Blog | Archive for May, 2008

Open Visualisation Workshop at the Trampery

By jan | Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Trampoline Systems is hosting a visualisation workshop this coming Saturday, 24th May, organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Come along if you’re interested in open source visualisation technologies (Prefuse, Flare etc.). The goal is to have a very informal setting to talk about various aspects of visualising data. Find out more in the official announcement.

Hope to see you here!

Posted in Coding | No Comments »

On the hunt for a Marketing Executive

By rebecca | Monday, May 19th, 2008

Trampoline’s looking for a Marketing Executive. It will be a challenging and fun role, ideal for a graduate or second-jobber.

If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, please give me a shout! rebecca [at] trampolinesystems [dot] com, or +44 207 253 6959.

UPDATE: This position has now been filled.

Tags: Jobs, Marketing
Posted in Jobs, Organisations & Technology | 1 Comment »

Creating DMG Files Without MacOS X

By jon | Monday, May 19th, 2008

I’ve put together a script for creating DMG files without using OS X…it requires Linux, I’ve tested it on Kubuntu 7.10 but it should work on anything recent.

Run the following commands:

# This gets and builds a patched version of Apple's diskdev_cmds package which will work on Linux
wget http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/mb_boot_tv/diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
wget http://www.ecl.udel.edu/~mcgee/diskdev_cmds/diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2
tar xzf diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
bunzip2 -c diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2 | patch -p0
cd diskdev_cmds-332.14
make -f Makefile.lnx

# Create symlinks to the mkfs and fsck commands for HFS+
sudo cp newfs_hfs.tproj/newfs_hfs /sbin/mkfs.hfsplus
sudo cp fsck_hfs.tproj/fsck_hfs /sbin/fsck.hfsplus

# Get and enable the hfsplus kernel module
sudo apt-get install hfsplus
sudo modprobe hfsplus

Now that's done, you can use the following handy bash script (must be run as root) I've written to create a DMG file which contains the contents of a directory you specify on the command line.

#!/bin/bash

# DMG Creation Script
# Usage: makedmg <imagename> <imagetitle> <imagesize (MB)> <contentdir>
#
# imagename: The output file name of the image, ie foo.dmg
# imagetitle: The title of the DMG File as displayed in OS X
# imagesize: The size of the DMG you're creating in MB (Blame Linux for the fixed size limitation!!)
# contentdir: The directory containing the content you want the DMG file to contain
#
# Example: makedmg foo.dmg "Script Test" 50 /home/jon/work/scripts/content
#
# Author: Jon Cowie
# Creation Date: 02/04/2008

if [ ! $# == 4 ]; then
	echo "Usage: makedmg <imagename> <imagetitle> <imagesize (MB)> <contentdir>"
else
	OUTPUT=$1
	TITLE=$2
	FILESIZE=$3
	CONTENTDIR=$4
	USER=`whoami`
	TMPDIR="/tmp/dmgdir"

	if [ ${USER} != "root" ]; then
		echo "makedmg must be run as root!"
	else
		echo "Creating DMG File..."
		dd if=/dev/zero of=${OUTPUT} bs=1M count=$FILESIZE
		mkfs.hfsplus -v "${TITLE}" ${OUTPUT}

		echo "Mounting DMG File..."
		mkdir -p ${TMPDIR}
		mount -t hfsplus -o loop ${OUTPUT} ${TMPDIR}

		echo "Copying content to DMG File..."
		cp -R ${CONTENTDIR}/* ${TMPDIR}

		echo "Unmounting DMG File..."
		umount ${TMPDIR}
		rm -rf ${TMPDIR}

		echo "All Done!"
	fi
fi

Hope it’s useful!

Tags: dmg, Mac, os x, software
Posted in Coding | 6 Comments »

Gartner Top 10 Disruptive Technologies in 2008

By peter | Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Gartner is showing their top 10 disruptive technologies for 2008 right now here in Barcelona, and there’s some great stuff in here for us. I’m going to stick with the top 5 as we have plenty to think about there, and frankly the bottom 5 are a bit less clear so there’s not as much in there which says “do something now!!!!”. (List is ranked in importance by Gartner.)

Link to pic.

Multi-core – we’ve already factored SONAR for multi-threading, so we are in good shape to take advantage of multi-core solutions, provided of course we are on top of any OS that supports multi-core well. I think for Debian 64 we are pretty solid at least up to the number of cores we’re likely to see in the near future.
Virtualization – as you’ve seen in some of our other posts, we view virtualization as a great way to manage a complete SONAR install. It’s not the only way, of course – eg a VM is vastly larger (and often somewhat slower) than a native solution, however virtualization lets us build a complete working OS, JVM and SONAR solution here in the Trampery without having to worry about the underlying OS or Enterprise environment. VMWare FTW! (Hypervisors, as it turns out, are really important. Who knew?)
Social Networks and Social Software – w007! SONAR FTW!!! Nice to see Gartner putting this as number 3!
Cloud Computing and Cloud/Web Platforms – Gartner is basically saying that IT needs to just get over the whole “my stuff can’t run on a computer with their stuff” thing. Gartner note that Enterprises should know they can survive this because any enterprise which doesn’t actively BLOCK Google is sharing significant computing with, well, everyone else using google, and yet still everyone uses google and nothing bad seems to happen. We would love to run a hosted environment for customers on a third party like Amazon, however so far we’ve found that the security and overall risk-management concerns have prevented this. I look forward to trying this out – it could really free us up in some ways that could be quite handy for both us and for our customers.
Web Mashups – this is something we are, quite recently, seeing a lot more interest in, primarily from other Enterprise-serving vendors who see SONAR as providing them with some great capabilities they would have to work really hard to build themselves. We’ve started work on a meta-data framework and API which we think will radically improve what we can do in a mash-up environment, so stay tuned for more information on that.

All in all, it’s pretty cool to be either directly providing or directly supporting so much here.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Habla Espanol? Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, Barcelona

By peter | Friday, May 9th, 2008

I will be in Spain next week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, representin’ Trampoline. There are some cool sounding sessions, and evidently there is also a concurrent Gartner event (why oh why do people run two events at once in the same place? it’s hard enough with 5+ tracks in one event!) for us plucky new-comers to the enterprise scene. I will be at both. My interest is in where Gartner sees Enterprise computing heading over the coming months/years, connecting with technology providers, checking out our competition, and meeting with customers.

It should be interesting as I don’t speak Spanish. Much as I delight in saying “Berthaylona”.

I begged my 12 year old son to ‘splain to me how I might go about ordering food, or even just bottled water, when my vocabulary consists of cerveza, a few Mexican food names, and por favor. (I speak Simplified American Taco-Truck quite well, thank you very much). He said he’d try to send me a few sentences in email, which means that evidently some 12 year-olds know of this old-fashioned thing called “email”. Not very many. Like maybe 2. That’s a trend right there! I’m sure Gartner is all over it.

And yes, I do know about the interweb and it’s language-ness, and translation books. It’s just been a few years since I was last in-country where I don’t speak the language AND I’m travelling on my own. I’ve become wussier in my old age. In China, Germany, France, Japan and even the UK, where they speak something called “English”, I have or had the benefit of translators…

Anyway, if you are at either show, please let me know. We can drink some, er, agua and eat some, er, frittata? : ) If you speak Spanish and will be there then hey, you are my new BFF! Peter (at) trampolinesystems (dot) com

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Marketing and morals: No woman is an island?

By rebecca | Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

In which a sticker not only ignites the latent inner arts critic of your correspondent. It arouses her rampant, explicit feminist.

One of the four or five women I spoke to on the Web 2.0 Expo floor declined a “No man is an island” sticker with the rebuttal “I’m a woman.” I was dumbstruck, a rare occurrence when discussing Trampoline. Why did this matter so much to me?

First, it was a failure of a piece of work I’d done. That hurts. We created a material with which to engage people, and on this occasion it failed. A small minority of our target audience, admittedly, but it still sucks.

Now the second, overwhelming reason. I often ponder the disconnect between my personal and professional codes of conduct. On occasion the space between them is wider than I’d like, sometimes I am pleased by their convergence. Critics might argue that I should just be myself at all times – especially seen as Trampoline is meant to be an easy-going, do as you please type workplace, or be 100% corporate automaton – but that doesn’t fit here either. I do find the conflation of, or discrepancy between, work and personal behaviours interesting and a helpful lens at work: hardball for women, anyone? In fact, a core principle of Trampoline’s technology is that personal and work behaviours aren’t that dissimilar.

My current method is to push until I’m blue in the face about matters related to work on which I believe comment necessary. So I emit a constant mantra of “hire women, hire women” and try to call people out when they say something I consider offensive or derogatory to women. That’s because I believe having a woman-positive workplace is vital and that women-positive workplaces aren’t formed without effort from all involved.

But I am careful. I would hate anyone telling me to vote Boris (off topic, but it was very dispiriting to return from a Portland, Oregon so full of optimism for Obama, to a London run by the abhorrent Boris Johnson) so I in return I don’t ask anyone to sign petitions against the reduction of the time limit for legal abortion proposed in the amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I would love it if you did, though. And besides, my begging quota is most effectively used at work for work stuff.

The Web 2.0 Expo stickers didn’t always bear the legend No Man is an Island. We mocked up an early version which read No man (or woman) is an island.

We nuked this version because:

a) it didn’t look clean enough

b) women were still an afterthought

c) it’s not a real quote

d) Donne’s habit of woman as land metaphor has always pained me

e) we’ve got the sisterhood, right?

I like to think that if we had used this version, the woman would have accepted the sticker. But, perhaps ironically, I still wouldn’t change it.

The use of he/she, man/woman is one crux of my personal and professional conduct conflict. I use “she”, rather than “he”, always in my personal life. In work, I try to use “she” first, then “he”. I don’t like “he” as a catch all but I’m not sure it’s right to use “she” throughout as our audience is primarily men and I don’t want to undermine the good impression Trampoline makes through a writing style that could alienate them. My compromise is to put women first. We’ve been second for too long. Incidentally, I encountered the only drop-down list of titles in online shopping I’ve ever seen at work. It was on Sainsbury’s supermarket. Depressing, much?

Moral of the story? I am glad that woman called Trampoline out and I wish I had an answer for her. Speaking up is always better than remaining quiet. At Portland airport on Sunday I saw a woman with a canvas bag that read “Speak your mind – even if your voice shakes”. These words are from Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers. I will now decline from the opportunity for a rounded, cosy “together we can change the world” conclusion. I’m not convinced it’s that easy, but I’d be pleased if you inferred that logic and acted accordingly.

Posted in Organisations & Technology | 2 Comments »