Archive for Jan 2010

5 entries

CTO Breakfast Tomorrow - Free Pizza Tonight

Thu Jan 28 06:59:00 2010

Tomorrow is the CTO Breakfast. I know, kind of late notice, but this one snuck up on me. I've been heads down with a major ope-heart surgery of the Kynetx rules engine. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow at the breakfast--refactoring code provides lots of opportunity for reflection on software development. The breakfast will be held in the usual place (Novell Cafeteria in Provo - map) at 8am. Anyone interested in how information technology is used to build products or run companies. Despite it's name, you don't have to be a CTO to attend--just interested in technology, where
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Starting a High Tech Business: Do What's Important by Embracing the Urgent

Thu Jan 21 08:42:00 2010

Image by Getty Images via Daylife 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 twenty-second installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way---if so, please let me know! Last Saturday I attended the BYU vs Colorado State basketball game and came away with a lesson I hadn't anticipated. When the game first started, things seemed pretty even matched and you'd have had a hard time seeing significant differences between the
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Using OAuth to Access Twitter from KRL

Wed Jan 13 09:18:00 2010

The latest build (Build 391) of the Kynetx Rule Language (KRL) includes support for accessing Twitter data intrinsically within the language. Integrating interesting data with KRL is an important part of what makes the language so useful for building cross-site applications that mash-up data and user interactions. But what's really interesting about this release is that we're using OAuth to access the Twitter API and have built primitives into the language for dealing with the Twitter OAuth interaction to save developers from doing it. Not only are we making it easy for developers to write apps that use Twitter,
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UtahPolitics.org All Over the Web: A Kynetx App

Tue Jan 12 21:35:00 2010

Since 2003, I've been running a site called UtahPolitics.org. The site started off as a blog on which I and others posted articles. When I started UtahPolitics.org there was some speculation about my motives. But my motives are simple: create a place I can experiment with new media in an arena that interests me. Last year, in an effort to continue the experiment, I put up a retweeter for UtahPolitics.org that would retweet any tweet from friends of the @utahpolitics account that contained the tag #utpol. When I did that I also morphed the web site--imperfectly--to a site that
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On Science, Society, and Democracy

Mon Jan 11 08:49:00 2010

A few weeks ago a friend said something about science that helped me understand why many people misunderstand it. He said "science isn't the only way I have of knowing the truth." He was looking at science as a way for individuals to know things. Certainly science informs us all--and that's at the heart of the misunderstanding--but that's not the point of science. Science is how we as a society can know the truth about the world we live in. Another example of a societal truth-finding system is the justice system. A court of law is
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