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May 30, 2008
UT Open Source Conference CFP
The Utah Open Source Conference is calling for presentations. If you've got something you've always wanted to tell the world about open source, this may be your chance! Sign up on the Web site and submit your presentation idea now. The deadline is June 1st.
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May 29, 2008
Turning Shoppers Into Customers
Someone asked me for a one-paragraph description of Kynetx today. Here's what I sent them:
Kynetx is an early stage ecommerce company focused on turning shoppers into customers. We provide online merchants with easy to use tools and services that give them the ability to merchandise in real-time to shoppers according to the shopper's individual context without changing their existing ecommerce toolset. Shoppers get a better shopping experience without sacrificing their privacy. Merchants sell more. The management team includes experienced ecommerce veterans Steve Fulling (CEO) and Phil Windley (CTO) who created the iMALL product strategy that successfully led to a $450M exit in 1999.
The last sentence isn't so important for someone wanting to know what we do, but it's good information for investors. Comforting, I hope.
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May 28, 2008
Larry H. Miller at the vSpring v|100 Lunch
Larry H. Miller, owner of the Utah Jazz, numerous car dealerships, and a member of the v|100 spoke at today's lunch. Here's a few note son what he said.
He starts with two words of advice: don't stampede. Moving too fast causes you to dilute yourself. It's good to branch out, but doing it too fast will cause you to be ineffective. You have to learn how to run one unit that you manage yourself and can control before you branch out. That will cause you to manage differently. You then have to sell them the vision. Develop the base, then grow.
There's a difference between management and leadership. Either can be both, but by no means are they. In any organization, you have managers who occasionally need to manifest leadership and they fail. Management is making decisions by the numbers. Leadership requires understanding the numbers, but entails selling the vision to others. Businesses with more than one person require that others catch the vision. People need leadership.
When you start a business, you should recognize what it is that you're a part of. We function in a system that provides us opportunity and support. The system has flaws, but the free enterprise system is a special and marvelous thing. The only way it can continue is to use it effectively and correctly, teach others how to use it, and finally give back. We can't ever assume that free enterprise is genetic. The next generation needs to understand that the system requires the rule of law & integrity.
You can tell he has a passion for starting businesses. He says that he frequently startles his wife of nearly 50 years by blurting out "business is really cook!" He quotes from a Ronald Reagan speech: We do all this "so that we will never be faced with a situation where we have to face our children and our grandchildren someday when they ask 'where were you and what were you doing on the day that freedom was lost?'" Business people have a responsibility to protect freedom.
Referencing the current economic situation Miller says "Opportunity comes along at times like this and while the system we live in isn't perfect, it beats the heck out of whatever comes in second."
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Transactional Memory
We all know that Intel and AMD have punted. They can't keep building larger, faster chips for a variety of technical and economic reasons, so they have started placing multiple cores on a single chip. This, in theory, maintains the overall processing power and is easier to build. There's just one catch: it's much harder to program because to make use of that power, you have to program concurrently.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Microprocessor engineers have saved programmers from the hassles of concurrency for years. That's as it should be: get it right once at the lower level to free programmers higher up the abstraction hierarchy to think about the domain problem being solved.
But, alas, that world has come to an end. It's only a matter of time before chips with 8, 16, 32, and, eventually, 1024 cores appear. How will we program them?
Traditional tools for managing concurrency fall short. Processes and even threads are too course grained. Fine grained concurrency primitives like monitors and conditional variables are prone to error. Fabulously prone to error.
But a new abstraction based on transactional memory is gaining traction and will probably land in your favorite programming language in the near future. Simon Peyton-Jones or Microsoft Research spoke about transactional memory at OSCON. We've got it on IT Conversations:
Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research introduces a new tool called Transactional Memory to simplify concurrent programming. Due to the increasing prevalence of multi-core hardware, concurrent programming is becoming more and more important. Unfortunately, the most common tools for handling concurrency, locks and condition variables, are over 30 years old and fundamentally flawed. Problems that are simple undergraduate assignments in sequential programming become publishable results when done with concurrency.
Transactional Memory borrows the concept of an atomic transaction from databases. Rather than locking resources, a code block is marked as atomic, and when it runs, the reads and writes are done against a transaction log instead of global memory. When the code is complete, the runtime re-checks all of the reads to make sure they are unchanged and then commits all of the changes to memory at once. If any of the reads are dirty, the transaction is rolled back and re-executed. This, when combined with additional tools for blocking and choice, allows program to remain simple, correct, and composable while scaling to many threads without the additional overhead that course grained locking incurs.
Listening to this talk will give you a fair understanding of what transactional memory is all about. If you're a developer and have only enough time to listen to one IT Conversations talk this week, this is the one.
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May 27, 2008
Utah CTO Breakfast on Friday
The May CTO Breakfast will be held on Friday (May 30) at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G, Provo Campus).
Anyone interested in how information technology is used to build products or run companies. 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.
If you've seen something cool or just want to discuss a current topic, come prepared to bring it up.
Put these future meetings on your calendar:
- June 27 (Friday)
- July 18 (Friday)
- No breakfast in August
- Sept 26 (Friday)
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May 26, 2008
Please Help Serenity
Phil Burns' (@phil801) daughter Serenity was diagnosed with leukemia this past weekend. He's been blogging her progress. Jesse Stay had an excellent idea and built a "ChipIn" widget to collect donations. Please donate, any amount, if you can.
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May 24, 2008
Cat Brains and Bionic Eyes
This article from New Scientist about how scientists recorded the reponses of 49 neurons in a cat's brain (the lateral geniculate nucleus, or LGN to be precise) in order to create a better bionic vision system reminds me or the sentient lobsters in Accelerando by Charles Stross.
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May 22, 2008
Am I Done with Facebook? Twitter FTW!
I got a message from Facebook today saying that someone had friended me. I realized I didn't care. Not that I didn't care about the person who'd friended me--I didn't care about Facebook. It's been weeks since I was there and my life is pretty much the same.
I think the reason is Twitter. Twitter is much more social, much more interesting, and the plethora of clients (including any mobile phone with SMS) means that I don't have to remember to go check the site to see what's happening. Twitterific displays a solid stream of the 140 character thoughts of my friends.
Because of Twitter, today I know:
- There were tornados in Denver and Laramie
- Twitter posted an article about their architecture on their blog
- There's a blogger dinner tonight in Salt Lake City
- @tylerwhitaker and @bradbaldwin aren't going to carpool to the blogger dinner
I like that.
Twitter has scaling problems even though their user base is reportedly quite small. As Nik Cubrilovic points out, Twitter isn't like Wordpress or Digg. Twitter is a group forming network (GFN). When a Metcalfeian network adds another user, the number of potential connections goes from N2 to (N+1)2. When a GFN adds one more user, the number of potential connections goes from 2N to 2(N+1). In case it's been a while since you'd done that math--it's a big difference.
To make this more real, consider TechCrunch's twitter account. When TechCrunch, with almost 18000 followers, sends a message, that results in 18000 messages--one to each follower. This is like the phone system with infinite, always-on conference call capability. Sure, you can do things internally to collapse some messages, but you're still dealing with exponential growth.
Cubrilovic points out that this feature creates some serious engineering problems getting Twitter to scale. AL3X at Twitter argues that they're not blind to the problems and they're working on them. There are dozens of people blogging about what kind of architectural solutions might lead to better uptime at Twitter. AL3X's final plea: if you're so smart, come work for us. Good answer.
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May 20, 2008
Wall Street and Web 2.0
I really enjoyed this discussion on Web 2.0 and Wall Street from ETech with Bill Janeway and Peter Bloom. There are some interesting parallels and some great discussion from a couple of financial jocks who clearly get technology and, especially, the 'Net. Recommended.
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May 15, 2008
Plaxo and Comcast
I'm still trying to make sense of the news that Comcast is buying Plaxo (reported value of the deal between $100 and $200 M). I can't tell you how happy I am for Plaxo and especially Joseph Smarr who I have great respect for (see our Technometria interview with Joseph Smarr here).
Still, the discontinuity between what Plaxo is and what Comcast does is jarring--at least on the surface. I believe there is a fundamental conflict o interest between a company that does both transmission of traffic and sells other Internet services. Yeah, I know they all do it, but if the FCC wants to do something useful, they ought to separate those functions.
The fact that they have little real competition leads to problems like not treating customer fairly and throttling BitTorrent. That's a problem--but one that I believe will work itself out with more competition--and that's going to come one way or another. But the real problem is that Comcast offers many services that directly compete against the traffic they carry. Do we expect them to act in an unbiased manner in that regard? Sorry, I don't. Where's the Anti-Trust Department when you need them?
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May 14, 2008
One Is the Loneliest Number: Relationships on the Internet
Bob Blakely is speaking about building a relationship layer for the Internet. A relationship is the context within which we observe one another. Past history and even attitudes are not directly observable. This is imperfect--distant relationships are the basis for inaccuracies. More observations at a closer distance make for a more useful and feature rich relationship.
Bob puts forward the emergence of the credit card industry as an example. Rather than requiring shoppers to create intimate relationships with every merchant, you create a single intimate relationship with your bank and the merchant has an intimate relationship with their bank and then the banks form a relationship (contract) that connects those.
Generalizing this thought to identity, in situations where you don't have one good relationships can two relationships provide the answer? Intermediaries need to have a trust relationship with the user. Phone companies, utilities, even shipping companies have a great advantage here. They can out compete banks.
Relationships are the type information about edges in the social graph. Bob presents a schema for relationships. Relationships have a creator. Relationships have a type (FacebookFriend). Creators establish rules and roles. Rules might be "can't copy." Roles are descriptions of individuals who can participate in the relationship.
There are other elements in the schema. Consents are what you agree to (i.e. enter into a relationship, you can send email, etc.). Promises are things you're held to (i.e. abide by terms of service). You also have claims (i.e. this is my name, this is my email address, etc.) There might be blocks to list other participants. The schema is a contract sorts. In privacy, for example, this shifts the discussion from one of rights to one of contract law.
Employees present an expensive relationship. Contractors are a less expensive way of having an employee relationship. This is relationship federation. The contracting company provides context about the relationship and there are rules, etc. that govern the relationship.
Identity providers present a similar scenario. The IdP can, in theory, create the expensive relationship with the user and with the RP. The difference is that IdPs can't make money from the expensive user relationship. You're not selling identity. If you sell identity, like Equifax, people hate you. You're selling relationships. They should compete on the basis of cost and quality.
"X-centric" is dysfunctional nomenclature no matter what the value of "X." Functional relationships happen when both parties gain value and agree to treat each other with respect.
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May 13, 2008
Judging Credibility
Jeff Jarvis points out the flaws in Newscred.
It's very simple --- though that's the problem; credibility isn't so simple. They list articles and you get to "credit" or "discredit" them. These scores are, in turn, compiled for writers and publications.
The first and most obvious problem, which TechCrunch points out, is that this is bait for grudges. Fox from one side, the Times from the other will get discredited by their detractors all day long. One man's bias is often the other man's truth.
From BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Credibility is not binary
Referenced Tue May 13 2008 09:45:47 GMT-0700 (PDT)
Precisely: reputation, credibility, are personal judgments. We often think of the New York Times having a reputation, but in fact, there's not some single, magic score somewhere. There are millions of opinions. But there are also millions of reputations. Each person judges what the reputation of the NYT is based on what they think others are thinking. Any system that doesn't allow each person to have a personalized reputation for a given entity is doomed to suffer this problem.
But Jeff points out a second problem:
The second and more fundamental problem is that there's no basis to decide credibility. Does one error ruin an article's credibility? How many discredits does it take to ruin a reporter's or a publication's? And then what does that mean? That they lied? That you don't believe them? That you don't like them? That they make mistakes? That they don't report enough? That they use anonymous sources? That they relied on bad sources? That they wrote it badly? That they weren't transparent?
From BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Credibility is not binary
Referenced Tue May 13 2008 09:49:44 GMT-0700 (PDT)
Just as each person keeps an individual idea of the reputation of every other entity they care about, they also use their own basis for making that judgment. Apes are remarkably good at this--we have to be to create large social structures. Our frustration with computational systems that attempt to do this for us is partly rooted in the fact that they don't come close to the nuanced sophisticated social judgments that any 6 year old can make.
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May 12, 2008
What's Your Architecture's Agenda?
One of the topics that came up in today's free range small groups discussions are IIW2008A was the idea that architectures have agendas. Brad Templeton voiced the idea that all designs have defaults and those defaults represent an encoding of some kind of agenda.
For example, let's say that you collect click streams from your web site visitors in order to give them recommendations, optimize banners, or whatever. What is the default for how long that data is stored? One week? A month? A year? Forever? You might not think of that default as an agenda, but it is in the sense that it enables or disables certain behaviors in the future.
"But wait!" you say. "I didn't even think of that! My site stores it forever because I haven't written a purge function--yet." Even implicit acts create defaults and those defaults represent an agenda. For example, if your agenda were different with respect to storing private data, you'd have prioritized your development differently.
I've been using privacy as an example, but it's larger than that, of course. Designs are full of defaults--some explicit and most of the implicit. Programmers don't pay enough attention to defaults. Rail's "convention over configuration" is a great example of a system that carefully thought through defaults. 37 Signals calls this concept opinionated software.
The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they're not just looking for features, they're looking for an approach. They're looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it.From Getting Real: Make Opinionated Software (by 37signals)
Referenced Mon May 12 2008 17:14:47 GMT-0700 (PDT)
I like that idea.
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May 10, 2008
Final: 2008 Utah State Republican Convention
 Greg Curtis and John
Valentine, House Speaker and Senate President (click to enlarge) |
I'm at the Utah State Party Convention this morning. There are literally thousands of people here. Traffic was backed up off the exit ramp near UVU (where the convention is being held). The convention just opened at 10am, but even at 8am, the parking lots were full. People come early to pick up their credentials and wander the candidate booths.
I enjoyed wandering around and talking to a bunch of folks who I normally don't get to see. Lots of old friends and acquaintances here.
 Chris Cannon running for Congress in the Third District (click to enlarge) |
We start with prayer, the flag ceremony, the pledge of allegiance, and the national anthem. Carmen Rasmusen Herbert sang the national anthem and it was very nice. She's married to Gary Herbert's (Lt Gov) son Bradley, for what it's worth.
The Utah Republican party has a set of banners up and buttons playing on the "i can" in "republican." "I can provide students an excellent education," "I can give my family a great life," and so on. Very clever and emphasizes the Republican ideal of self sufficiency.
 Opening ceremony at the convention (click to enlarge) |
After the opening, we had a credentials report and adopted the rules and agenda for the convention. As usual, there was drama around Mike Ridgeway. Apparently Salt Lake county refused to seat him has a delegate and there was a motion to allow him to be seated at the State convention. It failed. I'm sure there will be more.
We've now moved to the district breakouts. District 3 stayed in the main hall, so I just sat still. The candidates I consider serious contenders in District 3 are Chris Cannon, the incumbent, David Leavitt, and Jason Chaffetz. There's also Joe Fergeson and Stone Fonua who haven't raised much money and haven't been heard from by delegates. They'll get their seven minutes of fame this morning. Fergeson is campaigning against the North American Union and Fonua is campaigning for something called "the Peacemaker."
Jason Chaffetz has raised around $70,000. David Leavitt raised twice that many and Chris Cannon has doubled Leavitt. Not surprising since Chris is the incumbent.
I'm torn between these three. I believe them all to be good men with Utah's best interest at heart. They aren't that far apart politically. I know Chris and Jason well. I've spoken to them several times over the course of the campaign. I don't know David Leavitt, but have tremendous respect for his brother Mike (current Secretary of HHS).
When I ran in my caucus meeting, I told the people there I'd base my vote for congressman on the basis of their support for Larry Lessig's Change Congress. I've had the opportunity to speak to both Chris and Jason about this and they were both supportive of two of the four pledges. Chris didn't think eliminating PAC money was practical, but was in favor of limiting all contributions to less than $300.
Why didn't I speak to David Leavitt about Change Congress? It's partly my fault: I went to only one event where he spoke. But it's partly his fault as well. He's been largely unavailable. Several attempts to get a message to him about Change Congress through his staff failed to elicit any response.
In fact, one of the things that's turned me off about Leavitt's campaign is that it's been much more impersonal than campaigns I'm used to. Lots of events to hear him speak and lots of literature, but not much personal contact. This morning for example, Chris and Jason were both at their booths (and I've got photos to prove it). Where was Leavitt? I don't know. I wandered around the entire center and didn't see him once.
I wasn't overly impressed with David Leavitt's speech. Some shouting at inopportune times. Jason gave a great speech, but his calling global warming a farce turned me off. Of course, I'm not sure Cannon or Leavitt feel much different. Both Cannon and Leavitt started their speeches with videos. Cannons was probably the best, but I liked that Chaffetz didn't have one. Cannon's speech was good: he talked about his background and how he got where he is.
Cannon is a supporter of eVerify, which I think is a big mistake. Of course, you can't find anyone who you agree with on everything--unless you're the candidate. That might not work either. I've known some candidates who I'm sure argued with themselves.
Time to vote!
I voted for Chris Cannon. I know some people will disagree with that vote so let me say why:
- Chris was willing to support important aspects of the Change Congress pledges, including big support for transparency. He even took the time to meet personally with me on the pledge and talk about it.
- Chris has been a good friend to technology. Many technologists in the state who I know and trust are firm supporters of Chris Cannon. I've talked to Chris several times about technology issues and he's well informed and thinks carefully about them.
Now we're listening to speeches for statewide office. The only interesting race is for Treasurer. Go figure.
 Ballot
boxes (click to enlarge) |
Gov. Huntsman spoke about his accomplishments. He made it clear he only intends to serve one more term (if he's elected, of course). Chuck Smith, running against Huntsman, gave a good speech and seems to have some good ideas, but he's not going to win. There's been no campaign to speak of.
Mark Walker is a former legislator with little experience in financial management. Richard Ellis is currently the Deputy Treasurer and a former directory of the Governors Office for Planning and Budget. But Ellis has been roundly criticized by the legislature and has little support there. I think it's more than Walker being "one of our own" with the legislature. I think Ellis has seriously made many of them mad with things he's said and done. Of course, I know how that feels. :-)
The Utah County Treasurer nominated Richard Ellis and said Ed Alter (current Treasurer had planned to do it, but was unavailable.) The nomination focused on Ellis' experience. Gordon Snow (Majority Whip) seconded the nomination. Ellis spoke about what he's done in the Treasurer's office: financial and technical innovation. Ellis gave a good speech.
 Balloons waiting to fall above my head (click to enlarge) |
David Clark, Majority Leader, nominated Walker. He noted Walker's integrity. John Valentine (Senate President) seconded. Mark Shurtleff and Ron Bishop (1st District Congressman) also spoke for Walker. He emphasized more investment of public funds for larger returns. It's interesting that our conservative legislature supports a less conservative financial manager for treasurer. He emphasizes his private sector experience--although he doesn't get specific since he has no financial experience that I've heard about. He seems to be running largely on his Republican credentials.
Results: Merrill Cook, Bill Dew, and Brian Jenkins advanced to the run off ballot for District 2. In District three, David Leavitt received 220 votes, Jason Chaffetz received 469 votes, and Chris Cannon received 338 votes. They'll all go to the second ballot. The other two received almost no support, so unless people change their vote, I'd expect to see Jason and Chris go to a third ballot. We could be here all day...
The conventional wisdom is that a vote for Leavitt or Chaffetz is a vote against Cannon. But that's not the case. In fact, I saw Leavitt and Cannon talking in the hall and the word going around the floor is that Leavitt is asking his delegates to vote for Cannon. Of course, that won't keep the final outcome from going to a primary vote in June. In fact, it would take a huge swing either way to avoid that. Greg Curtis, Speaker of the House, predicted 55% Chaffetz, 45% Cannon. I think it might be closer than that.
I snagged a seat at the press table: power and a table to put my computer on. Sweet!
While we were waiting for the second ballot to be counted, Senators Hatch and Bennett spoke. Basically cheerleading for Republicans. That's OK--this is the right crowd for it to be sure. Hatch says: "I was a Mitt Romney supporter, but that's over. If you can't get behind McCain, you might as well turn the election over to Barack Obama. That would be a catastrophe for the judiciary." Hatch says McCain will appoint the right kind of judges and that alone is a good enough reason to support John McCain. Hatch gets a standing ovation. No doubt that the man is popular with this crowd.
Along with all of these are the usual controversies surrounding voting and credentialing procedures. Some older and disabled delegates had a tough time getting to the ballot boxes apparently.
 A row of Macs at the press table (click to enlarge) |
Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and State Auditor Auston Johnson were elected by acclamation since they're running unopposed. We watched a McCain video. Mark Shurtleff spoke after showing us a video. I presume it's been prepared for the general election. Shurtleff gave a god talk and got a standing ovation. Balloons dropped. Basically anything to fill the time while they count votes.
The bags filled with balloons were hung above the press table, so they all fell on the floor around the press and not on the delegates.
Argh. Now we're doing party constitution changes. What fun. In the middle of the second amendment, someone went down and there was a call for a medic. There was a division called on the second amendment to replace winner take all with proportional representation in future presidential primaries. The amendment failed.
There will be a third ballot for the 2nd and 3rd Districts. In the 3rd District, Leavitt got 161 votes, Chaffetz got 529 votes, and Cannon got 356 votes in the second round. That gives Chaffetz over 50%, but he needs 60% to avoid a runoff. That's 630 votes it everyone stuck around and will vote on the third ballot. He needs 100 of Leavitt's votes to win outright.
People in Leavitt shirts are walking through the hall carrying Cannon signs. They're getting boo'd and the Rules Chairman is asking them to leave since campaigns are not allowed to campaign in the convention hall itself.
I'm going to go get ready to vote. They're not going to open the ballot boxes until we've heard the Bylaw changes because they're afraid people might leave. Ya think!?!
 Jason Chaffetz running for Congress in the Third District (click to enlarge) |
The first bylaw amendment is to allow the delegates that are bound to Mitt Romney to vote for McCain. People cheered wildly after the speech against the change. People here still love Romney. Someone made a motion to postpone he amendment indefinitely. Everyone really just wants to vote and go home, I think.
In the end, for the 3rd District, Jason Chaffetz came within 9 votes of being the nominee and not having have a primary with Chris Cannon on June 24th. The final tally was Chaffetz 59%, Cannon 41%. What a finish. I'll bet there's some Chaffetz supporters who went home early and are kicking themselves right now.
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May 9, 2008
Doing CPAN Installs Using Capistrano
I've been trying to use Capistrano for application deployment over the last few days, writing rules to do some common tasks, figuring out how it works, etc. One problem I ran into is that I have a private CPAN bundle that I use to ensure a machine has all the right Perl libraries when I deploy to it.
The problem is that CPAN is often run interactively and so module writers often assume the user will be present. That means that it stops in the middle and asks questions about skipping tests, etc. I searched for a while to figure out how to get a default answer to questions. It's not Capistrano's job and CPAN didn't seem to have a configuration option that worked. Turns out it's in MakeMaker.
MakeMaker is the Perl library that the CPAN modules use to automate the build process. There's an environment variable called PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT that when true causes the MakeMaker prompt function to assume the default answer.
So, here's the task from the capfile I came up with.
task :load_bundle, roles => :local do
run "cd /web/lib/perl/etc/kynetx-private-bundle;
sudo perl -MCPAN -e
'$ENV{PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT}=1;
install Bundle::kobj_modules'"
end
This works fine. Of course, you also need to make sure the account you're using for installs can sudo without a password or this will fail as well. Maybe there's a better way to do sudo inside Capistrano? I'd like to know about it.
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May 8, 2008
VC Meetings Next Thursday
I'm going to be in the Bay Area next Thursday (May 15) with the day free and would love to get a few meetings with venture firms who might be interested in hearing about what we're doing with Kynetx. I don't know many VC's in the Bay area well, so if you wouldn't mind doing an intro to your favorite Bay Area VC, contact me.
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New IT Conversations Design
 IT Conversations redesign! (click to enlarge) |
Doug Kaye has been working for months to redesign the infrastructure for the Conversations Network, including It Conversations. Much of that work hasn't been visible to IT Conversations listeners, but it's made the management of the network and production of shows much nicer. Now, that hard work is showing on the site as well with today's launch of the new IT Conversations.
The new design is cleaner, brings lots of features, like ratings and playlists, out to the homepage, and automates things like "current series" and "topics" so that they're more up to date. Ratings are also more reliable in the new system--I'm already seeing more meaningful ratings data come through. The old Personal Program Queue has been updated and is now called a Personal Playlist (under "My Programs" on the top menu bar).
With all the great changes to the homepage, you might be tempted to stay right there, but take time to click through to the program detail pages. They've also been reworked with better ways to comment and share programs with your friends. Also, the new recommendation box on the right hand side shows other programs you might like.
As with any launch, there will undoubtedly be things that don't work. Be sure to let us know and we'll try to get things fixed as soon as we find out about them.
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May 7, 2008
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for April 2008
In doing this month's top ten for IT Conversations, noticed two things:
First, since Doug put in our own code for ratings, the number of ratings per show is way up. I think with the new homepage design (oops! Did I let that slip?!?) we'll see even more ratings. We've not had enough in the past for me to put a lot of confidence in them, but that's changing.
Second, the number of overall downloads is down. We recently had to update the feed URL and this didn't get propagated correctly in all feedreaders and podcatchers. Please take a minute to check right now and make sure you're still getting IT Conversations on your MP3 player. The correct feed URL is:
http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itcOr just head to feed subscription page and resubscribe.
The following is the list of the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for April 2008.
- Phil Libin - Personal Outboard Memory (Rating: 3.69)
Phil Libin was the CEO of CoreStreet when he appeared as the first guest on Interviews with Innovators. Now he's back as CEO of EverNote, a company that aims to build the memex, or personal outboard memory, that Vannevar Bush famously imagined in his 1945 article "As We May Think."
- Scott Sigler - Infected (Rating: 3.39)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Scott Sigler, who talks about his bioterror thriller "Infected." While it's based on the premise of a biological weapon on the loose, he's actually a modern day Charles Dickens.
- Amory Lovins - Energy Efficiency in Buildings - Part 2 (Rating: 4.79)
Well-designed buildings not only conserve energy and reduce costs but also create conditions for better health and wellness. Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, uses several examples to show how the right mix of materials, resources, and expertise can create structures that celebrate living. From MAP.
- Wagner Au - The Growth of Second Life (Rating: 3.44)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Journalist Wagner Au, who embedded himself in the virtual 3D online world, Second Life, and talks about its incredible growth.
- James Reinders, Dirk Hohndel - Exploiting Parallelism with Multi-core Technologies (Rating: 2.90)
There has been a lot of talk about the difficulties of parallel programming, but Intel has decided to do something about it. Intel representatives announce the open sourcing of Threading Building Blocks, a product used to simplify parallel development. TBB has been around for several years as a proprietary tool, and Intel hopes that by opening it up, it will reach a broader audience and be adapted to more situations.
- Jeff Hawkins - Why Can't a Computer Be More Like a Brain? (Rating: 4.20)
Despite amazing strides, computers are still relatively poor at performing high level activities that come naturally to the human brain. Co-founder of Palm, Inc., Jeff Hawkins, describes recent breakthroughs in the modeling of brain functions based on the theory of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. New insights into how the neocortex supports cognition, inference and prediction can be applied to a variety of problems using Hawkins' Numenta computing platform.
- Matt Zimmerman - Ubuntu Technical Roadmap (Rating: 3.20)
Matt Zimmerman delivers exactly what his title promises: a technical roadmap of where Ubuntu has been and where it is going. He discusses the collaborative development process, an overview of past and future releases, the expansion of Ubuntu from the desktop to server and mobile environments, and what's next for Ubuntu. Highlighting key features of the latest releases, this presentation will be of interest to existing Ubuntu users as well as anyone considering migrating to this popular linux-based operating system.
- Werner Vogels - A Web-Scale Computing Architecture (Rating: 3.83)
Developers are increasingly using Amazon, not only as a source of technical books, but also as a web services platform to build robust and scalable infrastructure. Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, reveals how to make the most of the popular S3 service and uncovers some of the features underpinning the new EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. As a bonus for Conversations Network listeners, there's even a cameo appearance from our own Doug Kaye, who explains how Gigavox Media is exploiting the web services functionality Vogel describes.
- Jamais Cascio - Metaverse Singularity (Rating: 3.55)
Technology is becoming more entrenched in every part of our life, and we need to be aware of where that might lead us. Jamais Cascio gives four possible scenarios based on whether technology is used to augment or simulate reality and whether it is internally or externally focused. Because of the human bias inherent in any technology, he argues that we need to democratically include all of the world's stakeholders to avoid having these scenarios become dystopias.
- Fred Krupp & Miriam Horn - Earth: The Sequel (Rating: 3.22)
Today a complement of new energy technologies exist, but are they economically feasible? Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn, from the Environmental Defence Fund, about their new book, "Earth: The Sequel."
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May 1, 2008
Fusion 1.1.2
VMWare released a new version of Fusion last week: 1.1.2. There are a lot of little fixes that if they were a problem for you you'll be very glad to have fixed. If not, you might not notice much difference. I'd been bit a few times by Fusion refusing to release USB resources when it quit. Bottom line: if you're not having any issues, no rush.