Changeset 2848:

Added redirect_to :back as a short-hand for redirect_to(request.env["HTTP_REFERER"])

A few impressions from the first ever E€ Open Source Convention in Amsterdam.

• The main street between central station and central square was really full with people. Stuffed.
• I got into my smoke-free room on the third attempt. First I was handed a smoking room, then a smoke-free room with nonfunctional key and finally everything went fine. Good excercise.
• I went through the two last hours of my presentation on the spot in the grand ballroom. My Rails tutorial has been attracting most people of all the tutorials (yay!) so it was moved there instead of Amsterdam room.
  

• The hotel is poshy. You thought the breakfast buffé on the Baltic sea ferries costs something. Think again. Having breakfast in the wintergarden here makes you 22€ poorer.
• I’m feeling both pretty excited and surprisingly little nervous about the tutorial. I guess the practice is starting to pay dividends.
• The free conference wifi doesn’t stretch all the way to my room so I ended up paying 12.50€ per day to Swisscom. The whole conference would have been 60€ but I’m here only for 3 days so where’s the bargain?
• I won’t be wearing an AJAX Amsterdam shirt during my presentation. I contemplated buying one in the airport but then the whole idea struck me as a bit too corny so I let it for Paul Everitt in his Model-Driven AJAX tutorial.

I created a Flickr set for the convention and will be updating it during the week. Stay tun

I will start a week-long journey today which will include first an orienteering relay in southwestern Finland and then EuroOSCON in Amsterdam.

My tutorial in EuroOSCON is my first big presentation so you can imagine I have some butterflies in my stomach already. The flexible path and show-don’t-tell theme of the tutorial hopefully makes it a bit easier to survive the three-hour gig. I’ve practiced the whole tutorial already quite a few times and still have a few days left to hone the last glitches. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited.

As my tutorial will be a whirlwind tour through Rails, it pays off to at least know what’s Rails is about before the tutorial. Coincidentally, ONLamp.com has just launched Curt Hibbs’s article ““What Is Ruby on Rails”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html” that does a great job explaining what Rails is. My tutorial will then tell you how that will benefit you.

The only people who never experience failure are those who are not pushing the envelope of what mankind is capable of doing.

::: {style=”text-align:right;”} —John T. Preston in Success Factors in Technology-based Entrepreneurship :::

UPDATE We lost. I am now (or at least in a few weeks) officially a criminal. And so are at least a million other Finns. Welcome to the club.

If you’re living in Helsinki area, please take part in the demonstration against the new copyright law that is about to be ratified by the Finnish parliament tomorrow. I’m deeply concerned about the new law that will make

• circumventing copy protection (e.g copying music from DRM CD’s to my iPod),
• talking about DRM circumvention methods
• and group purchases of books from Amazon.com

illegal.

Not only is the proposed law arguably unconstitutional (even according to the constitution committee of the parliament), it is also so strongly against the common sense of justice that I find its passing utterly incomprehensible. That doesn’t seem to stop the parliament from making the decision, tho, so I’d be grateful if as many of you as possible would gather around the parliament house tomorrow and relay my wishes to the MP’s.

The manners the local recording industry executives (“If you’re on Mac, by a CD player”) and ministers have shown during the battle is a whole ‘nuther story so I won’t bore you to death with it. Just drag your friggin’ arse to the demonstration, will ‘ya. Please. Pretty please.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.

::: {style=”text-align:right;”} —Paul Graham in What Business Can Learn from Open Source :::

If you would go and propose that CGE Mannerheim was wearing hipsters on his journeys, in some circles you’d undeniably get mugged. However, here’s some proof for you, linked by 43Folders:

And no, <em>{=html}I</em>{=html} didn’t have to look up who Mannerheim was.

One of the mythic figures behind ArsDigita, Aurelius Prochazka has stepped into the Rails world and started a typo -driven weblog.

ArsDigita was one of the most influential companies in the early days of my web hacker career (or shall we say, studies). It seemed to be so different from the traditional dotcom shops. It had a human voice. It was honest. Although I was too young for the dotcom boom (and not quite as obsessed about ArsDigita as Guan), I followed the (at that time sliding) chapters of AD very closely.

One of the things I remember best about the battle between Philip Greenspun and the VC’s is this comment made by Gary Jin in Lars Pind’s ““Goodbye ArsDigita”:http://pinds.com/blog/one-entry?entry_id=2867” :

ArsDigita WAS something special. While other company sent cute, young female recruiters deep into the hallways of UCLA Enginner, aD send down Aure and the problem sets. Instead of sugar coat problems, aD had public shame. If something is bad, people would say, “it sucked!” There was vision, the brain and yes, plenty egos as well. It was an awesome place to be…while it lasted.

So imagine my reaction when Aure today appeared to the Rails mailing list and told he was building a user/group management framework on top of Rails. And in his own, non-apologetic way, no less :-)

Welcome on board, Aure!

OK, it’s time for me to become an adult as well eventually and one obvious symptom of that is that I started to work on my Master’s thesis this Monday.

I’ll try to be as open about the writing process as possible, partly because of the subject and partly because I hope I can get some feedback from you.

Here’s the preliminary setting for my thesis:

• Research problem: Small software businesses as part of an open source community.
• Research question: What does it give to (and on the other hand demand from) a small business owner to be a member of an open source community?
• Point of view: Small software business owner¹
• Subquestions
  • What can you win by contributing to an open source project/community?
  • What specific requirements are involved?
  • What are the potholes you should avoid?

I have setup an Amazon.com wishlist for the books I think are relevant for the thesis. If you have read some of them or know some other books that you think would be spot-on, please leave a comment. The same goes for online articles, of course. I found this huge list of papers about Open Source and made already an initial screening on the papers. But finding the best and most relevant for my purpose is not easy so if you know about some great piece you think I should take a look at, please let me know.

The theoretical background for the thesis will be the network theories of the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group) school, of which I know nothing yet. However, the goal is more to give practical advice to business owners than to be very theoretical. Therefore the meat of the thesis will consist of advice collected through interviews. So if you feel like you would have experiences to share and a lot to say, contact me and we can make up a time for an interview.

Yay! Since David won’t make it to Monday’s Ruby on Rails tutorial in EuroOSCON (17-20 October), I will step into his nice shoes and give the presentation. I’m both totally excited and nervous about the gig, but I’m sure the former will take over eventually.

That said, if you haven’t yet registered for the first-ever EuroOSCON, it’s about the time to do it now. But wait! Before you register, check out this David’s article. It might be worth hard cash for you.

And when we’re at it, here’s the headshot my father-in-law candidate took for the presentation with his ““little toy”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jarkko/7796967/”. Just so you know to run when you see me coming down the aisle.