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November 30, 2006
Jim Harper on Identity and Public Policy
 Jim Harper (click to enlarge) |
Tonight Jim Harper gave a talk on identity and public policy at the Utah State Capitol. I've recorded the talk and will hopefully have it up on IT Conversations soon.
Jim starts by telling the story of his book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood. . A few years ago, Jim joined the CATO institute and was invited by the ACLU to join them at the US Capitol for an event on national ID cards. He read the ACLU briefing and thought it was good, but overly simplistic. He sat down to read the literature on identification and identification policy--it took him a few hours and he was done. Jim decided to go back to the beginning and develop a theory of identity.
He start with identifiers--there are four
- Something you are (e.g. biometrics, what you look like)
- Something you are assigned (e.g. name, rank, and serial number)
- Something you know (e.g. passwords or other shiboleth)
- Something you have (e.g. an ID card)
He brings up some interesting points about these. We use socially assigned identifiers like time and place for a meeting that are single use.
Card issuers gather information and print it on the card and then the relying party ties the card to the user and verifies that the card is legitimate.
Each identifier that we use has different qualities: fixity (how tied to the person is the identifier?), permanence (can it be changed?), and distinctiveness (how many people use the identifier?).
Identifiers allow us to recognize people and visit consequences on wrong-doers.
Jim talks about identity systems.
- A government issued ID has preeminence as far as who uses it. The more easily it is to ask for ID (with the issuance of national ID), the more likely it is that it will be asked for--accelerating the move to a surveillance society. Jim brings up the ACLU Pizza screencast.
- An ID transfers information and thus power to the identity providers (institutions), giving them more power over our lives. Jim brings up the example of Holland in the 1930's. They had a wonderful identification system. It was very efficient, which was wonderful until the Nazi's came in. The fact that the religion of an individual (in this case Jewish) was known was a
- Identification is used to secure things. What if we only had one physical key? You couldn't let someone else use your car key for fear that they'd end up in your house. Having multiple keys is less convenient, but more secure. Moving to a single key system may leave us vulnerable. Identity theft is, in part, a product of the fact that there is a single key that gives people entrance to multiple records.
Children aren't born with identities. They build them over time.
Security, national security, is a significant argument in favor of strong identity systems. Identity makes forensics easier. Immediately after an attack of some kinds, identity reveals who did it, leading us, deceptively, to believe that identity could have told us who was going to do it. The 9/11 terrorists, for the most part, accurately identified themselves. They didn't rely on anonymity. They relied on surprise.
A national ID would have some effect on illegal immigration. The easiest way to measure it is the market price of a fake ID. If it costs $1000 now, it might cost $2000 with a national ID system. The benefit of being a documented worker is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you'd have to raise the cost of obtaining a fake ID significantly to stop illegal immigration.
Directly addressing the threats is a more effective strategy than identity for preventing terrorist attacks. The hardened cockpit doors are probably the single biggest improvement to airline safety, not anything that's happening at the airport.
Jim talks about RealID. Hard to blog because, but he has some great information--listen to the audio. Using ID to control access to places like courthouses has significant constitutional issues. RealID is perfect example of how bad process leads to bad results.
A competitive and diverse credentialing marketplace holds more promise for stronger identification than a national ID system. Different cards have different purposes--high value and low value transactions need different identifiers.
Jim holds up a $1 bill and a $20 bill. One has been updated twice to prevent counterfeiting in the last decade where the other has been updated not at all. When you make an identifier more valuable, you increase the cost of protecting it.
I didn't blog the question and answer session, but there was some good discussion of the social cost of identity and the way social systems can be used in place of identity. We didn't have a mic for the questioners--didn't think of it--so I hope we can get them into the audio.
This was a great session and I'm glad Jim could come do it. He is entertaining and makes good points about identity in public policy. Very good stuff.
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IIW2006B Is Next Week
We're getting ready for another excellent IIW next week. There are good people coming and the numbers are working out just right (we've got about 100 people signed up as of today). It's still not too late to sign up. Here's some things that are happening.
We're going to do speed geeking right after lunch on Tuesday. If you've got something to demo, plan on a five minute presentation with rotating groups. There's a place to put your name on the wiki, but you can tell us you want to present as late as Monday.
If you are in the Bay Area and have access to a projector, please bring it. It's nice to have projectors in the break-out rooms for those who want to use them.
Spouses and significant others are welcome to come to dinner on Tuesday night. You need to let Kaliya or I know by Monday. The cost is $30 per person (conference attendees are paid for already).
On Tuesday night Kaliya and Eve Maler will host an "untalent show." The place we're having the dinner has a stage and sound system, so bring musical instruments or iPods with music you wan to share with us (yours or just good music). If you are a visual artist we would love to show your some slides. Bring them on a USB key and give them to Kaliya Monday.
We'll start with the intro session on Monday at 1pm. We'll end Wednesday at 3pm. Please let Kaliya know if you're coming Monday. Here's Monday's schedule:
- Welcome Kaliya and Phil
- Landscape Map, Kaliya Hamlin and Mike Ozburn
- The Identity Gang Lexicon and Laws of Identity, Dick Hardt
- OSIS - Open Source Identity System, Dale Olds, Johannes Ernst
- CardSpace/iCards - Kim Cameron or someone else from Microsoft
- Higgins, Paul Trevithic, Mary Ruddy
- SAML/federation/Liberty Alliance, Eve Maler
- URL Based Identity (OpenID which includes, LID, Yadis, I-names/XRI, Sxip) David Recordon, Scott Keveton
- Identity Commons, Eugene Kim
- Closing, Doc Searls
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USB Missile Launcher
I want one of these.
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CTO Breakfast Report
We had the monthly CTO Breakfast this morning--perhaps for the last time in it's usually place. There was a good group present and some fun discussion.
Bruce Fryer's brought up an ironic encounter with a word-of-mouth marketing company. The person who runs the marketing for a prominent WOM company somehow didn't get Linked-In and who social networks work. Funny.
We got into a discussion of new media. I brought up the Bear Sterns report I blogged about the other day and it's breakdown of the media pipeline. There's a great opportunity in the "content packaging" space--although I wonder if advertising is the only viable model for supporting packagers.
One of the big problems, as pointed out in the report was that infinite choice equates to overwhelming confusion for end users. This point was made about the Web 2.0 conference on a recent Gillmor Gang: there were so many companies vying for attention. Many of them will never get it. In this world, the content packagers are conferences like Web 2.0, TechCrunch, Engadget, and so on.
Ben Galbraith, who knows something about AJAX, brought up Tibco GI. I'd never heard of it. GI is a set of libraries and tools for creating AJAX clients.
As usual, we spent some time discussing virtualization. The topic was brought up when I moaned about the work involved in upgrading my production server. Scott Lemon asked why I didn't just virtualize it. Interesting question. I think I'll try rsync first.
We also discussed old computers and got into a fun discussion of paper tape readers and 4k BASIC. The good old days.
The rhythm of these breakfasts is always interesting to me. The final 30 minutes or so, is always a smaller group and the topics tend to come faster and faster as things wind down. Some of my most favorite discussions are reliably in the last part of the discussion.
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November 29, 2006
Violent Video Games Change Brains
A study looked at the direct effects of videogames on teen brains and documents functional differences between the brains of teens who play violent games and those who play non-violent games. This Newsweek article interviews the researcher behind the study, Dr. Vincent P. Mathews, professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
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We Are Smarter Than Me
Wade Billings sent me a link to the we are smarter than me project. The goal is to collaboratively write a business book. If you've got something to say, sign up and say it. The book will be published by Pearson Publishing and there's a meet-up planned for March for anyone who's contributed.
The book is being written using book wiki, a tool for creating books on a wiki (not surprisingly). The founders have set up chapters and written some starter text for each chapter to get them going. New chapters can be proposed, but the founders exert some control here. In true wiki fashion, anything you write might be changed by someone else.
I'm anxious to see the outcome of this experiment. Writing a book is a huge undertaking. Writing a piece of a book is a much smaller commitment. If the process produces something worth reading, it could portend a completely new way of creating books.
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Integrating Mantis and Subversion
Tom Gregory has a nice tutorial on integrating Subversion and Mantis so that, for example, Mantis tickets can be automatically closed when a fix is committed to the repository. Frankly, I'd never even considered this. Good stuff and well written.
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Free Sound Effects
If you're looking for sound effects to add to a play list or insert in the middle of a podcast, this site has a good nice collection of free sound effects in categories like ambiance, domestic (household sounds), machines, and people. For example, here's an outside crowd.
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November 28, 2006
Launching IEEE Spectrum Radio on IT Conversations
Today I published the first show from a new series that we're launching on IT Conversations, IEEE Spectrum Radio. If you're familiar with computers or electronics you're familiar with IEEE and have probably seen Spectrum, IEEE's flagship publication.
IEEE Spectrum Radio is an audio edition of selected stories from Spectrum. When we were getting this going, I listened to about a dozen shows and was really impressed with the content and the production values. I'm excited to welcome IEEE to IT Conversations and I'm looking forward to sharing more of the shows I loved with you. As always, contact me with any feedback and please rate the shows so I know what you like and what you don't.
The first show up is author James Bamford talking about the implications of the Bush Administration's decision to eavesdrop on communications between individuals outside the United States and citizens inside the country. Bamford is the author of A Pretext for War.
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November 27, 2006
CTO Breakfast for November and December
This Thursday will be the CTO breakfast for November and December. We'll hold it at 8am in the usual place (Executive Conference Room of Building L at Canyon Park Technology Center). For more information on location, including maps, please see the CTO Breakfast page.
Things that are on my mind include building reservations systems, reputation, and next week's Internet Identity Workshop. Come prepared to discuss what's on your mind.
Future breakfasts will be held on the following dates:
- January 25 (Thursday)
- February 15 (Thursday)
- March 22 (Thursday)
As far as location for these meetings goes, I'll let you know early in January if we're moving to a new spot or not. There are several possibilities--I'll fill you in on Thursday.
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Managing Vendors Before They Manage You
On this week's Technometria Podcast, Scott Lemon, Matt Asay and myself are joined by Britt Blaser and Doc Searls. We have a great discussion about how Internet tools can be used to manage vendors instead of them managing us. Doc calls this "vendor resource management." Good name.
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Discussing Identity Public Policy in Utah
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, public officials have been under increasing pressure to employ identity in the name of security. Advancements in identification and surveillance technologies -- biometrics, identity cards, databases, RFID, and so on -- threaten privacy and civil liberties, enable identity fraud, and subject people to unwanted observation. But there is no going back.
Rep. John Dougall has invited Jim Harper to discuss his book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood. Identity Crisis is a superb primer on identification, identification theory, and identity policy. Citizens, technologists, and policymakers alike need a good grounding in the uses and abuses of identification in providing security and facilitating daily transactions. His book serves precisely that purpose and his talk will as well.
| Time: | 6:30 pm |
| Date: | Thursday, November 30, 2006 |
| Location: | W-135 (West Bldg, Plaza Level) |
| State Capitol Complex | |
| Salt Lake City, UT |
If you're interested, you're invited. Park on the east side of the Capitol Complex and walk through the east building and across the plaza to the West building. I think you'll find Jim very interesting.
Jim Harper is the Director of Information Policy Studies at the CATO Institute. I heard Jim speak at DIDW and was very interested in having him come out to Utah. His message is very useful for anyone interested in identity and it's uses. There are clear public policy issues. Jim's book, Identity Crisis, is a great read for anyone interested in what the move toward increased uses of identity means for society.
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November 26, 2006
Building Reservations System - Volunteers Needed
I've been asked by the Heber Valley Camp (HVC) to help them build a reservations system. HVC is an 8500 acre camp east of Heber Utah that is used by young women's groups from the LDS Church. The camp also allows family camping when it's not being used for it's primary purpose. Right now the camp has six separate camps that can accommodate around 350 people each. When it's complete that number could go to as high as 21 camps. As you can imagine, scheduling something like this isn't something you can do with a spreadsheet since the camp deals with 1000's of reservations per year.
The current Web site has a reservations system that "kind of grew up." Consequently, it is rather brittle and hard to change. My goal is to build a reservations system that is tailored to meet the unique needs of the camp, but flexible enough to allow for changing policies as the camp grows and matures.
I'm looking for volunteers who would like to help build such a system. The current pilot is in Rails and it may grow up to be the final system, so I'm particularly interested in people who know Rails or are fluent in Web programming in another system (e.g. PHP/MySQL) and would like to learn Rails (and Ruby, naturally). I also need the services of a few system administrator types.
If you'd like to help, you can volunteer by adding your name to the mailing list (Google Group) using the form on the HVC Development page. The development page also has links to the wiki where we're documenting design decisions, the code repository (Subversion), and the bug tracking system (Mantis). After you've added you name to the list, contact me and I'll give you necessary permissions, etc.
I'm planning on officially launching the effort with a orientation meeting and hackathon on Saturday in January.
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November 22, 2006
Flying to Afton
 The Elk Arch in Afton (click to enlarge) |
I flew up to Afton WY this morning with Steve Fulling and my daughter. We were actually headed to Driggs, but as we passed Afton, I suggested we stop there. I was glad we did--Afton is a nice little town and we had a great breakfast. Today was a beautiful day for flying too--there's nothing better to do on a holiday weekend that fly somewhere for breakfast! I've got got pictures, if you're interested.
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November 21, 2006
Curing the Common Cold
Ever wondered why there was no cure for the common cold? Now you know.
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In Praise of IT Conversations' Audio Engineers
I published a panel discussion of Web 2.0 from SofTECH last week. Listen to it--I think you're like it.
In fact I was so sure it was good content that I put it in the production queue against the advice of Paul Figgiani, IT Conversation's Chief Audio Engineer. As we got it, the audio was pretty rough. If you listen to it now, you'd never know it--I was amazed at how well it had cleaned up. All I've got to say is that Steven Ng, the show's audio engineer and Paul are miracle workers.
At one point in the discussion, Robert Rebholz from Microsoft mentions CardSpace and Kim Cameron and then mentions an upcoming "reputation" product (service?) from Microsoft. That piqued by interest, as you might expect.
I just finished a paper on our reputation framework (PDF) for the upcoming WWW2007 conference last night. This is, I believe, much improved over our earlier paper. This paper expands and justifies the reputation principles by appealing to (and referencing) past research on reputation.
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Talking About Sun's Open Source Java
I posted the latest edition of the Technometria Podcast yesterday. We talk about voting technology in the wake of the election and the announcement that Java was going open source. Matt has some interesting perspectives on what the GPL license would do to Sun's bottom line and why GPL was a strategic move.
It's interesting to note that Java wasn't open sourced--rather the name was. That is, Sun still retains copyright and trademark protection over the name and thus can control what is and what isn't Java. For now, they seem to be keeping pretty tight restrictions on the use of the name--if you take things away from the code base, you probably can't call the result "Java."
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Concatenating PDF
Today I needed to combine a PDF file for a coverpage (produced from Word) with another PDF representing the body of the document (produced from LaTeX) into a single document. Turns out OS X already has a script that does this hidden deep inside Automator. The path is very long, so I'll break it up to lead you to the file:
cd /System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action cd Contents/Resources ls -l join.py
If you look at the Python script, you'll see some usage information at the top.
I created a link to the script in by bin directory to make using it more convenient, then just used the command:
~/bin/joinPDF.py -o 2006prop.pdf 2006cover.pdf 2006desc.pdf
That's it. The resulting PDF is perfect. I found this recipe at Benjamin Han's site.
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November 20, 2006
Perverse Progress
Lessig has another great essay on what he calls "a costly addiction." My favorite quote:
[I]t takes an extraordinarily perverse view of progress to think that protecting the past is the best path to the future.From Wired 14.11: Posts
Referenced Mon Nov 20 2006 13:54:58 GMT-0700 (MST)
And as a bonus, be sure to read Steven Levy's article on the iPod. He is such a great writer. He describes showing the iPod to Bill Gates the day after Jobs announced it:
I brought along my new iPod. At the end of the meal, just as the other guests at the table were pushing away their chairs, I pulled out the iPod and put it in front of Gates.
"Have you seen this yet?" I asked.
Gates went into a zone that recalls those science fiction films where a space alien, confronted with a novel object, creates some sort of force tunnel between him and the object, allowing him to suck directly into his brain all possible information about it. Gates' fingers, racing at Nascar speed, played over the scroll wheel and pushed every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen. I could almost hear the giant sucking sound. Finally, after he had absorbed every nuance of the device, he handed it back to me.
"It looks like a great product," he said.
Then he paused a second. Something didn't compute.
"It's only for Macintosh?" he asked.
Yes, it was. (Then.)From Wired 14.11: The Perfect Thing
Referenced Mon Nov 20 2006 13:56:27 GMT-0700 (MST)
Classic.
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The S Stands for Simple
I'm neck deep trying to get a paper out today, so I won't be blogging much, but in the meantime, if you're interested in Web Services, go read Pete Lacey's The S Stands for Simple. I laughed out loud several times.
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November 18, 2006
EyeTV Hybrid for Macs
A week or so ago, I picked up one of these EyeTV hybrids, a little device that has a USB connector on one end and a cable connector on the other. Plug it into your computer, connect up the cable and you're watching TV. There's an online program guide so you can schedule recordings of upcoming shows--just like TiVo.
The device works with the Apple remote that comes with the new iMacs, Minis, and MacBooks. The best part is that it can automatically takes things you record and put them on your iPod (or at least into iTunes, to that they sync with the iPod). No hassle--just tell it to record and it's there.
The encoder doesn't seem particularly fast--VLC encodes video for my iPod faster, but since it's all automatic, I don't really care that it's slow.
The device even does HDTV. Combined with a Mac Mini, it would make a pretty great home entertainment center.
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November 17, 2006
Podcasting Survey
If you're inclined to help IT Conversations at all, take a few minutes to answer this survey about podcasting and how you feel about it and use it. We'd really appreciate it.
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November 16, 2006
LaTeXiT
If you've ever needed to add complex equations to a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation or a Word document, then you need to know about LaTeXiT, an OS X application that typesets LaTeX without the need to create a file and run it through LaTeX. The images it creates are draggable to other applications. Of course, you have to know LaTeX to set up the equations, but if you need to typeset math, there's no way around that in any event.
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Bot Nets and Spamming
You've probably been deluged by Spam in the last month or so selling penis enlargement pills or trying to get you to buy penny stock. A fascinating eWeek article gives details about the sophisticated bot net that's behind the Spam. The bot net is capable of sending over 1 billion email messages a day. That's quite a resource. Like anyone with a valuable asset, the bot herders have put considerable time and effort into growing, managing, and protecting it. The accompanying slide show is worth looking at as well.
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Doing Time for Web Design
In the "be careful who you do business with" category is this story about New York authorities shutting down an illegal gambling operation. They also went after the Web site's designers and the security firm that did security screening for the site.
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November 15, 2006
CTO Breakfast Venue
It's been a good run, but after almost two years, the executive conference room at the Canyon Park Technology Center will no longer be available for our monthly CTO Breakfasts. Canyon Park has leased Building L to UVSC and the restrictions that UVSC is placing on its use make it unpalatable.
First, they want to charge us $50 per month to use the conference room unless we cater breakfast through them. Second, they want me to purchase insurance. We could probably work all that out, but it would mean a lot of administrative overhead in signing contracts, working out payment, collecting money from people who come, etc. The thing that's made the CTO Breakfast work has been the easy-going nature of the arrangements: show up, buy your own breakfast, speak if you feel like it.
I'm not giving up on the CTO Breakfast, but I'd like to find another venue. If you're aware of something that would work, please let me know. Preferably, it's free, has food that people can buy or not, and provides a comfortable, private area where we can talk. We might, for example, be able to use a private dining are at a Denney's or something. I'm looking for ideas. If you have any, contact me.
In the meantime, we're OK for November since the deal doesn't close until Dec 1 and the breakfast this month is on Nov 30. There's no breakfast in December, so we're looking for something in January and going forward.
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November 13, 2006
Good Housekeeping On Your Mac
 Activity monitor shows which processor apps were
built for (click to enlarge) |
Rosetta, the OS X technology that runs code built for the G4 processor in the Intel platform is so good that you can easily be running old code, even when new code, built for the processor you're running is long out. Kelly Flanagan told me today that you can make Activity Monitor show you the "kind" of a process (select "kind" in View). I found I had half a dozen little applications and menu bar items that were running G4 code and updated them. I also found a few things that should be running and took steps to make sure they stay shutdown. Good housekeeping...
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Starting Up svnserver With launchd
Last night when I messed up my account, I was trying to (re)set-up SVN on my laptop. I was following these instructions. They're pretty good, but they leave out how to actually get the launchd daemon loaded and working. I found these instructions on creating launchd daemons helpful as well as these on getting started with launchd. Here's specifically what I did after I'd created the svn.plist file:
- cd to /Library/LaunchDaemons
- Start up launchctl as root
sudo launchctl
launchd% load svn.plist
launchd% start svn
Now, the daemon is started and should load each time the machine reboots. Since it's "on demand" it will actually start up the SVN server each time it's needed rather than having it always running.
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I'm a (Fan) Control Freak
Found this little app for controlling fans on the MacBook Pro. The second editions (with the Core 2 Duo) seem to run much cooler than the first editions (with the Core Duo). Still, it's fun to play with things like fan speeds. I also use CoreDuoTemp to monitor the temperature and see what's happening.
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Chatting Up RubyForge
I put up the third installment of the newly launched Technometria Podcast at IT Conversations today. This week Scott, Matt, and I are talking to Tom Copeland about RubyForge. I like the discipline of doing the show regularly and I like the conversations we're having. I get something out of them every week--I hope you do to. Let me know what you think...
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Virtual Regionalism
David Stephenson has written an Op-Ed piece for the Boston Globe calling on Massachusetts Governor-elect Deval Patrick to use the Web to create better state government. David lists several examples of how eGovernment initiatives in other states have made government better. He also makes some suggestions that go beyond merely adopting what others are doing, including something he calls "virtual regionalism:"
Most creative would be what I call "virtual regionalism ": not statutory regional bodies, but ad hoc, voluntary ones helping communities with similar interests and problems to collaborate on shared solutions. If the Office of Commonwealth Development or Administration and Finance hosted a variety of collaboration tools such as " wikis, " officials in a given community could form ad hoc alliances to discuss and manage services with, for example, other communities served by the same state highways, with similar concentrations of immigrant residents, similar economic bases, etc. These shared tools would allow municipalities to lower costs with joint bidding on equipment, evaluate the impact of large proposed development projects, work out sharing of specialized DPW or fire equipment, etc. Because virtual regionalism wouldn't be statutory, communities could instantly form working arrangements -- and dissolve them if they are no longer were relevant.From A Web strategy for better state government - The Boston Globe
Referenced Mon Nov 13 2006 09:34:10 GMT-0700 (MST)
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And Now...Scheme in Haskell
AS a followup to my post last week about building a Lisp interpreter in Haskell, here's a similar, albeit more in-depth, tutorial that shows how to implement a good-sized subset of R5RS Scheme in Haskell.
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Breaking Into My Mac
Over the weekend, I somehow unclicked the "Allow use to administer computer" box on my Mac for my own account. I was playing around with some account stuff, trying to set up a role account for SVN and didn't notice my mistake until I'd quit System Preferences. At that point, I was using an account that was a system administrator, so I couldn't correct my mistake.
I had another administrator account on the computer that I'd set up some time ago when the computer was in the shop and they needed access, but I couldn't remember the password. I tried everything I could think of and it didn't work. What to do?
OS X has a "master password" feature, but I'd forgotten to set it. Root is available unless you enable it and I'd never had occasion to. OS X is pretty thorough and removes you from /etc/sudoers when you're no longer an administrator, so I couldn't sudo either. Argh.
I got in after a little searching on the 'Net. Here's what I did:
- Reboot into single user mode. (Hold down Apple-S while you reboot until you see the text-mode boot messages.)
- Mount the file system with this command
/sbin/mount -uaw
rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
When you Mac comes up, create new account--it will automatically have system administrator privilege. Create an account that doesn't already exist on your machine to avoid overwriting anything else in your existing accounts. I named mine bozo for obvious reasons.
Log into the new account, reset the system admin privileges on your real account, and you're in. You can delete the new account if you like, but you might want to keep it around--with a password you can remember--for emergencies. I also recommend setting the master password. You can use it to log into accounts that you've forgotten the password to.
Doing the set up has one affect that I've been able to discern--it changed the name of my machine to "Bozo's Computer." Appropriate, but I went back to the Sharing preferences pane and reset it.
One note of warning here--never assume that you're machine is safe if someone has physical access to it. Breaking in to any machine that you have access to and can get into single user more is trivial. You can do all of this in 5-10 minutes.
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November 10, 2006
Web Services and IDEA
 Sears
Tower (click to enlarge) |
I spent yesterday in Chicago giving a talk on Web services to the Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates (IDEA). IDEA is a group of seven northern Illinois counties and over 200 municipal governments that was formed to promote data exchange for eGovernment. Greg Sanders of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning is one of the chief instigators of IDEA and asked me to come speak. I had a blast and really enjoyed the trip.
The basic idea: simple, inexpensive design rules for Web sites can lead to big data exchange opportunities. Start with public data, do simple things, and work incrementally. I also stressed POX (plain old XML) for easy starts. Here are my slides (PDF) minus two quicktime screencasts that I did to demo how Jon Udell's Library Lookup project works and to show how Sex Offender registry mashups work (I didn't have 'Net access). I've included those here and here (warning--they're big). There's no audio on them since I was talking over them in the presentation.
CMAP is in the Sears Tower and I took an hour to head up to the observation deck. I took some pictures.
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Company Silos and Design
One of the criticisms of eGovernment is that it's silo'd--each agency is an island and there's little incentive and even less money for doing interagency eGovernment projects. But government isn't alone in that area--businesses are just as bad.
In this talk on Good Design from User Experience Week, Peter Merholz talks about the silos that exist in companies that create barriers to serving customers. His specific example is how redesigning a bank's Web site isn't very effective when customers are so put out at the design of the paper statements they get each month that they've given up interacting with the bank.
I've long been a believer in an idea called customer interaction hubs, not technology per se, but rather the notion that companies need a more unified view of their interactions with the customer. This isn't reality in most companies today.
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November 9, 2006
All Your Base Are Belong to Us
In case you hadn't heard, Bill Gates is the new Secretary of Defense.
Oh, wait...different
Gates. All I can say is "it's about time." In fact, it's way
past time. I don't care how smart he is or how much the President
loves him, Donald Rumsfield lost the confidence of the public and the
military long ago. You'd have to conclude that the only reason this
happened is because the Dems took Congress and Pres. Bush
felt that he had to. As a lifelong Republican, I'm not excited about
that development, but if that's what it takes to wake
people up... Sad.
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November 8, 2006
A Lisp Interpreter in Haskell
Defmacro.org has an excellent little article on using Haskell to build a working Lisp interpreter--at least a good start at one. I do something similar with my 330 class using Gofer (an outdated dialect related to Haskell). I mostly use Gofer to show them how type inference works, but since they're studying interpreters, they might as well see an inerpreter in Gofer while we're at it.
It's been too long since I've known monads well enough to decipher what he does at the end. I'm going to have to go back and review and then look at his article again--if you don't understand monads before, I doubt you'll get why they're so powerful.
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Managing Your Online Reputation--With a Little Help
Wired has an article about reputation management services that are springing up on Web.
Michael Fertik and his partners originally conceived of ReputationDefender as a way for parents to protect their children from potentially damaging postings to social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. "I don't like the idea that kids and teenagers might suffer lifelong harm because of momentary mistakes," says Fertik.From Wired News: Delete Your Bad Web Rep
Referenced Wed Nov 08 2006 15:52:37 GMT-0800 (PST)
Of course, the service might be useful to people who are a bit older as well. They charge a monthly fee and then a fee for help removing offending items, using a combination of investigation and legal threats.
"If the letter is sufficiently threatening," says Crawford, "the threaten-ee could bring his or her own lawsuit seeking a declaration that what they posted wasn't unlawful. But, again, most people will just buckle rather than fight back."From Wired News: Delete Your Bad Web Rep
Referenced Wed Nov 08 2006 15:54:39 GMT-0800 (PST)
So, bloggers beware--you may get a nasty note sometime threatening you with legal action if you don't take down that comment where someone made a fool of themselves.
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November 7, 2006
FCW Government CIO Conference
 Hotel Del Coronado (click to enlarge) |
I've been at the Federal Computer Week Government CIO conference today in San Diego. I was asked to speak on Digital Identity and they were even good enough to give away some copies of my book. Here are the slides from my talk. I wish I'd had more time to develop some of the themes. The conference was at the Hotel Del Coronado, a lovely place on the beach. I took a few pictures. Tomorrow I heard to Chicago to talk about Web services and data sharing.
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Voting Machine Troubles in Utah County
Voters in Utah County are having trouble voting this morning. The problem seems to be poll workers not knowing how to bring the machines up and make them work.
Robert Nelson was among those in Provo and other locations in Utah County who were unable to cast their votes using the new voting machines when the polls opened. After arriving at his polling location at 7 a.m., Nelson said he spent an hour and a half hoping the machines would be fixed. "The workers were earnestly trying to get the machines to work, but not a one in our precinct worked," Nelson said. "I work in Salt Lake City, so I couldn't wait for the machines to work."From Salt Lake Tribune - Problems for voters in Utah County; some delays in Salt Lake
Referenced Tue Nov 07 2006 10:00:53 GMT-0700 (MST)
The problems seem to with the cards that each voter gets to activate the machine. Large batches of them were wrong and no one could vote.
Encoder problems at most, if not all, of the 118 voting stations left early morning voters standing in line for more than an hour waiting to cast their electronic ballots.
There were problems with the encoders at most, if not all, of the polls in Utah County, said Sandy Hoffmann, elections coordinator for Utah County, but all of the problems have been remedied.
Hoffmann said there was no indication that there would be any problems with the encoders. To fix the glitch, Hoffmann said one of the electronic voting machines at each polling location was taken out of sequence and turned into a large encoder.
"The encoder is the little device that programs the voter card," said Joe Demma, spokesman for Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert.From Daily Herald - UPDATE: Voting machine glitch causes big delays, county says problem fixed
Referenced Tue Nov 07 2006 10:07:00 GMT-0700 (MST)
Reportedly some precincts went to paper provisional ballots, but most of the poll workers just turned people away and told them to come back later.
If this comes down to poorly trained poll workers, that's a big problem because those are the people who are the front line defense in voting security. If they're not being training properly, then we should be skeptical of any plan that requires them to play a significant role in voting security.
If the problem is about mistakes by people in the clerk's office, then I'm less concerned since they're capable of setting up procedures and learning from their mistakes. Still, it shows that mistakes happen and we shouldn't be sanguine about procedures being carried out correctly.
I'm concerned that poll workers would turn voters away when a provisional system was in place and could have been used. I wonder if they have guidelines about when to break out the paper ballots and whether they were followed.
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November 6, 2006
Technometria Podcast Is Reborn
One of the things I've thought IT Conversations needed was a panel-style show that aired regularly. I like that style of show as a listener and hear occasionally from other people that they like them too. So, I started one.
I just published the second installment of Technometria as a regular panel today. I published the first last week.
The first show had Dave Rosenberg of MuleSource as a guest and has an open source focus. The second show had Ross Mayfield as a guest and we talked a lot about wikis, social software, and the Google/JotSpot deal, as you can imagine.
We must be doing something right since I've already received my first piece of hate mail--accusing me of providing free advertising to SCO--about the first show. This guy obliviously missed the point of open conversations on IT Conversations. I think ITC listeners are smart enough to make up their own minds about what people say on my show or anyone else's.
My regular guests, or co-hosts--whatever--are Scott Lemon and Matt Asay. I'm enjoying their contributions and interaction a lot.
We just finished recording the third installment today (watch for it next Monday) with Tom Copeland, the founder and operator of RubyForge. It was a good conversation and I'm anxious for people to hear it.
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November 3, 2006
Nokia's Open Source
Maybe Nokia S60 users are all over this, but I wasn't aware of it until Kelly Flanagan pointed it out to me: Nokia has a small collection of open source projects online. This one, for example, looked pretty interesting: a Symbian port of Apache httpd and connectivity solution that gives a mobile phone a global URL. Of, how about a port of Python for the S60.
Phones have suffered from being too much about what the cellular company puts on them and not enough about what users put on them. Of course, the cellular companies do this to create walled gardens and charge people lots of money for things--like ringtones.
It's nice to see this Nokia site because it's a baby step toward Nokia creating general purpose platforms that can benefit from wider participation by a community of developers.
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November 2, 2006
Hacking the Vote
There's an HBO documentary on tonight called Hacking the Vote (see the trailer on YouTube). I don't have HBO, but wish I could watch it.
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Rails Demo
I put together a Rails Demo for my class that shows them how Rails could be used to do part of what they're doing in one assignment with J2EE. I plan to run through the entire demo Monday in class.
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Contextual Authority Tagging
Terrell Russell has a good post about the wisdom of crowds and expertise and why they're not the same. Crowds are good at giving opinions, but experts have knowledge.
Folksonomies are about the wisdom of crowds. Great for classification. Terrell things tags can be used to "[discovering] and [defining] cognitive authority through reputation." He's working on something called contextual authority tagging to fill this gap.
Contextual Authority Tagging is the use of folksonomy to discover and define cognitive authority through reputation within communities of users. Authority is granted by individual users to other individual users with regard to their perceived domains of knowledge via free text tags or labels. This allows discovery of at least two things, 1) which users in a group are authority figures on a certain topic area, and 2) what areas of expertise a particular user possesses. A basic proposal is laid out along with a few examples to foster communication and thought on this new distributed way to discover cognitive authority.From This Old Network » A democracy is for opinion, not for knowledge
Referenced Thu Nov 02 2006 09:19:03 GMT-0700 (MST)
This is one of the problems we punted when we built our reputation framework last spring. It's the problem that really needs to be solved. I was talking to Andre Durand earlier this week about this very thing.
The reason we punted on this problem was time constraints, but we're coming back around to it. The basic idea is that you want to assess someone's reputation about some particular point (e.g. determine whether they're really an expert on the Motorola Q). How do we know if the assessment is valid? Terrell identifies some open problems in determining the validity of the reputation:
- Is it internally consistent among peers? Does this matter?
- Is it "good enough", from different perspectives?
- If it's wrong, what about it is wrong?
- Is it comfortable to the person being evaluated?
- Does the person find it agreeable?
- What terms are missing? Who decides?
- What if every term has to be 'approved' by the person a priori?
He has a paper (PDF) on the topic which I need to take some time to read.
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Memes, Links, and Gestures
Jason Calacanis quoted my entire post on why mobile data center matter in Part II of this week's Gillmor Gang. (Part I of the Hangup Gang is entirely skippable, BTW, so start with Part II.)
He does this as an example of how podcast listeners aren't just listeners. Rather they're participants in the conversation. The whole discussion started with an observation by Jason that even though podcasts don't have links, people link them anyway. This got labeled "meme extension."
You might view this as a generalization of links to something more abstract. Or you might just view meme extension as something that's always gone on and links were just a cheap proxy for it in the hypertext world.
I think I'd lean toward the former because it's really the acceleration and expansion of conversation that's made this viable (another theme in Part II of Hangup Gang). I've struggled in the past to understand what Steve Gillmor means when he talks about gestures and "links are dead" but I'm starting to understand it better with this example.