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March 25, 2009
You Should Be Listening to Money:Tech
We just launched a new series on IT Conversations: Money:Tech. You might think "I don't care about financial services" (especially now), but they have some interesting, relevant problems. The first show illustrates that well.
In Data and Capital Markets, Michael Stonebraker discusses why traditional relational databases don't work for many of the problems that financial systems face. Along the way he talks about the power of linguistic abstraction and gives the reason that Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and other "elephant vendors" products run 30-100 times slower than the best solution in a range of problem spaces. For anyone who's interested in data, there's plenty of meat here.
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March 24, 2009
CTO Breakfast on Friday
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The CTO Breakfast will occur this Friday, Mar 27 at 8am. The venue has changed for this breakfast: we'll be holding it in conjunction with PodCamp SLC. The venue is Neumont University in South Jordan. There's no food at Neumont , so Kynetx will provide bagels, etc. If you want something else, you probably ought to stop and get it before you come.
The CTO Breakfast is open to anyone who wants to come and is free. You'll need to register for PodCamp SLC separately if you want to attend that. We'll be ending before the 9:30 keynote starts.
Here is a list of future CTO Breakfasts:
- Apr 24, 2009 (Friday)
- May 28, 2009 (Thursday)
Please put them on your calendar. You can also subscribe to the Google calendar for the CTO Breakfast if you like.
I look forward to seeing you there.
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The Institutes of Oratory and Open Source Software
Image by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr
One of the advantages of being the Executive Producer of IT Conversations is that I get to see what's in the queue. When I saw that r0ml was coming up on OSCON, I was really looking forward to it. I published the show yesterday and listened to it this morning on my drive to Salt Lake. I wasn't disappointed.
In his talk, which takes a little while to get going, Robert combines Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory and the Compendium of Juggling to develop an open source software development methodology. The real point, I think, is to elucidate important philosophies of open source development.
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March 23, 2009
Kynetx on IT Conversations
Last week Jon Udell interviewed me on Interviews with Innovators about Kynetx and Contextual Browsing. It was fun to be the one answering questions for a change and Jon asked some good ones. If you've been wondering what Kynetx does, this podcast is a pretty good intro.
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March 21, 2009
CIO Blogging: Kelly Flanagan
Image by minifig via Flickr
Kelly Flanagan is a good friend, a collegue, and the CIO of BYU. Years of seeing all the trouble I get into with my blog were not enough to disuade Kelly from starting one of his own. Kelly calls his blog Technology: Rantings, Ramblings and Reviews.
Kelly is a CIO who gets his hands dirty--configuring systems, transfering video, building things--and is also curious. Those combined in his blog to create articles that are much more interesting that the typical "enterprise computing" discussion you get from many CIO bloggers.
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March 18, 2009
Starting a High Tech Business: Achieving Q=1
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 sixteenth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way----if so, please let me know!
Image via Wikipedia
In fusion energy research Q is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state and is called the fusion energy gain factor. When Q=1, the amount of power that the reaction is producing is equal to the amount of power you're putting into it to establish the fusion in the first place. Alas, fusion researchers have yet to get to this point.
You can also think of your business having a Q factor that is the ratio between the energy and activity your business is generating and the amount of energy you're having to put into it.
In the early days, your Q factor will be very low. You're putting in enormous amounts of energy (not to mention money) and seeing very little excitement or movement. Every conversation is hard because you're not sure how to explain the idea. You won't have a real product yet, so customer conversations are as difficult as they are necessary. Convincing investors, volunteers, and co-founders to jump in or keep going is hard.
Then one day something will seem different. Instead of you telling others why what you're trying to do is cool, they'll start telling you. Investors will be excited when you talk them instead of tolerant. And people will sense the energy and want to jump on board. Your Q-factor just crossed 1.
One of the hardest parts of reaching Q=1 is that you often don't realize when you're getting close. The energy requirements aren't linear. You often have to work harder than ever just when it's the easiest to give up and believe you're wasting your time.
In the same manner, getting past Q=1 doesn't mean it's easy afterwards. You still have to put in a lot of work. Probably even more than before. But psychologically, you've reached an important milestone that makes it easier to do because you're getting positive feedback that reinforces your beliefs and efforts.
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March 17, 2009
Participate in Usability Testing for HP
A friend of mine at HP is looking for small business owners (1-20 employees) to participate in some usability testing of online tools for marketing their business. Participants will receive a $50 gift card to Amazon.com or Best Buy, or a discount on design services like brochure creation, for an hour of their time at the HP office in American Fork, Utah. If you're interested, just send a note to Esther at HP.
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March 13, 2009
Continuous Deployment
This morning Steve gave a presentation on context automation and Kynetx at the Utah Technology Council's CTO P2P forum. The presentation was great and the audience asked a lot of good questions. One thing that came up (I don't even remember why) was the subject of continuous deployment. I decided I'd pull a few URLs out of my head and put them in a blog post for people to mull over.
The first URL I think of when I consider continuous deployment is code.flickr.com. If you've never been there, the bottom of the page lists when the last deployment of Flickr was, how many deployments have happened in the last week, and who was involved (pictures). Here's a screenshot:
When I first saw that I was astounded. Sometimes there are a dozen or more deployments in a single day. The questions that spring to mind: why? and how? Both are answered in a few posts by Timothy Fitz.
In Continuous Deployment, Timothy discusses the concept. Basically, it comes down to "fail fast." Deploying a few small changes is less likely to break something and when it does, you'll know more quickly what caused the problem and be able to correct it.
In Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day Timothy goes into more detail about how they do this. The idea comes down to
- Commit early and often
- Automatically test on commit
- Automatically roll the code out if the tests pass
There are, of course, some problems to solve to get that done. First, you need a good, thorough test suite. Timothy points out that you also need tests that
- run fast and
- execute reliably.
The test suite Timothy is describing takes 4.4 machine hours to execute. That's a lot of testing. To make it run fast enough to deploy continuously, they have a buildbot that runs tests across 36 machines in parallel.
The point about test reliability is important too. Intermitently failing tests will ruin this process. Timothy says:
When I say reliable, I don't mean "they can fail once in a thousand test runs." I mean "they must not fail more often than once in a million test runs." We have around 15k test cases, and they're run around 70 times a day. That's a million test cases a day. Even with a literally one in a million chance of an intermittent failure per test case we would still expect to see an intermittent test failure every day. It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it's just one part of my day job.From Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day. « Timothy Fitz
Referenced Fri Mar 13 2009 10:54:22 GMT-0600 (MDT)
I love this whole idea. I've lived the life of infrequent deployments and it will suck the soul right out of your engineering and ops teams. That's why when we started up Kynetx, I was determined to not repeat those mistakes. Our system is not as sophisticated as the one Timothy describes, but my goals is to get there and we make specific goals about things that need to happen to get there.
You may not be able to get to 50 deployments a day overnight, but you can increase the frequency of deployment and prioritize the development efforts necessary to increase that frequency. Set some goals and take your life back.
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March 9, 2009
We Are the Ten
Steve Fulling articulated some principles a few years back on business, leadership, and life that he called "We Are the Ten." While the ideas in general were not necessarily original with him, the document was a powerful vision ofhow self-actualized people go about working together. Here is the preamble:
We believe teams are only as good as the values that bond them together. We reject the notion that in a team of one hundred, ten do the work. We are the ten. We believe values and culture can fundamentally transform the behaviors and actions of a team. We reject the idea that policies and procedures can fill the gap of individual accountability and responsibility. We believe that through individual practice and patterning we can break old school techniques that taught disengagement and laziness. To this end, we have identified our cultural values that are necessary in order to successfully become part of the ten.
Dave McNamee, a mutual friend and someone we've both worked with has started blogging about the principles in We Are the Ten in an "every Monday" series. Follow along. I think you'll enjoy it.
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Registration for IIW8 (2009A) is Open
You're invited to the 8th Internet Identity Workshop to be held May 18-20, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.
Registration for IIW2009A (IIW8) is open now. Early Bird Rates are in effect until April 1st. This is a $50 discount for independents and a $75 discount for regular tickets from last year's price.
We need to get 75 people registered by April 1 to make a final confirmation for our conference space at the Computer History Museum. All those who book early will get a special thanks.
Sponsorship opportunities are still available for the following:
- Morning Break, May 19 and 20 ($1000 each)
- Afternoon Break, May 18, 19, and 20 ($1000 each)
- Lunch on May 19 and 20 ($3000 each)
- Barista and Coffee Bar, May 18, 19, and 20 ($800 each day)
- Monday Dinner, May 18 ($5000)
- Documentation Center ($1000)
We're grateful for Microsoft and Plaxo being early sponsors. If you or your company can sponsor one of these events, it will help IIW greatly and ensure that we can continue the same high energy event we've had in the past.
If you're planning on coming, please take a minute to register now. In any event, please help us get the word out by blogging about IIW registration and putting a blog badge with a link to the registration page.
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March 6, 2009
Pluto and the Importance of Nomenclature
This Moira Gunn interview wth Neil deGrasse Tyson , director of The Hayden Planetarium and author of the book The Pluto Files is a fun and humorous discussion of the importance of nomenclature. Calling Pluto what it is--a drawf planet--makes some people mad, but it's better science and leads to better science education.
I've long been a believer in the importance of nomenclature and my experience in going through nomenclature discussions at Kynetx with Craig Burton has only strengthened that belief. We're a different company because of how the right words help us understand and explain ourselves in powerful ways.
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March 5, 2009
Using Grep and Find
Image by dannyman via Flickr
One of my favorite tools is "grep." That gives away the fact that I spend more time on the command line than many. One of the things I originally loved about OS X was that I could fire up a terminal and use the machine just like Unix (yeah, Linux was a new fangled thing for me).
Recently I complained about always having to look up a certain switch for grep and Weldon Dodd tweeted "if you write a blog post about grep, maybe others will commit the switch to memory too, and when I say others, I mean me." So, here it is.
Grep is an acronym from "global, regular expression, print" three commands you often did in a row inside ed, a primitive Unix editor (vi is slightly better, emacs is the best, of course). As an aside, knowing some rudimentary ed commands is a good thing for any sysadmin because it's always available, even in single-user mode.
Grep is used to searching files. I was using it this morning to search for strings in old email mailboxes to find a Quicktime registration. The fact that grep accepts regular expressions makes it a very powerful tool for finding data in files.
There are only a few flags I commonly use:
- -H - print the filename of any matching files. If you grep a file glob and get match you want to know which file in the glob the match was in
- -P - use Perl-style regular expressions
There are others, just grep --help to see them.
One thing you will commonly want to do is grep through directories. Grep allows you to recurse, but I am in the habit of using it within find to do the same thing:
find . -exec grep -H "Quicktime" {} \;
Why do this instead of using the built-in recursive features? simply because I know find well and when I want it's powerful filtering features to work with, this makes them readily available. For example, if knew I wanted to search for "Quicktime" in files that were created in my Documents folder within the last week:
find ~/Documents -ctime 7 -exec grep -H "Quicktime" {} \;
So, why not use Spotlight? I do. But sometimes I want a scaple rather than a chainsaw and grep combined with find give me that.
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March 4, 2009
Top Ten List of Valuable Web Sites and Services
A while ago Christian Gray asked a number of people (Joe Andrieu, Tony Winders, Mike Reid, Michael Lodge, William Hayes, Richard Weddle, Scott Lemon, me and Ian Palmer) to send him a list of Web sites and applications that they found valuable. Here's the list (in no particular order):
- http://www.kiva.org -- microloans, loans that change lives
- http://www.linkedin.com - professional social networking (free and premium) - best way to leverage your professional network
- http://www.getfriday.com -- virtual assistant, we first read about them in the book The World Is Flat
- http://www.ning.com -- start your own social network/project group today, very easy for non-techs
- http://www.google.com/alerts + http://www.google.com/reader - stay on top of info in an automated fashion
- http://www.zemanta.com - automatic links, associated photos, related articles and tags for your blog
- http://www.zoho.com - Online apps for business. Free for individuals. Small fees for business.
- http://www.twitter.com -- if you don't know about
http://blog.mrtweet.net/?p=69 - http://www.tweetdeck.com -- makes twitter easier to manage/use
- http://www.helpareporter.com -- get you quoted in news stories and position you as the expert
Christian has a list of all the contributions on his site.
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Guy Kawasaki: How to Drive the Competition Crazy
Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr
Guy Kawasaki is speaking at the Infopia ecommerce conference in Salt Lake City today. (You might also enjoy reading my notes from the last time Guy was in Utah.) His topic is how to drive the competition crazy. In standard Guy style, he gives his talk as a list of ten things:
- Find a mighty opposite - find a great enemy who is trying to do something in direct opposition to what you're doing. Portray them in ways that emphasize how you're different. It doesn't have to be a company. It could be something like "ignorance." Finding an opposite allows you to make meaning instead of just making money.
- Know thyself - you can't fight the competition unless you know what you're about and where you stand. Guy recommends creating a mantra (not a mission statement) as the first step. Here's Kynetx' mantra: automate context.
- Know thy customer - everyone says this, but the key is the degree to which you do it. Don't farm it out; do it yourself. Making sense of who your customers are and what they want will drive you crazy--not just your competition.
- Know thy enemy - the best way is to become your competition's customer. What's the shipping policy, their credit policy, etc.? How do they do it? Get first hand knowledge. Go to their conferences.
- Focus on the customer/create good shitake - too many companies focus on their competition. People don't care about your battle with the competition; they only care about whether or not you serve their interests. The most important aspect of focusing on your customer, you have to build a good product that your customers want to buy. He takes a swipe at SEO: Google is in the business of finding good stuff. If you build good stuff, Google will find it because their interests are aligned with yours. Great products aren't a little better; they're 10 times better. Your product ought to be emotive and be polarizing. He references his DICEE advice.
- Turn customers into evangelists - if customers are emotional about your product they will talk about it--for free. Guy uses Nike as an example: they're not selling cotton and leather stiched together as shoes. They're selling ideas and emotion.
- Create your own day - Levi Strauss commissioned a study on the effect of casual dress on workplace morale and productivity. They made this available to the press and created a "casual dress implementation kit." Lots of papers picked it up. They created their own opportunity.
- Make good by doing good - align yourself with good causes.
- Turn your competition into allies - find ways to work with, rather than against your competition. Where can you be collborative to engage new markets? He gives the example of J.B. Hunt trucking teaming with railroads to put semi trailers on flatbeds.
- Play with the minds - Once you've done everything else, play games with the competition. He tells of a pizza company that offers 2 for 1 pizzas if you tear out and bring in the yellow pages ad of their competition. He talks of a small business person sitting next to a Home Depot who renamed his business "Main Entrance" to get people coming to Home Depot to come into his store.
- Use Twitter - A bonus 11th tip. What good is a cell phone that allows you to listen to random snippets of conversation? Use search to find out what people are saying anything about you or your company? When you see people talking about things your sell they are potential customers. Guy gives a demo of Twitter to a room of people who aren't Tweeple (for the most part). He demos Tweetdeck (FTW). He recommends using TwitterHawk but staying away from the autopost features.
Good marketing pisses people off. If people aren't getting mad at you, then you're boring and bland. You can't let a vocal minority tell you what to do.
I enjoyed this talk a lot. First of all Guy is an entertaining speaker. Second, and more important, even though he's using some material from older talks I've heard, he's constantly refreshing and rearranging his content. There's new stuff here and it adds new interest.
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March 3, 2009
Augmentation Gone Wild
Joe Andrieu has written a blog post on Netizen Developers wherein he makes this assertion:
As netizen developers, we have an obligation not just to do what makes us money, or even what makes users happy, but to build systems that work at Internet scale, when everyone does it. If the systems we build don't work when everyone tries to get into the game, then we are just being selfish, hording value just because we are first-to-market.From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen Developer
Referenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:07:56 GMT-0700 (MST)
He mentions systems like the one we're building at Kynetx, others like ad blockers, as well as his own toolbar-based SwitchBook. You might view his point as altruistic given the quote I use above, but his real point is "how to we make this all work?"
It comes down to a question of open systems. Open systems that work, work when everyone does it, because that's where you get game-changing economies of scale. The network effect only happens if the value of the system increases when more and more people use it and open systems are all about the network effect.
- What happens if everyone uses TCP/IP? WhoohoO! Seamless interconnected networks.
- What if everyone uses SMTP, POP, and IMAP? Yes! You can email anyone, anywhere, anytime!
- What if every company, government agency, and organization uses HTML and http to build online services for their users? Mega efficiency. 24 hour engagement. Low-cost quick answers. Happier people and happier organizations.
Those are good open systems.
From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen Developer
Referenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:10:59 GMT-0700 (MST)
I don't know that I or anyone else can answer Joe's questions completely at this point. The ultimate answer will include standards involving the execution environments that augmentation services operate in and how they interact with each other. This is a tough problem. There's not a single, elegant answer. To this point standards that have been written have mostly been security related and been something that makes mashup writing more difficult, not more reliable.
I don't see this as an "ethical" issue the way that Joe seems to--in terms of being a good "netizen." I see it through a practical lens. If we don't solve this, then users will solve it for us by just not using our stuff. That said, the problem with simply looking at this as an issue that vendors must solve is that it means that no one may build a true "system" that works in the way email, the Web, and the 'Net itself do.
Such a system is the solution that Joe proposes:
Ultimately, what we need is an open system that allows all of these types of augmentations from Adaptive Blue, SwitchBook, Kynetx, Azigo, Google, Skype, and others, to mingle smoothly in the same interface.
From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen Developer
Referenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:44:04 GMT-0700 (MST)
Kynetx sees itself as that system. Azigo is built on top of Kynetx and ultimately so could most of the others.
Joe says we need an "open system" and I agree. The word "open," however, comes with a lot of baggage that may not be helpful. Kynetx is not open in the sense that it's not open source. What it does provide, however, is an open API and a language specification that anyone could implement (note that this is still in development). We may open more in the future as we determine how this works and discover business models.
I look forward to discussions about the model and requirements for adoption. I'm especially interested in figuring our how what Kynetx is building can better serve as a platform for creating web augmentation services that work well for users and don't conflict.