Archive for Mar 2009

15 entries

You Should Be Listening to Money:Tech

Wed Mar 25 08:23:00 2009

We just launched a new series on IT Conversations: Money:Tech. You might think "I don't care about financial services" (especially now), but they have some interesting, relevant problems. The first show illustrates that well. In Data and Capital Markets, Michael Stonebraker discusses why traditional relational databases don't work for many of the problems that financial systems face. Along the way he talks about the power of linguistic abstraction and gives the reason that Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and other "elephant vendors" products run 30-100 times slower than the best solution in a range of problem spaces. For anyone who's interested
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CTO Breakfast on Friday

Tue Mar 24 15:52:00 2009

The CTO Breakfast will occur this Friday, Mar 27 at 8am. The venue has changed for this breakfast: we'll be holding it in conjunction with PodCamp SLC. The venue is Neumont University in South Jordan. There's no food at Neumont , so Kynetx will provide bagels, etc. If you want something else, you probably ought to stop and get it before you come. The CTO Breakfast is open to anyone who wants to come and is free. You'll need to register for PodCamp SLC separately if you want to attend that. We'll be ending before the
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The Institutes of Oratory and Open Source Software

Tue Mar 24 08:29:00 2009

Image by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr One of the advantages of being the Executive Producer of IT Conversations is that I get to see what's in the queue. When I saw that r0ml was coming up on OSCON, I was really looking forward to it. I published the show yesterday and listened to it this morning on my drive to Salt Lake. I wasn't disappointed. In his talk, which takes a little while to get going, Robert combines Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory and the Compendium of Juggling to develop an open source software development methodology. The real point, I
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Kynetx on IT Conversations

Mon Mar 23 08:44:00 2009

Last week Jon Udell interviewed me on Interviews with Innovators about Kynetx and Contextual Browsing. It was fun to be the one answering questions for a change and Jon asked some good ones. If you've been wondering what Kynetx does, this podcast is a pretty good intro.
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CIO Blogging: Kelly Flanagan

Sat Mar 21 09:57:00 2009

Image by minifig via Flickr Kelly Flanagan is a good friend, a collegue, and the CIO of BYU. Years of seeing all the trouble I get into with my blog were not enough to disuade Kelly from starting one of his own. Kelly calls his blog Technology: Rantings, Ramblings and Reviews. Kelly is a CIO who gets his hands dirty--configuring systems, transfering video, building things--and is also curious. Those combined in his blog to create articles that are much more interesting that the typical "enterprise computing" discussion you get from many CIO bloggers.
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Starting a High Tech Business: Achieving Q=1

Wed Mar 18 19:47:00 2009

I'm starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the sixteenth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way----if so, please let me know! In fusion energy research Q is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state and is called the fusion energy gain factor. When Q=1, the amount of power that the reaction
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Participate in Usability Testing for HP

Tue Mar 17 17:03:00 2009

A friend of mine at HP is looking for small business owners (1-20 employees) to participate in some usability testing of online tools for marketing their business. Participants will receive a $50 gift card to Amazon.com or Best Buy, or a discount on design services like brochure creation, for an hour of their time at the HP office in American Fork, Utah. If you're interested, just send a note to Esther at HP.
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Continuous Deployment

Fri Mar 13 10:57:00 2009

This morning Steve gave a presentation on context automation and Kynetx at the Utah Technology Council's CTO P2P forum. The presentation was great and the audience asked a lot of good questions. One thing that came up (I don't even remember why) was the subject of continuous deployment. I decided I'd pull a few URLs out of my head and put them in a blog post for people to mull over. The first URL I think of when I consider continuous deployment is code.flickr.com. If you've never been there, the bottom of the page lists when the last deployment
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We Are the Ten

Mon Mar 9 09:27:00 2009

Steve Fulling articulated some principles a few years back on business, leadership, and life that he called "We Are the Ten." While the ideas in general were not necessarily original with him, the document was a powerful vision ofhow self-actualized people go about working together. Here is the preamble: We believe teams are only as good as the values that bond them together. We reject the notion that in a team of one hundred, ten do the work. We are the ten. We believe values and culture can fundamentally transform the behaviors and actions of a team. We reject
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Registration for IIW8 (2009A) is Open

Mon Mar 9 08:51:00 2009

You're invited to the 8th Internet Identity Workshop to be held May 18-20, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. Registration for IIW2009A (IIW8) is open now. Early Bird Rates are in effect until April 1st. This is a $50 discount for independents and a $75 discount for regular tickets from last year's price. We need to get 75 people registered by April 1 to make a final confirmation for our conference space at the Computer History Museum. All those who book early will get a special thanks. Sponsorship opportunities are still available for the following:
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Pluto and the Importance of Nomenclature

Fri Mar 6 08:45:00 2009

This Moira Gunn interview wth Neil deGrasse Tyson , director of The Hayden Planetarium and author of the book The Pluto Files is a fun and humorous discussion of the importance of nomenclature. Calling Pluto what it is--a drawf planet--makes some people mad, but it's better science and leads to better science education. I've long been a believer in the importance of nomenclature and my experience in going through nomenclature discussions at Kynetx with Craig Burton has only strengthened that belief. We're a different company because of how the right words help us understand and explain ourselves in powerful
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Using Grep and Find

Thu Mar 5 11:36:00 2009

Image by dannyman via Flickr One of my favorite tools is "grep." That gives away the fact that I spend more time on the command line than many. One of the things I originally loved about OS X was that I could fire up a terminal and use the machine just like Unix (yeah, Linux was a new fangled thing for me). Recently I complained about always having to look up a certain switch for grep and Weldon Dodd tweeted "if you write a blog post about grep, maybe others will commit the switch to memory too, and when
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Top Ten List of Valuable Web Sites and Services

Wed Mar 4 17:54:00 2009

A while ago Christian Gray asked a number of people (Joe Andrieu, Tony Winders, Mike Reid, Michael Lodge, William Hayes, Richard Weddle, Scott Lemon, me and Ian Palmer) to send him a list of Web sites and applications that they found valuable. Here's the list (in no particular order): http://www.kiva.org -- microloans, loans that change lives http://www.linkedin.com - professional social networking (free and premium) - best way to leverage your professional network http://www.getfriday.com -- virtual assistant, we first read about them in the book The World Is Flat http://www.ning.com -- start your own social network/project group today, very easy
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Guy Kawasaki: How to Drive the Competition Crazy

Wed Mar 4 09:54:00 2009

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr Guy Kawasaki is speaking at the Infopia ecommerce conference in Salt Lake City today. (You might also enjoy reading my notes from the last time Guy was in Utah.) His topic is how to drive the competition crazy. In standard Guy style, he gives his talk as a list of ten things: Find a mighty opposite - find a great enemy who is trying to do something in direct opposition to what you're doing. Portray them in ways that emphasize how you're different. It doesn't have to be a company. It could be
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Augmentation Gone Wild

Tue Mar 3 10:04:00 2009

Joe Andrieu has written a blog post on Netizen Developers wherein he makes this assertion: As netizen developers, we have an obligation not just to do what makes us money, or even what makes users happy, but to build systems that work at Internet scale, when everyone does it. If the systems we build don't work when everyone tries to get into the game, then we are just being selfish, hording value just because we are first-to-market. From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen DeveloperReferenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:07:56 GMT-0700 (MST) He mentions systems like the one we're
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