Our corner of the Grameen Foundation focusing on Technology for Microfinance has a lot to learn from OpenNMS! They’re also FLOSS, and they’re profitable.

I talked with Tarus the other day. Turns out he’s a really cool guy. I’ve been following his blog closely for quite a while now, so I was thrilled with the chance to pick his brain. The point of the call was to find out why and how they run their developer summits: in-person meetings where coding, alignment, teambuilding and planning are plentiful. OpenNMS hosts these yearly, and we’d like to do them for Mifos.

We talked for a while, so I’ll summarize. I’ll cover the dev summit stuff first, then more about FLOSS business.

Adam: what instigated the first summit?

Tarus: I live on a farm in the middle of NC, wanted to get in touch with other devs. I invited them to hang out at my place and code for a week. The result was camaraderie and commonality of purpose. In other words: the hard stuff. We also got a lot of useful coding done. There were only 5 people, yet it was an awesome time.

A: How do you think things will be different if you didn’t have these summits

T: we had to cancel last year’s, and we felt the pain. We missed each other. We usually have dev tasks that are especially suited to summits that we didn’t do.

A: can anyone come?

T: yes. We sponsor active contributors. Full-time paid employees are pretty much required to go. Others must pay $1400 (includes room + board). This is modeled after debconf ( http://debconf.org ).

A: who comes?

T: 1/3 full-timers, 1/3 sponsored volunteers, 1/3 folks who pay their own way. Even with the folks who pay, dev summits are expensive and can run $20-$30k.

A: what’s the format?

T: loose/barcamp/vague. This works much better for us than a dictated organized agenda

A: What are your definitions of “success” for a summit? How do you know when you’ve had a successful summit?

T: we don’t really have a measure, but the value is apparent from the team cohesiveness, fun had, code produced, and productivity following the summits.

A: can I come?

T: yep

A: what do I need to do to run a successful summit?

T: plan it well. Make it fun. Buy food. Have someone go onsite and set up logistics: rooms, wifi, whiteboards, projectors, etc. Do stuff together. Discourage newbies (they need to pay to attend): don’t make it a training session: make it a *developer* summit. Publish prereqs: compile the code, run tests, study the schema, have your laptop ready, etc.

Other stuff:

A: where are your devs?

T: global.

A: how do you reward volunteers and retain contributors?

T: LOTS of ways! “order of the X polo”: exclusive group of contributors are in the “order of the green polo”, these folks are the steering committee. OpenNMS is business driven, but the OGP drives the tech. They stick around because they are invested and we value what they say. They’re the experts. OpenNMS Group sells services, not software: training, consulting, installation, custom dev. Volunteers and contributors are invited to (and do!) do the cool stuff, the fun stuff, the most important stuff. We guarantee the code will not suck, and it will always be Free (as in freedom). also see “order of the blue polo”: that’s the one you should sign up for, Adam!

A: will do. Can you say more about what custom development you’ll have to do?

T: yes, but not just anything. Ex: someone wanted RT integration. Instead, we built a generic event-based framework and allowed them to hook into it. I don’t sell “custom dev” to a customer, I make them *sponsors* of features that make it into OpenNMS. Salespeople must have technical knowledge to make this work. The custom features aren’t what make them competitive anyway, it’s their business strategy, their processes, their people. We also sell commercial licenses for OEM arrangements. They pay for (us to do) custom dev, and we get the code, too.

I’ll be there, too!

Thanks to Adam Feuer for encouraging me to approach Tarus/OpenNMS.

First, I made a filter:

detectMobile (controller:'*', action:'*') {
  before = {
    if (request.getHeader('user-agent') =~ /(?i)iphone/) {
      request['isMobile'] = true
    } else {
      request['isMobile'] = false
    }
    return true // keep processing other filters and the action
  }
  after = { }
  afterView = { }
}

Next, I added the following to a controller:

def afterInterceptor = { model, modelAndView ->
  if (request['isMobile']) {
    modelAndView.viewName = modelAndView.viewName + "_m"
  }
}

For that controller, if a request comes in from a mobile device, a view ending in “_m” is loaded, instead of the default view. The view “list.gsp” would have a counterpart mobile view “list_m.gsp”, and that’s what would be served to iPhone clients. That’s it, so far.

One bit that would be handy would be to add this closure to every controller, rather than have to copy and paste it to controllers that support mobile views. I’ve been meaning to see how the rest plugin dynamically adds methods to every controller in case that is similar to what I’m trying to do, but if anyone knows offhand what I need to do (or read) to automatically get the closure in every controller, please let me know.

Non-nerdy folks following this blog, you’ll probably want to tune out now. Or not! I tried to write this for a wide audience, so come on down the rabbit hole if you dare.

Slides are for your Audience

Sometimes I give talks, and I like having a slide deck for these talks. It’s a useful and familiar idiom for most audiences, and it serves as a kind of roadmap as I walk through live demonstrations and deliver a message.

OpenOffice.org Impress, Powerpoint, or Google Docs all help you create a presentation. Sometimes these tools are fine, but sometimes they get in the way. Here’s an example.

I keep notes in plain text files. My notes look something like this:

making bread is fun
	smells great when baking
	yeast does the tricky work for you

Indented lines are subtopics of lines with less indenting. Hierarchical. Not fancy.

If I wanted to make this into a presentation, I could cut and paste it into some presentation-building software. Then format it. Then choose a nice background, save it, create PDFs, etc. But if I add to my notes, I have to also change the presentation. And I don’t want to open up Impress and start having to click fifty buttons and be compelled to pick a fancy background and diamond-swipe slide transition. Why can’t I just say “notes, become a presentation!”

For help, let’s turn to markup. When I say markup, I mean annotations to text that provide meaning. HTML is a kind of markup, for instance, but it doesn’t look great for a slideshow without a ton of work.

I dig markup. It’s generally readable. It encourages focusing on content/meaning over presentation/look & feel. It leverages powerful tools with consistent, deterministic results. Since markup is plain text, it can be usefully tracked/shared in version control.

There are lots of extensible, feature-rich markups, but I only considered lightweight markups to help with creating my presentation.

Then came the breakthrough: my notes are already markup!

Content is King

Sure, my presentation should look nice. But the important part about my presentation is the content. Trying to put aside text size and spacing, graphics, animations, backgrounds, and bullet-point styles can be difficult while creating a presentation using tools like Impress. Markup can help isolate you from these details while still allowing customization of presentation.

There are several tool that generate presentations from markup, such as S5, Beamer, and MagicPoint. S5 looks cool, and I like that it does everything in a Web browser. But I don’t like authoring HTML so much. I’ve used Beamer, but I don’t like writing LaTeX either. MagicPoint looks cool too, but I didn’t know about it until, well, just now.

I decided to write my own. I designed a very lightweight markup for generating input for Beamer. Then I let Beamer/LaTeX take care of the grunt work of pretty-printing the content, putting images in the correct place, and creating presentation slides and presenter notes.

Here’s how it works

Create a plain text file:

Save it as “food.txt”. Indent lines 2 and 3 with a tab. It’s the same source code as above. Just make sure the whitespace at the start of the lines is a tab character.

Install prerequisites.

• otl2beamer
• LaTeX, Beamer (I did this with “sudo apt-get install latex-beamer” on Ubuntu)

Run “otl2beamer”, then “pdflatex”, like so:

otl2beamer.py food.txt > food.tex
pdflatex food.tex

Among the generated files will be food.pdf, the presentation.

The indentation in the plain text file has meaning. Here’s the basic markup syntax:

• No indent? Slide title.
• Indented? Bullets.
• Doubly-indented? Sub-bullets.

It does more, too. If anyone’s interested, I’ll document the other features.

Why in Sam Hill would I do all that?

I wouldn’t recommend using a markup-based presentation tool for a single presentation, but if you give talks often and are looking for a good way to manage your content, give it a shot! The setup time is significant, but the ongoing time savings, focus on content, and process improvement might just be worth it.

Sundries, Parting Shots

These are odds and ends an editor would likely toss had I an editor and were this ever sent to print.

• first mention of otl2beamer
• otl2latex – I probably wouldn’t have written otl2beamer had I found otl2latex first

If you’re saying “who needs slides, anyway?” but still want to show the audience something, you could do what Damian did: present your talk in a text editor. He wrote a talk on Vim, presented in Vim. I couldn’t convince him to release his presentation source, but I imagine it was just a gigantic Vim script.

I’ve been dying to use AsciiDoc for something.

I’ve created a Makefile to simply use of otl2beamer, as well as some magic for the Vim text editor to run the Makefile (and process the result) within Vim. Lastly, here’s a more extensive example presentation.

We’ll have a video feed going. I’ll be wearing my track suit.

Check out our coordination wiki page and stop by our IRC channel if you’d like to join in! If you’ve ever edited text on a wiki, are brave enough to learn how, or just want to see me in a track suit, come on by.

I suppose I should explain the title of this post. If we can establish a framework for software development on Mifos like we’re running this sprint, we can break Brooks’s law. Why not? The Ksplice folks did it, so we can too!

Apparently Ehcache includes an automatic update check that is also effectively a phone home. Terracotta software conveniently collects some extra information (such as your IP address) when Ehcache phones home. The information they collect is benign. But, seriously? A library phoning home, by default?

Who decided it would be a good idea to add this feature to a popular Java library? It’s a transparent attempt at gathering usage statistics.  As a participant in a professional FLOSS project, I can fully identify with the need for knowing who is using your software. But automatically, secretly phoning home is not the way to do it!

Terracotta, will you turn this feature off by default in the next Ehcache release?

I see this issue has come up in forums:

• Ehcache update check
• Can Ehcache check user local info?!
• ehcache 1.7.0 calling home to check for updates?!?!?

Other tidbits:

• We use Ehcache 1.4.1 in Mifos, but that (pre-Terracotta) version does not phone home
• Quartz, another recent Terracotta acquisition, also phones home
• Here’s an open issue about the update checker creating unnecessary threads

When I was a kid, I swear Tic Tac candies/mints/whatever were skinnier.

Anyone know the real story here?

I also mentioned this on Twitter. The Wikipedia page doesn’t currently state a difference in size, although there is a comment on the discussion page that claims they are 30% bigger in the USA.

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