Advogato: Personal info for mdz

mdz is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Matt Zimmerman
Member since: 2001-07-08 07:46:34
Last Login: 2010-05-26 13:27:09

Homepage: http://mdzlog.alcor.net

Notes:

I haven't been here in years.

Projects

Lead Developer on Ubuntu

Recent blog entries by mdz

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19 Jan 2012 »

Singly is hiring engineers

I’ve written before about joining Singly and a little bit about the open source software we’re building. There’s now a bit more content on our website too, or you could watch my colleague, Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, talk about it on stage.

Suffice to say, it’s pretty interesting stuff, and we need more interesting people to join the team in order to achieve our goals in the next year. In particular, we’re looking for engineers to build highly flexible, resilient and performant back-end infrastructure using Ubuntu, and innovative, usable and beautiful front-end interfaces using HTML5.

For full details and how to apply, check out the Singly blog or contact me directly. At this time, we have a preference for candidates in the San Francisco bay area, but are open to exceptional candidates from elsewhere.

Syndicated 2012-01-19 03:41:41 from We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

7 Oct 2011 »

Ada Lovelace Day 2011: Dr. Marian C. Diamond

For Ada Lovelace Day this year, I want to share my appreciation for Dr. Marian C. Diamond.

In years past, I’ve saluted women in the field of computing, which is my field as well. Dr. Diamond, however, is a biologist. Her research includes “neuroanatomy, environment, immune functions, and hormones. In particular, she is interested in studying the effects of the external environment, aging, and immune responses on the cerebral neocortex.” She has, in her words, had a love affair with the brain for about 70 years.

I know very little about biology. The content and methods of her research are, frankly, beyond me, though some of her results have garnered popular attention. She has inspired me by demonstrating that rare combination of gifts: a deep understanding of a technical subject, and the ability to explain it to other people in an accessible way.

In her interviews, articles and lectures, many of which are available online, Dr. Diamond displays these gifts in abundance. Her skill and enthusiasm for both learning and teaching is unmistakable. After applying her gifts in the classroom for many years, digital distribution has now enabled many more people to see and hear her, through millions of YouTube views.

In 1960, she became the first female graduate student in UC Berkeley’s anatomy department, and was apparently given the job of sewing a cover for a magnifying machine. I can only imagine the persistence required to continue from there to become a recognized leader in her field. She has gone on to help many other students along their way, and was named an “unsung, everyday hero” for the support she provided to students outside of the classroom or lab.

As if that weren’t enough, she has also traveled to Cambodia to apply her expertise in helping children injured by land mines. She still teaches today, just across the bay from where I write this, and will turn 85 next month.

Syndicated 2011-10-07 19:29:34 from We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

15 Aug 2011 »

Building a personal data locker

If you were building a digital container to store your personal data, what would it look like?

Personal data being information associated with you: your contacts, your photos, the web pages you’ve visited, the places you’ve been, the messages you’ve sent and received, and so on. In short, your stuff.

Here’s my personal wish list of technical requirements:

It has to be made of free software, of course
It must keep my data secure, while allowing me to share it when and how I want to
It needs to handle a range of different data types natively, and be extensible to new types, from photos to real-time sensor data
It should be able to collect my data from many different places where it is being created and stored
It should have a rich API, so that I can create applications which access my data
If I want to, I should be able to host it myself, on my own hardware, without compromising my ability to access and share it

Of course, this isn’t merely an academic exercise, as my new day job at Singly is about building exactly this type of system. With a technical team including Jeremie Miller of Jabber and XMPP fame, our goal is to develop a personal data platform which meets these criteria and more.

There’s a lot of work to do, but today, you can check out the code and run a locker of your own, which can sync in data from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Github and dozens of other services. It’s a bit of a bear to set up, particularly if you don’t already have API keys for these services, but that’s fairly normal at this early stage of development.

If you try it, or have thoughts about what we’re doing, please let me know in the comments.

Syndicated 2011-08-15 16:00:35 from We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

9 Aug 2011 »

Where’s your data center?

Thanks to the tremendous growth of “social” applications over the past five years, we have our pick of services for collecting, saving and sharing our experiences online. We each have collections of photos, contacts, messages and more, spread across multiple popular services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as many less popular services which address particular needs or preferences. We’re also producing a wealth of “exhaust data” through our browsing history, mobile sensors, transactions and other activity streams that we rarely if ever examine directly.

This ecosystem is becoming so complex that it’s easy to lose track of what you’ve created, shared or seen. We need new tools to manage this complexity, to make the most of the wealth of information and connections available to us through various services. John Battelle calls these “metaservices”, and points to growth in the number of connections between the services we use.

I expect that this next age of information tools will center around data rather than services. Data is a common denominator for these online experiences, a bridge across disparate services, technologies, social graphs, and life cycles. Personal data, in particular, has this property: the only thing that links together your photos on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Twitpic is…you.

So where’s your “data center”? I don’t anticipate the emergence of a single service where you do everything. There will continue to be innovation in the form of new and specialized services which meet a particular need very well. There won’t be a single service which is everything to everybody.

Instead, I foresee us wanting to track, save, use and control all of our “stuff” across the web. That’s why my new colleagues and I are working to make that possible.

There’s open source code available on github, a vibrant IRC channel (#lockerproject on Freeenode), and lots more I’d like to write about it. But it’s time to get back to work for now…

Syndicated 2011-08-09 15:53:37 from We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

8 Jun 2011 »

DEX finishes first batch of derivative patches for Debian

It’s been a few months since Zack and I announced the DEX project, which aims to improve the Debian ecosystem by working jointly with derivative distributions.

Our first milestone

The goal of our first project, nicknamed ancient-patches, was to clear out an old batch of a few hundred Ubuntu patches whose status was unclear. We couldn’t tell which ones had been merged into Debian, which were waiting in the BTS, and which had yet to be submitted to Debian. All of them were several years old.

I’m pleased to announce that this project is now complete. Thanks to help from David Paleino, Colin Watson, Nathan Handler and Steve Langasek, we were able to clear over 95% of the patches in a matter of days. These were the easy ones: patches which were obsolete, or had already been applied. We discussed the remainder, and resolved all of the patches whose status was still unclear. This left the harder ones: patches stalled in the BTS, and patches where there was no consensus about what to do with them.

One of the stalled patches was merged into Debian via an NMU, eliminating the delta between Debian and Ubuntu. Another had been submitted to Debian by a third party, but was no longer shipping in Ubuntu, so we considered it obsolete for purposes of this project.

This has left only two patches out of the original list of 277. Both of them are filed in the BTS and have been discussed with the relevant maintainer team. One of them is expected to be obsoleted when a new upstream version is packaged, which implements similar functionality. The other is being discussed with the upstream developers, but there is no conclusion yet about whether it can be merged upstream or in Debian.

Conclusions

Although we weren’t quite able to clear the whole list, we still consider the project to be a success because:

We ensured that all of the patches received due consideration for inclusion in Debian
We proved the concept of DEX, with developers from Debian and derivatives cooperating on a common goal and sharing tools
Most importantly, we learned from the experience

What’s next

In the most recent DEX update on debian-derivatives, I highlighted a few important events for DEX:

Our second major project, nicknamed “big-merges”, will begin soon. Our goal is to identify the few packages which are most diverged between Debian and Ubuntu, and work to get them as close to identical as possible. If you have suggestions for packages to focus on, let us know!
Allison Randal is beginning a DEX project to implement the Python 2.7 transition across Debian and Ubuntu
Nathan Handler is working on a Summer of Code project to develop specialized tools to help with this kind of cross-distribution teamwork
Zack is organizing a derivatives BoF at DebConf 11

We’re looking forward to seeing DEX develop further. If you’d like to get involved, come and join us on the debian-derivatives mailing list or IRC (#debian-derivatives on ~~freenode~~OFTC).

Matt Zimmerman and Stefano Zacchiroli