Apache Gump

Apache Gump: Gump is a social experiment. The primary goal of Gump is to get diverse projects to communicate early and often about integration, dependencies, and versioning management. One way to think about it is that some of the concepts of Extreme programming applied to Continuous Integration on an unprecedented scale.

Blogdex

blogdex - about blogdex: Blogdex is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community. Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media.

social circles: mailing list social visualization

social circles - marcos weskamp:Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address. When subscribing to a mailing you never know who the principals are, how many people are listening or what subjects they are talking about. It's like entering a meeting room with plenty of people in the darkness and then having to learn who is who by just listening to their voices.

Weekend in beantown

We're driving to Boston for the weekend Thursday night to visit with Alister, Abigail and Harriet. Depending on the condition of I95, we may or may not arrive in Boston by the time we need to leave to get back to NYC.

Pepper and pastries don't mix

My morning routine is to walk Frisket about four blocks to a local coffee, pastry, and sandwich shop. I typically pick up a coffee for Lisa, and something for me. For better or worse, I usually grab an oatmeal and raisin cookie or two. I buy the "it cuts down on cholesterol" line. Anyway...this morning's batch of cookies had the ever so faint yet present taste of....pepper.

Ugh.

Now I have this faint pepper taste in my mouth (I ended up eating them as a post-lunch snack).

Ugh.

Ad-hoc vs Managed software development

Alex writes about our shared experiences at IBM.com in the 1995-1997 era while commenting on an essay by Clay Shirky. I'd add that one downside to the ad-hoc, small group developed software is that it didn't always scale on a variety of axes (sometimes traffic, sometimes amount of data, sometimes maintenance). Too often the executive overlords would see how cheaply some solution had been developed and then extrapolate unreasonably that no futher investments of time, people, or other resources would be necessary. When the I/T BT/CTIO octupi struck, they struck at the weak parts of the system (security, reliability, scalability) even though frequently the "formal" organizations were no better at these aspects than the informal groups.