Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Video, Anandeep

An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

anandeep — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:49:00 GMT

Michael Koziarski (a.k.a) Koz is one of the core group of about 12 people who holds the keys to the code repository for the Rails framework (also known as Ruby on Rails). They’re all listed on the Rails core page with name and mug-shot. (I checked, a guy who looks like the Michael I interviewed has his mug shot on the page!).

According to his bio there “Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) is a software consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. After a successful stint as an enterprise Java developer, he switched to rails shortly after the first public release. He’s a contributor to The Rails Way and maintains a personal blog.” That’s as good a intro as any so we thought we wouldn’t improve on it!

Michael was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit and I was able to spend some really entertaining and educational time with him. I even showed him the lab! I think he may have enjoyed his time here as he wrote about us in a blog entry.

I enjoyed talking to him – and he stayed to talk to us about Rails, the dev process and other stuff despite being very close to missing his flight!

Anandeep

Video: An Interview with Ruby on Rails Core Team Member: Michael Koziarski

Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra

anandeep — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 23:32:00 GMT

Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate in Philosophy and is interested in the intersection of politics and technology – specifically information technology.

Samir and I share more than our interest in Open Source (or Free Software as Samir prefers to call it!). Our fathers trained as Air Force pilots in the Indian Air Force in their teens and knew each other very well. In fact Samir (being the renaissance man that he is) has co-authored one of the most successful books on Indian Air Force history “The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965”. We contribute to an “open source” site on Indian armed forces history – you can read one of my articles (shameless plug!) on air war history here.

Samir is a Free Software proponent and recently he was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit to exchange ideas with a wide audience from both within Microsoft and from all around the globe. I jumped at the opportunity to interview him about his forthcoming book “Decoding Liberation” and to debate with him our views of how software would evolve.

Samir’s site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/ (his co-author, Scott Dexter's site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sdexter) and he writes a blog on Free Software which has the same title as his book.

An introduction to the book is here.
Routledge has also given us permission to post the first chapter of this book which is available now for pre-order.
Video: Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra

Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of our Friends at Teamprise

MichaelF — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT

Awhile ago we interviewed Martin Woodward from Teamprise regarding their suite of client applications that provide cross-platform access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Today Teamprise announced that they are providing complimentary licenses for the Teamprise Client Suite to developers who plan to use the license to access Codeplex. This allows projects with developers on the Eclipse IDE along with anyone on the Mac, Linux or Unix platforms to use Codeplex for hosting their projects.

To obtain access to the client go to the sign-up page.

To provide some additional information on this release and Teamprise, Anandeep sat down with Martin to catch up.

Video: Cross-Platform Access to Codeplex Compliments of Teamprise

Martin's Blog about this announcement can be found here.

Can the Linux Kernel be More Maintainable? Anandeep interviews Professor Stephen Shach

anandeep — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:15:00 GMT

Prof Stephen R. (Steve) Schach is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the Vanderbilt University.

Port 25 met up with him while he was visiting Seattle, Washington in picturesque Kirkland, Washington on the shores of Lake Washington.

Steve (he hates being called Prof Schach!) believes in gathering data to make predictions. While he accepts that there may be interpretations of data he thinks gathering the correct data is paramount.

He credits Open Source Software with kick starting the Empirical Software Engineering movement saying “We could count the number of lines of code in gcc and Linux – we couldn’t do that with Windows 95!”.

In this interview we discussed empirical software engineer/computer science and some of the work Steve has been doing. This includes his work on the proportion of time that code is in bug fixing mode and his work on global variables in Linux.

The latter work was found to be controversial by the Open Source Community. Steve thought that all he was doing was counting the number of global variable in Linux vs BSD and stating that Linux had far more than is considered wise! This was surprising to Steve, but isn’t that much of a surprise to the people who know how much passion Open Source can generate!

Steve’s website is here http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~srs/ and you can find his publications on his website.

Video: Anandeep interviews Professor Stephen Shach”

Crash Data Collection and Analysis

anandeep — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 18:35:00 GMT

Archana Ganapathi is a Computer Science graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Archana has been working in the area of Empirical Computer Science (which relies on real data rather than theory or simulation) and some of her research is on computer crashes. She worked on collecting data on Windows crashes and is in general interested in the idea of using real data to advance Computer Science.

Here home page is http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~archanag/ . Her paper on Windows crashes is “Crash Data Collection: A Windows Case Study” and another interesting paper she has written is “Why do Internet services fail, and what can be done about it? “

The Open Data Repository link referenced in the video is http://institutes.lanl.gov/data/. This is a temporary link with a public data set as there is currently not an official link for the repository that will eventually be hosted by USENIX. We'll be sure to pass along the official link as soon as it is available.

-Anandeep

Video: Crash Data Collection and Analysis

The Hardware Vendor's Perspective

MichaelF — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:09:00 GMT

Anandeep Interviews James Jech, Senior Manager of Global Alliances and Business Development from Dell Inc's Enterprise Systems Group, to discuss how the evolution of hardware has impacted how users choose an operating system and how they deploy their infrastructure.

Video: The Hardware Vendor's Perspective

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Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa, on the ROI of Code Quality

jcannon — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 20:01:00 GMT

Anandeep interviews Khaled El Emam, Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Khaled's research looks very deeply at how bugs and software defects introduced in software development impact an organization after purchase and deployment. His assertion, the more bugs and issues in deployed software, the more downtime, support and maintenace costs are incurred post-purchase. Thus, evaluating code quality upfront can be a helpful tool in predicting ROI. The less bugs, the less code maintenance. Khaled's research looks at both commercial and open source software development projects and has uncovered some interesting insights.

Video: Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa, on the ROI of Code Quality

Related Links:
ROI From Software Quality - Samples from Khaled's Book
Check out ROI From Software Quality (Amazon)
Learn more about Khaled El Eman (Short Bio)

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Meet: Anandeep Pannu

admin — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:41:00 GMT

Welcome Anandeep Pannu to the OSSL. In this interview Sam and Anandeep discuss his background and role on the team, see what you can expect from Anandeep on Port 25...

Video: Meet: Anandeep Pannu

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