The world through the eyes of an evil genius

So I’m finally leaving Beantown where I’ve been at LinuxWorld 2006 all week. Was it good? Shoe-ah. It was killa. However, it was wicked hard getting around town cause I didn’t have a cah. Plus, everywhere I went there was another gahkablahka. The traffic was hoopie. Overall the conference was nizza. I saw Nicholas Negroponte speak about the One Laptop per Child program. All I have to say is man that guys a bomah! I mean wicked smart. Anyway the plane is about to board and I need some suppa. So why don’t you go check out the wicked killa photos I took on flickr. Oh, and will I be at LinuxWorld San Francisco. Puleeaase!

The openQRM project has been named a finalist for 3 2006 SourceForge Community Choice Awards. The project is a finalist in the SysAdmin, Enterprise, and Clustering categories. The Winners will be announced at the Slashdot Lounge at LinuxWorld Expo in Boston on April 5th. Thanks to everyone who has participated in the project. Without you nothing would be possible.

Today ITBusinessEdge.com published an interview with me. The interview consist of three questions about the work I’m doing at Qlusters to invent a new future for systems management. While I’m not sure why the word invent is in quotes, they asked a few very good questions. My favorite was “A customer has been quoted as saying that openQRM could become the open standard for data center management. Is that something you are actively seeking for the platform — standardization?”.
Well, as I said, we can’t worry about that. Standardization is conferred by community adoption of a project over a very long period of time. Right now I’m just focused on delivering on the promises I’ve made to the community. If you’re so inclined, you can read the interview online. Please feel free to post comments here with your thoughts on the questions and my responses.

BarCampAustin was finally over. So the BarCampAustin team (whurley, whurleygrrl, Raven, CKS, and several others) went searching for a late night meal. We ended up at Kirby Lane South with Eric Skiff from GlitchCast. He did a PodCast interview on the spot, which you can hear as GlitchCast 023. Just keep in mind we were exhausted.

Accessibility, Community, Social Capital, and the Psychology of Developers were just a few of the things touched on by an all-star open source panel put together by Raven Zachary at BarCampAustin. I had the honor of sitting next to Simon Phipps (Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems), Doc Searls (Senior Editor at Linux Journal), Matt Mullenweg (Lead Developer at WordPress), and Chris Messina (Open Source Ambassdor at Flock). If anyone was able to get an audio or video recording of the panel, I would really like to obtain a copy. This was one of the best panels I’ve ever had the privilege to participate on.

This weekend was BarCampAustin v1.0. The event came off without a snag thanks to the fantastic participation of everyone involved and the help of a few key volunteers. I’ll post my reflections on the event about a month from now. Until then, check out the BarCampAustin photo set on flickr.

I’ve finally posted the attendee photos from BarCampAustin. Out of the 340+ people security counted coming through during the day we only captured about 180 in ones and zeros. See the photos of attendees and see who you know.

Today I received a package from the United Nations. In it was a copy of the UNCTAD Information Economy Report 2005. The report references whurley.com and the work I was a part of at Symbiot. Specifically it links to the now infamous “On the Rules of Engagement for Information Warfare” white paper. My thanks go out to Dimo Calovski, the Economic Affairs Officer at the Palais des Nations in Geneva who notified me of the report. He was kind enough to mail me an official copy for my library. Being included in the report was a bit of a surprise. However it just goes to show that the issues Symbiot brought into the limelight are pervasive and global. Speaking of which, I’ll have an update to post soon on the latest development in the countermeasures controversy and the search for community centric security. Look for it around the first week of April.
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Today my interview with Stephen Feller was published in an article on NewsForge. It was a fairly strait forward interview that I did 90% of from the OSBC conference in San Francisco. The article discusses the release of openQRM to the open source community. However, there is a point into that I would like to debate on a panel at some point in the future.
A research manager at International Data Corporation (IDC), says “many companies are not concerned with licensing and access to source code”. In my humble opinion this is “old world” thinking. I can’t think of one company deploying software today that doesn’t have legal counsel review the license agreement. As far as the access to source code…well in my world that’s prerequisite. You can read the entire article on line.

This afternoon I had the honor of participating on a panel at OSBC 2006 in San Francisco. The panel was moderated by the amazing Sarah Lacy (BusinessWeek) and focused on the threats open source creates to traditional proprietary software models. The panel ws made up of an all-star cast of characters including Mark Spencer (President at Digium / Asterisk), Jason Haislmaier (Partner at Holme Roberts Owen LLP.), Richard Daley (CEO at Pentaho), and Bill Vass (Chief Information Officer at Sun Microsystems). I found myself far to busy to document the event as we were doing an openQRM press/analyst blitz in tandem with the conference. However, you can check out a sad little collection of photos I snagged from the conference online.