Barcamp: June 2006 Archives
I have been busy this week with work and such, and haven't had a chance to sit down and writeup a postscript for last weekend's Barcamp. Thankfully, Justin has prodded me through e-mail, so here it is. Justin writes:
"Any final thoughts on BarCamp? Were there things that you thought they did particularly well? Anything they should have done better?"
And here is my response:
I probably should blog about this, but I think that BarCamp might have been a little over-hyped in my mind. I expected to be fully blown-away by all of the smart people talking about really smart things. Instead, there were a few sessions that were like that, and bunch that were just "ok".Things that they did well - for being an event that is supposed to be barely-contained anarchy, things were planned really well, there was tons of food (which was all very good), and there wasn't really a time where I didn't know what to do. It also seems like they were pretty good about casting the sessions on the 'net (with video, irc, etc.).
Things that weren't as good -- I don't think that we (the participants, myself included) did a good enough job capturing things in the wiki.
All-in-all, it was a weekend well spent, and I would like to go again. I'm pretty happy that so many people volunteered to pull-off Barcamp, because it really was great. I think that if I do go again, I need to work harder on doing a session of my own. By the time I finally decided what I would like to talk about, it was too late. I think it is true that you get out of Barcamp what you put into it, and I was a bit timid this time, and need to put more into it next time.
Justin is also aiming for me to head up to Seattle for Mind Camp, which is also a possibility.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp
I went to an interesting session that was basically a discussion of 37signals' PDF book, "Getting Real", and how people are adopting it at their companies. What was interesting to me is that the methodology described in "Getting Real" really does seem to work, especially at smaller, more close-knit companies.
One of the central questions is will this scale, to much larger companies? I related my own experience at EDS (a 117,000 person company -- the next largest company of those that were in the session was 60 people). In my view, there is a pretty real chance at getting my immediate team to adopt some of the principals contained in "Getting Real". My concern, however, is how do teams that are following the agile/getting real approach interact with teams following more "traditional" approaches. This matters, because our team is increasing its interactions with other teams within EDS, and I think this is starting to bring us down to a lowest-common denominator.
The great insight about "Getting Real" that I gleaned, however, was this quote: "the magic of getting real is agile development for the rest of the company (not just the developers)". So, I can definitely see how sending this around to the non-development layers of EDS could really help.
The book seems to be really focused on companies producing web applications, however, which I wish we had addressed in our session. But I still got a lot of food for thought, in my efforts to transform EDS into a more social company.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp, EDS, 37signals, Getting Real
Ben Stucki was kind enough to give a talk this morning about Adobe Flex, which is a new development framework that sits on top of Flash 9. However, he had some technical difficulties getting his Sony Vaio to work with the projector, so I decided to step in and show off how easy it is to get my Macintosh to work with external displays. So, sure enough, my Mac detected the projector just fine. But I didn't want to take the time to install the Flash 9 beta, along with the Flex designer (which is based on Eclipse) on my Mac. Instead, I demonstrated how flexible the Macintosh is, by using the Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect to Ben's Vaio over the WiFi.
So witness Ben giving his presentation on my Mac, connected remotely to his Vaio:
Ben Stucki talking about Flex, via some unholy Windows/Macintosh alliance
Anyways, setup drama aside, Flex seems reasonably interesting. In general, I'm not a big fan of proprietary development solutions that break the model of the web (any content in any browser). But flash is reasonably portable, and it does look like it is super-easy to generate rich applications using Flex. Apparently, this is targeted towards enterprises, and I would much rather see Flex getting adopted than Microsoft's crazy (and super-evil) Avalon stuff.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp, Flex, Adobe, Macromedia, Mac Snob
Jordan's talk seemed to really dive right in - he quickly got to navigating around in the shell. I think I would have started with a bit more of UNIX philosophy (which I know, is probably boring), and comparing and contrasting UNIX with Windows.
The UNIX philosophy (in my mind) is:
- Clean separation of components - the Kernel is separate from the windowing system, which is separate from the web browser, which is separate from the web server. In UNIX, you can choose the components that you want to use for each function.
- Keep things simple. The basic idea is to keep commands simple, and chain them together using pipes and files.
- "Everything is a file" - in UNIX, pretty much every resource can be accessed as a file. This file-access semantic makes it possible for different commands to interoperate with each other. Think of it as the common UNIX protocol.
- Supports multiple users by design - since the beginning, UNIX has been designed to support multiple users all sharing the same system. This legacy of supporting multiple users has made UNIX quite secure.
- Clean design - The core design of UNIX has endured for over 30 years, with numerous implementations. But the fact that UNIX remains, is a testament to its elegant design.
-Andy.
I really wanted a picture of the Barcamp logo to start things off, but I could find one until last night, on a t-shirt:
Anyways, I camped out on Microsoft's concrete floor last night (comfy!), and I am ready to go for another day of Barcamp. I think that things wrap-up at around 4 today, at which point I'm sure that I'll be pretty tired. :)
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp
Erica Douglas - Simpli hosting - owner of a webhosting company (for last 5 years). Here to answer questions.
Q: Can I use Google WiFi to host my website for free?
A: Yes and no - depends on what ports Google blocks. If not, you can do it, if it is a personal site, etc. Upstream bandwidth will hurt. Some free hosting companies - i.e. addyour.net (free web hosting, pick your subdomain), pbwiki.com (free wiki), wordpress.com (free blogs).
Q: Why host at all?
A: Hosting companies have high (multi gigabit) bandwidth. Reliable power. Cooling. Controlled environment.
Q: What should be the cost for colo with low bandwidth requirements?
A: Depends on size of server (rack space) - space in colo environment costs money. Office space in San Jose costs $1.26 sq/ft. Market post tower (MAE West) - $22 sq/ft. Recommend 1U or 2U case. Can convert typical desktop to this case for one-time fee of $200. Will save a lot of money to convert vs. keeping desktop space.
1U = $35/mo
2U = $60 - 70/mo
desktop = $110/mo
Simpli prices are are 1U + 100Gb for $79/mo.
Q: What does 100Gb of transfer mean per month?
A: Two ways to measure bandwidth - in terms of data/mo, or bandwidth (1Mbit - 95th percentile). Server is connected 100Mbit out to Internet, can burst up to that. For 95th percentile, they measure bandwidth every 5 minutes, chop of the 5% highest usage points, then bill on that. All hosting providers are billed 95th percentile style for the bandwidth that they buy. For gigabytes transferred, on the other hand, the ISP just calculates data transferred per month. ISPs, as a rule of thumb, is that 200GB/mo is 1Mbit of 95th percentile billing.
Q: What if I am pushing a lot of data to my colo server?
A: Read contract carefully, there could be hidden fees. Some will only charge for downstream (upstream gives them peering leverage), others will charge.
VPS - Virtual Private Server. This is a hosting offering that is taking advantage of virtualization, anything from a FreeBSD jail to a Solaris zone, up to Xen or VMWare. This is still fairly expensive, because you need to back each image with real RAM. So, if you give each VM 512Mb of RAM, then hosting 24 customers requires a box with 12Gb of memory (i.e. not cheap).
Q: Is there an objective site that reviews webhosting company?
A: Not really. News.com has reviews (but they take money). Webhostingtalk.com, but it is a form, and not super-awesome. Looks like there is an opening here for somebody to start something. Possibly a wiki?
If you are looking for a cheap jail, try: linode.com, or jvds.com.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp, Webhosting
They have something that they call "The Wall of Independence" here at Barcamp. The idea is that people randomly and independently write things on some large sheets of white paper tacked to the wall near the entrance. So far, there isn't a whole lot there, but this one caught my eye:
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp
This Barcamp has been a pretty sweet deal so far. They had a pretty nice spread for lunch, supplied by WilmerHale:
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp
The Barcamp folks have some free books for volunteers, and I spotted one that I had never heard of before:
"Just no to Microsoft"
I'm not sure who donated this one, but I thought it was cute.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp
I went to the Microformats and Music talk, and took some notes, which are going to evolve in the Wiki. What was interesting to me is that it seems like the hCalendar microformat is getting fairly pervasive, with services like upcoming.org and eventful.com collecting event information and distributing it this way. Thus, the focus of this session was more on how can we get bands and representation and venues using hCalendar, so that their show information can start zipping around the Internet automatically, notifiying me of all of the cool bands that are coming to my town.
This session was pretty small, and also pretty cool. I learned about a bunch of new websites (including pingerati.net), and learned a bit more about microformats - which I have been interested in, but haven't had time to read about.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp, Microformats
When I signed in to Barcamp this morning, I decided to earn some karma points (since I haven't actually been helping with the planning or financing or anything) and sign up to volunteer. So, now I'm manning the greeting table from 1 - 2 pm. Of course, my metal-clad laptop can't get a wireless signal out in Microsoft's lobby, so this is giving me a break from the web to summarize my experience so far.
I guess it is a little bit what I expected, in that the discussions are really hard to blog about. I think I was expecting to be really "blown away" buy a bunch of smart people talking about really smart things. And granted, I haven't been here too long (yet), but so far it has been just a bunch of nice, smart people talking about things. Which is cool.
In the opening intro, the thing that really struck me was when Tantek said "you get out Barcamp of what you put into it". So, as long as I stay social and engaged, I am sure that I'm going to get something great out of this experience.
-Andy.
Technorati Tags: Barcamp
I derailed the Flex and Ajax discussion (organized by Andre from EBA Labs) by moving it into one of my rich web application pet peeves, accessibility. What I learned is that there are some screen readers (Jaws for Windows, apparently), that actually understand enough about Flash and HTML DOM that they can actually navigate into flash and Ajax applications, and read out the contents for the visually impaired.
So, that's good, but I still feel that great strides were made in terms of accessibility with HTML, but a lot of the newer technologies for making the web richer (plugins, Java applets at first, now flash and Ajax) are taking us backwards.
-Andy.
