Phil Windley's Technometria

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November 30, 2005

Geek Dinner Tonight

I'll be speaking on microformats at the geek dinner tonight. See you there.

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URLs as Identity

Johannes Ernst thinks that's URLs should be used to identify people. That's the basis of his LID identity system. Open ID is based on the same concept. Johannes notes that OPML has joined the party and talks about an emerging consensus on how it should work.

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How Newspapers Can Use the Internet

Robin Miller writes an interesting essay at Slashdot on "why [newspapers have] failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the Internet dominates the news business." The lessons are helful for anyone trying to build content-based Web sites.

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CTO Breakfast for November and December

This Friday is the CTO breakfast for November and December. We'll meet in the conference room near the food court at Canyon Park Technology Center (Building L). See the CTO Breakfast page for more information and directions. Also on that page are dates for future meetings, so mark your calendar. Our next meeting will be on January 26, 2006. Come prepared with a few new things you've seen over the last month that other's might enjoy.

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Barnett Interview Up

My interview with Thomas Barnett is live on IT Conversations. In the interview we talked about the concepts in his new book, his use of technology-base analogies to explain his ideas, blogging, and outsourcing. Doing the interview was a lot of fun--I hope it's as interesting to listen to.

Tom has great appeal to the IT Conversations crowd (65,000 downloads of his last interview). Part of the reason is that he uses technology-based analogies to describe world events. But more than that, he also sheds lights on non-technical issues that techies care about. A sampling of two recent entries from his blog show that.

In one, Tom talks about how growing up on video games (in Tom's words: "been there, Doomed that") has produced a generation of soldiers better equipped to handle the multitasking, fast-paced chaos of battle and yet hasn't increased their overall endurance for battle.

In another Tom explores how a small country like Israel has to create companies that go global right from the start. The small size of the home market means you have to target Europe, Asia, or the US as part of starting up. Globalization means more to small economies than to large ones.

Tom's blog is a regular read for me. I like seeing the news through the lens of the ideas in his books. In fact, I've started to see the news that way without Tom's blog. I frequently hear a news story and think: "ah, this is about ... getting connected through ..." or "this is happening because ... is more connected now and it's changing their society."

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November 28, 2005

Utah.gov a Model

Utah's State Web portal was mentioned as a model for other states in this Indianapolis Star story on plans for Indiana's Web portal:

One model many are watching is Utah, which is recognized as an Internet pioneer among states and has configured its Web site by questions and services rather than by agency. It also offers breaking news, traffic reports and weather forecasts, information not typically found on a government site.

From State has big plans for www.in.gov | IndyStar.com
Referenced Mon Nov 28 2005 07:55:15 GMT-0700 (MST)

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Geek Dinner Wednesday

Paul Allen, Phil Burns, Aaron Zupancic, and Jamis Buck are hosting a geek dinner Wednesday Nov 30th from 6 - 8 pm at Los Hermanos Restaurant (395 N State St in Lindon UT). I'm going to take 20 minutes or so to talk about microformats. If you're interested in going, drop by the Web site and RSVP.

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November 27, 2005

Free Sheet Music by Sally DeFord

I sing in the choir at church. This morning as we were practicing, I noticed this at the bottom of the music:

Copyright 2005 by Sally DeFord
Making copies for non-commercial use is permitted.
This and other DeFord sheet music may be downloaded free at:
http://www.defordmusic.com

I was curious, so I visited the site when I got home. What I found were dozens of pieces of music, all nicely typeset, some with sample MP3s, free for downloading. Some are original compositions and some are arrangements of familiar hymns. Some are specific to the LDS church, but most would be suitable for all sorts of choirs. The two pieces I've heard so far were excellent.

Sally doesn't solicit or accept donations. Why does she give her music away? In her words:

I guess it's just because I can. The Lord has placed me in circumstances that currently don't demand extra income, he has inspired the creators of technology to produce programs that I can use to publish the music without the assistance of typesetters, and he has given me a gift that I did nothing to earn. Sharing seems logical.

From Sally DeFord Music: FAQ/Contact Information
Referenced Sun Nov 27 2005 12:13:39 GMT-0700 (MST)

People who do good work and make it freely available deserve thanks and recognition. And so, Sally DeFord, this is my thanks to and recognition of your good work.

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November 26, 2005

Keep Science Off the Web

If you thought record companies and movie studios were the only organizations capable of harmful anachronism in order to perserve outdated business models, then you'll need to read this story from the Guardian about the Royal Society's stand on publishing academic reseach on the web:

A spokesman for the Royal Society said: "We think it conceivable that the journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?"

From Keep science off web, says Royal Society
Referenced Sat Nov 26 2005 13:30:12 GMT-0700 (MST)

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November 23, 2005

XDI Workshop

I'm going to the XRI Workshop that Andy Dale is teaching Dec 5th in Alameda. The timing worked out perfect and I've wanted to dig deep into XRI for a while. This seems like the perfect opportunity.

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November 21, 2005

DRM, TiVo, and the iPod

I put a little piece at Between the Lines on TiVo's announcement that they future versions of TiVoToGo will have support for creating iPod ready video. While you're there, check out David Berlind's article on Sony and DRM. Apparently Sony is rethinking DRM as a strategy. In related news, the rootkit and other CD DRM techniques can be defeated by scotch tape. Cool.

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Micron and Intel in Lehi

John Dougall notes that Intel and Micron will manufacture some of the flash memory in their new joint venture at Micron's Lehi, Utah plant. That plant was built eight or nine years ago and has never really been at full capacity. It would be nice to see more happening there.

John also mentions the new Apple retail store in Salt Lake--just in time for the holidays.

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November 20, 2005

My Gmail Account Has an Atom Feed

I was looking at the page source on GMail a minute ago and saw a link tag that gave a URL for an Atom feed. Sure enough, go to

https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

and there's XML staring you in the face:

<feed version="0.3">
  <title>Gmail - Inbox for windley</title>
  <tagline>New messages in your Gmail Inbox</tagline>
  <fullcount>1</fullcount>
  <link rel="alternate" 
        href="http://mail.google.com/mail" type="text/html"/>
  <modified>2005-11-21T03:18:30Z</modified>
  <entry>
    <title>testing</title>
    <summary/>
    <link rel="alternate" 
          href="http://mail.google.com/mail" type="text/html"/>
    <modified>2005-11-21T03:18:10Z</modified>
    <issued>2005-11-21T03:18:10Z</issued>
    <id>tag:gmail.google.com,2004:1187557503841339412</id>
    <author>
      <name>Phillip J. Windley</name>
      <email>me@my.org</email>
    </author>
  </entry>
</feed>

It's apparently been there for quite a while. I just never knew about it.

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November 19, 2005

Digital Identity Reviewed

Ben Rothke reviewed Digital Identity at UnixReview.com. Overall Ben's comments were favorable, saying:

Overall, Digital Identity provides the reader with a good introduction to the various areas necessary to develop a productive identity management infrastructure. Anyone planning to deploy an IMA or any sort of federated identity solution in a corporate environment will find Digital Identity a valuable reference.

From Book Review: Digital Identity
Referenced Sat Nov 19 2005 16:03:58 GMT-0700 (MST)

Ben especially liked the chapter on Identity Policies. He complained about editing mistakes and the number of first-person anecdotes I used. On the issue of typos, I sincerely wish there were fewer. I went over it numerous times and even read every word out load to try to catch them. Ben was kind enough to send me a list in case there's a second edition. If you see any, I'd appreciate you letting me know.

The issue of personal stories is more subjective. Many people like them--I do when I read a book. If you have strong feelings one way or another, I'd appreciate knowing them.

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Podcasting Barnett

Tom Barnett mentioned my interviewing him on his blog. He said:

Then 1-2pm EST I taped an hour with Phil Windley of IT Conversations. He and Doug Kaye said my recorded presentation at Pop!Tech last year was downloaded about 65,000 times from their site, so both were excited to have me back at their plate. Windley's questions were great: simple, direct, and with good steering. It was the kind of skillful interview that lets you walk away feeling better about your work.

From Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog: Two interviews banked
Referenced Sat Nov 19 2005 07:54:47 GMT-0700 (MST)

65,000 downloads is a lot. As Doug said that's more than any radio station except NPR or one of the big networks can give him. The interview I did Thursday went really well, as Tom says, I'm anxious to see how it does.

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November 18, 2005

Cringely on Sony and Grokster

Robert X. Cringely on the Sony rootkit capper and Groksters last days:

The rootkit of all evil: As if foisting Mariah Carey on us wasn’t bad enough; Sony (Profile, Products, Articles) BMG Music Entertainment has been caught installing a rootkit -- a tool typically used by malware. If you play a copy-protected Sony CD on your PC, it installs a digital rights management scheme you can neither detect nor remove. After security wonks revealed the rootkit could be used to compromise systems merely by appending the prefix “$sys$” to the name of any rogue program, Sony and software partner First 4 Internet issued a steady stream of denials, along with a patch that removes the rootkit. Everybody in the music biz wants to be a gangsta, but Sony seems to be taking those dreams literally.

It’s only grok ’n’ roll: File-swapping network Grokster has closed its doors and agreed to pay $50 million in damages to the record companies (although, given Grokster’s subzero bank account, the companies may have to accept payment in Monopoly money). So, to recap: Making it possible for consumers to illegally swap music is very bad. Making it possible for hackers to illegally hijack your computer, however, is just an average day in the record business.

From Sony discovers its roots, Grokster gets the boot | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-11-11 | By Robert X. Cringely®
Referenced Fri Nov 18 2005 18:24:28 GMT-0700 (MST)

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CanyonBridge Focus Group

CanyonBridge Technologies is holding a brief focus group around a C++ Middleware technology that will allow the quick deployment of AJAX enabled applications for the web. They'll give you lunch and pay you $30! Unfortunately, I'm late off the dime--it's today at 11am, 12:30pm, and 2pm at the CanyonBridge offices in Orem (625 E Technology Ave). Register or give them a call at 801.225.1003 if you're interested.

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November 17, 2005

Interviewing Tom Barnett

I interviewed Tom Barnett today for an upcoming podcast from IT Conversations. Tom is the author of Blueprint for Action : A Future Worth Creating and The Pentagon's New Map. Tom was delightful to interview--you can tell he does it a lot. We talked about the concepts in his new book, his use of technology-base analogies to explain his ideas, blogging, and outsourcing. I could have spoken to him for hours. Hopefully Doug will have it up at IT Conversations soon. I'll point to it when it's up.

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November 16, 2005

Flushing the 'Net Down the Tubes

Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the 'Net at Linux Journal. The piece is long, but if you take the time to read just one essay on the 'Net and the politics surrounding it this year, read this one. We haven't framed the conversation correctly If you're involved in public policy, it's especially important that you take the time to understand what's at stake here. One of Doc's main points: we haven't framed the conversation correctly and our poor choice of words makes the argument seem overly technical and arcane when it's really about freedom, markets, and innovation.

Doc notes that one point of pain is whether the 'Net is a place or a transportation system:

One reason transport trumps place is that business itself is largely, though not entirely, conceived in shipping terms. The "value chain" is a transportational notion. We speak of "loading" goods into "channels" for "distribution" to "end users" or "consumers". We even talk about "delivering" services.

On the other hand, we have understood markets as places since marketplaces were the only kinds of markets we had. The metaphors that come naturally to Wall Street are helpful here. When we speak of "bulls", "bears" and "invisible hands", we assume those beings operate in an place-like environment. When we say markets have feelings--"excitement", "fear", "anticipation", "reaction"--we assume those happen in an environment (that is, a place) as well. Even "Wall Street" is ontologically locational. It is a real place that serves, by what cognitive linguistics call metonymy, for the whole stock market, which we also conceive of as a place.

Experience counts. Humans are physical beings. All of us who use the Net experience it as a place. Prepositions are revealing. We go on the Net, not through it.

From Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal
Referenced Wed Nov 16 2005 16:26:36 GMT-0700 (MST)

As Doc notes, most people think of the 'Net as a place, but that's not how the carriers or the FCC see it. As we frame the arguments about the 'Net, we need to speak of it as a place where speech happens, people meet, and commerce happens, not just a conduit for all that.

As an aside, I write in my November Connect column that the metaphor of place has it's own problems when misapplied to the Web. Trespass law, misapplied because of a sense of place on the 'Net, can threaten rights of access to things people have published in public places. The problem perhaps isn't the notion of place itself, but a poor understanding of what's public and what's private on the 'Net. A student asked me the other day whether or not exercising the URL-based API of a 'Net-based application could be against the law. The fact is it can, although it shouldn't be.

Neither Doc nor I want to shortchange the carriers. There is infrastructure that makes all this happen and carriers should be fairly compensated for any use of their infrastructure. What we can't let happen, however, is to allow the carriers to own the layers above the infrastructure in an effort to control and regulate the 'Net. Market competition doesn't have to mean "your choice of silos." It could mean not having to be in any silo at all.

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Writable Web: Annotating Manual Pages

I'm doing a project in Perl where I needed to tidy the HTML in some pages. There's a nifty little Perl package called, appropriately enough, HTML::Tidy. I used CPAN to grab it and got it working, but I'll be darned if I could figure out how to actually get the tidied text back from the package. If you read the man page, I'll bet you can't figure it out either. No useful examples with the code and searching the Web turned up very little. Turns out the clean method returns the cleaned text, although the man page doesn't say that--it says that it returns "true if all went OK, or false if there was some problem calling Tidy, or parsing Tidy's output."

In the process of searching for how to actually use this little gem, I can across the annotated CPAN documentation project. Here's the annotated page for HTML::Tidy. Notice that someone has annotated the page to correct the oversight of telling you where the tidied output will be, along with some other useful information. Very handy idea. One more instance of the writable Web at work.

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Google Base Portends a Structured Web

I wrote a piece at Between the Lines today about the newly launched Google Base. Google Base has been described variously as an online database, competition for CraigsList, or Google's first crack at eBay. And of course, Base is being judged in that light:

Google Base can be used to store information of any sort--the company seems to like using recipes as an example. Already, there's commercial stuff like classified ads and job listings in there; the service has been described as an eBay killer or a Craigslist killer. At the moment, it's clearly very far from being either.

I recently sold a wristwatch on eBay and was struck by just how highly-evolved that service is--it not only has scads of general features for buying and selling (and in PayPal, the mechanism for moving the payment between parties), it has tools specifically for people selling vintage watches, and for folks doing many, many other specialized tasks. It took eBay a decade to get so powerful and easy to use, and I don't see Google Base catching up anytime soon, even though its features for defining data types are, in a sense, an attempt to get users to do some of the heavy lifting that eBay's done itself.

From Google Base is Live
Referenced Wed Nov 16 2005 09:54:30 GMT-0700 (MST)

I think this misses the point. Base isn't about being an eBay replacement. Base is about Google's bread and butter: better searches. Google wins in two ways:

1. They don't have to crawl for the data
2. The is structured and so Google can create better indexes from it.

This idea of structuring the Web is more found more generally in microformats and other similar efforts. I think it's one of the important memes of Web 2.0.

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November 15, 2005

DRM Day

Today was DRM Day at Between the Lines. David Berlind posted three excellent stories that all had something to do with DRM:

• The DRM grinch who stole Christmas
• The day the broadcast died
• How to stop Hollywood and Congress from trampling on your constitutional rights

In addition, I posted a personal story about DRM that claims that the DMCA (yes, I got it wrong at BTL and wrote DCMA) is more about protecting TiVo's (and other company's) business model than it is about protecting the rights of copyright holders.

I was especially intrigued by the post on broadcast. What would really make this take off is Apple putting support for BitTorrent in iTunes. They won't do it. Hollywood has done such a good job of convincing people that file sharing (and particularly BitTorrent) is evil that Apple can't do it. Again, this is much more about protecting entrenched interests than it is about protecting intellectual property.

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November 14, 2005

The Writable Web

Several interesting pieces on writable Web in the last few days:

• Tim Bray: Why would anyone want a word processor any more?
• Dan Bricklin releases WikiCalc

Add these to things like hCards in Kwiki and Jot. That only scratches the surface, of course. The whole "writable web" thing includes wikis of all sorts and even blogs.

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Urquhart Out

If you've been paying attention to the newspapers, you've heard by now that Steve Urquhart has dropped out of the race. When we talked about him running last spring, we knew that November would be the first gate. If there was enough financial support, then the race would be possible and the next gate was caucuses in March. Well the financial support hasn't been good enough and Steve has decided that ensuring his business survives so that he can keep his family fed takes priority. I can't blame him.

Steve has learned a lot from this effort and, as LaVarr Webb says in his column Sunday, will emerge from this relatively unscathed. He'll live to fight another day.

Still, it makes me sad because it leaves us without a credible Republican challenger to Hatch. Pete Ashdown is still in the race, but a Democrat winning in a statewide race against a well-funded and well-liked Republican is a longshot. I believe that Hatch is bad for innovation, no friend of technology businesses, and working against the interests of most Utah businesses. If the tech community wanted to send a message to Congress on copyright law, this was their best shot, in my opinion. I'm pointing the finger at myself as much as anyone; I could have done more. Life goes on...

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IIW2005 Talks

If you missed IIW2005, or were there and wanted to hear something over again, the audio from the conference is now online. A big thanks to Scott Mace for recording the workshop and post processing the audio. You can link to the audio individually below or subscribe to this podcast.

• Opening remarks by Phil Windley, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005. (13:58)
• Identity in the Marketplace: The Rise of the Fully Empowered Customer, featuring Doc Searls, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005. (1:19:31) [Notes from my blog]
• Use Cases for the Social Web, featuring Mary Ruddy, co-founder of Socialphysics.org and vice president of Marketing and Business Development for Parity Communications, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (45:40) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• Microsoft's Vision for an Identity Metasystem, featuring Mike Jones, Director of Distributed Systems Customer Strategy and Evangelism at Microsoft, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (51:00) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• Liberty Alliance Overview, featuring Brett McDowell, Director of Operations at Liberty Alliance, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (47:13) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• XRI Metaidentifiers, featuring Drummond Reed, CTO of Cordance Corporation and co-chair of the OASIS XRI and XDI technical committees, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (1:39:32) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• Identity 2.0 Design Guidelines and the Evolution of the SXIP Protocol, featuring Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (1:15:02) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• Decentralized, REST-ful Digital Identity with LID, featuring Johannes Ernst, founder and CEO of Netmesh, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (44:19) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• OpenID, featuring Brad Fitzpatrick, chief architect of Six Apart, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (1:19:53) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• SocialPhysics And The Higgins Trust Framework, featuring Paul Trevithick, co-creator of Socialphysics.org and co-founder and CEO of  Parity Communications, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 26, 2005 (37:43) [Wiki abstract, Notes from my blog]
• Closing session, podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop, Oct. 27, 2005 (28:54) [Notes from my blog]
• Green Room Session, recorded October 27, 2005, took place in the conference's “green room,” set up for attendees who wished to create a podcast of their discussions. Among the participants were: Joaquin Miller, product architect and vice president of engineering at NetMesh; Rob Marano, adjunct associate professor at The Cooper Union; P.T. Ong, founder and chairman of Encentuate; Alain Bloch of Rubyminer.com; Bob Morgan, Senior Technology Architect, Computing & Communications at the University of Washington; Paul Trevithick, co-creator of socialphysics.org and co-founder and CEO of Parity Communications; Jair of Imaginify Community Network; Gabe Wachob, chief systems architect at Visa; Scott Lemon, of FreeID.org; Dave Kearns, editor of Identity Management Journal, and Scott Mace, editor of Information Manager Journal. Podcast from the Internet Identity Workshop 2005. (43:28)

From everything people have said, IIW2005 was worthwhile and so we're planning on doing it again second quarter of 2006 (we'll narrow it down a little later).

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November 12, 2005

Remote Vehicle Diagnostics and Personal Portals

What OnStart sends you for diagnostics. (Click to enlarge)

I subscribe to the OnStar Safe and Sound plan (things like remote door unlocking, vehicle recovery, etc.). I was just notified that OnStar has begin a new service (included in the Safe and Sound plan) that give remote vehicle diagnostics. I think it's pretty cool that I can got to a Web page and be told about the health of significant systems in my car. My car is not online in the sense that it has an IP number, but can anyone doubt that that is somewhere in the future?

GM is trying hard to make OnStar catch and no wonder; It's a great business move for them: establishing ongoing relationships with their customers.

Given that I just got done checking on some bank account information online and then renewing a corporate license for an S-Corp I have, this OnStar thing got me thinking that I want a personal portal. I want a standard (RSS or Atom would work) for getting information out of place I have relationships with (my bank, OnStar, and the State of Utah, for example) and placing them on a single Web page where I can go and get status information. The technology exists. What does it take to make it work?

An identity metasystem would help. It's tough to do what I just envisioned without some standards about identity. Not impossible, but tough. Yodlee tried to do this during Web 1.0. But they've retreated from user-centrism to building portals for banks.

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Ben Galbraith at UVLUG

Ben Galbraith will be speaking at the Utah Valley Linux Users Gpoup meeting next Saturday at 2pm. Ben's a good speaker and I'm sure this will be a great presentation. He's competing with the BYU/Utah game for audience though.

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November 11, 2005

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

I ran into Jeff Barr today and he asked what I thought about Mechanical Turk. 'Huh?" I said. Don't know where I've been for the last week. Amazon launched a service that brings together people with small jobs and people willing to perform them. The jobs pay pennies and take a few seconds. Micropayments for microwork. Very cool idea.

Most of the examples on the site now are picture identification tasks. The payments are around $0.03. Not a lot of money, but the jobs don't take long. Right now the requesters all seem to be Amazon. I signed up and spent a few minutes earning $0.24. Not the best pay I've ever received, but I was using a trackpad. :-) The money goes to my Amazon account and can be turned into cash.

I couldn't help thinking, however, as I did it about Paul Allen's talk that I just attended and about his pleas that we use technology to help lift people. There are a lot of people who could earn money doing this. If you have access to a computer (in the library, for example) and can read, you're qualified. To earn enough to put you above the poverty level ($9/hr), you have to do 300 tasks an hour--not inconceivable. The only sticky point is that the people most in need might not have access to a bank account to turn the earning's into cash. That's something that could be fixed without much effort.

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Approaching Omniscience

I attended Paul Allen's keynote at eBusiness Day. He spoke on "Approaching Omniscience." Paul gave an amazing talk and I wrote it all up in a blog post but then a errant click killed the page where I was writing. Argh!

Paul started with a quote from Robert Browning: "Grow old with me; The best is yet to be." This aptly reflects Paul's natural optimism. He ended by saying that we are empowered like no other generation to lift the poor and help people and giving suggestions about how people can change their lives and do that.

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November 10, 2005

InfoWorld Articles

I've recently had a couple of articles in InfoWorld. The first was an analysis piece a few weeks ago regarding IBM's acquisition of Datapower.

The second is a review of Systinet Registry 6.0. I found Registry to be a full-featured and mature registry offering. The review is in the same issue that contains Eric Knorr and Oliiver Rist's 10 Steps to SOA. Registries are step five. I agree with the assessment that registries of some kind are essential to production-level SOA deployments, even if I'm not sold on UDDI.

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Orrin's Got a New Gig

I think Orrin must be the CTO for Sony BMG.

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November 9, 2005

BYU Ruby User's Group Report

I went to the BYU Ruby User's Group meeting tonight. Devlin Daley (one of my grad students) gave a demonstration of Rails by building a movie database application. He did a good job. There were about a dozen people there. Again, I was impressed by the power of convention in contrast to configuration. We don't, in general, do a good enough job of thinking out defaults for our programs so that they work without configuration for what most people want to do.

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Monads in Ruby: Yum!

Just ran across an introduction to using monads in Ruby. If you're more of a Schemer, you might enjoy this introduction more.

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Micropayments for Big Ideas

You may have noticed a new banner on the right hand side of my blog. I'm trying an experiment to see if I can use my blog to help support student research at BYU (where I teach). I've never been much for exploiting my blog commercially, but I do think supporting student research is a good cause. I'm appealing mostly to corporations (although individual donations would be more than welcome) who want to support interesting and innovative research in digital identity, Web services, and virtualization.

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Grad Student Uptick

If you travel abroad, you find that many of the government and business leaders you meet, particularly in developing countries, were educated in the US. Moreover, many of the best executives in our most innovative companies are foreign born. Since 9/11 the number of foreign grad students has declined and that's worried me. The US benefits handsomely from foreign-born grad students who come and stay as well as those who return home. Thomas Barnett reports that last year, for the first time since 9/11, the number of foreign-born grad students increased. Good news. If it were up to me, I'd give offer every foreigner who graduates from an accredited graduate program a green card--at least a scholarship.

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November 8, 2005

Stanford Buys the Old Excite@Home Campus

Stanford University has purchased the old Excite@Home campus in Redwood City. I'm glad to see it being used. They say a biotech center is in the works.

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BYU Ruby User's Group Meeting

The BYU Ruby User's Group is having a meeting tomorrow (Wed, Nov 9th) in 120 TMCB at 7pm. They're going to walk through implementing an application (can you say "live demo?") in Rails 1.0. Come one, come all.

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Business Continuity Planning for Academics

Writing about business continuity planning in light of avian flu scares for Between the Lines made me think about the same subject in the context of what I'm doing now: teaching classes, doing research, and interacting with students. I came to the conclusion that we could actually manage fairly well.

• My students are already using email and instant messaging to contact me. Naturally, we still meet face to face a good deal as well, using IM mainly for quick discussions, setting up appointments and so on, but in an emergency we could move more to IM and email.
• My classes already have most of the material online and my students use wikis for collaborating on everything from research projects to course notes.
• I've got a good podcasting set-up and could easily record lectures and post them online along with slides and other material.
• I give quizzes and other assignments online and much of the grading happens with online grading tools.
• I've not done online discussion sections using IRC for a decade, but that wouldn't be hard to get going.
• I've got high speed Internet in my home and most of my students have it at home as well.
• I have a nice, private office at home (in fact it's really much better than my office at work) where I could work.

Would it be as good as traditional course delivery? Probably not, but in an emergency it would be good enough.

I suspect other CS profs would do about as well. Even if they haven't done much podcasting, turning on the mic and editing down sound is something they could easily figure out. Other, less technically inclined, faculty, might do with some training on these tools and non-technical students are probably less likely to be familiar with them.

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November 7, 2005

Learning from the Web

I've heard Adam Bosworth talk about the lessons we should have learned from the web about semi structured data, but it didn't really hit home for me until I read his arguments in this article in Queue. I read it in hardcopy 6 weeks ago or so and it's finally online so I can link to it. He lists five "unintuitive" lessons:

1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones.
2. It is worth making things simple enough that one can harness Moore’s law in parallel. This means that a system can scale more or less linearly both to handle the volume of the requests coming in and, ideally, to handle the complexity.
3. It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
4. The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.
5. People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs).

He also lists some rules that are more obvious, but bear mentioning:

1. Pay attention to physics.
2. Be as loosely coupled as possible.
3. KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid.

The rules are good, and interesting, but what really got my attention was Adam's application of the lessons to XML and Web services:

Lesson 3 tells us that elements in XML with values that are unlikely to change for some known period of time (or where it is acceptable that they are stale for that period of time, such as the title of a book) should be marked to say this. XML has no such model. You can use the HTTP protocol to say this in a very coarse way, but, for example, a book may mostly be invariant, though occasionally have a price change or a new comment, and certainly an item up for auction may see the price change.

Lesson 4 says that we shouldn’t over-invest in making schemas universally understood. Certain ones will win when they hit critical mass (as RSS 2.0 has done), and others will not. Some will support several variant but successful strains (as RSS has also done where most readers can read RSS .92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom). It also suggests that trying to mandate universal URLs for semantics is unlikely to work because, in general, they will not reach a critical mass, and thus people will not know about them—never mind take the trouble to use them. In short, if a large number of people aren’t using something or there isn’t a feedback mechanism to know what to use, then it will not be used.

Lessons 1 and 5 tell us that XML should be easy to understand without schemas and should let the clients intelligently decide how and when to fetch related information, especially large files such as photos, videos, and music, but even just related sets of XML such as comments on a post, reviews of a candidate, or ratings for a restaurant.

From ACM Queue - Learning from the Web
Referenced Mon Nov 07 2005 14:25:28 GMT-0700 (MST)

XML, of course, has limitations with respect to the lessons we might learn from the Web. Adam goes on to talk about RSS and Atom as "a hopeful turn."

Recently, an opportunity has arisen to transcend these limitations. RSS 2.0 has become an extremely popular format on the Web. RSS 2.0 and Atom (which is essentially isomorphic) both support a base schema that provides a model for sets. Atom’s general model is a container (a <feed>) of <entry> elements in which each <entry> may contain any namespace scoped elements it chooses (thus any XML), must contain a small number of required elements (<id>, <updated>, and <title>), and may contain some other well-known ones in the Atom namespace such as <link>s. Even better, Atom clearly says that the order doesn’t matter. This immediately gives a simple model for sets missing in XML. All one has to do is create a <feed> for a set and put each item in the set into an <entry>. Since all <entry> elements contain an <id> (which is a GUID) and an <updated> element (which is the date it was last altered), it is easy to define the semantics of replacing specific entries and even confirm that you are replacing the ones that you think (e.g., they have the same <id> and the same <updated>. Since they have a title, it is easy to build a user interface to display menus of them. Virtually all Atom entries have a <content> or <summary> element (or both) that summarizes the value of the entry in a user-friendly way and enhances the automatic user interface. If the entry has related binary information such as pictures or sound, it contains <link> elements that have attributes describing the MIME type and size of the target, thus letting the consumer of an Atom feed make intelligent choices about which media to fetch when and how, and resolving the outage XML has in this regard.

From ACM Queue - Learning from THE WEB - The Web has taught us many lessons about distributed computing, but some of the most important ones have yet to fully take hold.
Referenced Mon Nov 07 2005 14:28:37 GMT-0700 (MST)

Adam's conclusion about today's databases is the most interesting (and the part that I hadn't quite grokked before). His summary is that today's databases violate almost every lesson we've learned from the web:

• The don't easily support simple relaxed text formats and protocols.
• They don't enable people to harness Moore’s law in parallel.
• They don't optimize caching when it is OK to be stale.
• The don't let schemas evolve for a set of items using a bottom-up consensus/tipping point.
• The don't handle flexible graphs (or trees) well.
• They haven't made their queries simple and flexible.

I've been working with a company called Aradyme that has a database product with dynamic schema that does well on some of Adam's points. At present, "it's difficult for a tools-vendor to raise money" so their marketing and sales has been almost entirely about data cleansing (and they're doing pretty well at it). But at some point, I think the underlying tool deserves more exposure. Consequently, I'm intensely interested in the lessons Adam thinks databases ought to learn.

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November 3, 2005

CiteULike: Del.icio.us for Academics

If you are an academic, CiteULike might be a tool you'll enjoy. CiteULike is like Del.icio.us, but oriented to academic papers. In addition to the regular bookmarking and tagging that Del.icio.us does, CiteULike allows you to enter all the relevant reference data (presumable if someone else has already done it for a URL, it will just be there for free), put in the abstract, and enter a note. You can generate EndNote and Bibtex entries for papers and even upload a private PDF of a paper. Like Del.icio.us, there's RSS for accounts.

One thing I like is the group feature. I can have all my research assistants sign up for an account and then group them together to see the collection of papers they're all referencing. Of course, you could do it for a class as well. I've had my students doing this on our lab wiki and even entertained ideas of creating wiki pages the understand Bibtex, but this beats anything I could put together on my own.

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Twelve Reasons Not to Use Microsoft

Robert Scoble lists twelve reasons people tell him they don't use Microsoft. The thread has over 100 comments. Interesting reading.

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TaskTracer: Gathering Attention Data

Today's CS department colloquium featured Thomas Dietterich from Oregon State University. His research area is machine learning. On of the things he talked about is called TaskTracer. The basic idea of Task Tracer is to capturing the coherence of user's desktop activities.

As users use windowed desktops, they engage in seemingly random activities involving applications, documents, and events. But these are not really random--they are all associated with tasks of one sort or another. In the user's mind, these activities are all associated with the task that they're working on:

• users choose resources associated with tasks
• users work on resources and then deliver them via print, email, fax, etc.
• users communicate with other people (or roles) involved in the activity
• users attend meetings associated with the activity

To be effective, Task Tracer must

• Capture events
• Discover tasks
• Associate events with tasks
• Give users access to this information

One of the issues is that automatically associating events with tasks if made much more difficult by the fact that people routinely multitask. Task tracer makes the unwarranted, but greatly simplifying assumption that users are working on just one task at a time. TaskTracer uses machine learning technology to watch user actions and determine when the user changes tasks. The goal is to predict the tasks based on email activity ad desktop activity (menus, etc.)

Here are some of the challenges:

• The set of tasks is constantly changing
• The distribution of task documents changes within a task over time. For example in the task of "teaching a course," the activities would include creating a syllabus at the first of the semester, making and grading a midterm exam later on, and computing final course grade and archiving course materials at the end.
• Real-time online learning and prediction is hard
• Must achieve high accuracy to be acceptable

The email predictor works pretty well based on sender, recipients, and subject. The body of message isn't that important. The predictor uses a hybrid approach. A naive Bayes classifier makes a yes or no determination of whether this message looks like messages seen in the past and if so, a second, Support Vector Machine algorithm classifies the message.

An interesting side note: running this on a faculty member, two post docs and five students showed that the professor and post-docs have 3-4 times as many tasks they were working on at any given time.

The desktop task predictor is based on what they call "window document segments" (WDS). This is a time interval when one window is in focus for one document. So, switching windows or switching documents within a window constitutes a new segment. The goal is to predict a task for each WDS. Classification is done based on the window title, pathname, website name, and URL pathname of a Web page. The technique uses the same hybrid classifier as the email predictor. The bad news is that the accuracy isn't good enough yet.

One of the tools they're developing is a TaskExplorer that looks like the Windows Explorer, but aimed at tasks. Clicking on a task in the left hand menu brings up a list of documents, emails, instant messages, Web pages, and so on associated with that task.

Another tool is the folder predictor. When you do a "Save As" or an "Open" the file dialog shows the top three folders that that document is predicted to be in. There's an optimization algorithm that tries to minimize the number of clicks. We all hate navigating file systems to get to the right place. Results show that folder predictor reduces clicks substantially over the default Windows dialog. As an aside, I've found I can do pretty well in reducing clicks associated with files using DefaultFolder on OS X.

The third tool is a notes file associated with each task. Timestamps are automatically inserted and the notes are automatically saves as you change tasks.

This work seems related to attention.xml and other attention efforts. I asked Dietterich if he were familiar with attention.xml and he wasn't. They're calling it tracing tasks, but in reality--it's attention.

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November 2, 2005

Achieving Ubiquity With an Identity Metasystem

Brett McDowall, who gave a presentation on Liberty at IIW2005, has started a blog. At IIW2005, he said "the world belongs to those who show up" and his blog is an effort to "show up" in the blogosphere.

Brett notes that there's a lot of misunderstanding about Liberty Alliance, even (or maybe especially) among the IIW2005 crowd. Some of that's FUD, but as he notes, there are technological barriers. The primary one he notes is that RESTians aren't likely to jump on board SOAP just for the privilege of using an identity infrastructure.

I was interviewed this afternoon by Laurianne McLaughlin for an article she's doing for IEEE Computer on Microsoft's InfoCard initiative. I brought up this exact argument. Developers who use .Net and Visual Studio will probably have an easy time just using InfoCard. Whether its easy for others remains to be seen. If Microsoft is truly interested in the ubiquity of InfoCard, they need to take other programming paradigms into consideration.

And this includes the REST folks. In 2006 there is still no complete SOAP library for Perl, for example. (Yes, I know all about SOAP::Lite; compared to SOAP packages for C# and Java, it's not even a dim shadow.) This isn't because Perl programmers can't figure out SOAP, it's because there's not much interest. How will Perl programmers (and I could include other languages here) talk to Liberty or InfoCard? Right now, they just won't.

When I've tried to talk to Kim Cameron about this, his answer has always been "I don't understand why people don't want to use SOAP." But that's really beside the point. The fact is that there are scads of influential and innovative programmers out there who won't use SOAP and need a path to the identity metasystem (whatever that turns out to be).

Liberty and InfoCard are currently what I'd call "heavyweight" systems designed to appeal to the heavyweight software development process. No surprise considering where they were born. But that's not the only way to develop software and indeed much of the really interesting stuff these days is being turned out in more lightweight languages, frameworks, and processes. Achieving the ubiquity, or a close approximation, necessary to make this all worthwhile isn't going to happen unless the systems reach out to the developers in these paradigms as well. It would be a shame if myopia about "the one way" of developing software scuttled the identity metasystem.

Update: AS I was thinking about this later, I realized that another way of expressing this is to say that the identity metasystem should be transport neutral. SOAP proponents would argue that that's exactly what SOAP is. That's true: SOAP builds an abstract transport layer on top of HTTP, MOM, and most everything else. What I'm arguing is that we need neutrality up and down the stack as well. I shouldn't have to buy off on a particular transport abstraction to use the identity system metasystem.

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Rasiej Campaign Post-Mortem

Micah Sifry has written a post-mortem about the Andy Rasiej campaign for NYC Public Advocate. Some important lessons there for anyone using the Internet for leverage. Here were a few that hit home for me:

We misjudged how much people would care about our initial pledge to not take more than $100 per donors, and we overestimated how much the Internet could compensate for our weaknesses, in terms of spreading our message and assisting with fundraising;

Low name recognition plus low voter attention meant that network effects (such as a message spreading virally, or friends of the campaign being able to convince their friends to donate money) were almost impossible to produce.

From micah.sifry.com
Referenced Wed Nov 02 2005 09:39:33 GMT-0700 (MST)

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November 1, 2005

Using VLC to Create iPod Ready Video

A few days ago I wrote about using VLC to turn MPEG2 video from the Tivo into something that will work on your iPod. I had some funny problems with the aspect ratio and the GUI-based approach is fine for a single video, but it's time consuming since each conversion takes near real-time (i.e. one our of video takes a little more than one hour to transcode to MPEG4). Well, there's a better way.

VLC has a command line interface and it works lovely. Not only can you run the command on multiple files in batch mode, but you can set the aspect ratio and width and height to ensure it plays back right on the iPod. For some reason the video from the Tivo thinks it's encoded at 352x480, even though it displays it correctly in VLC. When you transcode it to MPEG4, Quicktime uses the bad width and height.

Here's the shell script I used to transcode the Tivo MPEG2 to MPEG4 for the iPod. This should work for any MPEG2 source file--there's nothing specific to the Tivo in it.

#!/bin/bash
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -vvv "$1.mpg" \
 --sout "#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=1024,scale=1, \
 acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2}:standard{access=file, \
 url=$1.mp4}" \
 --aspect-ratio "4:3" --sout-transcode-width 360 \
 --sout-transcode-height 240 --sout-transcode-fps 30    

This works even when the file name has spaces. The script assumes that VLC is in the /Applications directory on the Mac. If you use Linux or Windows, the flags will all be the same, just change the command name to reference the right executable. Windows users are on their own for making the shell variables work. Note: This script expects the MPEG2 file without the .mpg extension as its argument.

This will run for a while and spit out lots of debugging messages. When it's done it doesn't exit, but rather announces that it's playlist is empty. Ctrl-C quits just fine.

The resulting file can be loaded directly into iTunes (using the "Add to Library" command) and plays just fine. Now, I can download several files, use DirectShow Dump to remove the Tivo DRM (which is fast even in Virtual PC) and then transcode them for the iPod in batch while I sleep.

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