Pasero and Patterson are both very accomplished musicians in their own right. Richard Patterson also is the director of the Omni Concert Series which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Richard’s maininfluences are classical Spanish guitar, where Stevan seems to have a wide variety of influences including Bosa Nova, Tango and Jazz. Together it is a wonderful hybrid.

Their performance at Enzo was mostly Latin American music and even the maluguena was the classic Maleguena by Lecuomo, a Cuban. The set included a Bosa Nova sequence, pieces from Venezuela, Cuba and Argentine Tangos. The Tangos ware possibly in honor of Mauro, our host and the driving force behind Enzo. Mauro is Argentine. I loved every piece.

What really makes this special though is the venue and the whole experience. Picture 40 of your close and new found friends, getting together for wine and a delicious meal at a house on the beach followed by a private concert by two of the best Spanish guitarists you have ever heard. It doesn’t get any better in my book.

The original Trek DS2 fork was an early air fork with limited travel and almost no adjust-ability. It was good at the time, but times have changed and the seals were starting to go. I wanted to upgrade it with a modern fork with more travel, but didn’t want to drift to far from the original design center and look. I also wanted to keep the existing vBrakes. I ended up finding a good deal on a Manitou R7 with VBrake bosses and 100mm travel.

The DS2 is a threaded fork, swapping it out with the R7 also meant upgrading to a threadless headset and stem. I went with

 
• Manitou R7 Absolute Fork
 
• Cane Creek S8 Headset
 
• Ritchey WCS Stem

The whole job cost about $400 and 2 hours of work. It was time and money well spent. I had never replaced a headset or cut a fork before but with advise from friends and The Big Blue Book it went smoothly.

After the conversion, the bike climbs like a bunny on mate. The fork is very light and with the fork locked out is super stiff. On descents, the bike gives me more confidence than my SuperLight with its old Manitou Skareb fork. That fork will be the next one to go.

I picked them up at Chain Reaction Cycles. The shipping cost to the US was surprisingly low and very prompt. I’ll definately do business with them again.

But it is a problem. The 2002 Shimano FC-M952 has a very functional but totally non standard design. It is spiderless and has an unusual 68/110 four bolt pattern. The replacement rings for this kit are almost impossible to find and when you do they are expensive. I could replace the whole crankset but now we are talking hundreds of dollars for something equivalent to the XTR.

After a lot of googling I found that Middleburn in the UK makes an XTR M952 replacement spider. This spider replaces the original spider from XTR M952 cranks, allowing you to run your choice of 4 bolt 104/64 BCD chainrings.

MTB Tandems sells these and other Middleburn components (scroll to the very bottom of the page). I may just keep the old XTR BB abd crank arms and convert to Middleburn chainrings using this adapter. Or any other 64/104 BCD chainrings for that matter.

Ebay to the rescue! Last week I picked up an used Santa Cruz Superlight on eBay and I’m tracking the shipping progress hourly. The photo is the new old Superlight.

Out of the box, Ubuntu has the Gnu JVM and JDK installed. You can install the Sun JDK 1.6 using the Synaptic Package Manage. Great!

But after I did that, I was surprised to see that the default JVM and JDK were still pointing to the Gnu versions. A little googling turned up this howto install and configure the Sun Java Development Kit.

But this is really just a beginning. We need to translate the interest and good will into engagement.

"I’m in here 60-80 hours a week right now. It’s way less depressing than long hours in a cube farm with an uncomfortable desk and phone books to boost the monitor height."

 
• Continuous integration and automated release builds using Hudson
 
• Maven repository management using Nexus
 
• Scripts, poms, etc to support consistent builds

We have a couple of projects that are building now and we’ll be having a code jam Thursday to get a couple more up and running.

For our pilot, we are using a CollabNet hosted Cubit environment. We are not sure if we will stick with cubit or not. We are also trying to figure out what level of build support that we will offer to projects, if we will charge projects back, etc.

We have our initial pilot projects in place and are in the process of making the code open source ready. Mostly that means improving the documentation, adding more unit tests and changing the copyright information in the source. As of today, we have 90 registered users who are all Intuit developers. Only a handful of these are active contributors but we expect both numbers to increase when we start showing the site to external developers.

We have been spending time recently working on the contributor and licensing models. We’ll be rolling that out when we get legal and executive agreement. We will be going with a business and developer friendly contributor agreement. For outbound licensing, we are looking at a liberal license such as Common Public License. Once we decide, we’ll be updating code.intuit.com with the details.

This is one fun project.

Summer 2008 088, originally uploaded by robertstacylarson.

I just got around to uploading a set of photos taken last summer to Flickr. This one was special. It is from the Lyle Lovett concert at the Paolo Soleri amphitheatre in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lyle was playing with the large band and the show started just before dusk. That is Lyle in the Camel colored suit. He is a dapper fellow.

The show started just before dusk and it was one of those magical Northern New Mexico evenings where the sky is exploding with thunder and lightening and vertical rainbows. This shot captures a bit of that magic.

One of the things I don’t really like so much at Intuit is that the development tools and processes sometimes get in the way of getting stuff done. So I decided to focus my whitespace time on figuring out a better way to get stuff done.

What does that mean? Well, the idea is to use open source tools and practices to accelerate development and improve overall quality. The initial focus is on open sourcing some of our technologies in support of our Intuit Partner Platform developers, but it will grow beyond that if we are successful. Our thinking is that if we solve for external developers and get that right, we will be on the right track for internal developers to.

By working in the open we believe that we can give developers earlier and more transparent access to technology and by using a community process, we believe that we develop consensus earlier.

But I’m getting beyond myself here - we’re not even ready to give out the URL to the community site yet.

What I can say is that we just started a pilot this month. In the first phase we will be getting our initial components "open source ready" and getting used to working in a more open and meritocratic fashion. This phase will go for a couple of months, and if we pass the checkpoint, we will start inviting external developers for the second phase.

This is kind of related to work I did previously at CollabNet where we worked with a lot of companies like Intuit. We are using Source Forge Enterprise for the pilot and so far, we are pretty happy. I’ll be blogging about some of our experiences as we go.

We are pretty excited. This is a first for Intuit.

I started this post with Word. One feature that is nice is the photo uploading. Here is an old photo of my guitar from my PC … 

But there doesn’t seem to be a plugin for inserting images from Flickr directly into the blog like ecto has.

Hold on! A little googling turned up Microsoft LiveWriter. Here is an update from LiveWriter using the Flickr plugin:

Very cool.  This a very nice tool and an even better flickr plugin. You can find the Flickr4Writer plugin here.

Being a blog tool LiveWriter is more tuned to blogging than Word for sure. There seem to be a gazillion plugins and you are not tied to MS Live. The downside? It still feels a bit heavy, especially when compared to something like ecto.