But something wasn’t right. My specimen of this particular chair didn’t feel quite the same as those ringing the conference room table. After 5 minutes, I realized the difference – the lumbar “support” piece – a D-shaped springy plastic affair upon which the chair’s poly-mesh back rested – felt like a yardstick pressed into my vertebrae. Far from the super-adjustable high-end version of the chair I’d first experienced, I realized I had purchased a much more basic model on which this lumbar support was fixed. And held in place by a T30 bolt.

Which is how I found myself at Sears an hour-or-so later, in search of a new set of Torx drivers. In order to remove the offending lumbar support piece, I’d need to remove the bolt through an opening too-small for my interchangeable-bit screwdriver. And as I surveyed the options in the “six-sided fastener-adjusting tools” section, I noticed a selection of various hex-key sets. Ever since my loose 5mm hex key – an essential tool for bicycle maintenance – went missing, I’d been meaning to remedy its absence. This is how men shop.

Hoping to avoid the loss of another loose 5mm key, I opted for a fold-up style set. I had two options: a SAE/metric pair from Allen brand (“The Original!” exclaimed the packaging) for $9.99, or the same array of sizes with Craftsman branding for $25.99. Both carried lifetime warranties. Both seemed durable enough. Both had ball-style ends. Both even had little accessory tabs that could be used to hang the tool from a pegboard. The difference? The former was made in China, and the later in Estes, Illinois.

I set down the set of Torx wrenches and picked up both of the hex-key contenders, realizing that this was fast becoming a “practice what you preach” moment. As far as “things we buy” go, there aren’t that many things sold that are still manufactured domestically. Our government has made it all-but-impossible to do business profitably in this country, and what roadblocks they haven’t put up, labor unions have. So when the issue of buying American-made goods comes up, I enthusiastically advocate for it – and even more so for “buying local” if one can. And now I had a simple choice: pay more or compromise.

I hung the Allen-brand wrench set back on its hook and headed to the checkout counter. The total bill for 10 American-made hand tools was $69.84. Just under $7 per tool, or under $3 each if you count each key on the folding sets individually. And while I realize that my purchase doesn’t affect much of anything on a global scale, it does amount to a single ballot in a very large game of vote-with-your-wallet.

And that new chair? Turns out it was made in Zeeland, Michigan.

In my years as a member of the free software community, I’ve seen plenty of projects come and go, and even witnessed the rise and fall of an empire or two (yes, Gentoo was my daily-driver for a while). But I never really considered just what the creation of a community around a piece of software would entail. As I tend to do, I oversimplified the concept – just “hang out your shingle” (virtually, of course) and the magic of the Internet will unleash a throng of developers and users at your doorstep. Teamwork would flourish, bright people would contribute inspired code, and all would be right with the world.

In the first week of the Deacon Project’s existence, I pulled some late nights and scraped together everything that – in my experience – I felt an open-source project ought to have. I started with a WordPress-powered web site (deaconproject.org), a hosted repository and project wiki on GitHub, and a mailing list. The blog’s first post painted a picture of the project’s inception, and offered a simple vision for how the Deacon push library would take shape. Within hours, I had my first contributor – my good friend and fellow grad-student, Spencer. A few days later, I received an out-of-the-blue email with another offer to contribute – this time, from Toronto-area software engineer, Android-enthusiast and entrepreneur Faisal Abid. The library began to take shape, with plenty of commits and frequent new blog entries.

It’s been four months since I founded and announced the Deacon project, and the team and I have learned a few lessons about open source projects along the way. The project is admittedly still a fledgling, but if you’re interested in hearing a few impressions from our work so far, feel free to hit the jump…

Critical Mass

After launching the Deacon Project, I quickly discovered that I’m far more comfortable wearing a software engineer’s lab coat than a marketer’s suit and tie. But as the founder of a nascent open source project, one must don many hats. You’re not only the chief coder, but also the chief promoter. You don’t just set up the infrastructure, you also set out and evangelize your work. Of course, making our first attempts at Deacon’s design and implementation, and taking a full course load, didn’t leave much time for self-promotion. I ventured back to all the web sites I’d found while initially searching for push options on Android, left comments and posted links. Today, the referral traffic from those links accounts for around a third of the hits to Deacon’s web site.

At some point, I still hope that Deacon will achieve some form of “critical mass” – a self-sustaining momentum fueled by contributions and propagated by adoption. But in software, the concept of “critical mass” is a lot more ephemeral than it is in nuclear physics. To date, the Deacon library files have been downloaded from GitHub a mind-blowing 36 times, but I have no way of knowing whether or not those downloads generated any interest or testing. The blog’s comments have been eerily quiet, though an issue or two has been logged (much to my genuine delight) on our bug tracker. Still, the fact that (potentially) 36 people have taken an interest in what my co-contributors and I have created is amazing to me in itself.

Expect the Unexpected

Not long after Deacon’s first proof-of-concept runs and initial battery impact testing, Spencer and I watched the IO 2010 Keynote #2  from the grad-student lab at RIT as Google announced the new features of Android 2.2, codenamed “Froyo”. One of those features – which had apparently been flying under-the-radar, since we never saw it coming – was Google’s on take on push notifications, called Cloud to Device Messaging (or “C2DM”). Using C2DM, app developers could deliver push notifications to their Android apps through Google’s infrastructure. We looked at each other, and tried to figure out what to do next.

As it turns out, Deacon’s value proposition wasn’t completely clobbered by Google’s announcement of C2DM. From the beginning, we set out to create a means to deliver push notifications that was independent of any third-party servers. The idea: your push notifications from your server, and having a choice in how you push-enable your app. Beyond that, Deacon is also usable in pure-Java form, so developers of Java apps can use it to deliver push notifications as well. And all those hundreds of thousands of handsets that don’t (and in all likelihood won’t) run the Froyo version of Android? Deacon can be used to push-enable apps on those devices, too.

The point? I’m not suggesting that open source projects start going gonzo with inception-phase due-diligence, market analysis and contingency plans. But having a solid vision of what you want to build, and why you want to build it, will help you stand your ground when the unexpected happens.

It’s about People

As it says on Deacon’s “core team” page, free and open-source software wouldn’t exist without the people and communities that make it happen. That means that at some point, you’re going to have to actually interact with some people in order to make your project happen! When the opportunity to give a lightning talk at Interlock Rochester (a multi-disciplinary maker-space and really cool group of people) surfaced, Spencer and I threw some slides together and spent our five minutes talking up Deacon. (If you want to check it out, the slides and talk are both online.) By the same token, it’s also people that ultimately use the Deacon library, so I thought a simple screencast on push-enabling your app with Deacon might also be helpful.

But more than just talking to people, and making things for people, and hopefully enabling people to do cool things with the cool things you’ve made, I think free software is about connecting with people. Android fan(atic)s have a shared passion, and I get a strong sense of it when I talk to Spencer and Faisal. In a lot of cases, that shared passion and motivation is the fuel that gets free software projects off the ground, helps them build momentum, and ultimately makes them successful. Sure, there are plenty of free software projects out there that are developed by an “army of one” (or two, or three), and that “boutique” status might end up being Deacon’s lot in life. There are also projects that get swallowed up by bigger ones – as could also happen with Deacon and the Meteor web server project to which it acts as client. And that brings me to my last thought on starting an open source project: trust your idea. It’s the same thing quarterback-turned-entrepreneur Drew Brees says of crazy business concepts. Even if your project never makes it past proof-of-concept, treat it like it’s the next Apache, or Subversion, or even the next Linux. That doesn’t mean “aim for the stars” or “you are a beautiful and unique snowflake” or any fuzzy stuff like that – it just means that you need to do the same thing that the people behind Apache and Subversion and Linux did when they started out: do something meaningful, do it with a purpose, and do it well.

[Teamwork image: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain]

Ubuntu from Keith Kenniff on Vimeo.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched Linux advertisement competitions – such as the annual contest from the Linux Foundation – with interest. And every year, I’m hugely disappointed. The videos submitted are generally poorly-produced, based on obscure concepts or just downright cheesy. But this one – while it’s a little dated (Ubuntu 10.04 is out now, and we’re just a few months from 10.10) and not quite up to ad-agency quality – I think it’s the most competent thing we’ve seen in a long time. Of course, if you want to see what happens when the heavy-hitters take out their wallets, take a look at these legends:

iPhone 4 Diamond Edition: white, unlocked, and $20k

• warycka.com
• slidewaysmedia.com

Welcome back, Andy!

From what I know of Andspot, it holds a lot of promise for Android users and app developers alike, improving the way we find and buy apps for our mobile devices. If you want to learn more, you can sign up for the private Beta test at http://www.andspot.com/ (there’s an invite code on his blog to streamline the process).

Update: Andspot has been featured on Wired Magazine’s Gadget Lab blog: Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market

Today is the last day of RIT‘s academic break between Spring and Summer quarters, and Kelly and I spent a good chunk of that break exploring Vermont with our friends Jason and Alicia. From the photo below, which show’s Kelly’s car loaded and ready, you can probably guess the theme for the trip…

Yes, that's 7 bikes

We spent 5 phenomenal days venturing between Bennington, Burlington, Waterbury and Burke – the last of which found us back on the nothing-short-of-glorious Kingdom Trails. Good riding, good food, good beer and good times were had by all!

Since returning home, Kelly and I have more-or-less laid low. Surprisingly, there’s been plenty that’s blogworthy, but little motivation to sit down and type it out. I suspect part of that has a lot to do with the dearth of physical activity that’s accompanied “laying low”, so I’m hoping that getting out for an off-road ride tonight will help bring the spark back…

Chances are most people have never noticed – and likely don’t care – that the Android mobile phone platform doesn’t have a native way to do Push Notifications. You know, something happens somewhere, and your phone buzzes and lets you know about it. You’d be surprised how much goes into making that happen – it’s a little more complicated than just shooting off a text message.

The folks over at Xtify have created a nice Push framework for Android, but (as a developer) you have to use their servers to push out your messages. I can just hear you asking now: Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way for Android developers to push-enable their apps without depending on an outside server? You weren’t asking that? Well, just stick with me here.

Never mind. Long story short? I decided to plug this gap by creating a new open-source project aimed at bringing push notifications to Android developers. It uses the Meteor web server as a back-end – effectively, it’ll just be a pure-Java implementation of a Meteor client. Maybe it’ll take off, maybe it wont – but I hope it can benefit someone at some point! You can read more about it at The Deacon Project.

…when RIT actually looks like a college campus!

(And for the record, “What’s Golden” by Jurassic 5 was playing on that jam box…)

I wrote the post late Friday night, and read through it a few times yesterday, tweaking here and there. And then I read through it a couple more times. And then I asked myself, “why bother posting this?”. The answer wasn’t because I wanted to make a point, or share my conclusions, or push my point of view – it was because a new week was about to start, and I didn’t have anything else chambered up. So I flushed it. In the grand scheme of things, no one who reads this blog would have their mind changed by a bitchy post relating geek issues to Obamacare. And no one new would have visited the site just to see my rant. Why bother?

We had plenty of excitement in the afternoon, either way. After I nuked the rant, Kelly and I jumped in the car and headed out to Geneva Bike, in hopes of walking in with a gift certificate (a Christmas present from my parents) and leaving with a new pair of cycling shoes for me. Of course, you can’t go to a shop like this and not browse around a little – and that browsing landed us in front of a wall of ladies’ road bikes. As Kelly eyed one in particular – a Trek 2.1 left over from last year – I wandered off to play around on the 29′ers. A few minutes later, I found her (and the bike) bolted into a trainer, getting fitted! Long story short, after the bike was set up and we talked it over, it ended up coming home with us…

As much as I love mountain biking, I’m hoping that Kelly’s new wheels will give me a little more excuse to get out on the road with my trusty old Trek this season (after Craig tunes it up, of course). Stay tuned here; I’m sure we’ll have experiences to share!