Blogging Roller

Ellison says he learned that Sun's pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.

"The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."

Ouch! I guess Ellison isn't going to be signing up for an account on blogs.sun.com anytime soon. At least he acknowledges the "really great blogs."

Lot's of activity in the OpenID and OAuth space recently. Both OAuth and OpenID have suffered from bad user experience, bad developer experience and low adoption. Now they're in the process of re-invention and folks from both Google and Facebook are involved. Here's my reading list so far on the topic:

• IETF OAuth working group - The OAuth 2.0 Protocol - draft-ietf-oauth-v2-05 is the latest draft of OAuth 2.0, published about two weeks ago.
• Eran Hammer-Lahav - Introducing OAuth 2.0 is an excellent overview of what's different and new about OAuth 2.0, listing the six new flows that are supported including a username/password flow.
• David Recordon (Facebook) - OpenID Connect: A strawman... is a proposal for "OpenID Connect" a standard way to do what Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect today, allow users to login sites with either their Facebook, Google or other identity provider credentials.
• Chris Messina (Google) - Combining OpenID and OAuth with OpenID Connect covers the thinking behind OpenID Connect and the expansion of the "OpenID brand."
• Michael Calore (WebMonkey) - New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes covers motivations behind OpenID Connect, problems with OAuth and OpenID.
• Joseph Holsten - Your New New Web Identity another nice overview of the new OpenID and OAuth ideas, pushes back against dropping/reinventing of OpenID Attribute Exchange.
• Tantek Celic - I'm calling bullshit on #OpenID Connect. Still too complex, ... is about one run-on tweet's worth of contructive criticism

IBM is going to be at Google I/O again this year, talking about OpenSocial and giving demos of new OpenSocial features in IBM products. Randy Hudson of IBM/Rational will be there to show how OpenSocial Gadgets can be used in Jazz-based product dashboards (introduced in Jazz Foundation 3.0 Milestone 5).

And IBM's Mark Weitzel, who happens to be an officer of the OpenSocial Foundation, will participate in panel discussion on Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise.

Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise

Social Web, Enterprise - Mark Weitzel, Matt Tucker, Mark Halvorson, Helen Chen, Chris Schalk

Enterprise deployments of OpenSocial technologies brings an additional set of considerations that may not be apparent in a traditional social network implementation. In this session, several enterprise vendors will demonstrate how they've been working together to address these issues in a collection of "Best Practices". This session will also provide a review of existing challenges for enterprise implementations of OpenSocial.

Session type: 201
Attendee requirements: General understanding of OpenSocial technologies. Some Enterprise experience is also recommended.
Tags: OpenSocial, Enterprise
Hashtag: #socialweb7

Date: Thursday May 20
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Room: 9

It's kind of surprising to me that JIRA does not have a "REST API." Looking on the bright side, this may be an opportunity for Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) to show its value, so back in March I made a little pitch in the appropriate JIRA issue:

JIRA-19796 - REST API for JIRA

Dave Johnson added a comment - 10/Mar/10 9:24 AM - edited

You should consider making the JIRA REST API conformant with the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) interface for Change Management (OSLC-CM). This would allow JIRA to integrate with ALM tools from IBM, Oracle, Rally, SourceGear, etc. The Mylyn folks are already involved. Here's the link to the OSLC-CM home page: http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/CmHome. OSLC-CM v1 is the current spec and work on v2 is underway. It's an open effort and we'd love JIRA and/or JIRA users to join in and help us define v2.

Congrats to Simon Phipps on what sounds like a great new job at ForgeRock and on his new column in ComputerWorld.UK.

One of the key benefits to customers of the source code becoming open source is that, in the event a product is discontinued by its owner, a group of people from the community can simply pick up the source code and keep on maintaining and improving it. That's a radical change from proprietary products, which can be killed stone dead with no appeal. With open source, the company may fold but the community carries on.

That's all fine in theory, but does it actually work? I intend to find out. Starting this week, I'm joining ForgeRock as chief strategy officer.

Be nice to your software

Unfortunately, she's right on the money with that remark.

Funny that "buy your own damn computer" can be spun as a benefit, but it works for me.

Apple Insider: Following the general trend away from top-down, centralized corporate computing monoculture, Kraft Foods has initiated a "Bring Your Own Computer" program for its employees, providing new support for employees who want to use a Mac.

Kraft's new employee initiative "gives you the freedom to choose the right computer for your lifestyle," according to the fact sheet the company distributed to employees. The program is described as "best suited for employees who want to use a particular type of computer that isn’t currently supplied or supported by Kraft Foods, such as a Mac," and prefer to take their work system home, "have the experience and know-how to take care of their own technical support," and "work out of the office on a regular basis."

Mac-based weblog editor MarsEdit v3.0 has just been released by Red Sweater Software.

Because MarsEdit v3.0 supports the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), it works with Apache Roller 5.0RC1's new and improved AtomPub support right out of the box. I'm writing this post in MarsEdit right now and publishing to Roller 5 via APP.

MarsEdit includes a rich text editor and supports image upload via drag-and-drop into the editor. You can edit a draft post locally or use Send to Blog to send the draft to the server for further editing before publish. You can specify multiple tags for your post and MarsEdit will send them to Roller as tags.

Generally, I prefer to edit my HTML by hand but for somebody who wants simplicity and a familiar Mac interface, MarsEdit v3.0 looks like a great choice. And the HTML it generates doesn't look too bad.

Here's a screenshot that shows what MarsEdit looks like when editing a post:

Here are the settings I'm using (URLs changed to protect the innocent).

MarsEdit is $39.95 and there's a 30-day free and fully-function trial version available too.

Dan Yoder's 10 reasons are all good ones, but I'm still on Facebook. My take: if you assume that *everything* you do and share on Facebook is public, and you know how to hide the annoying games, then Facebook ain't so bad.

Dan Yoder: While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

It's been a while since the BETA (over 6 months) but we now have a release candidate for Apache Roller 5.0 available for testing. This site is running Apache Roller 5.0 RC1 right now, as you can see in the itty bitty screenshot below:

Here's a What's New in Roller 5.0 page that summarizes what has changed since 4.0. One thing I forgot to mention on that page was that Roller now uses ROME Propono 1.0 for AtomPub and Roller 5.0's AtomPub support has been successfully tested with MarsEdit and Windows Live Writer.

I like the approach and wonder why XML RPC and JSON RPC don't work this way.

James Snell: Step one is to realize that HTTP is the envelope. You don’t need a special new XML data format, you don’t need new security token formats in custom must-understand headers, you don’t need special endpoint description languages that describe exactly how to tell your software development code to automatically generated client code for you. You just need a URI, HTTP, a request message and a response message.

Interesting essay by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the huge shift we're experiencing in the computing/tech industry with wide spread adoption of mobile tech, social web and cloud computing.

Marc Benioff: Facebook’s success, as well as the rise of other new technologies like YouTube, devices like the iPhone and the iPad and models like Cloud Computing are evidence of a huge shift happening in computing — and it’s bigger than anything we have seen before. And although Microsoft is a casualty, it certainly is not the cause. This is the fundamental nature of our industry in which every 10 years or so a radical new paradigm of computing emerges. From mainframes (70s) to minicomputers (80s) to PCs and LANs (90s) to Cloud 1-the desktop Internet (2000s) to Cloud 2-the mobile Internet (2010+), we can safely say that the only constant in the last 50 years of computing is change. And no company or individual can escape the velocity of change of our industry.

Wonderful WWW2010 keynote speech by Danah Boyd on privacy in social networks, social norms and the responsibilities of those developing the WWW.

Danah Boyd: As a community, WWW is the home of numerous standards bodies, Big Data scholars, and developers.  You have the technical and organizational chops to shape the future of code, the future of business, the direction law goes.  But you cannot just assume that social norms will magically disappear over night.  What you choose to build and how you choose to engage with Big Data matters.  What is possible is wide open, but so are the consequences of your decisions.  As you're engaging with these systems, I need you to remember what the data is that you're chewing on is.  Never forget that Big Data is soylent green. Big Data is made of people. People producing data in a context.  People producing data for a purpose.  Just because it's technically possible to do all sorts of things with that data doesn't mean that it won't have consequences for the people it's made of. And if you expose people in ways that cause harm, you will have to live with that on your conscience.

Privacy will never be encoded in zeros and ones.  It will always be a process that people are navigating.  Your challenge is to develop systems and do analyses that balance the complex ways in which people are negotiating these systems.  You are shaping the future. I challenge you to build the future you want to inhabit.

It's cool and just a little weird at the same time to see IBM's social/collab software offerings get some praise from Jeff Jarvis via the Howard Stern show and "Howard's geek guru, IBM's Jeff Schick."

Jeff Jarvis: Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I’ll concede: It’s impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected….

Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.

...just noticed that Ed Brill has a post w/comments on this same topic: Have you been following the "why does Howard Stern use Notes" discussion?.

I haven't mentioned it yet here on my blog, but I've been working as the spec lead for the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) since January of this year.

I hope to blog about OSLC more later, but now I'm writing to tell you about a talk that I'll be doing with Rational Chief Architect John Wiegand at Innovate 2010 The Rational Software Conference in Early June. Here are the details:

Session: ALM-2210B: Open Services (OSLC) and Jazz: Working Together

When: Mon, 7/Jun, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: Dolphin - Northern Salon E4

Rational proposed the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative at the Rational Software Conference in 2008 to make life better for software delivery teams by easing the way tools can be used in combination. Two years later, we are gratified to see an active and open community making this vision a reality. This presentation will explain the challenge of tool integration, how the OSLC community is addressing the challenge, and how Jazz builds atop OSLC to deliver an open lifecycle platform

For more information on OSLC, visit http://open-services.net

UPDATED: scheduled change - talk is now 3PM to 4PM.

Interested in attending Innovate 2010? You can register here.

I've been a Rockford regular for the last 5 years or so, dining with friends there every Wednesday night. Feels like the end of an era to me.

By Edward James,

The Raleigh Telegram

There was no sign on the front of the building to let people know there was even a bar located there and it’s a sure bet that many people new to Raleigh didn’t even know it was there.  Regular patrons just looked for the nondescript looking front door underneath the barber pole that led up to the Rockford.

Upstairs, bar patrons could hang out at the copper bar or eat one of the Rockford’s reasonably priced sandwiches, which were very popular at lunchtime.

The Rockford had a cult following almost among young Raleigh citizens, as evidenced by some of the notes posted on the front door.

Here's an camera-phone shot that I took from the bar one day in 2008:

Dave Koelmeyer offers a nice step-by-step guide to getting Roller up and running on OpenSolaris, Glassfish and MySQL.

Although WordPress undoubtedly has more bells and whistles, with themes and plug-ins galore, I find Roller quicker and less fussy in operation, with far more comprehensive documentation – and its scalability cannot be denied. This guide will enable you to install and run Apache Roller for the purposes of evaluation and tinkering.

We will be using OpenSolaris snv_134 x64, with Apache Roller 4.01, Glassfish v2.1, and MySQL 5.1.

Facebook's David Recordon lists the positive aspects of Facebook's recent Open Graph Protocol moves and says its good for the semantic web.

The Open Graph protocol increases the amount of semantic data on the web in a manner that isn't specific to Facebook or any single social network. While we can all disagree about where the quotes and angle-brackets should go, at the end of the day I think we all can agree that this sort of metadata is good for the web

ReadWriteWeb says Facebook's new Open Graph could be a breakthrough for the semantic web:

One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. We've written previously about the Semantic Web here, and it has been a personal passion of mine. What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook.

Dare Obasanjo on the Open Graph protocol and the semantic web angle:

One of the things I find most exciting about this development is that sites now have significant motivation to be marked up with extremely structured data which can then be consumed by other applications. Having such rich descriptive metadata will be a boon to search engines especially those from startups since some of the big guys consider their ability to extract semantics out of HTML tag soup a competitive advantage and have thus fought the semantic web for years.

Nothing to argue with there. It makes me wonder, though, is Facebook really going to get behind semantic web tech and push things like RDF, SPARQL, etc. forward? Is Facebook really taking a semantic web or open linked data approach, or is this just tactical?

I'm not sure anybody would have noticed this but Just FYI... I'm doing some spring cleaning here at rollerweblogger.org and decided to remove a bunch of things that I no longer use including those below:

• JSPWiki at wiki - the old Roller wiki at /wiki, the new one is here
• SocialSite at /social - a demo install of Project SocialSite that I no longer use
• Planet Tool aggregation at /triangle - an aggregation of 50 or so Triangle area blogs
• Planet Tool aggregation at /rome - aggregation of Project ROME related feeds

One year ago on this day I wrote that Sun Microsystems is willing to contribute Project SocialSite" to the Apache Software Foundation. My contacts at Sun told me it was OK to make that announcement because a VP approved. One year later, we have established Apache SocialSite (incubating) project, setup user accounts, put up a status page and setup source code control but we still have no code from Sun.

Since March 2009 I've been exchanging emails with my helpful contacts at Sun and trying to help them move forward with the contribution, but because of the ongoing Oracle/Sun merger things have moved incredibly slowly. Finally in late December 2009, my Sun contacts had permission to actually release the code to Apache, but there was a problem.

When Sun said that they were willing to contribute the SocialSite code to Apache, I figured that they would do so using the standard Software Grant agreement that was used for Roller and all other projects entering Apache via the Incubator. Unfortunately, the Sun lawyers did not want to use the standard Software Grant agreement and Apache did and does not want to devise a new legal agreement just to accommodate Sun. That's where we stand today. Sun committed to contributing SocialSite to Apache and now we're waiting for Oracle/Sun to follow through on that commitment.

Meanwhile, others have been making some progress with SocialSite. A major sports brand has launched a SocialSite based network with a million-plus users. A couple of developers have rewritten the build script to use Maven, others have "ported" to JBoss and there is still interest in and a need for what was Sun's Project SocialSite. Neither effort has contributed code back to SocialSite-proper and because of legal concerns are waiting for the main code to appear at Apache.

SocialSite is a small project and it will not survive for much longer with resources spread across multiple sites and a community working separately. So, I'm asking again and publicly: Oracle, please follow through on your commitment and grant the Project SocialSite codebase to Apache.