MashedPotato Tech

There is nothing quite like the sound of a very insistent police officer knocking on your door/ringing your doorbell at 5 am on a Thursday. No, for those of you wondering, they weren't there to serve a warrant or arrest me. :) As it turns out, we had a MAJOR outage of communications service in the South County area of the California Bay Area. Specifically, the towns of Morgan Hill (where I live), Gilroy , and part of South San Jose were all completely isolated from a communications perspective. No E911 services, no long distance (calls within the local telephone central office would go through sporadically), and no cell phones. Basically, back to the 'good old days' (or at least the simpler times). The friendly police officer was at my door to fetch me as one of the leaders of our volunteer emergency response team since there was literally no other way to activate our team. I serve on both the Amateur Radio Emergency Services team ( ARES ) and the Community Emerg...

The concept of a 'back-channel' during presentations, meetings, classes and similar events has been around for a while (the analog version was called 'passing notes', and who knows, maybe even the cavemen did that during boring recitations on hunting/gathering strategy :)). The modern equivalents started with email, but now even that quaint old service is derided as 'too slow' in the world of instant messaging, and more recently, Twitter . There are two types of back-channel - private (usually in instant messaging), and public (Twitter). I know very few people who don't utilize the former during long conference calls (especially if they are with clients, and you need to address something that came up during the call privately with a colleague). This can be a huge advantage if someone can go off and get an answer/research an issue while the call continues. I can easily see a role for junior-level associates to perform this function, as I think it makes go...

Lance Armstrong , one of the people I admire most in this world, wrote a book called It's Not About The Bike . It is a good read, and I enjoyed the main point he made in it - namely, his life and his fight against cancer are about so much more than how fast he can ride his bike, or how much he enjoys the 'tech' of cycling (or tech in general - check out his Twitter Feed ). I was thinking of Lance and that book when I read Fred Wilson 's latest blog post, entitled It's About People, Not Technology . He makes his point by pointing out Twitter, and how it has grown to be more than the sum of its technology - I'm an avid user, and I would tend to agree its importance in the social media landscape is directly derived from the users of the tool that post interesting things. The definition of 'interesting' is different for everyone, but the fact that people are forming ad-hoc 'communities' by who they follow, and their use of Twitter 'hash tags...

Thanks to Gwyn Firth Murray , Larry Augustin , and Jeff Luczcz for a very entertaining panel discussion around Open Source at the recent eBig meeting . I was a bit nervous about how this panel would come together since I was the 'rookie,' whereas Gwyn had worked with Larry and Jeff separately before. However, the commonality of the passion for Open Source brought this panel together nicely and there was an excellent exchange of ideas between and amongst the panel (as well as our audience). I think we had someone in the audience comment on the fact that it seemed like we had all known each other a long time! :) The areas we covered during the talk were: licensing, community development, and reasons for using Open Source. I think the panel all agreed on good reasons for using Open Source, with all of us giving cogent examples of what the value proposition for using Open Source is (taking advantage of the huge amount of R&D and work that goes into good Open Source project...

For anyone interested in hearing about Open Source as it applies to companies, I'm going to be part of a panel discussion at eBig (East Bay Innovation Group) in Pleasanton, CA on Monday 11/10/08 titled ' Open Source: How to Make Money and Get Money? '. Given my previous post on the pragmatic aspects of using Open Source, I think this should be an interesting discussion. It's been a while since I've spoken/participated in a panel, but this one should be a lot of fun. I'll be joined by Open Source luminaries Larry Augustin and Jeff Luszcz , with Gwyn Firth Murray moderating. So, yes, for those following, I'm the least well known of the panelists. :) Hopefully my colleagues on the panel will handle most of the questions around legal/IP, since those that follow my blog will remember that while I recognize the value of understanding licenses around Open Source, I tend to be more focused on the community building/collaboration aspects (not surprisingly, giv...

Stormy Peters, the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation , penned an interesting blog post today on how she got started in the computer field. Reading through it, I was struck by how similar some of the aspects of her beginnings in the industry were to mine. It is kind of scary actually. :) I fell in love with using an Apple IIe in the A/V room of my high school, and found every excuse I could to go down there between classes and at lunch to play with 'peek' and 'poke' (and yes, write everyone's favorite BASIC program which loops the phrase 'I'm awesome' forever). :) The fascination of holding data and programs on a 5 1/4 floppy drive was something I'll never forget. I too 'graduated' to IBM PC's, and wrote some early graphics programs (but, they looked kind of hokey on the 'green screen' monochrome monitors). I was very fortunate, in those early days, to know that this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my li...

First off, to my few readers, I didn't die... :) I had a very interesting couple of weeks, plus a vacation. The short version of my interesting weeks is that I've left Motorola and taken a job as an Open Source Community Manager at CollabNet , where I'll be working to help build the communities of CollabNet's current and future customers interested in Open Source development practices. When and if I end up doing a corporate blog, I'll post the link here. Now, on to today's topic - Open Source Pragmatism. I was having a conversation with some new colleagues, and I mentioned that I sometimes get a hard time from hard line Open Source folks about my use of a Macbook Pro. I look at software very pragmatically, and quite frankly, while Ubuntu has done a great job of getting the Linux Desktop to where it is, it still cannot compare (for my needs as a consumer) with OS X. Now, that doesn't mean I don't believe that Open Source (and Linux) have made grea...