Just a final reminder: I still need help moving tonight. I still have some
rather heavy furniture to move, so if you haven't come out yet, please
consider doing so. I would really appreciate it.
Thanks very much to the crew so far, especially JP and Itamar, both of whom
showed up on two days.
Did you miss my last post?
Were you out of town?
Was the notice too short?
Are you concerned that your absence indicates the fact that you are a fundamentally bad person? That by abandoning your fellow man in his hour of great need, you have thereby fallen out of God's favor, and thereby damned your immortal soul?
Can you feel the fires of Hell itself already lapping at your feet?
Don't worry! It's not too late. You still have two more chances!
Today we moved most of the knickknacks and books, as well as the TV and several small bits of furniture. Tomorrow I'm moving clothing, boxing up the books that were already moved but now located in ungainly stacks in the new place, taking apart and throwing away furniture which cannot be moved whole, and moving my bed.
On Tuesday, when my Internet arrives upstairs, I will be boxing up the router, and moving my desk and Ying's desk. This is happening "after work", which, since I can do pretty much whatever the heck I want at work (and a faster move is certainly better for productivity) is whenever people start showing up to help. I would suggest 4PM.
Were you out of town?
Was the notice too short?
Are you concerned that your absence indicates the fact that you are a fundamentally bad person? That by abandoning your fellow man in his hour of great need, you have thereby fallen out of God's favor, and thereby damned your immortal soul?
Can you feel the fires of Hell itself already lapping at your feet?
Don't worry! It's not too late. You still have two more chances!
Today we moved most of the knickknacks and books, as well as the TV and several small bits of furniture. Tomorrow I'm moving clothing, boxing up the books that were already moved but now located in ungainly stacks in the new place, taking apart and throwing away furniture which cannot be moved whole, and moving my bed.
On Tuesday, when my Internet arrives upstairs, I will be boxing up the router, and moving my desk and Ying's desk. This is happening "after work", which, since I can do pretty much whatever the heck I want at work (and a faster move is certainly better for productivity) is whenever people start showing up to help. I would suggest 4PM.
I have to move all my worldly belongings ... up two floors.
Ying has purchased the apartment (now condominium) unit that we live in (#1203). As part of that package we are getting some renovations done. However, in order to do those renovations, we've got to move out. The management office has provided us with a second unit to live in for the duration (#1603). However, we still have to schlep our stuff up the elevator and back down again.
Here's what's happening. This weekend (mostly on saturday, but depending on who can come and when, maybe sunday too), my friends, whoever they may be, and I, will move lots of boxes and furniture and random crap up 4 stories with the help of a small-furniture-sized elevator. There will be laying of ethernet cable. There will be much rejoicing.
Are you my friend? Because if you are, you will be here, helping me to prevent a triple hernia from moving two thousand pounds of books by myself. The aforementioned sad news has Ying flown out to Dallas this week, and possibly NYC the next; she won't be able to help with the move.
In all seriousness this is more of an excuse to get together (since we have two whole apartments to hold people!) than a huge amount of work. Our stuff is mostly in boxes already, we don't have much furniture, and there are no stairs to negotiate. If a few people show up, we should make short work of it. Considering that there is labor involved though, I do plan to provide food and refreshment of some variety for whoever shows up.
Do you have to get on a train or bus to get here? No problem! I don't think they're keeping track of who is in what apartments too carefully. I bet easily 3 people could stay here over the weekend and the office wouldn't care.
Ying has purchased the apartment (now condominium) unit that we live in (#1203). As part of that package we are getting some renovations done. However, in order to do those renovations, we've got to move out. The management office has provided us with a second unit to live in for the duration (#1603). However, we still have to schlep our stuff up the elevator and back down again.
Here's what's happening. This weekend (mostly on saturday, but depending on who can come and when, maybe sunday too), my friends, whoever they may be, and I, will move lots of boxes and furniture and random crap up 4 stories with the help of a small-furniture-sized elevator. There will be laying of ethernet cable. There will be much rejoicing.
Are you my friend? Because if you are, you will be here, helping me to prevent a triple hernia from moving two thousand pounds of books by myself. The aforementioned sad news has Ying flown out to Dallas this week, and possibly NYC the next; she won't be able to help with the move.
In all seriousness this is more of an excuse to get together (since we have two whole apartments to hold people!) than a huge amount of work. Our stuff is mostly in boxes already, we don't have much furniture, and there are no stairs to negotiate. If a few people show up, we should make short work of it. Considering that there is labor involved though, I do plan to provide food and refreshment of some variety for whoever shows up.
Do you have to get on a train or bus to get here? No problem! I don't think they're keeping track of who is in what apartments too carefully. I bet easily 3 people could stay here over the weekend and the office wouldn't care.
Since I often use this space to complain or talk about tragedy in various
forms[1], I thought I should balance it out.
Divmod is doing awesome. I can't wait to show you all some applications! Our team is fantastic.
In the infrastructure, we have some great stuff in Mantissa, which I've mentioned in previous posts. Today JP and I merged the "Offering" branch, which sets up a structure for code that plugs in to Mantissa as a product with public functionality in its own database and private functionality that users get access to when they create their accounts or when an administrator grants it to them.
We have code which acts as a telephone server and records calls, as well as responding to DTMF signals (you pushing the buttons on your phone), thanks to Allen Short[2].
We've got a new mail server that receives email and puts it into a browser, and view the message as well as it's MIME attachments, thanks to Moe.
Amir has been keeping it all together, working on the Quotient stuff with Moe, and keeping our focus sharp. In addition to re-designing our entire customer experience for a re-launch, Amir has been exuding one of the qualities of a really good manager: not one second of the team's time is being spent in useless meetings or procedural issues - it feels like Divmod runs itself.
Finally, I've had some time to do some blogging, to talk to people on the team on a regular basis, polish our tools, and start engaging the community. After years of slogging away in the open source salt mines it's really nice to see patches which do things that we need spontaneously emerge from contributors on a semi-regular basis. There are things happening behind the scenes in the community that I'm even more excited about.[3]
[1]: Sadly, I fear I may need to again soon - I almost didn't post this entry because despite all this great news, as I was writing it I received some bad tidings about both of Ying's grandmothers' health failing rather badly, simultaneously. I decided it's probably best not to let the bad vibes drown everything out though.
[2]: If you click on that link you'll probably notice it's taken a toll on him. The standards related to voice on the internet are not pretty things. ;-)
[3]: Hear that, Alex? Things are happening, aren't they?
Divmod is doing awesome. I can't wait to show you all some applications! Our team is fantastic.
In the infrastructure, we have some great stuff in Mantissa, which I've mentioned in previous posts. Today JP and I merged the "Offering" branch, which sets up a structure for code that plugs in to Mantissa as a product with public functionality in its own database and private functionality that users get access to when they create their accounts or when an administrator grants it to them.
We have code which acts as a telephone server and records calls, as well as responding to DTMF signals (you pushing the buttons on your phone), thanks to Allen Short[2].
We've got a new mail server that receives email and puts it into a browser, and view the message as well as it's MIME attachments, thanks to Moe.
Amir has been keeping it all together, working on the Quotient stuff with Moe, and keeping our focus sharp. In addition to re-designing our entire customer experience for a re-launch, Amir has been exuding one of the qualities of a really good manager: not one second of the team's time is being spent in useless meetings or procedural issues - it feels like Divmod runs itself.
Finally, I've had some time to do some blogging, to talk to people on the team on a regular basis, polish our tools, and start engaging the community. After years of slogging away in the open source salt mines it's really nice to see patches which do things that we need spontaneously emerge from contributors on a semi-regular basis. There are things happening behind the scenes in the community that I'm even more excited about.[3]
[1]: Sadly, I fear I may need to again soon - I almost didn't post this entry because despite all this great news, as I was writing it I received some bad tidings about both of Ying's grandmothers' health failing rather badly, simultaneously. I decided it's probably best not to let the bad vibes drown everything out though.
[2]: If you click on that link you'll probably notice it's taken a toll on him. The standards related to voice on the internet are not pretty things. ;-)
[3]: Hear that, Alex? Things are happening, aren't they?
PC programmers originally wrote programs for DOS. It was simple. It was
direct. A program could do whatever it wanted. It could write directly to
video memory, it controlled the whole screen.
Later PC programmers had to learn to write programs for Windows. At first, that was a big pain. The Windows API, even Win16, is hundreds of times more complex than the DOS "API", if you could even say it had one. Applications had to be changed so that their UIs behaved like Windows did, rather than what was "best" for their application domain. Most programs had to abandon their crazy key-bindings to make room for C-c and C-v to mean "copy" and "paste". (Even we geeks only have room in our hearts for one or two sets of crazy key bindings.)
Browsers are today's "video memory"; applications put information wherever they want, with no user-interface conventions that aren't enforced by the browser itself. There is no operating system for the web, no mechanism to make different applications play nicely together on a single server, let alone on a single page. The web is in need of a major shift.
Many would have you believe that "Web 2.0" - AJAX and such - is this shift. "Web 2.0", insofar as I can tell that it refers to anything concrete, is the idea that web applications should respond to the user interactively. This is something that applications have been doing even before DOS; it is not a new idea, and in a sense, it is only the web playing catch-up in an area where desktop applications have long been the clear winner.
What I want to know is, where is the integration paradigm? Where is the clipboard for the web?
I think that whatever answers this question will rightly deserve the moniker "Web 3.0". It will be providing a leap forward over non-web applications which will really be worth something, and hopefully won't be worthy of brutal derision at the hands of industry pundits.
Web 3.0 is going to come with a price, though. By way of an analogy: DOS developers didn't understand the value of Windows programming at first. They objected: Windows is slow. It's ugly. The UIs are boring and everything looks the same. It takes too much memory. Why couldn't they just use DOS like they used to?
Today's web frameworks are generally more like DOS than like Windows, in this respect. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean they're bad: DOS was a huge step up from its predecessor, which was, basically, "you have to write DOS yourself in every application". The "Web 2.0" frameworks I'm familiar with: Rails, Seaside, Subway, Django, and TurboGears are geared (no pun intended) towards providing those parts of your application that you'd have to write yourself, if they weren't provided. They are sometimes libraries, sometimes frameworks, but their purpose is to provide you with a quick path to development and make your application interactive. They aren't really geared towards providing a context in which your application can communicate with other applications.
The infrastructure Divmod is building, we hope, will provide some of the imposed structure that has thus far been lacking on the web. The first step, by way of Mantissa, and our recent work on the "Offering" system, is to provide a way for multiple installed applications to be easily installed on the same website, an idea that Zope, among others, pioneered with some success. That's the front-end, the Windows-1.0 phase. Later, we hope to build clustering and inter-application remote integration with Vertex, the "networking" and "multitasking" that came with Windows 95, following in that same metaphor.
Let's escape the metaphor for a second. The concrete features we want to provide will be things like: You want to write a social network application. Social networks implicitly use telephones and email. With Divmod's framework you can (in the future, when we have finished these systems) write an application as a set of plug-ins which will be activated by the Address Book page, the "Email Inbox" page, and the "Place Call" page from our VoIP application. You can automatically create To-Do items for the user's existing task-tracker. Similarly, if you provide appropriate plug-in interfaces (which the system does make pretty easy and idiomatic)
In the process of writing this essay, I discovered that wikipedia says others are already speculating about Web 3.0 and with similar ideas. It will be distributed, it will be decentralized, it will involve connections within and between web services.
So, how does this all relate to Divmod? What could we hope to gain by providing this kind of technology, especially by giving it all away for free? I'll explain the part of our business model that this impacts, because I am personally always suspicious of people telling me of great stuff they'll do for me without an idea of how it's helping them.
To start with, we have a lot of different ideas for applications, and we want to make sure they can all inter-operate. All the standard reasons for using open source apply - making bugs shallow with more eyeballs, etc - and we also want to make sure that as we're focusing on our first few uses we are preparing for a broader and broader use of our technology, and what better way to do that than by having other people with other use-cases take a look at it.
We have another reason too, though. Once we're done with all of our ideas for applications, (and by all that is good and holy in this world, one day we will be done!) we want to step back and allow the service to keep growing through the contributions of our users, and eventually compensate those contributors who provide us with useful code. Taking a page from Red Hat's book, rather than attempt to sell a commodity into a market, we want to define a market for "web 3.0" products, and then be the market leader and provide a marketplace for good products, rather than simply sell our own.
By providing a structure that will allow lots of different applications to be installed on the same site, we provide a way for independent developers to provide us with applications that can be run together on our site. We can then run all those applications through our account management system and make it easy for those developers to get compensated based on usage patterns and that sort of thing. Of course, any applications we're going to run on our cluster will have to be licensed as open source so that we can have the same expectation the developer does: we won't sue them for using our stuff, they won't sue us for using theirs.
In other words, we're trying to leverage this technology shift to make a way for hackers to get rich writing open source software, without going through the process of starting a startup.
Later PC programmers had to learn to write programs for Windows. At first, that was a big pain. The Windows API, even Win16, is hundreds of times more complex than the DOS "API", if you could even say it had one. Applications had to be changed so that their UIs behaved like Windows did, rather than what was "best" for their application domain. Most programs had to abandon their crazy key-bindings to make room for C-c and C-v to mean "copy" and "paste". (Even we geeks only have room in our hearts for one or two sets of crazy key bindings.)
Browsers are today's "video memory"; applications put information wherever they want, with no user-interface conventions that aren't enforced by the browser itself. There is no operating system for the web, no mechanism to make different applications play nicely together on a single server, let alone on a single page. The web is in need of a major shift.
Many would have you believe that "Web 2.0" - AJAX and such - is this shift. "Web 2.0", insofar as I can tell that it refers to anything concrete, is the idea that web applications should respond to the user interactively. This is something that applications have been doing even before DOS; it is not a new idea, and in a sense, it is only the web playing catch-up in an area where desktop applications have long been the clear winner.
What I want to know is, where is the integration paradigm? Where is the clipboard for the web?
I think that whatever answers this question will rightly deserve the moniker "Web 3.0". It will be providing a leap forward over non-web applications which will really be worth something, and hopefully won't be worthy of brutal derision at the hands of industry pundits.
Web 3.0 is going to come with a price, though. By way of an analogy: DOS developers didn't understand the value of Windows programming at first. They objected: Windows is slow. It's ugly. The UIs are boring and everything looks the same. It takes too much memory. Why couldn't they just use DOS like they used to?
Today's web frameworks are generally more like DOS than like Windows, in this respect. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean they're bad: DOS was a huge step up from its predecessor, which was, basically, "you have to write DOS yourself in every application". The "Web 2.0" frameworks I'm familiar with: Rails, Seaside, Subway, Django, and TurboGears are geared (no pun intended) towards providing those parts of your application that you'd have to write yourself, if they weren't provided. They are sometimes libraries, sometimes frameworks, but their purpose is to provide you with a quick path to development and make your application interactive. They aren't really geared towards providing a context in which your application can communicate with other applications.
The infrastructure Divmod is building, we hope, will provide some of the imposed structure that has thus far been lacking on the web. The first step, by way of Mantissa, and our recent work on the "Offering" system, is to provide a way for multiple installed applications to be easily installed on the same website, an idea that Zope, among others, pioneered with some success. That's the front-end, the Windows-1.0 phase. Later, we hope to build clustering and inter-application remote integration with Vertex, the "networking" and "multitasking" that came with Windows 95, following in that same metaphor.
Let's escape the metaphor for a second. The concrete features we want to provide will be things like: You want to write a social network application. Social networks implicitly use telephones and email. With Divmod's framework you can (in the future, when we have finished these systems) write an application as a set of plug-ins which will be activated by the Address Book page, the "Email Inbox" page, and the "Place Call" page from our VoIP application. You can automatically create To-Do items for the user's existing task-tracker. Similarly, if you provide appropriate plug-in interfaces (which the system does make pretty easy and idiomatic)
In the process of writing this essay, I discovered that wikipedia says others are already speculating about Web 3.0 and with similar ideas. It will be distributed, it will be decentralized, it will involve connections within and between web services.
So, how does this all relate to Divmod? What could we hope to gain by providing this kind of technology, especially by giving it all away for free? I'll explain the part of our business model that this impacts, because I am personally always suspicious of people telling me of great stuff they'll do for me without an idea of how it's helping them.
To start with, we have a lot of different ideas for applications, and we want to make sure they can all inter-operate. All the standard reasons for using open source apply - making bugs shallow with more eyeballs, etc - and we also want to make sure that as we're focusing on our first few uses we are preparing for a broader and broader use of our technology, and what better way to do that than by having other people with other use-cases take a look at it.
We have another reason too, though. Once we're done with all of our ideas for applications, (and by all that is good and holy in this world, one day we will be done!) we want to step back and allow the service to keep growing through the contributions of our users, and eventually compensate those contributors who provide us with useful code. Taking a page from Red Hat's book, rather than attempt to sell a commodity into a market, we want to define a market for "web 3.0" products, and then be the market leader and provide a marketplace for good products, rather than simply sell our own.
By providing a structure that will allow lots of different applications to be installed on the same site, we provide a way for independent developers to provide us with applications that can be run together on our site. We can then run all those applications through our account management system and make it easy for those developers to get compensated based on usage patterns and that sort of thing. Of course, any applications we're going to run on our cluster will have to be licensed as open source so that we can have the same expectation the developer does: we won't sue them for using our stuff, they won't sue us for using theirs.
In other words, we're trying to leverage this technology shift to make a way for hackers to get rich writing open source software, without going through the process of starting a startup.