Blogbody

Wow - this is embarrassing. Another one of those "I can't believe I haven't posted in so long" posts. But really, it's been 5 months since my last post, and 7 months since my second to last one. Ouch!

That is going to change, especially because I little side project I have going on involves a lot of blogging...

As for what I've been up to...

• Got married a few weeks ago
• Sold my company earlier this year (I don't think I ever actually blogged that - whoops!)
• Been traveling a lot to Boston (50% of the time)
• Speaking at various conferences (The Ajax Experience, STPCon, StarWest, etc) - mostly QA-related stuff
• Not too involved in Struts and OpenSymphony, but I hope to be again soon
• Still fairly involved in OpenQA

I think that's it. More posts soon...

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Forget all the whizbang stuff... Stacks, Dock, Time Machine, etc. And look past the fact that stupid Apple has decided to abort Java on OS X. As someone who travels a lot and loves his basic Dell keybaord, this is what I've been waiting for:

Yup - that's right. OS X will finally automatically change the keymapping for me between my laptop keyboard and my desk keyboard. Considering all the travel (and lounging on the couch) I do right now, I have probably gone in to this preferences panel over a thousand times just this year. Never again!

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my very good friends, Kevin, as well as my old CEO back from my Spoke days, work at a company called MerchantCircle. Kevin recently opined about how the focus of MerchantCircle relates to the upcoming presidential election.

First, a quick note about what MerchantCircle does: think "social networks for businesses" and you kind of have the idea. Instead of focussing on the consumer, like review sites like Yelp and CitySearch do, they focus on the business. Businesses can "partner" with other businesses for coupon deals (think "friends"), create their own home page, (think "profile page"), and provide an official response for praise or criticism of their business.

I find his points interesting specifically because of the waves Fred Thompson is now making as he begins his candidacy. Fred Thompson is claiming that he, like Howard Dean, will use the power of the internet and social networks, to run a more effective campaign for less.

So far we've heard about Barrack's MySpace page, but I don't really think things like that are a good demonstration of how Web 2.0 can be utilized to improve our democracy. MySpace is, afterall, mostly about kids who can't even vote, or stoners who likely won't.

However, more focussed communities like MerchantCirlce (small businesses), Digg (high tech workers, perhaps?), or online schools (ie: University of Phoenix, etc) might provide an excellent conduit for engaging in deep, thought-provoking exchanges about specific issues.

Forget town halls, virtual town halls, or even debates - they are too general and end up suffering from the "law of diminishing returns" because their audiences cover such a broad base. I think engaging with a specific community about needs specific to them, on a mass scale, would really open our eyes up about the candidates. I would love to see an online chat with Digg users, or a forum for MerchantCircle users to ask tough questions.

Update: MerchantCircle just recently celebrated it's one-year birthday. Congrats to them. I love the idea of bridging local small businesses and the vastness of the internet.

My only complaint would be that they focus on the business owner and not the consumer, but that's not really a valid complaint because they readily point out to and integrate consumer-focussing sites, ending up being a companion to them more than a competitor.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently upgraded the OpenQA forums over to Jive Forums 5.5 (beta) and I am very impressed. We were using a pretty old version (4.2.1) and the difference was like night and day.

The upgrade

The upgrade was as simple as it can get

1. Copy the new war file over the old one.
2. Open the forums in the browser.
3. Enter the administrators password to initiate the upgrade process.
4. See a nice little list of steps that need to be completed, along with estimated times for each task.
5. Done.

It really was that easy. Everyone should build software this good. The only other company I know that has a nice upgrade framework is Atlassian, and theirs is nowhere as elegant, nor does it provide the visual feedback that inspires confidence in a process that inherently introduces risk.

Reply by watches

By far my favorite new feature. Previously, the OpenQA forums have been using Jive's unique "email gateway" feature that allowed a mailing list and a forum to stay in sync. This let users choose the style of message delivery (web, RSS, forum watch email, mailing list membership, etc).

I chose RSS+web because I get enough email as is and hate being subscribed to random lists that I can't remember how to jump off of. Plus, I like knowing that my membership is part of the forums, which gets you little things like "reward points" for answering questions (something which obviously email doesn't have).

But whenever I traveled, I missed email. I wanted to be able to reply to the threads I saw in my RSS reader while offline in an airplane, but I couldn't. In the latest version of forums, Jive introduced a killer new feature: reply to watches by email.

Now I can watch my feeds in RSS, but when I know I'll be on the road coming up, I can turn on my email watches to the forum. Then, as each message comes in, I can reply to the watch notification itself and my response will automatically show up in the forums (and get sent out to the mailing lists, thanks to the gateway we're using). To me, this is the best of both worlds, and Jive did an excellent job with it.

My only complaint is that the subject the watches come in with is unique every time. This is due to how they sync up replies with threads. The downside of this is that my watch notifications won't get grouped together as a thread in my mail client, so it's a bit harder to follow conversations. I also had to modify the watch templates to include the entire thread instead of just the new message. This gives the required context that one would expect if they wanted to reply by email.

Wiki formatting

The new forums also allow for common formatting, often found in wikis, to be used in forum posts. This is nice because now I can format new replies by email and I know it'll look good for both audiences: text (email) and HTML (web and RSS).

But what I was really impressed with was the customizations. Jive supports a link syntax similar to Confluence (Atlassian's wiki) that uses square brackets. Unfortunately, the OpenQA forums use square brackets a lot due to the fact that people post xpath expressions all the time, such as

//div[contains(@id, 'border-box')]

This, of course, produced some bogus links. What impressed me is that I could drill in to the wiki formatting settings and individually turn off link support. Even more: when I turned it off, it no longer appeared in the help guide! That's the way software should work all the time.

Other stuff

THe OpenSymphony Forums have had integrated web chat support for a while, written by yours truly. However, the OpenQA ones never did because I didn't want to maintain the code going forward. While it isn't quite as nice as the OpenSymphony forums, Jive Forums now comes with an integrated web-based group chat. This is a great way to host meetings and to help people out in real time.

The features I'm missing from the OpenSymphony forums are:

• Ability for chat transcripts to be easily searchable and accessible. I did this by posting the chat log to the forums every 24 hours, but other solutions are possible too
• When in the forums, being notified that activity is happening in the forums (new message posted). I did this with a "chatbot" in the OS forums, but again, this could be done other ways, such as XMPP watches, etc.
• Tying chat rooms and forums together such that the people in the associated chat room are listed along side the forum as "now chatting". Even better, their expertise level (reward points) are shown, so people can immediately tell if experts are ready to help them in real time.

The good news is that a lot of this stuff will likely end up in some sort of integration between Openfire and Clearspace (think of it as Forums + blogs + wiki + content management + etc).

Overall, Forums 5.5 was a great improvement. I'm looking forward to Clearspace, when hopefully my little nit-picks will be addressed :)

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Speeding up Apple Mail:

Apparently this is a well known performance boost for Apple Mail users - I wish I'd known about it sooner! I'd been having all sorts of problems with performance and Mail.app hanging, and this simple trick has it like new again.

I have to wonder why such a thing isn't done by Mail.app itself given how bad it did get over the course of the last 6 months.

(Via Brett Porter.)

Worked great for me. Pretty amazing little trick!

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Testing Ajax?:

I ran across an interesting article entitled “Improving Test Coverage of Ajax Applications” in which the author likens the challenges of testing Ajax applications to that of testing traditional GUI apps. While some newer frameworks (like Selenium) are positioned to actually verify Ajax-ian behavior, they can lead to a false sense of security because of the complexity associated with the combination of actions in using a GUI.

(Via Test Early.)

I posted the following comment to the entry above, but I think it important enough that I bring it up here as well. I'd be interested in hearing about ideas that can help make expressing tests for AJAX applications easier:

Absolutely - Selenium and other tools are now available to help, but there are still real challenges in describing these new types of interactions. The old-school tools (SilkTest, QTP, HttpUnit, etc) either didn't understand the concept of multiple user transactions in a single page or didn't have the technology to deal with AJAX at all.

Selenium helps with the AJAX/multiple user transactions issue, but it still requires testers to express the desire to "click on button X, wait for Y to appear" in their tests. I think there is still room to make this easier to understand and test against, possibly by integrating with AJAX and/or web-based frameworks, and thereby understanding the interactions at a deeper level.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone know if a good Mac client exists for MusicBrainz? The only one I've found is iEatBrainz, but it runs like crap on an Intel mac because it isn't a Universal Binary.

Any other good solutions for dealing with large amounts of poorly tagged audio files?

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't think I'll be leaving my living room for a while...

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The last two episodes haven't been uploaded to iTunes - anyone know if FOX and Apple have suddenly decided to stop their partnership?

I am a big Apple fan, but I have to admit that it's pretty lame that I can't even find a place for help on this particular question inside of iTunes. Not the most customer-friendly site :(

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I'm pleased to announced that the OpenQA jobs board is now live. As OpenQA, and the great projects that make up the community, have grown over the last year, a rich community of developers and users has sprouted up around it. Part of that growing process involves needs for commercial support, training, and technical expertise around the opensource tools at OpenQA.

That is where jobs.openqa.org comes in. It is a place where people looking for developers with deep knowledge of OpenQA can go to look for work, as well as a place where people can offer services around OpenQA-related technologies.

As OpenQA continues to grow, we hope to keep adding features like this to help strengthen the bond between opensource QA and commercial companies.

And of course, a small personal note about this for full disclosure: my company, Autoriginate, is one of the first companies offering support and training for Selenium, an OpenQA project. The creation of the Jobs Board certainly helps my company, but it can also be used by any other company offering similar services without exception. We believe this is required to take OpenQA as a community to the next level of growth.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hot on the heels of the HostedQA 1.5 announcement, we're also pleased to announce that, as will always be the case, AutoQ 1.5 has also been released.

AutoQ provides all the same features as HostedQA, but with the convenience and assurance of being hosted behind your firewall. No matter which option you choose, you can be confident you're using the most cost-effective and feature complete QA automation solution for today's web applications.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we have a lot to share and are excited to announce that HostedQA 1.5 has been released.

The first and most important announcement we want to make is the immediate availability of our new product, AutoQ. AutoQ offers all the same advanced features that HostedQA does, but is packaged so that you can deploy it behind your firewall. Both are being offered as a pay-as-you-go subscription model, and both continue to be the most cost-effective and feature rich automated acceptance testing platform available.

You can download a trial of AutoQ immediately by signing up for a free trial of HostedQA. In doing so, you'll receive a link to the AutoQ download as well.

We have a ton of new features that are now available in HostedQA version 1.5. In the coming days we will go in detail to each of these new features, providing screenshots and detailed analysis for how they improve QA automation. They are:

• Full screen capture
• Screen resolution options
• Extremely fast VM startup
• Shell scripting support
• Many UI improvements
• First class Ruby on Rails support
• Support for Linux
• Multiple virtual machines

See below for a detailed description of each of these features.

UPCOMING FEATURES

As always, our most important upcoming features are the ones our customers want. So if you've got any ideas or requests, please send them to support@autoriginate.com and we'll be sure to give them the priority they deserve. In addition to any user-requested feature, we're also working on:

• Continued improvements to the UI
• Ability to create your own custom virtual machine
• Ability to log in to a remote virtual machine
• Improved virtual machine capabilities, such as "snapback" support in between tests, ensuring better test state management
• Notifications by email and IM
• Additional browser support, such as Opera and Netscape

NEW FEATURES

• Full screen capture
• Screen resolution options
• Extremely fast VM startup
• Shell scripting support
• Many UI improvements
• First class Ruby on Rails support
• Support for Linux
• Multiple virtual machines

Full screen capture

As you may already know, HostedQA has an innovative feature that takes a screenshot of the client desktop after every step in a test. This is a great way to visually see where a test is breaking, but it also is a fantastic tool for manual testers to use to quickly scan for problems in the UI that may not be caught by automated testing. Today, we've taken this one step further with the introduction of the takeFullScreenshot command. Using this command, you can instruct HostedQA to take a snapshot of the entire page in your browser, not just the visible portion. HostedQA will automatically scroll vertically and horizontally, stitching the final screenshot together.

Screen resolution options

Now you can specify what resolution you want your client tests to run under. You may choose from 640×480, 800×600, or 1024×768. This is a great feature for allowing manual testers to visually see if there are any problems viewing your application at lower resolutions. Combined with our advanced screenshot capabilities, this is a perfect feature for manual testing. We promise to continue to make HostedQA an invaluable tool for both manual and automated testing, as we understand that both are equally important.

Extremely fast VM startup

One of the top concerns from our users was that starting up virtual machines (VMs) was taking too long, especially in a hosted environment. We heard you and made some drastic improvements. No longer does it take 2-4 minutes to start up the VM. Now, the most popular VMs are pre-loaded, ready to be used. This means that under most circumstances, it takes a matter of seconds, not minutes, to kick off a test. We're very happy about this new capability and plan to continue to add more hardware to HostedQA that will allow us support even more VM options and faster startup times.

Many UI improvements

As we said in our August Update, improving the UI is important to us. We continue to make incremental improvements. This month we spent most of our time on pages that contain a form. The biggest improvement by far can be seen in the Deployment Settings page, where the form for editing or creating new Deployments is now drastically easier to follow.

Shell scripting support

Sometimes uploading a zip file, a database snapshot, and an application isn't enough for QA automation. So to make automating your deployment easier, we've added support for DOS batch scripts and Unix shell scripts. Now you can upload a script and indicate whether it should run on startup or shutdown. A great use for this could be if you are building a product that is completely self contained, such as a J2EE web application that has a bundled Tomcat server. Simply upload the entire zip file and write a shell script that launches the bundled Tomcat by hand.

First class Ruby on Rails support

We're very excited about this one. Ruby on Rails is making a lot of waves in the web development space, and rightfully so. There are tons of new projects, internally and externally, that are using Ruby on Rails to quickly build web-based applications. While Ruby on Rails support could have been done by using our new shell scripting capabilities, we wanted to go one step further and make Ruby on Rails a first-class citizen in HostedQA. Now you can upload a zip file of your Rails-based application and we will automatically run the bundled WebBrick server and configure the application to run against the local test database. This is just one more way HostedQA makes web-based testing as painless as can be.

Support for Linux

Up until today's release, HostedQA only provided Windows-based VM snapshots for running both the server and the client. Some of our users wanted to test on their production environments so we've added Linux support. As of today, you can now select the following VMs for both the server deployment environment and also the client side browser environment: Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2 and IE6, Windows XP w/ Service Pack 2 and IE7, and Linux CentOS 4.0 (aka RedHat Enterprise 4.0). We will continue to make additional VMs available as they are requested, so if there is an environment you want but don't see, just let us know.

Multiple virtual machines

Before today's release, you had to run your server and client on the same virtual machine. This presented a problem, especially if your application was meant to run on Linux but needed to be tested on Internet Explorer. Today, this is no longer a problem. You may now specify different VMs for the Deployment and the Client, and HostedQA will automatically take care of launching one or two VMs as needed. We want you to test in an environment that is similar to production, and we're helping you do that with this feature.

Note: This entry is a cross post from the Autoriginate blog, found here.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A good friend of mine is looking for some PHP wizards. The startup is interesting, the people are smart, and the location rocks (right next to the San Francisco Giants ballpark, where I used to live). See if the following matches you (or someone you know), and if so ping me and I'll get you introduced.

And for you Java guys that read my blog (most of you): don't be put off by PHP. Remember, Resin can run PHP now, and so there is an opportunity to mix Java and PHP if it makes sense.

Who We Are
LicketyShip is a technology startup angel backed by some of the brightest minds in the Silicon Valley . Named a Top 5 Startup by Fortune Magazine, LicketyShip aims to deliver items consumers order online in 2 hours, direct from retail stores.

Here's a brief article that describes what we're up to:
www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/11/kozmo-nostalgia-try- licketyship /

Who We're Looking For
We're looking for 1 exceptionally talented PHP Programmer/Designer to join us in our quest to change the face of e-commerce. The warrior we're looking for will not be just an employee – he will become the 5th member of a tight-knit team.

If you consider yourself one of the best PHP Programmer/Designers on earth, have a fire burning deep within you to be part of a meaningful, successful company, and want to be a member of a strong, dedicated team just as passionate about technology as you, then this may be the only job you'll ever have to apply for.

Our Lifestyle
Our homebase is the infamous Third Floor at 625 2nd St. in San Francisco , just across from the ballpark in the South Beach/South Park area. Some of our good friends and neighbors are VideoEgg, Ruby Red Labs, Spot DJ, Odeo, and Buzz Logic.

Startup life is a blast - we go out together, eat many meals together, and even occasionally hit the punching bag together (best company purchase we've ever made) :-p

We work like a family, and we're all in it for the same reason - we absolutely LOVE what we do, and we wake up every morning excited about what the new day will bring.

Your Job

• Be an active co-owner of the company, have daily input in strategy and technology decisions
• Design, build and improve a front-end web system that will be seen and used by millions

Your Skills

• Master of PHP & MySQL
• Master of HTML & CSS
• Master of Photoshop (& Illustrator a bonus)
• Expertise in AJAX
• Proven success in developing large-scale applications
• Willingness to work with us late hours!
• Ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound
• College Degree in Computer Science or equivalent, Masters, PhD a major plus

Next Step
If this job sounds like its for you, send your resume to: mydreamjob@licketyship.com SUBJECT: I Am A PHP Warrior. Or just leave a comment on this blog or email me at plightbo@gmail.com and I'll get you in touch.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Autoriginate is releasing a sister to HostedQA called AutoQ. You can read more about it here and get in line to be the first to try it out! It should be interesting making a product that is both SAAS and enterprise software. Anyone know any other companies doing something similar?

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm selling my Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard - if any of my "loyal readers" wants to buy it, let me know.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If anyone is interested in taking on some extra part time work (maybe 5-10 hours a week) for a stealth project in the area of social networking (can't say more at this point), backed by a very solid team with a proven track record, let me know.

The technologies we're working with include a mixture of things from Project Able and things from RIFE. Right now we're only interested in bringing in people who are highly trusted and have some spare time. So if you're one of my opensource acquaintances and have the time, let me know. Sorry, if I don't know you it is best that you not ask to get involved right now.

Requirements include:

• Self-starter, able to work without much direction.
• Available for part time work (5-10 hours a week, maybe more later).
• Excited to get involved in an early stage startup.
• Extremely skilled with Java and Java web applications.
• Very knowledgeable with SQL and large scale database deployments.
• Solid understanding of JavaScript, AJAX, and CSS a plus.
• Experience with RIFE, iBatis, and Spring a plus.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we're pleased to announce that HostedQA is now available free of charge for any opensource or other qualifying not-for-profit organization.

If you're interested in trying it out, just sign up for a free trial and we'll convert your account to a permanent one once we've verified your project's status.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, HostedQA was upgraded to support IE7. With the rush of AJAX-base web applications, IE7 support is a welcome addition by our users, including Joe Walker of DWR fame. This is even more so the case considering how hard it is to get various versions on IE running without a larger investment in physical or virtual computer (both of which require additional software licensing costs).

In fact, for the price it would cost you to purchase just a standalone copy of Windows XP, you could get an entire month of HostedQA paid for. And on top of the collection of browsers that are supported (Firefox, IE6, and IE7), you get all the other great testing tools, such as automatic deployment of your J2EE application, simple record-and-playback tools, easy refactoring support, and informative reports - all through a simple web interface.

Recently, Joe Walker, blogged about how the edit/compile/test phase for AJAX applications can be especially tricky when it comes to various flavors of IE. He had this to say about HostedQA:

DWR has been using HostedQA recently. HostedQA for me is JUnit + Cruise Control + Selenium + an army of browsers. We've been testing DWR using HostedQA for a while now and it rocks. It's helped us find bugs, and the plan is to set it up so we can test with a whole bunch of browsers so I don't even have to mess about with Firefox profiles. To a certain extent it can make the edit/compile/test cycle an edit/check-in cycle.

(You can see an example DWR report of a test on IE7 here.)

So why not give HostedQA a chance today? You might find it to be the easiest, most affordable, convenient QA tool you've ever used.

PS: If you're developing for an opensource project, we offer HostedQA and Continuous Integration servers free of charge. Go and sign up for a free trial and we'll be sure to turn it in to a fully paid-for license as soon as we verify your project is opensource.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we just updated our website and product, HostedQA, to make evaluating the product even easier. Now when you sign up for a free trial, your account is set up instantly (no waiting for a sales rep to call and blab on and on). On top of that, we set up a sample project that runs some tests against google.com. Finally, we run one of those tests right away so that by the time you log in some sample test reports will be available.

Can your enterprise software do that?

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several people requested that I upload my OSCON 2006 Selenium presentation. It is now added to the list of publications and presentations about Selenium.

On a side note - we're doing some great things with HostedQA and if Selenium interests you, then you should really check out HostedQA. It's free for open source projects, as well as free for the first 30 days. You can sign up right away and no credit card or verification of any kind is required. You can be uploading your J2EE web app and testing your application within minutes from signing up.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend of mine, Auren Hoffman, is starting a company called RapLeaf. If anyone is looking for a job in San Francisco with a very early stage startup, let me know and I'll get you hooked up. Auren is a very smart and well-connected guy and I'm sure RapLeaf will do great. I've tested out early prototypes and I think they are on to something.

Job openings cover both engineering and marketing. See more at Auren's blog about two marketing positions (here and here). For the engineering positions, you can just drop me a note and I can pass your resume along.

Bonus points: they are using Rails, if that helps (personally, I'll forgive Auren, but just this one time) :)

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the last three months my company, Autoriginate, has been working hard on our first product. Today, we are pleased to announce HostedQA to the world. HostedQA is a super-low-cost QA solution for J2EE web applications. With a focus on complete automation (including starting your database and application server and in-depth reporting) and convenience, HostedQA is by far the lowest cost and most innovative option for Java web application testing.

With an intuitive AJAX-based UI, you can upload WAR files, database snapshots, and other resources. Then assemble these resources together in to deployments unique to your testing requirements, such as "Tomcat running on Postgres" or "JBoss running on MySQL".

Launch your application from within HostedQA's virtual servers and record test scripts from within your browser. You can upload your scripts to hostedqa.com and even refactor them by introducing macros with common functionality. HostedQA is smart enough to even analyze your tests for potential replacements for macros.

We're really excited about HostedQA and hope to make it available for any open source project that could benefit from it. We're also offering extended free trials during our initial rollout, so please check it out if you're interested.

Now that we're finally announced to the world, I plan to be blogging a lot more about HostedQA, our company, and testing in general. I definitely want to hear from my readers about what pains you have when testing your products. Hopefully we already have or soon will address it with HostedQA!

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My new venture, Autoriginate, Inc, is exploring various product directions and distribution models. One of them is a hosted product. While I think that generally hosting is a great way to go, this article about Saleforce.com's recent problems does give me something to think about.

When you have a shipping product, customers that don't push it as hard won't see performance problems. When you have a hosted product, everyone sees them.

Anyone else have thoughts on the hosted model?

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So freaking random...

• Cheese
• Carpet
• Nut

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Cuban remembers Broadcast.com's IPO on its 7th aniversary today. I think the most telling quote is this...

Going public wasnt a reason to relax, it was as stressful a moment as I had ever experienced. I was now responsible to people who I had never met. People were buying our stock as a foundation for their future. That was scary.

... and this...

There was no doubt that Todd and I had to get back to work the next day. We had to make it clear that the IPO wasnt a reason to celebrate, but rather a reason to work harder for all of our new shareholders.

I think these words really underscore the mindset that an entrepreneur must have.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About 6 weeks ago I left Spoke Software to take on a new challenge at a company: Jive Software. I'm extremely excited about this opportunity because it opens me up to tons of new learning opportunities -- especially those not necessarily directly technolog-related.

Spoke was great for the 14 months I was there. What I learned has been invaluable. The company is in the process of transitioning in to something really great and I'm sad that there isn't a way to do everything in life.

This new job also means a new location: I no longer reside in San Francisco, CA, but rather Portland, OR. I got my furniture last week (movers will always underwhelm you), and so I'm finally settling in (including the powering up of lightbody.net).

Anyway, if anyone in the Portland area reads this, feel free to drop me a note and itroduce yourself.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It has been forever since I've written anything up here. Good news is: I'm not dead. Bad news is: no one missed me. Ha!

Anyway, here's what I've been up to:

At work, we released version 1.8 and 1.9 of our product. The stuff I was part of includes support for co-branded sites for associations, like a school alumni for instance. Spoke Associations lets you leverge your association to identify leads that are in or around the members of your various associations. Check out http://associations.spoke.com if you think you might be interested in getting one for yourself (it's free if you quality).

Another little thing I did was allow for your profiles to be public. Mine is at http://center.spoke.com/profiles/Pat. You can use it to be your official resume and provide for a simple way for people you email to find other people with similar interests, work history, etc.

So what about non-work? Let's see...

"WebWork in Action" is coming along nicely. We're about two-thirds done and we're really picking up steam. Matt, Jason, and Kris have all been doing an excellent job.

Spaking of WebWork, I have been busy getting WebWork 2.1 and XWork 1.0.1 ready for release. They are pretty much ready to go, but once again documentation is our downfall. We got a new wiki that I plan to use to write/organize/export documentation for each release, but I don't want to make any more releases until that area is cleaned up. On the mailing list there has been some excitement about helping out with documentation, so if you're interested, please get involved!

I also started work on a WebWork plugin for IDEA. No matter what Hani says, a plugin (or console) is a good thing for WebWork. It won't be for managing configuration (though I may add that just for good measure), but rather for the other stuff that the "masters of effeciency" forget to put in to the equation when claiming how easy technology X is that it doesn't need an editor. That is, I intend to find all the repeatable processes I see myself doing when building (ie: internationalizing text by cutting and pasting mindlessly) and write tools to help with it. So far the plugin does nothing -- I don't know Swing and so it might be a while before something useful comes from this.

In the sports world I was lucky enough to be at the game when Barry Bonds hit #661. The ball flew RIGHT over my head in to the bay. It was awesome. Not so awesome was the idiot who jumped from the stadium trying to get the ball. He fell 30 feet on to his head and forced me to believe that a guy just died right in front of my eyes. Thankfully new reports later said he'd be OK. Unfortunately, the Giants haven't been doing so hot this season, but I have faith they will turn it around.

The 49ers were rated the second worst team of the league today by ESPN. Good thing I have season tickets. Or not. It's too early to tell, so I'm not going to state any opinions yet.

The Sharks are making San Jose history and moving on to round three. I'm going to try to get tickets if at all possible (constant reloading of the browser on TicketMaster.com sometimes works!). I really think they are going all the way.

OK, that's all I got. Come help us write WebWork docs!

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 02:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night I learned of the Turducken. Good lord that must be the most amazing thing ever invented. The only thing that could top that is if there was chocolate inside the chicken -- but I guess not everyone might agree with me on that last part.

Once again, John Madden proves he truly is a genius.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After more than a few anonymous comments, I've decided that I will begin deleting any comments that are anonymous AND add no value to my blog. Since it's my blog, I can do what I like. If someone wants to provide constructive comments (positive or negative) that add some real value, I'll leave the anonymous comment. However, the majority of anonymous comments I see on my site and others tend to lack depth and usually result in mindless name-calling.

I have already deleted two comments from my last post. For the sake of fairness, I'll repost the comments here. However, this will be the last time I'll be allowing pointless comments to be posted from anonymous users. Again, feel free to post anonymously, but remember to keep the comment full of depth and actual insight. I'm not doing this to censor anyone who doesn't agree with me, but rather I'm trying to encourage thoughtful discussion or at least some accountability. You are more than welcome to post pointless comments under your real name, since at least there is some accountability.

Now to the first two comments I have deleted:

From "web@webwork.com":
The books sucked. Answer this question by youself: Can a reader go beyond the online documentation available for the projects covered to solve real world problem, by reading the book and the answer is a big NO.

From "passerby@yahoo.com":
Friends have the guts to tell the truth. The rest will kiss your ass. At least, Hani had the guts. Stop whining. Just do a better job next time.

For future reference, I deemed these comments as "delete-worthy" because they don't actually address anything at all related to my post. If you read my previous posting, you'll see I make several claims on a point-by-point basis. Comments like "this book sucked" without giving reasons (even Hani gives reasons, although some are incorrect) will quickly be deleted. Likewise, a comment like "this book rocks." without reasons will also be deleted (if you think I'm lying, try me).

If you feel that I'm censoring you, so be it. I know that I'll be fair, and you are more than welcome to provide insightful commentary to express your opinion. If you can't live with that, you are more than welcome to not visit my website.

So, the new rules are:
* pointless anonymous comments (both positive and negative) will be deleted
* pointless comments from real users will stay
* well-thought out anonymous comments will stay

Likewise I'll most likely start deleting pings that I feel don't further add to the discussion. I've had a few recently and it's quite irritating.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Some of the top search requests that lead to my website are:

• anyone but bush
• stupid things republicans say
• stupid things democrats do
• struts sucks
• friendster slow
• golf in the 70s
• gay hobbits

Wait... GAY HOBBITS? OK, so some of the search terms are a bit odd, but gay hobbits was by far the wackiest one. Then I remembered why a search gay hobbits was causing my web server to show up. It's pretty amazing to see how such random topics such as Clay Aiken or gay hobbits can perk the interest of totally random people. I think I need to start posting about totally random events to see what other kinds of obscure terms I might.

One particular topic I'd really like to discuss: what happened to the cheesy gordita crunch at Taco Bell in Fresno, CA? They seriously just don't serve in the entire Fresno country! And don't get me started on Carl's Jr's sourdough ranch bacon cheeseburger being discountinued...

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So last night I went and saw In America. I was a bit worried at first, because the opening scene involved the super-played-out scene where immigrants come in to New York for the first time waving and pointing at all the huge neon signs and all the various sights. Cheeeeese.

But then the movie changed, and that cheesiness was contrasted with the family moving in to a crappy apartment full of junkies. I won't give away anymore of the movie, but I must say it was one of the best I've seen in a long time (though, I do admit I don't get out to too many movies these days).

The most interesting parts to note are the sense of fragility that the film made me feel. At any given point in the film I felt as if this delicate family could be ripped apart any second. At first I thought it was just my mind getting a bit morbid, but my brother and my mom both felt the same way. Although we couldn't pinpoint what exactly it was that made us feel this way, it was clearly something that the director meant to instill. Truly amazing.

Also amazing were the performances of both girls, but especially the younger one, Emma. This little girl was absolutely perfect.

I didn't know anything about this movie when I got in to the theater (I like it better that way usually), but I was surprised to see that the film credits were to Jim Sheridan and his daughters Naomi and Kirsten... dedicated to Frankie Sheridan. I'm not sure how much of the story was a true story and how much was made up, but it was really neat to know that someone actually experienced at least some of what would otherwise just be a heartwarming story.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I got some mail from my mom. Opening the envelope, I discovered two newspaper clippings: one that detailed how more kids than ever are being injured while skiing and snowboarding (I'm planning to go skiing a lot this season), and the other discussing how 22 people pedestrians were killed in San Francisco this year, as opposed to only 18 last year. The article points out that a higher percentage of those killed were at fault this year.

Great. My mom also likes to send me articles about people my age dying of skin cancer, or of kids murdering their parents. Uh huh... I know this can't be normal, right? And people wonder why I talk about how I don't expect to live past age 30...

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My brother, Chris, now has his very own blog. I wanted to share that with the world. I also wanted to share the image of the clay chef with the toast. And lastly, I wanted to make a point of that it is now in writing that I am "infinitely smarter" than my brother, as well as you. Deal with it and shut up.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another one I found through Danah... connected selves: Buying and Selling the Little Black Book.

Esther was one of the VCs at a recent "under the radar" event -- basically a "social software meets WWF" face-off between LinkedIn, Spoke, VisiblePath, and ZeroDegrees. At the time she seemed really concerned with two things: protecting data and avoiding the situation where you have to reject a referral (the you-are-not-my-friend rejection that no one wants to do on Friendster).

Both are a form of privacy. Recently at Spoke we developed a system that spiders the web for information about people to further enrich the social network (especially around searching). Now if someone searches for "OpenSymphony" I show up -- even though no _person_ in the network states that I am associated with OpenSymphony.

It's not that any of these social software companies are exposing more data than existed before (in some cases they are), but the bigger fear is that they are lowering the ease of access to data that was always there.

Google did this a couple years ago. Before Google, who would have been able to find out that in 1996 I used Fractal Painter (?!?). It's not that Google is invading my privacy -- it has just lowered the access to already public information.

In the future companies like Spoke might be able to use information found all over the web -- not just the raw who-knows-who data -- to build very rich graphs. Like all information, if not properly checked, it could lead to the perception of serious privacy problems.

I say perception because nothing new is being exposed. In 1997 someone could have found that newsgroup post of mine if he or she tried hard enough. Likewise, if someone connects the dots they can figure out pretty much my entire life history via various public newsgroups, mailing lists, blog comments, blog posts, and websites.

Is it scary that in the future all the information that a private investigator might have gathered can now be accessed with a mouse click? Yes. Does it mean that we should all be careful about what we let leak on to the internet? Yes. Does it mean that social networking companies (or Google for that matter) are evil? No. Does it mean they should take privacy seriously and do everything they can to protect the consumer? Of course. Should that be their duty (by law)? That's yet to be determined.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So Danah Boyd is talking about how useless Friendster is (she's mentioned it a few times in the last few days). Here she discusses how many weird friendster requests she has received.

I'm not an avvid Friendster user (mostly because it's slow as dirt... and you know how slow dirt is). But I can attest to the fact that I have several "friends" who I don't consider friends on there. I also have received a few requests from people that look faintly familiar. I have a horrible memory, so I might have known them at one time, but who knows.

This is the problem with Friendster: it encourages users to grow "uber networks" not through actually socializing but rather through artificial procedures. Fakesters, made up friends, requests from unknowns. All of these are happening because of the binary relationship that Friendster advertises.

The key here is binary and advertise. Binary is bad because as well all know, binary relationships are totally unrealistic. I may consider someone my "best friend in the whole wide world", but he might not think the same. Likewise, my friendship with someone I took a class with in college compared to my friendship with my brother is vastly different.

Advertising your social network via a set of concrete numbers is a neat gimmick, but it causes pointless competition. I'm not quite sure why people do this (I'm quite content with me 23 friends), but it happens nonetheless. What value does this advertising add? I find much more interesting information on Friendster after I've found someone that looks interesting (cute!) -- then I learn how I'm connected. I have never been interested in seeing who in my social network has lots of friends.

I think both of those are the root cause for why Frienster is useless now. I really like the Spoke approach (again, I'm totally biased) because it doesn't use a binary relationship and it doesn't advertise anyone in particular as a well-connected individual. In short, it lets the true social dynamics play out.

The real key for social software, including Spoke, is when we can expand upon building networks from easy stuff like email and move in to IM, phone calls, and someday, using location-aware devices like ActiveCampus@UCSD (my alma mater), in-person interactions. Oh well, I suppose we better walk before we start running.

Update: my grammar was horrendous -- had to fix. Apparently my bad review wasn't so off target after all :) MT seriously needs a good applet-based editor to place red squiggles under my words while I spew my garbage.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just discovered a friend of mine from highschool had a blog online tracking his trip across the US to every ballpark. Check out Summer of Glove to see what a true fan is all about! I'm very jealous! My original blog actually was started when I went to Europe for a couple months and updated my site with my progress as I traveled around. It's great fun to allow friends and family keep up with you while you're on the road.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I updated my website. Apparently I use the word "hella" too often. My bad.

Posted by Patrick Lightbody at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)