Jicksta.com

The telephony industry sickens me. I make it a point to follow things closely. I sift through the nauseatingly boring Del.icio.us VoIP feeds, catching the occasional library I hadn’t seen before that mildly captures my interest. I hear that SuperBigComm has bought TinySmallVox every week or so. I subscribe to the feeds of the VoIP’s biggest bloggers (of which there are surprisingly few) and usually read their posts last, procrastinating the tedium. I don’t unsubscribe and keep the faith because I want to believe this industry is going somewhere.

But last night my feeds agreed with my doubts. Resounding through the VoIP blogosphere, O’Reilly announced they have cancelled their Emerging Telephony conference and blog. To help paint the picture, Emerging Telephony was widely considered to be one of the actually fun, innovative conferences every year in this space.

Therein lies the problem. Too little fun and innovation exists in this industry to make a full conference out of it.

Remember the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the omnipotent Q places all of humanity on trial for being a savage, inferior species? Q asserts that the years since the first time he placed humanity on trial has been squandered with virtually no progress toward enlightenment. I’m convinced Q was so pissed off because of this ridiculous blemish in our history. We are a savage, uncivilized race apparently.

This is a frustration I’ve had since I created Adhearsion. The framework’s name reflects my attempt to unify this godforsaken wilderness. I’m herding cats and fighting the good fight simultaneously.

But I’m not giving up yet.

There are many wonderful things brewing under the covers of the new version of Adhearsion. It’s a maverick, opinionated approach but it may just work. The effect could be truly disruptive:

• A significantly next-generation approach reaches hackers who can finally develop actual open-source VoIP applications.
• An open-source ecosystem forms.
• More people become professional VoIP developers.
• Additional global expertise increases the number of open-source VoIP applications.
• The ability to host the applications becomes predictable and inexpensive through standardization.
• Startups form around new applications.
• A few startups succeed and contribute back.
• Years of contributions improves software quality and lowers barrier to entry.
• Disruptively innovative companies catch big telecom companies with their pants down and chip away at their market share.

The fight will be a long and difficult one, though the next baby step is to get Adhearsion v0.8.0 out the door. Near the end of the this month I’ll outline the changes in the new version of Adhearsion which should see a release by RubyConf on November 4th, 2007!

On August 10th I gave a presentation about Adhearsion at the Ruby Hoedown conference. Despite only two hours of sleep the night before, I think it came out quite well.

The ConFreaks guys were there and recorded my presentation. It’s completely available online on their website here. It can also be downloaded in AVI format at 640×240 or 960×360.

Here are a few snapshots from my talk:

Perhaps "roadshow" isn't the right term but I am doing quite a bit of Adhearsion and VoIP promotion. Below is the current list. As I land more, I'll expand it:

Past speaking events:

• Emerging Telephony, San Francisco, Feb 27th
• Gotham Ruby Conference, NYC, April 21st
• Boulder/Denver.rb, May 15th
• Asterisk Developers Conference, Atlanta, May 22nd

Upcoming speaking events:

• Cluecon, Chicago, June 26th
• PDX.rb, Portland, July 3rd
• Ruby Hoedown, Raleigh, Aug. 10th
• Lone Star Ruby Conference, Austin, Sept. 8th
• Astricon, Phoenix, Sept. 24th

Unconfirmed Events:

• FOSCON, Portland, July 26th

If you are a member of a Ruby brigade or Asterisk users group and would like me to present, shoot me an email. My contact info is available on the Adhearsion contact page.

And I can’t wait. The conference is going down early next year and caters to the high-end Telecom world. The biggest names in the industry will be there and will get to see all the exciting work I’ve been pouring into Codemeccca. What a great opportunity!

I’ll be giving a ninety minute hands-on workshop showing why Adhearsion rocks by example of a fictitious new Web 2.0 service starting with VoIP integration. What’s more, speakers get free tickets. I had a blast at Astricon 2006 here in Dallas and ETel I’m sure will become a lifelong memory. Just looking at the lineup this year gets my mouth watering.

Isn’t it strange when you have to face the realization that some incredible part of your life is over? That’s how I feel now.

I just got back from the Digium HQ in Silicotton Valley – geographically known as Huntsville, Alabama. Since Codemecca’s top-super-pseudo-secret Adhearsion project is a framework for Asterisk development, we’ve been working together on a few pretty sweet new technologies I think the entire Asterisk community will enjoy.

Mark Spencer, one of Geekdom’s greatest geeks and an enormous personal inspiration, treated me to a fabulous four days over there. I brought my laptop and pitched camp right in the middle of the biggest concentration of Asterisk professionals in the world: its developers! Digium’s own success is undoubtedly a result of Mark’s fantastic leadership and his ability to find such wonderful comrades.

My lips are still pressed tightly shut about Adhearsion, but I can announce a release date: Christmas 2006. Grab my feed and stay tuned!

I’ll be holding a free Defeat DRM sticker distribution next Tuesday (October 3^rd) for those interested in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Since there was such a demand in the Dallas area for stickers, the Free Software Foundation’s DRM Elimination Crew has sent me a roll of 500 warning labels and 200 other stickers for me to distribute around the metroplex.

I want to see some creative uses of these stickers next Tuesday. Here are a few ideas for those wishing to participate:

• Hand them out to shoppers going into electronic stores, talk to them about DRM, and ask them to wear the sticker whilst they shop – ask to take their picture wearing the sticker.
• Go into the store and hand them out to the assistants and say “Hi, I’m here with regional management, and I need you to put these stickers on all the Blu-ray DVDs we carry. Can you do that now please, it’s very urgent. We have a consumer inspection team arriving here in 30 minutes. When your done, come and see me, I will be in the office”
• Give them to people you see wearing the white ear buds. Tell them not to buy from iTunes.
• Put them on the Microsoft computers at work or school and let your colleagues know that their devices are infected by DRM.
• Give them to friends and ask them to do the same.

If you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and this sounds like something you’d like to attend, visit our page on the Defective by Design website to sign up and keep up to date with what’s going on.

Everyone else can read more about this controversial subject by checking out this page about DRM.

Thanks to the University of Texas at Dallas’s Association for Computing Machinery, I will be teaching a Ruby seminar on campus. If you live in the Dallas area or would like to make it, contact me via email through Jicksta “at” Gmail.com.

The seminar is publicly described as “Learn to program with Ruby for fun, the web, and the enterprise” because I will be making the seminar useful for everyone. This includes everyone from the quintessential hacker programming simply for fun to the IT manager wanting to explore the benefits of using the Ruby technology.

I’ll be covering by example the language’s syntax, its idioms, its perks and what you need to comfortably get started coding. Each example will be taught for its usefulness, the breadth of knowledge required to understand it, and how well it applies to improving a business model.

If you haven’t checked out Ruby, this a great opportunity. Tell your friends and spread the word!

So Mike and I finally decided on an official company name after months of deliberation. Our choice was a possibility that’s been right in front of out face since the beginning, but the neurons apparently never connected properly.

We’re Codemecca.

This was a domain name I registered, oh, like two years ago based exclusively on my lust for its awesomeness. Until now it’s not been put to much use.

It’s actually the perfect name for us: coders drawing things together. No public word yet on our project, but it’s coming soon—mid-September soon.

It’s time to dust off this old blog. Jay needs some place to put this! After exactly one year of no activity, this blog is finally getting some action.

So, months in advance I ecstatically buy tickets to an Eisley concert coming to Houston. Time passes and the day finally comes. This was May 4^th — right on the tail end of my high school career.

School lets out at 2:35 p.m. and I rush home to map directions to the Meridian, the concert’s venue. Initially, my partners in awesomeness attending the concert were my roommate Grant and friends Emma, Joanna and Denise, but Denise and Grant both decide against it last minute, leaving two tickets up in the air. Dayna, another friend from school, mentioned that Grant would potentially sell his ticket to her since she is an Eisley fan, had been to a concert the previous year in the same venue, and after all, is the individual responsible for getting me into the band.

So I call Dayna after school and ask her if she still wants to go. She tentatively accepts after giving it some thought and discussing it with the matriarchal powers. I pick her up as soon as she is ready and we hit the road.

The drive is the quintessential Houston escapade: several wrong exits, feelings of complete disorientation, quaint drives through ghetto slums. Perhaps thirty minutes after our intended arrival time we find the place. A rather run down vacant lot resides across the street from the venue, but no sign designates that humans are expected to park their cars among its weeds, sand pits, and shattered asphalt. We do it anyway, parking somewhat parallel to a curved white streak, the only one of its kind, which can be interpreted as a parking line if your eyes are squinted enough and the tilt of your head is just right.

Leaving the car, we double-check no stray money remains in plain view and triple-check that all doors are completely locked. As I cross the street I look over my shoulder, half expecting the car to be already towed, ticketed or stolen. Nope, still there! The humid Texas summer air quickly becomes our next concern as we consider the appalling thought of waiting three and a half hours under the sun for the doors to open.

Traces of life are entirely absent at the Meridian. Garage doors and the looming ancient warehouse feel of the place imply we’d somehow chosen the wrong Meridian in Houston — surely Eisley wouldn’t have chosen to play in an abandoned shell of building last tended to decades ago.

But a few knocks on a set of double doors reached by a steep flight of metal mesh stairs evoke the appearance of a large man through a second-story window wearing a flowery shirt angrily gesticulating we go around. Expressing gratitude to the disgruntled insider, we walk down the flight of stairs, circle the building, and walk up another. Ah, bonjour open door!

The small foyer is as humid as the air it’s exposed to. Two tables, one covered in bundled fliers for other bands and one with a cash register sit unattended. As we stare at each other, uncertain and half-laughing at the silliness of it all, an big elevator door opens — the industrial kind with doors receding into the floor and ceiling like a mouth — and a man pushing a cart loaded with beer emerges and quickly disappears behind a set of double doors behind which we briefly see a display of Eisley t-shirts and posters. A few continually uncertain minutes elapse and a middle-aged woman cheerfully pops out from behind the same doors, stops to assess our presence, and starts the first dialog we’d had with anyone since we got there.

She introduces herself as Kim and the three of us engage in small-talk. She and Dayna speak about last year’s concert at the Meridian and its miserable lack of air conditioning. She assures us this year the Meridian’s air conditioning is working properly — almost too properly. Speaking to her I can’t help but think how strange it is that this woman, someone clearly with the tour, wasn’t telling us kids to beat it.

But she bids us a happy concert and leaves out the doors to the stairs leading back to the street. We’ve stood unmoving for over ten minutes and the uncertainty starts making us feel somewhat nervous. Then our impulsive, mischievous teenage sides come out:

“Hey, when that guy with the beer went through though those doors, there was a stand with t-shirts on it?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Well, since we’re the only people here not with the concert, we could probably go through and stand there — if anyone asks, we can say we’re looking at the stuff. ” “Haha, you want to?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

So we put on our game faces and stride through the double doors, into the lovely air conditioning, and stand in front of the wares trying to create the facade of belonging. No one catches on! Save a few glances of doubtfulness, we received none of authority or animosity. We talk it out for five minutes and then feel we’ve been standing too long. Let’s go sit on those couches!

So we walk in further and crawl on a large conspicuous red loveseat in direct view of a strange Russian cartoon from the sixties or seventies being projected on the wall in front of us. Simultaneously people-watching and cartoon-watching, we sit for a few minutes and relax. Man, we made it!

Then a member of the band I now know to be Sherri walks by us. Woah! The unexpected appearance evokes poorly concealed ear-to-ear smiles from both of us. She checks up on a few guys working menial tasks and disappears as quickly as she came.

Having just experienced the apex of our day thus far — seeing Sherri perambulate — we look for new sources of excitement. Our interest turns to watching the cartoon with increasing fascination.

I notice the dancing animated sailors and ballerinas’ close synchronization with the loud general-selection music playing over the venue’s overhead speaker system and pointed it out to Dayna. Watching more intently, we laugh hysterically as the drama of the cartoon unfolds perfectly with pivotal points in the music. The average, modern music and idiosyncratic, artistic cartoon couldn’t have been matched better.

Then we hear it.

Eisley! In another room somewhere! Drowning out the other music with their sudden practicing! The adrenaline rushes into us and a few minutes of antsy sitting become enough reason to force us off our butts and on the hunt for this beautiful sound. Following through a small hallway down which Sherri disappeared previously, we walk into an unexpectedly large room full of people setting up things, bartenders wiping down bars, and a stage. A stage… Ahem… with Eisley playing on it!

We seat ourselves on a couple of stools at a small table and radiate exhilaration. Here we were, hours before the event was scheduled to start, watching Eisley practice, discuss the show, quarrel, check microphones, and exchange flippant jabs at each other. Of this entire night, this image of seeing their personal sides raw and unrehearsed on the stage still lingers most visibly in my mind.

After an hour or so Eisley moves off the stage to the V.I.P. so the opening band can practice. Dayna and I sit in the wonderful atmosphere and converse. This is another fantastically memorable moment of the night because Dayna has always been (and still is) quite an enigmatic source of intrigue to me.

As the minutes float by workers slowly emerge to finalize the decorations in the stage room. Dayna suggests I ask to lend a hand so I approach a young woman about my age putting up Eisley posters. She informs me the last of the posters had been put up, but followed me back to where we’d been sitting and joins us. Much like the woman before, she introduces herself as Stacy and small-talk succeeds. She reminisces with us of a time when her little brother once went up to a hulking bouncer at a show and bravely asked him “What’s it like being so big?” She jokes that she’ll never get used to having big bouncers around her. At least she has a yellow wristband to prevent her from getting bounced!

After five minutes or so Stacy walks away and we remark what a nice girl she was. If only we knew who she was.

Following Stacy’s departure our attention shifts to a middle-aged man, half balding, on-stage helping Sherri tune her guitar. Sitting indian-style with the blonde girl in her early twenties, his patience and knowledge both reflect from his peaceful countenance as he both assists and encourages her. Knowing the band is closely familial, we correctly inferred this man was her father and the father of the other members of the band, excluding Garron, the bassist cousin.

When finished he walks off the stage onto the floor just as the woman we’d met in the foyer emerges out of the hallway and walks past us giving us a wink. He grabs her hand and lovingly spins her into a loving hug. Tightly held together, the couple watches the girls in the room with a seemingly profound sense of pride. We then realize this woman whom we’d met earlier was the mother of the four siblings in the band.

This sight too offers a glimpse far beyond what “back-stage” access like this yields. Seeing the band members’ parents in this way shows us that behind Eisley are loving parents — people with devout love for each other and their children both. The success story of Eisley is best reflected in the familial success of their home.

When finished setting up, the decent opening band began practicing and our attention shifted back to talking between ourselves. The remainder of the time until the show began was spent much in this way.

A periodic countdown until seven o’clock, the time at which the doors were to open, shouted by a man seemingly in charge makes us increasingly more anxious. Joanna and Emma show up just minutes before the doors open and I am actually on the phone with them when people are first allowed in, giving us a heads up to make it to the stage first before people started tearing in for the cherished front and center spots — which we shamelessly took. Still having an extra ticket, they give it to a kid they recognized from our school. Dayna and I each still had our tickets since no one even considered people coming as early as we did. Later we find out Joanna and Emma had to pay for parking as well — another thing of which our earliness had conveniently spared us.

An hour of standing in front of the stage elapses as eight o’clock approaches. The four of us joke and laugh the whole time, effectively passing it pretty quickly. When the time comes to start, we find the two opening bands better than expected. Their performances were watched with an underlying degree of impatience to get to the real show.

And boy did we get it.

Eisley’s performance was the perfect climax to the perfect night. As much as I’d loved them before, those feelings multiplied every minute. I spared them no shouting or applause — in reference to the crowd that night on their MySpace blog they even remarked “You guys are pretty crazy.”

What’s more, the girl whom I’d asked to assist setting up and conversed with was none other than Stacy DuPree, a lead singer of the band! In the picture below from Eisley’s MySpace account I drew an arrow to my otherwise anonymous head in the crowd. To my left is Dayna.

But time passes and, as the Germans say,

«Alles Gute hat sein Ende»

Time got the best of us and forced the two happiest teenagers alive out onto the Houston freeways with thoughts racing. The drive home yielded no wrong turns, no problems whatsoever. We drove home not in a car, but rather glided home on air.