Houston Street

The information is laughing at us
The ticker tape feeds the night
Looking for a lost transmission
A heaven that we left behind

When the information comes
We'll know what we're made from

- Beck

We put a damper on more than one dinner party conversation a couple of years ago when asked for our opinion on the future of The Economy. These days, of course, it is hard not to tune into any media without being bombarded with doomsday information 24/7. Our favorite financial news source continues to be Bloomberg which offers up the stuff that trades are made on.

While news reports focus on the global financial crisis and the U.S. debate on bailing out dinosaurs, we remain bullish on innovation and entrepreneurship.

It's Global Entrepreneurship Week
A series of events promoting entrepreneurship is taking place around the globe this week. Details on Global Entrepreneurship Week are at unleashingideas.org.

The reasons for this are quite simple:

• Ubuntu follows the same synchronized release model as Midgard does, offering a predictable upgrade schedule
• In many cases the stable Ubuntu version has newer PHP and GNOME packages than debian stable. As these are Midgard dependencies this makes our life easier
• Ubuntu is one of the distributions supported by the openSUSE Build Service
• Ubuntu is still basically the same familiar rock solid platform that debian is

While not everybody is happy about the way Ubuntu has established itself in the market, there seems to be a strong gravitation towards switching to it, on both desktop and server.

I immediately added three apps, displaying my latest conference presentations, upcoming trip plans and posts on my blog:

This is great as the applications already were part of my workflow. However, in general it is not a good idea to trust web apps to be the only place where you keep your things.

In my case, I'm using my Midgard-powered website as the backup where I automatically gather information I publish on other services like Jaiku or Flickr. This means that I can use the convenience and collaborative features of social web applications but still remain in control of my data. In the future I may move this to an even more replicated setup...

World Bank Live Webcast

Participating countries include Brazil, Ghana, Senegal, Russia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and the United States.

The participants in Ghana include a group of students and

Benjamin Mako Hill posted some thoughts on how the first generation of free software developers has grown:

Certainly, GNU has matured and accomplished wonderful things in last quarter-century. More importantly perhaps, it's produced wonderful progeny. It has spawned hundreds of thousands of free software projects, thousands of free or nearly-free operating systems, and an unbelievably vibrant global free and open source software community. Beyond the software realm, the free culture movement, most free licensing projects, and much of the access to knowledge movement can trace a connection back to GNU. We are living, and building, a new generation of the free software movement.

As computers are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and affect more and more every aspect of our lives, software freedom becomes a strong necessity. I personally have been involved with free software since late 90s. It gives me the operating system for our servers, our programming language, and our toolkit. It also gives me an amazing community to work and share ideas with. It is hard to imagine working in a world without them.

To support free software, write some code, use a free operating system, join the Fellowship, and celebrate the Software Freedom Day on September 20th!

Having read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where the lead character Hiro, a fellow swordfighter and free hacker is making his living by collecting intel to upload onto the CIC library, the concept had some appeal. To test it, I created some pages:

Workstreaming
Workstreaming means collecting activities of geographically dispersed team members into a consistent news feed, enabling managers to track process and colleagues to stay up-to-date with the day-by-day happenings.

Developing P2P business applications
Moving business applications to the web has solved many issues like easier deployment and backups, but at same time introduced a single point of failure in the infrastructure. A group of open source frameworks seeks to solve the issue by helping developers to migrate their applications into resilient and scalable peer-to-peer networks.

Haedong Kumdo
Haedong Kumdo is a modern martial art based on ancient Korean sword techniques.

This should not detract from my open content activities, as the Knol pages are also Creative Commons-licensed.

A thousand years ago, men from my lands traveled here in search of opportunities and adventure. Now, due to intercontinental relationships and working permits, I follow their footsteps.

While Istanbul didn't score perfectly in Monocle's Quality of Life index, I still find it a quite appealing place for a web worker. The lifestyle is more relaxed than in the north, WiFi-equipped cafes are everywhere, food is good, and the old city and Bosporus are absolutely beautiful.

Web working while running a consultancy in Helsinki is not the easiest thing to do, but with some new processes, and new tools I think we may be able to cope. The main thing is to learn using telepresence tools better than we do now.

At least the web working test run I did in London earlier this month felt very productive. Now the plan is to split my time between Helsinki and Istanbul, and of course the mandatory conference trips. This all will be challenging for regular project work, and so good web working tips will be appreciated!

But in any case, my reasons for being in Istanbul go far beyond mere working environment and productivity...

http://jaiku.com/channel/Nemein

If you are a Jaiku user, feel free to join the channel. Others can follow it via the RSS feed.

As part of redesigning our processes, our company has been looking for a workstreaming solution. While private channels support in Jaiku would probably be the best option, we will now be testing ididwork.com for our needs.

Here is a quick overview of the first launched version of ididwork.com:

The good:

• Simple, pleasant user interface
• Tagging support (including machine tags), which means we can connect entries with Ajatus tags
• Email reminders for managerial review of entries
• Excel export of work reports

The bad:

• Users can be either managers or employees, not both. Managers don't have work to report?
• User's own log entries and log entries of colleagues are shown separately
• User can only belong to one organization. No multiple teams or projects

The ugly:

• No API
• No RSS feeds
• No XMPP support

Classmate PC

Intel's Classmate PC, which will soon use their new low-power Atom processor, runs Windows and varients of the GNU/Linux operating system such as Mandriva Linux. Mandriva, formerly Mandrake in France, acquired Brazilian Linux company Conectiva in 2005. Mandriva is also providing a customized version of Linux for the Gdium "netbook" which runs on a USB key.

Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

Yet nobody bothered to conduct a serious inquiry into the working conditions of people who make websites until A List Apart launched its first survey in 2007.

The results of the 2007 survey are online.

We're reminded of former executives of a now bankrupt film company disagreeing over the color of their new corporate jet's leather seats in reading the piece about comfort capsules for U.S. Air Force Generals.

One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table's wood be darkened.

Changing the seat color and pockets alone was estimated in a March 12 internal document to cost at least $68,240.

Terminator transport?

Everyone thought these guys were the best in the market at evaluating mortgages, so they let them skate by with huge debts and tiny financial cushions. But now it’s less clear they knew what they were doing, and it’s really hard to know who’s right and who’s selling pipe dreams and then hoping for the best.

- Thomas H. Stanton, John Hopkins University

I had some goals:

• Keeping status of different projects up-to-date with more accuracy
• Ensuring our sales and project management knows if some project is being blocked by missing materials
• Enabling a more distributed, web working culture

We're a small company of less than 10 people, and as such most project management methods have not been very successful for us. In general they have been made for situations where same person or team keeps on working on a project for several months, whereas in our situation a person typically works on several projects every day.

I discussed this over some beers with Tero Heikkinen from Rohea, and he told me how they were implementing Scrum in their small company. While their number of different projects running at the same time is a bit smaller, their situation otherwise is quite similar: same technologies used, Ajatus for work tracking, etc.

We had a company sauna evening and I presented Tero's ideas there: we would partially implement the Scrum model, and keep tuning it to our needs. At the first phase this means:

• Every morning we have an all-hands 15-20min meeting ("the daily Scrum") where everybody goes over what they have been doing the previous day, and what they were planning to do today. If they are being blocked by something missing: a software bug, missing information or other materials, this is also brought forward
• Every project has a file in Google Docs where we keep the project status and task list (Backlog). This task list is updated based on what comes up in the morning meeting
• Work hours are reported with Ajatus. Rohea also uses it for project burn-down charts, and once their add-on for that is finished we may do the same
• Emilia, the project manager (or Scrum Master) is responsible for resolving possible impediments and maintaining the per-project status files

The approach we have taken should be quite pragmatic and low-tech. Instead of fancy project management software we use simple word processing for status data. And thanks to Google Docs the documents produced are accessible and editable from anywhere.

Similarly the actual meetings are quite easy to manage. The people who are at the office attend there, and others attend either via a Skype or mobile phone conference call, depending on network availability. We decided to have them at 10am so that everybody will be able to participate. Even if there is a Sprint or meeting scheduled for the same time, the short time needed for our all-hands meeting means it can be held over a "cigarette break".

Ajatus is the only more experimental piece of software in our puzzle. In our company, we use it for hour reporting, expense tracking and keeping meeting minutes. For these it works quite well, although more reporting tools are definitely needed. The alpha status of CouchDb, the database software powering Ajatus has bit us a few times by database corruption (caused by OSX-specific erlang bug) or simply difficult installation procedure, but these problems will hopefully improve over time.

We're now in the second week of this model, and at least the gut feel is that this has improved coordination inside the company. The next challenge then is to let the customer get involved in the process. This can mean just sharing the project status files, or even giving them access to actual meetings or the Ajatus data.

Little emerald soul
Little emerald eye
Little emerald bird
We must say goodbye

Running the last mile of the 2008 Boston Marathon, Ethiopia's Dire Tune inches ahead of Alevtina Biktimirova on Commonwealth Avenue. Tune won by 2 seconds.




Kenya's Robert Cheruiyot, at 25013, was a strong lead. He won his fourth Boston Marathon despite an interruption in his training due to the civil strife in his homeland.

This isn't a battle for the smartphone space, but featurephones.