Phil Windley's Technometria

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September 29, 2007

GovGab, a New eGoverement Blog

GovGab is a new group blog from the folks who run USA.gov (formerly FirstGov). They've been at it for a week. The articles have a personal voice and are related to finding government resources online. For example, the first entry is about Jake's hunt for an apartment and the online resources he used.

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September 26, 2007

Managing the Legislature

There was a time that people in the Drivers License Bureau didn't want to be in the ID business. I can remember having the head of Utah's DL bureau tell me in no uncertain terms that the drivers license was not an identity document.

Times have changed. I can only imagine that the emergence of REAL ID has given the bureaucrats an idea of how much power there could be in being the primary arbiter of truth. This change is reflected in the sessions at a conference on REAL ID for state bureaucrats that Jim Harper brought to my attention.

Jim quotes one of the blurbs on a session from the conference:

Bringing Your Public Onboard For Smoother Legislature Changes

... [E]very State DMV needs to find a way to educate their public so that they can ensure the legislature changes necessary to become Real ID compliant. So how exactly can you do this? This session will examine how you can change your public's perception as quickly and as cost effectively as possible.

• Listen to your people: Examining the direct impact on your public so that you understand the perception you are trying to change
• Know which marketing methods will be most effective at reaching your public
• Examine how much of your budget a public relations exercise is worth: Measuring cost against outcome

Of course, this isn't anything new. Taxpayers frequently foot the bills for people in government to go to a conference and learn how to advance their agenda. We hope they're doing this for our benefit. Vigorous legislative oversight is the only way to ensure that they are.

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September 25, 2007

CTO Breakfast on Thursday

Our monthly CTO Breakfast will be held on September 27, 2007 from 8 until at Novell Cafeteria, Building G, Provo Campus . Despite it's name, you don't have to be a CTO to attend--just interested in technology, where it's headed, and the problems of starting and building a high-tech business in Utah.

Here are future dates:

• Sep 27 (Thursday)
• Oct 30 (Tuesday)
• Nov 29 (Thursday)
• No CTO Breakfast in Dec
• Jan 24 (Thursday)

Please reserve them on your calendar now.

For directions, links to the Google calendar, and other information, please visit the CTO Breakfast page.

If you've been meaning to come, but are put off by driving that far south, give us one month and see if it isn't pretty easy to get to even with the extra few minutes on the freeway.

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September 24, 2007

Digital Identity 101 at DIDW

I gave my tutorial this morning. The room was almost full, which pleased me. I didn't have enough time--never enough time--to get to everything that was interesting, but I think we hit the high points. I promised people I'd my my slides (PDF) available here.

At the end of the talk, I demoed using a signon.com issued OpenID to log into Jyte and authenticated at signon.com with a self-issued InfoCard using the DigitalMe card selector on OS X. We didn't have time to trace through what was happening, but interested people can at least try it themselves and see what's going on.

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Kim Cameron: Why Claims Will Change Everything

Kim Cameron is talking about claims. Today's landscape is filled with silos. The perimeters are purposely impermeable. Users are reduced to the system's definition of them within those boundaries. Digital experience is organized from the point of view of the system, not the user--who employs many systems. There are gates at the edges to control movement in and out of each system. The technology landscape is rigid in terms of protocols, formats, syntax and semantics. The system represents a single source of truth.

Users want to obtain a service, not be defined by it. We face all kinds of silos: operating systems, applications, enterprises, services, networks, and the access control stack.

Security in this world is based on layers of protection, but there's no end-to-end policy for coordinating their actions.

Claims are the information through which loosely coupled components can decide whether and how to provide services. There are different sources of claims for different purposes. A claim is an assertion which is in doubt. Claims describe entities. Claims can be static, relationship based, derived, describe capabilities, or even be claims about other claims (meta-claims).

An identity provider is a claims transformer. Those transformers can transform trust (partner claim to local claim), format (X.509 cert to SAML token), and content (role to access). To get loose coupling, we need systems that are linked by claims that can be transfered, transformed, and evaluated to match local needs.

In short, user-controlled claims are the key to loose coupling. My personal experience is that this is a tough concept for many in IT to understand. They like the idea of loose coupling, but their instinct is towards control--which leads to tight coupling.

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Stupid Reporter Tricks

I don't water ski. Never been. But let me take a minute to tell you why it's a stupid thing to do and all the reasons why you should waste your time doing it--just based on things I've heard. Stupid? Doesn't keep people from doing the same thing about Twitter.

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Phil Becker's State of Digital Identity

Some thoughts on identity from Phil Becker. Identity transforms security from "keep out unauthorized" to "allow access by authorized." Digital identity is the organizing construct for a distributed, service oriented computing that allows it to dynamically adjust to the needs of each user while simultaneously following the policies of various authorities who control and manage the data and applications being used, ad enabling visibility into what occurs.

Identity today:

• Identity deployments now succeed far more often than they fail
• Identity virtualization and federation are prover technologies with growing deployment base
• Authentication has evolved significantly in response to use experience requirements.
• Regaining lost visibility for compliance is a continuing driver as is compliance automation.
• Self service delegation has become a big driver.

The coming third wave: truly networked management by identity. The drivers:

• The nature of networking drives promiscuous inconnectivity and use empowerment (self-service)
• Scale revealing the need to modularize solutions and have interoperability standards
• The nee to interconnect (and network identity systems becomes undeniable.

Identity's natural state is decentralized, since it has its origins in many disparate places. The concept that we can centralize identity data on a large scale has been tried and found wanting. The task is to manage and leverage identity while respecting it's decentralized nature.

The future:

• Greatly increased networking between identity management domains
• The emergence of compelling identity based user experience driven applications

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September 23, 2007

World Wide Network

Dave suggests that we not use "graph" when we mean "network." To that end, I think we should further dismiss the confusion of the word "web" and avoid that in usage as well since it's less descriptive than "network" and not even technically correct. From now, on, no more "World Wide Web." We'll talk about the World Wide Network. Hmm, maybe not...

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September 22, 2007

Want to Buy Used Cricket Phone

I'm looking for a used Cricket mobile phone to replace one my daughter has dropped one too many times. If you have one in good shape you're not using anymore, let me know. I'll buy it.

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September 21, 2007

Installing Rails on Fedora

I'm building a virtual machine (VMWare flavor) for use with Rails development. After installing Fedora, there were a few things I had to do to get everything ready. I thought I'd take a minute and document them in one play for the next poor soul.

First, I don't know what I do wrong, but the GUI auto-update feature seems more trouble than it's worth. I like doing it manually. So the first thing to do is:

sudo /usr/bin/yum -y update

I've found that the Yum system can get corrupted and hang (I think I do this by force quitting the auto-update tool). Alternantely, you might see a bunch of errors. To fix that, I do the following:

sudo rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.*
sudo rpm --rebuilddb

Next, I install or update some other tools:

sudo /usr/bin/yum -y install \
sudo \
wget \
tar \
gzip \
make \
gcc \
mysql \
mysql-devel \
mysql-server \
ruby \
ruby-libs \
ruby-mode \
ruby-rdoc \
ruby-irb \
ruby-ri \
ruby-docs \
ruby-devel \
ruby-mysql \
rubygems \
subversion \
lighttpd \
lighttpd-fastcgi \
httpd \
ImageMagick \ 
ImageMagick-devel

Now, we're ready to install rails and some other gems:

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
sudo gem install rmagick

If gem complains about "Could not find rails..." you need to reset the gem cache. The correct path can be found using the command gem env.

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/source_cache
sudo gem update

If you're going to use MySQL, be sure to set it to start up and set a root password:

sudo /sbin/chkconfig mysqld on

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h localhost.localdomain password 'new-password'

If you're going to use FastCGI with LightTPD, then you'll need to install the FastCGI code:

curl -O http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
cd fcgi-2.4.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

And the Ruby FastCGI support:

curl -O http://rubyforge.iasi.roedu.net/files/fcgi/ruby-fcgi-0.8.7.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-fcgi-0.8.7.tar.gz
cd ruby-fcgi-0.8.7
ruby install.rb config --prefix=/usr/local
ruby install.rb setup
sudo ruby install.rb install
cd ..

And the fcgi gem:

sudo gem install fcgi

I also need RMagick (the Ruby ImageMagick package) installed. Notice that I installed ImageMagick in the yum command above. To install RMagick, I used the gem install:

sudo gem install rmagick

Note that the ImageMagick install I got from yum had been built with the configuration option for TrueType fonts, so it was looking for those and failing. You can see what fonts your installation is looking for using the convert command:

convert -list type

You'll see path information for the configuration files as well as the various fonts each type file is loading. I changed my type-windows.xml file to look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE typemap [
  <!ELEMENT typemap (type+)>
  <!ELEMENT type (#PCDATA)>
  <!ELEMENT include (#PCDATA)>
  <!ATTLIST type name CDATA #REQUIRED>
  <!ATTLIST type fullname CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type family CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type foundry CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type weight CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type style CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type stretch CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type format CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type metrics CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST type glyphs CDATA #REQUIRED>
  <!ATTLIST type version CDATA #IMPLIED>
  <!ATTLIST include file CDATA #REQUIRED>
]>
<typemap>
</typemap>

This did the job, but beware that it may break other things you want to use ImageMagick for. I just know it worked for what I wanted to do.

Finally there are a few small jobs.

• Add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run /sbin/ldconfig.
• Add a alias for root to /etc/aliases. Don't forget to run newaliases.
• Set up hostname. I like to edit /etc/sysconfig/network directly, but that's OS specific.
• Set up any users. Be sure to set passwords.
• Run chkconfig --list |more and turn off anything you don't need. I usually turn off bluetooth, cups, and yum-updatesd for starters. Turn on anything you do (like mysqld).
• Set up /etc/sudoers. I can't tell you what to do since that's specific to what you are setting up. The simplest configuration is to use set it up so that anyone in group wheel can be a sudoer. Then add the wheel group to each user who should be able to sudo.

At this point, I'm unsure that the FastCGI is working completely with LightTPD. I'll add more information if something changes.

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She's Geeky

Kaliya's doing an unconference for women working in technology called She's Geeky. Here's the goals:

• Exchange skills and learning from women from diverse fields of technology.
• Discuss topics about women and technology.
• Connect the diverse range of women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky fields.

If you're a woman working in technology and would like to attend or just find out more, go read Kaliya's blog entry for more details.

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More ITC Badges

Some people didn't like the yellow and blue badge in my post on promoting IT Conversations because it is animated. I agree in general that animated gifs can be annoying but this one rotates so slowly, I don't mind it. I've had it on my blog before and frankly didn't even notice the animation. Still, I can se why some people might not want to use it, so here's four badges that represent each stage of the animation.

 

 

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September 20, 2007

NBC's Troubles

NBC has announced that it will open its own download site for it's programs after a dispute with Apple over the price and DRM for its programs on ITMS.

There are a lot of people who think NBC is mad to take their shows off of ITMS and maybe they are, but I think NBC and others are bound to explore their options in this brave new world.

We call NBC, CBS, ABC, and others "networks" because in the old days they had to worry about distribution because of the limits of technology (VHF television has a 50 mile or so radius). So, NBC had to have a local affiliate to distribute their shows to various parts of the country.

This all broke down with cable, when cable companies began providing distribution without any shows of their own (to speak of). Of course the old model survived for the "networks" but new "channels" like ESPN, Bravo, Lifetime, and others sprang up who have no local affiliates. Some local affiliates, like TBS, even became national channels through cable distribution.

The networks don't need local distribution anymore. We're beginning to networks offer their shows directly to audiences over the Internet. That's what the NBC/ITMS story is all about.

So if NBC isn't a network, what is it? An aggregator. NBC, CBS, ESPN, and others aggregate new and old video entertainment into a package, wrap it in a brand, and make money from the aggregations. This is essentially editorial in nature. They hope they'll select programming that makes you trust their brand as a good place to go to be entertained.

As an aside, this is very much what IT Conversations does. We're not a podcast, but rather a podcast aggregator who exercises editorial control over what shows appear on our channel.

More to the point, it's also the business that Google, Yahoo!, Apple (with ITMS), and others are in. The Internet has given the "networks" a lot of competition that they didn't have before as the price for virtually free distribution and unlimited shelf space (the longtail phenomenon).

There are plenty of reasons to believe that editorial control of program selection is a vital, important function, but it's not clear that the big guys will be the ones who win. Back to IT Conversations: it's niche player in a niche market but to the thousands of loyal listeners, it's just what they need for that small area of their world.

The point is that you don't need loads of money to get into the aggregation business anymore. Move over NBC, iTunes is the least of your problems.

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Do You Love IT Conversations? Show It!

I hate public radio pledge drives. Who doesn't. Nevertheless, I recognize the need. I hope you'll forgive this low-key request for support for IT Conversations.

IT Conversations is easy to love--free audio that's interesting, relevant, and good quality. Admittedly I'm biased, but I think the popularity of IT Conversations backs this sentiment up.

If you love IT Conversations, take a minute and show it. Here's a couple of ways:

Become a member of the Conversations Network. IT Conversations is part of the Conversations Network, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation and a section 501(c)(3) public charity under the Internal Revenue Code. Creating good programs isn't free and your donations help. They may even be tax deductible!

Help us find sponsors. We're looking for a few good sponsors who can underwrite the cost of producing shows on IT Conversations. If your company is interested in reaching tens of thousands of IT professionals and supporting a unique community asset, please contact Doug Kaye (doug@conversationsnetwork.org).

Finally, even if you're not in a position to help financially can help promote IT Conversations, by linking to us with one of these badges:

 

Here's the code for the first badge:

<a href="http://www.itconversations.com"> <img src="http://assets.conversationsnetwork.org/channels/itconversations/ext/button9-12.gif" border="0" title="Listen to IT Conversations"alt="Listen to IT Conversations" /></a>

Here's the code for the second badge:

<a href="http://www.itconversations.com"><img src="http://assets.conversationsnetwork.org/channels/itconversations/ext/button2.jpg" border="0" title="Listen to IT Conversations"alt="Listen to IT Conversations" /></a>

Take a minute and put on of these on your blog or Web site so people know you support IT Conversations!

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September 19, 2007

User Expectations Are Out of Control

This is great essay from Raganwald on what users expect and IT fails to deliver. Hyperbole? Sure, but that makes it funny and just like antiseptic, the sting let's you know it's working.

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Avast Me Hearties!

Today, September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. My kids thought it was great fun when I woke them all up with pirate talk this morning and spent the morning calling each other "scurvy bilge rats."

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September 18, 2007

Finally! An InfoCard Selector for OS X

I posted a short piece at BTL about the Bandit project's InfoCard selector for the Mac. There have been some solutions in the past, but they were hard to install or flaky. This one is solid and the install is a breeze.

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Ike: An American Hero

I just finished reading Ike: An American Hero, Michael Korda's biography of Eisenhower. I'm a sucker for biographies, particularly US Presidents and I'd not read one of Ike before, although I'd had Steve Ambrose's two-volumn set on my list for a while. I saw this a few weeks ago while I was in DC and picked it up. I wasn't disappointed. Korda delivers a book that tells a great tale by focusing on what made Ike and made him great rather than getting lost in details that most readers won't care about.

I came away with a newfound appreciation for Eisenhower. He was president when I was born and had a great role in shaping the world I grew up in. Still, other than a few facts, I knew hardly anything about him. For example, I hadn't realized how fast Ike was promoted after WWII began--moving from Colonel to four-star general in a matter of a few years. Buy he had been marvelously prepared and mentored by the likes of Pershing, MacArthur, and Marshall.

Korda is clearly an Eisenhower fan and that helps make the book what it is. If you like critical biographies that rip the subject to shreds, you won't enjoy this one. Still, Korda isn't shy when it comes to deeply exploring Ike's relationship with Kay Summersby, perhaps the most controversial aspect of his personal life or the steep learning curve he faced as Supremem Allied Commander.

Korda's writing is clear and brings Ike to life. I found I couldn't wait to get back to it--more like a good novel than a dry biography. I recommend it.

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September 17, 2007

Memory Solves the PC Problem

A few weeks ago I reported that I'd put together a PC with my kids and it failed to start up. After trying a variety of things, I came to the conclusion it was the motherboard, the CPU, or RAM. A friend sent a note to say he had a couple of sticks of extra RAM I could try in it, so after a week of forgetting about it, I finally did and it solved the problem!

The new RAM was from Silicon Mountain. The RAM that wasn't working in the motherboard was Kensington. Various forum postings indicated that the RAM settings in the ASUS motherboard could be problematic. I tried changing them to the recommended settings with the Silicon Mountain RAM in place (so I could even run the BIOS) and then using the Kensington RAM, but that made no difference.

Interesting that they're playing it so close to the edge on timings, but I guess that's the name of the game in high performance systems. In any event, I just bought some Silicon Mountain RAM and gave the Kensington RAM to a friend. Hopefully it can be put to good use somewhere else.

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Wordpress Blows Up Blogs

Newspapergrl tells the story of a blog gone away at the hands of Wordpress. The moral of the story is that if you use another company to host your blog you're at their mercy. Everything you write could be gone someday without warning or explanation.

The only way to prevent this is to take matters into your own hands and run your own server. Of course, that too is subject to the whims of nature and man, but you stand a better chance of controlling your own destiny.

But what does this say of the blogging "revolution" if the only ones who really have a free voice are the ones who have the skills to run a server or pay to have someone run it for them?

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September 14, 2007

IT Conversations System Changes

Over the past week Doug Kaye has been working furiously to change over the backend systems that support IT Conversations. The changes won't be immediately obvious when you just visit the Web site, but they were necessary in order to make future growth possible. There have been a few bugs associated with the switchover, but for the most part it's gone smoothly. If you do notice something that's not right, please contact me and I'll forward it to Doug.

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September 13, 2007

SOA Governance Tutorial

I'm going to be doing a day-long tutorial on SOA governance at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum in New York on November 8th. If you register before October 7th, it's $695. After that it's $795 until November 5th. Then the price goes up to $895. Here's the details:

Counterintuitive as it may seem, SOA requires more organizational discipline than previous development models. Your intuition might tell you that flexibility results from less rules, not more, but that's not the case.

Standardization provides the underpinnings for SOA across an organization. To prevent IT from being overwhelmed by this new complexity, the industry has created a new classes of software, registries, repositories, and runtime management systems, that help keep all the rules straight. But creating an SOA for an enterprise demands more than using SOA-based tools -- it requires that IT organizations make serious choices about design, which result in design rules.

This tutorial will:

• Introduce SOA governance and effective governance models
• Discuss how to put a governance processes in place
• Talk about enablers and detriments to effective governance
• Describe policies and procedures you should put in place now
• Show you how to create an interoperability framework for your organization
• Teach you how to build and use reference architectures
• Describe, evaluate, and compare the tools available to manage SOA governance artifacts

This is a detailed outline:

Governance Models - One of the most important questions to answer is "How does my organization make decisions?" We're after loose coupling and that requires a way for making rules and ensuring that they're followed. Consequently, its important to understand what works--and what doesn't. Governance isn't something that happens once, it's an ongoing process. The governance lifecycle defines the process and provides a timeline. There are some things to watch out for--stumbling blocks that will make it hard to get going until you've moved the out of the way.

SOA Maturity Evaluation - Good governance depends on understanding your processes and where they can be improved and where they are simply incompatible with the loosely coupled organization you want to build. Process evaluation gives you the opportunity to reengineer how your organization gets things done by finding the gaps between where you are and where you want to be and then filling those gaps with best practices. Data architecture is equally important. If you can't find where your data is or if the same kinds of data is stored, formatted, and understood differently in different repositories, you can't succeed in creating an SOA.

Digital Identity for SOA - Digital identity plays a foundational role in SOA. We will discuss the role of identity systems in your SOA and how such systems can be defined, built, and managed in the enterprise.

Policies - Many people, especially techies are scared or distrustful of policies. We're all familiar with "computer end user policies" that spell out all the things employees can't do--and then are ignored. The fact is that well thought out, carefully planned policies are essential to building loosely coupled systems. We'll cover the types of policies that are needed for loosely coupled SOA and how policies can be effective. Evaluating policies is a key activity in the governance lifecyce and one that's critical to creating policies that work.

Building an Interoperability Framework - If there's one policy that's more important than all the rest, it's the Interoperability Framework (IF). The good news is that an IF is relatively easy to create. An IF is a list of internal and external standards that the organization supports and their current status. It's the most basic part of an SOA policy and critical to achieving interoperability. This is also a good time to talk about what standards exist, what they do, and why you need them.

Tools for Managing Governance Artifacts - Numerous tools exist for managing governance artifacts. Repositories and registries are used to enable service discovery and enforce enterprise policy at design time and deploy time. Web services management systems are used to manage running services and enforce SOA policies at runtime.

Reference Architectures - Reference architectures come in two flavors: "enterprise" and "system-level." An enterprise reference architecture provides the context that system architects need to ensure their designs will fit in with other systems in the enterprise and be able to interoperate. A system-level architecture gives examples and best practices for common enterprise systems that might be deployed in the organization and shows how those systems relate to the enterprise reference architecture.

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September 12, 2007

Installing Tools in Fusion When They Won't Install

In Fusion (and other virtualization systems) you should install OS tools on the guest OS to make it behave better. This is not something specific to Fusion, this is a general fact of virtualization. Usually, clicking the "Install VMWare Tools" does the trick--especially with Windows. Sometimes, however, it doesn't do anything. On those occasions you need to take over and do it manually. Here's how.

First, mount the right ISO as a CDROM image. You'll find these in

/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/isoimages

Select the right one for your OS. You may need to manually mount the disk. Fedora, for example, should automatically mount the CDROM when you connect it, but sometimes it doesn't. As root, use a command like this one to mount it:

mount /dev/hdc /mnt/media -t iso9660

I say "like this one" because you'll have to figure out which device is the CDROM. Note that if the /mnt/media directory doesn't exist, you may get an error.

The image will contain a tarball. Untar it to a convenient directory and then run the Perl script. It will ask you lots of questions. For Fedora Core , I accepted it's default answers and it worked great. If it can't find the right version of vmmemctl it will try to build it. This worked flawlessly for me. If it doesn't for you, it probably needs include files from packages you didn't load at install. I always load the developer and kernel building packages.

That's it, a reboot or an X restart and you're done.

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This Page Will Not Be Available in the Future

Richard Stiennon has a post about efforts by EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini to make search engines block certain "dangerous words" like "bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism." So, since this post has those words in it, you may not be able to read it in the future. Or maybe Orrin Hatch will figure out a way to just have computers storing such dangerous words to be destroyed by lasers or something.

The most important question: who gets to decide which words are dangerous? I vote that we add "Frattini" to the list.

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September 11, 2007

Syndication Oriented Architectures

Two of the people I respect the most, Jon Udell and Rohit Khare are together in one podcast: Jon's latest from his weekly Interviews With Innovators podcast on IT Conversations. Jon has a short write-up on his blog about the podcast and it's topic: syndication oriented architectures.

SynOA was born on the open web and is now creeping into the enterprise. To understand why, just consider Facebook. It is a deeply syndication-oriented application. Although Facebook users never have to think about it in these terms, they are constantly publishing events onto a syndication bus while at the same time subscribing to aggregated feeds published by their friends. As a result, they're effortlessly yet comprehensively aware of a large number of summarized event streams. Rohit Khare thinks that syndication-oriented architecture will enable business users to achieve that same kind of awareness.

Good stuff. Rohit has a white paper on SynOA at KnowNow (registration required). It's worth reading to get the meat of what he's talking about.

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September 10, 2007

O'Reilly Calls for Participation

O'Reilly Media has several calls for participation that are due soon.

Now in its seventh year, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference hones in on the ideas, projects, and technologies that the alpha geeks are thinking about, hacking on, and inventing right now. Do you have something that points the way to the future? O'Reilly Media invites technologists and strategists, CTOs and CIOs, technology evangelists and scouts, programmers and hackers, researchers and academics, artists and activists, business developers, and entrepreneurs to lead conference sessions and tutorials at ETech. The call for participation ends September 17, 2007.

The O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference celebrates what's different across the entire telecommunication industry, examining the edges of innovation to find the freshest ingredients for the telecom cooking pot. ETel welcomes plenary submissions for our audience of people who, like you, are pushing through the boundaries of communications into new ways of thinking and doing. Topics will be centered around the innovations and projects occurring at the intersection of voice, instant messaging, the mobile ecosystem, and the Web. The call for participation ends September 17, 2007.

The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference explores how technology is influencing the future of publishing, sparking creativity and inspiring conversation for leading change in the industry. TOC considers what's at stake for the future of publishing for people who are passionate about books and book publishing -- if you are passionate about books and publishing, submit a proposal to speak at TOC 2008, the call for participation is open until October 1, 2007.

ETel and ETech will both happen in San Diego the week of March 3, 2008. TOC is in New York Feb 11-13, 2008. All three of these will be appearing on IT Conversations.

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Some Thoughts on Co-Working

Sean O'Steen, one of the hard-working audio editors on IT Conversations, had an article at Web Worker Daily on co-working in Berkeley. Sean's article discusses the concept of co-working in general and the Berkeley Coworking site in particular.

If you're not familiar with it, co-working is the trend for developers, writers, independents, and other professionals to spend at least part of their day in a shared, public space. Starbucks, Borders, libraries, and other places that have Wi-Fi have been popular hang outs for some time and now people have started to create specific co-working spaces like the Berkeley one.

Of course, this trend has been enabled though a number of technologies: laptops, wi-fi, email, IM, cell phones, VoIP, and even things like Twitter.

The draw to co-working is being able to work without the isolation that just working from home can bring or the structure that a standard office entails. I'm surprised at the number of people I know who spend at least a few hours a week working from a Starbucks or the library. Personally, I like to spend some time working at Borders when I can. I see the same group of people there all the time.

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September 7, 2007

User Centric Identity Tutorial

Here's the slides from the user centric identity tutorial that I gave this afternoon. The PDF won't show the embedded screencasts. I've included them separately. Here's one on using CardSpace and one on using OpenID. If you're interested in getting my Perl wrappers for using the JanRain OpenID libraries and the guestbook application, contact me.

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Lamont Peterson on XEN and Virtualization

Lamont Peterson, co-founder of NeverBlock is talking about XEN and virtualization.

The talk is an intro to virtualization technology and a discussion of why use virtualization. Here are some pros:

• Resource consolidation: fewer systems to buy, own, manage, power, cool, etc.
• Unification: all VMs have the same "hardware" even if they're running on different hardware.
• Access and management tools allow VMs to be managed over the network.
• Utilization: most bare metal systems are under utilized. VMs allow that resource to be recovered.
• Fewer physical machines can improve reliability since there's less

Of course, there are some cons:

• It can be more complicated to set up.
• Administrators have another layer to learn and work with.
• Physical servers need lots of RAM.

It's a good idea to keep some headroom on each machine so that VMs can be migrated when a physical box dies. This gets easier (and less costly) as the number of physical boxes you're using grows. Here's my analysis: The headroom you need is somewhat greater (20%) than 1/N where N is the number of servers. So with 2 boxes, you can use about 40% of each machine and still be able to migrate everything from one machine to the other in the case of problems. With 10 boxes, you can load boxes up to 80% (as much as I'd do in any event) and still have room to migrate a single bad server's VMs. XEN supports live migration if you get the storage architecture right.

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Brad Nicholes on Apache 2.2 Configuration

I'm in Brad Nicholes' session on configuring Apache 2.2.

First up he starts talking about MPM (multi-processor modules). MPMs control the multi-processing that happens on in Apache (servers and threads). If you install Apache, the default is the pre-fork MPM that doesn't include threads. You have to install the Worker MPM to get threads. the pre-fork MPM is more stable, but slower. The Worker MPM won't play well with mod_perl and other modules that aren't thread friendly.

Brad recommends using include files to modularize configuration. I've never done this (habit) preferring to have everything in one place so I don't have to go out and look in multiple files. Still I can see the wisdom in this. Sometimes the configuration file can get pretty hairy.

Huh, I didn't know you could use ServerAlias (with or without wildcards) to create aliases for a host. That will save me a few lines in my configuration file!

LDAP authentication looks relatively easy to set up. This would be good to use on my server at BYU since we have an LDAP server anyway for the lab. I've never bothered to figure it out. Brad makes it look easy enough to try.

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Longtails and Software Keynote

Several people asked for a copy of my slides from keynote this morning. Here they are: Longtails and Software.

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September 6, 2007

Bruce Perens: Innovation Goes Public

Bruce Perens speaks to UOSC (click to enlarge)

Bruce Perens is here for the second keynote of the evening. I spoke to Bruce on IT Conversations last March when he was last in Utah to protest the Novell/Microsoft deal. Bruce is not only interesting to listen to, but entertaining as well.

Bruce gives an intro about why he got excited about open source. As I mentioned, Bruce has criticized Novell in the past (and will today). The conference is being held at Novell, but the security folks haven't thrown him out yet.

How can "innovation" go public? It's not a company. FOSS development share a lot in common with investment markets. Note: this isn't about open source companies going public. It' about a new way of innovating in a public setting.

Open source isn't Redhat, Novell, or HP. They're part of the community, but not the majority. Open source is development teams that make products. Apache, wikipedia, and others are products, not companies.

Open source appears to go against capitalistic economic theory, but only until you look closely. It's main developers are not it's vendors. It's very customer -centric in its emphasis, rather then vendor-centric. (Cue Doc Searls here.)

Companies go on the stock market to distribute cost and risk with the motivation of sharing in the reward. Non-open source software developers must pay for development first and then start making a profit. The stock will be worth nothing if the company fails. Stocks allow many people to share in the cost and risk with the hope of a reward.

FOSS distributes the cost and risk of development among many developers because each share sin the development and no one puts in too much. The pay-back is working software that is high quality and well suited to it's user's needs--because some of them wrote it. FOSS developers float their source code on the market for others to share.

Amazon, Gogle, Merrill Lynch, and Pixar are all companies that give away software and still make profits. They do so without giving away their critical innovations.

Most companies don't sell software--they sell books, wine, services, and so on. But all of these companies still need software. Software isn't a top-line product for most companies, it's a cost of doing business. Most of the software that companies need is non-differentiating. They can give this away and it doesn't make any difference in how customers perceive the company. Giving your competitor software makes them your partner--in that non-differentiating area. Bruce guesses that about 95% of the software in any company is non-differentiating.

Companies should naturally try to remove as much of their budget from non-differentiating software and move it to the innovative software in their business that differentiates them. Of course, that means that you have to find a way to get the other 95% of your software as cheaply as possible: enter FOSS.

Bruce points to HP and IBM. HP had plans at on time to spend $1 billion rewriting HPUX. Maybe they still are. IBM, on the other hand, decided that AIX wasn't a long term differentiator.

How do you find differentiating software? If yur competitors can get it, it's not differentiating. So, neither Microsoft not FOSS is differentiating. For software to being differentiating, you have to control it. So, your employees or consultants (as long as you control it) have to create it for it to be differentiating.

Business differentiating innovation has high value to a company. Non-differentiating innovation improves some internal aspect of the business, but doesn't make a difference to the customer.

Sharing non-differentiating innovation between companies has a low transaction cost. Open source has always trumped consortia (think X.org vs. X Consortium, Linux vs. Taligent, and GNOME vs. CDE). Open source structures put product first. Consortia put vendors first and they work to the detriment of the product.

People with similar (crazy) ideas can form on the 'Net and create real product with no capitalization except the sweat of their brow.

Open source is a massively parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process. The result is that 10,000 people all do what they feel like and the result is Linux or Apache. Open source isn't like a company, it's like an ecosystem. Projects start with one person's idea, but they don't become open source until they're at least a little useful to someone else. Lots of projects die before they reach critical mass. They don't waste much resource.

Strategic marketing, on the other hand depends on someone predicting the future. Being smart isn't good enough--you have to be prescient.

When an open source project dies, someone else can take over--anyone has the right. This strongly protects companies that use FOSS from having the software become useless. Source code escrow doesn't work: judges frequently nullify them.

Should FOSS be allowed to displace proprietary software? Should refrigerators have been allowed to displace the large ice industry at the turn of the century? FOSS should be allowed to displace proprietary software when there are clear advantages. Of course, that's a political statement.

If you can take FOSS into a business, take the low-hanging fruit rather than attacking Microsoft on the desktop. FOSS is being used in almost every business and become a mission critical function--often without the business executives being aware of it.

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Matt Asay: Making Utah a Center for Open-Source Innovation

Matt Asay is something of a fixture here in Utah and clearly a big booster of open source (he founded the Open Source Business Conference). He's giving the first keynote of the evening on bring open-source home (to Utah).

He uses Plato's Allegory of the Cave to talk about how many people aren't prepared to understand that FOSS is better and works. The prisoners, in this case, are traditional IT folks. This is changing; he points to a Gartner study showing people believe FOSS software is better.

FOSS achieves ubiquity through exceptional software, focus on the product to drive self-selected sales, low conversion rates on lots of leads, and superior service. FOSS developers worry about adoption first and protection later.

Ten open source vendors will do over $10 million in business this year.

Matt points out that major FOSS projects aren't from Silicon Valley--they're from all over: Sweden (MySQL), Atlanta (jBoss), Belgium (Drupal), or Alabama (Asterisk). You don't need to move to do open source. Open source is geography neutral. Developers are everywhere. Don't let anyone tell you that you have to move.

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Utah Open Source Conference

A string quartet entertains us while we eat and chat (click to enlarge)

I'm sitting in Novell's Open Source Business Center waiting for the Utah Open Source Conference to begin. There's about 250 people registered, so a pretty good sized event as far as regional conferences go.

Tonight is the open reception/dinner (there's a four piece string quartet playing in the corner) and keynotes by Matt Away and Bruce Perens. I'm giving a keynote tomorrow morning and then giving a tutorial on user centric identity and OpenID tomorrow afternoon. There are a large number of sessions in the breakouts tomorrow after the keynotes and they continue into Saturday.

Congrats to the conference organizers on a rousing success. This is going to be fun!

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Why Vista?

I just put an article up at Between the Lines wondering why anyone would use Vista in a virtual machine if their primary goal is to be able to run Windows applications on their Mac.

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Apple Gives $100 to Early Adopters

Here's a letter from Steve Jobs saying Apple will grant iPhone early adopters a $100 Apple store credit in light of yesterday's price cut. Dave Winer would have settled for a t-shirt. Frankly, I would have too. Something very cool and commemorative. Maybe with pictures of arrows poking the wearer in the back!

I wasn't mad at all about Apple dropping the price. As my pal Steve says in his letter: "That's life in the technology lane." I knew I was an early adopter and there would be bugs, bumps, and price cuts down the road. Still, I'll take the 100 bucks. :-)

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Reeds Law and Social Networks

David Cushman has brought together a lot of different pieces in a thoughtful article about Reed's Law and social networking. As I read his thoughts about our identity (personal rather than digitial), I'm reminded of a recent conversation Moira Gunn had with Goff Moore and David Thomson (podcast) about how we relate to each other in this first decade of the 21st century.

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Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for August 2007

Here are the top ten shows (by downloads) for August 2007 on IT Conversations.

1. Geoff Moore & David Thompson - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.60)

   Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Geoff Moore and David Thompson about how Web 2.0 is seamlessly taking the high tech lives of our young people right into the workplace.

2. Matt Ridley - BioTech Nation (Rating: 3.43)

   Dr. Moira Gunn and David Ewing Duncan interview eminent science writer Matt Ridley, the author of "Genome."

3. Drew Major - Technometria (Rating: 3.20)

   Drew Major is one of the true pioneers in the computing industry. He first worked with early CP/M computers but really expanded his programming activities when IBM unveiled the IBM Personal Computer. His initial work revolved around resource sharing and networking. As part of his work with Novell he attempted to get the company to expanding into video sharing. He joins Phil and Scott to discuss both his history and his current projects.

4. Scott Berkun - Technometria: The Myths of Innovation (Rating: 3.60)

   How do you know whether a hot technology will succeed or fail? Or where the next big idea will come from? The best answers come not from the popular myths we tell about innovation, but instead from time-tested truths that explain how we've made it this far. In The Myths of Innovation, author Scott Berkun takes a careful look at innovation history, including the software and Internet Age, to reveal how ideas truly become successful innovations-truths that people can apply to today's challenges. He joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss his new book and his career.

5. Greg Papadopolous - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.17)

   Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Greg Papadopolous, the Chief Technology Officer of Sun Microsystems. Sun is celebrating 25 years in the computer industry, and he describes the ups and downs.

6. David Kaplan - Tech Nation (No rating yet)

   Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with David Kaplan, senior editor at Newsweek, about the newest, niftiest, technology-stretching, sailing yacht today - and why a person would spend $130 million building it.

7. Doug Levin, Jonathan "Jothy" Rosenberg - Avoiding Pitfalls of Open Source Software Reuse (Rating: 2.80)

   Open source is the foundation of today's gift economy, but have you checked everything that comes inside those packages? Black Duck Software helped one company find and remove a surprising payload from such open source code before it could pop up on customers' screens. Find out what they found in this interview with Black Duck CEO and president Doug Levin and Black Duck customer and advisor Jothy Rosenberg.

8. Richard Morgan - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.60)

   Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Richard Morgan about what life may be like after a hundred years of biotech. Morgan explains we'll have gotten plenty right and plenty wrong.

9. Mike Hudack - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (Rating: 4.00)

   On this edition of Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks with Mike Hudack, one of the founders of the video sharing service blip.tv. Mike had seen Udell's essay on walled gardens. They discussed blip.tv's current and future efforts to ensure that videos, as well as metadata about videos, flow freely on the web.

10. Lewis Shepherd - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (Rating: 4.10)

    As senior technical officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency and chief of its requirements and research group, Lewis Shepherd has promoted and observed a remarkable transformation that's occurring inside the U.S. intelligence community as analysts begin to embrace Web 2.0 practices. There's a long way to go. In this conversation, Jon Udell and Lewis Shepherd discuss the origins, progress, and future of these initiatives.

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September 5, 2007

FreeNum Links Phone Numbers to the Internet

I loved John Todd's ETel presentation (podcast) on FreeNum, a scheme for bringing phone numbers to the Internet. Of course, I love identifiers and addresses and all that they enable, so it was a natural.

Suppose you were a university campus and when you looked at your phone bill, you noticed that a lot of calls were to other universities. You've got a VoIP telephone system; they've all got VoIP telephone systems. You might wonder "isn't there some way to route these calls over the Internet and save some serious money?"

The answer, of course is "yes" but making it usable is a little harder than simply routing packets. The problem is all about identifiers and addresses. In this case, identifiers that are addresses.

Traditional phone numbers are tightly controlled by the telcos, unlike the world of Internet addresses. The simple answer would be to use something like SIP URLs, but we run into a usability problem: most people's phones have a regular, standard-issue DTFM 12-key dial pad. Using that to enter SIP URLs is a non-starter for anyone but the most hard-core.

ENUM could provide some help. ENUM is method for providing DNS-like services for phone numbers that piggybacks on DNS. The problem is that it's not very DNS-like. In DNS, control of a subdomain can be delegated (the zone file), but with ENUM, it's hard to delegate responsibility for zones to the right entity. This is because ENUM is based on traditional telephone numbers and so the zones don't necessarily match with entities who care. For example, who should responsible for the "3" zone inside the 801 area code?

Todd discusses an alternative approach called ISNs. ISNs rely on a new number, administered by IANA called an ITAD or Internet Telephony Administrative Domain. Like a domain, anyone can get an ITAD. Once you have one, you control the naming inside that number, just like you control the email addresses inside your domain.

ITADs are combined with an internally assigned number (called the subscriber number) to create an ISN. So, suppose that BYU's ITAD was "256" (it's not). My extension is "26465" so my ISN would be "26465*256". Someone at another entity with a SIP phone could call me, from a regular keypad, by calling that number.

Update: I wasn't far off. BYU's ITAD is 458. I don't know that 26465*458 works as my ISN, however.

It seems that my i-name registrar ought to be able to apply for an ITAD and then assign a number to be that resolves to by i-name and then use the information in my XRDS file to route the call for me--even to my cell phone if that's where I've pointed xri://=windley(+phone). That's a service I'd like to see.

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September 4, 2007

User-Centric Identity Events at DIDW

There are several user-centric identity events happening at the upcoming Digital Identity World.

Identity Open Space

User-Centric Digital Identity is gaining traction. OpenID is one of first of several efforts moving out on the web. There is a cluster of working groups working on various issues including Identity Schema's, Identity Rights Agreements, Interoperability with OSIS, protocols working together on the Concordia Project and others.

You're invited to participate in a half-day Identity Open Space being held in conjunction with Digital Identity World on September 26, 2007 (Wednesday) at the San Francisco Hilton. Cost for this afternoon of open space is $40 which covers the cost of lunch and incidentals.

Like the longer Internet Identity Workshops held twice yearly, Identity Open Space events are based on open space principals. The first order of business will be to create the agenda. We expect the afternoon to be filled with interesting sessions on user-centric and internet-scale identity systems. Introductory sessions will be included as necessary, taught by experts in the field.

Please plan on arriving at the IOS meeting space (exact room TBD) at noon for lunch and the agenda planning session. Actual IOS sessions will begin at 1pm.

Attendees at the Identity Open Space qualify for a discount admission to