What can the tech world do to help with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath?

Josh Bancroft writes:

I just can’t believe that a major U.S. city is practically completely submerged under 20 feet of water. Millions are homeless, and will be for weeks, if not months. Basic service infrastructure is wiped out, as well as most communications. Can we do something with WiMAX here, to get VoIP and internet access to the area? Information about loved ones, evacuation routes, emergency services, etc. are in extremely high demand right now, and there’s no way for most people in the affected area to get any of it. The geeks of the world are trying to put their heads together to come up with ways to help.

Not that I have any specific ideas, but I’d love to see Intel come up with something to help, similar to what we did with 9/11. While the loss of life is nowhere near other disasters that have happened (9/11, the tsunami, etc.), the magnitude of this disaster is huge. Almost incomprehensible to me. Let’s put our heads together and come up with some ways that we can help where perhaps no one else can…

Josh also has links to citizen journalist coverage of Katrina.

My heart goes out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Watching the anguished face of one father whose wife was swept away when their house split in two, my mind instantly flashed back to Sri Lanka in December, where I’d seen the exact same expression in a victim of the tsunami.

We are all united in the transience of life and the preciousness of our families, and no degree of first world technology can entirely protect us from the risks of being torn apart from our loved ones without warning.

I’ve added relief for Hurricane Katrina victims to the list of recommended charities for Berry 411 and encourage everyone to do what they can.

thebogles.com is now up and running on a dedicated machine hosted by ServerPronto.com. My previous host, python-hosting.com, had served me well as a shared host for this site, but I was beginning to need root level access to do some of the things I wanted to do.

In my survey of the options out there, ServerPronto was unique in offering a dedicated server at $30 a month, which almost seems to be too good to be true. That includes 200GB of traffic a month on a 100MB connection. The server itself is on the low end– 256MB of RAM, 40GB harddrive, but considering that’s all mine and I can run a lean Linux distribution that’s adequate for my needs.

So far, everything has gone quite well. The system was deployed for me within a single business day and was speced as advertised.

What’s the catch? I’ve seen complaints on discussion that ServerPronto isn’t good about answering emails and requests for support. If you need support, ServerPronto may not be a good choice, but if you can administer your own machine they are a uniquely affordable option.

Jobster has raised $19.5 Million in venture capital funding capital in a round led by Mayfield and joined by our existing investors Ignition Partner and Trinity Ventures.

We’re delighted to welcome Allen Morgan to our board, joining John Connors and Jon Anderson from Ignition and Patricia Nakache from Trinity.

I’m personally excited by this because it will allow us to attack the full range of technical challenges in the targeted job advertising and recruiting space.

Helping companies go beyond active jobseekers means helping them to connect with high quality professionals wherever they are on the internet. Doing this right involves a whole range of challenges.

For instance, we need to help companies rank prospects based on their connections to the company and fit for the job, maintain relationships with tens or hundreds of thousands of professionals in a talent network, target their positions to the right places on the internet, and measure the effectiveness of various online sources.

Conversely, we need to help professionals stand out from the crowd and get noticed for the right jobs. Finding job listings is easy– getting past resume spam and standing out is the hard part. Leveraging trusted relationships to the company is one way to do this, and we will be layering on a number of other paths over time that will help the best rise to the top.

Online job classifieds are a frictionless but broken marketplace for both companies and professionals, filled with both resume spam and job spam. Companies spend billions advertising their jobs with a low return on investment.

The solution is not just aggregating more and more jobs– the solution is fixing the marketplace itself. Technical innovation provides us the path to do so.

So now we know at least part of the client side development that the Kirkland Google team has been working on– see David Bau’s post on Google Talk on the Google blog.

If you connect the dots, you can infer much of the rest of what they must be working on. Back in June, Adam Bosworth was writing in Ajax Reconsidered about how the browser isnt good at listening to external events, such as “an XMPP message or a VOIP request or a data-changed post for an ATOM feed.”

The XMPP comment was a clear leading indicator of Google Talk. Anyone reading carefully between the lines might have broken the story months early. Let’s suppose that the rest of the message is also a leading indicator of what Google would like to do with the browser.

Clearly, Google would have prefered to deliver Google Talk through the browser, but as Adam notes it’s just not possible using today’s technology.

Bosworth continues “Obviously, these things are fixable from a technical point of view. This isn’t rocket science. But if only one browser fixes them, it is unlikely to help at this point. We have a sort of deadly embrace. It is hard to predict how this will play out. History has shown that when innovation is stifled, sooner or later some one runs around it who has nothing to lose and changes the rules of the game completely. I’m confident that this will happen here as well.“

He goes on to say that truly mobile computing on smart devices will drive this innovation… neither WAP nor Java offers the right development model today. That may well be the case, but my own experience with working with the carriers suggests that are substantial barriers to the adoption of innovations such as a mobile browser that supports eventing, offline operations, and asynchronous network operations.

I think the mobile angle is a bit of a red herring. There has been long standing speculation that Google is interested in building a Google browser, and Bosworth’s comments give clear hints about a few of the areas that they’d like to invest in. (Not that they wouldn’t mind defining the mobile browser space as well, but I think the PC work will come first.)

Perhaps Adam’s has some inside knowledge that makes him so confident that the weaknesses in the Ajax model will get addressed.

What I don’t believe has been fully considered is the likelihood that Google’s efforts will span both the IE and Mozilla platforms. Note Adam’s comments about “But if only one browser fixes them, it is unlikely to help at this point.” It can’t be pure coincidence that many of the people hired by Google in their Kirkland office were original members of the Internet Explorer team.

Google is likely to drive adoption of their browser extensions by riding on the popularity of an application like Google Talk. You’ll download the bits because you want to chat, but in fact you’ll be buying into an extended browser platform that can deliver a variety of real time experiences that aren’t possible in today’s browser.

With Microsoft under close watch for anti-competitive practices, it now enjoys few of the advantages of linking products to Windows and all of the disadvantages (long ship times, complex interdependencies, political infighting, calcified decision making, and so on.)

Even without the legal concerns, the massive network that is Microsoft is arguably already s starting to collapse under its own weight. Yet blindly, almost out of force of habit, Microsoft continues to pursue integration strategies that are harmful to its health and long term survival.

The only cure at this point is radical organizational makeover. The idea of splitting Microsoft up for its own good into multiple independent companies isn’t new, but Adam Barr has a unique spin on how this might happen. He cleverly ties the breakup to the retirement of the Ballmer and Gates. It’s almost impossible to imaging Microsoft without Ballmer and Gates, so why not let the breakup happen then?

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: The Answer: “There has been some speculation about who will succeed Bill and Steve at Microsoft…

The problem is that it’s hard to imagine Microsoft without Bill and Steve, and it’s hard to imagine whoever succeeded them having enough respect from employees to impose their vision on the company.

So my solution to who will replace Bill and Steve is…nobody will replace Bill and Steve.

See, there’s another problem. Microsoft is becoming a huge company, and it’s not clear that any person, even Bill or Steve, can really keep it all in their heads, and use the size of the company to its advantage…

n recognition of the difficulty of coordinating among 60,000 employees, Microsoft has already divided the company into seven “P&Ls” (as in profit and loss) … Each of these have their own CFO and in ways function like independent companies, but they all report back to Bill and Steve.

So my idea is that when Bill and Steve retire, they do so together, and at that moment Microsoft is split into seven companies. Actually six companies, because client and server and tools are too intermingled to separate. Microsoft Research either sticks with one of the six, or else gets spun off into a separate company owned by the other six, everything cross-patented to the hilt. Shareholders in Microsoft get shares in all the companies, and then it’s up to the stock market to decide.

Some would suggest this should happen now, with Bill and Steve taking the client and server and tools part (producing a nice echo of proto-Microsoft, circa 1983). But hey, Bill and Steve have earned the right to stick around and kibbitz as long as they want. But once they’re gone…time for the Big Bang. “

O’Reilly has announced a new book entitled BlackBerry Hacks, to be published in October.

Blackberry Hacks includes information of special interest to Blackberry power users and Blackberry developers. I’m looking forward to getting some good inside tips from other developers!

I have contributed two articles that will be published in Blackberry Hacks, one on power user features of Berry 411 and the other on some of techniques used to build the application.

Formulas are a useful feature of the Hibernate Object-Relational mapping layer; they allow you to specify “raw” SQL to compute the value of a property in a mapping file.

For example, a sample formula property might look like this:

< property name=”autoRating” formula=”(select apr.rating from view_auto_prospect_ratings apr where apr.job_id = job_id and apr.user_id=user_id)”> … </property &gt’

Unfortunately, there is a significant bug/misfeature in formulas; I note it here to share the workaround I found.

The bug is that anything that looks a column reference without an explicit table name is prepended with the alias of the main object table. In the example above, this would be the right thing to do for job_id, but the wrong thing to do for rating, which belongs to another table. The workaround is to qualify explicitly qualify columns with a table name whenever possible, as I did here with “apr.rating”.

Wang Yu has a good overview article on J2EE clustering entitled Under the Hood of J2EE Clustering.

Even if you’re not a believer in Enterprise Java Beans, the discussion of how different containers handle HTTPSession failover is interesting.

This looks promising:

MochiKit - lightweight Javascript library

MochiKit makes JavaScript suck less

MochiKit is a highly documented and well tested, suite of JavaScript libraries that will help you get sh*t done, fast. We took all the good ideas we could find from our Python, Objective-C, etc.Experiencee and adapted it to the crazy world of JavaScript.

I was also impressed by the web syntax highlighting performed by dp.SyntaxHighlighter.