by MichaelF on October 23, 2006 12:34pm

Taking a brief detour from the thread about OSS and its similarities (or not) to law to take note of a couple recent publications, both of which discuss the interaction between traditional IT vendors and OSS:

In MIS Quarterly (September) (link) Brian Fitzgerald (University of Limerick—one of the must-read researchers on OSS, IMO) provides a comprehensive survey of what he calls “The Transformation of Open Source” with expectations for “Open Source 2.0.”  He expects IT vendors—including Microsoft—to play significant roles in “OSS 2.0.” 

In Communications of the ACM (October) (link) Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley) discusses “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source.”  (The title pretty much speaks for itself as a summary.)

I highlight these because they reflect what seems to me (qualitatively) to reflect a trend in the literature.  We’ll work on getting a better sense of what the trend is and researchers’ perspectives on it to bring back to Port25…because (to bring things back to analogy and metaphor), they introduce the question: Is a vendor in my OSS more a fly in the ointment or chocolate in my peanut butter?

by Frank Chism on October 20, 2006 03:06pm

"`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' "

Through

the

Looking

Glass

Lewis

Carroll

Where’s the glory?
I work in the cluster business. I can tell you that all too often I have felt like Alice trying to hold a conversation with Humpty Dumpty in Looking Glass Land. This usually occurs when I’m talking to someone new to cluster computing or someone who comes from a different tread of the industry than I do. My roots are in a thread that used number crunching to mean serious floating point arithmetic done by Fortran programs to simulate physical processes. Of course, some of the support routines and tools and even the operating system might be written on C, but Fortran ruled. Imagine my surprise when I found there was a ‘Number Crunchers Users Group’ in Seattle and they got together to discuss using spreadsheets. “Now where’s the glory in that?”  I thought to myself.

Time marches on, but technology runs as fast as it can just to stay in one place.
Fortunately for me, the object oriented police have provided me with just the right jargon to describe my predicament. Just consider that in any modern object oriented language it is possible that + can mean any number of things. Humpty would be proud. In OOP + means just exactly what the developer chooses it to mean. This is called overloading an operator. That may be OK for a compiler, but what about me? When I use cluster I am thinking of something that descended from the original Beowulf. No, not the King of the Geats. I mean the seminal work of those oft sung NASA nerds who put together the first Beowulf compute clusters. When I say nerds, I am here to praise cluster creators, not heap dirt on them or their work. After all, they ain’t dead yet.

For example, I work for a company that has several cluster offerings. There’s failover clusters, and load balancing scale out clusters, and my baby compute clusters. Now that’s overloading. You can usually tell what kind of cluster we mean by the type of work we talk about feeding it. If you had one type of cluster in mind and I had another and we kept talking long enough we’d either figure out the root cause of the confusion or dismiss our conversational partner as an idiot.

But wait. It gets worse.
Within my own little compute centric world, two new terms have come into common usage. They are farm and grid. So how do I tell a farm from a cluster if both are eating compute intensive programs? And worse yet, how is a cluster or a farm related (or not) to a grid? I was recently told by a co-worker to not tell our customer that he had a cluster, because as far as he was concerned it was a grid. This is proof that technical correctness is not nearly as important as political correctness. As in politics, so in life.

I can’t claim to have invented farms, but I can certainly claim to be one of the first of the render farmers. I was working at an early Computer Generated Images (CGI) site that was falling behind schedule for a major (OK, it was a big deal to us) Hollywood movie. If we were to finish in time for the planned release, we needed to get our CGI effects generated at just about twice the rate we were running at on our current machine. Fortunately the little ol’ mainframe we were using, a Cray-1, had just been superseded by the Cray X/MP, which had two CPUs instead of one and each CPU was about 50% faster than the Cray-1 CPU.  In an example of embarrassingly parallel render farming, we ran odd numbered frames on one thread, even numbered frames on another and ran a third thread to collate the frames and send them to the camera.

I can’t be blamed for grid at all. Well yes, some of the computers my company sold were ‘on the grid’, but I never thought of the grid as anything other than a route for users to do cool things with our machines. In fact I wasn’t sure that grid was anything other than a buzz word used to get NSF funding. Now, thanks to the efforts of the hardworking and unpaid volunteers at Wikipedia, I have at least one fixed mark to guide my wondering barking.

If a cluster on the grid failed over and no one was there to farm it, would it make any sense?
So, can we all agree on one set of definitions for clusters (several flavors to be sure), farms and grids? If not, I’m sure I’ll hear from the more assertive of the Port 25 readers and perhaps we can reach a group consensus and I can start quoting the  group mind of an entire community in defense of my own use of these terms without sounding too much like Humpty Dumpty making up meanings as I see fit.

Cluster: Making more than one computer behave as a single resource.

Failover or High Availability Cluster: A cluster specifically designed to perform functions in a manner that makes the service it provides continuous, even in the event of individual computer failures.

Load balancing or Scale out Cluster: Generally a high availability cluster that in addition to offering resiliency against individual computer failures also offers addition ability to deliver more of the intended service.

Compute Cluster: A cluster that is built as a single unit and treated as a single system and tuned to perform compute intensive tasks either as a capacity engine, that is to run lots of single node jobs or many low scale parallel jobs, or a capability engine, that is to run much bigger parallel jobs than a single node can accommodate.

Compute Farm: A cluster that uses a collection of computers, generally in a centralized location, to run many similar jobs in parallel for improved time to completion of a particular process. This is very similar to a Compute Cluster in capacity mode but the farm is not necessarily built to look like a single system.

Compute Grid: A heterogeneous farm that is spread out across a wider network or even the Internet but more importantly that is controlled by and conforms to the standards, concepts, and tools originating in the Global Toolkit. It can be used in both capacity and capability mode but is generally a distributed collection of resources, not a single system.

I tried to turn the handle but—

That’s all for now. I enjoyed writing this and hope to hear from some of you about what you think of my proposed definitions and how they can be improved. Other items on my blog-fodder list are ‘The Parallel Imperative’ and ‘What the Heck is Parallel I/O Anyway?’

So, never stop studying and I’ll blog at you later.
- Frank

by jcannon on October 19, 2006 04:40pm

Paul Moore sits down with Sam in this podcast, our second go around with Centrify. For those who don't know, Centrify builds software that provides access control and centralized identity management in mixed networks (Yes, this can include Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac, J2EE and web platforms with Active Directory). This interview is a bit different as Sam runs through questions submitted to Port 25 from the first Centrify interview and Paul takes the opportunity to directly answer the community.

Centrify is also a sponsor of TechX, a roadshow being sponsored by IBM, Linux.com, Slashdot, Microsoft and others to help customers better enable interoperabiliy between operating systems, directories, applications (headed to DC, Chicago, Dallas & San Fran - check it out).

by MichaelF on October 18, 2006 05:00pm

Today we are pleased to introduce Frank Chism.  Frank is a Technology Specialist at Microsoft who has worked in the High Performance Computing space for 41 years.  He is joining our team of bloggers and will contribute a monthly blog regarding HPC.  In this interview Sam and Frank talk about Frank's background as well as some of his insights on HPC both past and present. 

Look for Frank's first blog later this week or early next.

by MichaelF on October 17, 2006 06:16am

Today Microsoft announced the addition of it's Virtual Hard Disk Format (VHD) to the list of specifications covered by the Open Specification Promise (OSP).  As a result individuals and organizations can use, redistribute and modify Microsoft's virtualization format for free.

In light of this announcement we thought it would be a good time to catch up with a company that utilizes the VHD format:  Xensource.  In this podcast Sam and Simon Crosby, CTO of Xensource, discuss the Xensource and Microsoft partnership, Veridian, virtualization approaches, what's on the horizon and more.

Attachment: xensource.mp3

by MichaelF on October 16, 2006 08:13pm

Last Thursday we posted an interview with Jeremy Moskowitz in which we mentioned the book he authored:  Windows and Linux Integration.

As promised, today we have posted a complete chapter from his book dealing with:   Printer Sharing between Windows and Linux

Please respond with any questions or comments, we'll see if we can get Jeremy back on to answer your feedback.

Attachment: winlinchapter.pdf

by MichaelF on October 13, 2006 05:57pm

Today we are introducing Cyril Voisin, Security Advisor for Microsoft in France where he has worked for 9 years.  Cyril is a CISSP (Certified Information Security Systems Professional) and along with his work at Microsoft also teaches systems and network security in local schools as time allows.  Cyril has started a blog, primarily focused on security (exact blog intent can be seen here) but occasionally dealing with interoperability as it relates to security.

Cyril has given us permission to syndicate his content on Port 25, the first example is below.  Please feel free to post any questions or clarifications below or on Cyril’s blog.

We welcome Cyril to Port 25 and look forward to featuring his work and insight in the future.

-michael
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to use Windows Vista’s Boot Manager to boot Linux
The Web is full of explanations on how to dual boot Windows and Linux using a Linux boot manager like GRUB or LILO. If you want to dual boot Windows Vista and Linux using Windows Vista’s Boot Manager, please read on. I will assume that you already have installed Linux on your machine using GRUB as your boot loader.

Step 1 – Install GRUB on the Linux partition (outside of MBR)
As Windows Vista will replace the Master Boot Record (MBR) with its own, we need to relocate GRUB elsewhere by running grub-install with the Linux partition as a parameter.

•On Linux, launch a Terminal with root privileges
•Find the name of the partition Linux is installed on by running fdisk –l (the partition you’re looking for is the one whose system is Linux, can be  something like /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1. For the rest of this post, I’ll use /dev/sda1)
•Install GRUB on the Linux partition by running : grub-install /dev/sda1

Step 2 – Get a copy of Linux boot sector
We will need to instruct Windows Boot Manager how to boot correctly Linux using Linux boot sector, which we will extract using dd.

•On Linux, launch a Terminal with root privileges
•Take a copy of Linux boot sector : dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/tmp/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
•Copy linux.bin on a FAT formatted USB key or any storage accessible from Windows Vista

Step 3 – Install Windows Vista

Step 4 –  Configure dual booting in Windows Vista
We will create an entry for GRUB in Windows Vista boot configuration data store using bcdedit.

•On Windows Vista, launch a command prompt with administrative privileges (by right clicking on cmd and choosing Run as Administrator)
•Copy Linux boot sector on the root of the Windows boot (active) partition, namely the one containing bootmgr. If you don’t know for sure you can use diskpart or diskmgmt.msc to find out which one it is.
•Create an entry for GRUB :
  o   bcdedit /create /d “GRUB” /application BOOTSECTOR
  o   Note: bcdedit will return an ID for this entry that we will call {LinuxID} below. You will need to replace {LinuxID} by the returned identifier in this step. An example of {LinuxID} is {81ed7925-47ee-11db-bd26-cbb4e160eb27}
•Specify which device hosts a copy of the Linux boot sector
  o   bcdedit /set {LinuxID} device boot
•Specify the path to a copy of the Linux boot sector
  o   bcdedit /set {LinuxID}  PATH \linux.bin
•Add Linux entry to the displayed menu at boot time
  o   bcdedit /displayorder {LinuxID} /addlast
•Let the menu be displayed 10 seconds to allow for OS selection
  o   bcdedit /timeout 10

Building a dual boot system with Windows Vista BitLocker protection with TPM support

Many people have wondered if it would be possible to dual boot a TPM-bitlockered instance of Windows Vista with Linux, or another OS. The answer is yes and the following procedure will hopefully help you setup your machine correctly.

Some (simplified) background on Bitlocker:
Bitlocker Drive Encryption allows encryption of Windows Vista’s partition and provides a secure startup process when in use with a TPM (a crypto chip on the motherboard).  Basically the BIOS, the TPM, the MBR and the boot sector will collaborate to help verify that there was no modification to the boot sequence since Bitlocker was activated. This is done by using a function of the TPM to compute and store a hash of the code before executing it, at each of the initial steps of the boot sequence. Different hashes will be computed and stored in specific registers of the TPM. Then Windows Vista will ask the TPM to unseal its volume encryption key and the TPM will only provide this key if its registers are correctly set. Therefore if you replace Windows Vista’s MBR by a MBR that is not TPM aware, it won’t hash the boot sector before executing it and a register in the TPM won’t be populated. Same with the boot sector. Therefore Bitlocker will simply refuse to be enabled.

The underlying idea here is to have Bitlocker enabled with the original Windows Vista boot files. Another possibility would be to use a TPM-aware version of GRUB. However this would imply using files in the boot sequence that were not tested by Microsoft, which I would not recommend. Moreover, using original Windows Vista files offers you the benefits of code that went through the Security Development Lifecycle, which I personally find very valuable.

Note: I assume that you have a Bitlocker compatible machine (including TPM 1.2, TCG BIOS). See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/library/c61f2a12-8ae6-4957-b031-97b4d762cf31.mspx#BKMK_require

Step 1 – Install Linux
Note:  be sure to leave enough unpartitioned space for Windows Vista: about 11 GB of free unpartitioned space and slots for 2 partitions are needed

Step 2 – Install GRUB on the Linux partition (outside of MBR)
See other post “How to use Windows Vista’s Boot Manager to boot Linux”

Step 3 – Get a copy of Linux boot sector
See other post “How to use Windows Vista’s Boot Manager to boot Linux”

Step 4 – Create partitions for Windows Vista
We need to create 2 primary NTFS formatted partitions on the disk: one active, 1.5GB size minimum and another larger (all the rest for instance with a minimum of 8.5GB). The former will be used to boot the machine (active partition) and will remain unencrypted while the latter will host Windows Vista and will be encrypted when we activate Bitlocker.
You can use diskpart tool to do this (available from Repair options on the Windows Vista DVD). Here is what the instructions may look like :

•  
  • select disk 1
  • create partition primary size=2048
  • active
  • create partition primary

Step 5 - Install Windows Vista
Install Windows Vista on the largest NTFS partition.

Step 6 - Set up Windows Vista Boot Manager to boot Linux
See other post “How to use Windows Vista’s Boot Manager to boot Linux”.

Step 7 - Enable BitLocker on Windows Vista
See BitLocker documentation, like http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/library/c61f2a12-8ae6-4957-b031-97b4d762cf31.mspx#BKMK_S3

by MichaelF on October 12, 2006 02:30pm

Capturing the sentiment from my colleagues, Anandeep, Hank and Sam – I LOVE THIS JOB !!! Last week I had a chance to meet w/ Mozilla, watch Sam interview Steve Wozniak and the wonder of it never ceases to amaze me. This week, we had a chance to have lunch w/ Barry Crist, the CEO of Centeris, Krishna Ganugapati their VP of Development and Chuck Mount, the VP of Marketing. Centeris is a company based out of Bellevue, WA that makes the Likewise product which allows Linux Servers to be manages within a Windows centric environment. We all got off to a great start in our discussion because one of the core and common goal that ties us together to the charter of partners like Centeris is “Interop”. Yes, Interop, and finding more and better ways for Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms or products to co-exist and thrive. This is a really important charter for not only the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab but for also all of Microsoft. After brief introductions to the Program Managers of the Team and our beloved Penguins, we got down to discussing what Centeris as a company was all about and more importantly, what is it that “Likewise” did. Barry and Chuck gave us a very good insight into what the overall focus of Centeris was about and why there is a prominent need for providing this functionality in a heterogeneous environment.

If you’re an ITPro managing a small, medium or an enterprise-wide shop, you know how diverse and today’s implementations are and/or can be. This translates to greater complexity while managing your environment, which as the market data will tell you, is rarely single-platform centric. Thus, making accommodations for manageability of the diverse platform-portfolio is a skill that we all much acquire sooner than later. This is where Centeris fits in perfectly for several reasons because it is extending Windows-based manageability and windows-based tools towards day-to-day management of Linux servers and improve interop. This also means that organizations that have tight budgets can continue to manage their environment with existing skill-sets under tight budgets.

The way Likwise works is where the console is installed on the Admin’s machine, the agent (which is an open source product) is installed on the Linux Server/s and using the console, these servers are managed using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). Likewise Open Agent includes server-side components (that work w/ Samba) and client-side components (that work w/ MMC) The functionality that is extended to the Linux systems is possible through RPC’s and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Likewise open agent is available on sourceforge.net and has been released under the CDDL (common development and distribution license).  We found the approach that Centeris took towards Linux manageability to be very simple and ITPro centric.

The highlight of our discussion yesterday was getting to know more about Krishna Ganugapati.  Krishna spent 10 years at Microsoft from 1993 to 2003 most of it in Windows development team. After we got into deep discussions, we found out that Krishna was the inventor of ADSI (Active Directory Services Interfaces), the preferred means for accessing Active Directory. Krishna also led the development teams for Windows IPSec and Window wireless security through the Windows 2000 and XP releases. The interaction that followed between all of us, penguins, PM’s and Krishna was very rewarding. Krishna got into the guts of how manageability is being approached as a concept by Centeris. The big takeway after we saw the Centeris demo, for me was that there doesn’t always have to be a steep learning curve every time new technology is introduced into the environment. Sometimes, its easier to manage new technology with familiar tools and that was a very novel concept that I walked away with yesterday. It also affirmed my faith as to why “Interop” is as prominent, as important and as critical as it is to us and to the success of Microsoft.

Thanks Centeris !!

by MichaelF on October 10, 2006 12:10pm

Recently we posted about http://www.devreadiness.com, an online resource for Vista Application Compatibility questions/guidance.  After posting we received some feedback that with some changes they could become much more useful for Open Source Developers.  Based on this feedback we are going to create a set of resources specifically tailored for the open source developer/ISV. 

This is where we would like some help.  We can move forward with this based on our understanding and assumptions or we can involve our community and ensure that the “right” changes are being made.  To this end we are seeking a small group of volunteers who would be willing to act as a review/guidance team.  This endeavor should not be tremendously time consuming.  We anticipate a single review/feedback cycle of existing content to get us started.  After an initial pass we will request one to two more review cycles to ensure we are on the right path.

While the time required is not tremendous, the impact of your participation will be.  Please drop a line to port25@microsoft.com if you are interested.

Thanks!

Sam

by MichaelF on October 06, 2006 12:57pm

In the IT industry it is axiomatic that whatever is new will be old, and will then be new again!  Consider the “Service Bureau” approach that was used in the mainframe days, in which an organization’s computing needs were taken care of by a “Service Bureau” that maintained the infrastructure, served up the applications and  provided the support for the users. The  Service Bureau typically served many organizations needs, had to keep their customer’s data separate and provide an SLA to each one of their customers. Sound suspiciously like SaaS (Software as a Service) doesn’t it?  Service bureaus were not as sexy as SaaS and they never completely went away. With the advent of PCs, computing was available at the individual level – which meant that small teams could manage their own IT infrastructure, applications and support for the users. This freed them from constraints (and some cynics say from discipline!) on their ability to adopt and adapt new software technology. The software on PCs grew capable of handing mission critical applications allied with the raw compute power provided by networked distributed PCs. The small teams began to feel the pain of managing and maintaining such infrastructure, and the PCs were serving not just these small teams but entire enterprises. With the commoditization of hardware and the adoption of common software standards,  the “Service Bureau” idea re-emerged as “SaaS”, and was immediately attractive to the customers. Of course, I am oversimplifying, but I think I can use my blog writers license here.  The new avatar (SaaS) is better for the users because it doesn’t force the compromises the old avatar (Service Bureau) on its customers.  The idea is the same but the implementation is improved immeasurably!

I think I have identified a similar new, old, new cycle in OS technology (ladies and gentlemen, please save the standing ovation for later!).  Of course, I have to insert the “don’t-try-this-at-home-kids” warning.  I am not an operating systems expert – I just play one on blogs!
Heard about microkernels?  They were all the rage back in the late 80s/early 90s (that’s in the nineteen hundreds).   This is how Wikipedia defines them “A microkernel is a minimal computer operating system kernel providing only basic operating system services (system calls), while other services (commonly provided by kernels) are provided by user-space programs called servers.” 

Microkernels were a reaction to the bloat introduced into operating systems, which started out lean but then added all kinds of services as part of the operating system. This meant that operating systems were not as portable as they used to be, because all services had to be ported over – whether to a new processor or to a new board. There were attempts made to make operating systems that were minimal that also had the effect of making them portable – because to port an operating system, all you had to do was port the teensy weensy kernel.  I know this because one summer as a mere stripling I was working at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay which had just got a bunch of tapes of one of the first microkernel based operating systems called Mach. Some highly talented academic and industry folks were building a Unix workstation (from the hardware up) and wanted to do the least amount of work to do it!  To someone using the workstation  it was hard to distinguish between that system and a vanilla (think Sun/DEC) Unix workstation.  But the speed with which the port could be done was astounding or so the people working there assured me.

Mach, which came out of Carnegie Mellon University, was much more than the portable operating system  thing I made it out to be– it was a radical new way to look at OS’s.   The idea was to abstract away the non-essentials of an OS and leave a very small microkernel to be dealt with. This had far reaching impact on how portable both the kernel and the services written on it could be from hardware platform to hardware platform.  An interesting fact, Rick Rashid who was the Prof leading the MACH team, came to Microsoft and is now the SVP responsible for MS Research.  Hmm, worked on Mach, was at Carnegie Mellon and then came to Microsoft to become SVP! Looks like my career is on track here!

Then two things happened:

1. suddenly there was only hardware platform that mattered (the one that Linux and Windows run on) and
2. Linux and Windows were certainly not microkernel based – think MACROkernel.  There were both monolithic operating systems, at least as far OS researchers go. Ok, some people will argue that they are really “hybrid” kernels with a kernel and a user mode division, but microkernels they certainly were not! 

So the old (microkernel) went out, and the new came in (macrokernel – it’s not a term, just something I invented!).

Ah ha! You say.  When is the old going to come back?

I think it has already sneaked in by another name -  virtual machines.  I don’t mean Virtual Machines as they have been defined by Xen, Microsoft and VMWare.  I mean in the computer science understanding of the term virtual machines which implement “virtualization”.  According to Wikipedia (what would I do without it!) “In computing, virtualization is the process of presenting a logical grouping or subset of computing resources so that they can be accessed in ways that give benefits over the original configuration”.   Hardware abstraction layers (think Xen) and virtualization engines (think network-seen-as-one-computer) are just different aspects of virtualization.

This probably needs some more explanation. A concrete example would be even better.  One dropped into my lap as I was writing this blog.  My attention was guided towards a company called 3Tera which claimed to be building a “Grid operating system”. They make the claim that they take an existing web application and without changes drop it onto a grid, so that the web application is able to be scaled by the provision of on-demand resources dictated by consumer demand. They are platform independent i.e. it doesn’t matter to them that the application runs on Windows or Linux.

The reason that they are able to do this is because they have redefined a conventional OS using the concept of virtualization. That gave me the idea of how I could diagrammatically show you what this means.

The new microkernel does very few things, it just manages the allocation of today’s OS’s (which are just applications to the new microkernel) on to a grid of commodity hardware.  This grid could be a single computer or more likely a widely distributed network of computers. All this is possible because the two dominant OS’s Windows and Linux rely on the same commodity hardware.  This allows for the capability of a mainframe (in terms of manageability, security & protection, partitioning) while retaining the advantages of using cheaper distributed computers.

The dream of “a view of computing resources is not restricted by the implementation, geographic location or the physical configuration of underlying resources” will be realized.  It is also realized by utilizing in full the investment made in today’s OSs – which do their thang much as they do now!

So what? You ask.  Patience, young Jedi!

(Peering into my trusty crystal ball)
Operating systems will be sets of services.  OS’s will be chosen based on some favorite service, without giving though to “platform lock in”.
Operating systems components will be componentized. So that a Linux daemon will (gasp!) be able to use a Windows security component, via the use of standardized protocols.  Without it knowing that it is.
Clustering and failover will not be high end luxuries, but will be baked into all OS’s – and schedulers will schedule multiple OS’s across Internet scale networks

……….VB programmers will be able to make the equivalent of the salaries they were making during the dot com boom.  Ok – so that will never happen!

I think these predictions are probably going to raise some level of discussion. (Understatement, understatement!).

by MichaelF on October 04, 2006 09:47am

So, as people are finding out, we at OSSL are doing things a little differently. One of those things Sam Ramji’s invite to the Mozilla guys to come up and help them making their products work on Vista better.

This was met with great criticism (Slashdot for example had people make all kinds of wild assumptions that started with suggestions all Mozilla folks flying on different planes to MS offering everybody jobs. And everything in between) and surprise.

Well, I am glad to report that the Mozilla guys are here. I have spent a really cool day in all kinds of meetings with the following guys from Mozilla; Robert Strong, Mike Schroepfer, Doug Turner, Vladimir Vukicevic, Scott Macgregor.  (If I slaughtered anybody’s name I apologize for it in advance!!)

They are meeting with all kinds of people here, and it seems that both sides are learning greatly from each other. One thing that I noticed right away is that both the MS side and the Firefox side just love the technology and are hitting it off nicely.

The things we talked about today for example have been;

Cardspace; Mike Jones and Garrett Serack gave an overview of cardspace. Cardspace is a carrier of identity tokens.  But you can read about it here as a nice starting point http://blogs.msdn.com/garretts/ .  We spend some time talking about what it is providing, and that it is an effort from the industry to provide a way to provide identity management.  Vista will include it out of the box, and .Net 3.0 will include the cardspace technology. Which will make it run on XP and 2003.

And we are currently looking to writing a plugin to make cardspace work inside of Firefox. (Like I said, we do things differently here at OSSL )

IE Lower Integrity Marked: IE will be running in a Low Integrity Marked setting, resulting in a greater security environment IE will run in. But it limits a whole bunch of places it can write to. (which is good) We talked with the IE people to the benefits and pitfalls of doing this, Mozilla is interested in checking into doing this for Firefox as well.

MS WPFE: the developers from the plugin had a conversation to make it work inside Firefox better. (I am not an expert on this, but this should give a better understanding of what it is; http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx )

MSI: MSI developers talked about the changes in and advantages of using the new MSI way of installing software in Vista. One of the things that came up was that some vendor have problems with their plugins (xpi files) such as Adobe. (Problem relating to global plugins)  XPI can only be installed per user in Vista. I will talk more about this in a later blog

Windows Vista Shell: we went through a high level overview of the Windows shell in Vista.

If you want to know what the Mozilla folks thought of yesterday’s meeting, check out Vladimir’s blog http://blog.vlad1.com/

Well, I wanted to keep this short. But still let you all know what is going on. There is another day with them coming up tomorrow.

Btw, the chips have been implemented into the brains of all the Mozilla folks that have shown up here. And it looks like from Firefox 2.0 on it will be released on Windows exclusively. 

Hank.

by MichaelF on October 03, 2006 06:42pm

About a month ago, I did a presentation on What I Learned from OSCON, based primarily on James Howison's talk on OSS Communities.  Since James had such great and interesting feedback on my presentation, we decided to do a follow-up podcast.  I'm trying to publically capture as much of this journey as possible of a team at Microsoft learning how to go open.  Maybe this journey will make for an interesting OSCON '07 talk, I hope.  =)

-sara

Introductions:

James Howison is a doctoral student on Kevin Crowston's NSF-funded research team at the Syracuse University Information School and a regular presenter at O’Reilly events.  At OSCON '06, James gave a talk on OSS Communities, where Sara Ford took notes until her fingers went numb.

Sara Ford is the Program Manager for the Power Toys for Visual Studio.  Her mission is to explore the various ways Microsoft developers can have conversations with the Visual Studio community at the source code level, while providing great after-market solutions to developer pain-points via Shared Source.

Attachment: http://port25.technet.com/videos/podcasts/jameshowison.mp3

by jcannon on October 02, 2006 06:06pm

Last week, I was fortunate to take a day & visit the floor of Interop New York. The Interop conference celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, underscoring the persistence & complexity of interoperability as an industry issue. This year’s mission was no different…to discuss achieving the ideal state of all technology talking to itself, and to others.

OK, so here’s the clever metaphor I came up with on my walk over to the Javitz Center (I live in NYC – anyone around….let me know). Interoperability is a loaded term since it can mean so many different things to different folks …but why? Because interop is really more about many means toward an end. In fact, I would suggest the goal of most interoperability efforts is to enhance the performance of a total system through improved communication and accessibility of the various subsystems – be that protocols, applications, schemas or operating systems (the means). It’s kind of like…..a city! The below pick was snapped on my way over to the show....the total system of a city only works when it’s subcomponents work together successfully – be they water, electric, gas, subway, building specs & zoning, urban development & layout, garbage, sewer, security, transit. All of those systems must talk to themselves and to each other to provide a quality of service to the citizens it serves. I skillfully Photoshop’d the below to illustrate my point….if you live or have visited NYC, you know that it’s amazing that the system works so well, every single day. We grumble that interop in IT is hard to achieve with legacy systems 5, 10, 20 years old. Imagine connecting systems dating back to Gangs of New York. Absolutely nuts.

Pretty Complex Stuff (PCS)

The Show
More than anything, it was fascinating to hear how customers & vendors are defining interoperability. The pervasive definition was squarely on technology and the increasing role of (here comes the buzz-train) Web 2.0 in connecting data, information and systems. This was reflected in the keynotes, such as Andrew McAfee and SocialText CEO, Ross Mayfield’s presentation. I’ll start by breaking that notion down into a couple more discrete ideas:

The Browser as Epoxy
This was the most interesting theme of all ~ across both IT and Developer tracks, interoperability was a problem best addressed by the browser. I phrase it this way because at its most basic level, the browser, through robust XML frameworks and rich presentation layers, is what is bringing disparate data and systems together in a seamless way for enterprise end-users. That quality of adhesiveness is being enabled by technology like AJAX and DHTML – not surprisingly - and subsequently one arrives at ‘Rich Internet Applications.’  What was interesting to me was that interoperability solutions weren’t being implemented over wires to connect servers. Instead, silo’d data was being fed to powerful client machines for cohesion. In essence, the browser was the epoxy for the data & systems throughout the network. Cool stuff indeed.

The (Dubious) Optimism of Enterprise User-Collaboration
The keynote on Thursday was dedicated to examining how social software conventions (Wikis, Tagging, RSS) can & should be extended into the enterprise environment. In contrast to the process orientation of most enterprise-level applications, Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School, pointed out that there was much to gain through large scale, unstructured data sharing in an enterprise & the subsequent emergent analysis that could be leveraged as a learning system. What makes all this possible? The very cool technologies of Web 2.0: Deep Linking, Search, Tagging, RSS, Easy Authoring.

Why dubious? Only the largest sites on the Internet are proof points of success: Digg, Delicious, Technorati….we have no idea how to bridge legacy systems to a new generation of tools in an enterprise, nor the required tipping point at which critical mass is reached and emergent patterns actually become meaningful. (How useful is this really for a small/medium/large organization?) And control. Users tend to be untrusted, unsupervised, distributed, silo’d and working in environments under great rates of change – how does a manager leverage a system like this?

Can I Get a Customer?
There were a ton of great demonstrations and eye candy, but I was hard pressed to find a customer talking about a successful interop implementation using most or all of the above technologies. This indicated – to me- we’re still in the early hype cycle of these technologies and lack a customer base and the watered-down expectations that accompany real-world implementation.

 Adult Visual Aides; Server Racks & The Show Entrance  

• More Photos from Interop (eWeek)

It was absolutely worth the day – although I would have liked to have seen more customers on-site. Can’t blame anybody given it was the last day of the conference though. Did you attend the show, or have any questions about it? Share your thoughts; I would love to hear other perspectives on the themes that were presented.

- Jamie

by MichaelF on September 29, 2006 07:01pm

Sam and Hank spend some time with Iain McDonald and Andrew Mason.  In this interview they discuss Windows Server Core a command line controlled installation of Windows Server intended to simplify management and minimize the server installation for the four key server roles: AD, DHCP, DNS and File Server as well as others..  They discuss the architecture, why it was developed, comparisons with Linux and even show us the interface.  They also spend some time drawing on windows while hanging out in a stairwell...

by MichaelF on September 28, 2006 06:31pm

In my last blog I started talking about the power of analogy and metaphor, and dove into a discussion of the first analogy of my collection, asking what if the practice of law, rather than being like a domain suffering the consequences of a “failure of openness,”  was more like an example of a domain with a great deal of openness.  I promised to offer some ideas for analogies that helped make sense of the situation in my next blog.

I was subsequently intrigued by where some of the comments to the post (unexpectedly) led me; thus, I postpone those (original) ideas in order to share some of where those comments led me on the path toward new ones.  In this post, I will address the first of two substantive issues: the analogy made by CDarklock between the legal profession and  open source software development (--in his view, to the disadvantage of OSSD).

Comparing “do-it-yourself lawyering” with “do-it-yourself usability,”  he  implies a lack of sensitivity among developers to the risks of the latter relative to the legal profession’s  diligence with respect to the former.  

Surely enough, when pointed to Groklaw by stats for all, front and center is a warning of the risks of the former:

IANAL. I am a journalist with a paralegal background, so if you have a legal problem and want advice, please hire an attorney.

This prompted me to think about some quick phenomenological test to determine if  similar evidence for this type of  distinction made by journalists commenting on law (Groklaw) might in fact be recognized with equal alacrity by open source developers commenting on usability: in fact, in defense of OSS developers, there are indeed cases of IANAUE (“I Am Not A Usability Engineer”)—although AFAIK it has not made Wikipedia yet, in contrast to variants of the apparently fecund IANAL which has spawned  IANYL, TINLA, and IAAL. (WTF?)

At this point you’re probably wondering why I was so engaged on this topic—the first reason is that, IMHO, challenges with consistent and effective usability practices are endemic and impactful. (I will never forget my introduction to the usability disipline: I was helping usability engineers build a stochastic model on top of their user observational testing of  a web experience which (thankfully) has since been improved.  The model was pretty cool as a quantification of how much customer time and effort things like ambiguous terms and redundant links actually wasted—but nothing seared the importance of usability into my brain like watching a test subject (a middle-aged, tech-savvy woman with, as I recall, a PhD—kind of hard to blame the user) actually start to cry in frustration as she tried to complete a task.)

The second reason is that  I had never considered the possibility of an analogy between “ legal self-representation” and  “developer self-usability” as conceptually similar problems to be solved. This analogy offers a different (and interesting) way to think about why it occurs and what to do about it in OSSD, in contrast to traditional corporate development where the origins of usability challenges nor their resolution seem to me to be fairly straightforward: does a company (or development group) recognize the value of good practices, resource for it, make it a priority, test against user interaction metrics etc.

In fact that there is a paper (Nichols & Twidale, online at First Monday) which provides a comprehensive assessment of usability in OSSD, with suggestions for remediation that come awfully close to echoing ideas for what folks in the legal profession would call increasing access to justice (--like academic volunteerism and corporate involvement).

It’s an interesting line of thinking both because it is just in time for CSCW  2006 (Computer Supported Cooperative Work—anybody going?) and because folks in the OSS community (just like in the legal community) are doing some “out of the box thinking.”  I’ve been trading mails with a PhD candidate at Penn State who has outlined a very thoughtful research agenda on OSS and Usability—I’m pleased to say we’ll be bringing her to Port25 for an interview near the end of October.

With that said, the next point release on our path to part 2 will address an issue raised by ssjdrn who surfaces (in my words) a tension between two principles  I have always taken for granted: efficient signaling and disciplinary control through normalization that is keeping me up at night (literally—when Spence and Foucault, respectively, aren’t jibing for  me, I can’t sleep.  You can ask my wife.)

And yes, it all does come back to an even richer –than-anticipated analogy between law and  open around making successful software.