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July 08, 2002
eGovernment and Ownership
John Patrick writes:
A trailer for towing motorcycles to and from always seemed like a good idea to me. Getting the trailer was the easy part. Registering it at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Connecticut was the hard part. First I rode to Danbury -- a half hour ride. Then I stood in line for ten minutes to get a form and a ticket with a number on it -- just like at the deli. My number was 462. The wait began.
This is a great eGovernment project. The reason: its relatively hard. Gotta love a challenge. Renewing a registration is easy. Establishing one is difficult because of a piece of paper called a "title." How to establish proof of ownership on the web? Digital signatures (if you can get people to use them--another story) are just part of the answer. Still if we can do mortgages online, we can do titles.
What do we need? A system for generating and exchanging titles securely. Ways of turning paper titles into electronic ones, ways to turn electronic titles into paper versions, standards to recognize titles from other states, ways to recover lost titles, etc. Trustworthy digital identity is the foundation of this, but only the foundation.
06:00 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Business Week Online on Warchalking
Business Week Online interviewed me last week on the Warchalking craze. Their article quotes me in one paragraph, or at least semi-quotes me. By the time a 15 minute conversation makes it down to one paragraph enough detail is lost that it sounds like we'll be installing 2000 WAPs next week. Our roll-out will be a little more conservative than that. Call this the "vision."
05:12 PM | Recommend This | Print This
IM and REST: First Class Events?
After posting the previous piece about IM and REST, I happened to see a reference to work DJ Admans is doing with weblog updates and Jabber on Scripting News. The basic idea, as I understand it, is to use Jabber in lieu of something like MQSeries or JMS to notify people of changes to weblogs. I see the usefulness of that: remember those discussions in your undergraduate architecture class about polling vs. interrupts?
News aggregators function by polling their RSS feeds. If everyone on the net used news aggregators and subscribed to hundreds of channels and wanted near realtime notification of changes to resources (not unreasonable if I'm to use it for things like monintoring systems or my airline reservation) the whole thing would drop to its knees. Interrupts (i.e event notification) are the answer.
Now, the RESTian response, I'm confident, would be HTTPEvents. Not a bad idea and certainly something I'd like to see developed further. From a RESTian point of view, using a system like Jabber or JMS to manage events takes them out of the "first class citizen" category (from a programming language theory point of view). In a programming language, anything that can be manipulated within the programming language itself is a first class citizen. So, for example, functions are first class citizens in ML, but not in Pascal (don't even think about C--it gets too weird). In REST, to be first class, you need a URI and (probably) use HTTP.
So, maybe the question for RESTians is how far to go with the religion and when to get practical (and I'm not saying that they've gone too far yet). One example of a language where everything is first class is LISP. An elegant language. I love it. Nevertheless, not a winner in the language wars. If REST wants to "win," RESTians may have to decide when enough is enough.
03:17 PM | Recommend This | Print This
IM and REST
Technology review has a nice introductory article on the problems with IM in the enterprise. Says the article:
But today that promise is stymied by IM software packages that use their own proprietary protocols. “The whole IM scene is as factionalized as Afghanistan,” says Rob Batchelder, research director at Gartner, a technology research firm in Stamford, CT.
My main concern is how to use IM behind the firewall with security, logging, etc. at a price that gives an ROI I can see without using a microscope. I've been playing with jabber lately and have been pretty impressed. I've haven't even started to consider the interoperability issues. I guess I don't quite see it yet. For example:
“Imagine,” says Sonu Aggarwal, CEO of Cordant, a Bellvue, WA maker of IM gateway software, “having a contact in your IM buddy list that represents your Delta flight reservation. Rather than having to call an 800-number and digging up your reservation code, that ‘buddy’ is your ticket, constantly communicating the status of the reservation.”
What I don't get is why I need an IM system to do this for me. If the airline reservation system is well designed and my reservation has a URI, my aggregator can do that same job without interoperability of IM systems, new ports opened on the firewall, etc. Maybe I'm high, but I don't see it yet.
12:41 PM | Recommend This | Print This
PTO Woes and Government IT
In a Government Computing News article entitled: PTO: No One Should Trust Our Systems, the following appears:
If disaster struck the Patent and Trademark Office’s data center today, the agency would be without access to its records for nearly four years and would have to spend $550 million to regenerate them from tape backups.
I think Utah is better off than that, much better; but the basic issue that leads up to this mess is at the heart of most problems with IT in government: the funding process. The problem comes down to a sophie's choice:
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If you leave IT funding in the various agencies and departments, then they are constantly faced with decisions like: "do I fund the new system X that will update and modernize our IT systems or do I put 10,000 more kids on health insurance next year?" The way our government works, the latter is likely the right choice.
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If you fund IT out of a separate pot of money, then everytime someone goes looking for money for their special interest (and everything is a special interest) then your pot likely takes a hit. You can get a vote by taking money away from IT system X and giving it to the homeless, or the environment, or anything else, any day of the week.
Its easy to say that politicians need to have more backbone and stand up to this kind of thing, but having seen this process from the inside now, that's easier said than done (remember the old joke about sausage?). Anyone can say "I'll stand up to the special interests and bring good management to government." but the reality is that this is built into the way out political process works and what the press (because of its readership) finds interesting. I can get a rally at the capitol everyday about a lot of things: IT isn't one of them.
Part of the problem is that mostly IT companies are very politically unaware compared to their cousins in other industries. Very little lobbying goes on by IT companies. This means that IT issues are likely to be seen as "unimportant" by the harried legislator who has lots of people vying for his attention.