Facebook and open source

Watching the movie The Social Network gave me an appreciation for the open source mindset that guided Facebook’s creation. During the scenes where Mark Zuckerberg is creating the first application that would become Facebook, I chuckled at all the actual open source and Linux terminology that was used. It wasn’t the typical made-up Hollywood technical mumbo-jumbo the actors were spouting: it was the real stuff. The movie didn’t take shortcuts and I was impressed.

Outside the fiction of the film, Facebook truly does value open source. Their platform is built on open source tools and the company shares bugfixes and enhancements back to the projects it relies upon. I consider the Facebook platform a prime example of how open source software is up to the challenge of the most demanding websites.

Upon installing some perl modules the other day, I noticed one of the CPAN mirrors was hosted at a Facebook domain. That’s when I found Facebook’s open source portal page, detailing the open source tools they use and the public mirrors that they host.

I admire Facebook for its commitment to open source.

Raleigh CityCamp

This weekend brings Raleigh’s first CityCamp. Raleigh CityCamp is an “unconference” where the agenda is decided on the participants: and everyone is a participant. It’s a giant brainstorming session about how government can be made more efficient using technology.

In an unconference, everyone is expected to contribute ideas and perspectives. There is no “audience” per se. What you as a participant get out of it is exactly what you put into it. It’s one of the few events where you never go home disappointed: because you help set the agenda.

I was involved in some of the initial planning for Raleigh CityCamp but soon had to dial back my time. Many of the planning meetings took place when I was away at other meetings. Also, my daughter’s birthday is Saturday, taking me out of the running for most of that day’s discussions.

I did volunteer to sit on a panel regarding the “government” view, joining Raleigh’s CIO, North Carolina’s CIO, and other experts. I’ll be bringing the layman’s point of view, obviously!

Local blogs

I was searching through the MT.Net archives tonight, trying to find the name of the service that sorted blogs based on their location. Turns out I found it, or where it used to be, anyway: Local Feeds. It used GeoURL meta tags to mark your blog so that you could easily find blogs in your area. It was a pretty useful service when I first found it seven years ago.

Wow. That’s a long time.

Anyhow, Local Feeds is defunct now, which is a shame. The reason I love Facebook so much is because I like knowing what’s going on in the area. I check Twitter often, for the same reason. Problem with Twitter is that I don’t get enough depth from it. I guess the same applies to Facebook: there’s only so much that one can fit into a status update.

I would like to see someone revive the blog geotagging idea and provide folks with a location-based blog search. I think it would fill a gap that the status-update services just can’t provide. Anyone out there want to take this up?

FDIC “Your Business Account” scam

Got this scam email purporting to be from the FDIC. Funny how the feds send their email through Ukraine. Folks, be very suspicious about any unsolicited emails, particularly ones that reference your bank account.

Kudos to the FDIC for addressing this scam on their webpage.

Return-Path: acquiescing5863@gmail.com
X-Original-To: Mark Turner
Delivered-To: Mark Turner
Received: from eddy.neusemedia.com (eddy.neusemedia.com [67.217.170.39])
by maestro.markturner.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id CEAE214119
for Mark Turner; Thu, 2 Jun 2011 09:47:01 -0400 (EDT)
X-Received-SPF: neutral (eddy.neusemedia.com: 209.19.62.178 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of gmail.com) client-ip=209.19.62.178; envelope-from=acquiescing5863@gmail.com; helo=remote.usgvmwd.org;
Received: from remote.usgvmwd.org (remote.usgvmwd.org [209.19.62.178])
by eddy.neusemedia.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E30178AE826
for Mark Turner; Thu, 2 Jun 2011 09:46:57 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from [86.93.221.142] (account easterlyhiru6@gmail.com HELO yyrxuzpt.poaijeowjkovzu.net)
by remote.usgvmwd.org (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.2.3)
with ESMTPA id 000646149 for Mark Turner; Thu, 2 Jun 2011 05:47:00 -0800
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 05:47:00 -0800
From: alert@fdic.gov
X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.51) Home
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-ID: 4283985778.NY7NS133995951@isplnzolzalejp.eeibmulcjotavug.ua
To: Mark Turner
Subject: FDIC: Your business account

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Logo

Dear Business Owner,

We have important news regarding your bank.

Please click here to see further details.

This includes information on the acquiring bank (if applicable), how your accounts and loans are affected, and how vendors can file claims against the receivership
FDIC

Questions for FDIC?
Contact Us

Repair conditioning

This week’s heat wave has taxed our upstairs AC unit to the maximum. I work upstairs every day and became alarmed at the rising temperatures there. The AC was not keeping up with its settings. I didn’t notice this last year but this is the first summer we’ve had our new upstairs office/bedroom, so any cooling issue has become more apparent.

I called up the neighborhood HVAC guy who went through his troubleshooting checklist. Refrigerant was fine, the compressor was fine. The blower coils were fine. Everything looked good. That is, until he checked the bottom of the blower in our attic.
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College and enterpreneurship

I read with interest PayPal co-founderPeter Thiel’s publicity stunt of paying 20 college students $100,000 each to drop out and innovate. He’s got a point when he says:

“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.

Some of the most successful folks I know in the tech industry do not have computer science degrees. Most of them attended college and most have earned degrees, but many of their degrees are in fields other than computer science. In many cases they might as well have skipped college entirely.

I worked with one guy who was so smart it was freaking scary. He could code rings around our degreed developers and yet his formal education ended with high school (and half of that home-schooled). I’ve met enough of these folks that I can say with certainty that college is absolute a waste of time and money for some people.
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Tree crew makes short work of tall pine

My neighbor got a pair of her tall pine trees cut down on Thursday. I broke out my digital video camera to record the process for the second tree. It was fascinating to watch them work, and even more fascinating to watch it again on video.

I sped up the video to 5 times the normal speed to show how the tree guy went about dismantling this pine.

The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – Businessweek

It’s a lonely calling. “Washington is full of Carnegie and Brookings Institutes with people who can tell you every option we have in Egypt or Pakistan,” laments Herr, who has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. “Try and find someone who does that on the postal service. There aren’t many.”

Yet Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. “It’s one of those things that the public just takes for granted,” he says.”The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and that’s it.”

via The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – BusinessWeek.

Air France 447 black boxes

Ages ago when I was taking ground school, thinking I would get my pilot’s license, I asked my pilot friend some questions about the mechanics of flying. To my surprise my friend, a retired Eastern Airlines Boeing L-1011 pilot, could not answer my simple questions. I wondered to myself how a seasoned pilot could not know the basics. It seemed to me that, like many things people do in their jobs, the skill of flying a plane becomes second nature to many pilots and they no longer have to think about what they’re doing.

Except when they do have to think. Like in an emergency.

The news today is that investigators of the doomed Air France flight 447 have found evidence that pilots were pulling the nose up on the plane in reaction to the stall warning.
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Doggie arms race

The suspect

I’m locked in a doggie arms race when it comes to the garden. Once the plants were in the ground, I surrounded the garden with a two-foot-high wire fence, thinking that that would be enough disincentive for Rocket, our boneheaded Labrador, from wandering in and grazing.

I should’ve known better. At first I surrounded the garden on all sides but one, leaving a three-foot-wide opening to walk in. I was anticipating Rocket would be too lazy to walk all the way around. Needless to say, it didn’t take long to see that this wasn’t working. A few days later, I put up more wire fence to block it all the way around.

Then I saw the fence next to my new fence was dented outwards, as if a big, clumsy, lazy dog had not quite cleared it on his way out. I didn’t do much about that, preferring to keep an eye on it. Turns out I never saw that happen again: it seems the height was enough to keep him from jumping it.
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