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April 30, 2008
IIW Is Just Around the Corner
If you are wondering what the Internet Identity Workshop is all about we have a new articulation posted on the main wiki page for our upcoming conference. It goes into the range of topics covered along with the technology and social issues. This is our 6th event and I think it will be a great one.
MONDAY IS FREE (beginning at 1PM)
We have Monday’s program figured out and Monday afternoon is FREE to anyone who wants to come and check out the emerging field. We will open at 1pm.
We will open with a ‘newbie’ perspective from Ryan Janssen who has been an amazing active reader of the community blogs and writing about it as Dr. Star Cat
Everyone will get a hand out of all the community project one pagers.
Presentations will then follow about five centers of gravity in the community that we see:
The VENN OF IDENTITY
- OpenID - David Recordon
- SAML/Liberty Alliance - Paul Madsen
- i-cards - Pamela Dingle
- Data sharing/linking - Drummond Reed
- Vendor Relationship Management Project - Chris Carfi
Between 3:30 and 4:00 we will be all together - considering “what useful things can we do” along with other questions please be there for this if you feel all up to speed on “everything”. We think that the presentations will be informative for those already familiar with the landscape it has moved forward since we last were together - so we encourage you all to get there at 1PM.
We are working on a blog push on Thursday May 1st - blog about it that day- (if you miss that day - blog about it anyways over the weekend)
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April 29, 2008
Gin and Television: Using Our Social Surplus
Clay Shirky has posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 talk "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." In it Shirky argues that television was the safety valve that society used to sponge up all the excess cognitive capacity that we developed after World War II. In effect, the mindless activity of watching television kept people from going crazy with all the spare cycles that they had.
Shirky says that with the Internet and Web, we're starting to re-use that capacity for social good, finding ways to create value from what was previously wasted.
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
From Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
Referenced Tue Apr 29 2008 09:36:02 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Pretty interesting stuff. Go read the whole article.
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April 25, 2008
Web Authentication with Selective Delegation using SRP
Bryant Cutler and Devlin Daley developed a methodology for adding selective delegation to relationship-based identity systems. This afternoon I presented that work at WWW2008. The talk went well. There were probably about 40 people in the room. There were some good questions afterwards, so all in all, I'm pleased. Here are the slides (PDF) if you're interested.
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Tyler Close: Using Promises to Orchestrate Web Interactions
 Tyler Close
answers questions after his talk (click to enlarge) |
Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of promises in asynchronous systems was developed by Barbara Liskov in the late 80's. Tyler has a tutorial online. I also found this description from Brian Lothar of Web calculus which discusses promises in that context. Very interesting stuff. I think this was my favorite presentation of WWW2008.
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April 24, 2008
WWW2008 Conference Dinner at Great Hall of the People
 Great Hall of the People (click to enlarge) |
We just got back from the WWW2008 conference dinner at the Great Hall of the People, China's parliment building and center of state ceremonial activities. How the conference got permission to have the dinner there, I don't know. I do know it wasn't cheap. Extra tickets were $150 and they said that was cost.
In any event it was quite an event. The banquet hall was huge, the food was first rate and quite varied, and the entertainment well planned. I enjoyed the whole evening. I've posted some pictures of the event. Unfortunately, they told us we couldn't take a real camera, so all I had was my iPhone. Given that constraint, they didn't turn out too badly.
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April 23, 2008
Computational Advertising
 Andrei Broder of Yahoo! Research (click to enlarge) |
I'm in a talk by Andrei Broder, a Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President of Computation Advertising on, what else, computational advertising. I was drawn to the talk by the title.
Find the "best match" between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement. Context could be click stream, page content, or something else. Key ideas:
- The financial scale is huge. Small constants matter.
- Advertising is a form of information
- Finding the "best ad" is a type of information retrieval problem.
Classic advertising falls into one of two camps: brand advertising that is projecting a message and direct advertising that is attempting to elicit action. Coupons are a classic example of direct marketing.
For advertisers interested in online (keyword) ads, the key issues are
- what words to buy
- how much to pay
- spamming is an economic activity
For search engine owners, the questions are
- How to price the words (auction)
- How to match ads to content
The problem with matching is that it's not purely syntactic. For example, an ad for Seattle hotels ought to match "Alaska cruise starting point" but not "Seatlle's Best Coffee Chicago". Finding the right ad is a query problem, but the ad database is smaller than the database of web pages. The the entries are smaller pages (less content). An ranking is not just based on matching, but also the bid.
There's been a lot of progress on this problem in recent years. Matches are not syntactic. What's not solved? Filtering for relevance. Ads on a page about Scotter Libby's testimony included entries for Libby Shoes.
We're moving from an explicit demand for information driven by a user query to active information supply driven by user activity and context. This requires the increased use of semantics and context. An information supply engine looks at user profile and context, the activity context (browsing) and the ad inventory, and provides an ad. User action then feeds back into the system.
There is a different quality (utility) factor for publishers, advertisers and users. The ad agency has it's own economic interest. Different types of ads (text, graphical, multimedia) are not easily compared.
One technique is to allow the searcher to peak at the result to determine what a query is about. For example viewing the query "TFM-PCIV92A" doesn't give you a lot of information about what this is about, but looking at the results tells you this is about 56K baud modems. Note that if you do that search in Google, you don't see any ads for modems. If you modemsearch modem, you'll see all kinds of sponsored ads. Why isn't Google figuring out the first search is about modems? (this is at least true from China...)
Finding better approaches requires interdisciplinary techniques: machine learning, optimization, information retrieval, statistical modeling, microeconomics, and so on.
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Taking Search to New Frontiers: Dr. Harry Shum (Microsoft)
 Harry Shum (click to enlarge) |
The Web can be divided into three components: content (pages, images, videos, blogs, feeds), people (readers, writers, creators, commenters), and actions (queries, clicks, pageviews). Current search engines have taken advantages of "keywords" to link those three components together. But the keyword model has reach it's limits.
One phenomenon that's challenging keywords is the explosive growth of content. Multimedia content is especially difficult The scale requirements are huge. Another challenge is that the Web is becoming more dynamic: people want to interact. Search engines have a long way to go to satisfy user needs. To make progress, we have to stop worrying about just the content. We need to consider the context.
Users are not anonymous, but they form a community with specific interests. Actions are not random, but are driven by intent. Semantics is important. Extracting semantics is difficult.
There is a practical approach to semantics: understand->extract->expose. It should be data-driven, incremental, and interactive. We need to derive concepts from content, people from users, and intent from actions.
Understanding content has three vectors: intra-page intelligence, inter-page intelligence, and temporal understanding.
The technologies more useful for understanding users as people have been personalization, collaborative filtering, and analyzing social graphs. Personalization has failed to live up to it's promise. Harry demos Gianxi, a Microsoft Research project that searches the social network. This isn't online yet as far as I could see. Reminds me of something Rohit Khare shoed me at the last WWW in Banff.
 Harry Shum (right) and his demo partner Graham (left) (click to enlarge) |
Deriving intent requires contextual intelligence, mobile awareness, and intent refinement. The better we d with query classification, the better we do with user intent. Is there commercial intent? Is it location sensitive? Harry shows a demo (actually it was his trusty sidekick "Graham") where user action (dragging a particular picture to a special zone on the page) reorders the search results and filters them according to additional user action. This is a great example of how understanding intent give much better results than mere keywords. "Give me things that look like this..." This demo actually generated applause from the audience.
One of the demos was actually hobbled by the "Great Firewall of China" according to Graham. Interestingly it was searches of video from Hillary Clinton. The demo extracted the most relevant portions of long videos and showed just the relevant snippets. Seeing the relevant portion, viewers could then select the whole video.
In order to get more out of search, we have to understand semantics, extract it, and then expose it to the user for further refinement.
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Runaway Daemons in OS X
This morning, my MacBook Pro was hot--the fan was running--and sluggish. A look at the activity monitor revealed that syslogd was consuming all of one CPU (apparently it's not threaded) and the other CPU was taking all the load. A reboot would have fixed it, of course, but I like to find ways to fix what's wrong without resorting to restarting the machine when I can.
First thing to try: just kill the process. OS X is pretty good about recognizing when critical processes are down and restarting them. Unfortunately, simply restarting syslogd didn't solve the problem. There was something causing it to run.
A little searching revealed that sometimes Time Machine will cause this problem. Time Machine logs information and there's apparently something wrong with how it does it under certain circumstances. So, the fix is this:
- Disable Time Machine in the System Preferences
- Kill syslogd from the command line (killall syslogd) or using activity monitor--OS X will automatically restart it
- Re-enable Time Machine
After that things were normal. I'll note for the record that my Time Machine drive wasn't connected at the time and hadn't been for days since I'm in China. Maybe that's part of the problem. I'm not sure. In any event, all's well now.
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Trust-Based Recommendation Systems
Reid Andersen from Microsoft Research is talking about trust-based recommendation systems (PDF). To build a personalized recommendation, you need a trust graph among users. What system should you use to determine the recommendation? The researchers use an axiomatic approach.
The context of their axiomatic system is social choice theory (see Arrow's impossibility theorem for voting systems from 1951). More recent treatments are Webpage ranking systems (Altman, Teeneholtz, '05).
The details are fairly complex, but the basic idea is that by proposing axioms until you get an inconsistency in the axiom set and then backing off and exploring other axioms to add to the set, you can generate unique recommendation systems that have a provable set of properties.
The overall model is simple, but there are several nice result including being able to show incentive compatibility which avoids self-interested bias in the recommendations. For details, see the paper (PDF).
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April 22, 2008
Planetary-Scale Views on a Large Instant-Messaging Network
Collect 150Gb/day of compressed log files from MSN instant messenger over thirty days (June 2006) and you find on a typical day you get 1 billion conversations, 93 million users logged in with 65 million of those actually engaging in a conversation. This is the basis of research by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz.
The demographics of MSN users shows that, not surprisingly, they're far younger than the general population. The probability of any two users having a conversation with each other isn't largely affected by their repsective ages or genders. One interesting finding is that people are more general to have conversations with a range of people in all ages as they get older. Older people talk the longest, but the trend isn't monotonic. Middle aged people have shorter conversations than older and younger talkers. Young people type faster (more messages per unit time).
There's little gender bias. Any two random nodes are as likely to be talking to the opposite gender as the same gender. Cross gender conversations are longer and there are more messages per conversation.
Generally people talk less as they live further apart. You can see peaks in the data that correspond to continental distances. Most conversations happen between people within 50-100 km of each other.
Only 8% of US population has MSN IM. For Iceland, it's 35%. When you look at the map with users per capita, the world map pops out, but there are some bear regions. Interestingly the western US is very high. No analysis in the talk on why. You can plot axes of conversations between world areas and see heavy connectivity between US and Europe and less between other areas of the world.
Over the course of June 2006, 180 million people exchanged messages and there are 1.3 billion edges in the graph (each user does 6-7 conversations on average). Over 30 billion total conversations. The number of buddies follows a power law distribution.
Analyzing connectivity confirms the 6 degrees of separation theory. The average length of a path from any two users in buddy lists is 6.2. 90% of people can be reached in less than 8 hops. People are very close together.
When you removed nodes (given some order like number of links, total conversations, total duration, etc.) you can see the strength of the network. Not surprisingly, removing people with the most links makes the network fall apart fastest. But removing them according to the average conversation length causes the network to fall apart even more slowly than removing them at random.
So, in conclusion,
- People who communicate are similar (except gender)
- The world is well connected (small world theory)
- The network is very robust. Many random people can be removed and the network is still connected.
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Cloud Computing: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google
 Main hall where
keynotes were held. I love the red slip covers on the chairs. They
were more comfortable than your standard hotel chair. (click to enlarge) |
The opening keynote at WWW2008 is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google.
Before the keynote, we were treated to a presentation that featured dancers in blue Spiderman uniforms, a dancer in what I assume was traditional dress, and a guy with a "Welcome to Beijing" banner running through them all. Somehow, it seemed to fit perfectly even though it was the first of it's kind at any tech conference I've been too--especially one that's essentially academic.
We received a welcome speech from Dr. Yong Shang who is the Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Science and Technology. It basically said "thanks for coming, China's pushing forward with Internet technology." No mention of the firewall. :-) As an aside, the fact that I can find him and his ministry on Google in English speaks louder about what he was saying than his actual words. No doubt the Chinese government understands the power of the Internet. That said, in terms of eGovernment, there was mostly information there, not much in the way of services I could see.
The Internet connectivity has failed and we're not even 30 minutes in. Hopefully it will come back up. I was planning on watching Twitter for news of the Pennsylvania primary. The opening ceremony has gone on for 40 minutes now. Finally we're ready for Lee's keynote.
 Cloud Computing:
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google (click to enlarge) |
He starts out asking what people want. Many of his answers were specifically about accessibility and it's control. There are four key attributes of cloud computing
- Data stored in the cloud
- Software services are increasingly moving to the cloud and accessed through the browser
- Based on standards and protocols
- Accessible from any device
Interesting that this is more or less the Google's core set of beliefs. Companies often distinguish themselves from Google in departing from these principles. The world has moved from hardware-centric to software-centric to service-centric.
Six ideas driving cloud computing:
- User centric Data is stored in the could and follows you and your devices. Data accessible anywhere and easily, safely shared with others. He mentions several obvious examples of Google services that meet this definition.
- Task centric People don't want to make spreadsheets or write documents. Rather they want to plan a curriculum or collaborate on a business plan. Right now, of course, all Google's examples are simply documents or spreadsheet with collaboration built in.
- Power Lots of computers in a cloud can do things you can't do with a single PC. Google search is faster than desktop search because there's lots of computers on the task. Cloud computing isn't just about moving things off the desktop, but bring more data and compute power to bear on the problem.
- Intelligent Intelligence comes from data mining of massive data. "A ton of data is more valuable than an ounce of algorithm." I'm not sure that says much. Machine translation is a good example where feeding lots of good translation data into a learning algorithm leads better translation of general text. Storage + analytics = intelligence.
- Affordable Of course, this all uses a lot of computers and that gets expensive. Google's strategy is to use cheap machines. 1000 CPU PC-Class machines cost about the same as on 64-way high end machine and give 30x the performance (warning: data may be out of date). The actual numbers at Google are even greater since Google builds it's own hardware. Faulty hardware can be overcome with a sophisticated software layer. This is the heart of engineering.
- Programmable How do you program 1000's of flaky servers? Fault tolerant distributed disk storage, distributed shared memory, and a new programming paradigm. Google uses GFS for file storage: every piece of data is replicated three times. Anytime a server holding on of the three chunks dies, the others notice and make another copy. The shred memory architecture is Big Table. The programming is done using MapReduce, a way of creating parallel algorithms. Between Mar 2005 and Sept 2007 the number of processes using MapReduce went from around 72000 to over 2 million!
Cloud computing requires new skills. This is very true. We don't do enough to teach these skills to students. We ought to be introducing parallel computing in the cloud as the second programming course--ensuring that the first emphasizes the building blocks for the second. This probably means it's not in Java.
John Breslin has an excellent write-up of this speech as well.
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Exploring Beijing
 Parking attendent (click to enlarge) |
I'm in Beijing for WWW2008 which starts tomorrow. I came out early (last Saturday) because I find conferences much more enjoyable when I'm not suffering from jet lag. I'm pretty well adjusted now and I'm looking forward to the talks tomorrow.
In the meantime, I've taken some time to explore Beijing a bit. Sunday I was quite tired and other than going to church, a fun experience in Beijing, stuck close to the hotel. It was rainy both Sunday and Monday, so the weather wasn't up to outdoor activities.
Because of that, I decided that the best use of Monday was to do some shopping. I'd been told that I ought to go to the Silk Street Market, so that's where I headed. What an experience. Six floors of stalls crammed with everything from clothes to watches to electronics to luggage. Most of it is branded with famous brands. Not many of them real, of course.
 More
workmen (click to enlarge) |
The stall vendors are very forward, even clinging to you to get you to come into their stall. The first price you get quoted is 4, 6 or even 10 times what they'll settle for. I'm not very comfortable negotiating and don't like it, so I probably didn't get the best possible price, but I did pay significantly less than the first price quoted. I got some fun gifts for my family. I won't name them here for obvious reasons.
The sun was finally out in the afternoon and since the hotel I'm in is close to some of the Olympic venues, I walked around a bit and took some pictures. I was fascinated to see the workers. For example, they were working on a sidewalk in front of the Bird's Nest stadium (where the opening and closing ceremonies will be held). There were at least a dozen of them all working with hand tools--picks and shovels. No power equipment of any kind being used to build a sidewalk hundreds of yards long.
 Rain spout (click to enlarge) |
Today I took a tour of the Great Wall and the Ming Dynasty Tombs. The best part was getting out of Beijing proper for a bit and seeing some of the country side. There is beautiful country not far out of Beijing. Of course there are still people everywhere. The Ming Tombs were amazing in size.
I went to the Badaling area of the wall. This is not a wall over flat terrain, but up and down mountains. I scratched my head in wonder when I thought about people hauling all that stone up those mountains. I hiked up to the top the section where we were and it was very steep. I'm sure my knees will be reminding me tomorrow of the journey.
 More pictures of how steep it is (click to enlarge) |
We also spent a little time at a jade factory (refactory, I supposed since the original factory was the earth) and had lunch in a cafeteria at the back of a Friendship Store (government run store for tourists). I've had better food. The people making the jade pieces and Ming vases were working in almost unthinkable conditions from an OSHA perspective. But I'm sure they're very well paid in compensation for the danger (sarcasm).
Tonight I went to the Microsoft Research Asia reception at Microsoft's Beijing facility. The food was just so-so, but I enjoyed seeing the demos and talking to the researchers. There were some very fun projects.
The only one I went to that had a handout and a Web page, was the Excel Web Data add-in. This is essentially a very sophisticated screen scraper that puts its results in Excel and can refresh them as the Web page changes. I don't think it runs on Excel 2007 on OS X--at least the installer is a .exe. Maybe I'll fire up Fusion and give it a go later.
Another one that was pretty cool was a mobile application. Imagine two mobile phones streaming separate copies of a movie. When they get close together they both start streaming and showing just half the movie--combining their screens for more pixels. Swap their location and they swap the half of the movie they're showing. The amazing thing is that this coordination isn't done with radio signals, but with sound. The phones chirp to let the other phone know where they're at.
I'm having fun trying to decipher characters. I knew around 250 characters when I lived in Japan. Many of those are coming back and are similar enough to recognize. Of course there are thousands of characters that an educated Chinese knows, so a few hundred doesn't do much good. Even so, it's fun and helps with getting around some.
So far, China has been amazing. The amount of industry and innovation you see everywhere is beyond belief. This is a country that's movin' on up. Of course, everything is being spruced up for the Olympics and there's plenty of poverty around, but the message that comes through loud and clear is that people are working their way up.
I've taken a bunch of pictures. You'll find them all in my photo album for WWW2008.
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April 18, 2008
Following Up on MacBook Pro Memory and Freezing
Almost two weeks ago, I wrote that I suspected that a memory issue was causing my MacBook Pro stability issues. I bought a new 2Gb memory stick ($70) and haven't a single problem with my MBP freezing. Maybe the old memory was bad, maybe it just wasn't working well with the MBP (memory can be finicky), or maybe it was running hot and causing a thermal problem. I don't know. But for now, replacing a single memory stick seems to have solved the problem.
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Starting a High Tech Business: Getting Five Clients
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 fourteenth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way—if so, please let me know!
Most days lately, I've been getting dressed up and talking to people about Kynetx. I'd rather be in jeans writing code, but when you're raising money you're going to dress up more and code less. Raising money is a distraction from running a business and so should be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary. Unfortunately for the kind of business I'm interested in building, there are times when it's necessary. I spoke with the CEO of one venture backed late-stage startup yesterday who said he spends 25% of his time raising money. Ugh.
Going into this process (which I've been doing seriously for several months) I knew some things about raising money, but hadn't ever done it myself. There was always someone else to do that while I made stuff. I've learned a lot and likely still have a lot to learn.
One of the things I've learned is that you're in great peril of losing the sense of magic--the very thing that made this exciting and launched you on the journey in the first place. When you say something over and over again, you get bored with it--even when it's the first time for your audience.
Another thing, like software, the second version of your pitch will be overbuilt. Last summer, based on what we wanted to do, I put together a slide deck. Based on some information we got this spring we completely rewrote it. Once we got good feedback on the second version, we ended up with a third version that was--mostly--just right and much more like the first than the second.
Steve and I went to a FundingUniverse speed pitching event last Wednesday and it was probably one of the most useful things we've done in this whole process as far as getting our story down and getting the pitch smoothed out.
If you haven't seen one, it's like speed dating, but there are angel investors sitting at the tables instead of women (or men, depending). The entrepreneurs move from table to table. You have 7 minutes at each table: 4 minutes to pitch your idea and 3 minutes for questions.
The investors expect the full pitch--everything: problem statement, solutions, marketing plan, sales plan, go to market strategy, financial model, cap table, personal background, and competitive analysis--in those four minutes. When we first heard this, we thought it was impossible. Turns out you can do it. And when you're done refining your pitch to four minutes and then giving it a dozen times (after practicing it dozens more) you'll have be very good at explaining what you do.
That last point is important. Explain what you do. That's the most important thing you can do in any pitch--long or short; Guy Kawasaki is right: the most important thing you can do with any audience is tell them what you do. When we first started practicing the four minute pitch people would say "I'm still not sure what you do" when we were done.
Of course we told them in the first slide--or thought we did. But what you think you said and what people hear when they're unfamiliar with the idea and bringing their own assumptions to bear are two different things. You need to them over and over again in many different ways before they'll really understand. All in four minutes.
Of course, the primary idea is to generate interest and get a chance to sit down in a more relaxed atmosphere to really get into the details. We were pleased to get 5 or 6 people express interest in another meeting from the group and we'll be following up in the coming weeks. If you get a chance to speed pitch do it. It's a great exercise--even if it doesn't lead to funding.
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April 17, 2008
Google App Engine at the CTO Breakfast
 Not Getting Things Done (click to enlarge) |
There was a pretty big crowd at this morning's CTO Breakfast. Sam Curran had spent some time building an application on Google App Engine, so we had him demo his app and show us the code.
Overall, Google Apps looks like a very nice piece of infrastructure for building Web applications. The database integration with Big Table and Google's authentication platform add some good tools for quickly building applications.
We got into a pretty large discussion of the pros and cons of Google Apps, Amazon Web services, dedicated hosting, and so on. None of these services are directly competitive. They're complimentary in many respects. You could imagine many applications that would make use of all of them.
Speaking of Sam's application: a few days ago, I mentioned to Sam, Bryant and Devlin, that I liked putting things on lists because then I could get them out of my mind and if I lost the list, I never had to do them. A guilt-free way of not getting things done. The problem with online todo lists is they don't forget. I hate that! Sam picked up on that for his app and created a task list for people consumed with the guilt of unfinished tasks: Not Getting Things Done. Just put your tasks on the list and forget about them!
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April 15, 2008
Utah CTO Breakfast This Thursday
It's time for another Utah CTO Breakfast. This Thursday at 8am at the Novell cafeteria (building G). We're a little early this month due to my imminent trip to China. Please bring any topics that have struck your fancy this month.
All are invited--the only entrance requirement is an interest in high-tech companies and products.
Here's a schedule of future events:
- Apr 17 (Thursday)
- May 30 (Friday)
- June 27 (Friday)
- July 18 (Friday)
- No breakfast in August
- Sept 25 (Friday)
I have created a Google Calendar with dates for the CTO breakfast that you can subscribe to.
Or if you'd rather subscribe from iCal or Outlook, here's the iCalendar link.
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April 14, 2008
NewsGang Fantasies: The Dream Team
I enjoy the News Gang, The Gang, the Gillmor Gang, or whatever it's called. Actually, I think Steve's starting to call it all the Gillmor Gang again and that's good. That's the right name and brand for Steve's podcasts. I usually listen to the Gang, as I can, while I'm driving.
There's quite a flow and I can't listen to them all (after all, I have all the IT Conversations stuff to listen to). So, I usually just pull up the latest. Today that was Friday's show.
I found myself laughing out loud as it devolved from a discussion of Shel Israel and his puppet alter ego to a liberal fantasy where Cheney and Rumsfeld are tried for war crimes by President Obama. That wasn't enough, in this flight of fancy, Hillary is the veep, Bill is the Secretary of State and both Kerry and Dukakis (yeah, him) are given cabinet posts. Not sure how Mondale fell out of favor, but he didn't get a mention that I heard.
What really cracked me up however was someone's comment that this would be awesome. Hillary could do health care, Bill could do foreign policy and Obama could do....then there was a long pause. The speaker couldn't find a role for Obama. I guess he can make speeches, exhorting them all to have hope and work for change.
The Democrats always seem to find ways to lose elections. This conversation was an indication why. Do they really not understand why the nation rejected people like Dukakis and Kerry? Are they so blind to that that they would seriously consider them part of the dream team? Yes. They are.
Between Obama and McCain, I'm actually split. I'm sure I wouldn't like many of Obama's policies, but I relate to him more generationally and sometimes that makes a bigger difference than politics. But if I had any inkling that any one of the people mentioned in the "dream team" were going to be part of the cabinet, he'd never get my vote and I think that's true of many. Hillary, even as veep, is poison to the Democratic ticket. Don't walk--run!
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Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2
With Amazon's Web services, you've been able to store stuff in S3 or SimpleDB. You've also been able to fire up as many machine instances as you liked with storage that went away when you shut the machine down. Anything you wanted saved better be in a database somewhere else, or you had to painstakingly copy it out to S3 yourself. Last night Amazon announced persistent storage on EC2. Now you can create disks in S3 and attach them to EC2 instances. You want a terabyte of storage for your machine, just create it in S3 and mount it.
Another feature rolled out last night is snapshots. Need backup or the ability to rollback? Snapshot the instance and it's on S3, ready to use. You can create new volumes from any particular snapshot.
These two features make Amazon's grid computing platform a very nice place for startups to experiment, develop, and build out. All with little or no capital cost.
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April 9, 2008
Starting a Small Business: Active Paticipation or Passive Resentment?
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 twelfth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way--if so, please let me know!
Every business makes a choice, often implicitly or by default, about what kind of relationship they want to have with their customers: will their customers be active participants or passively resentful? We all know business in the latter category. Cell phone companies spring to mind with almost no effort. You never hear someone say "Wow! I just love how my cell provider treats me!" Most of us are resentful of them.
On there other hand, there are businesses that have made their mark through the participation of their customers and users. Amazon and Google are both great examples. Neither would exist in their current form without the active participation of people--often without their even being aware--in providing the business with better information. Google relies on links. We don't link for Google's benefit, but whenever you do, you're helping Google make sense of the world. Amazon also relies on implicit participation, but also uses explicit requests of the customers to help make their service better: reviews, list, and wish lists are all examples.
With a nod to Doc Searls who taught me this, some of this has to do with language. At Kynetx, for example, we don't "target consumers." Rather we "serve customers." Even if the action you take is largely the same in either case, the words make it different. The former is impersonal, intrusive, and demeaning. The latter is uplifting and makes us think about our customers as people.
The word "consumer" brings to mind a stupid cow, carelessly ingesting whatever happens to be put in front of it. And who wants to be "targeted?" Not me. People are happy to be served, they want to be understood, they crave relationships.
This focus on nomenclature may seem silly and soft headed, but I think it's vital to developing the right culture in our business. Ultimately, I believe that culture can be a bigger differentiator than anything else you do.
I'm putting a jar at the office. Anyone who uses the word "consumer" or "target" when talking about our clients or their customers is putting a quarter in it. Maybe a buck. Along with a share of stock. Just kidding about the stock--but only because it's too hard to implement.
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April 7, 2008
Belay My Last! Parallels Found Innocent!
Well, maybe not completely innocent. Here's the story: A little bit ago, I claimed that uninstalling Parallels from my system had solved some instability problems I was having. Not so fast. I'd gone five days when I wrote that post without seeing any evidence of the instability after removing the drivers. The next day they came back.
What did change was that my erratic mouse problem went a way permanently, so I still believe that vmmain.kext was the cause of that. But it wasn't causing the freezing. As I said, that returned and kept happening.
I began to suspect that it was a memory issue since there were no third party kernel extensions left to uninstall and the visible behavior was not something I'd attribute to a application (overall system hanging with frequent accompanying high CPU load). It felt like a tight loop in privileged code.
So, my latest theory is that it's related to memory. I've now gone a week without a problem after pulling the memory and replacing it with new DIMMs. The only problem is that I only had 3Gb of replacement RAM so I went from 4 to 3Gb. If this really does solve my instability problem, then I will have to determine whether the memory is really bad or if it's something to do with having 4Gb in my machine. Another option is that it's thermal and having 4Gb of memory pushes it over the top on temperature. Isn't this fun?
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April 4, 2008
Spimes on Technometria: Transcript Available
A few weeks ago, I talked to Roberto Ostinelli and David Orban, founders of OpenSpime.org, an open source infrastructure that supports spimes, small objects that can be tracked in space and time (hence, "spime"). Bruce Sterling coined the word.
You can hear the interview or read it, if you'd rather thanks to David making a transcript available.
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April 3, 2008
Is Office 2007 a Pig or What?
Update: Its really Office 2008...
Microsoft Office 2007 on OS X is a complete pig. I was so looking forward to finally having an Intel native version of Office so I wouldn't have to put up with long start times and the SBOD (spinning beach ball of death). With Office 2007, they're worse! I've rarely been as disappointed in a software product. Office 2004 is a better Office--even in Rosetta. Heck, Office on XP running in Parallels is a better Office. I'm glad BYU has a site license because I'd be really mad if I'd actually paid for this.
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What's the @ in Twitter?
Pretty much everyone at Kynetx has started using Twitter. That led to a new crop of my other friends starting to tweet as well. Today @fulling asked my "what's the @"? He didn't know he was opening up a can of worms.
Steve Gillmor refuses to use the @. He rightly points out that the Web client moves those out of the tweetflow and that while thick-clients do a better job of that (I use Twitterific, for example), that's not a solution for people who want to use the iPhone or other mobile platforms.
Now I'm getting pushback for avoiding @messages, which are difficult to render on the iPhone and not what I want to do for the most part elsewhere. What I do want to do is respond to direct requests for dialogue while leaving open the opportunity for the larger community of people who follow me to absorb the flow. In other words, while I may be answering someone directly, I'm always cognizant of the power of the Twitter space to amplify and accelerate ideas and issues in this hybrid public/personal editorial space.
This Twitterstage is unique in its various overlapping attributes, what I would call a swarmscape where ideas are accelerated by the realtime interaction around ideas, questions, assertions, humor, avoidance, and other gestures much richer than those of the aggregated services they draw on: IM, email, blogging, etc. So my shorthand methodology takes the form of first replying with the Twitter name without the @ sign, then shortening it as the dialogue extends to first name or just continued response, always assuming that the participants will either find it sufficiently interesting to follow me (and hopefully I them) or if they wish, use the @message to trigger my track keyword harvesting.
From NewsGang
Referenced Thu Apr 03 2008 15:44:15 GMT-0600 (MDT)
I wouldn't have expected anything else from @stevegillmor. After all, he elevated not linking to people to an art-form. That said, he's got a point.
When @fulling and I talked, I explained it was shorthand for him, his identity on Twitter, if you will and that I used @fulling to refer to him so that others had context about what I might be saying. If you're not following @fulling and I say:
@fulling don't do that or your Macbook will fry!
You can easily go see what @fulling was going to do that I warned him about. With out the @, it's harder. In fact, you're not even sure if it's an Twitter username or not.
When I got back to the office after talking with @fulling, I saw this tweet from @timbray about an article he'd written on Twitter. Among other interesting things, Tim said:
@ · When you create an instantly-recognizable, simple, Internet-wide addressing mode and it shows signs of sticking, well, that's a big deal. "@timbray" has become a significant part of my identity.From ongoing · On Twitter
Referenced Thu Apr 03 2008 15:54:48 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Well said. Twitter has created a brand new, Internet-wide addressing system that has become an identity system in it's own right.
They really do introduce you by your usrname at twitted hq. Hi I'm @bryce. Nice to meet you.
Heh.
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April 2, 2008
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for March 2008
Below are the titles and descriptions of the top ten shows on IT Conversations for March 2008.
- Michael Lenczner - Interviews with Innovators: Community Wireless (No rating yet)
Michael Lenczner is one of the founders of Ile Sans Fil, Montreal's community wireless network which comprises over 150 hotspots and serves almost 60,000 registered users. By any standards the project is a huge success. On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Lenczner whether Ile Sans Fil has really enhanced community life in the ways the founders hoped it would.
- Raph Koster - The Core of Fun (Rating: 4.33)
Raph Koster, author of the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design", describes the grammar of fun. He gives a checklist of ways to make social media more fun based on his work in online games. Most important is to give users context and feedback for every action they take, and that fun comes at the edge of failure.
- Adrian Holovaty - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (Rating: 4.60)
Adrian Holovaty recently launched EveryBlock.com, a service that generalizes ChicagoCrime.org's style of hyperlocal news to other cities and to a broader range of data types. Six months into a two-year project funded by a Knight Foundation grant, he discusses EveryBlock's accomplishments and aspirations.
- Jeremy Faludi - Technometria: Green Computing (Rating: 4.50)
As more companies examine the issue of environmentally friendly products, it is not surprising that the concept of green computing would grow in importance. IT professionals are examining power consumption, the hazardous materials used in manufacturing computers, as well as how best to recycle older devices. Jeremy Faludi, a product designer currently working for Project Frog, discusses the subject with Phil and Scott. He talks about the issues in general, as well as how companies are working to keep up with the problems.
- Moshe Yudkowsky - Revolutionary Telephony (Rating: 3.67)
In the last few years, telephony prices have dropped to ridiculously low levels and today, one doesn't need a telephone instrument to receive or make calls. Personal services are disappearing from the landscape while technology rapidly replaces them, albeit with a divide between what a customer wants and what he gets. What change is behind this revolution? Moshe Yudkowsky, President of Disaggregate, offers his theory on why emerging telephony is revolutionary.
- Tim Sanders - The State of WIMAX Late 2007 (No rating yet)
WiMAX, a new wireless broadband standard, is coming, and the buzz is growing. How is it different from what is available today, and where will it take wireless broadband in the future? These and other questions are answered by Tim Sanders, a leading industry expert and champion for this new wireless technology.
- CTO Panel - Technometria (Rating: 3.91)
Phil Windley regularly holds CTO meetings where IT professionals discuss current events in technology. In this show he talks with four individuals who work in and write about computing. The group reviews the current status of Twitter, whether companies are using blogging in useful ways, and other similar topics.
- Jim Fowler - Tech Nation: Online Global Directories (Rating: 4.00)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Jigsaw's CEO, Jim Fowler, about keeping an online, global directory with millions of business contacts up to date.
- Dan York - The Black Bag Security Review (No rating yet)
"Practice safe VoIP," is Dan York's appeal to the new entrants in the digital telephony landscape. In a spicy, fictional anecdote, CISSP's Director of Emerging Communication Technology cleverly reveals the possible security vulnerabilities VoIP networks are amenable to. Like all happy tales, in the end, the bad guys lose; VoIP security tools are to the rescue. But in real life, Dan warns, the potential threats are only increasing.
- Ward Cunningham - Interviews with Innovators: Creating Wiki Cultures (Rating: 2.85)
On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham, who discusses the two most recent phases of his career. At the Eclipse Foundation in 2006, he pioneered a transformative new approach to making software-supported business processes transparently understandable both to developers and to users. Now, as CTO of aboutus.org, he's helping to create a new wiki culture for companies and organizations to explain themselves to the world.