Phil Windley's Technometria

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July 29, 2005

BlackDog Linux Server

These USB-powered, deck-of-card-sized Linux servers from BlackDog look pretty cool. I'm not sure what I'd do with one, but I want it anyway. The Web site's down until Aug 8th, but they had an ad in Make magazine.

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System Administrator Day

Wade Billings wrote to remind me that today (last Friday in July) is System Administrator Appreciation Day. So, if you employ a system administrator, take them to lunch or buy them a new XBox (no need for flowers). If you're a system administrator, find some way to subtly remind your boss that this is your day, unlike the other 364 days of the year, when you merely control their most important and valuable information. :-)

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New ListGarden

Dan Bricklin has released a beta of the new version of ListGarden, his small tool for creating RSS feeds. Dan's old version didn't support enclosures, a problem in this podcasting world. I had written a patch to add enclosures for the old version, but this was far from ideal, judging from the number of questions I got from people asking how a patch worked. Some even tried to apply the patch by hand--not a fun way to spend an evening.

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July 28, 2005

Hollywood Sock Puppets

The Register picked up the Beating Hatch with an article called Hollywood sock-puppet senator faces tech insurgency.

In an e-mail conversation with The Register, Windley added: "This is an interesting race, because Hatch has a national profile as an anti-technologist and the Internet gives people outside of a state [the ability] to have considerable influence on elections within the state, even though they can't vote, through donations to the candidates who can defeat Hatch."

And what a track record Hatch, a 28-year Senate veteran, has. Although he was for a time disillusioned by the inequities of the recording industry (See - Senator Hatch's Napster Epiphany), to the extent that he threatened the major labels with a compulsory license, he has since returned to the fold.

Last year, the one-time keen supporter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), proposed to the so-called Induce Act, which makes the "intentional inducement of copyright infringement" and offense.

From Hollywood sock-puppet senator faces tech insurgency | The Register
Referenced Thu Jul 28 2005 15:54:06 GMT-0600 (MDT)

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Making Technology Decisions in a Democracy

I put a piece up at Between the Lines this morning called When society makes technical decisions. British ID cards and eVoting...

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Dave Fletcher's Moved!

Dave Fletcher, one of the authorities on eGovernment, has moved his blog from Radio to Blogger. Unfortunately, that makes him hard to find. Google doesn't even have the new blog on the first page.

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Playing Games

The LA Times has a response to Sen Clinton over her call for a study of the effect of playing video games on children. TechNation has a great interview with Henry Jenkins on this very subject at IT Conversations. I'll admit to having worried about the amount of time that my kids seem to spend on video games, but Jenkins makes a good case.

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July 27, 2005

Google's Expanding Homepage

Google's personalized homepage with RSS feeds

If you haven't been paying attention, you might have not have noticed Google's personalized homepage and you'd have to really be paying attention to have noticed that yesterday, they added the ability to put RSS feeds on it. If you click the picture on the left, you'll see my personalized search page with Technometria and UtahPolitics.org on the left. These can be repositioned by merely dragging them around when you're in edit mode.

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Internet Identity BOF at OSCON

We'll be doing a BOF on Internet Identity (or grassroots identity, if you prefer) at OSCON Wednesday evening from 7:30-8:30. Feel free to attend.

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Dave's New OPML Editor

Dave Winer, founder of Userland and creator of Radio (not to mention Manila and Frontier), struck out on his own a while back. Now he's got a new tool that edits OPML. You're saying "What the heck is OPML?" Its an XML format for outlines (Dave's always been fond of outlines). What can you do with it? Blog for one thing. Zannen, it only works on Windows. Here's a dynamic list of things people are creating with it.

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The Language of Privacy

Tim Grayson, who I met years ago at the very first Digital ID World, has written a well thought-out post on the language barriers we have in discussing privacy. He says: "some of the intractable challenges of identity (especially the non-technical notions of information "ownership," privacy, and so forth) are the direct result of having the wrong language for dealing with digital identity." His post is a response to the recent finding by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner that ads stuffed in with bank statements constituted an invasion of privacy. That's the problem with things like Privacy Commissioners (and other bureaucrats): they have to do something to feel like they're accomplishing something.

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Leaking Knowledge

Ann All of IT Business Edge interviewed me on why companies leak knowledge. I wrote about this subject in Connect Magazine as well: Your Company's Leaking Knowledge.

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Personal Digital Identity Summit in London

Simon Grice has announced the Personal Digital Identity Summit in London on November 17 and 18th. These are the precise dates of Jaco Aizenman's virtual rights summit in Costa Rica. Ah, I'd like to go to both. From Simon's email announceing the summit:

We are hoping to bring together most of the key parties in the space in London for a 2 day event exclusively focused on PDiD. The event has already attracted significant interest from speakers, attendees and possible sponsors so with a following wind it will be an enjoyable and productive couple of days.

EEMA (www.eema.org) are actually organising the event and the 'forming' PDiD Association will be managing commercial sponsors and PR/marketing etc.

The event will take a 2 day form with the 17th Nov (Thursday) being more formal aimed at helping corporate/government/voluntary organisations understand what PDiD *is* and how the world is starting to change around 'it' and of course the benefits to their organisations of embracing PDiD in some form.

The 2nd day (18th November) will be more informal and be aimed at helping those in the sector (including possibly some people on this list) to get together, discuss, share ideas, demonstrate etc. A slightly more formal Technical session will also be held in the morning of the 18th November.

No doubt those with the energy and desire will end up sampling London's nightlife on the evening of the 18th.

If you're interesting attending, speaking, demoing or sponsoring, contact Simon at summit@personaldigitalidentity.com

If you're wondering what "personal digital identity" is, see Simon's white paper (PDF) on the topic.

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July 26, 2005

Pro MySQL

Mike Kruckenberg, a friend with Utah connections, has just finished the book Pro MySQL and its shipping now. Congratulations Mike!

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Name Your Children: A Critique of UDDI

Rohit Khare wrote to point me at a relatively old, but still timely, critique of UDDI by Paul Prescod. Worth reading again...

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Announcing Planet Utah

I'm pleased to announce Planet Utah, an aggregation of blogs about Utah Politics. You can subscribe to its RSS feed, import its OPML into your favorite feed reader, or just come by and read.

If you would like your feed included, please send an email to editor at utahpolitics.org that includes the name of your blog and the URL of your RSS feed. I prefer to keep this mostly about politics, for now, so if your Web site contains other items as well, please consider creating a category for politics and submitting the URL for just that category.

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July 25, 2005

Building Customer Interaction Hubs

My latest piece at Betweeen the Lines is about an interview that eGain did with Gartner analyst Esteban Kolsky on customer interaction hubs.

The goal of the CIH is improved interaction with customers at reduced cost by providing an end-to-end customer experience across all channels. You might have experienced the frustration of losing the context of a customer support interaction when we moved from email to phone. A CIH makes sure that doesn't happen. What's more, the CIH should seamlessly transition a customer from a self-service interaction to an assisted interaction.

From Building customer interaction hubs | Between the Lines
Referenced Mon Jul 25 2005 13:24:23 GMT-0600 (MDT)

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July CTO Breakfast

July's CTO Breakfast will be at 8am this Friday. We'll be meeting in the usual place. The discussion is always interesting, so come join us.

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Speaking Politician's Language

Joe Kraus spent two years as a lobbyist in DC on technology issues. Joe recently spoke to the Always Online 2005 Summit and said we need to talk to DC in terms they can understand. Not copyrights, but economics. That's an important distinction to make in the fight against Hatch as well. Hatch's supporters will try to turn his support for DCMA and INDUCE into a fight against "lawbreakers" instead of what they really are: attacks on the new economy, innovation, and small companies. I do not, under any circumstances support the theft of anyone else's property--intellectual or real--but I also don't think we should destroy whole classes of legitimate businesses to protect the entrenched interests of Hollywood.

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July 22, 2005

Tantek on Microformats

Doc Searls' latest SuitWatch features on interview with Tantek Celik on microformats.

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July 21, 2005

Using XML Namespaces

Jon Udell's column in this week's InfoWorld is about XML's quirky namespaces. Jon points out that recent moves by Microsoft and Apple have brought namespaces to the fore and people will have to deal with them sooner or later.

I'll second Jon's statement that namespaces can be a pain. As he says, every tool seems to treat them differently. And not in a trivial way--tool author frequently have deep-seated philosophies about how namespace should work and build that into the tool. Just when you think you know what's what, you start up another tool and are forced to revisit the underlying philosophy of namespaces to understand how to tame it.

In my most recent project, I've mostly punted on namespaces, recognizing that that was a big bit of "programming debt" I'd have to pay off later. I'm to the point now where it needs to be tackled and I'm not looking forward to it.

Jon recommends Ronald Bourret's Namespace Myths Exploded as a good bit of reading. I just reread it and agree that it's full of useful information. It's not likely to answer many of the questions that programmers will face as they struggle to use namespaces in their XML. Those will continue to revolve around tools and the quirky ways that they differ. Hopefully we'll get all this worked out as we use namespaces more and come to some collective philosophy about what namespaces are and how they can be used. Until then, plan on some late nights.

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Turning Off Trackbacks

A few days ago, I logged into my server and typed chmod 644 mt-tb.cgi. Yup, I turned off trackbacks. I found that even with a trackback Spam filter like MT-Blacklist, it was just getting to be too much. Dealing with it took time, I worried about missing some of the offensive crap, and, frankly, I just don't want to look at it. This is an example of a great idea dealt a series of, perhaps fatal, body blows by the lack of a credible identity infrastructure on the Web.

Now, before you leave a comment saying "did you try X?", understand that I'm willing to spend time setting something up, but I'm not willing to spend anymore of each day dealing with Spam. So, if requires substantial care and feeding, I'm not interested.

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July 20, 2005

Beating Hatch

It's no secret to most techies that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah is no friend to the Internet. Some have described him, tongue-in-cheek, as the Senator from Disney--not because he's Mickey Mouse, but because he seems to represent Anaheim's interests much more keenly than he does Utah's. Hatch has been a supporter of the INDUCE Act, DMCA, and even suggested that he'd like to see technology developed to destroy the computers of people who download music illegally. Hatch will be up for re-election in 2006 and I'd like to see that he doesn't get six more years to wreak havoc.

To be sure, I think Hatch is a nice, sincere guy. I've interacted with him several times and he's very personable. I think he really believes that he's doing right. That's probably the scariest part.

The way I see it, Techies been saying that the Internet is a great equalizer and this is our chance to prove it. Wouldn't it be ironic to use the technology that Hatch is out to destroy to challenge and beat him?

To understand what it would take to beat Hatch, you have to understand that he's a popular 5-term Senator from a state where only one two Democrats have won a state-wide race in over twenty years and that was for Attorney General. Scott Matheson, the Democratic candidate for Governor was probably the perfect candidate given his long Utah roots and name cache. He only garnered 35% 41% of the vote in 2004.

For Hatch to lose, he'd have to be taken out by a Republican. That's still a very difficult task--unless you beat Hatch at convention. In a general or primary election, Hatch's war chest and popularity are big advantages. But to beat Hatch at the convention, you only need 60% of the 2500 or so delegates. Still not easy, but a task where technology can help a great deal.

Of course, you'd need the right Republican. Steve Urquhart announced today that he's challenging Hatch and I think he's the right Republican. I'm one of those who's been urging him to run. He's a party insider with a leadership post in the legislature, he's smart, he's conservative, and, most germane to this conversation, he gets and uses technology. His blog isn't something he started because he was running for Senator. Steve's been blogging since last November in an effort to communicate more widely and accurately with his constituents. This is a guy who can not only say "Technorati" but he knows what it is!

If Hatch were just bad for Utah, this might just be a Utah issue. But Hatch is bad for the Internet and this is a chance for Techies to show a little muscle and strike a blow for what they believe in. If you don't like what Hatch is doing and are afraid of the influence he wields, then help defeat him.

How can you do that? First spread the word and link to this post to explain to people why they ought to help. Second, go to Steve's site and donate. According to Federal Election Commission reports filed last Friday, Hatch has $1.72 million in cash in his main campaign account. Steve doesn't need that much to beat him at convention, but still, it won't be cheap--probably on the order of $750,000 to $1,000,000. How much should you donate? Any amount helps--just to show your support, but I'd suggest that you donate what you spend on your Internet connection in a year. Think of it as "Internet Insurance."

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Firefox Growing Pains

Less than a week after being told to update to 1.0.4 to patcha security hole in Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation released 1.0.5 to fix a bunch of security problems caused by 1.0.4. I hate upgrading Firefox because I always have to reinstall the Spell Checker extension because extensions are stored in the application directoy (at least on OS X). Ugh!

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SXIP's Identity Appliance

Last week SXIP announced an appliance that supports the SXIP protocol. Kim Cameron is highlighting a debate between Craig Burton (who calls the idea "insane") and Marc Canter (who calls the idea "brilliant"). Quite a spectrum.

I have a lot of respect for both Craig and Marc. My personal view is that appliances work best when your target market is operations folks and your configuration looks similar to a router or firewall. Also, as Craig points out, I think that people have to perceive what you're doing to be sufficiently complex that they don't want to deal with installing it.

The opposite side of the complexity coin is that by releasing an appliance, you'll convince some people that your product is too complex for them to install themselves. Kim points out that he's already talked to people who now think you have to have an appliance to use SXIP--not the reaction SXIP was hoping to provoke, I'm sure.

Update: Chuck Mortimore, of SXIP, tried leaving a comment, but my comment spam filtering appears to be too aggressive. He wanted to weigh in with his blog notes about the appliance and to also correct a misperception of mine: "Sxip Access [the appliance] doesn't support the SXIP Protocol, but rather, it's an Identity Management platform for On-Demand applications like SalesForce.com Part of our enterprise Idm buisiness." Thanks for the update Chuck.

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Podcast: Frank Martinez on Web Services Protocols

My interview with Frank Martinez, CTO of Blue Titan software is now available at IT conversations. I had some good conversations with Frank in NY in May about Web Services protocols and thought others might enjoy hearing his thoughts about them as well. I was particularly intrigued that Blue Titan was actually using things like WS-Policy inside its software, not just talking about how they might be used, or enabling their use by others. Frank maintains that the architecture of his middleware platform eats its own dog food and is built using the same technologies it enables.

As Doug explains in the editor's note, this isn't a light introduction to the topic of Web services middleware. We pretty much dove right in. Even so, I think you'll find it interesting and understandable if you're familiar with Web services and the idea of Web services middleware.

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July 19, 2005

WikiD: Structured Data and Wikis

One of the things that JotSpot opened my eyes to was the possibilities of backing wikis with a structured data repositories. Jeff Young wrote to point me at a project he's working on called WikiD, a "project (originally called MetaWiki) [that] leverages open standards, open source software, and existing resources to extend the Wiki model to support the creation and maintenance of structured data." There's a demo site if you'd like to play around with it.

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The Death of Podcasting

Steve Gillmor has a tongue-in-cheek story on the death of podcasting.

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July 15, 2005

Domain Names and Phone Numbers

I was helping a friend with a DNS issues today and logged into NameTech, the place where he bought his name. At the top of their page is a quote from Prof. Juan Gonzales at the Univ. of Delaware that says "By 2010, your personal domain name will be more important than your phone number." My reaction was "why will it take that long?" I don't know about you, but my domain name is already more important than my phone number.

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July 14, 2005

Apple 30" Cinema Display Problems

Every once in a while, my Apple 30" Cinema Display freaks out and it takes me an hour or so to fix it. I've got it attached to a 15" Powerbook with 128 Mb of VRAM, so the set up is OK, and it mostly works, so there's nothing structurally wrong as far as I can tell. The problem exhibits itself in one of two ways:

1. The display is only recognized as having a maximum resolution of 1280x800 (see see picture)
2. The display creates two 1280x800 bands top and bottom that are duplicates of each other. (see picture)

Putting the Powerbook to sleep, rebooting, hot plugging and unplugging, shutting down, restarting, and various combinations of these only serve to toggle between these two modes most of the time. Selecting "detect display" from the Monitor preferences pane has no effect at all. If I play around with it enough eventually I can get it to work and then it will work for weeks. This behavior happens on both OS X 10.3 and 10.4. My 23" Cinema Display at home works flawlessly.

I'm convinced that there's something wrong with either the Powerbook or the display since there's nothing on Google or Apple's support forums that I can find on it. If I'm the only one having the problem, then its likely a hardware problem. The trouble is how to diagnose and fix the problem. I've not been able to find any consistent way to fix it or any clues that tell me why its happening.

I've called Apple support and they want to walk through all kinds of scenarios like "do you have another Powerbook/Display you can try" etc. Without some kind of concrete diagnosis, they're answer is to take it to an Apple Care center.

I hate the thought of that because (a) I've got to lug that huge monitor there and (b) the problem only turns up every once in a while. I'm not sure they'll be able to diagnose it.

Any ideas anyone?

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July 13, 2005

Identity Problems Hurt Online Commerce

Yesterday, we talked about how identity theft, phishing, and other identity-related problems are hurting online commerce. Kim Cameron has posted some excerpts from a Wall Street Journal story that gives some surprising details about how identity problems affect people's behavior online. In short, the lack of a credible identity infrastructure for the Internet, threatens to arrest progress in electronic transactions and could very well ruin the net for anything of any sophistication. Even blogging is under attack. I've been getting hammered today with comment and trackback spam. Ugh!

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Smart Self-Service With Adaptive Web Platforms

Why is it that most corporate Web sites are so hard to navigate? It might be because they're trying to be all things to all people. If you've got more than a few products helping customers buy or service those products means more than adding another layer to your hierarchy of menus. The best companies are creating adaptive, rule-based Web platforms that show the customer a Web flow specific to them. This article at Optimize Magazine discusses smart self service models. It's worth reading.

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Sun's Open Source SSO Solution

Sun announced today that they're open sourcing their single sign-on solution. The code provides authentication, single domain SSO, with Web and J2EE agents. The web site is up and code will be available Q4, 2005.

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The Cost of Not Deprovisioning

Jarrod Jasper of GM just told the story about an employee phone that was not deprovision when the employee left. The former employee decided to run a 900 number service through the phone. That one phone cost GM $50,000 per month--for 18 months--before it was shut down. Whoa!

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Giving Out Cows

Scott Blackmer, speaking at Catalyst, just referred to something he saw on the Net about how it's amazing that we can track the calves of a cow born in Canada right to their pens in Washington state, but we can't track 11 million illegal aliens. The suggestion is that we give each illegal alien a cow.

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Seven Flaws of Identity

I'm at Burton Group's Catalyst conference today. I'll be blogging some things here and some over at Between the Lines. I just put Jamie Lewis' keynote up there. I've also got some pictures online.

Mike Neuenschwander, an associate research director at Burton Group introduced what he called the "seven flaws of identity," a take on Kim Cameron's Seven Laws of Identity. Here they are:

1. Failure of the weakest link mustn't lead to catastrophe. For example, smart card deployments are sufficient protection against social engineering and inside attacks. Encrypting the channel doesn't stop dumpster diving.
2. Don't put the role before the start. Role engineering is important, but it doesn't drive the project.
3. Not every identity nail requires the technology hammer. Technology may be fine, but without governance, it will fail.
4. Use of a system invites abuse of the system. Test the architecture with attack vectors.
5. Identifying things doesn't make the more secure. Identification can improve security, but security isn't an inevitable outcome. Over-identification has repercussions.
6. Identity isn't about the individual. It's about the relationship. IdM encompasses the services community's need for organization.
7. There are a lot more than seven flaws.

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Big Government IT Projects

This sort of thing is very scary: Oregon Awards $73 Million Medicaid IT Contract

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Identity Gang at Catalyst

I spent yesterday afternoon in an identity BOF meeting in San Diego. (See pictures at Kaliya's Flickr site.) As you might expect, there's plenty of people with an interest in identity systems at Burton Group's Catalyst conference and so we took the opportunity to have a face-to-face discussion with about a dozen people who care about identity metasystems.

The topics today were far ranging and difficult to summarize, but there were some interesting issues.

There seems to be big disagreement (surprise) around whether HTTP, SMTP, and the like are completely broken from an identity standpoint or whether they can be salvaged. If not, then Microsoft's move to SOAP-based protocols for the identity metasystem is a necessary first step for any transactions where identity is important.

To put this in perspective, banks and other financial institutions have pretty much been forced to abandon email as a means of communicating with their customers because of phishing. This is a problem even with things like SSL that allows, but doesn't require that, users check the integrity of the sites that they visit.

Moving to different protocols requires different clients, or at least changes to existing clients to understand the new infrastructure. Of course, InfoCards (Microsoft's proposed digital identity system) includes such a client, buried deep in the OS.

Kim Cameron believes that we can't ask humans to manage multiple systems at the experiential level as well as manage the trust decisions, and everything else we need from them. This is a little bit of a "one client to rule them all" strategy, but there's some sense to it. The browser is a great example of how a UI standard provides a common UI experience (at least to some degree) regardless of the vendor.

Another issue I found interesting had to do with auditing and transparency. One critical requirement for enterprise identity systems is auditing in order to ensure compliance, etc. For an Internet wide infrastructure there are other auditing requirement. For example, the user may want to disable auditing for privacy reasons. Of course, you may not be obligated to provide service without auditing enabled. The policy negotiation requirements in such a system boggle the mind.

Related to that is the need to provide human readable equivalents of machine readable tokens and assertions and to ensure that they are confluent. The microformats discussion that's caught my eye lately seems suited to that requirement. I wonder if microformats can meet other requirements as well (and what they might be).

Fourth party auditing of actions provides checks and balances to protect entities from abuses by authenticating gatekeepers or asserting identifiers. Many times these fourth parties would be courts operating in widely varying jurisdictions. The metasystem can't enforce these actions, only provide for them with proper transparency and auditing.

Another point of contention seems to be the very name "identity metasystem" itself. I think it was coined by Microsoft innocently enough to describe an identity system that ties other identity systems together. I think some would prefer it was called a "network" or something else. The work "system" implies there's a there there, but in reality, it's more about protocols and interop.

I think that we need to get this group, along with others together for a more formal discussion where we can get to the heart of what we can all agree on, find out where we really disagree (that's not clear), and use that as an underpinning to understanding proposals. I'd like to see the various proposals laid out with philosophical beliefs, understand how those beliefs influence architectural choices, and then dive into whether we can agree that specific architectures support those various philosophies. I'm thinking of organizing a workshop in October (in the slot Digital ID World used to use) to do just that.

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July 12, 2005

More Microformats: hCalendar

I've long had a travel calendar on the right-hand side of this blog to show people what conferences I'm attending. I've had lots of great experiences with folks seeing I'm coming to something near them and linking up with me for a meal. After I wrote about microformats yesterday, I decided I'd change the program that generates it (a hacked version of phpiCalendar) to generate hCalendar mark-up to the XHTML. You can see that human readable content hasn't changed.

What's different, however, is that it's now machine readable as well. For example, you can see the iCalendar format of the hCalendar data by simply running this entire page through the X2V application.

Here's what the hCalendar data looks like to save you from wading through the HTML for this page:

<span class="vevent">
 <em><span class="summary">MetaIdentity</span></em><br/>
  <abbr class="dtstart" title="20050712">July 12</abbr> - 
 <abbr class="dtend" title="20050713">July 12</abbr>
</span><br/>
<span class="vevent">
 <em><span class="summary">Catalyst (Burton)</span></em><br/>
  <abbr class="dtstart" title="20050713">July 13</abbr> - 
 <abbr class="dtend" title="20050716">July 15</abbr>
 </span><br/>
<span class="vevent">
 <em><a class="url" href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/">
   <span class="summary">OSCON</span></a></em> <br/>
  <abbr class="dtstart" title="20050801">August 1</abbr> - 
 <abbr class="dtend" title="20050806">August 5</abbr></span><br/>

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i-Names and SSO

i-Names can now be used for single sign-on. There's even a WordPress module to allow i-name authenticated posting and commenting. Movabletype anyone? Then we'd have a cross-blog commenter authentication system.

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Identity and Repression

Kaliya Hamlin (aka Identity Woman) worries that emerging identity systems might be used by repressive regimes.

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hCards: Trying Out Microformats

Yesterday, I wrote about microformats here on my blog and also decided to do a piece about them for my September column in Connect magazine. As part of that effort, I created my own hCard. Click on the vCard link to see the information embedded in the HTML dynamically turned into vCard data.

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July 11, 2005

Microformats: Paving the Cowpaths

Long ago, Jon Udell introduced me to the idea of using class attributes in HTML tags to add semantic information to Web content. The goal is a simpler way to make searching better without the overhead of hiring a team of librarians to create an ontology for every new effort. I've long used a bookmarklet to create quotes for my blog so that the date they were referenced and their URI were captured in the HTML for eventual searching. I've done the same thing with code snippets, putting class="code" as an attribute to the <pre> tag that surrounds the code.

Friday, while I was in Palo Alto, I met Tantek Celik and he started going off on microformats. From the Microformats website:

[M]icroformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

From microformats | About microformats
Referenced Mon Jul 11 2005 11:23:22 GMT-0600 (MDT)

The idea is to mark-up human readable documents with additional, semantic information. Here's an example. If you use OS X, you're probably familiar with the iCalendar format, the lingua franca of iCal. iCalendar is not XML based. You could imagine an effort to create an XML-based version of iCalendar (in fact they exist), but it's not clear you're going to get much traction. Instead, the microformats folk create ways of translating iCalendar into HTML in a way that is lossless. That is, you can translate it back into iCalendar if you need to.

Here's an example of an appointment expressed in iCalendar format:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//XYZproduct//EN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
URL:http://www.web2con.com/
DTSTART:20051005
DTEND:20051007
SUMMARY:Web 2.0 Conference
LOCATION:Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

The hCalendar spec shows how this can be encoded as HTML that also contains the semantic information (as described by the spec) necessary to interpret it as an appointment:

<span class="vevent">
 <a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/">
  <span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>:
  <abbr class="dtstart" title="20051005">October 5</abbr>-
  <abbr class="dtend" title="20051007">7</abbr>,
 at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span>
 </a>
</span>

This encoding displays as follows in a browser:

Web 2.0 Conference: October 5- 7, at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA

One format that's readable by machines and humans. Pretty cool. In addition to hCalendar, for marking up XHTML with calendar information, the Microformats organization also has specifications for the following:

• hCard - People and Organizations
• hCalendar - Calendars and Events
• VoteLinks, hReview - Opinions, Ratings and Reviews
• XFN - Social Networks
• relLicense - Licenses:
• relTag - Tags, Keywords, Categories
• XOXO - Lists and Outlines

Adam Rifkin has referred to this approach as paving the cowpaths. I like that image because it's how things mostly get done.

Tantek said something provocative on Friday to the effect that RSS and XHTML are the only wins XML has had on the Internet. XML is very useful within the firewall, but outside the firewall, XML hasn't really had that big a splash. I'm not sure I'd conclude from that that it never will--there's just too much structured data that needs to be shared. I am willing to concede, however, that things like hCalendar and hCard make a lot more sense to me than trying to get the whole world to adapt to some new XML standard and then build XSLT stylesheets and the like to get them on the Web.

This might not seem obvious. After all, if I've got to get someone to move to a new standard, why not move them all the way to a sparkly, fresh XML standard instead of just adding some tags to HTML? The answer is that I can adopt the hCalendar format in a few minutes, even hand generate it, and its useful without any further infrastructure because I've already got a browser. Add that to the power of an XQueryable RSS cache like the one Jon Udell has or the one I'm working on in Scheme and now you could get value out of it with no programming at all. Cool, huh?

The point that the microformats people are making is not that XML isn't useful, just that its power is best harnessed through incremental additions to XHTML that people can immediately use inside their browser rather than with some brand new infrastructure.

Microformats are not a lot different, in philosophy, than REST. REST is another "pave the cowpaths" effort that catches on because it's so much easier to use. In fact, if you read the following set of principles from the Microformats wiki, you'd find most of them apply to RESTful Web services as well:

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

I like the concept. There are HTML purests who will object. In fact, there's one guy who's downright nasty about this stuff (I know I've received email from him), but I think that's really water under the bridge. HTML has never been about purity--it's been about practically solving problems. This is a practical solution to a real problem and bending (X)HTML to the task will be just one more instance of HTML proving its versatility.

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July 8, 2005

Palo Alto Trip

iPod set up with the "Muse"

I flew to Palo Alto this morning with Steve Fulling for some talks with Rohit Khare, Frank Martinez, and others on directory services. We left Spanish Fork this morning at about 6am. It took 3.5 hours to fly to Palo Alto with a little bit of a tail wind. (See pictures.)

Palo Alto has a great little airport, but very busy. You can get in and out of Palo Alto without entering the SFO class B or the San Jose (SJC) class C airspaces. We contacted the Palo Alto tower over the east bay and flew the Dumbarton bridge right in. Very different experience flying to the Bay Area in a small plane. I enjoyed the trip a lot.

We came over at 14,500 feet and discovered that iPods, at least Steve's v4, have issues at altitude. My v3 iPod seemed fine and we listened to that most of the way. You can see the set up we use to hook it to the plane intercom in the picture. A little kludgy, but it sure beats singing to yourself on a 3 hour flight.

Overall the meeting went very well. We were discussing possible alternatives to UDDI, which I've dubbed LDDI. The meeting notes are a little rough, but convey the gist of the conversation.

Update: Doug Kaye had the same experience with his iPod at altitude some months ago. He wrote about it in his newsletter (towards the bottom of the page).

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July 7, 2005

Book Cover

Cover for Digital Identity. (click to enlarge)

The cover for my book on Digital Identity is done. At first, I was lukewarm on the deisng, but it's really grown on me. The black mask is a good touch. I especially like the tagline, "Unmasking Identity Management Architecture," in connection with the picture.

The book is available now for pre-orders on Amazon. Buy a couple!

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London Bombings on the Net

Donovan Smoke's Flickr site has pictures of London after the subway bombings. You can also follow the Flickr tags for blasts and bombs to see more. Technorati is also showing ongoing activity on the Net surrounding the news of the London explosions.

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Kim Cameron on Channel 9

Kim Cameron, architect of InfoCard and author of the Laws of Digital Identity was interviewed by Channel 9.

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July 6, 2005

GovTracker: Getting Rhode Island Data

If you live in Rhode Island and want information on Board/Commission Memberships, Corporations, Elections, Lobbyist Registration, Rules and Regulations, or State Directories, you're in luck. The Rhode Island Secretary of State's office has just released GovTracker, a tool for getting any or all of this data as an RSS feed. The project is the brainchild of Jim Willis. I wrote a longer piece about GovTracker at Between the Lines.

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July 5, 2005

Florida Man Charged with Wi-Fi Theft

A St. Petersburg Florida man has been charged with unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony after he was caught using the Wi-Fi connection outside a 28-year old veterinarian's home.

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James Governor's Thoughts on UDDI

James Governor has collected some thoughts on UDDI, including a quote I liked from John Sowa:

What if John Sowa is right, that "whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X"?

From James Governor's MonkChips: Any viable service registry should have UDDI as its foundation.
Referenced Tue Jul 05 2005 20:04:23 GMT-0600 (MDT)

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July 4, 2005

Digital Identity Available for Pre-Order on Amazon

My book, Digital Identity, is available for pre-order on Amazon. There's no cover art up yet (although it's been selected). Amazon shows the release date as August 1, 2005.

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July 1, 2005

Curious Browser Rendering

Firefox and Safari seem to treat <em></em> and <em/> differently. The first does just what you'd expect, but Firefox and Safari treat the second the same as <em>. The tag is never closed and the rest of the page is emphasized. Is this expected behavior for a browser? Not by me...

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