It’s that time again. Time for one of my all time favorite conferences: Etech. If you’re here, look me up. If you’re not, you can always sit in on the IRC channel at Freenode.net #etech, which often is more fun than meatspace.

MindTouch (OpenGarden.org) has organized a scavenger hunt I’m calling: MindTouch Scavenger Hunt, Wii!!. Yes, I know I’m not so good at naming things. Did you ever hear the story of how I was so fed up with arguing with SteveB about the name of DekiWiki that I asked the janitor in my office in MN what his name was and wanted to name DekiWiki after him. His name was Brown. In my defense, we had been arguing about the name for over a month.

The first two people to complete the MindTouch Scavenger Hunt, Wii!! will win, guess what: Nintendo Wiis. I’ll be posting the hints Tuesday, 3/27 probably around 5pm.

Right now I’m sitting in the bar at they Hyatt trying to play catch up on community related work at OpenGarden.org. Also, somehow this year I ended up with a totally lame pass. I came down for lunch today and the good folks standing guard informed me I was not allowed because my badge is lame. _sob_ I don’t belong again! _/sob_. Our previous admin who booked my ticket was…well…less than focused.

There is a APP BOF I’m looking forward to and a BlogBridge BOF tonight, but I think they conflict. I’ll probably have to go to the APP BOF. Anyway, expect some posts and photos.

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog

I have to learn to do trackbacks instead of leaving comments because so often people won’t accept my comments. _sniffle_People don’t like what I have to say_/sniffle_. Anyway, this is funny. I really shouldn’t poke fun, but it’s so easy.

Today we have more deployment options than any established or upstart vendor.

* Managed Service Appliance (SaaS behind the firewall)
* Dedicated Hosted Appliance (here is a good introduction to Appliances)
* Custom On-site
* Hosted Professional
* Hosted Personal (free)
* Open Source

Of course, MindTouch has all these (for longer in some cases) +1 more: software appliance (VM). It’s called MindTouch Deki. I especially enjoy the recent trumpeting of the managed service appliance. A concept MindTouch pioneered. We call it the DekiBox. Also, as I’ve spoken about previously, the claim that Socialtext is open source is dubious at best considering they’re not OSI-approved and it took them four years of claiming to be open source to release their source code. Strange, I know. Anyway, clearly Socialtext is not the most comprehensive provider. Of course, you don’t hear me saying: “Sorry, Charlie“. That would be totally lame.

SteveB recently installed a distributed computing client on his Playstation3 and earlier today shared this wonderful story with me:

The Folding@Home project…uses software programs to simulate the way proteins change shape – the way they fold – within the human body. Correct folding is necessary for proteins to perform their many functions, such as carrying oxygen from lungs, while misfolding can lead to conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

The complex software simulations… require so much computer time that some segments of research can’t be completed within a graduate student’s years at the university. But when the simulations can be downloaded to a PS3, the speed of the research will be multiplied, depending on how many people participate. Pande expects, for example, to shorten the time for some simulations from a year to two weeks.

“It’s a big deal,” said Pande. “Even starting small, the PS3 means a dramatic increase.”

Here’s one scenario: Sony says there are about 1 million PS3 owners in the United States and Canada. If just 10,000 of them (1 percent) download the simulations and run them to completion, the project estimates it will double the computing help it already gets from personal computers around the globe. – San Jose Mercury News

The client for running Folding@Home was released earlier this week and holy crap!

OS Type	Current TFLOPS*	Active CPUs	Total CPUs
Windows	151	159144	1624849
Mac OS X/PowerPC	7	8713	95337
Mac OS X/Intel	7	2716	7204
Linux	35	24959	215690
GPU	41	697	2185
PLAYSTATION®3	346	14138	15079
Total	587	210367	1960344

Folding@Home Client Stats

Yes, you heard me correctly. It was just released earlier this week! Already PS3’s are providing more than twice the processing power of Windows PCs. How is this possible, you might ask, when there are far less active Sony PS3 CPUs? I won’t claim to know a whole lot about the Cell’s CPU arch, which is what powers the Sony PS3. I haven’t taken the time to read up on it, but I have a basic understanding after a quick read. The Cell is really designed to allow CPUs to federate to work cooperatively and share processing, it’s all about distributing processing. Partially this is achieved by processing being sent to hardware cells in the form of software cells that consist of data and programs (known as jobs or apulets). The processing is completed without caching. In the case of the PS3 the Cell consists of a PowerPC chip, which plays the role of the Power Processor Element (PPE) a kind of master CPU and eight Synergistic Processor Elements (SPE) that act as slave processors. Each SPE has a 256 Kbyte “local stores”. These are like are like cache because they are on-chip memory, but behave more like CPU registers. The local stores access main memory in blocks of 1Kb minimum (16Kb maximum), but the SPEs can only operate on local stores and not directly on main memory. This approach is a means of minimizing contention and complexity in order to facilitate distribution of processing and scaling (adding more "cells"). As usual, everything old is new again. A similar architecture was employed with the Cray 2 in 1985, what’s new is 21 years of Moore’s law and how bloody cheap chips are now.

The Cell will almost certainly find its way into a variety of devices, such as PDAs and other consumer goods. Imagine for a moment what this means. We’ll be able to create very powerful distributed computing arrays. My PDA will be capable of supercomputing processing power by distributing. Also think about what the PS3 is going to do for number crunching with projects like Folding@Home. Very, very cool stuff. This is going to dramatically change things. It is important to note that programming to a system that employs an architecture like the Cell is pretty hard. We need an abstraction to improve this. This is actually what I was recruited to help work on at Microsoft back in 2003 when I met SteveB. I surely don’t claim to be an adept on this topic, but SteveB surely is.

The greatest thing in the world is snuggling up with my 15 month old daughter, Ashby, in the morning and watching TV. Unfortunately the only time she doesn’t mind snuggling is when we watch the ‘stupid box’. There is a new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse television show on the Disney channel. It’s awful. Neither Tara nor I can stand it, but Ashby loves it. It’s all computer graphics. At the end of every episode there is this insipid song they sing, which sticks to your brain like starch on rice. You can’t shake it! Allow me to share:

“We’re splitting the scene, we’re full of beans.” Huh?

I spent the first half of this week at the Dow Jones WebVentures conference in San Mateo. Ken Liu, the CEO Steve and I brought in November, presented in two sessions and I ran a booth. The booth was a good buy for us. The cost was very reasonable, there was a total of five exhibitors, and we were the only exhibitor worth talking to. No offense to the others, but they were just not interesting to the conference goers. There was an executive recruitment firm, a law firm, a financial services firm, and some booth that just had a TV playing. Seriously, someone setup a table, a tv, and hit play. Not one person even bothered looking at it. I have no idea what the company did, I can’t remember the name of the company, nor do I care to. Equally strange was the person manning the law firm’s booth. She literally barricaded herself behind with a large retractable upright banner, a table, and other things. You couldn’t even see her because she was behind the banner, behind the table, and her nose was buried in some reading material. Not exactly someone you would want to talk to even if you did see her. She may as well have setup a TV and hit play. It likely would have been more effective. Why even bother? Clearly we were a hit in this crowd.

There was a lot of interest in our newest product. With this we’re helping online publishers, media, newspapers to create and steer quality user generated content and weave it into their editorial content. In short we’re giving traditional online media companies the ability to have a social media initiative that they can have a reasonable level of control over. This provides stickiness, freshness of content, authenticity, and most importantly: inventory. It’s interesting stuff. The industry is desperate for this. We’ve began developing this product because we’ve been approached several times by media companies that have asked us for exactly this. We’re getting a lot of traction in the industry and we got a lot of traction at WebVentures.

While at WebVentures I met some interesting people and I learned about some interesting companies and lots of very uninteresting ones. The companies I found interesting included: BigTribe (which is begging for a wiki), Dapper, Mashery, and Multiply. Mashery was started by Oren who shared a table with me at DemoFall. He happened to be present when I made a total ass of myself. For the record, my nerves got the better of me when the panelist couldn’t hear me and I misunderstood this. No Marc Orchant 😉 I wasn’t being arrogant. To the contrary. Anyway, have you heard of Multiply? Neither had I. I ended up at the same table during the cocktail hour with Multiply’s Founder and CEO, Peter. He’s a really nice guy. Interesting fact about Peter: he was user #56 on Slashdot. Turns out Multiply has 4 Million registered users, 13 Million visitors monthly and 1 BILLION page views monthly! EGAD, And I’ve never heard of this company…odd. Peter was fun to chat with. We shared drinks and conversation for a couple hours. I pushed Peter on adopting OpenID and he had a very logical and disappointing response. His point was that OpenID, currently, is only interesting to smaller, up and coming, companies. For companies with medium to large sized communities there is a disincentive to consuming OpenID. Sure they’ll merrily be a provider, but why should they make it easy for their community to be mobile?

In many of the panels at this event there was much todo about many of the traditional walled garden social networking sites. I am convinced when identity becomes distributed and mobile these walled gardens will cease to exist. We the users will own the nexus of our relationships with others, the content we’ve created, the content we read regularly, and how we define ourselves. This nexus can also help us define how our content can be consumed and by whom. Will we need the old walled garden model? How will they adapt?

I ran into Dave Hersh from Jive again. I was on a panel with him at Community 2.0. He’s a bright guy and fun to speak with. I also met Isaac Garcia the CEO and Co-Founder of Central Desktop. He too seemed to be an intelligent and friendly fellow. I enjoyed speaking with him and we did so at length. He was as open about his business as I’ve always been with mine. The biggest surprise that came out of Isaac’s and my conversation was that he was as confused by the folks at Dynamo with respect to the Wiki.com domain as everyone else was. Wild stuff.

In conclusion, WebVentures was a successful and rewarding event. I even enjoyed it. I don’t know why this surprises me. Maybe I’ve just become accustomed to and fond of geeky events like the upcoming Etech that I’m attending.

OpenGarden

MindTouch has launched Wik.is, a community wiki site that simplifies collaboration and knowledge sharing for friends and family members, businesses, associations, students and educators.

The uses of wik.is are as broad as human knowledge and activity: Friends and family: family scrap book, travel log, event planning and celebration (graduation, wedding, anniversary) Personal interest,clubs and associations: sports, cars, games, Siamese cats, Persian rugs, combat airplanes, Mongolian throat singers, anything and everything. Schools and researchers: research papers, study plan, group project, school bulletins, and more.

We thought it would be a good idea to launch/re-launch http://www.Wik.is in connection with the Community2.0 conference. I want to highlight a few choice communities. These are in no particular order and are a few I noticed while watching sites scroll by:

• essentials.wik.is
• videogamebabes.wik.is
• neosocratics.wik.is
• mrcg.wik.is
• ladysenegal.wik.is
• ssis.wik.is
• futurama.wik.is
• wapathfinders.wik.is

Of course within the first few hours we had a big spike in traffic (see graphic below), it took us down for a few hours.

I have to say. I’m surprised. We didn’t really do much to build awareness. It’s not a ridiculous amount of traffic, but it did require RoyK and PeteE scramble to get us up and running again. Thanks guys.

I just attended a keynote from this this guy Ben McConnell. His Powerpoint was killer! It was exactly what PPT should be. The slides were emotional or visual reinforcements of what he was talking about. Every 2nd or 3rd slide had text, but rarely did a slide exceed 5-7 words of text and the most text I saw was about 11 words. Very impactful. I had to split out early because Roy, who is sitting outside of sessions hurriedly finishing off the product we’re launching tomorrow, notified me he was sitting across from Craig Newmark. So, I rushed out to get a photo with Craig and thank him for his product and not sellng/cashing out. True to form, Craig was responding to support requests from Craigslist users, but was willing to pause for a moment and take a photo with Roy and I:

I’m pissed I didn’t think to have us face the light. Damnit, bad photo! Anyway, Craig is more handsome in person! At first I wasn’t sure it was him. LOL. Newmark kicks ass.

Here a some shots of the hotel. The arcitecture is stunning and designed to reflect the mountains. I wish Tara and Ashby were here sitting by the pool.

I’m at the Community 2.0 conference today. It’s the conference’s inaugural event and it’s being held at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. This is the first conference I’ve been to that started with Champagne being served at 8:30 AM during the keynote. Last night I discovered the event’s blog and this morning an IRC channel. What do you know, Chris Heuer and Nate Ritter were in IRC. I didn’t know either were here. Nate is local to me in San Diego and Chris I just met (virtually) a few weeks back.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention I got into Vegas last night. I mention this because when I got here I went to a restaurant in the casino for a beer and something to eat. I had a $2.99 cheesburger and a free beer. This burger was better than $15 burgers I’ve had! Standing in line to register a gentleman named Charlie pointed out he had a cold $30 burger delivered to his room. Take a look at this burger:

I guess it’s the little things. What’s really annoying is the hotel is charging anywhere from $9.99 for 2 hours of wifi access to $12.99 for 24 hours. Ridiculous. At least at OSCON the event planners made certain the hotel gave attendees free wifi access. Every conf should demand free access for their attendees or else take the conf somewhere else. There is free access at the conference around the conf ballrooms, but no where else. Free beer, $3 burger, but no free wifi. Lame. I suppose they want me gambling rather than surfing. I’m using my Blackberry to connect. I’ll be posting more about the conference. MindTouch is sponsoring. We’re exhibiting and I’m on a panel. Should be a great event.

Tara pointed out I’ve been short on family posts for a couple weeks. Last Sunday we went to Pacific Beach for the first time. We split a killer hamburger at some New Zealand hamburger joint. PB is cool. I could live there.

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I hadn’t realized Pacific Beach was the birthplace of Wikipedia. I thought it was San Diego. I recently met Ted O’Connor (his site says Ed, but he goes by Ted) at the MindTouch office warming party. He’s a great guy. Turns out he was the first, or one of the first, paid employees at Wikipedia. He actually preceded Sanger. Update: read the comments for how I misquoted Ted. What can I say? MaxM mixes a mean white Russian So, I asked him: is Wales the corrupt and borderline sleazy individual I’ve come to believe him to be? Keep in mind this was right in the midst of the Essjay thing. Also, I’ve been really turned off by some other peculiar goings-on at Wikipedia and some odd things Angela Beesley said back in 2005. Ted explained that it was quite to the contrary and shared some stories about Jimmy Wales. It made me re-evaluate the guy. Maybe I’ve been wrong? I don’t know. I had hoped to meet him at the upcoming Community 2.0 conference. However, for some reason Wales is no longer listed as a speaker. With how poorly organized as this event has been it makes me wonder if he was ever actually coming…

Back to journal stuff. Tara, Ashby and I walked over to the Gaslamp today. It was a typical 70 degree day in San Diego. A tad windy though. We hadn’t been to the Gaslamp but once since moving here just over a month ago. Having been there today made us both glad we live in Little Italy. We had looked at some condos on that side of town. Little Italy is definitely more family friendly.

In the day time Dick’s Last Resort is a surprisingly good place for children. The place is a dump. Ashby couldn’t possibly make a mess the staff would notice. Also, it’s loud and there is a lot of stuff going on to interest a child. I asked our server for some napkins and she brought out an entire sleeve of napkins that she proceeded to throw into the air above our heads. Ashby liked it A LOT. Tara and I both were concerned about the trees that were destroyed and the pollutants that were generated while producing these paper products. Ignorance is bliss… Oh, if you noticed the writing on the hat Ashby is wearing, don’t worry Ashby doesn’t _really_ like Tequila. She preferred the Guinness 😉

San Diego Business Journal Online

“(Ajax) provides very pleasant online experiences that people can have an emotional connection with,” said Fulkerson. “It’s not just the geeks, but my mom or dad who can use it.”

Keep in mind this is a mis-quote. I said with AJAX one can create highly usable web applications that provide a desktop application look and feel, which means AJAX enables online applications to be sufficiently usable that my mom or dad could use them. I surely wasn’t implying my mom or dad would be using AJAX in their web programming. My mom and dad are all about Flash applications (just kidding).

Fulkerson, however, sees problems ahead for making money on the [Ajax13/WebTop] concept.

“(Ajax13) is a ‘WebTop.’ All of your applications (are) on the Web instead of a desktop and there’s a lot of companies doing that,” said Fulkerson. “In WebTops, I’m kind of skeptical … Google’s revenue is ad-driven, but it’s difficult to be successful when your success is incumbent on someone else’s property.

“If it’s a subscription model, Google isn’t going to charge (for its service),” he added. “Charge based on storage? Storage is cheap. So that’s a tough one. How are they going to make money?”

I do see problems with Webtops. Least of which is the one cited above regarding revenue model. By the way, in this interview I also said Ajax13 is a good thing because these guys are pushing the edges on the web. This is wonderful and will absolutely lead to innovations. Howver, the bigger issue I see with Webtops like Ajax13, Zoho, and countless others is that for decades computer scientists have sought to distribute applications across computers/devices. Now we’re going back to the future. Remember how we used to have time sharing mainframes? Remember how all the processing was done on a server somewhere while we tapped it on a dummy terminal that did no processing locally. Well, this is the equivalent of webtops. We have enormous pools of processing power locally on our desktops, laptops, and handhelds. This processing power is still increasing in accordance with Moore’s law. Are we to just throw this processing away? Who cares! Put it all on the server! With webtops the only processing performed locally is done in javascript. This is not optimal. What’s interesting and where we will be within five years is distributed applications. Applications that exist in the network across multiple devices and platforms that federate to provide an optimal computing and user experience. This is more than just data mashups. This is also about having behavioral mashups in which the application exists both on the client, the server, and perhaps many other servers and devices. Some may say I’m a DREAMer, but I’m not the only one.