Cooper Stevenson's blog

Hello, Everyone!

I was delighted to find presentation slides (in Open Document format) posted to the LinusFest Northwest's home page!

I found an overwhelmingly positive response from Innotech attendees to OpenSourcery's offerings. The booth-goers had a way of 'juicing' me up as we started talking about OpenSourcery's products and services. I had more fun that I should get paid for; I'd like to see us have Innotechs held quarterly!

People would kind of peer over curiously at the little computer set on our booth's table. "He's about a hundred bucks," I'd say. Amazingly, people became even more interested; it as if the clouds of skepticism had parted just enough to bring warm, golden light that is 'open' and 'value.'

I thank goodness for my engineering background--it was so much fun translating folks' IT needs into solutions; I'd draw up quick network diagrams on whatever was handy--in one case I used a spare napkin!

For the executive crowd, I know from experience that they've generally not time for detailed technical drawings or drawn-out explanations. "I'm going to air-drop an IT solution customized to your needs. I'm going to provide you something that works," I would tell them with no shortage of confidence and know how to back my claim.

On the software side I heard one CTO say, "There's a real need for outsourcing advanced web development work away from the internal engineering staff," one attendee said, "the operations staff are certainly bright but they're not always equipped to build out quality custom content."

Exactly. I could see before a hesitation for outsourcing development under the proprietary model. We're different--we hand you the keys, we give you the source code! I must say that more often than not, a business paying ramp-up costs for internal software development just doesn't make for a lot of value.

We had a great time showing off our thin clients to the Education sector. I was excited to see the educators show a real interest in the product the Sys team worked so hard on; from lab to real--world. We're scheduled to give live demonstrations in the coming weeks!

Just for fun (it's Friday afternoon) here's an image depicting some usefull information derived from your digital camera, your GPS, and a handy script:

The image above depicts exactly where you took each image with your digital camera. My script reads through each of the image timestams, organizes them, and calls another script that goes out to a GIS server (USGS in this case) and automatically pulls down the image's GIS coordinates. The script then labels each image (represented as a number) to coincide with where the photo was taken.

My dream for thin client computing is finally coming to fruition. Three conditions must be met, in my opinion, for successful thin client deployments. New hardware with lower costs now bring TC's to the forefront as a practical and reliable solution for IT. I'm seeing the "new" paradym take place; it's like looking over a mountainous landscape who's early morning sun lights the valley below.

If you're not familiar with thin client technology, here's a primer.

The three joining technologies for making thin clients cost-effective and practical for general purpose use are:

• Inexpensive Hardware
• Fast/Inexpensive Networking
• Web Based Applications

Traditionally the greatest argument against thin client technologies is always related to the cost of the server and the networking equipment. "Why should I install an expensive server and networking equipment when I can just put a PC on people's desk and be done with it," people will ask, "I have to buy the PC's anyway, so why should I create expense with the rest?"