Phil Windley's Technometria

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Anti-Perl Social Engineering

Dave Cross has a piece on why corporations hate Perl. He's being a little hyperbolic (as he admits)--not everyone hates Perl, but he's right in noting that there is a backlash against it. He says: I was talking to... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 20, 2008 11:13 AM

The Run to Ubiquity

Craig Burton has written a nice essay on why software infrastructure behaves differently, economically speaking, than other products and why that upsets the natural inclination most people have relative to protectionism. That, of course, is what the whole net... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 15, 2008 9:45 AM

Namespaces, Twitter, Identi.ca, and Federation

A few days ago I wrote about federating with Identi.ca. Yesterday I had a great chat with Craig Burton about that whole idea. He's not buying. I asked him to respond on his blog so we could move the... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 14, 2008 1:26 PM

Puppet Fun

I'm continuing to explore the use of puppet for managing systems. I'm convinced that it's the best system for managing large groups of interacting servers and keeping them all in sync. For example, today I was trying to figure... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on August 5, 2008 3:58 PM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for June

Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for June: Episode Nine - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.28)Joel and Jeff discuss Apple's WWDC (and the correct pronunciation of OS X), the use of JavaScript on modern web sites, affiliate programs, and... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 14, 2008 4:00 PM

The 50-50 Rule in Retail: Capturing Customer Conversations

Ross Mayfield notes that in an Apple retails store "50% of the space is for retail sales and 50% for service and support." He goes on to contrast that with places like Fry's or Best Buy. I'm always amazed... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 9, 2008 10:03 AM

Open Source and The Gap

David Eaves posted a piece overlaying the Firefox 3 Pledge Map and Thomas Barnett's map that divides the world into the "the functioning core" and the "non-integrated gap." As you might expect, there's a high correlation. People in the... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on July 3, 2008 9:56 AM

Velocity 08: Even Faster Web Sites

Steve Souders of Google is speaking on Even Faster Web Sites. I've read Steve's book and loved it. It's the kind of book you read in the morning, use to make changes to your site in the afternoon and... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 24, 2008 2:45 PM

Velocity 08: Some Tools for Improving Web Performance

HTTPWatch is an HTTP traffic viewer for Internet Explorer. There's a free basic edition, but the professional edition is almost $300! Whew! Firebug for Firefox, of course, remains free. Fiddler is a Web debugging proxy that runs on a... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 24, 2008 12:42 PM

EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems

Rich Wolski from University of California, Santa Barbara is speaking about an open source implementation of cloud computing that has an interface compatible with Amazon's EC2 called Eucalyptus. Rich does research on grid computing. He's been looking for the... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 24, 2008 11:05 AM

Velocity 08: High Performance AJAX Applications

Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! is speaking about creating performant AJAX applications. The most important point: plan for performance from day 1. Interestingly many of his initial points are about telling the developer to work with the product manager and... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 23, 2008 4:24 PM

Velocity 08: Energy Efficient Operations

Luiz Barroso from Google is speaking about Energy Efficient Operations. Computing has a great track record of having a positive impact on society. The world needs more computing. But more computing means more energy (usually). World energy use of... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 23, 2008 12:50 PM

Velocity 08: Jiffy: Instrumenting and Measuring Web Performance

Scott Ruthfield from WhitePages.com is announcing a new open-source projects called Jiffy, a tool for measuring the end-to-end performance of Web sites (PDF slides). Jiffy provides real data about performance that is more complete and more fine grained than... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 23, 2008 10:52 AM

Velocity Keynote: IT Operations are Unsustainable

Bill Coleman (the "B" in BEA) is giving the opening keynote titled Green Data Centers, but it's really about sustainable operations. He begins by saying that the current way we operate data centers is unsustainable. Operations costs are growing... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 23, 2008 10:21 AM

Government Data: the Good and the Bad

While I'm at Velocity, Personal Democracy Forum is happening on the other side of the US. David Stephenson was kind enough to send me a slide share of the talk he'll be giving there on government data feeds and... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 23, 2008 9:00 AM

Web 2.0 and Ecommerce: David Friedman

David Friedman of Avenue A | Razorfish is talking about Web 2.0 technogies and ecommerce. The title was "Web 2.0: A reality check" and I was kind of expecting a cautionary tale, but it was more a tale that... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 10, 2008 1:46 PM

Internet Retailer Conference 2008: Keynote by Mike Boylson

I'm at the Internet Retailer this week at the McCormick Center in Chicago. I haven't been to an industry conference like this since 2000. The opening by Jack Love was, frankly, a throw away. Nothing like a Phil Becker... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 10, 2008 8:19 AM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for May 2008

Here are the top ten IT Conversations shows for May 2008: Michio Kaku - Physics of the Impossible (Rating: 3.89)Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and author of "Physics of the Impossible" about the improbable, and... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on June 2, 2008 11:24 AM

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... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 30, 2008 4:53 PM

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,... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 20, 2008 3:39 PM

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... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 13, 2008 11:01 AM

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... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 12, 2008 6:19 PM

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... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 9, 2008 1:17 PM

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!... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on May 7, 2008 8:31 AM

Gin and Television: Using Our Social Surplus

Clay Shirky has posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 talk "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." In it Shirky argues that television was the safety valve that society used to sponge up all the excess cognitive capacity that we... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 29, 2008 9:44 AM

Web Authentication with Selective Delegation using SRP

Bryant Cutler and Devlin Daley developed a methodology for adding selective delegation to relationship-based identity systems. This afternoon I presented that work at WWW2008. The talk went well. There were probably about 40 people in the room. There were... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 25, 2008 2:01 AM

Tyler Close: Using Promises to Orchestrate Web Interactions

Tyler Close answers questions after his talk(click to enlarge) Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 25, 2008 1:43 AM

Computational Advertising

Andrei Broder of Yahoo! Research(click to enlarge) I'm in a talk by Andrei Broder, a Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President of Computation Advertising on, what else, computational advertising. I was drawn to the talk by the title. Find the... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 23, 2008 9:31 PM

Taking Search to New Frontiers: Dr. Harry Shum (Microsoft)

Harry Shum(click to enlarge) The Web can be divided into three components: content (pages, images, videos, blogs, feeds), people (readers, writers, creators, commenters), and actions (queries, clicks, pageviews). Current search engines have taken advantages of "keywords" to link those... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 23, 2008 7:32 PM

Trust-Based Recommendation Systems

Reid Andersen from Microsoft Research is talking about trust-based recommendation systems (PDF). To build a personalized recommendation, you need a trust graph among users. What system should you use to determine the recommendation? The researchers use an axiomatic approach.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 23, 2008 2:31 AM

Cloud Computing: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google

Main hall where keynotes were held. I love the red slip covers on the chairs. They were more comfortable than your standard hotel chair. (click to enlarge) The opening keynote at WWW2008 is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google. Before... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 22, 2008 8:04 PM

Exploring Beijing

Parking attendent(click to enlarge) I'm in Beijing for WWW2008 which starts tomorrow. I came out early (last Saturday) because I find conferences much more enjoyable when I'm not suffering from jet lag. I'm pretty well adjusted now and I'm... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 22, 2008 8:02 AM

Google App Engine at the CTO Breakfast

Not Getting Things Done(click to enlarge) There was a pretty big crowd at this morning's CTO Breakfast. Sam Curran had spent some time building an application on Google App Engine, so we had him demo his app and show... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 17, 2008 9:31 AM

Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2

With Amazon's Web services, you've been able to store stuff in S3 or SimpleDB. You've also been able to fire up as many machine instances as you liked with storage that went away when you shut the machine down.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 14, 2008 7:10 AM

What's the @ in Twitter?

Pretty much everyone at Kynetx has started using Twitter. That led to a new crop of my other friends starting to tweet as well. Today @fulling asked my "what's the @"? He didn't know he was opening up a... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on April 3, 2008 4:05 PM

Utah Holds Caucuses Tonight: Change Congress

Utah will hold caucus meetings tonight for the purpose of selecting delegates to the county and state conventions. Your voice is amplified many times over by being part of the process that decides who's on the ballot rather than... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 25, 2008 7:15 AM

Visualizing Workflow and Transparent Systems

I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Udell's interview with Ward Cunningham on IT Conversations. They talk a lot about Ward's efforts at the Eclipse Foundation to build transparent workflow systems. That is, as Jon puts it: But what if you could... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 20, 2008 8:49 AM

v|100 List: I'm On It

I was chosen, for the fifth year in a row, as a member of vSpring Capital's v|100 list. Actually, the reason I started Kynetx was so that I wouldn't get kicked off the v|100. :-) The list is supposed... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 17, 2008 10:33 AM

Starting a High Tech Business: What's Your Story

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 eleventh installment. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 17, 2008 7:00 AM

Bigger Monitors Boost Productivity

An article in the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog reports on research that James Anderson conducted for NEC. The research found: someone using a larger monitor could save 2.5 hours a day. But James Anderson, the professor in... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 12, 2008 6:53 PM

iPhones On Campus

Abilene Christian University has a program to give all students an iPhone. They've also got a video that shows how the iPhone might be used on campus (the video is conceptual, not factual). I found some of the ideas... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 11, 2008 9:10 PM

CouchDB from 10,000 Feet

Jan Lehnardt and Damien Katz(click to enlarge) Damien Katz and Jan Lehnardt are talking about CouchDB. My students have mentioned it several times and we've had brief discussions about it, but I've never spent much time on it. This... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 6, 2008 11:23 AM

Larry Lessig on Changing Congress

Larry Lessig on Changing Congress(click to enlarge) Lessig's keynotes are hard to blog, but the message isn't. Lessig's basic message is that government makes poor policy--even when the choice ought to be easy. The problem isn't overt bribery. In... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 5, 2008 8:49 PM

DIY Drones: Building Cheap UAVs

Chris Anderson(click to enlarge) One of the reasons I love ETech is talks like this one from Chris Anderson (of Wired) on building homebrew drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). He has a Web site that shows how to... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 4, 2008 5:51 PM

Amazon's SimpleDB

Jay Ridgeway from Nextumi(click to enlarge) This afternoon, I was torn between the session on botnets and one on Amazon's SimpleDB by Mike Culver and Jay Ridgeway. I chose the latter. The goal is a durable, flexible datastore at... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 4, 2008 4:47 PM

Sectored Wi-Fi Architecture

Xirrus Wi-Fi array controller(click to enlarge) O'Reilly is using one of these Xirrus Wi-Fi arrays and so far, I've got to say I'm impressed. The bandwidth has been great with none of the traditional conference wi-fi problems we all... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 4, 2008 11:35 AM

Top Ten IT Conversations Show for February 2008

Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (ordered by number of downloads) for February 2008: Muhammad Yunus - Tech Nation (No rating yet)Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 3, 2008 9:12 PM

Marc Hedlund: Debugging Hacks, What They Never Taught You About Solving Hard Bugs

Marc Hedlund talks about debugging(click to enlarge) There's no doubt that debugging is a critical skill for anyone who codes. Marc Hedlund is talking about how to tackle the really difficult ones. I enjoyed Marc's tutorial from last year,... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 3, 2008 3:42 PM

Organizing Ourselves

I was listening to Jon Udell's interview with Valdis Krebs on IT Conversations and Valdis tell the story of seeing hotels guests self-organize to deal with hotel management about the awful Wi-Fi service. He says: Hotels are used to... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on March 1, 2008 1:52 PM

Tiny Planet Likes IT Conversations

Tommy Weir of Tiny Planet wrote a nice review of IT Conversations. In particular he enjoyed the interview with Billy Hoffman about AJAX security. He says: If I had to pick one tech podcast and discard the rest it... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 21, 2008 11:27 AM

IIW 2008 Happening May 12-14

The announcement and registration pages for IIW 2008 are now live. Please take minute and do three things: Register so we know you're coming. Having a good count early makes the whole thing go smoother. Help us spread the... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 20, 2008 12:01 PM

Undersea Cables, Connectivity, and the Gap

I'm a fan of Thomas Barnett's gap-core lens for understanding world events. My simple paraphrase goes something like this: states that are part of the core (and that's a lot of them) don't make war on each other, don't... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 19, 2008 2:57 PM

On Static Types and Language Choice

I caught a little flack in response to my post calling attention to Steve Yegge's recent essay "Portrait of a Noob." In particular Levi thought I was out of line for endorsing something so inflammatory: "People who approach programming... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 12, 2008 8:46 AM

Types as Comments

Steve Yegge is at it again. This time he's taking on modeling: Well, we also know that static types are just metadata. They're a specialized kind of comment targeted at two kinds of readers: programmers and compilers. Static types... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 11, 2008 5:08 PM

Universal Housing Anyone?

Dave says: But there are some things we can change, and if you have a heart, and think about it, I don't see how anyone could be against universal health care and still sleep at night. From Debating health... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 8, 2008 7:53 PM

CommuterLink Is Looking Pretty Tired

My daughter called me from Heber this afternoon to tell me she'd be late getting home because Highway 189 through Provo Canyon was closed. I went out to the Internet to try and find out what was going on... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 7, 2008 9:13 PM

MacBook Air SSD - Uncertain Performance Gain

One of the things that interested me about the Mac Book Air with the solid state drive was the hope that it might give better performance than a standard HDD and even better battery life. According to this review... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 6, 2008 9:06 PM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for January 2008

Here are the top ten shows (ordered by number of downloads) on IT Conversations for January 2008. Billy Hoffman - Technometria: Ajax Security (No rating yet)More and more Web sites are being rewritten as Ajax applications and traditional desktop... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 4, 2008 3:14 PM

ActionStreams: Follow Me Around the Net

Adding your IT Conversations profile to Action Streams(click to enlarge) The more you use sites on the Web for keeping track of our online lives and sharing things with friends, the more you'd like to have a place on... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 1, 2008 9:12 PM

TripIt Is My New Best Friend!

If you travel and haven't yet heard of TripIt, you're going to be sooo excited! TripIt is a site that keeps track of your travel. But unlike many other sites that promise to help you with your travel, this... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on February 1, 2008 5:33 PM

Starting a High Tech Business: The Rude Dog Demo and Working Code

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 eighth installment. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 31, 2008 10:03 PM

Arc Is Released

Paul Graham has released Arc, his new language. Arc is still a work in progress. We've done little more than take a snapshot of the code and put it online. I spent a fews days cleaning up inconsistencies, but... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 30, 2008 4:40 PM

CTO Breakfast Report for January

Scott Lemon shows off his XO Laptop(click to enlarge) We started off this morning discussing AsteriskNow, an easy install of the Asterisk VoIP system. Scott Lemon and I talked to Jared Smith a while back on that. Apparently it's... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 24, 2008 10:56 AM

Phil's Pick of the Week: Dark Matter

My pick of the week on IT Conversations is Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? from Supernova 2007. The discussion, about money made on the Web--from exploiting inefficient ad networks using arbitrage to the downright illegal,... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 10, 2008 8:21 PM

How the iPhone is Changing the Wireless Industry

Apple iPhone(click to enlarge) The latest issue of Wired Magazine has a great article on the iPhone: The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. Very interesting behind the scenes details and analysis. Here's the summary:... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 10, 2008 8:46 AM

Getting Free HD TV Programming

As I mentioned before, I bought a new HD TV for Christmas (a Sony 40 inch XBR4). That put me on the hunt for good sources of HD programming. Something I overlooked for a while, and I'm sure I'm... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 2:19 PM

Is Intuitive Always Good?

Here's a good, short artcile from Raganwald on the trade-off between intuitiveness and programming languagge expressiveness. Most of the article is a few quotes. The meat is at the bottom. Is Ruby's for loop an improvement over Java? By... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 7, 2008 1:54 PM

Starting a High Tech Business: Talent

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 seventh installment. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 4, 2008 8:38 AM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for 2007

Here's the list of the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for all of 2007: Bruce Johnson - Technometria: Google Web Toolkit (Rating: 4.15)Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 2, 2008 9:54 AM

Top IT Conversations Shows for December 2007

Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for December 2007: Trust Online Panel 1 - Technical and Regulatory Issues (No rating yet)While the Internet is quickly becoming an indispensable part of our lives... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 2, 2008 9:49 AM

Cheap Computer Microscopes

salt 200x(click to enlarge) Celestron will supposedly announce a sub-$300 dollar microscope with a built-in screen and a 2 megapixel camera. That's pretty cool, but it that's out of your price range, you can pick up an used IntelPlay... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on January 2, 2008 9:30 AM

Family Information Center from an Old iMac

iMac as family information center(click to enlarge) I have an old 17 inch iMac G5 that I'm not using. After I installed Leopard on it, it just didn't cut it anymore, so it had been retired. I decided it... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 31, 2007 4:36 PM

Dr. Mendel Rosenblum

GigaOM has an interesting interview with Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, the Chief Scientist at VMWare. We went down a rat hole on how we built the data centers. I am not surprised with all the problems we are having with... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 27, 2007 10:41 AM

Starting a High Tech Business: You Need a CTO

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 sixth installment. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 18, 2007 12:59 PM

Amazon's SimpleDB

I just posted piece at Between the Lines on Amazon's latest announcement: SimpleDB, a database service in the cloud. I gave it the title "Economics that are impossible to stop" because that what I think Amazon's doing: changing the... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 14, 2007 4:28 PM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for November 2007

Here's the top ten shows, by download, for IT Conversations during November 2007. I'm late because some recent server changes means that I didn't have access to the logs for a bit. Also, unfortunately, we lost 11 days worth... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 12, 2007 11:15 AM

Blogging: Talking to Friends

Jeff Jarvis, in a larger piece on corporate blogging and where it goes wrong writes a nice bit of advice for all bloggers: When I was in London, I sat with folks from the BBC in an afternoon devoted... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 10, 2007 7:39 AM

Google Chart API

Google has released a chart API that returns PNG files from an HTTP GET. The following types of charts are available: Line chart Bar chart Pie chart Venn diagram Scatter plot The chart to the right was created using... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 7, 2007 8:53 AM

Placing the User at the Center of Identity

Coincidentally, a feature I did for InfoWorld on user-centric identity appeared today. Here's what I contributed: Federating identity for the WebUser-centric innovations CardSpace and OpenID may finally bring the promise of federation within reach Understanding OpenID and CardSpaceOpenID and... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on December 3, 2007 6:37 PM

PayPal Really Makes Me Mad!

I got an email from PayPal today: We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. We have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features in case your account has been accessed by an... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 30, 2007 5:44 PM

CTO Breakfast Report

As we did introductions today, a surprising number of people were remodeling their basement (time of the year, I guess). Consequently we ended up talking about home theaters set ups for the first part of the meeting. Interesting tidbit:... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 29, 2007 10:07 AM

Stop Complaining and Starting Building

Doc, as usual, hits the nail on the head in explaining how to solve the privacy-problem-de-juer: Facebook's advertising platform. To wit: If we want our reach to truly exceed Facebook's grasp, we can't just tell Facebook to stop grasping.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 26, 2007 8:40 AM

Kinetic Energy, Flywheels, and Friction

I read this essay on Kinetic Energy, Flywheels, and Friction at A List Apart when it first came out last year. I just reread it. Here's the basic idea: The reason you have a Web site is to get... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 14, 2007 1:19 PM

ParenScript: A Lispy JavaScript Generator

Feedback on my interview with Bruce Johnson on the Google Web Toolkit led to ParenScript, a little language for Lisp that generates JavaScript. From the intro: ParenScript is a small Lispy language that can be compiled to JavaScript. It... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 12, 2007 9:18 AM

Defrag Closing: Relevance and Information Overload

Paul Kedrosky, moderator of the closing panel at Defrag.(click to enlarge) "Everytime I try to get more personalized information, I end up with more celebrity obituaries in my newsfeed. Why is that?" asks Paul Kedrosky, moderator of the closing... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 6, 2007 5:07 PM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for October 2007

Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by download) for October 2007: Bruce Johnson - Technometria: Google Web Toolkit (Rating: 4.20)Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 6, 2007 2:26 PM

Defrag: Making Interactions Explicit

Eric Nolin is being very explicit about sponsor talks at Defrag. No harm there--in fact, I like it. The sponsor talk is clearly labeled as such and right before lunch. Today, it's Shane Pearson, from BEA. I interviewed him... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 5, 2007 1:35 PM

Defrag: Web 2.0 and Security

I just put a piece on Michael Barrett's (CISO, Paypal) presentation at Defrag. He started by saying that Web 2.0 scares the hell out of him.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 5, 2007 12:14 PM

Domain Specific Languages

Recently, I've been designing a domain specific language for Kynetx, the start-up I'm working on. When you tell someone you're designing a language, the usual reaction is incredulity. "Why would you design your own language?!?!" they say. I'm here... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on November 2, 2007 10:24 AM

Starting a High Tech Business: Get a Clubhouse

I'm starting a new business called Kynetx (nothing to see there yet). 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 third installment. You... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 25, 2007 8:34 AM

Google Web Toolkit

I just posted my interview with Bruce Johnson on the Google Web Toolkit. This was a fun interview and I learned a lot. GWT allows you to write AJAX applications in Java that then gets compiled to Javascript.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 23, 2007 8:14 AM

Fixing MacBook Pro Sleep Problems

One of the things I loved about my Powerbook was that it slept--and woke--reliably. I would go weeks without rebooting my machine and I bragged about it often to the poor saps who had to use XP on their... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 17, 2007 10:08 AM

Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for September 2007

Update: I've updated this with ratings data. Normally the top 10 report includes the ratings for each show. The way I get access to the ratings data has been inop for some weeks now. I've delayed doing the report... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 15, 2007 1:17 PM

State Sovereignty Doesn't Count for Much Online

Let me pose a hypothetical situation for you: Imagine some backwater town in your state. Now, imagine that some vandals move through town one night and plaster the local water board office with pornographic posters. The town fails to... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 5, 2007 11:29 AM

Starting a New High-Tech Business: Setting Up Email

I'm starting a new business called Kynetx (nothing to see there yet). As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. You may find my efforts instructive.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 3, 2007 9:32 AM

Using Twitter for Messaging

Dave's given his podcatcher a Twitter account. So, if you're interested, you can subscribe to notices, via Twitter, of what Dave's downloading. "So what?" I hear you ask. You may not care what Dave's listening to, but chances are,... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on October 2, 2007 11:11 AM

Stupid Reporter Tricks

I don't water ski. Never been. But let me take a minute to tell you why it's a stupid thing to do and all the reasons why you should waste your time doing it--just based on things I've heard.... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 24, 2007 10:14 AM

World Wide Network

Dave suggests that we not use "graph" when we mean "network." To that end, I think we should further dismiss the confusion of the word "web" and avoid that in usage as well since it's less descriptive than "network"... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 23, 2007 4:35 PM

Installing Rails on Fedora

I'm building a virtual machine (VMWare flavor) for use with Rails development. After installing Fedora, there were a few things I had to do to get everything ready. I thought I'd take a minute and document them in one... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 21, 2007 3:43 PM

NBC's Troubles

NBC has announced that it will open its own download site for it's programs after a dispute with Apple over the price and DRM for its programs on ITMS. There are a lot of people who think NBC is... [Continue reading]

Posted in Phil Windley's Technometria on September 20, 2007 12:17 PM