Phil Windley's Technometria

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January 31, 2007

Stubborness Isn't the Same as Resoluteness

Barnett on the troop surge strategy:

In the normal world, those are all considered big signs that one's thinking is sort of screwed up, but Bush, who confuses stubbornness and incuriosity with resoluteness and certitude, chooses his own path. To me, that's a presidency out of control, lost in its own Gap.
From What we're creating in Iraq (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)
Referenced Wed Jan 31 2007 11:38:14 GMT-0700 (MST)

Later he talks about troop counts and effect:

Will someone please tell me what Dick Cheney knows that the none of the rest seem able to figure out? Because here's the historical record on good and bad peacekeeping jobs by America: Bosnia and Kosovo were good, and featured 22-23 soldiers per thousand population. Somalia and Haiti were bad, and featured 3-4 soldiers per thousand population. Afghanistan sits at 0.5, and Iraq's at 6.1. Even when the Iraqi army is added in, we're at about 14. Experts say 20 is the solid minimum for foreign troops. This surge puts us back up in the 160k range. We hit that peak twice before in 2004 and in 2005. The impact on troops per thousand will be negligible. Bush and Cheney were told all this going in, and decided otherwise. They still decide otherwise. We could have had the troops if we made the deals with others to get them. But Bush and Cheney don't do diplomacy. They don't trade. They don't compromise. They don't talk to enemies. Instead, they consistently put our troops in the worst possible strategic position...

I'm sad about what's been squandered in the management of Iraq. I've lost confidence that anything that happens before Jan 20, 2009 will make any difference.

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Calendars, Concept Count, and User Experience

Jon Udell has a detailed post on connecting Google Calendar and Outlook, but that's just the vehicle for talking about "concept counts"--the number of difficult concepts a person must understand and sort out to accomplish some task. Jon enumerates seven for this particular task; clearly too high. He concludes:

All this only scratches the surface. We could elaborate a whole lot more of these conceptual underpinnings. Bottom-line: support for standards is necessary but not sufficient. Even when products comply with standards like iCal, people struggle mightily to use those products interoperably. It's the conceptual barriers that get in their way. It's really hard to figure out how a concept expressed in one system maps to the same (or a similar) concept in another system. To make that easier, technology providers will have to agree on more than just protocols and file formats. We'll also have to work together to minimize conceptual clutter and normalize core concepts.
From Calendar cross-publishing concepts « Jon Udell
Referenced Wed Jan 31 2007 11:34:09 GMT-0700 (MST)

This week I posted a Technometria podcast on IT Conversations with Jon as a guest. His focus, now that he's at Microsoft, is evangelizing things geeks take for granted, like subscribing to an Outlook calendar in Google, to regular computer users. Obviously, doing that requires surmounting hurdles like concept count. Give it a listen, I think you'll find Jon fascinating.

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Open Source As Truth

Matt Asay, who co-hosts the weekly Technometria podcast I do on IT Conversations, has written an excellent essay on the pragmatism of open source. Matt uses Richardson's William James as a jumping off point. Matt says:

Why do I believe open source is the best way to develop, distribute, and support software? Because it works. Some may answer, "But look at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc. Surely they "work" in the sense that they have been massively successful." To this I concur, but with a caveat. Or, rather, with a statement: "at a given moment in time."

That is, the end-to-end proprietary model makes sense, but only in the early phases of a market's growth. Those of you who have read Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma will recognize this principle. It remains true just long enough to become false. Soon into the market's evolution, the market shifts to embrace heterogeneity. Those that cling to end-to-end proprietary ecosystems eventually fail through the exact same mechanisms that made them initially so successful.
From Open Sources | InfoWorld | Open source: pragmatism buys in | January 28, 2007 03:37 PM | By Matt Asay
Referenced Wed Jan 31 2007 11:11:43 GMT-0700 (MST)

This is a bold statement. He goes on to argue that if he's right "open source is a far more efficient way to profit from code". And in the tradition of James declares that "the truth of what I say (or the falsehood) will demonstrate itself in the market."

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Bosworth on Physics, Psychology, and Software

Adam Bosworth almost always makes me think, so I jump at a chance to listen to him or read what he writes. He recently gave a talk in NYC as part of the Google Speaker Series and Darryl Taft wrote up a report at eWeek.

Bosworth talked about how physics and psychology affect which applications fail and which succeed. His examples: AJAX, PDAs, and natural language recognition. His recommendations:

Keep it simple and stupid--even if that requires more clicks
Use AJAX where it makes a difference--not just the geewhiz factor
Make your tools transparent and fast
Support bottom-up learning

Google's success, of course, can be attributed to these (and other) ideas.

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Social Networking Without a Safety Net

Jeff Jarvis just got back from Davos where he found plenty of identity-related discussion. Jeff says "One of the thin threads I saw cutting through much of my Davos experience was the notion of identity" and goes on to enumerate many of them, including the trade-off between privacy and reputation and the relationship between reputation and transparency. What caught my eye though, was this:

All this opens up lots of opportunities in technology. I said to a couple of my fellow participants at Davos --- a media mogul, an internet entrepreneur --- and I will say it in another post here that I think the real opportunity is not to start a social network but to better enable the social network that the internet already is, to pull together our distributed identities and help us manage them and make the connections we want to make. That comes through the expression of our identities. We express that both with our content and our connections: We are the company we keep.
From BuzzMachine
Referenced Wed Jan 31 2007 10:13:56 GMT-0700 (MST)

In 2003, I wrote an essay on what I called loosely coupled conversations, describing what I think Jeff is talking about. Blogging is arguably the first, largest, and most successful social network on the Web. The remarkable thing is that there's no central service.

Blogging doesn't require a LinkedIn to keep track of the connections between people or a MySpace to say who your friends are. Blogging, done right, links you to people and helps you find friends, but without the safety net that social networking sites provide.

There's nothing wrong with the safety net that social networking sites provide. Millions of people benefit from the additional structure, but they're never going to be the Internet, which as Jeff points out is where the real opportunity lies.

Beyond blogging, adding real value to the loosely coupled social network we call the 'Net requires portable, Internet-scale, decentralizable identity. The kind that we discuss at the Internet Identity Workshop. Without such identities, we're at the mercy of some authority to grant our identity to us.

Blogging shows, I think, how you can break free from institutional identity and establish one with more independence. The only real institutional foundation my blog identity has is the domain name and the rules there are sufficiently established, that we can assume that windley.com is mine. After that, what identity I build on top of that domain is up to me. This is why I advise people who want to start blogging that they need to own the domain their blog is on.

Of course, for most, getting a domain and tying it to the place where you blog is way too hard. The geeks out there are laughing, but until it's as easy as signing up for MySpace or Typepad it's too hard. Creating, owning, and using an identity on the 'Net needs to simple.

Creating and, with the right set-up, owning an identity isn't that hard. After all, i-names do this already. The trick is using them. There are some things that need to happen in browsers and some things that the XRI folks need to do to make XRI resolution something that anyone can play with.

Not only is there opportunity here, but this also a nut I think can be cracked. If i-names or OpenID don't solve the problem, something else will. This isn't PKI where no matter which way you look at it, it's hard. Enabling Internet-wide identities that are easy to get and easy to use while at the same time providing real value and security is within reach.

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January 30, 2007

Can You Regulate VoIP?

House Bill 119 (First Substitute) would tax VoIP service for E911 service:

3 (a) Except as provided in Subsection (3)(b) and subject to the other provisions of this Subsection (3) a county, city, or town within which 911 emergency telephone service is provided may levy monthly an emergency services telephone charge on:
...
(iii) any other service, including voice over Internet protocol, provided to a user within the boundaries of the county, city, or town that allows the user to make calls to and receive calls from the public switched telephone network, including commercial mobile radio service networks.

Of course, the state already taxes landline and cell phones for these same services. There are some problems here:

How do you find all the VoIP providers to even notify them of this requirement?
Once you find them, what jurisdiction do you have to regulate them? Some VoIP providers do have some facility within the state. I think Vonage, for example, has some gear located in Utah in order to deliver service within the 801 area code, but that isn't required. Many do not. Skype isn't even a US company.
Why are you regulating voice traffic and not data traffic? If this works, then why not a tariff on Google searches to pay for anti-child pornography measures?

In the old days, geography mattered and so state-regulation of telephones worked. Whether it was right or not is a subject of a different blog. Now, geography matters less and less. That makes state arguments of jurisdiction harder to justify.

I'm sympathetic to the compelling interest the state has in making E911 service universal. I'm also a fan of service fees over general fund tax increases. Still, this one seems like a non-starter. I don't think it's possible and I don't think the courts will allow it.

At the same time, it's unfair for traditional phone companies to be regulated in this manner and VoIP companies to escape simply because of a technology difference. My general rule of thumb is that regulation shouldn't happen on the basis of technology because it will quickly be superseded by something new.

In general, the Internet has changed the technology and delivery of phone service radically and that has huge ramifications for regulators at the state and national levels.

I think the only solution in this case is to repeal the service fee for all phone customers and fund E911 service from the general fund. That more fair than any other alternative I can think of.

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January 29, 2007

Virtual Market Ponzi Schemes

Randolph Harrison has an interesting article asking whether SecondLife is a revolutionary virtual market or a ponzi scheme. Duane Day sent me the link and also this one defending SecondLife.

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Information Devices

One of my graduate students, Sam Curren, has an interesting post on hardware widgets. One, WidgetStation looks like the kind of thing you could build a nice special purpose dashboard out of. It's nice enough looking that the CEO or CFO wouldn't mind having on their desk.

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Senate Radio

The Utah Senate has a podcast called Senate Radio, a podcast featuring Utah Senators talking about their bills and ideas. Obviously, the interviewer is a friendly, but there's still some good value here. I like that it's a real podcast--you can subscribe with iTunes or whatever podcatcher you use and have it show up on your iPod if that's what you want. Otherwise, you just go to the site and listen there.

I'd like a list of the most recent shows to show up on the page (you can click on "Posts" on the embedded player and get that information). The production values could also be upgraded a little. Just getting into a room with less echo would help.

Still, this is a great example of politicians disintermediating the media by speaking directly to voters.

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January 26, 2007

White-box Cell Phones

I posted a write-up of the discussion on white-box cell phones from the Mobile Identity Workshop at Between the Lines.

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Open Podcast Device Ideas

Dave posted a list of ideas from this morning's discussion of open podcast devices.

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Mobile Identity Workshop 2007

Doc Searls is hosting the first Mobile Identity Workshop at cNet headquarters in San Francisco today. I flew out last night.

Doc's now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman center and this is one of the topics he's put on his list of things to explore. There's about 100 people here, so it's promising to be a great day. The usual identity gang is here, but there's quite a few new faces as well given the emphasis on mobile.

Doc started off the day with a list of statistics, noting that there are 800 million cars in the world, 1.2 billion PCs, 1.3 billion Internet connection points, and nearly 3 billion mobile phones. Mobile phones are nearing ubiquity and are intensely personal, so identity is incredibly important.

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January 25, 2007

Governance As Collaboration: Managing Layers 8 and 9

I'm doing a feature for InfoWorld on SOA governance and collaboration. The genesis was a short piece I did for InfoWorld on emerging collaboration options. Somehow Eric Knorr and I got talking about how SOA was a formalization of how collaboration can happen in building distributed applications and that governance was a key part of all that.

Governance is a term that has been much hyped in the last year, but that's because it's so important. Like most things, the technology of SOA isn't the hard part--its what Rohit Khare calls level 8 and 9 in the OSI seven-layer model: economics and politics. Governance is all about managing layers 8 and 9.

This view that governance is more important to successfully employing SOA than the technology factors is the basis for viewing SOA as a way of formalizing collaboration in the application development process. Governance prescribes and proscribes patterns of interaction, acceptable standards, and creates communication channels. Done right, governance also aligns the incentives in the organization with the goals of SOA and sets up support structures inside the organization.

One of the things that we'd like to do in this article on governance is be a bit more prescriptive than we have in the past. With that in mind, one idea I have is to center the article around a list of things to do to create good governance--best practices--and, as a result, manage layers 8 and 9. Here's an initial cut at such a list:

Do your homework

Understand the governance requirements at each stage of the SOA lifecycle--run-time policies are created and implemented very differently that development-time policies.
Find the right sponsor--having the right executive sponsor is critical to accomplishing everything else on this list.
Find out what SOA activities are already underway--you probably have pockets of excellence in your organization. Work to expand their influence.

Build a governance process

Establish the communication patterns that will create, approve, and implement SOA policies.
Ensure the feedback loop is working--if something isn't working, will you know?
Determine how policies will be enforced--if you're not enforcing policies, they're just suggestions.
Create a board of review for governance process--constant tweaking of the process is a fact of life. A board of review can ensure continued improvement.

Build your SOA Enterprise Architecture

Start with an interoperability framework--the IF is the easiest part of the enterprise architecture to create. Get it going to break everyone in and find the weak spots in the process.
Develop the right policies at the right time--You don't need to create a 3-inch rule book before you start using SOA. Pick the low-hanging policy fruit.
Create reference architectures (enterptise and system level)--reference architectures show developers, architects, and project managers the preferred way to do everything from building hooks in their code for the WSM tools to preferred hardware deployments for high-availability applications.

Get the tools in place

Use one registry for production level processes and another for production and QA--You need a registry to enable deploy-time and assemble-time policies. In fact you need at least two and the production registry needs to be redundant.
Use Web services management (WSM) tools to automate as much of the runtime policy as practical--WSM tools not only help enforce policy automatically, but they save developers from building things like security services into their services.

Build the right support into the organization

Enlist the project management office--the PMO is already controlling how projects happen, they're a great place to get some non-intrusive enforcement.
Align financial incentives with governance objectives--if people are rewarded to doing things that are counter to building an effective SOA process in your organization, you've lost the battle before you show up.
Create and use a center of excellence--supporting the SOA effort with a group who can showcase best practices, evangelize SOA, and answer questions gives the whole effort a boost.

Now, I'll admit that this probably isn't a linear process--it's a Hasse diagram at best. Still, this has to be presented in some order.

Why am I sharing all of this now? I want your feedback on what I've missed and what I've messed up. I also need to get in contact with people doing these things and talk to them. Contact me directly, or leave a comment.

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Exploring Interoperability Space

Paul Trevethick has put together a document identifying the dimensions along which components and data flows can be changed in user-centric identity systems. His space is a diagram that is general enough to cover most wire-level interactions of various user-centric identity systems. I found it instructive. For any specific set of interactions with various components some of the components or flows would drop out.

This is timely because we're trying to figure out how to do interoperability demonstrations for IIW07 in May. That requires mapping out scenarios that various parties will try to play in. Paul's diagram gives a good indication of the possible space of interactions from which those scenarios can be drawn. The hope is that this interaction will lead to an understanding of what's possible and what's not working yet.

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January CTO Breakfast Report

We talked about the recent SHA-1 hack and the MD5 exploits that are available. Lockcrack (a password cracking program) apparently has a table of pre computed hashes now installed that make cracking many hashes a job of just a few seconds.

There's a pattern in some technology start-ups where there's a brilliant technologist who has an idea that many others can't quite understand. They attract some money and generate a lot of hype on the basis of their brilliance, but eventually fail because they can't explain what they do.

We got into a discussion of phones and convergence. Richard Miller mentioned GrandCentral.com. They are a "one number for life." That's weird since I used to review them when they were a Web services routing company. Not sure if this is the same company repurposing their technology or someone who bought the name. I also mentioned Equals, a similar offering that I wrote about last September.

Of course, you can't Scott Lemon reported that he's playing with AskteriskNow and TrixBox. They're much better to install than plain old Asterisk. AsteriskNow seems very polished, but it will just wipe out whatever box you boot with the install CD in, so beware. Jared Smith, author of the Asterisk book lives in Draper Utah. We need to invite him to the CTO breakfast--I guess I just did.

We had a small discussion of living software and intentional programming. I really like this idea of building systems that build applications rather than building applications themselves. I think the popularity of Rails has something to do with this idea. Rails is just a taste of what's possible. Lisp macros also play into this idea as well. I've been thinking of how we could redesign CS330 (Programming Languages) in terms of domain specific languages and there's something in this whole living software idea that I'd like to have in the class.

Phil Burns brought up The Truth Machine, a book about a future where everyone has to tell the truth because of a new technology that will let people know you're lying. Scott mentioned KishKish, a lie-detector plugin for Skype.

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January 23, 2007

eGovernment Calendaring for Meetings

Sometimes it's the simple things that make the biggest differences--that's true for eGovernment as well. Rep. John Dougall has proposed HB222 in the Utah House to require that "a public body which holds regular meetings that are scheduled in advance over the course of a year shall give public notice at least once each year of its annual meeting schedule...on the Internet, in a manner that is easily accessible to citizens that use the Internet"

This is a good move and takes advantage of the strengths of the Internet to inform citizens of when their government is meeting. Naturally, I have a few suggestions:

Utah.gov ought to make it easy to find all of these either through a central calendar or some other kind of aggregation of distributed solutions.
Changes ought to be available via RSS, providing a way to notify people of changes.
The calendars themselves ought to be available in iCalendar format so that you can subscribe to the calendar.
Both the above two features ought to be available in various slices and categories, by agency, timeframe, topic, and so on.

Now, the bill shouldn't specify these design details (except maybe the first), but it ought to specify an owner who has the legal ability to make rules about the calendar (rules are legally binding).

Update: Listen to the UTC meeting from Nov 15, 2006 to hear the discussion of this item. It starts about 18:15 in.

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v|100 Podcast Interview

A month or so ago, I was interviewed by Dennis Wood of vSpring Capital as part of their v|100 series. The podcast is now up.

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January 22, 2007

The SHA-1 Defense

SHA-1 has been officially cracked. So what?

Technically, it probably doesn't mean much. Being able to produce a hash collision doesn't mean that you can produce a meaningful collision. For example if you have a digitally signed contract for $100, you won't be able to produce a contract for $100,000 that has the same signature--at least not yet.

What could be a problem are the legal challenges to SHA-1 based signatures on the basis of "reasonable" doubt. George Ou discuses these kinds of challenges and points to the MD5 defense:

A Sydney Magistrate threw out the digitally time stamped photos in a speeding ticket case because the Roads and Traffic authority failed to produce an expert to testify that its speed camera images were secure. The motorist's defense lawyer took advantage of the courts ignorance and argued that the MD5 hashing algorithm was a discredited piece of technology and therefore the speeding photos were invalid. Never mind that the defense never proved any actual tampering by the police department or explained how hash collisions in MD5 could possibly be used to fake photographs, it didn't matter because the judge was ignorant and the traffic authority was incompetent in their prosecution of the case. We lock people away for life with photographs and audio recordings all the time that have NO digital signatures but because a piece of police evidence used a less than perfect MD5 hashing algorithm in the digital signature the entire case was thrown out. With SHA-1 being officially cracked by Chinese researchers, the "MD5 defense" just became the MD5/SHA-1 defense.
From » Putting the cracking of SHA-1 in perspective | George Ou | ZDNet.com
Referenced Mon Jan 22 2007 16:44:14 GMT-0700 (MST)

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Politicopia: Participatory Legislation

Steve Urquhart is the Rules Chairman of the Utah House of Representative. Before I worked in the Governor's office, I had no idea what that meant. It's a very powerful position because the Rules Committee essentially decides what bills make it to the floor and can be voted on. In other words, they're the gatekeepers who decide what legislation gets to a vote.

Rep. Urquhart is also one of the Utah politicians most committed to transparency in Government. He was one of the first politician bloggers in Utah or anywhere. Now, he's taken a big step toward making the legislative process more open and accessible: Politicopia. In his words:

For me, the beauty of the Internet is its ability to cut out the middleman. Though the Internet has moved sellers and consumers closer together, its strides in politics haven't yet been so grand. In politics, intermediaries -- like special interest groups, bureaucrats, and the media -- heavily filter information between people and their elected officials.

In an effort to give people a more direct handle on the issues pending before the Utah Legislature (and to give elected officials a better read on what the public wants), some friends and I started Politicopia. Check it out, participate in the dialogue, and help move your government where you want it to go.
From Steve Urquhart
Referenced Mon Jan 22 2007 10:44:41 GMT-0700 (MST)

I like this idea for a couple of reasons:

Rather than letting the "experts" tell us about bills, we can discuss them directly. Blogs do that as well, but in a more distributed way.
Rather than a general political debate, the site encourages debate about specific bills. That's important because it focuses the discussion.

I think this is a huge event. For the first time I can imagine, the Rules Committee is saying "tell us what you think" and giving you the tool to do it. Take a minute and go to Politicopia and comment on a bill that's already there, or, if the bill you care about isn't there, add it.

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January 19, 2007

Building Living Software

Steve Yegge rants, in reference to software design, that crap is still crap, no matter how many rubies you swallowed. If software design interests you, then you'll enjoy this--even if you don't agree.

As I was reading this, I was reminded several times about Scott Rosenberg's article on Charles Simonyi, Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta. Simonyi, who was the force behind Office at Microsoft and arguably the richest programmer in the world, is hot on the heels of a programming methodology he calls "intentional programming" and has a company to develop it Intentional Software.

The basic point is described in the article by means of a fable. The bottom line: don't build systems, rather build systems that build systems. Steve's not saying the same thing exactly, but there's a similarity of purpose, if not execution.

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Practical Choices

Barnett has a great post on Israel and Iran and the choices the Israelis face. Puts it in very stark terms.

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Distributing the Surveillance Society

New York will allow 911 Dispatchers to receive and use images from cell phones. At one point, the surveillance society seemed like it would happen with lots of cameras mounted on lightpoles, but this points to a more distributed method. Make it easy to tattle on your neighbors with cell phones and people will do it.

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Digital Certificates for State Government

The State of Illinois has been a big proponent of digital certificates for citizens and has been issuing them for some time. People can use these to authenticate to eGovernment applications. Of course, you don't want to force people to use a digital certificate when they renew their driver's license, but there are somethings that require strong authentication and the lack of good ways to accomplish it hampers digital government.

According to this story from Government Technology, they just issued their 100,000th digital certificate. They have also cross-certified with the Federal Bridge Certification Authority (FBCA), so these state-issued digital IDs can also be used for authentication to federal government applications.

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CTO Breakfast for January (at Novell)

It's time to start the CTO Breakfast series for 2007! We'll be meeting in a new place this time, so pay attention.

The CTO Breakfast for January will be help Thursday Jan 25th at 8am at the Novell Cafeteria. As usual you can bring any topic that has caught your interest for discussion. I'm anxious to talk about Windows Vista, bad software, and the new iPhone.

Here's directions: Take the University Ave exit off I-15, cross University Ave, and turn left (north) onto Novell Place and enter the Novell campus. When you drive up to bldg H (the 8-story bldg), turn left and park in the SW parking lot. The sidewalk on the west side of bldg H will take you to the cafe (bldg G). We'll be in the conference room at the far end (past the food court).

Here's the schedule for upcoming CTO Breakfasts. Put them on your calendar now, so you don't double book.

January 25 (Thursday)
February 15 (Thursday)
March 22 (Thursday)
April 27 (Friday)
May 24 (Thursday)

I had breakfast at the Novell cafeteria last month and was impressed--good food and good choice. I know this is further south than many like to drive, but I hope you'll give it a shot and then give me your feedback.

I hope to see you there!

Many thanks to Novell for making the space available to us.

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The Coming China Wars

I just finished listening to Moira's interview of Peter Navaro on his new book The Coming China Wars. Very interesting. I enjoyed Moira's earlier interview with Peter as well. This is just part one of a two part interview, so I'm looking forward to next week.

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January 18, 2007

The Longtail of Banking

This article from the Economist on the unbanked doesn't use the term, but what they're talking about is th long tail of retail banking. I have a friend who, a while back, didn't have any bank accounts. His life wasn't pretty.

I've always had a jaundiced view of check cashing establishments--they seem to prey on the poor (and mathematically challenged). On the other hand, I have a friend who runs an emergency dental outfit and many of their customers are "unbanked." Teaming up with a check-cashing outfit allowed them to offer services to these folks--who usually don't have the cash on hand, don't have credit, and need their teeth fixed right now--while managing the risk.

I have a pretty conservative (Republican?) view of it, however. The market will chase the excessive profits these establishments seem to make and narrow that gap until the price reflects a reasonable profit after accounting for the risk. Evidence? The Economist article mentions El Banco de Nuestra Comunidad, which targets check-cashers by undercutting them. Imagine that!

By the way, the article also mentions Wal-Mart's banking plans, which apparently include Utah. Recent legislation in Colorado attempts to stop Wal-Mart and similar banks. I think that's a big mistake. Any time you've got an established industry trying to legislate an upstart (if you can call Wal-Mart an upstart) out of existence, it's probably an attempt to maintain the status quo at everyone else's expense.

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Who Owns Your eBay Data

In the Who Owns "You" panel at Supernova (available on IT Conversations) the question came up about eBay reputation. An eBay seller's reputation score is calculated from how other eBay users rate the seller. Does that score belong to the seller, the eBay users who contributed to it, or eBay?

Pretty easy actually, when you consider the principles of reputation.

The eBay score is eBay's story about the user. They calculate that story and it's pretty simple but still they're the ones deciding the algorithm that's used.
The eBay users and eBay jointly own the ratings. That is, each user should have the right to use in any way they want all of the ratings they've contributed. Of course, so does eBay.
The seller jointly owns, with the buyer data about the transactions that he or she had with each buyer. Both parties should be able to use that data in any way they see fit.
In the interest of transparency, the eBay seller ought to also have the ability to inspect, but not change any rating about them.

Now, what should be and what is are two different things. Right now, there's no convenient way to export your transactions or ratings from eBay. eBay considers that a key part of their business model. Internet-scale identity systems however, will invariably give rise to cross-site reputation. Something I think will have a big impact on the 'Net.

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(Not) Scaling MySpace

Larry Dignan has a five-point analysis of MySpace's IT infrastructure and it's scaling issues over at Between the Lines. Very interesting. I know a little about MySpace before they were bought and this scaling issue doesn't surprise me. Read the Baseline article for the details.

Bonus: I posted a piece on Tivo's walled garden and Tivoserver at BTL this morning.

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Blogging for Friends

I found this piece by David Carr about 24-hour news people in the Times from a post on Thomas Barnett's blog about why he wouldn't dream of giving up his blog. The gist of both articles is that blogs are lot of work, but once you're hooked, it's hard to imagine life without it.

Carr talks about how he has friends from his blog, sort of:

There is a serial commenter on my blog and others at The New York Times, "Mark Klein, M.D.," an older, accomplished gentleman with a lot of opinions and time on his hands. He can be a bit of a crank, politically incorrect to the point of provocation, and yet he always writes as though we are friends.

And maybe we are. A week ago, he posted a note saying that he was traveling to Israel and that I wasn't to interpret his sudden silence as a sign that he'd lost interest in me. As if I cared.

Except that I did. I sort of missed him. I dropped him a note and then called him in Israel about being off the grid (in particular, my grid).

"It's nice to hear from you. I missed you too," he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"There is an intimacy to the exchange of electrons --- almost like an online romance --- that means you are a real person to me," he said. "We were already having a conversation of sorts."
From 24-Hour Newspaper People - New York Times
Referenced Thu Jan 18 2007 08:30:09 GMT-0700 (MST)

It's funny, there are lots of people I've never met in person, who I know because they read my blog and send me email or comment. Occasionally, I run into one at a conference or something and it's not at all like the first time you meet someone.

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January 17, 2007

Adding Value By Taking Away Choice

Thomas Beck did a great job of expanding on and adding value to the discussion Matt, Scott and I had with Bryce Roberts on the Technology and Venture Capital podcast from a few weeks ago. His value map is a useful tool for finding value in various delivery chains.

I think his equation can be refined however--at least for media plays. He says that

value = sevices + device

I think the model Spencer Wang presents in The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment is a good one and it has a five level delivery chain:

producer -> packager -> delivery -> device -> end user

Wang posits that the value is in the packaging making this point: the rise of user generated content, combined with virtually free delivery (Internet) leads to a situation where users have nearly infinite choice and that leads to overwhelming confusion. Who solves that pain? The packager. The packager filters content, taking away to add value.

In the old days, the TV network functioned as packager. In modern terms, Wang talks about Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace as packagers. I think IT Conversations is another example of a packager in a niche space.

IT Conversations adds value by collecting good content together and making it easy for listeners to find things they like. We don't do as good a job as we should, but that's our goal and one we think about every day.

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January 16, 2007

Buying Windows Vista

A while back, I posted links to reviews of Windows Vista. That page is getting quite a bit of play and undoubtedly, my flippant summary at the end isn't much help for people trying to make buying decisions, so here's my buying advice (with links to Amazon for easy purchasing).

First off, will Vista run on your computer? If you're computer is reasonably new (last two years), then you're probably OK. You'll need gobs of memory, however--probably at least 1Gb of RAM. So, make sure you add that into the total purchase price if you decide to upgrade.

Now, the bad news is that there's way too many editions of Vista and that's sure to cause some confusion. For most people, there's only two real choices: Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows Vista Home Premium. I never recommended XP Home edition to anyone, but the Vista Home Premium edition looks to be pretty good. (Don't purchase the Home Basic edition.)

What does Ultimate have that Home Premium doesn't? Here's a list:

Max memory of 128 Gb (vs 16Gb) in the 64-bit edition
Windows ShadowCopy
System image backup and recovery
Encrypting File System (EFS)
Windows BitLocker Full Drive Encryption
Client only remote desktop
IIS Web server
Offline file and folder support
Fax and Scan

If you can live without those, then settle for the Home Premium edition.

If you're upgrading from Microsoft XP Media Center Edition or Windows XP Home Edition, you can get the upgrade edition of Vista Home Premium and save $90. If you're upgrading from Microsoft XP Media Center Edition or Windows XP Home Edition / Professional, you can get the upgrade edition of Vista Ultimate and save $130!

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Making IT Purchasing Decisions

I just published the latest in my Technometria series on IT Conversations, a conversations with Kelly Phillpps. Kelly is someone I've turned to for years because of his way of thinking deeply about issues. We discuss the weeks announcements from CES and MacWorld and those turn to a discussion of open source in the enterprise and how companies make IT purchasing decisions.

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Identity Crisis Book Forum

Jim Harper will be conducting a book forum on Thursday January 18 at 12pm EST at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. on his excellent book Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood. The event will be streamed if you can't make it to Washington by Thursday. After Jim speaks, there will be comments from, and discussion with, James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Jay Stanley of the ACLU.

Jim spoke here in Utah last year and I recorded the talk and placed it on IT Conversations where it continues to attract listeners and is highly rated.

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January 12, 2007

Firebug

Brent Thompson turned me onto Firebug, a Firefox plugin for inspecting and editing HTML and CSS on pages you're viewing. This is a lot more convenient that editing the CSS and then reloading to see what the change does. You can also edit and debug Javascript on the fly and explore the DOM. Fun stuff. And the fact that it's a plugin for Firefox means that it's OS agnostic.

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January 11, 2007

YouTube For eGovernment

David Stephenson's arguing that YouTube will prove itself a critical tool for emergency management. Government agencies could already make much better use of video, podcasts, and screencasts than they do. Once they catch onto their importance, they'll need to realize that content aggregators like YouTube are a much better alternative than burying these services on some agency Web server.

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January 10, 2007

Cisco Sues Apple Over iPhone Name

Steve Jobs jumped the gun in announcing the iPhone according to a lawsuit filed today by Cisco. Dan Farber has the entire complaint at Between the Lines. They ought to just call it the Apple Phone. Here's some other related links from Between the Lines:

What's the rest of the story? Apple can't be that stupid. Or can they?

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Using Quicksilver

If you use OS X, you should also use Quicksilver. Here's a good tutorial on getting started with Quicksilver and here's one that's a little more advanced.

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January 9, 2007

Why Software Sucks, the Podcast

I just published the podcast version of Why Software Sucks on IT Conversations. The interview is part of the Technometria series with David Platt, author of the book. Here's the description of the show:

What is the most important thing to the average computer user? They want their machine to "just work". Why does Google know how to correctly translate a United Parcel Service tracking number, while the actual UPS website requires multiple entries just to get to the point where the tracking number can be entered? Programmer David Platt is the author of "Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It". He discusses his findings with Phil, Matt, and Scott.

Platt believes that much of the problem is related to poor design, with not enough consideration for the end user. For example, he considers open source to be software written for other programmers, of little interest to the typical computer user. He also believes that blaming a particular operating system does little to solve the problem. He talks about the number of programmers who drive cars with manual transmissions to better illustrate how different the programmer thinks compared to other people.

While average users are expected to use the computer as an everyday tool, programmers too often produce software that has poor functionality, especially compared to other devices used to perform other routine tasks. People go to Home Depot to find something that makes a hole, not to learn every little thing about drills before they can make the holes.

One of the other major problems is that software is too often marketed to enterprises rather than individuals, and that constant updates are meant to convince companies to regularly upgrade, with little or no thought given to the end user.

The discussion is both enlightening and entertaining. While Platt believes the problem can be solved, he thinks it won't happen unless software designers change their point of view to better consider the needs of the end user.
From IT Conversations: David Platt
Referenced Tue Jan 09 2007 21:07:41 GMT-0700 (MST)

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iPhone Is an OSX Computer

I'm reading Jason O'Grady's live blogging of the Jobs keynote. Jobs just introduced the iPhone saying "Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products 1. widescreen iPod with touch controls 2. revoutionary mobile phone 3. breakthrough internet communication device" But it's not three products, it's one: the iPhone. It runs OS X and has a multi-touch, 160dpi wide-screen--no stylus. Jason said he was considering leaving the keynote to go buy one. Connectivity is both EDGE and Wi-Fi; it switches between them seamlessly. It features a full Safari browser and real email. Where do I get one?

Update: You can't get one...until June. This from the Apple iPhone site: This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.

Using SizeEasy, Engadget has a comparison of the iPhone, the Q, Treo, and Pearl. About the same size as as the Q, slightly bigger, but much skinnier than the Treo.

Here's a c|net video of the iPhone portion of the Keynote.

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Detailed Windows Vista Review

Update: See my cheatsheet on Windows Vista Buying Advice for the easy answer of what you need to buy.

Have you been wondering just exactly what Window's Vista is and when to upgrade? The most detailed review I've found is from Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows. Admittedly, there's a pro-windows bias here (we all have some kind of bias) and the mousemines that litter the site, waiting for you to accidentally mouse over them and launch a video are truly annoying. Still, there's plenty of good info here. Here's Paul's eight part review:

If that's too much reading for you, here's my short review: Vista is late, most of the interested features have been jettisoned, and the rest have been available in OSX or through XP add-ons for months or more, but even so, if you use Windows, it's not a matter of if you'll upgrade, but when. So, it doesn't really matter what the features are frankly. Eventually, you'll buy it.

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30 Boxes

Yesterday Dave Fletcher pointed out 30 Boxed, a tool for building a calendar view of the last 30 days using RSS feeds--any RSS feeds. The calendar includes images, links and other information. Here's one from this blog's RSS. Try building one of your own.

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January 8, 2007

Podcasting: Beyond the Audio

Darusha Wehm is the force behind all of supporting material that appears on the IT Conversations Web site for each show. She runs the network of Web site editors who write the text that accompanies each show, trains new editors, handles assignment problems, and answers the questions that come up about sticky situations. She spoke at the last Podcast Academy and I just posted her show on supporting podcasts with other material the IT Conversations homepage.

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Podcast Academy V

GigaVox Media has announced Podcast Academy V to be held at Duke University on Feb 14-15, 2007. So grab your valentine and head out--if you're interested in Podcasting, there's no better place to learn how to podcast. I went to the last one and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

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January 5, 2007

Top Ten Shows on IT Conversations for December 2006

Here are the top ten most popular shows on IT Conversations for December by downloads:

Overall in December we served up over 800 unique MP3 files from our collection. Interestingly 9% of our requests for MP3 files were from China.

As interesting as these numbers are, I depend even more on ratings that you leave on the individual programs. Take a minute to login to IT Conversations and rate some of the shows you've listened to recently.

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January 4, 2007

BibDesk for BibTeX

If you use BibTeX for managing paper references (and after all, who doesn't) and you use a Mac, then you should know about BibDesk, an open source tool for managing BibTeX bibliography files.

BibDesk is at a great intersection: open source tool used by people who, for the most part, know how to program. There are frequent updates and the set of features is impressive. For example, I love the ability to not only manage the bibliographic data for an article, but the PDF as well, if I happen to have it. It turns my BibTeX file into a reference library.

The keywords are great and the preview, which shows what the entry will look like once TeX get a hold of it is very nice. Sharing of BibTeX data via Bonjour is also cool. Recommended.

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I-names and Usability

Kaliya likes i-names. She does a good job in this post of articulating why. There are a few things she points out, however, that will only be "good" and "simple" if we choose to make them so.

In particular, she says "[d]omain names system usability sucks." The unstated implication is that XRI resolution won't. It's hard to tell since the tools for letting users do that aren't really available yet. Will they be better and easier to use? WE can only hope.

Also, i-names are deceptively simple now because not many people are using them. What happens when all the good i-names are gone and people are using ones like

=thisismyreallylonginamebecausenothingelsewasavailable

And is this example from Kaliya really better than a LiveJournal URL?

@integrativeactivism*morningglory

Probably not. The only thing you can say for it in terms of usability is that at least it's not in reverse order.

Don't get me wrong--as I said earlier, Kaliya makes some good points, but I don't believe that the primary benefit of i-names is usability. The primary benefit of i-names is the power you get from any system that creates a layer of indirection: the power of abstraction. Here's Kaliya's example that illustrates that beautifully:

I like the fact that I could start out with a community name like @integrativeactivism*morningglory and use that on several sites around the web and then....decide you know i want a top level name just for me ... so I go and get =morningglory and all the logins that I have under that other community name don't break. The i-number under @integrativeactivism*monrningglory is mine and can be resolved to =morningglory.
From Identity Woman » Why i-names? I think they work for my people.
Referenced Thu Jan 04 2007 08:56:08 GMT-0700 (MST)

As I said in an earlier post: "XRIs make up for their additional complexity in semantic mappings and flexibility."

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January 3, 2007

IEEE Spectrum Radio Shorts

The edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio I just published is a small experiment. Some of the features we get from Spectrum are shorter than our normal format. I decided we'd combine them into a single show. For example, this show is only 23 minutes long and contains four short programs on Sudoku, exoskeletons, housefly aeronatics, and Microsoft's MyLifeBits project. We'll probably do this about once a month. Let me know whether you like it or not.

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Routing Around VMWare

Today Terry Wilcox, my grad students working on virtualization informed me that he had Xen installed and working on our virtualization testbed (two dell 6650's with 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM). Working means that he can transfer running instances from one box to the other. We have been doing a lot of performance studies of VMWare's ESX, but switched to Xen for the next part of Terry's research.

The reason isn't that we wanted some infrastructural diversity, although that's not all bad. The reason is that we had reason to fear that VMWare might hinder the publication of Terry's work, a risk we can't afford to take. They'd sent us a (nice) email about some earlier work we'd published informing us that our license doesn't allow us to publish performance information. So, we'll route around the issue entirely and use Xen.

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January 2, 2007

Installing MS-DOS in Parallels

In the fun, but mostly useless, knowledge category, tonight I loaded MS-DOS 6.22 onto Parallels. I didn't have a copy on CD, only floppies and I couldn't get Parallels to see the USB floppy, but I was able to easily make floppy disk images of the originals and mount those. Here's how:

Plug in the USB floppy drive and load the floppy. You should be able to see all the files from the Mac Finder window.
Start OS X's Disk Utility application. Click on the floppy and then click "New Image" in the menu bar of Disk Utility.
Select "Read/Write" for image format and no encryption.
Type a name and then click save.
Once the image is done, change the extension to "fdd". I did this in Terminal so that I didn't have to put up with Finder asking me insipid questions.

That's it. Now you've got an image that you can mount from any Parallels instance. I created images of the four original MS DOS 6.22 install floppies and in a few minutes had a working instance of DOS. I even fired up BASIC and played with it a bit. I'd forgotten about "DoubleSpace" and other programs for making the computer usable. DoubleSpace seems downright laughable in this day with 200Gb drives in a laptop, but there was a time...

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Who Wants To Be a VC?

Over the holidays I published a reduced schedule on IT Conversations. But we start the new year off with a full slate of great shows. Today I put up the Technometria show featuring Bryce Roberts of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Talking with Bryce was fun. At one point I asked him how one becomes a venture capitalist, so if you've ever wondered, give it a listen.

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Teaching Yourself to Program

This article from Peter Norvig on teaching yourself to program in 10 years has been around for a while, but it's still worth reading. The basic points? Get interested in programming, pick an interactive language, and do it--for a long time.

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