Tarus Balog is the CEO of the OpenNMS Group, a company which funds the development of OpenNMS: FLOSS enterprise network monitoring software. OpenNMS lets you know when your machines go down, among other things. I use OpenNMS at work to keep Mifos infrastructure up and running: build servers, cloud, databases, etc.
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.
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I’m really excited for the Mifos user manual sprint tomorrow. We’re using FLOSS Manuals to write our new user manual. FLOSS Manuals is an exciting way to write a book, it provides a framework for high-bandwidth collaboration, publishing to HTML and print, translating, and more. There are many examples of small teams (less than 10 people) publishing large, excellent books in short time periods (less than a week).
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!
I just took a peek at recent Grails development, and noticed they added code to disable a “phone home” feature in Ehcache. Strange, I thought, why would this be necessary?
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:
Other tidbits:
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Here’s a cool video describing the product I work on at my job.
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The Subversion repository I use at work is hosted by java.net. Performance is generally on the slow side, but lately, the server is frequently going down. The most recent outage was more than 24 hours. Since Subversion is a centralized version control system, server uptime is critical. Without access to the server, we can’t view logs, commit, merge, or update.
Why is performance so bad? Why does the server keep failing? Sun and CollabNet have been responsive (thank you Sonya and Eric!) but mainly all we hear is “we’re working on it”.
The outages are costing us. If service doesn’t improve, we need to move to another provider. SourceForge sounds hopeful, especially since we can directly migrate over our Subversion repository and, eventually, switch to a dVCS like Mercurial.
Mifos has been accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2009! Working on Mifos has been my full-time job since October of 2007. The Google Summer of Code is an awesome program funded by Google wherein students get paid to work on FLOSS. Yay!
If you’re an eligible and interested student, check out our ideas page, hop on IRC during US/Pacific business hours, ask away on the mailing list, download the code, try building it, etc. and we’ll get you signed up!
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Mifos’s beloved director George Conard will be giving a talk on Mifos at the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon.
The phrase double bottom line refers to having a bottom line besides just profit.
See you there!
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IRC is an ancient, tried-and-true one-to-many chat protocol. Pidgin is a feature-rich instant messaging client that can handle many protocols, including IRC. Pidgin runs on many different platforms, including the three most popular ones. Pidgin integrates nicely with the desktop.
Here’s how to set up a Freenode IRC account in Pidgin:
- Open Pidgin; click
Accounts -> Add/Edit.
- Click the
Add button.
- Change the protocol to
IRC and enter
irc.freenode.net as the server.
- If you have a Screen name (called a “nick” or “nickname” in IRC
parlance), type it (e.g. MrOpenSource) in the Screen
name field. If you don’t own one yet, make one up.
- Click on the
Advanced tab, and fill in the Real
name field.
Now, register your nickname. This helps people recognize you, protects your
identity, and allows you to send private messages.
- Click on
Buddies -> New Instant Message.
- Fill in
NickServ for Name.
- Change
Account to the Freenode account you just created,
and click Ok. Now you can “talk” with the
NickServ robot.
- The first message you send should be
register PASSWORD
(where PASSWORD is one of your choosing).
- Next, set an email address. This will give you a way to reset your
password later should there be a need. Send set hide email on
to NickServ.
- Next message should be
set email ADDRESS (where
ADDRESS is your email address)
Then, join #mifos. :)
One problem sometimes occurs when you have connection problems. You may be disconnected from the internet and the IRC server may not realize you’ve dropped off. When you reconnect, you may see what appears to be two of your username in the channel with slightly different names. Like: USERNAME and USERNAME_. Send help release to NickServ, and NickServ will tell you how to release the original, correct nickname.
Further instructions can be found here or by saying help to NickServ. Commands like /msg NickServ help do work in Pidgin.
This guide was heavily inspired by the following article on freesoftwaremagazine.com.
One more final tip: enable the “Join/Part Hiding” plugin to supress the many “so-and-so joined the room, so-and-so left” messages that will likely show up in the channel.
Mifos was mentioned in the New York Times yesterday. The big news is that I.B.M. is having 10 software engineers work on the project. Can’t wait to meet ‘em!
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Check out this map of Mifos deployments (created by Sam). Nice!
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