Spam Voicemails
Dave is getting pissed off at all the political spam voicemails: I got a voicemail from Rudy Giuliani, urging me to vote for Bill Simon for governor. At first I thought it was my brother imitating Giuliani. I thought to myself. "That's a good imitation." Then I realized it really was the former mayor of NYC, the hero of 9-11. He didn't leave a number for me to call him back at. I'm starting to get pissed at all these political spam voicemails. [Scripting News] I'm not nearly as upset with the voicemails as I am with all the hang-ups.
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XML for Justice
Gae Lyn DeLand, the IT Director in Corrections sent me a note about the Department of Justice's XML standards initiative. The page includes a large (332 pages) and comprehensive Justice and Public Safety XML Data Element Definitions document which I found to be sobering because of its size and complexity. The document includes a set of general principles which I think are worth reviewing and included in any such effort: Any XML specification developed should be guided by the principles put forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) Internal system representation is not constrained by these guiding principles or
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eGovernment via Business Week
This article in Business Week is an interesting read on the current state of eGovernment. I don't necessarily agree with all of its conclusions or its assumptions about the current state of the art or what's important. It also takes a typical "Business Week attitude" on government workers which I haven't found to be true. Still, there's some good points in it.
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TechnoVolunteers
I read something on John Patrick's weblog this morning that reminded me of an experience I had. John makes the point that non-profits need IT expertise and discusses his experience with the United Way: Today started out with a meeting at the United Way of Northern Fairfield County to help think through some strategic issues with regard to their use of information technology. It is a very good feeling to be able to help non-profit organizations and I highly recommend that all of us do so as often as possible. (read more) I was a delegate to the Republican party convention
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Transition
This morning's opening panel is discussing transition. At least 22 governors will change this year. There could be as many as 35, I believe. When they change most will also change the CIO for the state since that usually an appointed position. Most CIOs at the conference have never been through an administration transition and so I'm sure this is a topic on the minds of many here. Each of the panelists has significant experience with multiple governors. Charlie Gerhards (CIO, PA) and Carolyn Purcell (CIO, TX) both talk about the enthusiasm that new Governors bring to the job. Charlie says
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Pictures from NASCIO Conference
Here are some pictures I took around the conference at break this afternoon. Clockwise from the upper left are Mark Foreman from the Whitehouse who spoke this morning. Rock Regan, the current president of NASCIO and CIO from CT. Rich Varn (CIO,, IA), Tom Davies (Governing Magazine), Rebecca Heidepriem (CIO, WI), and Mary Barber Reynolds (CIO, IL). Michaela Mezo from Enterasys and Al Cabraloff from Microsoft.
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Innovative Funding, Total Cost of Ownership and ROI
Moderator: Bob Feingold, Chief Information Officer, Governor's Office of Innovation and Technology, State of ColoradoPanelists: Craig L. Johnson, Associate Professor of Public Finance and Policy Analysis, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Pat O'Donnell, Vice President-Sales and Marketing, Anexsys Richard Varn, Chief Information Officer, State of Iowa Pat O'Donnell is talking about various ROI models. She cites the following issues that make calculating ROI in the public sector less straightforward than it might be in the private sector: agencies must serve all constiuents agencies must abide by specific legislation and rules eGovernment initiative deliver on both tanglible and
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Roman Goddess
NASCIO, in addition to being an organization of state CIOs is the name of one of the Roman goddesses of birth.
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In Honor of the GIS Panel
In honor of the GIS panel that I just listened to, I note that the location of this NASCIO conference (Hyatt Regency Station) is N 38 degrees 37.770' W090 degrees 12.556' and 578 feet above sea level. Here's a map (which I found by typing the hotel's phone number into google; the easiest way I know of to turn a phone number into a geographic information.)
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Schema Controlled XML Editing
Reading Jon Udell's weblog, I ran across the Xopos XML editor. I clicked on the demo and within minutes was editing XML inside my browser. I haven't played with it extensively, but what I did do was pretty neat. The editor is fairly comprehensive; you can edit the content of cells and move them around (subject to the schema) without ever seeing the XML or even knowing what XML is. It was smart enough to warn me when I left the page with unsaved changed (something I've fussed with in other browser based editors). If you've got data you want entered
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GIS and a National Map
I'm in the GIS breakout session. Kari J. Craun, who is Chief, Mid-Continent Mapping Center, US Geological Survey, and a cartographer by trade is speaking about a national map. The topological maps that we all know and love are apparently 25 years out of date. The USGS has a project to produce a "national map" that would be a seamless, continuously updated set of geospatial information built from orthorectified imagery, land cover, elevation, geographic names as well as vector layers for transportation, hydrography, structures, and boundaries. One of the drivers is, not surprisingly, homeland security. Someone who trains on a map
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Federal Enterprise Architecture and eGovernment
Mark Forman, Associate Director for Information Technology and E-Government, U.S. Office of Management and Budget is speaking about the use of enterprise architecture in the federal government. Mark has been very good about working with the states and recognizing that there is a great asset and huge constituency in the state CIO offices. One of the tings I like about the federal eGovernment vision is that its not just about 24x7 availability, but also says that it will deliver decision in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. I like it for two reasons: It focuses on what citizens really
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Information Security Coordination
Matt DeZee from AMS (and a former state CIO) is talking about the desirability of the creation of a center for coordinating information security information among the states. Apparently there is a plan to do this. The theory, of course, is that we all see the same kind of attacks and could help each other by cooperating. He tells the story of getting a report from his CISO that his state was getting scanned and then showing up the next day at a NASCIO event and finding that 4 other CIOs he talked to had had the same scan the
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NASCIO Blogs
My number two referrer on my blog today is a google search on "nascio blog." I'm apparently the only one, but there are at least a dozen people looking for them. I've run into a few people here who read my blog regularly, including other CIOs, but no one who is writing except for me. As an aside, there's no WiFi access here, so without my Sprint wireless network card, I'd be out of luck.
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Chartered Projects
I'm listening to the Homeland Security panel: Robert Clerman is speaking and talked about Gov. Leavitt's role in homepland security. He specifically talked about "chartered projects" in speaking of Gov Leavitt's proposal. So, while I get asked over and over again in Utah what a "charter" is, it is apparently getting some traction on a national level.
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Autonomy: Using Unstructured Data
I was going to go to the session on finance, but ended up not making it because I stopped to spend some time with some folks from Autonomy Systems and by the time I got to the session, it was beyond full. Oh well, Autonomy was probably more aligned with my interests anyway. Autonomy allows one to find information by concept in unstructured data using a combination of "bayesian inference and Shannon's information theory." Its been a long time since I studied either one of those, so that didn't mean much to me. I found this document on their site which was much
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Statewide Networking for Government and Education Panel
Moderator: Laura Larimer, Chief Information Officer, State of Indiana Panelists: Shaun Abshere, WiscNet, State of WisconsinDavid King, Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System Bill Mitchell, MOREnet, State of Missouri Shaun Abshere is talking about an organization that I'd never heard of called StateNets. StateNets is an organization of non-profit and public groups that manage state K-20 networks. Our own UEN, for which I'm on the steering committee, is a member. He is giving some impressive composite statistics about the member networks. Our state uses our education network as our ISP. This is just one form of cooperation that exists between UEN
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Privacy: Good and Bad
I did a little reading at lunch in The Transparent Society by David Brin. Brin sets forth the following and calls it an "accountability matrix:" 1. Tools that help me see what others are up to. 2. Tools that prevent others from seeing what I am up to. 3. Tools that help other see what I am up to. 4. Tools that prevent me from seeing what others are up to. His contention is that people see boxes (1) and (2) and good and boxes (3) and (4) as bad. What what society needs is boxes (1) and (3) since that creates accountability. Further,
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Enterprise Architecture Panel
Moderator: Gerry Wethington, Chief Information Officer, State of MissouriPanelists: Carey Brown, Information Resources Manager, Kansas Information Technology Office Theresa Lynn Hadden, Senior Internet Architect, Fairfax County, Virginia Venkatapathi Puvvada, Chief Technology Officer, Unisys Carey Brown talked about the implementation of the Kansas Criminal Justice Information System. I think the idea was that it was a successful implementation based on an enterprise architecture toolkit, although somehow that point didn't seem to come out in the talk. Still, the recitation of the project was interesting---if nothing else it emphasizes the nature os projects in the public sector: wide range of clients, wide range of sizes,
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Steve Cooper on Homeland Security
Steve Cooper, from the Office of Homeland Security (OHS), is the keynote speaker this morning. I blogged his talk at the Western CIO Summit in Breckenridge this summer. Steve is discussing the OHS national strategy for homeland security---not necessarily the particulars of the strategy, but how it serves as the primary driver for an enterprise architecture. Interstate System for Sharing Information Steve talks about using the word "interstate" instead of "national" to describe an information sharing infrastructure. I think its important to remember that the interstate highway system (Steve's analogy) was built by the states with federal dollars to federal
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Deja Vu All Over Again
We just the part of the meeting that is both interesting and somewhat depressing: each new CIO introduces themselves and discusses the issues that they're facing. Every CIO here is facing many of the same problems. What's depressing is that this is the third time I've been through it and each time its the same issues.
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Public Health Infrastructure
Morris from Dept. of Health and Human Services is talking about IT infrastructure for public health. In the face of some skepticism (not from this crowd, but others) he quotes a 1902 article from Harper's Weekly: The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect... He envisions a "weather channel" for public health information that would give real time reports on disease similar to the way to we get weather reports. Most people outside the government would probably be surprised to learn that there isn't a
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NASCIO Member Session
I left home this morning at 4am (daylight savings time is my friend) so that I could get to St. Louis in time for the four hour NASCIO member's session this afternoon. This is a business session that is about NASCIO as an organization whereas the rest of the conference is about issues, technology, policy, etc. There are about 30 CIO's here. After going over the new strategy document, Gerry Wethington (CIO, MO) presented the business plan. The business plan is a good document that identifies major areas of emphasis and where the dollars will come from for those areas. This conference
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Utah County: The Most Wired Place in America?
OK, maybe not the most wired place in a America, but getting pretty cool. Utah county is the second largest county by population in Utah and just south of Salt Lake. Utah county is home to Novell and (formerly) Word Perfect and has a large high-tech base. This morning I had a meeting with representatives from American Fork City, Spanish Fork City, Provo City, and Utah Valley State College about the Utah Valley Community Network. These three cities and the college have built or are building fiber out to the homes of their citizens and are starting to offer services,
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ITC Direction to CIO on IT Strategy
Today the Information Technology Commission directed the CIO to develop a 2-5 page "vision" statement for IT in the State of Utah as a precusor to developing a larger plan. The doucment is to be presented at the next ITC meeting on Nov. 21st. I'm planning on the ACIOs providing a great deal of input into this document even though the ITC specifically stated that they would accept a document without agency input at this point. I shared the notion of enterprise architecture with the group since I believe ITC is the right body in state government to encourage and endorse an enterprise
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Executive Appropriations Testimony
In case you didn't get a hand out, here is the text of the testimony that Camille Anthony, Karen Okabe, and I presented at Executive Appropriations yesterday in response to the recent legislative audit. This whole thing has gotten kind of kafkaesque.
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Round 2.0
I got a few complimentary issues of a magazine called Context recently. Not a bad 'zine, but I've got too much to read already, so I didn't pay a lot of attention. Still, an article called "Round 2.0" by Andy Lippman caught my eye. In speaking of the dot-com boom, he says: The problem with likening the dot-com boom to the 17th-century Dutch tulip insanity is that, now that the bust has come, many companies think they can go back to sleep. To them, the threat is over: Dot-coms did not generate a New Economy, they did not rewrite the
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Transparency and Metrics
I'm just starting The Transparent Society by David Brin. I'm only to page 20, but its already fascinating. The subtitle of the book, intentionally provocative, is "Will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom?" The gist of the first part of the book is that, as a society, we use freedom of information or "information flow" to drive accountability. Two interesting points from the book so far: Whenever a conflict arises between privacy and accountability, people demand the former for themselves and the latter for everybody else. ...[T]wo opposing traits that occur in ...modern privacy debates: A. One party believe
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WSIL is RDF for Web Services
A good article by Tim Appnel called An Introduction to WSIL calls WSIL the RDF for web services. I've advocated the use of WSIL to advertise the presence of web services at the State. Its simple and easy to do. What's more it can be used in conjunction with UDDI if that becomes the prefered method for advertising web services.
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Tim Oreilly is a Stud
I just ran across Tim's talk on Inventing the Future. Great stuff.
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IM Bots
A couple of months ago, I wrote about IM bots because the idea intrigued me and I think it would be a neat way to offer some interactive information on Utah.gov as well as internal applications like help desk. Joe Heck turned me on to some other resources that are pretty interesting: DJ Adams has an article about ChatBot, a Jabber bot written in Perl using the Net::Jabber libraries. Infobot is a daemon that connects to IRC servers and can be customized to conduct various chats. IRC isn't IM, but its still interesting. An article in The Perl Journal by
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The Truth about Excite\\@Home
Recently, there has been much confusion about my previous occupation to the extent that I'm thinking getting my birth certificate changed to Phil Windley, former owner of now defunct Excite\\@Home. Some, including the press, have started to question why the State is taking advice from someone who "ran his company into the ground." For the record, here's a brief synopsis of the facts: In 1994, I and a partner started a company called Electronic Marketing Services and started an online shopping mall called imall.com. In 1995 we sold EMS to a company which eventually became iMALL, Inc. In 1997, Richard Rosenblatt
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Standards
This article from the Associated Press (via the Salt Lake Tribune) is about standards. Surprisingly, it ran on the front page---must have been a slow news day. Apparently, October 14th was national standards day. If I'd have known, I'd have baked a cake and worn a costume. At any rate, the article gives a number of good examples about why standards are important---they are the key to interoperability, a catch phrase these days what with eGovernment and Homeland Security issues.
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Blogging in Utah
This Salt Lake Tribune article by Mary Malouf is about blogging in general and features several utah bloggers, including me. Overall, I think the article does a good job of describing the blogging phenomenon and what makes it different. Mary and I had a fairly lengthy conversation and I have to say she really seemed to get it. The best thing about the article is that unlike a lot of things printed about me in the paper lately, most everything in it is true! As an aside, JOHO, the Blog was on the computer screen in the art piece that
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Utah's IT Plan
Last August, the Governor sent a letter to IT workers in the State outlining his plan and vision for conducting cross-agency eGovernment and IT projects. In the intervening time, we've conducted meetings, formed groups, gotten Cabinet approvals, and worked through a lot of the details. I and others have written several times about some of these meetings. Now, to try to pull some of it together, I've written a white paper on Utah's IT Plan that gives some more detail. This process will continue to evolve as we work through the issues.
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ZDNet Article on Open Source
I'm quoted in this article in ZDNet News on open source. The article probably makes it sound like we're contemplating a move to Linux or OpenOffice here in Utah. Such is not the case---there are a lot of hurdles to overcome in moving to Linux or OpenOffice. At this point, I'm more inclined to open source solutions on the server side and, in some cases, clients on the desktop. Here's what would change my mind: User demand. If an agency got tired of paying license fees to Microsoft and wanted to make a move to Linux or OpenOffice, I'd support it. What would
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Virtuoso Performance as a Measure of Organizational Maturity
Mary Shaw of Carnegie Mellon University talked about "virtuoso performances" in the engineering world about ten years ago in an effort to define what she meant by engineering. The idea is this: engineering is a system of processes and procedures where normal people can perform quality work. Without engineering, you're left to rely on virtuoso performers to accomplish the task. The problem obviously is that there are a lot fewer virtuoso performers that normal folk. Think of it in terms of building a bridge. Hundreds of years ago, building a bridge was an art practiced by people who did a good
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Digital Identity: Where are the People?
At the conclusion of several days of immersion in the world of digital identity, I would ask the question: where are the people? Here's what I mean: Most of the companies at Digital ID World don't seem to really care about linking identity to people. That is, they are content to have an identity with the appropriate attributes attached to it. Let me give an example: when you present your credentials to a web site to purchase something, they don't care about the meat attached to that identity, only that it has a proper credit card number and an address to
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FWIW
For what its worth: according to my GPS, the Hyatt Regency Tech Center is a N 39 degrees, 37.820' W 104 degrees 53.896' and its elevation is 5692 Ft. And with that, I'm off to the airport.
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Conference Extracurriculars
Digital ID World is on my list of favorite conferences this year. I think Phil, Andre and Crew did a great job of putting together a forum that is entertaining, informative, and most importantly, a great place to meet and talk. I spent the afternoon looking in on the vendor exhibit hall and talking to people. Here's some of what I saw and heard: I talked to Andre Durand (of Jabber fame) about PingID. PingID has aspirations of being the Visa of the identity world. Someone needs to do it. He also envisions services (such as risk scoring) that I
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Digital Right Management
David Weinberger is moderating a panel on digital rights management. Denise Howell spoke about the legal aspects of digital rights management. She made the point that DRM moves the payment to a per-use rather than a per-copy basis and this changes in fundamental ways, the relationship we have with content providers. Bala Vishwanath talked about how newspaper companies tried to discourage people reading someone else's newspaper and failed but succeeded, as a business, by adding coupons, etc. to the paper. Brad Brunell is the director of trusted platform technologies at Microsoft. He's the guy whose name I didn't get yesterday at
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Privacy and Customers
Martha Rogers (1to1.com) is talking on privacy and customers. I'm really enjoying the talk. Here are some thoughts from her: There are no successful companies without customers, so companies need to: get more customers keep more customers grow them into bigger custormers Viewing the customer base as an asset, the customer base is the single best measure of the value of the company itself. Random acts of kindness by customer-fiendly personnel are not the same as customer centricity If I'm a successful company I need to know something about you that my competitors don't know and use that to do things
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Craig Mundie on Identity
I'm listening to Craig Mundie, CTO for Microsoft, deliver the keynote for today. He is one of the first speakers here (outside the government session) to talk to the fact that governments will be players in this space and what challenges that presents. He brings up the problem of trans-jurisdictional and trans-national identities and mentions that many of these problems have traditionally been solved by legislation (in the case of jurisdictions) or treaties (in the case of sovereign nations. As I've said over and over---this is a real issue that cannot be ignored. Government has a way of making sure its not
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Dinner
I had dinner last night with AKM Adam and Jon Udell. I'd never met either of these gentlemen before, although I felt like I knew Jon well both from his writings from Byte and, more recently, his weblog. It was great to finally meet hi in person and have an opportunity to talk. Adam is a Episcopalian minister and professor of divinity at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. In some ways that link guided some of our conversation about how a detachable identity (i.e. one that is virtual) changes what a person thinks about themselves. An interesting thought occurred to me as
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Jamie Lewis of the Burton Group on Provisioning
Jamie Lewis, CEO of the Burton Group gave a very detailed talk on identity infrastructures. I wish I had access to an online copy of the slides because they've got a lot of information in them. One of the things he talked about was provisioning and the security issues surrounding it. Simplified, the issue comes down to, at least for employee provisioning, making sure that authorizations are tied to roles so that as employees move from job to job within the organization or leave the organization, the access rights that they had before terminate when their role does. Think of
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Shiboleth
I went to a panel discussion moderated by Doc Searls on open source issues and identity. The part I was most interested in was Ken Klingenstein's talk about Shiboleth. Shiboleth is an interesting word what was used to distinguish the Ephraimites from the Gileadites. The Ephraimites, not being able to pronounce sh, called the word sibboleth. (See -- Judges 12:4). From the introduction: Shibboleth is an initiative to develop an open, standards-based solution to the needs for organizations to exchange information about their users in a secure, and privacy-preserving manner. The initiative is facilitated by Internet2 and a group of leading
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Cluetrain Lunch
I had lunch with three of the four authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I'd met Doc Searls before, but not David Weinberger or Chris Locke. The Palladium d00d from Microsoft was there as well (didn't catch his name), so the conversation revolved around digital rights management to some extent. I've read the book (Cluetrain) and while I can't say I agree with everything thats in it, I found it thought provoking and would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how connectedness changes business. At some point, I think it would be interesting to research the same question with respect
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My Talk at Digital ID World
I spoke this morning. I posted my thoughts on this talk earlier. Here's what I actually said. I shared the stage with David Temoshok from the GSA. David is their expert on eAuthentication. I went through many of the ways that state governments interact with identity, my primary point was that state governments are, for better or worse, going to have something to say about identity in the digital world and that the digital ID community needs to engage with state legislatures to inform, educate, and guide that discussion.
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GM CTO on Identity
Tony Scott, the CTO of General Motors, is talking about digital identity at GM. The interesting thing to me is how similar his problem was to the problem we face in Utah today: multiple fragmented systems controlled by dozens of relatiely independent organizations with multiple identity representations for any given customer. They've solved the problem over the last few years. I like that this has enabled me to take my Silverado Pickup to multiple dealerships and have the history of the vehicle maintenance available. This has to be more efficient for GM and should result in better maintenance for my
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Public Domain Information
Phil Becker in the opening session just said: "universal networking drives information towards the public domain." This resonates with something Ray Ozzie said yesterday: "what if all email was public?" Governments deal with this issue more than other organizations because there is an expectation that government information is public domain by default and private only in specific circumstances. Powerful forces fight at the interface of these two domains. I do know that having all email public would make most people uncomfortable. I don't know that anyone has studied the effect of networks on the public nature of government. Sounds like a
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Digital ID World
I'm at the Denver Tech Center attending Digital ID World. I'm speaking this morning on digital identity issues in state government. I'll post the slides from my talk after I'm done (since I won't be sure what's in the talk until then). I'll be blogging the conference as I can. The complete set of posts will be in my ID, Privacy, and Security category. Coincidentally, Dave McNamee blogs about his work on our authentication projects today.
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Technical Feedback
I was interviewed by a reporter from Network World this afternoon on what I thought was an interesting subject: knowing what technology to apply where and how to get good technical feedback from your staff. I think one of the most important things that technical leaders can do to ensure that they get good technical feedback is to be technically literate themselves. You have to keep up with the technology to make technical decisions. I think any CIO or IT manager who thinks that they can just make business decisions and leave the technical decisions to the staff is kidding
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RSS Tutorial
The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) project of the Utah State Library has a nice tutorual on RSS that shows examples of its use in a variety different scenarios. They do good work.
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Web Site Accessibility
An article on Slashdot talks about a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines on the accessibility of their web site for blind users. I've thought for some time that we need greater emphasis on this issue for utah.gov. We recently held a set of classes for state web site developers on ADA and Section 508 issues. That's probably not enough. I think we need a usability lab and some requirements that all state web sites meet certain minimum standards. As more and more services are online, we need to ensure that they are as widely available as possible.
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Digital Identity in State Government
I'm trying to get my thoughts organizined for my talk at the Digital ID World conference in Denver on October 9-11th. Here's what I've been thinking so far: Like it or not, states are in the identity business. We like to claim that we're just in the licensing business, but the truth is that, for better or worse, the state issued driver's license is the gold standard for identification in the physical world. Going one step further, states are also the keepers of vital records such as birth and death certificates. These documents are a key part of identity since, in
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The Media Got it Wrong
The Salt Lake Tribune this morning has a story on a "blond extinction hoax." Seems that the media (including the major outlets like ABC and CNN) got taken by a hoax that claimed a World Health Organization (WHO) study found that true blonds were becoming extinct. Turns out not one journalist bothered to call WHO. If you've never dealt much with the media, this may come as a shock to you. It doesn't surprise me. Since every story that's been written about me (good and bad) has contained major factual errors, I have to believe that most stories contain factual errors.
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Emergence and Computational Equivalence
I've been reading "Emergence: The Connected Loves of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" by Steven Johnson and "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram (almost done with Johnson, just starting Wolfram). If you're not familiar with them, Johnson discusses how acting on a local scale, on local information produces useful, global patterns. Ant hills are one example---no one directs the actions of the ants, they have simple rules for responding to local stimuli and yet, produce complex behavior (such as creating graveyards for dead ants or finding and harvesting food sources in a rather systematic manner). The whole idea
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An Abundance Mentality
Brent Ashley reacted to my post on Jeremy: Phil Windley, blogging CIO of the State of Utah, admires Jeremy Zawodny's sharing. I do too. I've noticed with myself though, that my sharing-ness tends to rise and fall with my sense of security. When I've got lots of business and no worries, I'm a veritable sharing phenom, but my willingness to participate and to share has dropped considerably this year since I've been more interested in finding enough paying business to get by. Brent makes a good point. Blogging requires what is called an "abundance mentality." If you don't approach it with
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Google Search Appliance and Outsourcing
Infoworld reports that Google has released a bigger, beefier version of their search appliance. The new search engine extends "the search capabilities to 3 million documents and 150 queries per minute." We probably don't need 150 queries per minute, but we definitely have that many documents or more. The new appliance also uses a clustering approach to HA. This sort of support needs to be added to our web infrastructure platform that McNamee is working on. We use an internally developed search engine right now. Its actually a great piece of work, but we have a tough time keeping up
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Zawodny on MySQL, Operating Systems, and Threads
Jeremy Zawodny is the head MySQL guy at Yahoo!. He writes a blog that is very informative on system engineering issues. In this post Jeremy discusses the differences in threading on Linux and FreeBSD and its effect on MySQL. You should note the following: The level of detail that someone putting high performance systems needs to understand about multiple, complex systems and their interactions. The kinds of analysis and tools that he uses. That there isn't a single right answer. There are lots of "it depends" and compromises. Zawodny is intelligent, dedicated to his craft, and, I'm sure, well compensated.
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