IT in Utah

May 04, 2006

v|100 Selectees

vSpring has released the names of the v|100 for 2006. “The v|100 was conceived by vSpring as a tool to recognize the region’s outstanding entrepreneurs and to support and promote partnering and collaboration among the state of Utah’s top entrepreneurs.” I’m happy to say that I’m among them for the third year in a row, particularly since the nomination and selection process is done by the entrepreneurial community in Utah.

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April 28, 2006

April CTO Breakfast Report

Today we did something different at the CTO breakfast and brought a projector for 5 minute lightening demos.

• Nathan Conger from Novell went first and showed the new SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop. We saw Beta 10. This is available from OpenSUSE.org. Nice integrated wireless network management. Virtual desktops are a rotating cube. Windows warp when you drag them. Windows can live “on the corner” of the cube. An official DVD player will ship with the final version. Window transparency built-in. Expose-like behavior. All-in-all, pretty flashy. Support for Visual Basic macros in OpenOffice. Windows users now have to envy SUSE as well as OS X.
• Jeff Hunsaker from SCO showed a mobile technology called Shout. Shout is an application based on a platform called Me, Inc. Shout is a way to broadcast one to many voice messages to phones (via SMS) and email addresses from your mobile phone. Other Me Inc applications include one called Vote that allows you to broadcast “polls” to a group and collect results. Another application was a mobile order entry tool. The tool connects to legacy applications (COBOL, PowerBuilder, etc.) over the phone network and uses Web services. Building other applications takes a few weeks. The Me, Inc. platform allows these applications to run across mobile platforms regardless of the underlying OS.
• Dallan Quass from WeRelate.org (not WereLate.org). Using Google to find genealogy using last names either gives back too many results or only shows 30-50% of the available sites (when you limit it with other keywords). Dallan demoed a search engine specific for genealogy. Having a domain specific search engine gets better results and also gives better ancillary services like “what’s related.” The really cool thing is that the search engine allows users to use a wiki-like feature (based on MediaWiki) for influencing future results. They’ve extended MediaWiki to use XML blocks for storing structured data. In case you’re wondering what business Dallan has doing search engines, he has a long history in search, building (and selling) the Junglee search engine in the Web 1.0 days.

Phil Burns announced that the next GeekDinner will be a first-night screening of X-Men 3.

Bruce Grant spent some time this month playing with Grails, a Rails-like framework for Groovy. Groovy is a dynamic language that has access to all of the Java Libraries because the scripts compile to JVM byte-code. I wrote about it at OSCON 2004. Bruce thought it was still too immature to be useful.

Parallels seems to have made a few people think seriously about buying a MacBook. The latest release has shared folders between the virtual machines. Scott Lemon reported that performance was “mind blowing.”

We got into a discussion Tivos. Rumors of Desktop Connection for Macs in May. Roxio’s Popcorn seems to be a good tool for getting video on the iPod.

Company’s leak IP. It’s not about how much IP you have, it’s about how fast you can generate it. Patents are a form of mutual assured destruction where companies amass them in an effort to ensure they can take on anyone who tries to take them on.

Update: Richard Miller has notes from the breakfast.

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April 24, 2006

April CTO Breakfast Reminder

Just a reminder that April’s CTO breakfast will be held this Friday (Apr 28) at 8am in the usual location (Bldg L, Food Court of Canyon Park Technology Center).

This time we’re going to try something new. I’ll have a projector there and we’ll invite (at the meeting) 2-3 people to give 5 minute demos. So, if you’ve got something you’d like to show, bring a laptop or a URL. This doesn’t have to be something you made. It could simply be something you think is cool and that the entire group would enjoy seeing. On the other hand, if you just created the world’s coolest Web 2.0 app, feel free to come show that to us too!

Future CTO Breakfasts will be held on

• May 19 (Friday)
• June 23 (Friday) - avoiding 4th of July weekend
• July 14 (Friday)
• August 25 (Friday)

Mark your calendar now.

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March 30, 2006

March CTO Breakfast Report

This morning’s CTO breakfast had around 30 people in attendance. As always, the conversations was geeky and varied. Here are a few things I took notes on.

We had a discussion of Ruby and how it’s always at the bottom of the lisp. The facts of the matter, however that in most Web applications (where Ruby seems to have found it’s sweet spot) the CPU and language aren’t the bottleneck. What is? Database communication. Someone mentioned that this podcast with Jamis Buck that discusses the scalability of Ruby Web apps.

We had lots of discussion on virtualization. I brought up rumors that OS Tiger will include native virtualization. Devlin Daley reported that the Intel Dual Cores that Apple is shipping now contain hardware virtualization primitives. We also talked about running Linux on IBM mainframes and Sun’s Niagara.

Someone asked why disks seem slower. I brought up this interview with Jim Grey. The main trust of the article is that disk density is increasing ten times faster than access speeds. The end result is that we are very close to having what looks, for all intents and purposes, like infinite storage capacity but not being able to access it fast enough. In fact, the speed to density ratio is approaching that of tape.

Daniel Bray wondered if federated databases we one way to deal with this problem. We talked about the possibility of building arrays of microdrives to decrease access time. I brought up some research by Kelly Flanagan that explores putting multiple copies of the same sector on the disk and then seeking to the closest one. This is essentially creating a virtualized array of disks.

Robert Merrill brought up Fon, a share and share alike wireless system. You can use the access points of Fon members as long as you’re willing to let them use yours. Maybe not so helpful in Lindon Utah, but it could be very interesting in an urban setting.

We briefly discussed OpenVPN, a open-source VPN implemented on top of SSL. I’ve been looking for something like this, so I was glad to hear about it. OpenVPN apparently can run as a IP Cop plugin in addition to standalone mode.

Ning came up for the second month in a row. Time to go look at it, I guess. You can move your code, but Scott Lemon has been hacking some apps on it. There’s some danger of lock in because of the proprietary Ning API for data storage. Ning makes money by charging to protect your source (the standard Chicago protection racket business model), additional storage, private URLs, and so on.

For IIW, I put together a map of the hotels nearby. Actually, I stole it from MashUp Camp since they were in the same place and reentering all that data seemed like a waste of time. But they built it using MapBuilder.

Devlin Daley had the closing point and brought up Huddletogether’s LightBox. You have to go see it to understand what it does. Not only is it easily the coolest thing I’ve seen for a few weeks, but it’s also dirt simple to put on your site. Here’s an example of Lightbox with some pictures from ETech06.

Click on an image to view the full sized image. Mouse over the side of the image to see a “next image” arrow that takes you to the next image in the set. Clicking on the X, of course, closes the window and brings back the browser.

There were enough things like this today that I was thinking that it would be a good idea to bring a projector and have a bit of time at the front end for “five-minute demo.” Kind of like open mic night, five-minute demo would have anyone who wanted it five minutes at the projector to demonstrate something cool that they’ve done or that they’ve seen. Let me know your thoughts.

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March 27, 2006

March's CTO Breakfast

Just a reminder that the CTO Breakfast for March will be held this Thursday at 8am in the food court of the Canyon Park Technology Center (Building L of the former Word Perfect campus). Come a little early, grab some food at Gandolfo’s, and enjoy the conversation.

Please bring ideas, interesting Web discoveries, and other technology related issues to discuss. The past few months have had a large attendance and the discussion has been great. I’m looking forward to this Thursday.

Here are the dates for the next four meetings. Mark you calendars now.

• March 30 (Thursday)
• April 28 (Friday)
• May 19 (Friday)
• June 23 (Friday) - avoiding 4th of July weekend

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March 08, 2006

Peter Norvig at BYU

With the reams of stuff I spewing out at ETech, there’s a real danger this will get lost in the middle, but I persist. Peter Novig, Director of Search Quality at Google will be speaking at this week’s CS Dept. Colloquium. If you’re in the area and interested, you ought to try to go. I think it will be very good. I’m genuinely sorry I’m going to be in CA and miss it. Here’s Peter’s abstract:

The system of publishing the written word has made more knowledge available to more people than any other technology. No other system comes within a factor of a million. Now that a good portion of this written material is available online, it can be processed by computer. But the written word is notoriously imprecise and ambiguous, so currently the best way to make use of it is to leverage the intelligence and language understanding ability of author and reader, and relegate the computer to the more modest role of connecting the two. Even this modest role still leaves a number of challenges in computer science, computational lingusitics, and artificial intelligence, which will be discussed.

The colloquium will be held, as is our tradition, on Thursday at 11am in 1170 TMCB.

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February 27, 2006

Alan Kay Followup

Here’s a few follow ups to Alan Kay’ talk last week.

• Scott Lemon has notes from Alan’s technical and public lectures.
• Here’s the link to the $100 laptop organization.
• Bill Clementson referenced my notes and added some quotes from Alan (from other talks). My favorite: “I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.”
• Alan’s interview in Queue remains one of my favorite.

I’ve had quite a few side discussions with others about the talk—it’s gerenated a lot of interest. It’s not often when I find myself thinking about a talk I heard last week.

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February 23, 2006

February CTO Breakfast Report

This morning’s CTO breakfast was well attended (about 30 people) with good discussion. Here are some of the things we talked about.

• I started out mentioning that Hillarie Orman was on a panel at Demo and asking for a report from her. We got a good Cliff Notes version of the panel and conference. Bruce Grant was also there and mentions that conference was full of marketing hype as well as very smart people.
• We got into a short discussion of quantum computing and what that means to cryptography. Quantum computing and it’s effects on cryptography shouldn’t be confused with quantum cryptography which is a simpler application of quantum principles.
• Bruce’s big love right now is mobile devices. He mentioned that they’re becoming more and more capable as computing platforms. That led to a discussion of whether or not they’d mature into an open platform that leveraged developer efforts. I consider Windows an open platform, in this case, since the APIs are available and programmers can write code for the OS with an expectation that it will run on anyone’s machine.
  The consensus was that there will be consolidation and a platform will develop (although it may be a Javascript capable browser, rather than a cell phone OS). Scott Lemon suggested we’ll move to OS independent apps, either via web or a CLR (e.g. .NET). He also predicted corporate market response to the $100 laptop project in the next few weeks.
• We got into a review of some of the things that happened at Mashup Camp this week. Much of the discussion centered around business models and whether there was revenue to be had in mashups. Clearly, popular mashups can leverage AdWords. Is there more than that?
• Bruce, who was doing AJAX before it was cool, mentioned that he thought one of the big mistakes he made early on was trying to build applications for the browser without a significant server-side presence. We had a few folks at the breakfast from Bungee Labs (née CanyonBridge) and Bruce thinks they’ve struck a good balance in this area. With respect to business models, Bruce believes people pay for reliability. I brought up Jon Udell’s recent column on the browser as orchestrator.
• A related discussion was on the importance of content and data in Web 2.0. Flickr didn’t win because they have a great API. They don’t maintain their position because people can’t copy their API or idea. They win because they have the most pictures, period. People are invested in them and the idea is viral (“come look at the picture of my new kid”).
• Also mentioned were Ning a site for creating social Web sites, and Jot. The idea is to “build Excel for the Web,” not in the sense of NumSum, but in the sense of something that changes how business uses the Web. Bruces tells of talking to a business person who said “Before Office, I had to have a secretary create a presentation and it took weeks. Now in 2 or 3 hours I have the presentation and I do it myself. Until dealing with applications and data online is that easy, the Web doesn’t mean that much to me.”

There was some discussion of outsourcing and the new Macs. Some of it is too hard to capture in text. You really need to be there. Stop by next month and see what it’s like. Scott Lemon has notes from the meeting online as well. Scott also has notes of Alstair Cockburn’s presentation at last night’s Geek Dinner.

Thanks to Tom Gregory and Nathan Stocks who collaboratively recorded notes for the meeting using Subetha Edit.

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February 21, 2006

Hearing Alan Kay

Alan Kay is giving the Organick Lecture at the University of Utah on Thursday. It’s actually two lectures, one in the afternoon on “computer science” and “software engineering” and on in the evening on the $100 laptop. I’m planning on going to both.

If you’re interested in riding with me, I’ve got four seats—first come, first serve. I’ll be leaving BYU at 2:15. Since I’m planning on staying for both lectures, I won’t be home until late.

If you’re already in Salt Lake, it would be fun to get some people together for dinner in between the lectures. Say 5:30 or so at Market Street Broiler. Let me know if you’re coming and I’ll make reservations.

Some people have asked if these lectures will be available online. I’ve asked the CS department at Utah and gotten a “maybe” kind of reply. So, I’ll let you know later if there’s a link.

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CTO Breakfast on Thursday

We’ll be having the monthly CTO Breakfast this Thursday at 8am. As usual, we’ll meet in the Food Court at Canyon Park Technology Center (Building L of the former Word Perfect Campus). Come prepared to talk to the group about one or two interesting technologies you’ve seen in the last little while. We want to know what made you say “wow!” lately.

The next three CTO Breakfast’s will be:

• March 30 (Thursday)
• April 28 (Friday)
• May 19 (Friday)

Mark your calendar’s now!

Remember, you don’t have to be a CTO to come. Just someone interested in technology and its role in creating products. If you’re interested in seeing what we do, read the report from January’s meeting.

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February 16, 2006

Open Telecom Box

Telecom box left open in Orem (click to enlarge)

Yesterday afternoon I was driving down 1600 North in Orem and noticed an open telecom box. I stopped and took a picture. I also tried to close it up. The latching mechanism seemed to be working and undamaged, but there was no handle on the outside (it’s removable). The box appeared to house some kind of remote DSLAM and probably Qwest’s. It had been open for a while (notice the little icicles hanging inside the cabinet).

I went to the Qwest Web site to find some way to report it and there was nothing obvious. I called and they wanted to know my account number. I finally figured out how to get past their IVR and talk to a human. Fortunately, I wasn’t on hold forever. Meanwhile, if you live in southwest Orem and you’re DSL isn’t working, you can stop over and check on the circuit yourself.

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February 07, 2006

Alan Kay Organick Lectures

Alan Kay will give this year’s Organick Lectures at the University of Utah on Feb 23rd. He will speak in the afternoon (@3:40pm) on “Are ‘Computer Science’ and ‘Software Engineering’ Oxymorons?” and in the evening (@7:30pm) on “Children, Powerful Ideas, and the $100 Laptop.” Both lectures will be at the 202 Skaggs Biology Research Building.

If you’re in the area, you ought to go. Alan Kay has wonderful and inspiring to listen to whenever I’ve heard him. What’s more, the setting is usually fairly small. Last year, when I heard Vint Cerf speak, there were probably less that 100 people there.

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January 31, 2006

CTO Breakfast Report

Today’s CTO Breakfast was a lot of fun. There were about 30 people there. I was afraid that with the day change we’d have fewer people, but not so. Any more and we’ll have to get a bigger room. We talked about a lot of interesting things. Here are some pointers to some things people brought up or mentioned:

• Ross Livingston couldn’t come, but sent me a note about a company in North Dakota that’s exploring the use of weather balloons to provide cell coverage. The idea is to launch the balloons on the west end of ND and then let them float to the other side where they release their payload (the cell radio) and drop it back to earth where people turn them in for a bounty. With a cell tower costing a quarter of a million dollars and the need for 1100 new cell towers in ND alone to cover the state, the logistics might be reasonable.
• Scott Lemon brought up the PopTech! podcast by Dr. Todd Kuiken and Jesse Sullivan. I had listened to it a few weeks ago as well. Jesse Sullivan lost both arms to an electrical accident several years ago. Todd Kuiken build prosthetic arms that use non-invasive techniques to read the nerve signals from the nerve that used to be attached to the arm. You’ve got to listen to the podcast to appreciate how cool this is and how far there is yet to go.
• Eric Smith said he’d recently bought a TeraServer from Buffalo Technologies to serve as a media server in his home. These devices have a TB of memory and a GigE connection all in one inexpensive box. Control4 (Eric’s company) is creating a set-top box will play videos from a local server. Sounds like a great match.
• This naturally led to a discussion of CRAP (formerly known as DRM) technology. A lot of people said they use DVDShrink for getting DVDs onto a server. On the Mac, I hear tell that Handbrake works well. Handbrake is multiplatform, so it apparently also works on Linux and Windows.
• There was some discussion on thin and thick clients. Bruce Grant brought up the problem of clients on mobile phones. There are 80 different browsers on phones. AJAX simply doesn’t work in that environment. This is a huge barrier to interesting mobile apps and companies.
• We talked about NX, a protocol for remoting machines. The architecture is based on the X-Windows system. From the Nomachine Website: “It consists of a thin layer of server software that enables any Unix computer to work as a terminal server. Clients are also available for a wide range of platforms and operating systems. NoMachine has chosen to build the foundations of its NX Distributed Computing Architecture on the well known and widely used X-Window System - the windowing system that’s behind the Graphical User Interfaces of Linux and the Unix Operating System.” NoMachine apparently has version for sale and there’s also FreeNX, a free version. This caught my attention because I found out about Clearcube, a company that sells blades that serve as remote workstations. Pretty cool idea for call-centers, student labs, etc. I wonder how cost-effective it is.
• In a discussion of cell phones for kids, we talked about Boostphone and Firefly. As a parent, I’m a firm believer in cell phones for my kids. They think its a big deal that I’m giving in to them, but in fact, I’m enabling a kid tracking system that makes me more comfortable about having them out and about.
• No one listens to voicemail anymore (especially anyone under 21). Send them a text message, however, and you’re likely to get a response. Not many people have turned off their email yet, but it’s bound to happen.
• Speaking of voicemail, does anyone have a voice to text transcription service that operates in near real time? The idea would be to have voicemail come across as text. Scott Lemon proposed outsourcing it to India. I found SpinVox but apparently it’s available in Britain.
• VPNs are something that ought to be easier for regular folk to do without the support of an IT department or a deep dive into the SSH man page. Hamachi is a free VPN client for Windows and Linux (OS X client in the works) that sets up VPNs between a set of machines. The interface looks like an IM window.

Every month, I’m amazed at the topics that come up and the discussion that ensues. If you’re interested in coming, you’re welcome. Just sign up for the mailing list on the CTO Breakfast page and I’ll send you a reminder before the meeting each month.

Update: Scott Lemon has notes from the meeting that capture some of the ideas and conversations I missed.

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January 30, 2006

CTO Breakfast Tomorrow

Remember that we’re holding January’s CTO breakfast tomorrow morning at 8am in the food court (BLDG L) at Canyon Park Technology Center (former Word Perfect Campus). Come prepared to talk about things you’ve seen in the last month. I just got back from visiting Brian Chee’s Network Testing Lab in Hawaii this morning and I’ll tell you a little about what I learned.

Directions and dates of future meetings can be found here. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

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January 26, 2006

Wanted: Linux Developer

Ken Knapton at Content Watch is looking for a developer with Linux roots. Here’s a list of the skills required:

• In-depth understanding of Linux operating system and development practices
• Demonstrable experience developing Java and/or C++ applications
• 3-5 years of work experience in Software Development
• Server-side development experience preferred
• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field
• Knowledge of Java/C++ and object-oriented design and development

The job’s located in Utah. If you’re interested, contact Ken directly.

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January 17, 2006

CTO Breakfast Date Change

I’ve had to change the date of the CTO breakfast for January. The schedule originally had us meeting on Thursday the 26th or January, but I’ve got to leave for Hawaii that morning (I know, but someone has to do it). So, instead, I’ve moved the breakfast to Tuesday the 31st of January.

We’ll be meeting at the Food Court in Building L of Canyon Park Technology Center (former WordPerfect campus) at 8am. The reason I’m going to Hawaii is to visit Brian Chee’s network testing lab and I’ll report on that. Please come with a few new things you’ve seen lately and would like to discuss. The past few meetings have been particularly interesting and I hope we can keep that going.

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Geek Dinner Tonight

There’s a geek dinner tonight in Sandy. The discussion topic will be geek law. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to make it.

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January 11, 2006

Asterisk Users Group in Utah

There’s a new Asterisk user’s group forming Utah and their first meeting is tonight. If you’re not familiar with Asterisk, it’s an open source PBX that is extremely capable.

Update: The formatting bug in the hCalendar that Jon mentions has been fixed. The formatting kept the “download” link from appearing. I also changed the spelling. :-)

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December 30, 2005

Salt Lake Tribune News Quiz

I scored 105 or 125 on the Tribune News Trivia Quiz.

I took the Salt Lake Tribune’s News Trivia Quiz and scored 105 out 125. That qualifies me as an official news junkie. I missed questions about entertainment—the one thing that doesn’t interest me much. Try it and see how you do. I’m surprised they don’t have ads on the quiz—lot’s of page views.

The quiz has a bug in the HTML form presenting the questions. The top radio button doesn’t have the same name as the bottom two, so it’s possible to select more than one answer. Of course, when you do that, the database doesn’t like it very much and spits out an error. The page source also shows the SQL for selecting the question—kind of sloppy. I hope they’re not running this on a system with any sensitive information because it’s probably a security nightmare. Even so, it’s fun.

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December 05, 2005

Novell's New CTO

I’d have done it for half that.

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