GeekAustin Blogs

Where can you discuss private spaceflight, vampires, and steampunk, plan your time travel, and test your zombie apocalypse preparedness all in one weekend? There is an event just like that in Austin, and it is coming up this weekend. It's ArmadilloCon, a science fiction convention held annually in Austin, and known for its literary emphasis. It's three days of discussion panels, authors readings and autograph sessions, vendors selling books, media and genre-themed stuff, art show, costumes and parties.

There are some public domain (verifiably out-of-copyright) design books held by the UT Libraries and Harry Ransom Center that I'd like to scan.

The PCL and HRC both have big fancy Digibook overhead scanners, but the queue is managed by various subject matter experts and they didn't make it sound plausible that I could get the books I wanted in the queue, let alone scanned any time soon.

You’re invited to participate in the 5th ProductCamp Austin event, which promises to be better than ever – More Attendees. More Tracks. More Networking! Get ready - ProductCamp Austin Summer 2010 is on Saturday, August 7, 2010.  Register today!
 
For those who've not attended a ProductCamp in the past, ProductCamp Austin is organized in the spirit of BarCamp. It's is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics. At ProductCamp there are no "attendees," since everyone participates in some manner: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development processes! From ProductCampAustin experience, it is understood that everyone has something they can teach and everyone has something they can learn.
 

I must admit that I am personally not a fan of broadcasting my location broadly on the internet. For that reason, I haven't been a user of either Foursquare or Gowalla other than looking at them with the curiosity I give any other new piece of technology. However, I was intrigued by the Berlin-based Aka-Aki, a location based service begun in 2007 by recent art school graduates. Stephanie Hoffman, one of Aka-aki's founders and their CTO, Gabriel Palomino, were both in San Francisco last month for O'Reilly's 2010 Web 2.0 Expo.

Ok. This rocks.

Here's the main link:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/idah/

And here's all the juice details in the faq:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/idah/faq

Steve Watt also forwarded the following comments:
This has a really intuitive installer that should lower the barrier to
entry for first time Hadoop users. It will set up the SSH Keys, create
the users and deploy Hadoop and your config across the cluster all via
a web based UI.

Following a blog post I wrote on how to find all the Drupalistas in your town, I got this tweet from Ryan (@liberatr):

@linearb: I'm sure by now someone from New York has
told you about the movement to have Drupal happy hours
last Weds. of the month everywhere.

Um, no, but count me in!

We had already been hosting Drinks And Drupal happy hour events in Austin, and it was long past time for another. So I reserved one of the local pubs for the last Wednesday of the month.

Tim O'Reilly says that he has always defined Web 2.0 as 'the internet as operating system.'

What would most folk definitions of an operating system include? Operating systems include Windows, OS X, Unix, Linux and more obscure systems such as BSD, Plan 9 and so on. These are pieces of code that allow a human to interact with a computer and manage hardware usage with respect to the programs running on the system. The internet as operating system should thus be pieces of code that allow human-internet interaction and manage the resources of the web with respect to the component pieces of the web. If that's the direct correlation, then the internet as operating system would be web browsers and RFC specifications.

In a recent press teleconference with Tim O'Reilly concerning Web 2.0, a broad range of topics were covered. Among these topics were social media, cloud computing, the rise of mobile computing, and the Semantic Web. Social media is about connecting people to other people and ideas. The Semantic Web is about, in the words of Dag Kittlaus "making the computer understand what the human using human language." Mobile computing is simply computer usage shrunk down to fit in your hand and be usable anywhere. Cloud computing is the non-localized use of computing resources. None of these alone can be termed an operating system.

Tim Berners-Lee essentially has said that the Web is defined as the interaction between people. One could also refine this definition as the Web is the interaction of people with other people, ideas and a marketplace. It is a redefinition of the way we engage with the world, both static events - such as the reading of news and blogs -- and active -- shopping or chatting online -- or the strange blend of the two that the web has allowed, such as email and collaborative editing of documents.

Conversations these days with my co-workers and friends are abuzz with the changing state of technology -- the shifting lines of alliances and competition between Apple, Microsoft and Google, the empowerment that both mobile computing and social media allows, and all of the subtle new ways that the web has changed the way we live, socialize, shop and even make decisions. Web 2.0 is perhaps a term whose time has passed, if it ever was necessary to begin with. Maybe it's time for a new term to describe the way that the web has become the integral tool of the post-modern world in which we now live.

-Jana

I was lucky enough to meet quite a few local organizers at Drupalcon, and a few folks who were looking to grow their local communities as well. I promised them that I would share some of the things I've learned over the years. This is the first of several posts.

Lone Drupalistas

Recently, two guys from Bryan/College Station (BCS) came to the Austin Drupal Dojo. They came on different nights. The two of them didn't know each other.

I left SXSW Interactive this year with a feeling of hope and inspiration for the world -- there seemed to be so many good panels and discussions about how developers and social media tools were working on issues of social justice and increasingly in traditionally underdeveloped and under-served populations. I wanted to continue and follow up with many of the things I had heard about at SXSWi this year, and Ushahidi was one project I had heard of and wanted to know more about.

For the last four or five months, I've been speaking about communities of practice (CoP) as a model for 1) propagating Drupal culture through this period of rapid growth and adoption 2) supplementing Drupal training, and 3) helping facilitate Drupal learning where professional training is not a practical option.

After blogging about it and subjecting my drupalfriends to lengthy rants about CoP, it was a real pleasure, when bringing up the topic yesterday at a DrupalCon lunch, fellow Drupalista Heather James (@hjames) responded : Oh yes! Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave! Communities of Practice!. Heather and I went off at a hundred miles an hour like two friends who just realized they shared a secret, and at the end of the conversation, everyone was asking for a bibliography.

As I said in a previous post, there is a shortage of qualified Drupal talent. We need to get a lot of new people up up to speed. The topic has been getting increasing visibility in the Drupal community.

I'm happy to see that folks are rising to the occasion. Lullabot has hired new trainers. Mediacurrent and Open Source Training have announced a new partnership, and Dries just announced Acquia's new training program.

Though much more modest in scale, myself and some of the folks at the Austin Drupal Dojo will be launching a Drupal theming study group. GeekAustin friend Eve Richter, Coordinator for the City of Austin's Emerging Technology Office, has offered to support the project by providing space. Several of Austin's top Drupal themers have committed to support the project as well. I'll be publishing more details as soon as everyone gets back from DrupalCon.

Weeee.

Lynn

Into Big Data and the new data stores? How about these guys:

Or how about these other titles:

My buddy Vito made a few thoughtful comments (It's not just enough to train them) to my post on training Drupalers (Dries was right).

Vito states: You don't want to get into a situation like CS had a few/several/many years ago, with a big influx of people learning Java because that's where the money was, and we end up with a wealth of lackluster, unmotivated, average Java developers who can "get by" but who aren't ever going to build you anything interesting.

Today I sat on a train mostly full of men going to tech jobs in Silicon Valley -- it reminded me of being in college and being one of the few women in a math class.

Being a woman in tech or math or science can sometimes be a very lonely and socially awkward place to be -- and this is 2010. I try to imagine the way the English noblewoman must have felt in the mid-nineteenth century -- she seems to be utterly singular in her social milieu. Ironically, it is said that she was taught mathematics from a young age to root out the madness her mother saw as inherent on her father's side of the family. Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage to develop what are considered the world's first computer programs -- despite such a start, women are still underrepresented in much of technology outside of marketing, technical writing and recruiting.

If you have a few minutes today, check out Austin's own Girlstart, which seeks to educate and stimulate interest among teenage girls in math, science and technology. This organization was founded in 1997 and has probably influenced girls that are now old enough to have graduated from college and who have probably began careers in technology -- I reflected upon that at SXSWi this year after I saw Julie Shannan at the Duh...It's Like Tech for Girls session.

Also, over at Adafruit, they are posting every hour about another fabulous woman in technology, from electronics crafting and DIY to cryptography.

-Jana

Back in January, Dries Buytaert, founder and lead of the Drupal CMS, wrote on his blog:

We need to train more good Drupalistas. Almost every Drupal company I talked to is trying to hire talented Drupal developers, but can't find any. The demand for Drupal talent continues to exceed the supply. It is, in fact, holding back Drupal's adoption.

This was not news to me. Since I joined the Drupal community in early 2009, I've had a non-stop stream of pings from companies and recruiters looking for Drupal talent. Currently, I receive on average two to three such requests a day. Every Drupal firm in town appears to be hiring -- and turning down work. I'm not referring to dev shops that "do a little Drupal." I'm talking about dedicated Drupal development shops. And as for independent contractors, every qualified Drupal pro in town is booked at least a month or two in advance.