Phil Windley's Technometria

« March 2004 | Main | May 2004 »

April 30, 2004

Context as an Integration Driver

I just read a white paper at the Radiant Logic Web site on context. The article contends that hierarchical relationships provide context and that one of the primary drivers for integration on the business side is recovering context. As an example, when I combine customer service and customer billing systems, I gain more context surrounding any individual customer and the understanding I gain from that is what makes the integration worthwhile. The article hums right along and makes some interesting points until it gets to the "Context from a technical perspective" section and then is feels like the author lost interest and posted it before it was done. I wish that weren't so---I was anxious to read it.

2:44 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Ravenous RSS Readers

A Wired magazine article talks about the problems with bandwidth comsumed by RSS. Overall, I think the article is a little shallow, only getting to the interesting solutions in the last three paragraphs. There are plenty of interesting solutions to be developed and as Dave Winer says at the end of the article, once its in someone's economic interest to solve them, they'll get solved.

11:09 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Cowster Moves Closer to Reality

WYTrax cattle tracking program runs on a Palm and uses a bluetooth enabled RFID reader to inventory the herd and return information about each cow.

Cowster is the nickname I've given to the idea of using Web services to build a distributed cattle tracking system. Now a Wyoming company has move us one step closer to reality by using Bluetooth, RFID, and PDAs to let ranchers keep track of vital information about each member of the heard and pull it up with the wave of a wand.

A article on News of the Weird explains it pretty well (warning scroll down to read the page). Cowster would take this one step further and create datastores with herd genealogies at private hosting services (perhaps associated with coops). A standard would allow a particular cows genealogy and heard associations to be traced through this centralized system. The goal is to keep the data private and under the control of its owners unless it needs to be queried to prevent the outbreak of some disease.

10:39 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 29, 2004

Poindexter Confidential

Wired Magazine has an iinterview with retired Admiral John Poindexter who has a Caltech PhD. The article says Poindexter may be "the only serious technologist ever to reach the highest circles of power in Washington." (I think John Sununu had a PhD in Engineering.) Of course, he's also famous for being the Big Brother in Chief. The interview is fascinating. I wish it were longer.

4:14 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Making CD-R's Last

From Doug Kaye I learned of an interesting article on how long CD-R's will last and things you can do to increase or decrease that time. I've always just popped down to Staples and bought the cheapest disks I could find. For some of my uses (the latest Suse distro, for example) that's fine. But this article makes the point that if you're using the disk to archive important material, you need to be more careful. The article contains information on how to select good media and media that's appropriate for the drive that you'll be recording on. This may be especially important for organizations building large collections of CD-R's that they need to keep to meet regulatory or other business requirements.

Update: Coincidentally, Steven Vore pointed to some NIST information on the same topic yesterday.

2:22 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Digital ID World 2004

Everytime I hear it, I think it would be a great name for an amusement park for geeks, but actually, its the premiere event for anyone interested in digital identity: Digital ID World. The third annual Digital ID World Conference will be held October 25-28, 2004 in Denver. For the last two years this has been among my favorite conferences. Good organization, good people, and great content. If digital identity is important to you, go to this conference. You won't be sorry.

8:50 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Identity Tops Security Priorities

The April 2004 Heat Index from Information Security Magazine lists identity management, user provisioning, and single sign-on as the top three highest priority IT security purchases of 175 Fortune 1000 companies.

8:29 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 28, 2004

W3C Publishes First Draft of WS-CDL

The World Wide Web Consortium has published the first draft of the Web services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL). WS-CDL is targeted at coordinating interactions among Web services and their users. WS-CDL promises to be a necessary component for BPEL or other programming languages used to model business processes.

The WS-CDL specification defines peer-to-peer collaboration between Web service participants. A user of a Web service, automated or otherwise, is a "client" of that service. Users may be other Web services, applications and human beings. In WS-CDL, a set of client interactions may be related over time in a "collaboration group." A collaboration group could be for example, a set of components that make up a business transaction or a database transaction.

The future of e-business applications is in the loosely coupled, decentralized environment of the World Wide Web. This environment requires the ability to perform long-lived, peer-to-peer collaborations between the participating services, within or across the trusted domains of an organization. Applications that implement WS-CDL can accomplish this shared business goal, as the Working Group developed its requirements document to consider both broad practical business needs and sound theories.

From World Wide Web Consortium Publishes First Public Working Draft of Web Services Choreography Description Language 1.0
Referenced Wed Apr 28 2004 17:31:35 GMT-0600

Interestingly enough, WS-CDL is based on Pi Calculus. I used to be a formal methods guys and have studied Pi Calculus and its predecessor, CCS before. Never imagined that they'd show up in Web services.

I believe that there is hope that WS-CDL and BPEL will be complimentary. We'll see.

5:36 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Batch Processing with J2EE

DevX has an interesting article about batch processing that caught my eye for two reasons: it talks about doing it with J2EE and it discusses when asynchronous processing is a better solution. The article identifies batch jobs as those that possess the following characteristics:

• High volume, involving thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of data rows or transactions
• Computationally expensive, and you don't want this cost to be part of your on-line application
• Unable to be triggered by a particular user action as the data is incomplete or unstable; Data stabilises after the fact or when some other business process occurs
• Triggered by a high-level, overarching business or time-based event

The problem is that each of these effectively describes scenarios where you'd want to do asynchronous processing as well. How to choose?

Batch processing processes the work off-line. The basic architecture uses a "client" to partition the job into parallel chunks and then fire off EJBs to process those chunks. On the other hand, real-time asynchronous processing is applicable when the the processing must be performed immediately or when the results must eventually be communicated back to an on-line user. The obvious choice for asynchronous processing in J2EE is the message bean.

Fine-grained, real-time timers and events are suitable for when you need to handle the issues in real-time. However, they can be expensive. You spend CPU cycles raising, maintaining, and checking events. Event/timer processes may contend with your on-line processes for resources and for access to the same data, leading to locking problems. Using many small events to process large volumes is not as efficient as processing large data sets in one go. It's hard to get efficiencies of scale.

Batch solutions are ideal for processing that is time or non-real-time event based and/or state based:

• Time-based: The business function executes on a periodic or recurring basis. The function is required to run only on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly cycle or at a time denoted by the business.
• State-based: The business function operates over data that matches a given state where state can include simple, complex, and time-based criteria.

Batch processes are data-centric and can efficiently crunch through large volumes off-line without affecting your on-line systems.

From High-volume Transaction Processing in J2EE
Referenced Wed Apr 28 2004 15:35:01 GMT-0600

3:36 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

One More Academic Blogger

For the past 16 months, I've been living the life of the independent. Its something I've always wanted to do and it has been fun. Fortunately, I'm in a position that I can afford to do it--the pay can be spotty (not necessarily bad, but it comes in lumps). Here's some of my activities over the past year and four months:

• I've written for InfoWorld, had a monthly column for Connect Magazine, and been working on a book about digital identity.
• I've spent a lot of time working with start-ups as a member of their advisory board, or even as a CTO for hire.
• I've done some consulting on large IT organization dynamics.
• I've spoken at a number of conferences (I was on the road 45 days last year).
• I've taught three courses at BYU
• I've served on the board of a public company (Sento)
• And I've written a lot in this blog and UtahPolitics.org

As fun as all that is, however, I've missed building things. The greatest times of my life have been the times when I was building big systems or exploring new ones. Consequently, I've been looking for the opportunity to do it again.

Over the past months, I've been quietly looking and I've had a number of offers--all of which I've turned down for one reason or another. There's only one I regret turning down, but my reasons were sound and I'd probably make the same decision. As I examine my motives for turning these opportunities down it basically comes down to the fact that I don't just like building big things, I like building my big things. Fundamentally, I think successful CTOs are usually associated with something they're passionate about and I just haven't found anything that I was so passionate about that I was willing to trade my freedom for it.

The obvious choice then would be to start a company and in fact, I've been involved in starting a few lately. Some of them were intended to remain small and they have. A few are intended to be big and perhaps they yet will be. As they mature, I'll talk more about them here. Even so, starting a company hasn't happened and part of the reason is I'm more interested in the right ideas than I am in making money. I'm not interested in starting a company just because its a good business. Its got to grab me and not let go.

At the same time, I've been finding that the more time I spend on campus, the more I realize I miss it. I have loved colleges since I saw "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" when I was 5 or 6. I got a PhD because I liked being at school. I became a professor because that was the only way to get paid to be at school. My epiphany was to realize that I realized the I could continue to do many of the things I've enjoyed over the past year (like blogging and going to conferences) and also have the opportunity to build things.

Where this is all leading to is that I've decided to rejoin the Computer Science Faculty at Brigham Young University starting May 1st. I was there for 6 years from 1993 to 1999 and love the school and the department. My lab will concentrate on what I'm calling, for now, "connected computing." Calling it distributed or networked computing has too many connotations that don't fit. I'll be hiring some grad students over the next few months and starting to build some things. I've already had some discussions with people about some interesting RSS systems we'd like to build.

I'll continue to have other interests and activities. I view this blog as a fundamental part of my activities and intend to incorporate it into my new activities. You'll probably see more posts about academics and, hopefully, some about the cool things we're building.

11:24 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 27, 2004

Eclipse and XDoclet Tutorial

Earlier I mentioned an Eclipse plug-in for jBOSS that gives IDE functionality to jBOSS programming. An new article from DevX tells how to use XDoclet and Eclipse. XDoclet is a code generation engine that uses metadata within your code files to generate the uninteresting portions. For example, I've had my 462 class (large-scale distributed programming) use XDoclet with EJBs. You basically write the bean file and XDoclet generates all the rest of the EJB files from that, provided the proper metadata is included. This latest article runs through a EJB tutorial to show how Eclipse and XDoclet work together to generate code for servlet-driven EJB-based application.

4:32 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 26, 2004

Challenging Spyware

My son came upstairs Friday night and told me the computer had told him we had a virus and wanted him to download a program. Fortunately, he's pretty bright and noted right away that it didn't look like the usual virus warnings he'd seen before from our virus scanning software and wanted to know what to do. You guessed it, the warning was being generated by a pop-up from some piece of spyware loaded on the computer. I have a separate computer for the kids because they're always clicking on something. After about 3 months of use by kids, your typical PC is so infected that your best chance is to just blow away the OS and reload.

The New York Times had a story today (usual disclaimer about free registration required) on Spyware and the legal efforts being undertaken to stop spyware with legal means and even mentions Utah's efforts. The Utah law has its basis in a lawsuit brought by a Utah company (1-800-Contacts) against WhenU.com, a spyware vendor.

The bill's sponsor, state Representative Stephen H. Urquhart, said that the law focused on giving computer owners notice of what was being done to their machines and the opportunity to refuse the software or remove it easily. "I'm convinced over 75 percent of the people who have this on their computers have no idea it's there," he said.

The law that WhenU.com is challenging has its origins in a lawsuit against the company by a Utah company that sold contact lenses. The company, 1-800-Contacts, said it was losing customers because WhenU was placing ads for lens-selling rivals when visitors came to the 1-800-Contacts site. It sued WhenU in federal court in New York.

"We've made substantial investments in our trademark and copyrights and consumer awareness," said R. Joe Zeidner, vice president for legal affairs at 1-800-Contacts, and "we think there needs to be protection in place for business."

Last December, Federal District Judge Deborah A. Batts granted an injunction prohibiting WhenU from serving pop-up ads for rivals of 1-800-Contacts - a departure from other case law that had supported WhenU's practices

From The New York Times > Technology > The Latest High-Tech Legal Issue: Rooting Out the Spy in Your Computer
Referenced Mon Apr 26 2004 13:25:32 GMT-0600

WhenU.com has challenged Utah's law saying it will outlaw what WhenU.com does. Duh! That's the idea, isn't it?

Even so, I remain somewhat skeptical that the law will have the desired effect given the ineffectiveness of anti-SPAM laws. It might take WhenU.com down, but it can't touch off shore activities and those will just grow to fill the gap as far as I can see.

1:30 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Mid-Year NASCIO Meeting

Dave Fletcher is blogging highlights of the mid-year NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) meeting in Chicago. I always enjoyed the NASCIO meetings, so I look forward to following along.

1:16 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Offshore Outsourcing and Utah

The Utah Technology Commission was the focus of the latest round of offshore outsourcing hysteria last week. The Deseret News reported on the meeting. Seems that the Dept. of Workforce Services contracted with a company to do customer service on one of their programs and that contractor turned around and sent some of the jobs to India. This, of course, presents a perfect opportunity for political posturing and that's just what happened. Here are some of the quotes:

"The perception is these are low-end jobs, that we can't find people to do them here, therefore we go offshore," said Rep. Brent Goodfellow, D-West Valley. "I think that the concern I would have is that this is just a start, and if we don't do something we will have high-end jobs going offshore as well."

Sen. David Thomas, R-South Weber, said he worries about identity theft overseas.

The commission's co-chairman, Rep. David Clark, R-Santa Clara, said he wondered if information is secure "when we're dealing with a land with a different set of laws."

Thomas wondered if Utah's rural Smart Sites could handle the work, but Nixon said Smart Site companies typically want to have jobs paying more than the $7 per hour typical of call center wages.

From deseretnews.com | India may lose 'Utah jobs'
Referenced Mon Apr 26 2004 08:02:19 GMT-0600

Of course, this is more fun to read when you know the personalities, but still, I'm sure you get the flavor. The funny thing is, we're not even talking about Utah jobs. Likely, the contract will go to some other state since Utah has no "Utah first" clause in its procurement code. That doesn't matter though since its the idea of the thing that gets people upset.

This kind of political pandering is inevitable because its very difficult to build support for conceptual issues like free trade and economic theory. Even if the legislators understand it, their constituents probably don't and so they're vulnerable. There were all kinds of people handing out leaflets at the Utah County Republican Convention on Saturday protesting NAFTA. I told them all I was a strong supported of NAFTA and they didn't even know what to say. They just looked at me like a traitor. Only Dave Harmer, Executive Director of Economic Development (and a private sector guy who's created a separate peace with the public world) had any kind of sophistication about the issue:

"Outsourcing benefits both parties, or it doesn't happen," said Harmer, who noted that the United States is a net importer of jobs.

Anxiety always results when there is an economic shift to more-efficient producers, he said. Harmer called it "a big mistake" for government to restrict the use of the most-efficient producer. He also said protectionist barriers delay the economic impact of such job shifting, but the impact is usually more severe than simply adjusting to the job losses.

From deseretnews.com | India may lose 'Utah jobs'
Referenced Mon Apr 26 2004 08:09:14 GMT-0600

The question is, should Utah taxpayers pay more to save a job in Ohio or West Virginia? The answer should be a resounding "no!" Paying to support relative inefficiencies always bites you in the end. We'll end up paying more money and get less. That doesn't sound like good government to me. If Utah lawmakers really want to know how to grow Utah's economy and compete globally, I'd recommend that they start by reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman andAs the Future Catches You by Juan Enriquez.

8:15 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 23, 2004

CTO Breakfast Report

I just got back from another CTO Breakfast. We continue to attract new people and today there were 6 or 7 people there who'd never been there before. I enjoy these events a lot because there's always some interesting discussion. One of the things that came up today was using OnStar equipped cars to feed information to traffic systems. Our highway departments spend billions of dollars, collectively, creating huge centralized systems for gathering traffic data so that they can keep traffic flowing. Its cheaper than build new roads. What's interesting is that there's a huge distributed traffic system already on the roads that we're not able to use. Every OnStar equipped vehicle knows where it is, how fast its traveling, whether the brakes are on, and even things like the temperature outside the vehicle. Wouldn't it be great to be able to capture all of that data and use it as the input to our traffic analysis systems? There's no reason why we couldn't. We just haven't figured it out yet. If I were GM, I'd be doing pilot projects and talking to state highway departments.

Meanwhile, put May 28th on your calendar. That will be the date for the next CTO breakfast.

11:00 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 21, 2004

Jim Grey on Distributed Computing Economics

I attended Jim Grey's talk at the Organick Memorial Lecture at the University of Utah this afternoon. He spoke on distributed computing economics.

Jim asks:

• Why is Seti@Home such a great idea?
• Why is Napster a great idea?
• Why is the computational grid uneconomic?
• When does computing on demand work?
• What is the "right" level of abstraction?
• Is the "access grid" the real killer app?

Observation #1: Computing is free. 1 CPU day costs $1 (given a computer costs $1000). But the phone bill isn't free. Internet bandwidth costs $50--500/mbps/m So 1GB costs 1$ to send and 1$ to receive.

So Seti@Home requires: send 300KB (costs $03e-4). User computes for 1/2 a day for a benefit of $0.5e-1. The ROI is 1500:1. So Seti@Home is a good idea. The Seti@Home "supercomputer" has 61TF. This is bigger than the top 4 supercomputers in the world put together. They invested zero and got back a computer worth a billion dollars.

Here's Napster: Send 5MB costs $5e-3, or roughly half a penny per song. Both sender and receiver can afford it. Yahoo! has a similar story: $1e-3/page view in advertising revenue against $1e-5/page view cost of serving the page. That's a 100:1 ROI.

But in reality, computing is not free. IBM, HP, Dell and others make billions of dollars selling computers. But, storage makes up 61% of the cost of the computer.

$1 buys:

• 1 day of CPU time
• 4 GB ram for a day
• 1 GB of network bandwidth
• 1 GB of disk storage for 3 years
• 10 M database accesses
• 10 TB of disk access (sequential)
• 10 TB of LAN bandwidt (bulk)
• 10KWhrs == 4 days of computer time

Consequences:

• Beowulf networking is 10,000x cheaper than WAN networking. Factors of 10^5 matter
• The cheapest way to move TB cross country is sneakernet. 24Hrs = 4MB/s. You can pay $50 for shipping or $1000 for the WAN. Sneakernet is better performing in most cases, more reliable, and cheaper.

To the extent that the computational grid is like MPI where large data sets are transfered for data analysis, it fails on economic grounds. Move the programs to the data, not the data to the programs.

When to export a task:

IF instruction density > 100,000 instructions/byte
AND remote computer is free (i.e. costs you nothing)
THEN ROI > 0
ELSE ROI < 0

Computing on demand is things like Salesforce.com, Oracle.com, and other outsourced application vendors. Computing on demand works for commoditized services. Airlines outsource reservations and banks outsource ATMS, but Amazon, AMEX, Wal-Mart, eTrade, eBay and others can't outsource their core competencies.

What do you outsource? Here's a stack:

• Disk blocks?
• Files?
• SQL?
• RPC?
• Applications?

Not very many successful companies at the lower levels of abstraction, but AOL, Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo! are all vibrant examples of applications on the Internet. So, what about SOAs (the RPC level in this stack)? The jury is out. There are some examples of companies economically offering SOA-level services.

Is the Access Grid the next killer app? Jim asks: "What comes after the telephone?" eMail and IM seem too retro: just text and emoticons. Picture phones have been tried since the 60s. The access grid may be the right idea. The access grid is picture phone for groups. This is the "Internet as a billion TV channels" idea as near as I can tell.

The questions afterwards, inspired by the Access Grid comments, were about Mayor Anderson's recent opposition to UTOPIA. Its ironic that he's opposed to building more highways and the technology that would reduce our dependency on them.

10:18 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

XMission Linux Install Fest 04

If you've always wanted to try Linux, but never felt comfortable jumping in all alone, this is your chance. XMission, Utah's oldest ISP, is running a Linux Install Fest. The event will take place Saturday, May 15th, 2004. There are three sessions: 10:00 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., 1:00 p.m. to 3:45 p.m., and 4:00 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. The location is

VŽritŽ, Inc.
9320 South 608 West
Sandy, Utah 84070

Here's what they're saying about it:

Choose from Debian, Knoppix, Mandrake or SUSE Linux along with several BSD flavors and we'll help you get it installed and working on your computer.

We'll be there to help you with some Linux basics once you're up and running. We can recommend free software for web browsing, email, work, gaming, and other needs. And for gamers, bring your Linux game CDs with you and we'll show you how to play in this new environment.

I'm sure they can also help with some of the trickier aspects such as dual boot so that you can still boot you machine as a Windows box if necessary and dealing with stubborn hardware.

6:55 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 20, 2004

What is Identity?

Last week David Weinberger published an essay entitled There's No I in Identity. The essay discusses the way people talk about identity in the real world and how the word is used on the net. The gist of the essay is perhaps best summed up in its subtitle "Why Clark Kent Isn't Superman's Secret Identity." David ends with five conclusions:

So, what does the ordinary language meaning of "identity" in the real world suggest about digital identity?

1. In the real world, we don't identify everyone. We only identify those about whom we have doubts that we have to resolve for some purpose. Identifying is not the default in the real world. Nor, IMO, should it be online.

2. Real world identifying is the connecting of the thing/person at hand with information relevant to our purpose. There is nothing in this process about a "real self" that has "properties." In the same way, digital identification is about connecting what's in hand with other information we need for some purpose. That's the sense in which there's no "I" in "identity."

3. The cluster of information that gets connected to what's at hand should be limited to what's needed to accomplish the purpose of the identification. But the purposes of, say, a merchant and customer are at odds in this regard: merchants like to know lots more about customers than is required to complete a sale because merchants want a relationship, not a mere transaction. That's not what we mean by "identification," though. That's more like "investigation." Digital ID ought to be used to refer to connecting what's at hand to the minimum set of information.

4. In the real world, an ID is a unique token that is evidence that some other information about a person is true: A driver's license connects you to permission to drive and to a birth date, etc. It'd help people like me not be so confused if "digital ID" meant the same thing.

5. In the real world, not every case of going from doubt to certainty by connecting myself to other information is a matter of identification. For example, I can get out of the parking lot for free by showing a ticket that's been stamped by one of the merchants. That connects me to other information (that I made a purchase) but doesn't identify me. We should strive to keep the same range of options online; I should have to identify myself only when there is some legitimate reason to.

We have evolved a careful, subtle set of usages for the terms of identification. We've done so because they serve important social purposes. Let's hope that in bringing "identity" to the digital world, we're guided by the nuances shown in ordinary language, not by the ham-fisted assumptions we bandy about in our real world thinking.

From JOHO - April 15, 2004
Referenced Tue Apr 20 2004 15:29:13 GMT-0600

I think David's points are well taken. I like his distinction between identity and ID (the credentials) and I think his use of language to guide our thoughts about identity in the online world is a good approach.

Still, I can't help but agree with much of what Jon Udell says in a response called "Always-On Identification". In particular, I think Jon is right when he points out that the acts of identifying and authenticating in the real world happen so frequently at the subconscious level that letting language be our sole guide may be a mistake. We often don't have words for things that seem almost automatic. Borrowing Jon's example, when my 5-year old daughter tries to sneak up behind me in my office and scare me, I don't say I "identified her" I just say I "heard her" or something else. Still, my brain, supreme pattern matching engine that it is, is certainly "identifying."

Andre Durand's concept of identity tiers is instructive here in that it helps us define more clearly what we mean when we say identity. We often use "identity" to mean many different things that these tiers are good examples. I've written my own description of what Andre was saying, along with some interpretations developed during conversations with Doc Searls. Here it is, Digital Identity Perspectives, in language that David will almost certainly dislike. This is taken from a chapter of my upcoming book on Digital Identity. Your comments would be welcome.

4:01 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Broadband Causes Obesity

In a c|net News article brought to my attention by Harold Carr's posting at UtahPolitics.org, Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson is quoted as saying that giving people more broadband will make them fatter and just let them download more illegal music.

"I just don't see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files," he said. "We should spend money on getting people fit, rather than deteriorating their quality of life with higher bandwidth to surf the Net."

From Quest for 'Utopia' hits a roadblock | CNET News.com
Referenced Tue Apr 20 2004 13:18:33 GMT-0600

Sometimes I'm still amazed and this is one of those times.

1:20 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 19, 2004

UtahPolitics.org in the News

The Deseret News had a piece on UtahPolitics.org today. UtahPolitics.org is a multi-author blog I started last November to offer a place for people to comment on Utah politics. The IRV strawpoll and the virtual debate among gubernatorial (I love that word) candidates have attracted quite a bit of interest.

8:52 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Trading Information and Good Web Site Design

Dave Pawloski and I were chatting about agent technology and he asked if I'd ever heard of a company called Agentis. I was interested enough to go to their Web site, but I still don't know very much about what they do. Here's why:

• First, their Web site is almost useless to anyone trying to figure out what they do and how their technology is different. As a free lance writer, I spend a lot of time on company Web sites and in this Agentis is in good company. Like most corporate Web sites, its full of marketing speak and takes 3 clicks to get to anything that looks remotely like an explanation.
• The more frustrating part, however was that anytime I got close to anything that looked like real information, they wanted me to put in my email address to continue. These guys are real bozos. They may know a lot about software agents, but they're Web savvy is abysmal.

I believe strongly that customers make rational decisions about parting with their private information and that they'll gladly give up personal data in exchange for something that they value or want. Web sites are all about these kinds of information transactions and good ones are designed with that in mind. In fact, I like to think of the privacy policy as a term sheet describing the terms of the information transactions occurring on the site.

The problem with the Agentis site is that they're asking me for something (my email address) in order to get something that I feel should be free. I'm sure Agentis salespeople would find the idea of asking a customer to pay for product information ludicrous, but that's just what they're doing when they ask for my email address so that I can read what are essentially sales and marketing materials.

A smart company gives out the sales and marketing materials freely. Asking for an email address goes against this. The problem is that Agentis wants to get my email address so they can follow up. That's OK, but they've got to offer me something of value in order to get that. One example: I'll give them my email address when I'm downloading a demo version of the software (although others might not). At that point I'm a more qualified customer anyway, which serves their purposes better. Experiences like this one just tell me we've still got a long way to go before companies get smart about using the Web to connect with customers.

9:00 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

eGovernment from the Private Sector

I've written before about how sometimes eGovernment happens because of someone in the private sector decides that they'll do what they government doesn't seem to be able to accomplish. One example I noted was the Deseret News putting up an eGovernment site on gasoline pump inspections using data from Utah's Dept of Agriculture. Dan Gillmor, in his Sunday column digs into what is perhaps the most spectacular example of this phenomenon: Earth911.org:

Every Monday morning, volunteers from the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group, collect water samples from San Mateo County's beaches and send them to a laboratory for testing. By Wednesday, Carolann Towe, a part-time county employee and foundation volunteer, has the results.

Towe then logs into a Web site called Earth 911 (www.earth911.com), where she updates the county's beach information, noting when bacteria counts have risen above or fallen below levels considered risky to swimmers and surfers. It takes her five or 10 minutes a week, she says.

What's the result of this effort? County residents or visitors can check the site and, using an interactive map and other tools, quickly check the status of the beaches.

Across the United States, government workers and volunteers are feeding all kinds of environment-related information into Earth 911, an environmental clearinghouse of unparalleled scope and value, serving both governments and communities.

From Mercury News: Bay Area news, technology, jobs, cars & real estate
Referenced Mon Apr 19 2004 08:13:55 GMT-0600

I first met Chris Warner, the driving force behind Earth911 when I was CIO of Utah. Chris has an extraordinary vision for how ordinary citizens can play a role in the governance of our cities, counties, states, and country. His vision empowers citizens to create the kind of data that only government could previously aggregate. Moreover, he empowers government workers by giving them the IT tools they need to inform the public. A surprising number of government workers provide data to Chris' projects because they care about their jobs and Chris' systems are the best way for them to accomplish their goals.

One of the reasons I believe strongly in eGovernment is because of the ability it has to create transparency in government where that hasn't previously been possible. I have faith that when the public has the right data, the right things will happen. We often worry about what the government keeps secret, but there's a lot more data that isn't secret, but is effectively unknowable. eGovernment changes that. Chris Warner and Earth911 are a great example of how we don't have to wait for the government to give us eGovernment.

8:22 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 16, 2004

Tim O'Reilly on Why GMail Matters

In his inimitable style, Tim O'Reilly tells us why GMail matters. The piece is entitled, "The Fuss About GMail" but that doesn't begin to properly identify the real meat of what Tim's saying. For example, here's one part I found surprising:

Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn't one computer -- it's a hundred thousand computers, by report -- but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the internet is becoming.

Until I heard about gmail, I was convinced that the future "internet operating system" would have the same characteristics as Linux and the Internet. That is, it would be a network-oriented operating system, consisting of what David Weinberger calls "small pieces loosely joined" (or more recently and more cogently, a "world of ends"). I saw this as an alternative to operating systems that work on the "one ring to rule them all principle" -- a monolithic architecture where the application space is inextricably linked with the operating system control layers. But gmail, in some sense, shows us that once storage and bandwidth become cheap enough, a more tightly coupled, centralized architecture is a real alternative, even on the internet.

From O'Reilly Network: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus [Apr. 16, 2004]
Referenced Fri Apr 16 2004 12:28:54 GMT-0600

I have to admit, when I first heard about GMail, my response was "so what?" since there are already so many free, hosted email solutions, but size does matter and 1Gb of storage for mail changes some things. Most importantly, it makes smart searching and analysis of email possible. For Google to make that work, they need lots of mail on their servers and this gives them that. This is an example of where "more of the same" enables dramtically different results.

12:34 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Jim's Blogging Again: Fiber to the Home

Jim Stewart is blogging again and has published the first of three articles he plans on fiber to the home called "Embracing Change." His conclusions from the first article:

1. Fiber to the home is the future.
2. Wireless has a place in the home.
3. A new generation of consumers is coming and they will not settle for narrowband access.
4. New opportunities abound and will generate new profits.
5. The old model will not work and will only frustrate both the consumers and the service providers.
6. There will likely only be enough capital to build one fiber infrastructure. It should not be left to one company to do this. However, all companies should be allowed to benefit.
7. Competition should be differentiated on services, not infrastructure.

Pay specific attention to the last point. "Facilities-based" carriers like Comcast and Qwest are doing just that. In fact, its the only basis on which they want to compete. When a telecom provider says "facilities-based" just translate it into "monopoly." That's what they're really saying.

9:26 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Who Controls My Movies

If you read or listen to the first chapter in Larry Lessig's newest book Free Culture, you'll quickly realize that Lessig believes that society is damaged when our right (and yes, maligned as it is, it is a right) to rip, remix and burn content is diminished. In today's Deseret News, there was an article about one of our local companies, ClearPlay, that brought Lessig to mind.

I first ran into ClearPlay three years ago when they were seeking initial venture funding. Their technology is simple in concept: skip frames of a DVD while its playing according to the instructions in another file. With this you can delete scenes from a movie you may not want to see, delete commercials or other content from a program you've recorded on DVD, or even mix frames from multiple DVDs playing back simultaneously. The most obvious use for the technology, of course, is editing films to delete offensive scenes. Note that the technology doesn't modify the disk in anyway. It simply decides which portions of the disc will play back when.

Well, despite lawsuits from the film industry, the Director's Guild and others, ClearPlay technology will be offered in a player manufactured by RCA and sold in Wal-Mart and K-Mart. The Director's Guild had the following to say:

In the guise of making films 'family-friendly,' ClearPlay seeks to make whatever 'edits' they see fit to any material they don't like," the group said in a prepared statement. "By not seeking the consent of the director, whose name on the movie reflects the fact that the film comprises his or her work, or of the studio as copyright holder, they can and do change the very meaning and intent of films."

From deseretnews.com | Retailers to offer DVD film filters
Referenced Fri Apr 16 2004 08:42:19 GMT-0600

Just so I've got this straight, let me read this back. I go to the store and pay $30 for a DVD and place it in a player. I don't modify the DVD, I simply play it back in a different way than it was placed on the DVD. The Director's Guild thinks I shouldn't be able to do that because I am messing with the "intent" of the director. I guess that the "random" button on my CD player ought to be illegal as well then since I'm clearly changing the intent of whoever laid out the tracks on the CD by playing them back in a different order. If this isn't about the clearest example of hubris then I don't know what is.

This may seem different than the complaints of the music industry, but its not. The foundational argument is who gets to control content and to what end. Consumers want to be able to do anything they like with the content they've purchased and Hollywood and the music industry and trying desperately to force us to take it there way. The ClearPlay case illustrates that the nature of this entire debate isn't about the theft of intellectual property so much as the ability to do as we please with the things we buy.

8:49 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 15, 2004

Using RSS for Customer Service

My friend Steve Fulling was recently in an auto accident--someone rear-ended him. That was no fun, but he was telling me about the awesome customer service he was getting from the body shop (Central Body in Provo). They called him up soon after his car was dropped off and said "Mr Fulling, I wanted to call you and tell you that your truck will be fixed on the day we promised and we don't see any additional charges beyond what you were quoted." In essense, they were reporting "on time, on budget." They called again today to give him an update. That gave me the idea that what I'd really like is for the body shop (or anyone else providing similar service) to tell me: "Mr. Windley, we've emailed you the URL of a personal RSS feed we've set up for you. Load it into your feed reader and you will see twice-daily status reports on your vehicle." I'm a geek--sue me.

10:40 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Incompatibility is the Goal of DRM

Ed Felton has a good article at Freedom to Tinker on the incongruity of music industry technologists who are trying to create a "transparent and universal" system that protects copyrights at the same time.

The whole point of DRM technology is to prevent people from moving music usefully from point A to point B, at least sometimes. To make DRM work, you have to ensure that not just anybody can build a music player -- otherwise people will build players that don't obey the DRM restrictions you want to connect to the content. DRM, in other words, strives to create incompatibility between the approved devices and uses, and the unapproved ones. Incompatibility isn't an unfortunate side-effect of deficient DRM systems -- it's the goal of DRM.

From Freedom to Tinker: A Perfectly Compatible Form of Incompatibility
Referenced Thu Apr 15 2004 09:08:22 GMT-0600

9:09 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 14, 2004

Knock Knock, Its SSH Calling

Wade Billings pointed out knockd to me. This little program lets you set up secret port knocks and then take action when you see them. So, for example, you could set up a server with all ports locked down and then open up SSH just when you needed it by knocking on selected ports in a specific order. The ports you knock on don't have to be open since the daemon listens to the ethernet interface. If you're really paranoid and only a few people need to access the server, then this might be for you.

8:21 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Blogger Wish List

Lisa Williams has summarized over 100 comments that people posted in response to this question from Dave Winer:

Premise: We've reached a plateau in blogging tools. There haven't been a lot of changes in the last two or three of years. The growth continues, lots more weblogs, and we've got better tools for reading (aggregators).

Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs? If you could influence people who are making the tools, what feature or features would you want? Think as big as you like, or as detailed as you like. What bug is most in your way. Ramble, please. Is there one thing you'd kill for? Or perhaps you're satisfied with the tools as they are. I hope your comments are on the record so I can assemble a quote sheet as the beginning of a conversation that I hope will yield better tools for all of us.

From BloggerCon:
Referenced Wed Apr 14 2004 10:42:09 GMT-0600

My personal wish is to be more easily create entries on my blog. I've cobbled together some bookmarklets and whatnot to help create content (like the quote just above) but I still spend far too much time cutting and pasting URLs, etc. and typing HTML.

10:46 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Web Services Are Happening All Over, Right Now

RSS, a simple XML document, aimed primarily at desktop consumption, and delivered along RESTful principals, is currently the best example of Web services in widespread use. Web services happened behind our backs while were all watching big companies trying come to grips with SOAP.

Those who read between the lines of these conversations can intuit that RSS is rapidly approaching a critical mass in the enterprise. Notification, subscription, presence, and awareness services are congealing into a real-time events-based information routing fabric that outpaces other existing legacy channels. Such channels include email, developer conferences, print publications, and broadcast media.

From Steve Gillmor's Blogosphere - Tuesday, April 13, 2004 Entries
Referenced Wed Apr 14 2004 10:28:45 GMT-0600

Steve's right. RSS is reaching a tipping point. RSS is simple enough that there's not much hype. People just use it. That's not to say that other Web services won't come of age in time--I think they will. But RSS is first because its viral just like the Web was in 1994. Once you use it, you tell your friends about it and how "cool" it is. Not many people email me to say "you've got to try this new SOAP service I just found!!" Its too difficult to consume or its probably just a toy.

10:39 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

The Flap Over Gmail

The magnitude of the controversy about Google's new Gmail service is astounding. Many people have decried the attempt of Google to link their new 1Gb email service with targeted ads, searching, and so on. This has led to an anti-Gmail bill in the CA State Senate and I'm sure that won't be the last. I just can't get over the number of people who want to protect me from myself.

Almost every online service requires some kind of identifying information from me in order to provide the service they're offering. Sometimes they need my personal information and money (think Amazon) and sometimes they're willing to just settle for the personal information (Gmail).

Gmail is offering a 1Gb email box in exchange for being able to target ads and so on. This is a transaction. I give information in consideration for the service Google provides. The privacy policy represents the terms of the transaction. Like any other term sheet, I can read it or ignore it, accept it or not. I believe that people enter into such transactions rationally. They know that Google isn't just giving email away and that there's a price to pay.

I encounter the same thing when I go to Albertson's. They want to associate my purchases with my name and address, so they give me a discount on my six-pack of coke if I'll tell them who I am when I check out. When I'm in a good mood I tell them and when I'm cranky I don't. Sometimes I'm willing to give away my personal data in exchange for a buck and sometimes I'm not.

One of the fundamental rights of privacy is the right to do as I please with my personal information. That includes giving it to Google if I want. I don't need the government or other watchdog groups to protect me and I don't think most other people do either. If you truly respect my privacy keep your nose out of my business with Google--its private.

9:51 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 13, 2004

Claria Corporation nee Gator

Paul Allen has a nice piece on Gator's S-1 filing. Gator is one of the companies bringing you spyware. Maybe not as obnoxious as some, but spyware nonetheless. Its not surprising they're changing their name with the filing since their old name is synonymous with in-your-face, invade-your-privacy marketing.

6:06 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Five Issues Holding Back Open Source Software

In an article at First Monday, Michelle Levesque explores five issues that are holding back open source software. The abstract:

Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems. The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary softwareâs more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that they have a solid core. Open Source programmers also tend to program with themselves as an intended audience, rather than the general public. Lastly, there is a widely known stubbornness by Open Source programmers in refusing to learn from what lessons proprietary software has to offer. If Open Source software wishes to become widely used and embraced by the general public, all five of these issues will have to be overcome.

From Fundamental issues with open source software development
Referenced Tue Apr 13 2004 17:32:53 GMT-0600

I don't necessarily disagree with any of these issues, but many OSS projects are not aimed at having the general public "embrace open source software." For the most part, open source software thrives where there is still experimentation and change happening. That's not the right place for the general public. Certainly there are some projects ostensibly aimed at the general public, desktops and office tools are the best examples. Chandler is maybe the most anticipated project in this class. An analysis of Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, and Chandler on these issues would be interesting.

5:40 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Wayport Providing McDonald's Wi-Fi

After a 9-month trial, Wayport has won the right to provide hot spots in McDonald's restaurants. I suspect it will be a while before Utah is on the list, but still, it points to a future full of easier Internet access on the road.

5:29 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

RSS for Forums

I would rate my experiment with the Ask Phil forum a qualified success thus far. There have been some great discussions, most recently on PHP and Document Management, and I've learned something and hopefully others have as well. One thing I didn't like about it was the need to keep going back to the forum each day to check what was new. The world has a solution for this problem called RSS and fortunately, there's a module for the bulletin board software I'm using that creates RSS. I've been using it for about two weeks now and it seems to work pretty well. So, along with the RSS feed for my weblog, here is the RSS feed for the Ask Phil forum. Subscribe and you'll soon be receiving anything new from the forum conveniently delivered to your feed reader.

1:18 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 12, 2004

Networking Class Project Presentations

I heard presentations about class projects today for the networking class I'm teaching this semester. The rules for the project are simple: it has to be equal to the effort required for two normal labs, it has to be vaguely about networking, and it has to be fun for the student. As a result, some of it turns into an opportunity to hack. Not everyone presents, but the one's who presented today had some good projects:

• Craig Hancock built an HTTP server with modular handlers for different data types that accepted GET and POST and ran PHP programs.
• Ben Watson built an instant messaging system with his own protocol, a client and server.
• Jeff Hansen built a secure shell server that ran entirely from a RAM disk and then installed it on server with a RAM disk mounted as the boot partition so that if the hard drives failed, he could still log in.
• Nathan Stocks built a distributed parallel computation system similar to SETI@Home and analyzed the parallelizability of RSA key generation.
• Steve Mak set up a SER SIP server and got two XLite softphones talking.
• Matt Mullins and Wade Berrier got Linux running on an XBox and then turned it into a MythTV set-top box complete with remote control.

I thought it was a good group of projects and it was clear that people had fun.

11:20 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Document Management with SharePoint

elearnspace points to a an overview of SharePoint, Microsoft's server-based document repository. The elearnspace article gives some pros and cons:

If you know Windows and Office, the learning curve is very low. In my experience, I've been disappointed with the product (sign in isn't direct and obvious, very little metadata support, very "boxy", no support for RSS, collaboration is basically just a threaded discussion, etc.) Given the opportunity, I would move toward a product like Plone, Groove, Drupal, or Convea. Over the next several versions, Sharepoint will certainly improve...but it's currently a product that looks like a poor duplication of the more effective collaboration tools now available (both open source and proprietary).

From elearnspace: Microsoft Sharepoint
Referenced Mon Apr 12 2004 09:11:43 GMT-0600

The c|net news article admits that getting people to use the tools is perhaps more important than finding the perfect tool:

Relying on a familiar set of tools is particularly useful with collaboration, Nemertes' Turek said, because there are bound to be other worker issues with using a collaboration system. Routinely saving documents on a shared server rather than an individual hard drive not only requires fundamental behavioral changes but a shift in attitude.

First, you get people comfortable with tools. Then, you get them to expand their notions of what they should share and whom to share it with, she said.

"Most Americans are a little bit reluctant to share all their information," Turek added. "They don't want to lose ownership of their ideas."

But the approach can be valuable, because "if everything I do is available for everyone else to see, then everything I do has to meet some standard of excellence," she said. "Management really has to lead people into this style of working."

From Sharing the love--and data--through SharePoint | CNET News.com
Referenced Mon Apr 12 2004 09:14:29 GMT-0600

9:16 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Speaking of Disruptive Bandwidth Upgrades

Britt has a well-written piece about Arrianna Huffington's infatuation with bloggers. The part that caught my eye was the about the "disruptive bandwidth upgrade" that the colonies experienced in the form of post roads that suddenly made it practical for the colonies to talk to each other in a peer to peer fashion rather than relying on the hierarchical communications structure between the colonies and London. The hierarchical communications infrastructure was necessary when the colonies were separated by impassable wilderness, but too slow and inflexible once intercolony communication was possible. Revolution was born of the post roads, the printing press, and leisure time to read, think and talk.

As I read Britt's article, I couldn't help thinking that UTOPIA, Utah's community sponsored, fiber to the home broadband project, represents a similar disruptive infrastructure upgrade. Rather than being at the mercy of Qwest and Comcast for whatever broadband services they think we need, new businesses will spring up to provide them. One example I thought of: video blogs. Not reasonable in Qwest's DSL world with their slow upload and restrictive rules, but maybe someday soon.

8:59 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 9, 2004

The Goddess of Social Networking

Using an interesting story about Indian matchmakers, Bundeep Singh Rangar of Ariadne Capital makes a compelling point about monetizing social networks; money is made at convergence events:

It's at the point of the marriage event that the money kicks in. Indians spend about almost $4.5 billion a year on wedding-related gold jewelry alone. And another $2 billion is spent on catering, clothing, resorts, and venues.

For social networking to be fully monetized, the nodes in the social network need a convergence event. These events provide a focal point where new networks are created and existing ones utilized. That's why Aunty-jee needs a wedding. Her monetization is in the form of gifts, party invites, and a cache of social capital.

So, here's the prediction. While some money will be made by social networking companies by subscriptions, online transactions, and licensing of software, the really big money will be made by the vertical integration of online networking and offline networking.

The sum will be greater when there is a merger of social networking companies and conference and events organizers. That's where the merchandise, memberships, personnel, and company equity will be ultimately bought and sold.

The global conference industry totaled about $102 billion last year, according to Meeting Professionals International. That's a pretty lucrative market for the online social networks to target.

From The Goddess of Social Networking :: AO
Referenced Fri Apr 09 2004 11:58:43 GMT-0600

This reminds me of the statement Zoe Teacher, online coordinator for the Dean campaign made to Ed Cone: "I'm obsessed with off-line." Why? Because that's where the action happens. Its at offline convergence events that the campaign gets its pay-off: votes. Zoe understood the point that Rangar was making even if the Dean campaign failed to drive these off-line convergence events as successfully as they needed to.

12:03 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Paul Allen on Becoming a Parallel Entrepreneur

Utah has our very own Paul Allen. Not the Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, but a Paul Allen who's made a name for himself in the high tech community by starting ventures such as Infobases, Folio, and MyFamily.com. Paul knows a lot about starting companies and willingly shares his knowledge with anyone willing to come to his class at UVSC on Wednesday evenings. Paul, who recently started blogging, is trying to move past being a serial entrepreneur and become a parallel entrepreneur. Here's a list of the companies that Paul's involved in right now.

I've recently been thinking along those lines myself, although on a smaller scale than Paul. I find being on lots of boards and involved in a number of companies to be quite exciting. I'm usually more interested in equity from those activities than cash because I think that's the real payoff. Like Paul, I think there's less chance of vast wealth, but I believe there's a greater chance of good wealth, and even if there's not, its a lot of fun. The trick to doing this is to get in a position where you can afford to be picky and work for equity when appropriate. I've found that's more a matter of mindset than it is the balance of your checking account. The key is being willing to commit; its hard to make money waffling.

9:34 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 8, 2004

PHP for Large-Scale Web Sites?

I had a discussion with a friend yesterday about a Web site we're going to build. I have to plan for the possibility that at some point in the future, the site will have millions of page views per day, many of them from interactions. The nature of the interactions is such that I don't think we need an application server (e.g. EJBs), but will use a 2-tiered architecture connecting a Web server-based front end to a database. The Web server will be Apache and the database MySQL, but the question raised was "what to use for the scripting language?"

I've used JSP's in numerous projects and like the way you can use servlets as controllers to manage business logic and keep it seperate from the presentation logic. In the past, I've used PERL extensively. Lately, I've been hearing the siren song of Python. My friend was ademant: "If you want my help, it will be PHP. I simply won't use anything else." Now, I admit a bias: I've never written a PHP application from the ground up, but have modified numerous PHP pages and found that the business logic and presentation were all jumbled together. I didn't like it. So, I've been asking myself, is this merely an unfounded bias, or is PHP really just for small Web applications and bigger sites should look elsewhere? Here are some of my questions:

• First, can you effectively seperate business and presentation logic?
• Can it scale to multiple servers, millions of page views per day, etc.
• Are there frameworks, like Turbine, that provide connection pooling and other services.
• What big Web sites are written in PHP?
• What concerns are there in using PHP for large-scale Web sites? Anything you should do at the first to ensure that things work out later?

I'll start a discussion topic on the Ask Phil forum. If you've got some answers for me, please post them there.

9:47 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

The Spyware Who Loved Me

John Borland at c|net News deliberately let down his guard to see what happens to a typical, non-technical Windows user when they innocently go onto the Web to surf. The result is scary. This is, by the way, one of the reasons your non-technical relatives call you to say "that their computer just stopped working."

9:32 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Open Source Voting

Vote Here Technologies released the source code to their electronic voting system this week. Vote Here uses an interesting twist on the paper trail that allows each voter to verify on the Internet that their individual vote was correctly tallied. Here's how it works:

[Vote Here CEO Jim Alder] said the VoteHere method ensures the accuracy of the machines in a way that is more secure than a simple paper receipt. Here's how it works: Next to each candidate's name on the ballot, a random code appears that changes for each voter. After making their selections, voters receive a printed receipt containing their unique codes, along with encrypted information that assures that the codes match the correct candidates. Once the voters verify their votes, they cast their ballots on the machine. After the election, voting codes appear on the county website so voters can see that the codes on their receipts translated to a counted vote. While the county tallies the votes, the public can tally them independently as well.

Adler said nonpartisan watchdog groups and computer scientists also could verify the results independently in this way to ensure that no votes were lost or changed.

From Wired News: See-Through Voting Software
Referenced Thu Apr 08 2004 07:17:15 GMT-0600

7:18 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 7, 2004

Document Management Round-up

Earlier I asked for suggestions on document management for the small business and invited comments. There were some good suggestions in the forum, as well as some that came by email. They were:

• Zope which was one of my first thoughts.
• Vignette's Business Workplaces which used to be called "Instraspect" and seems to have disappeared inside Vignette's Web site.
• Xerox DocuShare
• WorldOx a solution used by small law firms according to Dennis Kennedy
• AtomZ, who I'd always viewed as a search service (in fact Windley's Enterprise Computing uses AtomZ for search.
• Crown Peak, a hosted content management solution.

Of these, I have direct experience with Zope. Zope has the disadvantage that it would likely require some upfront customization to do just what is needed. On the other hand, the other's probably do as well, if they're customizable at all. If an out of the box solution is needed, that WorldOx, Intraspect, or DocuShare might be good candidates for further study.

I'm surprised that no one mentioned NextPage or Groove. NextPage may be out of reach of small businesses and Groove is seen more as a collaboration space. On the other hand, document management is partly about collaboration---that's why you need to manage documents most of the time.

This exercise started out from a question from a friend. I think I'll recommend he look at Zope first.

2:52 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Mono Status

I had a colleague who switched his entire lab over to C# last fall. While I'd heard much good about C#, I knew I wasn't willing to switch to Microsoft for my development and certainly not willing to be locked into Microsoft platforms for deploying applications. Consequently, I've kept my eyes on the Mono Project. Edd Dumbill attended the Mono developer meeting in march and wrote a report for the O'Reilly Network. He concludes:

The Mono project is one to watch. The audacity of using Microsoft's own investments and technologies to bring developers to the Linux platform sets the tone for interesting times. If they're prepared to take on the 800lb gorilla in this way, there should be no doubt that Novell is aiming to grab the Linux platform by the neck and shake it up a bit, too.

From ONLamp.com: Will Mono Become the Preferred Platform for Linux Development? [Mar. 11, 2004]
Referenced Wed Apr 07 2004 13:19:58 GMT-0600

1:25 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

A Leathal Combination: MythTV+RSS+BitTorrent

In response to a post by Dave Winer, Matt Goyers says "So just think about what you could do with RSS, BitTorrent and a Media Center." I'm not sure why you'd use Media Center when MythTV is available. I suspect its just a matter of time until someone puts RSS+BitTorrent inside Myth TV. If I'd thought about it sooner, I'd have had my Networking class do it this semester for a final project.

8:24 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 6, 2004

CanyonBridge Slips into Web Services Orchestration

Web-based Outlook replacement that's better than Outlook

I spent this morning with Dave Mitchell, the CTO of Canyon Bridge, a Utah-based start-up. From looking at their Web site, you'd guess that they sell a product that gives you Web-based access to Microsoft Exchange, but its actually what's under the covers that interested me.

First the obvious stuff: They've built a Web-based replacement for Outlook that's better than the thick client in many ways. I know what you're thinking: slow and clunky, but this was fast and slick. Drag and drop works, so does multi-item select and edit. Most of it happens right on the client through Javascript.

It would be impressive if CanyonBridge used Javascript to build a slick Outlook replacement, but its how they did it that got me excited. First, they have a technology for just sending snippets of pages back and forth between the server and the browser so that the Web page doesn't have to be refreshed. The Javascript modifies the display using the DOM in accordance with instructions from the server.

Second, they built a SOAP front-end for Exchange so that they can deal with Exchange using SOAP calls rather than MAPI. Of course once that's done, you could substitute something else for Exchange itself and that's just what they've done. They've got a Linux/MySQL replacement for Exchange in Alpha right now.

Thirdly, they build a server side orchestration language for controlling the presentation and interacting with SOAP-based services so that the action of the client is controlled using an XML-based business logic language.

Fourth, the Javascript that runs the Outlook replacement isn't custom one-off code, but built using a framework. Consequently, you can program things besides Outlook fairly easily.

To demonstrate the power of this, one of the demonstrations they showed me was a Salesforce.com integration with their Outlook replacement. Not only could you see all of your Exchange-based calendar, contact, and messaging in the tool, you could also see all of your leads and appointments from Salesforce.com. The calendar showed Exchange hosed appointments in an integrated view with the Salesforce.com appointments. Very cool. What's more, they built it in 3 days.

So, while this company may be starting out selling a Web-based Outlook replacement, they're tools make them much more than that. When I saw what they were doing I thought "This is what I imagined Web services would be like."

Canyon Bridge is ultimately a Web services intermediary, but differs from all that I've seen in that its not trying to do management and its not about automating business processes. The tool is used to orchestrate Web services to create a user-facing application. In fact, you'd probably want to use the Canyon Bridge intermediary in concert with a more traditional intermediary to do security, routing, and so on.

6:23 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

VoIP in the Contact Center

Always On has a piece about VoIP's potential in the contact center:

But what's been less discussed and understood is that the small office/home office market holds only a small slice of VoIP's potential. The much more exciting and compelling opportunities reside in midsize to larger businesses÷and specifically in their contact centers (a contact center is essentially a call center that also handles other communications channels÷most notably e-mail and Web chat). In this market, VoIP isn't simply about cheap, flat-rate telephony. It instead offers companies the potential to completely reinvent how they do business.

From VoIP in the Call Center :: AO
Referenced Tue Apr 06 2004 08:27:17 GMT-0600

The "reinvent" part is what is interesting. I'm on the Board of Directors at Sento, which is in the outsourced contact center space. We're using VoIP extensively to cut costs and increase flexibility, but the reinvent word captures my attention. The key is the VoIP allows you to put communications on the net and integrate it in ways that just can't be done with traditional phone switches and all the various boxes that hang off them. I don't think its any accident that Siebel has integrated VoIP solutions into its Siebel on Demand product.

8:32 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 5, 2004

Utah's New Project Planning Methodology

Dave Fletcher, acting Director of ITS at the State, talks about the new ITS project planning methodology. I like that the methodology includes a "roles and responsibilities" matrix. Dave reports that they're using DotProject, an open source project management tool to do the planning.

1:36 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Overcoming Asymmetric Routing on Multi-Homed Servers

Having two network interfaces in a server seems like a good idea, but it doesn't always just work by itself. This LinuxJournal article discusses configuring a multi-homed Linux server to take full advantage of the extra card.

12:55 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Document Management

My call last week for ideas on document management solutions for small business yielded two suggestions, both from people I know and both saying, in essence, "Zope." I'm not surprised that Zope was suggested since it was one of my first thoughts when my friend asked me for advice, but I'm a little surprised that nothing else was suggested.

9:14 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Does Sharing Music Hurt Sales?

A study released last week by Harvard and UNC researcher states that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." This has, of course, been met with some disbelief by the RIAA. A New York Times article discusses the study and the music industry's reaction. The most recent findings are in keeping with what most people learned in Economics:

"Say I offer you a free flight to Florida," he asks. "How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free." If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but "it doesn't mean that these people would buy CD's at $18," he said.

From A Heretical View of File Sharing
Referenced Mon Apr 05 2004 08:33:11 GMT-0600

The study hasn't been peer reviewed yet, but several other scientists have commented that the technique looks to be sound. I'm sure that facts will just confuse the public policy debate.

BTW, you'll notice that I've taken pains to avoid the use of the term "file sharing" in discussing this since I think that using that term unnecessarily confuses the issue and hurts legitimate uses of P2P technology.

8:37 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 2, 2004

Draft the Press Release First

Britt Blaser's been working on an idea to use technology to increase grassroots participation. Warning, this post is best read after having digested the last two weeks of Britt's blog first. Its worth the effort. Britt's onto something.

8:08 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

More Salt Lake Public Library Pictures

I've added some new pictures to my album of pictures of the Salt Lake Public Library. I was there this morning to do some work on the free Wi-Fi and couldn't resist taking some more pictures of the building. Its really a magnificent structure. My gallery of pictures of the library continues to be one of the most highly visited parts of this site. Its the number five entry on Google for salt lake public library and the number one link for salt lake public library pictures.

5:00 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Aloud Allowed!

Last weekend, AKMA had the wonderful idea to have people around the Blogosphere create an audio version of Larry Lessig's new book Free Culture. The call for volunteer readers took off like a shot and the result is a emergent project that created an audio book where none existed before. I've listened to several of the chapters and the content is great and the readings are pretty good too. The interesting thing is that this activity was allowed at all.

Its no coincidence that this particular book sparked the idea in AKMA's mind. After all, that's just what this book is about: the idea that in a free culture, people are free to rip, mix, and burn other's people's ideas to create completely new content. Lessig, putting his money where his mouth is, convinced his publisher to allow him to release the electronic source to the book online. That act enabled this project. If you only listen to one chapter, listen to Doug Kaye's reading of Chapter 1. Doug has a great voice, but the entire concept is spelled out in clearly by Lessig. Doug also has interviews with AKMA and Larry Lessig on the audio book project.

This is one of the things that's so interesting about the current state of the Internet. Lessig is crying out that the foundations of creativity and innovation are being destroyed by those who would make intellectual property rights absolute. Current moves by Congress to criminalize P2P show just how out of touch our elected leaders are. I expect small mindedness from the recording and motion picture industry---they have a very narrow focus. But I expect, in the face of countless disappointments, my elected officials to have more of an abundance mentality.

I remain optimistic that right (small 'r') will prevail. Free culture is like free trade. Its hard to understand, its difficult to support when you're the victim, but ultimately its the path to greater prosperity for all. The job of elected officials is to find that path, not the path to greater prosperity for the few and I believe that messy as the process is, we will eventually get there. The path may be pitted with excesses on both sides, mired in stupid court battles, and littered with the bodies of politicians who have to be voted out of office, but I think this is a battle that can be won.

Demonstrating, through projects like this one, what is possible in the alternative universe is important. We need to keep them coming.

10:34 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

April 1, 2004

Replacing FTP: The Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol (PDTP)

The Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol, or PDTP, is a project to define a replacement for the venerable FTP protocol. PDTP is similar to BitTorrent in the way it handles distributed streams, but also manages a directory hierarchy automatically and includes other interesting features such as metadata rich directory listings and support for file integrity validation through the use of DSS signatures. The project proposes three use cases for increasing scale. So what's wrong with BitTorrent? Here's a snippet from the FAQ:

As PDTP is fundamentally different from BitTorrent in several ways, it shouldn't be viewed as "reinventing the wheel". However, PDTP was designed after analyzing and learning from a number of BitTorrent's design and implementation problems.

BitTorrent places considerable logic in the client. The tracker is little more than a switchboard through which every client participating chaotically attempts to manage the transfer process. Because no one client ever has the "big picture", transfer rates are often suboptimal as the network of transfers is not logically organized by a central authority into an optimal configuration. Without centralized control, special hacks are required in order to improve transfer rates.

BitTorrent provides a means of transferring groups of files rather tha files within a hierarchy. Consequently, BitTorrent cannot act as a "drop-in" replacement for an HTTP or FTP server. While it would be possible to use a program like dnotify to autogenerate .torrent files for every file within a directory hierarchy, a subsequent problem with BitTorrent's design is encountered with the computational overhead of the protocol design.

Tracker communication in BitTorrent is handled over HTTP in a connectionless manner, which places significantly more demand on the server than a lightweight transactional protocol. Because of this, it becomes difficult for a single server to serve multiple "torrents" due to the resource usage of the BitTorrent tracker. While BitTorrent makes claims of "limitless scalability", anyone who has actually used it knows this isn't the case.

BitTorrent suffers another problem in that the only usable implementations are currently only available in Python. The primary problem with Python is its excessive resource usage, but other problems arise such as integration of the Python implementation into a native GUI frontend for a given platform, as well as the need to bundle the Python runtime with the BitTorrent client on most platforms as few deployed systems have a Python runtime available.

From pdtp - FAQ
Referenced Thu Apr 01 2004 19:41:12 GMT-0700

The project is far from complete. In fact, at this point its mostly a collection of Sourceforge projects with little in the way of downloadable code. The project status page shows that there's still much to do. If you're a programmer, jump in and help. This is a project worthy of support. I have to say that if I never had to select a mirror again when downloading a large file, I wouldn't miss it at all.

7:43 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Bluetooth Better on the Mac

I've often wondered why more people weren't raving about Bluetooth when I found it so incredibly useful. I sync my contacts with my phone, use my phone for a wide-area networking device, and even have a Bluetooth headset for handsfree phone operation. I can use my phone as a slide show remote for my computer and even a remote control for iTunes that shows what song's playing. None of this was difficult or tricky, so what's the problem? This story in PCWorld.com gives a hint at why Bluetooth isn't more widely used. Windows just makes it too hard.

When it comes down to it, there are still too many seams showing in Bluetooth on Windows. Sure, if you're a savvy user you can make it work. But unless you're really phobic about a few cables, why spend the time? And in this case, the Mac mystique has some substance behind it. Setting up my whole Bluetooth network on the Mac was quick and painless from start to finish--and truly wireless, unlike the Logitech DiNovo set.

From PCWorld.com - Mac Skeptic: Is Bluetooth Better on the Mac?
Referenced Thu Apr 01 2004 19:28:00 GMT-0700

7:29 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Sick and Tired of Doing Things the Hard Way

Jeremy Zawodny's switching.

8:55 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

vSpring Capital Unveils its Inaugural v|100

The v|100 is officially known as the vSpring Capital Top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs and was conceived by vSpring as a tool to recognize the region's outstanding entrepreneurs and to support and promote collaborative partnering and mentoring among top entrepreneurs in the region. This is important to the Utah business community since lack of corporate leadership experience is one of the identified hurdles that Utah has to overcome to attract more venture capital. This list is the beginning of a group that can mentor new leaders and serve as management for new ventures. Members of the list have raised more than $1.8 billion in capital and formed companies leading to the creation of more than 7,000 jobs. The vast majority (more than 70 percent) has founded Utah-based businesses during the past 10 years.

"Those nominated to the v|100 have made a significant positive impact to the Utah economy and the quality of life for its people," said Scott Peterson, Ernst & Young's Pacific Northwest area assurance managing partner and the former managing partner of the Ernst & Young Salt Lake City office. "The v|100 is solid proof that Utah is not only a phenomenal incubator of innovative technologies and technology companies, but that it has a large pool of seasoned executives and technologists driving that success. It is likely they will continue to drive this trend, which makes it appropriate for them to be recognized in this way."

From Connect :: Resource/Article :: vSpring Capital Unveils the Inaugural v|100
Referenced Thu Apr 01 2004 07:08:59 GMT-0700

The group was selected through a nomination process followed by a poll of those nominated wherein they selected their own top ten. I was honored to be among the group chosen.

7:13 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This