We just launched what we call the “Proving Grounds” for JumpBox. It’s a private invite-only community that gets access to use unlocked, pre-release JumpBoxes. We added the following eight new open source server applications and have a bunch more on the way:
There’s already a decent velocity of member signups – we’ll probably throttle back membership at some point so grab an invite code while we’re handing them out freely.
Wow, the volume of commentary around the OpenSocial announcement last week is enormous. Let me explain why all the doomsday predictions for Facebook are off the mark. Here is an analogy:
Saying OpenSocial will kill Facebook is like predicting that Orbitz will kill SouthWest Airlines.
SWA still has superior value and user experience to any airline in the Orbitz consortium when it comes to reliable, affordable travel. And at the end of the day as a consumer of air travel you’re just buying a ticket and getting on a plane. Twenty-two competitors that have second-rate products don’t unite to form Voltron and having a bargain shopping aggregator doesn’t kill off the vendor who refuses to participate if he still has the best bargain for the customer. Likewise, having “one API to rule them all” is nice for developers writing applications for social networks but it takes more than that to make users of the abstaining network flee the place where all their friends are.
Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb wrote an excellent analysis. Opening the platform and appealing to the developers to build applications is a tactic Facebook used to amplify their power and deliver the ultimate user experience while offloading the burden of developing compelling apps to external developers. Think of it as the development equivalent to a company’s reseller program only instead of leveraging external sales forces, they’re leveraging external development forces.
I share the same concern that Marshall Kirkpatrick expressed – for all the hype of OpenSocial, it doesn’t sound like it will truly be a 2-way street of open-ness as the name implies. It will be interesting to see how FB rolls with the punches but they shouldn’t have any more fear of OpenSocial than SWA has of Orbitz. They’ll participate when it makes sense. Maybe someone will write an abstraction layer that sits above FBML and OpenSocial XML? Maybe not and instead developers will have to write to both systems (like software vendors that write native Mac and PC installers)… Ultimately users go to the “clean well-lit place” that provides the best experience. As the industry moves inexorably towards open the underlying social network fabric becomes irrelevant (think IM channels – Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ- irrelevant since Adium or Gaim is the interface that masks the underlying complexity). That Adium-equivalent for social networks will be the interesting piece at that point; a single dashboard that gives me one place to manage my digital identity easily in the way that Adium lets me forget what IM services I’m using and talk transparently to my friends regardless of the service they’re on.
Just curious. Here are the services for which I’ve written checks in the past month:
There are a kajillion other free services I use but I’m interested in hearing which ones people find valuable enough to purchase.
Tuesday night I did a presentation for the San Diego Java User Group on how to use Trac to manage the development a software project. Below is a video capture of that talk (~45min). We cover the big picture of what’s involved in effective project management, the qualities of what makes a good tool and then we walk through hands-on usage of Trac in a real project scenario to demonstrate how it fulfills these objectives.
I’ve also made the resources I used in the talk available for download including the slides, the notes and the final state of the from the demo so you can actually play with the exact data we used. Big thanks to Paul Webber for allowing me to present for the group. There were some great questions asked and I even learned some new stuff about Trac like the Mylyn Connector that allows you to interact with your tickets right from within Eclipse. There’s also a shorter video screencast that covers a subset of this talk (the screen is more readable than the projector in the video).
| You can work along with the video tutorial below by firing up a JumpBox for Trac right in your browser (nothing to download or setup). You’ll need a JumpBox account as well as an Amazon Web Services account. Once you have those you can launch and terminate a private Trac instance on Amazon’s cloud service and pay only pennies per hour while it’s running. Click the signup button to the right to get started ->
*Disclosure: I’m one of the co-founders of JumpBox, Inc. |
is here again. This is a 2-day deal this time around starting 8am on Saturday at the University for Advancing Technology in Phoenix. I’m giving a talk on how to use Trac & Subversion for effective software development (unfortunately it looks like it’s already at capacity but we’ll squeeze in as many as we can fit). I just now posted a video tutorial on Trac with SVN to serve as a primer for the person who is new to it and looking to get productive with it quickly. Saturday’s talk will be an interactive version of this tutorial only diving into more of the features in Trac.
With 96 confirmed sessions this is a nerd fest you don’t want to miss if you’re in Phoenix this weekend!
UPDATE 10/18/08: Here’s the video capture of the Trac preso I did for SDJUG earlier this week.
UPDATE 5/19/09: Below is a more recent shorter Ramp Up video I did for Trac:
On the off chance this helps someone who faces the same weird Quickbooks error we did, here’s the resolution to this strange problem we recently encountered. I’m using Quickbooks Premier 2006 and have it setup to automatically connect to our Bank Of America account and pull all transactions from the various sub acounts. This simplifies the data entry in Quickbooks considerably.
It stopped working last week however with an error that had a ton of junk and the error code OL-323. Turns out while we were at OSCON a few weeks ago, someone sniffed Kimbro’s credit card and tried to buy $2700 worth of flowers. BofA immediately recognized the transaction as fraud and suspended the account. They have since closed it entirely so it no longer appears in our online dashboard but Quickbooks was still trying to pull transactions from that account. The fix: deactivate the online access for that account in Quickbooks (chart of accts > right-click edit acct > online tab > uncheck online access).
You’d certainly think Inuit could throw a more descriptive error message or at least allow the connection to pull data from the working accounts since it wasn’t an issue of authetication… Anyways, a week later having dealt with both BofA and Intuit, this turned out to be the resolution to this issue. Lesson learned: don’t send sensitive data over untrusted wifi at a conference of 2700 techies all using the same connection. Even when using SSL and presumably connecting to a legit wifi hotspot, people can emulate an access point by broadcasting their own wifi signal under an SSID like “OSCON wifi,” intercept your connection and perform a man-in-the-middle attack to steal your info.
