Category Archives: [FOS]

Identity mashup

Posted on by

Via Tim Daneliuk: Andy Oram on The Long View of Identity:

Because I care intently about online identity myself, I was excited to attend the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law school’s Berkman Center, one in a series of identity conferences held there. Coming out of a technology space into this legal space was a bit of a culture shock for me. When lawyers consider things–to speak very broadly–they look at how things can hurt people, while I might make an initial categorization of identity systems along social lines, such as:

* Identity systems that help individuals find each other
* Identity systems that facilitate commerce
* Identity systems that promote communities
* Identity systems that support online government
* etc.

…or along technical lines, such as:

* Identity systems based on taxonomies
* Identity systems based on the web of trust
* Identity systems based on digital signatures
* etc.

In contrast, lawyers categorize them as:

* Identity systems that facilitate fraud
* Identity systems that violate privacy
* Identity systems that let corporations control people
* etc.

Fortunately, the far-thinking Berkman Center can encompass all these different categorizations at once. The conference turned out to be a wonderful mashup of legal, technical, social, and business aspects of online identity. The value of such a conference became most apparent on the third day, when the formal sessions that attracted some two hundred attendees came to an end, but over fifty people from all sorts of disciplines came to a kind of unconference with no preset agenda.

We think Xen is ready

Posted on by

From Jeff Jaffe’s blog:

In my last post, I argued that Linux needed enhancements to fully address the demands of a data center. I identified 7 key characteristics which were required. I also committed that I would describe how SUSE’s Code 10 addressed these needs. In my next post, I will provide some of this detail. But there’s some press play out there right now about one of the critical new benefits available in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 – virtualization – that I can’t let pass. A Red Hat VP has been telling the press that, although there is “unbelievable” demand for virtualization, that Xen, the leading open source virtualization offering, is not ready yet for the enterprise.

What does Novell believe? Xen is ready! What do other companies say? IBM has made it clear they’re supporting Xen now. I’m looking at another corporate press release supporting Xen from March 2006. The company “Formally Announces Integrated Virtualization”. Who is that company? Why, it is Red Hat! Do they really believe Xen virtualization is not ready? Or are they trying to introduce a little FUD into the market because another Linux vendor has beaten them to the punch by a good half year in terms of an integrated virtualization offering, including Xen? (In fact, Red Hat seems to be backtracking today, according to this story in the Register, so I’m not sure where they stand.) Xen is the leading open source project for virtualization for a reason – because it’s so strong. Novell and many others in the industry support it. If you have virtualization needs in the data center, we can deliver it today. Don’t be fooled….

Who’s on the O’Reilly Open Source Radar?

Posted on by

From Radar O’Reilly:

Greenplum – Scott Yara. At the heart of most web 2.0 applications is the management of big data. Greenplum’s massively parallel Postgres database is the highest performance open source database around.

Hyperic – Javier Soltero. If operations is advantage, Hyperic would like to help more companies find that advantage. They’re also building a Web 2.0 ecosystem in which the software gets smarter the more people use it.

Django: Adrian Holovaty. Like Rails, Django is a case where the application was kept proprietary, but the framework used to build it was released to the world. Is this the new model for how to open source a web application?

DabbleDB – Avi Bryant. OK. This thing is built with smalltalk. What else do you need to know? It’s a web-based database, potentially asymmetric competition for Access and Filemaker, but it’s also a data multiplexer that can help to give people more control over their own data.

Alfresco – Matt Asay. There are a lot of open source content management systems, but Alfresco is the one that’s targeted where the money is, and that has built the robust data store to meet the needs of big companies.

Google Spreadsheets

Posted on by

So Bob Hull, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Web 2.0, sends out this email today to a couple of other spreadsheet nerds in my practice:

Hey,

Been trying out the web-based shared spreadsheet beta at google. I’m not sure how fully compatible it is with .XLS formats, but it is a great tool for collaborating remotely (e.g., when Nadine and I were working on the [client] business cases, which weren’t full of advanced functions, it would have helped a lot).

If you haven’t tried – do

I’m sure there are some security issues – although it is PW protected.

The specific case he refers to is illustrative in a couple of ways. We were working on a Linux migration strategy a big Novell customer, including doing financial analysis of several scenarios (e.g., Oracle/Solaris -> Oracle RAC/Linux, Windows -> virtualized Windows on VMWare or XEN). So that’s cool and everything. But we were also working in different locations (Bob’s wife was hospitalized during the project, so he had to leave to care for her, but he foolishly kept working remotely) and with terrible collaboration tools. It was really a case of the slow boat in the convoy determining the speed for everyone.

On that project, as Bob indicates, we really could have used Google’s spreadsheet, or one of the alternatives that are out there.

And, by the way, I’ve been testing it and it seems to import .xls files – as long as they’re fairly simple – with no problem at all. So you can’t bring in a multi-tabbed pivot table rich charting dashboard, but the single tab discounted cash flow analysis comes across fine. And you could reasonably argue that doing DCF is what a spreadsheet ought to be doing, not running your company.

So what?

The product itself is interesting, in that it’s a viable alternative right off the bat to Excel and OpenOffice. But, as I’ve said before about Writely (which Google has subsequently acquired, so they have a word processor and a spreadsheet and check out S5 for presentations), these web based office tools have built-in advantages. Bob highlighted the collaboration aspect, but there are others. For me, foremost among them is format. I don’t know how long .doc is going to be around, but I can bet you that .html is more viable.

Google’s spreadsheet is the first good way I’ve seen to go from .xls to .html, which is not trivial. A lot of spreadsheets, including at Novell, get mailed around principally as presentation layers; columns and rows of numbers. You can do this in HTML, of course, but that’s not in the toolkit for most Excel users. There’s an Export to HTML option in Excel (which is generally very good about importing and exporting), but it generates ‘orribly non-standard HTML. So if I want to generate a web page from my Excel spreadsheet so that I can share it with my team mates, currently the best option that I know of is Google Spreadsheets. Or maybe MS Sharepoint.

Also, if Google plays their hand correctly, it will get better quickly on the basis of the community around it. Do you need a function to convert pre-July 11, 1998 Thai bhat to dollars? Maybe someone had that itch once and scratched it and released it into the wild so not only are there the Excel functions from Microsoft (=sum(b1:b15)) but also (=oldbhat(value, target_currency)).