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November 30, 2002
Gallery for My Blog
For some time, I've been looking around for a good photo album solution for my blog. I wanted to be able to host it (as opposed to using a hosted solution like Web Shots). I also wanted something that would take the drudgery out of uploading the pictures, creating the thumbnails, index pages, etc. This weekend, I installed Gallery on my server. It seems to be just what I was looking for. Its PHP based and I'd never used that before, so the hardest part of the instlalation was just getting up to speed on PHP and getting it working on my server. I created an album with the pictures I took on my recent trip to Tucson to attend the Center for Digital Governments RE:PUBLIC conference.
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November 27, 2002
Selling Your Anonymity
Doing the Thanksgiving shopping at Albertson's, I was once again slightly enraged to find I'd picked up something, thinking it was a great price (in this case a 12 pack of soda for $1.99), only to find out at the check out stand that I only got that price if I used their "value card." The regular price was $4.50. Of course, that's just a way to convince me to let Albertson's add my purchases to their collection of marketing data. I don't mind the quid pro quo so much as the fact that you've got to really pay attention to the signs to know what price you're going to pay. So far, I'm a hold out at Albertson's but not at Best Buy. I bought a ViewSonic TV adapter for my PC. The regular price was $159, but I got a $30 rebate if I sent in my receipt. Course, they also got my address. The moral of the story? I can be bought, but I'm not cheap.
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November 26, 2002
iBook is Best of Both Worlds
The iBook is quickly becoming my development platform of choice. I find its more intuitive to me than Windows (since I cut my teeth on Unix) and its easier to use than my Linux box (it runs standard open source tools with ease and the UI and management tools are superb). I just finished getting up to speed on jBOSS and rewriting a credit card gateway simulation bean I give to my class to use the jBOSS xdoclet template. The iBook was a great platform for this work.
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Identity Theft and Digital Identity
By now, everyone has probably heard of the identity theft ring that the FBI broke up yesterday with the arrest of this man and two others. Philip Cummings worked as a help desk technician at a company called Teledata Corp. He allegedly stole passwords for downloading credit reports on people and sold them on the street for $60 a pop.
I couldn't help but put this news story in the context of my recent trip to the Digital ID World conference. One of the things that became very clear to me was that almost no one was interested or concerned about linking identity in the digital world to a real person. They were much more concerned about what properties that identity carried with it. For example, an online bookseller only cares that the identity being presented has a valid address and a valid credit card. The credit car company cares on that the card gets paid on time and is used in a consistent manner. And so on.
Identity theft is exacerbated when we cannot tie identity to a real person. In fact, identity theft depends on this inability in our current system. Governments almost always care about identity being linked to a real person (usually so that that real person can be sued or go to jail if they fail to meet their obligations such as paying their taxes or not honoring a contract). I think the rest of the world should care too. I want my identity to be linked to me, not to be some disembodied collection of properties.
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November 25, 2002
jBOSS and xdoclet
While I was reacquainting myself with some tools for my class, I ran across a good tool called xdoclet. My class uses jBOSS as their application server and since I don't get to play with these things as part of my job anymore, every year, I have to get up to speed on the latest release and what new features it has. jBOSS changes a lot in a year, to the point where almost nothing I knew last year is applicable anymore. While I was searching for a good primer, I ran across this document on the jBOSS site and some associated examples. The examples are based on a template (which is quite helpful) for bean development that uses xdoclet. xdoclet, with some help in comments, creates all the associated bean files (remote interface, home interface, deployment descriptor, etc.) from the primary bean source. Its configurable to support BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere, and others in addition to jBOSS, so its really quite helpful.
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Another Candidate for the Indexing Bake-Off
One of the realities of life for a CIO is you talk to lots of vendors. Often I show up at a meeting that someone decided I "just had to be at" with very little idea of why I'm there. I know, you're saying "take charge of your schedule" and believe me I try, but sometimes politics is a driver you can't ignore. The largest crop of vendors I'm seeing lately is the type that comes in and says "we were sitting around one day and suddenly we thought 'Wow! We have the answer to Homeland Security'." Today I had such a meeting with a company called Whamtech. All in all, a pretty interesting technology. I think they'd make an excellent candidate for the indexing bake-off I proposed.
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SmartUTAH's Tech Expo in Box Elder County
I'll be speaking at the SmartUTAH Tech Expo in Box Elder County on December 5th. SmartUTAH is a local non-profit foundation aimed at increasing the penetration of technology to the rural areas of the State. I've spoken for them in Sanpete and Uintah counties as well. My topic will be "New eGovernment Services for Utah." Microsoft has been an important sponsor of these events and a good corporate citizen in this regard. They usually send someone to talk about Microsoft's new directions and I have found them to be pretty interesting. Got one of my early previews of .NET at the Sanpete county event.
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November 23, 2002
Bluetooth and CDMA Phones
Fazal Majid wrote to me about Bluetooth phones for CDMA networks (like those run by Sprint and Verizon). He pointed me to this article from The Register which discusses Qualcomm's monopoly over CDMA technology. The article cites that as the reason no Bluetooth CDMA phones are available. The article says:
Consumers will not make their choice of network operator based on the underlying network technology. Their choices are influenced heavily by the the appeal, popularity and price of handsets and services.
This is so true. I've been a Sprint customer since for 5 or 6 years, but I'll switch for a Bluetooth phone. Not to mention the fact, that I'm quite disappointed with Sprint's latest offerings. The data and voice service are great, but what's wrapped around the base technology is underwhelming.
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November 22, 2002
technolgy\@breakfast
Once a month, the Utah Technology Alliance sponsors something they call 'technology\@breakfast.' This morning's meeting featured Satel, a local security consultancy who supplied much of the computer security to the 2002 Olympics. I spoke briefly at the beginning on the importance of WiFi and the absolute necessity to stay out ahead of users in deployment if you're going to maintain security. If you don't stay out ahead of them, you'll have rogue wireless networks springing up all over. Stay out ahead and you get security and interoperability.
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Communications Hub
Apple has been making a lot of noise about the Mac being a "digital hub," that is, the central device that links your camera, PDA, MP3 player, etc. and provides the processing necessary to make them valuable tools. For some time, I've been looking for the same thing on the communications side: a "communications hub," if you will.
The problem is this: I've got a laptop and an iPAQ that I use frequently. For a while, I've been using a Sprint WAW (wide area wireless) card to access the net from my laptop and my iPAQ when I'm out of the office. The card works pretty well and has great coverage. The problem is that I've got to remember to move it from my laptop to the iPAQ and back. What's more, when its on the iPAQ you've got this hideously bulky holster that it plugs into. The whole set up is just clunky and, thus, discourages use of soemthing that out to be a productivity tool. The final straw is that its a power hog, so you can deplete the batteries on any device pretty quickly.
Last week I got a hold of a Bluetooth enabled Sony Ericsson T68i phone from AT&T Wireless to try out as a communications hub. The phone is small and sleek. The network uses GSM. My hope was that a single device, that worked as a phone could also serve my data needs without bulky wires, holsters, or antenna. The set-up succeeded beyond my wildest hope.
My iPAQ and my laptop are both Bluetooth enabled which means "no wires." Setting up the phone to work as a Bluetooth wireless modem from the laptop and the iPAQ was easy. The phone stays in my pocket and I can still pull out my iPAQ anywhere and get on the net. Same with the laptop. Also, the phone battery lasts much longer than the batteries in the devices.
What's the downside? There are two:
- The phone is not dedicated to any of my devices, so I can't have them both on net at the same time (although the can talk to each other using Bluetooth).
- You can't place or receive a call while the phone is being used for data.
A few other points:
- Even if your laptop doesn't have Bluetooth, D-Link sells a relatively cheap USB dongle that is small and works just fine.
- The phone supports wireless headsets. This means that if auto manufacturers will start building Bluetooth hands free kits into cars, you'll be able to just step into you car and be connected.
- Bluetooth seems to be pretty battery friendly.
- The Bluetooth modem works automatically. It can take a minute to connect, but you don't need to fiddle with it.
- This works with an iBOOK as well (using a D-Link dongle). I followed these instructions. This information from Oreilly was also helpful.
- I don't know of any Verizon or Sprint phones (CDMA) with Bluetooth built in.
- You can use the Bluetooth in the phone to sync your contacts to the phone, a very nice way to manage phone information. There's a calendar in the phone as well, but I haven't synced that yet.
My conclusion: this is, by far, the best WAW set-up I've come across yet. If you're away from the office or travel a lot and want to be on net with an iPAQ and laptop, this is a great way to go.
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November 21, 2002
Lindon Utah: High Tech Heaven?
Well maybe not, but for a town of 6000 people, Lindon isn't doing too bad. A few weeks ago, someone from the local (read small) paper interviewed me about high tech in Lindon. Lindon is only about 4 blocks from the old Word Perfect campus in Orem. Consequently, many of my neighbors are ex-Wordperfect folks and have worked in high tech in various capacities. Lindon is home to businesses like Key Labs, Canopy Group, Center 7, Altiris, Lineo, Caldera (now called SCO), and Modus Media to name a few. Most (but not all) of these companies have one thing in common: Ray Noorda, the former Chairman and CEO of Novell.
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Road to the Future?
Last month, the IT Commission asked me to prepare a vision document and present it this month. What I came up with is something I entitled "Road to the Future" after a diagram that I built the paper around. The diagram came from the Dept. of Community and Family Services in Australia. I liked it because I thought it was indicative of many of the issues that we face as a state.
I had originally planned on gathering input from the ACIOs for the document, but it turned out that there wasn't time. A month is just not much time to put something like that together. The good news, depending on how you look at it, I guess, is that there's still plenty of opportunity to participate. The IT Commission accepted the vision document and asked that an enterprise architecture document be presented in April (the next time the ITC meets). That gives us 5 months to work on the enterprise architecture, something we've already decided to do, and have it ready for the ITC to look at. All aboard!
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November 20, 2002
2002 Annual IT Report
I released my annual report to the Governor and Legislature on the state of IT in Utah today. The report is required by statute. In it, we discuss the Governor's plan for IT, annual expenditures, significant agency accomplishments, awards, ITPSC actions, and our progress on the Digital State act.
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Interoperability for Homeland Security
Today's USA Today has an article about how interoperability is a serious issue for first responders. The problem is that, for years, different emergency agencies blithely operated in frequency and technology silos. Now, they find that they need to work together and can't. Furthermore, the cost of fixing the problem is terrifically high because it involves replacing millions and millions of dollars worth of gear. This quote illustrates the problem:
In Boulder County, Colo., Sheriff George Epp keeps a ''fire cache'' of extra radios for other jurisdictions to use at wildfires and other joint operations. It would cost $6 million to replace his department's older VHF-band radios and join the state's 800-megahertz system, money the county doesn't have. So whenever Epp's patrols are on the border of neighboring jurisdictions with which Boulder County can't connect directly, his deputies carry extra radios that can.
Utah was blessed by the Olympics with a large infusion of federal funding related to emergency preparedness. One of the outcomes of that was a 800MHz voice system along the Wasatch Front that provides for interoperability. The state set up a quasi governmental agency called UCAN. UCAN has done a great job of creating a mobile voice network in the 800Mhz band. They also set up a unified dispatch center called the Valley Emergency Communications Center. Still, we face challenges (besides the obvious one of money):
- We need more than just voice interoperability, we need data as well.
- We need interoperability outside the Wasatch Front (which accounts for 80% of the population, but only 20% of the land mass of the State).
- We need to expand beyond a specific technology (800MHz).
- We still have significant political problems on all fronts.
Interoperability in communications is just a specific instance of the kinds of technology issues that organizations are facing across the board and homeland security isn't the only driver. We have a Governor who has the foresight and vision to tell us now, before the crisis, to enable interoperability. The Governor's recent IT plan is aimed at creating a process to govern cross-agency projects to solve these exact kinds of problems. We face a monumental challenge of creating and enabling interoperability throughout our systems. We can't wait until we need to interoperate and then wring our hands and say that the cost of rebuilding is too high.
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November 19, 2002
Arizona Award
I reported earlier that Utah placed 7th in the Digital State Survey. Arizona placed 1st and so Gov. Jane Hull came to Tucson to accept the award as the final event in the conference. This picture shows Kent Lassman from the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Cathy Martin from HP (sponsored the award this year), Gov. Hull, and Cathelia Robinett from the Center for Digital Government during the ceremony.
As an aside, I had breakfast with Gov. Hull and her husband last year during the Olympics. I just sat down at the Governor's Mansion for breakfast before and ISS event and talked to them for quite a while. I didn't know she was the Governor of Arizona until later.
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Clay Jenkinson on Civic Participation
Clay Jenkinson, Senior Fellow for the Center for Digital Government if the Raconteur for this morning's session. Jenkinson is a Jefferson scholar and his talk is laced with references to Jefferson and Jeffersonian ideals. What's the tie to eGovernment? Read on...
Jenkinson tells the story of his neighbor who didn't vote because he'd read in the paper that the new voting machines would increase the time it took to fill out the ballot to 7.5 minutes. In most ways this man is a model citizen, yet he doesn't participate in his government. The limit of most American's civic participation is
- Obey law
- Pay taxes
- Vote evey two years if its not inconvenient
Jenkinson claims three gaps are at the heart of this disenfranchisement:
- Gap between representatives and the represented.
- Gap between majesty of our constitution and the poverty of our electoral process.
- Gap between goal of a "highly educated citizenry" and a adequately educated citizenry.
He characterizes the issue in terms of a surface contentment: "As long as there is some long term prospect for material comfort then I'm OK with things." The two parties have collapsed into a single party of materialism.
Jenkinson discusses the contrast between "Constitution" and "constitution." The small "c" constitution is how we've put our country together. We create this constitution, not just through civic processes, but by our everyday acts. For example, buying an SUV is a vote for certain things: an interstate highway system, low gas prices, ineffective emissions standards, etc. Government reacts to these votes everyday. The California energy crisis is an example.
Leadership brings out our best selves in the face of adversity. Not many Americans have been asked to sacrifice anything in the aftermath of 9/11. We haven't paid more taxes, or been asked to serve (for the most part). We've simply reacted to the crisis with security measures and calls for broader police powers. Jenkinson asked who our national leaders are. Who are the Martin Luther Kings of this generation? Who are the people waiting in the wings to lead the country. According to Jenkins, the Jeffersonian ideal of political leadership had the following qualities:
- Take your ego off the table
- Don't thwart the will of the people
- Communicate your ideas clearly
As I've pondered this discussion that the ideas behind it, I have to argue again for transparency and accountability. This is, I think, the tie in to eGovernment. I think that a legislature, wanting to solve to ecucation problem in their jursidiction could accomplish a lot by simply requiring the near real time, online reporting of specific statistics. Lyle Wray, who I wrote about on Sunday, talked of a report his group did on education in Minnesota that has had an impact. Chris Warner and Earth 911 have done the same thing for water quality. Are we left to non-profits to gather, interpret, and publish the data? Maybe so, but government ought to make their job easier and that will probably only happen through legislative mandate.
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November 18, 2002
Chris Warner on Citizens and Community
Chris Warner is the Founder and CEO of Earth 911. He is serving as the raconteur for this afternoon's last session. Earth 911 is a web site that gives people information customized to their zip code on where to recycle, what local water quality issues are, etc. The site functions in cooperation with all 50 states in a public/private partnership. The site uses a GET for queries and so its results are linkable. Here is the information customized for my neighborhood.
Chris says that government hasn't been able to do this. California, for example, had 248 government funded hotlines to tell citizens where to recycle oil. What happened was that the state mandated that that hotlines exist and so each little community or agency that had anything to do with oil recycling created a hotline that did it in their own way. Each was a little fiefdom that didn't want to go out of business. The problem was that there was no way even one of those numbers was going to show up on 8 billion oil containers each year. Earth 911 was able to create a single place that works nationally and its number is on oil containers. They've been able to do the same thing for water quality and avoid a similar fate for a similar state mandate.
Over 4500 government jurisdictions input data onto this site, so that data is near real time. He tells about a meeting with Christine Todd Whitman where she went to his site to get information about a beach she lived on in New Jersey and the data was 50 minutes old. The EPA site for the same beach had been last updated 2 years and 3 weeks earlier. In their defense, the EPA is getting better. Utah is part of a pilot program now to send XML data to the EPA to update their information regularly.
Earth 911 provides a value to the people entering information by making many of the notifications that they'd have to do manually, so that by going to one site, they accomplish a lot of the administrative tasks required for different events. So people have a vested interest in using this site to do their work. A pretty nice business model.
The point of all of this is that Chris has built a community of concerned citizens and government workers to solve a real problem. The community couldn't have happened without technology, but it was driven by a common cause and innovative people. Foundations and non-profits don't typically make good use of technology and don't understand it as an enabler. They see it solely as a cost, not an opportunity. Earth 911 is clearly a diffferent breed.
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Paul Taylor on Moving eGovernment from Commodity to Community
Paul Taylor, Chief Strategy Officer from the Center for Digital government is the raconteur for this afternoon's first session. He offers the following table:
| Citizen as... | Season of Gov | IT POV | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Y2K | Customer | Expanding | Legacy |
| Dot GOV | Owner/Shareholder | Efficient | Extend Value |
| Post | Citizen | Effective | Transform |
Paul calls the Pre-Y2K and Dot GOV eras "Digital Government 1.0" and says they are mostly about moving routine stuff to the web. The citizen is sold on DG1.0 by choice and government was sold on cost (i.e. "efficient"). He views this era as being defined by the term "commodity." The Digital Government 2.0 era, called "Post" in the previous table, is sold to the citizen as a conversation (see Cluetrain Manifesto here) and government being sold on contribution. In between DG1.0 and DG2.0 is a rocky road that is defined by the notion of capacity. That is, how do we build the governance models, enterprise architectures, and systems that will enable DG2.0 to work?
This notion of eGovernment being about conversation as opposed to commodity experiences is an interesting one. Paul makes the point that a system in Tucson that helped citizens report road damage so that pot holes could be repaired turned into policy discussions about infrastructure maintenance where the citizen is part of the governance process. This ties into some of the discussion we had regarding Joel Kotkin's talk this morning.
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Chris Thomas on Web Services
Chris Thomas, Chief Strategist, Intel Corp. is the keynote speaker at lunch. He began by talking about portals. The Intel portal does $2 billion in business per month. The portal was deployed in 1998. In 1999 a partner survey showed that partners hated the portal because they had to enter data from company systems to portal and info from portal to company systems. Intel reaslized that they had forced the insertion of a person in the process.
Intel has found that there are 700 places where a human is part of their business processes and they are a relatively automated company. Intel is asking the question "where are the places where these people are ciritical to the business process (an approval, for example) and where are they simply adding unreliability to a process that ought to be more automated?"
Portals are like dating services. Dating services bring people together, but after that, the people form a trust relationship and interact peer to peer (my words, not his). Web services is about that P2P relationship. The portal is about finding things. Web services are about the trust relationship that occurs afterwords and, hence, transactions.
If you look at my Enabling Web Services paper, the breakdown for this is the portal is serving the XML Schema, WSIL, RDF, and WRDL documents (the dating service) and then the application is designed for direct machine to machine transactions (by bring XML to the front, having URLs that are well designed, and having a well defined and well designed API).
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Office 11: Why it Matters
So far, I've pretty much ignored the news of Office 11 and its XML capabilities. In this InfoWorld piece, Jon Udell discusses in detail what it does and why it matters. After reading it, I've decided that I'd better start paying more attention to Office 11. I've written before about the vast amounts of government data that is largely unavailable because its unstructured and unindexed. Office 11, if used right (and therein lies the rub), promises to be an important technology in solving this problem. The 2000 and XP upgrades to Office were easily ignored. Many agencies have not upgraded since Office 97 and its worked out just fine (and certainly saved some money). I think Office 11 will change that.
The fact is, Microsoft may have finally seceded in doing with product development what they couldn't do with oppressive licensing and software audits: given us a reason to buy their stuff (I hope someone in Redmond is paying attention). The question that faces us is how to make this kind of upgrade happen. We have a number of machine/OS combinations that will not likely support Office 11 and there are, as always, financial concerns. Many of the applications of Office 11 won't be deployable until most desktops are sporting it. This is a good example of how the lowly desktop is becoming a critical part of the enterprise architecture and choices that individual division make affects the ability of the enterprise to interoperate. Its gotten a lot more interesting that "can Word Perfect read Word documents?".
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The Real Economy
No conference like this can not talk about the economy. Joel Kotkin, Senior Fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.is the raconteur for the morning's opening session on just that topic. Cities and regions are always in competition with each other and ultimately, the question is one of survival. Cities come and go, at least in terms of their relevance. An interesting fact: the longest run for any current city as a "place that matters" is London at 400 years. There's a link here to Emergence. Some interesting issues that change cities:
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People can live anywhere they want (relatively speaking) and are not as tied to a place as much as they used to be. Interestingly, this leads them to be less nomadic than their parents. This could spell trouble for places like New York and San Francisco. To wit: San Bernadino/Riverside CA is the fastest growing economy in the US.
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There is a sociological return to family, stability, and faith.
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Terrorism makes a number of cities less livable than others. New York and DC, for example, have a lot of symbolic targets. People in urban areas are twice as concerned about terrorism as rural folks. Terrorism causes companies to disperse their systems, data, and people.
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More and more companies are moving technical operations to heartland communities because they have well educated, hardworking people who can be hired for a reasonable salary and enjoy the quality of life.
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It is a mistake to believe that when the economy recovers things will be just like they were. He tells the story of talking to a group of developers from New York City who said "smart people have to be here." In fact, New York hasn't made much progress in 40 years. 140 of the Fortune 500 were located in New York in 1960. now, only 39 are locate there. The same is true of the Forbes 400 richest people: 80 lived there in 1960 vs. 48 now. The fact is, smart people don't have to be in New York and techies don't have to live in Silicon Valley.
Joel ends on the note that the availibility of information is leading to what he calls a "new citizenry" that is able to make independent of the developers, enviros, labor unions, and others who have traditionally driven much of public policy. I think this ties in nicely to my theme of eGovernment, ultimately, being about transparency and accountibility.
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Mayor Robert Walkup
The opening remarks for the conference are being given by Tucson's Mayor, Robert Walkup. Walkup is not a career politician. He was a retired engineer who decided to run when he saw a problem with water in the city that had a technical solution that no one would acknowledge or consider. He sings the same song that Gov. Leavitt does on quality of life and its link to economic development.
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November 17, 2002
RE:PUBLIC
I am in Tucson at a Center for Digital Government leadership conference they have called RE:PUBLIC. There's a relatively small number of people here and the conference is set up for discussion instead of talks. Should be an interesting couple of days. Tonight was the opening reception. I talked to a number of people, but particularly enjoyed a lengthy conversation I had with Lyle Wray, the executive director of the Citizens League, a Minnesota based public interest organization. Lyle runs a weblog on Blogspot called "The Pulse." I'll be blogging the conference live, so if you're interested, tune in an follow along.
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Transparency for Sex Offenders
In another example of the public policy side of transparency and accountability, two articles in today's Deseret news talk about sex offender registries. As you're probably aware, the Supreme Court heard arguments last week and will rule on their constitutionality. On one side, the argument is that these people have served their time and this is additional punishment that keeps them from leading productive lives. One the other side is the fact that their conviction is a public record and the kind of public record that might provide real protection to people. Utah has an online sex offender registry that is well designed. I'm glad to see, for example, that the form uses a GET and the results have a URL that is linkable (in keeping with good URL design principles). Regardless of what is determined about their constitutionality, I'm convinced that this is a case where transparency provides a real public service. For example, in just a few seconds, I was able to see a list of sex offenders in my neighborhood. One of them lives right next door to the junior high school. Hmmm.....
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November 16, 2002
County Property Taxes Online
One of our goals with utah.gov is to make it a place for all government in Utah, not just the State. The reason is simple: citizens usually don't know which level of government does what and there ought to be one place to they can go to find what they need. We took a step closer to that goal with the release of county property tax payments for Utah, Davis, and Toolee counties. The press release was picked up by Government Technology Magazine and FedSources.com.
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November 15, 2002
Privacy and eGovernment
I've written from time to time about privacy issues, and most recently have argued for transparency to support accountability. On the eGovernment side of things, I believe strongly that we must engender citizen's trust that their private data will remain so before most will be willing to use online government services. Al Sherwood is Deputy CIO for Planning and Policy and also serves, as a collateral duty, as the Chief Privacy Officer for the State of Utah. He gave a talk a few days ago on the subject to the Intermountain Chapter of the Association for Information and Image Management Information (AIIM). As usual, Al covered all the bases and touched on some important issues. He's available to speak on these issues in other venues as well (like a department IT meeting or an agency management meeting, for example). I believe it would be worth your while.
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November 14, 2002
More on WiFi Antennas
Aaron Mefford sent me a couple of interesting links related to WiFi can antennas. The first has a number of useful links, incluing places to buy N-type connectors, etc. along with instructions for building and using the antennas. It even has a little javascript application that calculates key dimension for parts depening on the diameter of the can you use. The second, called Cantenna is a commercial product that you can buy for $19.95. Pretty good when you consider most commercial antennas with a 12dB gain cost around $150.
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Springville Get Into the Game
Not too long ago, I blogged about the incredible regional network growing up in Utah county. Now it seems Springville, another Utah county community, does not want to be left behind. Springville is buying the network assets of a company called Switchpoint (née Airswitch). This is how American Fork got into the game. I hope they got a good deal because from what I know, the Springville plant was the first prototype and American Fork was the second, more engineered build-out. Nevertheless, when you add in the communities that will be served by Utopia nearly every community in Utah County will be on the net with high speed access.
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November 13, 2002
Transparency at Delta
Jon Udell blogs about something that those of us who fly Delta regularly have known for a while: Delta is an airline that gets IT. Jon, in describing about the gate information system, says the following about one of its features:
Seating status. A realtime window onto the secrets formerly known only to the desk agents.
1st class coach seats checked in (claimed) 22 153 seats reserved (unclaimed) 1 22 seats unassigned 1 48 Simple. Obvious. And yet, revolutionary. The line was moving slowly, there was only one agent at the desk, blood pressures were starting to cook. But at a glance, I could see that with 22 reserved seats still unclaimed, and 12 people in front of me in the line, there wasn't going to be a problem.
This is a great example of how IT can increase transparency, give people useful information, and thus keep customers happy. I'm sure it also builds in some accountability for the gate agent as well.
Those of us who fly Delta regularly also get to enjoy Delta's wonderful web site with real time links into the reservation system. I've been on the phone, talking to the agent, upgraded to first class on the web site, and had the agent see the change seconds later in the reservation system. That's some good integration. I blogged in August about Charlie Feld, the legendary CIO of Frito-Lay who is responsible for the IT turn around at Delta.
Now I wish someone would do something for Sprint. Does anyone know why a company would spend hundreds of millions in capital to build out their next generation network, which is supposedly all about data, and then do such a crappy job on the web site that services it? The phones are beautiful, the service itself is good, but the execution of the mobile features just plain sucks. Go figure.
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Nursing Home Metrics
U.S. nursing homes took a giant step forward yesterday in terms of transparency and accountability with the release of a new Nursing Home search tool on the HHS Medicare site. The site allows you to search for any nursing home in the US (actually you can select them by state, county, and city) and view key statistics that the Feds collect (through the States) as part of the Medicare funding process. For example, in a matter of seconds, I was able to find the nursing home my Grandma was in in Blackfoot Idaho and see that 6% of the residents have pressure sores compared with 8% of residents nationally. I'd mark them down on their use of URLs. They break Principle No. 4 for Enabling Web Services by using a POST instead of a GET for many of the queries yielding them unlinkable. Overall, however the site is a winner and will drive better behavior.
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November 12, 2002
WiFi Grounded?
I am quoted in this opinion piece in CIO Insight entitled "Why WiFi Won't Fly." The author's opinion is that public, for profit WiFi nets won't make it. I'm not as negative as the quote in the article makes it sound. However, I do not believe that 3 college students in a garage running a wireless network in my neighborhood offers the level of reliability and customer support I'm willing to pay for. On the other hand, I've seen some plans for mesh networks and such in the public spectrum that I think could provide a reliable networking service, but we're not there yet. For now, if you need wireless service on the road, use a wide area service like the one from Sprint or AT&T. They work well and are much more widely available.
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IRIS: Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems
Courtesy of the latest Wired wired/tired/expired list, I found out about IRIS, an MIT project with NSF support to build P2P networks that scale and are resiliant to attack. The power point slide show gives the best technical detail about their methods (distributed hash tables). An article in Dr. Dobbs gives an overview. This is a topic I've thought about off and on for the last two years. An index or directory of some kind is at the heart of any P2P system and make it the most vulnerable to attack. Solve that problem and a lot of other things become easier (which is what the slide show says in 40 slides or so with a lot more detail).
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Pete Hayes of Microsoft
This article in Government Computer News is an interview with Pete Hayes, Microsoft's Industry VP for government. The article caught my eye because Pete was in Salt Lake last Friday where we met for the first time. He let me play with his tablet PC, so he's OK in my book.
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WiFi in the Workplace
This article in Fortune magazine highlights WiFi installations at Novell and talks about the value of WiFi at work. There are claims of productivity increases in the article, although its not a study. Wireless networking (whether by WiFi or a wide area solution) certainly makes sense for people who spend a large portion of their day away from their desk. Its a lifesaver for me somedays since I can use time away from my desk, in between meetings, to check email, get messages to my assistant, etc. Before, I'd get home at 7pm, eat dinner and spend several hours going through the days email. Now, my email is usually done during the day.
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November 11, 2002
URI Design at Yahoo!
Seems like Jon Udell has got lots of people are thinking about URI design right now. I posted something last week in response to Jon's post and now Jeremy Zawodny has done the same regarding Yahoo! Finance. I think that some of the changes that they're contemplating regarding XML are fascinating and much needed. Jeremy asks for an opinion on three different design options for Yahoo! Finance URLs:
The bulk of the argument boiled down to roughly something like this:
1. http://finance.yahoo.com/xp?YHOOOr...
2. http://finance.yahoo.com/x/p?YHOOOr...
3. http://finance.yahoo.com/x/p/YHOOThat's right. We spent a long, long time arguing about the difference between a slash ('/'), or question mark ('?'). And we argued passionately for our favorites.
Like any self-respecting academic, my answer is "it depends." Here's how I think it shakes out. If the only thing you're doing is quotes, then I'm not sure it matters a great deal which of these options. In general, I don't like using PATH information for arguments, but that's more style than anything. If you've got a more complicated set of features than just returning quotes, then I don't like any of these. I like
1. http://finance.yahoo.com/xp?q=YHOO&p2=X2&...&pn=Xn
OR
2. http://finance.yahoo.com/xp/YHOO?p1=X1&...&pn=Xn
The nice thing about (2) is that its eminently guessable and simple to remember but allows for the addition of parameters to change the default behavior.
In any event, I believe that the whole set up ought to be carefully documented and that document ought to be available online and, preferably in machine readable form. The problem with the "machine readable" part is that WSDL isn't up to this task (built for something else) and nothing else has emerged as a strong contender. Maybe Yahoo! has enough clout to take something like Paul Prescod's WRDL and make it a de facto standard?
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OpEd Irony
I found the lead OpEd piece in yesterday's Deseret News, entitled "Howling at the Moon," ironic. The piece is about the way conspiracy theories can come about and specifically about the various theories that NASA faked the moon landings. The piece begins:
It's easy to come up with a new conspiracy theory. Just think of an event or a big institution, add in a hated (at least by some) group of people and throw in a suspicious motive for good measure. Greed usually will do, but sometimes the need to cover up or save face works better. Mix it all liberally with large doses of "evidence." You can find this in a lot of convenient places. Generally it will be in the form of truth that easily can be manipulated to mean something else.
Slap it all together on a web site or a talk radio show or any other public forum and presto! Next thing you know, honest, intelligent people are scrambling to do what is nearly impossible — prove beyond a doubt that something didn't happen.
Americans are good at this. That's why so many people believe the United Nations is out to take over the world, the Oklahoma City bombing was really the work of federal agents and the Deseret News has purchased the Tribune.
I could add a few more things to their list.
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November 9, 2002
Gaming in Utah
Yesterday I went with the Governor to visit Microsoft's Salt Lake City facility. A few years back Microsoft bought a local company called Access Software to fold into their computer game unit. That group, now 150 strong, writes games for the Xbox. There are some pretty impressive things their doing with computer generated scenery. One of the things that surprised me is how fully developed some of the graphics is for games that are still 12 months away from launch. Their production process was very similar to what we saw last year at Pixar.
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November 8, 2002
Choose Your URIs Carefully
In my white paper on Enabling Web Services, one of the principles that I proffer is "Cool URIs Don't Change" (which, of course, is the title of a paper from Tim Berners-Lee). The larger point, however, is that URIs should be carefully designed, not just haphazardly thrown together. I just discovered a paper by Jon Udell from September 2000 called "The Art of Organizing Search Results" which makes the point even more strongly. Pay special attention to the second page of the article where he describes a de facto API for the Oreilly web site that was created inadvertently simply by choosing the URI conventions with common sense.
There are some that argue that URIs are a bad place for meta data, but it certainly is effective. People who believe this are probably the ones who are responsible for all those unreadable URIs you see created by content management systems. This has led Brent Simmons to coin his Law of CMS URLs: the more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs. Every day Utah's web API is being modified, built-out, and expanded as people add content. We must ensure that our URIs are designed carefully and usefully. To do anything else is to squander an opportunity to build something now that has lasting value.
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November 7, 2002
Utah Ranks 7th in Digital State Survey
The Center for Digital Government released their annual rankings of the states today. Utah ranked 7th, the same place we were least year. At first glance, that may seem like we're not making progress, but CDG raises the bar every year, so to "stay the same" you have to make significant improvements. Of the 6 states ahead of us, only 3 were ahead of us last year as well: Washington, Illinois, and Arizona. There's only a handful of state that are consistently in the top ten every year and Utah is one of them. This sort of consistency doesn't happen because of one person's push or a few interesting programs, it is the result of many dedicated people working over time to continually improve every facet of government. Congratulations and thank-you to everyone who worked hard to make our eGovernment program one of the best in the Nation.
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Utah Company Makes InfoWorld Top Ten
Associated Food Stores, a Utah-base food distribution company was ranked No. 9 in the InfoWorld 100 for wireless networking. The write-up says:
Farr West, Utah, is home to AFS’ 600-acre distribution center and massive wireless networking deployment that locates, tracks, and manages assets. The network uses WhereNet’s Real-Time Locating System, which works with wireless LANs and bar code data-capture tools and rides on AFS’ trailers, tractors, and dollies, to provide AFS with up-to-the-second location and telemetry information on the hundreds of vehicles rolling through the center. Led by Tim Van de Merwe, Internal Logistics Manager, the wireless system returned AFS’ investment of several hundred thousand dollars in just six months.
I'll have to go visit and see for myself what they're doing. Sounds like a fun field trip.
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November 6, 2002
Network for Homeland Security
This InfoWorld article describes Steve Cooper's plan for a "network of networks" for homeland security. The message is similar to the one I blogged last week at NASCIO. I have a few comments:
- This needs to be built like the interstate highway system: the federal government provides the funding and sets the standards, but the states (and others) build it).
- We need to step up to the plate and help define this. If we do, it will likely be useful for much more than homeland security, the same way that the interstate highway system is useful for more than national defense (its original purpose and justification in the '50s).
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November 4, 2002
Unstructured Data
Got a question? Somewhere, on some government computer, the information you need is probably available. Information you paid for and the government would gladly share with you---if only they could find it. There are thousands and thousands of documents stored on thousands and thousands of hard drives just in the State of Utah. Throw in city governments, county governments, school districts, universities, water districts, and other special use districts and the problem is staggering. Multiply that by fifty states and add in the federal government and its mind boggling. With all of the technology available to index, catalog, and store this data, what's wrong?
There's also some great search and concept indexing software available. I wrote something on unstructured data last week and today I read an article in InfoWorld on the same topic. In the end, I think the answer comes down to ROI. As the InfoWorld article says:
Although no one disputes the value contained in unstructured information, the work and expense required to add structure to the data or to make it consumable and searchable by workers is significant, Ramos says. And because the ROI is not necessarily solid, many organizations put their limited technology dollars toward financials or CRM applications instead.
While there are some great arguments for making all this unstructured data available for use, its hard to convince people to spend money on that instead of medicaid benefits for N more people or new highways. I'd argue that governments do better than most organizations their size in at least making an effort. The State of Utah has an entire program on locating government information, housed in the State Library division, which has responsibility for this topic. They're experts at meta data and retrieving information. What they don't have is a lot of money and to get that, we'll need more than a soft ROI. We'll need real numbers on real savings or benefits.
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November 2, 2002
Pringles Can Antennas for WiFi
John Patrick has a list of links to information on making a WiFi antenna from a Pringles can. I've been meaning to do this for a while and see what kind of range you can really get. I haven't made an antenna (stringing wire for my FM radio in the living room probably doesn't count) since I made a radio telescope in high school from plans I found in Popular Science Magazine.
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Employee Web Sites
Yesterday, as I was meeting with Siebel, I started to develop a vision for what a employee web site ought to have:
- Unified help desk, not just across organizational boundaries, but across functional areas as well (like Facilities, IT, HR, Finance, Fleet, etc.). When the bathroom near my office needs attention, I want to go to the same place to get help as I go to get help with my email or fix a problem with my latest pay stub.
- Alerts for critical issues, personalized and targeted. For example, if I work in the Ag building, I don't want to see heating issues from the Capitol.
- Content that allows employee self-service. This also ought to be targeted by geography, job function, and maybe even past activity. This kind of content includes static content as well as applications that let an employees do things like change their 401K withholdings, etc.
- Analytics pertaining to their job. There's a lot more to be said here.
- General communications to employees, again targeted.
- Logs of my recent activity on the site.
The more I look at it, the less I see the difference between the kind of site a shared service organization like ITS or Fleet might build for its customers and the employee facing web site for the organization (like Innerweb). They ought to be one and the same.
7:25 PM |