Brandon Philips

systemd on openSUSE 11.3

2010-07-22T00:00:00-07:00

WARNING: this could cause your machine to stop booting, experienced Linux admins only. :)

Systemd is a new init system being written by Lennart, Kay and many others. If you want to give it a try on openSUSE 11.3 or openSUSE Factory follow these steps to get it all installed.

su
# Add the Factory repo for dbus upgrade
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/oss/ Factory
zypper mr -p 100 Factory
# Add Kay's repo for systemd install
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/kay_sievers/openSUSE_Factory_standard/home:kay_sievers.repo
zypper mr -n systemd home_kay_sievers
zypper mr -p 100 systemd
# Install new dbus and then systemd
zypper install -r Factory dbus-1
zypper install -r home_kay_sievers udev vala systemd

At this point systemd is installed in parallel with systemvinit. To actually use systemd as your init reboot your machine and append the following to your kernel command line arguments at the grub menu:

init=/bin/systemd

That it! If things break try some of the Documentation.

If you want to expand this article visit the wiki page

bandar - Patch monkey tools for mutt

2010-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

I was looking at a way of taking patches from mailing lists and importing them into my devel tree with quilt. Thankfully Greg KH had some scripts already and we both cleaned them up a bit. The result is Bandar!

Bandar is a simple set of scripts to integrate mutt/quilt/etc into a nice workflow:

Review patch in mutt
Press key
Patch opens up in editor for editing
Close your editor and apply patch to tree

Greasemonkey makes real estate fun!

2009-05-13T00:00:00-07:00

Nisha and I started seriously looking at getting a house recently. It being the 21st Century means large amounts of our house hunting time will be spent on the Internet; specifically rmlsweb.com a regional real estate listing service.

A huge annoyance with the site is that it uses a pretty lame mapping service called “GeoJet” which generates horrible looking maps.

Naturally, I started Googling for Greasemonkey scripts to find out if someone had fixed this already and sure enough my friend Kees Cook had written a user script in 2006!

With a little modification I got it working great with the new RMLS site. You can find it at git://ifup.org/philips/rmls-mapper.git or install the latest version now!

Linux Plumbers Conference Call For Topics

2009-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

The Linux Plumbers Conference focuses on a collection 2.5 hour microconferences that gather experts together to discuss and develop solutions to emerging problems that affect the Kernel, libraries and supporting system daemons that make Linux Linux. Last year there were six of these focused microconference on topics including: audio infrastructure, power management, and boot.

Many of the most successful microconference topics were suggested by community members not directly involved in planning the conference.

So, I need your help for 2009!

Head over to the Call for Topics and suggest an emerging topic in the Linux plumbing that we should discuss in 2009. Topics ideas can be submitted in the comments section of the LWN.net article.

The Right Tool for the Job: git-stitch-repo

2009-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

I maintain the acl and attr packages for SuSE and I was bitten by a bug twice last month because these two packages both have a copy of a utility library called libmisc. In summary: I fixed the acl version of libmisc but forgot to copy the patch over and check-in the same fix for attr. Needless to say a user filed a bug a few weeks later against attr too. Doh.

The root of the problem isn’t my incompetence, naturally, it is the fact that these two utilities duplicate code instead of sharing. ;)

Yesterday, Christoph Hellwig moved these packages from CVS at SGI to GIT at kernel.org. With the code available via GIT I now had an opportunity to fix the libmisc duplication problem. Initially it wasn’t clear how to merge the two histories of these projects together. But, with a bit of Googling I found a great little utility called git-stitch-repo that is designed for exactly that. Here is how I made it happened:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/xfs/attr-dev.git
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/xfs/acl-dev.git
mkdir acl-attr-dev
cd acl-attr-dev/
git init
git-stitch-repo ../acl-dev:acl ../attr-dev:attr | git fast-import
git checkout master-A
git pull . master-B
git branch -d master-A 
git branch -d master-B
git checkout -b libmiscmerge

hack..hack..hack

git checkout master
git pull . libmiscmerge

And the result is the merged acl-attr-dev.git. Neat!

FreedomHEC Taipei Wrap-up Notes

2009-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

FreedomHEC Taipei is a conference where hardware engineers are invited to learn how easy it is to make their hardware work with Linux. This was the first year for the event and it took place on November 20-21, 2008 in Taipei, Taiwan. Support from the Linux Foundation and the Institute for Information Industry made the event possible.

The event was attended by 165 people representing 41 companies. Speakers covered a large range of topics including X.org graphics drivers, input devices, and how to work with the Kernel community. Next year I hope we can involve more local speakers, provide translators and offer tutorial sessions.

It was a great experience organizing this years event and I would like to give a hearty thanks to everyone involved. I look forward to helping improve the event next year if everyone is interested :D

Improvements for 2009

Continue to focus on getting people who are doing Windows driver work at Acer, ASUS, VIA, etc.

Advertise in chipset trade magazines - could help with above

Blogging brought in several good local people. More blogging about the event next year.

Workshops

How to write a driver (like Greg KH's). Perhaps patch up QEMU to provide a simple USB device so we can show people how to write device drivers on that.

Workshop to get patches into mainline. Helped Vortex86 get their small patches up to mainline.

Ensure speakers are focused on a development topic. This will require local organizers to read abstracts.

Provide opportunity for hardware vendors attending conference to give a 2 minute rundown of their devices. Hearing about new hardware was useful for many of the Kernel developers in attendance.

Wifi with other ports opened :D

Accomplishing next years goals

Get list of top requested non-working hardware from Ellis and invite vendors

Contact Scott from Motorola about about chipset trade magazines

Find more people in Taipei who are interested in doing organization

Session NotesHow and why to work with the Kernel community - Harald Welte:
overview of the how and whys. A session like this should be given every year.
Introduction to git - Junio C Hamano:
enjoyed the visual metaphors used in the presentation. Great approach for presenting what can be a difficult to understand topic. Linux graphics driver development model - Eric Anholt: Overview of the present and future of Xorg architecture. Surprised that the audience had no questions as this topics was requested by several people. Perhaps translations would have helped? Ask Eric if a tutorial format might be able to show people how easy some of this stuff is: since he was insisting it really is ;)
File System Performance Tuning for Gdium - Coly Li:
Mandarin but it triggered a number of questions. Note for next year: talks don’t need to be just about drivers to be relevant. ACPI EC driver - Alexey Starikovskiy: Alexey had the chance to meet with several people to talk about ACPI issues in their hardware. He seemed very happy with this result but missed out on meeting someone from Acer.
Eee Peripheral Interoperability - Ellis Wang:
of getting a closed driver from vendors then opening a driver later. We talked at length why this process can be painful and doesn’t work for the community. Also pained to hear the EeePC OS uses a closed source Bluetooth stack instead of helping with BlueZ. Still confused on their requirement to get device specific printer tools working.
DMP x86 Soc Family - Anthony:
to use proper QUIRKS so the hardware should work under the next vanilla Kernel release.
"Secure Linux" Primer - Toshiharu Harada:
Security systems under Linux. Made a convincing argument that security systems like AppArmor, SELinux, Tomoyo are interesting for embedded systems.
TOMOYO Linux: pragmatic and manageable security for Linux - Kentaro Takeda:
that blocks system calls like the Vista “Keep Blocking”/”Unblock” dialog boxes.
Andes Open Development Environment For Linux - Shawn:
new $ARCH. Planning to merge in the next 6 months the GCC, Kernel and QEMU changes. Harald tried to convince them to merge now- or at least get an RFC out there so upstream can be prepared for the changes.
The experience of touch pad driver and application development - Garylee:
understanding of all of the moving parts in the Linux input system. Linux Multiqueue Network Driver Infrastructure - Herbert Xu: Didn’t watch this one- talking with EeePC guys.

FreedomHEC Taipei - November 20-21, 2008

2008-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

Hot on the heals of LPC is another event I am helping to organize. :D
If you are involved in Linux driver development please consider giving a talk at FreedomHEC Taipei.
FreedomHEC Taipei
FreedomHEC Taipei brings together experts in the Linux community with developers wanting to write Linux drivers for their hardware products. Taiwan is a leader in hardware component development and teams based in the country are building headlining devices such as the EeePC. Helping Taiwan developers learn the Linux development process will improve future hardware support in Linux.

Who: Hardware engineers, driver developers, you.

What: High-intensity learning, networking and Linux driver development unconference

Where: Technical Service Building (14F., No.133, Sec. 4, Minsheng E. Rd., Taipei City 105, Taiwan, R.O.C. )

When: November 20-21, 2008

Why: Take control of your own destiny and make your hardware valuable to the Linux market.

The event is hosted by the Institute for Information Industry with support from the Linux Foundation.

Linux Plumbers Conf- huge success and looking to 2009

2008-09-24T00:00:00-07:00

Linux Plumbers Conf was a huge success due to the huge amount of effort put forth by the organizers and the great turnout of attendees. Thanks to everyone!

A highlight of the conference, for me, was meeting some of the folks in the DVB/V4L community. This was the first time that this many core video developers were together in the same place and a lot was accomplished. There was discussion about the new DVB API for supporting new protocols, libv4l’s progress, routing APIs for future devices, and my discussion about a V4L server. Also, I found out that Mauro now works for Red Hat- which is great news for the subsystem.

For those who weren’t able to make it LWN has a collection of good wrap-up articles on the front page. Also, Sri is working on getting videos of the keynote and some other events up on the web. Keep an eye on LinuxPlumbersConf.org for those.
Looking to LPC 2009
Next year we would like to get other people involved in the conference organization and planning. If you are interested in helping please register for the 2008 WRAP PARTY / 2009 Kickoff this Friday September 26th from 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm at Andina’s Restaurant - 2nd floor (above the restaurant)

example code: socket server and client using select()

2008-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

I spent the last hour re-familiarizing myself with Unix sockets via man-pages and HOWTOs. I have written client/server socket apps a dozen times before but because of iterative development I no longer had a simple example lying around.

To save myself this trouble in the future I created a little socket client and server for future reference. This app allows you to have a Twitter style conversation (140 char limit) with everyone on your system who has permissions to the Unix socket! Perhaps the Unix shell is the next micro-blogging platform. ;)

Linux Plumbers Conf: speakers, early bird registration, V4L microconf

2008-08-17T00:00:00-07:00

The Linux Plumbers Conf early bird registration is drawing to a close- grab a cheap seat while you still have time.
Need a bit more convincing? Check out our speakers list.
We released our speaker list this week and we have a great group. I am most excited that we are finally bringing together a few of the video4linux developers for a face to face microconf.
In particular it will be good to talk about libv4l, a low level library that does frame conversion, since nearly all video applications need conversion soon to support gspca devices. Hans De Goede started the library a few months ago and we are both working to patch applications to get support into OpenSuSE 11.1 and Fedora 10.
Having applications use a library also opens up the possibility of doing some smart things like launching a proxy server (ala. dmix, pulseaudio) and having Cheese and Skype able to use the camera at the same time. Although, it would be nice if Skype got involved so we wouldn't have to LDPRELOAD our way in ;)

It's a good time to be on Twitter

2008-02-14T00:00:00-08:00
Twitter
Primarily I use twitter to stay up to date on local Portland tech but it seems that the Novell and OpenSuSE twitter users are growing.

If you want to add me on twitter my account name is philips.

Six Weeks to Robot at Ignite Portland

2008-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

Recently I presented at Ignite Portland and a video has been published on YouTube. The event was rockin' and being a part of the whole thing was amazing. If you weren't able to make it you really missed out.
Luckily, we have the technology to bring the event to you! LinuxAid lovingly recorded all of the talks and posted them on YouTube. The complete collection can be found here.
If you want to dig in even further Silicon Florist has made a links arrangement of the event which includes Flickr links, blog posts and Twitter archives.
Be sure to keep your eye on IgnitePortland.com in the future so you can be a part of these great events.

Come see me at Ignite Portland 2

2008-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

If you are unfamiliar with Ignite the presentation format consists of 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. Result: a 5 minute talk. This style of presentation is also known as pecha-kucha which is Japanese slang for chatter. My friend Ron sent me some great background articles if you are interested: here and here.

I am going to be giving a presentation on the high school robotics program known as the FIRST robotics competition. The story will be rooted in my experience mentoring Meeks Technical Team 2411

If you are free Feb. 5th come and see me and the other 13 awesome presentations! Arrive early too because hundreds of others will be swarming to get in.

Tuesday, February 5 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm (doors open at 5:15 pm) Bagdad Theater 3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd Portland, OR 97214 Admission is FREE Please RSVP

suckless screen lock

2007-11-25T00:00:00-08:00
A useful tool:
href=”http://www.suckless.org/download/slock-0.7.tar.gz”>slock</a> is a tiny c program that locks your screen like xlock. But, with only 147 lines of very straightforward code it would be very difficult to introduce vulnerabilities :)

Perfection: Spoon + Dancing Robots

2007-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

I am a huge fan of robots and Spoon so this video is perfection. It is too bad I will be leaving LA two days before Spoon and KeepOn play at NextFest!
Source: IEEE automation blog

Geeky music, tools and bugs

2007-08-17T00:00:00-07:00
Today's discoveries:

TCC is a tiny C compiler that allows you to do #!/usr/bin/tcc -run at the top of C files! It is really handy for those 20 line test programs.

Things I am working on:

Today I wrote what seems like a proper solution to a QEMU bug that was causing CDROM devices to be unhappy under recent Kernel versions. The bug turns out to be really simple but it took a bit of time to learn about ATAPI and AT devices to understand what was failing.

I am also working on a patch to give quilt the ability to pull down a series and all patches via http/ftp. It is a bit frustrating being pointed at a patches/ directory but having no quick way of pulling them into your series.

Life: an update

2007-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

I have not blogged recently because of a number of life changes. I will try to fix that now that I have a steady location and job. To clear the air here is everything I have been doing in a chronological list.
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Graduated from Oregon State University with a computer science degree.
Traveled to Vienna, Austria to visit Nisha George who is working for TTTech
Started working for SuSE Labs/Novell as a Kernel developer
Moved into a neighborhood (SE Portland) right next to Ron Jackson and Karla Beck! Ron has been a great mentor and worked with me on the Bob project
Went to a drive in theater for the first time, double feature of Die Hard 4 and Transformers, awesome!
Visited the only American owned sake brewery, Sake One, and bought a sake keg. :)
Went to OSCON and met a bunch of Novell and Debian people. Living in Portland is going to Rock!
Volunteering to help with the Linux Plumbers Conf
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Life is good, I am having fun and I will be blogging again soon.

procmail magic: I am not afraid of lists anymore

2007-06-03T00:00:00-07:00

Yesterday a number of list posts from lists I had forgotten to write a procmail rule for made their way into my inbox. I didn’t like the idea of adding yet more cookie cutter rules to my ever expanding .procmailrc to fix the issue so, I went hunting for a better solution.

After searching for a bit I found jdub's procmail which got me most of the way there:

REXML could not parse this XML/HTML: <pre> # MOST LISTS - Automagically handle lists :0 * ^((List-Id|X-(Mailing-)?List):(.*[< ]\/[^>]*)) { LISTID=$MATCH :0: * LISTID ?? ^\/[^@\.]* ifup.$MATCH/ } # MAJORDOMO - Automagically handle Majordomo lists :0 * ^Sender:.*owner-[^@]+@[^@\+]+ * ^Sender:.*owner-\/[^@\+]+ { :0: ifup.$MATCH/ } </pre>

But, vger.kernel.org mailing lists have listname-owner instead of owner-listname so I wrote this:

# MAJORDOMO with inverse owner :0 * ^Sender:.*-owner@[^@\+]+ * ^Sender:[ ]*\/[^@\+]+ { :0: ifup.`echo $MATCH | /bin/sed -e s/-owner//g`/ }

Does anyone know how to skip that sed call? I am not too terribly happy with it but it works.

Final result: 80 insertions, 116 deletions and it handles all of my lists- not just the ones that I remember to add. w00t

guilt: my first Debian package

2007-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

For the last few weeks I have been working on a Debian package for guilt, a quilt like tool that works on top of a git repository.

Getting the initial package together was easy thanks to dh_make. This created the debian/ directory and basic control files that were needed to Debianize the source. After customizing all of the control files I built the package with dpkg-buildpackage and it seemed to work!

But, I quickly hit a bump in the road, lintian, the Debian package checker complained that there were no man pages.

$ lintian -c guilt_0.20-1_i386.deb W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt-add ... W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt-top W: guilt: binary-without-manpage guilt-unapplied

Knowing the package would never get sponsored without docs I worked with Josef Sipek, guilt author, to get an asciidoc documentation system built for guilt. In a few days we had built a man page for every command in the system and the lintian warnings were gone, w00t.

With the package in good shape Debian developer Pierre Habouzit kindly sponsored my package. And today I got notification that the package has been uploaded Debian!

Next step: Become a Debian developer.

P.S. If any Debian developers from around Oregon are reading I need my GPG key signed :)

In high school I built robots

2007-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

While digging through a pile of old CDs I found a video documentary of my first high school robotics project, Bob version 1.0. So, I posted the video up on Google Video. The project was a joint venture between Sherwood and Newberg high schools and I was a lead developer.

The year after this project we created a more robust version of the robot that we aptly named Bob version 2.0. Enjoy the film!

LCA Day #2

2007-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

The talk “Demystifying PCI” in the LinuxChix miniconf by Kristen Carlson Accardi was a highlight of day two. Using sysfs and lspci on a running system was an effective way to introduce the PCI bus and is certainly more entertaining than reading the PCI spec. A couple of new things I picked up from the talk: lspci -x prints out the configuration space of the PCI devices in hex which lead to the observation that the vendor code for Intel is 8086, ha!

It was also good to meet Kristen in person; she had helped me with a patch for adding the docking station entries to sysfs. Hopefully we can get her down to Oregon State to give a talk to our open source development class.

After the conference on Tuesday Google sponsored a party for all conference goers. It was a great night to meet and chat. In particular I got a chance to meet a few of our donors including conference organizer Lindsay Holmwood. Thanks again to everyone who donated.

LCA Day #1

2007-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

I had been meaning to post daily updates from LCA but the conference is just too awesome to get a chance to blog- ROCK!

href=”http://www.debian.org/devel/leader”>Debian project leader</a> (DPL) Anthony Towns. The first minute of the talk was really strong. Then his phone rang and he took the call! It was the first time I had ever seen this at a conference.

After a good minute of “uh huh pause yes, yes, ok ok” he got off the phone and asked one of the audience members to call his mum. Naturally, everyone was very confused. It turned out he was moving today and his mom was the only person in the area to look after the movers.

With that brief interruption the Debian miniconf was off!

A few of the highlights:

Funny: m68k buildd is keeping up properly thanks to an emulated build box running on amd64

Hopeful: the rework of the GNU Free Documentation License to fit into the DFSG

Sad: There were updates on IceWeasel. Why is Sun better at working with Debian than the much more open Mozilla Corp?

The next talk was interesting because of the problem domain: honey bees. Jamie Honan, the presenter, was trying to find a way to keep an eye on his remote bee hives to prevent them from swarming. The problem with a swarming hive is that his next door neighbor is allergic to bees. The best detection method of a swarming hive is smacking the hive and listening to the frequency of the reaction. He didn’t have a mechanical process for smacking the hive yet but a device like the Fascinating Electronics USB servo controller that I brought along for show and tell would work great.

The last session I went to before the embedded show and tell was a talk by Keith Packard on the direction that X.org is heading. If all goes according to plan it shouldn’t be necessary to have much of an xorg.conf in a few more versions as most everything will be hot-pluggable. w00t!

It was a great day. Thanks to the Seven who are putting this week together.

Regulatory Binary Free ipw3945 Drivers for Linux

2007-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

Today at the Kernel Introduction Keith Packard corrected Jonathan Corbet and said that the Linux ipw3945 wireless driver no longer requires a binary regulatory daemon to run. After poking around the Sourceforge project website for a second I couldn’t find the code and asked Keith about it.

It turns out the binary free project is now hosted at bughost.org. At this time the new driver requires running linux-wireless git tree so it isn’t easy to use and build like the old driver but the lack of a binary userspace daemon should guarantee that the code is merged into mainline sometime in the future. Thanks to Intel for finding a better solution to this.

The Story So Far

2007-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

This is assignment zero, a brief biography, written for Dr. Budd’s CS419 and CS480. Enjoy!

Part of my decision for coming to Oregon State was that my Debian install had automatically chosen ftp.oregonstate.edu as the fastest mirror available. The message this sent me as a high school student was that OSU, our at least a few people on campus, cared about Free Open Source Software. It didn’t hurt that OSU had an engineering program that is well known for creating quality graduates either.

During the fall term of my freshman year I meet up with the ftp.oregonstate.edu admin, Scott Kveton. At the time he was forming the Open Source Lab and was looking to hire students to write open source software. I had been using Linux for a couple of years and could hardly contain my excitement; I was going to be paid to write open source software as a freshman! And at the time I had no idea that this job was going to open up crazy amazing opportunities for me and all of the other students at the Open Source Lab.

Every successful project I have ever worked on has had a few components: an interesting problem, an experienced mentor and hands off management. At the Open Source Lab I had all of these components for three years and I grew a lot as a developer and person. The OSL and FOSS are great opportunities for students to work on interesting and large projects even as they are still developing their skills in the classroom.

The software I find the most interesting is behind the scenes: the system software. Kernels, device drivers and networking protocols are all things that most users don’t have to think about but are nonetheless very important. There are a few interesting properties about this level of software. First, it must be extremely well thought out and written; if this software goes bad then the user is going to have a very bad day. Second, the code is usually rich with interesting data structures and programming tricks to squeeze out as much performance from the hardware as possible. And finally a lot of smart and interesting people work in system software and I like working with those types of people.

I decided I wanted to be a computer scientist after working for two high school robotics project. The patience and guidance of my mentor, Ron Jackson, helped improve my programming abilities a great deal. Despite the tight deadlines involved in creating full scale humanoid robots in under 6 months during both years the software was written and working before the competition. It was a huge confidence boost to have that responsibility and trust invested in me and in the end come through with a working solution. I had found something I was good at and had a really fun time doing. Perfect.

After college I would like to work as a Linux Kernel developer. This decision is partly influenced by the great experience I had working on a genetic algorithm for the CPU scheduler while working at IBM in Austin. It is also a result of the number of great interactions I have had with members of Kernel community including: Val Henson, Greg KH, Jake Moilanen, the entire OzLabs crew and many others that I have probably forgotten. Plus, I like penguins- that helps.

/me runs off to Australia for a bit.

An Ajax Tabbed Browser

2006-12-03T00:00:00-08:00
Ryan Miglavs
hacker, came up with the idea of an in browser tabbed browser a few months ago. It was brilliant! People without tabbed browsers could use a tabbed interface and those people constantly on the go could use the service to access their tabs from anywhere.

But, as we wrote a demo implementation a number of “technical issues” were discovered:

A parent IFrame can't get a child's title. So, how do you name the tabs?

Flash doesn't obey z-index! Every ad shows up on every tab!

Websites can pop out of frames! if(top.location!=location) top.location.href=document.location.href;

If you want to reproduce these bugs for yourself check out the proof of concept demo.

Perhaps there are good solutions to these problems. And perhaps someone reading this entry knows the answer. If you do- please leave a comment!

Although the outcomes of this experiment were suboptimal it did yield some good. I learned a bit of Javascript and discovered the wonders of FireBug, a javascript development tool for Firefox. Also, I had the chance to eat my fill of Triscuits and hummus at Ryan’s house.

A better eMusic downloader for Linux

2006-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

store and I have had an account for about a year. Until today I had been using a download manager written in Perl but it was a pain because of the EMusic.pm library it required. Then today just as I was starting to write my own I found this lovely Python script called: dromanova.py. It is perfect for assigning as the default Firefox action for .emp files. Enjoy!

It's About Community

2006-09-06T00:00:00-07:00

As my work at IBM on the genetic library comes to a close my attention is beginning to turn to life back in Corvallis and at Oregon State. And one of the most exciting things about heading back is my new job.

With the help of Dr. Timothy Budd, Alex Polvi and I are going to create the Open Source Education Lab at OSU. Now, why isn’t that a link? Because the OSEL is so hot and new that it doesn’t even have a website yet! (That will change soon)

But, in the mean time a “What” document for the OSEL was created (here) to give some hint at what we are aiming to do at the OSEL. And one of the first headings in this flyer reads: “It’s About Community”. The term community gets thrown around alot in the FOSS world and is arguably one of the most important aspects to creating good Free software. So, in this post I wanted to share some of my recent run ins with communities in and out of the software world.

At the Supermarket

href=”http://grip.ifup.org”>NASA days</a>, recently visited France with her Dad and sister. During her visit she told me about an attempt to go to the corner market to pick up some produce with their family-friend and host Etienne Uncle. When they got down to the market door it was shut and locked despite being a Tuesday afternoon. But, Etienne Uncle wasn’t suprised, he had simply forgotten that the family who runs the store was on vacation for the month.

My mind boggled- could you imagine this situation happening in the states? Etienne Uncle didn’t even vow never to shop there again!

But, then I started to reflect: The 8-5 grind of working life keeps me on a pretty regular schedule and for that reason I tend to hit up the supermarket at a pretty regular time two or three times a week. In doing so I have discovered that I see some of the same employees everyday when I come in.

Now, some nights I come in right at 9pm (it is too hot to run before 8pm) when the meat counter is closing. A few times the regular guy there, Mike, told me he was closed, so I thanked him and moved on. But, he started to notice my pattern and I started making an effort to come in before closing time. This worked out well and on most nights we would exchange a few words about the day and I would move on. Then, tonight I showed up at 9:05pm and Mike just smiled and laughed a bit, and so did I.

However, this time he didn’t say he was closed- he set down his mop, said hello, and asked if I needed anything. And to my suprise, despite showing up 5 minutes late I got the deli meat I needed and had a quick pleasant conversation too.

Then, at the checkout, the checker Sean noticed I was buying my new favorite drink: Naked Juice (stop laughing :-)). I had recommended it to him a few days ago after he asked about it- and he stopped his checking and thanked me for the recommendation.

These three anecdotes are about community- it isn’t anything magical- it is simply people who are empathetic to one another and who are willing at times to do a little extra for each other.

Communities Go Beyond Differences

insight into the way religions mix in India. He told me that in the city in which he grew up the population was a mix of people following Muslim, Hindu, and Christian faiths. But, he never saw or heard of animosity towards any group because of their faith; and in fact everyone lives and works side by side.

Maybe, he suggested, if people were to live in this city for a few months, they would see that intolerance is unnecessary.

Between Colleagues Beyond Companies

to visit the Ottawa Linux Symposium and after a bit of coaxing from Val Henson I went to a room party for file system developers. When I arrived I saw that there were people from big tech companies and universities sharing ideas, complaints, insights and critiques on file system development and the Linux Kernel. So, in the case of this community FOSS was the enabler.

A Company that is a Tribe

href=”http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2006/09/the_human_workp.html”>Robert Paterson’s Weblog</a> a great post was made about the web design firm Silver Orange and in particular their strive to maintain a small tribe of developers instead of growing a big company. For a company of this size they are quite successful and seem fully dedicated to maintaining a healthy tribal community:

We openly challenge each other all the time. I don't mean that we fight but that we speak out minds about what each of us are doing. Peer review happens everyday and in all settings. To fit here you have to be able to be comfortable with giving and in receiving opinion about what is going on for real and what you are doing for real.
Conclusion
Develop empathy and friendships
Bring smart people with a common interest together

productive work</li> </ul>

It is the goal of the OSEL to encourage the growth of a thriving FOSS community on the OSU campus. And I think it is quite clear why this is a Good Thing™.

P.S. Don’t ignore the communities forming all around you when you are walking down the street with your earbuds a blaring. Visit Social Recession for more information.

Austin Fuzion 2

2006-09-06T00:00:00-07:00

Free is always good. But, a free concert starring one of your favorite DJs set against two huge inflatable projection screens with live video mixing is awesome. The particular awesomeness I am referring to was called: Austin Fuzion 2 starring RJD2.
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The opening act was great. They were a local DJ group by the name of: supercontinent. I knew it was going to be enjoyable when the only intruments they setup were Apple laptops and 16 button sample pads.
6535
After the concert I took a walk around the capitol and captured my silhouette against the capitol building.
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Good times in the ATX! w00t!

Beware Britt World Wide

2006-07-16T00:00:00-07:00

In the last week I have had two run-ins with ”business men” ”building teams” for ”internet sales.” The first was a couple that noticed my Oregon plates outside of HEB, introduced themselves and after some friendly discussion about ‘ol Corvallis they wanted to select me for their team. Yea!

After a couple of minutes he wouldn’t shut up and I am not a rude guy so I gave him my email and darted.

The next day I got this email:

…I enjoyed meeting you. You seem like a very confident person and someone that might fit well on the team we are putting together. Listen, I can’t promise you anything but if you are truly interested in making some additional income we should talk. We need to get together for about 15min so we can get to know each other better and I can give you an overview of what we are doing. I have some time in my schedule Thursday late after noon or Friday. Which is better for you?…

Uh huh, uh huh. Oh gee, wowie, that sounds great, a team, money and a business plan that is so complex that it must be explained in 15 minutes, instead of in the email…

So I did some research on his email address and turned up bww.com. And the website is as non-descript as the email: “Empowering people around the world”. They didn’t even bother to put what BWW stands for anywhere on the page.

Something was up and after some Googling I discovered Britt World Wide AKA Amway + Internets AKA Free Business Training at Hotel Near the Airport AKA Pyramid Scheme.

Here are some links about the business:

Britt World Wide or "If he can do it, why can't I?" (Part II)

Pyramid Scheme Alert

NBC Consumer Alert

Summary: BWW should be avoided.

Today I was attacked by another BWW person while drinking my iced tea and reading up on TCL/TK. But armed with the information on BWW I was able to quickly hush him and get back to my reading.

So why am I posting this? Because non of these resources link to bww.com, so using google for link:bww.com returns no results. At least until my site gets crawled :-)

As a side note everyone in Austin is extremely friendly and these few brain washed creeps by no means represents the whole of the ATX.

In other news don’t lay on metal that has been sitting out in the direct 100 degree sunlight. You will burn your back… badly!

69 Archived Comments Comments are closed

1. omar Posted 7/19/2006 at 9:59 pm

sweet, i’m a resource! : ) glad i could provide some useful information. I’m in Orange County these days, but I was approached by a guy from “the biz” when i was living in Austin - at Metro Cafe, across from the University of Texas. Enjoy Austin though!

2. Ryan Miglavs Posted 7/21/2006 at 9:11 am

Hey, a pyramid scheme is pretty cool if you get in right at the start! Those people below you will have to find a way to deal with that little “population of the world” thing, so that’s their problem. So, um, would you like to get in on an exciting opportunity to make huge cash on the side with an innovative online rubber knife subscription company?

3. Sham Posted 7/31/2006 at 11:37 am

Hey, Iam in California. When I was in a shopping mall, A guy approched me and told .. that I was so familier to him… then we were talking for 5 min.. Finally he gave his card .. and he invited to the meeting at his home. Its all about BWW. :)

4. Ron Jackson Posted 8/1/2006 at 2:00 pm

I had an opportunity to get in on a pyramid scheme in the 80’s. They didn’t bother with products, went right to the funneling of money up the pyramid. It worked something like this: A person would be the “pilot” of the “airplane”. They get a “copilot”. Then they enlist the “passengers”, each of whom pays $1K to the pilot. The cycle repeats with the passengers moving up to copilot, copilot moving up to pilot, and a new crop of “passengers”. Sound pretty lame? A massage technician I knew had lots of contacts through her practice and personal development seminars and managed to fill a number of “flights”. She then skipped the country. I heard she was living in Bali. Hard to imagine falling for a scheme like that… but then some people are both greedy and not good with math.

5. SP Posted 8/29/2006 at 5:02 pm

Yup. Someone contacted me about running my own business and generating $1000s dollars/month on the side. She told me that they are recruiting sharp and ambitious people for their business. I looked at the bww site- nothing up there interesting. Immediately bells were ringing about Amway (quixstar). Notice how bww distributors use cookie cutter messaging like “sharp and ambitious”. thx. sp

6. johnny Posted 11/15/2006 at 7:52 am

what about learn to trade go and see how many people are scapegoats at this seminar after asking so many questions the guy trying to sell the product said we not good to buy the product so we told him his not good for our money.

7. thebowerbird Posted 12/16/2006 at 8:12 pm

I had one of these guys approach me recently, seemed really nice (then don’t they all when personal interest is involved), but I instantly recognized it as a pyramid. These things are bastardly, and I am inclined to the believe that people involved are either naive or evil themselves.

8. Soody Posted 12/21/2006 at 1:37 am

When I was in loo last week , a guy peeped in, did not allow me to wash my hands and took it and shook it before I could clean. Told me that he had met me some where and started fishing. We exchanged cards as we spoke. Looked like a smart one. SOmething told me that he will call and he did call the next day and followed up with a statement that there is an opportunity for Young and open minded people like me. AAAAhhhhh~~~~!!!!!. Then he told me about BWW and I learnt quite a good deal from these articles. All of these guys are cheats around us. Be ware. Work is worship. Do not join these pyramid schemes and get sc****ed. Bye Soody

9. Finster Posted 1/3/2007 at 10:19 pm

Thank heaven for this post. I met a young college alum of mine at a sports bar while watching our team play its arch rival, and he called me a week later using nearly all of the buzz words that appear in the email above. Of course, he refused to tell me what he wanted to talk about over the phone, and insisted on a short meeting in person. I have since Googled the guy, and he’s a ghost, nowhere to be found, which is odd for a guy who helps companies build their Web presence, don’t you think? So thank you for posting this. I now know exactly where to tell this guy to stick his pyramid, sideways.

10. alex Posted 1/12/2007 at 10:06 pm

Hey Guys I was approached by a guy I signed up and now am earning prettu god money. This Internet is a bathroom wall anyone can come and write anything. Any Motherfucker finister, soody, johnny, joe can come and write their experience about being approcahed but this is mine. IT IS FUN MAKING MONEY. Hope to see you guys in one of the office working your butts off to get someone else rich. Working under someone else that pet is called a DOG.avk_19@hotmail.com

11. Vic Posted 1/16/2007 at 7:07 am

My story: met a woman at a grocery store! She was like:” Wow, do you like this crackers?” Then she asked me about my background. I said I am working on my MBA and she said she has a great opportunity for me! Then she called me and arranged a meeting with her husband at a coffee shop. Very pleasant people, but I had a feeling right away that it is not for me. The only thing that pissed me off that I wasted half an hour talking to them instead of studying. They invited me to the “house meeting with a very important leader”, I was very skeptical right away! I would never go to some stranger’s house. Business should be in business environment. Thanks to this site to reaffirm my thoughts.

12. Bryant Hampton Posted 1/20/2007 at 11:34 am

Being a former Amway consultant I can truly understand many people’s concerns. However, while I was not very succesful in amway as a business, I did learn alot about relationships with people and God. These people are the most caring and honest people you will ever meet. Check it out. Don’t let the opinions of others ruin your future. I have personally seen many people become succesful in Amway. The ones with the gift of gab are usually the most success.

13. A. E. Posted 2/7/2007 at 2:30 pm

Thank you for posting this blog. I too was approached and declined from this. In response to mr. Hampton’s comments, I am glad that he has lerned a lot about people and god from his own personal experience. However, like he said, the ones whom become very sucessful in this type of “work” have a gift a gab…I wonder why. This again, like so many others are “Network Marketing” scams which makes you “market” in your own “network”. I find that this is a waste of time and effort since you will always be remebered as the one trying to get someone to join your group which forever tarnishes your repuation in business.

14. A. E. Posted 2/7/2007 at 2:32 pm

Plus, if it was a real business, none of the required information would be an initial secret.

15. A.Seq Posted 2/11/2007 at 11:25 pm

I was also just contacted about joining britt world wide. it concerned me coz I asked the person if I could just sign up without going to the seminars or buying the tapes….and they said “we prefer that you do join”. makes me wonder if they are more interested in making money through the learning material. Have any of you ever evaluated whether the products save you money. Irrespective of whetehr you make money selling to others are the discounts you get worth it.

16. Thaddeus Wilson Posted 3/8/2007 at 8:55 pm

The above blogs, WOW, you guys are really oozing with intelligence. Oh boy, the things you people dream up. I could school everyone here and not miss a beat. It reminds me of the monkeys you have seen at the zoo or on TV, where they swing around and make a lot of noise. Thats what most of the previous blogs amount to, lots of noise and no intelligence. For the record, BWW is no secret. Anyone checking out the oppurtunity that is offered through BWW will find that it is perfectly legitimate. When was the last time someone thought enough of you to offer you a business oppurtunity?! Pyramids, pyramids, so much chat about pyramids! Heres the low down on pyramids, everything in the universe is a pyramid! So, for all the monkeys who think that people who own a pyramid business, traditional or non-traditional, are evil mo-fos, here is a tip for all you mental midgets out there. Flee your jobs right now or else you will continue to be guilty of aiding and abetting these evil mo-fos in their evil quest to provide an honest future for their families! Just know, I am an evil conservative who oppresses his fellow man by teaching them about free enterprise. So beware, I am laying in wait for you;}

17. magnus olsson Posted 3/15/2007 at 11:20 am

You should get a job. All Corporations are forming their structure the same way btw. Improve your theoretical math skills,because then you would find out that not everyone gets involved and that this business type is actually desaturating….meaning that the number of people in the business compared to not in the business is decreasing daily. So, go visit the pyramids in Egypt Magnus

18. Pravin Thakur Posted 3/17/2007 at 12:29 pm

I am a little confused; and would like to know the answer to two simple questions: [1] What exactly dows BWW sell or involve selling? Is it a product, service or both? [2] If BWW is so great, then why do the BWW agents try soooooo hard to sell? Thank you in advance for your comments!

19. Raymond Posted 4/16/2007 at 6:31 pm

BWW sells what are known as Business Support Materials (BSM) consisting of CD’s, books, and tickets for seminars held 4 times in a year. There are other organizations selling similar things besides BWW that use Quixtar as suppliers.

20. Deepak Kumar Vasudevan Posted 5/22/2007 at 7:28 am

BWW and the Pyramid Scam (!) seems to be destroying good friendly relationships. It makes you to drive every friend and relationship, despite the fact that you meet after long time to turn into business potential corners. I was glad to meet an old friend in Missouri, US. But her husband seems to be affected with this BWW fever. Now he and his colleague are daily calling me and emailing me regarding BWW Business Potential. I did send him a very casual, friendly reply to him asking for clarifications, what actually the BWW business is all about. They keep saying business, business but till finally, they don’t say what exactly they are trying to give as a business to the visitor. Is this someway related to Amway in India? Amway got caught in a lot of scam including its top leaders involved in some way to Sivakasi Jayalakshmi Police Scam case. Hope at least weblogs like these highlight people and save them from the menace of such bad marketing which destroys relationship by showing money and greed to them.

21. Shar Posted 6/1/2007 at 4:17 pm

Almost same experience here. I’m new into US and suddenly found these MLM vultures prying around shopping malls, identifying soft targets. I have to agree, after reading so many motivational material and watching DVDs, they get smart into sniffing an newbie. Same formula is applied by everybody: 1. You look familiar. Have we met? 2. Which place you are from? OH! I from same city. AHA!!! Exchange contact info and then they call you first, just to make you comfortable, like a good friend. In 2nd or 3rd call, they want to tell you about the business/opportunity/great-team/***** all cr*p. If you try to say no politely, they won’t take it. If you clearly say it, they still will not take it and it comes to the point where you have be blunt and rude. a****les To top it up, One of my relative approached me with “business opportunity”. Sending off his friend(aka business partner)to contact me. Apparently, the smarta** was in IT and earning $150K plus BWW. I insisted about knowing more about the business and was sent a mail of invite suggesting “business attire/Tie” horsesh**t Figured out hyperlinks in the mail and started the search on net about bww. The website is ONLY for IBOs. Found some good posts like this. Thanks a lot. I still wonder, are these people blind? what is this system, that motivates them to work so hard to seek new members. Amazing brain-washing.

22. trini concern Posted 6/15/2007 at 1:09 pm

we are contemplating weather to get involve in this “exciting” business or not. but after reveiwing these comments we are all left confused. my family memebers and i had several meetings with the representatives of trinidad. when mr Pooran Benny spoke to us we were pretty much convinced to join this bandwagon.we had our money in place an it was just for us to only register but after a couple of questions i hestitated and now i am reading this and it have my family an i very confused. making the situation worst is that the information and catalogue are not readily available until your $2890.00TT is paid. how do i know that this is real.i am young an investing my life savings into this could be beneficial also a rip of. what am i supposed to do now?if anyone has info. please reply on this same site. thank you

23. Kamara Posted 6/21/2007 at 1:28 pm

WOW. I totally understand these sentiments…I have studied MLM and pyramids and can offer some clarification. Pyramid schemes have high start up costs and you only earn money for recruiting people…The Feds are always shutting those down. However, there are legitimate MLM opportunities that are POORLY MARKETED by 95% of the people. The stupidest thing people ever tell you when you join is to make a list of EVERYONE YOU KNOW. How the hell can you sell the same thing to EVERYONE YOU KNOW…We have different personalities and when you hear the high figures of people failing in these ventures, it’s because of their “training”. When a company has products at very high prices, they KNOW that no one will buy so they offer you it at cheaper price if you JOIN. That puts people under pressure to SELL SELL SELL to everyone they meet so it’s not totally their fault that they’re so obnoxious.Let me say though, that you can join a company that has products that people would buy IF THERE WERE NO OPPORTUNITY ATTACHED TO IT. I was with one of these companies that offered “wholesale price” as they call it and got screwed…it’s pretty dumb recruiting EVERYONE ON THIS LIST THAT YOU MAKE. If you sell vacuum cleaners, make sure that your prospects already have carpet BEFORE you go spitting in their faces. I studied this industry carefully then joined a company where they sell all the products at the same price whether you join or not…I do NOT have to bombard anyone at the mall and make lousy promises to them. I can just find where I can satisfy a need and do it. If I meet people who ALREADY BELIEVE IN MLM, then I share with them about business, otherwise I don’t twist people’s hands to join me…THAT’S STUPID. For those of you who have had bad experiences with MLMs, there’s a book that outlines EXACTLY how and why so many people fail in MLM…You can download it at http://www.sponsorlikethepros.com and it’s FREE. For the rest of you, please do your research before you brand ALL MLMs as scams…There are bad people in school yet we still send our kids there. Bad people in church yet we still go there. Bad people in the police force yet we still believe and trust in them. Bad people in politics yet we still vote for them… There are bad people in MLM but that does NOT mean that MLM is bad…it’s just presented in bad ways by excited and overhyped people. It’s totally legitimate. I’m sure most of you readers have used Avon products…did you know that Avon is one of the oldest MLM companies in the world? I rest my case.

24. Satya Narayan Das Posted 6/27/2007 at 10:31 pm

Dear Guys, I have gone through many of your messeges. I have only to say that, its a common sense to work upto 60 years or work for 2 to 5 years and enjoy rest of the life. basically, if you study this amway business throughly, you will find, like others, its a business which has a purchase, sale, profit, loss and organisation. Its the best business opportunity in this world so far. It does not matter what your opinion is. denying to truth does not make it less true. BWW people are truly dreamers and you guys also should be. why not. donot you dream of giving a good carrer to your child, getting good marrige, travelling to a nice place??. what is harm in dreaming big if others have achieved and proven it through this business??. and truly a man who does not have deam is a dead one. Guys, if you comment that its scheme, pyramid, you will keep on saying those words and we will go on making money. ITS TIME TO DECIDE - EITHER YOU TAKE RESPONSIBILITY OF YOUR LIFE A A MASTER OF YOUR OWN LIFE OR TAKE ORDERS AS A EMPLOYEE. CHOICE IS YOURS. GOOD BYE

25. Jertasha Posted 7/14/2007 at 2:28 pm

I was approached by a guy who also offered this business opportunity to my husband and i. But i must ask those who believe that bww is this “best thing in the world”: how much money do you really have to put out and invest before you start making real money? is it that you will continue to get a check for a little bit of money for six months straight until “things look up”? my next question is, if you are not the type of person who enjoys bothering, harassing and begging people to join, could you ever be successful at this business?and finally, why is it that these bww fanatics do not fully explain what products they sell, and what the business entails?They keep on telling us they would explain at another meeting, and every meeting we are even more lost and confused.

26. Paul Posted 7/19/2007 at 7:47 pm

Ha, im glad i found this. I was approached in a chapters/indigo bookstore in Yorkdale mall (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) .. i was reading through some linux books, and was approached buy a gentleman name Manu.. he was kind enough to me, talked about computer for a bit, then insisted on taking my contact info because of some business ventures.. so to get hte guy off my back, i gave him my cell number.. and he gave me his card, i didnt eve nthink about it. Sure enough, 2 days later, he called me about his “business proposition” , i didnt answer the phone, he left a message, and never called back again. Here i am , 2 months later, i saw his card, and i knew something was up, so i started searching around on bww.com .. but on his card, it says “Birla World Wide” .. anyways, its the same thing. Scammers.

27. porames Posted 9/5/2007 at 3:18 am

well… I’m working as ABO(AMWAY BUSINESS OWNER) in Thailand.I’m 21 yeards old. I appreciate with Mr.Kamara (comment 23) The MLM doesn’t like the pyramid as he said… I feel so good that …the team(which you work with them)will teach you to know how to be the LEADERSHIP. They teach people to be more believe in themselves. Besides, they teach people to be the giver first!! I hope all your guys have a good attitude for this business….in yours country… good luck for all.

28. Paoboi Posted 10/11/2007 at 3:17 am

Hi there, can you please tell me “what do you really mean by pyramid scheme”? In my opinion the pyramid has a great foundation construction in the history.Listen carefully,I am an IBO(Independant Business Owner)too, when some one give attention to the products it’s O.K, but Amway or whatever mlm company… when they give special attention sponsoring people and selling their business opportunity is their first priority,they automatically turn their business into a “pyramid scheme” it’s that simple.

29. raj Posted 10/30/2007 at 7:41 am

Hey, the web master is such a bastard. he deletes all the messages he dont like. u son of a bitch if u delete people wont know the truth. u bastard. leave the messages. if u delete them then wats the real purpose ein putting a blog like this. bastard. any questions, mail me at : thebigshow_001@yahoo.co.in

30. Brandon Philips Posted 10/30/2007 at 7:53 am

Hello Raj- I got hammered by blog spam yesterday and deleted 100+ spam comments by hand. You may notice that I have a captcha system now… So, if some legitimate posts got lost, I am sorry. Also, I would expect better behaviour and language from someone with a University IP address 8-) Cheers, Brandon

31. rajesh Posted 11/8/2007 at 2:51 pm

hey i dont mean to hurt or scold the admin. but i want the people to know the truth. sorry abt the mess created. thanks. u can remove my message if needed.

32. Karthik Posted 11/17/2007 at 7:29 pm

hello folks, I am new to this Pyramid Business, but I understood that it selling products through forming a network. In fact I was approached by my dearest friend 2 days back joining BWW/Quixtar. I read the whole blogs till the end. I am still not very clear if I can take this opportunity or not or is it legal for a person who is working in US on L1 visa. I was convinced that it is legal to do this business. But I do understand after reading all your true opinions that this is not something that everyone can do. * esplly.. points like made me to think are as follows: 1. You should have ability to approach friends and people to form a network under you. 2. Choosing the right MLM company (is not an easy task…) 3. Why this business is so unclear even after several years Everyone will want a better life and better survival and same applies to me as well. I would like to hear your humble opinion on this before I take up this. Thanks so much, Karthik

33. Derek Chassion Posted 11/21/2007 at 11:40 pm

People!!! Wake up!! To start off with, who ever is reading this, ask yourself something: How come these 34 people display their names, but the person who started this website didn’t display his? The answer is simple: HE or SHE IS SCARED!!! And, that makes this website just as bad as writing on the bathroom wall!!! On the other hand, I’m not. My name is Derek Chassion. I am 18 years old and have been apart of the BWW team for 2 years now. BWW stands for Britt World Wide (the person who started this website can’t even figure that much out if he is such a smart person). For the people who know a little bit about all of this, BWW is an education support system that is used by Quixtar IBO’s. If you go to the website listed below, you will be able to find out some more background information. Quixtar was launched in 1999. It is the 2nd largest computer main-frame in the world!! The largest, is for the Pentagon. It cost $100 Million to launch, and it was paid off that very same day. That means they owe money to NOBODY!! Here’s a hint: That’s why IBO’s (Independent Business Owners) make money!! The way the Quixtar IBO’s make money is based off a PERFORMANCE BONUS BRACKET!! The key word here is PERFORMANCE!! You have to perform to make money. Another hint: the reason why people start websites like this one, is because they did not PERFORM!! If you believe that this is some get-rich quick scheme, or a pyramid, then you are WRONG!! There a many people who make more money than the person on top in this business opportunity. Hey, person who started this website, I hope you read this: at the top of the page you wanted to know why you had to sit down with someone for 15 minutes or so, maybe that’s because they wanted to see if you are as sharp as they thought you were…..ever thought about that? I’m not here to bagger people, but people don’t know what they don’t know. And people can just be flat out stupid and Goggle everything. Here’s a nugget for you, I bet you never Goggled your job!! If you have, I’m sorry, but something is wrong with you. Come on people, get some common sense!! Hey, news flash, the Social Security Administration says that 98% of Americans fail at the 45-year plan. What’s the 45-year plan? That’s when you get of high school or college and work until the age of 65-72 and HOPE to retire. Do you know what retired is? That is when you can do what you want, when you want, where you want to do it, with whomever you want to do it with, however you want to do it. For the broke-minded people in this world, that means you don’t have to go get a part time job at Wal-Mart just to pay the bills!! If anyone who reads this has any comments to this then send me a message on myspace because I don’t just give out my e-mail address. My myspace URL is: http://www.myspace.com/chassion You can talk to me on there. Oh and remember just a few things: 1. You can make money, or you can make excuses. But you can’t do both!! 2. If you want broke advice, listen to broke people. If you want wealthy advice, listen to wealthy people. 3. The difference between being rich and wealthy, is that when you’re rich, you have NO TIME!! http://www.bww.com/Common/BWWFacts.aspx Enjoy, Derek Chassion

34. Brandon Philips Posted 11/23/2007 at 9:12 pm

Hello- > To start off with, who ever is reading this, ask yourself something: > How come these 34 people display their names, but the person who started > this website didn’t display his? Just to be clear, the authors name is at top of every page: Brandon Philips. Cheers, Brandon

35. Adam Posted 1/5/2008 at 5:41 am

Guys, come on…. Do you EVEN KNOW WHAT A PYRAMID SCHEME IS??! BWW and AMWAY ARE legitimate businesses. Both have been verified by the Better Business Bureau, the American Chamber of Commerce and the Tax department. So if your best friend Larry or some anonymous nut on the Internet writes otherwise, ask yourself if they are better qualified than the aformentioned institutions to make a judgment on the legitimacy of such an enterprise. Think about it, why would big companies like Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Disney, Coke etc. all have business relations with the Amway corporation if it was illegal? Since Amway has been around for 50 years, don’t you think that if it was illegal the authorities would have shut it down by now? If it was illegal, why would all of your uplines invite you into their homes so that you know their families? Why are there 3.5 million Independent Business Owners in the world? Do you think the all got fooled (even though many of them are qualified professionals with degrees)?! Why would I even bother to write this if I did not believe whole heartedly in the validity and worth of this business? At the end of the day, there will always be skeptics, but the proof is in the success of the organisation. If you do the work, you will help other people and in doing so, succeed yourself. If you are lazy and are NOT willing to educate yourself in how to understand finances, people skills, interpersonal communication etc. then you will fail. It’s like anything in life, you get out what you put in. I personally have found that this business and the system that BWW have provided has been life changing. It’s the best thing I have EVER done and I am thankful everyday that I was open minded enough to investigate this opportunity properly. If you are looking at this business for the first time and want to know more… ask someone who has actually succeeded, rather than asking someone who has been a failure. After all, who do you think is qualified to give you the best answers? God bless, Adam.

36. Nipun Patel MD Posted 1/16/2008 at 3:51 pm

Derek Chassion - First of all u r a lodo.. it’s not goggle - it’s GOOGLE.. I know that this is a biggest scam.. This is a perfect way to make great great enemies.. And yes, a good friend of mine got lured into this business when I was in college.. HE was determined, and used to goto every meeting, but never tell me what this ‘business meeting’ is all about. after about 1 year into the ‘business’ he came to me and tried to sponsor me….I said no, then again and again and again until I got fed up and screamed once and for all… Even though i didnt like this scam, I was always wishing the best for him… 7 - 8 years after - I see the guy… SAME position as he was before EXCEPT - With lotta enemies, I myself dodged from that fool… I was also approached by another man about this ‘business opportunity’ - it turned out that the scam was AMWAY. Pravin and Madhu Chheda are the people who tried to recruit me to buy this 300.00 business kit and some tapes and books and all the garbage.. I am actually wondering what them two mofo’s are doing. I am hoping that they are reading and hopefully reply. I also heard the CD from Meena and Shashi Narayan of the BWW - Who are these a*** holes trying to fool.. These two people needs some SERIOUS SERIOUS speaking skills.. I mean come on now - IF you will be marketing this business, at least make it seem like people are convinced !!! BAD BAD grammar usage as well as lotta uhhh ahhhh uuhhhh aahhhhh …. Meena /Shashi - Please if you read this blog - pLease respond and tell us that how much $ are you making per annum. And If a helicopter landed at your work parking lot and if your wife and son got out and told your boss “there is a free man in this place, you need to let him go” Or if you have burned the cubicle and you came out with a marker (RAMBO STYLE) and on a big paper instead of THE END it says “LIFE BEGINS”… Thanks. Nipun Patel MD. NJ

37. Anonymous Posted 1/19/2008 at 9:56 am

I was also approached by a guy in a book store. He came to me saying that my shirt was very nice, and then asked me about my job, name, etc. Then he asked my contactnumber and called up after two days and told me about this BWW!

38. IBO Posted 2/7/2008 at 8:01 am

Nipun Patel what is your real name? if u have some guts, come tuesday to a mtg in woodbridge, to see the Chhedas for yourself you can curse at people on websites, how about doing it for real

39. George Posted 3/25/2008 at 9:36 pm

Hello, Nice to read the comments. Let me just put a small example. If you want to learn how to swim, you have to go to a swimming pool.If you sit at the pool side you will not learn . you have to get yourself wet. Then you need a coach to help you to learn to swim. Some of the comments above are from people who are sitting at the pool side and learning to swim. I am an AMWAY distributor and i know how to swim in it. It is one of the most well known business oppurtunities and also the most misunderstood. It is a peoples business and many a person has their own style of doing it. IT is very sucessful and trust me it is not a pyramid. THe guy below you can make more moeny and free time than the one above. Also This is a business that you can start at a low investiment and there is no risk. reg george

40. Lerma Posted 4/15/2008 at 7:16 pm

There is a saying, “an empty vessel makes the loudest noise.” That’s what I think of all those who talk down on BWW/Quixtar/Amway IBOs. I do not blame you if you are empty and make such loud noise. What I can blame you is that you never took the opportunity to be filled. For the others who are not empty headed, may God bless your endeavors. Pyramid? What’s wrong about that? Dont you have Pyramid structure at your JOB(Journey Of the Broke)? Your boss will never come to the point of teaching you all that he knows to be successful for fear of you taking over his position. Sure there is always somebody of a higher position than you. Is that not a pyramid? Well, this BWW/Quixtar free enterprise, it is people helping people believing of TEAMwork (Together Everyone Achieves More). and believe me, every IBO gets mentored by whoever has already been successful. If at one time you had the opportunity to be in this business and you did not succeed, it is not that the business does not work, but that you most likely did not work the business. I’m sure you’ve heard of this other saying, “Quiters never win, and Winners never quit.” This BWW/Quixtar/Amway business is very much legal, legitimate, and solid. Our exclusive products that we market are quality products, no wonder the company allows money back guarantee. There’s so much opportunity for anyone looking to be successful in this business. Those who do not know will always make the loudest noise of negativism. But for those who are serious in building a big business, do not let anyone steal you dreams. Be around more positive people, who have big dreams in improving their lot in this world and in return helping improve the lot of other people. God bless you, and remember, Think and Dream BIG! –Lerma

41. Oscar Posted 4/16/2008 at 2:36 pm

Thank you for posting this! You might have saved my whole economy!

42. Anonymous Posted 4/20/2008 at 10:00 pm

I attended a BWW function over the weekend. There was thousands of people at the event. I noticed they do nothing but brainwash naive people and get them sucked into this business. They make it sound so easy to become rich and free. If it was so easy, why wouldn’t everybody do this business? They kept calling people with real jobs “SLAVES” . Please be careful. This business is like winning the lottery. There are millions of registered IBO’s in this business but only a small percentage is successful.

43. Bryant Hampton Posted 4/26/2008 at 6:34 pm

Bill Britt is a brilliant man, He truely wants to help people, This man is extremely wealthy and does not need to work, but he chooses to anyway to help other people, the is the American way and the way god intended it. Do not confuse your jealousy as corroption ( i am a terrible speller) for many have tried and failed, but, many have been successful. This business is not right for everyone, but for the cost of getting started it has one of the biggest possible returns. I am no longer with quixtar, formely amway, because it was not the correct vehicle for me, but, that doesn’t mean it is not right for you. Good luck and remember if you stay in your comfort zone you will never be anything, try and fail but keep trying till you find the right vehicle for you. I have not been involved with amway for 10 years now so if Bill Britt is dead change all my is’s to was. Also, remember that he duplicated himself in his teams so they have the same morals and work ethics as him.

44. Bryant Hampton Posted 4/26/2008 at 6:54 pm

Lerma How much money have you spent on tapes, books, retreats, meatings, and that up. Be careful as to not put more money in then your getting out. Amway is a publishing company that makes it money off of the books, tapes, and propaganda you purchase. Do the math with me 2 tapes a week 10.00 one book a week 5.00 weekly meating 5.00 FED 300.00 plus so 20.00 per week 80.00 per month fed is quartaly so 1200.00 per year plus the 80 x 12 is 960.00 added togoether 2160.00 times 1000 ibos 2,160,000 and they have noy even purchased one product. Be careful, leagel yes, addictive yes, it is almost like gambling you keep putting money in hoping praying that it will work truth is if you didn’t get in in the 60-70 forget it. You may have a good month and hit direct but only a few go hire than that. Take your 1200.00 per month and put it in an IRA and you will be alot, happier with your return.

45. Antony Posted 5/2/2008 at 6:17 am

The business is highly over rate, as is the product.Over pricing is another problem of the product and does not save money.This business has been very unprofitable, and undesirable by the multitudes. I advise to look elsewhere for a business.I can simply attribute this business to little more than the Mafia.

46. coolio Posted 7/19/2008 at 11:43 am

I have been approached by a quixstar couple in walmart and they talked so pleasantly and warmly that me and wife got trapped, they talked for a couple of days and invited us for a meeting telling that its a great business deal and we can make 3000-4000 per month, I dint know the trap and went there but dint believe them and rejected their offer pleasantly. Fuck man no call nor visit from the very next day, damn these amway and quikstar people are real bastards, they wanna cheat you and ditch you silently. Its very unfair and ridiculous. They should be punished for this, and the gov shd ban these kin off fkin marketing companies. Why cant you guys enjoy with your hard work, and trust on your self and trouble other people with your cheap tricks. Please wake up people.

47. Rahul Posted 7/19/2008 at 11:49 am

I have joined into this quixstar because of my close friend and I am telling you as a real member it really sucks and you wont even get a single cent out of it, except ur loss of time and money and fkin begging other people and troubling them and no peace of mind and rest. You should always beg other people and request them to join and its a lot of headache beleive me, it does not work out, if any of your friends or relatives is forcing you, DO NOT JOIN INTO ANY OF THEIR PRODUCTS AND TRAPS, its nothing but a piece of shit. TRUST ME, it sucks and do not get into that trap, its not worth it, you wont even get ur money back. I have experienced it. IT SUCKS LIKE HELL, its like a piece of rotten dog shit. Did you know the level of frustration now.

48. JASON Posted 7/20/2008 at 9:54 am

I think it’s funny how almost all the bad comments writen about Amway are from people who have never been involved in Amway. I do agree that there are Amway business groups out there that consintrate on taking advatage of people. Thing is there are people like that who work at walmart but does that make walmart’s bad? NO. It just means there are people in this world that only care about themselves. I am an Amway IBO I’m not in BWW though, Jerry and Sherry Meadows are my upline and they never told me I would make millions of dollars starting out. They said its a business and it takes hard work and dedication just like any other business. They’ve never lied to me or hidin anything from me I haven’t made a huge amount of money yet but I am satisfied with what I do make and I know that If I don’t make anymore money its my own fault. I’ll leave you with this Quixtar and Amway Global are Partnered with some of the top corporations in the world and those corp. have a good reputaion and image to uphold so do you think that they would want to be involved with a co. that had a bad reputation? No, they wouldn’t want anything to do with them. so if Amway is so bad why are these co. involved with them? You can listen to someones opinion or you can look at the facts thats your decision. I’m just glade that my success in life doen’t depend on the opinion of the people on this site.

49. JASON Posted 7/20/2008 at 10:02 am

I forgot to leave my website above JSMITH186.QHEALTHZONE.COM check out a few of the products I also thought they were high at first til I tried them and noticed they were a lot better than what I was buying at the stores and they lasted longer. Prices do vary but if you go to Walmart are you always going to get the cheapest price? No.

50. Man Who Tried Posted 7/21/2008 at 3:36 pm

Amway/Quixtar is cultish. Everyone who works for them has the most glorious things to say about the company and its history. How many happy, successful employees can you find at other companies saying the exact same thing? The problem is that people who don’t work for Amway/Quixtar has glowing things to say. Why? Men and women have been running businesses for thousands of years and you IBO’s think that the Amway founders are geniuses who figured out something that no one else has? Everyone already figured it out, tried it, realized that they were selling people crap cosmetics and vitamins they don’t need, felt guilty and quit. I did it and realized that I was lying to people about a product. Bill Britt has the greatest con of all, write a self help manual and sell it. If 50% of you IBO’s tried to write one, 25% would complete one, 10% one sell some, but roughly 5% would make a profit. It doesn’t cost Quixtar a dime to make you sell their products but if you study Economics, you’ll realize that the amount of time you spend to sell stuff could be spent on a business model that works. You are working for them for free, then you make a small percentage on each product you sell. If you started your own company like that tomorrow, you wouldn’t owe Quixtar a dime.

51. Wilson Posted 8/8/2008 at 11:11 am

I actually have just started my own business and I was out passing out promotional flyers for it when I wound up in conversation with this odd man (who was an IBO for bww/quixstar) who started aggressively asking me about what my dreams were, and I said to own my own business. And he was like “what kind” and I said basically what I am doing now. But apparently he really wasn’t listening to me because beside saying I wanted to and do own my own business he kept trying to lecture me, sketchily alluding to his “rich” friends and how he worked for a company that was worth “8 billion dollars.” This all seemed strange to me, as he said his name was a very American “Jack Hofman” but he spoke with a thick eastern european accent and wore a cheep watch. Additionally, he talked down to me because he perceived that I was young but I guess he could not perceive that I perceived that he was a crock and a jackass. Also, when talking about his “rich friend” he said “He is a man like you, he started his own business, well…not like you, you are colored” Yep he used the term “colored.” He then proceeded to briefly mention Quixstar in a “maybe youve heard of them, or maybe you haven’t because they are above you” fashion. He then proceeded to hand me business card which said “A & J International” on the top but the web address started with “bww” and I noticed that neither of those things started with “q” as in quixstar. If you ever met this man while you are out and about, take my word, he is a crock and a jackass. Do not get get roped into this bww/quixstar jackassary

52. Patrick Posted 8/13/2008 at 8:57 am

What’s interesting to me is that people are so skeptical of IBOs. They suggest that IBOs are dis-honest, and not good for there word. However, as anyone who has actually built a networking business understands, its all of the prospects who are usually dishonest. Its all you people who say, “yes lets meet for coffee,” but never show up. Its all you people who agree to participate and then hide from your potential sponsors phone calls. Spineless if you ask me. Just have some guts, and say NO, I’m not interested. But that’s not what you do. Instead, you slip away and posts anonymous entries on a blog somewhere.

53. lou Posted 8/24/2008 at 10:53 pm

Those of you that do not know what multilevel marketing is, have filled your empty minds with it’s a pyramid. Hope you finish what you start.But enjoy working 40 years to retire with 1/3 of your current salary which is not enough for you right now!Enjoy the rest of your lives and being so close minded and the unwillingness to work for your and your families future.

54. vasundhar Posted 8/26/2008 at 8:48 am

Absolutely same painful story. Except two Variables He and Me. Thanks You saved my life and temptations, if ever I get any

55. Saranya Senguttuvan Posted 8/27/2008 at 9:49 pm

Brandon philips, I had a tough time gathering some information on BWW as I was not very clear even after going through their website, which is when i found a link to your site. I should admit that the blog has both side views and I am immensely clear on what i want to do! Needless to say that I have been approached too by one of the IBO’s. My answer to them is going to a clear NO. Thanks. Cheers, Saranya Senguttuvan

56. Stuart Lucks Posted 8/30/2008 at 3:45 pm

I ask you this: If pyramid schemes are illegal, how can this “pyramid scheme” be in business for more than 50 years? That’s right, Amway started in the mid 1950’s and now is the single largest retailer in the world, with 8 BILLION DOLLARS in sales!!! I say, if this is a pyrmaid scheme, where and how to I get in? Those of you who are ignorant or too lazy to do anything but talk will quickly call it a pyramid scheme because you don’t have the guts to do something for yourselves. Here’s a word of advice: keep complaining and believing that you can’t win. Let the others like me get rich.

57. Amrit Siew Posted 10/11/2008 at 8:58 am

Hey guys, just putting myself out there one time, I am an IBO of Amway Global, not here to condemn you or your views or even convince you to join, lol. There is nothing wrong with your choice to go or not go along with this type of business. I just want to give you my perspective on the business and why i joined. I joined like many other people cause someone referred me to the opportunity, I had a good job, great car but wasn’t really happy where my life was, I wanted to own my life instead of depending on others. Got really sick a while after i joined the business and had to leave my job. Went through depression even nutured thoughts of suicide. I have to say, luckily the team of people i joined with came around for me, helped my business when i was unable too, worked on my time when i was too sick to put in the work, and even provided me additional books from BWW that taught people about being successful, positive and self-motivated. I can honestly say without the motivation from my team, i wouldn’t be here today. The thing is that asking people to join is a part of the business yea, but there is so much more that people are not being exposed to, like the friendship, motivation and all round positivity. Now i have my own businesses and still run Amyway on the side cause even though I may not be at the top level I gives me drive and confidence to do what i do on a daily basis. Just something to point out, If Amway Global is a scam, why was its website Quixtar.com built by Bill Gates? or promoted by Asafa Powell and Tina Turner? even used as a marketing medium and partner by Barnes and Noble, Sony, Ciruit City, Ace Hardware, and dozens more. To me if all these heavy hitters in their own industries are investing in this business,whats my small contribution?

58. Roy Blocher Posted 10/25/2008 at 5:50 am

There have been alot of inaccurate or partial truths here. I recommend that if you seek truth, accurately and fairly presented, go to: http://www.firstclassmlm.com There are a set of questions and answers there, independent of any specific company, that clearly present MLM, or Network marketing and will clear up the confusion. Respectfully, Roy

59. Amrit Siew Posted 11/2/2008 at 12:50 pm

Hey Roy, Thanks for the information, great site. What i liked it the defined differences between a multi level marketing business and a pyramid and how to determine if an MLM is really a pyramid scheme. “A pyramid is an illegal business that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, usually without any product or service being delivered. Sometimes there may be the appearance of a product, but it’s only there to make the pyramid look like a real business. Few people outside of the pyramid desire the product. If you enrolled me into your “business” and I paid $300 to join BUT THERE WAS NO VALUABLE PRODUCT EXCHANGED, it could be an illegal pyramid.” http://www.firstclassmlm.com/2007/12/07/pyramid-schemes-and-scams/ Amrit Siew

60. Simon Posted 12/5/2008 at 6:17 pm

I moved recently to this new home and one day a guy comes around our ground floor patio and poses questions like ‘You guys just moved in?, Welcome to the community’ , etc to my wife, and then later we met him again and spoke and exchanged cards. the calls me 10 mins after we met a pitches this ‘Additional Income thing’. He comes over the next day and starts his full pitch .. BWW. It rang a bell when he mentioned Amway and I was ready to end the conversation right there. The whole pitch was so systematic, I thought I will see through the end. But kept contradicting him on almost all of his arguments, like Time is Money.. So if you say you dont have time, then you dont make money… BS… Anyway, he gets the signs and leaves, leaving some DVDs and stuff.. Comes back in a week for follow up and just the fact that the DVDs cases were not even opened gave him the message. So he says you can buy their products from them and eliminate standing in line at the supermarket… My answer, I just enjoy the in store shopping experience.. He gave a smile and that was his last smile to me…

61. Sebastian Posted 2/10/2009 at 2:23 pm

i had a friend of mine get involved wit BWW a few years ago. When the guy that brought him in (his sponsor i asume) introduced himself, i could already sense ulterior motives other than a simple greeting. I avoided it, but soon noticed a change in my friend. He started giving off the same vibe as his “partner”. It’s almost like they brainwash you!! you are basically “encouraged” to use and endorse their brand line or products. ridiculous!!!

62. Perky Posted 2/12/2009 at 1:20 pm

im doing well with amway because i took a positive risk. even if i would have learned nothing, i wouldn’t have lost anything that night I went to my first meeting. And I’m glad i took that risk. I’ll admit, i was put off by being approached, but you can’t knock something until you take the steps to try it; not the half-ass way of “oh, let me see, but I really don’t wanna do this, so i’m sure it’ll fail. let me find an excuse for my skepticism.” like that, it’ll be over before it starts. I mean really, open up, do the research. every intelligible IBO is aware of the criticism and accusations the companies receive before getting involved; it’s called doing your research first(which is what we implore skeptics to do), so what makes us join?? you should ask yourself that question very seriously…what would make people, particularly people who already earn a living, join a “big, bad, marketing scheme?”…we’re regular people like you. we have goals and big dreams and are willing to do something about it. people that wanted to stray away from the cycles that have landed people no job, working until they die. cycles that have cost your mother and father their health and sanity, trying to make a living for a child who will do the same. we’re not brainwashed like people want you to believe (lol, it’s called TV folks!). but we made the decision to see it for ourselves, and that’s what has separated us from you. There are people in this business from all races and Creeds. there are people straight from India in the business, from Trinidad,from Japan, From Jamaica, England; the business is in 80 countries and it is reflected in the meetings. the demographics are always mixed. that alone says alot about the business (at least my meetings anyway). it shows that people from all corners of the world, from different religions, languages, backgrounds, schemata, values, political affiliations, sexual orientations, are all in the same business. That means people who were brought up in life from different corners of the world, using different lenses to see the world can all see the same thing; can see that this thing is moral, ethical, and above all, is working, and get involved, and in turn, be successful. People that are teachers, engineers, doctors, psychologists, college grads, college students,clerks, secretaries… i mean people from everywhere…conservative, liberal, non partisan….all in the SAME BUSINESS.That means something is working…and lemme tell you, that something IS working, whether you are bitter about your experience or not. that’s the reality and you’ll have to live with that ; regular people who were approached just as you were, are earning a considerable living off of something you didn’t think to look twice at….*shrugs* I’d say look again. I think most of you lack confidence, and think you will be “brainwashed’ (oooooh, there’s that word again!) Remember, the key word was “look”…again. oh yea, and we are in almost every magazine now with that big “hi, my name is…Amway Global” banner. I think some people are doing something right. it starts with you, and the numbers don’t lie. we’re not taught to hawk people in the mall or knock on doors. some people do, and i’m really sorry for those who have had bad experiences. but i guarantee, if you give someone a chance to talk to you, someone who knows what they are doing, your perspective will change. it’s so much more than “just selling products to people”. you’re not an odd-job salesman, you are an entrepreneur… oh yea, and at least try the products before you knock them. i mean come on…just because it’s “new” it doesn’t mean it’s “evil”. lol. humans are sadly predictable. “oh no, not something new…no stop!!…” come one guys… There are doctors who are aggressive and cold, and some that are warm and caring, don’t you think people in the business will vary as well? o.k., there is a “familiar pitch” that is given when you are approached, but do you become skeptical when asked “Welcome to McDonalds” 6,000,000,000 times in your life? lol, get real people. I’m having such a good time as an IBO. like i said, it’s much much more than just “selling people stuff”. the process of making the money is fun in itself; the meetings, the camaraderie, it’s so fun..there are so many things involved that you can’t imagine. your experience really depends on your psychology. I sit and read the comments made by people who are so damn bitter…and for what? why are you so mad? lmao. breeeeathe a little… you’re not wrong for not wanting to join us (didn’t you hear that in college from the greeks?), but don’t criticize our world if you have no idea how it works. just respectably say, “it didn’t appeal to me when it was presented”. And that’s fine, not every IBO is as sharp as we’d like them to be…that’s called…umm…life. Those of you who aren’t sure about it, talk to your local IBO. come talk to us, come see what we are REALLY about. and if you’re serious about bucking the trend, come join us. Be a game changer, not a spectator. *wink*

63. adam Posted 3/6/2009 at 9:51 am

I use to be in Britt World Wide (BWW) for years. I was totally brainwashed. I went to every event and had tons of tapes, etc. I use to be “downline” to Dean Wood and Andrew Malcome. These guys were amazing con-men. They truely made you believe you were part of something bigger than life itself. My advice to anyone talk to someone in the “business” is that don’t try to talk them out of it. it was a waste of time. Let them figure it out on their own. People tried to talk me out and I honestly thought they were losers trying to “steel my dreams”.

64. Terry Posted 3/12/2009 at 11:12 am

I truly don’t see it as ‘brainwashing’. They introduce you to positive thinking, and creating a better life for yourself and doing it other than a regular work to your death 9-5 job.

65. Jeanette Diesel Posted 3/27/2009 at 7:17 pm

Its very sad that a few people that do things the wrong way can make a bad name for everyone. I myself am an IBO for Amyway Global but I am not a part of bww and I myself have heard some negative about them. Amway is not a pyramid, If that were the case then you could never be above the person who signed you up.And to be honest most jobs are without you even realizing. If your boss makes money if you do work guess what thats a pyramid!Instead my sponser made $800 for me making $3000 so call that what you want but its an up and down line.Amway is partnered with Disney, Barnes and Noble Dicks sporting goods, so unless you know something they dont you should get the facts. This biz now.com see what they say about Amway. I have made a lot of money in the 4 months I have been a part of and if it doesnt work I have myself to blame noone else,you get out of life what you put in, if you want to work for other people thats great too.The FTC uses Amway global as the STANDARD to govern other companies that want to operate in the same manor

66. Maria Pivarnikova Posted 4/5/2009 at 10:26 am

Iam looking sponzor Birmingham

67. Parminder Singh Posted 6/2/2009 at 10:44 pm

Almost all are correct as per what they have seen, heard and experienced. Many people are half-learned and make prejudices. Half a knowledge is sometimes a very dangerous thing. I am an IT Manager and in my circle, three guys have retired from their job when they are in their early 20’s. That made me think that I can also do it and am on the way to make it big. I would make these folks silent. You may mail me in period of 24 months from today at parmindersinghaziz@gmail.com. I shall let you guys know what this business has done for me. I am very positive on this after seeing what I am getting after just a couple of months. May God bless you all! Parminder Singh

68. Parminder Singh Posted 6/2/2009 at 10:57 pm

I had myself prejudged about amway the same that many of my friends have said here. I also thought this is whole rubbish. I now think that I have lost some six years. I started using the nutrition supplements of their partner Nutrilite marketed by Amway and I have myself got positive results in my own family. Business was initially not in my mind when I started using health products but as a couple of months ago, I thought it was no harm initiating the business. I am doing it part time and would suggest those who want financial freedom in a few years to initiate.

69. Jameel S Posted 6/23/2009 at 1:17 am

I truly understand that, if a companies has exponential growth increase and that company stands in the world for more than 50 years, and has listed at 44th rank in FORBES 400 is not cheat, is it?. System like McDonald has started the concept of network marketing is not cheat, is it? Amway has followed up the concept and taken it a step further to provide opportunity to more people is not cheat? is it? If anybody has any doubt please use below provided link for more information, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amway You guys are smart enough to understand now.

Mario < Statistics

2006-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Today I had planned on exploring North Austin a bit to learn the roads and sites (see: excuse to find the local Fry’s).

But, instead I got distracted finishing “Stranger from a Strange Land” by Heinlein. Which you must read if you haven’t (slightly used copy available for shipment). It is a great piece of science fiction that explores human nature, religion, humor and social structures. It is also the book in which the word ”grok” is coined.

In any case this put me back by an hour.

With that finished I opened the garage and walked outside just in time to hear the neighbor say: “I think it is going to rain.” And sure enough, checking the local weather showed a tropical storm heading right over Austin. I have heard stories of Austin hail blowing out the windshield of cars so I postponed my outing.
6467
To kill time I played fetch with Sam, my roommate’s boston terrier, and waited for the newly formed lakes to turn back into roads.
6482
With the roads cleared I made my 4 minute journey to Fry’s :-) with the intention of buying either a Nokia 770 or Nintendo DS Lite. But, after some soul searching I decided against it and headed off to find a bookstore.

I ended up in central Austin at the Barne’s and Noble and browsed, read and had a $4 Starbucks Arnold Palmer. When it came to closing time I set my Linux books back and purchased two statistics books. Yes, I hated my statistics class last term, yes the material is a bit dry, but extracting data from large sets of numbers is kind of a big deal. Particularly interesting is ”Benford's Law” which describes generally how digits are distributed in a set of data.

So to conclude:

Read Stranger from a Strange Land

Don't mess around with Texas storms

Mario's got nothin' on statistics

Guess the Job!

2006-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

Here is a snippet from a job description that came accross a mailing list:
Technical Skills:

Proficiency in Linux, C++, XML, Javascript & SQL.

Experience in BIOS & bootloaders would be a plus but not required.

AJAX GRUB?

Ink on my Hand

2006-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

Some notes that I wrote on my hand at American Dream while talking with Kernel Developer and all around cool person Val Henson.

Query by Example by Meredith Patterson- Cool PG SQL tool

TCP/IP Drinking game - Good fun

RFC Poetry

Lakeoff - Who doesn't like a good math book?

Real Genius - Apparently I am missing out on something

Jake Moilanen - The tech lead for my summer project at IBM - Val said he is one of the people to know at the LTC

Brilliant! Schwag Resale!

2006-05-02T00:00:00-07:00
Valley Schwag
the most renewable, Web 2.0 and trendy business model I have ever seen. Soooo funny.

America's CS Isn't Trying Hard Enough

2006-04-25T00:00:00-07:00

After reading A Red Flag in the Brain Game I started reflecting on my schooling. From my experience Universities are going soft on CS students. In the first two years of undergraduate classes we play with Legos and Java instead of working on hard problems. And even senior level courses are soft: in Computer Architecture we have spent the first three weeks explaining key concepts of computer architecture that every C programmer must be aware of to create working code. Oh, and how many times must I listen to a lecture on binary arithmetic?!

CS 411 - Best CS Class Yet?

2006-04-03T00:00:00-07:00

My first lecture of the term was today at 9am: Operating Systems II. Paul Paulson, OSU instructor, detailed what I have known for a few months: this class will now use the Linux Kernel and simulate a class size open source community. The required text is “Linux Kernel Development” by Robert Love (a book I recently read and enjoyed) and halfway through the term a special lecture by Greg KH is scheduled! It should be a great course.

Java Without the IDE?

2006-03-31T00:00:00-08:00

Today I stayed home but wanted to do some work on the Registry. However, I don’t have a workstation at home with the specs to run IntelliJ with any reasonable speed. Furthermore, I was hoping that dumping the ultra slick IDE will help me learn a bit more about the Java environment.

Eclipse Integration in Vim (Eclim) was the first promising lead I found. However, I had a tough time getting the Registry to run properly under Eclipse and Eclipse is as resource hungry to run as IntelliJ.

I couldn’t turn up any other good Vim tools so I started searching for Emacs tools. Although I am not a huge fan of Emacs I was very impressed with the SLIME environment when I did my towers of hanoi assignment in LISP. And it turned out a very slick Java environment for Emacs is available tool

A quick search for emacs java lead me to the Java Development Environment for Emacs (JDE) which offered a reasonable level of integration including:

Debugger Integration

Syntax Higlighting

Ant Integration

Code Templates

However, it was a beast to configure. My primary problem was that the Debian jde packages in unstable are broken. After uninstalling this package and doing a manual install I had JDE running like a champ.

The next task was to write a prj.el that would contain all of the information for JDE including: source location, classpath, default file headers, and build configuration. With some help from an example prj.el I wrote one for use with the Registry (here). Although, this file looks daunting the IntelliJ project files are unreadable by comparison.

This screenshot shows Emacs and JDE after an unsuccesful compile of the Registry. Clicking on the ant error loaded the proper file making it quite clear that I had an unfinished line.

Another standard IDE feature that JDE supports is method completion using the compact keystroke [sic] C-c C-v C-.. This brings up a dialog that lists all methods that can be called on this object.

After some digging it turns out debugging the application while it is running in Tomcat is a straightforward affair also. After deploying the application into the $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps directory running $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh jpda start starts Tomcat with remote debugging via JPDA on port 8000. Because the prj.el I wrote has this port set in jde-db-option-connect-socket using the menu Jdb->External Process->Attach via socket enables the debugger. Using this mode common debugging tools such as breakpoints and variable inspection are available.

Overall I am very impressed and excited to start using JDE. Only one thing is holding me up: JSP debugging. Anyone have a solution?

World Famous

2006-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

Alex, Mike and I were featured on the front page of the Daily Barometer today for the Google Pizza Ambassador program and the Linux Users Group. Go Beavs!

Open Source and Defense

2005-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

Recently I recieved an email from Jay Lyman of NewsForge.net who wanted my input on an article he is working on:

I heard you talk a little about your work developing software at NASA when I got a tour of the OSU Open Source Lab earlier this year. As I recall, you mentioned that some of your work had the potential to end up in weapons systems, and a discussion of the matter then followed. I’m working on an article now on the appropriateness of open source for weapons, military and national defense and would like to include your input.

This is a very creative and timely topic given our current political climate and I was happy to help by answering the questions that followed.

Do you believe that military, weapons or defense applications are contrary to the ideals of the open source software community? Please explain.

Freedom is the number one ideal of open source and I believe it would be contrary to these ideals to restrict what the software is being used for. The FOSS community is providing a general purpose foundation for a computing system that requires a great amount of customization for a military application and because of the dedication to the ideals of freedom I think it is a valid however possibly unfortunate use of the software.

As a developer, are you concerned about the use of your creations and development for military/defense purposes?

The project I worked on this summer while in the NASA Goddard Robotics Internship Program was general purpose hand recognition software that had as much application on a Mars rover and physical rehabilitation as it does on a military platform.

This is the only software that I have ever developed that has any military applications.

Although I am concerned that the software could be used in a weapon I am hopeful that more productive application may be found. And by using a FOSS license a developer may be inspired by this software and create an entirely new application.

Do you believe open source is appropriate for these types of applications and national defense?

Ensuring that FOSS is protected by licenses that offer liberal and wide freedom to everyone is key. It would be dangerous to start trying to put any restrictions on how FOSS is used as many good things can come out partnership with governments such as the NSAs SELinux.

Furthermore creating additional barriers of use may confuse consumers and scare off vendors from distributing FOSS.

For example would using Linux on desktops in the Senate be considered defense use? Senate does handle defense funding and decide on military actions.

From your perspective, how significant is open source software in this area?

The group that I worked used Linux for prototypes. However this is primarily R&D and proof of concept work. Deployed military applications more than likely are then converted to a specialized CPU like an FPGA.

I think FOSS is used for rapidly prototyping and feeling out a concept but deployed hardware is futher ruggedized and made more compact and manufacturable by special hardware.

Anything else you would like to add?

Freedom is a central value of the community and I think restricting that freedom to protect from unwanted users, such as the military, would be subverting this value.

The next day after emailing my response I started reading The Debian System and read the following passage:

The additional ability to use Debian for whatever purpose a user thinks fit is equally important. Debian does not allow any discrimination of persons, groups, or fields of endeavour. Debian may be put to use by anyone for anything, even in morally debateable domains, such as genetic research and warfare. Debian does not attempt to define what is acceptable and what is not because it would put a limit on the freedom of its users

So it seems that the community has already given some thought to this topic; however I am still anxious to see what Jay has found from the research of his article.
Note:
security Linux distribution, see http://phlak.org

Mozilla Day Part 1

2005-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

Today shall be deemed Mozilla Day.
Update:
href=”http://lug.oregonstate.edu/index.php/Projects/Firefox/Firefox_Sky”> Write-up from the OSLUG Website</a>
Weather Balloon
href=”http://lug.oregonstate.edu/gallery/firefox-one/2005_10_21_23_05_18”></a> Last Saturday at a Kveton BBQ Polvi, Marineau, Kveton and I were trying to come up with an idea to celebrate the 100 Millionth download of Mozilla Firefox.

At 50 Million we painted a Firefox logo mural in the middle of the MU quad which got a ton of attention. This time we wanted to do something even bigger so after several suggestions like paper mache logos and beachballs.

Then I remembered the NASA Oregon Space Grant Consurtium and LaunchOregon weather balloon program. Perfect! So after a few minutes of thinking through the logistics it was a done deal.

On Monday I went to the Space Grant and talked to Catherine Lanier at the OSGC and she was pumped! w00t. The weather balloon was a go.

By Friday Northwest Graphic Imaging had donated a 5’x6’ poster that would fly on the balloon, press was covered and we found out perspective students would be hitting the quad at 12:00pm for launch due to the Beaver Open House.

The event went off smoothly today and we had a ton of people and coverage in the quad. It was a great collaboration of OSLUG, NASA Oregon Space Grant Consurtium, Mozilla, and NW Graphic Imaging. Thanks guys!

Around 3:00pm the satellite should have landed back on Earth from a descent of 100,000 feet. The satellite carried two cameras, one pointing down and another pointing at the poster both were on a 3 minute delay. And when we recover the balloon there will be amazing shots of the horizon and the Firefox logo.

Mission Success

2005-08-31T00:00:00-07:00
I'm Back
Although serious injuries almost resulted from the obvious ending to this situation it was alot of fun at the time.
NASA
The last 5 weeks at NASA were fantastic; everyone came together and finished not only their team projects but also the group project.

In those last weeks I finished up the hand tracking software although I never got the chance to integrate it in to Archie, there just wasn’t enough time. But I did manage to make a neat demo of the software in action:

In amongst finishing up Archie I was elected the President of the NASA Robotics Internship Program Alumni Association. My first order of business as President is organizing the “reunion trip” to Vegas to see the DARPA Grand Challenge. When we visited CMU Red Wittacker assured us that the Red Team Racing team was going to win the challenge this year; we will see first hand.

In the future I will be working with the Treasurer Daniel Calvo to establish the Alumni association as a incorporated non-profit guaranteeing not only our positions as dictators for life but also giving us an opportunity to figure out how to do it. The only difference between a non-profit and for profit organization is one isn’t allowed to make money; pretty obvious huh?
Reading
Since my last post I finished Robot Visions a collection of Asimov’s short stories; this book was a great collection and the introduction had some interesting insight from Asimov about the Three Laws of Robotics; the most famous words he ever wrote.

Given my next few weeks off I have started to tackle the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming which promises to be a good warm for school. On Intelligence; which was recommended to me by Freddie and it is a book that offers one of the first theories on how the brain creates what we call intelligence.

!DEAD

2005-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I have been too busy doing things to have time to write about them. So what have I been up to?
Human Robotics Interfaces
My robotics internship team has been assigned the task by Anthrotronix to create a platform for testing new robotic input devices. To get a jump start we were given a shell from a prototype of the iRobot PackBot. Over the last few weeks we have been researching and purchasing parts for the robot including: a PC104 Mainboard (it is fricken sweet), microcontrollers, power systems, cameras, ultrasonics and a whole range of other cool components to get this thing up and running.

There is a lot of work to be done but seeing the thing actually move around under its own power on Friday has really got me excited.
Image Processing
I have been spending most of my time writing image processing software with the goal of reducing images down to smaller and smaller pieces of data. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the goal of image processing is to find one or two really useful ones. My primary task is to take video of a person making large hand and arm movements and figure out what movements they are making. For a human being this is an easy task, especially when the gestures are made over several seconds and may be made over one or two feet. But for a computer this task is a difficult one.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming midterm poster presentation:

Controlling Urbie using broad arm and hand gestures is our primary goal. Our approach uses a standard webcam and PC to do processing of the video to detect the motion of skin colored objects in a scene and then match those with a gesture template on a 3x3 grid. The algorithm takes the following steps:

Mask the image to match only skin tones

Use a timed motion history image (tMHI) to track motion in the scene Davis, 95

Input x,y over entire motion into stroke matching algorithm libstroke

The final output will be a string containg the numbers of the boxes that the motion passed through in order.

Sight Seeing
Being right next to the nations capitol and one of the largest research sites for NASA leads to plenty of opportunities to see some great things. Photos taken by myself and the other 27 interns can be found over at grip.ifup.org/photos. My favorites include the Discovery Channel chopper, the open air spider exhibit at the national zoo and the robots at the Johnson Space Center.
Reading
Between the metro rides, forty minute commutes to work and time spent in airports and shuttles I have had alot of time to read. Before we visit the Computer Science and AI Labs at MIT next month I thought it would be good to read up on Rodney A. Brooks, the lab director. So I borrowed a compilation of his papers on subsumption architecture called Cambrian Intelligence The Early History of the New AI. It is a very good read.

On the fiction side of things I just started “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and also purchased two books from Orson Scott Cards “Ender’s Game” series: “Ender’s Shadow” and “Speaker for the Dead.”
Tomorrow
At 2am I will be sitting in a big auditorium at the University of Maryland watching some of the first footage from Deep Impact and about 18 hours after that watching the largest fire works display in the country in Washington DC. It is going to be great!

Kernel and Mozilla Builds

2005-05-05T00:00:00-07:00

In the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to watch releases of both Mozilla (1.0.3) and the Linux Kernel (2.6.11.8 aka Woozy Beaver). These are two of the largest open source projects in existence today and watching the release, build, bug tracking, and communication systems used by these projects was an eye opening experience. Why was it so interesting? Because these projects have strinkingly different ways to develop software.
Bug Tracking
Bugzilla is used pretty much exclusively by Mozilla to track issues, patches and the versions of software that they effect. Chase Phillips of Mozilla seemed very happy and comfortable working with the interface and understanding how and what all of the flags meant. It is a system that seems to work very well for the Mozilla crew.

Alternatively Greg KH said that the bugzilla.kernel.org rarely gets the attention that it needs and ofter goes ignored by kernel developers; although Andrew Morton does notify the proper subsystem maintainer if a bug has been sitting in the database too long. Instead the LKML is used as the primary place for tracking bugs and patches.

The kernel seems to have alot more “buy in” from its community of developers than Firefox does. And from my limited experience in working with open source communities, I think that the use of a mailing list over a BTS could make this difference. When filling a bug report people generally file and forget never having to get involved further. But with a mailing list you post your own problem and in response get to see everyone elses bugs and get introduced to the development process as patches poor into your mail box. I realize that there are many other differences between the projects but I think that the dynamics of a mailing list are superior in getting people involved in a software project. But it has its draw backs- the LKML is historically a very harsh environment to get introduced to as the existence of Kernel Newbies and Kernel Mentors suggests. Furthermore some people do not feel comfortable working with mailing lists and smaller projects may miss out on bug reports from users if that is there only form of contact.
Source Code Management
Mozilla uses CVS and have some cool tools setup and integrated with it. Chase gave us a brief tour of Tinderbox (see below), LXR and Bonsai. If there is something that you want to know about the sourcecode these services would be a real help.

The Kernel deals in patches sent through email in particular Greg showed off some cool scripts that allow mbox files containing patches to be automatically parsed applying the patch after a dry-run and adding the patch writers information to the commits and changelog. It all seemed to be a very regulated and standardized process that was inspiriing to watch.

Recently the kernel developers have been working on git and from Gregs recommendation I have been following its development and all I can say is WOW the system is already usable after a month of work and it is looks to be one of those software products that is so practical, simple and pragmatic that in a few years it will become the standard. At the very least I have been having fun reading the source and watching it being developed.
Automated BuildsMozilla's Tinderbox
the developers. Particularly the integration with CVS and the ability to comment on who was taking charge and fixing the issue was neat.

The Kernel doesn’t have such a system although I have emailed the IA64 team which runs this service and I have been following the git mailing lists and playing with cogito. Maybe I will write one before someone points me to one that exists already :-).
Thanks GuysGreg KH Chase Phillips Dave Miller

SpreadButter!

2005-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

A few days ago Beth Gordon suggested the idea of SpreadButter.com as a spoof on the great community developing over at SpreadFirefox. I just couldn’t stop laughing after she suggested the idea, so I did the only logical thing; I registered the domain and installed CivicSpace.

Already some of my friends have written some pretty funny odes to butter and I hope you will too.

Heck, SpreadButter has even been on Slashdot with Polvi submitting the poll I wrote.

SpreadButter!

OpenCV

2005-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Recently I have started playing with a computer vision library. But it is one of those pieces of software that just moves sooo slow because the developers are hard to get ahold of.

In particular I have a terribly trivial patch that makes the library compile under Linux 2.6 and no one has even commented on it on the mailing list or bug tracker. Furthermore the documentation currently has examples that do not compile because of missing libraries and almost twice a day someone is asking how to fix it on the mailing lists.

To make things worse the mailing list is hosted on a closed Yahoo! Groups account and requires logging in to view. Gah!

In any case I am doing my part and I am going to update the documentation and post it on my wiki as soon as possible. If I can’t get the developers attention I see a fork in the future…

Maintain Talk at Panug

2005-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

href=”http://pdx.innotechconference.com/home/home.html”>InnoTech</a> I met Ed Sawicki of the Portland Area Network Users Group. Ed is working on a new book about DNS outside of the world of BIND and was very interested in Maintain since it uses Tinydns as a backend. In any case he convinced me to give a presentation.

On April 21st Danny and I gave the talk (OO.org Impress File) in a conference room on the Novell campus in Tigard. Unfortunatly the 21st happened to be one of the first sunny and warm days in several weeks so only about 10 of the expected 25-30 showed up to the meeting (I keep telling myself that is the reason for the low turnout :-)).

Also a good friend of mine, Ryan Miglavs, stopped by to watch the presentation. Ryan and I go way back, waaayyyy waaayyyyy back, to a time when squirrels roamed the country side and anti-pirates walked the streets. Phew, I am glad I got those inside jokes out of the way (you better be reading Ryan).

In any case it went well and I hope a few people went away wanting to try out the software. And I would like to thank PANUG for inviting me.

One interesting thing I learned from Ed during the presentation is that DJBDNS supports handing out different records depending on what IP they come from. This coupled with IP to country mappings would make for an interesting way to distribute the load accross a mirror network.

The Perfect Summer Internship

2005-04-16T00:00:00-07:00
What is the recipe to my ideal summer internship?

1x Robotics

1x Image and Voice Processing/Recognition

1x Embedded Linux

1x Internet Technologies

Now of course it should be in a really neat location. I have always wanted to live on the east coast and visit the MIT AI lab and the NASA centers; so lets put it in Maryland. To finish it off I want to be working for some very talented people and most important of all making a difference in peoples lives.

In January Kim told me about a new NASA robotics internship program, I applied and patiently waited as the date of notification for interns was pushed back several times, settling on April 1st 2005. The 2nd and 3rd came and went with no phone call and I began considering my other options.

At 10:30am today my phone rang, it was from an area code that I didn’t recognize and I almost elected not to answer. I am glad I didn’t make that mistake.

It was Lubna Rana of the Goddard Space Flight Centers Office of University Programs and she had some good news. I got my first choice project for the Robotics Internship Program and I should be in Maryland on June 6th 2005. Wow! It was the last thing I expected today.

The project I will be working on is called ”CosmoBot,” a robot used to help educators and therapists give better care to children with special needs. And it will be my job, along with 2-3 other students, to figure out how to integrate image processing, voice recognition and wireless sensors in to the product over a 10 week period.

It is going to be a great summer!
Other Cool Internships
Fellow LUG members Alex and Jeremy are taking off on some cool internships too:

Alex Polvi - Polvi is going to San Fransico for the summer to work at Mozilla

Jeremy Orem - Jeremy is going to work at Intel

Open Source Business Models

2005-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

server?</strong> I asked this question to the great guys over at Jive Software during their open house last month. To my suprise I learned that their flag ship product Jive Forums began life as an open source application but was re-written as a closed source application when Sun showed an interest in using it to power the Sun developer forums.

Today Jive runs jivesoftware.org on which they host a number of projects based around Jabber. Although I am sure they all feel a need to give back to the OSS community given their own beginnings it also makes business sense for them. Their Live Assistant product is based on the XMPP (Jabber) standard and as such if they are able to help that community grow and get corporations to deploy IM systems using Jabber, then when the time comes to pick a Live Assistant product Jives Live Assistant will be the first choice.

It makes business sense: it helps generate revenue, grows a community around a technology that have developers familiar with, and they have also hired a few developers over the years who have been significant contributers to their open source products.

Now this is by no means the only way in which a company can make money off of open source.
Atlassian
href=”http://www.bitkeeper.com/”>BitMover</a> both have give/gave their product gratis to open source projects as a way of gaining good will in the community. This works in a few different ways:

Most open source developers also work for a company that has a budget and their own closed source products. If an employee is pleased with the product, he will want to use it at work too

Good ol' grass roots advertisement, these tools are going to get alot of press. Before BKBits.net, no one had heard of BitKeeper, and without the help of Linus' star power I can't imagine that would have changed

Testing and bug reports. There is no distributed software development project bigger than the Kernel, if BitKeeper could handle it, it could handle anything. Not only that but open source developers have a tendency to tell it how it is and report truthful and helpful bug reports that are not sensitive to any political or organizational choices. At the end of the day the company is going to get an improved product.

And of course their is always pay for support model. This is what I think of as the classic open source business model that has been adopted by Red Hat, Mandriva, Progeny and the rest.
Why am I so interested?
Last week I visited a “Pitch Night” with a few of the people at Oregon Venture Partners and they said that one of the areas that they have been investing in is open source software. But, they aren’t a philanthropic group, and some sort of business model needs to exist to run a company.

When I was asked to put down my career goals for my scholarship application I stated my wish to create a company around open source software:

It is the blending of both the open source application work with the customer specific consulting that will help me succeed both in my experiences here and once I have graduated from Oregon State University.

New Useful Tools

2005-04-04T00:00:00-07:00

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
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!

Ajax and Ruby on Rails (Until 5am)

2005-04-02T00:00:00-08:00
UPDATE: Demo offline permanently UPDATE:
home. It is a slow old box so be gentle, it is serving a little under 10req/s, but it works.
Over the last few weeks I have been seeing what I can do with Ruby on Rails. My conclusion? In the future I want to use RoR for web applications: PHP just isn’t as fun after you have worked with RoR.

At the Open Source Lab I work on a project written in PHP/MySQL called Maintain (demo), it is a DHCP/DNS management tool that is used by Oregon State, the Open Source Lab, math.ku.edu, and several others. It is a really great package, and one that many people are getting joy out of using. And given its size and complexity and my familiarity with its code, it made a great canidate for me testing out RoR.

Last night I decided to add LiveSearch support into my little pet project that is exploring how I would implement some of Maintains features in RoR. The first thing that needed to be done was add search methods to my models. Browsing around Tobias' typo source tree I figured out how I wanted to implement searching for one of my domain class and came up with this:

# This search defaults to searching for all strings that match with no # restriction on beginning or end. Also it will OR together statements in # the query with a space in them. def self.search(query) if query tokens = query.split.collect {|c| "%#{c.downcase}%"} r = find_by_sql(["SELECT * from domains WHERE #{ (["LOWER(name) like ?"] * tokens.size).join(" OR ") }", *tokens]) s = Array.new r.each {|domain| domain.children.each{|child| r.push child}} return r.uniq # No need for duplicate entries end end

The line with r = find_by_sql( is something that is just amazing to me, and would have required a whole looping structure and some if statements to implement in PHP, but in Ruby I was able to use prepared statements, Array#join, and the * operator on the array to quickly build a restraint on the domains; all in one line.

After implementing the search methods, and looking at the Typo code the rest was a breeze, I created a couple of partials for live search results, and now with two lines of code I can add new objects to the LiveSearch sidebar. Very cool.

If you want to take a look at it in action click here (site down permanently, code available here). The handshake starts with a testguy and ends with a testt. Oh, and this is a limited time offer, the site is running on my laptop.

And speaking of the OSL Scott Kveton has made a great post about OSU’s College of EECS strategy to take on the big research schools and focus less on undergraduate education. Its pretty clear that they should be focusing on open source software and education especially given the current climate around the state but I guess they would rather Go Big than think smart.

Projects in School

2005-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

While waiting in line at the Portland Car Show I snapped a photo of a Hot Rod not knowing that it was actually a project by a group of high school students. When I walked by the booth of a local AM station I saw these students talking about their hot rod project and listened for a few moments, they were really excited, and had alot to say about what they had learned and done.

This all reminded me of how empowering and important it is that schools encourage their students to work on real world projects. Why? Because, the students benefit greatly years after the project is finished, and the few extra resources applied to these students, get great returns for the school.

In high school I joined a three person independent study group doing robotics work. We had the same excitement and enthusiasm for working on robotics, that the Oregon State Linux Users Group has for Linux.

Anyways, this group attracted the attention of Newberg High School, whose robotic teams had been going to National conventions for years. In 2001 they wanted to do a PC based robot, but needed some programmers for this latest project. They decided to partner up with my group at Sherwood High, and I worked with them on two seperate projects.

Over the next two years I learned and experienced alot:

Learned what real software development was

Visited New York twice to compete in the RI/SME

Wrote a magazine article for Servo Magazine

Started working on independent consulting projects for USB

The school also got alot of love from the project. During all four years I took the robot to several shows, fund raisers, photo shoots, newspaper interviews and board meetings. Heck, I just noticed that the robot is still on the front page of Sherwood High Schools website.

They also provided the group with alot of resources, like some minor funding, and a small lab… hmm…

This all comes back to the OSLUG and our goal of getting permanent lab space and FOSS used in the computer science classes. Like my high school project and the Yuba County project we have an excited and enthusiastic group of students, and all we need now is some encouragement, and resources. The OSLUG has been doing some great things, and I think that with the support of the college it can do some amazing things.

But, I think that the last point is the most important. I was able to start working on the side for both Fascinating Electronics and Ron Reed eVentures/OHSU doing work with USB devices. Dean Adams wants to see entrepreneurs coming out of the department and I think that if it is going to come from anywhere it will come from the students of the OSLUG. When I started my work with the robotics project I had no idea that I would eventually write for a national magazine and do consulting, but had it not been for the help I had gotten from the school I would never had gotten these opportunities.

core dump

2005-03-12T00:00:00-08:00

I just upgraded to Wordpress 1.5, and was reminded of the number of blog entries that are just sitting in my notebook waiting to be posted.

Project Based Education 1 2

Open Source Platform for Learning

LUG Proposal

InnoTech

My progress with Ruby On Rails

The goal is to type out these various articles between studying this weekend, as a way to let my mind release from Physics and Infinite Series and Matrices.

Bugs, Curriculum, and Communities

2005-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

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 Michael Marineau
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.

Don't Read This Blog!

2005-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

”Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.” –Francis Bacon

I keep a personal journal, a little black Moleskine with me most of the time, it is my Anti-Blog, I write down anything that comes to mind. Most of the time they are useless, of little value, and just stay in the book, never having to bother anyone.

Here is where I chmod o+r. And I am going to begin with the lasagna that I am having tonight, a recipe that my mom gave me a few months ago. And with everything that I will try to post, it is good; or else it would have stayed in my notebook :-).

Enjoy:
Mom's Lasagna

1/2lb Cooked Beef

1 jar Prego

3/4 Cup Water

1/2 pkg 160z lasagne noodles

1 Cup cottage cheese

12oz Shredded Mozerella

heat Prego and water in pan

in a 13x9” glass pan layer Prego, noodles, other ingredients - 3 layers, alternating noodle orientation

cheese on top

375 degrees

cover with tin foil for one hour

cool

enjoy