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I just read about... SharpOS 0.0.1 ...which is an Open Source project attempting to write an Operating System (OS) in C# based on Microsoft .Net technology. I'm not sure about the .Net part of the statement. But, I downloaded the 840KB...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The operating system on your computer is becoming less and less important. Really. In the next three to four years, I think the desktop OS will become a minimal consideration. Why? Because most...

For the ampersand lover in your life. See also: mousepads and cast metal sculptures. #

The other month I blogged about OpenOffice and the fact that it tends to be marginalized in the face of free and commercial products. Most readers did not particularly like that stance. Lou Dolinar just blogged about OpenOffice, but focused instead on...

A few weeks ago we ended up hiking the Mirror Lake Trail in Yosemite National Park and encountered an amusing little squirrel near the end of the trial. I just happened to have finished filming a deer that walked nearby, so I pointed the Canon SD800 at the little furball to see if he'd perform.

Sure enough, he did. Check out the video.

I have no idea if this is common or not, but we were all amused at the little stretching thing he did at the ~40 second mark.

I also have some good photos of that hike (and the visit to Glacier Point) that should be coming online soon. Watch my Flickr photostream.

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Apache released their HTTP Server 2.2.9 on Friday the 13th last month (obviously no superstitious people on the release team). Apache HTTP Server 2.2.9 Released Every now and then, I install the latest Apache web server on a Windows server just to...

Cirrus Design, the makers of the revolutionary SR-20 and SR-22 light airplanes, have flown their first VLJ (Very Light Jet) prototype: The Jet V1.

Given the reputation that Cirrus Design has created for itself, "The Jet" is a highly anticipated jet. The all-new design should appeal to pilots of existing Cirrus aircraft looking to upgrade, as well as those currently flying aging twins which have high operating costs and slower cruise speeds.

AVweb covered the story in this video and this article.

The video is included below.

It'll be interesting to see if they're able to hit all the price and performance targets they set out at the beginning of The Jet development. In the meantime, anyone have $1.5 million I can borrow to get one? :-)

It occurs to me that there's a lot of development and excitement on both ends of the general aviation (GA) spectrum: light sport aircraft on the low end and VLJs on the high end. Hopefully fuel prices don't cut too deeply.

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A couple weekends ago we experienced a pair of glider extremes at Hollister on Saturday: one very short flight and one very long flight.

The short one, unfortunately, was us. Kathleen and I headed down to fly the BASA Grob 103 on what was predicted to be an epic soaring day. And it was. Unfortunately, we got there a bit late and the weather had already developed quite a bit more than we expected.

We towed toward the east hills and got off around 6,000 feet in what seemed like decent lift. But it was hard to stay with it and the high clouds from over-development in the Santa Cruz Mountains were quickly spreading. That blocked out the majority of sunlight and shut down most of the lift. We quickly went from "wow, this is going to be a good day" to "gee, let's see if we can find enough lift to keep from having to land soon."

Before long, we were getting low and had to head back to the airport. But there was one big a problem. A wall of clouds and rain was approaching from the west and brought a wall of dust on the ground to match. There was a very visible gust front headed directly toward the airport. Folks on the radio were advising pilots to stay away because of the 30 knot crosswind.

We were getting so low at that point that I didn't like the idea of flying back through possible sink and a definite headwind just to land at an unsafe airport. Luckily we were just a few miles from the private Christensen airport, so I put the nose down and headed straight to the runway at maneuvering speed (Va). No pattern. I knew where the wind was and decided to land downhill but into the wind.

All the the while, we were watching lightning strikes in the Santa Cruz Mountains from the approaching storm--some of which started a few of the 1,000+ wild fires that have burned so much of the California countryside.

Anyway, before long we were on the ground and sitting in the glider while the storms passed. And after the fun passed, I got on the phone to call for a retrieve.

This goes down in my book as my shortest (distance and time) cross country flight. Ever.

*sigh*

More pictures available in my Christensen Landout on Flickr.

And for something completely different...

In related but much better news, Hollister glider pilot Eric Rupp set a new distance record the same day, flying his DG-300 glider from Hollister to Calexico, California--right on the Mexico border. This amazing 782.66 kilometer flight has been the subject of much planning and speculation until Eric finally pulled it off. It was an amazing combination of great weather, timing, and piloting.

You can see flight details on OLC and his SPOT Satellite Messenger kept the rest of us informed on the ground while he was flying.

Eric's epic flight was covered a bit in the press as well:

• Bay Area glider makes record-breaking flight to Mexico - Santa Cruz Sentinel
• 444 Miles Of Non-Powered Flight - AVweb

Congrats to Eric on an amazing and inspiring flight.

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I've been getting lots of inquiries from recruiters recently looking to find good people for various tech companies. Two in particular might be interesting if you're in the market or know someone who is. Technology Evangelist at New York City Based Startup

If you saw Fred Wilson's post Are You A Connector?, you know a bit about this job already. It's a NYC based startup developing a new platform in an area that's likely to see serious growth in the next few years.

They're looking for someone with coding experience who loves showing other developers and users how stuff works: on stage, via blogs, in screencasts, and so on. It's important that this person have a technical (programming) background and also be very comfortable getting in front of people to demo and speak.

The company is New York based and this job is too. However, I'm told that a Bay Area candidate may work as well, since a presence here will be important. Otherwise, I'm sure that frequent travel to the Bay Area will be part of the gig.

The company is still a bit stealthy but more information will be forthcoming soon.

Ping me if you're interested and I'll put you in touch.

Network/Systems Administrator at Rapleaf in San Francisco

The folks at Rapleaf ping me from time to time looking for talented engineers too. Here's the description of the position they're currently hiring for.

Rapleaf is a well-funded San Francisco startup (we’re currently at 15 people). We gather publicly available information from the social web on hundreds of millions of people to enable developers and companies to give their consumers a better user experience. Rapleaf has built the largest portable social graph in the world. We provide rich insight on customers for clients such as retailers, airlines, hotel chains, social networks, lead gen firms, telcos, political campaigns, financial services, and more (these companies learn about their consumers in order to give them a better user experience). The company has processed over 175 million unique searches for businesses and consumers. You will maintain Rapleaf’s entire infrastructure and enhance the system to do great things as we’re on the trajectory to change the world. Helping grow one of the largest and most complex databases for a small start-up.

Role:

• Manage all Rapleaf servers (Linux – CentOS, Redhat), backups, web servers (Apache clusters)
• Manage relationship with hosting provider and hardware vendors
• Scalability and expansion (Hadoop)
• Systems administration (DNS,LDAP,NFS,TCP/IP,SELinux)
• Some scripting (Shell, Ruby, Python, or Perl)
• Administer MySQL databases (multi-master replication, snapshot backups)
• Learn how to scale with Ruby on Rails
• Manage complex Java systems
• Manage billions of data items of pages being served
• On-call duty

Note: this job is really hard. You’ll be working with some of the top search engineers in the world and they are going to expect that you kick ass. We’re doing things that no one has ever done before and solving problems that have been open for years.

Qualifications:

• Master of all things Internet and Linux.
• Incredibly smart, can learn fast, and takes no prisoners
• Learn new platforms fast. We use Ruby on Rails and Java … you can pick this up quickly.
• Intensely driven and proactive person.
• Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours.
• Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy.
• Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players.
• Likeable person who garners respect on and off the job.
• Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty.
• Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance.
• Strong desire to build a more ethical society.
• Desire to be an early employee and want to be a real owner in Rapleaf’s future.
• Want to work with extremely large datasets and indirectly build portable APIs that thousands of other companies can build applications on top of.
• Ability to lift and install servers (50 lbs)
• Should want to live in or near San Francisco (relocation available if necessary)

Perks:

• Good salary/stock compensation.
• Personal MacBook Pro or Linux based machine
• Medical insurance, 401k.
• Kitchen stocked with food
• Work with some of the smartest engineers
• Contribute to the Rapleaf Dev blog (http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/)

Again, ping me if you're interested or know someone who might be. I'll make an introduction for you.

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I chatted with a friendly writer over at BusinessWeek recently, and the result is a little article focused on the redesign of Sphere. Part of a larger Web Design Special Report published last week. #

Just spotted this by Paula Bach over on Microsoft's Port 25 site... CodePlex project developers wanted The data from the project will be used for Paula's PhD dissertation project which looks at usability support features in Open Source projects....

Teaching Open Source development requires Open Source ways. I teach at Seneca College in Toronto, and we've been teaching inside the Mozilla community for the last three years with some very good results (I'll be talking about this at OLS in a...

I haven't been blogging much lately, and for the first time since I started this blog, I've only managed one post all month.

There has been plenty to talk about, but I've been too busy with both work and play to keep up. I'll try to recap the previous month (roughly in chronological order) for posterity.

• I saw Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová at Radio City Music Hall, which was possibly the best show I've ever seen. (It's tough to beat the Indigo Girls, though.) If you live in NY, and you're not going to ZendCon, you can see them in Central Park in September.
• I went to Chicago for php|tek, easily one the best PHP conferences each year. I got to celebrate my birthday at Shoeless Joe's while watching the Champions League final, and I ended the day with a brief stint as a rock star.
• My wife and I took a canoe down the Delaware River with some friends, and we camped on a small island. I rediscovered my hatred for stinging nettles.
• I gave a keynote at the DC PHP Conference on the intersection of security and user experience. As with most new talks, it was unpolished, but I'll be giving an updated, polished version of it at ZendCon. (See you there?)
• I enjoyed the Telectroscope, despite not managing to convince Matt, Lorna, or anyone else to meet up on the London side. Luckily, I managed to convince a few people that it was real, so that was fun. :-) It was conveniently located a few steps away from OmniTI NY, and I took some photos while it was here.
• The Euro Cup started. :-)
• My blog was featured in Smashing Magazine again, this time for the pretty blockquote and note styles Jon designed.
• Motivated by Andrei, I started the hundred push-ups challenge. This commitment also persuaded me to check my various style guides to see whether it's pushup, push up, or push-up. :-) News spread quickly on Twitter, and there is now a group of PHPers all taking part in the challenge.
• Theo was mentioned on Radar again for his detailed post on Internet traffic spikes.
• I got to witness a colleague's first encounter with T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, which I enjoyed far too much.

I'll leave you with the PHP anthem from Rasmus. If you're a Mac user, just enter the following in the terminal:

say -v Good oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ow oh PHP ow ow oh PHP ouchie

If you're not a Mac user, Terry has an MP3.

Sing it with me...

Posted Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:44:02 GMT in Chris Shiflett's Blog

When I saw this ZDNet blog headline in my RSS feed the other day... ZDNet - Dana Blankenhorn & Paula Rooney: Will Bill Gates’ departure usher in open source friendly era at Microsoft? ...my first thought was: Here we go again, another...

I read about the U.S. government's USAsearch.gov site using the Vivisimo engine for search federal, state, and local government sites in the U.S. This is the same engine used by the Clusty search site (which somehow always reminds me of Krusty the...

I read about the U.S. government's USAsearch.gov site using the Vivisimo engine for search federal, state, and local government sites in the U.S. This is the same engine used by the Clusty search site (which somehow always reminds me of Krusty the...

Kerry and I welcomed the birth of our daughter yesterday. Tenley Murphy Cederholm was born June 25th at 1:22pm. Six pounds, eleven ounces of pure joy.

Where our 2 1/2 year old son Jack came six weeks early, Tenley decided to do it her own way, arriving 3 days late. Everyone's doing wonderfully though, and Mom and baby will be coming home tomorrow.

I'll be taking the next month off as much as possible as we adjust to newborn status once again. See you in a bit.

Here's something that's a bit dated (a few weeks old) but something I've been meaning to mull over and comment on. On May 28, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that... Open source a more disruptive competitor than Google (as reported...

The first Linux Plumbers Conference has just been announced. It takes place on September 17-19 in Portland, Oregon, back-to-back with this year's Linux Kernel summit. The main topics of this conference are laid out in advance, but the organizers are leaving time for last-minute additions and have set aside rooms for ad hoc meetings. There will also be a few tutorials (for which a Call for Proposals is open).

A few weeks ago I wrote up my BlackBerry Curve Impressions and heard from Chad Atchison from OtterBox. I'd never heard of them before but he said:

I work for a company called OtterBox and we make cases for several smart phones, including the Curve - I actually have one sitting on my desk right now. Anyway, if you're worried about dropping it, etc., I could probably convince our PR girl to send you a free sample.

So I had a quick look at their site and decided to go for it.

About a week later, a BlackBerry Curve Defender Case arrived and it'd been dutifully protecting my BlackBerry ever since then. The thing has been through moving stuff in a storage unit, daily use at home, a week in the Nevada desert, flying in light airplanes, hiking in Yosemite, and random stuff in between.

I'm very impressed with this rugged little case. It strikes a great balance between protection and usability. The plastic keyboard cover does a good job of keeping stuff out of it while still making it easy to type on (well, as "easy" as a blackberry sized keyboard can be). Clearly this is a well thought out and tested design. If you're looking for a case to protect your BlackBerry or other smart phone from the elements, check out OtterBox. I think it'd be worth the money if you want to keep the phone in good shape for a long time.

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