Photos from the recent Extreme Blue Expo

As I already mentioned, this years Extreme Blue Expo was held in Dublin this week. As expected this was a very exciting event with much of the excitement captured in a twitter feed #ebe2010. You can also some of the pictures from the event posted to the dedicated facebook page.

Many of the talks were also captured on video. The video clips are in the process of being prepared for upload. I will let you know where to find them as soon as they are available.

Some of the presentations have been made available via a special collection page on Lotus Files. I believe the rest will be published there shortly.

Many of the sessions were captured on video. The videos are not yet online because the a substantial amount of post editing is needed. I will share a links as soon as it is available.

Software Freedom day

The Software Freedom Day for 2010 is being celebrated next Saturday (18th of September). This is a wonderful event which aims to publicise and promote the use of free software. There are many different events being organised all over the world on this day. The nearest to me would be the event organised by the Irish Linux Users Group, but  there are so many different local teams getting involved that wherever in the world you are based you will probably find something happening near you.

Is Ubuntu turning Ugly

I do not consider myself much of an expert on colour schemes, but in my opinion the recent versions of Ubuntu Linux are definitely getting more ugly. I know that many style conscious people used to criticise the Ubuntu default scheme saying - brown is boring, but I thought it was calm and reassuring.

In recent releases Ubuntu has been striving for a more lively and with-it theme and so the primary colour is switching from brown to purple. However, to my untrained eye it is definitely getting more ugly. In fact when I first saw the default theme in Maverick I thought my monitor was broken and displaying the colours all wrong.

I know it is not a bug deal because people can and do change their colour scheme, but first impressions make a difference. I wonder if I am alone or if others think the same?

If you wan to judge for yourself. Here is the default desktop background in Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10 which was released in October 2009)


This is a screenshot of the default background in the Beta versions of Maverick (which will be released on 10th of October next or 10/10/10)

Extreme Blue Expo Next Week

The Extreme Blue program is one of the coolest things that IBM does. Every summer we bring together teams composed of some of the brightest students and put them to work on really innovative projects. To foster an element of competition we bring all of the students from our various labs in Europe to a single Expo event to show off their work. To make the event even more interesting we also invite high profile speakers to join the students.

This year the event is being hosted in the Dublin lab (where I work) on the 14th and 15th of September. The event on 14th is invitation only, but registration for 15th is open to the public via our web site. I strongly encourage people who are based nearby to come and visit. If you want to see the full agenda you can read it here, but you can better feel for the event by watching this video.

How to improve the CAO points system

This this the time of year when the Central Applications Office (CAO) announces who has been allocated places in the various courses run in the Irish Universities. It is common to read articles written around this time criticizing  the points system, but many of them don't offer any concrete advice for how a better replacement could be put in place. Therefore I thought I would stick my neck out and a practical suggestions for how to easily improve the system.

There seems to be consensus that there are three different problems with the existing points system:

1. Many excellent students who want to study at 3rd level can't because there are not enough places available
   
2. The selection system does not select the students who are best suited for the course.
3. Students are encouraged to choose the course with the highest points score for which they can qualify rather than selecting the course that really suits them.
   

I don't intend trying to solve the first problem because I think that it can't be solved without either dramatically increasing the number of places available (which is not economically feasible at the moment). However, the two other problems could easily be solved by making a minor tweak to the current system whereby applicants for all courses are given bonus points for having studied relevant subjects in second level. Students who have studied relevant subjects at secondary school are naturally more likely to succeed at 3rd level because of this head start and in addition their choice of subject in secondary school probably shows a genuine interest in the field.

In the past many courses gave bonus points to students who studied higher level maths and/or scientific subjects. This practice was abandoned because it was felt to be unfair to students from schools where science subjects were not offered (surely there can't be many of these left) and because it was felt important to standardize the points system across all colleges. However, I don't think it is necessary for all colleges to standardize their points selection system. In fact if one college was brave college was willing to go it alone with such a modified point system they would have a competitive advantage (e.g. their business courses would be mainly filled with students who had studied business at second level) and other colleges would be likely to follow whichever college took this brave lead.

The video recording of our talk at the Blogtalk conference is now available on line

I am delighted to see that the video for our talk at the Blogtalk 2010 conference is now available online. The recording is quite good quality although I must admit I hate hearing my own voice. We must have run over the time limit because some of the Q&A portion is not included in the recording.



Of course it is not just our talk that was posted. All of the other speakers were also recorded and most can be found here, but some are not yet online because it is taking some time to upload them (by the time you read this I am sure they will all be up)

How much notice should service providers give their customers when the terms of service change?

One of the cool things about the Twitter service is the fact that they don't send many emails to their subscribers to let them know how wonderful their service is. They have a very unusual attitude in that they expect that the usefulness of their service should be able to speak for itself. Therefore when they sent me an email today entitled "Update: Twitter Apps and you" I decided to actually read the email.

It started out quite well:

Over the coming weeks, we will be making two important updates that will impact how you interact with Twitter applications. We are sending this notice to all Twitter users to make sure you are aware of these changes.

Then I read the next paragraph:

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use OAuth to access your Twitter account.

At first it sounded reasonable, but then I realised that this email was being sent on 2nd of September!!! I know internet time is different from normal time, but how can they use the phrase "in the coming weeks" to refer to 2 days ago!!

Suddenly the penny dropped and I realised why BlueTwitSidebar stopped working with Twitter yesterday. I pinged the developer of this tool to let him know of the issue, but it turned out that he already knew about it becuase everyone was screaming at him.

Surely this is a very unfair way to treat users by telling them of a significant change in authentication policy after it has already been implemented :-(

Report on Blogtalk 2010 conference last week

A number of people asked me to write up a report on the Blogtalk 2010 conference that I attended last week. This was a really interesting conference with lots of interesting topics being discussed, but since most of the people there were really great at using social media tools and they were all posting commentary all the time I don't think I can do really much better than to point you at the very active Twitter feed for the conference using the hashtag #blogtalk2010 or Emer Lawn's excellent summaries of day 1 and day 2.

I will write up a few blog posts later on specific topics that came up during the conference, but my general impression was to be amazed at the amount of buzz and excitement which can be generated when a bunch of like minded geeks get together. I was also delighted to see that my Alma Mater NUI Galway is looking both completely new and modern, while at the same time being reassuringly familiar from 30 years ago (when we used to call it UCG).

You can see the slides for my own talk with Gabriela Avram below. It went down pretty well despite being in a bad slot as the second last presentation of the conference when everyone was tired (including the presenters). A number of the other presentations are also available on SlideShare, but there is no unified feed for them available (yet). I believe that the conference site will be updated shortly with links to all of the presentation and video's of the various presentations (every move was captured on camera).

Who am I? Blogtalk 2010 presentation

View more presentations from coniecto.

Open source software licenses are irrelevant for cloud based services?

I am a big fan of open source software, butI don't think open source licenses are relevant to the cloud based services that have become popular in recent times. The issue is that people are looking to avoid being tricked into using services with unreasonable rules on intellectual property , but it is possible for a cloud based service that is implemented with open source software to have totally unreasonable rules (and of course it is also possible to develop a service with proprietary software that respects their users' rights in a very enlightened way). Therefore we need to develop a new idea of what are reasonable licenses in an era of cloud based services.

In the  traditional model of computing, the flow of intellectual property is from the software developer to the user. Therefore, an organisation that develops software will distribute it with a license which is a legal definition of the restrictions on what users are allowed to do with the software. However, with cloud based services the transfer of intellectual property is often in the reverse direction. For example, if you are a Facebook user you will be providing valuable content to Facebook every time you upload a photograph or post a status message. Therefore the most important part of the Facebook terms of service is not the rules about what the users are allowed to do, but the rules about what Facebook is allowed to do with this content provided by users.

People rarely read the license that comes with their software, so organisations need to be able to communicate briefly what are the rules about the use of their software. For example, if a company says that their software is "Open Source" users will assume that they will enjoy the four freedoms defined by the Free Software Foundation. In fact most companies publishing open source software won't write their own license, but will use something like the GPL or the Apache license so potential users can know the restrictions without having to read the license at all. In a similar way companies publishing software under a proprietary software will try to summarise the restrictions in a single sentence e.g. "can be used by up to 100 named users" or "can be used for non-commercial purposes only".

What cloud based services need is a similar shorthand way to communicate to potential users of the service what are the terms and conditions associated with using the service (e.g. will your data be shared with 3rd parties looking to target you with advertisements). This is a rapidly evolving area so there is not yet any consensus about what constitutes reasonable restrictions. The best proposal I have seen yet is the Open Cloud Manifesto which was recently launched by a number of important companies active in the cloud services space (including my employer IBM), but this proposal still does not have the backing of several other key players in the industry. This manifesto is geared towards a definition of cloud services where the service provider mainly provides computing power to the users (e.g. the way Amazon or Racksppce do), but different concerns need to be addressed when the service provider is hosting a complete service (e.g. the way Google or Facebook do).

A temporary gap in weekly reviews

At the start of this year I started publishing regular weekly reviews on my blog each weekend as part of an effort to become better at implementing the GTD methodology for task management. Nobody has been more suprised than me to find that I have perservered with this discipline and only very rarely missed a week.

I do find that the discipline of writing a weekly review has helped me focus on what are the important tasks I want to complete each week. However, there is a lot of work involved and I am wondering if I get adequate return on my investment of effort.

I am about to go off on a few weeks holidays. I don't think I want to manage my holiday time in a GTD way :-) and in any case I possibly won't have adequate internet access to update my blog. Therefore I will take a break from my weekly review for August and then reflect upon whether or not to start up again in September.