alex.polvi.net

Now that the school year is almost over it is time to look back on all the open source in COE heckling. In brief, it worked. Of course, I do not think the job is done with… but there has definitely been change.

Case 1: CS 312. “Linux Systems Administration” is going to be taught in the Fall by Scott Kveton. While this was mostly just a renaming of a current course, it still is progress.

Case 2: CS 411. Rumor has it that this course is going to use the Linux Kernel instead of Nachos next year. Finally!

Case 3: Open Unix Computing Labs. Next year COE plans of having at least one Linux lab (out of three total labs) in the new Kelley Engineering Center. This too is all tentative, but I would bet it will happen.

Case 4: I was contacted by Don Heer to discuss a platform for learning for EECS. He seemed pretty fired up about the idea, and wanted me to collect more information. He asked me to research three different things, the responses are here(many people helped compile this) . Good things will come of this.

Case 5: While members of the OVP were interested in helping start an internship program for open source projects, they now insist on not responding to email. Too bad. This is still a great idea and needs to be presented to the professor who runs senior capstone projects.

Here is the progress from the beginning of the year to the end:

• Open Source and COE — part one
• Open Source and COE — part 2, The meeting
• Open Source and COE — part 3
• Open Source in COE — part 4
• Open Source in COE — part 5, The big meeting
• Open Source in COE — phase 2

This is progress.

After our little firefox prank there has been a pretty large fall-out. So far it has been talked about on:

• Slashdot
• Fark
• The Inquirer
• Spreadfirefox
• The Barometer
• Wired News (a mention)

Oh, and don’t forget all the comments on the LUG photos, and my previous blog.

All of this attention has generated over 2.2 million page hits via 60,000+ unique vistors. CRAZYNESS. All over a silly stunt!

Some quick thoughts. These are things I am thinking about when you see me muttering and shouting to myself as I walk across campus.

1) Complete central authentication. It would be neat if there was a central host that acted as a proxy to any authentication systems. System Admins could “sign-up” their entire directory to the service and then allow any parties that use the central service to auth through them. Sure, this opens up a wide array of security and privacy concerns…. but it sure would be neat to have a single sign on globally across the web. Then I would have good reason to change my password every other day and not have to worry about forgetting it.

2) Open services. What if a project like ebay open sourced its code under a license that only allowed people to contribute back to the project? So instead of allowing everyone to deploy their own ebay, people interested in helping would improve the single large project. If someone had a user interface annoyance, for example, they could write up a patch and send it in.

3) Load balancing. While doing my laundry tonight I realized I had three washers, two color and one white, that I seemingly filled randomly. This was load balancing at its finest. The whole situation really brought out how difficult and slow the process can be.

4) Feed Gravity wins the hearts of the young and fearless.

5) Staff lists. Are staff lists really important? In particular, the ACM staff list on campus is pretty active while the member one is completely dead. As Brandon put it, why not make the members part of the organization effort? I think it would just stir up more potential leaders.

Recently the Austin Entrepreneurship Program brought Bob Foulor, of MSN marketing research, in to talk with us about Microsoft. We ended up talking more about google then we did about Microsoft. With quotes like, “Nobody will by lining up for the next Windows release” he really made it sound like Microsoft is having a hard time. He went around the room asking people how they used their computer, and for most people it was just a bitch session about how slow and insecure Windows is… I did not hear any actual constructive feedback, but oh well, hopefully he enjoyed the pizza.

After that talk I started reading some of Paul Graham’s latest essays. He mostly talks about how to start companies and why young people should. The common theme through out all of his papers is, “Make something people want.” Relating this back to the Microsoft evening I quickly realized that Microsoft is not doing what customers want. They do a lot of things partially and not very well, but since they are the only ones even close customers go to them.

Customers want a faster and more secure operating system. They want it to be more intuitive. They want to have everything “just work”. People want to have systems so consistent that they can think as if they were the computer and predict its behaviors (side note, I think Google search does a great job of this). With the success of products like Firefox it is evident that this is indeed the case. It is not by chance that an alternative browser has become to popular, it is evidence that people are looking for something new.

So then, what to do? We have this hodge-podge of free-software laying around… maybe it is time we get it up to the right level, bundle it up, and release it. Ubuntu seems to be giving this a shot. However, they may be a touch too early. The free software environment is missing many things. For example, maybe we need to wait for open office 2.0. While the current open office is good… I do not think that it is friendly enough for most end users. We also need some sort of calendaring equivalent. Mozilla will hopefully tackle this one. Finally we need to integrate all these components together into a supportable package that can be easily distributed. Again, Ubuntu is making headway on this. Hopefully Mark and his team can pull it off.

People are beginning to want something different. We are so close to accommodating them. All the communities need to do is make something that is genuinely better. If you serve something that is really good, the customers will never leave. As Mr. Graham asks, “can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?”

OSLUG got farked!

A common procedure in botany lab is to cut off a sample of something, look at it under the microscope, and draw it. Today we had 1 microscope and 4 people who each needed to draw 5 slides… normally this would take a very long time. Not today!

It would be like reality TV, but with blogs! Think about it, people are all about reading into other peoples lives… what if someone set up an environment that people would regularly blog about
their interactions with each other. If it was consist and easy for someone to stumble on to, I think it would gain great readership.

Brandon also mentioned that focused blogging would be a great way to rapidly write a book. The readers would get content as it came off of the authors (or group of authors) head instead of waiting for the packaged product.

UPDATE: This exact thing is being done! Thanks for the pointers….

Here it is folks, the full featured yoyo clip video “Oregon 020202″. This is a clip video from high school (02 - 02 - 02)… You will see the truth behind my yoyoing ability, and that I am better off as the camera man.

Mad props to Joseph and Kyle for being awesome.

Enjoy!

Fast Mirror
Slow Mirror

It should work fine with mplayer, and quicktime (if you have the divx codec installed).

The LUG shirts came together.

Get them while they are hot!

For some reason people like to write me rejection letters, especially people who offer scholarships. Here are some examples:

It is probably because my poor writing ability. The largest scholarship I won I did not apply for, I was selected by a high school counselor. All job offers I have received were verbal, never from a formal application. Regardless, this method seems to have worked out for the best.

At least I have the blog to keep me writing. Maybe I will print it off and take it to the writing center! :)