I wanted to share funny story from Friday. After WebVisions, I headed over to Beer and Blog, a weekly Friday gathering of local bloggers at a local brew pub here in Portland. The brainchild of Justin Kistner, these working sessions are as much social gatherings as they are instructional workshops, and that’s how we like… Read More
Category: general
Blogging is Hard
I just realized that I’m nearly at the one year anniversary of my very first post. Interestingly, at least to me, I’ve blogged about 350 times since then. That’s nearly one per day. Blogging is harder than it looks. What do you think of our last year of blogging? Anything you’d like to see done… Read More
I’m Ready for Preso 2.0
I spent Thursday and Friday attending WebVisions here in beautiful Portland at the Oregon Convention Center. I really enjoyed the event; it was a nice change of pace from the massive events I usually attend at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The content was just as good, but it had a more cozy feel. Very… Read More
Implementing Oracle SSO in a generic java container? It is not as easy as you think.
Recently Rich and I got a chance to implement the mod_osso for any generic java container. The current mod_osso module only works in Oracle iAS, but we would like to use Oracle single sign-on in virtually everywhere. We can then use it for development, testing, or even production when we don’t need a relatively heavy… Read More
Bandwidth Policing
I’m attending WebVisions here in Portland Thursday and Friday. Good stuff so far, and very different than those mega-conferences I’m used to at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Rather than let you pine for content, here’s a taste of something new. Some of you may know that I made a guest apperance on Web Worker… Read More
AppsLab FAQ: What if Someone Posts Porn?
I’ve decided to start a periodic feature I call AppsLab FAQ, which serves several purposes. First, it gives me topics to blog when I’m short on ideas, which happens frequently. Second, it gives me a permanent place to store experiences and lessons learned in a given subject area. So, the next time I get asked… Read More
U Can Has Beta Invites
Last week, I alluded to Twitter as a place to get and barter for invitations to beta services. It may surprise you to know that Twitter has been up and down more than normal lately. Well, turns out blogs are often a good place to get beta invites too. I have invitations to several services… Read More
Bugs in the Matrix
My wife introduced a theory to me years ago. She observed that certain odd themes tend to repeat themselves in high frequency over the course of about a week, then disappear back into obscurity. Her theory was that if you apply numerology to these coincidences, you could translate chance into good fortune, e.g. using the… Read More
What a Difference a Year Makes
This year is not last year. Last year, I spent hours talking Web 2.0 to teams in development. Collectively, we probably held 20 or so educational sessions and then a similar number of follow up roundtables to discuss ideas spawned by the first session. This year, I’ve been spending days collecting requirements of teams that… Read More
Stuff That Just Works
I’ve been so very busy lately, but not with bloggable activity. This week has been slow on Mix news; ENTP is putting the finishing touches on a big feature, and we did deploy a few bug fixes. I did finally catch up on feed reading from a month ago, and a post from friend of… Read More
Work Could be More Funner
At Web 2.0 Expo about a month ago, Rich, Paul and I all attended a fascinating session called “Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web“. Aside from being interesting, it reenergized me on my quest to make work more fun. Then, daily operational stuff intervened. I managed to rush some thoughts onto virtual… Read More
Random Twitter Effects
Hard to believe I haven’t blogged about Twitter in a while. Like New Web in general, Twitter has reached that cusp where early adopters are calling it “established” and new people are kicking the tires. Lots of them. The recent departure of Blaine Cook, Twitter’s former chief architect, could mean any number of things. Many… Read More
Mix Updates
Rich, ENTP and I spent last week fixing some issues in Mix that you may have seen. Suggest a session for OpenWorld has driven steady traffic into Mix, and we’re rushing to fix bugs that people have encountered. Virtually all of the recent fixes have been around suggest a session, which makes sense because that’… Read More
Just Add Enterprise
If you read here, you’ll know I’m not a fan of the term Enterprise 2.0, at least not when it’s used to refer to Web 2.0 practiced behind the firewall. I know why people feel the need to differentiate Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0; Web 2.0 suffers from an image problem, i.e. it’s associated with… Read More
Pour Some Gas on the Fire (Eagle)
I blogged about Fire Eagle last week. Remember? The service that stores and brokers your location and provides a host of APIs for anyone wanting to integrate location data into their web apps. That post got 0 comments, which was a bit surprising. I thought Eddie or Dan or Matt would be geeked to check… Read More
Kick People out of Your Groups
I missed this in last week’s broohaha about Suggest a Session, but you can finally remove members from a group. It’s been a long time coming and requested by many people. Insert your favorite excuse here. If you are the group owner or an admin, you will now see a “Remove from group” link next… Read More
Suggest a Session is a Hit
Less than a week since we deployed it, the Suggest a Session for OpenWorld 2008 offer made by the Events team on Mix has been a big hit. Traffic was up over 250% over the weekend, and the voting page is already among the top pages on Mix in terms of pageviews over the past… Read More
My First BarCamp
I spent portions of this past Friday, Saturday and Sunday attending my very first BarCamp, held here in Portland at CubeSpace. The origins of BarCamp are interesting; back in 2005, O’Reilly held a user-generated conference called Foo Camp that was invite only. Lots of people wanted an invite (kind of like Web 2.0 Summit, ahem),… Read More
Suggest a Session Topic for OpenWorld
Last night, as promised, Rich deployed some new stuff built by ENTP, right before they headed to a midnight Iron Man showing. On a side note, is he really a superhero? The shiny new feature is Suggest a Session. If you have an idea for a session you’d like to attend or present, bounce over… Read More
More Web 2.0 Expo: Worth the Time Investment
So, two keynotes from last week’s Web 2.0 Expo are worth watching, if you have a block of time. One is Clay Shirky’s keynote from Wednesday afternoon. His observations are keen, and his presentation is both funny and interesting, well worth the 16 odd minutes. The other is Dan Lyons’ keynote from Friday, which I… Read More