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June 29, 2007
iPhone Update
I'm number ninety six in line. I'm about half way up, so I expect there's about 200 people here. The Apple guys have been by to pick up trash and hand out slurpees (very nice!). They said we'd "be fine" so I expect that the inventory is good. There's lots of news crews and reporters working the lines as well. People keep showing up.
The security guards for the mall came by a while back and gave us "the rules" regarding saving places, etc. People can swap in and out of line, but if they try and save places for more people than are in line, security will kick them out.
Rummors were that the Cingular store a block away didn't have much of a line, so a bunch of people jumped out a few hours ago and went there. Some of them came back later--apparently the Cingular store only had like 20 phones, so when their line got too long, they told people to go.
A guy near me in line, Kevin from Park City TV, went to Dicks Sporting Goods and bought a shade tent. I went over and bought a golf umbrella. Lots of people have bought chairs, umbrellas, and so on. Whether of not Apple makes money, Dick's is cleaning up!
California Pizza Kitchen has been making deliveries to the line. I got a Diet Coke and it about saved my life.
Apple will let you by two phones--even the security guard confirmed this. My second phone is already spoken for. Sorry.
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The Social Side of IT Conversations
Jon Udell's Interviews with Inovators submission for this week is a conversation with Simon St Laurent. St. Laurent isn't someone you'll necessarily meet at the next O'Reilly conference you go to. Jon singles him out as an innovator because of his use of local blogs reflect and enrich the life of a community. Jon says, "Day by day, and year by year, he's showing his fellow citizens that political blogging doesn't have to be bombastic and divisive. It can be a civil dialogue that informs and unites."
On his blog, Jon asks why IT Conversations and our sister channel Social Innovations Conversations are different channels for different audiences. He quotes Dean Kamen from the Globeshakers series on SIC:
Given the enormous rate at which technology is moving forward, almost all the 'Can this be done?' questions have essentially been answered by 'Yes.' The much tougher question right now isn't 'What can we do with technology?' --- it's 'What should we do with technology?' That's a much harder question involving practical issues, moral issues...the haves and the have-nots, in technology, education, and health care, are diverging.
People who can develop new technologies ought to start thinking, more than they have in the last few decades, about where it's appropriate to deploy the energy and passion to develop the next level of technology. There are just so many video games that we need, and just so many luxury leisure-time products that we need.
If societies start to recognize that we really do get what we celebrate, and we start celebrating the right things, we'll see a much more effective use of our available technologies and a much more appropriate and focused set of developments of our future technologies. Instead of focusing on what we can do with technology, we should focus on how to be responsible to each other, to the environment, to the future of this delicate little planet.
I can cross post shows from SIC to IT Conversations and I'll try to do that more often. If you run across SIC shows that you think other IT Conversations listeners might enjoy, contact me.
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Document Engineering
This week's Technometria podcast is a discussion with Bob Glushko of UC Berkeley's iSchool. Bob's book, Document Engineering is a look at the methods people should employ in designing the document that surround their business. Document, in Bob's view, is a very broad term, encompassing everything from books and papers to XML. If you last week's discussion with Dave Weinberger, then this week's podcast will nice complement to that.
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In Line for iPhone
I'm in line at the SLC Apple store. So far, it's been kind of fun. A little bit of a party atmosphere. The Apple store employees just came by handing out water. Unfortunately, the line is going around the building to the west and so the shade is getting scarce. It's going to be HOT before this is all done. I brought some sunscreen and have been sharing it--gotta make friends to survive.
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June 28, 2007
Scoble on Kyte.tv at an Apple Store
Scoble's sitting in front of an Apple store and video blogging on Kyte.tv. Lots of fun.
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A World With No Advertising
Most of complain about ads, particularly ones that are "in our face" like the new floaters appearing on Web sites. Barnett has an interesting perspective based on a year spent in the Soviet Union in 1985:
One thing I remembered from my summer in the USSR in 1985: no advertising meant no one knew where anything was or how to buy it, so you wasted so much time ferreting out such info--just wandering around.From The Gap will map itself (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)
Referenced Thu Jun 28 2007 16:12:22 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Of course, that doesn't mean all ads are good or appreciated. The Web has allowed many of us to get at information that we need by easily pulling it when we need it rather than getting it by having the ads pushed at us and hoping the stream of information is helpful.
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Bandit's Cross Platform Selector
Novell asked me for a quote for this press release on the Bandit cross-platform card selector. I said:
"For the vision of user-centric identity to thrive, ecosystems like information card selectors have to extend beyond a single operating system. As a vendor of a major Linux distribution, Novell is in a great position to lead the use of information card selectors on Linux. I'm very encouraged by these developments."
I haven't tried building the card selector for OS X yet. If anyone beats me to it, I'd love to hear a report. As I said in my post about SignOn.com, I like the idea of being able to use an InfoCard to log into sites--even those that use OpenID.
When I gave the quote, the whole firestorm over Federated Media's blogger campaign was happening. Fortunately, I don't take money from anyone for my blog, so I can say something positive about Novell's efforts in this area without looking like a shill.
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June 26, 2007
iPhone Matches Hype
David Pogue, the technology reviewer for the NY Times, has released his review of the iPhone. The conclusion:
[E]ven in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles.
In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn't hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, "It ain't bragging if you done it."From The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype - New York Times
Referenced Tue Jun 26 2007 17:45:18 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Predictably, Pogue pans both the AT&T voice network strength (citing Consumer Reports) and the EDGE network. The download times he gives are scary:
Then there's the Internet problem. When you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot, going online is fast and satisfying.
But otherwise, you have to use AT&T's ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times's home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo, two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.From The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype - New York Times
Referenced Tue Jun 26 2007 17:48:20 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Ugh! Waiting nearly two minutes for Amazon to appear??? The iPhone software can be upgraded, but I doubt that the phone can move from the EDGE network for 3G (when that's available) without a hardware upgrade. So, you may be shelling out $600 now only to turn around and upgrade the hardware later on when the newer network is available. That's sure to turn some people off.
Some other reviews:
- Ed Baig, USA Today: Not perfect, but worthy of the hype
- Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, Wall Street Journal: On balance, beautiful and breakthrough
Mostly notably from the Mossberg review was that he was able to conquer the keyboard:
The iPhone's most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt -- who did most of the testing for this review -- was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.From The Mossberg Solution - WSJ.com
Referenced Tue Jun 26 2007 17:54:24 GMT-0600 (MDT)
That's good news. People have been worried about that.
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Linking OpenID and CardSpace: SignOn.com
PingID (disclaimer: I'm on the advisory board) released the beta of SignOn.com today. SignOn.com is an OpenID identity provider that also accepts InfoCards. Once you've signed up, you can register an InfoCard with SignOn.com, you can use that to authenticate when you use your SignOn id at a Web site. Confused? Here's an example:
- I go to Jyte.com and click "login"
- Jyte asks for an OpenID, so I give it my SignOn OpenID (windley.signon.com)
- SignOn asks me to authenticate (since I'm not currently logged in there) and I choose to authenticate with an InfoCard
- The card selector pops up, I select an InfoCard I've previously registered with SignOn.com
- I'm asked the usual "grant permission" questions and select the right option
- I'm in
This sounds more complicated that it is. The fun part was that I essentially logged into Jyte using am InfoCard. Look Ma! No Passwords!
The rest of the site is, for now at least, a good implementation of an OpenID identity provider with easy to understand buttons for adding profile info, managing "trusted sites," and viewing past activity. All in all a very solid identity provider play with a great twist.
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iPhone Service Plans
Apple and AT&T have released details of the iPhone service plan. Most interesting part: the phone is activated using iTunes. Looks like you'll just buy the box and take it home to activate it rather than doing it at the store. They say that customers with existing AT&T contracts will have the option of keeping their current number and upgrading the account to work with the iPhone, but I'll bet that's not true of business accounts. We'll see.
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Java Framework Round-Up
Matt Raible of Raible Designs gave this morning's keynote presentation comparing Java Web frameworks (slide - PDF). Matt started off with an overview of the pros and cons of each framework, as he saw them.
Java Server Faces or JSF is the Java EE standard. Lots of demand and lots of jobs working with JSF. Initially, its fast and easy to develop with. There are a lot of tools and component libraries are plentiful. The bad news: Tag soup for JSPs--the pages are lots of anything but HTML. JSF doesn't do REST-style Web services well and security can be a problem. What's more, there's no single source for an implementation. Consequently, it's hard to track down answers about problems.
Spring MVC has lifecycle for overriding binding, validation, etc. It also integrates iwth many view options seamlessly: JSP/JSTL, Tiles Velocity FreeMarker, Excel, XSL, PDF, and others. Because control is inverted, it's easy to test. The downside: lots of configuration. Also, it's almost too flexible. For example, there's no default parent controller. Spring MVC doesn't have built-in AJAX support. That can be an advantage since built-in AJAX support in other frameworks is frequently out of date.
Stripes doesn't use XML following the Rails mantra of convention over configuration. There's good documentation and Stripes is easy t learn. An enthusiastic community is eager to help newcomers get up to speed. The cons: the community is small and development is not as active as in other projects. If Stripes does what you want, great. If it doesn't then you may be out of luck. Another problem, Action URLs are hard coded.
Struts 2 has a simple architecture that's easy to extend. The tag library is easy to customize with FreeMarker or Velocity. You can use either controller-based or page-based navigation. Digging into the code is pretty easy. The downsides: Documentation is poorly organized. It's wiki-based and mostly just thrown together. There's too much concentration on new features rather than stabilization. Using Google will give you back Struts 1 documentation rather than Struts 2 documentation.
Tapestry can be very productive once you know it. Templates are HTML, so it's very designer friendly. Lots of innovation happens between releases. On the other hand, the documentation is conceptual rather than pragmatic. It can be hard to find answers to specific problems. There's a steep learning curve and a long release cycle.
Wicket is great for Java developers, not Web developers. There's a tight binding between pages and views. There's an active community and getting support from the creators is easy. But... HTML templates live next to Java code in the package. Could be a good thing, but it throws people off at first. You need to have a good grasp of OO. You need to be willing to live with the "Wicket way"--everything is done in Java.
Matt moves into an evaluation based on the following criteria:
- Ajax Support: Is it built-in and easy to use?
- Bookmark-ability: Can users bookmark pages and return to them easily?
- Validation: How easy is it to use and does it support client-side (JavaScript) validation?
- Testability: How easy is it to test Controllers out of container?
- Post and Redirect: How does the framework handle the duplicate post problem?
- Internationalization: How is i18n supported and how easy is it to get messages in Controllers?
- Page Decoration: What sort of page decoration/composition mechanisms does the framework support?
- Community and Support: Can you get questions answered quickly (and respectfully)?
- Marketability of Skills: If you learn the framework, will it help you get a job?
- Job Count: What is the demand for framework skills on dice.com and indeed.com?
I won't report the detailed results of the evaluation of each framework in these areas. See the slides if you want to see the results (and pretty graphs). What do people use? Struts and JFC were reported as the most used in an AppFuse survey.
After the session, I asked Matt which of the Java frameworks is most like Rails. He said that Struts2 and Spring were trying hard on the convention over configuration front and Tapestry 5 is promising dynamic class loading. He ended by speculating that the best solution was probably a hybrid with Java doing the heavy lifting on the back-end and some dynamic language doing presentation on the front end.
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June 25, 2007
Justinian's Flea
A few weeks ago I was walking through Borders and saw Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. This, frankly, is the kind of book I can't resist. I was expecting a book about a period of history I'm largely unfamiliar with (the early Byzantium era) with a twist. I wasn't disappointed.
Rosen tell's the story of the Emperor Justinian, the world that came before him, the world that came after, and the importance of the bubonic plague in shaping the course of Europe. The book combines a detailed look at history with a respectable understanding of biology and bits of religion, law, architecture, demographics, philosophy, and literature to make for a very interesting read. There are plenty of references for those wanting to follow a thread to its end.
Surely, the history of Europe, Rome, China, and Islam are more complicated than what can be explained by a flea and the bacteria it carries. Rosen acknowledges that. But he also makes an interesting case that the combination of events that resulted in the Eastern Roman Empire being devastated by the plague had a disproportionate effect on all of these nations.
The plague left Rome permanently crippled. After Justinian, Rome was never again to rise to greatness. At the same time, the plague caused a labor shortage in Europe that sparked a revolution in agricultural production, leading to large population increases in northern Europe. China and Rome had roughly the same population in the sixth century, but Rome was hit hard by the plague and China wasn't. Islam came to power against a Rome with a serious shortage of men, again because of the plague.
As I mentioned, the whole idea of Byzantium was a big black hole for me in between the Roman empire that we're all familiar with and the later Europe of the middle ages. This book filled in those gaps nicely.
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CTO Breakfast on Friday
The next CTO Breakfast will happen on June 29, 2007 from 8:00 until 10:00 at the Novell Cafeteria, Building G, Provo Campus. You're invited! You don't have to be a CTO--just interested in products and technology.
Given the coincidence of the date--Apple's iPhone will be release at 6pm that day, I'm sure that will be a topic of discussion. Also, Phil Burns had a "map of the Internet" he wanted to show off. Knowing Phil, I'm sure it will be interesting.
Please put these future dates on your calendar:
- Jul 20 (Friday)
- Aug 23 (Thursday)
- Sep 27 (Thursday)
If you need directions, see the CTO breakfast page. If you've not joined us at Novell yet, give it a try--it's not as far as you think!
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In Denver With a Free Evening
I'm going to be in Denver Tuesday evening (June 26). Anyone interested in dinner? If so, contact me.
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CAS: Simple Authentication
Ken McCrery, from Virginia Tech gave a presentation at JA-SIG on their experience using Central Authentication Service (CAS) to provide single sign-on and single sign-off for their campus systems. CAS is an authentication system originally created by Yale University to provide a trusted way for an application to authenticate a user. It's freely available for download.
VT orginally used a home grown system called AuthPortal but their middleware group couldn't keep up with the portal groups requirements. They determined to move to something that was more widely used.
They found that
- CAS 2.0 was easy to deploy
- Previous AuthPortal clients were simple to convert
- Small footprint--fast and efficient
- System has been very stable and reliable over the last two years.
According to the JA-SIG CAS Web site, CAS has
- An open and well-documented protocol
- An open-source Java server component
- A library of clients for Java, .Net, PHP, Perl, Apache, uPortal, and others
- Integrates with uPortal, BlueSocket, TikiWiki, Mule, Liferay, Moodle and others
- Community documentation and implementation support
- An extensive community of adopters
CAS is similar to OpenID in goals and overall effect. The academic IT community has largely gone it's own way in solving lot of problems like authentication. That's not necessarily because they're out of touch. In fact, quite the opposite. They have a better traditional of cooperation because they're aren't really competing with each other and so they get together and scratch the itches before the commercial side is induce to cooperate by market forces. SSO was one such itch.
The problem is that now, they have a choice (or several) in OpenID, CardSpace, and others. There are several possible routes:
- Ignore outside project and continue to roll their own. Clearly they will miss out on the ability to integrate with products and services based on the more widely used protocols.
- Change over to a more widely used solution once the winners are more apparent. This is painful, but is often done.
- Integrate the ability to use these other systems with CAS so that CAS deployments begin to take advantage of the more widely deployed code base of the other systems.
I' guess that the last option is the one academic institutions will follow.
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JA-SIG Keynote on Digital Identity
I gave my keynote presentation on the social and economic impact of digital identity to the JA-SIG 2007 Summer conference. JA=SIG promotes the development and use of open architectures in higher education. In addition to their semiannual conference, they also have several projects that members develop and contribute to.
The presentation went pretty well, I thought. There were probably about 150 people in the room. The PDF of my slides is available as well as a screencast demoing CardSpace and another screencast demoing OpenID which I showed in lieu of live demos. Neither is edited nor does either have sound. They are both simple, first-look style demos. Be warned: the screencasts are in Quicktime and both the screencasts and slide deck are large.
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June 22, 2007
Hard Choices
I'm trying to figure out:
- Where's the best place near my house to get an iPhone?
- Which of my kids should I make stand in line all day for me?
Sometimes being a Dad is tough work. If anyone has good intel on iPhone sources in Utah County, let me know.
Update: Near as I can tell, the AT&T store in American Fork will have them. Still checking.
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iPhone Tour
I'm watching the 20 minute guided tour of iPhone that Apple posted today. While Amanda might be cheating the word "amazing" it's an excellent word to describe the phone this video shows off. Coupling a large multitouch screen with Apple's legendary design skills clearly makes for a much better phone than anything I've used. Of course, touch is believing in this case and that's still a week away. Still, I can't see how businesses will be able to keep them out of the hands of employees.
If you don't want one of these phones after watching the video, I don't get it. I think this phone is going to change the whole idea of what a phone is.
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Fake Colgate and China Wars
If you want to understand stories about tainted dog food and fake, poison toothpaste, listen to part I and part II of Moira's interview with Peter Navarro. I bought and read Navarro's book, the Coming China Wars after listening to the interviews. Definitely puts these stories in perspective. I think we're just seeing the beginning of the problems counterfeit products are going to cause.
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June 21, 2007
Everything is Miscellaneous
This week's Technometria podcast is an interview with Dave Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I've known Dave for some years and find him to be a very interesting person to talk to. This interview was no exception.
The idea of everything being miscellaneous at first conjures up images of chaos, but the key is to remember that this isn't an argument against classification, but a priori classification. The Internet enables and requires that we classify things when we want them, not before. You may want things alphabetically and I may want them by shoe size. We can both be right.
An interesting connection to the content of the interview and book is the very name of this blog and podcast. As I say in the page that explains the Technometria name, Technometria was the name of a book by William Ames in the 17th century. Ames' goal was an encyclopedic systematization of the arts, the very thing Dave is claiming can't be done. I even mention Dave and his fascinating talk to the Library of Congress on this topic in that page.
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Blue Light Special
Chuck Knutson has a funny post about his discontent with the flashing blue lights that manufacturers of Bluetooth devices seem intent on putting on their products. As Chuck says "Bluetooth is cable replacement technology, and I believe it should act like it." I get that product managers are proud of their little devices, but hen the light is distracting, we've gone too far. I wonder if "annoying" is one of the design metrics that Sara Ulius-Sabel tracks?
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June 20, 2007
Boycotting Blogs
Jeff Jarvis obviously doesn't get it. In commenting on the National Union of Journalists' plan for a Europe-wide day of protest against cuts in journalism, Jeff has cast the problem as the Internet, blogs, or readers. As the journalists well know, the real culprits are the capitalist owners of the newspapers. These diabolical folks are killing their own papers just to tweak the nose of the downtrodden workers. No one fully understands the depths of their cunning and evil.
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First iPhone App
Want a glimpse of the first iPhone app in the wild? OneTrip is a shopping list application that is built with the iPhone's form factor and multi-touch screen in mind, but will run in Safari on any platform (and apparently Firefox as well).
one thing I noticed when I played around with it is that there's no log in. That makes it simple, and cookies are good enough to keep your list around from visit to visit. But the power of a Web-based application lies partially in it's ubiquity. I want to be able to maintain my list on my computer and then see it on the iPhone (or more realistically have my wife put things in it and I go pick them up). Given the requirements, OpenID would be a perfect solution here.
OneTrip is the work of Neven Mrgan, a 27-year old software developer and graphic designer from Portland, OR. Of course, no one knows (except maybe Walt Mossberg) knows whether this app will work on a real iPhone.
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EFF Wins 4th Amendment Email Victory
Richi Jennings has a nice wrap-up of reactions to the court ruling that EFF won against warrentless email snooping. Quoting Luke O'Brien:
The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upheld a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using "Smiling Bob" ads that have gained some notoriety.
The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional reach when it demanded e-mail records from his internet service providers. Under the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act (SCA), the government has regularly obtained e-mail from third parties without getting warrants and without letting targets of an investigation know (ergo, no opportunity to contest).From Threat Level -- Wired Blogs
Referenced Wed Jun 20 2007 08:49:43 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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June 19, 2007
Milestones at IIW2007A
Dale Olds just put up some thoughts on IIW2007a and the significant events that occurred. He concentrates on the interoperability session and has some great pictures. Mike Jones gave some detailed stats from the interoperability session.
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New From AT&T: Family Visit Plans
As I was reading this Bob Frankston quote on Doc's blog, I was imagining what would the world be like if our entire road system, including the roads in our neighborhoods have been built privately and we had to pay fees to use them.
You'd probably see packages advertised on TV announcing the new Family Visit plans for only $19.95 per month. Pay one low rate and visit all the relatives you want. Malls would have to pay huge hookup fees to the road networks because of the "extra traffic" they'd generate. Interchanges would not just exchange cars, but money also as cars transfered from one operators road network to another's. If you wanted a public driveway (not one NAT's behind the road network's local barricade) you'd have to pay $10 more per month. And of course more cars would be able to pull into your driveway than would be allowed to leave.
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June 18, 2007
Computational Thinking
When Jon Udell interviewed Phil Libin, on IT Conversations, Libin said that in the future people will have to understand asymmetric encryption in order to function in the world. At first I was incredulous--that seems like a pretty esoteric concept to force on everyone. But then he said this: when Adam Smith first put forth idea of free markets, the notion that most adults would have an intuitive understanding of the concept seemed equally ludicrous, but in fact around 80% of U.S. adults do.
Why understand encryption? Because it affects your life in multiple ways. People who understand encryption can make informed decisions about how secure their ATM or voting system might or might not be, or whether they should trust a particular online banking site. People lose money every day because they don't have a basic understanding of encryption.
Understanding encryption is just one aspect of what we might call "computational thinking." Last month I attended Jeanette Wing's Organick Memorial Lecture at the University of Utah on that very subject. Wing, the head of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computing believes that computational thinking will be a fundamental skill, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, in the 21st century. Coincidentally, Jon just finished interviewing Wing for IT Conversations. I posted the show last week.
Computational thinking isn't thinking like a computer, rather it involves an understanding about how computer scientists think and solve problems. The reason that computers are used in almost every discipline is that the techniques that computer scientists use to solve problems are universally relevant. At its heart, computer science deals with how difficult problems are to solve, how to think about and manage problems, and how to create procedures for solving them.
Computational thinking involves thinking recursively, thinking abstractly, thinking ahead, thinking procedurally, thinking logically, and thinking concurrently. In Wing's words: "computational thinking is taking an approach to solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws on concepts fundamental to computer science."
To underscore the importance of these ideas in general education, Wing pointed to the influence that computational techniques are having on disciplines of all sorts--not just science and engineering--but fields as diverse as sociology and the law. Just as math and good writing are a key skills that affect almost all disciplines, so is computation. As a result, computational thinking isn't just for scientists and engineers. Computational thinking is a fundamental skill--one that every human being needs to understand to function in modern society.
I believe that Computer Science, like English or Mathematics is a good undergraduate degree for people going into almost any profession because the techniques have such broad applicability. More parents should encourage their college bound children to consider Computer Science.
More importantly, I think we need to do a better job of teaching computational thinking in grades K-12. Many of these concepts can be learned and understood without a computer at all. Computational thinking is conceptualizing, not programming. Every day activities provide plenty of examples. Computational thinking has almost nothing to do with how to use a word processor or spreadsheet--the current mainstay of computer courses in our schools.
Moving computational thinking out of our Computer Science departments and into the broader classroom will require that Computer Science professors look beyond their own parochial needs and interests. I think it also requires school administrators to put into place the organizational models that encourage and support these outreach efforts. Ultimately, however, this is the road to the real influence computational thinking needs and deserves.
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June 16, 2007
The Contrarian Solution for Iran
Time for some Saturday politics.
Almost everyday there's a story on the news about Iran and the showdown that the media is hoping will happen over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, Pakistan is the elephant in the room. The media ought to start asking Presidential candidates what they'd do about Pakistan, not Iran.
Ironically, what we're doing in Pakistan is probably the right course (in broad brush strokes): we're engaging them, connecting them, working to bring them more fully into the world economy. Maybe that's why the media's not asking about Pakistan, but I'd still like to hear what Presidential candidates would do.
This is the same course we should take with Iran. We should move to establish diplomatic relations with them (something we haven't had since 1979, I believe) and work with our European and Asian allies to open up to them as much as they'll allow. The real answer in Iran isn't to isolate them, but smother them with love--or at least positive attention.
If any of the current Presidential candidates are espousing such a course for Iran, I'm unaware of it. It's easier and more popular to spout the "get-tough" line.
Israel would love nothing more than for the US to fight their war with Iran for them, but this does not serve America's long term interests. I'm not even sure it serves Israel's long term interests.
Nearly three decades of trying to isolate Iran have done little to influence them. Continuing in that vein is likely to result in a more, not less, dangerous threat in an already threatening part of the world. Maybe it's time we looked to the contrarian solution.
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June 15, 2007
Inline SVG
Sam Ruby puts inline SVG on his blog. SVG is a language for describing scalable vector graphics. Browsers that understand SVG can render the graphics directly rather than downloading a raster-based image with another HTTP GET. Because its tags, you can manipulate it using Javascript. Check out this circle editor from Kevin Lindsey, for example. Just Javascript and SVG.
If you're going to serve inline SVG, you need to configure your Web server accordingly, so that browsers get the right stuff. I also believe, although I'm not certain, that you'd need to make sure the entire file it's in is XHTML compliant. One more reason to make that leap.
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June 14, 2007
The Last Chinese Chef and Technology
I'm a little behind in listening to TechNation. Sometimes before I listen to a show on TechNation, I wonder "how can this be related to technology." Such was the case with Moira's interview with Nicole Mones author of The Last Chinese Chef.
First, this is a novel. Second, it's about Chinese cooking. But the conversation was, in large part, about the technology of Chinese cooking the role that topipc plays in the novel. They also talked about Mones' previous book A Cup of Light and how it is based on the technology of porcelain.
Things like food and porcelain are so old hat now that we rarely think of the technology behind them and the significant discoveries that have gone into the centuries long developments that we enjoy everyday.
On the topic of food tech, a while back we published an IEEE Spectrum Radio show on geek cooking that profiled Michael Chu and his Cooking for Engineers website. I thoroughly enjoyed that show.
If you're interested in the science behind cooking, I highly recommend What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained . I picked this book up a few years ago and liked it a lot. The style is lots of short articles, so it's easy to read on the go, or while you're cooking.
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Java Desktop Developments
This week's show on the Technometria podcast is an interview with Chet Hasse. Chet works for Sun Microsystems in the Java Desktop group. We talk about upcoming features in the Java desktop and Sun's applet strategy.
Chet's new book Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications will be out in August. I'm sure this will be a great book for anyone interested in developing Java clients. The best GUI people I know also have some genuine artistic abilities. If you check out Chet's blog you'll see he fits the bill.
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June 13, 2007
Optical Illusion: Qwest's Concern for Consumers
I was quoted in a City Weekly article on what Salt Lake City mayoral candidates think about municipal broadband in general and Utopia in particular. It wasn't my quote, however, that caught my eye, but one from Jerry Fenn. Jerry is a lawyer by training and Qwest's Utah President (a position that's mostly about lobbying, I think):
Fenn admits that Qwest has been on "the other side of municipally backed telecom projects" mostly because of the long-term harm to consumers.From Salt Lake City Weekly - Optical Illusion
Referenced Wed Jun 13 2007 22:00:46 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Is there anyone, and I mean anyone, including Jerry's wife and kids, who believes that Qwest is in this fight because they are concerned about "consumers?" The amazing thing is that Jerry could say that to your face and not even crack a smile.
I'd love to see a study on the net effect of municipal broadband. I think residents of cities in Utah with municipal broadband have benefited regardless of whether they've signed up for the service or not. Whenever Utopia goes into a neighborhood, Qwest and Comcast drop their rates to keep their customers.
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June 12, 2007
SSHFS Rocks
Can I just say, one more time for the record, that sshfs rocks. Mounting SSH-accessible file systems and then just using them like any other file system on your machine is ever-so convenient.
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Tacit Knowledge, Nomenclature, and Debugging
Jon Udell has a nice riff on my washed out screen problem, talking about how much of what we can do on computers depends on our tacit knowledge--the things we know that we don't really know we know. Debugging is a task where tacit knowledge plays a huge role.
The tacit knowledge thing is exactly the right spin on this. Jon also hit the nail on the head when he talks about the problem of vocabulary. I wasn't thinking or using the word "contrast" until *after* I'd discovered what was wrong. I wasn't even thinking "washed out" until I wrote the blog post. The entire time I was doing this, I believed it was some problem with RGB settings somewhere. The display preferences pane was an obvious place to look (which I did early on), but offered no pointers to other display issues like the fact that the contrast was out of whack.
This is also why Google was little help. Unless you can think up the right words to describe your problem, search won't do you much good--online or off. I've been a stickler for proper nomenclature in business settings for this and other reasons. I push my kids to use the "right" names for things because nomenclature is so important. In hindsight, I should have spent a few minutes trying to accurately describe the problem and showing it to others who could help me figure out what to call it. I might have saved some time with the right words.
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Screen Contrast Display Mystery Solved!
Yesterday I reported on my debugging exercise to fix my washed out display. I thought it was the result of an HP Scanner install or a Photoshop CS3 upgrade. Turns out it was neither. It was me.
I use an application called Quicksilver. Some people call it a launcher, but it's much more than that. In fact, it does so much and is so useful that it's hard to describe. The Quicksilver site describes it as a "unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." If you're interested, here's a roundup of Quicksilver tutorials and screencasts.
Here's how Quicksilver plays into this little drama. Quicksilver lets you set up triggers--keystrokes or mouse gestures--that control applications. I'd set up a trigger that used Apple-Option-Control-. to play iTunes (and Apple-Option-Control-/ to pause it). In OS X's Universal Access, it uses Apple-Option-Control-. to increase screen contrast. Apparently it captures the keystroke in addition to Quicksilver and I was doing it to myself. Any single increase wasn't enough to notice, but over a few days it built up until my screen was unreadable.
I apologize for unfairly maligning HP and Adobe. I wish there was some way to just turn all the Universal Access keystrokes off, but I can't see an easy way to do that. There's probably an XML file somewhere you can edit to disable them, but a cursory google didn't reveal them to me. So, I just changed my trigger.
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Safari as a Development Platform
I just put a piece up at BTL with my thoughts of Apple's announcement that Safari will be the SDK for the iPhone. Bottom line: it's a sign of the times and a move in the right direction. Feel free to "vote" that the article is "worthwhile." :-)
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June 11, 2007
Curing Washed Out Display Problems
Yesterday I reported on my debugging exercise to fix my washed out display. I thought it was the result of an HP Scanner install or a Photoshop CS3 upgrade. Turns out it was neither. It was me.
I use an application called Quicksilver. Some people call it a launcher, but it's much more than that. In fact, it does so much and is so useful that it's hard to describe. The Quicksilver site describes it as a "unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." If you're interested, here's a roundup of Quicksilver tutorials and screencasts.
Here's how Quicksilver plays into this little drama. Quicksilver lets you set up triggers--keystrokes or mouse gestures--that control applications. I'd set up a trigger that used Apple-Option-Control-. to play iTunes (and Apple-Option-Control-/ to pause it). In OS X's Universal Access, it uses Apple-Option-Control-. to increase screen contrast. Apparently it captures the keystroke in addition to Quicksilver and I was doing it to myself. Any single increase wasn't enough to notice, but over a few days it built up until my screen was unreadable.
I apologize for unfairly maligning HP and Adobe. I wish there was some way to just turn all the Universal Access keystrokes off, but I can't see an easy way to do that. There's probably an XML file somewhere you can edit to disable them, but a cursory google didn't reveal them to me. So, I just changed my trigger.
Here's a story of another Mac user who had "screen problems" that turned out to be a barely engaged zoom in Universal Access. Ugh.
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WiFi on UTA Busses
The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) is experimenting with WiFi on busses. The move is an effort to attract riders. It seems to be working:
"Free Wireless Access keeps me riding the bus," a survey respondent said. "Though driving to work would get me faster, wireless access is an incentive to me to stay off of the road. This is the single best thing about riding the bus. Keep it UP!! Please!!!"From Salt Lake Tribune - UTA plan will let riders surf Web while they ride
Referenced Mon Jun 11 2007 13:23:23 GMT-0600 (MDT)
I suggested a similar move for light rail 5 years ago when I was Utah's CIO. Glad to see it happening.
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June 10, 2007
Plane Camping
 N9472C parked on the
side of the strip (click to enlarge) |
This weekend, my wife Lynne and I and our two good friends Steve and Jenny Fulling went camping--with our plane. This is easily the funnest thing I've done with a plane in all the time we've owned one. I enjoy camping and love flying, so put them together with a beautiful spot and you can't get much better than that.
We flew to a little place called Garden Valley Idaho, about 300NM northwest Salt Lake City. They have a nice grass strip (U88) that's nearly 3000 feet long with camping facilities right on the airport. When I first described this to my wife, she thought of a typical asphalt tarmac, but with the grass strip and the Payette River flowing right next to the airport, it's very nice.
 My first landing on a
grass strip (click to enlarge) |
We left early Friday morning and enjoyed a pretty nice flight all the way--although we did have to dodge some clouds near the Utah/Idaho border. Getting four people, enough fuel, and all our gear in the plane took some careful planning, but we managed to do it and meet our weight restrictions after leaving out a few chairs.
Landing on a grass strip is a little disconcerting because it just doesn't seem right. The airport is beautiful and the camping spots were great--grass, tables, and grills. There was a 180/185 fly-in at the airport, so it was fairly crowded, but it was fun to have some activity and lots of beautiful planes to watch.
 Causeway in the Great
Salt Lake (click to enlarge) |
Camping was just plain, fun: lots of good food and relaxation. Saturday after we broke camp, I went up in the plane to practice my own first grass strip take-off and landing.
We stopped in Mountain Home for fuel on the way home. Despite it's name, Mountain Home isn't in the mountains, but rather the desert. We flew west of the Salt Lake Class B airspace on our way back to Spanish Fork Airport (U77) which takes you right over the Great Salt Lake. Flying over the Salt Lake is pretty interesting--lots of weird colors.
I've got more pictures of the trip in my gallery.
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June 8, 2007
Security and Virtualization
I've been a big proponent of virtualization over the last couple of years, but I'd never stopped to think how it changed the nature of computer security. This week on the Technometria podcast, I interviewed Greg Ness about security in virtualized environments. It turns out there are things that virtualization makes more difficult, but the ability to run a privileged "security shield" on the hypervisor presents a new, potent weapon in the fight for more secure enterprise computing. I found the conversation fascinating.
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June 7, 2007
Why Does HP Software Suck Sooooo Bad?
I have an HP Scanjet 4670 that I've owned for 3 years now. I haven't used it for a year however, and a few months ago when I rebuilt my machine, I didn't reinstall the HP drivers on purpose. This morning I needed to make a scan. I worked for an hour to try to figure out how to make it work without installing HP drivers (it's hard to find good information on whether this is even possible) and no joy. I really didn't want to install the drivers and all the other stuff HP would force on me, but I was stuck.
Reluctantly, I gave up, downloaded the 100Mb file and started the install, thinking maybe I could leave out the parts I didn't want. The first thing it does is say "your computer will need to be restarted." This is pretty annoying for a Mac person, but I said OK. The software immediately, with no warning, killed every running application and goes through the install. When the computer restarted, it on the initial grey screen without even showing the Apple logo. I tried restarting three times and was about to give up, but decided to try it with nothing plugged into the computer (note that the scanner was never plugged in). That did it and I finally got the thing to restart. Whew!
HP, of course, installs all kinds of crap in addition to the drivers and Photoshop plug-in I wanted, putting things on the Dock that I don't want there and, in general, just being annoying.
Compare this experience to what Mac users are accustomed to when they open a new piece of gear and turn it on. It's the stuff of legends--not to mention unboxing videos. Where Apple makes opening something new from them an almost religious experience, HP (and I think Windows-world stuff in general) treat it as a chore you've got to get through to get your work done. The two experiences are fundamentally different. Why?
This presentation from MX Week by Tim Brown of IDEO is instructive. Tim talks about how businesses approach innovation. Some approach it from the business standpoint: what will make money? Some approach it from the technology standpoint: what is viable? Some approach it from the design standpoint: what will people want? At some point every successful venture has to deal with all three of these questions, but different company cultures approach innovation from one primary standpoint or another.
With this backdrop, it's easy to see that HP, as a company with a strong engineering culture approaches their projects form the technology angle. Apple approaches the same kind of activities from a design standpoint. Thus the difference between unboxing an HP product and unboxing an Apple product.
Still, I wish the HP experience didn't suck so badly.
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June 6, 2007
Steve Gillmor on iPhonomics
I love talking to Steve Gillmor because he expands my world view several notches each time. I spent a whole afternoon at the Internet Identity Workshop with him and enjoyed every minute of it. He put up a post yesterday called iPhonomics that says that "[i]n a world post-iPhone where everything changes, battery life becomes the arbiter of usage."
The iPhone will kill the Blackberry. Apple TV will kill the DVR. In Steve's view, the iPhone is center-stage--everything else is a peripheral to it. The secret to understanding this is to realize that more and more, text, images, audio, and video are "cached across the surface area of my environment: laptop, AppleTV, iPhone," in Steve's words.
Of course Gears, Google's project to enable offline Web applications is a key component here--it's not just data, but applications that are ultimately networked, but can function apart from their home environment.
iTunes is a microcasm of this effect. Your iPod is just a cache for what in iTunes, which is just a cache for what's on your shelf or at the iTunes Music Store. The iPhone extends that across multiple modalites.
Dan Farber, extends the battery life riff, suggesting that "with every purchase of a [Starbucks] double latte with soy milk you get access to a charging station." It used to be that free Wi-Fi was a draw, but with mobile Internet cards and devices--like the iPhone--raw power is the thing.
8:21 PM |