Adventures in Open Source

For the second year in a row, we are humbled to have been recognized by InfoWorld with a Bossie Award.

OpenNMS was a winner in their “Best of Networking Software” category.

What I also thought was cool was that of the ten other projects honored in the category, OpenNMS integrates with three of them: Hyperic HQ, RANCID and OTRS, and it is a honor to be in the company of all the other projects who also won.

Last year the focus was on OpenNMS 1.6, and this year it is for OpenNMS 1.8.

They also mention the upcoming iPhone app. For those who have been waiting, version 1.0.0 has been submitted to the App Store for approval, and a big thank you to Ben Reed for working on this. We should know something about it within the next week.

The podcast that Ethan Galstad and I did with John Willis and Michael Coté is now available.

A year ago I decided to see who “owned” each letter of the alphabet when doing a Google search. Simply go to Google, type in just one letter, and see what is suggested.

Let’s see what changes a year can make. Those with a “*” were there last year.

A – Amazon *
B – Best Buy *
C – the speed of light (Craiglist was second)
D – Durham Bulls (some still get Dictionary from last year)
E – natural logarithm (eBay is second)
F – Facebook *
G – Gmail *
H – Planck’s Constant (hotmail is second)
I – iPad (IRS drops to fifth)
J – Justin Bieber (Java is second, JCPenny from last year is fifth)
K – Kohls *
L – Lowes *
M – Mapquest (MySpace is second)
N – Netflix *
O – Orbitz *
P – Pandora (Photobucket is gone)
Q – QVC (Quotes is second)
R – REI (Redbox is second, Realtor from last year is fourth)
S – Sears (Skype is second and Southwest Airlines is gone)
T – Target *
U – USPS *
V – Verizon (Verizon Wireless, from last year, is second)
W – Walmart *
X – Xbox (xkcd is second, then XM Radio)
Y – Youtube *
Z – Zappos (Zillow is second)

So the big losers look like Photobucket and Southwest Airlines.

MySpace continues to decline, and I could never understand why Zappos wasn’t first last year (I had never heard of Zillow).

I am only vaguely aware of who Justin Bieber is, but he rules the “Js”, although Java now makes a strong showing at number two. I was also happy to see xkcd up there.

It was funny to see scientific hits, like the speed of light, coming up first, although in every case the number one from last year has simply moved down one.

The “D” was funny, since I think it is location-based. I asked a number of people on IRC and they got different things.

Anyway, until next year …

The last day of Dev-Jam is always about commitment – well, commits to git anyway. After a solid week doing all things OpenNMS, parting is always bittersweet.

We took our group picture late, so we’re missing Bill and Matt R. The camera is Alex’s but the photo credit goes to Jen, one of the dorm advisor’s that Alex convinced to take our picture. I was stylin’ in my Doktor Kaboom t-shirt.

After we cleaned up the Club Room, 19 of us headed over to Town Hall Brewery for our last meal together this year. I think most people felt this was the best Dev-Jam ever: great facilities, awesome bandwidth and wonderful weather.

On Saturday the shuttle picks half of us up at 9am, while the rest will leave over the course of the day (well, except for Ronny who has decided to stay another week in the US). It will be nice to be home, but I’m not looking forward to a return to the hot and humid weather I’ve managed to avoid for the last two weeks.

We should be publishing a Dev-Jam wrap up in the next week or so, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

Things are starting to blur together now, so I can’t really remember all I worked on Thursday. I know I played around more with RT, and in the early afternoon, Ethan came over and we did a podcast with John Willis and Michael Coté.

I’ll post a link when Coté puts it up, but I think it was one of my favorite podcasts of all time. Willis got to gloat when I said that I liked “the cloud” and I got to talk about some of the scalability features of OpenNMS, such as the ability to discover and manage devices with 32,000 interfaces each (virtual, of course) and a test we ran for the Department of Energy where OpenNMS was handling 125,000 syslog message a minute – more than the Netcool/Omnibus syslog probe could handle.

Oh, and OpenNMS did it for 8 straight hours before we stopped the test.

Ethan got to talk about Nagios XI and we had a friendly debate on the open source services model and the commercial software model. If you are in to that sort of thing, it will be worth a listen.

For dinner that night we ate leftovers, and then went to Big 10 for the weekly pub quiz. We started to play but got distracted by a game that Ben introduced to us called Mafia.

There is a moderator, who removes all of the aces and face cards from a standard deck, except for two aces, a king and a jack. They then add enough “plain” cards so that everyone playing gets one, and they are dealt out.

The people with the two aces are “mafia”. The person with the king is the “inspector” and the person with the jack is the “doctor”. All of the rest are villagers. The moderator then launches into a story about night falling on a village and every goes to sleep. Everyone playing shuts their eyes.

He then instructs the “mafia” to open their eyes, and then silently decide which person in the game they wish to kill. Once a decision is made, the moderator has them shut their eyes.

He then asks the “inspector” to open their eyes. The inspector can then indicate a person at the table and ask the moderator if that person is mafia. The moderator will then indicate “yes” or “no” and the inspector closes their eyes again.

Finally, the “doctor” opens his eyes and the moderator asks them to indicate if there is a person at the table they want to save, and then they close their eyes.

The moderator starts their story again, stating that dawn has come to the village, and tragically someone has died. The game is then opened up for discussion and the villagers must decide on someone to lynch. That player “dies” and the game repeats until either all of the mafia are dead or all of the villagers are dead.

If the mafia targets the person the doctor chooses to save, no one dies in the night.

It’s actually a pretty fun game. Even if the inspector knows who a mafia member is, it is doubtful that they would flatly state they were the inspector since the remaining mafia member would obviously target them next. It is also doubtful that the doctor would save anyone but themselves in the beginning (although if the inspector identified himself the doctor might protect them in the next round).

In our game the mafia targeted me in the second round, but the doctor saved me so I didn’t die (you don’t learn this during the game but I was told afterward). The villagers were victorious but it had nothing to do with me, since the final mafia member was Antonio and I kept arguing that it was stereotypical to blame the only Italian at the table.

I was wrong. (grin)