Accept no substitutes

Day: February 18, 2005

Django on WCOM

I had no idea who was singing this catchy song, “American Romeo,” on WCOM tonight as I was driving home. I missed whatever the DJ said except that they were from here in Chapel Hill. Luckily Google came through for me and I discovered Django Haskins and The Old Ceremony. Pop Noir indeed. Good music even on their rough cuts.
This is one reason we need community radio. This guy is good and he’s been playing around town and I’d never heard of him — of course I’m too old and tired to be a scenester.

Autonomic Computing

Went to a great talk over in Computer Science (Thanks Diane Pozefsky for inviting us) by Kathryn Britton (IBM) and Wayne Clarke (Cisco) on autonomic computing. Autonomic computing is like the autonomic nervous system. That is it is a system that operates without thinking like say your circulatory system, digestive system, etc. Autonomic computing is the evolving effort to achieve the right balance between what a person does and what technology does. IBM has a very good descriptive site dedicated to explaining autonomic computing. As well as a place to download and try out some free software for autonomic computing. The Alphaworks site also has some good introductions to autonomic computing including the very useful ABCs of Autonomic Computing by Lori Small.
Note: ibiblio is involved in information sharing with IBM at the theoritical level for autonomic computing when we are working with Rick Harper and Dave Bradley.

Abstract for the talk:

Self-Managing Systems: A Necessity for Future IT Infrastructures, the Autonomic Computing Vision

Computing technology has progressed rapidly over the last several decades with implementations and applications that were unthinkable a decade ago now commonplace. The rate of progress, however, has brought its own cost. As large IT infrastructures grow more complex the cost of managing these systems has increased rapidly. As a result a greater percentage of the IT budget is going toward maintenance of the infrastructure rather than improving its benefit to the business.

We will discuss how self-managing systems will not only help solve today’s problem of increasing complexity but, will, in fact, finally allow IT infrastructures to directly serve the corporation’s business needs rather than being a static and poorly implemented attempt to automate yesterday’s business processes. We will delineate the opportunities for, and challenges of, standardization of self-managing technologies. We will describe IBM’s vision for autonomic computing, with particular focus on problem determination, configuration, and optimization. We will conclude with some of the research areas in which further exploration is needed.

ibiblio in 40 – 50 words

So, I have to describe ibiblio.org’s past 12 years and its future communicating clearly what the project is designed to do and how it changes and improves people’s lives while “situating the benefit within a specific business or institutional context” in less than 50 words!
Suggestions are welcome.
My first cut is:

ibiblio.org, which began its life as sunsite.unc.edu in 1992, is a contributor-run digital library and archive serving the world. ibiblio began as a way to share and support all kinds of free software, we now host over 1500 non-software related information sharing projects on almost every conceivable subject.

That’s 48 words.

Jones-mania (literary version)

Just got email from Jan Hensley who is doing a photo display of writers from North Carolina saying that he, his camera and my old buddy poet Ann Deagon would be coming here next week so’s he can add my photo to his show. He’ll be putting together a show of photos and first books for the North Carolina Writers Conference in July. My only book, What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common, has some age on it, but it’s also been sold out since it was published in 1990. You can read it online where it’s been since 1992.
Some more recent poems are “Unapproachable Edens,” “Birds and Fishes,” and “Dividing Waters (1954)”.

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