Blogging Roller

Oracle: please follow through on Project SocialSite

2010-03-27T09:10:46+00:00

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.

Trip report: Social Web Camp, Santa Clara, CA

2009-11-09T10:07:19+00:00

(I just returned to work after vacation and a week of conferences in the SF bay area. Instead of posting my trip reports to the limited audience that reads my internal IBM blog, I'm going to post them here so that everybody can benefit from them.)

On Monday Nov. 2, I attended Social Web Camp at Sun's Santa Clara campus. There were about 40 people in attendance. The event was organized by Sun's Henry Story, an expert in semantic web technologies and inventor of the FOAF+SSL approach to implementing Social Networking features (relationship based privacy). Unfortunately, Henry was not able to attend the conference because he was detained by US immigration.

Social Web Camp, Santa Clara, CA
http://barcamp.org/SocialWebCamp-Santa-Clara
Sun's Santa Clara Campus - AKA the Agnews Insane Asylum
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm
FOAF+SSL distributed/open social networking
http://esw.w3.org/topic/foaf+ssl
Henry detained for 6 days, case dismissed in 30 seconds
http://twitter.com/bblfish/status/5509198135

During the camp, I lead a session on OpenSocial using my "What's up with OpenSocial" slides from BarCampRDU. Surprisingly, very few people were familiar with OpenSocial, so this was an introductory level discussion.

What's up with OpenSocial preso from BarCampRDU
http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AWuMBlP1tnN6ZGcyY2ZuendfOThmcXMydjdmcQ&hl=en

I participated in a session on enterprise social networking and shared a little about we do with micro-blogging inside IBM, mentioning BlueTwit and the new features in Lotus Connections. A couple of folks from Boeing were present and described the home-grown social networking and micro-blogging system.

BlueTwit mentioned in Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_22/b4086056643442.htm

John Panzer of Google pitched his new Salmon protocol, a distributed commenting system that allows comments made on items in downstream systems (e.g. aggregators, social networks, FriendFeed, etc.) to find their way back upstream to the source item. The protocol is based, in part, on AtomPub. Comments are signed and posted back upstream. Seems like this could be useful in both Lotus Connections river of news feature, Jazz-based products and Roller; so I'll going to track this one closely. It might be fun to try to implement Salmon for Roller.

Salmon: comments and annotations to swim upstream, spawn more commentary
http://www.salmon-protocol.org/

I missed a little of the conference because I had lunch with some of my former co-worker from Sun and I left a little early to return my vacation rental car and make my way to Oakland for ApacheCon US 2009. More about that later...

Month of blogging

2009-08-02T16:04:33+00:00

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, the automatic Latest Links posts from my Delicious.com account started to pile up in my blog editor. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them and would never have let a month go by without blogging. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.

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Category: Blogging

Joe Gregorio: Comment system review
"Comparing Disqus, IntenseDebate and Google Friend Connect." Joe Gregorio looked at commenting systems and ended up chosing Intense Debate.
Integrating Disqus and Roller Weblogger on blogs.sun.com
"I've recently updated my site to use Disqus the blog comment hosting and conversation site." Sun UK CTO Wayne Horkan explains how (and why) to use the Disqus in a Roller, with code and helpful comments from Disqus CEO Daniel Ha.
Official Google Blog: New Blog Search tools
"Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts." Nice to see Google is still working on blog search despite the rumored death of blogging.

Category: Feeds

pubsubhubbub - Google Code
"A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom." Collaboration between Google and SixApart folks to allow quick notifiation of new content to feed subscribers and reduce load on feed publishers. Hub implementations are underway for AppEngine/Python, Erlang, Python and Ruby. Hmm... no Java?

Category: General

The Ryding List | Why Not?
"I have found a wealth of great things to do in Raleigh." Great list of things to do around Raleigh by newcomer John Ryding, one of my coworkers at IBM.
The Different CTO Roles - All Things Distributed
"there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does." Of special interest to me now that I work on a CTO's staff.
Life During Wartime video from Stop Making Sense - Boing Boing
"This is the best concert movie I've ever seen." Me too.

Category: IBM

Integrating and Extending Rational Team Concert 2.0
Great guide and presentation on Team Concert development via the Jazz Server SDK. Referring to this a lot these days.
Eclipse Galileo for Mac: Cocoa or Carbon?
"Carbon is more mature and thoroughly tested, the new Cocoa implementation offers advantages and improvements." And the answer is: 32-bit Cocoa. Yep, I'm paying attention to Eclipse again. It's really the only way to do Jazz development.
Whitepaper: e4 Technical Overview
Lots of detail on the apparently massive changes coming in Eclipse e4 including the ability write Eclipse components in JavaScript and to run "existing SWT applications to be executed on web platforms such as ActionScript/Flash."

Category: Java

James Strachan: Scala as the long term replacement for Java
"if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy." I'm sure that sent a lot of folks to Amazon, including me.
Google App Engine plugin in NetBeans
"With a video showing how easy it is to develop Google App Engine application in NetBeans. You can see that Hello World takes just 1 minute. :-)" Looks good and apparently it's an open source side-project. Hosted at Kenai.
Trails of EasyExtend: Java Spring - or the Biggus Dickus effect
"Looking at the API alone Spring feels like reading a parody on Java enterprise software." Schadenfreude for me; never been a fan and always thought of it as a big grab bag of insidious crap I don't need.

Category: Open Source

NYTimes.com: For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Are Getting Tricky
"Google pays Mozilla hefty fees in return. The deal accounted for 88 percent of Mozilla's $75 million in revenue in 2007." Makes you wonder about the future of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS
"The software architecture is simple: Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Yet another Linux distro. That's cool with me; I like Linux distros.
The Java Wars, continued (Scripting News)
"most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today." Dave Winer's take on Google's Chrome OS. I think he's probably right at the moment but things are changing rapidly.

Category: Social Software

Creating a Google Data Gadget - Google Data APIs - Google Code
"This article will walk you through creating a Blogger gadget." Google and OpenSocial Gadget support for OAuth makes things easier, but it's still a PITA.
Writing OAuth Gadgets - Gadgets API - Google Code
"send mail to oauthproxyreg@google.com with the following information to register your OAuth Consumer Secret." If you want to write a Gadget that uses OAuth to access Twitter there's an icky manual registration step involved. Apparently the solution to this problem is for Twitter.com to enhance their "OAuth configuration to accept digital signatures directly from iGoogle."

Category: Sun

The end of Sun
"And that is why Schwartz isn't here, I believe. Because he genuinely loved Sun and its employees." A depressing article for former Sun employee to read, or anybody I guess. I do think there is something to this quote about Scwhartz.
Oracle-Sun Creating Churn - Forbes.com
"Suns loyal customers are defecting in droves." Not really very surprising considering the conventional wisdom, which seems to be that Oracle will gut Sun's software efforts and ditch the hardware entirely.
Computerworld Blogs: Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? -
"Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid." This article is typical of what I've seen from the author: dumb speculation of the mean-spirited variety.
Justice department extends Oracle-Sun probe
"All that's left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed." I don't there's a chance in hell that it is, but wouldn't it be fun if this was all about the Sun-Apache Terms of Use controversy?

Web development

InfoQ: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
Brief overview of Twitter architecture, use of caching and message queue technologies.
Evaluation of Javascript Libraries
"jQuery and YUI come out on top, Prototype at the bottom." Helped convince me that, now that we have YUI, we don't really need Prototype and Scriptaculous in Roller.
"MooTools vs JQuery vs Prototype vs YUI vs Dojo revised
"Prototype is among the slowest." More justification for ripping out Prototype and Scriptaculous.

And now, back to your regular schedule of blogging, or not.

The future of Project SocialSite: Apache?

2009-03-27T13:17:27+00:00

Since January, the future of https://socialsite.dev.java.net">Project SocialSite has been in the hands of the SocialSite community. During that time, I continued working on the project almost because I think it's got great potential and I would really like to see it live on in some form. That's also why I continued to talk to Sun about the project.

Today, I'm very happy to announce that Sun Microsystems is willing to contribute Project SocialSite to the Apache Software Foundation. It's not clear whether SocialSite should be contributed into Shindig or as a new incubator project, but either way I think this is the best thing for the project and will give it the best possible chances for building a thriving community. I've started some discussions about this on Apache-private mailing lists and I'll let you know what happens next.

This post brings to an end my series of posts about Shindig for blogs and wikis. Here are links to the earlier posts:

By the way, I delivered my Shindig talk just a couple of minutes ago. It was well-attended and I think it went pretty well. You can find the slides online at the ApacheCon EU 2009 site here: http://www.eu.apachecon.com/c/aceu2009/sessions/184">Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Latest Links: Sun and clouds

2009-03-19T16:00:04+00:00

Forbes.com: A Rorschach Test for IBM and Sun
"Even as Sun has stiffened into a slow-moving, self-entangled behemoth over the past decade, IBM has gradually shifted into the nimble mode of a start-up."

IBM's bid to acquire Sun might cost jobs - The Denver Post
"Sun is known for having a lot of cool technology but not much recognition in the market for it."

ZDNet.com - IBM's potential purchase of Sun: Here's why it makes sense
"One problem: There's a lot of software overlap here. In databases, IBM has DB2 and Sun has MySQL"

Javalobby - IBM in Talks to Buy Sun?
(in the comments) "Sun's energy would have been much better spent investing in writing proper Eclipse plugins for things such as Python/Groovy/Matisse/JavaFX/etc. instead of pushing their own IDE"

SAS to build $70 million cloud computing facility
"the facility will be built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for water and energy conservation"

Atlassian Developer Blog - Customizing your cloud
"we've released support for running builds in the cloud with the Elastic Bamboo feature"

Tim Bray The Sun Cloud
"We're going to be rolling out a Sun Cloud offering later this year"

Thanks, tweeple

2009-01-26T12:20:01+00:00

Even when you're mentally prepared for a layoff and you know it's probably for the best, its still a life-changing shock when it happens, a loss. It's hard not to feel fear, anger, sadness, self-recrimination and all those stages that fellow RIFee David Van Couvering blogged about. I still cycle through those, but not as frenetically as before.

I got over the sadness and fear part pretty quickly thanks to my tweeple, the very supportive network of friends, colleagues, former coworkers, etc. that's grown around my blog, my work at Sun, my involvement at Apache Software Foundation and my social network accounts like Twitter. I got the word out on Twitter first and word spread quickly. I posted to my blog and some very kind friends, Tim Bray, Ted Leung and Robert Donkin helped spread the word on their blogs and said some very nice things about me in the process. Within hours a flood of supportive tweets, emails and calls come rolling in, including about a dozen real live job leads.

So, thanks folks. I really appreciate the help. I'll keep you posted.

Leaving Sun...

2009-01-22T17:23:11+00:00

It was over four years ago when I discovered that Sun was using my software, Roller, to power blogs.sun.com. I was thrilled to go to work for the company back in 2004 and what an awesome cast of characters I've gotten to work with over the years. I really enjoyed the folks I worked with on the blogs.sun.com team, the open source folks and most recently, the Glassfish team -- some of the most talented and nicest folks I've ever worked with. It's been a great four and a half years but all good things must come to an end and today is the day.

I've been swept up in the latest round of Sun layoffs. Sun has decided to disinvest in Project SocialSite and as of today I'm free and available for employment. Though I do feel some urgency due to the bad economy, Sun's layoff package is pretty good and so I have some time to figure out what comes next and no need to make hasty decisions. Whatever I end up doing, I'll be blogging it here.

Oh, and about Apache Roller and Project SocialSite? I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'll be using a little of my time to do some mentoring and to move forward plans for Roller 5.0 this spring. And I see real value in the Project SocialSite "social-enable existing web sites" concept and I'm considering ways to move that forward as well, with or without Sun. I'm still giving my talk Shindig for Blogs & Wikis in March 2009 and, actually, I'm pretty happy I have some time right now to focus on those demos and slides.

Sun should give up on the desktop?

2008-11-25T17:27:19+00:00

Tim Bray: What Sun should do: Sun is going through a lousy spell right now. Well, so is the worldâ€™s economy in general and the IT business in particular, but this is about Sun. This is my opinion about what my employer should do about it.

It takes a lot of guts to write a piece like that and I'm really glad Tim did it. I'm going to walk out on the same limb and agree with pretty much everything Tim wrote. Tim wants Sun to focus like a laser on providing the best web platform around with Solaris, storage offerings, Java/Hotspot, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans for Java, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, etc. tooling. He writes:

Itâ€™s easy to understand how our servers, CMT and x86, and the Solaris OS, fit into the Web Suite. All the software, including the HotSpot, GlassFish, and MySQL runtimes, needs to be obsessively tuned and optimized to run best in the context of the Suite. Obviously, the Suite will also include Ruby and Python and PHP runtimes, similarly tuned.

All of Sunâ€™s software tooling should have a laser focus on usability, performance, and ease of adoption for the Web Suite.

I agree, but as a web geek I guess I'm pretty biased.

Tim doesn't shy away from the critical question of what Sun should stop doing. Tim says Sun should give up on the client-side, dropping JavaFX and JavaME (and OpenOffice too, I presume). Here's Tim on JavaFX:

For actual business apps, the kind that our servers spend most of their time running, the war for the desktop is over and the Web Browser won. I just totally donâ€™t believe that any combination of Flash and Silverlight and JavaFX is going to win it back.

I can't say I disagree with that either. Cutting JavaFX and JavaME would be extremely tough and painful decisions, but somebody's going to make to make some of those. Looking at things from Tim's web-platform-only point of view, they make sense. Sun needs only enough client-side software to keep Solaris attractive to developers and to support great development tools on all the platforms that web developers love.

SocialSite's Flexible Relationship model

2008-11-19T10:47:21+00:00

Image by flawedartist

We're designing Project SocialSite to support the needs of any site that wishes to add Social Networking features and support OpenSocial. That means we have to be flexible.

We can't hard-code the names of different types of relationships because some sites might want to call friends "buddies" and some might call them "connections." Some sites might want multiple levels of relationships, with some relationships being considered stronger than others, like on Flickr where you have contacts, friends and family. Some sites might want to allow one-way relationships, as Twitter does with "followers," but some sites might want to require that relationships be two-way, as Facebook does.

We want SocialSite to have a Flexible Relationship model that a site operator can tweak to suit the unique requirements of her site's community. We've settled on a model based on relationship types and named levels. In this post, I'll review this new model that we have designed in hopes of getting some feedback, push-back and other good things that might help us refine our model.

I) Relationship Types

SocialSite is designed to support the types of personal relationship shown below. This doesn't include group relationships, which are handled separately.

One-way relationship: A relationship from one person to another person that is not reciprocated. For example, Fred has a relationship with Bob, but Bob has no relationship with Fred. Another example: a follower relationship as you see in Twitter.
Two-way relationship: A relationship from one person to another that is reciprocated. For example, Fred has a relationship with Bob and Bob also has one with Fred. Another example is Facebook, which requires friendship relationships to be two-way.
Mutual relationship: Fred and Bob have a two-way relationship and have agreed on a "how we know each other" message. This is more meaningful than a two-way relationship, because the two parties have agreed on some shared item of information about the relationship like "we met at band camp."

II) Relationship Levels

SocialSite can be configured to support multiple relationship levels like Flickr's contacts, friends and family levels. Users can use these levels when sharing information, e.g. share a photo only with relationships of family-level or higher. I'll explain how the configuration works, but first let's define what we mean by relationship level.

Relationship Level

A Relationship Level is a named integer index that is assigned by one person to indicates the strength of a relationship with another person. People only know the levels that that they have assigned to relationships, so one person in a relationship won't feel slighted if the other party thinks less of the relationship than they do. For example, Fred might consider Bob to be a level 2 "Close Friend" but Bob considers Fred only a level 1 "Acquaintance" relationship. Fred won't learn about this (unless Bob tells him).

You can configure the relationships levels and names supported by SocialSite via the property 'socialsite.relationship.levels'. You simply provide a comma separatied list of the I18N keys of the relationship level names, in order from no-relationship to the strongest level. Here is the default setting, which establishes three relationship levels 0=none, 1=contact and 2=friend:

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
  relationshipLevel.none,\
  relationshipLevel.contact,\
  relationshipLevel.friend

OpenSocial doesn't define differently named relationship levels like we do, so we need to do some mapping. OpenSocial has one type and one level of relationship called "friend." So, to map SocialSite relationships to OpenSocial, we have introduced the notion of a friendship level.

Friendship level

Friendship level is an integer configuration property which indicates the relationship level that is considered to be the friendship relationship across a SocialSite system. Relationships at or above this level are considered to be friends when returning data via OpenSocial APIs. Also, when you add a relationship at friendship-level or above, the other party will be notified and given the opportunity to add you as a friend too. You can configure the friendship level via the property below:

  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=2

It's good to have the flexibility to support both one and two-way relationships, but we can't assume that all sites will want both. Some social network services, like Facebook, require that friendship-level relationships be two-way, i.e. both parties must agree that they are friends. To make such a setup possible with SocialSite, we've introduced the configuration property below:

  socialsite.relationship.twoway.requiredForFriendship=true

If that property is true, then any relationship that is considered a friendship (relationship level >= friendship level) must be a two-way relationship. So, when you add a relationship at friend-level or above, the other party must reciprocate or the relationship will not be created.

III) Example SocialSite configurations

To better explain how SocialSite Flexible Relationships work, here are some example configurations that configure SocialSite to behave like well-known social network services.

-like configuration. Flickr supports relationship levels of Contact, Friend and Family. It's possible for you to consider somebody to be Family, while they only consider you only to be a Contact. Any level relationship is considered to be a friendship relationship, for the purposes of OpenSocial.

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.contact,\
     relationshipLevel.friend,\
     relationshipLevel.family
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=1
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=false

-like configuration. Twitter supports one relationship level and that is follower. Its possible for you to follow somebody that does not follow you.

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.follower
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=1
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=false

-like configuration: Facebook supports one relationship level and that is friend. Friendships are required to be two-way, so we have this:

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.friend
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=1
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=true

The default SocialSite configuration. We're considering the below settings for our default configuration. This would allow you to have contacts, with which you can share information but who are not considered friends and would not show up in your friends list or be returned as friends via the OpenSocial APIs.

  socialsite.relationship.levels=\
     relationshipLevel.none,\
     relationshipLevel.contact,\
     relationshipLevel.friend
  socialsite.relationship.friendshiplevel=2
  socialsite.relationship.twowayRequiredForFriendship=true

IV) Wrapping up...

That just about covers it, so I'm going to wrap up now. Most of the above is now implemented in SocialSite, but none of this stuff is carved in stone. So your feedback is more than welcome, either here or on the SocialSite development or user mailing lists.

Details of Roller setup at blogs.sun.com

2008-11-18T15:33:52+00:00

Meena Vyas, Murthy Chintalapati and Allen Gilliland just published an article on BigAdmin that describes the architecture of blogs.sun.com, a Roller, Sun Web Server, Memcached and MySQL based site that averages 4 million hits a day with its two SunFire T2000 servers at 97% idle. You can get the article for free (registration required) here: Sun Blogs: A Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Reference Deployment

Happy 4th birthday to blogs.sun.com

2008-04-27T17:30:43+00:00

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

Six

2008-03-08T17:30:36+00:00

By my count that's how many Apache members work at Sun. I thought I had a complete count, but Nick Kew's recent post revealed a sixth (see the comments). Here's the list:

Craig McClanahan
Craig Russell
Dave Johnson
Jim Winstead
Nick Kew
Ted Leung

Know of any other Sun employees that are Apache members?

Welcome to Sun!

2008-03-04T18:33:38+00:00

It's great to be welcoming new folks to Sun, especially when they're brilliant people like Ted Leung and Nick Kew, both of whom, by the way, are members of the Apache Software Foundation. I met Ted at ApacheCon US 2004 in Vegas and he answered all my questions about the implications of moving Roller to the ASF. And I met Nick at ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin and we chatted, over a couple of pints of Guiness, about the perils and pleasures of working from home and other things.

I'm also pretty damn pleased to be part of the MySQL welcoming committee, AKA the SunVisor program, and paired-up with Chuck Bell of MySQL. He's the author of Expert MySQL. I'll be answering his questions about Sun and, I hope, learning a thing or two about MySQL in the process.

Welcome to Sun guys!

Blackbox tour coming to the Triangle

2008-02-21T14:43:33+00:00

In case you're not following the Blackbox blog, the Sun Modular Data Center is coming to the Triangle on March 12, 2008. The event will be hosted at the SAS Institute campus in Cary, NC. Here's the blurb:

Join us and enjoy presentations and tours throughout the day of Sun's Modular Datacenter, the world's first datacenter in a box - a 6.1 meter (20 foot) shipping container. Also known as Project Blackbox, this is a virtualized datacenter optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. It applies Sun's trademark innovation and network computing infrastructure expertise to engineer out complexity and provide a whole new alternative for quickly adding datacenter capacity anywhere it's needed, with the ability to move it as business needs change. Because of its modular, high density design, the Sun Modular Datacenter packs more heterogeneous compute power in less space than a traditional datacenter, and can be configured, deployed, and quickly modified and redeployed for another project virtually anywhere worldwide.

Interested? The sign up is here.

Project Kenai: social networking place for developers

2008-02-06T09:17:55+00:00

Kenai was announced yesterday at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS 2008):

It was mentioned in Software VP <a href= "http://www.sun.com/events/sas2008/docs/07_Green_Software_SAS_2008.pdf">Rich Green's presentation.
I think that's just about all I can say on the topic.

And by the way, the audio and slides for all of the SAS 2008 presentations are online now. Ian Murdock's presentation is especially good, as Redmonk's James Governor tweeted yesterday "Ian Murdoch (the ian of debian) is doing a phenomenal job of explaining what Linux, and distributions are. A great education for analysts."

Sun open source project governance

2007-12-01T13:57:03+00:00

Here's a sampling of governance docs from some of Sun's many open source projects. I've listed them in order of what I feel to be, the most progressive (i.e. community governance) to least progressive (i.e. corporate control). I've also listed a key quote from each doc and made a brief comment about each.

OpenSolaris governance: "The OpenSolaris Community has the authority and responsibility for all decisions" - seems to approach ASF style governance.

OpenJDK interim governance: "The [board] shall be comprised of [5 and ] shall conduct its affairs in accordance with democratic principles and shall represent the interests of the Community. Two [members] shall be employees of Sun" - not final, but looking good.

Netbeans governance: "In the case of an irresolvable dispute, there is a governance board of three people, who are appointed for six month terms." (2 appointed by community, 1 by Sun)." - sounds pretty good, but the doc seems a little vague.

SunGrid governance: "The Board positions include the Community Leader, the Community Site Manager, and four general members, two Sun members and from the independent developer Community." - sounds good, again doc seems a little vague.

Glassfish governance: "The GlassFish project has an overall Project Lead ... appointed by Sun" - Sun has final say.

OpenSSO governance (draft): "Project Managers make the final decision ... are appointed by Sun" - Sun has final say.

OpenDS governance: The OpenDS project has single, overall Project Lead [who is] appointed by Sun Microsystems." - Sun has final say.

Mobile and embedded: "Sun may change its appointed Governance Board members at any time" - Sun has final say.

Looks to me like the trend is towards community governance and the most important projects are the ones getting the most attention and the most progressive governance. That's good and I sincerely hope the trend continues.

SuperPat speaks tonight at Tri-LUG

2007-11-08T08:31:05+00:00

Tri-LUG announcement: Pat Patterson from Sun Microsystems will provide us with a developer perspective on digital identity, starting from the emergence of LDAP in the 90s, through single sign-on, SAML and the Liberty Alliance protocols to recent developments such as OpenID, Cardspace and OAuth. The emphasis will be on understanding the protocols and how they are implemented in the real world, with a particular focus on deciding which (if any!) approach to select for a given project.
Pat Patterson is a federation architect at Sun Microsystems, focusing on federation, identity-enabled Web services and OpenSSO, Sun's open-source implementation of those technologies. Pat's blog centers on identity-related topics.

Looks like a great talk and I've always wanted to meet SuperPat, so I'll be there.

Here are the details:

Speaker:   Pat Patterson
Title:     Digital Identity from LDAP to SAML and beyond
Date/time: 7PM Thursday Nov. 8, 2007
Location:  Red Hat HQ (map)
           1801 Varsity Drive
           Raleigh, North Carolina 27606
           Tel: +1-919-754-3700

Diversity and acceptance

2007-10-04T22:28:36+00:00

Linda Skrocki: I find it interesting that although trust is a two way street, the focus in the blogoshpere is often on companies going out on a limb by trusting employees to blog on a corporate sponsored site, but the fact is, employees also go out on a limb for companies when they contribute content to the company blog site (whether it's personal or not).

Some wonderful insights from blogs.sun.com PM Linda Skrocki, read the whole post. She's writing about Sun's 2007 Corporate Responsbility Report.

Blogs on Sun's new stock ticker

2007-08-23T21:13:41+00:00

Todays news that Sun's stock ticker will change from SUNW to JAVA was met with pretty mixed reactions both inside and outside of Sun. On the day of the announcement, the more than 170 comments on Jonathan Schwartz's blog announcement were mostly negative and though there are some positive reactions in the interblogonet, they come mostly from Sun employees.

Below are the posts that I've seen in my feed reader so far.

For (or seeing the positive)

Barton George (Sun): "bold move"
David Van Couvering (Sun): "Wow. Bold, audacious, wild."
BlogBridge blog: "Thatâ€™s good news for us" - reaction from a Java ISV
Nick Wooler (Sun): "reinforces the brand"
Jonathan Hawkins (Sun): "good idea"
Bruce Hill (Sun): "certainly a cooler name"
Glynn Foster (Sun): "massively supportive"
Jason Beloro (Sun) "already a success"
Fake Schwartz: "we're open sourcing the stock as well!"
Marc Kossa (Sun): "I like it !"
Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (Sun): "turning out to be a very good communication strategy"

Against (or seeing the negative side)

<a href= "http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001609_applause_ssunwjava.html">Evil Geir (ASF): "brilliant" (with extreme sarcasm)
Geoff Arnold (formerly Sun): "This is simply silly"
Sam Ruby (ASF): JCP (JCP with the C for Community crossed out)
Shawn Ferry (Sun): "I preferred SUNW" via Twitter
Dan Latcher (Sun): "don't see the point"
Murphee's Rant: "Run for the hills, folks! "
Dion Almer: "Oh momma"
Paul Krill, InfoWorld: "likely to cause confusion"
C. G. Walters: "army of hamsters" (sorry, that's my favorite part)
Sanjiva Weerawarana (ASF): "incredibly bad idea"
James Robertson: "dilutes Sun's brand"
Daring Fireball: "shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic"
Catherine Helzerman: "Java isnâ€™t just Sun"
Tim Bray (Sun): "I hate it."

Unclear (don't state a strong opinion either way)

James Gosling (Sun): "totally bizarre"
James Duncan Davidson: "something not to be done lightly" (good story, don't miss it)
Kevin Chu (Sun): "In light of our change..."
Jim Jagielski : "The next several months will be very telling indeed."
Garbage Collection blog (Sun): "Maybe it might work"
Madhan Kumar Balasubramanian (Sun): "What is this?"
C. Enrique Ortiz: "[Sun] is very committed to Java"

What do I think? I'm not sure what I think of the change. The ticker SUNW was out of date because "workstations" are so 80s man, so it's a good thing to update it. And Java ISVs like BlogBridge should like the vote of confidence in Java. On the negative side, it's easy to search for SUNW to get Sun news and that won't work as well with the new ticker. And Java's not all Sun does. One more point. I'm not sure most folks really care what the ticker name is. If they did, don't you think Sun would have changed it years ago?

By the way. I didn't mean the hit the post button on this entry so soon, but it's out there now so I might as well let it stand. I'll update over the next day or two as reactions roll in.

UPDATE: Ed Burnette has a positive, neutral, negative and funny breakdown of his 25 favorite comments from Jonathan's blog post. He says that "Stockholders and employees are among the most vocal critics." of the change.

JavaOne bloggers bash

2007-05-08T18:44:27+00:00

Sun is throwing another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

openid.sun.com

2007-05-07T15:05:57+00:00

Tim Bray: Whatâ€™s more interesting is that weâ€™re rolling out an OpenID provider at (last time I looked) openid.sun.com, but with a twist: You canâ€™t get an OpenID there unless youâ€™re a Sun employee, and if someone offers an OpenID whose URI is there, and it authenticates, you can be really sure that theyâ€™re a Sun employee. It doesnâ€™t tell you their name or address or anything else; thatâ€™s up to the individual to provide (or not). The authentication relies on our Access Manager product, and itâ€™s pretty strong; employees here have to use those crypto-magic SecureCard token generators for serious authentication, passwords arenâ€™t good enough.

Now, if only Roller and blogs.sun.com supported OpenID we'd reallly be cookin'

ApacheCon EU 2007 wrap-up

2007-05-06T23:09:36+00:00

As usual ApacheCon was a blast. I showed-up on Tuesday, made myself at home in the hackathon room and started reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. I arrived at the members reception a little late and missed the beer, but was not too late to meet Lars Trieloff of Mindquarry, a startup that's working on an interesting open source product suite that combines content management, task management and wiki functionality. Behind the scenes the product combines Subversion, Apache Jackrabbit and other open source products. Apparently everything is tied together via the Java Content Repository (JCR) API and that's why Lars is interested in the possibility of hooking Roller up with a JCR backend.

Talks began Wednesday and I sat in the business track for most of the day. I particularly enjoyed Rebecca Hansen's talk Better than free: Strategic opportunities in open source and Bill Stoddards talk on Best Practices for Incorporating Open Source Code in Commercial Production. I also enjoyed Alexandru Popescu talk on Up to Speed with Java Content Repository API and Jackrabbit. I attended Stefano Machacci's excellent Community Building Practices talk again -- I think it should be required for all Apache contributors.

Thursday night was the Sun party at Lloyd Hotel, which was was quite successful. I had an interesting Roller-related chat with Paolo Castagna of HP, who is investigating new ways to integrate blogs, planets and wikis -- so we had a lot to talk about. I'm hoping he'll find that Roller is a good foundation for his work and encouraged him to collaborate with us via the Roller mailing lists. By the way, like Lars Trieloff, he is also interested in JCR as a back-end for blog/wiki data.

My talk Roller and blogs as a web development platform was scheduled for 10:30 Friday morning. It didn't go so well. Power went out at around 10AM and didn't come back until about 20 minutes into the talk. That left me a bit frazzled and feeling rushed, so I don't think I gave my best performance. If you'd like more information on the talk, you can find the outline here and the slides here (1.6MB PDF).

Happy 3rd birthday to blogs.sun.com!

2007-04-27T11:35:18+00:00

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the blogs.sun.com (BSC) launch. Sun bloggers are having a birthday party of sorts around the tag bsc3years, so check out all the posts. My favorite is Linda's, which sums up the successes and reasons for the success of BSC. I think she's right on the money with her comments about employee blogging. Let me add this: you don't need a marketing team or a blog consulting firm to write your company's blogs. Trust your employees. Encourage them to blog and, if you can, provide the enabling infrastructure. I think I may have said that before

I still remember how amazed, surprised and pleased I was to learn that Sun was using Roller. I found out on May 5, 2004 via Roller; I noticed referrers from blogs.sun.com and just couldn't believe my eyes. Shortly after that I wrote to Tim Bray, who introduced me to Will Snow and soon I managed to become part of the BSC phenomenon. I'm proud to have played a part in the BSC success, but the success was certainly not due to the Roller software; it's the bloggers who made BSC. So here's to the BSC bloggers: happy birthday!

Roller graduation and 3.1 announcement

2007-04-23T13:53:28+00:00

Finally! Roller has graduated to become a top-level Apache project and we've shipped the long awaited Apache Roller 3.1 release. You can find the full announcement on the Roller mailing list and on the Roller project blog and our new top-level site at http://roller.apache.org.

planet.sun.com

2007-04-07T18:28:39+00:00

We haven't released the standalone Roller-Planet application yet, but the .Sun Engineering team quietly deployed the latest bits at planet.sun.com a couple of weeks ago in response to requests from the Glassfish, SWDP and other teams for planet-style web sites. You can follow the links on the main page to find planets for Glassfish, SWDP, Sun India, Sun Alumni, Sun Java System Web Server, web services and globalization bloggers.

What's Roller-Planet? It's a community aggregation server, similar to Planet-Planet but with some key differences: it's got a web UI that enables groups of users to run their own planet sites, it's based on Java and it uses the ROME feed parser and fetcher. I've written about it before. We don't have a release plan yet for Roller-Planet so if you really want to try it you'll have to fetch and build it from the Apache Roller SVN repo.

Geertjan's blog

2007-04-03T23:01:08+00:00

I've really been enjoying Geertjan's blog recently. Lots of interesting details, screenshots and his passion for his work really comes through. His posts on the Netbeans Schliemann generic languages framework and today's Capturing Matisse make me want to drop everything and start hacking Netbeans. And I'm especially happy to see that somebody is interesting in Breathing Life Back into a Dead Coyote (part 1 and part 2), which is currently the main vehicle for Groovy language support in Netbeans -- I'd hate to see Groovy dropped in the mad rush to Ruby.

Latest links [March 29, 2007]

2007-03-29T08:28:49+00:00

ZDNet: GPL 3 isn't the 'last call'
"here are some key changes in the latest GPL draft and how they're designed to target the Microsoft-Novell partnership"
Allison Randal: GPLv3, Third Draft
"I'm beginning to lose confidence in the FSF as the primary defender of free software principles"
Simon Phipps, SunMink: GPLv3 Third Draft
"All very interesting, I know there will be a lot of discussion about this inside Sun over the next few weeks."

Slashdot | Linux Preinstalled Dell Available Soon
in the comments: "So I'm wondering if this is an actual effort to offer Linux boxes or another PR stunt?"
Ian Murdock: Making Solaris more like Linux
"There is no reason we can't make Solaris look and feel more like Linux"

InfoWorld: Dell division will design Web 2.0 datacenters
"Dell hopes to sell the service to only the largest Web-based companies, the top dozen or two dozen hyper-scale datacenters of the business world"
Sun HPC Watercooler: Rackable Clones Black Box
"a 40-foot by 8-foot mobile data center with the capacity to hold up to 1,200 of company's rack-mount 1U (1.75-inch) servers"

fnokd! JBoss.ORG: Blogging & RSS
"I think personal blogging, even on corporate topics, tends to be more real and honest."
fnokd! JBoss.ORG: Plans
Plans include Blogging, RSS and aggregation
BCOM 522: Corporate Blogs: Sun Corporate Blogs Case Study
"blogs also give Sun engineers an outlet for showcasing and getting credit for the work they're doing"
Discovering Identity: Treo Blogging Attempts
Mark tried u*Blog, HBlogger, BlogPlanet, and mo:Blog -- "This little exercise has fallen way short of my expectations"

Breathing Life into a Dead Coyote (Part 1)
Geerjan works to bring the Coyote project back to life for Netbeans 6.0
Southeast VC: Calling All Entrepreneurs
"I still keep hearing from entrepreneurs that VCs are hard to reach"
Ben Rockwood: Web 2.0 Mashup: Define it and win a prize
"people like Tim Bray lay the foundations for greatness and people like Michael reap rewards not due to them"

Congrats

2007-03-20T13:02:07+00:00

Congrats to Mark Pilgrim on his new job at Google, where he'll be working on the "right" vision for the future of the web. I assume the "wrong" vision, in Mark's mind, comes from the W3C and specifically the W3C's semantic web activities. Mark's comment pointing to his earlier The Overton Window post seems to back that up. I think it's interesting that Mark will be working remotely; that's a rare thing at Google.

And congrats to Debian Linux co-founder Ian Murdock on his new job at Sun, where he'll be working on all things OpenSolaris and, I hope, helping to make it as easy and fun to use as Debian or even Ubuntu.

Roller on SJS Web Server 7.0

2007-03-20T13:02:02+00:00

Complete instructions for Running Roller Weblogger on Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 by Seema Alevoor and Marina Sum. Via The Aquarium.

Redmonk on Roller, Covalent and IBM

2007-02-14T09:29:01+00:00

James Governor: Covalent gets its mojo back and refocuses on its core competence - supporting open source code, and doubles down on Apache projects, going back to its roots. The latest example of Covalent seeing an opportunity and nailing it is the companyâ€™s announcement of support for the Roller blog platform. Thatâ€™s now two companies, IBM and Covalent, making direct revenues from a platform originally built by a Sun employee, but for which Sun has no business model. Here is a hint Sun - perhaps its not software you need to sell but service and support. That is what Covalent is nailing.

I appreciate the support from James and the Redmonk crew. They always seem to be rootin' for Roller.

Of course I'd like to see better support for Roller all around, but at this point I can't say much beyond this: I'm focused on building a great blog platform and support is a very important part of any platform.

A couple of small corrections for James. I was not a Sun employee when I originally developed Roller. Second, IBM hasn't shipped Connections, so they're not any making "direct revenues" yet. Third, I don't know if Covalent has "nailed" anything -- I haven't heard from anybody who has tried the service and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they offer.

Eco theme

2007-02-07T00:02:16+00:00

Aaron Cohen is looking for feedback on a simple and clean new Roller theme known as Eco.

Update: Linda says Eco is not really a "Roller theme" as it relies on some .Sun Engineering ad-server components to serve up the rotating eco-fact. She's got some instructions for BSC users interested in the theme on her blog.

Raible wants to know: what's it like to work at Sun?

2007-02-01T08:38:11+00:00

Matt Raible has been talking to folks at Sun (including me) about working for Sun. Now he's using his blog as part of the interview process. He asks:

For those folks out there that have worked for Sun - what's it like? Is it a good place to work these days? Would you recommend it for a passionate open source developer like myself that likes to make contractor rates and take lots of vacation?

I've already talked to him and told him what I think. We didn't talk about vacation, which is a disappointing two weeks for a new employee, but other than that I think Sun is a great place to work for a passionate open source developer. If you work at Sun or worked at Sun, leave a comment on Matt's blog or send him an email and tell him about your Sun experience.

IBM Roller development update and iBatis vs. JPA

2007-01-30T13:40:33+00:00

Elias posted some good news about some upcoming IBM contributions to Roller. We're discussing how best to get them into Roller now.

Note that we now have two possible replacements for our old Hibernate back-end. We've got a Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) based back-end developed by Sun's Craig Russell and Mitesh Meswani and IBM is getting ready to contribute an iBatis based back-end. How do we choose which one to use in Roller? Consensus seems to be that we'll have a bake-off. We'll compare the programming models, test performance and discuss the pros and cons -- and let the best framework win.

Good news

2007-01-26T10:54:31+00:00

Lots of good news and stuff to blog this past week including the Sun makes a profit story, the Sun-Intel deal and more. I really like reading news like this Amid Profit, Brighter Days for Sun and this Sun turns profit after five quarters in red.

And how could I fail to mention the announcement of Lotus Connections, the product formerly known as Ventura. Connections is IBM's new Web 2.0 social networking suite and it includes Roller. IBM's James Snell posted some background info about IBM's internal use of social networking tools and how that led to Lotus Connections. Elias Torres blogged about it too and included a screen-shot of the new Connections based BlogCentral (IBM's internal blogging site).

And in other news...

My ApacheCon EU talk on 'Roller and Blogs as a Web Development Platform' was accepted. Looks like I'll have a busy May, Amsterdam for ApacheCon and (hopefully) San Francisco for JavaOne all in the space of two weeks.

Wordpress is finally gonna get Atom format support and apparently Atom protocol support is going to happen too.

The ROME project is just about ready for ROME 1.0 and there's a new subproject in the works: ROME Propono. co-worker Ramesh Mandava and I are putting together a Blog Client library (based on code from Blogapps) and an Atom client/server library (based on code from Roller). Hopefully, we'll have it ready by the time that ROME 1.0 comes out.

New job at Sun

2007-01-05T17:14:40+00:00

I mentioned that I've got a new job at Sun and it begins Monday, so I guess it's time to explain.

Since I joined Sun two years ago I've been working in the .Sun Engineering organization, the team that runs sun.com and blogs.sun.com. In that time we've taken Roller through three major releases, made massive improvements to the Roller code-base, helped grow the Roller community at Apache and delivered new features and improvements on a monthly basis. It's been a truly wonderful experience and I've learned a lot from Will Snow's amazing team, but now that Roller has matured and stabilized I'm ready to start working in some new directions.

On Monday I'll move to the Java EE organization (under Tony Ng) where Sun's working on some very interesting and very cool technologies from server-side scripting with Phobos and JRuby on Rails, RESTful approaches to web services and client-side UI goodness with JMaki. I'm very excited about the move and getting a chance to get involved with those technologies, but I can't talk yet about the specific product(s) I'll be working on. I can say this: I'll continue to be very closely involved with Roller development and I'll continue my work with RSS/Atom, ROME and the Blogapps project. And, of course, I'll continue blogging Roller so stay tuned.

Rich Burridge's blog-to-book blogapp

2007-01-02T14:55:15+00:00

Rich has put together a interesting blogapp that pulls all entries from a blog and turns them into a book, using either cups2pdf or OpenOffice.org Writer. I had the same idea when I was writing RSS and Atom in Action, but I was going to go the DocBook route and eventually dropped the idea because DocBook seemed a bit too complex.

I don't think Rich's work is Roller-specific. Rich used Grabber to get the entries out of Roller and into simple HTML files, so the approach should work with other blog servers that support the MetaWeblog API.

OpenSolaris in 2007

2007-01-02T09:03:00+00:00

Paul Murphy: By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community - and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.

That's a nice way to start the new year. No doubt plenty of Sun bloggers will be linking to Paul's predictions.

Farewell to 2006

2006-12-31T23:11:21+00:00

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

Roller-Planet mind map

2006-12-22T22:16:15+00:00

I'm glad I was able to help Simon get his personal planet back online yesterday. And I'm glad the task was fairly easy. All Simon needed as a new version of Blogapps PlanetTool updated to use ROME 0.9 and I was planning on doing that anyway.

What's PlanetTool you wonder? PlanetTool is a command-line program which reads a set of RSS/Atom newsfeeds and then uses a set of templates to generate a planet site with HTML, RSS, Atom, OPML and other representations. Simon uses it to bring together his personal blog, Sun blog, del.icio.us links and Flickr.com photos into a single webpage and a single feed. If you subscribe to that feed, you'll get just about everything that Simon publishes to the web.

If you're interested in learning more about PlanetTool, here are some of my previous posts on the topic:

Try PlanetTool, it's easy!
ROME + Texen = PlanetTool
PlanetTool internals
It's also covered in Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.

The above title Try PlanetTool, it's easy! is a little misleading, but it brings me to my point. PlanetTool is only easy if you're a developer or a power-user; somebody who can handle running Java on a server, editing an XML config file and setting up a cron job. Simon could handle it, but I'd like to make planets easier.

In fact, I'd like to make it as easy to create a planet as it is to create a blog. This past week, I've been thinking about how to do that by taking the simple ROME powered Roller-Planet code, which is found in both Roller and PlanetTool, and build it into a multi-user planet server -- kinda like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs. To get my thoughts into digital form I worked up a little FreeMind mind-map on the topic, dumped it to text, added some wiki syntax and some screen-shots. The result is this: a RollerPlanetMindMap that outlines ideas for the future development of Roller-Planet.

Join the blogs.sun.com team

2006-12-12T22:58:04+00:00

If you dig blogs, wikis, feeds, Java and Solaris then you might be interested in the fact that we're hiring. Linda Skrocki's got the scoop on the job opening in Sun's Community Software Engineering team.

DDJ Swain's Cafe on blogs.sun.com

2006-11-12T09:44:54+00:00

Mike Swaine in Dr. Dobb's Journal: But employee blogs are turning out to be a good place to go to track what's really going on. When Sun partnered with the University of Kent on the NetBeans IDE/BlueJ Edition, Ian Utting of U Kent vlogged in Sun's blog space about this beginner's Java tool. Incensed by rumors that Java doesn't work on Windows Vista, Sun's Chet Haase blogged to the contrary. And, responding to a high-news-value development, CEO Jonathan Schwartz links to YouTube video of Jonathan and Sun's Chief Technologist Greg Papadopoulos on Oracle's decision to fork Linux. (Hey, that's Jonathan's choice of words, not mine.)

And maintaining a place for ex-employees to blog is either brilliant or loony. My guess is, brilliant.

Yes, definitely brilliant. No bias here.

Latest links

2006-10-27T00:00:39+00:00

OpenSolaris distributions show promise | eWeek
"these distributions point to intriguing new directions for Solaris"
New file system boosts the already excellent Solaris 10 | eWeek
"One of the most impressive things about ZFS is how easy it is to use"
Sun narrows loss significantly | InfoWorld
"Stronger sales of its Solaris 10 operating system helped..."
blojsom/Google Maps template mashup
"You're looking at blog entries 'rendered' on a map of the earth"
Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 1: Overview
Overview of plans to transition Sun's portal server to an open source project at Java.Net
Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 2: Portlet Repository
Overview of Open Source Portlet Repo, which includes RSS feed viewing and blog editing portlets
The dictator's free cookie day?
Opening Move podcast with Simon Phipps, David Van Couvering and yours truly
Wiley::Professional Apache Geronimo
by Bruce "this one time, at band camp" Snyder, Jeff Gerender and Sing Li
RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats
Excerpts from Chapter 4 of RSS and Atom in Action, at WebReference.com

Latest links: rules for blogging edition

2006-10-23T12:22:28+00:00

Lots of reading material on rules or lack of rules for blogging today.

First, some posts about Tim Bray's use of the F-word in a blog about Sun's new Project Blackbox. My take on the F-word? It's good and I use it, but I haven't had the guts or the reason to use it on my blog (although I have posted quotes that include the word). I'm with Scoble on this one: when somebody like Tim says something is F-ing cool, then I sit up and take notice.

Can a corporate blogger use the "F-word?"
Scoble: "I paid attention to that new product launch BECAUSE of Tim's language"
Tim's Bomb
Douglas: "If you believe [free speech laws] carry over to your corporate blog, then we disagree."
The F-bomb: never cool
Robertson: "when you use coarse language, there's no upside. That's right - none."
Oh My Goodness Gracious
Bray: "I'm sincerely sorry. But that's really what I'm like."

Sun VP Dave Douglas' point about corporate vs. personal blogs seems valid, but as Douglas points out, it's not clear whether Tim's blog personal or corporate. Tim's posts are included on the front page of blogs.sun.com through the magic of aggregation (actually, only the first sentence or two). Do we need to add a bad language filter to the aggregator? Should Tim and other externally hosted Sun bloggers provide a safe-for-Sun feed for our aggregator that includes only polished professional posts?

And second, some links from Raleigh News and Observer's Sunday feature on blogging, which included articles by Triangle blogging mavens Ruby Sinreich and Anton Zuiker:

Raleigh News and Observer: Rules to blog by
Sunday feature on blogging, rules, ethics and journalism
When blogging, face the conversation
by local blogger Anton Zuiker, published in the Raleigh News and Observer
Moving past the "blogs versus journalism" debate
by local blogger Ruby Sinreich, published in the Raleigh News and Observer

One year at Sun

2005-09-15T20:10:52+00:00

On this day one year ago I was raving about my first week at Sun. If I had the energy to write a long retrospective blog entry, I'd brag about Will Snow's amazing team, all the Roller revs we've shipped, speaking at JavaOne, winning the chairman's award, and Roller's ongoing move to Apache, but I don't. I'm completely drained by a day of documentation work and two hours of flash-cards with my 7-year-old. So I'll just say this: I love working at Sun.

Menlo Park

2005-04-09T16:18:22+00:00

That's where I'm going today. I'll be working at blogs.sun.com HQ from Monday through Wednesday.

What belongs on a corporate-sponsored blog?

2004-05-09T21:51:37+00:00

There is a interesting discussion of what should be allowed on a Java.Net weblog in the comments of Richard Monson-Haefel's post 9 of Clubs Seeks a new Deck of Cards. Richard needs a job and is using his weblog to do a little self-promotion/marketing, but his weblog is hosted on Sun's Java.Net site which suppoosedly restricts marketing. Java.Net's managing editor Daniel Steinberg raised this issue, mainly as a discussion point, and thankfully the consensus seems to be in favor of allowing Richard's post and others like it.

Last year, I criticized what I saw as forced corporate blogging on Java.Net, but the open spirit on the Java.Net weblogs, Sun's progressive new Policy on Public Discourse, and the Sun employee blogs at blogs.sun.com, show that Sun trusts it's employees to communicate publicly and directly with each other, with Java developers, and with customers. As a long-time Java developer and small-time Sun shareholder, I see this as a very good thing.