Found or rediscovered a bunch of nice software this week
- Spreed.com web-based meetings, with shared whiteboarding, application sharing, video, and soon mindmaps. Why is it noteworthy? They explicitly support linux, even for whiteboarding and app sharing. The whiteboard is geared toward making notes on top of a presentation, and participants can easily generate a PDF of any page. The linux screen sharing client is written in python, and the mind maps (coming soon) promise to be compatible with FreeMind.
- Coccinella instant messaging client with shared whiteboards. What I really want is OmniGraffle for Linux, with the ability to share drawings with someone on the other side of the world and both edit in realtime. Inkscape’s Inkboard feature would be even better, if it worked, but it doesn’t, and I haven’t had time to get in and try and fix it. Coccinella doesn’t have a good way to save the drawings for later though, it’s more useful for scribbling on existing drawings. It does have a very nice way to screen grab anything and then draw on it.
- Monitoring software - I need to start doing some serious monitoring soon, and here’s what I’m looking at
- Graphite enterprise scalable realtime graphing. in django. with a custom storage engine.
- Collectdthe system statistics collection daemon
- Reconnoiter - when Theo says he’s writing a better version of something, I listen. Goals are to support monitoring thousands of machines.
- Satchmo a couple of different projects that I’m working on are going to need to handle credit cards soon, and Satchmo integrates with a lot of different payment gateways, and with Django.
And then there’s the background rumblings of new database projects - innovation in this space is far from dead, and ideas want to be published! New code coming out almost every day, which is great to see.
I’ve started a new project at Canonical, and am *really* excited about it - going to be building some nice things that even my non-technical friends will want to use, and thats going to be a lot of fun. I really need to find some talented Gnome hackers and also some engineers to work on very scalable web service systems - if you are interested please contact me.
Jun 19 
Category: bazaar | 
1 Comment
There is some very big news going around that internet thing today: MySQL has switched from Bitkeeper to Bazaar. I wrote up a quick post on the Canonical blog about the same thing, and Giussepe Maxia has a nice technical post about how to get started working with the new system.
Here’s an excerpt from a mail I just sent to an internal Canonical list:
Bazaar and Launchpad are truly tools that matter, from a historical and social perspective. MySQL and other open source software run a huge percentage of the internet, and these tools preserve and enrich the body of knowledge that is in the public commons, knowledge that will be there for our children and grandchildren to study and improve on. Thank you for letting me be part of a project I will be proud to tell my kids about.
The best feeling in the world is to know that you have a small role in contributing to that body of public knowledge, in building tools that the whole world can use to make things better. It’s so critical that really important software projects like MySQL are preserved in an open system - even though I’m proud of Bazaar it doesn’t really matter so much whether the choice is Bazaar or some other open system, as it does that the history be available in a fully functional free VCS. Bjarne Stroustrup said that “technological civilization depends on software”, and both when I was working at MySQL and now working at Canonical, it’s inspiring that the people in charge (hi Monty, hi Mark), have such a strong commitment to paying the bills in a socially responsible way and trying to create tools, fundamental building blocks that can benefit society as a whole at the same time.
There is plenty more work to do - go contribute to your favorite bit of open source software today! Maybe grab a branch of MySQL and make something interesting.
As Paul points out, this new erlrc project is very exciting news. One of the most interesting features of Erlang is how you can do hot code updating, and getting integrated into the package manager is absolutely wonderful. Anyone working on getting this into Ubuntu yet? There is a very nice howto written about how to set up your Erlang app with this. I’m looking forward to setting this up on my mini-cluster of slicehost nodes.
This is a native OS X bazaar GUI! Still in the early stages of development, but making rapid progress towards an alpha release. If you’re rocking bzr on a Mac, go give Martin a hand: https://launchpad.net/bazaarx
And here we are, my second post in which I mention twitter, and wonder aloud what open source software projects should be doing with twitter. I don’t have any well-formed thoughts to foist on you, but I’ll tell you about an experiment I’ve been doing. Last week I started using summize.com to search for conversations about bzr. I did the same thing for ubuntu and for git, but only really stuck with the bzr stream. It’s been interesting to see what people are talking about, I’ve tried chiming in with suggestions when I can or asking for further details when people complain. I think what is so fascinating to me about this is that I’m finding a whole lot of conversations that aren’t at the level of a ranting blog post but are encouraging or thought-provoking feedback nonetheless.
I also registered twitter.com/bzr, but I’m not sure what to do with it yet. Suggestions? One idea is to tweet the commits that go to the main bzr tree, along with release announcements. Greg K-H has an interesting twitter stream of his command history from selected terminals. I mentioned this to Martin last week and we talked about making a bzr plugin that would let you tweet certain things (commit messages maybe?).
Several people have drawn some parallels between twitter and IRC. For me, IRC is something that I only respond to in real time. Twitter is something that I only respond to on the same day. Email is something that piles up and tries to kill me. That spot where I don’t have to respond in a matter of minutes but things don’t pile up over multiple days is a very comfortable one indeed. I’ve seen a few other projects or companies using twitter in similar ways (VMWare Fusion is an interesting one). Is it worth the effort?
This week I’ve been thinking quite intently about what to do next in my career. I’m still employed at Canonical, currently managing part of the launchpad.net team, but I’m thinking about what I want to do now. As Canonical keeps growing, there are new opportunities, and I’ve really enjoyed work there - I love using Ubuntu and Bazaar every day, and I used them even before I worked at Canonical.
In addition to my full-time job at Canonical, I’ve been helping out at Statiksoft, giving guidance on business issues, technology choices, generally trying to be a good cofounder without getting in the way, since I already have a full-time job. Business is good there, surprisingly good, and we’ve been discussing interesting things like how much time to spend doing project and consulting work, and how much to invest in building a product. I quite enjoy my work here too, and it is a very different challenge being an owner than it is being an employee. It would be quite fun to go work on Statiksoft full-time, but I imagine the first few months would be pretty tight, cash-flow wise.
The recruiters tell me that there are also many interesting opportunities in the wide world of software development, even with my insistence on working on projects that are friendly to and give back to open source. I think the parameters I most look for in a job is a strong mission to be accomplished, great freedom (within the resources that are available) to accomplish that mission, and working with people I respect on a variety of tasks. After many years of extensive international business travel, I decided this year to completely stop travelling for work, because my wife has been ill, and I need to help care for my daughter. While this has made some aspects of working on a distributed team much more difficult (particularly because I am currently a manager), I have seen it pay huge rewards in how happy my wife and daughter are, and how close I feel to them. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to refuse to travel, certainly paying the medical bills is pretty important too, but it’s been worthwhile so far.
One development that I really like about the job market in the last few years is how intensely personal business is becoming. I’m no longer a faceless engineer or manager working as a cog, no matter how large or small my employer - after all, you’re reading my personal blog, can see samples of my work, can search the internet to see how I interact in both positive and negative situations in a community of my peers, who I’ve worked with, etc. While many employers (and employees) have yet to realize that this shift is happening, I think it is a very good thing, making it much easier for people to find a good fit (and to avoid the rare bad apples or poisonous people).
I’ve been reading this book called Flow, which is about the psychology of happiness (optimal experience). One of the things I agree with about this book is the premise that happiness cannot be obtained directly - you obtain happiness indirectly by doing things that have value and meaning. For example, you can be very happy in a job you don’t enjoy if you appreciate being able to provide for your family, while you could be miserable in your dream job if it meant losing touch with people who were important to you (partner/children/etc). It’s fascinating, the book points out that a common experience of “flow” is not noticing the passage of time - and that’s certainly something I experience regularly both when working on a software problem and when relaxing with my family, so I’m pretty lucky there I think.
Here are my LinkedIn profile and my resume(which includes my phone number). If you think you’d like to work with me, or have a suggestion for a project that I would like, you are welcome to give me a call - I promise to take you seriously, and do my best to recommend someone if it turns out I’m not a good fit or not available. If you want to hear my dorky sense of humor, give a listen to Launchpod, the podcast I’ve recently been cohosting. I’d also like to give you a link to the current job openings at Canonical, which is truly a fabulous place to work, highly recommended. How’s that for transparency?
