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Archive | June, 2005
The Gillmor Gang Rides Again!
Back (although at a new venue, it appears) after a long hiatus, the Gillmor Gang (Steve Gillmor, John Udell, Dana Garner, Mike Vizard and Doc Searls) are a formidable bunch on their own, and they chat with Adam Curry this week. Excellent thought-provoking materials touching on topics of podcasting, directories, SOA, screencasting, Apple’s ITunes RSS announcement, Open Source agility and much, much more.
I burn the audiocast to CD (I know, how analog!) and play it in the car CD player on the way to a client. This one was so good that I played it again on the way back.
The big issue I have with most podcasts is the one-to-one nature of input and output: it takes me as long to listen to it as it took them to say it. A half-hour broadcast takes me half an hour to listen to. Compare that to an RSS reader, where I can skim 300 articles, picking out facts as I go, digging deeper into intriguing ones, noting general headlines on others. Even though it may have taken each of those authors hours to write a piece, in my half-hour, I can grab 300 times that. It’s all about data density.
Most audiocasts just can’t pack enough info in for me. These six guys did, though.
OTOH, I was driving, so that’s where I spent my concentration. And it was good enough to listen to twice. And I’ll listen again. Five stars.
Steve Jobs Keynote, Monday morning , 1 Pm EDT
Tune in Monday at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, for Steve Job’s keynote Presentation at the World Wide Developer Conference, http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/. I always find Jobs’ presentations entertaining. Buy your developers lunch and set up a projector in the lunch room to watch along. With any luck, you’ll have a good idea on what Microsoft will be announcing next month, Of course, it won’t ship until Longhorn. In 2007.
Hang onto your, er, hats!
OSNews is reporting that Red Hat lets go of Fedora Linux. “Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation.”
Unlike the news out of Seattle, which has been a pretty grim bunch of product delays, end-of-life announcements and news on which products they will no longer be supporting, the Linux community is hopping with activity. Look to Fedora Core 4 to ship on Monday. And keep an eye on Ubuntu as it rapidly becomes the desktop of choice.
Dartmouth Lake Sunapee Linux User Group tonight
Off to DLSLUG tonight, where Jeff Woodward will be demonstrating OpenAFS:
OpenAFS is a distributed filesystem product, pioneered at Carnegie Mellon University and supported and developed as a product by Transarc Corporation (now IBM Pittsburgh Labs). It offers a client-server architecture for file sharing, providing location independence, scalability and transparent migration capabilities for data. IBM branched the source of the AFS product, and made a copy of the source available for community development and maintenance. They called the release OpenAFS.
CentraLUG: Ed Lawson presents Scribus, 7 PM June 6th, NHTI
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Technical Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. (Note that we’re likely to reschedule the July meeting as it falls on the Fourth.)
This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf, marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, with Ed Lawson presenting Scribus, an open desktop publishing system. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Scribus is available from http://www.scribus.org.uk and is not just another pretentious word processor, but an entire pre-press system for producing high-quality documents suitable for publication. It will generate PDF files. It has a new “Scriptor” API for scripting in Python. Imports and exports SVG. Bells! Whistles! It runs natively under Linux and under X11 on Mac OS X and (in theory, anyway) CygWin on Windows. Scribus is distributed under the GPL.
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org.
Hope to see you there!
Roadmap Paved With Good Intentions
Ken Levy’s monthly letter is out and points to a revised VFP Roadmap, most of which has been leaked by Ken over the past month on the UT. No surprises here. The project code-named “Sedna” – how harsh! – is officially announced.
There’s a great plug for the Hentzenwerke “New in Nine” book.