Can blogs help save lives?

Last week, I became aware of a friend of a friend who is waiting for a liver transplant at Duke Medical Center in Durham, NC. Her name is Shauna Saunders, and although I don't know Shauna personally, I feel like I've gotten to know her through postings her family and friends have been making at the CaringBridge website dedicated to updates on her urgent need for a liver transplant to hold onto life itself. Shauna has been dealing with this problem for most of her life, but only recently has the situation become urgent.

Reading through the family's online journal is a difficult but uplifting experience -- the real strength and hope of the human spirit shines through above all else in a tough situation that never seems to overwhelm Shauna's friends and family, who continue to exhaust all means to try to save Shauna's life. The family was able to reach Ruth Sheehan at the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC, and she wrote a story on Saturday that explained the urgent nature of Shauna's need for a liver:

Saunders is currently at the top of the list for a liver donation.

But time is short. The doctors told her family and friends Friday that she has perhaps five days, perhaps a week.

Since that story ran, a donor surfaced but the liver was not satisfactory for transplant, so Shauna's family is waiting for another offer (a fourth). This may seem like a problem that you can't help solve personally, but you can do something now -- take the time to fill out an organ donor card and make sure your family is aware of your decision. All the materials you need are online here and here. Urge your friends and family to do the same in your blogs and in your "real" conversations. This is definitely a situation where the time-criticality of such an urgent need for Shauna and thousands of others could potentially be addressed through the rapid and broad dissemination of actionable information in the blogosphere. If ever blogs could be used for the Greater Good, this is it.

(Incidentally, I was unaware of CaringBridge before now -- it's a non-profit -- but I made a donation to support them today. The whole reason I got involved in technology and the Internet was because I thought it would connect actual people in new and interesting ways, and an organization like CaringBridge is doing this for people who are too busy taking care of friends and family members to jump through all the hoops to set up their own web site or blog.)

Update: Shauna Saunders passed away last Friday evening after attempts to locate a compatible liver were unsuccessful. My thoughts and deepest sympathies are with her family and friends in this difficult time. This tragedy only underscores the need for getting those organ donor cards filled out so fewer families have to go through such a deeply painful experience.

Top 20 IT mistakes

The Top 20 IT mistakes feature I blogged about several weeks ago is in the can and available for public consumption here. The mistakes run the gamut from the more generally applicable ("Dismissing open source -- or bowing before it") to the very specific ("Developing web apps for IE only", "Underestimating PHP").

Writing this story was more difficult than I expected -- writing 3500+ reasonably coherent words is a lot harder than hammering out an opinion-based column (~600 words) or a blog post (any number of words I want).

In any case, feedback is welcomed. If you have more IT mistakes that I missed in the story, send them in or post them to your weblog and I'll keep a running tally.

(A nice PDF version of the actual magazine version with cool illustrations is available here -- registration required).

Adam Bosworth on. . . well, everything

This is great stuff -- worth stopping whatever you are doing and reading it. I would quote a small bit of it, but it's all good. If you work in IT, I would recommend reading it every morning before work.

Sun Java Desktop System on OS X running Virtual PC

Well, folks, I sort of got Sun's JDS (Java Desktop System) to install under Virtual PC 7 on OS X. The install hung when I was installing the Java Media Framework API (package name: jmf-jre-2.1.1f) off of CD #2, so I chose "Abort" in the JDS installer, but then chose "Continue installation" on the next screen. The installer cranked back up and hummed along nicely for a while, then got stuck again while installing the GNOME desktop user documentation. I did the abort/continue thing again and the system installed and later booted up, though it was a little flaky -- which is understandable considering the goofy don't-try-this-at-home way I installed it.

Installing JDS in this manner isn't really a fair test of its capabilities, seeing as how it uses a virtualization engine (Virtual PC) under the covers, but it's a reasonable way to get a quick peek at a running Linux desktop system if you don't have extra Intel hardware laying around (if you do, don't waste your time messing around with Virtual PC). All I can say is that with the announcement of the Novell Linux Desktop, we now have two choices for a Linux desktop from two big tech companies, so the old complaints of "where do I get support?" for Linux on the desktop have been put to rest.

I think this Linux desktop thing might be picking up some real steam. (You may say I'm a dreamer -- but I'm not the only one .) I felt this way five and a half years ago about Linux on the backend. Stay tuned for an upcoming InfoWorld column on the subject.

Biggest blue screen I have ever seen

When I'm visiting New York, I tend to walk with my head down and take little notice of the giant screens flashing around me, but today, I noticed a sign in the distance that was unmistakeable: I was standing before the largest "blue screen of death" that I had ever seen at the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Ave. While most people experience the soul-crushing blue screen in the solitude of their homes or offices, I took part in a truly mass blue screen experience, and if you don't think that is particularly profound, tell that to the network guy who handed me his card on the street and asked if I would send him the photo (hi, Ramez).

Apparently, there is a Windows error screen photo-taking subculture as you can see here and here. Lots here (though the site seems slow).

Bonus link: The Computers That Run NYC's Times Square (Popular Mechanics)

Wiki vs. blog

Occasionally when you're writing a regular column that is turned in a full week before it actually runs (for copy editing, etc.), a serendipitous intersection with real-time blog discussion happens. And so it happened with Tim Bray's post reinforcing the fundamental distinction between the blog and wiki concepts and my column that went online the same day ("Is the Wiki under your radar?").

My sense is that your average corporate IT person is still catching up on what blogs mean for knowledge management, and something with such a whimsical name (a wiki?) is way down the priority list. A lazy writer might be tempted to lump blogs and wikis together just to get it out of the way and move on to other topics, but equating the two is kind of like saying basketball and hockey are converging because in both cases, you are trying to put an object in a net.

Finally, an election spectator

Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, this year's U.S. presidential election is absolutely momentous. For me, this is the first presidential election where I haven't been working in an environment where political concerns were mixed with the need to keep web servers running under massive traffic loads. Back in 1996 (an absolute snoozer of an election compared to 2000 and the way this one is shaping up), I was working at CNN.com in Atlanta, and my colleagues running the web server farm (I was on the developer side of the fence then) saw perhaps the most challenging short-term scaling challenge in the history of the web up to that point. I wasn't directly involved in capacity planning at the time, but I learned a lot just listening to the discussions around the office before, during, and after. I think the CNN.com operations staff learned a lot that night as well.

In 2000, I was working on Salon.com, a smaller site compared to CNN but still substantial and with the same spiky big-news-event sort of traffic patterns that require you to architect systems that will handle peaks that can be a couple of orders of magnitude higher than normal traffic. Even though that election was more recent, I don't remember a whole lot about it from a systems standpoint, so I guess things must have gone reasonably well. When I started at Salon in 1998, the 1996 election experience was still fresh on my mind, so the architecture of the site was deliberately simple and powerful in the CNN model I had learned. Maybe that helped.

In any case, this is the first presidential election where I will be sitting comfortably at home watching the returns on TV and on the web like everyone else. Best wishes to all the IT guys around the world who are running the systems that will allow mere citizens like myself to get important election information quickly -- your work is very much appreciated, at least by this CTO. Break a leg. . . or melt a router, as it were.