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September 30, 2002
Information Additive Codecs and P2P Networks
I was just reading a great paper on using Information Additive Codecs (IAC) on P2P Networks on Doug Kaye's web site. Interesting stuff. As I understand it, the ability to receive content abstractions out of order allows multiple downloads to be recombined to create the original, even in the presence of lost packets. This means, that you can get data streams from multiple peers simultaneously and reconstruct them into the original content without the peers having to coordinate their actions. I was wondering if anyone has done any work in this area that uses IACs in the presence of byzantine faults. My gut tells me there's something there and the work would be important since one would want to thwart the efforts of "bad guys" to corrupt a data stream by sending bad IAC data (think RIAA, for example).
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XML and the Recreation One-Stop
Interior Secretary Gale Norton was in Salt Lake City on Saturday to celebrate National Public Lands day. She was joined by my boss, Governor Leavitt. I am surprised that there seems to be no local press for the event. Usually when a cabinet secretary comes to town to talk about public lands, there's a lot of interest. There was an Interior press release (naturally) and a story earlier in the week saying the event would take place. The thing I want to highlight from the 90 minute event is the use of XML on the recreation.gov one-stop.
If you go to the site and search, you'll notice that you can find information about state parks in Utah (and other places, of course). How did the data get there? We (specifically the Dept. of Natural Resources) send them XML. Utah is a recreation.gov partner. This works the other way as well: you can get the recreation.gov data in XML. An online manual describes the data format (unfortunately, its in Word format). There is also (supposed to be) an XSD Schema file but no WSIL or other documentation as far as I can see. All of these is being coordinated by the Government Without Boundaries project.
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September 26, 2002
Jamcrackers and Shared Services
In the old days of floating logs down rivers, there were times when the log raft would get all jammed up and unable to move. Into this uncertain situation came a fellow called a jamcracker. The jamcracker's job was to look over the log jam and find the points that, if changed, would break up the jam and let the logs flow freely. The job was extremely dangerous and the jamcracker frequently used dynamite to do the job. This is not unlike the situation found in a modern shared service groups.
Organizations have a love/hate relationship with their shared service groups. For a shared services group to benefit the larger organization it must provide quality service to other divisions. When that fails to happen, managers in those other divisions will do anything they have to do to accomplish their mission, even if that means by-passing the organization that should be providing them services. Efforts to force its use "for efficiency's sake" will be met with resistance, hostility, and a lot of complaining.
At this point, the shared service groups can take one of several routes. They can recognize their problem and correct it, or they can develop defensive mechanisms to cope with the onslaught of criticism and protect their jobs. The former is difficult to do and the latter reinforced by the lack of communication that ensues. Eventually both sides settle into a kind of unhappy truce.
Being the jamcracker in this stalemate is a dangerous proposition. Both sides have been entrenched for such a long time that it feels natural. Anyone attempting to change the status quo is likely to be caught in the cross fire as they are seen by both camps as somehow in league with the other. The solution calls for finesse, toughness, and an willingness to take risks. It also requires a hearty constitution that can handle the long hours that offer little appreciation and sometimes open hostility.
Jamcrackers work best when there are supporters all over the organization who can recognize where change is needed, help spread the message, and, occasionally, watch the Jamcracker's back during a particularly risky operation.
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September 25, 2002
Utah Legislature's Kid's Page
Today, while perusing the the Deseret News, I found out that the Utah Legislature just launched a kids page. You'd think that there would be a better way for me to find out about things like this. You'd be wrong.
The Legislature's kids page is geared toward helping kids understand the legislative process and is, in my opinion, well done. Utah.gov also has a kids page. You'd think that they'd want to coordinate with us and get their page featured on the Utah.gov kids page or even the homepage since Utah.gov is supposed to be the web site for all of Utah government, not just the executive branch. Again you'd be wrong.
The different branches of government are jealous of their independence and rightly so. Its what provides the checks and balances that are so important to our democracy. Part of our challenge is figuring out how to make technology respect that independence.
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September 24, 2002
Provo's No Wrong Doors Policy
Friday, I had the opportunity to visit with some folks from Provo City. There are a couple of interesting developments there:
- First, they've adopted a "no wrong doors" philosophy. As implemented, there is a single number and customer service center that customers use to get answers to all their city questions and help with any problems. You can call them about a broken water main or problems with your cable (Provo runs a municipal cable concern). They've used a product called eWorks to create a CRM application that works for all they do. Right now, each department has a task queue that they manage separately from their existing workflow, but their next step is to go through each department and integrate workflow into all their business process and tie them into the system.
- The second cool thing is that this week they will launch a pilot of their fiber to the home project. By tomorrow, there should be 200 homes online with fiber connections providing everything from Internet service to digital cable.
Provo is a very progressive place and I'm anxious to see where they go. They're big enough (over 100,000 people) to have the money to do things and yet small enough that its not like trying to steer a battleship. I wish them well!
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September 23, 2002
Wireless Internetworking
An article in Wired by Negroponte discusses wireless internetworking---the concept of having wireless hubs that are smart enough to route and talk to each other. That way, my wireless network talks to my neighbors, which talks to a neighbor further away, and so on until the wireless system drains to the larger Internet. I've seen this work. A Utah company, called United Internetworking (founded by Jay Carlson) has built working hardware and software that does this exact thing in the 5GHz band. Its actually very cool to see.
The article goes on to say:
Reallocating spectrum won't happen overnight. It is just as hard to shake up occupied electromagnetic zones as it is to bulldoze part of a city for a park or a civic center. New attitudes will have a more immediate effect as we look to higher and higher parts of the spectrum, and use them for shorter and shorter distances.
It will be harder than bulldozing part of a city. Usually we pick on the disenfranchised when we bulldoze the city. Spectrum is controlled by the ultra-enfranchised and they don't give it up without a fight.
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ACIO Meeting
Today was the first meeting of the team of Assistant State CIOs (ACIOs) that have been appointed from each agency. There are still a few Cabinet level agencies that have not made an appointment, but we had a good group and it gave me great hope. Here are the things we talked about:
- DCIO appointments:
- Kevin Van Ausdal (Tax), DCIO for IT
- Al Sherwood, DCIO for Plans and Policy
- Dave Fletcher, DCIO for eGov
- ITPSC agenda for Thursday
- Cancellation of WAN rate structure change
- Legislative audit Q&A
- Future meetings with agency IT staffs
- Email consolidation project
- Enterprise architectures
If you're interested in knowing more about these topics, please contact your ACIO, Kevin, or myself. We'd be happy to give you more information.
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September 19, 2002
Three Great Items from Dave Fletcher
Dave Fletcher posts three great items on IT in Utah on his blog today.
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New Rate Structure
I've written before about the need for transparency in cost, particularly in a government setting. We're in the middle of a rate setting process, whereby we decide what rates our central services organizations can charge in FY2004.
As part of the this rate process, ITS, our central IT services organization is proposing to change how they charge for network connectivity. In the past they have charged per port. They are proposing charging per person. The cost would be linked to each user ID (UID) in the Utah Master Directory (UMD). I'm fully in support of this for a number of reasons:
- My goal is that employees be connected everywhere and that includes wireless. How do you charge for wireless on a per port basis? You can't. I'd rather we just gave each person access no matter where they are.
- Its easier to count people than ports. Making sure that agencies are accurately charged ensures that funds are being properly used (especially since network access can be paid for from a variety of sources).
- A large percentage of our cost is based on per-user licenses. If we're paying for a Groupwise license for each user ID, we should charge for each user ID. This gives the right pricing signal to the people doing the hiring and, again, ensures that funds are being used properly.
- Security is enhanced when the UMD contains valid, and only valid, logins. For example, when an employee leaves, we should be deleting their access. Linking a UID to money helps drive that behavior.
This change might be painful if not for the support GOPB and Legislative Fiscal Analysts in ensuring that budgets get changed to match the changes in costs brought on by the new plan. Overall, the change is meant to be revenue neutral to ITS.
I've heard some complaints about the fact that user count is linked to the Utah Master Directory. Those complaints seem to be of two kinds:
- ITS has control of UMD and can inflate the numbers. I think this is, in the first place, a little too paranoid. But in the second place, ITS doesn't control the UMD--DHRM does. The data about employees and who gets a login is driven by employee records controlled by DHRM.
- I've got more UIDs in UMD than I have employees. This is evidence of the benefits I've mentioned about. Already, you can see that better pricing data is forcing people to clean data up. It doesn't matter if those UIDs are valid or not, Utah gets charged for licenses regardless.
In short, while changes like this can be very painful and require a lot of work on many people's parts, we're doing the right thing here and we shouldn't be dissuaded because it looks difficult.
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Dictionary.com Word of the Day: Cronyism
The recent Legislative Auditor's report on hiring practices has some leveling the charge of "cronyism" (has a nice, government ring to it, doesn't it?). Dictionary.com defines "cronyism" as follows:
Favoritism shown to old friends without regard for their qualifications.
Since every hire I've made has been specifically with regard to qualifications for the job, this word does not apply. I'm committed, as I always have been, to finding the best person for the job. If you've got questions about the report , or anything else, drop me a line. I don't bite.
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September 18, 2002
Extensions in URLs
Ugo Cei has been having a small dialog on his blog about using extensions in URLs. I've recently be contemplating the same thing because we discussed it in my class last Monday when we were talking about Tim Benners-Lee's "Cool URIs Don't Change." Ugo says:
What's the point of having extensions in URLs? What if someday you adopt a system whereby you can serve your content in different formats (HTML, WML, RSS, PDF, etc.) to different devices or users based on the User-Agent HTTP header? And all from the same URL? Would it still make sense to use the .html extension?
I've personally gone through the hell of changing from .html to .shtml to .jsp and then back to .shtml as I shifted technologies on a web site and it would have been much nicer to have had no extensions to deal with. This document discusses content negotiation (which is how you make this work) in Apache.
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September 16, 2002
How Many Data Centers Does an Organization Need?
The State of Utah has 22,000 employees working in the executive branch in roughly 30 agencies. We operate two primary data centers that house the mainframes and numerous smaller hosts. Still, many departments continue to operate "data centers" although most are merely machine rooms.
As I contemplate this situation, I'm left to wonder how many data centers a relatively small organization really needs. Companies larger than Utah and more spread out geographically (such as Siebel and Oracle) run all of their operations out of a single data center with provision for an emergency business continuity center (Siebel's production data center is, in fact, located in Utah). I constantly have people tell me that we couldn't possibly move their email server from their downtown building to the primary data center (both are on a fiber ring) and at the same time Oracle can somehow serve email to people in France (and elsewhere around the world) from a server in California.
Real data centers have conditioned air (temperature and humidity), conditioned power (including static protection, grounding, uninterpretable power supplies, back-up UPS batteries, and back-up generators), water detection, fire suppression, smoke detection, facility monitoring, physical security, earthquake safeguards, and so on. In addition to the physical facility, one must wrap the infrastructure in layers of process, including a 24x7 operations staff that monitors more than just ping and power. How can we possibly argue that we need more than a few such facilities for the State? How can we argue that critical production applications should be housed in anything less?
Most agencies will argue that due to their unique mission or some other special circumstance, they need to house their servers close to them. These are arguments that most organizations stopped listening to years ago. The real reasons are usually technical myopia or, more often, applications that were not designed with the network in mind. Until we stop making and accepting these arguments we'll continue to have multiple, expensive data centers spread around Salt Lake City, each housing a small cluster of servers. The citizens of Utah are poorly served by this strategy.
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September 13, 2002
Wireless is Cool
As I type this, my iPAQ is syncing with my laptop using Bluetooth. To sync the calendar, it has to communicate with the Groupwise server over a Sprint wireless connection. No cables anywhere in sight. Wireless is cool!
As an aside: its pretty slow and you can see the battery meter moving when you do it. So, you can only be wireless as long as the power holds out.
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September 12, 2002
Presenting Information in a Human Voice
InfoWorld reviewed the recent Seybold publishing industry conference in San Francisco:
Tim Bray, one of the co-creators of XML, spoke Monday alongside Seybold. He discussed what he sees as other defining changes in the industry, such as improved graphical user interfaces, and stated in passing that as far as tagging data goes, "nobody is doing it" in the publishing business.
In addition to touting XML, Bray, now chief technology officer at Antarctica Systems, promoted Weblogs as a promising tool for publishers. Weblogs are Web sites that feature chronological entries by an author, or "blogger" (for Web logger), and typically reflect his or her personal view.
Used as a marketing tool, a Weblog can provide an inventive way to reach customers and partners with engaging content, he said. Ray Ozzie, inventor of Lotus Notes, and Phillip Windley, Chief Information Officer for the State of Utah, were among the notable bloggers Bray cited.
"You might want to give serious consideration to humanly publicizing your organization," Bray said. "Presenting information in a human voice is the best way to get people to read what you publish."
This is in stark contrast to the recent article in Information Week by Herbert W. Lovelace (a psedonym) called "Beware the Blog" which painted a very suspicious picture of blogs. Obviously, I disagree with "Lovelace" on a number of counts. Because of blogs, I know more about my organization and I hope my organization knows more about me and my thoughts and motives. I don't see how that can be bad.
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Enterprise Architectures
When people hear the word architecture in the context of computers, they're likely to think of hardware or, at best, systems. An enterprise architecture is much more general than that. An enterprise architecture is a basic structure or design for all the agency’s real-world businesses, such as licensing or law enforcement, related information flows and the technologies that handle them. It’s an exercise in system design and analysis, more than anything, and is meant to ensure that components cooperate and share data. [Government Technology News]
The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 requires that all Federal agencies create an enterprise architecture. To put some teeth in that, the Office of Management and Budget has started linking funding to the existence of an enterprise architecture and a demonstrated correlation between the architecture and what the agency is proposing. Organizations like the Federal CIO Council and NASCIO publish information about enterprise architectures in government.
We recently completed an inventory of production databases in the state in an effort to come to grips with what data is stored where. Interestingly enough, there is no mandated planning process for data in Utah. Data represents an huge investment by the State and yet we create it, manage it, and destroy it as a side process to what we do, rather than a core activity.
I've been struggling with how to get a handle on this problem and others. Enterprise architectures would address many of these issues. Perhaps, we should require agencies to have an enterprise architecture and to link funding to it in the same way that OMB has for Federal agencies? The larger question is: how do we make the IT planning process useful and relevant? This will be one of the questions I'll be putting before the ACIO group when they meet.
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Emery DSL Connection Not Working? Blame Lightening.
From Joel Finlinson's Radio Weblog: [Got a] call from Norm in Emery saying that he cannot connect to the Net. He'd called Emery Telecom and they said that his DSL modem had been fried in the lightning storm yesterday. He went to pick up a new one and about 35 other people were getting new ones too at the same time. He put it in and it still didn't work. The tech support folks now say that its the NIC in the PC and I told him that we'll send Doug out that way to replace/check it out tomorrow.
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September 11, 2002
Visit from Jeff Henley of Oracle
I had the opportunity to go to lunch today with Jeff Henley, the CFO of Oracle. Jeff was also good enough to come over to the Capitol and speak to a group of IT managers and Product Managers about Oracle's experience with eBusiness. I'm sure most people won't believe it, given the content of his talk, but I didn't tell him what to say. In fact he came because the Governor had met him, listened to his message and asked him to come and talk to IT folks in Utah.
Jeff talked about Seven Tenets for Business Prosperity, his rules for eBusiness as it were. They are:
- Consolidate and simplify IT
- Move to shared services
- Adopt self-service
- Automate all processes
- Leverage low-cost computing
- Ensure visibility and accountability
- Build a culture of agility
I believe these same principles apply in government as well. Many people look at the list and say "what does this have to do with eGovernment?" but in fact, these tenets are, as Jeff pointed out repeatedly, about more than driving down costs. They are at the core of working smarter and having better information to fulfill our various missions---in other words: eGovernment.
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Building Cross Agency Applications
One of the biggest challenges to eGovernment is the mecahnisms we use to fund government activities (state and federal) and the traditional organization that the funding leads to. This has come to be called "stovepiping." People have railed against it in the past, but with the recent focus on eGovernment and homeland security, we've come to see more and more how disfunctional it can be in the 21st century.
Al Sherwood writes today about one of Utah's efforts to break down some of these stovepipes:
I’ve been fortunate to get in on a project that is in my opinion headed in the right direction and one that I look forward to seeing come to fruition. One-stop Business Registration, as it is called, promises to do some uncommon things with an uncommonly committed group of individuals who understand the importance of working together as a team to reach success.
After many months of agency staff trying to explain “in detail” the business processes of ten different local, state and federal organizations we almost have a final description (requirements document) to hand off to developers who will actually build what we all thought up together. Projects like this need a lot of talent to succeed and if any major gaps occur, projects simply grind to a halt. Different people must dream the dream, drive the process, and do the application.
Al's article goes into considerable detail and even links to a prototype of the application.
What the one-stop team is doing is exactly what we want to do with all our eGovernment applications. As State employees we're justifiably proud of the organizations we work for and their mission. Still, we have to realize that citizens and businesses don't understand, and what's more don't care, how we're organized. All they know is that they want to start a business and there's not even a list to tell them all the things they have to do to keep their government happy.
One-stop changes that. With the one-stop business registration, someone starting a business in Utah will be able to fulfill all the requirements in a single convinient visit to utah.gov (including a city business license in many cases). There are literally thousands of similar applications that could be built to make government more accessible and less of a burden. Getting there will require more than vision, however, it will require that we change the way we think about how government works, how its funded, and what out missions are. The Governor's plan for IT is a step in that direction, but its only a step. These changes will be played out over the coming months and years.
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September 10, 2002
China Reroutes Google
A recent ZDNet article talks about how China is rerouting requests for Google and Altavista to internal search engines, presumably ones that are more politically friendly to the regime in China. Michael Robinson, chief technical officer of Beijing-based Clarity Data Systems is quoted in the article saying:
This is escalation. They're not acting as administrators. They're acting as hackers. They're impersonating authority that they don't in fact actually have.
While I certainly sympathize with Mr. Robinson, I think the Chinese government (and probably most governments) would take considerable exception to the last sentence. While we techies like to pretend that somehow the Internet is "above" or "beyond" national borders and that the "authority" that governs the Internet is somehow independent, the facts remain that sovereign governments still hold all the cards. There's really no such thing as authority outside that granted by the various governments of the world. We haven't even begun to approach the world described in Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash (anyone got a three ring binder handy?).
Mr. Robinson may be right and the Chinese may be wrong in the abstract, but unless China signed an international treaty agreeing to grant authority over DNS service in their country to some other organization, they have all the authority they need to do what they're doing. I think we'll see this same story played out over and over again with respect to the Internet and other "global" players in the years to come.
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September 9, 2002
A New iBook Arrives
A new iBook arrived in my office on Friday. Ever since OS X was introduced, I've been intrigued my Apple's new offerings and wondered if using Macs would be a viable option for State of Utah employees. I've spoken to some of the logictical issues before, but haven't had any recent personal experience with Macs.
Some first impressions:
- Its beautiful and very well executed. Everything about it, hardware and software, makes you want to play with it. Some of its "gee whiz" but other stuff is useful and neat.
- Things "just work." I've used the wireless networking, SMB compatibility (Windows sharing), and other things that are usually a little finicky in Windows and they were easy to set up and worked flawlessly.
- OS X rocks! As someone who used a Unix workstation until three years ago and only begrudingly started using Windows when the widespread use of Word documents ruined the Internet forever, I love having a Unix core. All the developer tools you need to port real software are already there: gcc, make, emacs, etc. Really nice.
- The power management is great. I've only rebooted the machine once since I took it out of the box on Friday. I shut the lid and it goes to sleep. I open the lid and it wakes up. The wireless network recovers and life goes on. This doesn't seem like it should be such a shock, but it has never worked reliably enough on my Billbox that I'm willing to rely on it.
Now some things to fix:
- The iBook only comes with 1024x768 screen resolution. Come on Apple! I have 1400x1050 on my Thinkpad and love it. Even the expensive TiBook doesn't have great resolution. I don't get it.
- The iBook doesn't have a PCMCIA slot. Death for someone who relies on a wide area wireless networking card. The built in WiFi is great, but sometimes I need something more and there's no way to use it. (The TiBook does have a PCMCIA slot, I understand.)
- I'm not a fan of trackpads in general and this one seems particularly touchy.
- The external video requires a dongle. I give a lot of talks and use my laptop to drive projectors several times a week. Having to remember the dongle all the time would be a real chore.
The local Apple sales guy and systems engineer are due to visit and help me get some things set-up (there are a few advantages to being CIO). One of the things I'm thinking will challenge them is the Novell environment we run at the State--particularly Groupwise. More on that later.
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September 7, 2002
Fall Means its Time for Class Again
Each fall, I teach a course on enterprise computing at Brigham Young University. The class differs from the content of this weblog in that it is oriented to hard core computer science and systems engineering issues whereas this site tends to deal with softer, but larger issues like processes, people, and IT in large organizations.
The course is lab oriented: students start off with a raw box, load Linux on it and get going. For the rest of the semester, they are responsible for loading everything we Apache to Postgresql to Tomcat to JBOSS and building a functioning n-tier client-server application that provides some specific functionality using those various components. Certainly, knowing how to program is essential to success in the class, but the class is more about systems engineering. I try to introduce some of the issues I deal with in this blog during lecture.
The course web site is a blog (based on Slashcode) where I try to create a community feeling for the class, encouraging students to post items of interest to them. I hope it becomes quite busy. This semester, they're using the Slashcode journal system to create personal blogs that serve as their lab notebooks. There are 42 students signed up for the class and another 10-15 on the waiting list. No worries though, I usually scare a lot of folks off when they realize how much work the class is.
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September 6, 2002
A Culture of Candor
In a previous life, a fellow executive and I used to bemoan what we called "hypocritical politeness." That may not be the best term for it, but what we were trying to fight was a culture that valued not hurting someone's feelings more than it valued telling people what they needed to know to get their job done, make improvements, etc. People were being polite, but they weren't being helpful.
In this article from CIO Insight, Warren Bennis (a professor at USC) discusses a "culture of candor." There are a number of worthwhile quotes:
- The tragic weakness of most organizations today, whether public or private, is that they are designed to suppress truth and transparency. Most are set up in such a way that everyone in them seems to know the truth, but nobody ever tells it to anyone else.
- No organization can be honest with the public if it is not honest within.
- No organization is served by silence...
The article is full of great examples that are too extensive to quote here.
I think blogs are one great tool for creating more candor, more expression, and more communication in an organization. I'm impressed in the short time we've been using them in Utah, what I've learned from other people's blogs. I hope that my blog helps make my thinking, motives, plans, and actions more transparent.
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September 5, 2002
Wireless Mobile Productivity Devices
Ray Ozzie opines on wireless mobile productivity devices (i.e. notebook computers) and concludes that "In terms of the value that we can get from our own personal computers and the Internet, however, we're still at the dawn of a new era. An era in which software matters, and architecture matters." He says:
The browser has served us well. It has provided a means by which we can have universal access to applications, transactions, and published information. But in the meantime, the PC has become a powerhouse: cpu, gpu, storage, price. The Great Conversion to notebook computers is well under way, and it's now clear that the most wildly successful wireless mobile productivity device won't be the 3G phone, or even the BlackBerry, but the ubiquitous and inexpensive WiFi notebook. In a shape and size to suit every need.
I use a notebook computer exclusively and have for years. I got tired of never having the right files with me and so now they're all in one place and I carry that place with me. I also have a WiFi card and one of the new Sprint CDMA cards for wide area wireless. I find its easier to get work and other things done if I've got the same environment no matter where I go.
The question that I ask as a CIO is how widely should notebook computers be deployed in the organization. One school of thought is to let Ozzie and others develop applications that drive demand and let business managers make the decision of who should have a laptop and who doesn't ned one. That presumes that the business managers have the vision to see the (often soft) value that a notebook might bring.
The other school of thought is push them out to the organization widely and see what happens. As an example, about a year ago, I needed to replace the computers for my staff and I got a notebook for everyone. My feeling is that they don't have to take it home and work very often for me to recoup a few hundred dollars difference in cost.
At an enterprise level, I prefer a third way. As CIO, I have a duty to support business managers in reaching business goals, but I also often have to wear the visionary hat, which sometimes means finding ways to deploy technology that may not have a proven ROI yet. There is a kind of person (they exist in every organization) that if you give them a new tool with unexplored capabilities, they will figure out some pretty neat ways to use the tools. I think we need to find ways to "award" notebook computers with wireless networking capabilities to these people and see what develops. This is kind of the approach I took with blogging. Fortunately, giving away blogs is less expensive than giving away notebook computers.
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My Hate/Love Relationship with Internet Explorer: An Open Source Story
Infoworld had an article this week on IE not locking down correctly. What happens is that IE will display the lock symbol, when a proper SSL connection has not truly been established. More details can be found in the original report by Mike Benham. This is on top of the fact that since I started using XP, I get asked about a jillion times a day if I want to install the Java runtime environment (which XP doesn't support) Yes, I know you can tell it not to ask you anymore, but I let it keep telling me so I can remind myself how much I hate Microsoft and their silly little games.
I'd switch to Mozilla in a heartbeat but for on tiny little problem: I'm addicted to the slick WYSIWYG editing box in Radio. I know, its silly, but I tried it and it was just too much work to enter all the HTML by hand. I think this is a hurdle that open source has to cross. The innovators will use it because its open source and be willing to put up with all kind of pain to do so. The early adopters will want to use open source, but be driven back by problems like the one I describe above. The late majority won't use open source until its the software that meets their needs better than closed source software. No amount of philosophical chest thumping will change that.
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Licenses for Radio
If you're a State of Utah employee using Radio to create a blog and you're listetd on my utah.gov blogroll to the left, you can contact Cherilyn in my office for a license number. As I've said, I'm willing to buy 100 of them.
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September 4, 2002
South Dakota Puts All State Forms Online
From Al Sherwood's IT in Government Webloga piece on South Dakota putting all forms online:
PIERRE, S.D. -- Gov. Bill Janklow unveiled a one-stop Web site last week for more than 1,100 state forms.
The South Dakota Service Direct page went live on the state's Web site last Thursday, Janklow said, allowing citizens and businesses to search for and access nearly all state forms through one Web page.
Each form on the Service Direct Web site has links to information about the form, as well as a downloadable copy for printing and mailing. In many cases, officials said, the site offers a fill-in-the-blanks style online form for direct submission to the state electronically, allowing for many state forms to be processed entirely online for immediate service.
"The goal is to reduce the hassle for people," Janklow said. "This is a no-brainer."
This really is a no-brainer, as long as you can avoid arguments about what the right software is and who's going to pay. Once those issues enter into the discussion, you'd better have your brain fully engaged.
1:32 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This
Intel Sells Utah-based LANDesk Unit
Intel's desktop management software is developed at their Salt Lake City facility. They announced today that they're selling it to a group of venture capital companies. At least one of the companies, vSpring, is based in Utah. Utah seems to have a few companies working on desktop management software. Utah-based Altiris is another example.
I've written here before about desktop management. I believe that in the last few years the ubiquity of the network and the development of software like LANDesk and Altiris has made desktop management a real possibility. The benefits are many. Among them lower costs and increased service to employees. There's a strong resistance to this kind of change because it runs counter to conventional wisdom: more local people must mean we'll get better service, right? Regardless, I think that a move to an enterprise desktop management program is inevitable. If it doesn't happen on my watch, it will happen on the next person's. We waste a lot of time trying to swim upstream.
10:40 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This
September 2, 2002
Warflying on a Nice September Morning
Last week, Dave Fletcher pointed me at this article on warflying--just like wardriving, but using a plane. Now, it turns out that I had all the requisite gear except for a portable GPS that plugs into my laptop (the plane has two, but I didn't want to tap into them). Here's my list of gear:
- Airplane: A Piper Turbo Arrow that I own with a friend.
- Laptop: An IBM T-30.
- GPS: A Garmin eTrex Venture. I bought this at Circuit City for $170 and it comes with the cord to hook to the laptop.
- Software: netstumbler
- A WiFi card supported by netstumber: An Enterasys Networks card with an external antenna that Enterasys was kind enough to loan me (netstumbler doesn't support either the Cisco or IBM cards that I own).
I've been meaning to take my kids out anyway so this morning presented a perfect opportunity. After a quick breakfast at MacDonalds we were off to the airport.
I didn't intend for this to be a systematic aerial survey, just a trip to learn a few lessons. Once I have if figured out, I'll do a more comprehensive survey of Salt Lake and Utah counties. Here's what I found:
- First, set the laptop so that it doesn't go to sleep. I missed a lot of points because the laptop went to sleep and there wasn't anyone to tend it. I was busy flying the plane.
- The antenna seems to work best when its oriented horizontally. I'm not an antenna expert by any stretch, but my understanding is that when its oriented horizontally, you pick up more signals outside of the plane (in the geometric sense) you're in. If anyone has more info on this and would like to clue me in, drop me a line.
- I was up for a about an hour and covered 124 statute miles. Most of the time, i tried to keep the speed around 125 mph. I was about 1000 feet above terrain (which is minimum legal flying altitude over populated areas).
- I discovered 27 access points. Only 5 of them were encrypted. Only a few of them still had default SSIDs. A number of them appear to be commercial ISP access points, so I'd have to assume they are locked down some other way.
- I have latlong for each of these courtesy of netstumbler and the GPS, so it would be a relatively simple task now to go back to them in a car and spend more time exploring.
- With only a little more sophistication in terms of outside antennas, etc. you could do an extensive aerial mapping of an area and no one would be the wiser.
All in all, its a kind of fun way to spend some time and a good excuse to fly! Next time, I'll take another pilot and spend some time concentrating on getting good reception, making sure the laptop doesn't go to sleep, flying a pattern, etc.