Month: December 2005

VNC vs. WebEx: VNC wins!

I’m running a little activity at work tomorrow where I need to allow several remote people to show demos (mostly web-based and likely on Firefox) on a laptop hooked into a projector in a conference room full of people watching the demos. This sounds like a job made for WebEx, right? I hadn’t used it in a while and thought maybe it was a good idea.

Wrong. Bad idea.

After messing around with WebEx for two hours and getting absolutely nowhere (on a 1.8 ghz machine with 1GB RAM), I gave up. I tried starting WebEx in Firefox (it worked, but my colleague couldn’t join the meeting, Firefox stopped responding, and I had to kill the Firefox process), then tried starting WebEx in IE (where it insisted that install an ActiveX control — yuck — and froze my machine). It broke in lots of different ways, and I had to reboot my normally quite stable XP machine.

I decided to give the RealVNC Free Edition a try. Within about five minutes, a colleague across the Internet was remote controlling my laptop (through a couple of layers of NAT). Easy, easy, easy. The only downside is that the sharing is one-to-one, but that’s all I really needed in this case (since the projector will handle the one-to-many sharing).

It looks like WebEx just isn’t particularly Firefox-friendly ( James Governor suggests MS Live Meeting instead of WebEx if you’re using Firefox). If you search for Firefox in the WebEx Knowledge Base, though, you’ll find a page (Article ID WBX21942 — can’t figure out their URL scheme to link to it properly!) that says you just need to download the “Meeting Manager Installer for Netscape Navigator” and install the Firefox User Agent Switcher and tell Firefox to announce itself as Netscape 4.8. Maybe I’ll give that a try the next time I use WebEx — if I ever use it again.

Some old systems (almost) never die

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Solaris running on Oracle (having long since moved over to Linux/MySQL for most things), but I was recently contacted by the VP of Technology at one of my old employers with a question about an Oracle database I had set up there about six and a half years ago. They were migrating to a new server from the server I had set up and had a minor problem in the process. I was offline for most of the day yesterday, so by the time I got back to them, they had solved the problem. As far as I know, the old server had been running fairly problem-free for six and a half years since I set it up (and I was an amateur Oracle DBA at best — absolutely no credit is due to me).

Say what you want about Solaris or Oracle, but from a pure technology standpoint, it’s a pretty problem-free combo in my experience. I’m not saying I’m recommending that combo now, but it definitely works (at least that old version).

Now, back to your regularly scheduled Linux / MySQL program. . . .

Syndicate Conference next week

The Syndicate conference is next week in San Francisco, and I think it’s well worth checking out. Last year, the conference was an interesting mix of traditional media types who wanted to know what all the RSS/blogs/syndication fuss was about along with the folks who were creating the new world. This year, Doc Searls is the conference chairperson, so you know it will be both thoughtful and entertaining. Here’s the schedule and how to register.

I’ll be there both days, so if you want to meet up, drop me an e-mail (chadd -at- yahoo-inc -dot- com).

(Disclosure: I am on the Syndicate advisory board, though not nearly as active as last year when I moderated two panels and wrote a bunch of the session descriptions.)

John Battelle, the Yahoo! TechDev Speaker Series, and the "Flickrization" of Yahoo!

John Battelle visited Yahoo! yesterday and wrote about it on his blog (see perspectives on the talk from Jeremy, Matt, and Nate. I took the blurry photo you see on your right). I invited John to speak for somewhat obvious reasons (he just wrote a book about search) but it was more than that. As the old saying goes,”journalism is the first draft of history.” If you look at John’s track record with Wired, the Industry Standard, the Web 2.0 conference, his Searchblog and now his book, John is the rare journalist who often seems to be writing the first draft of the future. That’s impressive.




John Battelle @ Yahoo!

Originally uploaded by jchaddickerson.

As Nate notes in his blog, these talks are a regular weekly feature at Yahoo! known as the “TechDev Speaker Series” — “TechDev” because it’s run by the Technology Development Group within the Search division at Yahoo! (that’s my group). Bradley Horowitz (our leader extraordinaire) started it last summer and handed it over to me a couple of weeks after I started at Yahoo! in August. His only instructions were: “Find interesting people for the series. Surprise me.” Bradley had already set the bar high by bringing in people like Chris Anderson, Mark Pauline, and Philip Rosedale (among others).

Since I took over the series, other than John Battelle we’ve had (in no particular order):

An impressive list without a doubt (and thanks to the folks within Yahoo! who’ve helped me bring some of them in). The subject matter of the series is intentionally broad and multi-disciplinary in nature. Chris Anderson spoke about the Long Tail, while Mark Pauline told us about hacking together fire-breathing robots for his performance art pieces with Survival Research Labs. Lawrence Lessig talked about how broken U.S. copyright law is in the digital domain and was followed the next week by Mark Hosler of the experimental and sound collage “band” Negativland, who gave us the artist’s perspective on the issue.

I think the multi-disciplinary content and focus of the speaker series as it continues to develop hints at something I’ve been noticing about Yahoo! in my first four months there. While Yahoo! continues to attract top talent with stellar computer science backgrounds, there’s another type of person Yahoo! seems to be attracting as well in what some have called the “Flickrization” of Yahoo!: folks who skipped the CompSci degree but built amazingly cool things on the web (I think the two complementary sides of Yahoo! are evident in the backgrounds of two Yahoo! employees recently named as top technology innovators under age 35 by the MIT Technology Review, for example). To me, working at Yahoo! these days is a heady mix of art and science (just like the web itself), and I’m glad to be a part of it. It rocks.

Browser breakdown and other stats for my blog

I’ve never paid much attention to browser usage on my blog, but I just looked and it breaks down like this according to Measure Map (from November 5 to the present):

  • Firefox: 48%
  • MSIE: 35%
  • Safari: 13%
  • Other: 4%

According to Measure Map, my readership is 71% U.S., 5% Australia, 5% Canada, 4% UK, 2% Germany, and 2% India. Overall, I had visitors from 59 countries.

I would like to thank the 2 visitors each from South Africa and Brazil. Also, thanks to the 1 visitor from Tunisia — please stop by and visit again sometime.