Open Web20's MessageStream

Digg Story: She Has A Boyfriend

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:47:08 GMT

708

This one is hilarious!. Must watch the video.

How annoying is it when you are talking to a girl and she just insists on mentioning the fact that she has a boyfriend. Makes me so mad.

Click here to read this story on Digg

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace - Mind Blowing!.

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:24:45 GMT

Must read article on Wired , see video on Wired as well. (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all)

Cougar ace

15,683-horsepower engine
pushing 55,328 tons of steel.
A deep-sea car transport, its 14 decks are packed with 4,703 new Mazdas bound for North America
Estimated cargo value: $103 million.

And cougar ace tipped.

Johnson, who has worked with Habib once before.

Photo courtesy US Coast guard and Wired magazine.

Self-healing rubber bounces back [BBC]

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:31:05 GMT

Now this is what I call "Brilliant!".

A material that is able to self-repair even when it is sliced in two has been invented by French researchers.

The as-yet-unnamed material - a form of artificial rubber - is made from vegetable oil and a component of urine.

The substance, described in the journal Nature, produces surfaces when cut that retain a strong chemical attraction to each other.

Pieces of the material join together again as if never parted without the need for glue or a special treatment.

This remarkable property comes from careful engineering of the molecules in the material.

The French researchers are already making kilogramme quantities in their Paris laboratories and say the process is almost completely green, and could be completely so with a few adjustments.

Video and Complete story on BBC

Mashable OpenWeb Awards

Open Web20 (openweb20) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:51:22 GMT

http://mashable.com/openwebawards

Folks!..Happy New year

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:09:55 GMT

Happy new year everyone. See you all next year and have a great time celebrating new year moments. Drive safe and enjoy the evening.

Any plans for the nite BTW?

http://www.savedmyday.com

New York Times opens up code - More Power to Open Source!

Open Web20 (openweb20) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:47:22 GMT

I ran into interesting 2 month old article. NYTimes going open source. Thats nice to hear . I wish the whole world would go Open source.

Here is the snippet of the post and detail story here

New York Times opens up code

By Tina Gasperson on October 26, 2007 (9:00:00 PM)

The New York Timeslikes open source -- so much so that, as it gradually moves more of itsprint operations online, it is nurturing a Web development team thathas released two of its own open source projects.

XSL Cache is a PHP extension the Times is using to cache stylesheets on its Web site. DBSlayeris a tool the team developed to overcome LAMP scaling limitations thatcaused database replication processes to overwhelm the DB connectionlimits.

New York Times senior software architects Jacob Harris andDerek Gottfrid say they've received a mixed reception from thecommunity, because some people just can't understand why a print mediacompany would jump feet first into the open source philosophy. But opensource software use isn't new to the Times, says Gottfrid. "I've beenhere a number of years, and open source has always played an integralpart in everything we do."

Recently, the team has experienced growth, according to Gottfrid, inthat custom applications developed in-house are "shifting from aproprietary posture. As we were building out and replacing oldinfrastructure, there were some gaps, so we wrote additional code. Andsome of those things we're open-sourcing. It's a small, humble effort."

Gottfrid says that upper management has been supportive. "Opensource has grown so much in terms of people being aware of it, and ourmanagers have grown up in that environment. Five or 10 years ago wewouldn't have had this reception."

To support their community efforts, Harris and Gottfrid launched a blog at open.nytimes.comwhere they and other members of the development team share theirthoughts about code, tools, the New York Times site, and sometimes evenfun little widgetsthey've written. Harris, who join the Times only about a year ago, wasa big influence on the launch of the open source projects. "We have alot of internal data that we could potentially share," he says, "and wehave applications we're interested in exposing."

Harris says he's received some pushback from members of the opensource community. "We went to OSCON, and some people were very excitedthat we were there, and some were like, what the hell are you doinghere. A lot of people feel like we're pretty much irrelevant, and thatthey know what our business model should be. When you talk to geeks,they say 'just stop printing the newspaper,' but that would pretty muchbankrupt us overnight."

Gottfrid says they didn't take it personally. "We've all beeninvolved in the community for a long time. We want to figure out how tohave a meaningful engagement with the community, to try to explain someof our problems so we're not just thought of as a monolith. We want tohave a discussion with the community we're wading into. So we'refiguring out the right way to do outreach; we're trying to find asympathetic ear and engage some feedback."

Gottfrid says the most frequent comment he hears about the New YorkTimes' foray into open source Web development is "'That's surprising.'They general think of us just as a newspaper, so they don't understandwhy we would be doing this. Is there a secret angle? But as soon asthey read some posts, they start to break it down and understand. Nowthere's a bunch of people interested in this."

Gottfrid's first release was DBSlayer. "It's a lightweight databaseconnection-pooling tool that we use internally. We were always saying,'We should open-source this thing.' And that got a positive responsefrom our manager -- they said, 'Go ahead, let's see where you can takethis.' It hasn't taken the world by storm, but it is somewhat of aniche thing. It's a new program, so we haven't developed it fully andit is still in the early stages. But people have submitted patches andwe've gotten good comments. It's been a very positive response. If wewant to open-source other stuff in the future, it makes it a lot easierbecause we've established that we can."

Harris says one of the things they've talked about doing in thefuture is "opening up some of our content in the form of widgets orAPIs, and see what the general public would do with it."

Gottfrid hints at the ultimate goal of NYT's move toward opensource. "The key goes back to the title of the blog: Open. We wanted tohave an open dialogue because we value the conversation with thedevelopment community. We want to be a part of that, and have a placeat the table and listen and give feedback and have that respect. As weopen more and more, it gives us a built-in audience that we can seedthese things with, and a number of people that we already have a goodrelationship with."

Gottfrid says there are things you can do to make it easier to jumpinto the open source community -- among them, "Be humble." He says theydon't try to act like they already know where their place is. "We'venever presented our solution as a definitive solution for all problems.It worked well for us, and hopefully someone else can make it work forthem." And don't forget to be persistent. "Just because you releasesomething today doesn't mean everyone will show up the next day anddownload it and praise you and shower you with accolades."

Harris and Gottfrid stress the importance of trusting yourdevelopers. "This [move toward open source] wasn't a corporatemandate," Gottfrid says. "There were no vice presidents involved inthis at all. This was Jake and me monkeying about and saying, 'Wouldn'tthis be cool?' The fact that they empowered us speaks volumes about theNew York Times entrusting non-senior people to have a voice on theoutside and represent the company. There's a growing awareness thatdevelopers play an integral role in how the medium is evolving."

Harris agrees. "We're no longer just a print company, we're atechnology company. We need to express ourselves in technologicalterms. The best way to do that is to give the developers a voice."

TinaGasperson writes about business and technology for some of the mostrespected publications in the industry. She's been freelancing since1998.

Track Santa Operation..

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 07:57:17 GMT

Track Santa as he makes his deliveries all over the world! Google Maps will refresh Santa's position every 5 minutes.

Click here to view the videos of Santa we've captured on our Santa Cam so far!

Learn more about Redding, California, United States on Google.com

Map

Hybrid

Terrain

Current location:

Redding, California, United States

Next update:

03:37

Places Santa has visited

Santa Cams (View recent videos)

Old article on Open source / Web 2.0

Open Web20 (openweb20) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 07:13:28 GMT

Found this Old article on Open source/Web 2.0 , from late 2005

Open Source and Web 2.0

by Daniel H. Steinberg

Here is the link

Few interesting lines from Jonathan Schwartz

" What matters more in this world is the price of the software. Free software is what has massive power. Google is powerful not because it's running on any one technology, but because its service is free."

"Get to open source quickly [and] there is no downside I can see. Get to free quickly. There is no downside I can see."

"you really have to think about open source in two respects. One of the ways is in the distribution of intellectual property."

Old article on Open source / Web 2.0

Open Web20 (openweb20) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:58:02 GMT

Found this Old article on Open source/Web 2.0 , from late 2005

Open Source and Web 2.0

by Daniel H. Steinberg

Here is the link

Few interesting lines from Jonathan Schwartz

"Get to open source quickly [and] there is no downside I can see. Get to free quickly. There is no downside I can see."

"you really have to think about open source in two respects. One of the ways is in the distribution of intellectual property."

World Famous Bushman from San Francisco's Fisherman's wharf

Rajesh Shetty (rshetty) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:10:23 GMT

I was in San Francisco city today and saw the bushman again. I had to stop and get a good laugh out of his acts of scaring people and it gives a light moment for watchers and few seconds scare spike to people who goes thru the quick scare attack of bushman. I thought of googling bushman and He is on Wikipedia and I was amazed by looking at the details on him . Here is the Wikipedia article on bushman and when you are in San Francisco next time make sure go get a good laughter at Fisherman's wharf.

World Famous Bushman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bushman giving a scare

David Johnson also known as the World Famous Bushman, is a busker (street performer) who has been entertaining passers-by along Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco since 1980. His current act began after he tried dressing as a robot but found there were too many others doing the same thing.^[1] Johnson hides behind branches and waits for unsuspecting people to wander by. When they approach, he jumps out and startles them. Crowds gather to watch him work,^[2] often including those he has previously scared.^[1]

Crowds usually watch Johnson in front of Joe's Crab Shack, located across the street from where Johnson usually sits, to see Johnson entertain people.

In a "good year", Johnson claims to earn $60,000.^[3] He employs a bodyguard to protect him against attacks by the unamused, to distract his targets, and to alert him to the approach of elderly people so he can avoid scaring them.^[1]

The police have received a number of complaints about the Bushman, and Fisherman's Wharf merchants have tried to shut him down.^[4] In 2004, he was charged with four misdemeanors, but a jury cleared him. The District Attorney subsequently dropped several remaining public nuisance complaints.^[2]