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September 29, 2008
Did Pelosi Screw Up or Is She Crazy Like a Fox?
Legislatures don't run like electing a student body president. Leadership counts votes and generally knows what's going to happen before the bill comes up for a vote. So, what happened with the failure of the Bail Out Bill is a really a failure of House leadership.
I see three possible scenarios:
- Pelosi didn't know if she had the votes and gambled that the pressure of a vote would push people into a "yes" decision.
- Pelosi thought she had the votes, but got snowballed. If that's true there's going to be some payback from her.
- Pelosi knew it would lose and wanted that outcome.
People are blaming Republicans for the failure, but let's face it, there were plenty of Democrats who voted against this as well (95, in fact). Do you really believe Pelosi didn't know that?
Why would Pelosi want this last outcome? Easy answer: it gives the election to Obama and ushers in period of huge discontent that Democrats can take advantage of to expand their powerbase and send Republicans into the wilderness for 20 years.
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I find it hard to believe that Pelosi is stupid or naive. That leaves me wondering why this came up for a vote today if she thought it would lose.
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Geolocation and eCommerce
This Wall Street Journal article talks about how geolocation data can aid online commerce. I find it interesting because Kynetx takes this data and layers other services on top of it and then makes the whole thing incredibly easy to integrate with any Web site.
This story about ACE Hardware is exactly what Kynetx does today:
Consider Ace Hardware, a cooperative of more than 4,600 dealer-owned hardware stores that overhauled its Web site in February 2007. Using geolocation software from Digital Element, a unit of Norcross, Va.-based Digital Envoy Inc., Ace now gives Web-site visitors a list of stores within a 30-mile radius of their location. A click takes visitors to a page showing the stores plotted on a Google map, and from there, they can drill down to the various stores' Web sites for information such as hours of operation and driving directions.
Dana Kevish, Ace's e-commerce marketing manager, says geolocation is important to Ace because some 75% of online sales go through local stores -- where Ace will ship products free -- and 30% of customers who pick up an online order make an additional purchase in the store. Having geolocation capabilities "helped us create a connection between the consumers and the local store," she says.
Ace plans to expand its use of the technology this winter by directing Web visitors to one of five or six different home pages, depending on their location. People in cold climates will see a home page featuring snowblowers, for example, while Floridians might see patio furniture.
From We Know Where You Are - WSJ.com
Referenced Mon Sep 29 2008 10:11:53 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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September 25, 2008
Yammering Away About Work
A few weeks ago Yammer walked away with top honors at TechCrunch 50. I'd been hearing about it, so last week I went over and signed up. I'm really liking it.
Yammer is Twitter for work. The first person to sign up using an email from a particular domain establishes a sandbox for yammers from people in that domain. Since I signed up using my kynetx.com email, Yammer automatically created a domain for Kynetx and made me an administrator. Very low friction.
I sent out invites and soon had the whole Kynetx gang yammering away about work. Only people within your domain (i.e. those with emails you control) can see what the others are saying. Yammer has a Adobe Air client that makes keeping up with what folks are saying easy (you can also use the Web). In addition, Yammer has a number of features that are geared for business like the ability to input and display detailed contact info and organizational information as a crude social network.
We've been using Yammer for a week now and everyone feels it's been a good addition to our communications patterns. This is especially true with a distributed workforce like we have now.
So what of Twitter? Most of us still use Twitter too. Twitter is my public space. Yammer is my work space. That separation has real value and enables conversations and uses for Yammer that just wouldn't happen on Twitter.
We've made real decisions over Yammer that would have previously taken a phone call or email chain. Generally people are pleased with the connectivity it provides. For us, Yammer is a keeper.
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September 24, 2008
Hack the Debate
How many times have you been watching a political debate on TV and wanted to get your two cents in? With the rise or things like Twitter, of course, you can at least tell your friends what you're thinking. But for the September 26th debate, you'll be able to have your comments on screen with the debate itself.
Current TV and Twitter have teamed up to sponsor something called "Hack the Debate." Just tune into the debate on Current TV (channel 366 on DirecTV, 196 on Dish, 107 on Comcast, and 87 on MStar) and tweet away. Be sure to include the hash tag #current in your tweet and Current TV will broadcast as many tweets as possible on top of O and Mc in real time. This is a pretty cool mashup.
For those of you who haven't been following along, Current TV was co-founded by Al Gore to explore how TV can be enhanced and improved by the 'Net. I don't quite understand the meaning of it, but if you look at Current's management page, there are no "vice" presidents. Only presidents. Everyone's a president at Current.
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September 22, 2008
CTO Breakfast on Friday
We will be holding the CTO breakfast this Friday at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G). You don't have to be a CTO to come, just interested in technology and building high-tech products. The format is open discussion, so bring your ideas for topics to discuss and throw them out.
Please mark the following dates for future CTO breakfasts.
- Sept 26 (Friday)
- Oct 30 (Thursday)
- Dec 5 (Friday) - Combined Nov and Dec breakfast
- Jan 30, 2009 (Friday)
I've created a Google Calendar with dates for the CTO breakfast that you can subscribe to if you'd rather do that.
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September 18, 2008
Russia Gets a Spanking
One of the great things about the global economy is that markets serve as great limiters on regimes that don't play by the rules. No where is this more clear than Russia as this piece from the WSJ makes clear.
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September 17, 2008
Getting Ready for IIW2008B (Nov 10-12)
We'll be holding the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) again on November 10-12 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA.
The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on what has been called user-centric identity; basically asking the question how can people manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with. IIW is a working meeting for a range of groups focused on the technical, social and legal issues arising with the emergence identity, relationship and social layer of the web.
Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that don't necessarily have a formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within one or a few organizations (enterprise provisioning/termination or federation between 2 companies).
As a community we have been exploring these kinds of questions:
- How are social networking sites and social media tools applying user-centric identity?
- What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
- What are technical implementations of those standards?
- How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
- What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
- What tools are needed to make it usably secure for end-users?
- What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?
IIW is highly participatory anyone who wants to present can do so. The agenda is made all together on Tuesday morning. We invite you to post topics on the wiki ahead of time.
More information is available in the announcement. You can register for IIW online.
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September 16, 2008
Lovin' Genius
The latest version of iTunes has something called Genius which automatically creates playlists from a single song. When I downloaded the new version, I turned off the genius sidebar and figured it was something I'd just ignore. I was turned off by the need to genius to upload information about my songs to Apple and the idea that it has such strong tie-ins to iTMS.
But yesterday Steve Fulling was raving about it, so I decided to give it a try. In less than 12 hours, I'm a convert. I still hide the sidebar because that's where all the music suggestions are and I don't need to buy any more music right now. The playlists it puts together are incredible. I can hardly wait for one to finish so I can pick another song and listen to the next set that iTunes puts together for me.
I often find songs I like but haven't listened to much on the list and the selections are always diverse and yet somehow hang together. Just one thing--I can't figure out why almost every playlist has "Brandy" (Looking Glass) in it. What's iTunes trying to tell me?
Here's an example of the playlist that Genius created for me when I selected "Melissa" (The Allman Brothers Band):
| Can't You See | The Marshall Tucker Band |
| Long Train Runnin' | The Doobie Brothers |
| White Room | Cream |
| Gimme Three Steps | Lynyrd Skynyrd |
| Walk On the Wild Side | Lou Reed |
| Rocky Mountain Way | Joe Walsh |
| Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) | Looking Glass |
| Peace Of Mind | Boston |
| You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet | Bachman-Turner Overdrive |
| Feels Like the First Time | Foreigner |
| House of the Rising Sun | The Animals |
| New York State Of Mind | Billy Joel |
| Statesboro Blues | The Allman Brothers Band |
| Fire On the Mountain | The Marshall Tucker Band |
| God Only Knows | The Beach Boys |
| Ventura Highway | America |
| Cocaine | Eric Clapton |
| Somebody's Baby | Jackson Browne |
| What's Your Name? | Lynyrd Skynyrd |
| Take the Money and Run | Steve Miller Band |
| Hey Nineteen | Steely Dan |
| Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald | Gordon Lightfoot |
| New Kid In Town | Eagles |
| Crimson And Clover | Tommy James & The Shondells |
Repeating the same selection and hitting the genius button results in a new, but similar playlist. Don't like the list? Just change the selection or hit refresh and you've got a brand new set of songs. As a bonus, Genius is also available on the iPhone and iPod Touch if you've enabled it in iTunes.
So is Apple mining my music listening? Probably. But they're also giving me value. I'm willing to make that trade. My music is now more valuable to me and more enjoyable and that's not something I can say for the dusty CDs sitting on my shelf.
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September 13, 2008
Larry Lessig on Changing Congress
This past week, I published Larry Lessig's talk from ETech on Changing Congress. This is a very good talk on what's wrong with Congress and how it can be changed. The talk is not partisan--it's about the ways that the system, more so than the politicians, is corrupt and needs reform. I highly recommend it.
After you listened (or before), head over to Change Congress and fill out this petition on earmarks.
Update: To see earmarks more clearly, check out the earmark visualization tool from the Sunlight Foundation.
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September 12, 2008
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for August 2008
Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for last month. I'm a little late because I had to modify the program that produces these slightly due to some backend changes that Doug made. All's good again!
- Dick Hardt - Sxipper (Rating: 4.00)
Sxipper is a free Firefox add-on that saves you time by keeping track of an unlimited number of usernames and passwords as well as the personal data you share every day over the web. Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben, to discuss the product, as well as the entire issue of privacy and identity on the web, as well as how to market plug-ins as products.
- Episode Seventeen - StackOverflow (Rating: 2.00)
In this special "developer edition" podcast, Jeff and the Stack Overflow development team discuss the development processes and decisions that go into building a public community web site for programmers.
- Episode 18 - StackOverflow (Rating: 2.50)
In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.
- Episode Sixteen - StackOverflow (Rating: 4.50)
Joel and Jeff discuss the perils of programmer design, the purpose of a private beta, the importance of quality chairs for programmers, and the mysterious cone of uncertainty on software projects.
- Episode 19 - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.00)
Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.
- Kent Beck - Test Driven Development, Patterns and Extreme Programming (Rating: 4.89)
Relating anecdotes from the past, Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit, reflects back on the impact his ideas have had in the last 20 years, especially with respect to the history of Test Driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, and Extreme Programming (XP). According to him, good ideas take about that much time to mature and come to fruition.
- Kaliya Hamlin, Reid Hoffman, John Clippinger - Do You Know Where Your Identity Is? (Rating: 4.00)
As our lives increasingly straddle the physical and the virtual worlds, the management of identity becomes increasingly crucial from both a business and a social standpoint. John Clippinger, Kaliya Hamlin, and Reid Hoffman examine how online identity can foster relationships and deepen value creation. They discuss OpenID, including how America Online has chosen to adopt it, and answer questions related to such issues as anonymity and restricting information.
- Evan Prodromou - Identi.ca (Rating: 4.33)
Identi.ca is an open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The product's developer, Evan Prodromou, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the project, including its open source license.
- David Huynh - Parallax: Searching Freebase (Rating: 3.25)
For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.
- Maurice Franklin - The Space Elevator (Rating: 4.00)
Maurice Franklin, a Microsoft software engineer who is passionate about the space elevator, recently organized and hosted a conference on that topic at Microsoft's Redmond conference center. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, Franklin discusses the reasons to build a space elevator, and describes how the concept, first proposed by Arthur C. Clarke, is evolving toward a practical implementation.
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September 10, 2008
Doc Searls on Relationships (DIDW)
Doc Searls has taken the stage for todays keynote. He started with a brief review of the history of DIDW and the identity space and how we got where we're at leading up to a discussion of VRM. VRM is all about relationships between people and the entities they want to interact with.
One thing he said that stuck with me is that big companies should embrace the networked individual and small companies should enable them. Free customers are more valuable than captive one. Businesses still thing that the opposite is true. That's what we think the free market as "your choice of captor." Markets won't be free until customers are free. For individuals VRM is a way to relate.
Doc starts talking about the Rel button. The Rel button looks like two horseshoe magnets lying on their side facing each other. The Rel button can indicate (depending on how it's colored) an intention to buy, an intention to sell, or a relationship between the two.
In Doc's vision, underneath the Rel button is a protocol for exchanging information between parties based on the relationship including preferences, transaction histories, payment histories, and so on.
The first, pilot project is radio. Network-based radio streamed to devices over the data network is the future of broadcast. You could imagine that as advertising supported or subscription supported, but Doc sees it as finer grained than that. A Rel button in an iPhone streaming radio app could give people the ability to pay for the programs they enjoy piecemeal using the phone's built in payment system. This is in the early stages and will launch with public radio.
Doc ends by saying there's no limit to the amount of business that can be done with free customers in free markets. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers because we're producers as well. VRM removes the guesswork because in a relationship you know what people want now (and at what price), what they want later, and what they never want.
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September 9, 2008
Taking DNS Security for Granted
One of the hallway conversations I had yesterday was about how DNS is just hanging on by a thread from a security standpoint. The basic idea is that if I can control name resolution for you, I can phish you all day and you'll never know. Systems like OpenID are wholly dependent on the integrity of the DNS system.
One method an attacker can use to insert themselves in the DNS resolution process is a Wi-Fi hub. Whether it's a free hub acting as bait, or one someone has broken into, Wi-Fi hubs are a perfect place to subvert DNS. Once that's happened, you may type paypal.com into your browser, but you won't necessarily end up on Paypal's site. Sure, people can check certificates, but who does that?
A more insidious issue is ISPs who hijack "not found" returns as opportunities to display ads. It works like this. Say you type noworkie.windley.com into your browser. You should get a page saying that that domain wasn't found. We've all seen that. But, an ISP can intercept that "not found" return and instead give you an IP address for a server they control that has ads. For windley.com, that might not be a big deal, but what if you typed wwww.paypal.com and got back a page of ads, some of which are from phishers? You think you're clicking on something on a Paypal page, but you're not.
This practice is dangerous, but as far as I know not illegal. Technically, as the owner of windley.com, I and I alone ought to be able determine what subdomains of that domain resolve to. But there's no way to enforce that.
Most of us take DNS for granted, but that's not going to last, I'm afraid. It's the new frontier in subverting the infrastructure of the 'Net for nefarious purposes.
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Jamie Lewis on the Importance of Relationships (DIDW 08)
 Jamie Lewis at DIDW08 (click to enlarge) |
Jamie Lewis gave the opening keynote this morning on the state of digital identity. The first part was pretty straightforward review of where we've been and where we are. Then Jamie started riffing on the relationship idea that Burton has been talking about lately.
Digital identity exists to enable human experiences online. In human experience, trust (I'd say reputation) is critical. He references Alan Greenspan's book The Age of Turbulance where Greenspan talks about the global economy being based on trust. With current technology we don't enable trust in the way humans use that term.
Trust is based on relationships. In close relationships you can make frequent, accurate observations about identity attributes that lead to better understanding. Close relationships require investment and commitment. A useful, good relationship provides value for all parties.
Centrism focuses on contention and sets up an adversarial approach. Relationships aren't just about rights, they're also about obligations. Systems that simply collect information without placing it in the context of a relationship are destined to fail.
Scaling is hard when we talk about relationships because of the commitment and time required. Custodial identity is what Burton Group calls the kind of close relationship-based identity that some entities will establish. Contextual identity is what distant parties use. It's provided by the custodian. Transactional identity is the use of minimal disclosure to reduce individual risk (Is this person over 21?) For many companies who use identity data, they can get by and should get by with just transactional identity data.
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September 8, 2008
The Power of Citizen Media
Sorry for the back-to-back political posts. I try to keep politics to a minimum on this blog, but as the election heats up I find myself with more and more to say on the matter.
Over the weekend, a blogger asked Palin a hard question and got an evasive answer. The result was a widely circulated blog post detailing how Palin and McCain refused to answer the questions put to them.
Recently a blogger in Utah had a run in with Utah Senate Majority Leader Curt Bramble and posted the encounter on her blog. I think she was surprised by the play it got and the reaction, but she writes well in a hip, snarky way and the story took off.
While some believe the media no longer asks the hard questions because it doesn't lead to good ratings, the truth is we've never been more empowered as citizens to affect campaigns, elections, and government operations. The voice that new media gives ordinary people is unprecedented and will have a noticeable affect on the election.
That puts more pressure on everyone to employ good filters and decide for themselves what matters and what doesn't. While this new media gives ordinary citizens a real voice, it can also be used to swiftboating a candidate with lies and half truths as long as they make for a compelling story. A good example is the deplorable bevy of chain letters going around the Internet about Obama's alleged radical Muslim connections.
Update: The pizza delivery girl, Anna Eagar, is now campaigning for Bramble's opponent.
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Why the Democrats Keep Losing Elections
The thinking typified in this post is why Democrats keep losing elections. They can't accept the facts, so they make up reasons like dirty tricks, or cheating, the complicit media, or (GASP!) a vast right-wing conspiracy. The real reason, however, is fairly simple. In the last 40 years, Democrats have won when the fielded a centrist candidate and lost when they fielded a liberal candidate.
This year, they've got another liberal candidate (although one with lots more appeal than Kerry, for example) and they're behind. So they start making excuses earlier than ever. That may make them feel better but as any troubleshooter knows, if you don't correctly identify the cause of a problem, you'll never get the fix right. So, they keep on losing election after election.
I'm sad to see this, because while in the short run it will keep Republicans in the White House, it's not good for the system. Having a large group of people disaffected because they thought they were cheated is not good for America.
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September 6, 2008
Parsing with Perl
The system we're building at Kynetx includes a domain specific language that uses rules to create JavaScript programs that get sent down to the browser. I've documented our decision to use a domain specific langauge and our choice of Perl in other posts.
When I started this project, I was reading Mark Dominus' book Higher Order Perl and started using his HOP parser to play around with. One thing led to another an before you know it I had a full blown language parser in HOP without giving much thought as to whether or not I'd made the right choice.
I found the HOP parser to be pretty flexible, but it has it's quirks. More importantly, I didn't like the BNF specification format and so I was constantly trying to keep the spec and the implementation in sync. Better if I could just use the spec as the implementation 'ala Bison. Don't get me wrong, this is a great book with lots of wonderful ideas, but I wanted something else for the parser.
As I added more and more features to the language, it got to where I'd dread making the parser changes. Recently, I decided I had to significantly beef up the predicate expressions and thought it would be a good time to change out the parser as well.
A few months ago I picked up Christopher Frenz's Pro Perl Parsing in anticipation of just this day. Reading through it illuminated my choices and ultimately, I picked Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent, a recursive descent parser over the other contender, Parse::Yapp. The reasons for my choice were partly esthetic and partly a trust in Damian. The main thing I was after was a parse spec that I could read and compile and RecDescent seemed great in that regard.
The biggest downside of RecDescent is that there's no associated Lexer. For most things that's not a big deal since terminals can be specified as regular expressions. The place where it really bit me was comments. Removing comments is trickier than you'd think because you don't want to process "start of comment markers" inside any quotes. With a lexer, that's easy; without one, it's more problematic. Writing the regexp to remove comments took me a while to get right. I ended up using a modified version of the solution given in this FAQ. The problem with most solutions, including Regexp::Common, which has a language comment module, is that they don't account for comment markers in quotes.
All in all, rewriting the parser was a good exercise and I'm happy with the choice of RecDescent. Here's a sample production from my file:
decl: VAR '=' VAR ':' VAR '(' expr(s? /,/) ')'
{$return =
{'lhs' => $item[1],
'type' => 'data_source',
'source' => $item[3],
'function' => $item[5],
'args' => $item[7]
}
}
| VAR '=' 'counter' '.' VAR
{$return =
{'lhs' => $item[1],
'type' => $item[3],
'name' => $item[5]
}
}
| VAR '=' HTML
{$return =
{'lhs' => $item[1],
'type' => 'here_doc',
'value' => $item[3]
}
}
|
This production for decl has three alternates. Each has a separate return value (a hash) that represents the portion of the abstract syntax tree created for that part of the input.
If you decide to give Parse::RecDescent a try, here are some resources:
- The Parse::RecDescent documentation
- The Parse::RecDescent tutorial
- The Parse::RecDescent FAQ
- An O'Reilly getting started-style tutorial
- An example showing SQL CREATE TABLE statements
Reading the documentation and the FAQ thoroughly is highly recommended. There's lots of little tricks that can make your job easier.
My job, replacing an existing parser, was made easier by the fact that I'd previously built a pretty thorough test suite in Perl for the parser and some related modules. So once I got the language spec pretty much complete, I started running the tests and correcting errors as they cropped up. In a few hours, I'd solved all the problems and was confident my parser was ready to go. Definitely the way to go.
At any rate, now I've for a shiny new parser that I can go modify. Fun!
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September 1, 2008
Follow IT Conversations on Twitter
Doug has put code in place to post new IT Conversations podcasts on Twitter. You can follow the IT Conversations twitter account and see new podcasts as they're published (about one per day).
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Tell IT Conversations What You Listen To
Doug has put together a Podtrac survey to help us understand what IT Conversations listeners listen to and who you are. We're really appreciate it if you could take a minute and fill it out. You may find some of the demographic questions a little intrusive, but remember it's anonymous and that information is extremely helpful to us when we try to find underwriters for shows. It will take you 5-10 minutes, but it's very helpful to us, so I hope you'll give us a little of your time.
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WARP your WAN for Performance and Reliability
My review of Fatpipe WARP has appeared in InfoWorld.
I've had a Comcast cable Internet connection for years. Last year I got a shiny new fiber connection from Mstar. But rather than uninstall the cable connection, I asked FatPipe Networks if they'd be willing to let me perform an extended test of the company's flagship route clustering product, WARP.
WARP is a 4U, rack-mountable network appliance that allows up to three WAN connections to be aggregated without the need for complicated BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing configurations. The unit provides traffic load balancing over these connections, allowing both inbound and outbound traffic to take advantage of them. Being able to handle connections of varying speeds from different providers makes WARP a great choice for businesses seeking to add extra bandwidth and increase the reliability of their connectivity.
From Product review: WARP your WAN for performance and reliability | InfoWorld | Review | 2008-08-28 | By Phillip J. Windley
Referenced Mon Sep 01 2008 10:25:41 GMT-0600 (MDT)
I eventually shut the Comcast connection down and now get by with the fiber connection (15 Mbps symmetric). But while I had it and the WARP set up, it was pretty cool to be able to push load onto one connection or the other.