Archive for Apr 2004


Context as an Integration Driver

I just read a white paper at the Radiant Logic Web site on context. The article contends that hierarchical relationships provide context and that one of the primary drivers for integration on the business side is recovering context. As an example, when I combine customer service and customer billing systems, I gain more context surrounding any individual customer and the understanding I gain from that is what makes the integration worthwhile. The article hums right along and makes some interesting points until it gets to the "Context from a technical perspective" section and then is feels like the author
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Ravenous RSS Readers

A Wired magazine article talks about the problems with bandwidth comsumed by RSS. Overall, I think the article is a little shallow, only getting to the interesting solutions in the last three paragraphs. There are plenty of interesting solutions to be developed and as Dave Winer says at the end of the article, once its in someone's economic interest to solve them, they'll get solved.
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Cowster Moves Closer to Reality

WYTrax cattle tracking program runs on a Palm and uses a bluetooth enabled RFID reader to inventory the herd and return information about each cow. Cowster is the nickname I've given to the idea of using Web services to build a distributed cattle tracking system. Now a Wyoming company has move us one step closer to reality by using Bluetooth, RFID, and PDAs to let ranchers keep track of vital information about each member of the heard and pull it up with the wave of a wand. A article on News of the Weird explains it pretty well (warning
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Poindexter Confidential

Wired Magazine has an iinterview with retired Admiral John Poindexter who has a Caltech PhD. The article says Poindexter may be "the only serious technologist ever to reach the highest circles of power in Washington." (I think John Sununu had a PhD in Engineering.) Of course, he's also famous for being the Big Brother in Chief. The interview is fascinating. I wish it were longer.
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Making CD-R's Last

From Doug Kaye I learned of an interesting article on how long CD-R's will last and things you can do to increase or decrease that time. I've always just popped down to Staples and bought the cheapest disks I could find. For some of my uses (the latest Suse distro, for example) that's fine. But this article makes the point that if you're using the disk to archive important material, you need to be more careful. The article contains information on how to select good media and media that's appropriate for the drive that you'll be recording on. This
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Digital ID World 2004

Everytime I hear it, I think it would be a great name for an amusement park for geeks, but actually, its the premiere event for anyone interested in digital identity: Digital ID World. The third annual Digital ID World Conference will be held October 25-28, 2004 in Denver. For the last two years this has been among my favorite conferences. Good organization, good people, and great content. If digital identity is important to you, go to this conference. You won't be sorry.
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Identity Tops Security Priorities

The April 2004 Heat Index from Information Security Magazine lists identity management, user provisioning, and single sign-on as the top three highest priority IT security purchases of 175 Fortune 1000 companies.
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W3C Publishes First Draft of WS-CDL

The World Wide Web Consortium has published the first draft of the Web services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL). WS-CDL is targeted at coordinating interactions among Web services and their users. WS-CDL promises to be a necessary component for BPEL or other programming languages used to model business processes. The WS-CDL specification defines peer-to-peer collaboration between Web service participants. A user of a Web service, automated or otherwise, is a "client" of that service. Users may be other Web services, applications and human beings. In WS-CDL, a set of client interactions may be related over time in a "collaboration group."
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Batch Processing with J2EE

DevX has an interesting article about batch processing that caught my eye for two reasons: it talks about doing it with J2EE and it discusses when asynchronous processing is a better solution. The article identifies batch jobs as those that possess the following characteristics: High volume, involving thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of data rows or transactions Computationally expensive, and you don't want this cost to be part of your on-line application Unable to be triggered by a particular user action as the data is incomplete or unstable; Data stabilises after the fact or when some other business
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One More Academic Blogger

For the past 16 months, I've been living the life of the independent. Its something I've always wanted to do and it has been fun. Fortunately, I'm in a position that I can afford to do it--the pay can be spotty (not necessarily bad, but it comes in lumps). Here's some of my activities over the past year and four months: I've written for InfoWorld, had a monthly column for Connect Magazine, and been working on a book about digital identity. I've spent a lot of time working with start-ups as a member of their advisory board, or even as
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Eclipse and XDoclet Tutorial

Earlier I mentioned an Eclipse plug-in for jBOSS that gives IDE functionality to jBOSS programming. An new article from DevX tells how to use XDoclet and Eclipse. XDoclet is a code generation engine that uses metadata within your code files to generate the uninteresting portions. For example, I've had my 462 class (large-scale distributed programming) use XDoclet with EJBs. You basically write the bean file and XDoclet generates all the rest of the EJB files from that, provided the proper metadata is included. This latest article runs through a EJB tutorial to show how Eclipse and XDoclet work together
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Challenging Spyware

My son came upstairs Friday night and told me the computer had told him we had a virus and wanted him to download a program. Fortunately, he's pretty bright and noted right away that it didn't look like the usual virus warnings he'd seen before from our virus scanning software and wanted to know what to do. You guessed it, the warning was being generated by a pop-up from some piece of spyware loaded on the computer. I have a separate computer for the kids because they're always clicking on something. After about 3 months of use by kids,
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Mid-Year NASCIO Meeting

Dave Fletcher is blogging highlights of the mid-year NASCIO (National Association of State CIOs) meeting in Chicago. I always enjoyed the NASCIO meetings, so I look forward to following along.
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Offshore Outsourcing and Utah

The Utah Technology Commission was the focus of the latest round of offshore outsourcing hysteria last week. The Deseret News reported on the meeting. Seems that the Dept. of Workforce Services contracted with a company to do customer service on one of their programs and that contractor turned around and sent some of the jobs to India. This, of course, presents a perfect opportunity for political posturing and that's just what happened. Here are some of the quotes: "The perception is these are low-end jobs, that we can't find people to do them here, therefore we go offshore," said
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CTO Breakfast Report

I just got back from another CTO Breakfast. We continue to attract new people and today there were 6 or 7 people there who'd never been there before. I enjoy these events a lot because there's always some interesting discussion. One of the things that came up today was using OnStar equipped cars to feed information to traffic systems. Our highway departments spend billions of dollars, collectively, creating huge centralized systems for gathering traffic data so that they can keep traffic flowing. Its cheaper than build new roads. What's interesting is that there's a huge distributed traffic system already
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Jim Grey on Distributed Computing Economics

I attended Jim Grey's talk at the Organick Memorial Lecture at the University of Utah this afternoon. He spoke on distributed computing economics. Jim asks: Why is Seti@Home such a great idea? Why is Napster a great idea? Why is the computational grid uneconomic? When does computing on demand work? What is the "right" level of abstraction? Is the "access grid" the real killer app? Observation #1: Computing is free. 1 CPU day costs $1 (given a computer costs $1000). But the phone bill isn't free. Internet bandwidth costs $50--500/mbps/m So 1GB costs 1$ to send and 1$ to receive.
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XMission Linux Install Fest 04

If you've always wanted to try Linux, but never felt comfortable jumping in all alone, this is your chance. XMission, Utah's oldest ISP, is running a Linux Install Fest. The event will take place Saturday, May 15th, 2004. There are three sessions: 10:00 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., 1:00 p.m. to 3:45 p.m., and 4:00 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. The location is \t\t\t VŽritŽ, Inc. 9320 South 608 West Sandy, Utah 84070 Here's what they're saying about it: Choose from Debian, Knoppix, Mandrake or SUSE Linux along with several BSD flavors and we'll help you get it installed and working
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What is Identity?

Last week David Weinberger published an essay entitled There's No I in Identity. The essay discusses the way people talk about identity in the real world and how the word is used on the net. The gist of the essay is perhaps best summed up in its subtitle "Why Clark Kent Isn't Superman's Secret Identity." David ends with five conclusions: So, what does the ordinary language meaning of "identity" in the real world suggest about digital identity? 1. In the real world, we don't identify everyone. We only identify those about whom we have doubts that we have to
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Broadband Causes Obesity

In a c|net News article brought to my attention by Harold Carr's posting at UtahPolitics.org, Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson is quoted as saying that giving people more broadband will make them fatter and just let them download more illegal music. "I just don't see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files," he said. "We should spend money on getting people fit, rather than deteriorating their quality of life with higher bandwidth to surf the Net." From Quest for 'Utopia' hits a roadblock |
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UtahPolitics.org in the News

The Deseret News had a piece on UtahPolitics.org today. UtahPolitics.org is a multi-author blog I started last November to offer a place for people to comment on Utah politics. The IRV strawpoll and the virtual debate among gubernatorial (I love that word) candidates have attracted quite a bit of interest.
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Trading Information and Good Web Site Design

Dave Pawloski and I were chatting about agent technology and he asked if I'd ever heard of a company called Agentis. I was interested enough to go to their Web site, but I still don't know very much about what they do. Here's why: First, their Web site is almost useless to anyone trying to figure out what they do and how their technology is different. As a free lance writer, I spend a lot of time on company Web sites and in this Agentis is in good company. Like most corporate Web sites, its full of marketing speak
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eGovernment from the Private Sector

I've written before about how sometimes eGovernment happens because of someone in the private sector decides that they'll do what they government doesn't seem to be able to accomplish. One example I noted was the Deseret News putting up an eGovernment site on gasoline pump inspections using data from Utah's Dept of Agriculture. Dan Gillmor, in his Sunday column digs into what is perhaps the most spectacular example of this phenomenon: Earth911.org: Every Monday morning, volunteers from the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group, collect water samples from San Mateo County's beaches and send them to a laboratory for testing.
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Tim O'Reilly on Why GMail Matters

In his inimitable style, Tim O'Reilly tells us why GMail matters. The piece is entitled, "The Fuss About GMail" but that doesn't begin to properly identify the real meat of what Tim's saying. For example, here's one part I found surprising: Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn't one computer -- it's a hundred thousand computers, by report -- but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that
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Jim's Blogging Again: Fiber to the Home

Jim Stewart is blogging again and has published the first of three articles he plans on fiber to the home called "Embracing Change." His conclusions from the first article: Fiber to the home is the future. Wireless has a place in the home. A new generation of consumers is coming and they will not settle for narrowband access. New opportunities abound and will generate new profits. The old model will not work and will only frustrate both the consumers and the service providers. There will likely only be enough capital to build one fiber infrastructure. It should not be
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Who Controls My Movies

If you read or listen to the first chapter in Larry Lessig's newest book Free Culture, you'll quickly realize that Lessig believes that society is damaged when our right (and yes, maligned as it is, it is a right) to rip, remix and burn content is diminished. In today's Deseret News, there was an article about one of our local companies, ClearPlay, that brought Lessig to mind. I first ran into ClearPlay three years ago when they were seeking initial venture funding. Their technology is simple in concept: skip frames of a DVD while its playing according to the
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Using RSS for Customer Service

My friend Steve Fulling was recently in an auto accident--someone rear-ended him. That was no fun, but he was telling me about the awesome customer service he was getting from the body shop (Central Body in Provo). They called him up soon after his car was dropped off and said "Mr Fulling, I wanted to call you and tell you that your truck will be fixed on the day we promised and we don't see any additional charges beyond what you were quoted." In essense, they were reporting "on time, on budget." They called again today to give him
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Incompatibility is the Goal of DRM

Ed Felton has a good article at Freedom to Tinker on the incongruity of music industry technologists who are trying to create a "transparent and universal" system that protects copyrights at the same time. The whole point of DRM technology is to prevent people from moving music usefully from point A to point B, at least sometimes. To make DRM work, you have to ensure that not just anybody can build a music player -- otherwise people will build players that don't obey the DRM restrictions you want to connect to the content. DRM, in other words, strives to
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Knock Knock, Its SSH Calling

Wade Billings pointed out knockd to me. This little program lets you set up secret port knocks and then take action when you see them. So, for example, you could set up a server with all ports locked down and then open up SSH just when you needed it by knocking on selected ports in a specific order. The ports you knock on don't have to be open since the daemon listens to the ethernet interface. If you're really paranoid and only a few people need to access the server, then this might be for you.
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Blogger Wish List

Lisa Williams has summarized over 100 comments that people posted in response to this question from Dave Winer: Premise: We've reached a plateau in blogging tools. There haven't been a lot of changes in the last two or three of years. The growth continues, lots more weblogs, and we've got better tools for reading (aggregators). Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs? If you could influence people who are making the tools, what feature or features would you want? Think as big as you like, or as detailed as you like. What bug is most in your way.
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Web Services Are Happening All Over, Right Now

RSS, a simple XML document, aimed primarily at desktop consumption, and delivered along RESTful principals, is currently the best example of Web services in widespread use. Web services happened behind our backs while were all watching big companies trying come to grips with SOAP. Those who read between the lines of these conversations can intuit that RSS is rapidly approaching a critical mass in the enterprise. Notification, subscription, presence, and awareness services are congealing into a real-time events-based information routing fabric that outpaces other existing legacy channels. Such channels include email, developer conferences, print publications, and broadcast media. From
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The Flap Over Gmail

The magnitude of the controversy about Google's new Gmail service is astounding. Many people have decried the attempt of Google to link their new 1Gb email service with targeted ads, searching, and so on. This has led to an anti-Gmail bill in the CA State Senate and I'm sure that won't be the last. I just can't get over the number of people who want to protect me from myself. Almost every online service requires some kind of identifying information from me in order to provide the service they're offering. Sometimes they need my personal information and money (think
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Claria Corporation nee Gator

Paul Allen has a nice piece on Gator's S-1 filing. Gator is one of the companies bringing you spyware. Maybe not as obnoxious as some, but spyware nonetheless. Its not surprising they're changing their name with the filing since their old name is synonymous with in-your-face, invade-your-privacy marketing.
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Five Issues Holding Back Open Source Software

In an article at First Monday, Michelle Levesque explores five issues that are holding back open source software. The abstract: Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems. The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary softwareâs more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to
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Wayport Providing McDonald's Wi-Fi

After a 9-month trial, Wayport has won the right to provide hot spots in McDonald's restaurants. I suspect it will be a while before Utah is on the list, but still, it points to a future full of easier Internet access on the road.
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RSS for Forums

I would rate my experiment with the Ask Phil forum a qualified success thus far. There have been some great discussions, most recently on PHP and Document Management, and I've learned something and hopefully others have as well. One thing I didn't like about it was the need to keep going back to the forum each day to check what was new. The world has a solution for this problem called RSS and fortunately, there's a module for the bulletin board software I'm using that creates RSS. I've been using it for about two weeks now and it seems
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Networking Class Project Presentations

I heard presentations about class projects today for the networking class I'm teaching this semester. The rules for the project are simple: it has to be equal to the effort required for two normal labs, it has to be vaguely about networking, and it has to be fun for the student. As a result, some of it turns into an opportunity to hack. Not everyone presents, but the one's who presented today had some good projects: Craig Hancock built an HTTP server with modular handlers for different data types that accepted GET and POST and ran PHP programs. Ben
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Document Management with SharePoint

elearnspace points to a an overview of SharePoint, Microsoft's server-based document repository. The elearnspace article gives some pros and cons: If you know Windows and Office, the learning curve is very low. In my experience, I've been disappointed with the product (sign in isn't direct and obvious, very little metadata support, very "boxy", no support for RSS, collaboration is basically just a threaded discussion, etc.) Given the opportunity, I would move toward a product like Plone, Groove, Drupal, or Convea. Over the next several versions, Sharepoint will certainly improve...but it's currently a product that looks like a poor duplication
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Speaking of Disruptive Bandwidth Upgrades

Britt has a well-written piece about Arrianna Huffington's infatuation with bloggers. The part that caught my eye was the about the "disruptive bandwidth upgrade" that the colonies experienced in the form of post roads that suddenly made it practical for the colonies to talk to each other in a peer to peer fashion rather than relying on the hierarchical communications structure between the colonies and London. The hierarchical communications infrastructure was necessary when the colonies were separated by impassable wilderness, but too slow and inflexible once intercolony communication was possible. Revolution was born of the post roads, the printing
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The Goddess of Social Networking

Using an interesting story about Indian matchmakers, Bundeep Singh Rangar of Ariadne Capital makes a compelling point about monetizing social networks; money is made at convergence events: It's at the point of the marriage event that the money kicks in. Indians spend about almost $4.5 billion a year on wedding-related gold jewelry alone. And another $2 billion is spent on catering, clothing, resorts, and venues. For social networking to be fully monetized, the nodes in the social network need a convergence event. These events provide a focal point where new networks are created and existing ones utilized. That's why
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Paul Allen on Becoming a Parallel Entrepreneur

Utah has our very own Paul Allen. Not the Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, but a Paul Allen who's made a name for himself in the high tech community by starting ventures such as Infobases, Folio, and MyFamily.com. Paul knows a lot about starting companies and willingly shares his knowledge with anyone willing to come to his class at UVSC on Wednesday evenings. Paul, who recently started blogging, is trying to move past being a serial entrepreneur and become a parallel entrepreneur. Here's a list of the companies that Paul's involved in right now. I've recently been thinking along
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PHP for Large-Scale Web Sites?

I had a discussion with a friend yesterday about a Web site we're going to build. I have to plan for the possibility that at some point in the future, the site will have millions of page views per day, many of them from interactions. The nature of the interactions is such that I don't think we need an application server (e.g. EJBs), but will use a 2-tiered architecture connecting a Web server-based front end to a database. The Web server will be Apache and the database MySQL, but the question raised was "what to use for the scripting
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The Spyware Who Loved Me

John Borland at c|net News deliberately let down his guard to see what happens to a typical, non-technical Windows user when they innocently go onto the Web to surf. The result is scary. This is, by the way, one of the reasons your non-technical relatives call you to say "that their computer just stopped working."
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Open Source Voting

Vote Here Technologies released the source code to their electronic voting system this week. Vote Here uses an interesting twist on the paper trail that allows each voter to verify on the Internet that their individual vote was correctly tallied. Here's how it works: [Vote Here CEO Jim Alder] said the VoteHere method ensures the accuracy of the machines in a way that is more secure than a simple paper receipt. Here's how it works: Next to each candidate's name on the ballot, a random code appears that changes for each voter. After making their selections, voters receive a
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Document Management Round-up

Earlier I asked for suggestions on document management for the small business and invited comments. There were some good suggestions in the forum, as well as some that came by email. They were: Zope which was one of my first thoughts. Vignette's Business Workplaces which used to be called "Instraspect" and seems to have disappeared inside Vignette's Web site. Xerox DocuShare WorldOx a solution used by small law firms according to Dennis Kennedy AtomZ, who I'd always viewed as a search service (in fact Windley's Enterprise Computing uses AtomZ for search. Crown Peak, a hosted content management solution. Of
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Mono Status

I had a colleague who switched his entire lab over to C# last fall. While I'd heard much good about C#, I knew I wasn't willing to switch to Microsoft for my development and certainly not willing to be locked into Microsoft platforms for deploying applications. Consequently, I've kept my eyes on the Mono Project. Edd Dumbill attended the Mono developer meeting in march and wrote a report for the O'Reilly Network. He concludes: The Mono project is one to watch. The audacity of using Microsoft's own investments and technologies to bring developers to the Linux platform sets the
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A Leathal Combination: MythTV+RSS+BitTorrent

In response to a post by Dave Winer, Matt Goyers says "So just think about what you could do with RSS, BitTorrent and a Media Center." I'm not sure why you'd use Media Center when MythTV is available. I suspect its just a matter of time until someone puts RSS+BitTorrent inside Myth TV. If I'd thought about it sooner, I'd have had my Networking class do it this semester for a final project.
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CanyonBridge Slips into Web Services Orchestration

Web-based Outlook replacement that's better than Outlook I spent this morning with Dave Mitchell, the CTO of Canyon Bridge, a Utah-based start-up. From looking at their Web site, you'd guess that they sell a product that gives you Web-based access to Microsoft Exchange, but its actually what's under the covers that interested me. First the obvious stuff: They've built a Web-based replacement for Outlook that's better than the thick client in many ways. I know what you're thinking: slow and clunky, but this was fast and slick. Drag and drop works, so does multi-item select and edit. Most of
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VoIP in the Contact Center

Always On has a piece about VoIP's potential in the contact center: But what's been less discussed and understood is that the small office/home office market holds only a small slice of VoIP's potential. The much more exciting and compelling opportunities reside in midsize to larger businesses÷and specifically in their contact centers (a contact center is essentially a call center that also handles other communications channels÷most notably e-mail and Web chat). In this market, VoIP isn't simply about cheap, flat-rate telephony. It instead offers companies the potential to completely reinvent how they do business. From VoIP in the Call
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Utah's New Project Planning Methodology

Dave Fletcher, acting Director of ITS at the State, talks about the new ITS project planning methodology. I like that the methodology includes a "roles and responsibilities" matrix. Dave reports that they're using DotProject, an open source project management tool to do the planning.
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Overcoming Asymmetric Routing on Multi-Homed Servers

Having two network interfaces in a server seems like a good idea, but it doesn't always just work by itself. This LinuxJournal article discusses configuring a multi-homed Linux server to take full advantage of the extra card.
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Document Management

My call last week for ideas on document management solutions for small business yielded two suggestions, both from people I know and both saying, in essence, "Zope." I'm not surprised that Zope was suggested since it was one of my first thoughts when my friend asked me for advice, but I'm a little surprised that nothing else was suggested.
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Does Sharing Music Hurt Sales?

A study released last week by Harvard and UNC researcher states that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." This has, of course, been met with some disbelief by the RIAA. A New York Times article discusses the study and the music industry's reaction. The most recent findings are in keeping with what most people learned in Economics: "Say I offer you a free flight to Florida," he asks. "How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free." If there were no free ticket,
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Draft the Press Release First

Britt Blaser's been working on an idea to use technology to increase grassroots participation. Warning, this post is best read after having digested the last two weeks of Britt's blog first. Its worth the effort. Britt's onto something.
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More Salt Lake Public Library Pictures

I've added some new pictures to my album of pictures of the Salt Lake Public Library. I was there this morning to do some work on the free Wi-Fi and couldn't resist taking some more pictures of the building. Its really a magnificent structure. My gallery of pictures of the library continues to be one of the most highly visited parts of this site. Its the number five entry on Google for salt lake public library and the number one link for salt lake public library pictures.
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Aloud Allowed!

Last weekend, AKMA had the wonderful idea to have people around the Blogosphere create an audio version of Larry Lessig's new book Free Culture. The call for volunteer readers took off like a shot and the result is a emergent project that created an audio book where none existed before. I've listened to several of the chapters and the content is great and the readings are pretty good too. The interesting thing is that this activity was allowed at all. Its no coincidence that this particular book sparked the idea in AKMA's mind. After all, that's just what this
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Replacing FTP: The Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol (PDTP)

The Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol, or PDTP, is a project to define a replacement for the venerable FTP protocol. PDTP is similar to BitTorrent in the way it handles distributed streams, but also manages a directory hierarchy automatically and includes other interesting features such as metadata rich directory listings and support for file integrity validation through the use of DSS signatures. The project proposes three use cases for increasing scale. So what's wrong with BitTorrent? Here's a snippet from the FAQ: As PDTP is fundamentally different from BitTorrent in several ways, it shouldn't be viewed as "reinventing the wheel".
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Bluetooth Better on the Mac

I've often wondered why more people weren't raving about Bluetooth when I found it so incredibly useful. I sync my contacts with my phone, use my phone for a wide-area networking device, and even have a Bluetooth headset for handsfree phone operation. I can use my phone as a slide show remote for my computer and even a remote control for iTunes that shows what song's playing. None of this was difficult or tricky, so what's the problem? This story in PCWorld.com gives a hint at why Bluetooth isn't more widely used. Windows just makes it too hard. When
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Sick and Tired of Doing Things the Hard Way

Jeremy Zawodny's switching.
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vSpring Capital Unveils its Inaugural v|100

The v|100 is officially known as the vSpring Capital Top 100 Venture Entrepreneurs and was conceived by vSpring as a tool to recognize the region's outstanding entrepreneurs and to support and promote collaborative partnering and mentoring among top entrepreneurs in the region. This is important to the Utah business community since lack of corporate leadership experience is one of the identified hurdles that Utah has to overcome to attract more venture capital. This list is the beginning of a group that can mentor new leaders and serve as management for new ventures. Members of the list have raised more
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