the basement of phillips hall

September 14, 2007 on 12:45 pm | In ramblings | No Comments

so, during the renovations of the steele building, the advising department had to move somewhere.  poor, poor academic advising.  they got moved temporarily into the basement of phillips hall!  the old machine room, still with raised floor, is now silent save the clacking of computer keys.  the secretaries, lacking any natural light, provide their own sunshine as they welcome new students, along with old OIT employees who pop their head in the door for old times’ sake.

the dumbwaiter is still in the office in the back hallway, as is the water-filled pit beneath the sub-basement.  trey harris used to throw rocks in there to listen to them sploosh.  anyone who worked in the basement of phillips should walk through – surreal to have plush chairs lining the walls and undergrads wandering around looking for their advisor.

web 2.0 conference, afternoon session

September 12, 2007 on 12:17 pm | In tech stoof | No Comments

i didn’t win the iPhone. more on wikinomics – the wisdom of the masses. the baby name wizard. segue into a demo of IBM’s “many eyes.” graphical representations: hostograms of the text of Genesis, US government expenses, etc.  very, very cool stuf!

web 2.0 conference, social computing session

September 12, 2007 on 10:38 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

rob, martha and frank are leading the social computing session. anyone who has teenagers knows exactly what we’re talking about. remember “get off the damned phone?” kids don’t use phones for minutes, just for texts. rob reads an obituary from wikinomics: “the bottom line is this: the immutable, stand-alone web is dead.” frank demos the lotus greenhouse using firefox on vista.

  • how do we use social computing in the workplace?
  • privacy issues / challenges in social software
  • which sites are best to use, for which purpose?
  • what makes social software and sites succeed or fail?
  • how to bring people out of the enterprise into social networks?

ESPN is the single most blocked site on the web. del.icio.us may be more likely for searches than google. everybody knows youtube and wikipedia. their overgrown stickies get yanked. plug many eyes, an alphaworks product. maybe a demo later. del.icio.us demo. RSS discussion.

frank talks about friendster, myspace and facebook. he tells us cautionary tales – employers stalk candidates before interviews, so be careful what you publish about yourself. frank’s myspace page includes comments from friends telling him he’s hot but warning that they’ll disown him if he marries any relatives now that he’s moved to the south. also his friend marley warns that he’s going to hell, and she’ll see him there.

Qatsup is a spam engine – you upload your address book, and they use it to spam your friends. rob recommends against it. twitter only gets 15 seconds. frank says twitter is brilliant. now we go for a lotus connections demo, but they’re down for maintenance.

on to engadget. techcrunch. digg. we begin to see information aggregates. “the whole concept of a blog makes a lot of sense.” on to the developerworks community — social networking for the enterprise. almost out of time. didn’t get to talk about security. AIM was insecure, so IBM came up with sametime. social pools face the same security problems. when you bring them inside the firewall, you can log them. studmuffin123 becomes rob@ibm.  second life discussion but no demo. IBM highlighters for the folks that piped up in discussion.

web 2.0 conference introduction

September 12, 2007 on 8:46 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

led by the evangelist for the emerging technologies group at IBM, the coolest job in the company. web 2.0 may still be vague for a lot of people, so a primer on jargon. plugging developerworks and alphaworks. developers love demos and hate slides. we’ll be talking to super-geeks today. two-way interaction makes web 2.0. google is all that, but myspace gets more hits. if IBM had sponsored wikipedia, it never would have happened. this is a beta of the 2.0 conference.

holds up a punch card with notes on it. who knows what this is? you can write on it, and it fits in your back pocket. IBM still stocks them because IBM has customers that still use them. 12 goes first, face down.

  • who invented DOS? tim patterson got about $10k for it.
  • why did DOS have 8.3 character filenames? to be compatible with CPM
  • when jobs left apple, where did john scully work before taking the helm? pepsi
  • before IBM, lou gershner worked for… nabisco
  • jobs spent over $1m designing the NeXT box. why? because he wanted a perfectly square cube with perfect corners

what’s happening on youtube? how can we do that in the enterprise? in colleges? governments? we’ll show you some lotus products to help you do this. welcome rod smith, IBM fellow.

rod smith takes over. web 2.0 means the technically savvy are more willing to experiment than before. speed geeking. people want to see instant value. siphoning a lot of technologies for the community. developerworks is the #2 site where developers go these days. syndication. smaller communities. IBMers don’t get to see one another until they meet when working with customers.

as web 2.0 comes along, business worry about disruption. who will buy a book from amazon without seeing positive comments about it? most corporate information is locked behind firewalls. how to get it out? high school wanted info from NOAA, invited NOAA officials to see their projects, and had completed tasks NOAA had been meaning to get done.

this brings us to mashups. before, it took us years to build applications. now, we do them in 30 days. iGoogle, netvisor, what IBM is doing, all will shorten time to market. all with social aspects. got bored with retail mashups using google maps, but maps were very valuable to customers.

more talk of AJAX, long tail, and handing out of lab coats to be worn at the conference. break for coffee and reconfig.

web 2.0 conference, coffee time

September 12, 2007 on 7:57 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

held in engineering ii’s progress energy conference center. 13 projectors mounted on a central tower are beaming mashups and facebook pages onto the domed ceiling. the soundtrack is acid jazz and drum n bass, punctuated by announcements about QED wiki.

laura, the coordinator, is making the rounds to get a vibe from the audience before the presentation begins. i see over-sized post-it notes on the far wall. an un-conference! i see “linked in” “db2″ “information management” “del.icio.us” “gather.com” and “yootube”[sic]. the coordinator points them out. dig it?

here’s what the announcer is advertising in between music tracks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63qIq9t9Gqs

i wish i got SSH access through NCSU’s wireless service so i could check on our servers…

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