@Friendica Support

Hi there,
here kinda "long shot wild idea".

To a certain extent the activityPub (or fediVerse) related coder and helpers community is some how scattered not only in the federation itself but also over tons of platforms, including github, own wikis and forums, git instances and alike.

At the same time friendica itself is and pretends to be like the interconnecting node between as many platforms as possible.

Wouldn't it be reasonable and positive for the fediVerse as a whole to gather around some place to improve communication, interoperability and so on?
Same consideration might apply for git.friendi.ca.

Not sure how much work for example in terms of moderation this very support forum implies, and if such a proposal would mean more work load for those who are in charge of both subdomain projects, but in general it looks to me that on one hand a lot of work is wasted on maintaining all those scattered sites and on the other, this could be a step towards escaping centralized dependencies, better support for the fediVerse in general and in the case of github maybe even a step forward for the independence of the coding community around actvitypub.

friendica and it's community has a long enough trajectory in the space to imply enough trust as for being a serious and respectful offer to all I think.

Wieder Ostsee-Kabel kaputt – die NATO schlägt zurück!

Symbolbild: schon wieder ein kaputtes Kabel in der Ostsee
Es ist wieder passiert: Ein Unterseekabel in der Ostsee wurde beschädigt. Wahrscheinlich mal wieder von einem russischen Schiff, das rein zufällig genau dort langfuhr. Aber keine Sorge, die NATO steht bereit, mit scharfen Protestnoten und beispielloser Entschlossenheit.

Schweden ermittelt, Lettland ist besorgt, und die NATO entsendet Schiffe und Flugzeuge, um intensiv zu untersuchen, was ohnehin jeder ahnt. Doch was wird die Reaktion sein? Wirtschaftssanktionen? Ein Stopp russischer Schiffe in NATO-Gewässern? Harte militärische Maßnahmen? Nein, natürlich nicht. Es wird telefoniert, beraten und schließlich ein gemeinsames Statement veröffentlicht, das Russland aufs Schärfste verurteilt.

Vielleicht schreibt die EU noch eine neue Resolution, in der Putin sehr, sehr nachdrücklich aufgefordert wird, das bitte nicht noch einmal zu tun. Deutschland könnte sogar erwägen, die Gorch Fock auf eine symbolische Patrouillenfahrt zu schicken.

Und Moskau? Dort wird man sich vor Lachen den Wodka verschütten. Während russische „Fischerboote“ offenbar weiter ungestört Kommunikationsleitungen zerstören, bleibt der Westen seinem bewährten Kurs treu: Er zeigt sich tief besorgt.

Das ist Diplomatie auf höchstem Niveau – und eine Einladung für die nächste „ungeklärte“ Beschädigung.

twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/…

twitter.com/krus_stern/status/…

#Deutschland #Essay #GeopolitischeKonflikteBaltikum #Krieg #MaritimeSicherheitslageOstsee #Nato #NATORusslandSpannungen #OstseeKabelBeschädigt #Russland #RusslandSchattenflotte #SchwedenErmittlungenSabotage #Ukraine #UnterseekabelSabotage

tl;dr I created an extension for the GNOME desktop on Linux, so that folks can stream and listen to music from The Indie Beat – an online radio station powered by independent musicians sharing music in the Fediverse, via Bandwagon.

Background

Independent musicians, creatives, artists, makers – these are all folk who often struggle to connect with audiences, and where retail and tech platforms tend towards squeezing their ability to make money from their work (see the excellent Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow – essential reading for today’s world and understanding how it systematically squeezes creatives). Over the Christmas period, I finally deleted my Spotify account, after reading about yet more awful ways that company is destroying authentic creativity for their own profit.

Cancelled Spotify. One of those things I'd allowed to roll far too long for no good reason (not paying attention), and the "ghost artists" stuff has made me feel particularly unfriendly towards the platform. harpers.org/archive/2025/01/th…

— Andy Piper (@andypiper@macaw.social) 2024-12-23T12:31:01.894Z

I’ve been a huge fan of independent artists for a very long time. Back in the MySpace / MP3 / Napster days I came across folks who I now count as friends, amazing musicians such as Cindy Alexander, and Alex Cornish.

Up until recently there was a wonderful streaming station, RadioFreeFedi, that offered music from artists who had a presence in the Fediverse. Sadly, that has now gone away.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been attending Fediforum, an online conference where people building in the Fediverse gather to share projects and ideas. During the events in 2024, I came across two fantastic people with an interest in making things better for artists and musicians: Ben Pate, builder of the Emissary platform, which has a music-centric edition called Bandwagon; and Kirsten Lambertsen, a multi-talented web creative who runs Patron Hunt, and who spun up an alternative streaming station, The Indie Beat. The Indie Beat builds on Bandwagon, so artists who share their music in the Fediverse via Bandwagon, can also choose to add them to rotation on The Indie Beat.

Some inspirations

I was nerd-sniped, I mean, inspired, to make something with The Indie Beat, in part through a nice blog post shared by Neil Brown (which was apparently prompted by me, so that’s nice and circular!) about how to add the streams from The Indie Beat into Linux music apps such as mpd.

I don’t use mpd, and to be honest I most often live on Apple platforms (but I do keep a Plex server, which I intend to move to Jellyfin this year as I work on improving my self-hosting and homelab situations). I was pretty sure that I’d seen a taskbar music player for GNOME, though. I usually run GNOME on my Linux systems – the exception being my MNT Pocket Reform, which is Sway with a minimal set of other desktop apps.

The player I was thinking of is the SomaFM internet radio extension, which is a menubar app that lists the SomaFM station streams, and allows the user to choose between them.

The process

The first iteration was a straightforward copy/edit hack of the SomaFM extension, replacing the list of channel streams with the equivalent ones from The Indie Beat. Easy!

I excitedly sent a screenshot to Kirsten to show off!

There were quite a few things that I felt I could do better, though. First of all, the artwork was missing. Also, I knew that the whole point of The Indie Beat was to be a showcase for the artists on Bandwagon, and that there was supposed to be metadata in the stream header that contained their link information.

After a lot of poking at the MP3 stream, I realised that The Indie Beat is built on a streaming server called Azura Cast, which has an API – and The Indie Beat API had that data, and a whole lot more that I could use. In order to use it all though, I had to fully re-think how the extension would work.

So, I started over, from scratch.

• I hand-traced the “catellite” artwork and made a minified icon for the GNOME top bar – the full design was not great at a tiny size.
• I kept a similar look-and-feel to the SomaFM extension – an icon, a player, a list of channels – but, I removed the settings and favourites options from my scope, to keep things simple. I also have the menu expand to fit the channel names, which I don’t love as it means it changes size, but it works.
  
  • a little thing that I’m fond of is that the extension uses the configured accent colour – recently added in GNOME 47 – for some of the text.

  
  

• I did a lot of reading and poking around at GNOME Shell and gjs, the JavaScript API that enables extensions to be built. I also learned a lot about GStreamer, the engine that GNOME apps use for access to audio and video media. This was all a long, long way from my past work coding for GNOME, ~20 years ago, back in early Anjuta days! I’m not naturally a JavaScript person at all, so I made a lot of mistakes here.
  
  • huge shout-out to the author of the JustPerfection extension, who carefully and helpfully reviewed my submissions to the GNOME Extensions site. This thing would be a lot more crashy and messy without that oversight!

  
  

• the extension contains a small cached implementation of the Azura Cast API, which enables the extension to query the available channels, rather than needing to have a static internal list of streams updated if a channel came along or went away (a concept of “mixtapes” is on the roadmap for The Indie Beat in the future).
  
  • I needed to add a way to access an artist’s page, which comes from a property that’s stored in the now playing data, so building an API layer that sits parallel to the radio stream player seemed to work nicely.

  
  

The Indie Beat is evolving – within a few days of starting work on this side project, Kirsten switched the branding from pink to green, so I updated the artwork. She also added a Bonk Wave channel – and the extension seamlessly picked it up! That was a nice win.

OK… so what does it do?

I’ve posted a short video which covers the basic features: choose between channels, play/stop, open the Bandwagon page of the currently playing artist in a web browser, or directly jump to Bandwagon’s Explore page or The Indie Beat main page. I’ve aimed for simple and clean, as befits the GNOME philosophy.

makertube.net/videos/embed/13a…

Where to get it

The extension is available to install here. You can watch the demo video on my MakerTube. You can follow development on GitHub.

If you like it, a comment / review on the GNOME Extensions page would be very welcome. If you have issues or ideas, do leave those on the GitHub project. There is a donation button in the GNOME Extensions page, which is of course entirely optional.

Don’t forget to click over to Bandwagon and check out the artists you hear that you like.

What’s the future?

The world and the internet are kind of bleak right now, but actually – we’ve got the power to make it better.

Watch Molly White’s talk from XOXO and get inspired.

Also, this:

andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/29/the…

There’s a lot of opportunity for creatives in the Fediverse!

Castopod is a great way to self-host a podcast with native ActivityPub federation. Bandwagon exists, where you can create a Fediverse profile for yourself and your music. You can share it through The Indie Beat. I’ve personally got my eye on Libre.FM (like Last.FM, but free, and with a renewed / reinvigorated interest in building new features like ActivityPub and IndieWeb support – here’s my profile). Beyond those, there is also Faircamp, a static site generator that helps musicians self-host their content and avoid enshittification through other channels and platforms. I’m excited! We can work together to make our spaces better for musicians and other artists!

More features for the extension?

This has been a fun side project!

I’ve got a few barely-formed ideas for things I can do with this in the future, as both Bandwagon and The Indie Beat evolve. Stay tuned. 📡

Oh, and through making this extension, I found and purchased an album I’m obsessed with, which has inspired me to do some other new things… so watch this space.

Where do I get those stickers?

Come find me at FOSDEM in Brussels next weekend, I’ll have Bandwagon+The Indie Beat stickers to share 👍🏻

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#100DaysToOffload #art #bandwagon #Coding #creativity #development #fediverse #GNOME #javascript #Linux #Music #TheIndieBeat

Andy Piper

2024-08-29 22:14:09

During my recent blogging revival I’ve already written about how I love the web¹. I’ve also commented a couple of times about uses of AI and Large Language Models and the kinds of confusion that can be caused.

Today, I noticed an exchange between the brilliant Sara Joy and Stefan Bohacek on Mastodon, in which Stefan accidentally reminded me of something interesting that I hadn’t properly explored the first time around.

Rewind

About 20 years ago – actually 24 years ago, according to this Wikipedia article – there was a thing called FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend, an early online vocabularly / ontology for describing relationships between people and things online. There was also a related concept called DOAP, Description of a Project, that I was interested in and implemented in a couple of things I worked on back then. I did some digging, but the only references I can find on this blog are some passing mentions in the early 2000s, and I’ve lost my original foaf.rdf file but I might have to go hunting for that for posterity, at some stage.

I’m mentioning all of this because it reminds me that I’ve always been interested in the Semantic Web space, and also in the people aspects of the web, beyond just the words and the technology – Who is making What, and How it is all connected.

Humans today

Back to the ~present!

About 10 years ago – actually 12 years ago, according the last updated date in the original humans.txt file – there was the quiet proposal of an idea, for a humans.txt file, that could live in parallel to the robots.txt file on a web server.

The robots.txt file is intended for site owners to provide instructions to web crawlers – “robots”, or automated programs – as to how to behave in relation to the content of the site: this is the agreed-upon standard way in which the web works, and signals to search engines how to index websites, going all the way back to the early days of 1994-7, and later fully documented by Google and others.

The idea for the humans.txt file was that we should have a simple way to credit the people who made a website, in a super easy to create and publish format, regardless of the technology stack used to build the site or the URL formats and layout of the site. It was briefly documented and lightly promoted on humanstxt.org. I remember noticing it at the time, loving the idea, but then not really doing anything with it, and I admit that I didn’t end up using it myself.

However, Stefan is using this on his site (and wrote about it 11 years ago, because of course he’s ahead of me again 😀) and it made me think:

• This is still A Great Idea, and Right Now Could Be Its Time:
  
  • We’ve seen deliberate misinterpretations / mis-statements (from big AI players) about the value of robots.txt in relation to AI crawlers/scrapers in the past 6-12 months. Let’s re-emphasise the human aspect here.
    
    • I have a “made by a human” button in my sidebar, made by the excellent human Andy Carolan. You can get one here.

    
    

  • humanstxt.org could do with a bit of a refresh / re-upping and updating, maybe, but it’s on all of us to promote and adopt this idea.
  • the IndieWeb is thriving, and I’ve been seeing folks returning from XOXO over the past week enthusing about the greatness of the web.

  
  

REMEMBER THE JOY THE INTERNET CAN BRING ❤️

donotreply.cards/en/do-post-wh…

— Dan Hon (@danhon) 2024-08-24T17:53:01.066Z

• [… more thoughts …]
• Why don’t I add this to my sites? OK then, I will.
• Hold on, is there a browser extension for this? Oh, there is (although with the rollout of the new Chrome updates / Manifest V3 and lack of maintenance, they may not work in the future)
• OK what about a WordPress plugin, for this here WordPress blog of mine? Oh, there is (although it has not been updated lately, and continues to refer to legacy stuff like some site called Twitter; it works, though)
• We really, really need to give credit where credit is due, in a world where things are increasingly being sucked up, mashed together by algorithms, and regurgitated in ways that diminish their creators for the enrichment of others.

What I’m saying, is this – Thank You, Stefan, and Sara, and Dan Hon² and everyone else from XOXO and everywhere all over the internet, for reminding me that the web is great, humans are incredible, and hey, why don’t we all give this humans.txt thing one more try? I’m on board with that.

---

1. In that post, I also mentioned that the Tiny Awards 2024 winners were due to be announced – and as I’m writing now, they have been: One Minute Park, and One Million Checkboxes. ↩︎
2. A new edition of Dan’s excellent newsletter literally was published as I was typing this blog post. You need to subscribe to it. ↩︎

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #author #browser #creativity #credit #handmade #human #humanity #humans #making #Technology #web #wordpress

@andycarolan

@andycarolan is on omg.lol!

^{andycarolan.omg.lol}

During my recent blogging revival I’ve already written about how I love the web¹. I’ve also commented a couple of times about uses of AI and Large Language Models and the kinds of confusion that can be caused.

Today, I noticed an exchange between the brilliant Sara Joy and Stefan Bohacek on Mastodon, in which Stefan accidentally reminded me of something interesting that I hadn’t properly explored the first time around.

Rewind

About 20 years ago – actually 24 years ago, according to this Wikipedia article – there was a thing called FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend, an early online vocabularly / ontology for describing relationships between people and things online. There was also a related concept called DOAP, Description of a Project, that I was interested in and implemented in a couple of things I worked on back then. I did some digging, but the only references I can find on this blog are some passing mentions in the early 2000s, and I’ve lost my original foaf.rdf file but I might have to go hunting for that for posterity, at some stage.

I’m mentioning all of this because it reminds me that I’ve always been interested in the Semantic Web space, and also in the people aspects of the web, beyond just the words and the technology – Who is making What, and How it is all connected.

Humans today

Back to the ~present!

About 10 years ago – actually 12 years ago, according the last updated date in the original humans.txt file – there was the quiet proposal of an idea, for a humans.txt file, that could live in parallel to the robots.txt file on a web server.

The robots.txt file is intended for site owners to provide instructions to web crawlers – “robots”, or automated programs – as to how to behave in relation to the content of the site: this is the agreed-upon standard way in which the web works, and signals to search engines how to index websites, going all the way back to the early days of 1994-7, and later fully documented by Google and others.

The idea for the humans.txt file was that we should have a simple way to credit the people who made a website, in a super easy to create and publish format, regardless of the technology stack used to build the site or the URL formats and layout of the site. It was briefly documented and lightly promoted on humanstxt.org. I remember noticing it at the time, loving the idea, but then not really doing anything with it, and I admit that I didn’t end up using it myself.

However, Stefan is using this on his site (and wrote about it 11 years ago, because of course he’s ahead of me again 😀) and it made me think:

• This is still A Great Idea, and Right Now Could Be Its Time:
  
  • We’ve seen deliberate misinterpretations / mis-statements (from big AI players) about the value of robots.txt in relation to AI crawlers/scrapers in the past 6-12 months. Let’s re-emphasise the human aspect here.
    
    • I have a “made by a human” button in my sidebar, made by the excellent human Andy Carolan. You can get one here.

    
    

  • humanstxt.org could do with a bit of a refresh / re-upping and updating, maybe, but it’s on all of us to promote and adopt this idea.
  • the IndieWeb is thriving, and I’ve been seeing folks returning from XOXO over the past week enthusing about the greatness of the web.

  
  

REMEMBER THE JOY THE INTERNET CAN BRING ❤️

donotreply.cards/en/do-post-wh…

— Dan Hon (@danhon) 2024-08-24T17:53:01.066Z

• [… more thoughts …]
• Why don’t I add this to my sites? OK then, I will.
• Hold on, is there a browser extension for this? Oh, there is (although with the rollout of the new Chrome updates / Manifest V3 and lack of maintenance, they may not work in the future)
• OK what about a WordPress plugin, for this here WordPress blog of mine? Oh, there is (although it has not been updated lately, and continues to refer to legacy stuff like some site called Twitter; it works, though)
• We really, really need to give credit where credit is due, in a world where things are increasingly being sucked up, mashed together by algorithms, and regurgitated in ways that diminish their creators for the enrichment of others.

What I’m saying, is this – Thank You, Stefan, and Sara, and Dan Hon² and everyone else from XOXO and everywhere all over the internet, for reminding me that the web is great, humans are incredible, and hey, why don’t we all give this humans.txt thing one more try? I’m on board with that.

1. In that post, I also mentioned that the Tiny Awards 2024 winners were due to be announced – and as I’m writing now, they have been: One Minute Park, and One Million Checkboxes. ↩︎
2. A new edition of Dan’s excellent newsletter literally was published as I was typing this blog post. You need to subscribe to it. ↩︎

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #author #browser #creativity #credit #handmade #human #humanity #humans #making #Technology #web #wordpress

Andy Piper

2024-08-14 22:12:24

I use a lot of apps, and, I love my iPhone.

BUT

I really love the Web.

A few things lately reminded me of what a great and – so far – durable, open set of of technologies the Web is based on.

You can build such cool stuff on the Web! There are whole sites dedicated to collecting together other sites of cool things you can do with the web – see Single Serving Sites, or Neal.fun. And remember, there is no page fold. If you’re itching to build, I wrote about Glitch a few weeks ago, if you want somewhere to try new things.

The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.

[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.

Ernie @ Tedium

In turn, Ernie links to John Gruber’s assessment of the situation, which is also worth reading.

Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!

I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.

Plus, of course, with the state of capitalism and big tech, we increasingly don’t own what we buy (per Kelly Gallagher Sims’ excellent Ownership in the Rental Age post; I also again highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s books, Chokepoint Capitalism, and The Internet Con)

I use closed platforms, and I use open platforms.

The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.

The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.

If you like creative, quirky online sites, you should subscribe to Naive Weekly. I’m still enjoying things I found in it last month.

Now, I’m off to continue exploring… everything.

Long live The Web!

---

PS the winners of the Tiny Awards 2024 are announced at the weekend… 👀

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#Blaugust2024 #100DaysToOffload #appStores #Apple #capitalism #chokepointCapitalism #coryDoctorow #enshittification #openSource #openTechnology #rentSeeking #Technology #web

Better Call a Website

Internet Phone Book, Crawl Space, PBS of the Internet and more :)

^{Kristoffer (Naive Weekly)}

As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I went along to HomeCamp 08 in London, organised by Chris Dalby and Dale Lane, and sponsored by Current Cost and Redmonk.

I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.

[viddler id=e4676600&w=400&h=267]

The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.

Some very general comments on the day:

• Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
• A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
• A lot of fun… I only wish my hacking skills were greater – but I’m looking forward to contributing and generating ideas in this community.

That’s it from me. Really looking forward to HomeCamp 09!

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#andysc #conference #currentcost #energy #environment #event #green #homeAutomation #homecamp #homecamp08 #London #unconference #video #yellowpark

Andy Piper

2008-11-29 11:07:46

I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.

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#currentcost #event #homecamp #London #unconference

Join the fediverse!

Learn about the fediverse and find your community.

^{jointhefediverse.net}

IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:

These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.

Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.

67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.

Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system

This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.

As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supporting Chris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.

Secondly, beyond this individual approach, it ties in to some of what I heard at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin… people talking about the opportunity for technology to change the way things work, from Tim O’Reilly’s keynote on the way forward for Internet technology and innovative thinking, to Tom Raftery’s brilliant GreenMonk pitch on Electricity 2.0.

Finally, and most broadly, it’s a hopeful vision which resonates when lately, things do sometimes appear bleak.

Technology can help society. Let’s go and make it happen.

New York Times article on Sam Palmisano’s speech

YouTube Smarter Planet videos

Update: a couple more links, if you want to get involved…

Smarter Planet on FriendFeed

Smarter Planet on Tumblr

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#change #economy #electricity #globallyIntegratedEconomy #IBM #ideas #SamPalmisano #SmartPlanet #smarterPlanet #smartplanet #Technology #vision

Andy Piper

2008-04-27 19:50:15

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

Current Cost graph

Showing the power consumption based on the Current Cost meter. More about the Current Cost meter on my blog.

^Flickr

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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#currentCost #iphone #iwebkit

Home - iWebKit – Make a quality iPhone Website or Webapp

IWEBKIT IS A SIMPLE FRAMEWORK TO CREATE YOUR OWN IPHONE AND IPOD TOUCH WEBAPP IN JUST A FEW MINUTES. What’s […]

^{iWebKit – Make a quality iPhone Website or Webapp}

Andy Piper

2008-04-27 19:50:15

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

Current Cost graph

Showing the power consumption based on the Current Cost meter. More about the Current Cost meter on my blog.

^Flickr

One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).

This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).

So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.

There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.

Things I learned

1. Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
2. If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
3. Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).

A now, some notes just for my team…

Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:

• my home power monitoring
• my Twittering weather station
• IBM Smarter Planet
• Andy Stanford-Clark’s automated house
• Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).

And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.

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#BlueFusion #events #hursley #IBM #malvernStJames #schools #smarterPlanet

Andy Piper

2008-12-11 21:53:35

[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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andypiper.co.uk/2008/12/11/cur…

#currentCost #iphone #iwebkit

Current Cost graph

Showing the power consumption based on the Current Cost meter. More about the Current Cost meter on my blog.

^Flickr

My boss and mentor, James Watters, just blogged about the launch of what we’ve been working on since before Pivotal was formed earlier this year – Pivotal One, powered by Pivotal CF (based on Cloud Foundry).

As I wrote back in April…

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.

What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.

Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.

We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.

Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.

Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.

I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.

A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:

• a brief interview I gave to JAXenter
• Pivotal One press release
• VentureBeat coverage
• GigaOM coverage
• InfoQ coverage
• Wired on the Pivotal culture

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#cloudComputing #cloudFoundry #community #gopivotal #Java #openSource #OpenStack #pivotal #PivotalHD #PivotalLabs #platform #platformAsAService #rabbitmq #spring #VMwareVSphere

Pivotal Announces Pivotal CF Based on CloudFoundry

Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service

^{Alex Blewitt (InfoQ)}

Andy Piper

2013-04-24 16:25:55

I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.

I’ll be live tweeting from the event, where Paul Maritz our CEO will be introducing the company and vision. You can also follow the @gopivotal Twitter ID, and check out the new website.

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#cloudFoundry #gopivotal #paulMaritz #pivotal #pivotalOne #pivotalhd #rabbitmq #spring

IMG_0116.jpg

Explore andyp uk's 3924 photos on Flickr!

^Flickr

In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.

The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.

A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.

Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:

slideshare.net/slideshow/embed…

Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.

Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).

There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.

[…]

What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂
Joining Twitter!
I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.

If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.

I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!

Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…

[1] vmc is dead, long live cf!

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#career #cloud #cloudFoundry #job #paas #pivotal #social #SocialNetworking #springsource #Twitter #vmware

Andy Piper

2013-11-12 14:33:44

My boss and mentor, James Watters, just blogged about the launch of what we’ve been working on since before Pivotal was formed earlier this year – Pivotal One, powered by Pivotal CF (based on Cloud Foundry).

As I wrote back in April…

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.

What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.

Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.

We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.

Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.

Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.

I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.

A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:

• a brief interview I gave to JAXenter
• Pivotal One press release
• VentureBeat coverage
• GigaOM coverage
• InfoQ coverage
• Wired on the Pivotal culture

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andypiper.co.uk/2013/11/12/piv…

#cloudComputing #cloudFoundry #community #gopivotal #Java #openSource #OpenStack #pivotal #PivotalHD #PivotalLabs #platform #platformAsAService #rabbitmq #spring #VMwareVSphere

Pivotal Announces Pivotal CF Based on CloudFoundry

Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service

^{Alex Blewitt (InfoQ)}

I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.

This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.

• from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
  
  • the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
  • it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
  • you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.

  
  

• for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Grady wrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
• I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
• I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.

Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!

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#career #cloudFoundry #developerAdvocate #developers #events #job #Life #role #Technology #vmware

In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.

Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.

There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.

Why so many?

• Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
  
  • my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
  • I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.

  
  

• Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
• There was the time when I was copying friends like Andy Stanford-Clark and Tom Coates, and putting sensors around my house online (there’s brief mention of it in this 2009 post).
• There were test accounts I created for projects as far back as my time doing Service Oriented Architecture things at IBM.
• There were a couple of accounts I’d created during education sessions, literally to show others how to get started on Twitter, growing the user base.
• There were a couple of accounts from my demo apps and projects on the @TwitterDev team, such as the IoT sensors I demonstrated on stage at the first Twitter Flight conference in 2014.
• There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.

Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X.

In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.

… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!

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#Life #socialMedia #Technology #Twitter

Andy Piper

2012-03-12 16:38:18

I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.

This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.

• from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
  
  • the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
  • it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
  • you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.

  
  

• for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Grady wrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
• I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
• I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.

Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!

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New Kingmakers – a discussion about where developers have been and where we are going, with James Governor

2011_04_14 THU IMPACT 2011 UNCONFERENCE JAMES GOVERNOR REDMONK 7192 Video replay coming soon!

^Flickr