I hit on a message on the Subversion mailing list that there were Solaris packages for the latest version of Subversion on a site called Blastwave. This is a site I had never heard of and thought it was pretty cool that the latest version of the Subversion distribution was available so quickly on a site.

I had this message bookmarked in my mail to go back to later. As I hit the site this morning I found a message on the title page about the possible closing of the site due to lack of funding. Apparently, the operators have been trying to get corporate funding for this service for a while to no avail.

I would think this would be something Sun would want to contribute to given their recent opening of the Solaris Operating System to garner support. Apparently it is already a well established community dedicated to more than just the version of Solaris just opened, but supports packages for earlier versions of Solaris as well.

This is pretty sad. For the longest time I had frequented sunfreeware.org until performance made it more cost effective for me to build the software on my own. If blastwave has decent performance and gets the most recent packages for a given software suite built as quickly as they did for Subversion 1.2.3, it would be in the Solaris communities best interest to support it.

This is the biggest problem I think we have right now. While the internet is a commons that anyone can contribute to, it is very difficult to fund efforts like this that provide a community service without a revenue model behind it.

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Over the last week or so I’ve started listening to a podcast called the Gillmor Gang over on ITConversations. I’m getting a ton of value out of it and figured I would make a quick mention of it here.

The two episodes I’ve listened to so far are the January 21 episode, in which the Gang talks about RSS and blogging, and the February 4, 2005 episode on which Dan Bricklin is the guest and the gang talks about innovation.

Both podcasts were quite interesting and explain 4-5 very different views on the technology discussed. The really nice part about this podcast compared to other tech podcasts is the fact that each of the participants are long time members of the technical landscape, including Steve Gillmor, contributing editor at ZDNet, Doc Searls, senior editor at Linux Journal, Jon Udell, lead analyst, InfoWorld Test Center, and Dana Gardner, senior analyst at the Yankee Group.

The podcast format is these four guys (and one guest) on the phone just talking about the trends they see upcoming in the industry as related to the show topic.

This show is just one of many that I am finding valuable. I am more and more amazed with the concept of podcasting in general with each new show I find. Over the years, I have been extremely current on some technology while, since I work for a large corporation, I have not quite had the time to keep up on many of the trends going on. Mostly I rely on my people to give me a heads up to something (and to communicate it in such a way that I think it is important enough to spend time on). Consequently, there have been a lot of things I haven’t been able to keep up on in the last couple of years.

The quality of podcasts from an information standpoint that I have come across are outstanding. The time shifted nature of the medium allows me to listen to the content when I have time, during an hour+ commute to work. If a show is longer than my commute — no problem. I turn off the iPod and when I get back in the car and plug it in, its right where I left off in the show. If something is referred to in a previous episode — no problem. They are all available for me to go back and download. This is an area in which mass media radio just doesn’t give me the same value.

There are quite a few podcasts that I have been turned on to over the past few months that have given me much needed perspective shifts. One of them is the Gillmor Gang. For overviews of things going on in the news, I like GeekNewsCentral. For software development related information, I’m really enjoying the DrunkAndRetired podcast.

Each one of these I have had referred to me by someone in the blogosphere, by people I don’t even know. What a great world we live in nowadays!

When I first received this little white box for fathers day in June, my mind raced with the possibilities of not having a bazillion Cd’s in my car. I had no idea how much a little device could open up the world to information on my terms - when I had the time to listen. As it stands right now, I rarely listen to the music I spent a whole weekend ripping off of my CD collection.

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Jonna’s company sponsored a trip for their employees and families to the Milwaukee Zoo. I haven’t been there since the eighth grade and enjoyed it quite a bit.

We took over 100 pictures, but all of them didn’t turn out. Unless the lighting is perfect, our camera tends to blur easy. Either the camera sucks or the photographers (which consist mostly of Kelsi, Jonna, and myself) suck out loud.

Anyway, you can see the pictures that did turn out over at the Flickr album. All in all, we had a lot of fun and got some pretty decent pictures, my favorite aside from the ones of the kids being the one shown below.

At first glance all I saw was the red type. When seen like that, it strikes one as being a little extreme.

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I found this article this morning on Yahoo! News about John Darrigo, owner and operator of the Dog-Gone-It Pet Waste Removal Service in New Hampshire.

Doing a search on Google you find a ton of businesses just like this with names like DoGPiLe Patrol, PoopButler, and MineSweepers.

I’m not sure this is a business that I would want to be in (my solution would be to not have a dog if I had the voting power), but after thinking about it for a bit, I see two big strengths about this line of business. The first is that it is definitely a job that not many people enjoy doing, and therefore if you find customers like me, you could make a killing. Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of clever names you could come up with for a company which performs these activities.

Luckily, I’ve found this article so that I can point our kids over to it. Now we can just say that picking up the yard is prep for their future rather than just having to throw out a “because I said so”.

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