Michael A. O’Neill

Category: Web/Tech

  • In the press

    I wish my first press quote, professionally, could have been something a bit more happy. But here we are.

  • Blog: Day to Day in Iraq

    On The New York Times editorial page today, the Gray Lady touted a multi-author blog called Day to Day in Iraq. Simply put, the blog is written by regular Iraqis about daily life. Most of the authors are young men in their twenties. The entry that struck me the most was from Hassan Khuraffa about the daily life of his six-year-old sister.

    I was immediately reminded of stories about a family friend, Ramzi, who spent the first few years of his life in Beirut in the early 1980s, the worst years of Lebanon’s brutal "civil" war. [I put civil in quotes, since two of the major players, Israel and the PLO,  were external actors]. Those stories about Ramzi were the catalyst that sparked my interest in the Middle East.

    I also couldn’t help but realize that Nigel Parry’s plan in 1997 had finally come to fruition, just in Iraq, rather than Palestine. Nigel wanted to create the single source of raw, unfiltered news about day-to-day life in Palestine by equiping one Palestinian student in each major Palestinian city with a laptop, an internet connection, a camera and a slide/negative scanner [digital photography was in its infancy]. He modeled this web site on his own online journal, "A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" and a pilot project called "On the Ground in Ramallah" that he ran with several students to document the shooting war that erupted in the fall of 1996.

    The site never got off the ground, and when Nigel’s house was demolished in May 1998, he left Palestine and the project fell to the wayside.

  • Feedblitz

    Feedblitz_logo
    Another Web 2.0 experiment: Feedblitz. This blog widget should monitor my blog’s feed and, whenever I post something new, send an email of the new feed to subscribers. I’m checking it out, because I think my sister should create a Ramos-O’Neill blog featuring the adventures of Finn and Ellie, but she’d need a Wed 1.0 way to push blog entries to family members who aren’t that tech savvy.

    Actually, this entry is just to test how the thing works myself.

    02-JUN-06: Seems to work! You can sign up by scrolling down to the Feedblitz widget on the right hand side of my blog.

  • Experimenting with Wikipedia

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    In writing my blog entries and my manuscript, wikipedia.org has proven an incredibly useful resource. So I decided I’d try to give back a little bit.

    But where could I contribute? Photography? No, I don’t know enough about optics. Scooters? Even though the Vespa entry has been flagged for poor quality, there’s just not enough two-stroke oil coursing through my veins to improve it.

    The Mid-East, perhaps? Hmmm. The editors of wikipedia have banned new registrants from modifying major entries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not surprising. Wiki technology allows anyone to make changes or modification, so anyone with an axe to grind can come in and distort as they please. Of course, enough people will be monitoring the entry, so the changes will be rolled back. But better to be proactive than reactive.

    As I was browsing, I noticed a request from an Arab wikipedia member that someone add a photo of Birzeit University’s Martyr’s Memorial. I have pictures of that! So I made some minor changes to the entry about Birzeit University and Birzeit village: I added a few pictures, and made a minor correction. Another user has already modified my modifications. Very exciting.

  • Mash-up: Google Earth and my photos

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    My photo hosting provider, smugmug.com, has added a new mash-up with Google Earth. I can set lattitude and longitude points for every photo I’ve taken, and they show up on a map on my photo site.

    Now, the way it’s supposed to work is that you get a GPS card for your digital camera, and the geographic information is stored in the photo’s EXIF data, along with exposure and camera data. Not many cameras include GPS functionality, though, so you may have to use your camera’s only memory card slot for the GPS card, which limits your options.

    Of course, I still use film, so I have to find the spot where I took the picture using Google Earth, which is a bit of a pain. Smugmug.com hasn’t quite figured out how to make data entry easy, either, so I have to update one picture at a time, even though I may have many pictures taken at the same location.

    Also, Google Earth doesn’t have detailed photos of every place on earth–it’s mainly just North American and European cities, so I couldn’t create the photo maps of Guanajuato, Costa Rica and the West Bank that I’ve been thinking about, let alone pinpoint National Park locations in the US.

    Lastly, smugmug.com hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with domain mapping when combined with Google Earth. You have to register your domain with Google for the mapping features to work. I registered photos.spymyshadow.com, but my site can also be accessed via mao.smugmug.com. Now, If you drill down into the map on photos.spymyshadow.com to see the pictures, you switch domains to maps.smugmug.com. When you click on a picture to get back to my photosite, it returns you to mao.smugmug.com. Since I can only register one site with Google (and that’s the spymyshadow site) the map breaks at mao.smugmug.com.

    Still, pretty cool feature.

  • Your call may be recorded for quality assurance

    MoveOn.org recently sent out an email to collect donations to help CommonCause promote the development of electronic voting machines with a verifiable paper trail.

    I’m absolutely fascinated by the issue of paper trails because, well… have you wondered about the line "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." Now, as The New York Times pointed out in an 11-Jan-05 article entitled "Your Call (and Rants on Hold) Will Be Monitored," there is an awful lot behind recording customer service calls.

    But the birth of recorded calls in call centers, at least as I understand it, was part of a database backup strategy. Think about it: your database administrator screws up and somehow turns off the database’s transaction log (for those of you unfamiliar with this, all modern relational database management systems keep a log of every individual change in data, and this log is written before the database is actually updated). Later that evening–before backups of your database are created–a power surge from a major storm toasts your database server. You attempt to reapply those logs to the database (logs are typically backed up more frequently than the actual database, and are stored on a different physical server). But you don’t have any logs because your DBA messed up.

    Your only hope is to pull the physical tape of every single call, and have your call center employees re-enter all those orders.

    This is Database Management 101–for critical systems, always have a backup that isn’t a database or transaction log, something physical like paper or audio tape that you can go back to if your computers completely fail.

  • TSSJS: Ted’s keynote on open-source

    Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect, gave our keynote address at TheServerSide Java Symposium today (coverage in InfoWorld).

    Ted’s remarks reminded me of a fourth characteristic of open-source–or at least, of successful open-source projects–that I neglected to mention in my post on what makes open-source. Whether a project makes a tedious, repetitive task easily, provides functionality that would be difficult for an individual developer to support, fills an key business need, the project has to be cool to succeed.

    Ted also had a few more models of how open-source projects get started. In some cases, a developer is working on something individually that s/he does not have the time to finish. Or a company decides to move in a different direction and no longer maintain or support some piece functionality that is in use in the market (perhaps its not profitable, or its becoming commoditized).

    Doug Clarke provided another option: a bunch of developers love some commerical product but the license is so expensive that they can’t get their employers to purchase it. So a couple of them start a project to replicate their functionality, hoping that there is a large enough community frustrated with the license to provide the resources to complete the project.

  • What makes open-source?

    InfoWorld reporter Matt Asay posted a column recently about Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE), our lightweight database product built on our commercial database engine that is completely free to develop, deploy and redistribute.

    In addition to saying some very complimentary things about a colleague of mine, Monica Kumar, Matt asked, "[W]hy not just open source the whole thing, Monica, and let people pay you for a supported, certified version?"

    This raises an interesting discussion about what open-source is. Is it the free software that matters? The open source code? The community of developers?

    I think the first thing to consider is how "open-source" begins. I see four main models:

    1. Organically built community turns into corporate support model
    2. Corporation builds new community and starts with fresh code base
    3. Corporation takes existing closed-source code base, donates it, and attempts to create a community around it
    4. Corporation takes existing closed-source code base, finds an existing community, and donates the code to that community.

    JBoss follows the first model: an entreprenuer looks at a community of developers working on an open-source project (first release in 1999), and founds a company (2001) to provide commercial support for that project. JBoss continues to replicate that model by identifying active, successful open-source development communities, then hiring the lead developer(s), and creating a support organization.

    The Eclipse Foundation comes from a completely different direction (the second model). IBM decided that it wanted to make a major impact in the market for integrated development environments that developers use on a daily basis. So IBM a) endowed a foundation, b) assigned a bunch of its own developers to start writing new code from scratch, and c) allocated marketing resources to start building a community of non-IBM developers to join the project. There is still a great deal of debate about how much control non-IBM Eclipse contributors have been able to wrest from IBM, but the Eclipse Foundation has on the surface, opened up the project a great deal.

    The third open-source model can be found in Beehive, a proprietary, closed-source project developed by BEA that the company ultimately donated to the Apache Software Foundation as a completely new project.

    The fourth is seen with Oracle ADF Faces–a family of over 100 JavaServer Faces components–which is being donated to the existing Apache MyFaces project.

    It looks, then, like there are three main characteristics of open-source:

    1. Free software
    2. Open source-code (ability to fix bugs or customize on your own)
    3. The community of developers dedicated to the project

    It’s that last point, the community of developers, that I think Matt has forgotten about. Anyone can offer free software. Anyone can offer source code. The community, however, is what matters, what takes time and effort to build, and what, I believe, will ultimately determine if the project is successful. Without a community behind it, you’re just dumping commercial software into an open source project and hoping for the best.

  • JDJ: Putting a Face on SOA

    My first published article, "Putting a Face on Web Services and SOA," just came out in the March issue of Web Services Journal. Very exciting.

  • XE cont…

    Our first XE banner ad is up on IT Toolbox. You might have to refresh a dozen times for it to appear. But it’s up.

    I’ll find some way to show the ad on here.