew about the visa requirement for Brazil are all like, well of course. While most everyone else thought, as I did, that a passport was sufficient. According to a friend of SNAP, the requirement is because the United States requires visas for the citizens of Brazil, they require visas for U.S. citizens.

We are still fighting the good fight and will attempt to be there as much as possible in spirit, commentary, and whatever else we can dream up, but in the end it just wasn’t meant to be.

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Category: Computer, Open Source, Opportunity, SNAP  | 2 Comments