Scott Blomquist

Microsoft is a really old company as tech companies go, and they’re on the third revision of their logo. Much earlier, the logo had a crazy capital-O that was, for some reason, called “the blibbet”. I scored a $7 clearance t-shirt that has the old Microsoft logo on it, complete with blibbet. The 1s and 0s that comprise the majority of the shirt are both confusing and boring, but at least I now own a wearable blibbet.

I’ve mentioned before that one thing that moderates my natural inclination to go gaga over cloud-based hosting for web applications is that there is, so far, no clean way exists to switch providers. Both Google and Amazon[1] argue that there are theoretical ways to abandon them for a competitor today, but for most business decision makers theoretical doesn’t count when the alternative is tight vendor lock-in.

The cloud lock-in problem cannot be considered solved until there are multiple viable alternative cloud hosting providers that have essentially zero barrier to switching amongst the set.

To that end, Sun Microsystems announced their Open Cloud Platform today at their CommunityOne East developer event in New York. (Best technical overview: the walk-through on their wiki)

While this launch still only solves the problem in theory and not in practice, I give them reasonable odds that theirs will be the standard API that gets broadly adopted first by making a credible (if for no other reason than Tim Bray’s active involvement) and public effort to create open standards around managing machines, networks, images, deployment, storage, clustering, backups, and all other common aspects of managing a cloud hosting environment.

Come on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, you should get involved in some kind of cloud standardization effort, even if not this one!

Footnotes

[1] The only comment I can find from Microsoft regarding Azure lock-in is that they appear to have, in the time since yesterday’s Live Search cache snapshot, removed “or lock-in” from the “Low Risk… without worrying about operational constraints or lock-in” on the official Azure Services Platform page.

My Portland-area friends at Shizzow just got written up on ProgrammableWeb. They’ve just completed their big public launch, and will be lurking about at SXSW. If you’re going to be there, look up their whereabouts on their app, wander by, and say hello.

Curtis Chen of Team Snout has posted his recordings of the talks given at Game Control Summit 2009.

Pi aren’t square, they’re awesome! Better than awesome—pimp, even! You can get this yourself an instance of this t-shirt and many other hilarious shirts from T-Shirt Hell. (WARNING: If you’re easily offended, you seriously don’t even want to look—they’re as irreverent as it gets.)

There are not many of their shirts that I, personally, would be caught wearing in public. But if you’re braver than I am, I’ll (seriously) buy you a coffee if I see you in public in any of their shirts other than this one.

A colleague of mine mentioned a post by a UC Berkeley professor, Raymond Yee where he illustrates for students of his Mixing and Remixing Information course how he brainstorms and develops ideas for his mash-up projects.

It’s interesting to me that his post covers two topics that I’ve spent time talking about here: Freebase and Sunlight Labs.

Also worth mentioning is Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America mash-up competition.

Group scheduling tool Doodle.com has announced an app design competition for applications built on their API.

The winner gets a week in Zurich.

I’m exploring tweaking the rules that I’ve established for my t-shirt series. The funny thing is that I probably don’t even have to mention this, because I think I’m the only person that would even realize that I’m breaking any rules.

When I came up with this idea, I was going to wear a different t-shirt every day for a year, and document each shirt on a site dedicated to the project. I never got around to building out the domain, and I quickly discovered that shooting and editing t-shirt pictures every day was a whole lot of work for a secondary hobby.

So in order to break the logjam, I simplified. I figured I’d debut 1 new shirt a week on Monday and retire 1 old shirt on Thursday. But I never got around to doing the retired shirts, and besides, I kinda like the shirts that I have from before I started this project. So the new rules are that I’m going to document at least one shirt each Monday, new or old, and I reserve the right to do another later in the week.

So without further ado, here’s this week’s classic shirt:

As many of you know, I’m an extreme puzzle fan. I spent this weekend up in Redmond, WA competing in the 12th quasi-annual Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. I like to wear puzzle shirts to Puzzle Hunt, so I wore this shirt.

It’s from last summer’s instance of the Game that some of us puzzle fans write for each summer’s crop of Microsoft interns. Game staff, including beta testers each get a shirt that says “Game Control” on the front. The back documents the locations and clues that we included in the event (click the image above for a bigger version).

You’ve all heard me say before that every web site benefits from a data API. A corollary to that claim is that every site’s users benefit from a data API, and there are few domains where that corollary  applies more than in Government.

The good news is that we lowly citizens have some strong coalitions of fellow lowly citizens advocating for our side.

The Sunlight Labs project over at the Sunlight Foundation just announced that they’re seeking volunteers to help scrape state legislative data to better enable automatic consumption of, and mashups on, government data.

If you have a couple of hours free and are proficient in some parsing library (Beautiful Soup? Perl?), check out the state legislation data project wiki, and consider helping them out with your state.

If you love data and freedom, please spread the word!

My mom was in town visiting this weekend, and when I went to demo Freebase for her, I asked her to name a famous person. She suggested Pope John Paul II, so we looked him up. Most of the information that you would expect Freebase to know about him, it did. But there was one glaring omission: it didn’t know that he was Catholic.

Since Freebase knows 263 people who have ever been a professional Pope, I decided that it would take a little too long to update them each by hand. And so I set out to scribble up a few lines of Python to use the Freebase API libs for Python.

(Note for IronPython users: For help with the minor tricky steps of getting the Freebase API libraries working with IronPython, see my write-up over on Stack Overflow.)

Since I intended to write data to Freebase, I needed an authenticated account:

import freebase.api as fb

mss = fb.HTTPMetawebSession("sandbox.freebase.com")
# use be "www.freebase.com" once you've tested against sandbox

mss.username = "user"
mss.password = "password"
mss.login()

Next I needed to get a list of all of known Popes. For that, I used the following MQL Query:

query = [{‘profession’: {‘id’:‘/en/pope’},
          ‘type’:’/people/person’,
          ‘name’: None,
          ‘id’:None,
          ‘limit’:500}]

results = mss.mqlread(query)

This gave me an array of 263 results consisting of the English names and Freebase IDs of everyone who has ever had the profession of Pope. (I could have said ‘profession’: ‘Pope’ as the very first line of the query, but I chose to use the ID to make sure that there isn’t some other kind of Pope that I don’t know about.)

Next came the updates themselves. One safety feature built in to MQL is that you can only update one link per MQL Write, so I had to issue one update for each of the Popes returned from the read above:

for r in results:
    writequery = {
                     'id': r.id,
                     '/people/person/religion':
                          {
                          'connect':'insert',
                          'id':'/en/catholicism'
                          }
                 }
    mss.mqlwrite(writequery)

Each write took slightly under a second, and since I was running this interactively, the mqlwrite() call displayed the update status for each call. For most of the Popes, it had no idea about their religion, and so it replied:

{'/people/person/religion': {'connect': 'inserted', 'id': '/en/catholicism'},
 'id': '/en/pope_sisinnius'}

But for those that it did know:

{'/people/person/religion': {'connect': 'present', 'id': '/en/catholicism'},
 'id': '/en/pope_sisinnius'}