Just finished a “lunch and learn” session at Microsoft Hong Kong where I shared my knowledge and experience about open source software. The presentation is up on slideshare or you can download it.

I know a lot of people are skeptical of Microsoft’s recent selective support of open source software. However, I’m trying to be open minded and pragmatic. The open source community has always co-existed with proprietary and commercial partners from IBM to Red Hat to Novell and so on. Open source developers are right to be cynical of any of these companies, but there also comes a time to be practical and recognize that few, if any of us, are in this for purely altruistic motives. In fact, for me personally at least, it’s the pragmatic self-interest and business sense of open source that has fueled a lot of my interest and involvement. With that in mind, I welcome Microsoft to the table and hope the dialog and cooperation (and competition!) continues.

I hope to have time to write more about this, but at the moment I’m now rushing off to help prepare for BarCamp Hong Kong tomorrow.

I’ve switched the commenting system on Cubicle Muses to Disqus, a hosted discussion/commenting service. Blog spam has always been a problem, but since the site switch to Radiant, it’s been impossible. The Akismet feature just wasn’t working and rather than take more time to debug it, I decided to go with Disqus.

On older articles, you may notice comments published in two styles. This is because Disqus still doesn’t support importing comments from non-WordPress blogs. Until it does, the older comments will still be published using the older system.

Also, speaking of old content, I’ve noticed that some articles got messed up in the Radiant migration. I’m slowly going through and fixing them and their links. This is taking a lot of time as I can only work on it now and then. Sorry for the 404’s.

Things are coming together for BarCamp Hong Kong 2008 this Saturday. Here are the details:

• Where: Turner International’s offices in Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay
• When: Saturday, 6 September. Registration opens at 9:30 AM and the event runs until 5:00 or so.
• After Event Party: Join us at the East End Brewery after BarCamp for drinks and socializing.

Lunch and tshirts will be provided. We’re expecting as many as 200 people to show up, so please arrive early. Also, bring a form of identification (Turner’s requiring this for registration in the building).

We’ve got a lot of great sponsors this year including Microsoft (will give away an XBox!), Yahoo!, Turner, ThoughtWorks, Outblaze, Zendesk, BeansBox, Dookaz, Flying Tiger, aNobii, HKDay.NET, Mobile Radio.HK, the Hong Kong Startup Association and Palava Digital and JadeTower. Thanks everyone!

See you Saturday!

Due to popular demand, William and I will be re-running our Rich Internet Applications and Web Services three day workshops in Hong Kong.

The Rich Internet Applications class will run September 8-9 at the Hong Kong Productivity Council building in Kowloon Tong. The Web Services class will run the following week from September 17-19. Seats are limited, so please register soon. If you have any questions, feel free to email us.

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking about scrum to the Agile Hong Kong group. The presentation is below. You can also download a pdf.

Links and References

• Scrum Checklist booklet
• Introduction to Scrum
• Scrum photo on Flickr by ‘darkmatter’
• People photo on Flickr by ‘jek in the box’
• Photo & article on wall charts

BarCamp Hong Kong is only one month away on Saturday 6th September, 2008. Time Warner is graciously allowing us to use their office space this year. Please sign up on the wiki or the facebook event. The volunteer organizers are getting together next week to work out the event details. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event in some way, let us know by leaving a note on the wiki, the facebook wall, or dropping me an email.

Last year’s inaugural Hong Kong barcamp brought together almost 100 people to Yahoo’s offices to share about everything from online privacy to printing T-Shirts. I’ve had many people ask about when this year’s barcamp would happen, so I’m really excited.

In other Hong Kong event news, I’ll be speaking about scrum with the Hong Kong agile programmers group next Tuesday evening. And the following night is this month’s web wednesday, postponed thanks to the typhoon.