bootstrapping.net

Google Daily Menus
Follow what the dear people who are bringing us Google are eating today. Menus created and prepared by their world famous former chef for the Grateful Dead, Charlie Ayers.

Sense Worldwide
Interesting network concept.

squidfingers / patterns
Beautiful patterns in all shapes and colours.

Jerry Michalski’s brain is back online
It’s been offline for a year or two - will be interesting to dig through what has been added…

Those swedes, those swedes
Was at the opening of Minc - the Malmö Incubator - friday afternoon and evening. Once again the swedes are pulling ahead showing an almost scary professionalism in creating the right enviroment for innovation.
The Minc incubator is a very stylish 2,500 square meter renovated building in the harbour area - just at 4 minute walk away from Malmø central station.
Funded by the municipality of Malmø with 35 million swedish kr. the place offers working places plus consulting/coaching for a fee of 1,500 swedish kr. per month per person in the startup.
The VD/CEO is Anders Sjöstedt of old yalayala fame. Yalayala was involved in creating Unitedspaces which unfortunately didn’t do too well - but Anders has learned the lessons and created a magnificient place building on his experience.
Nice example of collaboration between the goverment and the private sector - is Copenhagen ever gonna wake up?
[Full coverage with 17 pictures on the mblog]

Nytimes: In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches [requires free registration]
Your standard profile on Google, but updated with some noteable rumored figures:
- number of servers 54,000 with 100,000 processors and 261,000 harddrives.
- eight data centers around the globe
- revenue 2002 $300 million. projected revenue 2003 $750 million or more.
- gross profit margins 30%

Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - Help Me With ‘Making the News’
Help Dan write his book about the intersection of technology and journalism.

Ross Mayfield: Birth of an Industry
Nice coverage of the computer history museum event about the birth of Visicalc with presentations by Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Mitch Kapor and Charles Simonyi.

Collaboraid dotLRN seminar
Coming to you live via wifi this is a live coverage of Collaboraid’s dotLRN seminar.
Lars Pind has managed to bring together 70 people from 11 countries around the globe for this seminar on the OpenACS based opensource dotLRN learning management platform
Ongoing picture coverage in this special mblog section

After the coffee break all the developers are introducing themselves. Developers are working on projects like SCORM compliance, openaces oracle 9i database adapter, jabber integration, etc. Developers are from everywhere - Norway, Finland, Sweden, France, USA, Denmark, etc.

Some notes from the discussions:
“Universities should be contributing to the digital commons and give back to the community - especially when funded with public funds”

“Diversified development means usable and robust in the end.”

Emphasis on the needs of having a lot of professional developers around an opensource project - a needed step in the opensource project lifecycle in order to make it a viable choice for a large institutions in the long run.

“Distributed development is now possible, but we can’t really imagine the new models yet”.

“There’s a need for advocacy and public support of the opensource projects to avoid the Microsoft scare”.

“The opensource sustainability argument”. Opensource is in the end more sustainable, but needs a continuing thriving active community in order to make the sustainability model to work”

But what’s the critical mass for a project like dotLRN?

We need both active users and active developers.

“Developers are not waiting for the educationel itch to popup as opposed to a lot of the other opensource projects. This is an experiment in a very focused opensource application - but we need to build a much wider community in order to make dotLRN work - not only developers.”

Analysis of the community. A healthy community. New developers and new installations. [can bechmarks be created to monitor critical mass for an opensource project?]

“So who’s gonna write the O’reilly book” [laughter in the audience]

Why would anyone accept a closed box they can’t customize themselves?

Discussing system security on opensource projects - reflects that Windows is not allowed on the MIT campus for enterprise applications because of security issues. Only Linux, Solaris, etc. is allowed.
So it’s not really an open source specific issue. Security is an issue for all applications and all developments projects - proprietary or not.

Break with water and cake - and now it’s demo time:

Interesting with a collaborative demo format with lots of developers kicking in with explanations and handling the questions from the audience. But tough to keep structure and pace in the presentation. And tough to keep notes!

Roadmap time. Lot’s of collaborative projects extending the dotLRN platform funded by different institutions and organizations.

It appears that danish online magazine Bitconomy is introducing a blog or turning itself into a blog [via bound.dk]