Click on this picture of a story from today's New York Post, anyone notice a problem?
A confident picture of Steve Ballmer juxtaposed with the worried face of Larry Page. Except the caption says Sergey Brin. Typical NY Post blunder, maybe they used Bing to search for Larry Page's image?
A few weeks ago, the Common Java Cookbook received a spike of traffic from DZone. In the intervening weeks, people let me know that they really want a PDF version of the book...
You can download the PDF, or you can read the book on Scribd...
The Common Java CookbookJIRA Project and Mailing Lists at Codehaus - I'm just starting to track progress on the work over at Codehaus, Browse the CJCOOK JIRA Project or sign up for the mailing lists.
Multimodule Build - Also, I took some time last week to split up the Commons Java Cookbook into a Multimodule Maven project that uses a number of plugins to fully automate the publishing pipeline. If you want to checkout the source code for everything, take a look at the GitHub repository.
I'm focusing on the book build because I'm trying to make it easier for me to move quickly before I start developing more content. I'm working on some automation tools that will make it easier to build, test, and inject all of the code samples in the book, and I'm also looking for even more ways to distribute the content. In the next few weeks, expect more news about an Eclipse version of the book and a version of the book for ebook readers.
As promised, I'm opening up the license for the cj-cookbook. I'm starting out with Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives-Non-commercial 3.0 US. So, I think that this license is a bit Draconian. It essentially means: "Can't sell it, don't use it for training, don't change it, and tell everyone I wrote it." Doesn't that seem a bit vain for an open source project? I might relax the license a bit by dropping the NoDerivs clause, but I'm still mulling it over. Does anyone reading this post have any particular feelings about what license this book should be under? Does anyone want to challenge me to release it under ASL 2.0? I have been critical of viral licenses in the past, so it would be ironic of me to release it under the GPL Documentation licenses.
Today I...
I'm sick of writing books behind walls, it's time to bring it all out into the open.
The ASF is having one of those fun, endless arguments: "what constitutes a software release?" The central problem is that the C people only think is appropriate to vote on a source distribution where the Java people tend to vote on a tag in source control. Should be a pretty simple difference to bridge, no? Think again, here's a picture of the discussion thread...
I can't tell you what prompted this email because it is secret, but I will tell you that there is an interesting discussion happening in the Foundation about something that people might have an opinion on. Tantalizing isn't it? Makes you wonder what people are talking about, huh? Well, trust me, it is interesting, it illustrates thinking behind a topic that many developers are discussing, but the conversation I'm talking about is secret, by the very act of participating in the discussion I've agreed to conceal it. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to tell you where it took place. Did it happen on IRC? Or, did it happen on a private mailing list? Certain people are going to read this post and say that it is inappropriate that I even mentioned it.
Every discussion that can be held in public that relates to the ASF must be held in public. The only discussions that need to be conducted on a "private" IRC channel, or on a private mailing list are those discussions that relate to security vulnerabilities or specific personnel and legal issues. One of the things that has worried me about the ASF over the years is that certain PMCs and certain groups within the organization act on an authority that seems incompatible with the idea of a consensus-based meritocracy, and there seems to be an ever changing interpretation of "The Apache Way".
Apache exists as a governance structure for a community of loosely coupled volunteers. It thrives because it attracts projects and people to the core ideas of community-driven development, meritocracy, and a common license. As it develops, as it grows over time, as the support cost for the Foundation increase, it appears to be under increasing pressure to "institutionalize" certain parts of its operation. As this growth continues, it will be interesting to see if it faces the same struggle between individual project autonomy versus standardization that would face any organization (or state). Will Apache adopt a "Federal" or corporate model of governance that requires TLPs to buy into much more than just "The Apache Way" and expand its reach to the tools, processes, and technologies that help to define a unique community?
I'd be happier with the Foundation, if someone at the top reminded people of a commitment to radical transparency. By this I mean that all participants, at every level of the organization should be conducting as much business as possible in the open. If the Board has a mailing list, it should discuss what can be discussed in the open. If Members have a mailing list, they should remind each other that Sunlight is a necessary disinfectant for open source. I encourage people to refuse to participate in a conversation that could happen out in the open. If someone brings up something on a PMC list that could just as easily happen on a development list, call foul, ask them to move it to the dev list.
I've been getting a lot of spam FriendFeed follows lately, that's usually the first sign that a social networking site has started to turn irrelevant. Anyone else notice an influx of high following to follower ratio FriendFeed users of late? This picture below illustrates everything that is wrong about tying to use sites like FriendFeed for marketing. The "expert" is trying to bump up her followers by mass following 12,000 people. She has also just tweeted about some tool that can automate FriendFeed subscriptions. FriendFeed... creeping toward irrelevance?
Note to the "Direct Marketing" and "Social Media Expert" crowds. FriendFeed != Twitter. Just because you suddenly follow 12,000 people using some automated tool doesn't mean that they will follow you back.
I was only gone for a few minutes, but when I returned I found that my "Open Source Infrastructure" diagram had turned into something much more interesting. Clearly, a project's Open Source infrastructure is only complete with a big pink Josie and some snazzy stars.
First, I wrote a quick piece pointing people to the Personal Genome Project. Church's experiment is expanding beyond the initial group of 10 luminaries and is starting to invite more participants. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, from some discussions at last year's Scifoo, I'm convinced that aggregating everyone's Genetic sequence into a massive data set would yield a series of benefits that could potentially transform our understanding of disease. The simple act of creating an index of the human genome and comparing that index to the incident rate of various pathologies could yield clues as to the cause of various conditions.
Second, a response to Morozov's Twitter missive in Foreign Policy. Morozov sounds the alarm that Twitter has the potential to misinform and bemoans the excessive number of tin-hat conspiracy theorists on the platform. Listen, Twitter is a communications platform, and, as such, a bunch of crazies are always going to show up to the party. I don't think that you discount the entire conversation because of eight example Tweets... nor do I think it is helpful or original to view Twitter as a potential terrorist threat. Maybe Morozov was auditioning for the role of Fox News columnist?
This is a follow-up to the two O'Reilly articles from yesterday "Twittering the Swine Flu" and "Tracking and Graphing the Swin Flu with Twitter".
I've been using Twist to graph Twitter trends, here's an interesting graph of the impact of Swine Flu on Twitter. What I find interesting about Twist is that it shows you a technology that is impossible with Google Search. Google's Flu Trend service is likely more accurate and able to track local Flu trends. Twist on the other hand is going to provide a quick snapshot of awareness of the general population.
With Twitter, services like Twist are able to perform analytics on the entire data set of Twitter (albeit indirectly). Twist didn't need to ask for permission to create this valuable graphing service. On the other hand, Google Trends and Google's Flu Trends had to be generated by the private entity that owns the search data. As services like Twitter and Google become essential tools of government, we should be comparing the openness of these platforms.
Here's a graph of "swine", "oprah", and "obama". As you can see the Swine Flu story seemed to break yesterday, and the awareness peaked out at just below 1%.
Click on the graph for more detail, or go to http://twist.flaptor.com/
