iPhone Update
I'm number ninety six in line. I'm about half way up, so I expect there's about 200 people here. The Apple guys have been by to pick up trash and hand out slurpees (very nice!). They said we'd "be fine" so I expect that the inventory is good. There's lots of news crews and reporters working the lines as well. People keep showing up. The security guards for the mall came by a while back and gave us "the rules" regarding saving places, etc. People can swap in and out of line, but if they try and save places
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The Social Side of IT Conversations
Jon Udell's Interviews with Inovators submission for this week is a conversation with Simon St Laurent. St. Laurent isn't someone you'll necessarily meet at the next O'Reilly conference you go to. Jon singles him out as an innovator because of his use of local blogs reflect and enrich the life of a community. Jon says, "Day by day, and year by year, he's showing his fellow citizens that political blogging doesn't have to be bombastic and divisive. It can be a civil dialogue that informs and unites." On his blog, Jon asks why IT Conversations and our sister channel
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Document Engineering
This week's Technometria podcast is a discussion with Bob Glushko of UC Berkeley's iSchool. Bob's book, Document Engineering is a look at the methods people should employ in designing the document that surround their business. Document, in Bob's view, is a very broad term, encompassing everything from books and papers to XML. If you last week's discussion with Dave Weinberger, then this week's podcast will nice complement to that.
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In Line for iPhone
I'm in line at the SLC Apple store. So far, it's been kind of fun. A little bit of a party atmosphere. The Apple store employees just came by handing out water. Unfortunately, the line is going around the building to the west and so the shade is getting scarce. It's going to be HOT before this is all done. I brought some sunscreen and have been sharing it--gotta make friends to survive.
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Scoble on Kyte.tv at an Apple Store
Scoble's sitting in front of an Apple store and video blogging on Kyte.tv. Lots of fun.
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A World With No Advertising
Most of complain about ads, particularly ones that are "in our face" like the new floaters appearing on Web sites. Barnett has an interesting perspective based on a year spent in the Soviet Union in 1985: One thing I remembered from my summer in the USSR in 1985: no advertising meant no one knew where anything was or how to buy it, so you wasted so much time ferreting out such info--just wandering around. From The Gap will map itself (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)Referenced Thu Jun 28 2007 16:12:22 GMT-0600 (MDT) Of course, that doesn't mean all ads
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Bandit's Cross Platform Selector
Novell asked me for a quote for this press release on the Bandit cross-platform card selector. I said: "For the vision of user-centric identity to thrive, ecosystems like information card selectors have to extend beyond a single operating system. As a vendor of a major Linux distribution, Novell is in a great position to lead the use of information card selectors on Linux. I'm very encouraged by these developments." I haven't tried building the card selector for OS X yet. If anyone beats me to it, I'd love to hear a report. As I said in my post about
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iPhone Matches Hype
David Pogue, the technology reviewer for the NY Times, has released his review of the iPhone. The conclusion: [E]ven in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn't hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, "It ain't bragging if you done it." From The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype - New York TimesReferenced Tue Jun 26 2007 17:45:18
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Linking OpenID and CardSpace: SignOn.com
PingID (disclaimer: I'm on the advisory board) released the beta of SignOn.com today. SignOn.com is an OpenID identity provider that also accepts InfoCards. Once you've signed up, you can register an InfoCard with SignOn.com, you can use that to authenticate when you use your SignOn id at a Web site. Confused? Here's an example: I go to Jyte.com and click "login" Jyte asks for an OpenID, so I give it my SignOn OpenID (windley.signon.com) SignOn asks me to authenticate (since I'm not currently logged in there) and I choose to authenticate with an InfoCard The card selector pops up,
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iPhone Service Plans
Apple and AT&T have released details of the iPhone service plan. Most interesting part: the phone is activated using iTunes. Looks like you'll just buy the box and take it home to activate it rather than doing it at the store. They say that customers with existing AT&T contracts will have the option of keeping their current number and upgrading the account to work with the iPhone, but I'll bet that's not true of business accounts. We'll see.
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Java Framework Round-Up
Matt Raible of Raible Designs gave this morning's keynote presentation comparing Java Web frameworks (slide - PDF). Matt started off with an overview of the pros and cons of each framework, as he saw them. Java Server Faces or JSF is the Java EE standard. Lots of demand and lots of jobs working with JSF. Initially, its fast and easy to develop with. There are a lot of tools and component libraries are plentiful. The bad news: Tag soup for JSPs--the pages are lots of anything but HTML. JSF doesn't do REST-style Web services well and security can be
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Justinian's Flea
A few weeks ago I was walking through Borders and saw Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. This, frankly, is the kind of book I can't resist. I was expecting a book about a period of history I'm largely unfamiliar with (the early Byzantium era) with a twist. I wasn't disappointed. Rosen tell's the story of the Emperor Justinian, the world that came before him, the world that came after, and the importance of the bubonic plague in shaping the course of Europe. The book combines a detailed look at history with a respectable understanding of
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CTO Breakfast on Friday
The next CTO Breakfast will happen on June 29, 2007 from 8:00 until 10:00 at the Novell Cafeteria, Building G, Provo Campus. You're invited! You don't have to be a CTO--just interested in products and technology. Given the coincidence of the date--Apple's iPhone will be release at 6pm that day, I'm sure that will be a topic of discussion. Also, Phil Burns had a "map of the Internet" he wanted to show off. Knowing Phil, I'm sure it will be interesting. Please put these future dates on your calendar: Jul 20 (Friday) Aug 23 (Thursday) Sep 27 (Thursday) If
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In Denver With a Free Evening
I'm going to be in Denver Tuesday evening (June 26). Anyone interested in dinner? If so, contact me.
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CAS: Simple Authentication
Ken McCrery, from Virginia Tech gave a presentation at JA-SIG on their experience using Central Authentication Service (CAS) to provide single sign-on and single sign-off for their campus systems. CAS is an authentication system originally created by Yale University to provide a trusted way for an application to authenticate a user. It's freely available for download. VT orginally used a home grown system called AuthPortal but their middleware group couldn't keep up with the portal groups requirements. They determined to move to something that was more widely used. They found that CAS 2.0 was easy to deploy Previous AuthPortal
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JA-SIG Keynote on Digital Identity
I gave my keynote presentation on the social and economic impact of digital identity to the JA-SIG 2007 Summer conference. JA=SIG promotes the development and use of open architectures in higher education. In addition to their semiannual conference, they also have several projects that members develop and contribute to. The presentation went pretty well, I thought. There were probably about 150 people in the room. The PDF of my slides is available as well as a screencast demoing CardSpace and another screencast demoing OpenID which I showed in lieu of live demos. Neither is edited nor does either have
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Hard Choices
I'm trying to figure out: Where's the best place near my house to get an iPhone? Which of my kids should I make stand in line all day for me? Sometimes being a Dad is tough work. If anyone has good intel on iPhone sources in Utah County, let me know. Update: Near as I can tell, the AT&T store in American Fork will have them. Still checking.
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iPhone Tour
I'm watching the 20 minute guided tour of iPhone that Apple posted today. While Amanda might be cheating the word "amazing" it's an excellent word to describe the phone this video shows off. Coupling a large multitouch screen with Apple's legendary design skills clearly makes for a much better phone than anything I've used. Of course, touch is believing in this case and that's still a week away. Still, I can't see how businesses will be able to keep them out of the hands of employees. If you don't want one of these phones after watching the video, I
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Fake Colgate and China Wars
If you want to understand stories about tainted dog food and fake, poison toothpaste, listen to part I and part II of Moira's interview with Peter Navarro. I bought and read Navarro's book, the Coming China Wars after listening to the interviews. Definitely puts these stories in perspective. I think we're just seeing the beginning of the problems counterfeit products are going to cause.
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Everything is Miscellaneous
This week's Technometria podcast is an interview with Dave Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I've known Dave for some years and find him to be a very interesting person to talk to. This interview was no exception. The idea of everything being miscellaneous at first conjures up images of chaos, but the key is to remember that this isn't an argument against classification, but a priori classification. The Internet enables and requires that we classify things when we want them, not before. You may want things alphabetically and I may want
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Blue Light Special
Chuck Knutson has a funny post about his discontent with the flashing blue lights that manufacturers of Bluetooth devices seem intent on putting on their products. As Chuck says "Bluetooth is cable replacement technology, and I believe it should act like it." I get that product managers are proud of their little devices, but hen the light is distracting, we've gone too far. I wonder if "annoying" is one of the design metrics that Sara Ulius-Sabel tracks?
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Boycotting Blogs
Jeff Jarvis obviously doesn't get it. In commenting on the National Union of Journalists' plan for a Europe-wide day of protest against cuts in journalism, Jeff has cast the problem as the Internet, blogs, or readers. As the journalists well know, the real culprits are the capitalist owners of the newspapers. These diabolical folks are killing their own papers just to tweak the nose of the downtrodden workers. No one fully understands the depths of their cunning and evil.
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First iPhone App
Want a glimpse of the first iPhone app in the wild? OneTrip is a shopping list application that is built with the iPhone's form factor and multi-touch screen in mind, but will run in Safari on any platform (and apparently Firefox as well). one thing I noticed when I played around with it is that there's no log in. That makes it simple, and cookies are good enough to keep your list around from visit to visit. But the power of a Web-based application lies partially in it's ubiquity. I want to be able to maintain my list on
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EFF Wins 4th Amendment Email Victory
Richi Jennings has a nice wrap-up of reactions to the court ruling that EFF won against warrentless email snooping. Quoting Luke O'Brien: The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upheld a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using "Smiling Bob" ads that have gained some notoriety. The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional
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Milestones at IIW2007A
Dale Olds just put up some thoughts on IIW2007a and the significant events that occurred. He concentrates on the interoperability session and has some great pictures. Mike Jones gave some detailed stats from the interoperability session.
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New From AT&T: Family Visit Plans
As I was reading this Bob Frankston quote on Doc's blog, I was imagining what would the world be like if our entire road system, including the roads in our neighborhoods have been built privately and we had to pay fees to use them. You'd probably see packages advertised on TV announcing the new Family Visit plans for only $19.95 per month. Pay one low rate and visit all the relatives you want. Malls would have to pay huge hookup fees to the road networks because of the "extra traffic" they'd generate. Interchanges would not just exchange cars, but
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Computational Thinking
When Jon Udell interviewed Phil Libin, on IT Conversations, Libin said that in the future people will have to understand asymmetric encryption in order to function in the world. At first I was incredulous--that seems like a pretty esoteric concept to force on everyone. But then he said this: when Adam Smith first put forth idea of free markets, the notion that most adults would have an intuitive understanding of the concept seemed equally ludicrous, but in fact around 80% of U.S. adults do. Why understand encryption? Because it affects your life in multiple ways. People who understand encryption
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The Contrarian Solution for Iran
Time for some Saturday politics. Almost everyday there's a story on the news about Iran and the showdown that the media is hoping will happen over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, Pakistan is the elephant in the room. The media ought to start asking Presidential candidates what they'd do about Pakistan, not Iran. Ironically, what we're doing in Pakistan is probably the right course (in broad brush strokes): we're engaging them, connecting them, working to bring them more fully into the world economy. Maybe that's why the media's not asking about Pakistan, but I'd still like to hear what Presidential
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Inline SVG
Sam Ruby puts inline SVG on his blog. SVG is a language for describing scalable vector graphics. Browsers that understand SVG can render the graphics directly rather than downloading a raster-based image with another HTTP GET. Because its tags, you can manipulate it using Javascript. Check out this circle editor from Kevin Lindsey, for example. Just Javascript and SVG. If you're going to serve inline SVG, you need to configure your Web server accordingly, so that browsers get the right stuff. I also believe, although I'm not certain, that you'd need to make sure the entire file it's in
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The Last Chinese Chef and Technology
I'm a little behind in listening to TechNation. Sometimes before I listen to a show on TechNation, I wonder "how can this be related to technology." Such was the case with Moira's interview with Nicole Mones author of The Last Chinese Chef. First, this is a novel. Second, it's about Chinese cooking. But the conversation was, in large part, about the technology of Chinese cooking the role that topipc plays in the novel. They also talked about Mones' previous book A Cup of Light and how it is based on the technology of porcelain. Things like food and porcelain
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Java Desktop Developments
This week's show on the Technometria podcast is an interview with Chet Hasse. Chet works for Sun Microsystems in the Java Desktop group. We talk about upcoming features in the Java desktop and Sun's applet strategy. Chet's new book Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java Applications will be out in August. I'm sure this will be a great book for anyone interested in developing Java clients. The best GUI people I know also have some genuine artistic abilities. If you check out Chet's blog you'll see he fits the bill.
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Optical Illusion: Qwest's Concern for Consumers
I was quoted in a City Weekly article on what Salt Lake City mayoral candidates think about municipal broadband in general and Utopia in particular. It wasn't my quote, however, that caught my eye, but one from Jerry Fenn. Jerry is a lawyer by training and Qwest's Utah President (a position that's mostly about lobbying, I think): Fenn admits that Qwest has been on "the other side of municipally backed telecom projects" mostly because of the long-term harm to consumers. From Salt Lake City Weekly - Optical IllusionReferenced Wed Jun 13 2007 22:00:46 GMT-0600 (MDT) Is there anyone, and
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SSHFS Rocks
Can I just say, one more time for the record, that sshfs rocks. Mounting SSH-accessible file systems and then just using them like any other file system on your machine is ever-so convenient.
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Tacit Knowledge, Nomenclature, and Debugging
Jon Udell has a nice riff on my washed out screen problem, talking about how much of what we can do on computers depends on our tacit knowledge--the things we know that we don't really know we know. Debugging is a task where tacit knowledge plays a huge role. The tacit knowledge thing is exactly the right spin on this. Jon also hit the nail on the head when he talks about the problem of vocabulary. I wasn't thinking or using the word "contrast" until *after* I'd discovered what was wrong. I wasn't even thinking "washed out" until I
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Screen Contrast Display Mystery Solved!
Yesterday I reported on my debugging exercise to fix my washed out display. I thought it was the result of an HP Scanner install or a Photoshop CS3 upgrade. Turns out it was neither. It was me. I use an application called Quicksilver. Some people call it a launcher, but it's much more than that. In fact, it does so much and is so useful that it's hard to describe. The Quicksilver site describes it as a "unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." If you're interested, here's a roundup of Quicksilver tutorials and
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Safari as a Development Platform
I just put a piece up at BTL with my thoughts of Apple's announcement that Safari will be the SDK for the iPhone. Bottom line: it's a sign of the times and a move in the right direction. Feel free to "vote" that the article is "worthwhile." :-)
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Curing Washed Out Display Problems
Yesterday I reported on my debugging exercise to fix my washed out display. I thought it was the result of an HP Scanner install or a Photoshop CS3 upgrade. Turns out it was neither. It was me. I use an application called Quicksilver. Some people call it a launcher, but it's much more than that. In fact, it does so much and is so useful that it's hard to describe. The Quicksilver site describes it as a "unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." If you're interested, here's a roundup of Quicksilver tutorials and
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WiFi on UTA Busses
The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) is experimenting with WiFi on busses. The move is an effort to attract riders. It seems to be working: "Free Wireless Access keeps me riding the bus," a survey respondent said. "Though driving to work would get me faster, wireless access is an incentive to me to stay off of the road. This is the single best thing about riding the bus. Keep it UP!! Please!!!" From Salt Lake Tribune - UTA plan will let riders surf Web while they rideReferenced Mon Jun 11 2007 13:23:23 GMT-0600 (MDT) I suggested a similar move for
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Plane Camping
N9472C parked on the side of the strip(click to enlarge) This weekend, my wife Lynne and I and our two good friends Steve and Jenny Fulling went camping--with our plane. This is easily the funnest thing I've done with a plane in all the time we've owned one. I enjoy camping and love flying, so put them together with a beautiful spot and you can't get much better than that. We flew to a little place called Garden Valley Idaho, about 300NM northwest Salt Lake City. They have a nice grass strip (U88) that's nearly 3000 feet long with
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Security and Virtualization
I've been a big proponent of virtualization over the last couple of years, but I'd never stopped to think how it changed the nature of computer security. This week on the Technometria podcast, I interviewed Greg Ness about security in virtualized environments. It turns out there are things that virtualization makes more difficult, but the ability to run a privileged "security shield" on the hypervisor presents a new, potent weapon in the fight for more secure enterprise computing. I found the conversation fascinating.
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Why Does HP Software Suck Sooooo Bad?
I have an HP Scanjet 4670 that I've owned for 3 years now. I haven't used it for a year however, and a few months ago when I rebuilt my machine, I didn't reinstall the HP drivers on purpose. This morning I needed to make a scan. I worked for an hour to try to figure out how to make it work without installing HP drivers (it's hard to find good information on whether this is even possible) and no joy. I really didn't want to install the drivers and all the other stuff HP would force on me,
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Steve Gillmor on iPhonomics
I love talking to Steve Gillmor because he expands my world view several notches each time. I spent a whole afternoon at the Internet Identity Workshop with him and enjoyed every minute of it. He put up a post yesterday called iPhonomics that says that "[i]n a world post-iPhone where everything changes, battery life becomes the arbiter of usage." The iPhone will kill the Blackberry. Apple TV will kill the DVR. In Steve's view, the iPhone is center-stage--everything else is a peripheral to it. The secret to understanding this is to realize that more and more, text, images, audio,
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Great Principles of Computer Science
Today at lunch, I was watching how the person who took orders communicated the type and number of sandwiches to the sandwich makers. She had a stack of cards for each sandwich type and she'd place them in order on the table by the sandwich making station. I remarked to my friend that there were using a queue to decouple the order taking unit from and processing unit (sandwich makers) so that order taking could happen independently of sandwich making. They could add more processing units (competing consumers) if things got busy. The world is full of these kinds
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XRDS and Self Asserted Claims
Andy Dale posted posted some cautions in response to my post on using XRDS. He later summarized his concerns very succinctly: SEPs in XRDS must be considered self asserted claims and as such should not be trusted on their face. Service Providers should publish the mechanisms by which SEP claims should be validated to be about a specific subject (authenticated identifier). From The Tao of XDIReferenced Tue Jun 05 2007 13:48:15 GMT-0600 (MDT) For an authentication service, this isn't a problem. If I claim 2idi.com is my authentication service, the method for a relying party to check that claim
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Top Ten IT Conversations Programs for May 2007
Here are the top ten downloaded shows on It Conversations (with their ratings) for May 2007. John Newton - Technometria: Enterprise Content Management (Rating: 3.75) Amit Singh - Technometria: Mac OS X Internals (Rating: 4.29) Randall Stross - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.43) Robert Scoble - Technometria (Rating: 3.23) Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.93) Irene Au - Elevating User Experience (Rating: 3.67) Dr. Nancy Mize - BioTech Nation (Rating: 3.80) Gent Hito - Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators (Rating: 3.38) Shel Holtz - Podcast to Your Employees (Rating: 4.00) Phil Wolff - Technometria: Skype (Rating: 3.43) Note:
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When Bricks Meet Online: Stale Inventory
I love bookstores. I love browsing, exploring new things, even just the variety of the covers interests me. I'd hate to see them go away. Consequently, I try to buy from local bookstores whenever possible. The problem is the word "possible." Just today, I ran into something I find all too often--especially with technical books. This morning I was in a bookstore and found a book I was interested in \t The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby. Knowing the Photoshop CS3 just came out, I checked the publish date and saw it was 2003. Suspicious,
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