Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

Virtuoso goes Open Source

It has recently been announced that Virtuoso has gone open source.

Here is a weblog announcement: Virtuoso is Officially Open Source! (Kingsley Idehen's Weblog).

This is a detailed history of how the product has evolved: oWiki | Main.VOSHistory

I first heard of this announcement via Jon Udell's A conversation with Kingsley Idehen announcing a podcast interview with Kingsley Idehen, and indeed I'd heard of the prodct becuase of Jon's earlier postings dating back to 2002.

The Open Web

An excellent article on walled gardens and the value of open systems for sharing information/data/knowledge/apis/... and so on: Breaking the Web Wide Open! (complete story) :: AO

About the author of this piece:
Marc Canter is an active evangelist and developer of open standards. Early in his career, Marc founded MacroMind, which became Macromedia. These days, he is CEO of Broadband Mechanics, a founding member of the Identity Gang and of ourmedia.org. Broadband Mechanics is currently developing the GoingOn Network (with the AlwaysOn Network), as well as an open platform for social networking called the PeopleAggregator.

Good morning, Waterford

Good morning, Waterford
Originally uploaded by Paul Watson.

Great picture from Paul Watson. And what was he doing up so early in the morning you might ask? The answer was catching an early bus to Dublin to atttend the Irish Web 2.0 Conference organised by Enterprise Ireland. Given that Paul works on the TSSG project Feed Henry, probably our most Web 2.0 ish project in our portfolio of 30 or so projects, it was very appropriate for him to attend.

Update: this article describes the conferernce:

Ireland.com piece on Web 2.0

Apache now leading SSL webserver according to Netcraft

From the monthly Netcraft web server survey Netcraft: Apache Now the Leader in SSL Servers

As the original developers of the SSL protocol, Netscape started out with a lead in the SSL server market. But they were soon overtaken by Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which within a few years held a steady 40-50% of the SSL server market.
Apache has taken much longer to reach the top. Version 1 of Apache did not include SSL support : in the 1990s, US export controls, and the patent on the RSA algorithm in the US, meant that cryptographic support for open source projects had to be developed outside of the US, and were distributed separately. Several independent projects provided SSL support for Apache, including Apache-SSL and mod_ssl; but commercial spin-offs, like Stronghold by c2net (later bought by Red Hat), were more popular at that time.
Now that mod_ssl is included as standard in version 2, Apache has become more popular for hosting secure websites. The total for Apache includes other projects from the ASF including Tomcat, and includes Apache-SSL, but does not include derived products like Stronghold or IBM HTTP Server. c2net/Red Hat includes only Stronghold and Red Hat SWS.
Apache is also gaining from geographical changes. The US, where Microsoft retains a strong lead, used to have over 70% of the Internet's secure websites. Other countries have been catching up, however: countries including Japan and Germany, where Apache is preferred, have faster growth in SSL sites. As ecommerce has caught on in other countries, the US share has been diluted, and is now only 50%.
Netcraft's SSL survey has been running since 1996. It tracks the growing use of secure web servers on the Internet, and the server software, operating systems and certificates that are used. Single user and company subscriptions are available, and custom datasets can be produced on request.

IPv6 in the USA

A Federal Times article on IPv6 deployment in the USA FederalTimes.com

Jon Udell - a tech writer for web techies

Tim O'Reilly has just published a posting explaining why he, and we all, read Jon Udell's blog postings and excellent articles.
O'Reilly Radar: Nice Recognition for Jon Udell.

I heartily agree with everything Tim says here, and so I thought I'd reproduce it in full with attribution; thanks Tim for using the Creative Commons licence that allows me to do so.

I still have a cherished copy of Practical Internet Groupware, and copies of old BYTE Magazine articles by Udell. He really has charted the rise of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in a way no one else has done, in his typically modest fashion. Keep it coming Jon!

Jon Udell writes on his blog: "Folio, the recursively-named magazine for magazine management, has included me in its list of 40 industry influencers, in the Under the Radar category." Here's what they had to say about Jon.
Of course, for active blog readers, Jon is anything but under the radar! Jon's Radio has long been one of the leading technology blogs. But even more striking is just how far ahead of the curve Jon is. His book Practical Internet Groupware, which I published back in 1999, prefigured the whole explosion of interest in what is now called social computing. Jon was also the very first person to articulate (at least for me) the vision of what we're now calling Web 2.0. (He gave a keynote talk on what we now call "the programmable web" at our first Perl Conference in 1997!) Jon was just a bit too early! He's long been one of the people I watch to learn about what comes next.
I wrote a preface to that book (now out of print, although still available on Safari) in which I told the world what I think of Jon Udell. It seems like an appropriate time to repeat what I said then:

At O'Reilly & Associates, we have a history of being ahead of the curve. In the mid-'80s, we started publishing books about many of the free software programs that had been incorporated into the Unix operating system. The books we wrote and published were an important element in the spread and use of Perl, sendmail, the X Window System, and many of the programs that have now been collected under the banner of Linux.
In 1992, we published The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, the book that first brought the Internet into the public consciousness. In 1993, we launched GNN, the first ever Internet portal, and were the first company to sell advertising on the Web.
In 1997, we convened the meeting of free software developers that led to the widespread adoption of the term Open Source software. All of a sudden, the world realized that some of the most important innovations in the computer industry hadn't come from big companies, but rather from a loose confederation of independent developers sharing their code over the Internet.
In each case, we've managed to expose the discrepancy between what the industry press and pundits were telling us and what the real programmers, administrators, and power users who make up the leading edge of the industry were actually doing. And in each case, once we blew the whistle, the mainstream wasn't far behind.
I like to think that O'Reilly & Associates has functioned as something like the Paul Revere of the Internet revolution.
I tell you these things not to brag, but to make sure you take me seriously when I tell you that I've got another big fish on the line.
Every once in a while a book comes along that makes me wake up and say, "Wow!" Jon Udell's Practical Internet Groupware is such a book.
There are several things that go into making this such a remarkable book.
First, there is the explicit subject: how to build tools for collaborative knowledge management. As we get over the first flush of excitement about the Internet, we want it to work better for us. We're overwhelmed by email, our web searches baffle us by returning tens of thousands of documents and only rarely the ones we want, and our hard disks bulge with documents that we've saved but don't know how to share with other people who might need them.
Jon's book provides practical guidance on how to solve some of these problems by using the overlooked features in modern web browsers that allow us to integrate web pages with the more chaotic flow of conversation that goes on in email and conferencing applications. While much of the book is aimed at developers, virtually anyone who uses the Internet in a business setting can benefit from the perspectives Jon provides in his opening chapters.
How to build effective applications for conferencing and other forms of Internet-enabled collaboration is one of the most important questions developers are wrestling with today. Anyone who wants to build an effective intranet, or to better manage their company's interactions with customers, or to build new kinds of applications that bring people together, will never think about these things in the same way after reading this book.
Second, more than anyone else I know, Jon has thrown off the shackles of the desktop computing paradigm that has shaped our thinking for better part of the last two decades. He works in a world in which the Net, rather than any particular operating system, is truly the application development platform.
All too often, people wear their technology affiliations on their sleeve (or perhaps on their T-shirts), much as people did with chariot racing in ancient Rome. Whether you use NT or Linux, whether you program in Perl or Java or Visual Basic, these are marks of difference and the basis for suspicion. Jon stands above this fragmented world like a giant. He has only one software religion: what works. He moves freely between Windows and Linux, Netscape and Internet Explorer, Perl, Java, and JavaScript, and ties it all together with the understanding that it is the shared Internet protocols that matter.
Any developer worth his salary in tomorrow's market is going to need a cross-platform toolbox much like the one Jon applies in this book.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Jon has laid his finger on the most important change in the computer industry since the introduction of the Web.
Especially in the later chapters of the book, he lays out a vision in which web sites themselves can be considered as reusable software components. The implications of this paradigm shift are truly astonishing. I confidently predict that in the years ahead, the methodologies Jon demonstrates in this book will be the foundation of multibillion dollar businesses and whole new schools of software development.
As Bob Dylan said, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?" Well, Jon Udell does know, and if you'd like to know as well, I can't suggest a better place to start.

While the bulk of the book is out of date, Jon's vision of the programmable web and his creative approach to using existing applications in new ways, is still worth reading today.

Estimates of cost for IPv6 deployment in the USA

This article describes a report from the RTI of the Research Triangle in NC, USA that evaluates the costs of IPv6 transitioning.Don't look for rapid ROI from IPv6
The conclusion is that it is hard to predict the ROI at present, but that the roll out cost is relatively cheap for its potential.

Irish Postal Database

The Irish post office, An Post, has published an on-line address validation system

You have to register, and then you can search to verfy any valid Irish address. The database seems to be based the delivery route, some some addresses list "nearby" major towns that the mail is routed through. Unfortunately, no geo-encoding is provided.

Thanks to Antoin antoin@eire.com » An Post Irish national address database now available to the public

US lags in IPv6 Adoption

A Washington Times article on US IPv6 adoption: U.S. slow to switch to new Web protocol - Business - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

The federal government must move to the new Internet protocol by 2008, and the Defense Department started its transition in 2003. But since then, the U.S. has slipped behind many Asian and European nations in making the switch, said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, Virginia Republican and chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.
....
Of the 8,000 Internet service providers worldwide, about 10 percent offer IPv6, Mr. Ladid said. Consumers can get the necessary connections now in the U.S., but it takes hours to set up and only a few companies sell them.
Consumers can expect to see IPv6 benefits in "three to four years, if we implement correctly," but that depends on who does it, Mr. Davis said. "If we don't, we'll be buying products from Europe and China."
The next 24 months will be a "very interesting, chaotic period," said Marine Corps Lt. Col. James Bacchus, strategic planner in the office of the assistants to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for National Guard and Reserve Matters. No one knows which will be first large program or user group to take advantage of IPv6, but he said the Defense Department will be first at doing IPv6 best.

Glad to see the start of mainstream press coverage for the debate on IPv6 deployment.