Builder.COM article number 3 has been posted — Bootstrapping A Software Development Project. Feel free to read and send me comments. I’m also looking for topics for future columns for Builder.COM and others. Suggestions?

For those that happened to visit here and note that it was off-line for the last couple of days, I offer my apologies. I’m not in the habit of connecting to my web site every day and consequently didn’t notice that it was down until I went to make a post today. If anyone notices that it’s down, feel free to email me and let me know. Obviously this is not a mission-critical web site, so my monitoring of it is sporadic at best.

I run this site on a Linux box, which tends to be highly reliable. Except for the last couple of days, of course :-).

It’s been about six weeks since I’ve posted anything, but it’s not been for lack of things to post. It’s just been a busy and fun summer. Now that Labor Day is approaching, I thought I’d turn in an essay on what I did this summer.

First of all, let me point out the animated image on the “Links” sidebar. That animation was created by Uri Kirstein, a designer. It was an unsolicited contribution to the site — Uri wrote the following in an email to me —

This has got to be one of the most bizarre ways to meet someone. Although it does say something, the fact that I happened to pick the same letter and number (randomly) as you did for your domain.

Again thanks for the image, Uri.

I’ve written a third article for Builder.COM called “Bootstrapping a Development Team”. It hasn’t been posted yet — I expect to see it around the second week of September. When published, there’ll be a link on the site with more shameless self-promotion.

I’ve been pre-occupied of late developing a new piece of software. There’s nothing like a complex, multi-threaded piece of software to keep one out of trouble during the summer. In the process, I’ve run into some very good open source software that has helped me out. I’ll post future columns on these components, including an embedded data store and XSLT processor. I’m not ready to talk about the details of this piece of software, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty cool and is sparking the imagination of the few folks who know about it.

Fortunately I didn’t waste my entire summer writing code. In between, I mixed in a little motorcycling, including a great trip to visit the Amish in Lancaster PA. I also saw Rent on Broadway in NYC — this show definitely qualifies as one of the better shows I’ve seen.

I should probably put in a few words about things that concern me in the technology world, but right now things don’t seem to have changed significantly. I’m still actively watching the RIAA and MPAA to see what their latest blunders will be. The RIAA, of course, has had it’s website hacked twice recently and has been suffering from a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Maybe this is just the public opinion poll they were looking for. I’m sure the RIAA thinks it’s just a few bad apples — the world’s a happy place when you are delusional. And from there, the push for Digital Rights Management solutions continues, in hopes of solving the music copying problem. CNet reports on JVC’s new anti-copying scheme for CDs — perhaps that will become something interesting. It sounds like an IBM initiative from not long ago, that was tied to pre-keyed discs.

In the meantime, I’m contemplating acquiring an MP3 player, probably one of the 20-30 GB units. I’ve been using my iPaq with a CF card to hold a few MP3s, but I can’t imagine that anyone actually bothers to continually load one of the 64MB or 128MB MP3 players with music regularly. It got old after the second time. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know what I want to listen to until the moment I press play — I need my options. Anyone out there have a unit that they particularly like?

I suppose that’ll be it for now. I’ll post more entries soon diving down into some of the specifics of this post.

Gene Kan, a pioneer in this emerging era of peer to peer technology, died June 29th, apparently of suicide (see John Borland’s article on CNet). I’ll tell you up front that I didn’t know Gene personally, but his work put him among the top names in the P2P community.

Kan was most identified with Gnutella, the protocol that Limewire and similar file sharing applications use to conduct searches. His startup, InfraSearch, was acquired by Sun, but I have always figured that Sun bought the company so that he would work on JXTA.

I’ve heard Kan speak several times and his ability to engage with the crowd was much better than with your typical techie. Kan and Sean Fanning are often put side by side as the guys who got the whole P2P revolution rolling, but they represented two very different things. Fanning developed an alternative namespace in which systems could connect to each other by a manual search of a large directory (Napster). Kan, on the other hand, contributed to the development of a protocol on which many other applications have been developed.

He was way too young to leave this planet — his contributions had only just begun.

• Gene Kan’s Blog
• Yaroslav’s Tribute