Archive for April, 2007 Page 2 of 2

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Sorrento Sprint 2007

Published by
KwangErn Liew
at April 5, 2007 in General. 1 

The Sorrento Sprint 2007 event is a conference, but a conference strictly for developers. Where developers all around the world, who shares common goals, come together to learn, code and fix stuff in Plone. Couple of months ago, the host, Vincenzo Barone from Abstract Open Solutions invited me over. Much thought went into it, and thought why not? It will be a good place for me to learn what the developers really do, how they work, and generally gain more exposure of the technical industry. Contributing whenever I can, I began to know more people than expected. Making friends along the way, I was peering mainly with KSS development, and being with the Belgian group to learn more about how Plone works through bug fixing. There were several talks that I’ve went for, e.g. Plone4Artists, KSS, and the works of ZEA that gave me a good overview of Plone.

Overall, the community is great! People are friendly, fun, willing, and passionate in improving Plone. With having a common goal that various companies, organisations, and individuals are working on – to make Plone more usable, it is no doubt great!

To me, it is the real world ‘University’ that makes a difference. Or rather, it’s a very large community organisation that brings mutual benefits for all.

One thing that was very interesting to see was how the Zope 3 architecture is blending into Plone 3 at the moment. Where new Plone Products are created purely in Zope 3 that is integrated into Plone itself. The benefit, hopefully, is to gain a larger community from Zope 3 developers and drive adoptations and improvements of the application. The main issue remains in the application design, on whether it’ll be purely integration, or a symbiotic relationship. I hope developers will keep in mind that integration is better than symbiotic in such cases. Care must be taken.

After much thoughts, personally, I stand that Plone does not fit to our use case. Though I have to say that Bilive.it is quite close to our use case. The amount of customisation and optimisation needed is not worth it in the long run. Still it doesn’t come up to par with the standards that I set. Plone isn’t fit for what it is not made for. From my perspective, Plone is very much fit for textual content, and less of media content. But I must say that Plone is also moving into the direction of catering artist websites, which is great! But since we aren’t moving in the same direction, it’s futile.

That said, this made me itch to contribute to Plone wherever I fit best. :)

MuSMo needs you!

Published by
KwangErn Liew
at April 5, 2007 in Announcement. 0 

MuSMo needs your input. With your help, MuSMo intends to draw the wisdom of the crowd – your opinion counts and will shape MuSMo. Early development has commenced, and we anticipate a launch later this year. Please do not hesitate to visit your site at www.musmo.com and be involved during the development.

So head over to our small little survey! Spread the word around so that we may shape and affirm our services for your benefit.

Do contact us if you have any doubts or questions. :)

Your life in their hands

Published by
silent
at April 5, 2007 in General. 0 

I missed the days when I hopped into the Central Line from Leytonstone to Oxford Circus for work. The skill of finding a suitable seat during peak hour, balancing on a moving tube and reading the Metro should not be undermined. For 3 plus years, the Metro was the source of news in the morning for free. A tad bit dated, but on February 7, 2007, the Metro ran an article entitled Your life in their hands. In a snippet, it discussed the value of our digital assets – it is easy to forget that computers are among the most fragile devices we own. BT estimates the average Brit’s digital assets to be worth more than 600 POUNDS! This is before totting up the sentimental value of home movies and photos. The article goes on to recommend sites such as MP3 Tunes, BT, Streamload, Omnidrive, and Mozy.

The article does provide an understandable warning – upload speed in Britain is pretty dismal (universal fact, I guess). If you’re backing up a whole PC, the first full upload will take a very long time. And with online storage, the monthly charges NEVER stop. Free services, especially, should be used with caution. Most will dump your data if you don’t use them for a couple of months. The beauty of the fine print most of us DO NOT READ!

This is especially worrying since most Internet businesses do not last the first 3 years – e.g. the switch from Friendster to MySpace – remember these ‘backup’ sites are asking us to entrust our valuable digital assets to them.

What IF, MuSMo take a leaf from the building societies in U.K., instead of relying on the common start up funding methods (i.e. friends, families, fools, bank loans, angel, and venture capitalist), MuSMo will gain $$$ from our users. MuSMo will not request for donations, but will reward our users with ownership. Stock options to motivate employees are well promoted in various companies, so aren’t we neglecting our most valuable asset? Our customers!?

More information will follow soon. Your comments will be appreciated, especially if there is a better alternative funding method. And NO, bootstrapping is not a funding method!

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