Archive for May 2007


Phil Wolff on Technometria

I've known Phil Wolff for years. Not in any particular context, he was just a fellow blogger I'd talk to at conferences we both showed up at. I enjoyed what he wrote. Then a while back, I noticed that my friend Phil had put himself front and center of all things Skype with Skype Journal, a blog that provides news, opinion, and tips about Skype. I ran into Phil at Internet Identity Workshop, where he was proposing something he calls "OpenCallerID." I thought it was high time we talked to him about Skype and other things that are interesting
Continue reading...


New Features on Utah.gov

Dave Fletcher, Utah's Deputy CIO, points out some new features for Utah.gov, Utah's eGovernment portal including many expanded search options, a multimedia portal, and sub-portals for travel and state parks. The state parks site contains a very useful mashup of state park data with Google Maps. Nice.
Continue reading...


Using XRDS

Back when people were trying to bring OpenID, LID, and i-names together, something called Yadis was born. At the time, it was all pretty abstract to me, but over time I've come to understand more of the details. Yadis was a discovery protocol for identifiers that was based on XRDS, or eXtensible Resource DescriptorS. The basic idea was that when you resolved an identifier, you'd get back an XRDS document that would tell you which authentication service the identifier was associated with. I'll talk about the details of how this happens in a minute. First, let's talk about why
Continue reading...


Facebook As Platform

Paul Allen is all over Facebook's f8 announcement in this post from last week. I know Paul well enough to know that when he gets this excited, something must be cooking. I even went and signed up for a Facebook account--something I've been loathe to do for some time (I'm tired of joining and typing every detail of my life into one app after another).
Continue reading...


Picotux

This picotux server is pretty cool. It's no bigger than an RJ45 jack. With power over Ethernet, you could deploy these anywhere you can run Cat 5 cable. I'm not sure why I love things like this, but I do.
Continue reading...


Technorati Wins and Losses

Technorati is one of the tools I use everyday. One of the most important parts of blogging is participating in conversations that are going on the 'Net. Technorati helps me find out when people are responding to something I've written. The good folks at Technorati are a busy bunch. It seems like the site is different almost everyday. Sometimes radically. Recently the layout for what Technorati now calls "reactions" changed. I like the new look and think that much of the important the information easier to find. It's also not as "busy" with ads. Frankly some of the ads
Continue reading...


Saying Yes to Paper Ballots

An editorial in last Thursday's Deseret News got a little hot under the collar over the current debate over what to do with electronic voting. It said, in part: The concern is understandable, of course. New inventions make nervous Nellies of us all. People once feared that microwave ovens would make them sterile or that garage door openers might lead to cancer. Humorist James Thurber recalled that his mother would never leave light sockets open in the house because she was convinced electricity would leak out, costing her money and threatening her health. Such things are often the source
Continue reading...


Follow Up To Seth Godin's Visit

I posted my notes from Seth's visit yesterday. Some related happenings might interest you as well. Phil Burns and Ash Buckles vowed that they'd let Seth shave their heads if enough money was raised to bring Seth to Salt Lake City. After Seth was finished speaking they made good on their pledge. I have a few photos, Phil has more and Ash posted a video. The video is worth watching. Seth was quite humorous when he was shaving heads. Phil also had a harrowing experience getting Seth to the airport. Phil, I'm laughing. Let me know when you can
Continue reading...


Seth Godin: The Dip

I'm sitting in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake, waiting for Seth Godin to show up. He's reportedly in the car, driving from the airport. That's OK, the wait time has been a great time for talking to friends I don't see all the time. There's probably 350 people here as we get started. The premise for this event is interesting. Seth is promoting his new book, The Dip. I wrote about it back in April. He will come anywhere people agree to buy 2500 copies of his book. This is just the sort of fascinating Internet marketing that
Continue reading...


At the May 2007 CTO Breakfast

We had the May CTO Breakfast today. There was a good group and some great discussion. I started off by talking about the Utopia install at my house. No one else at the meeting has Utopia yet, so there was some interest in how the install went and how well the service works. We also got into a discussion of Mozy. Of course, Tyler wasn't here this time, so we couldn't pump him for info. A general discussion of backup methods, drives, and programs ensued. I brought up Fuse, a cool way of building file systems in user space.
Continue reading...


Seth Godin Tomorrow

Seth Godin will be speaking on tomorrow at the Salt Palace. I have it on good authority that you can pay at the door, if you haven't pre-registered. The cost is $50, but you get to hear Seth speak, get some food, and also get five copies of his latest book. The doors open at 1pm and Seth starts speaking at 1:30.
Continue reading...


Google Goes Fishing

Jeff Barr has a humorous look at the approach junior Google recruiters are using on him. As Scoble said: Anyone who does an hour's worth of research with a search engine, like, say, Google's, knows that Jeff is worth hiring and isn't worth treating with a bit of the usual filtering bulls##t. Either hire him, or leave him alone. I also wouldn't let newbie recruiters even get close to anyone who has a blog --- I'd make sure that bloggers get handled by a real pro, not the amateur hour kind of hiring folks that are pitching Jeff currently.
Continue reading...


Black Swans and the Impact of Improbable Events

Black Swans(click to enlarge) Yesterday, Nassim Nicholas Taleb was on Talk of the Nation talking about his book Black Swan. Of course, we published Moira Gunn's interview with Taleb a few weeks ago on IT Conversations. The name comes from the fact that for centuries Europeans used the term "black swan" as synonymous with something that was impossible--until they got to Australia where black swans are common. Taleb uses it as an allegory for an improbable event that changes some aspect of our world drastically. It's funny how when you learn a new concept it becomes a way to
Continue reading...


Utah Open Source Conference

The Utah Open Source Conference will be held on September 6, 2007 through September 8, 2007 at the West Valley Cultural Celebration Center Open Source Technology Center (Novell). The conference is looking for proposals for 90 minute classes on open source topics including: Business solutions (process, applications, infrastructure) IT management and implementation Web development Language skills (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby) Emerging technologies I'm thinking about putting in a proposal for a session on OpenID and user-centric identity issues. Lots of open source tie-ins there.
Continue reading...


CTO Breakfast Reminder

Just a reminder that we'll hold the May CTO breakfast this coming Thursday at 8am. We're in the usual place--the Novell cafeteria. Some of you are still holding out because it seems so far away, but give it a chance. It's actually no further than the Canyon Park Technology Center meeting place from the freeway. I've been traveling for two weeks: WWW2007 in Banff and IIW2007a in Mountain View and have some interesting ideas from those trips. I'd love to hear about your ideas and interests as well, so come and share. There's no charge to attend, but you'll
Continue reading...


Stupid Web Design Tricks

I found this list of 19 things not to do when building a Web site. The first, DO NOT resize the user's browser window, EVER resonated with me because I was reading a site last week that had some great information that I wanted to read, but every time I clicked on a link, my browser would blow up to full size. I finally gave up--it was just too annoying to go on. I also liked number eight: If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007 DUMBASS. Even though on average, only 10% or so of
Continue reading...


Anyone Need a Pair of Netscalers?

Bungee Labs has two pair of Citrix Netscalers for sale. They're new, but out of the box and installed at a couple of data centers. I understand they'll give you a smoking deal. If you're interested, contact me.
Continue reading...


Obfuscating Passwords in Forms

Most are familiar with password fields in Web forms. When you use a password field, anything the user types is obfuscated. This is, to my knowledge, to reduce the danger of shoulder surfers stealing the password by reading the screen as it's typed in. As long as I've used computers, this has been standard practice--the IBM Selectric terminals I used in 1976 would pre-print multiple characters on the paper before having you type your password so it couldn't be stolen from the printout. What would you think of a social networking Web site that in the interest of reducing
Continue reading...


Schmedley

Paul Figgiani sent me a link to Schmedley. It's like the OS X dashboard inside the browser. The fact that you can do this kind of thing in a browser still amazes me. Update: I wrote more about Schmedley at BTL this afternoon.
Continue reading...


LunchMeet on IIW

Kaliya and I are on LunchMeet today talking about IIW. LunchMeet host Eddie Codel visited IIW yesterday and brought his camera.
Continue reading...


Internet Identity Workshop 2007: Day Three

Tuesday dinner at the Monte Carlo in Mountain View(click to enlarge) If you're interested in following blogs about IIW2007, you can look for the iiw2007 tag on Technorati. First thing this morning (after picking up bagels) I went to a presentation on Sxipper, Sxip Identity's login and form filling plug-in for Firefox. I've been using Sxipper since the last IIW and have come to rely on it. When I first started using it, it had some usability problems (at least for me) so I stopped using it for a while. When I switched to Firefox 2.0, however, with automatic
Continue reading...


Internet Identity Workshop 2007: Day Two

IIW2007A Agenda Wall(click to enlarge) The second day at IIW started in the traditional way: building the agenda. I was surprised that almost half to rooms stood up to propose a session. The wall is pretty full and there are lots of interesting sessions. If you click through on the thumbnail at the right (two clicks), you should be able to read the details. One of the sessions I attended this morning was on the OpenID 2.0 spec and what's left to be done. There seems to be some feeling among potential users that there is an opportunity lost
Continue reading...


IIW2007 Has Begun: Day One Activities

After months of preparation, IIW2007 has begun. Whew! I always feel a big relief when the "train leaves the station" as Mike Jones said. During the introductory presentation Eugene Kim asked how many people were here for the first time and probably one-half two-thirds of the audience stood up. That's great. He also asked how many people had been at the first IIW in Berkeley and there were a dozen or so people in that group. We're starting off differently this year. We broke the group into smaller groups of 7 or 8 and asked them to discuss the
Continue reading...


William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

A while back, during a recording for the Technometria podcast, Matt Asay mentioned he was reading a biography of William James. I'm not sure what intrigued me about what he said, but right after the broadcast I ordered a copy. It took me a while for it to get to the top of my reading list, but it finally did and I read it during my trip to Banff for WWW2007. William James was one of the members of the polymath James family, his brother was the famous novelist Henry James and his sister Alice was famous for her
Continue reading...


Andy Griffith

I listened to Scott Simon interview Andy Griffith yesterday on Weedend Edition. What a funny, interesting, and just plain nice man.
Continue reading...


Everything Is Miscellaneous

Dave Weinberger's new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, is out. I saw it in the bookstore at the airport in Calgary, but Canadian book prices are outrageous. It's like booksellers fixed the exchange rate years ago and haven't taken changes since then into account. It was $35 CAN. Yikes. So, I just ordered in from Amazon. Only regret is I won't have it for my trip next week.
Continue reading...


WWW2007 Wrap-Up

Today I'm on my way home from Banff. The conference goes until Saturday, but with IIW starting Monday of next week and Sunday being Mother's Day, I didn't feel like I could hold out until the end. My feelings on WWW2007 are mixed. This is one of the few conferences I'm aware of in this space that mixes academic and commercial interest. I think that's a worthy goal. What's more, I attended many good presentations that led me to new lines of thought. That's the ultimate measure of a presentation or conference, I think. And yet, I was also
Continue reading...


Marc Hadley on WADL: a RESTful API Description Language

Marc Hadley (from Sun Microsystems) is giving a talk called "Describing Web Applications - WADLing with Java." WADL is a RESTful description language for Web APIs. WADL comprises resource, method, request, and response descriptions. Marc gives an example using the Yahoo News Search API. Resources are specified relative to a base URI and can describe parameters that are common to all methods. Methods are the standard HTTP methods and can specify a request and response set for that method. Responses have representations that describe the type of the response. The language can also describe faults as responses. There are
Continue reading...


Theodore Bullock: HTTPerf is New and Improved

HTTPPerf is a tool for measuring Web service performance. The problem is it hadn't been updated since 2000, even though there had been numerous bug reports in the intervening seven years. Theodore Bullock, recently of the University of Calgary, reported on a project to fix reported bugs and redo the build system, making it more portable that a Software Engineering class carried out last year. The result is version 0.9 is is freely available. There are plugins that do sessions and Web log playback. Others could be written. For example, I'd like to see a plugin that incorporates Rhino
Continue reading...


Olivier Thereaux on the Unicorn Validator

I'm in a talk in the Developer's Track where Olivier Thereaux is discussing the Unicorn project, which is building a new, opensource, generation of Web content validation.
Continue reading...


Hunting Down Spammers

The last talk reminds me that on my way into Canada, as I was passing through customs, the customs officer asked me my business. I reported I was going to give a tutorial at a Web conference. Here's the conversation: Customs Officer: On what? Me: Digital identity. Customs Officer: What's that? Me: Ways to identify people on the Web. Customs Officer: Will it help with Spam? Me: Not directly. Customs Officer: Will you ask the people at the conference if there's any way we can hunt them [spammers] down and kill them? N.B. I think by "we" he meant
Continue reading...


Understanding Splogs

Have you ever wondered exactly how splogging (spam blogs) work? What's the structure of that industry (and it is an industry)? Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma (of Microsoft Research) and Yuan Niu and Hao Chen (of UC Davis) have studied the problem and found that there's a bottleneck in the economy of splogging at what they call the "aggregator level." This is the place to fight splogs. Here's the PDF version of the paper and here's a NY Times article on the results.
Continue reading...


Finding Quality Blogs

This talk entitled "Exploring in the Weblog Space by Detecting Informative and Affective Articles" by researchers from Shanghai Jiao-Tong University (see full paper) describes the use of machine learning techniques to classify blogs and blog articles according to the amount of "informative" and "affective" information in the blog. Affective here is a fancy word for "touchy-feely." The authors use various discrimination techniques and give results on which are the best for their purposes. The propose that being able to find blogs and blog articles they classify as "informative" leads to information, usually by experts, and is the kind of
Continue reading...


Fast, Interpreted XML Parsing

I'm in a presentation on a paper called A High-Performance Interpretive Approach to Schema-Directed Parsing (here's the PDF for the paper). Last year these authors presented a fast, validating XML parser (called Screamer) that outperforms Xerces (validating) and Expat (non-validating) by considerable amounts. The problem was that it compiled a custom parser for each XML schema. The fact that it required compiling code made it undeployable with products like DB2 (they work for IBM). This paper presents an interpreted version of Screamer, called iScreamer that is still fast, but doesn't require using a compiler. Instead it produces a parse
Continue reading...


Compact and Fast XML Processing

I went to a talk on a paper called "Querying and Maintaining a Compact XML Storage" by Raymond Wong, Franky Lam, and William Shui. Here's the abstract and here's the paper (PDF). The authors created a clever encoding of XML that not only takes much less storage, but is also much faster. For example, here's some data he shows for a 100Mb XML document (compared to MS Vista's native XML libraries): The results are sufficient that you could imagine doing this on a mobile phone, for example.
Continue reading...


Prabhakar Raghavan on Science for Engaging and Monetizing Audience

Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo! Research(click to enlarge) Prabhakar Raghavan is giving the morning keynote. He's the head of Yahoo! Research. The title of the talk was "What sciences will Web N.0 take?" But, more accurately, I'd call it "Science for Engaging and Monetizing Audience." Yahoo! takes in editorial, free (including blogs, twitter, pictures, etc.) and commercial content "content." The audience "consumes the content" but also enriches the content. Finally the audience transacts (commerce) with the content. Yahoo! isn't the only one in this business. Google, AOL, MSN, and even NewsCorp are in the business of matching content to audience
Continue reading...


Would You Let IT Conversations See Your Podcast Ratings in iTunes?

Not too long ago, Richard Miller suggested using the iTunes XML file that iTunes creates for use by other applications as a way of getting feedback for podcasts. Here's Apple's description of the XML file and what it can be used for. If you rate a few things in your collection and then go look at the XML file, you'll see it would be a relatively simple task to grab whether something had been played or not, it's rating, and how many times it was played (usually once for a podcast) from the file. An application that lived in
Continue reading...


Web Science: Do We Need a New Discipline?

Web Science panel(click to enlarge) I'm in a panel at WWW2007 on Web Science, essentially a proposal for a new discipline. The field would be interdisciplinary, taking things from areas as diverse as sociology, physics, biology, law, and psychology, as well as the areas you might immediately think of like computer science or math. What is Web Science? Here's a quote from a Science paper on Web Science: When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term "science" in two ways. Physical and biological science analyzes the natural world, and tries to find
Continue reading...


Fungus and Stink Ants

Rohit Khare shared this bizarre piece about fungus and stink ants with me last night at dinner. Fascinating stuff.
Continue reading...


User-Centric Identity Tutorial Resources

Banff Springs resort. (click to enlarge) I gave my tutorial on user-centric identity today. There were around 40 people there--a good crowd and very interested in identity. I promised that I'd post a list of resources, so here we go. First, my slides in PDF format. Warning: the upload from the hotel is going very slowly, so this probably won't be available until later tonight. Here's the tarball for the demonstration code I did with OpenID. I add authentication to a simple Web application using a separate, general login controller. There are pictures in the slides. It's in Perl.
Continue reading...


v|100 Selection

I was chosen, for the fourth year, in a row, as a member of the v|100. The v|100 recognizes entrepreneurs with Utah ties and is sponsored by vSpring Capital, an early stage venture firm. From the announcement: Each year, vSpring asks members of the Utah business community to nominate individuals who are most likely to lead a successful startup venture in the next five to seven years in the IT (information technology) or biotech industries in a chief executive or chief technical officer role. Those nominees who garner the most votes from their peers in this second step of
Continue reading...


Sun Supports OpenID and Opens the Question of Reputation

Sun announced (or at least Tim did) that Sun's supporting OpenID at openid.sun.com. Sun has taken the additional step of stating that only Sun employees will have IDs there. So, if someone presents an OpenID with a base domain of openid.sun.com, you can be assured that Sun is vouching that they are an employee of Sun. The biggest problem with this set up, of course, is that the attributes of an identifier ought to be transfered orthogonally to the identifier itself. The fact that the URL has a certain form should encode data like whether someone's an employee or
Continue reading...


Launching Book IT!

We've launched a new series at IT Conversations: Book IT!, a series of interviews with authors about their books. The series will ultimately have multiple hosts, but our first host is Jeff Parks, an information architect. His first interview, with Mike Moran is on search engine marketing. I enjoyed it very much. Jeff has a good style. I'm looking for one more host for this series. I can't promise you any renumeration, but you'll get a certain amount of exposure and some free books. We do most of the hard stuff: you need to be able to produce high
Continue reading...


Overdoing Security

I was registering for the FAA Medxpress program today. This program allows pilots to submit their flight physicals online. Once you've registered, the FAA requires that you change your password. Here's the requirements for the new password: You have accessed the FAA MedXPress site using a temporary password. You must change your password in order to continue. Passwords must contain between 8 and 12 characters and include at least three of the following four character groups: English upper case characters (A through Z); English lower case characters (a through z); Numerals (0 through 9); Non-alphabetic characters (such as !,
Continue reading...


Off to Banff for WWW2007

I'm headed to Banff next week for WWW2007. If you're going to be there too, I arrive Monday afternoon and I'm looking for a group to go dinner with on Monday night. Let me know. I'm doing a tutorial on user-centric identity on Tuesday morning. Not quite ready, but getting there. The demos are working and the slides are mostly done. Just need a little polish. In any event, I'll be writing about the conference throughout the week, and tagging the coverage with www2007. If you're curious, here's what I wrote about www2006 last year in Edinburgh.
Continue reading...


Prefetching Considered Harmful?

Yesterday I tried to access a page at Wolfram MathWorld and got this message instead of the material I was looking for: This was puzzling since as far as I know, Firefox should only prefetch pages that the site specifically gives hints for. Apparently not. What's more curious, however, is why Wolfram blocks the entire session rather than just using a rewrite rule that's triggered on the prefetch header to deny the prefetching itself. This would solve Wolfram's problem and not be so obnoxious for their users. Like so: RewriteEngine On SetEnvIf X-moz prefetch HAS_X-moz RewriteCond %{ENV:HAS_X-moz} prefetch RewriteRule
Continue reading...


Ken Knaptop's Blog

I've known Ken Knapton for years. I think we met in a job interview. He's currently the CTO for ContentWatch (I'm on the advisory board). Ken is the latest addition to the growing list of Utah Tech bloggers. Ken's blog focuses on his thoughts about software development with an occasional foray into Internet filtering. I look forward to reading what he writes.
Continue reading...


I've Got Fiber to My House

Utopia truck ready for install(click to enlarge) Utopia is Utah's large-scale municipal-broadband project. My city, Lindon, was one of the first supporters of the project and all winter I've watched in anticipation as crews dug up the lawns in my neighborhood laying fiber. I first heard about Utopia when I was Utah's CIO and Utopia was just a dream Paul Morris had. I've supported it, written about it, testified about it to city councils, and, mostly, waited for it. Yesterday was the day that I had service installed in my house. To understand the overall situation, it's important to
Continue reading...


What's That Odor?

If anyone notices a foul odor in the vicinity of Sheryl Crow, now we know why.
Continue reading...


Simulated Mouse Brains

Researchers from IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada ran a simulation of one half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer that had 8 million neurons and 6300 synapses. The simulation ran at one-tenth speed for ten seconds--so about 1 second of mouse brain activity. On other smaller simulations the researchers said they had seen "biologically consistent dynamical properties" emerge as nerve impulses flowed through the virtual cortex. In these other tests the team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a
Continue reading...


Finite Simple Group of Order Two

If you're into math humor, parodies, and pretty good singing, you'll like this: This is called "Finite Simple Group of Order Two" and is performed by the Klein Four Group. Here's the lyrics.
Continue reading...


Fuse for OS X

A few months ago I posted a short article about using the SSH filesystem to mount an OS X directory from Ubuntu in Parallels. At the time, I had no idea what it was or how it worked. Yesterday, however, I recorded an interview with Amit Signh, the author of the OS X Internals book. This interview will show up on my Technometria podcast on IT Conversations next week. We got into a discussion of the MacFUSE project, which Amit runs and something clicked. FUSE is a specification for creating file systems in user space (i.e. not in the
Continue reading...


HD-DVD Processing Keys Getting Some Late Play

A few months ago, I wrote a post on HD Processing Keys and the futility of DRM. I pointed to an article on Engadget that talked about the AACS processing keys being retrieved. As a quick aside, the processing keys are a little like the master keys that allow hundreds or thousands of discs created before April 23rd to be ripped. Yesterday, the story exploded when someone posted the keys, it got lots of action on Digg, and then Digg pulled the story in response to a complaint from the AACS. My post happens to be the first hit
Continue reading...


Bikely: Bike Routes on Google Maps

I found a cool little application that uses Google maps for bike routes called Bikely. Here's a route near my house that goes around Utah Lake.
Continue reading...


Defrag Registration is Now Open

Registration for Defrag is now open. If you look at the agenda, I think you'll agree there are some really interesting speakers and topics. We'll be hosting the audio from Defrag on IT Conversations and doing some pre-conference interviews with keynoters.
Continue reading...


Best Practices for Using Info Cards

Mike Jones is pointing to a newly released guideline for how to put InfoCards on your Web site: Patterns for Supporting Information Cards at Web Sites: Personal Cards for Sign up and Signing In.
Continue reading...


John Newton, Open Source Convert

John Newton was one of the founders of Documentum and, as a result, one of the inventors of what we now call "content management." Whether you like that term, or not, the idea of specialized databases that keep track of things like documents, Web sites, photographs, and so on has had a huge impact on our world. Now John is the CTO of Alfresco, an open source company building open source tools for managing content. John wasn't always an open source advocate, but now believe it's the right model for creating enterprise software. Scott Lemon, Ben Galbraith, and I
Continue reading...


Top Ten IT Conversations Programs for April 2007

Here is the list of the top ten shows on IT Conversations for April 2007 ranked by downloads. The ratings each of these show recieved is also shown. Kevin Werbach - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.25) David Platt - Why Software Sucks (Rating: 3.49) Lou Carbone - Creating Customer Loyalty (Rating: 4.43) Ian Wilmut - BioTech Nation (Rating: 3.38) Bruce Perens - Technometria: Software Patents (Rating: 3.80) Miguel de Icaza - Technometria: The Mono Project (Rating: 4.12) Phil Libin - Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators (Rating: 4.00) Geoffrey Bilder - Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators (Rating: 4.00) Dave Evans -
Continue reading...