Adventures in Open Source

One of the major things I love about OpenNMS is its worldwide scope. Last fall we had two students, Javier and Cristian, attend our training course in Pittsboro. They work for Telmex in Chile, and the office is just outside of Santiago.

When I heard about the magnitude 8.8 quake, my first thought was to hope that they were okay. I did get an e-mail from them and they are fine, although Cristian writes “I am hoping the earth stops moving … it is a worrying feeling all day long to feel the floor moving and not knowing when it will come.”

Our best thoughts go out to everyone affected by this earthquake, as well as our hopes for a speedy recovery.

Just in case you haven’t voted yet, this is one last reminder that the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards voting ends on Monday.

If you like OpenNMS, please be sure to give us some love with a vote (the link should pre-select OpenNMS for “Best Project for the Enterprise and if you don’t have a Sourceforge account you can just enter in an e-mail address).

Remember to vote early and often, and we really appreciate your support.

Plus, if you haven’t had a chance to check out our video, I think it’s worth a look.

The 14th of July, or Bastille Day, celebrates the beginning of French independence with the storming of the Bastille prison on this date in 1789.

I haven’t been able to spend as much time I would like in France. My friend Alex lives in France near the Alps and the Swiss border (he works in Switzerland so I assume he didn’t get today off) and I’ve been able to visit him a couple of times, and we have a customer in Paris that I was able to visit on a whirlwind trip there last year. The French seem to have a natural understanding of our free (libre) and open source philosophy.

One of the major IT companies over there, Bull, uses OpenNMS as the platform for its SmartOSS offering. They are presenting it at the Open World Forum and I was hoping to be able to attend, but I’m not sure that is going to happen (hint: if anyone wants me there, drop me an e-mail).

Also, I received an e-mail while I was on vacation from Samuel Mutel about OpenNMS Sans Effort, a distribution of OpenNMS on CentOS to make it easier for people to get started with the application. It is really exciting to see things like this happening and is one of the joys with working on free and open source software.

Here is hoping that all of our friends in France had a wonderful holiday today.

When I started a business around OpenNMS, everyone who had real jobs would say “Oh, it must be so nice working for yourself since you can take a vacation whenever you want”. Unfortunately for me, our support model business plan didn’t allow for me to just disappear whenever I wanted to, and for the first few years the best I could manage was an occasional three day weekend, where I would stop from time to time on the workday to check mail.

Now that the company has grown, I find I am able to take a decent vacation at least once if not twice a year. This allows me to get away from the business, get away from the farm and spend a little time getting my brain regrooved from the long weeks this project requires of me.

This year we went out to Oregon to spend a week fishing with friends. If I didn’t live in God’s Own Earth I would probably live in Oregon (somewhere down around Eugene). We camped and went fishing for steelhead, bass, trout and tuna.

The latter required getting up at some ungodly hour, getting on a boat, and spending over two hours to get 40 miles out to the tuna. Over the next six we caught 37 fish – nearly 1000 pounds. It’s an exciting and somewhat bloody form of entertainment.

My friend TJ with two of our fish

Unfortunately, I found out that the sea, a small boat and me don’t exactly mix so I spent most of that time in the wheelhouse hoping someone would shoot me and put me out of my misery.

Once back on land I perked up almost immediately and was able to clean the boat while the other folks worked on cleaning the fish. I brought along some wasabi and soy sauce and had some sashimi – that made it all worth it as it was so good (although my fishing buddies were certain I would see that sashimi again).

So let me apologize if I haven’t been responsive to e-mails over the last week. I don’t like “vacation” notification e-mails so I never use them. My first priority it to get through the backlog of nearly 250 messages, so if you are expecting a reply, please be patient.

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. I spent last week in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale, to be exact) and it kept me so busy that I wasn’t able to find the time to write anything.

I’ve been to this area of California dozens of times, but I can barely suppress my delight at seeing the headquarters of all those tech companies. Just driving around for lunch is a veritable Who’s Who of the industry. Seriously, as we went to In-N-Out one day we drove past a building that had a sign out front for a company I’ve been talking to for a couple of months about using OpenNMS, but we had never met in person. I dropped them an e-mail and we went out for dinner on Thursday. Too cool.

The company I was working for was right across the street from Palm.

Speaking of Palm, I’m still trying to decide on a new phone. The Palm Pre is out to relatively positive reviews. There is always the iPhone, but until AT&T gets their femtocell solution figured out it is not an option for me. A friend of mine at Google hooked me up with a G1 Android-powered phone, but one of my requirements has to be an easy way to sync my calendar and contacts from my Mac.

From what I can tell, the only way to easily sync your contacts with a G1 is to sync them through Google. I’m enough of a privacy nut that I really don’t want to have my address book on a server I don’t control, so that option is out. For the Pre there appears to be a Missing Sync that’ll work, so that is an option. Bah, I think I just hold off for a few months and see what else comes up.

One thing I really liked about being back in California was the plethora of places to eat. My throat has been bothering me lately, so it was nice to be able to get a big hot bowl of Pho.

On the way to the restaurant I saw a very typically California sign on a post:

I hope they find it.

Tuesday night I got to meet up with a friend of mine from high school named Geoff Davis.

He’s doing some interesting things at Google, and plus we got to try this great Thai place in Mountain View.

We talked past the last shuttle back to San Francisco, so I ended up driving him back to his place in the Haight. It was nice coming over that last ridge on the 101 and seeing the city skyline. I think there will always be a special place in my heart for San Francisco.

On Friday I made plans to meet up with John Mark Walker in San Mateo. Neither of us realized it at the time, but they were having a “wine walk” street faire so it took awhile to find a place to park. As I was waiting for him I wandered around a bit, and came across this Porsche 550. I’m not sure it was authentic, since they are extremely rare and worth north of US$1 million, but it was in any case a nice looking car.

We ate at this Indian place and got caught up on gossip in our little world of open source. He will be moderating a panel with me, Luke Kanies and Michael Coté at the LinuxWorld reboot called OpenSourceWorld in August.

I’m not sure what he was planning with the knife.

I made it home with little trouble on Saturday, ending my third trip out west in six weeks. In addition to the trip in August for the conference, I have only one more short trip to New York City scheduled, so perhaps I’ll get to sleep in my own bed for a change.