iPod Silence is Disconcerting
I've got a weird problem with my iPod. It won't play music, podcasts, or anything else I load on it. It's making sound--you can hear the clicks in the head phones. And it thinks it's playing the display shows the song dutifully playing with the progress bar moving along. I can even feel the hard drive spinning up as it starts to play. But no sound comes out. I've checked the volume and looked through the settings. I've restarted the iPod. I've even restored it to factory defaults and reloaded everything. Nothing works. Given that it makes sounds for
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Twelve Byzantine Rulers Podcast
Justinian by Meister von San Vitale(click to enlarge) I few weeks ago, I wrote a review of the book Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. Darryl Rosin left a comment asking if I'd listened to the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast by Lars Brownworth. I hadn't then, but I went out that day and downloaded it to my iPhone. I've been listening to it over the last few weeks and really enjoyed it. Lars has a great presentation style and makes the material accessible and interesting. If western history in the first eight centuries AD has always
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Vote for IT Conversations at Bloggers Choice Awards
If you enjoy IT Conversations, consider voting for IT Conversations as the best podcast at the Blogger's Choice Awards site. Naturally, we'd love to win. As an aside, you have to go through a registration process to vote. Sorry. This is the perfect kind of application for OpenID--too bad they don't use it.
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Double Your ID Pleasure with TSA
Via Jim Harper, a report on the TSA's ruling that requires some passengers to present two forms of ID. What's ironic is these are the passengers who signed up for the Registered Traveler program, designed to let frequent fliers escape the inspection line. The TSA is requiring that these registered travelers present a government issued ID (like any other traveler) in addition to their RT card. Beginning last fall, TSA suddenly required that RT members using the RT line show a picture ID and their RT card right before entering the line. These are the same RT cards that,
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Using Amazon S3 with Google Earth
One of my Masters students, Sam Curren, posted a great explanation of how he's using Amazon's S3 service with Google maps to make network links just as fast as the layers inside Google Earth. He's the creator of ActiveTrails.com, a site that let's you upload GPS data of your hikes to create trail maps on Google Earth, so he's got some practical experience in this area.
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Perl Web Framework Recommendations
Does anyone have recommendations on a Perl Web framework? I've heard of Catalyst and not much else. A few things make me leery: the blog is infrequently updated and the last release of the code was November of 2006. I know there are other frameworks (I vaguely remember attending a talk at OSCON) but I don't know anything about them.
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IT Conversations Moves Back
As Doug Kaye announced, IT Conversations has moved back to the The Conversations Network, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. I'm excited about the move because I think it will result in IT Conversations being able to grow and take advantage of new opportunities. It just hasn't gotten the attention that it needed at GigaVox due to competing interests and changing business models. Over the next few months there will be some technical changes which will probably affect me more than you, if we're lucky. Still, you should expect a few changes. Still, IT Conversations will remain largely the same. We've got
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NextPage Document Retention Review
My review of NextPage Document Retention came out a while ago in InfoWorld. "Compliance" is a word that can make a CIO cringe, especially when it comes to document retention and--just as important--destruction. Traditional document management products require that knowledge workers use a centralized system to track documents associated with a project. For some organizations, this is just enough of a disruption to established workflows that the systems frequently aren't used at all. The very applications we use to create, edit, and share documents often compound the management problem by hiding multiple copies all over the computer. NextPage 2
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The Yin and Yang of Software Development
This ACM Queuecast by Mike Vizard interviews Sergei Sokolov, Solutions Manager, for C++ at Parasoft about how putting in the right infrastructure elements allows an innovative development process to exist despite the structure the project wants to impose on the process. You can also listen to the interview if you'd rather.
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IT Conversations on Facebook
Lately Facebook has been all the rage. We've taken note of that at IT Conversations and we've created some Facebook groups for your favorite shows. First, there's the IT Conversations group on Facebook. There's also one for my personal podcast, Technometria. And Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators also has a Facebook group. I'm not sure how we'll be using these, but I'd encourage you to join these groups and help us make them into something that will be useful to all of us. Also, if you're an IT Conversations listener, feel free to add me as a friend as
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Reading Books on the iPhone
Tim O'Reilly points to a review of the iPhone for book reading by Peter Meyers. The conclusion: I took a look at three different kinds of content: a book from O'Reilly's Safari online reading library, a Web site whose layout appeared especially readable on the iPhone, and a PDF. The verdict? iPhone-friendly Web sites are the clear winner. Safari books take second place and are readable for about 10 pages or so at time. PDFs are as lame as ever on the small screen. Pictures, comments, and some suggestions after the jump. From Missing Manual GadgetsReferenced Fri Jul 20
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Conquering Gotham
Last month, I heard an interview on the Diane Rehm Show with Jill Jonnes about her book Conquering Gotham. The book tells the story of the Pennsylvania Railroads effort to bring rail service into Manhattan. The effort combined financial, engineering, and political challenges. The ultimate result was the construction of tunnels under the Hudson and East rivers as well as the monumental Pennsylvania Station. I enjoyed this book on several levels. First, I enjoy reading about railroads. Another great book I'd recommend is the Nothing Like it in the World by Stephen Ambrose about the building of the transcontinental
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Parallels Scares Me Sometimes
Tonight someone sent me an email with a spreadsheet in it. The extension was .xlsx, not something Office for the Mac understands. I clicked on it anyway to see what would happen. Here's what happened: Parallels fired up Excel in Windows in "coherence" mode so that my Windows version of Excel was running in it's own window--just like a regular application. Excel in Windows tried to open the file, but realized it was for Office 2007. Safari on Windows (apparently now my default browser) fired up and offered to download the compatibility pack. I did that and installed it,
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CTO Breakfast Report
The first item of discussion at today's CTO Breakfast was iPhone features and unfeatures. A few of us had one. I passed mine around for people to play with. We also discussed some other devices, like the Blackberry Curve. Apparently the voice recognition on the Curve is very good. Scott Lemon brought up openmoko, a hardware device for building open phones. Looks cool. The discussion of the iPhone's lack of GPS led to a great discussion of why GPS is cool. Someone brought up location reminders: "Next time I'm at Home Depot, remind me to pick up..." We talked
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Addicted to Blogging
I'm 84% addicted to blogging. I got knocked down from 100% because I don't read enough blogs or post more than 1-2 times per day. Ah well... 84%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?
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Scott Berkun: Myths of Innovation
This week on the Technometria Podcast Scott, Ben, and I talked to Scott Berkun, author of the book The Myths of Innovation. We had a great conversation and Scott sold a couple of books right on the phone: both Ben and Scott went to Amazon while we were talking and picked up a copy. If you feel like buying the book after listening to Scott speak, but sure to buy it through IT Conversations, so we get the referral fee.
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Pittsburgh's Diaspora: Coming Home to the Motherland
Last week's Interviews with Innovators has Jon Udell talking with Jim Russell about the way the Web can be used to create social contexts among far-flung people who share some connection--in this case the fact that they all came from Pittsburgh. I found this interesting because of a personal connection: my wife's from Pittsburgh--she's part of this diaspora. I lived in Pittsburgh for six months in 1983 (West Mifflin) and have been back many times. Scott Lemon, my co-host on the Technometria podcast is also from Pittsburgh. Beyond the personal ties, I find the whole concept of regional diasporas
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A Simple Solution to Form Spam
A few weeks ago, Britt Blaser sent me a link to a technique for using CSS to fight form spam. The idea is simple, you add an extra input field to your form and use the CSS visibility property to hide it. The input field won't be visible to humans, but will appear normal to a spambot crawling the Web filling in forms. On the back end, you look for values in that field. If the form returns a value for that field you assume that a bot filled it in and discard the session. If the field is
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Flying to Richfield
Little Bryce Canyon(click to enlarge) Last Saturday, Steve Fulling and I flew down to Richfield with my youngest son. The flight was all about breakfast and enjoying what turned out to be a beautiful summer morning. I was a little concerned that we'd run into smoke from the Milford Flat Fire (the largest wildfire in Utah recorded history), but it wasn't an issue. In fact I was disappointed that there weren't any cool firefighting planes at the Richfield airport. I used the flight as an opportunity to see how well my iPhone would do with pictures. Here's some pictures
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CTO Breakfast This Friday
Our monthly CTO Breakfast will be held on Friday, July 20 from 8:00 am until about 10:00 in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G). We'll be discussing recent technology developments, so bring your favorite ideas from the last month. You don't need to be a CTO to come--just aspire to be one or be interested in high-tech products. Be sure to mark future CTO breakfasts on your calendar: Aug 23 (Thursday) Sep 27 (Thursday) Oct 30 (Tuesday) For directions, please visit the CTO Breakfast page. See you there.
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Optimizing iTunes for IT Conversations
A number of people use iTunes as their podcatcher--the software that automatically downloads a podcast and puts it on their iPod. If that's you, please take a minute to change your preferences so that you don't miss any IT Conversations podcasts. By default iTunes only downloads the most recent podcast from a given site each day. For most sites, which publish less than once per day, that works fine. For sites like IT Conversations, however, that means you might be missing some shows you'd rather have downloaded. I try to just publish one show per day to avoid this
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Fixing Safari Crashes on the iPhone
Yesterday I reported that Safari reset on my iPhone frequently. Darcy left a comment that suggested that a hard reset would solve the problem. Sure enough, one simple hard reset later and the problem was solved. To perform a hard reset hold down the top button and home button simultaneously and about 10 seconds. Note that this is also how you power the phone off. When the "Slide to power off" slider appears, just keep holding the buttons down and pretty soon you'll see the Apple that indicates the iPhone is reseting. I didn't lose any data--a hard reset
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Social Networks, eGovernment, and the iPhone
This weeks' Technometria podcast is a little unusual. Due to a scheduling problem on my part, it started out with Scott and I discussing his recent explorations on Ning. At one point we start talking about how social networks might work in government. I happened to notice that Dave Fletcher, the Chief Technology Officer for Utah, was online and so I asked him if he could join us. He dialed in and we had a good conversations. Naturally, we also discussed the iPhone since it was just days after I'd gotten mine. Also, be sure to check out the
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Adding Summaries to the Top Ten
Some folks have been asking for more information about the top ten shows list I publish each month for IT Conversations. I modified my script to print out that information and republished the list for June. I like doing this since it gives me an excuse to code--something I don't get to do enough of lately. So, if you have suggestion, feel free to make them.
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Safari Resetting (Crashing) on iPhone
Has any one else experienced Safari resetting or crashing on their iPhone. Just the last few days this has happened to me several times. I'm trying to figure out if it's a Web site I go to, how I'm using Safari (quite a few pages open at once), the network I'm on (don't think so), or something else. I hope Apple's getting the crash reports from me and others. Meanwhile, Marc Hedlund has some praise and scorn for the iPhone.
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Blending the iPhone
If you've ever wanted to see the inside of an iPhone, then this video of an iPhone in a blender is for you. Or...maybe not.
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Watching Bad Sinatra
Steve Gillmor on Bad Sinatra(click to enlarge) I'm watching the first edition of Bad Sinatra, Steve Gillmor's new video show. The show starts with Steve walking into Marc Benioff's office. There are a few segments with Dan Farber. I love watching Steve and Dan argue. They're like an old married couple. At one point Dan's walking away and Steve says "Nice man. It's amazing how someone so nice can be so wrong." He talked to ;a href="http://scobleizer.com/">Scoble for a while at the Web 2.0 Expo when Scoble was doing his "Dork TV" bit. He spends some time with Doc
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My Media Consumption Diet
Ian Forrester tagged me on a meme to share my media consumption diet. So here's my diet: Web: I'm on the Web all the time. Even more now that I've got an iPhone. I typically have a dozen tabs open on my browser from various things I'm looking at on any given day. I used to have over 100 feeds on my news reader (NetNewsWire or Google Reader depending on my mood), but I've whittled that down to around 40 by getting rid of things I hardly ever read in detail. I used to use Firefox exclusively, but swung
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Reading News on the iPhone
Before the iPhone was released last week, news of an RSS reader for the iPhone started showing up. If you go to http://reader.mac.com/ with a browser, you see the message "This application can only be viewed using the iPhone." Visting it with an iPhone just shows the message "type an RSS URL into your browser" or something like that. I thought "that's lame--they built a whole Web site to tell me to type a URL into by toolbar?" But when you do, the browser automatically redirects to reader.mac.com and displays the RSS as a nice iPhone formated screen. It's
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I'll Be at Utah Open Source Conference 2007
I've received word that my proposal to give a tutorial on user-centric identity technologies at this year's Utah Open Source Conference has been accepted. I'm excited to be able to participate. I don't know what day I'll be presenting yet. As an aside, I know that conference is still still looking for sponsors, so if your company would like to tap into the open source community in Utah, check it out.
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Michael Yon On Iraq
A friend emailed me a link to Michael Yon's Online Magazine, a singularly unimaginative name that belies the real reporting that's contained in his dispatches and photos from the front lines in Iraq. He sees things many journalists seem to miss because he sticks around after things have gone boom and the TV crews have packed up and moved on to the next flash point.
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Being Extraordinary
One of my favorite morning rituals in the summer is to take my laptop and breakfast out on the patio in the mornings and sit in the shade, while it's still cool, while I eat and catch up on the news. This morning, when I saw that Britt had posted a long essay on flying, fighter pilots, and being extraordinary, I knew I had my morning reading.
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Speaking With Simon Phipps
This week, I posted the Technometria podcast with Simon Phipps. Simon is the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun. I've followed Simon's blog for years. He's one of the people I look to when I want to understand the subtleties of happenings in the open source world. I enjoyed the discussion very much and hope you enjoy it too. Be sure to listen to the end for the discussion of Lego ice cube trays.
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Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for June 2007
Note: Several people asked (in comments) for summaries of the programs. I've modified the program I use to generate this list to add summaries. So, here's the same list with summaries). Here are the top ten most downloaded shows from IT Conversations for June 2007 along with their ratings. You'll note that an interview with Dave Weinberger is the first and eighth entries--he's doubly popular! Moira and I both interviewed him--you'll probably enjoy both as their very different interviews. David Weinberger - Tech Nation (Rating: 3.47)David Weinberger, author of the "Cluetrain Manifesto" speaks with Dr. Moira Gunn about the
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Mobile Blogging
A blog post from the iPhone. Just to prove I can. Doing a lot of HTML this way would be tough.
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iPhone First Impressions
Waiting for the iPhone in SLC at the Apple store(click to enlarge) A little less than a year ago, I asked "what mobile device should I buy?" I received a lot of good advice on different phones, but in the end decided that nothing was quite right. I've had my iPhone for about 60 hours now. For the most part, I've been pretty amazed. Apple set a very high bar and they delivered. Count me as an unabashed fan. When I was waiting in line on Friday, Paul Beebe from the SL Tribune was wandering around talking to people.
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