Author: tarus

OpenNMS Users Conference Call for Papers

Posted on by tarus

In case you missed it, the Call for Papers for next year’s OpenNMS Users Conference is now open.

In my ten plus years of working on OpenNMS, I think the thing I am most proud of is the formation of the non-profit OpenNMS Foundation Europe e.V.. This was organized totally by people not on the payroll of The OpenNMS Group and their inaugural conference in Fulda, Germany, last year was a lot of fun.

Their sophomore effort will take place is Southampton, UK a little later in the year so perhaps we’ll miss the snow. It is one of my favorite events of the year and I hope to see a lot of people there. OpenNMS is created in something of a bubble. Since we don’t require any form of registration to get the software we have no idea who is using it, and we are often pleasantly surprised to find out where OpenNMS ends up. I can’t wait to see who shows up in April.

Registration is not yet open, but they are interested in hearing from you. The users conference is about users by users and your stories are what’s in demand.

Welcome China! (Country 27)

Posted on by tarus

Last week we received a PO from China, which is the 27th country in which we have commercial customers.

Considering the number of potential OpenNMS users in that country, I’m pretty excited.

The other countries are, in no particular order:

Finland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Israel, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the UK, Italy, Trinidad, Malta, India, Honduras, Chile, Sweden, the UAE and the US.

OpenNMS: Esencial Para Redes de Comunicación

Posted on by tarus

One thing I love about the OpenNMS community is its global reach. I never know from which new country I’ll learn about people using OpenNMS.

Votar en los Premios PortalProgramas al software libre

For example, I just learned that OpenNMS has been nominated for an award on PortalPrograms, a Spanish website promoting free software.

While OpenNMS doesn’t have the wide appeal of programs like Nagios, it is still cool to be nominated. Plus, I think other nominees like Debian and the Tor Project are more important to the free software movement (and freedom in general) than we are, but since it is sometimes hard to know when working in free software if anyone finds what you do valuable, it’s nice to get this sort of validation.

Voting is pretty easy – just enter in your e-mail address and click on the confirmation link when it arrives. I’d welcome your vote for OpenNMS and be sure to check out the other categories and nominees.

Happy Money

Posted on by tarus

Happy Money

As someone who has dedicated most of his professional life to open source software, it may seem strange that I think about money a lot. With respect to the company, the decisions I make not only impact myself but all of our employees, and personally money provides a certain amount of comfort and security.

Awhile back I was reading on Dan Ariely’s blog about a new book called Happy Money. I bought it on impulse (which I found ironic) but it took me a little while to get around to reading it.

It’s my kind of non-fiction book, meaning that about a quarter of it is references for the copious footnotes. If you are planning to change my mind about something, it helps to be able to back it up. I am still blasted for my review on Amazon about Life, Inc. which made sweeping and sometimes nonsensical generalizations and the author just expected us to take his word for it (or more likely, he just wanted to make a buck by telling people what they wanted to hear).

The authors of Happy Money, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, start off with the premise that there are a lot of books out there that tell you how to make money, but few that tell you how to become happier with the money you have. Their book details numerous studies undertaken by them and others, and they found five main things one can do with money that can have a large impact on one’s happiness.

The first thing was to buy experiences versus things. The studies they cite show that people get a lot more happiness out of, say, a trip to an exotic locale than in buying something like a fancy car. While owners of expensive cars reports a higher level of happiness when thinking about the car itself, when thinking about the last trips they took most car owners report about the same level of happiness no matter what type of car was used. So if you are driving to the store in the rain behind a dump truck because you are out of milk, it doesn’t matter if you are in a BMW or a Kia.

One example given in this chapter are the Tough Mudder races. These events are hardcore obstacle courses designed by British special forces. People who complete the course report a very high level of personal satisfaction, and it is in part because these events require teamwork and thus the experience fosters a sense of connectedness with others. While buying a new TV is for the most part a solo experience, working with others to get over a 12 foot wall requires teamwork. There is a bond created among finishers that can’t be purchased.

I occasionally play the lottery. I never win, but I do it for the daydreams I can have while I wait to find out that I’ve lost (I file it under “entertainment”). My rule is that I can spend $1 for every $100 million in jackpot. My spouse and I have talked about what we’d do if we ever won big, and the recurring fantasy would be to move to someplace like Positano, Italy, for a year and immerse ourselves in the culture. Then we might move on to Germany, or Argentina or Japan. Our lottery fantasies rarely include a big purchase.

The second thing they talk about is making things treats. They credit the comedian Sarah Silverman for this wisdom. She loves “pot, porn and fart jokes”, but she insists that you have to make it a treat. To truly enjoy something it helps if it isn’t available all the time. To go back to the car analogy above, most car owners report the same level of happiness with their vehicles, but when asked about a time they drove their car just for the fun of driving it, those with more expensive vehicles reported a higher level of happiness even if it didn’t happen as often.

The book talks at length about this issue of how availability results in “diminishing returns”. One example is candy corn, which tends to be easily available only certain times of the year (the Internet makes year round acquisition of almost anything possible year round, but let’s discount that for now). Or, as I just saw on television, the McDonalds McRib sandwich, which comes and goes off the menu, is available again. There is even a McRib Locator website to help people find them.

One example that I experienced talks about how people are more likely to savor something if they learn it won’t last. I lived in Northern California from 1994 to 1995, and when we decided to move back to North Carolina we rushed to visit Monterey, Alcatraz, etc. even though we had months to do so before the moving deadline appeared. When access to something is presumed to be always available, people are less likely to use it.

The third tip presented is the idea of buying time. I never have enough time, but I’m also cheap and tend to do a lot of things myself. One thing we always did on Saturday morning was clean the house. A couple of years ago, when my bride’s career took off, I was talked into hiring a cleaning service that comes in every other week. While they don’t do the job as well as I would, they do give us back our Saturday mornings, and that time is worth much more than the money I spend on the service.

Studies have shown that wealthier people tend to feel like they have less free time. In my lottery fantasy, having lots of money would give me more free time, but this book points out that people, especially those in my position who bill out their time on a hourly basis, seem to have issues doing things that don’t directly result in revenue. Why take a walk along the lake if that time could be spent helping a client?

The solution suggested by the book is to find ways, such as volunteer work, in order to purposely give time away. Giving time away reduced the feelings that time not spent working is wasted time, and thus increases happiness.

Step number four is to “Pay Now, Consume Later”. In the US our culture is geared heavily toward “Get It Now, Pay Later” which both fosters consumption, such as a new TV, and adds a future burden of payment. Not only is the happiness created by the purchase fleeting, as covered earlier, the added onus of having to come up with money to pay for it later greatly decreases the pleasure obtained by getting the thing in the first place.

However, the anticipation of an event can increase its happiness. Prepaying for, say, a beach trip and then thinking about it as the date approaches provides more pleasure than the trip alone. The book refers to the example of a Virgin Galactic flight. A woman and her husband both dreamed of going into space but couldn’t afford it. Unfortunately, the husband died. His wife decided to use the insurance money to pay the US$250,000 for a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight.

While the time spent in space will be measured in minutes, she gets to experience a number of things before the trip that both increase the anticipation and add to her happiness. There are astronaut-only events, trips to view the test flights and the training for the trip itself.

In my own experience I can think of a number of things where the run up to the event was as fun as the event itself.

The final step was called “Invest in Others” that shows that people tend to get a lot of enjoyment out of spending money on others more than just on themselves (the most pleasure came from spending money on others while with them). They even discuss a study where pre-verbal children seemed happiest when giving things to others (have you ever visited a friend with a small child who insists on bringing you things like their toys?).

While the book gave me a lot to think about concerning my own life, I was happy to find that working with OpenNMS tends to hit on all five. Working with OpenNMS users has provided me with a number of amazing experiences around the world. Due to the fact that I’m almost always traveling, revisiting my favorite places is a treat, from macarons in Palo Alto to Schwarzer Hahn beer in Fulda. I do a crappy job of buying time, but as we grow as a company I’m trying to learn to delegate more. Just this morning we got a notification that the drink machine was low on Fresca, and Tina was there to take care of it instead of me. As for “pay now, consume later” I like to think that all the hard work we put into the company will pay off in the future, and it is exciting to see our product grow over time, and finally the whole basis of free software is the idea of sharing and helping others.

Happy Money is a short read if not an overly easy one, and if you find yourself focusing more on getting money than being happy, you should check it out.

Steve Jobs is Dead and I Miss Him

Posted on by tarus

As much as I dislike Apple’s walled garden, I don’t impose my will on my teammates. If they are more productive using Apple equipment, so be it.

On Friday Seth mentioned that his laptop had been having issues since upgrading to Mavericks. Snow Leopard was fine, but now it would crash frequently, especially when it was cold (i.e. had not been running for awhile). Now the policy at OpenNMS is that everyone gets a brand new laptop when they come on as an employee and we always buy three years of service, so if anything goes wrong in those three years it gets fixed for free and then it’s time for a new laptop.

I asked Seth if he had taken it to the “Genius Bar” and he had, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with it running the test disk and since it was 30 days outside of Applecare so they wouldn’t explore it further without charging us for it. I hadn’t realized that his laptop was that old, so it was time to get him a new one.

We visited store.apple.com and configured a new one. Nothing special, just a 15-inch Macbook Pro with retina display, 16GB of RAM and the 512GB SSD (it’s ridiculous to pay an extra $500 for the 1TB disk). Unfortunately, it wasn’t scheduled to ship until November 22nd, and looking at availability at the stores nearby it also showed a November 22nd date.

This struck me as odd since the laptop had been out for awhile, so I called the Apple Store at Southpoint Shopping Center and talked to Christoph (not Chris – Christoph). I mentioned that I was a business owner and I needed a new laptop for one of my guys as soon as possible and what did he have in stock. Turns out the online store was wrong and they had several of the laptops Seth wanted on hand. Cool. I told him I was on my way and that I’d be there in about 30 minutes.

Now, I hadn’t been in an Apple Store in a long time, even longer since I’d made a purchase, and the first thing I noticed was the counter was gone. There used to be one counter about 20 feet from the door where you could run in, make a purchase and run out. After wandering around for a few minutes, I found a lady in a blue Apple shirt holding an iPad. I told her I had called ahead and talked to Christoph about a laptop I needed for one of my employees. She smiled, took my name, typed it into the iPad and said that there were a number of people in front of me so could I just “wait over there by the Macbook display”.

So for forty minutes or so I loitered near the counter listening to all of the people in front of me ask questions like “How does Facetime work?” when I knew exactly what I wanted and was ready to make a purchase. Luckily, there were a number of Ingress portals within range so at least I could hack them while I waited (and answer questions from Apple fanboys such as “What game is that?” with “it’s not for you”).

Finally it was my turn to get a sales associate. This is when it gets worse. He couldn’t find “OpenNMS” in the system and so he insisted on collecting all of my business information.

I asked “will this get me a discount?” No.

I asked “can you just you my Apple ID?” No.

(sigh)

Fifteen minutes later I was walking out of the store, fuming, with Seth’s new laptop. The whole process should have taken less than five minutes. Not only does it gall me that I had to waste an hour of my time just to turn over $3000 to a company I dislike, I couldn’t help but think that this wouldn’t have happened under Steve Jobs. He was a devotee of “form follows function” and he would have never let some fashion whim such as “no Apple Store shall have a counter” interfere with the purchasing process.

Now my hope is that I’ll never have to buy another Apple product for my team, but if I do, it surely won’t be through a walk-in store. This was one of the worst shopping experiences of my life, and definitely the worst one at that level of spend.

2013 All Things Open Conference

Posted on by tarus

Last week was the inaugural All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina (USA).

My involvement with this show was somewhat accidental. We were talking with Tom Rabon a few months back about how the Research Triangle Area (which includes Raleigh as well as Chapel Hill and Durham) is something of a hotbed for true open source companies, headed by Red Hat (‘natch). He was thinking we could emphasize this by hosting an open source focused conference in the area, and work toward building some sort of open source “center of excellence” for the region.

Now unfortunately the current North Carolina state government seems hell bent on making the State unattractive for technology businesses as a whole, but there are pockets where the open source culture thrives and the Triangle is one of them. This was noticed by a group out of South Carolina called It-ology whose mission is to promote Information Technology from primary education up through adult professionals, and they see open source as the wave of the future. They decided to hold a conference in the area to see if there was any interest, and when I found out that someone was already working on it I decided to get involved.

The expected attendance was 400 people. Over 800 showed up.

Now note that this was not a free conference, like the wonderful, grassroots LUG-driven events I try to attend. While definitely not as expensive as, say, a Gartner or IDG conference, the fact that so many people were willing to pony up the shekels to come speaks well toward both the conference line up and the organization, headed by Todd Lewis.

I arrived just before 9am and found a huge line of people waiting to register. I chalk that both up to first time conference issues as well as to the unexpected turnout, and for one of the few times in my life I used my clout as a sponsor to get my badge early (grin).

Along the way I ran into Mike Else, the evening’s entertainment, as he performs as Professor Kliq and OpenNMS had paid to sponsor his trip to the show. We entered the crowded, standing room only keynote room and found some places in the back to sit (yes, the “standing room only” part happened after we sat down).

During the opening remarks we were told that IT-ology is looking for a director of operations for the Triangle area, so if you are in to that sort of thing, give them a call. That sounds like something I would love to do, but alas I have bright and golden handcuffs to my current job.

This was followed by some good keynote speeches. One was given by William Hurley, more commonly referred to as simply “whurley“. I first met him back in 2006, but hadn’t seen him in awhile since he created his company Chaotic Moon (and he started rockin’ the C. Everett Koop beard).

He’s his own cult of personality and no one can deny he is a dynamic speaker, but I do want to criticize his use of “F-bombs“. Now don’t get me wrong, I love that word and it is very useful in certain contexts, but this wasn’t one of them. One might have been okay, but this was something of a family oriented show and it detracted from the message (by making some people uncomfortable) versus helping it.

I also took issue with his claim that open source hadn’t changed in the three years he’s been at Chaotic Moon (that company is definitely not open source, having gained fame through the development of iOS apps). He brought up some examples, such as RMS, Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Asay (that last one struck me as odd since he ceased to be relevant a long time ago, if he ever was) and to me we have so moved beyond them, this conference being one example.

The little video he showed of the mind controlled skateboard was cool, though.

I talked with him about the keynote afterward and the fact of the matter is that he is who he is and F-bombs are just part of that. Still, he does get the conversation started and it was great hearing stories about working with Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs in the same room.

But it wasn’t the whurley show (sorry to drone on about it but that is just what happens when he is around). I got to see Andrew Oliver and Phillip Rhodes, two local open source entrepreneurs who I’ve kept in touch with over the years. I also went to a talk by Jason Hibbets, the main project lead for opensource.com as well as the author of The Foundation for an Open Source City and another reason why the conference was held in Raleigh.

Most of Wednesday’s talks were business and introductory, whereas Thursday’s talks were more technical. I did one on my experiences running an open source business, which was held over lunch.

That night there were a number of social events. There was a Github drinkup, followed by a speakers dinner, followed by a party sponsored by OpenNMS. Kliq did an amazing set, but there seemed to be a large drop in attendance from the initial Github party and ours. I think that was mainly due to people being local and heading home (I made it back to my, slightly spinning, hotel room around 2am) but part of it may have been the delay in the middle. Next year we should probably not split the events like that, so there is more continuity (versus come to Spy, leave to get dinner, and come back to Spy).

Still, since I was buying the drinks, it worked out (grin).

Overall I had a great time, and the feedback has been uniformly positive. Next year may see a curtailing in the number of conferences I can attend, but All Things Open will be one of them.

More Tidbits (or now I remember what I forgot)

Posted on by tarus

I remembered what I meant to write in the last post.

I’ve left LinkedIn. It used to be my favorite social network for business, but now they just seem to want to mine your contacts.

I was pretty unhappy when a coworker started spamming me from the service until I realized that they probably just got caught with that intro window that snarfs up their address book. However, the last straw was when I read about Intro which actually routes all of your e-mail through their servers.

Enough is enough.

By the way, I read about Intro and a number of other amazing things on my friend Barry’s new news blog If That Isn’t Nice I Don’t Know What Is. Add it to your RSS reader. You’ll be glad you did.

Odds and Ends

Posted on by tarus

I swear I had three small things to talk about, but I can only think of two. Oh well.

The first is the new topology map in OpenNMS. As someone who really, really hates network maps, I love the direction the team is taking with them in the application. We have a geographical map which is just plain awesome, and now the topology map is starting to come together.

The topology map’s job is to show you how devices are related, and the beauty of it is that there is an API so you can determine exactly the relationships you want to see. For example, you could show Layer 2 connections, or, in a VMWare environment, you could display how host and guest operating systems are related to each other and to network storage. In the future we could have relationships between devices and applications. The possibilities are limitless.

Even Papa Johns Pizza has put it on the big screen.

The second thing, which is probably obvious but I still want to complain about it, is that iOS 7 sucks.

You might be asking yourself: Why do you care? True, Android is my mobile platform of choice, but my current phone is locked to the AT&T network. I tend to fall on the opposite side of the “unlocked phone” debate within the open source community in that I believe if you accept a discount on a device in exchange for being tied to a particular network for, say, two years, then you shouldn’t break that contract. So, when I go overseas to Sweden, I take an iPhone 3GS that is unlocked.

Now that my spouse has moved off of iPhone to Android, her iPhone 4 was up for grabs so I decided to get it unlocked.

The process was pretty simple, but Apple decided to force me to upgrade to iOS 7 in order to do it. So when Cult of Mac boasts that 71% of phones that can run iOS 7, do, they don’t take into account those of us who were dragged kicking and screaming into it.

And you can’t go back (Apple seems to have an odd definition of “backup” and “restore” in iTunes).

I hate almost everything about it. I hate the thin Sans font. I hate the Windows Metro icons. I hate the needless animations.

And I can’t find anything. It took me forever to figure out how to unlock the screen rotation. It used to be simple: double click the home button and swipe right. Now I found it buried on some settings page.

Anyway, since the biggest thing anyone is saying about the new iPhone is that “ooh, it comes in gold” I think Apple is in their twilight years.

While I didn’t always agree with him, I miss Steve Jobs. Not as much as I miss Lou Reed, but still.

Sweden Once More

Posted on by tarus

I recently returned from my fourth trip to Sweden this year. I had planned to go over the summer but the best plans are sometimes overtaken by events, and so it wasn’t until October that I was able to return.

We have been doing a big project there since around March, and I went over to do some training. It was a lot of fun, and probably one of my favorite trips so far. The weather was much warmer than in trips past, and it wasn’t much different than where I live in North Carolina at this time of year.

The work is being done in a little town called Åsensbruk, pop 522. I was staying in a hotel about 10km away in Dals Rostock called the Kroppefjäll, and the nearest “big” town is Mellerud, which is 11 people smaller than the small town in which I live.

To get there, I fly from North Carolina to London, and then from London to Gothenburg (the second largest city in Sweden after Stockholm). From there it is a two hour or so drive up the E45.

This time I was rented a diesel VW Golf, which I quite liked. It came with BlueMotion technology, which is a high efficiency, low emissions system that produces amazing fuel economy (I went over 1000km on half a tank of fuel). It did freak me out the first time when it turned itself off automatically. I had stopped to check directions, so I put it in neutral and let go of the clutch and the engine turned off. When I depressed the clutch to go again, it started back up. I really wish they were available in the US.

Note: if you plan to drive overseas, make sure you can use a standard transmission. While automatic transmission cars are available, you usually have to specify one when renting.

It was a real pretty time of the year, and while I spent most of it at the office, I did play a little Ingress while I was there. I really like to play when I travel because portals tend to be interesting places and it can be cool to go find them. On this trip I went to the Sörknatten Nature Reserve, and I should have known it would be an adventurous trip when the GPS first announced that it would involve unpaved roads and then errored out with “No route found”.

I went out anyway. The area is populated with some amazing lakes and the fall foliage was beautiful.

Once I got to the end of the directions provided by the GPS, I was able to detect the location of the portal in my scanner. It involved driving over this:

But I did manage to find it and gather some keys, which resulted in a pretty nice green triangle over the area:

Because of the remoteness of the area, there aren’t many dining choices, especially in Åsensbruk. The company has a local restaurant called Café Gruzzolos bring food in, so my usual lunch consisted of a salad or a sandwich. I was a little disappointed to find no actual skink in my skinkbaguette.

There is a little co-op grocery nearby where we’d go to get drinks. Craig bought a bottle of this, which I thought had an unfortunate name in English, especially considering the color, but he said it tasted fine.

In the evenings there weren’t many options for food. There is a pretty good Thai restaurant in Mellerud, but this being my fourth trip I’ve tried most of the places and just decided I would eat every night at Restaurant Vågen. It’s really good, and I especially like the fish:

and of course it is nice to finish off the evening with a beer:

Swedish beer is good, at least to my palate. It’s light and finishes clean.

But the thing that keeps me going back (well, besides getting paid of course) are the people. The Swedish people are pretty amazing to me. They have a socialist government (what some would call in the US a “Nanny State”) but the people themselves seem very independent.

And they know how to have fun.

For example, one night I decided to eat at the Kroppefjäll. The hotel is also a resort and spa (although it started life as a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients 100 years ago) and so it tends to host large parties for meetings, weddings, etc. The restaurant isn’t always open (there were days when I was the sole guest) but on this one Saturday they were. When I walked in there was a large party, about 50 or more people, in the main dining room eating from a buffet, but they were able to seat me off in the corner. While I was drinking a glass of wine and waiting for my meal, everyone just broke out into song.

Since I am nothing if not a child of technology, I pulled out my phone and took a little video. Sorry about the quality but I was trying to be discreet.

It was cool.

Toward the end of my visit we returned to the Kroppefjäll. One of my coworkers named Mats joined us, and I wanted to share a story he told.

The man who runs the company in Åsensbruk is named Lars-Olov. Lars is one of the more interesting people I’ve ever met, and I like the fact that he is also a little unconventional. He wanted to get his management team closer together, so he told them all to get ready for a weekend teambuilding exercise and that they would need to pack light. Most figured it would be held at some sort of remote Swedish luxury hotel. Well, as Mats shared with me, this is what passes for a luxury hotel for Lars:

The managers were driven to a rendezvous point and then placed into a military helicopter. The pilot flew in Korea, and he used his skills to glide them over the treetops (Mats later asked him about it and he said the highest they got was fifty meters above the trees and the lowest was within five meters). He flew them out to a remote part of the forest and they ended up having to survive on their own for two days. The “hotel” picture above was of the shelter they built. They had to do a lot of stuff on their own, including finding their own food. The exercise ended on the evening of the second night when cars arrived to drive everyone home. Mats said he made it back to his bed around two on Monday morning.

I had heard this story from Lars as well, but it must have made an impression since Mats was able to talk about it in detail.

On my final day in Sweden, on the way to the airport in fact, I was able to meet up with my friend Lena. She and her friend Emelie had come to the US back in early 2012 to get trained on OpenNMS.

Emelie is in the middle and Lena is on the right.

You might recognize Emelie as I tend to use this picture of her admiring my license plate to advertise our conferences.

Lena and I met at the Vågen and while we were eating lunch, Emelie called. Since she was close by she stopped in to say “hi”.

All in all it was a pretty nice trip. The weather was sunny and for the most part warm (it is much warmer there today than it is here) and I had a lot of fun. My next trip back will probably be in February, and while I can’t wait to see everyone again it will be cold.

But maybe there will be moose to eat.