Brent Sordyl's blog

Mahout, There It Is! Open Source Algorithms Remake Overstock.com | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

February 18, 2013 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The tale highlights the benefit of a blue-sky R&D operation. Overstock was founded in 1999 and went public in 2002, and Byrne — the company’s swashbuckling chief exec — created O Labs about a year ago to feed a bit more of the entrepreneurial ethos back into the company. “We’re saving $2 million a year with Mahout, and that never would have happened if not for the sort of experimental stuff we’re doing in the labs,” says Bagley. “We’re discovering things that can then have benefit across the company.” But it also shows how Hadoop and related open source tools continue to evolve and push even further across the web and into businesses. Mahout — which was specifically built for use with Hadoop — is little more than 3 years old, and it has already attracted the attention of several big-name web operations, including not only Overstock, but AOL, Foursquare, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Amazon.

(Full Story: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/mahout/ )

machinelearning, mahout, mapreduce, opensource

Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style – YouTube

February 8, 2013 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Noted Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky delivered one of the opening "provocations" at Supernova 2007. Using a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine as a metaphor, Clay explained how the New Network changes the basic dynamics of business and collective creativity.

(Full Story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xe1TZaElTAs )

clayshirky, collaboration, opensource

ClayShirky, collaboration, opensource

GitHub needs to take open source seriously

December 3, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Brian Doll, GitHub’s VP of Marketing, confirmed this arrangement is intentional:

Code without an explicit license is protected by copyright and is by default All Rights Reserved. The person or people who wrote the code are protected as such. Any time you’re using software you didn’t write, licensing should be considered and abided.

Ironically, this situation exists because the founders of GitHub want to ease code sharing. They were worried that selecting a license for a new project was so difficult that requiring new project initiators would be a barrier to the adoption of GitHub

(Full Story: GitHub needs to take open source seriously)

github, opensource

How Team Obama’s tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust | Ars Technica

November 29, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign’s IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linux—particularly Ubuntu—was used as the server operating system of choice. “We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose,” VanDenPlas said. “Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js.”

It also helped that the campaign, at least for internally developed applications, relied almost exclusively on Amazon Web Service for its infrastructure, eliminating a lot of the financial burden of infrastructure management. “For the applications built by the OFA [Obama for America] technology team, 99.999 percent were AWS hosted,” VanDenPlas said, “purely because it was the best fit for what we were doing. As a whole, if you include privately hosted virtualized environments in the cloud architecture definition, I believe everything was ‘cloud,’ even down to

(Full Story: How Team Obama’s tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust | Ars Technica)

cloudcomputing, opensource, Technology

cloudcomputing, obamacampaign, opensource, technology

Sears eschews IBM/Oracle for open source and self build

October 11, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

IBM mainframes and Oracle Exadata were two technologies described as too expensive and not flexible enough to adapt to the changes and seasonality of the business. The company is moving to open source solutions wherever possible.

(Full Story: Sears eschews IBM/Oracle for open source and self build)

opensource

opensource, Sears

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar – ACM Queue

August 28, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Getting hooked on computers is easy—almost anybody can make a program work, just as almost anybody can nail two pieces of wood together in a few tries. The trouble is that the market for two pieces of wood nailed together—inexpertly—is fairly small outside of the “proud grandfather” segment, and getting from there to a decent set of chairs or fitted cupboards takes talent, practice, and education. The extra 9,900 percent had neither practice nor education when they arrived in our trade, and before they ever had the chance to acquire it, the party was over and most of them were out of a job. I will charitably assume that those who managed to hang on were the most talented and most skilled, but even then there is no escaping that as IT professionals they mostly sucked because of their lack of ballast.

The bazaar meme advocated by Raymond, “Just hack it,” as opposed to the carefully designed cathedrals of the pre-dot-com years, unfortunately did, not die with the dot-com madness, and tod

(Full Story: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar – ACM Queue)

opensource

Why Union Pacific Builds Its Own Tech – Informationweek

August 28, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

While Tennison jokes that UP isn’t likely to get into the general ledger software business anytime soon, it did develop its own supply chain applications, as the likes of SAP and Oracle couldn’t meet its stringent performance requirements (it will tolerate only 1.5 hours of downtime a month for system upgrades and changes)…

..The mother of all UP IT projects is NetControl, a Linux-based transportation management system to replace the mainframe-based system the company rolled out in the late 1960s. About 270 people worldwide are working on NetControl, which Tennison calls “our family jewels.” The $200 million system, which is rolled out in increments, is about halfway done and due to be fully operational in 2017.

(Full Story: Why Union Pacific Builds Its Own Tech – Informationweek)

linux, opensource

Project Fedena – Opensource Student Information System, School Management Software

July 27, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Fedena is a free & opensource school management software that has more features than a student information system. Use fedena to efficiently manage students, teachers, employees, courses & all the system & process related to your institution.

(Full Story: Project Fedena – Opensource Student Information System, School Management Software)

e-learning, opensource

Desant App – Open source landing pages

July 27, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Desant is an open source and neat landing page application. It’s simple to use, customize and extend to your needs. There’s an awesome admin area too – it will give you all the information and statistics you need.

(Full Story: Desant App – Open source landing pages)

opensource, ruby

landing-pages, opensource, ruby