Striking the Right Chord, If You Can Find It

• I R O N M A N. See it. #
• Cutting down an old dead apple tree, a branch or two a day. #
• Did some gardening. Feeling itchy. #

• On plane in Chicago for last leg home, 3 1/2 hours late. #
• Home. Watched Jumper and I Am Legend on the long flight today. #
• | What can I get done outside before getting Katie at her friend’s and going to Will’s baseball game? #

• Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’ | The Social - CNET News.com

  “Social network Facebook announced Friday the debut of Facebook Connect, a new technology for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites. It makes the company the latest major Web site to embrace the concept of data portability.”

  tags: social networking, FaceBook, OB

• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Welcome!

  “The intent of this project is to compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world. We earnestly solicit information from all schools who participate in the development of research level mathematics and from all individuals who may know desired information.”

  tags: genealogy, mathematics, OB

• 90 minutes until flight from Rome to Chicago. Glacially slow wifi and not even free. #
• Bad sign, past boarding time and flight crew is not on plane #
• There’s really no excuse to show up at the last minute and cut to the front of the airplane boarding queue. #
• Still stuck on damn plane on ground in Rome, an hour after scheduled takeoff. #
• Plane left Rome over an hour late, missed my connection by 5 minutes after getting all the way across O’Hare. They did say they were sorry. #
• Weather permitting, I’m going to rent a jackhammer to take out some old brick stairs on Saturday. #

• Back-Up Your Mac, Effortlessly - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog

  “The beautiful thing about this arrangement is that it backs up your laptops automatically and completely, too–without your having to hook them up to anything. Any time the laptop is open and turned on, like when you’re using it, the Time Capsule backup is quietly doing its thing.”

  tags: OB, Mac, backup

• Fantasy and Science Fiction

  “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949, is the award-winning SF magazine which is the original publisher of SF classics like Stephen King’s Dark Tower, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Each 160 page issue offers: compelling short fiction by writers such as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Bisson and many others; the science fiction field’s most respected and outspoken opinions on Books, Films and Science; humor from our cartoonists and writers.”

  tags: science fiction, magazine, OB

• Just finished my talk in Rome. #
• All done at IBM Roma, have to get a taxi back to the hotel. #
• In front of the Musei Capitolini #
• Just finished walking around the Roman Forum #
• Trying the TwitterSync FB app instead of the broken Twitter one. #
• TwitterSynch didn’t work any better that the Twitter FB app. I am among the cursed. Will survive. #
• @cabbey I tried various FireFox Twitter addons on the Open Client and none of them worked for one reason or another. #
• Ready to crash, up in less than 6 hours to get to the airport. #
• @stshank 10 to 20 years starting when? #

After two days in Milan, I flew down to Rome last night with an IBM colleague for some business at IBM Rome today. It’s been a good and busy trip, but it’s nearly over. The hotel at which I’m staying is south of the city center, but runs free shuttle buses downtown every 90 minutes during the day. Though I was tired, I caught the 5pm bus which dropped me off at the Piazza Venizia around 5:30.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to Rome three or four times for business and several years ago we did a family vacation here, using up most of my acquired frequent flier miles on American Airlines at the time.

Much before that, in 1986 my wife and I came to Rome on a month long trip were I visited IBM Science Centers and universities to talk about the computer algebra system (Scratchpad II) on which I worked. Oddly enough, we stayed at the same hotel I’m at now. They didn’t remember me upon check-in last night.

There is always more to see and do in Rome, and even if you’ve visited all the places on your wish list, you can go back and see them again. This time I wanted to go see the “Church of the Bones,” also known as Santa Marie della Concezione. It’s macabre, but there is a crypt there where Capuchin friars used the skeletons of long deceased friars to construct and decorate the walls of chapels. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see that?

The church or crypt was closed for renovation in 2004 when we visited, so I thought I might be able to sneak over there today. Unfortunately the crypt closes at 6pm. Double unfortunately it’s not even open on Thursdays. So I didn’t go and I just have to find an excuse to come back. In the middle of the day. Maybe on a Tuesday.

Piazza Venizia is very close to the Roman Forum, so I decided to spend a couple of hours walking around the ruins of centuries worth of Roman and Christian buildings, arches, and walkways. Here’s a view of it from the western side near the Capitoline Museums.

I like arches. It probably goes back to when I took a “Roman Art and History” class as a college freshman, and one of the oldest in Rome is the Arch of Titus. It’s on the eastern side of the Forum, relatively close to the Colosseum. Here’s a shot of it:

Not a bad photo for a sunny Spring day in May, but I like photos with people in them, preferably family or friends. I was there solo, so I decided to do a self portrait:

Well, hmmm. I tried once more, and that came out a lot better, but someone offered to take photo and I reluctantly handed him my Canon camera. His shot was a definite improvement.

So I really was there, and I have the photo to prove it.

Incidentally most of the little fences in the Forum have signs, in English, that say “Do not lean on railing.” It may have been a language issue, but for many who did understand the signs they clearly didn’t think that sitting on a railing was the same as leaning on it.

The Forum closed about 45 minutes after I entered, so I quickly walked around some more, took some additional photos, and grabbed a cappuccino while I waited for the hotel shuttle bus. My total elapsed time away from the hotel was only 2 and 1/2 hours, but it was good to get out and visit some true wonders of the ancient world.

In truth, they looked a little older. But then again, so do I.

• Best line from dinner last night: “Remember me, we wrote a book together?” [Sebastian Rahtz] #
• Finished my talk in Milano about future IT technologies for standards development. Leaving around 4 for flight to Roma. #
• Too much sun during lunch, but sure felt good to be well past winter. #
• Catching an earlier plane to Roma with Mimmo. Waiting on the warm plane and got to carry on luggage. #
• Just landed in Rome. Anyone going to open the door? #
• Stuck in traffic in sight of my hotel. Not walkable. #
• Did end up walking across entrance ramp of highway to escape wait in taxi and get to hotel. Fascinating, I know … #
• FB seems to have stopped picking up tweets. #

Two members of one of my favorite indie bands The Mammals have recently gone off on their own and 1) gotten married, 2) had a baby, and 3) made an album, though I’m not quite sure of the order. Anyway, Michael Merenda and Ruth Ungar Merenda have a new album called The Honeymoon Agenda.

You can listen to the music and see some videos at the website.

If nothing else you might decide to like them because the home page says “This site is best viewed with Safari or Firefox.”

Not everyone can participate or support every standards effort they believe has value. There are thousands of efforts but only so many people, hours, and money that can be applied.

Let’s say that you had some fixed number that you applied to your standards participation. I’m not saying you don’t, but humor me in this experiment. Suppose very simply that you could only participate in X standards organizations, Y technical committees, or spend Z dollars on membership fees, travel, salary, etc., for how you participate.

How would you decide where to work?

If you decided that you absolutely needed to work in a new committee or organization, and given the caps as above, how would you decide which current effort you were going to leave? You’re not allowed to say “I’ll find the money to do the additional work” in this exercise.

How could you automate this? What metrics would you apply to how you participated and the value you received from standards so that you might simply say “we could join the new effort because we quit the lowest rated group in which we currently participated”?

Things are more complicated that this, but examining such simple examples might lead us to better being able to measure the value and results we obtain from what we do with standards.

Here’s a parting thought: what sorts of quantitative tools and measurements do you apply to sales that might be translatable in some way to how support your standards work?

• Are we closer to a ‘Matrix’-style world? - Frontiers- msnbc.com

  “Advances in computing, graphics are creating a more realistic virtual reality”

  tags: virtual world, OB, NP

• Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared — Linux Distros — InformationWeek

  “We tested openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.04, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1. All performed well, and each had at least one truly outstanding feature.”

  tags: OB, Linux

• Oh, yeah, six hour time difference. What time is it? #
• Starting to get hungry for lunch at IBM Milano #
• Having thousands of people travel to standards meetings each year is not "green." (Thanks Mimmo) #
• Finished reading _Sundiver_ by David Brin. #

• Can M-U-D Really Spell M-O-N-E-Y? - New York Times

  “For the last few years, the Three Stallion and 13 other inns have been trying to make muddy northern New England a destination, offering free car washes, complimentary mudslides (the drink) and spa mud wraps for travelers looking for an off-season getaway.”

  tags: Vermont, travel, OB

• How Google’s Checkbook Stymied Microsoft - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

  “As it turned out, Google was very much the spoiler in the deal. But its most effective weapon was not threats or coercion, but its very effective, and unconventional, use of its own checkbook.”

  tags: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, OB

I’ll be giving a talk at CEFRIEL in Milan at 17:00 today. The title as listed is “Challenges for ‘open’ in next 12 months.” I changed the title a little bit when I was putting together the talk, but it’s close enough.

And no, I’m not going to talk the whole time about document format standards. This particular talk and a similar one I’m giving in Rome later in the week is more based on the evolution of my challenges and priorities I laid out for open source and standards in January.

• Landed in London, only a 30 minute hold over Heathrow. #
• Security at T5 of LHR - not smooth. #
• @edbrill Given enough time, I’ll go through Heathrow. Probably should have flown to Rome and connected. #
• At the hotel now in Milan. Small room, but have wireless (expensive and timed). #
• Plasma or LCD? #
• Why does Linden break SL on Linux on my Thinkpad on every other release? Getting tiresome. #

• Vitamin Features » Make your site mobile friendly

  “The number of mobile devices loose in the world greatly exceeds the number of desktop (or laptop) computers filling up desk and table space in offices and homes. The number of people who might view your site while clutching a screen measuring anywhere from 100 pixels to 640 pixels in width increases daily. Creating mobile-friendly content is quickly becoming less of an occasional add-on and more of a standard practice.”

  tags: mobile, css, html