May 2005

Today was the final day of GUADEC 6. As is always the case, the day after any social event is usually a little subdued but there was still much going on.

Probably the biggest part of the day was the announcement that Nokia would be selling 500 of the new Nokia 770’s to GNOME developers at $99 each and all of the proceeds would go directly to the GNOME Foundation. That’s just fantastic and a big boost to the GNOME community.

My presentation (actually I was part of a panel) was today as well. We started with about 20 people and ended up with about 40 total by the end of it although I imagine a lot of folks were coming in ahead of Glynn Foster’s presentation … I think it went pretty well and I have to thank Hans-Ulrich and Katy for making it go off so well.

I managed to get a few more pictures up today with the closing of the conference.

Now I start my long journey home … just about 24 hours from now I should be arriving in Seattle … can’t wait to get home and see the family!

I’m off to bed and will be blogging more upon my return. Much to share about the GNOME community.

GUADEC Day 2 has brought some (much needed) rain with it … it’s cool finally in this beautiful city … haha … I guess the rain is making me lippy … this is a long post … sorry …

Couple of good talks today. I went to see Mark Shuttleworth give a talk about “all things open source”. Mark did a cool thing (IMHO) and had a slideshow of his trip to space running on his laptop instead of OpenOffice slides. Then he just free-form talked about what he’s up to and where he see open source heading in general in the next 10 to 20 years.

Bear in mind I’m just paraphrasing what he said:

* Open source is just the start. It could have been open architecture or open engineering but we just happened to have the first tools for decent collaboration; email, diff and patch. As the end-user tools mature, we’ll see more people and areas of expertise move to an “open” way of doing business.

* The future of the desktop will be open source. It’s just a matter of time. Just like they said Linux would never make it into the data center, it has and the desktop will follow. The key to this is simplicity, elegance and usability.

* Ubuntu was created to help speed the development of a desktop environment that anybody could use. In addition, it’s around to help enable collaboration umong many, many different projects. The goal is not to be a single uber company but to build an ecosystem of small companies (ISV’s if you will) that can help support and grow the community from a grassroots level.

I can’t do his talk justice. Feel free to watch it yourself.

Speaking of usability, there was a great talk that some Novell product folks put on about usuability of Linux from a Windows user perspective.

Usability has been a big theme at this conference so far (although the debate rages over what exactly that entails). There was a great talk that some Novell product folks put on about a study they have almost completed regarding Linux usability from a Windows user perspective.

Anna Dirks and Peter Goodall (the Novell folks) set about creating a usability station which they would take across the globe and do short, 30 minute usability tests with “average” users. They tested both KDE 3.2 and GNOME 2.6 and asked users to do a few “tasks” (not to confused with tests - its the software getting tested, not the user) under these desktops. The results were essentially that there is a lot of work to be done.

The best part was that the usability station they have has cameras that watch the users face, hands and computer screen all in real-time multiplexed into one 4-way split screen. It’s amazing how frustrated users can get trying to do things on a computer. More and more focus is being placed on usability and it’s going to have an impact on the bottom line of deployed Linux desktops in the years to come. If anything, their talk was great just to see some techniques for doing usability testing.

The next talk I attended was the “Project TOPAZ” or “GNOME 3.0″ (ToPaZ == Three Point Zero) which was done by Jeff Waugh. Jeff is a great speaker; he’s funny, engaging and doesn’t really need all that many bullet points to get his meaning across. My favorite piece was the “10×10″ initiative that he proposed; 10% of the desktop market running GNOME by 2010. It’s a daunting task but one that is attainable. I was impressed to see folks nod their heads when he offered this up and he was really pushing hard on the more-than-just-maintenance-releases mentality.

Again, I’m not doing his talk justice; watch it yourself.

The rest of the day was in ad-hoc sessions and a hackfest headed up by Nat Friedman. Not being a GNOME hacker I decided to head back to the hotel and catch up on email.

All-in-all it was a good day. I’m really impressed with the GNOME community but that is the subject for another blog entry.

I swear this heat is just makin’ me want to blog … haha … It’s been well into the 90’s (F obviously) since I arrived … thunderstorms are in the forecast for tonight … yeah baby!! BTW - more pictures are up on my gallery.

GUADEC started this morning bright and early at 8:30am. A few of the board members talked and there was a great presentation as well complete with stick figures and an “R” rating … haha …

I got a chance to sit in on Keith Packard’s talk about what’s up at Freedesktop.org. He started the talk off by offering up hosting through the freedesktop.org project and also mentioned that they have complimentary hosting at MIT so they have physical redundancy. He also talked quite a bit about where he thinks freedesktop.org is headed and where it has been. Good stuff.

I also got a chance to go to Ralph Giles talk on the Xiph project and it’s progress over the last couple of years. We’ve been hosting Xiph for quite some time and it was actually a great chance to get to know what they’ve been up to. I was really impressed with the work that Ralph and the Xiph Foundation has been up to.

Finally, I got to go to Miguel de Icaza’s keynote about the current state of GNOME, Mono and a bunch of other stuff. He originally put up a presentation entitled “Pictures of People I Hate” which was of course a joke but it was funny none-the-less … haha … The keynote was right after lunch so folks were pretty comatose … that said, Miguel was his ever-energetic self.

He made some great comments about the state of GNOME. He made some comments about how the GNOME developers and what they should be focusing on. Instead of trying to get everything perfect or re-inventing the wheel, he said focus on the user and get the code working … we can make it perfect later. Good stuff. He also mentioned that GNOME needs to find a way to embrace ISV’s and get more developers connected to the project. Trying to do everything yourself is rough at best; the more devs you have, the easier it is. That comment really blew me away.

Miguel also did some demos of new software that is really helping make GNOME a great solution. One application was F-Spot. He proceeded to show a bunch of pictures of Nat Friedman doing a bunch of crazy stuff … haha … I guess whenever he gets the chance to rip on Nat he does … heh … too funny.

This is my first real interaction with the GNOME community and I have to say I love the energy around the group. They almost remind me of the Perl or Python hackers you see at OSCON (don’t take that personally - its a compliment really).

I’m at GUADEC right now. During the speaker reception last night and this mornings opening notes, it’s obvious to me that the Stuttgart region really, really wants to be the epicenter of open source. They are pouring in resources to help court open source business and the community. I would say they are doing an excellent job.

I learned quite a bit about the region over the past few days. IBM and HP both have their German headquarters here in the region. Red Hat has a test center. KDE was founded at a University in this region. They are attracting groups like GNOME, KDE, Apache and Wine to do their conferences here. They are really going the extra mile for the open source community.

They have recently launched an open source center which I can only assume is likened to an inncubator in hearing how it was described. The center is geared towards open source startups and currently has 13 firms hosted there. They provide services for these companies to help get them off of the ground. The current hosted firms are doing things like embedded, multimedia and mobile applications.

I love what the Stuttgart region is doing. It’s much like what we’re seeing in Oregon and there are some great opportunities for collaboration across our two spaces. Things just keep getting better and better.

Another day in Stuttgart and lots to talk about.

The city is just a blast. There was a car show (pictures to follow) down on the Schlossplatz … man do the Germans love their cars. Everything from Mercedes to Ford to Citreon was there. I even got to see some Lambourghini’s first hand … wow … nice cars …

I spent a couple of hours down watching people go by while sitting in the shade. Totally fun to just people watch in the lovely weather and look across the fantastic city-scape.

The evening brought the GUADEC speaker reception that Nokia sponsored. This was a good event. Booze and food for everybody! They even had dessert. This was one of the better events I’ve been to at a conference like this. It was low-key and didn’t have too many people at it so it was a chance to really connect with people. I got a chance to meet David Neary, Luis Villa and Ryan Gammon … great conversations to be had by all.

Nokia was giving away their new 770’s for the GNOME developers which was really cool. This is a device that is running Linux and a completely open source software stack. Really neat to see and hopefully they can sell some. I was this close to winning one … haha …

The walk back from the reception was amazing. It was just after midnight and the city was totally electric. From talking with some of the folks from Stuttgart they said that this was the first big break in the weather and that people were just itching to get out. The downtown area was totally hoppin’ with all of the beer gardens packed … kids still out running around … just craziness … it’s a beautiful place at night.

GUADEC starts tomorrow … looking forward to it!

Door-to-door was 19 hours which isn’t too shabby. I’ve got some pictures up on my site of the trip as well as a little bit of Stuttgart itself.

Couple of notes on the whole trip:

* Getting out of Seattle was crazy. The flight was over booked and they have one guy working this huge line. I compare that to United and how they have completely stream-lined their process, even to their partners. My flight was with Northwest Airlines who partners with KLM. It was just a particularly painful process.

* I have never been so well-fed on a flight. It was 9 hours 5 minutes from Seattle to Amsterdam and I had dinner, a snack of a turkey sandwich, a drink break and finally breakfast. My lord; I don’t eat that well in the US … haha … BTW - did you know
that only 14% of departing flights leaving PDX? That’s just crazy to me. At least they have free wireless. SEATAC anted $9.99 for me to use a day pass.

* While on the flight to Amsterdam, there was a break between movies and there was (I kid you not) an 10 minute ad for Microsoft Business Solutions. What?! I guess world travellers are their target audience?

* Amsterdam is probably the nicest airport I have ever seen. Massive doesn’t even begin to describe it. We had to taxi close to 12 minutes just to get to our gate. So here’s the funny part. Massive as it is, its horribly, horribly laid out. I had 25 minutes to literally walk 2 miles as well as get through customs (although somebody just looked at my passport and waved me through … weird). I just made my flight.

* The Stuttgart aiport was great … small, easy to navigate, etc. I got my bags, hopped in a cab and was to my hotel in about 15 minutes. Stuttgart is a beautiful city. It’s nestled in this amazing little valley with loads of modern meets classic architecture. Oh, and its friggin’ hot. It was 90 degrees F when I got here … doh!

So I’ll just put this out there … anybody know of a travelling blog site? I’m thinking something like craigslist meets Go! Europe meets some login site … you could login and talk about the places you travelled, places to see, places to avoid, etc … there has got
to be something like that. If anybody knows about it, please let me know … I’ll do something about Stuttgart …

More tomorrow … good night everybody …

I’m on the road again starting this afternoon and I won’t be back in lovely Corvallis until the 4th of June.

I’m off to GUADEC to be on a panel about “Creating Jobs: Open Source & Economic Development”. This should be a really fun conference and a chance to put some names to IRC nicks. It’s not often that I get over to Europe and so I’m hoping to make the best of it.

I’ll also be attending OVP’s Annual Meeting on the 2nd and 3rd of June. OVP has taken an interest in open source and has recently finished a survey (see mid-way down the page) of Oregon and are helping to build a cluster around open source here. Open Source is just now taking off and the epi-center is clearly here in Oregon. To me, it’s a matter of execution now.

I’ll be giving daily updates as well as hopefully some pictures along the way right here at my blog. Going on the road like this is a necessary thing but it’s just so hard to leave Corvallis when the great weather hits (and my garden isn’t in yet) …

I spent the day in Portland this week in several meetings and finally culminating in the Eclipse and OTBC reception. While I was there, I wanted a chance to check out the Personal Telco project and see what they had to offer at some of their access points.

I headed down to Stumptown Coffee (the Ash Street location). I went in, bought some coffee, sat down and just tapped right into the Personal Telco wireless network. That was easy enough.

To me, this is a big deal. Portland is quickly becoming the friendliest big city I have ever seen in terms of wireless. Not only do they have wireless in the form of the Personal Telco project but the airport also has free wireless as well. Lord knows I can always find time to kill at an airport. So we have lots of free wireless access in Portland. Why is this a good thing?

Wireless access, and more importantly, access to cheap/free connectivity is just good for business. Connectivity is a commodity now and the price and access is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. We’re seeing a co-op like organization pooling their resources and working together to provide what I consider to be a basic service. Is it like water or sewer service? Not quite, but I will say its a lot like telephone and cell service and we know how those big uber vendors are treating our city. Put this access in the hands of the people, let us innovate and keep those dollars local to Portland instead of some off-shore tax shelter. But I digress.

While I was digging around the Personal Telco pages and node information I realized its more than just “free wireless”. They have location specific media (music, video, etc) as well as wiki’s and even a local Debian mirror. Wow. Again, a vendor could probably provide all of these things but having it be a co-op like initiative we’re seeing a much more vibrant offering for the community.

I’m really excited about using the Personal Telco network and will be doing my best to map out their hotspots so I can better utilize and support them. I love it. Keep up the great work guys.

After reading Alex Polvi’s blog I had customer satisfaction on the brain and then I got to attend a reception in Portland for the Eclipse Foundation.

I ran into a product marketing manager from Intel while I was there and she was asking about what makes an open source project successful? Specifically she was asking about Eclipse and why it has been so successful. She mentioned a great example; the Motorola Razr cell phone recently released. Motorola took a new approach to the development of this product; they looked at the cell phone from the customers’ perspective and specifically asked what the customer wanted from it. They then adapted the technology to those requirements instead of saying “here is the technologies we have available let’s cram them all into a phone”. The result is that the US $500 phone is flying off the shelf and Motorola is back in the #2 slot in terms of market share.

This got me thinking about the future direction of the Update Service for Mozilla. We have been debating the future direction of the application and where we want to go (and what is should be). What we really need to do is identify what we want for the real customers of the Update Service and then build the application around that. Right now we’re just hemming and hawing around a lot of “I thinks” and “it shoulds” when nobody has even asked one user what they want.

Why is Firefox succeeding? I would say originally it was because it was a small, focused development team that had a small number of features in mind; small footprint, secure browsing, no pop-ups and tabbed browsing. It just so happens that’s exactly what customers were clamoring for although at the time I’d bet that the creators of Firefox didn’t do any market research on it; they just did it and got really lucky with it.

Customer satisfaction starts with understanding who your customers are and then finding out what they really want. We have a fantastic opportunity with the next revision of the Update Service to ask the right questions and deliver the next-great-thing from Mozilla if we first identify our target customers and then find out what they want. If we do that, I guarantee we’ll have a killer app.

I have not been the biggest fan of Red Hat but I will say the RHN and RHEL 4 are big steps forward for Red Hat. As a long-time Debian user I’ve never felt the need to use RHEL. I was recently introduced to RHEL 4 and more importantly RHN while working with the Mozilla Foundation on the build out of their infrastructure and I really like it.

So when I see a brand new comparison of Red Hat and Windows 2003 and I hear that Windows won handily, I sort of perk up. Then I read the “study” and find that they were comparing Windows 2003 with Red Hat AS 2.1 and Red Hat 8.0. Huh?! Did somebody not tell the guys at Veritest that those versions of Red Hat are up to 4 years old? Not only are they only running the 2.4 Linux kernel, they are running the version without the back-ported features from 2.6 such as the nptl threading and different I/O schedulers. Of course Red Hat is going to be slower. That would be like me comparing RHEL 4 with Windows NT or Windows 2000. I can bet who would come out on top there too.

Much like TCO studies, find out who pays for the benchmark “study” and you’ll find knows the outcome before it even hits the streets.