(Actually from last night during the flight, but then I got home…)

As part of my new position for CampusEAI I’ve had a fairly aggressive travel schedule over the past few weeks (the cost of not relocating). It has however forced me to become much more closely acquainted with the airlines (and Continental in particular) and prompted a few observations:

1. Upgrades: Getting upgraded is nice. The biggest problem? Generally people who travel enough to get upgraded are flying on business — and — hence flying at the same time as others flying on business (who fly even more). It’s almost disheartening to watch half the people waiting for the flight standup when they’re boarding Elite Access. Still, it’s nice when it happens.

2. Delays: So far out of 6 flight segments between Newark (EWR) and Cleveland (CLE) I’ve been delayed 3 times. It doesn’t seem possible to get delayed by less than about an hour either, though so far I’ve been fortunate enough with nothing longer than about 2 1/2. Still, a 50% hit rate is pretty… good? bad?

3. Airline Clubs: Worth every penny. If you travel a lot. Normally I try to cut my arrival at the airport pretty tight with my flight departure, to grab more time at home with the kids, but during those aforementioned delays… There’s a big difference between an hour delay in the concourse fighting it out with other grumpy bench residents, and an hour delay while sitting in the lounge on the wifi, by the bar, munching on an apple.

4. Security: Surprisingly I’ve actually gotten used to security — to the point where someone I was traveling with was like “wow — that’s crazy” and my instinctual response was “eh”. Of course, I no longer travel with belts, a watch, coins in my pocket…

5. Pricing: This is kind of a crazy subject. Right now — a Sun-Wed roundtrip between EWR-CLE is ~ $260. A Sun-Tue roundtrip? ~ $850. Whaaaat!?!?! I’m not sure that there’s any way to explain that other than trying to segment the market into business travelers,since who else would stay less than 3 days? Though, if I book 2 weeks at a time, with 2 weeklong stays that just happen to overlap… hmmm…

In general, business travel (especially regular, sustained travel) has been something to endure. It feels good to vent though

Sitting on a flight, returning from the Sakai conference — still trying to take everything in. There’ll probably be more musing on the significance of specific items coming up, but things that struck me enough to want to brain dump were:

• There was wide consensus during the planning sessions that there’s a desire to focus on quality: reliability, testing, performance, and other traits, over new feature development.
• The community is moving from a development -> production mindset. The transition of many of the core schools from pilots or development efforts into full-blown production instances has certainly changed priorities and outlooks.
• Increased desire to pick up open-standards in preference to inventing our own. JSR-168 (Unicon demoed a cool Portlet-Tool for Elluminate integration), JSR-170 and the good work Ian is doing to integrate with repositories like Jackrabbit and Xythos, CAS Authentication (vis-a-vis Dan M.’s sweet CAS-embedding UserDirectoryProvider)
• There’s a lot of commercial activity around Sakai. RSmart, Unicon, Oracle, IBM, bit players like Mark Norton & Zack Thomas. I sat in a presentation about the work I did with FIDM for CampusEAI. I even talked with another developer who has already resigned (as of Jan 1) from his university to join his part-time venture (with others) full-time. Certainly a large, vibrant marketplace.
• Many sub-groups are organizing around Sakai. In addition to our very own NYC Regional group, there are groups in California, Australia, the Netherlands, and other places. They’re holding events, sponsoring training, and moving forward.
• It’s not just regions — there are an increasing number of functionally aligned teams. Developers, Designers, and Managers are the best organized and served. I also saw a lot of User Support people or academic technologists as well. This is the group I suspect may be the next to organize — a CAFE track focused on bringing user support people up to speed or sharing experiences/resources would probably be really valuable.
• Lots of parallel activities. Many examples of SIS integrations, library integrations, documentation & training, tool development. Unfortunately, communication barriers and other difficulties seem to be producing several duplicate/parallel efforts (e.g. Yale’s SignUp tool, EDIA’s signup tool, Stanford’s efforts around this space) though there is a desire to collaborate.
• Some stuff is still too hard: authentication integration, CourseManagement integration, libraries work, documentation, training are all pain points, especially for smaller teams/schools.
• Strong community. It’s easy to get lost in a group of smart, affable people moving towards a common purpose. Had an excellent time, and there’s a good sense of camaraderie weaving throughout the community. People are friendly and helpful.
• Twitter – yeah, it’s kind of narcissistic, but at an event or convention it can certainly be a lot of fun. Both to do self-organizing (e.g. dinner?) and to pull in people who are in the circle, but not present.

Made it into JA-SIG: ran into Susan on the flight from Newark, which was kind of surreal. The irony was that immediately before seeing her at the gate, I was thinking to myself how strange it is that I’ve never run into anyone else I knew while travelling out to one of these conferences.

Arriving at the hotel was nice, must have done something right since there was a cheese plate sitting on the table in my room Dinner was good too — a bunch of committee types went out to this brazilian-style BBQ place Texas de Brazil which was great, if far too much food.

The flight into Amsterdam from Newark was about an hour late, unsurprisingly. Once here things were pretty smooth — the train to Amsterdam Central Station was very nice. Once I got to Central station, I spent a few minutes trying to sort out the right tram to take to the Movenpick for the Sakai conference, then decided it was simpler just to walk since I could see the building. It was hot, but Amsterdam is a neat city, so (minus the sweat) not bad. For future reference, 10:30AM is clearly too late to walk, especially with luggage.

Tags: sakai, conference, travel

A US defence contractor has received more than $1bn in funding to build a prototype unmanned fighter aircraft for the American military.

Northrop Grumman will build at least three full-scale flight prototypes for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) over five years

The contract win will allow Northrop to continue work on its X-47B combat drone

The Future of Portable Video Players – But Mr. Jobs outlined three reasons he doubted video players would ever approach the success of audio players – not even counting their high price ($700 and up) and the time-consuming difficulty of loading huge video files onto them. It was clear from his answers that Mr. Jobs has done quite a bit of thinking about the topic. [ "(extlink)NYTimes":http://www.nytimes.com ]

I think Steve’s nailed it in one that video is a vastly different medium than audio, and so is going to demand a differently shaped solution than just slapping a screen onto an iPod. So what would a video iPod look like? How about a system, built around the current iPod that could be layered to support whatever was necessary? Continue Reading »

Space.com reports that SpaceShipOne has managed it’s first successful powered test flight. On the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight, it seems to have marked the first successful supersonic manned flight by a non-governmentally sponsored effort. Quite an accomplishment for a privately funded effort. Seems like the X-Prize competition has served to motivate quite a number of excellent projects for private, economical manned space flight.