Technology
Entries related to technology.
The Obama Effect on Open Source Software Development
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/20/2008 - 09:54Today, I was reading through emails on an open source developers’ list where there has been a contentious debate about different open source licensing agreements and the effect these agreements have on projects that interoperate with them. The discussion resides at the intersection of the geeky and the legal and can get very arcane.
So, I was very interested to read this comment in the midst of a heated discussion:
Ok. I took a deep breath. I watched the Obama speech, and that inspired me to be brutally honest with myself, and note an objection to my own impassioned argument.
#hashtags and other stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/13/2008 - 11:49Well, it is Thursday, and another good chance to catch up on sites that have caught my interest recently. The first is http://hashtags.org/. One of the nonprofit technology lists was discussing hashtags. If you are a Twitter user, simply follow hashtags, and hashtags will follow you. When they follow you, they search your tweets for a hashmark (#), and if there is one in your tweat, they track your tweat based on whichever tags you’ve used. If all goes right, this post will end up on Twitter via TwitterFeed, and since it has a hashtag in the title, it should show up in hashtags. As an aside, according to Tweetvolume Hashtags has appeared in 4,720 tweats as of the writing of this blog post.
On the politics side, or perhaps more accurately, the governance side of technology, Steve Clift sent around a link to an online dialog the Toxic Release Inventory Program of the EPA from last year. He notes, “This is so rare in the U.S. (shouldn't be) I thought I should point it out.” Wouldn’t it be great if the committees of the Connecticut General Assembly had online dialogs?
In Connecticut yesterday, http://www.ctpen.org/ had a website launch party at the Capitol. I suggested that Kim attend, but I think she was too busy dealing with the Jim Hightower event coming up tomorrow. While I’m talking about Connecticut events, I want to highlight the Shoreline League of Democratic Women Green Lifestyle Fair which will take place on April 5th in the lower level of the Clinton Town Hall.
One final highlight from recent emails, the Disaster Accountability Project has a post up about the lack of diversity hampering its response to Hurricane Katrina.
Enough for this mornings mail bag and assorted websites. More soon.
Tracking the Twisty Mazes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 19:43Everyone seems to be tweaking the way you can see what someone is up to online.
MyBlogLog has just changed its pages so that you can see all the updates from your contacts to any of the social network services out there. It seems to be in flux a little bit right now. When I checked a little while ago, it didn’t show any updates from my neighborhood. Now it is showing a lot.
One problem is that it is showing tweets from friends of friends that have added their Twitter page into MyBlogLog. As an example, at this moment, the most recent buzz in my neighborhood is a tweet from tombarrett to techiebreaker showing up in Alexdc’s twitter feed. Likewise, if you look at my feed, you’ll see the most recent update being a message from noneck to ahoppin. I’ve changed my Twitter feed to only show my own tweets instead of all the tweets from all my friends.
Even by doing that, I still get duplication. When I send a picture from Second Life via Bloghud to Flickr, it also shows up as a tweet on twitter. This is similar to problems I ran into Jaiku quite a while ago. Jaiku never really caught my attention, but since MyBlogLog incorporates into a bigger picture of who is reading whose blogs, it is much more compelling. Supposedly BlogCatalog is going to add some similar features soon.
Spock also aggregates news from different sources. I’ve gone out and tweaked the setting there and it looks like they are doing a nice job of it. Then, today, all my friends started showing up on friendfeed, yet another entry in the personal information aggregation space. Of course some of them provide RSS feeds so we can start feeding one into another.
IT Careers that make a difference!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/15/2008 - 14:43
Today, the State of Missouri IT department is having a job fair in Second Life, thanks in large part to Jedadiah Juran and his innovative approaches to recruiting IT staff, as featured in Government Technology and State Tech Magazines. I spoke with Jedadiah prior to the job fair and my discussion with him led me to write this article about recruiting in Second Life.
Yet for me, it was the comments by Cale Bellios that caught my attention.
Why do Ben and Jerry make ice cream?
Why does Starbucks make coffee?
Why does GMC make trucks?
The only correct answer to all three questions is to make money. And I’m not saying that answer is bad. Ben and Jerry, the entity and the people, along with the fine folks at Starbucks do a lot of good with the money they make.
GMC keeps John Cougar Mellencamp employed. But deep down past the mission statements and public relations, it’s about making money.
Now ask yourself,
Why do Health Clinics offer free immunization shots?
Why does the Highway Patrol watch over our roads and enforce our laws?
Why does the Department of Natural Resources award permits to building sites?
There are higher values in life than making money. When your profit is measured in healthy communities, safe places to live, and a clean environment then you are a part of something bigger than big business,
something more satisfying than sales reports, more beneficial than bottom line.
Missouri state jobs are not about politics and elections;
they are about providing the technology backbone on which kids are rescued from abuse,
the unemployed find work, the sick and poor find respite.
Where students and businesses grow to improve the quality of life across Missouri.
Jedadiah points out that this theme of careers that makes a difference permeates their online presence, as illustrated by the quote at the bottom of their IT Careers website:
If you are looking for a career where your work truly matters then we invite you to explore the numerous available positions building the systems that serve the public good. Our award winning environment will not only challenge you, but you will have an immediate opportunity to make a difference!
It is great to see a focus on making a difference and not just making a buck.
A Busy Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/07/2008 - 22:08It has been a busy day, mostly spent in meetings. It has piled up more and more things I need to write about, but at this point, I’m too tired to put the energy into some of the more serious posts, so I’m going to write about some of the more day to day things.
On one list, I was pointed to Yuwie. If you join this MLMOSN, you’ll get paid to blog, upload pictures, spam your friends, and look at lots of advertisements. Next.
BlogCatalog sent out an email that they are doing some sort of partnership with SezWho. “SezWho is a distributed context, rating and reputation service for blogs, forums, wikis and other social sites.” That is, of course if the blogs, forums, wikis and other social sites use Wordpad or Moveable Type. Next.
Two new Ning sites: Visual Editors and Social News Central. I like Ning. I like the sites that friends have built. I gladly joined both groups. I’ll probably even stumble back to those sites one of these days.
That said, the innovate of the day goes to Lillie Yifu for wikiHUD. It is a heads up display (HUD) in Second Life that allows you to look up Wiki entries. Right now, it is set up to look up entries off of the Second Life Wiki. I haven’t had a chance to start playing with Second Life Wiki, but it is a good site.
Another website that was highlighted to me today was Central Grid Community. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. I am already on SLProfiles, SLUniverse, Bloghud, have a stub on Second Life Wiki, am on rezzed.net and probably several others that I’ve forgotten. Do I need yet another site for my virtual world personae? Not really.
Okay. You got me going. Let me toss out a few other things about the move to multiple grids. Have you played with SLURL with other grids? It kind of works, if you’ve got a region in your grid that maps to a region in the main Second Life grid and so on. Take a look at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Central%20Grid%20HQ/130/135/25. It ends up bringing up a Google map without anything to click on. What would be nice would be if you can have an SLURL that would like something like http://slurl.com/Central%20Grid/Central%20Grid%20HQ/130/135/25, where the name of the grid was part of the SLURL. Not there yet. However, going to secondlife://Central%20Grid%20HQ/130/135/25does seem to work in the Central Grid.
While we’re at it, it would be great to see AjaxLife add Central Grid to its list of sites.
Beyond all of that, I set up a Drupal 6 test site today, noted the beginning of the Year of The Rat, and random other stuff.
