The first FOSScon Northeast was attended by a dedicated group of fifty enthusiasts this Saturday at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Henrietta NY, some coming from as far as Detroit to be immersed in a day of open source brouhaha. The Free Open Source Software (FOSS) convention included three tracks – Education, Business, and Home – along with two workshop tracks. The day also included Birds of a Feature sessions (special interest groups), and a round of lightening talks, where people gave a five-minute presentation on some FOSS topic.

My colleague Tom Patros and I lead a Drupal Kickstart workshop. We ran into projector problems, but the group was small enough that we were able to run the workshop up close and personal. I lead another talk later in the day entitled Open Source Secret Sauce. The decks for both talks are up on SlideShare.

In preparing for the Kickstart, we came across a couple of interesting\ cloud-based Drupal hosts. The DrupalCafe offers a free stock Drupal 6 site that is easy to setup and administer. The site does not allow you to install your own themes or modules, but certain extensions can be added on request. Another great starter site is the DreamHostApp. At this site, you can automatically setup a Drupal site, as well as Wordpress, PHPBBS, Zen, and Google Apps site, all in one click. If you ever wanted to take any or all of these “best of breed” products for a test-drive, DreamHost is your ticket to ride.

Meanwhile, FOSSCon One did suffer from the usual number of issues for a first-time conference. The website lacked detail. An overabundance of tracks and workshops lead to holding sessions in separate buildings. The lunch sponsor fell through, so attendees were left to fend for themselves. The tracks lacked a proctor to distribute and collect evaluations or to prompt speakers at the end of their sessions. But we all made the best of it, and many talks turned into intimate dialogs between people with a deep commitment to open source products.

One great takeaway for me was the notion of using Drupal for professional certification exams. The session leader had started with Moodle and then added Drupal. Since then the Drupal polls and rules modules came out, which together could make Drupal an excellent platform for certification exams.

In another session, my friend Chaz Profit highlighted the trend for open courseware. The prime example is MIT’s OCW site, which now has the materials for over 1900 courses online. The courseware includes lecture notes, sample exams and solutions, and even video lectures. Following MIT’s lead, more and more professors are developing an open and collaborative attitude toward sharing syllabi.

I also ran into Onno Kluyt, former lead of Sun’s Java Community Process (JCP). Onno is now living here in Webster NY, with his own software consulting practice. Afterwards, we caught up at Quinby’s, recounting stories of the dynamics between Sun and the Apache Software Foundation. The ASF hosts about fifty headstrong Java projects, which created some “interesting times” for Sun. (And now Oracle.)

Already plans are underway for FOSSCon 2011, and you can count me in. If you’d like to help out or stay in touch, like the Facebook. Whether you made it out this year or not, there is also an exit survey online.

Rochester Security Summit October 20-21st, 2010, Rochester NY, http://RochesterSecurity.org/

The fifth annual Rochester Security Summit is being planned for October 20-21 in Rochester, NY and is looking for top speakers. This year there will be three tracks: Business Professional, Technical Professional, and Software Professional.

If you believe you have a significant research or technical presentation that the security community would value and enjoy hearing, we invite you to submit your presentation topic for consideration.

All three tracks will consist of presentations in 50-minute blocks, including Q&A. Presentations may be allowed to span two blocks to accommodate topic exploration to different depths if the committee sees the merit in the longer time allotment.

• Please submit your proposal submissions before July 27, 2010.
• We will respond to proposals by August 17th.
• Draft copy of the slides for the papers must be submitted by September 14, 2010.
• Final submissions are due by October 5th.
  Please review the speaker guidelines on the web site, http://rochestersecurity.org/guidelines.html before submitting a proposal.

Proposals may be submitted via e-mail to (present2010 at rochestersecurity.org) or by using the on-line submission form at http://rochestersecurity.org/presentation.html.

Summit attendees are a mix of technical security professionals, vendors, programmers, web application developers, security testers, students, network administrators and IT executives. Preference will be given to speakers who can present innovative technical content to a broad technical audience. Of course, all presentations are expected to challenge the brightest and quickest of attendees.

The Rochester Security Summit is not a vendor fest. There is zero tolerance for heavy commercial content in presentations. Presenters are expected to avoid any marketing that is not immediately backed up with rationale for its inclusion.

Proposals should consist of the following information:

1. Presenter and contact info (country of origin and residence-mail, postal address, phone, fax).
2. Employer and/or affiliations.
3. Brief biography, list of publications and papers.
4. Any significant presentation and educational experience/background.
5. Topic synopsis, proposed paper title, and a one paragraph description.
6. Reason why this material is innovative or significant or an important tutorial.
7. Optionally, any samples of prepared material or outlines ready.
8. Will you have full text available or only slides?
9. Please list any other publications or conferences where this material has been or will be published or submitted.
10. If you think a second 50-minute block will be required to do your topic justice, please let us know and give a rationale for the longer format.
    Please include the plain text version of this information in your email as well as any file, pdf, sxw, ppt, or html attachments.

Please forward the above information to

• (present2010 at rochestersecurity.org) or via
• http://rochestersecurity.org/presentation.html.
  For more event information, or to register, visit us online at http://rochestersecurity.org/.

Thank you,
Rochester Security Summit Organizing Committee

An abridged version of Google Wave (Preview) Explained by Ted Husted is available for immediate download from <http://wave.husted.com/>.

A printed version of the unabridged version is available for purchase online from CreateSpace (an Amazon company). If you are struggling with Wave, or wondering what all the hoopla is about: Here’s your help.

The abridged version contains five chapters designed to get you up and running with Google Wave.

• Riding - What did we do before Wave? What is it like to use Wave today? Tomorrow?
• Learning - How do we create a wave? Who can participate? Can we publish waves?
• Touring - How do we work the interface? What are the authoring features? Any shortcuts?

• Flipping - Is there a list of keyboard shortcuts? Search commands? Useful searches?
  The unabridged printed version includes eight additional chapters, designed to provide a broader and deeper view of Google Wave.

• Grasping - What does Wave do? Why is it important? Where would it fit in my organization?

• Wading - How do we insert robots and extensions? Can we work with other systems? Other Google properties?
• Diving - How do we setup Wave? How do we store searches? Manage folders?
• Surfing - What are some typical uses of a wave? Can it help us at work, home, and school?
• Blending - What are the best ways to collaborate with others on a wave?
• Coping - What are some things that Wave doesn’t do well?
• Asking - What problems do people run into at first? Where can we get more help with Wave?
• Tripping - Is Wave truly unique, or are there similar applications we could use instead?
  But, wait, there’s more!

Two other Google Wave ebooks are also available, making for a total of three:

• Complete Guide to Google Wave (ebook) - <http://completewaveguide.com/>.
• Getting Started with Google Wave (ebook) - <http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920000426>.
• Google Wave (Preview) Explained (ebook and printed) - <http:// wave.husted.com/>.

Our waves runneth over!

(Google has made a limited number of development accounts available for a preview of its forthcoming “Wave” product. If you get yours, look me up. I’m ted.husted@wavesandbox.com.)

A few years back, when I first tried IntelliJ IDEA‘s refactoring tools, I felt like I was pair programming with Commander Data. In the background, IDEA would compile my code, correct my syntax, and suggest fixes when my programming got sloppy. IDEA helped me write better code in less time.

Being a Camelot of good ideas, Google Wave, in the guise of robots, includes its own twist on intelligent background agents. Spelly scans input to a wave and corrects spelling errors on the fly (using the web as its dictionary). Likewise, Linky scans the wave for text that looks like a hyperlink. If the reference leads to YouTube, Linky will even offer to embed a player into the wave. If language is a barrier to collaboration, Rosy the robot (no joke) will translate a wave into your native language.

To a wave, a robot is just another participant on the wave. A wave is often described as a conversation between participants. (In fact, to use a robot with a wave, you add the robot as a participant.) Just like any other participant, a robot can make real-time changes to the content.

Also like a human participant, a robot can interact with an external system. For example, Tweety can post from a wave to a Twitter account, and Bloggy can post a wave to a blog. If any changes are made to the wave, Bloggy will update the blog entry.

Aside from blogs, there are many other systems that a wavebot could update. While Wave has its own version control, a robot could also update an external Subversion repository with all changes made to a wave. Likewise, a robot could create a static HTML page from a wave, so we could edit a wave and automatically update a high-performance website.

Even though Wave is only in developer preview, there are already dozens of robots available, and more are being written every day. (A new website, Wavety.com, is already creating a directory of Robots and Gadgets.)

An “interesting” new robot is Eliza the Robot therapist. Eliza scans the wave input looking for chances to reflect. “How do you feel about that?” (Some people are calling Eliza the first spambot!) If you are unsure whether to chat with Eliza, decide with a quick round of rock/paper/scissors.

Already, I am feeling a need for a reverse Turing Test for wave participants – is it live or is it cybernext?

Press the Button

If robots are the workhorses of Wave, gadgets are the showdogs. Gadgets add interactive forms and animations to a wave, imposing focus and structure over participant input. Several gadgets are already available, including Polly, for polls, and Checky, for checklists. The gadget API is compatible with OpenSocial, making a host of existing gizmos available to wave developers.

Of course, the real test of any gadget platform is games. Already, we are seeing several multiplayer games bobbing into waves, including chess and soduko.

Although the full power of Wave is still rising to the surface, it’s easy to see that it will be a powerful platform for project management, content management, intranets, team communication, customer support, and just plain fun.

While we may not be able to use wave as a desert topping or floor wax, with the right robots and gadgets in play, we may be able to use it for everything else.

Resources

• Google Wave Made Simple (video)
• 12 Reasons Why Google Wave Will Change the Web
• 100,000 users to get Google Wave this fall
• The Fifth Wave: Google’s Realtime Collaboration Tool