about time...

A year later, an EU commission finally determined that Georgia started the war in South Ossetia. Something tells me that the news networks will hesitate to admit that they totally f'ed up the reporting of that conflict...

st. barack

Just read that Obama is scrapping plans to install the missile shield in Eastern Europe. That was one of Bush's dumbest ideas, and he's had quite a few of those.

So is it time to canonize Barack yet?

decordova

After slaving away on deck duty for a few hours, Susan and I decided to reward ourselves with a trip to the DeCordova outdoor sculpture park. The stars lined up perfectly, as the admission was free for Bank of America members.

"But wait, Stan," you might say, "your Bank of America account was closed a while ago!" Yes. Yes it was. But I still held on to my Hello Kitty card, heh heh!

The weather was perfect, and we really enjoyed walking around the forested reserve and discovering cool installations, like this one:

For some reason, I've been craving a Zingerman's sandwich the whole day, so we tried to find the closest substitute in downtown Concord. Main Street's Market came really close with its salmon BLT, so I left happy - right back to more construction work.

no somerville today

Ohhh man, we almost made it to Senator Kerry's town hall meeting in Somerville, but just as we were about to take off Oreo landed awkwardly after jumping off the front stairs and started whimpering. He seems OK now (good, 'cause he ain't got no insurance!)

Luckily, it looks like the town hall meeting went well, and that Senator Kennedy's dream wasn't smeared days after his passing. Still, what a debacle this healthcare debate has been so far...

handshake

Finally, my laborious labor has produced something I can show outside of work. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project that’s looking into using social networking to connect folks at MITRE to the people we work with on the outside – sponsors, research partners, vendors, etc. Sure, we have some tools now, but they’re either email-based or just too heavy-duty due to security regulations. We needed something more persistent but at the same time more open, and a social network may just fit the bill. Why do I say “may”? Well, that’s the whole point – we’re prototyping an approach, and if it doesn’t meet our needs, at least we’ll at least know why.

So anyhoo, after searching far and wide, the team established that we needed our own environment (sorry Ning/Facebook/LinkedIn, you ain’t getting our data!) We picked Elgg, an open-source platform that so far has been working reasonably well for us. The biggest problem I’ve faced on the user experience side, however, is that Elgg is endlessly expandable with plugins written by the open-source community – and those plugins are endlessly inconsistent. Just getting something that could pass for a reasonable navigation scheme took a few Stan-years... and I’m still not done.

Since this is a research project, we’ve had an equivalent of 1 - 1.5 full-time developers working on it, which meant I had to get my hands dirty with PHP - and actually, that felt strangely liberating. Normally, I’m working with locked-down COTS products, where even the smallest change takes. With this Elgg-based thing, everything is up for grabs.

Our baby, christened “Handshake”, is out on https://handshake.mitre.org. Check it out, although there’s only so much “checking out” you can do without being invited by a MITRE employee. If you’re interested, shoot me an email, and I’ll pull you in.