15 hours ago
At NTEN, the nonprofit tech conference, last year I met a developer who was really exited. One of the vendors on the floor was giving away Pentium 3 processors, and he had a box that could use an extra boost.
Me, I never touch hardware anymore. In fact, I don’t really know how many servers we’ve got — or where they are. Amazon knows. About six months ago we switched all our production servers to Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure.
As for how we moved to Amazon — and why we did it — check out this set of slides:
Frank of Phase2 Technology and I put these together for today’s Northern Virginia Drupal Meetup. Thanks to everybody who came out for a listen.
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77 days ago
Tim O’Reilly’s keynote this morning at the Web 2.0 Expo NY was inspired and inspiring. To be in New York this week, with markets crazy and the Feds bailing out Wall Street icons — and talking web 2.0. That’s not an enviable spot. And Tim handled it by going to the heart — musing on what it means for the web to meet the world.
From an engineering perspective, that means sensors and opening up the data they capture. But O’Reilly also talked about lasting values:
- Follow your heart
- Work on the the problems that matter
- Create more value than you capture
Interestingly, he also plugged several innovative nonprofits as examples:
There’s a more detailed summary on Kris Jordan’s blog.
Video should be posted in a day or so on the Web 2.0 Expo site.
159 days ago
Our office is going Web 2.0. We are all using a bunch of commercial web services out there, and we’ll be adding users to our internal ones soon.
Logins are a problem, of course. So is identity. We want folks to use their workplace name, email addresses, etc — they are representing the office in using these services. And it would be great if we didn’t have to remember 37 different passwords?
And it wouldn’t it be even better that, once someone leaves, we could turn off all of those identities — so that folks ex-employees can’t misrepresent themselves?
All of this can be done with OpenID.
Here’s how to persuade your CIO to implement it.
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288 days ago
A friend’s client wanted to help Ghana. Microlending seemed to be a good way to do it. The client would collect money in the US, and fund small loans to farmers and entrepreneurs in Ghana. The web might even make the first half of this — collecting money and telling the stories of who was helped — easy.
My friend was all set to start writing code. That’s his business, after all.
But did code needed writing? I could think of lots of options for helping Ghana — and finding like-minded people — with sites already on the web.
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