Phil Windley's Technometria

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June 30, 2004

Utah Voting Equipment Selection Committee

The State of Utah's Voting Equipment Selection Committee is holding a public meeting tomorrow afternoon at 1pm in Price (in the Public Safety Building, 240 W. Main St.). This is the last public meeting before they release their RFP on July 6th. I'd love to attend but other appointments keep me from getting to Price. Is there anyone who can go, take notes, and send them in?

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Hatch and INDUCE

The Standard Examiner has an editorial on Senator Hatch's INDUCE Act which targets P2P technology in defense of the Music and Movie industries. I agree with what they've said. P2P is about much more than illegally sharing copyrighted materials. I believe INDUCE gives incumbent companies power to veto technology that threatens their business model regardless of its benefits in other areas. This is bad policy and bad business. Interestingly almost no one protected by this bill lives in Utah and Utah companies would be hurt disproportionately by this bill since they tend to be smaller and rely more on innovation to displace established companies.

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Dynamic Language Meets Dynamic Database

I'm working with Aradyme to help them develop product plans for the next version of their software. The core of Aradyme is a database with a dynamic schema. We decided today that Python will be the supported scripting language in the new version. Previous versions have used a homegrown scripting language. I saw a demo today of the Aradyme extension to Python that allows Aradyme databases to be manipulated directly from within the Python program. Its clean, simple, and performs well.

Making the decision to go with an established language was easy. Someone else is optimizing the interpreter, someone else is writing most of the documentation, and many people already know the language. Most important, there's a big chunk of code that we no longer have to write and maintain.

Python is a little tougher call. The criteria included finding a language that

• has an established developer community,
• is interpreted,
• uses dynamic types, and
• has a license that allows it to be embedded in a commercial product and freely redistributed

This led to a few choices including JavaScript, PHP, and Perl as well as Python. JavaScript is perceived as Web-only (and perceptions count). PHP is very SQL specific. Perl, much as I love it, wasn't acceptable to other members of the team. Python seemed the best choice. Dedicated developers in other languages would still be able to tie in through the C++ API, but the scripting language we will support is Python.

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J2EE Lead Programmer

Sento (I'm on the Board of Directors) is looking for a lead programmer with J2EE experience. The work is farily interesting: developing a next generation platform for their core business. The job is located in Utah. Send me and email with a resume if you're interested and I'll forward it on.

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Campaign Site Security

Wired News has a story about the lack of security on Bush and Kerry's campaign sites. This isn't that surprising. The interesting thing about campaigns is that they have a hard deadline. You can't slip. That puts tremendous pressure on the campaign to throw up the site quickly and concentrate on content and functionality. Of course, ignoring security is a risk and one that campaign managers are unlikely to understand fully. They'll pay more attention after a candidate is hurt because of poor Web site security.

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June 29, 2004

Apple Previews Tiger

Banners hung at Apple's 2004 WWDC taunt Microsoft

Steve Jobs unveiled Tiger, Apple's newest version of the OS X operating system, at the 2004 world wide developer's conference (WWDC) yesterday. The hall was hung with banners that threw the announcement in Microsoft's face with slogans like "This should keep Redmond busy," "Redmond, start you photocopiers," "Redmond we have a problem," and "Introducing Longhorn." The two most interesting part of the Tiger announcement to me are a system wide search feature called Spotlight that searches everything, including email and appointment, rather than just files and an RSS feedreader integrated into Safari (the Apple browser). I was hoping we'd get it as a Christmas present, but it looks like 2005 before it ships. If you'd like to see Job's keynote its online.

If you watch this Safari preview you'll see some of the feedreader features, including searching on feeds and auto-discovery inside the browser. Dave Winer has some comments on the RSS reader. He doesn't like that they didn't respect the white on orange RSS icon.

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June 28, 2004

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

After reading that the EJB Expert Group determined to use Hibernate for lightweight persistent objects in EJB 3.0, I figured I ought to learn a little more about it. I bought James Elliott's Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook. If you haven't seen them yet, "Developer Notebooks" are from O'Reilly and present a short tutorial on a technology. This one contained chapters on

• Chapter 1. Installation and Setup
• Chapter 2. Introduction to Mapping
• Chapter 3. Harnessing Hibernate
• Chapter 4. Collections and Associations
• Chapter 5. Richer Associations
• Chapter 6. Persistent Enumerated Types
• Chapter 7. Custom Value Types
• Chapter 8. Criteria Queries
• Chapter 9. A Look at HQL

By the time I'd worked by way through it I had a pretty good grasp of Hibernate and felt like I could use it in a project. The running example is complex enough to be interesting without being overwhelming and the book is short (171 pages) so you can move through it pretty quickly. If you have occasion to use persistent objects in Java then Hibernate seems like a good tool and this book will get you going.

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June 24, 2004

Supernova: Afternoon Thoughts

Here are some thoughts I recorded as I listened to some of the topics this afternoon.

From Marc Canter: "FOAF is a lingua fraca for identity data."

From the Connected work panel: "We need to be able to move authenticated secure sessions between different messaging systems." I was struck by the fact that we have all these different messaging formats and transport protocols and we can't translate between them. They're silos.

In the email panel, Stowe Boyd said: "I think email sucks!" He goes on:

I think that IM is a better model -- so much better that email will have to adopt the defining characteristics of IM to survive:

• Gated community -- IM are networks, and the members must log in to enter. Once in, the members must follow certain protocols of interaction (either directly or indirectly enforced) or they are booted out. This could prohibit sales intrusion, sex advances, etc., depending on the network's arrangement.
• Communication with the Known -- while IM networks may allow strangers to contact us, we can opt to shut them off. In essence, we can limit communication to those that are known to us.
• Conversation, not Communique -- email is not conversational, really, unless you believe that sending letters through surface mail is conversational. Conversation is generally better than dueling essays, which is the communication style that email engenders.

Well. We will see, but email -- because of the fundamental flaws in the system -- is falling down. What made it useful in an earlier world is dooming it in this one.

From Supernova Email Panel: My Spiel: I Think Email Sucks
Referenced Thu Jun 24 2004 17:12:11 GMT-0600

Stowe isn't just talking about email. By IM he means a general purpose presence-based platform that handles not just text messages, but any kind of messaging. The issue really is that we treat email for everything. As Jon Udell says, "email is a jack of all trades and a master of none." New tools like IM, blogs, and RSS are going to chip away at this, but so far, they're just chipping away.

Esther Dyson said something interesting about adding friction to email, which is a general way of talking about computational taxes on sending email. Something she said though, made me think that this ought to be smartly applied, however. We want to create friction selectively to force certain kinds of conversations to happen in certain ways. This may be too difficult in a universal sense, but its certainly doable in the small sense.

For example Sento, where I'm on the board, provides contact center services, but our goal is to do so in a way that saves our clients money by selectively creating friction for the most expensive ways that their customers communicate with them (e.g. phone) and thus drive customer interaction less expensive interactions (e.g. chat and email). Could enterprises do similar things to push people to more effective communication media (IM, Wiki, Blog, RSS, SMS, etc.) for the task they're performing? Maybe.

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Rip, Mix and Burn

Michael Sippey asks Where's the rip, mix & burn? The point being that RSS is not about blogs, its about hyperfragmented, recombinational media. We don't use it like that. I was talking to Doc Searls at lunch about his IT Garage. Rather than write specifically for it, I'd rather "syndicate" some of the content from this blog in the original sense off that word. Right now, I have to cut and paste to do that. It should be more automatic than that.

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RSS for Food

Steve Gillmor has a great article on how RSS aggregators could do a better job of showing items of interest. He gives three specific examples of what they might do to do their job smarter:

To begin with, we need to harness the information we already possess about who and what we read. Rather than relying on content creators to signal already consumed material, let's let the RSS aggregator (offline or online) filter out the links, but not the supporting commentary, to already consumed posts. Instrumenting the browser to record what is read, in what order, and for how long is trivial, says Adam Bosworth, in the context of his Alchemy caching architecture.

Next, let's incent that cache, mirrored on both server and client, to save posts that appear of interest or import not just to me but my peers on the network, as represented by the RSS feeds that I and they are subscribed to. If Jon Udell, Dave Winer, Doc Searls and 70% of their subscribers find the RSS BitTorrent thread compelling, then please send a message to my cache engine not to throw that post away, no matter whether I have ever heard of the poster or the horse they rode in on, the idea he or she is promoting.

Next, compare all the posts and posters and produce a weighted priority list that takes into account variables such as author, subject, updates, Technorati cosmos tracking, the amount of time I have before the next meeting on my calendar, and so on, producing a post rank based not just on my attention but the attention dynamics of those I choose to do my filtering with and for me.

From Steve Gillmor's Blogosphere - Wednesday, June 23, 2004 Entries
Referenced Thu Jun 24 2004 14:52:38 GMT-0600

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Supernova: Social Spreadsheets

These are some comments and thoughts from a panel called "The Network is People." Esther Dyson, Ray Ozzie, Mena Trott, and Christopher Allen were the panelists.

Spreadsheets were amazing because they sit in the middle, between calculators and the corporate accounting system. They let people not just change the numbers, but to change the models and to build new models. The power of the spreadsheet is the power to persuade people (some might say "beat them into submission"). Spreadsheets are as much about group interaction as presentation software is.

Social networks have a problem in that they let you record relationships, but they don't give you power to control interactions. They provide too many opportunities for "friend inflation." They don't accurately reflect people's real social networks. What we need is a "wiki for transactions." We need a way for users to manage their workflow in a flexible way--a spreadsheet for social interactions.

Would you rather have ten networks with 700,000 people in them or 700,000 networks with ten people in them? This is an interesting question. Linked-In is the first. Blogs are the second.

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Supernova: Ray Ozzie on Cooperative Work

Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove Networks is giving a short perspective on "The Future of Cooperative Work in a Connected World." He's using several case studies with Groove as examples. The talk was interesting and showed how P2P work spaces are being used in Iraq. He cites the example of a Naval Commander with the Iraq Humanitarian Operations Center created an instant interorganizational workspace for doing humanitarian inventories using Groove, their personal laptops, and the open Internet. Here are some points Ray makes based on this and other experiences:

• A tool's value rises dramatically according to its fitness for purpose
• Awareness-based swarming is real and valuable.
• Hybrid architectures are key in an organizational context.
• Real and compelling local need to work together is required
• Individuals participate for selfish reasons
• Trust, accountability, privacy required for participation.
• Servers a re centers of territorial power
• Regulatory, compliance issues are real but are sometimes used as weapons.
• Increased transparency and accountability are very threatening

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Supernova: The Future of Work

Tom Malone from MIT's Sloan School is speaking on Decentralization. Tom is the author of The Future of Work. Tom thinks we are in the early stages of an increase of human freedom in business that may be in the long run as an important a change for business as democracy was for government. New technologies are making it possible for organizations to have the economic benefits of large organizations while maintaining the human benefits of small organizations. Its now possible for huge numbers of people to have all the information they need about the big picture to make their own decisions about what to do instead of waiting for someone above them in the hierarchy to tell them what to do. To shape these changes, we need to think deeply about what humans really want.

Tom uses the Wikipedia as an example. Even though any one can make a change, the list of changes is available so that frequent contributers can watch changes and make sure they are good changes. Individual actions with the right kind of feedback yield an amazingly good encyclopedia. He uses eBay as another example. eBay has huge scale, but also provides significant human freedom since the marketplace is created by thousands of small shop owners, many of them making their living on eBay.

Our ancestors made their living in small bands of people who were independent and egalitarian. The second form of government, historically, was large centrally organized empires or kingdoms. The third form of government was democracy. While there are significant factors in the development of all of these, there is one factor that is definitive: the declining cost of communications. Writing made large societies possible. The printing press made democracy possible. I've also heard similar talk about postal roads being one of the factors in the rise of the American revolution.

These same three stages are playing out in business. Early on, most businesses were small independent groups. Modern communications like telephone made the modern, large corporation possible. Now networked communications is making it possible for us to enter the third major stage of how businesses are organized.

Is this change desirable? To argues that people adapting to information rather than following orders are happier and make better decisions because they're adapted to local conditions. They're context sensitive. Motivation, creativity, and innovation are the hallmarks of decentralized decision making in business.

There are three main ways that large groups of people can make decisions:

1. Loose hierarchies - Universities and research organizations are examples. AES is Tom's favorite example. AES is a power producer. They made a decision to purchase a power producer in England a while back without the board of directors or even the CEO being involved. Their rule: you don't have to get approval for a decision, but you do have to get advice.
2. Democracies - Boards of directors are examples of democracies in corporations, but that's just at the top. This also can play a role further down in the organization.
3. Markets - two kinds: external and internal. External means outsourcing to other companies or individuals work that might have been done inside the company before. Communication technologies make it possible to do this as never before. Movies are a good example of this. Most of the people, including lighting people, sound people, etc. come together for the purpose of one project. Then they are disbanded. Internal markets happen where people inside one company buy from and sell to each other. Tom and others did a study on how Intel could use an internal futures market to determine how to resource new products. Sales buys futures on products from plant managers. Changes result in these future being resold to reallocate resources based on current context.

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Global Guerrillas

I had a chance to spend a lot of time at dinner last night with John Robb (former CEO of Userland) about his forthcoming book on Global Guerrillas. Fascinating and scary stuff.

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June 23, 2004

Hosted Community Building Tools for Politics

Judith Meskill's Social Software Weblog points to I Stand For, a new service of Andrew Weinreich, the founder of Friendster. The idea is to provide hosted solutions for political causes to build community.

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Exploding the Enterprise: Summary

As I've considered the topic of the panel, Exploding the Enterprise and discussed it with the panelists, we've decided that the description in the Supernova program is sufficiently vague to allow at least two interpretations:

1. Exploding the Enterprise in an internal sense. That is, allowing teams, groups and organizations to function effectively regardless of distance.
2. Exploding the Enterprise in the external sense. That is, creating opportunities for more and more of the business to be performed by service bureaus and even independent contractors.

The first is the domain of network communications, groupware, IM, and presence. The second is the domain of Web services, identity management, and transactions. The first is about cross-functional and interdepartmental cooperation and is long-term and fluid. The second is generally more focused by the specific tasks being performed (e.g. payroll), well-defined, and for a fixed-term.

I attended a MIT continuing education course 4 or 5 years ago where someone (wish I could remember who) presented research that showed that group interaction dropped in half when participants were separated by more than 400 feet (yes, feet!). And that's on the same floor. Don't even talk about stairs. This seems to present a huge barrier for the exploded enterprise. Perhaps the more limited, transactionally oriented, focused interactions common with external relationships overcomes this.

The external sense of "Exploding the Enterprise" seems more in line with the expertise of the members of the panel and I think that's where we will spend most of the time, but there's also some interesting discussion that can take place at the intersection of these two areas.

For example, I was part of an organization, state government, that in many ways could be considered dysfunctionally organized, but is probably not all that unusual among large organizations. There were many different divisions with their own goals and budgets and they were only loosely connected. As CIO, I saw Web services and identity management as great tools to create cooperative ventures among the loosely coupled divisions.

In this scenario, we could view the external, highly focused interactions of an organizations and the many external service bureaus and contractors as just a leading indicator of the kind of relationships that might exist in internal situations as organizations become more loosely coupled. Put another way, are technologies like presence, Web services, identity management, P2P document management and so on enabling a new kind of loosely coupled, decentralized organization that's still able to cooperatively achieve larger goals?

Here are some possible discussion points for the panel:

• Phil Becker and others, like the Jerico Forum, have talked about the "deperimeterization" of the enterprise. That seems an apt description of what we're talking about. This is being brought about by things as important as the need to work more closely with trading partners and even customers and as mundane as regular folks installing Wi-Fi in their homes and then logging onto the corporate network through a VPN. The exploding enterprise has significant ramifications for our traditional notions of computer and network security.
• Any enterprise is no longer a single organization, but a federation of many organizations. The organizations in the federation do not report to a common manager or even share a common long-term goal. They are federated by contracts and connected by networks.
• Enterprise applications are no longer homogeneous. There is no common IT infrastructure and no hope to ever build one. For example, you need to talk to the company that does your payroll, but you're not big enough to force any kind of architectural decisions on them.
• You have a varying ability to influence how partners operate. This goes beyond the common IT infrastructure decisions I was talking about in the last bullet--you may not even be able to get them to adhere to your corporate document naming standards, for example.
• For the most part, your partner organizations don't want to let you all the way inside their systems and you don't want to let them all the way inside yours. The interaction is at well-defined (hopefully) interfaces.
• The reality of modern organizations is that there is not and never will be a shared infrastructure for identity, computing, document management or anything else. The solution has to be decentralized to work.
• The ROI on provisioning contractors and part-time service providers, what we'll call "non-persistent employees" is lower than with a direct employee. IT systems have to be architected to reduce the amount of effort required for employee provisioning to make this model effective. Otherwise, it can eat the infrastructure budget alive.
• Much of the focus in this area has been in federating identity with the idea that once we have federated identity we can manage the access control issues of this exploded enterprise. There is a third way, however and that is to use accountability for those resources that its appropriate for. Dan Geer says that "accountability is a log processing problem." For accountability to work in managing resources in the exploded enterprise, you don't need federated identity, just some identity (like an email address).
• We're inclined to associate presence with IM since that's where its used most pervasively, but presence messages could be separated from the IM application and deployed as a general-purpose infrastructure that's usable by many apps, including IM. In this scenario, presence messages would flow between machines over an enterprise messaging infrastructure. These presence messages would be generated by an IM client, but by just about any application, such as your calendar or word processing program.

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June 22, 2004

BYU Linux Install Fest

The BYU Unix User's Group will be holding a Linux Install Fest this Saturday from 10am to 3pm in the lobby of the Crabtree Building (just south of the Wilkensen Center). They say:

Bring your computer and get help with Linux installation or configuration. We'll have CDs available for Fedora, Mandrake, and Debian. If you would like to use some other distribution, feel free to bring your own CDs, and we'll help you with it.

Remember to backup your data; problems are rare, but it's good to be careful. Defragmenting your hard drive will also speed up the process. A very small number of monitors and keyboards may be available, but you will have to wait in line.

From BYU Unix Users Group - Announcements
Referenced Tue Jun 22 2004 11:34:34 GMT-0600

If you've wanted to give Linux a try and were afriad to strike out on your own, this is your chance. The event is not limited to just those associated with BYU, so come on down! As a follow-up to the Install Fest, UUG will be holding a meeting on July 1st at 7:30pm called "Don't Fear the Penguin" to introduce Linux to newbies.

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Lovemarks: iPod and BMW

Combining the iPod with a BMW is a sure win in my book.

I have a passion for BMWs. I've owned a 3-series and a 5-series and they were both fantastic cars. I think the older 5-series (not the newest model) may have been the best production car ever made overall. The new 5 has it beat in performance, but the looks aren't there, in my opinion. Recently I've also developed a passion for Apple and I love my iPod, so the combination of the two makes me giddy. Both Apple and BMW are clearly lovemarks, that rare kind of brand that demands both respect and love from its customers.

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Universal Feed Parser in Python

Mark Pilgrim has released Version 3 of the Universal Feed Parser. The parser is written in Python and can handle RSS 0.90, Netscape RSS 0.91, Userland RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, and CDF feeds. There are 2000 unit tests and 100 pages of documentation. Very handy. Thanks Mark!

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Yahoo! and AOL Quit the Enterprise IM Space

First Yahoo! and now AOL have quit the enterprise IM game. This isn't so much a sign that enterprises are giving up on IM, or not taking to it, but rather that businesses are reluctant to pay for something they have been getting for free. Apparently identity management and logging aren't enough of a benefit to justify monthly fees for many companies. I think there's some big changes afoot in the enterprise messaging space and this is just one small sign of the turmoil.

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Wireless Dead Zones Considered Beneficial

An article in the most recent Baseline states that you will come to love dead zones, meaning places where wireless signals are blocked by design. Among the places that are suggested as dead zones: conference rooms, classrooms, and public transportation---the very places that conventional wisdom says ought to be the first places you deploy wireless technologies.

I don't agree with the premise of the article, that companies will seek out ways to create dead zones. Culture is a more effective deterrent for inappropriate behavior than technology. In many ways, I see this as the analog to the problem we face with technology that forces transparency. If you want my attention in a meeting or class, make it relevant and interesting. Don't rely on locks and jamming technology to get my attention.

The concern over cheating is real, although I have to admit I've never worried about it much. Most of the classrooms I've taught in at BYU would be difficult to use a handheld device in without the proctor being able to see. I also design my tests to be open book, short answer or essay questions with answers based on analysis rather than memorization. Those kinds of tests are much more difficult to cheat on than a multiple choice test, but they're harder to grade.

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June 21, 2004

Ubiquitous Camera Phones

Dan Gillmor examines the ramifications of ubiquitous camera phones and surviellence gear in general in his most recent column. Dan notes that "cameras will soon disappear from view, embedded in clothing and eyeglasses, not just phones."

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Top Ten IT Issues in Utah

Dave responds to my query for more details on last week's UTC meeting with details. Thanks Dave! Interesting that many of the issues being raised are nearly identical to the issues I raised in November 2002.

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Counting Web Site Visitors

If your organization runs a Web site, you may think that the statistics you're getting from your log analysis software are presenting a pretty accurate picture of your site's traffic. Well, not so fast. A newspaper research and consulting firm named Belden Associates did a study that shows most site traffic numbers are way off base for a variety of reasons. For example, Belden estimates that half of the daily users of a newspaper website access it from more than one computer, resulting a lot of double counting. I couldn't find the report on the Belden site, but a write-up in the Christian Science Monitor gives some details. Even though the study was done for the newspaper industry, most of what's reported is not specific to newspaper Web sites.

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June 18, 2004

Dave, Tell Us What Happened at UTC

Dave Fletcher reports that the Utah Technology Commission heard about open source and that Richard North presented his top ten list of technology issues in Utah, but Dave doesn't report what was said on either. Come on Dave! We don't want to wait a month for the minutes to be approved and published. Interestingly, North doesn't appear on the agenda, its just "Speaker to be announced," even though North is the guy who prepares the agenda.

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Cory Doctorow on DRM

Cory Doctorow has posted a talk on DRM that he gave to Microsoft. Its very entertaining and well-crafted. He argues effectively:

1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

If you've ever read any of Cory's books you know that he can really entertain and this piece is no different.

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June 17, 2004

How Microsoft Lost the API War

Joel Spolsky has a great article (albeit long) on How Microsoft Lost the API War that along the way talks about programming languages, memory management, and the Web. Even if you're not particularly interested in Microsoft or programming for Microsoft platforms, you should read it. The article is an excellent look look at large trends in programming and software development. Bottom line: more and more development will be going to the Web regardless of Microsoft's constant rant about "rich clients."

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June 16, 2004

Exploding the Enterprise, Part II

Darren Lee, the CEO of NextPage is one of the panelists on the panel I'm moderating at SuperNova 2004 next week. I've been meaning to catch up with him on what NextPage is up to anyway and since he's local, I took some time this morning to visit. They have some very interesting new products in the works and that lead to some thoughts that are applicable to next week's panel on Exploding the Enterprise.

First, the term "exploding the enterprise" can be thought of two ways.

• Most organizations now employee people at multiple locations.
• Many organizations now outsource large parts of their operations to service providers as well as employing temporary, contract employees persistently (i.e. there's always some group of contract employees on board).

These developments have some consequences:

• The ROI on provisioning contractors and part-time service providers, what we'll call "non-persistent employees" is lower than with a direct employee. IT systems have to be architected to reduce the amount of effort required for employee provisioning to make this model effective. Otherwise, it can eat the infrastructure budget alive.
• Any enterprise is not longer a single organization, but a federation of many organizations. The organizations in the federation do not report to a common manager or even share a common long-term goal. They are federated by contracts and connected by networks.
• Enterprise applications are no longer homogenous. There is no common IT infrastructure and no hope to ever build one. For example, you need to talk to the company that does your payroll, but you're not big enough to force any kind of architectural decisions on them.
• You have a varying ability to influence how they operate. This goes beyond the common IT infrastructure decisions I was talking about in the last bullet--you may not even be able to get them to adhere to your corporate document naming standards, for example.
• For the most part, these organizations don't want to let you all the way inside their systems and you don't want to let them all the way inside yours. The interaction is at well-defined (hopefully) interfaces.
• All of these add up to the fact that there is not and never will be a shared infrastructure for document management or anything else. The solution has to be decentralized to work.

Much of the focus in this area has been in federating identity with the idea that once we have federated identity we can manage the access control issues of this exploded enterprise. There is a third way, however and that is to use accountability for those resources that its appropriate for. Dan Geer says that "accountability is a log processing problem." For accountability to work in managing resources in the exploded enterprise, you don't need federated identity, just some identity (like an email address). That's an interesting concept.

If you've got further thoughts on this, please share them on the forum. I'll try to see that they get incorporated into next week's discussion.

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June 15, 2004

Beyond Bullets

From Robert Scoble I learned of Cliff Atkinson's PowerPoint blog Much of what I read on Cliff's blog and Web site remind me of two of the most effective users of PowerPoint I know: Doc Searls and Larry Lessig.

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Archiving CDs and DVDs

I've been seeing a lot lately on how to get better results when using CD and DVD media for archiving digital data. Today, my feedreader offered up this article from PCWorld.com on CD and DVD media quality. The article largely focuses on some efforts by NIST and others to create a standard rating system for recordable media so that we're not left guessing in the dark:

But NIST's Byers is seeking to change that. At an OSTA meeting in San Francisco this week, Byers is proposing an industry-wide grading system to indicate disc quality.

Byers is motivated by the desire to see a uniform mechanism in place to guide institutions and individuals who'll be storing data, music, videos, and images for long periods of time. "They need to be confident in their purchasing, so they can plan for their strategies in storing their information," Byers says. "Long-term storage has different meanings: For some, 30 years might be enough. For others, 50 or 75 years might be archive, or long-term, quality."

Under Byers's proposal, a series of tests would be developed to determine whether a DVD would last for a given number of years. "If you were to purchase a disc in a store with a grade that indicates it has passed a test to last X number of years, it removes a lot of uncertainty for the consumer, and it can save some expense in premature migration [to a new storage technology], or loss of data because they waited too long [and the disc was no longer playable]," he says.

From PCWorld.com - Burning Questions: When Good Discs Go Bad
Referenced Tue Jun 15 2004 11:00:31 GMT-0600

Byers has conducted tests and has data, but he's not naming names. For now the best approach is to buy high quality media that matches your drive speed and is produced by a vendor who manufactures their own disks (like Maxell or Verbatim) so that you get consistent quality.

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Federation Acceleration

Ping ID Corp released the results of their quarterly survey on federation today. The results of the survey of 100 corporations show a federation acceleration and increased planning for future federation projects:

• End-user convenience, better partner integration, and a reduction in overall IT costs were cited as the top three drivers of federation.
• The number of federations in production increased from 1% in Q1 to 7% in Q2.
• Over 50% surveyed were planning to participate in between 1 and 3 federations within the next 24 months.Ê
• Approximately 48% of those surveyed believed each of their federations would contain between 1 and 3 organizations within 24 months.
• 21% were being driven to federate by partners, while 72% were being driven to federate by either an internal business group or their IT department.
• Interest in deploying the SAML 2.0 and WS-Federation specifications rises significantly in Q4 of 2004 and continues through Q2 of 2005.
• Ease of Integration and Vendor Interoperability were cites as top characteristics desired in federation products.

The survey was quoted in a TechUpdate article by Dan Farber where he gives some background on the current state of the protocols:

Ê

Currently, SAML 1.1 is the dominant protocol used for federation. Vendors have announced support for the Liberty Alliance Liberty ID-FF 1.1, but few are shipping in a substantial way, according to Eric Norlin, senior vice president of marketing at Ping Identity. The survey indicated that interest in SAML 2.0 and WS Federation will begin to ramp up significantly in the latter part of 2004 and continue throughout 2005.

However, even with standards like SAML 1.1, interoperability problems crop up. Developers tend to create custom extensions or modify the code in a way that requires compliance testing and tweaking every time a node is added to a federation. Liberty Alliance is attempting to fix that problem. WS-Federation, according to Norlin, is very broad in its semantics, and doesn't become interoperable until profiles are defined that ride on top of the protocol.

From Federation acceleration - TechUpdate - ZDNet
Referenced Tue Jun 15 2004 10:45:12 GMT-0600

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June 14, 2004

RSS Middleware

In an article about Google and its decidedly different approach from Microsoft in creating network-based information repositories, Steve Gillmor spends a paragraph talking about a new RSS router that he saw demoed by Adam Bosworth (of BEA) and his son Alex:

In his eWorld keynote, BEA's chief architect, Adam Bosworth, cited the similar transformation around the GUI, which gave procedural control to users. Now RSS is creating another shift, away from the Web request model to user-controlled aggregation. TiVo-like user metadata can be harvested to offer services in return for access to group and trend data. And as RSS containers become more intelligent about applying authority filtering to feeds, the signal to noise improves. Bosworth showed eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft and me an intelligent RSS router, built atop his Alchemy extended browser project, a framework that uses declarative metadata dynamic caching to create a rich conversation between a thin client and the server cloud. Sounds like HailStorm, I told Bosworth, who didn't disagree. But a HailStorm based on a framework BEA will open-source.

From Gmail a Gentler HailStorm?
Referenced Mon Jun 14 2004 11:21:52 GMT-0600

Steve's blog has an extended transscript of the conversation during the demo. Some interesting tidbits in there. I'm looking forward to listening to last week's Gillmor Gang to see if it comes up.

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Unintentionally Cleaning Out My Inbox

While reading mail, my mail reader (Apple's Mail.app) popped up a message about some kind of error occurring during compaction and stated that my mailbox would be returned to its original state. Well, not quite. Actually, it was returned to its original state from that session except that everything that had been in there before the last download was gone. I'll see what I can recover from backup this morning, but if you sent me mail in the last while that hasn't been answered, contact me again.

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June 11, 2004

No More Pizza

One of my complaints about Safari has been that I constantly got the little spinning pizza (some people call it a "beach ball" since its multi-colored) whenever a page download was slow. Once the pizza started spinning, the whole application was hung until the download finished. These was very annoying and I almost moved from Safari several times because of it. Yesterday the network connection at BYU was hosed for some reason and I couldn't even work because Safari was hung. So, I decided to find out what I could and fix the problem. I was successful. Here's what I did:

• Deselected "Other" from the Autocompletions options in the Preferences.
• Deleted the ~/Library/Safari/Icons directory
• Add find $HOME/Library/Safari/Icons -type f -atime +30 -name "*.cache" -delete to my crontab to run once a day.

The Icons directory holds the favicon.ico files that Safari downloads. This last comment just clears out any that haven't been used in more than thirty days. I run it once a day.

I rather like the Other option for Autocompletion, so I'll probably turn it back on and see if it is really the culprit or not. The real problem is poor threading in at least this portion of Safari. In any event, I'm happy since I'm pizza-free, at least on my TiBook.

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IM Records in iChat

If you use iChat for work, you may want to record your iChat sessions for later recall. You can always save any individual session using the "File -> Save a Copy As" commands. If you want to do it more systematically, go to "iChat -> Preferences -> Messages" and check the box "Automatically save chat transcripts" and select a folder. Now every chat session will be saved to disk. To browse or search those transcripts, there's a handy little program called Logorrhea from Spiny.com that does a great job of letting you find and review your past chats. Even better, its free.

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June 10, 2004

Microcasting and Political Campaigns

Spurred on by Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis is talking about why the conventional model of TV is exploding. A few data points I thought of immediately:

• Today Jon Udell had a write-up about a how-to clip that he watched online about fixing your printer.
• Robert Scoble's Channel 9 is just a couple of guys with a video camera showing us the inside of Microsoft.
• Doug Kaye's IT Conversations is already as good or better than any radio program I listen to.

Each of these is "microcasting." None of them expect to hit an audience of millions, although I'm sure that latter two, at least, wouldn't mind. Why do you care? Because you get content more specifically aimed at what you want. I don't know what the audience for IT Conversations is, but it doesn't have to be huge for Doug to make it work. That means he can afford to produce content for a niche market that is un(der)-served by traditional broadcast.

I just had an idea: why aren't any of the campaigns doing this? For very little money, a campaign, even one for Governor of a smaller Western state (hint, hint) could afford to broadcast their own TV program around their candidate. The trick isn't technical---heck, even I can figure that out---the trick is to make it interesting. But that's why campaigns have liberal arts majors working for them, right?

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Presence and the Enterprise

As I prepare for the Exploding the Enterprise panel at Supernova in two weeks, my reading is colored by the topic. Thus, this article on presence from Business Communications Review caught my attention. We're inclined to associate presence with IM since that's where its used most pervasively, but presence messages could be separated from the IM application and deployed as a general-purpose infrastructure that's usable by many apps, including IM. In this scenario, presence messages would flow between machines over an enterprise messaging infrastructure.

What generates these presence messages? Applications such as your calendar or word processing program. I'd like people to be able to tell I'm on the phone, in a meeting (although not necessarily with who), or even that I'm very focused on a task so that they can more effectively time their interruptions. That means these applications have to be able to send presence messages about what I'm doing. Some worry about the privacy concerns, but that's only a problem if you don't let the user control what's visible and what's not.

This doesn't get us to an answer to the question of the Exploding the Enterprise panel, however which is "does any of this make any difference?" I've got an open topic in the Ask Phil Forum for you to leave your questions and comments for the panel before the show.

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Google Considering RSS

Derrick Strumpf sent me a note about an article on Google and RSS. If you haven't followed this, Google owns Blogger. Blogger, at one point, supported RSS, albeit only for their paying subscribers. In April, Google dropped support for RSS in favor of Atom. Now it seems that maybe they're reconsidering:

According to an internal Google e-mail seen by CNET News.com, the company has been considering the change and last month assigned at least one staffer to write a memo summarizing technical details relating to RSS. The request came amid a broader discussion touching on extending RSS support for new Blogger subscribers and Google Groups, which supports Atom but not RSS in a test version of the service.

"I did ask (a Google product manager) to develop a summary...about RSS feeds, including the ways they are produced and consumed, which platforms/devices they run on, and information on the various formats (RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom)," Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, wrote on May 22. The message was part of a thread addressed to Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and others.

As of June 4, it appeared no decision had yet been made on the issue. A Google representative declined to comment.

From Google mulls RSS support
Referenced Thu Jun 10 2004 06:02:53 GMT-0600

Google's decision, of course, carries huge weight in the standards space, since Google's support for Atom counter-balances, in some respects, the dominance of RSS and gives it momentum. A neutral Google would make Atom suddenly less compelling to many people, such as the software developers working on feed readers.

Personally, I've not really taken sides in this debate, although I have to admit that I've been impressed with the design of Atom. I used the API in my class yesterday as an example of a RESTian Web service.

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June 9, 2004

WS-Federation Proof of Concept

SourceID has released WS-Federation proof of concept code:

The ASP.NET-based WS-Federation Proof-of-Concept code is the basis for this demonstration, and is focused on providing a framework for exploration and meeting the interoperability event requirements, not on being deployable for general use. This code is not part of SourceID.Java or SourceID.NET (the primary projects at SourceID.org), although concepts and code from this release may be used in future SourceID releases.

From SourceID | SAML, Liberty Alliance, WS-Federation | Federated Identity Management
Referenced Wed Jun 09 2004 19:14:54 GMT-0600

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Did You Know? DVD-R vs. DVD+R

I recently bought a LaCie DVD recorder. I hadn't realized until I did that there was a difference between DVD-R and DVD+R. The drive will support either, but you have to make the choice when you buy the media. And, of course, make sure you choose media that maches your drive's speed.

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June 8, 2004

Shedding Capability for Certainty

Are IT departments becoming big bags of contracts? Jerry Gregoire, former CIO for Dell and PepsiCo, writes in this month's CIO magazine about the vanishing IT department. He concludes:

So, what kind of IT organization do you aspire to have? If you yearn for adequate results on vanilla systems in pursuit of dial-tone regularity, forget about talent shortages and go find yourself a good contract lawyer. If, on the other hand, you still believe IT can make a competitive difference and that even the more mundane tasks can be a channel of competitive advantage given a little creative effort, then developing and retaining a professional organization should be your number-one goal.

From The Vanishing IT Department - Peer To Peer - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 16:51:48 GMT-0600

Jerry also argues against the increasing trend of appointing people with weak technical skills as CIO:

Consider for a moment that, given an hour or two of reading an instruction manual and a few hours looking over a dentist's shoulder, I could probably do a passable job of pulling teeth. So why doesn't that make me a dentist? Well, because I'd be helpless if anything went wrong during the extraction, and since pulling teeth is the only thing I know how to do, a pulled tooth is exactly what every patient who comes through my door is going to get. CIOs with no formal training or long-term experience in IT are not CIOs. They're just very nice people from other disciplines sent in to make sure IT doesn't do anything dangerous or exciting. The same goes for the rest of the IT leadership.

From The Vanishing IT Department - Peer To Peer - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 16:55:02 GMT-0600

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NetNewsWire and Atom

BTW, if you happen to use Ranchero Software's excellent NetNewsWire feedreader on OS X, you'll have to download the 1.09b1 beta version to read Atom feeds.

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Dive Into Atom with Mark

Here are a couple of good articles by Mark Pilgrim on the Atom API and Atom Authentication via WSSE. Mark's also written a piece on Normalizing Syndication Feeds that contains XPath queries for picking out relevant pieces of RSS and Atom. Very handy.

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Syndication Standards Saga

Sean Gallagher (of eWeek) describes the recent developments in synidcation standards saga in his blog. The article is a nice summary of where the RSS vs Atom story is now and a little about its history. There's lots of links to other interesting content. Regarding Atom, Sean says:

Atom combines a weblog publishing API together with a syndication format. Winer says that's not novel--"We did that with the MetaWeblog API," he says, which was based on RSS. "The clever thing they did was that they gave them both the same name."

But Atom is incompatible with the RSS standard, for a number of reasons, some of which I'll grossly oversimplify here. For one, it creates a new XML data format for syndicated content to allow for more data types to be built into an Atom feed. The publishing API is being brought into alignment with other web development APIs and approaches such as SOAP and REST, says Bray. And Atom will link into enterprise security models like WS-Security, through WSSE.

From RSS, Atom, And The Syndication Standards Dance
Referenced Tue Jun 08 2004 15:37:26 GMT-0600

Atom is working its way through the IETF process. Probably as a foil, Dave Winer has suggested that W3C may want to standardize RSS 2.0. There's one side to this argument that goes "it doesn't matter to the users as long as the aggregator writers support both." However, I think it does matter in terms of divided focus and energy. I'm not taking sides; I'm just wishing that the fracture didn't exist.

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Portable Wi-Fi

Apple's AirPort Express (click for larger image)

Apple has announced a portable Wi-Fi hub called the AirPort Express that looks like the little square power adaptors that come with the PowerBook. The unit has a mini-stereo jack, a USB port, and an RJ-45 port. The unit is small enough to throw into a laptop bag for travel. In addition to serving as a regular base station, the AP Express can also serve as a Wi-Fi terminal point for attaching printers printers and as a bridge for extending the range of the wireless network in your house--just plug it into the wall. The coolest feature is that it will also attach your stereo to the network via Wi-Fi.

8:33 AM | Comments (