• Dana Blankenhorn: Decoupling the Grid in The War Against Oil

  “Watches and other battery-powered devices are likewise going off the grid, in this case the battery replacement grid. Small solar cells on the face of such products provide enough power to run most such devices. I recall having a solar-powered calculator back in the 1990s, so their proliferation is as much a function as reducing the energy drain of the device as increasing the capability of the cell. Expect cell phones to go next. But the real breakthroughs are yet to come, and are being driven by companies like IBM.”

  tags: OB, energy, grid, IBM, smarter planet

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• A look back at the open source victories of 2008

  “The past year brought some exciting advancements for the Linux operating system and open source software. Open technology continues to become more pervasive and the Linux kernel is now widely used in a multitude of mainstream products ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones. With 2008 coming to a close, we wanted to take a minute to look at some events of significance to the open source software community.”

  tags: OB, open source

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

In the waning days of 2008 the OpenDocument Alliance published their annual report regarding progress made on getting the standard adopted around the world. The 28 page document discusses development of the standard, worldwide adoption, positive changes toward open standards procurement policies, and application support. The main body of the document ends with a “Looking Forward to 2009″ section that includes

President-elect Obama’s IT technology and innovation platform, including his platform promise to “mak[ing] government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities” will put the U.S. front-and-center in the growing public debate on open formats.

• Open Document Format Has Been Accepted By 16 Governments — Microsoft Office — InformationWeek

  “The Open Document Format continues to gain ground with governments as the format in which they wish to create important documents, despite Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Office format, OOXML, being recognized as an international standard as well.”

  tags: OB, ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Grateful Dead Alum To Tour

  “Surviving members of the Grateful Dead say they’ll regroup for a 19-city tour, their first since 2004, beginning April 12 in Greensboro, N.C.”

  tags: OB, music, Grateful Dead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Linux/Open Source - Firefox, Safari Cut Into Internet Explorer’s Market Share

  “According to the Web metrics provider, Microsoft Relevant Products/Services’s browser market share has declined by more than six percent since February 2008. The browser held a 68.15 percent market share in December — its lowest in years. By contrast, Mozilla Firefox’s market share rose one-half of a percentage point from November and has climbed more than four percent since February to reach 21.34 percent in December.”

  tags: OB, browser, Firefox, Safari, IE

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• New World Notes: Koinup’s Top Ten Most Popular Second Life Sims For 2008

  “The folks at NWN partner Koinup just passed along the final data for the year, tracking the number of times members of the virtual world social network clicked the teleport SLURLs of the Second Life sims listed in their directory. Here they are below, with more screenshots and SLURL at each link; try to visit them all before the year is out! (And congrats to the creators and owners of such artfully realized locations– and all the Koinup members who paid tribute to them in the screenshots below.)”

  tags: OB, virtual worlds, Second Life

• Engage! Expo - March 10-11, 2009 - NYC (formerly Virtual Worlds 2009)

  “Engage! Expo (formerly the Virtual Worlds Conference) is the event for kid, youth and young adult brands, media, entertainment and agencies to meet and learn how to combine their existing online efforts with the unparalleled engagement opportunities, new revenue streams of the 3D Web and Virtual Worlds. Now in our third year we invite you to sign up to receive our email updates.”

  tags: OB, conference, virtual worlds

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Two year’s ago when my wife Judith was running for the New York State Assembly, I wrote a simple events calendar for her website to keep track of all the local meetings, parades, and county fairs where she would be appearing. At that time and since, I’ve thought about having a similar calendar for this website.

Over the holidays I sat down to see what I could put together. I did some research and found that there are several very good PHP-based events calendars, almost all of which did a lot more than I wanted. That is, I didn’t need a database back-end, fancy input interface, and an AJAX-based presentation. That is, I don’t think I need them yet.

So I wrote my own in PHP. It’s rudimentary, but it gets the job done. There are some more things I want to do with it over time to make it more attractive and functional, such as adding some images, tags, and mapping capabilities. Maybe I’ll even put in RSS and ATOM feeds. It’s probable that I’ll play with WordPress to try to do what I want before I extend this one too much.

What am I going to include in it? Well, anything in which I’m interested. Right now there are several open source conferences; concerts by Bob Dylan, Old Crow Medicine Show, Emmylou Harris, and Joan Baez; a guitar show in Montreal; and a few other things. It’s meant to be eclectic and match the topics and spirit of what I discuss in my blog. Feel free to send me suggestions.

You can access the events calendar via the link on the right sidebar or right here.

It’s that time of year again. Last year I wrote about challenges and priorities for open source, standards, and virtual worlds. In January, 2007, I reviewed my favorite blog entries for 2006 (and note that I was considerably more succinct when I did this for 2008 about two weeks ago). Finally, in 2006 I made some “open wishes” for that year.

I do go back and read these prognostications though I don’t grade myself on them. What usually happens is that things turn out to be more complicated than expected or else something surprising pops up. Financial market meltdown effect on open source as predicted twelve months ago? Sun buying MySQL?

That’s fine, and that’s what makes this sort of thing entertaining, though what happened to Wall Street et al was not funny by any means.

When I make predictions I’m somewhat handicapped in what I can say. I can’t give away IBM plans or strategies, nor can I pretend to make official pronouncements on behalf of the company when I’m really just trying to stimulate conversation and brainstorming. Business and industry partnerships also limit the amount I might decide to be critical about another industry player. That is, and I think you all know this, I’m not really completely independent.

Thus, to be clear, what follows are just my personal thoughts on some things we might or might not see in 2009 as it concerns open source.

• The pressure will pick up on successful open source database-driven projects like WordPress to use databases like PostgresSQL in addition to MySQL, though it might be difficult to do.
• We will not see a major fork of MySQL away from the Sun-maintained version.
• Microsoft will initiate a serious and non-trivial project at the Apache Software Foundation, in part to show that their $100,000 investment last summer was more than just marketing.
• Microsoft will not initiate any sort of serious and non-trivial project using GPL v3, though they will by 2012.
• OpenOffice.org will continue to mature and add users, especially on the Mac.
• Apple’s iWork desktop productivity suite will gain support for ODF, with interoperability with OpenOffice.org a key consideration.
• We still won’t see an open source competitor to Adobe Photoshop that has enough features and is easy enough to use. (I know about GIMP and Seashore.)
• The level of shrillness about open source supporters who use Macs will rise.
• The number of open source supporters who use Macs will rise. (Aside: empirically, the number of industry analysts who use Macs already appears to have increased.)
• The use or planned use of open source in governments, especially the US, will rise significantly.
• We’ll see fewer columns and trade journal blogs dedicated to open source by the end of the year as 1) open source becomes more mainstream, and 2) people run out of things to say.
• The growth of new open source projects on sites like Sourceforge will slow, but the total number of open source contributions will increase as more people work on key projects.
• Business will be good for intellectual property attorneys as more companies decide to incorporate externally-developed open source code into their products.
• OpenSimulator will increasingly challenge Second Life for those who wish to host their own virtual worlds.
• A new non-Java, non-Mono open source virtual world project will start to get serious traction this year.

I may come back and add a hunch or two as I think about this some more. How about you? What do you think will happen?

• City of Heroes ‘Mac’ Open Beta! | City of Heroes

  “The City of Heroes Development Team and TransGaming Media are pleased to announce that Mac users will now be able to test out City of Heroes for the Macintosh.”

  tags: OB, NP, video games, Mac

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The Energy Challenge - Houses With No Furnace but Plenty of Heat - Series - NYTimes.com

  “DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.”

  tags: OB, heat, green, furnace

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• More Readers Are Picking Up Electronic Books - NYTimes.com

  “For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.”

  tags: OB, ebook, Amazon, Kindle

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Mashed Potatoes with Parsnip and Horseradish | Williams-Sonoma

  “An underappreciated root vegetable, the parsnip looks like a white carrot and has a slightly sweet flavor. Parsnips can be cooked in the same way you cook carrots, boiled, steamed, roasted or grilled. Unlike carrots, however, they are not good eaten raw. Try to buy them individually rather than in bags, since the bagged ones are often not as fresh and, once peeled, are usually too thin to be useful in many dishes. Parsnips are at their peak of flavor during the cold winter months when frost converts their starches to sugar.”

  tags: OB, BK, recipes, potato, parsnip, horseradish

• Corn Pudding | Williams-Sonoma

  “Similar to a soufflé, this corn pudding puffs up, then sinks a little as it cools. It makes an impressive side dish for our Grilled Chicken with Ancho Barbecue Sauce (see related recipe at left). Or serve the pudding as a simple main course, paired with heirloom tomatoes and crusty bread.”

  tags: OB, BK, recipes, corn

• Artichokes, Roman Style | Williams-Sonoma

  “Rome’s Campo dei Fiori market offers some of the world’s most beautiful artichokes, which are given the following treatment in countless Roman homes and restaurants.”

  tags: OB, BK, recipes, artichokes

• Spanakopita | Williams-Sonoma

  “Common all over Greece, stuffed filo pastries make a memorable meze, or appetizer. These small triangles are stuffed with feta and spinach. You might also see them stuffed with feta and herbs, or with lamb and spices and rolled into cigar shapes or tied like knots. Serve these pastries with a glass of ouzo over ice.”

  tags: OB, BK, recipes, spanakopita

• Carrot-Ginger Soup | Williams-Sonoma

  “A slow-simmered stock and fresh, firm carrots deliver a bright orange pureed soup with an intense sweet flavor, complemented by orange zest. The sweet onion, ginger and garlic contribute pungency to the finished soup, while the starchy nature of the carrots delivers a pleasing spoon-coating consistency.”

  tags: OB, BK, soup, recipes

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• International Guild of Knot Tyers

  “We are an educational non-profit making organisation dedicated to furthering interest in practical, recreational and theoretical aspects of knotting. Our aim is to preserve traditional knotting techniques and promote the development of new techniques for new material and applications.”

  tags: OB, knots

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

As we wind down down 2008 and head into the holidays, I’ve been doing some planning about blog posts and longer pieces I plan to write in 2009. As part of that, I decided to go back over 2008 and list some of favorite posts from this year.

• “Ten challenges and priorities for open standards in 2008″
• “Announcement: The Eco-Patent Commons”
• “While you’re waiting, don’t save in OOXML format”
• “#2. If I were to build a virtual world … building up the basic model”
• “Some metrics for measuring the success of the OOXML BRM”
• “The OOXML BRM: Secrets and statistics”
• “Springsteen in Rochester”
• “Regarding OOXML and the need for change”
• “Should we require full disclosure by standards participants?”
• “More on the New York State report: A customer’s request”
• “On why the side porch tilts”
• “Family UK Trip, Days 2 and 3″
• “OOXML appeals: Now or never”
• “Open source and piracy”
• “LinuxWorld 2008 predictions and podcasts”
• “Swedish pop music 24/7″
• “Open letter to ISO/IEC from 6 countries on OOXML fiasco”
• “Our first child goes to college”
• “Remarks on the IBM Standards Principles”
• “Pretoria ODF Users Workshop”
• “Athens”
• “Twitter redux”
• “East coast, west coast + “smarter planet””
• “Everyone’s talking: standards reform”
• “Compatibility, interoperability, and interchangeability”

There are probably a few others that I could choose, but these are representative.

As I’ve done in the past, several times I wrote a post saying “this is the first of several entries in which i’ll discuss …” and then never quite got to the later entries, at least in the ways I had planned. I’ll need to try to fix that bad habit in 2009 or at least take some time out to deliver the sequels.

This year is not quite over and there is both more work to do and things to write (see, I’m still saying that). Thanks for coming along with me this year, one that’s been very significant for me personally. When we all started 2008 I don’t think we remotely imagined the challenges that we as an industry and, indeed, a world will face in 2009. Open standards, open source, quality, innovation, new approaches to intellectual property, and community-based approaches will be more important that ever.

That should give me more than enough to write about. Of course, I have another porch or two that needs some work …

• Linux Foundation Appoints Ted Ts’o to Position of Chief Technology Officer - MSNBC Wire Services - msnbc.com

  “Since 2001, Ts’o has worked as a senior technical staff member at IBM where he most recently led a worldwide team to create an enterprise-level real-time Linux solution. He will return to IBM after this two-year fellowship at The Linux Foundation. Ts’o has been recognized throughout the Linux and open source communities for his contributions to free software, including being awarded the 2006 Award for the Advancement of Free Software by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).”

  tags: OB, open source, Linux

• Three undersea cables cut: traffic greatly disturbed between Europe and Asia/Near East zone

  “France Telecom observed today that 3 major underwater cables were cut: “Sea Me We 4” at 7:28am, “Sea Me We3” at 7:33am and FLAG at 8:06am. The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear.”

  tags: OB, internet, cable

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.