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December 31, 2007
Family Information Center from an Old iMac
 iMac as family
information center (click to enlarge) |
I have an old 17 inch iMac G5 that I'm not using. After I installed Leopard on it, it just didn't cut it anymore, so it had been retired. I decided it would be fun to experiment with it as a "special purpose computer." That is, one that has limited duty.
A while ago I read an article in Macworld on making a family message center from an old iMac and decided to give that a go. You can see from the picture how it turned out.
I already had a VESA mount adapter for the iMac that I'd bought when it was new. I got a small VESA mount from Circuit City. The biggest problem I had was that this doesn't tighten enough to keep the panel straight. I stripped the bolt trying. I put a small piece of metal in the tilt stop slot with a glue gun to fix it in the position I wanted.
The next problem was how to mount a keyboard and mouse platform. I originally was going to put one on the wall, but that seemed kludgy, so I bought some 1 inch strap metal at Home Depot and bent it into brackets that attach to the VESA mount and hold the keyboard tray.
I opted for a Bluetooth wireless keyboard because its small. I'd like to get a track ball to replace the mouse since it's awkward to moves around on the small inclined platform. I'd rather have a tethered keyboard so I'll keep looking for something small and wired.
Now that every computer I own has a built-in iSight camera, I also have a few spare cameras floating around, so I added that (not pictured). The VESA adapter offered some nice slots for tucking in the mouse and firewire cables for a neat installation. I also wrapped the power cord around the mount to keep it out of the way.
On the software side, I reinstalled 10.4 (Tiger) since it does everything I need and is much more responsive on this machine. I set up an account to launch Sticky Notes, iCal, iChat, and FlickrFan at launch. I also configured this account to autostart on boot.
I also made it so that Dashboard widgets can be kept on the screen. Here's how. Run this command on the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Dashboard devmode YES
Then log out and back in to restart Dashboard. Then use F12 to expose Dashboard, click and hold the widget you want on the desktop and press F12 again. I found I had to move the widget a little after click and before pressing F12 to get it to stick. This let me put the weather widget on the desktop permanently.
iCal is subscribed to everyone's calendars now, so there's one place that shows everyone's schedule. I already had a WebDAV server set up, so that wasn't an issue. You could use a .Mac account or something else if you don't have a WebDAV server handy.
I created an account on AIM for the computer and added myself and other family members to it so you can IM family members from the message center. I also added our cell numbers so you can SMS from iChat. To do this, add a new buddy and for the account, type the 10-digit cell number preceded by a +1.
I didn't put any phone features on it since I'm not anxious to spend $130 to get a voicemail box system like Phone Valet Message Center. If anyone knows of something simpler that works with the internal modem, I'd love to hear about it.
As I mentioned I installed FlickrFan to get FLickr pictures on the machine and then set up the screen saver to come on after 3 minutes, so the computer is constantly showing us interesting pictures. The kids have been mesmerized by it at times.
All in all, this was a fun, simple project. Now we'll see if the family will use it or if it is just an expensive electronic picture frame. Even at that, it's a nice use for an old flat iMac.
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December 28, 2007
Comments in MT4
Wow! I just upgraded to Movable Type 4 and my comments have gone south.
For some reason, mt-comments.cgi is very slow and is taking gobs of memory and CPU. That, combined with spammers hitting the script as soon as it's executable means that the server load goes through the roof and things stop working. I tried some anti-spam things--even requiring authentication--but they all require that mt-comments.cgi run and that's not acceptable, as slow as it is.
For now, I'm experimenting with Discus, a blog commenting service. I'm not sure I like the idea of the comments living somewhere else. There's the Google problem and the issue of reliability. Discus claims that a plugin that uses the API rather than Javascript will be available soon. Hmmm.
Then there's the issue of friction. I've liked not having authentication for comments so that people can comment with as few speed bumps as possible. Discus requires authentication--on their site.
I'll keep digging into the slowness of the MT comment system. Doesn't seem right and there's not much on Google about it, so it's probably something local. Ugh.
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Upgrading to MT4.01
I'm in the processing of upgrading this blog to run on Movabletype 4.0, so there will be some things broken while I get it right. Thanks for your patience.
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December 27, 2007
Reasons to Buy a Mac Mini
For Christmas, I bought a Sony XBR4 40" LCD TV from Amazon. I was thinking I ought to get an Apple TV to go with it, but then thought that a Mac Mini might be more versatile. While in the midst of indecision, Dave Winer made up my mind for me and Scoble put the icing on the cake. I'll get a Mac Mini.
Dave's new product--not yet released--sounds like a fun convergence of a big, bright beautiful screen hanging on the wall and the Internet. The XBR4 already has a DVI input, so hooking up ought to be a breeze and getting good pictures on the thing would be wonderful.
There's a real culture war going on between the traditional open culture of computing--something that's survived 40 years of companies trying to build walled gardens--and the traditionally closed culture of TV, radio, and the whole broadcast industry. Thinking like Dave's will help keep the hounds at bay a little longer, I hope.
A word about the TV: the Sony XBR4 LCD flat screens are clearly the best on the market. This is a TV worth paying extra for.
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Thinking About Twitter
JP Rangaswami likes Twitter. What's even better is his analysis of why it adds value to our online life despite its apparent deficiencies (e.g. 140 character limit). Before you dismiss this as just another Twitter fanboy, recall that JP knows a thing or two about enterprise IT.
JP hits the nail on the head by discussing Twitter as a pub-sub platform. One of the key features of a pub-sub system is user (client) control of messaging. I choose who I follow on Twitter and thus the messages I receive. I've stopped following people because their tweets weren't very relevant to me. Nothing pejorative in that--simple message management.
This is similar to what people do with RSS readers and the overall feeling is the same. The key difference to me is that Twitter is lighter weight (primarily due to the 140 character limit) and more ephemeral. Further, because I use a desktop client that's always open to follow tweets, I can glance at it from time to time and see who's doing what without much overhead.
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Dr. Mendel Rosenblum
GigaOM has an interesting interview with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, the Chief Scientist at VMWare.
We went down a rat hole on how we built the data centers. I am not surprised with all the problems we are having with data centers. In my opinion, the architecture has problems because it was built with inferior solutions. What you had was people placing services on servers in a way that led to lightly loaded machines that were idle most of the time. The whole thing was built for peak performance (and not maximum utilization.) Well, idle machines use as much energy as fully utilized machines. The way out of this is to put more on the machines, and get them to be more efficient and take on the work load that will, to some extent, lower the power consumption.From The GigaOM Interview: Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist, VMWare - GigaOM
Referenced Thu Dec 27 2007 10:42:49 GMT-0700 (MST)
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December 24, 2007
Hard Drives and Apple
One of the great things about blogging is that it gives you and outlet to vent when you get crappy customer service--heck, I think that drives blogging more than anything. Dave Winer got ripped off in an Apple store yesterday and told the tale on his blog.
I've owned, if you count the machines I buy for my students in my research lab, dozens of Apple machines in the last five years. Overall, I find them to be moderately reliable--but I have to admit most of the problems I've had have been on new-release machines.
I've never taken my machine in to get a hard drive replaced and I've done that more times than I'd care to count. Dave didn't do it himself--not because he can't, but because he already had it at the store and they'd diagnosed the problem--I'd probably do the same thing.
Apple doesn't make machines particularly easy to work on. My recent experience taking an iMac apart is a case in point. Over the normal life of any laptop, chances are you'll want to replace the harddrive. That's especially true with the number of large media files that I find myself accumulating. External drives just don't cut it.
Frankly, it would be nice if Apple would make drives as easy to replace as RAM. I'll gladly trade some case esthetic for easier upgrades.
If you do upgrade the harddrive in your Mac, the best resource I've found is iFixIt. They have instructions for cracking the case on just about every Mac model around. Very handy.
Back to Dave, he clearly go ripped off. If this had been a warranty repair, then the Apple would have claim on the drive unless he paid a "own the drive" fee like Dell offers. But this wasn't. He paid to get the machine repaired and the drive should belong to him.
Dave's concerns over the data on his drive are valid. I'd have them too. When I replace a drive on my machine, I always do a security erase on it before giving it to someone else. With a broken drive, I'd like to destroy them, but so far just accumulate them on a shelf. You can buy a service. Anyone have any experience destroying old drives?
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December 19, 2007
Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1
The Richter Scales have posted version 1.1 of "Here Comes Another Bubble" after Lane Hartwell filed a DCMA take down request with YouTube because a picture she'd taken at a party and posted online was used in the video.
Hartwell posted a statement on her blog. The Richter Scales posted their own. Scoble said:
"I think it really is lame to take pictures of people (who don't get a cut of the profits) at parties, without being commissioned, and then send in invoices for that work when it gets used in a parody video."
Yeah, there's that. Hartwell won the battle and got her 15 minutes of fame to boot. I'm sure the next time someone in Silicon Valley needs a picture, Lane Hartwell will be the first one they call.
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Utah Top Ten IT Accomplishments
Each year, Dave Fletcher publishes a list of the top ten IT accomplishments in Utah state government. He notes that Utah.gov was selected as the #1 state portal in the country for the second time. Utah is the only state to have won that honor twice. There are now over 1030 online government services in Utah. Cool.
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December 18, 2007
DC Power in Datacenters
I just posted at article at Between the Lines on using DC power in datacenters to save power.
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Starting a High Tech Business: You Need a CTO
I'm starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the sixth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way----if so, please let me know!
People frequently get confused about the differences between CIOs and CTOs and even a lot of techworld business people I know can't really articulate what a CTO does. In many companies, the CTO is the most technical person on the founding team. That might or might not work out depending on that person's capabilities.
I was at breakfast this morning with a friend who has been CTO at several high-tech startups and we got to talking about what things a world class should know how to do and what role he or she ought to play. Here's what we came up with. There's probably more:
- Product - The CTO is the chief product officer. I'm at odds with many who believe that product management is a marketing function. There's a difference between product marketing and product management. I think the CTO has to, first and foremost, see him or herself as the person in charge of the company's product strategy.
- Architecture - The CTO is responsible for overall product architecture and for the primary architecture choices. Good architectural choices are crucial to future sustainability, current and future costs, and whether or not you'll even get funding.
- Finance and Accounting - A good CTO has to know how accounting practice affects products and the way the company can or can't recognize revenue. More importantly, a CTO needs to understand cash flow and how to model free cash flow for products. You can rely on others to build the models, but you have to understand them and tweak them.
- Legal - Almost all businesses have legal requirements that affect their products. How much, obviously, depends on what industry you're in. If you're in banking or health, the legal requirements are onerous. If you're building a photo sharing site, not as much. But even there, there are privacy implications, anti-pornography laws, copyright issues, and so on that you have to understand to build a product that can be sold without incurring undue liability. I learned early on that the general counsel was my friend.
- Standards - In today's world, standards are important because almost no product will operate independently of everything else. More than just knowing the standards, however, being involved in the standards process can give a company a leg up.
- Nomenclature - CTO's build language about their product. Using the right nomenclature and helping others figure out how to talk about your product builds common understanding.
When you think about this, what most of these have in common is that they build context within which others work. Good CTOs provide their company with context so that discussions about customers, products, and even finance happen with a common understanding of what the company is about and what it does. In that sense, a CTO is the heart of a high-tech business. That's why it's not unusual to see people with the twin titles Chairman and CTO in high-tech companies.
Many CEOs don't understand what they want a CTO for. They just know there's a bunch of technology stuff they don't understand. A good CTO educates the CEO about the technology and a good CEO will want to understand. Many CEOs think of the CTO as a VP of Development. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. A world class CTO might not be a world class programmer, although they often are. Here's why:
A CTO needs the respect of the technology organization to get the job done. They have to trust that the CTO is providing good leadership. Right or wrong, in the geek culture, that often comes down to a good old fashioned "alpha geek" shoot out and more often than not that means code. The CTO has to be the alpha geek.
I've run across people--not techies--who say "I just had this good idea for a Web business. All I need is a programmer. Do you know any good Web programmers?" What they don't get is that they probably need a lot more than a programmer. They need a CTO. Without a CTO, you don't have a high-tech business--you have a low-tech business with a Web site.
What else does a good CTO have to know and do? What mistakes have you seen CTOs make? I'd love to know what you think.
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December 14, 2007
Amazon's SimpleDB
I just posted piece at Between the Lines on Amazon's latest announcement: SimpleDB, a database service in the cloud. I gave it the title "Economics that are impossible to stop" because that what I think Amazon's doing: changing the whole economic model of how people build large scale distributed applications.
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December 13, 2007
Taking an iMac Apart
I wanted a bigger hard drive in an Intel (Core Duo) 20 inch iMac than the one it had and took advantage of CompUSA's clearance sale to pick up a 750Gb drive. I'd taken the cover off of my G5 iMac plenty of times and it's dirt simple, so I thought I was in for an easy time. I was very wrong.
My first clue should have been the separate RAM bay door on the bottom of the machine. No one puts a RAM bay door on a machine that's easy to crack open. Where the back simple lifts off the G5 iMac after loosening 4 captured screws, removing the screws from the Intel iMac didn't loosen the back at all, rather, it allows the front to be taken off.
After that, to get to the drive, you have to remove the LCD screen, which requires pealing away some black sticky stuff that I assume is shielding and removing four torx screws that are recessed about an inch below the surface. Ugh. I didn't even try to remove the whole panel, just took the screws out and had my son hold it up while I changed out the drive. These instructions were helpful in knowing what to expect, but my unit was slightly different.
After I put it all together, it still worked. I was glad--I didn't want to have to take it apart. After seeing how hard it is, I'm glad I got the 750Gb drive--I almost got the 500Gb thinking it would be easy to upgrade later. Whew! I can tell you I'm glad there's a RAM bay door. I want to upgrade the RAM with a spare stick I've got and if I had to remove the LCD panel again, I'd just say "forget it."
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Enomalism and Xen
I'm looking for a management console for Xen (besides the command line). I'd looked into this months and months ago and concluded that when the time came, I'd try Enomalism, but after some initial experiments I'm no longer sure. Any advice? Let me know what you use for managing the Xen hypervisor and why.
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December 12, 2007
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for November 2007
Here's the top ten shows, by download, for IT Conversations during November 2007. I'm late because some recent server changes means that I didn't have access to the logs for a bit. Also, unfortunately, we lost 11 days worth of logs, so this data is based on 19 days of November 2007.
- Scott Lemon - Technometria: Scratch and Squeak (No rating yet)
As described on its website, Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. It is designed to help young people As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Phil and Scott discuss Scratch, along with a number of other current technology topics.
- David Heinemeier Hansson - Keynote (No rating yet)
The next evolution of Rails isn't going to be a unicorn, according to David Heinemeier Hansson. In this keynote address at the 2007 RailsConf, Hansson talks about what the Rails community has and where it's going, and the gradual improvements Rails will see in the coming years.
- Beth Jefferson - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (Rating: 5.00)
On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Jon Udell's guest is Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons. Her company's new software aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons.
- Rodney Brooks - The Singularity: A Period Not An Event (No rating yet)
In the keynote presentation from the 2007 Singularity Summit, Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, explores many possible singularity futures based on decades of experience researching, inventing, and commercializing robots. During this presentation Dr. Brooks examines why we need robotics and AI as well as how the singularity will not be like it is portrayed by Hollywood.
- Dr. Norma Nowak - BioTech Nation (No rating yet)
On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Norma Nowak, who looks at some interesting new discoveries which could some day replace amniocentesis. David Ewing Duncan returns with Bio-Issue of the Week.
- David Bodanis - Tech Nation (Rating: 5.00)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with science writer David Bodanis, author of "Passionate Minds", about the scientist Emilie du Chatelet and the Poet Voltaire.
- Dick Hardt - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (Rating: 4.75)
Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, has been working with the Canadian government on a new virtual ID card that will streamline online interaction among government agencies, public-sector organizations, and citizens. In this conversation with Jon Udell, Hardt explains how this new program will work, and offers perspectives on a variety of online identity issues.
- Amory Lovins - Energy Efficiency in Transportation - Part 2 (Rating: 4.75)
Amory Lovins continues his discussion on energy efficiency in transportation by presenting the business case for lighter, more slippery vehicles. However, despite the superior economics of fuel efficient vehicles, there remains a lack of will on the part of automobile manufacturers to fully embrace the radical changes necessary to transform the commercial transportation industry. From MAP.
- Cooking with IEEE Spectrum: Brian Young - IEEE Spectrum Radio (No rating yet)
On this edition of IEEE Spectrum's Cooking with Engineers series, Spectrum's Suzan Hassler speaks with Brian Young, the Executive Chef at New York's Tavern on the Green. Young discusses his task as architect at a restaurant serving over a thousand diners for lunch and dinner, and the immense logistics involved in getting food onto the tables.
- Denise Caruso, Clay Shirky - Provocations: Challenging Assumptions About Technology (No rating yet)
The internet has opened up previously unimagined space for innovation, but unintended consequences befuddle our ability to assess risks on the technological frontier. Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky launch Supernova with a lively rethinking of risk, serendipity, and the power of love in a socially networked world.
I'm disappointed that we don't have better rating data on shows. I wish there were a way to get the ratings data while people listened instead of requiring them to come back to the site to rate shows. Too much friction and not enough kinetic energy.
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December 10, 2007
Blogs in Plain English
Ever wanted to explain to your mom what a blog is? Here's a nifty little screen cast from Lee and Sachi LeFever at the CommonCraft show that does just that:
Last week I posted a screencast on OpenID that has garnered some good comments from friends and even family ("oh, now I get it!"). I'm a big fan of this new medium. I've used it to augment classroom instruction in CS330. I want to try some of these "whiteboard" type screencasts for fun.
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Quicklook From the Command Line
This Mac OS X hint shows how to use Quicklook from inside Quicksilver. I'm a big Quicksilver fan, but frankly didn't get very excited since just hitting "return" launches Preview as fast as hitting "tab->q" and then waiting for the AppleScript to run. But, along the way, part of the hint involved creating a small shell script:
#!/bin/bash qlmanage -p "$@" >& /dev/null &
Using the script, you can launch QuickLook from the command line. Now that's handy!
qlmanage is a very chatty program that performs operations on the QuickLook cache and generators. I saved the above script as ql.
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Blogging: Talking to Friends
Jeff Jarvis, in a larger piece on corporate blogging and where it goes wrong writes a nice bit of advice for all bloggers:
When I was in London, I sat with folks from the BBC in an afternoon devoted to blogging, and the woman next to me was troubled, bearing weight on her shoulders from having to fill her blog and manage her blog. To her, the blog was a thing, a beast that needed to be fed, a never-ending sheet of blank paper. I turned to her and said she should see past the blog. It's not a show with a rundown that, without feeding, turns into dead air. Indeed, if you look at it that way, you'll probably write crappy blog posts. I've said before that if I think I need to write a post just because I haven't written one, I inevitably come out with something forced and bad. Instead, I blog when I find something interesting that I've seen and I think, 'I have to tell my friends about that.'From BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » It's not the blog
Referenced Mon Dec 10 2007 07:34:15 GMT-0700 (MST)
That's so true. When you read something so exciting that you have to share, the blog just seems to flow. When you're "just talking to your friends" there's no work in blogging.
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December 8, 2007
Achieving Accountability
Dave Winer's Club140.org gives us a good example of how hard it is to protect data. For those of you not following along at home, Dave created a site, called Club140, that lists any tweets he sees on Twitter that are exactly 140 characters long (the max allowed by Twitter).
Today, Dave posted this on Twitter:
i just added code to http://club140.org/ to filter out messages from people posting from "protected" accounts. hadn't thought of it before.
The issue is that some people have their tweets protected so that only people who are following them can see what they write. Dave, by reposting those protected tweets, was allowing the protected tweets to leak onto the 'Net for all to see.
Not a big deal in this case, and Dave corrected it, but it's illustrative of the problem we have with explicit authorizations of any kind--one that's at the heart of many of the discussions surrounding privacy.
If you try to protect data with explicit permissions (e.g. "you can share my blog URL freely, keep but not share my email address, and use my SSN once for the explicit purpose agreed to and then must destroy it.") This makes the problems of DRM look like child's play and we know how well that's worked.
The problem is that explicit permissions scale geometrically. Picture a 3 dimensional table with people on one axis, resources (like tweets) on the second, and possible actions along the third. Put a T or F at each intersection indicating whether or not person P is allowed to take action A on resource R. Now, make sure these travel around with each resource (including fragments) in a way everyone can read, no one can tamper with, and is extensible as others add their own data. Eek!
There are systems that scale better. Auditing is one. Someone who wants their tweets protected can see that Dave is sharing them and call him on it. Auditing scales linearly but requires transparency. If Dave weren't posting the tweets, but rather sending them off surreptitiously to the CIA, then no on would be the wiser.
That's where trust comes into play. Presumably, people allow Dave to see their protected tweets because they trust him to protect their privacy. He did and I'm certain that would be the case whether or no there was transparency.
What we're after, of course, is accountability. We use things like explicit authorization as proxies for accountability so often that we're in danger of confusing the means with the end. In reality, there are many ways of achieving those ends and with varying degrees of cost and effectiveness, but there's no silver bullet. The techniques that have served us well offline, based on transparency, are guides to what will work online as well.
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December 7, 2007
Starting a High Tech Business: Choosing a Deployment Model
I'm starting a new business called Kynetx (nothing to see there yet). As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the fifth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way---if so, please let me know!
Jason Fried at 37Signals has an excellent list of all the reasons they don't sell installable software. That inspired Joel Spolsky to write about gnarly programs. Interestingly, I know people with the exact opposite response as Jason: "Boy, I wish we just sold software and didn't have to keep things running 24x7." More on that later.
There are basically four options for deployment, as far as I can tell:
- Sell software that gets installed on customer hardware
- Package your code onto a hardware appliance and sell the box
- Package your code onto a virtual appliance and sell the appliance
- Sell a hosted solution
All of these have advantages and disadvantages and each is appropriate in different circumstances. Some products, a plug-in for Outlook for example, just have to be installed. Often there are choices between these options.
As Jason points out, option (1) is difficult because you don't have control over the environment. You need technical support, sales engineers, and consultants to spend time with customers helping them get it right. Not to mention that the software release cycle means that your customers will see updates much less frequently.
Option (4) is just the opposite: you've got perfect control over the environment--avoiding all those problems--and you can release new features every hour, if you like. But when you're selling mission critical components to enterprise customers, they're often loathe to trust a hosted solution. This is especially true when you're small.
The other bugaboo with option (4) is that running a 24x7 operation for mission critical apps is hard and expensive. I'm not saying "impossible" or even "no fun." But getting support calls at 3am just sucks sometimes.
Options (2) and (3) are compromises. An appliance can be installed at the customer site but is a controlled environment. A big advantage of appliances is that in certain business models, you can charge more for an appliance than you could or the software because it seems more substantial. Hardware appliances usually require that you invest working capital in inventory. Virtual appliances might put some customers off.
Either way--virtual or physical--some products are more appropriate for appliances than others. When customers might use your product to solve problems of vastly different sizes or for very different problems, building a one-size-fits-all appliance is hard. Database appliances, for example, would be difficult for that reason.
No matter which path you choose, you need expertise. Building installable software that has as few support issues as possible, running 24x7 operations, and making appliances all have their own peculiar issues where good engineering comes into play. These are some of Joel's gnarly problems and getting them right is where you earn your salt.
Find the gnarly problem you like solving because then you'll be paid to do what you like. If you hate the whole idea of installable software, don't pick a business where that's required and then try to force fit a different solution. What ever you do, don't try look for businesses without gnarly problems. If you find something that doesn't have gnarly problems, no one will pay you for doing it.
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Google Chart API
Google has released a chart API that returns PNG files from an HTTP GET. The following types of charts are available:
- Line chart
- Bar chart
- Pie chart
- Venn diagram
- Scatter plot
The chart to the right was created using this URL:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? cht=p3& chd=s:Uf9a& chs=200x100& chl=A|B|C|D
Adding charts to Web sites just got a lot easier.
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December 6, 2007
Technorati's Dead Too
 Crap ad
seen at Technorati.com on Dec 6, 2007 (click to enlarge) |
As long as I'm commenting on things that are dead, allow me to add Technorati to the list. They have descended into the dark depths of crap advertising "You've been chosen to get a free laptop computer. Click to accept!" Sheesh. If things are that bad, just shut off the servers, turn off the lights, lock the door, and go home.
As long as I'm on my soap box, do you imagine that the intersection of the kinds of people who use Technorati and the morons who'd actually click on this ad is very large? Given that almost no one I know ever clicks on online ads, I'd guess it's very small.
It's sad that Technorati couldn't make it. They do blog search better than anyone else--when they're working. I miss them already and they're not even gone yet.
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The Optical Disk is Dead
My recent travels had me wishing for a lighter bag--that implies a smaller laptop--or no laptop. I'm not ready for the latter, but I'd be happy to give up the optical drive on my laptop to get it. I never use it on the road. I'm willing to plug one in for the rare cases where I use it. I'm ready to jettison optical drives on all portable computers.
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What's New in OpenID 2.0?
OpenID 2.0 was finally release yesterday. I've put a piece up at Between the Lines on what's new in OpenID 2.0. There's some important capabilities that will move this forward in a big way.
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December 5, 2007
Understanding OpenID
Here's a screencast that Dan Lullich sent me showing how OpenID works using a whiteboard cartoon. Very clever!
Dan was also my guest on the Technometria podcast this week. We talked about reputation--go figure.
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December 4, 2007
Reputation at IIW2007B
 Doc
juggles (click to enlarge) |
I just posted a summary piece from Tuesday at IIW2007B at Between the Lines: Reputation taking center stage. I also have pictures. Look for more IIW coverage with the iiw2007b tag.
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December 3, 2007
Placing the User at the Center of Identity
Coincidentally, a feature I did for InfoWorld on user-centric identity appeared today. Here's what I contributed:
- Federating identity for the Web
User-centric innovations CardSpace and OpenID may finally bring the promise of federation within reach - Understanding OpenID and CardSpace
OpenID and CardSpace are at the forefront of user-centric identity. Here's how they work - Podcast: An identity layer for the Web
Microsoft's Kim Cameron speaks to the advantages of placing the user at the center of enterprise identity systems - Podcast: User-centric identity in the enterprise
Burton Group's Mike Neuenschwander discusses the state of federated identity, delving deep into the business proposition user-centric identity presents
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IIW2007B Kicks Off
IIW2007B is underway. I flew to San Jose with two of my grad students, Bryant Cutler and Devlin Daley this morning. We went to Costco to buy food for snacks and showed up at the Computer History Museum about noon.
The first day of IIW continues to evolve. Kaliya and her design team set out an agenda this time that included a set of parallel tracks to start off. The parallel tracks allowed us to run a real "intro" track for new comers alongside some working groups sessions.
I was in charge of the intro track. Paul Madsen started off with a talk introducing the major protocols and their relationship to each other. I think it hit the nail on the head in terms of what I wanted from that portion of the program. I'll post a link to his files in this spot when they're available.
I gave a talk that attempted to categorize the various protocols, software projects, working groups, interop projects and industry consortia. My slides are available (PDF).
The session ended with two talks on topics I think will be emerging themes at this IIW: VRM and Trust/Reputation. Doc Searls gave a nice impromptu talk on vendor relationship management. At Defrag, Dick Hardt gave a great talk, in his inimitable style on trust and reputation. I asked him to repeat it at IIW.
We'll be having a general session at 4pm and then dinner later tonight. Tomorrow we will jump into open space and let every one define their own topics.