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September 30, 2004
XML as a Native Data Type
Jon Udell talks about E4X, a version of Javascript that has the ability to work with XML natively. In the same way you can say things like
foo = "Hello"you can also say
bar = <people>...</people>Jon gives some examples and they're compelling. I agree with Jon that once XML as a native data type catches on, its likely to be a feature that you can't live without.
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Kodak Standards Adopted
I wrote a while ago about Kodak's changing business model. Part of Kodak's strategy was to create standards for digital printing. Yesterday, six printer manufacturers announced that they will support Kodak's standard.
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September 29, 2004
Municipal Wi-Fi in OK
Dave Fletcher points out that Oklahoma City is building a 400 square mile Wi-Fi network at the cost of $78 million. As Dave says "Wow!" What's sad is that this is just for public safety--no citizen access as far as I can tell. Even if it were, they' still wouldn't be able to do any interesting broadband projects that involve significant bandwidth, such as video. Utopia opponents were always saying "Wi-Fi is cheaper and will obsolete fiber." This proves them wrong.
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PODCasting: Delivering Audio to MP3 Players Like the iPod
Over at Doc Searl's IT Garage, he's discussing PODCasting which, of course, has reference to the iPod, but Doc has coined an acronym "Personal Option Digital" casting to be clear we're talking about a new way for users to hear what they want, not just one company's product. This is an interesting phenomenon, which will likely change how many of us listen to any audio that is time insensitive. This is generating a lot of buzz right now:
PODCasting arguably started with Doug Kaye's IT Conversations, at least that's where I first started seeing enough interesting programs that I'd regularly download them to my iPod so I could listen to them later. Adam Curry and Dave Winer are doing a regular program now called Trade Secrets Radio. Others, like the Evil Genius Chronicles are getting in the act as well.
Doug Kaye has lamented that there are more audio blogs already than he can afford to listen to. That brings up a limitation of audio: its more time synchronous than reading. I can read faster than you type; I can skim; I can skip. That's all harder to do in audio. Still, the overall situation is not all that different, no matter how fast I read, I can't keep up with all the interesting print information on blogs.
Audio blogs open up a whole new opportunity since there are some people who'd rather talk than type and are more interesting that way. The infrastructure is there to support is, although held together with bailing wire an bubble gum at this point. MP3 files are enclosed in RSS and consequently downloaded by the user's feedreader. From there, a lot of folks manually copy the MP3 to their MP3 player, but some tools to help this process are starting to appear, including Adam Curry's iPodder which makes the link between your feedreader and your iPod.
I love this new way of hearing people's ideas. I'm addicted to the Gillmor Gang. Like Doug, I just wish I had more time to listen!
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September 28, 2004
LiveServer Preview
My preview of LiveServer has been published at InfoWorld. I'm working on a full-blown review now.
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Perl Programmers Wanted
I've had two different companies approach me in the last week and ask me if I knew where they could find good Perl programmers. Both are paying gigs with people I trust. If you know Perl and you're looking for a new opportunity, let me know.
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New My Yahoo! Beta
Yahoo! has a new beta of their My Yahoo! service available (thanks to Jeremy Zawodny for the link). To use it, just click on the "try new beta" link at the top of your My Yahoo! page. Not only does it incorporate the RSS reading features that have been in beta since January, but the layout is better and the tools cleaner. One thing I really like is that the stories (RSS or otherwise) will display a short summary in addition to the headline so that you can tell if you want to click out or not. As Jeremy says, "The content model is open now." I suspect this will cause more news organizations and other Web sites to take a hard look at RSS. For example, neither the Salt Lake Tribune nor the Deseret News have RSS feeds for their stories. But if they did, their content could be on Yahoo! I've talked with the CIO of the Deseret News about it before. I'm not sure I communicated the point all that well. Maybe now the point will be obvious.
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Explaining RSS
I find myself explaining RSS a lot these days. When I spoke at the IT Seminar last week only a handful of the hundred or so students who were there raised their hand when I asked if they knew what RSS was. The problem is that its like trying to explain HTML, rather than the WWW. Rafe Needleman of c|net News has a video that explains RSS along with some other resources. I've added it to my RSS resources page.
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September 27, 2004
Technorati Outages and the Importance of Product Engineers
Dave Sifry gives some details about the Technorati outage this past weekend. Seems an electrical fire in the data center their co-lo at was the culprit. Running a 24/7 Web application reliably isn't easy and it isn't cheap. It took us several years of problems and study to hit on a solution at iMALL. We finally did figure it out and that was a real lightening of my load. One of the answers is product engineers, an engineer on the operations side whose job it is to make the product (not just the server) work. Properly incented, a product engineer will drive all of the emergency and contingency planning, along with ensuring that engineering delivers a system that can be reliably operated.
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CTO Breakfast Report: Local Exchanges
The topic for Friday's CTO
Breakfast was local exchanges. We had a great discussion and several
new people Hope to see you there next month. Don't know what an exchange
is or why its important? Keep reading.
In the days of railroad, dead end rail lines, called spurs, were built to connect small communities to the main rail line. This allowed farmers to ship their wares to market and small businesses to more easily get supplies. If you were a big business with lots of shipping needs, you didn't locate at the end of a spur, you located in a big city with a railroad switching yard and lines going out to multiple locations.
This situation with the Internet today is similar. There are major switching locations, called exchange points, and there are spurs. Much as we like to refer to the Internet as a "network" it more closely resembles a group of connected trees with lots of dead end branches.
This has worked pretty well, so far, but let's face it, the current network was built for dial up. The main problem with a group of connected trees is not bandwidth--you can always make the branches bigger--its latency. With dial-up, latency isn't really an issue. The latency issues can be ignored because more low-bandwidth applications aren't latency sensitive. Broadband changes that equation however. When I'm viewing live streams or playing an interactive game, latency can ruin the entire experience.
An exchange is a place where networks meet. Some of these meeting places are private, that is they are just an arrangement between two or three players, but some exchanges are more open and neutral. Exchange points are a central physical location where Internet traffic is handed off from the source carrier to the destination carrier. The are primarily used for peering, the free exchange of traffic between Internet backbones.
So why does this matter? If you live in a place without an exchange point, all of the Internet traffic that you generate and consume likely goes through some large city that does have an exchange point. The result is high latency as every packet has to go to this junction first before starting the journey to where its really headed. People who live in places like San Francisco or Washington DC, don't see this, but everyone else does. In Salt Lake, packets go to Denver, LA, or Chicago usually. If that's where I'm headed, no problem. When I'm trying to get to something in Utah however, that can be a problem.
Keeping local traffic local is good for the consumer, but is it good for the carriers? Well, yes and no. The good news for a carrier is that they don't pay money to backhaul traffic out of Utah and then back in. But unless that traffic is significant, the downside of exchange--leveling the playing field between competitors--is too great.
In the past, Utah's population hasn't been large enough for major carriers to want to play ball since the cost of backhauling what traffic there is remains small. The rise of fiber to the home broadband projects in Utah such as Utopia and iProvo, however, could change things in several ways:
- First, more broadband makes Utah's 2 million users look like 20 million.
- Second, there are a few large consumers who can create a market if they band together.
With that in mind, I'm going to be putting together a meeting soon to make a game plan for how we can create a marketplace and invite the carriers to participate. We've two of the four big players in Utah on board to give this a go and hope to convince the others soon. It will likely be an open meeting, so if you've got an interest, let me know and I'll put your name on the list.
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eVoting Round-Up
Here's a round-up of some eVoting articles from the last few days:
- First, the Deseret News has an article about the press conference on eVoting held at the Univ. of Utah last week. Its short, but gets the main point across: "paperless voting are insecure."
- An opinion piece from the Christian Science Monitor discusses the first use of electronic voting machines with a paper trail in Nevada's primary this month.
Perhaps inadvertently, Nevada's success will help squash much of the controversy over the reliability of electronic voting machines. Though states are moving toward e-voting - approximately one-third of voters are expected to use such digital machines on Nov. 2 - many types of them still aren't error-free.
Too many show vulnerability to hacking or software glitches. A paper trail remains the best interim step as states make their glacial efforts to comply with Congress's 2002 Help America Vote ActFrom E-Voting, With a Paper Trail | csmonitor.com
Referenced Mon Sep 27 2004 08:57:23 GMT-0600 - And, if you just want a little humor, Sundays' Non Sequitur cartoon pokes fun at electronic voting.
I particularly hope that Utah's Voting Equipment Selection Committee pays attention to the Nevada results. They have the flexibility to choose a system with a paper audit trail. There's no good reason to avoid paper--and plenty of reasons not to take any chances.
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September 23, 2004
Linux Savior or Sellout?
I was in Borders yesterday looking around and saw Miguel de Icaza staring at me. No, he wasn't in the bookstore, but he's on the cover of the September issue of Technology Review. The article was entitled "Linux Sellout or Savior?" and they played up that angle a bit too much for my taste, but it was still interesting to see the story. I'm sure its some version of reality. :-) Matt Asay was quoted in the article as well:
Matt Asay, Novell's Linux Business Office Director, concedes that it tool Novell employees a while to get used to "this Bohemian invader," as he calls de Icaza. "People were uncomfortable at first," he says. "But you walk around now and the pendulum has swung the other direction. People are giddy with the prospects for open source. I would say the greatest benefit that Novell got from Ximian was not their technology; it was their DNA."
Unfortunately, I can't link to the real article since Technology Review is decidedly not open souce and has a paywall; so, take a look if you're in the bookstore. As a bonus link, there's an interview with Carver Mead that is also very interesting.
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Slides from IT Seminar
I felt like my talk at the IT seminary went fairly well. There were a lot of people there. As promised, here are my slides. Warning: the file is large and there's not much text (mostly pictures) so they may not mean much if you weren't at the talk.
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September 22, 2004
Speaking at IT Seminar
I'll be speaking at the weekly IT seminar tomorrow in the Crabtree building (BYU) at 11am. I'll be speaking on the topic of "connected computing." I'll post slides here later for anyone who's interested.
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Presidential Candidate Website Smackdown
Brian Sweeting has a smackdown comparing the Bush and Kerry Web sites. If the technical merits of a Web site are any indication, Kerry sweeps it according to Brian.
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Data Center Consolidation
California is pushing data center consolidation among other things. Meanwhile Utah has its own data center consolidation issues. People continue to talk about it but until the legislature decides its time to stop allocating money for new data centers, they'll keep getting built. The Dept. of Corrections is building one in Gunnison, just up the road from the State's back-up data center in Richfield. Dave Fletcher, who runs the Richfield data center, is working hard to make it an attractive alternative for State agencies so that they won't build their own, but apparently that's somewhat threatenting to some Dept. of Corrections employees. At least Devin has the guts to say what he thinks in public---that shows more courage than most.
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Manipulating Feeds
Have you ever interrupted an HTTP download and then restarted it later and had it pick up where it left off? That little bit of magic is the result of RFC3229: Delta encoding in HTTP. This is useful for more than just resuming downloads. Jon Udell, for example, uses this trick to access a small part of an MP3 file and its also the secret sauce in mod_speedyfeed that I mentioned yesterday.
This article by Bob Wyman that outlines the particulars. In an interesting adaptation, while RFC3229 has always been about byte ranges, but the mod_speedyfeed module uses RFC3229 with item ranges. The bottom line: is there really isn't anything about this that would keep it from working with RSS 2.0 as well as Atom.
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Authorize.net Getting Hammered
Authorize.net's recent woes have made Wired News. Authorize.net is a local outfit. In fact, iMall and Authorize.net had discussions about merging at one point. We had just bought PurePayment.net and had some great credit card gateway technology that eventually became the SurePay gateway. Authorize.net had lots of customers. We thought it was a match made in heaven, but it was not to be. At any rate, Authorize.net has been suffering from a DDoS attack lately and their 90,000 customers are starting to get antsy:
"I'm losing four grand a day in revenue," said David Hoekje, president of PartsGuy.com, an online heating and air conditioning parts dealer. "My year is a bell curve, and we're on the upwards slope now. This is 5 percent of my year, gone."
"We know how hard it is," said Michael Adberg, co-founder of WeaKnees.com. The site, which sells TiVo upgrades and DirecTV installations, was itself the target of a DDoS attack last October. "But we're surprised that such a large company wasn't better prepared than we were." He added, "They have really let us down.From Wired News: Hack Attack Gums Up Authorize.Net
Referenced Wed Sep 22 2004 07:44:25 GMT-0600
Authorize.net used to be owned by InfoSpace. They were recently bought by LightBridge. LightBridge recently laid off 12% of their workforce and then these mysterious DDoS attacks started. Hmm...If I were looking, I know where I'd start. (see Stealing the Network)
Not surprisingly, the LightBridge Web site doesn't make mention of these problems and the Authorize.net page handles them with a small link that leads to a not very helpful statements. Maybe Authorize.net is connecting with their customers some other way to give them reassurance that they're handling the problem, but somehow I suspect that they're not. Like almost all company Web sites, the Authorize.net Web page continues to scream happy thoughts that in some marketer's imagination are supposed to make us want to use their service. My advice: start a blog and let a human write it. It won't solve the DDoS attacks, but it will connect to customers better.
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September 21, 2004
Accountability is Cheaper than Access Control
Jon Udell writes about using accountability to augment access control. Jon is working from Dan Geer's script. Dan has said that accountability scales linearly while access control scales at least as the square. For many applications, simply being able to audit what's happened to a resource (who accessed it, where was it sent, etc.) is sufficient and that's a lot cheaper than trying to build access control lists for every resource in your enterprise.
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Cutting Atom Feeds Down to Size
Through Sam Ruby, a pointer to mod_speedyfeed, an Apache 2 module that allows feedreading clients to only download the entries that have changed since the last access instead of the entire RSS file. This could cut the transfer amount significantly for many syndication sources. For now, it just works for Atom, but I don't see anything about it that couldn't work for RSS as well. The module is triggered by a header that the he client adds to the request like so:
GET /asdf/atom.xml HTTP/1.1 Host: asdf.blogs.com If-Modified-Since: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:18:36 GMT A-IM: feed
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September 20, 2004
Utah CTO Breakfast: Utah Exchange Point
September's CTO breakfast will be this Friday at the usual place and time (more information). Pete Kruckenberg of UEN has requested that we spend some time talking about how we can get a regional exchange point started in Utah including the technical hurdles, business benefit, and political realities. Pete's been working on this for a while. Maybe the timing's right now--especially with UTOPIA getting off the ground. I think that's a fascinating topic; come and add your thoughts and voice to the discussion.
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What the WWW Has Wrought: Mass Customization of M&Ms
In what I consider a perfect example of how the WWW opens up new business opportunities, for established as well as new companies, M&Ms can now be purchased in custom color mixes and with custom messages written on them. If you were a Mars Candy product manager in 1993 and had this idea, it would have been impossible to imagine how you could reach your customers with the offer and get their information effectively. Now, that's the easy part. The Web has allowed companies like M&Ms to build relationships with customers where before they simply pushed product through a distribution channel.
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First Snow
Y Mountain with a light dusting of snow.
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More on eVoting
Jay Lepreau (CS, Univ. of Utah) and I had an editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune yesterday on the dangers of eVoting. Some how the online version is missing the paragraph breaks which makes it somewhat hard to read. Jay's posted a text version with breaks included. The conclusion:
We applaud the state's goal of improving our voting systems. However, the result must really be an improvement. Voting equipment, costs, standards, laws, judicial rulings, and public opinion are all changing fast. Delaying the acquisition by just a single year would definitely reduce the state's Ê risks and likely its costs. Most important, the state must convince its citizens that any new voting system is at least as secure and trustworthy as the financial systems we use daily. Any other course is simply reckless.From Salt Lake Tribune - Opinion
Referenced Mon Sep 20 2004 06:55:16 GMT-0600
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September 17, 2004
Locks and Security
Seems that round barrel locks that are the staple of bike protection (Kryptonite) and laptop security are able to be opened in seconds using the barrel of a Bic pen. Here's some coverage on the net:
It seems that this information is not really new. Thieves have known about it for a while. What's new is that someone decided to publicize it. I'm glad they did. I'll think twice before securing my laptop or bike using one of these locks. I just spent $250 on Kensington MicroSaver locks for my lab. Guess I'll try to send them back.
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September 16, 2004
Firefox Support for RSS
The latest version of the Firefox browser autodiscovers the RSS feeds of sites that you visit and puts an RSS badge in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Clicking on the badge let's you add the feed to your bookmarks folder. Then, clicking on the bookmark folder gives a list of the most recent posts on that site. At this point, I'd say "good start." Here's why:
The great thing about this little innovation is that it turns certain bookmarks into dynamic, rather than static links. Rather than linking to a site, I get a dynamic folder full of the most recent content on that site. That's good.
Even so, its not a feedreader. The RSS feed looks like a folder and opening the folder gives you the titles without any content. You still have to click out to the site to read the article. Not quite the experience I'm looking for.
So, this is a handy addition, but doesn't collapse my browser and feedreader into a single tool. Still, I'm hopeful. Since Firefox is open source, it will undoubtedly inspire lots of people who want coolness to play with the incorporation of RSS into the browsing experience.
A note about autodiscovery of RSS feeds: The autodiscovery, actually relies on a <link/> tags embedded in the site's homepage. It didn't work for my weblog, so I tweaked it. Here's the right format:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title=\"RSS\" href="{full url to rss file goes here}" />
This is placed in the header. I use Radio for my blog, so I checked a few other Radio-based blogs and they all seemed have the same problem (except a few). They don't even have a <link/> tag. I had one, but it was malformed, at least according to Firebird. Mine had "meta" instead of "alternative." I don't remember why. I checked my Movable Type-based blogs and they all seem fine.
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State Networks Cracked
Utah State technology workers have apparently had their hands full the last few days dealing with people cracking the State's network. Here's a short blurb from the Deseret News and here's a different one from KSL. Apparently the attacks have been going on since 9/11. The State says that their systems are well protected, but its nearly impossible in a system as large and uncoordinated as the State's network to batten down every hatch. For example, there are all kinds of computers with public IP numbers simply sitting under people's desks. Likely as not, these systems are running operating systems that haven't been patched in years. The sole protection in this kind of scenario is firewalls and intrusion detection. What we have is a classic battle between security and local control. The State's been lucky and not had many serious attacks; consequently local control has won out so far.
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Directory to RSS Feed
Andrew Grumet has a handy little Perl script for creating an RSS feed, with enclosures, of the contents of a directory. Cool.
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The Rumors of Sender ID's Demise Are Exaggerated
In a piece entitled The Rumors of Sender ID's Demise Are Exaggerated, Yakov Shafranovich explains the recent IETF decision on SenderID. His conclusion is that SenderID in its current form is dead, but there are compromise solutions that are not.
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Public Fiber Projects
When I saw this puff-piece for the monopoly telecom providers in Wired a few days ago, I didn't bother to point it out because I'm frankly tired of debating the issue. Doc's done a nice job however: "It isn't just competition, dudes. It's service. Here's what we want from that service, in addition to speed: Symmetry, and lack of restrictions. No port 80 and port 25 blockages, for example. We want anybody to be able to set up a business, or do whatever business they already have." Indeed.
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September 15, 2004
Changing Business Models: Will Kodak Make It?
A while back Kodak bought Ofoto, an online picture album site whose business model was making money from providing prints of the terabytes of images that it store for free. Unfortunately, there's one small problem: most people don't print digital photos.
The heart of Kodak's digital strategy for serving the everyday snapshot artist has been Ofoto.com, an online company that Kodak acquired in June 2001 for $58 million. The service, which stores photos for free forever and then charges for making and mailing out prints, had 1.2 million customers when Kodak bought it; that has surged to 13 million members. Digital photographers, however, take scores of images but make few prints. Meaning: The company still doesn't know when it will turn a profit with Ofoto.From Eastman Kodak: Picture Imperfect
Referenced Wed Sep 15 2004 10:14:35 GMT-0600
Baseline uses this opening in an analysis of Kodak's business in a post-digital age. One of the things Kodak is trying is to create standards for photo printing. This is an interesting article, but it didn't make me want to go out and but Kodak stock. Kodak is a big company whose business model has been disrupted in a classic Clayton Christensen style.
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September 14, 2004
Is SenderID Dead or Just Not a Standard?
The IETF rejected Microsoft's SenderID proposal for dealing with Spam because of concerns over intellectual property.
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September 13, 2004
Digital ID World Schedule
The schedule of sessions for Digital ID World is out. There are some interesting talks and some good people. Looks like the conference will live up to its reputation.
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Why Working for Equity Can Be a Good Deal
A while ago, I sent a notice out asking if any developers were interested in working for equity on a Java-base P2P commerce system which I'm serving as an advisor on. Among some notes indicating interest, I received the following question:
So, if the business plan is good enough that the equity isn't worthless, why isn't there enough funding to pay a single developer's salary?
I can think of several reasons:
- Usually, before investors will put money into a deal, they want to see something, even a prototype, working. So, the business plan may be sound, but there could be very little cash laying around.
- Programmers can often see the potential of an online product before there's enough detail to attract investors because they live in this space.
- Even if investors are willing to put money into a deal, the higher the value of the company at the time you do the first (and successive) rounds, the less equity you give away for a given investment. A working prototype increases value.
- Programmers who have an ownership stake, especially early, can make a huge difference in terms of direction and vision. Programmers working part-time for money in a start-up typically don't have that kind of impact.
All of this means that programmers can make a big difference in early-stage firms and get a piece of the action for a relatively small investment in time. That's leverage.
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Internet Application Performance
One of the topics I try to discuss throughout the semester in my Engineering Large-Scale Internet Applications course is performance. It can be a difficult subject to discuss because of differences in terminology. I've put together a page on Internet application performance to serve as a resource on the topic. I'll be adding to it from time to time.
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Dave Barry on eVoting
Dave Barry's piece this week was on eVoting:
Inside the voting booth you'll find a ''touchscreen,'' which is a computer screen coated with a thin, invisible layer of germs left by all the people who voted ahead of you, many of whom use the sacred sanctity of the voting booth to pick their noses. When you touch this screen, tiny pieces of electricity called ''electrons'' go shooting into your finger, through your arm and into your brain, where they whiz around until they locate the name of the candidate you wish to vote for; they then transmit this information to Central Voting Command (located in India) along with any legally questionable thoughts you may have regarding terrorism, tax evasion or sexual fantasies featuring an armadillo and Wayne Newton.From Herald.com | 09/12/2004 | Low-carb leader will get my vote
Referenced Mon Sep 13 2004 07:12:55 GMT-0600
Remember to bring some antiseptic wipes with you to the polling booth.
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September 10, 2004
OSCON 2004 Photos (Finally) Posted
Mt Hood on the flight into Portland.
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My pictures from OSCON are finally on my gallery. The reason why its taken more than a month to do it is a tale of the kinds of niggling little computer configuration problems we all love.
Right before OSCON, I moved my gallery to another server. Everything seemed to be working fine but then when I went to upload pictures (from OSCON) it failed. I used iPhoto on my Mac and use Zach Wiley's great little export plugin for iPhoto. So, my first suspicion was that that had failed. I played with it, looked for updates, and then just gave up due to time constraints.
This morning I had some pictures of the installation of my virtualization testbed and ran into the same problem. I decided to fix the problem and I'm happy to report I did. It only took my 2 hours to find out that the problem was that PHP, by default, limits uploads to 2MB. Once I figured out that php.ini needs to be moved by hand (install doesn't do it for you), changed the parameter, and restarted the web server, everything started working again. Along the way, I also had to fix several other problems that cropped up. Whew! I've updated my notes on building Apache to address these issues.
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September 9, 2004
RSS is Eating Me Alive (Almost)
Robert Scoble talks about bandwidth costs of RSS and cites it as a reason more and more sites are not giving full text RSS feeds. I was wondering what it cost me, so I looked at my server logs for yesterday. I have about 800 unique IP addresses grabbing my RSS feed each day. That amounted to about 6000 GETs of which roughly 4200 returned a 304 (not modified). So, around 2/3rds of the hits to my feed return 0 bytes. I don't return a full text feed, so its only around 25K. That works out to over 1GB per month of data transfer just from my RSS feed. Having a full text RSS feed could increase that by 3 to 3GB per month. That's pretty substantial given that I'm serving one lonely RSS feed for one insignificant blog. Here's Scoble's math. Sam Ruby weighs in on the proper use of HTTP.
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The Great IDE Debate
Chad Dickerson's column in InfoWorld is about the great IDE debate got me thinking. I've never seriously used an IDE, unless you count Emacs. I'm generally someone who loves new tools and count myself as an early adopter. Still, I never saw the trade-off as worthwhile. I've often thought of it as a generational thing--younger programmers used IDEs--but I'm not sure that's really true.
Its certainly true, that whether or not you use an IDE depends a great deal on the language you use. I suspect that there are not nearly as many Perl or Python programmers who use an IDE. And I don't think that's just because they're less common. If Perl programmers wanted to use Eclipse, they'd build a plug-in to do it. I suspect it has more to do with the style of programming. Paul Grahams quote about Java being used to accrete large programs as a series of patches is germane here, I think.
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SMS Appointment Reminders
My dentists sends me reminders of my appointments using SMS. They're generated automatically from his appointments software. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I thought this was a good example of the right message on the right medium.
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September 8, 2004
Tony Scott on Enterprise Architecture
CIO Magazine has an interview with Tony Scott on Enterprise Architecture. One of the things Tony does is make sure none of his peers hear the term "enterprise architecture." In the end, this is all about simplifying IT infrastructures and processes by creating a context and structure within which IT operates. For it to work, that context must be based on the business. Tony talks about simplicity and gives an example from OnStar:
We don't ever want IT to be the thing that holds GM back. And to the extent that you have complexity in your IT environment, you tend to make it more difficult to change or take advantage of new opportunities. Companies that operate without an architectural approach end up like Gulliver, tied down by tens of thousands of Lilliputian strings and wires. If he's going to move, you have to cut 10,000 strings. If the company practices enterprise architecture, you will have fewer strings to cut and more freedom of movement.
One of the best places that we put this to use was over at OnStar. We worked with them, trying to understand the new customer services they were going to put in place. We created a map of the business activities and which IT systems, either current or proposed, would fulfill those activities. Which systems will provide enrollment for OnStar subscribers? Which ones will provide support for emergency calls?
We discovered some gaps where OnStar had assumed that there was already a certain system functionality that we didn't have yet. Then there were also a couple of cases where there were overlaps÷where the same function was provided in two different systems÷requiring us to choose which system should actually provide this functionality. Without this enterprise architecture process, we would have gone much further down the development road without realizing these problems. We probably would have paid systems integrators to develop those systems, and only when we got to testing or even to deployment would we have discovered these gaps and overlaps. So by engaging this process up front, we got to the goal line faster.From GM's Cure for Complexity - Architecture - CIO Magazine Sep 1,2004
Referenced Wed Sep 08 2004 18:56:43 GMT-0600
I just bought a new Suburban with OnStar. I'll let you know how the subscriber process works out. :-) As an aside, it also has XM radio, which I'm beginning to like a lot.
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MindShare: Real-time Monitoring and Reporting on Customer Interactions
Last Friday I had a chance to catch up with some old friends. I first met Rich Hanks and John Sperry when they were the management team for MyAssociation.com (later BlueStep). I also served on the Board of Directors for UITA with Rich. I have a lot of respect for the way Rich and John can build a Web-based product that works and scales. They've got a new gig now and it seems that they've applied all the lessons from their past to create a very interesting business.
Their company, MindShare provides customer survey data to companies in various verticals including hotels, restaurants, retail, and personal service. But there's an Internet twist.
If you were to just go out and create a customer survey system, you might buy an IVR system and have people call into it and complete the survey. If you were to apply the power of the Internet to the task, you'd use VoiceXML and build a whole Web-based back end that not only provisions customers automatically, but also provides each person in the chain of authority permission-based dashboards that show real-time, continuous information about how individual service personnel are performing. That's what MindShare did.
Real-time, continuous monitoring and reporting isn't about market research, its about operations. Getting that kind of feedback on individual servers let's managers solve individual problems and increase customer service levels. Statistical sampling can't solve this problem. Continuous monitoring and real-time reporting allows managers to do service lapse recovery as soon as problems occur because managers can easily find and call back unhappy customers.
MindShare has an impressive customer list, which they made me promise not to reveal and they're doing well. I think its a great example of how the Web gives something old new life and makes it useful in ways it couldn't be before.
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September 7, 2004
How I'm Using Del.icio.us
I'm really starting to like Del.icio.us which advertises itself as a social bookmarking site. The idea is simple, you click on a bookmarklet anytime you want to bookmark a page, up pops a Web page with the page's title and description. You can edit those field and enter an extended description or comment and free-form keywords. Each of those keywords becomes its own bookmark list, complete with RSS feed.
I've been using it exclusively instead of traditional bookmarks because I like its flexibility. I can store something easily and in more than one place. I can create custom bookmark lists for other people to read. For example, I've started a bookmark list for my class and they can follow it in their feedreader. The fact that I can add my own comments also makes it usable as a linkblog of sorts and its more flexible and easier to use than most blogging software for that purpose.
Another think I'm doing with Del.icio.us is just using it to hold stuff I want to read later or know I'll want to find. Because I can put things in multiple categories, I can easily create my own categorization scheme.
Del.icio.us lets you look at other people's bookmark lists too and even aggregate them. For example, I've classified some pages as having to do with messaging. I can also messaging for all users and see what other's have classified under that tag. I haven't found that to be as compelling, but I think with a little coordination, you could get a group of people sharing keywords and build some powerful bookmark lists.
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eBay's Infrastructure
eWeek has an interesting article on eBay's infrastructure that gives some tantalizing clues as to how they solve some of the most immense scaling problems on the Internet. Like most articles in this space, the article focuses on physical architecture issues with a few logical architecture tidbits thrown in (and not necessarily well identified as such). They've taken an interesting route with respect to geographic redundancy:
We've taken a unique approach with respect to our infrastructure. In a typical disaster recovery scenario, you have to have 200 percent of your capacity÷100 percent in one location, 100 percent in another location÷which is cost-ineffective. We have three centers, each with 50 percent of the traffic, actually 55 percent, adding in some bursts.From eBay: Sold on Grid
Referenced Tue Sep 07 2004 14:37:22 GMT-0600
The effect is that they have more overhead in terms of running machines at three locations instead of two, but they cut their potential infrastructure bill by 25%. Throw in the TCO for running those additional servers and they've probably saved quite a bit. You need to be big enough to absorb the overhead before the 3 redundant sites idea makes sense. That is, I suspect that there's a breakeven point for 2 data centers at 100% capacity each and 3 at 55% each. I wonder where it is?
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Spam and Open Source Software
Yakov Shafranovich has a two part article (part 1, part 2) at CircleID on the collision between Microsoft's proposals regarding Spam, intellectual property concerns, and open source software. The point of the article is that Microsoft is asserting IP rights regarding some proposals on Spam and trying to make everyone feel better by freely licensing it. That's not really going to cut it for most people. I don't blame Microsoft for looking for IP, that's what many companies do, but it seems that this is an unusual place to do so.
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RSS for Blackboard
Dan Olsen extolls the virtues of RSS in his latest entry comparing Blogs with Blackboard (a course management system). There's a subtle point in what Dan says. If I were working for Blackboard and read Dan's comments, my first reaction might be to say "let's create a customizable student dashboard that shows all the course information at one shot." Not a bad idea, but its still proprietary and leaves out other solutions. If Blackboard merely added RSS, their product would integrate nicely in a feedreader along with RSS information from other sources as well. The browser showed us the power of moving away from closed applications suites. That's where I believe the future is headed.
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September 3, 2004
John Terpstra on Intellectual Property
John Terpstra, one of the founders of the Samba open source project, author of some really helpful books on Samba, and a friend, has written an article on GROKLAW called Reflections on Intellectual Property Rights. He was also Tom Chance where he discusses the challenges to free software. Good reading.
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September 2, 2004
The New iMacs Would Make Neat Digital Picture Frames
Speaking of Apple's new iMac, Robert Scoble says:
I don't get it, though. Even if you hate Microsoft, why would you buy a computer that ties you down to one place? I have a desktop at work (and an old one at home). If you held a gun to my head and said "choose" I'd hand you the desktop computers everytime. Portability is just so much more useful. But, now I'm sure I'll hear from all the video game freaks who remind me that you need the latest ATI video card. Geesh, just get an Xbox. Heh.From Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger
Referenced Thu Sep 02 2004 08:11:32 GMT-0600
I agree that portable is better. I've used nothing but a laptop for six years now. I got my wife an iBook for Christmas to free her from her desktop and she loves it. So why would I buy one of these? Simple: I don't want my kids to have portability. I want them using the computer where I can track what they're doing. I also had the thought that these new iMacs are going to make awesome digital picture frames in a few years. In fact, I think Apple ought to market them that way: use it as a computer until you buy a new one, then hang it on the wall to display your digital albums.
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September 1, 2004
Personal Message Deflection
I've been thinking since I got home from a ten day vacation and had to process 2100 email messages about how much of my life is lived in my inbox. Of the 2100, almost 1700 of them were Spam and I'm not too concerned about those. SpamAssassin did a pretty good job and I have a feeling it or other technologies will eventually solve the Spam problem. What interests me are the 400 messages that were not Spam. At least 75% of those were messages that didn't really require my attention or could safely be ignored. Even of the remaining 100, many of them were more about coordination than real information. This has got me asking "what would it take to eliminate email from my life completely?"
No, I'm not talking about becoming an IT hermit. I still want to be connected, but I want to think about ways to significantly reduce the volume of email I process each day. Steve Fulling, the CTO of Sento, calls this time "dealing with micro-events." People asking a single question, sending a document, requesting a meeting, and so on. Interestingly enough, Steve is CTO of a company that solves this problem, at some level, for its clients. Sento tries to answer as many customer inquiries as they can using portals, email, and chat before taking the phone call since that's expensive.
This suggests that one possible strategy for reducing email volume is to proactively get information into the right channels ahead of time and create situations where many of these microevents solve themselves. Here's one example:
As a professor, one of the things I do is review thesis proposals and completed thesis's from students. This function generates a certain amount of email traffic as students request that I be on their committee, send me the proposal, ask to meet to review it, coordinate a meeting time, go over comments, request a meeting to review to fixed copy, and so on. The solution to this problem exists already: document management with built-in workflow.
Right now, I'm looking at all my messages and asking how I could move the task represented by the email stream out of the general purpose tool (email) and into a special purpose tool and what that special purpose tool would be. For the most part these tools, regardless of their ultimate purpose would be workflow and process management tools. This reminds me of Esther Dyson's comments on getting hold of processes. I want that to be as fine grained and personalizable as I can. If you're a BYU grad student and looking for a research topic, this would be a good one.
One problem with moving from a single general purpose tool like email to multiple special purposes tools is split focus. To understand what I mean, think about RSS. RSS has reduced the number of mailing lists I subscribe to and consequently reduced my email traffic. Perfect application, except that now I have to remember to fire up my feed reader in addition to my mail client. I generally treat it as lower priority and so I'm reluctant to get high-priority information delivered by RSS. What happens when there are a dozen special purpose tools managing my workflow instead of just a linear email list?
I think the answer to this problem lies in creating a task dashboard and having the various applications, including email, post control messages to the dashboard so that I have a single place to manage the various messages that are coming to me, albeit outside email. I'm envisioning something more flexible that a simple dashboard. I want a rule engine, easy graphics, templates, and so on so that I can customize it to the way I want to work. There's lots to think about here.
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Ernest Miller on Induce
O'Reilly's Policy DevCenter has an interview with Ernest Miller on Orrin Hatch's proposed INDUCE act. I wish I knew what Orrin was thinking here, because I think its bad public policy.
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