Last week I found two tools that make my life better and make me look cool in front of my friends (j/k). So I thought I would share them.

Keeping bookmarks sync’d and accessible
Back in the day I used to use a shareware tool to dump my IE bookmarks to html, then upload them via FTP, and then download them again and re-sync. But times have changed and del.icio.us is the new way to bookmark.

For those not in the know del.icio.us is a “social bookmarking” website. The first consequence is that your bookmarks are stored on a globally accessible webserver with an easy to remember URL like http://del.icio.us/philips. The second and more fun aspect is that when you make a bookmark (with one of the great del.icio.us bookmarklets) you can see who else has bookmarked the same page and what other sites may be related and of interest. From this feature I have found some great websites, including my new favorite techno radio station Radio ABF France.

But the coolest part is a plugin for Firefox called Foxlicious that allows you to sync your bookmarks from del.icio.us into a folder, organized by tags. It is great I can bookmark at home, and sync at work, then bookmark at work and sync at home, then; well you get the idea.

Zebra Tele-scopic
As you may already know I carry with me at most times an analog notebook (you know the paper kind). But I have never been able to find an inexpensive pen that is compact enough to keep in my pocket. Until my faithful run to the store last week where I found it! “It” being the Zebra Tele-scopic pen which is small enough to put in a jean pocket but telescopes into a regular sized and balanced ball point pen. Not only that but they are far cheaper than the Fisher Space Pen. At ~$5.49 US for two tiny telescoping pens with two refills these pens are a great deal!

The last few days have been alot of fun and required the help of a few friends. There have definitely been some challenges, but in the end it has been rewarding.

The GentooBugDay was a great experience, I got two bug fixes submitted 77328 and 68277. It is a start, and I plan on doing more in the future.

Alex Polvi invited Michael Marineau and I to a meeting he had set up with Professor Quinn and Dean Adams. Hearing the questions and concerns of Professor Quinn helped to focus what we can do to move our idea of having Oregon State use more Open Source Software in the classroom.

The next few baby steps are creating a document, a StateOfTheLug, something that we can place down on a table and show people what we have done, show them we have students excited about this, and that we need to bring that into the classroom. What we need to show is the benefits of having software developed by communities that reach outside the bounds of any one company, school, or even person. And how exposure to this process is valuable to students. It is an experience that Dan Frye, Randy Kalmeta, and many other universities recognize, but that we, OSU, are not taking the opportunity to engage in.

But, I think that we are approaching it the right way, the students should be able to demand the skills that the college teaches them, and I want to see open source development taught.

Today Dan and Randy came down today from the Linux Technology Center at IBM. Both of these men understand Linux the business very well, and listening to them helped me to realize how important Linux is becoming to the technology sector, and how it is making customers, engineers, and business people happy. I talked to Randy about where their employees are coming from, and they are not from Oregon. In fact one of their goals in coming down was to meet with the computer science department to see how they are going to help train students to work with open source communities; it is the community stupid! Dan said that it is not the “technology that is revolutionary but the community, and how this software is developed.” This isn’t a new idea, Eric S. Raymond, Linus, and Richard Stallman have recognized the power that a community of dedicated people have when they are able to work together without the frictions and bounds of traditional organizations.

On Alex’s blog he quotes Professor Quinn, “There are only finite resources, however there are infinite things to do.” I think the ultimate goal is to show the department that this is not another check box to add to the list of things that are being done, but a new way of teaching and learning about the things we are already doing. I don’t want to see an “Open Source Class” I want to see Open Source In Class. I think Dean Adams understands it, and loves the idea and we need to work on concentrating what it is we want to see done.

In other news I have been doing alot of work with Ruby On Rails. This framework is beautiful, Ruby is a great language, and the community is very fun and excited about the project. I plan on doing some weekend hacking on my side project of getting Maintain re-implemented in RoR. So far I have been impressed, and think with a week or two of work I could get a system rolling with alot of momentum. But I will wait and see how this weekend goes.