Dangerous Ideas

I generally don’t pay this much attention to DEMO, but shortly after I read Christine’s blog entry, my friend Shireen asked me a question yesterday about which is better, MojoPac or moka5. Both of these are being introduced at the DEMOfall conference.

About MojoPac or moka5 …A couple of years ago, I went with Val to a talk at Stanford about women and engineering. The professor who spoke there talked about portable computing – she talked about an idea where you could be working at the office, then you could save your entire environment, go home, and bring up that same environment there. She was very passionate, and I thought it was a neat idea and also an instance of how the stuff they were doing in the sixties is still being rediscovered today. Smalltalk could do something like that, although it wasn’t as generally useful unless your Smalltalk environment was your primary OS (which, for some programmers, it is). Like a lot of great ideas that come from academia, I thought that professor’s project would result in something theoretical. Then I took a look at moka5’s Web site. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but after seeing moka5’s site, I’m pretty sure it was Monica Lam. And the project looks a lot more solid than mere theory. And it’s much cooler than I originally thought.

Both MojoPac and moka5 are currently pitched as being able to take your PC with you on a USB drive anywhere you go. This sounds a lot to me like having your own copy of VMware or Parallels on a USB drive that you can run without needing to install it on the host PC. Pretty cool and a really great twist on virtualization, but doesn’t sound too different than the technology in other virtualization products. And, indeed, that seems to be exactly what MojoPac is (although I’m judging this from their Web site; there could be more under the hood). moka5, on the other hand, is pretty different from other virtualization technologies (in fact, it’s built on top of VMWare, so it’s an enhancement to a popular virtualization technology). They even have a page talking about the differences between LivePCs (i.e. moka5) and traditional virtualization technology in the über virbu (technical background) section of their Web site. The most obvious difference is that they’ve managed to separate system state and user state in LivePCs. This means that the producer of a LivePC can make changes to the system and have them appear to all of the users – the same benefits achieved through terminal services and other thin client technology (e.g., apply security patches to one source, have them work for everyone). In fact, you can stream LivePCs over the Internet and use your USB drive as a cache … pretty fantastic. And, of course, you can work offline, too. Oh, and they have file sharing (between host and LivePC, and between different LivePCs).

So what am I going to tell Shireen? I’ll take a look at their products when I have time (hah! that’ll be soon), but judging from their Web sites, moka5 is a lot more interesting and the fact that it’s based on VMware – a solid virtualization product – I’m inclined to think it’s probably the better choice. Plus, it’s founded by a woman computer science professor, which counts for a lot with me, too. Of course, I didn’t see pricing information on their site anywhere, and VMware is kind of pricey. Plus, a lot of the features I like are great for organizations but might matter less for individuals, at with regard to the aspect of moka5 that does what MojoPac does (a PC to go).

Of course, both MojoPac and moka5 require Windows. at Colorful Expressions, we have a lot of sysadmin clients with Windows, and I can already see how moka5 could make a big difference to at least one large organization. But for programming and personal stuff I much prefer working in Mac OS X or Linux. Of course, since moka5 is based on VMware, and since VMware currently supports Linux and will soon support Mac OS X, maybe there’s hope …

I read Christine’s blog where she often writes about cool and upcoming things, and she wrote a post about some cool new things at DEMOfall 2006. One of them, PostPath, really got my attention for being a drop-in replacement for Exchange. At Colorful Expressions, we’re offering Zimbra hosting to our customers. It’s a great solution but migrating from Exchange wasn’t the easiest process since it requires a plug-in to support Outlook. PostPath, on the other hand, is a drop-in replacement for Exchange. Put it on the network and AD and existing Exchange servers think it’s just an Exchange server. So do Outlook clients. Migrating users is as easy as using moving users from one Exchange server to another, using all the tools familiar to Exchange admins (which generally suck, but that’s another story). They also built on top of Zimbra’s open source code (I assume this is for Zimbra’s vaunted Web mail interface, but it could be more than that). And they deal with the main problems of Exchange, which I’d characterize as being more a problem for admins than for users. From a user perspective, Exchange isn’t terrible; from an admin’s perspective, it’s either a nightmare or a source of employment for a long time to come. Or both. ;-) This goes back to my theory that Microsoft is part of a conspiracy to keep idle sysadmins off the streets. I’m not ready to replace Zimbra with PostPath, but I’m definitely going to keep an eye on the company.

Wow, I’m impressed. It looks like Sreamlined will run on JRuby. This follows Charles Nutter’s post about getting Rails to run on JRuby.

I’ve never tried JRuby, so I don’t know how good it is, but just hearing that people have gotten some Rails and Streamlined applications running, even if they’re simple, is pretty impressive. I hadn’t realized how far along JRuby was. Charles’ post says that they can connect to some databases that Rails can’t right now (courtesy of JDBC). This opens up a lot of possibilities … Maybe if this goes well, certain elements of the Java and Ruby camps will fight a little less, too. ;-)

Like CJWP (who are organizing an APIs for Aimee Allison event in Oakland Chinatown this weekend!, the Oakland Tenants Union is one of the members of the Stop the Chinatown Evictions Coalition. The OTU is asking supporters to help with funding due to the lack of available grant money. They’re a great organization that does great things for tenants without charging membership dues.

Here’s a message from Eddie Fair of the OTU:

Dear Supporters of the Oakland Tenants Union,

The Oakland Tenants Union (OTU) is writing to request your help in maintaining our operations. For seven years, the OTU has been providing information and services to tenants: keeping tenants informed of their rights, representing tenants on issues of rent control in front of the Rent Adjustment Program, monitoring activities at City Hall and the state legislature, ensuring that tenant needs and concerns are understood and addressed in ordinances and laws written. The OTU was a driving force in helping get the Just Cause Eviction Ordinance passed, in writing the rent control ordinance, and currently leading the fight to prevent unlimited conversion of apartments to condominiums.

Understanding that many Oakland tenants live close to the poverty level, the OTU has typically not required membership dues or charged fees to tenants for our services.

Instead, we have managed to maintain our services through volunteer help, spontaneous donations from tenants for services provided, and from two grants from the Vanguard Foundation. In fact, grants have been the largest source of our operating budget. Unfortunately, grants are harder to come buy in the current economy as more nonprofits compete for them. Thus, the OTU must now turn to our membership for donations to maintain our phone services, PO Box, website, and many community activities on behalf of tenants.

Check our website www.oaklandtenantsunion.org to see some of the activities we are currently involved in. Then, please give as generously as you are able so the OTU can continue to serve tenants.

Address your check or money order to Oakland Tenants Union and mail it to: Oakland Tenants Union, 4043 Piedmont Avenue, Box 227, Oakland, CA. 94611.

This Saturday, a group of APIs will be getting together to show support for Aimee Allison, who’s running for Oakland’s District 2 City Council seat. This seat is particularly critical to Oakland politics for years to come – the other district council members are often split voting for or against progressive legislation. Allison, a solid progressive (much more so than her opponent in this runoff election, incumbent Pat Kernighan), would tip votes in favor of progressive issues. With progressive mayor-elect Ron Dellums coming into office (many of Dellums’ campaigners are on Allison’s campaign now), this would make for a solid team for the future. Allison has a good chance to win this election – she and Pat Kernighan ran pretty close to each other in the election.

The API community has a good chance of tipping the election in favor of one candidate or the other, since many APIs (particularly Chinese Americans) voted for Chinese American Candidate Shirley Gee, who came in third in the general election and didn’t make the runoff.

Update: The announcement for APIs for Aimee Allison is now available.

Like the other sheep, I’ve just moved from Typo to Mephisto. I’m living on edge right now, which is a little scary, but that’s soon going to be released as 0.7, right? ;-) I’m using the scribblish theme by Cristi Balan. I had to make a few changes to get it to work … needed to copy search.liquid and error.liquid from the default theme (Hemingway) and needed to change ‘comments’ to ‘article.comments’ in single.liquid. I also added the search form field to the template (which is probably why it doesn’t quite look right ;-) ). Things seem to be working okay … I’m looking forward to getting to know Mephisto (the blog engine, not the mythical being) a bit better!

Update: The feed URL for Mephisto differs from Typo. Also, it seems Mephisto only does Atom. I don’t think it’ll make a difference to most readers (could be a really bad assumption), so I just aliased the old URLs to the same action as /feed maps to, by adding these lines to lib/mephisto/routing.rb (right under the default feed one):

map.feed    'xml/rss20/*sections', :controller => 'feed', :action => 'feed'
map.feed    'xml/atom10/*sections', :controller => 'feed', :action => 'feed'

Update 2: updated base.css; removed reference to blockquote and added this (taken from Typo’s similarly-named Scribbish:

#content blockquote {
  color: #555;
  border-left: 5px solid #ccc;
  margin: 1.3em 1em; padding: 0 1em;
}

Everytime I move from one place to another I suddenly realize all the stuff I have to learn all over again. Recycling is one of the things I’m thinking about now that I’m living part-time in the Research Triangle Area of North Carolina (at least I’m still part-time in San Francisco!). There are so many ways to do an environmental spring cleaning in the Bay Area.

There’s of course the City of San Francisco’s disposal/recycling contractor, Sunset Scavenger (known by other names when you want other services, like shredding before recycling). The curbside recycling and composting programs make it easy to get environmentally dispose of a range of materials. The composting program is especially different from other municipalities – not only do they take yard waste, but they’ll take pretty much any organic material (including some food containers). That’s pretty great! Here in Durham, they only take yard waste – I guess I’ll have to go back to vermicomposting in the backyard. Maybe when my life is a little less hectic, though!

The City’s program is just the beginning, though … the Bay Area also has the great Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC), which not only rebuilds computers for schools and other organizations and people who need them, but can recycle things down to the material level (e.g. scrap metal). They’re a self-funded non-profit showing that green practices can make economical sense. You can see video of the ACCRC in action at the Maker Faire at Christine.net, including views of their veggie oil generator and an interview with a volunteer explaining how the recycling process works. For those in San Francisco who don’t want to travel to the East Bay to recycle their electronics, there are other options, too, like the local Goodwill, but those probably don’t come with cool veggie oil engines.

Of course, dropping stuff off is only one part of the recycling process. Places like SCRAP and Building REsources bring the process full cycle. SCRAP – the Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts – takes stuff that would normally be thrown out and resells them to people for art projects. How do they do this? No snake oil involved. ;-) They just operate on the simple principal that while an odd item alone (like a button) might seem like junk, if you put hundreds of them together, sorted by size and shape, they suddenly seem more appealing! I first visited SCRAP with other members of the Do-It-Herself Collective (one day I’ll get around to putting the archived Web site back up) – we found all kinds of uses for the materials there, including calendar making, book binding, candle making, and materials for all of our informative and promotional signs. Building REsources takes a similar approach to materials from construction and remodeling sites:

WE ARE a junkyard for the creative, a fun house for the builder, a launch pad for ideas!

I’m guessing that there are similar resources in other places, but finding them might be a challenge. Hopefully I can find a page like this for the Research Triangle Area!