Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.

Recent Items
 
The Difference an Open Source Makes
 
Grounding Your Work's Usability
 
Like It Or Not, We're In This Together -- The Software Improvement Cycle
 
Demos - Catalogue - The Pro-Am Revolution
 
Self-Configuring Networks
 
Open Source Enterprise
 
Failure Is Your Friend
 
Encouraging Open-Source Development
 
Streamlining Software Upgrade
 
Trusting Wireless Routing

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The Difference an Open Source Makes

O'Reilly Weblogs: Kevin Shockey -- Open Source makes a difference.  I subscribe to the Feed for the O'Reilly network and from time to time I go look at an article based on the short teasers that appear in the feeds.  Kevin Shockey's topic drew my attention, but I couldn't figure out what I was looking at.

Mostly, I can't figure out how to coordinate my browser (the famous disreputable one), my firewall, and however these pages are served up.  Even though I have an account and clicking "Sign In/My Account" simply confirms that I am already recognized, when I click to comment on a weblog entry, my browser goes into a URL fetch loop in the bowels of whatever O'Reilly does to provide single sign-one sans Passport. I finally caught enough of my firewall intercepts and authorized enough cookies, persistent cookies, 3rd party cookies (! and who is 1800-olympic.com anyhow?), and scripts and objects of all kinds that I feel my need to extend trust to the O'Reilly organization is severely strained.  But I can now get to the comment form.

So, apparently, paternalistic intrusion onto my computational premises has many forms.  The page also renders badly and that corruption denied me understanding of the George Bailey reference on the page.  Now I see it and I can correct my complaint in the comments I left.

With that kvetching behind me, I now return my attention to Kevin's theme. First, Kevin leads the SNAP Development Center, and that matters for the simple reason that he and his cohorts are pulling together a full-up open-source distribution of Java, incorporating the Jikes (IBM) compiler, the SableVM, and open source implementations of the standard API classes and such.

Sounds like worthy work to me.  I can think of a few reasons that I might want to use that, and at least do side-by-side verification of Java-based projects of my own with it.

There is more to Kevin's maiden soar onto the O'Reilly weblogs.  It's partly revealed in his author's biographical statement:

Kevin is an emerging high technology entrepreneur.  After spending 16 years in corporate software development and project management, he now leads an open source project funded with someone else's money.  When he's not reading, writing, or dreaming he likes to spend time enjoying his family.  His vision is to share his passion, mental agility, intuition, and challenge of authority to build an open future full of opportunity.

Enactment of the vision is illustrated by Kevin's choosing to work toward the development of a high-tech economy in Puerto Rico.  I can see how that fits an "open future full of opportunity" and also the housing of SNAP at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico.

And yet I'm uncomfortable with automatic association of undertaking an open-source project with the fulfilment of some vision for making a difference.  I can see that it is that way for Kevin (but notice that the difference he sees is about much more than open-source development and I assume that other vehicles would be acceptable).  I don't see how open-source as an activity is inherently making a difference, granting that there are many paths to contribution and finding a purpose.  For me this is some kind of ideological collapse.

In a near-immediate exchange on the comments for his entry, Kevin spells out how he sees it.  I get that.  I can get how being a good parent makes a difference.  I can get how many small things make a difference every day.  I get that open-source development is a way to make a contribution, and that can make a difference.  There's an edge to it that goes too far for me.  I don't want to smother Kevin's inspiration in a blanket of non-possibility, so I'm going to stop this and think off-line about whatever I'm attached to that has me stumble so awkwardly on this expression of making a difference.

Listening to:

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov Sheherazade, Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, WMA version of CD in Windows Media Player 9.0.  And The Russian Easter Overture is next up, appropriately.

Reading:

Andrew Greeley, The Bishop Goes to The University, Tom Doherty Associates Forge Book (New York: 2003).  In my long separation from the writings of Father Greeley, his Father Blackie Ryan has become a Bishop.  Returning to his books found as supermarket book-rack plunder, I am struck by how much I now feel like an outsider at a running inside joke.  I'm a bit irked that the protagonist announces thoughts about key matters without telling us what those thoughts are until teasing us several more times across 100 pages or so.  [Oh my, am I doing something similar here?]  There is also an uncanny connection to the lovely Star Bright! and the fumbling efforts of a splintered religion in the contemporary world.

posted by orcmid at 12/12/2004 10:49:53 PM, rating data by NewsGator Online

Grounding Your Work's Usability

Jared Spool: Three Important Benefits of Personas.  Here's a valuable essay on the successful use of personas (made-up users or virtualized stakeholders of any sort) to provide a reality perspective for the design of a system.  This is a companion to Alan Cooper's injunction to design systems for one user.  Although this approach shows up more in the context of interaction design and user-interface development, it strikes me that it is meaningful for the entire system-development life cycle and for the cycle of improvement that is envisioned for a product progression.

The single most-important takeaway that I recommend from this Scoble-Linked James Robertson find is that the successful introduction of a persona is a way to take the designer out of their world and into the world of the user.  One limitation of open-source development is the degree to which it has developers developing for themselves.  That works great when the user community consists of other like-minded developers.  It doesn't turn out so well when it is offered to a broader population of users with other purposes and perspectives.  The gap is often characterized as an absence of documentation.  I think it goes far deeper than that, back to whether the software is even designed to be documentable and reliably usable and by whom.

posted by orcmid at 12/12/2004 01:00:29 PM, rating data by NewsGator Online

Like It Or Not, We're In This Together -- The Software Improvement Cycle

Burningbird » When Open Source is Like Bad Sex  This find on Scoble's Link Blog raises some important concerns about the dynamic between users and open-source developers (among all other kinds), and about how the cycle of improvement (I am becoming enamored of that Deming phrase) involves users and developers together.  I'd say the point is that developers who don't cherish and embrace the participating user have a problem on their hands.

The lesson I see here is that there is a big difference between using the user and having an user.  Our consistency of purpose (or lack thereof) and what it offers to our user partners is going to speak loudly. We should not be surprised when our behavior exposes our disdain for users as necessary means to our ends.

posted by orcmid at 12/12/2004 07:59:05 AM, rating data by NewsGator Online

Demos - Catalogue - The Pro-Am Revolution

Demos - Catalogue - The Pro-Am Revolution.  This is the Demos open-access page for the Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller book, The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society.

posted by orcmid at 12/12/2004 07:48:24 AM, rating data by NewsGator Online