Year: 2005

Keeping America Strong

Betcha did­n’t know that small one-per­son con­sult­ing com­pan­ies in Canada play a vital role in keep­ing the US strong, didja? Makes you won­der why I moved to a big US-based com­pany, but I digress. 

I found out just how vital these small com­pan­ies are when an asso­ci­ate pro­du­cer from a TV pro­duc­tion com­pany cold called a few months ago to see wheth­er I’d be inter­ested in tak­ing part in their series called, yup, Keep­ing Amer­ica Strong. When I poin­ted out that I was in Canada and a one-per­son con­sult­ing com­pany, he respon­ded that keep­ing Canada strong would help the US bor­ders and that small com­pan­ies also play a vital role. And that the series was hos­ted by Wil­li­am Shat­ner, sup­por­ted by tele­vi­sion news anchors and a Navy Admiral.

I must admit, I was intrigued, although I might have been more temp­ted had it been Leonard Nimoy host­ing rather than Wil­li­am Shat­ner. Still, it was worth spend­ing anoth­er few minutes on the phone, explain­ing what XML does and how it is used by vari­ous US gov­ern­ment depart­ments such as Home­land Secur­ity. XML obvi­ously passed the test of being deemed worthy of the next step, which was to meet the field pro­du­cer who would write up the pro­pos­al for each “ente­pren­eur­i­al com­pany” (their words) that wanted to “move for­ward in these times” (their words). At about this stage I star­ted won­der­ing just how much this was going to cost, although I was enjoy­ing the pol­ished deliv­ery of the bene­fits of being on TV with the “Amer­ic­an icons” (their words). Even­tu­ally I got the answer. The major celebrit­ies were donat­ing their time and energy for this import­ant endeav­our, and the only costs were a con­tri­bu­tion to the pro­duc­tion costs of a mere $US 15,000. A tad pricey for a van­ity kick, I thought. So I declined with thanks, got a nice fol­low-up email, and still have the fax with the details of what I missed out on. Maybe I’ll keep that for pos­ter­ity; after all, paper does­n’t degrade the same way web sites do.

Then yes­ter­day I found an Invit­a­tion for Inter­view for “For­bes Radio” on Amer­ic­an Air­lines in my inbox. Yup, anoth­er invit­a­tion to prove I’m one of these “innov­at­ive industry and busi­ness lead­ers, who through effect­ive col­lab­or­a­tion, pro­gress­ive strategies, improved pro­ductiv­ity, and increased agil­ity, provide com­pan­ies and indi­vidu­als a com­pet­it­ive advant­age and bet­ter qual­ity of work and life”. This oppor­tun­ity is to take part in a 3‑minute inter­view to be played on Amer­ic­an Air­lines inf­light pro­gram, which has a “cap­tive audi­ence of 3.4 mil­lion exec­ut­ive trav­el­ers per month”, and offered at the dis­coun­ted rate of only $US 4,995! So make sure you remem­ber your iPod next time you fly on Amer­ic­an Airlines. 

Corporate Blogs/Wikis Article

The art­icle I wrote on some of the busi­ness uses for blogs and wikis has been pub­lished, under the title Blogs & Wikis: Tech­no­lo­gies for Enter­prise Applic­a­tions?.

I’d like to thank every­one acknow­ledged in the art­icle (Bob DuCh­arme, Lex­is­Nex­is; Chris­ti­an Wat­son, Seattle Children�s Hos­pit­al; Chris­toph­er Mahan, Health Net Inc.; Dave Pawson, RNIB; Derek Miller, Nav­arik; Jordan Franks, Trac­tion Soft­ware; Leigh Dodds, Ingenta; Mal­colm Tredin­nick, CommSe­cure; Norm Walsh, Sun Microsys­tems; Richard Tal­lent, Envir­on­ment­al Resources Man­age­ment; Robert Scoble, Microsoft; Ross May­field, Social­text; Tim Bray, Sun Microsys­tems; and Tony Coates, Lon­don Mar­ket Sys­tems). They all spent time writ­ing com­ments or emails in response to my request or talk­ing to me about what they, their com­pan­ies, or their cus­tom­ers are or aren’t doing with blogs and wikis. The tim­ing of the art­icle also meant I could put stuff in from the North­ern Voice conference.

Before doing my research for the art­icle I had­n’t real­ised just how wide­spread the use of blogs and wikis and hybrid sys­tems is in the busi­ness world. Even if wikis are only used for bursts of activ­ity, like organ­ising a one-off meet­ing, or used by one per­son for research notes, they’re still being used. Blog sys­tems are being used for sites, such as the Seattle Chil­dren’s Hos­pit­al web site which don’t look like blogs in any way; they’re a cheap, easy to use pub­lish­ing sys­tem. Blogs are being used for quick coordin­a­tion of tasks, such as at UBC’s Careers Online Pro­ject Web­log (this one did­n’t make it into the art­icle). There is a lot of blog- or wiki-based coordin­a­tion and col­lab­or­a­tion going on in the busi­ness world, much of it prob­ably unbe­knownst to people high­er up in these com­pan­ies, a bit like the way intranets star­ted. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see where this band­wag­on goes next.

Now at Sun

As of today (Feb­ru­ary 28, 2005), I work for Sun Microsys­tems. And no, it’s not what you think. It’s actu­ally all Eve Maler’s fault. She and I have enjoyed work­ing togeth­er on the XML Con­fer­ence and the CSW XML Sum­mer School for a couple of years, so when an open­ing came up in her group at Sun that she thought I was suited for, it was too good an oppor­tun­ity to pass up. I filled in the applic­a­tion, Eve made sure the right people saw it, and everything worked out! We did try to keep it secret from Tim for a while, but that ended up not being prac­tic­al. After all, he had already figured out the issues with liv­ing in Canada and work­ing for a U.S.-based group and knew the right people to talk to.

My title is Seni­or Tech­nic­al Pro­gram Man­ager; like Eve I will be work­ing on inter­op­er­ab­il­ity and tech­no­logy part­ner­ships. I’m look­ing for­ward to it, although since I’ve nev­er worked for a big com­pany before, I’m not quite sure what to expect in many ways. I do know that blog­ging is encouraged!

And then there are my oth­er activ­ites. Since the W3C Pro­cess Doc­u­ment does not allow two mem­bers of the W3C Advis­ory Board to come from the same com­pany, and Eduardo Gutentag was recently elec­ted, I am resign­ing from the AB after almost three years. I’ve learned a lot from the AB mem­bers and the W3C Team and I thank them. 

I will chair the XML Con­fer­ence again this year, but Eve won’t be on the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee. And I’ll be in Oxford in July for the XML Sum­mer School as well.

Upgrading MySQL on Debian

I’ve been wait­ing patiently for the updated Word­Press to come out. Once it did, I decided I should really update MySQL as well, so that I could finally serve pages prop­erly as UTF‑8. I’d been run­ning MySQL 3.23, and so I needed to upgrade to 4.0 to get real UTF‑8 sup­port. I also con­tem­plated upgrad­ing to MySQL 4.1.

The pro­cess was just com­plic­ated enough that I figured I should do the backup brain thing and dump the pro­ced­ure here; it might help someone else to have the gory details doc­u­mented, and it will cer­tainly help me when I come to upgrade!

I haven’t really used a Unix sys­tem since I had to move to Win­dows in 1996; for­tu­nately Debi­an makes upgrad­ing and installing really easy (who­ever came up with the apt-get sys­tem deserves lots of praise). I run the stable ver­sion of Debi­an because it was set up on stable in the first place and I’ve nev­er really needed to change that and I’d rather have the secur­ity patches be applied auto­mat­ic­ally. Except for, the Debi­an stable ver­sion of MySQL is, of course, 3.23 and not 4.0. The best solu­tion to this seemed to be to install the back­port of MySQL 4.0 from backports.org. In the­ory this is really easy, of course in prac­tice it does take a cer­tain know­ledge of how Debi­an works. This is because Debi­an Does Everything Dif­fer­ently (DDED). I’m sure there is lots of logic in how Debi­an does things, I just have nev­er quite taken the time to fig­ure it out. And up till now, I did­n’t need to. I did have one big advant­age though, Edd Dum­bill was online and was able to help me fig­ure out those little details that make the dif­fer­ence between frus­tra­tion and success.

So here’s the step-by-step upgrade details I needed. Debi­an experts have no need to read any further…

  1. Add the line deb http://www.backports.org/debian stable mysql-dfsg into your /etc/apt/sources.list file (I don’t know why it’s called dfsg and I’m not sure I want to know).
  2. Run apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade, or apt-get dist-upgrade.
  3. Find that although the pack­age list gets updated, noth­ing hap­pens and the mes­sage is “0 to install”
  4. Edd sug­gests check­ing the policy with apt-cache policy mysql-server.
  5. This shows that Sur­prise! the upgrade isn’t being installed.
  6. To increase the pri­or­ity, we need to pin the back­port. Edd tells me the magic incant­a­tion, which is to cre­ate a /etc/apt/preferences file with the contents
    Package: *
    Pin: release a=backports.org
    Pin-Priority: 995
  7. apt-get upgrade now works! Hurrah!
  8. Next to run mysql_fix_privilege_tables to fix the GRANT tables etc. Except for, the MySQL data­base root account has spaces in the pass­word and this script does­n’t like that. Even hard­cod­ing the pass­word in the script does­n’t work.
  9. Use mysqladmin to change the root pass­word so it no longer has spaces in it (BTW, does any­one else find it annoy­ing that some MySQL things use executable u=username and oth­ers use executable u username? For­tu­nately PHPMy­Ad­min makes most of my MySQL admin duties much easier).
  10. Suc­cess! The blog still works, the tables appear to have been fixed, and life goes back to nor­mal. I decide to not upgrade to MySQL 4.1 just yet, since I don’t really need to. This box in the base­ment acts as my fire­wall, DSL con­nec­tion, and web­site host; stick­ing with a stable con­fig­ur­a­tion strikes me as being a good idea most of the time.

Northern Voice

The North­ern Voice blog­ging con­fer­ence was on Sat­urday. I was on the organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee and I was glad that all our efforts paid off. People seemed to really enjoy them­selves, chaos did­n’t even threaten to take over, and because some registered attendees did­n’t show up, we even man­aged to fit every­one in without exceed­ing the fire depart­ment reg­u­lated capa­city! There’s some­thing relaxed about put­ting on a con­fer­ence that only costs $CAD 20 to attend (of which a quarter went on the cof­fee and tea, so it was nice that we were praised for the tea selec­tion). We also had a good num­ber of spon­sors.

The con­fer­ence con­tents have been exhaust­ively covered in oth­er post­ings — I have nev­er been to an event that was so logged, blogged, and pho­to­graphed in my life! The first posts and pho­tos were going up 15 minutes in to the con­fer­ence — just check out the 566 pho­tos on Flickr, the Pub­Sub feed, the Tech­nor­ati feed, or the del.icio.us list­ing to get a fla­vour of the day. 

This was a small. light­weight con­fer­ence with lots of scope for people to talk. At $20, people could afford to come who knew little about tech­no­logy (e.g., the woman who asked Tim Bray what Sun Microsys­tems does, as she’d nev­er heard of it) but we also had people from way out­side Van­couver (Bay area, the UK, Toronto…) which I would­n’t have expec­ted. And they all seemed to get some­thing from it and star­ted ask­ing about next year. 

Per­son­al take-aways: I should­n’t be so form­al in what I write; writ­ing more rather than being per­fect is what I should focus on (I blame too many years spent writ­ing form­al sci­entif­ic papers). The RSS excerpt vs full feed debate goes on; one way to make sure Robert Scoble does­n’t read what you write is to only put head­lines in your feed, for example, and short excerpts are also likely to get your blog dumped from his feed list (one could per­haps think about wheth­er this is an advant­age or not, depend­ing on wheth­er you want someone in Microsoft pay­ing atten­tion to what you write). The biggest buzzwords were authen­ti­city and trans­par­ency and how to find the line between reveal­ing enough of your­self to be your­self, without com­prom­ising your or oth­er people’s pri­vacy. I also dis­covered that even in a con­fer­ence with only two tracks you can miss out on a lot and pod­casts only go so far in alle­vi­at­ing that. And that if people enjoy the day, they want to buy the t‑shirt.

Upgrading

As you’ve prob­ably noticed by the dif­fer­ent look to Any­way, I’ve upgraded to ver­sion 1.5 of Word­Press. It will take a little while before I have everything imple­men­ted the way I want it; in the mean­time please let me know if any­thing is broken!