open-source

Time is fascinating. Maybe it's because I entered the field right before Y2K, but how we've taught computers to deal with time has been an area of interest for much of my career. Over a decade ago I gave a talk at HVOpen…

18 years ago I had this idea. Linux was on the rise, and wouldn't it be cool if we had a local Linux user group? How would you even do something like that? It took 18 months, a couple of false starts, driving to a…

Given that google is shuttering hangouts sometime in the next year, I decided this was finally the time to bail out of it. It did a lot of different things. Chat One thing Hangouts gave me, was a chat system that I could…

I had the pleasure of attending the first North Bay Python conference in Petaluma, CA this past weekend. IBM was a sponsor, and I gave a few quick remarks about doing python serverless actions on OpenWhisk. My two days…

When I first discovered the Open West conference, I was told it was the biggest US open source event that I'd never heard of, which is a pretty apt description. Open West brings together technologists interested in Open…

One of the more thought provoking things that came out of the OpenStack leadership training at Zingerman's last year, was the idea of the Triple Bottom Line. It's something I continue to ponder regularly. The Zingerman's…

People often ask me about my vision for Home Assistant. Before I can describe where I want to go with Home Assistant, I should first talk about how home automation would look in my ideal world. This will be the aim of…

Really great talk from this year's PyCon about how the mythology around "being a real programmer" keeps a lot of people out of the industry. Definitely worth 35 minutes of your time.

Guess who wrote their own time handling software library?! (What comes after March...) You'd think the folks at weather.com would know better. Time is software is the gift that keeps on giving. Something I should…

As soon as you get beyond a few people, you are working “remotely”. If you aren’t in the same room you will have your main workflow happening through tooling. Yes, you can get together to meet face to face on topics, but…

Reading through an interesting, and mostly accurate piece about OpenSSL the following jumped out at me: The fact that OpenSSL pays next to nothing constrains things further. Those who do help Henson out often juggle…

Third, and perhaps the best argument against OpenStack needing a leader, is the open nature of the beast itself. It’s precisely because there’s no dominant leader that OpenStack remains so transparent and competitive –…

One of my new years resolutions was to put more crypto into the world. Be it because of state actors , or rogue ISPs , I think the world would be a better place with a bit more cryptography in it. As part of this, I just…

The moment I found out that someone was running a TEDx in our area, I was intrigued. The moment I realized John Rooney was one of the organizers, I signed up, as I knew this would be good. I was not disappointed. The…

We lost a few features moving mhvlug.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, as modules just didn't exist. One of the ones I missed the most was the Planet function provided by UD Planet. This was an extremely simple to use…

10 years ago today I was on a plane, back from Portland, Oregon, to experiment on something new. For the previous 3 months I'd been working towards a kickoff for a local Linux Users Group. We had a venue: the Mid Hudson…

I love visualizations, and quite enjoyed this new tool by Linked In. It did a pretty good job on the clustering, blue is IBM, green is OpenStack, red is Wesleyan, the purple at the bottom is basically 3D internet/OpenSim…

Apparently Source Forge has gone open source again , and even is an incubated project at Apache. The source code is in git , and the new source forge looks like it's all written in Python instead of PHP. Source Forge has…

Interesting data point on whether 2 GB / month of data is enough on cell plans. At our MHVLUG meeting the local wireless wasn't working, so I instead just turned on the wifi access point on my phone for my laptop and…

On Wed, Sept 5th, I'll be giving the talk on OpenStack at MHVLUG. The last six months working on the project have been really spectacular, great learning curve, really good community members, and a very exciting…

I'm happy to say Lullabot featured Node Announce on Module Mondays : Unfortunately, one of the most useful calendar applications can remain elusive: sending users an email when something is about to happen . That's where…

I just released version 1.1 of the meetup_events module for Drupal. I started building this about 6 months ago when we started using Meetup for Mid Hudson Astronomical Association to draw in new members. I hate data…

This is a great idea : At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in…

Last night our MHVLUG meeting was a Desktop Shootout, where people showed off their Linux desktop environments what they liked and what they didn't. I went last, presenting Unity, and got a few good questions and…

We celebrated last year's 9th Anniversary meeting in style, with this incredible 3D Tux cake that Pat Ladd made for us. Totally awesome, but what in the world is he going to do to top it for our 10th anniversary?

It's time for the MHVLUG Anniversary, which means geeky baked goods. Thanks much to a trusty friend with a Thing-o-matic I've added Daleks and Tardises to go with Tux . Enjoy the pictures.

The metafilter comment that's been circling about what the massive cut to library funding in California really means : Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. Forget trying to form grass roots political…

Twice in the last month I've been contacted by friends I've made in the local tech community with questions about tech volunteering they are doing, or planning to do for local non-profits. I, hopefully, was able to…

NPR did a piece this morning on the Open Source Ecology project : Jakubowski moved to Missouri, where he eventually bought 30 acres in the town of Maysville. He grew wheat, raised goats and tended a fruit orchard. But…

The past couple of years something interesting has been happening with the Linux Users Group, it's growing. After a long number of years of lulling in the low 20s and sometimes teens in meetings, we're now regularly in…

Maybe the real missing skills for a 21st century leader are buiding a house : I agree that a liberal-arts education provides those intangibles. But maybe it's time that instruction—at least at some colleges—included more…

From SMBC :

Last night I was reading though the CiviCRM documentation, which is actually incredibly well written for tech docs. I came across the following, which stopped me in my tracks. Data storage jurisdiction As mentioned…

The first week of 2012 was pretty jam packed for me, which is a good thing. One of the many things that made this week busy was my talk, entitled "Getting Involved in Open Source" at MHVLUG . This presentation…

We're circling around on January again, which means it's time for my annual talk at MHVLUG. One thing that's really fascinated me over the last year is recovering and revitalizing open source projects whose maintainer…

I saw this person's stuff down at World Maker Faire, and was reasonably impressed by what she was trying to do. She's now got a fully funded (and then some) kickstarter project to mass produce these hydroponic window…

Wednesday is the last MHVLUG meeting of the year, as well as the last MHVLUG meeting at the Mid Hudson Library System Auditorium. In honor of that, I decided to make Tux Cookies. First I made regular sugar cookies...…

Three months ago I decided that I was no longer going to suck at design. This seemed like an impossibly daunting task at first. I started with a project: redesigning the MHVLUG website . Then I went to Amazon looking for…

At the September Mid Hudson Drupal Meetup I talked a little about a drupal module idea I'd been kicking around. Most of my drupal websites are about groups that have meetings. So I've got content types with cck date…

I was not prepared for the vastness that was World Maker Faire, this weekend in NYC. I took a few pictures, but I realized afterwards I shouldn't have bothered, and just done video instead. So much of what was going on…

Last night was the 100th MHVLUG meeting, which makes it a good time to reflect on a lot of things. Good organizing is invisible, and takes a lot of energy. Running a group like this for eight and a half years has truly…

July is a tough meeting for MHVLUG, people are off on vacation, and our turnout over the last few years has been pretty low. It's one of the few times we drop below 20 people. As Ben was putting together the schedule…

The July MHVLUG meeting (aka Arduino-palooza ) is something I'm really looking forward to, if nothing other than it has finally added the extra excuse to kick me into gear to start doing something with the Arduino and…

One thing I didn't mention about our Day of Service at the PFP is that we had great photography support from Bill Rooney all day. He was there at 7am when we got started, and stuck around till about 3 in the afternoon.…

Wired magazine has not been know for women on their covers, and when they are, they were somewhat problematic . At least this month, things are different, and they chose a really spectacular female engineer for their…

This was one of the most productive weekends of hacking that I've had in a long time. I finally managed to get all my fixes for the drupal epublish module upstream. And, as a bonus, I wrote a first pass at exporting the…

Recently the Poughkeepsie Farm Project received a $100,000 grant for the Building Bridges program to attack hunger in the city of Poughkeepsie. This is part of a Department of Agriculture initiative to fund pilot…

My typical morning blog writing time has gotten taken over by morning code writing recently, which I'm quite happy about, as I've been making very reasonable progress on a new drupal module: lending . This is still in…

I realized last night at our replacement MHVLUG dinner that I was the only one there who was still using Firefox on Linux. Everyone else was on the Chrome bandwagon. And that's where I thought it would stay, until Chrome…

I had a quite productive weekend working on the Poughkeepsie Farm Project site, and learned a lot of useful things about Drupal in the process. Content Profiles I now understand why core profiles are going away in Drupal…

We've managed to get 2 stories in the local papers about the Mid Hudson Astronomical Association in the last week. The first came from the New Paltz Times : Since 1985, a group of professional, amateur and the simply…

The 480 students have studied under two dozen scientists recruited from across the country for the program. Using lab equipment, computer modeling and classroom discussions, they have explored all aspects of disease,…

Over beers after Drupal Camp, 4 of us from the Poughkeepsie area were discussing how impressed we were with the organizers pulling of a 300 person event so successfully. As someone that organizes things, I understand how…

When your alarm goes off at 5:30am to go to a conference, part of you wants to skip and go back to bed. When it also means you've got to drive 2 1/2 hours in below zero conditions, there is even more inertia to just…

I didn't get home last night until 10:30, and sleep didn't find me until after 1am. All of this was because of a talk I gave at the Poughkeepsie ACM on my experience with Android Development with the Where is Io…

A couple weeks ago I gave the first MHVLUG talk of the year on the work I've done with Drupal for the Poughkeepsie Farm Project , Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association , and MHVLUG . I think it went well, but it's…

On Wednedsay, January 5th, I'll be giving the MHVLUG lecture on Drupal . It's been two years since I started poking at Drupal in order to overall the Poughkeepsie Farm Project website, and this talk is largely going to…

This is an old joke, but increasingly one that people haven't seen. Given that I stuck a vi/emacs question at the end of the mhvlug survey, I thought it would be worth reposting for posterity. The original version is…

I used to try to solicit feedback about MHVLUG on our mailing list, that always went poorly. What people were willing to tell me directly, if the opportunity came up, never would come up in a group. The social dynamics…

Over the past few weeks I've been redoing the Mid Hudson Astronomical Association website. It looks like this: Yes, it's dark, but that's when astronomy happens. The site is built on Drupal, as I've gotten some…

I love this new movement of small regional open source conferences that seem to be springing up everywhere. Democratizing the conference space by making it local and affordable is a wonderful thing. When I was at Ohio…

Reddit now officially wins the internet , by getting this idea out there, and then raising (so far) $250k for teachers at Donors Choose to help show how serious people were about this.

The folks over at Reddit, who got the ball rolling on trying to get Colbert to hold a Restore Truthiness rally in DC in October, found a new way to get his attention. Colbert is on the board of Donors Choose , a charity…

On the heals of my Cognitive Surplus review, I just found this TED talk by Clay Shirky that I didn't realize was out there. Great stuff. http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

CPOSC is now open for registration . It's in Harrisburg PA on October 16th (a Saturday), which makes it about a 4 hour drive from here in Poughkeepsie, NY. This will be my first year there, but based on the list of talks…

Rule 1: Spend as much time on logistics as on content Most events run by amateurs are “amateur” because they fall down on details. They have a great idea, or a great speaker, but the event turns out mediocre because the…

Thanks to John Lesica with helping on some of the design. Also available as PDF for printing .

Apparently I'm now writing a drupal drush module for patch management, and slowly understanding what that entails. I've looked around and surprisingly there really isn't a good solution for this yet. There are a number…

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But…

The full agenda for the Central PA Open Source Conference is now out there, and I'm on the agenda : Sean Dague: Solar System in your Pocket – Developing Android Applications It started with a simple discussion after a…

There is a great piece up on the Common Wealth Club's podcast feed on How to DIY (no page yet, so the link is directly to the mp3). It's hosted by Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, and has the editors of Make Magazine on…

Where is Io 1.3 has been released, and is available for free on the Android Market. Most of this release was behind the scenes refactoring, as I tried to get this into a shape where I could do useful animations. Being a…

Yay for fresh veggies off the farm

You can see it in the dust up over climate change or vaccines, most people just don't understand what science is, how it works, and how it's different from anecdotal evidence. This translates to some very real world…

Last night was our monthly MHVLUG meeting, and it also marked 7 years since our first meeting. 7 years... it's kind of hard to imagine. I was also really touched, multiple times last night, by the waves of appreciation I…

One of the things I've found is that people forget events quite often, so I try to make it easy for people to know when and what the next MHVLUG meeting is. One of the ways I've been doing this by setting the footer on…

Tuesday night was the first night of the Mid Hudson Astronomy Association in their new digs, the Coykendall Auditorium at SUNY, New Paltz. I really like the venue. The lighting and environment is much better than the…

I read about this in the local paper this week, and it's pretty inspiring. Irvin Miller is a local retired IBMer that has decided to throw his efforts in a big way into getting more children interested in science. He's…

If you give presentations with powerpoint or openoffice slides at any regularity, it is well worth investing in a presentation remote so you don't need to keep coming back to your computer to flip slides. It lets you…

Last Wednesday, we did a live stream of the MHVLUG meeting for my Git presentation . This was an experiment to try new ways of getting people engaged in the group. Most people seemed to think it went quite well, though…

Over the past couple of weeks I redid the MHVLUG site as a Drupal site. Drupal is a content management system, which is a fancy way of saying it's a website, that lets you modify most of it's parts via a web interface,…

Tomorrow night (Wed, Jan 6th) at 6pm EST I'll be presenting at MHVLUG on Git , the distributed source code management system. New and notable on this talk is that I'll be streaming the talk live on ustream , and,…

1999 was probably one of my worst years. It included lots of friends moving away, a rather awful breakup, and 2 funerals, one of which was for a friend from college. I was very happy to be done with that year. New Year's…

As part of our contribution to the Great American Hack-a-thon , MHVLUG will be sponsoring our own local hack-a-thon at SUNY New Paltz tomorrow, Dec 12. Full details and a map with parking locations are available on our…

I found this really insightful. We like to say new media is allowing us all to be journalists. But it’s probably more accurate to say it lets us all be anchors. Sure, the Internet also allows people with local knowledge…

After our android hack-a-thon , Frank put a page in the MHVLUG wiki to start to stub out Android information that we're all finding useful. It's small, and largely a stub, but it's a start. When I went back to shift a…

Last night we did the first , of what I hope will be many, MHV Android Hack-a-thons. The basic idea was to get folks together that are interested in doing android mobile development, and having others around they could…

Our local IEEE chapter does an annual fall workshop each year. Last year was robots (which I apparently forgot to blog about...). It was quite good, and showed off robots for largely military and educational purposes.…

If you had told me the biggest community Linux event in the United States took place in Columbus Ohio, I don't think I would have believed you before this last weekend. But Ohio Linux Fest blew away all my expectations,…

Wired has a great interview with the Federal Gov CIO, which actually dates back just prior to data.gov 's launch. It's definitely worth a read. I firmly believe that this is the most important change that the current…

Hours before the entire NY State Senate imploded into a bunch of whining 1st graders, the previous leadership pushed out something quite interesting: open.nysenate.gov . To pursue its commitment to transparency and…

I love git. I'll state that up front. I also love github , which I've expressed in the past . Both are making me look at software in a new way. I also think the pair of them are changing some of the rules we know for how…

I'll be giving the Poughkeepsie chapter ACM meeting tonight on Open Source development. Some recent experiences with github have got me thinking on some of the new patterns emerging out of Open Source development. The…

Yes, I'm a fanboy, but with good reasons. Tonight I decided that I'd really like to add openid support to the MHVLUG Event Calendar . Accounts aren't used that much in it, because you have to be in the admin role to…

... also known as - please don't make me fill out those same 6 fields to get into your website! A few weeks ago I gave an MHVLUG talk on Ruby on Rails . At the normal dinner outing afterwards one of our members was…

I made a couple of updates in the last week on the OpenSim Planet . First of, I'm more strictly trying to only pull in the "opensim" tag by various blogs. This helps keep the planet more on topic. This pruned…

By the late 1980s, the world had many competing vendor-proprietary networking models plus two competing standardized networking models. So what happened? TCP/IP won in the end. Proprietary protocols are still in use…

I, along with much of this country, even this world, was moved by Obama's acceptance speech yesterday. Two things really make me hopeful about this new administration. First, that expert opinions will be listened to.…

A few years ago I became sold on distributed source control . Being able to do offline work, try out new ideas cheaply, and throw them away, all were great things. I started with mercurial, but over the summer started…

I was working on the MHVLUG wiki , and needed to find a good color of orange. Typically I just launch gimp , and use the color wheel in there. But I stopped this time, and did this instead: apt-cache search color picker…

Mediawiki is the engine that powers Wikipedia . While that gives it lots of props, it is writen in php, which has historically had security issues. Over time, I've gotten over my php alergy, mostly because Wordpress is…

The OpenSim community is one of the most vibrant open source communities that I've had the pleasure to be a part of. We've got an active set of core committers, an active set of more casual developers constantly…

If you are in the San Francisco area in early August, I'll be giving a presentation on OpenSim at the Linux World Conference . Our local linux users group got a preview of that talk this past week. For the talk I started…

The whole OLPC goes windows debacle has been going on for months now, creating incredible polarization on many fronts. A huge part of what actually excited many of the XO laptop volunteers was the chance for a Linux…

For the past 4 years I've been using evite to manage the RSVPs for our memorial day weekend party. Given that it's a pretty large scale pot luck event, it's helpful to have a system where people can respond with a…

Once upon a time I said I would never host my own email (or email in general), as it was a pain I didn't want. Then, I ended up hosting email for mhvlug.org because it turned out to be the simplest solution. A week later…

I just did the upgrade of my linode (which hosts mhvlug.org , planet opensim , dague.org , and a few other sites) to Xen. I had put in the request to join the beta for Xen a couple weeks ago, got in, and was slow on my…

Tomorrow I'll be participating in part of the Life 2.0 series on Open Source, IP, and Privacy in Virtual Worlds as a panel member in Second Life. It's quite a line up of folks, so I encourage anyone interested in the…

Some hacking last night got the bulk of the Planet OpenSim site pulling style elements directly from the OpenSim wiki, which makes for a much more unified them experience. We're now tracking 10 blogs on Planet OpenSim,…

Among other roles in the OpenSim project, I'm reluctant admin for most of the opensimulator.org infrastructure. Infrastructure being defined as: scm repo (subversion and mercurial), bug tracker (mantis), and wiki (media…

I finally got around to using my Amazon Web Services account this weekend and push the entirety of my digital photos into S3 (it's in progress right now, doing a nice job of exercising my fios connetion). I thank Sean…

In the spring I came across The Open Disc , which is a collection of the best open source software for Microsoft Windows. This includes things such as: The Gimp, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Scribus, a bunch of…

"We have so much... stuff. None of us really need any more of it this year. And yet all of the world there are people that don't have enough. Wouldn't it be better if we got someone a goat than giving each other…

As a professor you get sent new sample textbooks all the time, or so I learned from Dr Nick last night. The "hot" area for these textbooks is the CS1 (or Intro to Computer Science) classes. Computer Science…

Two weeks ago my venerable iRiver H340 decided that this whole battery powered thing was so passe, and refused to run for more than 5 minutes at a go before declaring that it was done, and should be plugged back in. This…

Steve Yegge's OSCON 2007 keynote is up online now . It's a great talk, even if the slides didn't work during it. He also finally lets out what the Next Big Language is, which he's been alluding to for a while in his…

For those that had not previously heard, NYCCCP (aka "the space") is coming to an end. The space was the idea of Porkchop and Mike, based on hacker spaces that existed in Boston and Phili. The idea is…

I was attempting to find a useful podcast tool on Linux so that I can get This American Life as a podcast, instead of my normal method of timeshifting our local NPR station. After a few attempts I found Castpodder, which…

June's LUG meeting last week was on SELinux , presented by Bruce Locke. The subject is amazingly complex, and hence the talk ran the full 2 hours, with lots of great meaty information throughout. The SELinux transition…

On Friday I spent the day with IT Staff of a couple of different school districts in Connecticut. We were there to see how they were using Open Source in the schools, and what sort of future plans they have in that area.…

For the third time I attempted to get a paper in for OSCON , however, unlike the last 2 attempts, this one was accepted. :) The paper is entitled "Easy as Pie: Making Graphical Desktop Applications with Perl and…

While I have no end of gripes about Open Office, and ways that it could be improved, it also has some really shining gems that make me very happy. One of these is the Export to Webcast feature, which is buried beneath so…

Last night was the first MHVLUG meeting of 2007, and marks a return to Wednesday nights (which I think is where we started, though I'll need to look that up.) The Wednesday night shift appeared to be a good thing, as we…

As president and founder of Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group , my name is associated with the group in many directories in which MHVLUG is listed. As we all know, having your email address all over the interweb is how…

Debugging Hardware/Software on Linux Joe Appuzo presented the topic. There was an initial discussion about wants vs. needs when it came to a Linux system, followed by a lot of discussion on partitioning a system for…

I've decided that I'm going to start giving a synopsis of the MHVLUG meeting just happened, so people that don't make it, may get an idea of what they missed, and hopefully start coming around. Main Talk - Build Your Own…

ExifTagger 0.1 has made it out the door, and can be fetched from the exiftagger project page . ExifTagger is designed to be a simple front end application for updating Comment and Location fields for large numbers of…

We got a donation to MHVLUG a year ago, which was a stack of 2U PIII servers that were being decommissioned from a company that one of our members worked at. We sold about 1/2 of them (at really nominal price) to get…

About 3.5 years ago, I finally got all the piece parts together for the LUG. Beyond the standard reasons of getting together like minded technical people, which is always a good thing, I also had no idea if I could get a…

Last night's MHVLUG meeting was quite good. It was nice to get an outside vendor like WindRiver to come in and talk about Linux in an embedded environment. After a quick overview of the challenges of an embedded system,…

More and more IRC has has basically become a dashboard for me. Most of what I need to know goes on in it, and most of the technical conversations I have are based in there. Especially given that the 2 main tools I use,…

I recently upgraded the MHVLUG website to MoinMoin version 1.5.2, after a long evening of redoing my 🔗💀 Moin MHVLUG Theme (requiring some python hacking as well as css changes). The new version features a GUI Editor,…

I finally decided that I had enough of Trac , the integrated wiki / tracker / scm site, after it appears there are no longer any working versions in svn that support mercurial as the back end source management system.…

Last night when my fiance came home, I was quite surprised when she handed me a rather large envelope with the question "Who would have sent you something from Switzerland?". I was equally confused, until I…

We know you want them.... or at least Joe wants them. ;) So here it is , ready for your shopping glory. I haven't yet ordered one myself (need to get around to that), so if you do, tell me how they came out. Also let me…