Archive for Sept 2010

12 entries

KRL Patterns: Building Event Intermediaries

Wed Sep 29 09:38:00 2010

Recently we somewhat quietly added a BIG new feature to KRL: explitic events. Using an explicit event, one rule can raise an event for another rule. Explicit events are raised in the rule postlude like so raise explicit event foo [for ] with fizz = "bazz" and fozz = 4 + x; If the optional for clause isn't given, the event is raised for the current ruleset, otherwise it's raised for the named ruleset. The with clause allows the developer to add event parameters to the explicit event. The right-hand side of the individual bindings in the with clause
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Starting a High-Tech Business: Hiring Your First Engineer

Mon Sep 27 14:21:00 2010

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-sixth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way---if so, please let me know! Allan Carroll asked me a question on LinkedIn that I thought I would answer more publicly: What's most important in hiring the first engineer at a startup and how do you find that person? On one hand, I'm probably not the right guy to answer this question because
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Static Queries, Dynamic Data: Enabling the Real Time Web

Thu Sep 23 10:15:00 2010

If you're not up on event systems and event programming, no worries. Most programmers aren't. But I'm here to tell you that they're cool, they're accessible, and they're not just for enterprise kinds of problems anymore. Event processing enables the real-time Web. Most of the cool things we want the Web to do will be easier when we no longer rely exclusively on time and request-response based architectures and look to event based architectures to solve more problems. One of the unique things about the Kynetx architecture is that there's no database in the traditional sense. We have a
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CTO Breakfast Tomorrow!

Thu Sep 23 08:30:00 2010

We'll be holding September's CTO Breakfast tomorrow morning at 8am at the cafeteria on the Novell campus. Come join us for a free ranging discussion of technology and high-tech business. You don't have to be a CTO to come--just someone who's interested in high-tech products and businesses. I hope you can make it. Also, we're going to do a special CTO Breakfast meetup in conjunction with the Utah Open Source Conference on Thursday, Oct 7th. We'll have a room at the Miller Campus of Salt Lake Community College and be done before the morning's talks begin. More details to
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Beyond the API: The Event Driven Internet

Thu Sep 16 15:09:00 2010

Summary: There's no question that APIs are hot and generating a lot of buzz and excitement. In this article, I'll review why APIs are causing so much excitement, make an argument for why APIs are not enough, and finally propose a model that significantly extends the power of an API: an event-driven view of the Internet. Extending your API with events will make your APIs much more able to compete and make your business more competitive. After reviewing event models, I discuss webhooks as an event model that complements an API strategy and then briefly talk about how Kynetx
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Come to Kynetx Impact Dev Day this Saturday!

Wed Sep 15 15:12:00 2010

Don't forget that the Kynetx Impact Dev Day is this Saturday, Sept. 18th. A full day of intensive training, brainstorming and app-building for developers. And it's FREE! If you haven't signed up yet, make sure you sign up today so we can save you a seat. Can't make it, but want to watch? We'll be streaming the main sessions on the Kynetx Ustream channel. If you are coming, we'll be having an open sign-up for the App Showcase at 4:00. Have a cool app? We want you to see it, so come prepared to show & tell.
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The Cost of Fighting Illegal Immigration

Tue Sep 14 08:01:00 2010

This week NPR is running a story on the unknown price of border convictions. The question is that we're "getting tough on illegal immigration" but what is it costing. Turns out, no one3 knows. But we can guess: But even tripling the number of Operation Streamline defendants wouldn't come close to meeting the program's stated goal of zero tolerance: prosecuting everyone caught crossing illegally. In the Tucson sector, that would currently be nearly 1,000 prosecutions every weekday -- a quarter-million people a year. The presiding federal judge for Arizona, John Roll, says it's his job to carry out policy,
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PDX Principles

Fri Sep 10 12:22:00 2010

There was a lot of discussion around Personal Data Stores (PDS) and Personal Data Lockers at IIW East. Every time slot on both days had at least one and sometimes two sessions on the subject. (As an aside, if you're not familiar with IIW, the agenda is created in real time, by the participants, not months in advance by a program committee, so it represents more fully the interests of the participants than a normal conference aganda might.) I'm confident that this will also be a major theme at the upcoming IIW in Mountain View CA in November. The
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Referencing and Encoding Metadata

Fri Sep 10 09:03:00 2010

We need data permissions to be as portable as the data itself. So too for all metadata. Over the course of IIW East, I had a revelation (for me) that there's real power in having metadata encoded in the same format as the data itself and, in a related way, allowing self-refernce so that the meta data can be referenced from the document it describes. I think I've always believed that, but hadn't really articulated it to myself until yesterday. Certainly, this idea isn't new. Just look at XML for the largest, recent example. Nearly everything about and XML
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Changes for IIW

Thu Sep 9 15:42:00 2010

There are a couple of changes coming to IIW, one pragmatic and one philosophical. First the pragmatic... Due to some scheduling snafus, the Computer History Museum is not available during the time we'd advertised for IIW XI (Nov 9-11). After much thought and discussion we've determined that the best course of action is to move it to another day rather than change the venue. CHM has many things to like and it's become the workshop's home. So, we're moving IIW XI to November 2-4. We realize the 2nd is election day and hope you'll vote early. We also realize
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New Twitter Spam Tactic?

Thu Sep 9 07:22:00 2010

Today, someone (or some bot) tweeted something that had nothing to do with me, but had my Twitter handle in it. The interesting thing about this is that the URL shortener is smart and goes to Amazon when you first click it, but there after goes to another site (something about Tatoos for Geeks--not sure what the point is). If you just go to the URL shortener's base URL, you get redirected to bit.ly. This seems to be a new tactic to keep Twitter from finding spam: disguise the links so that Twitter doesn't see the real target.
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Twitter and the OAuthalypse: A RESTful Misfire

Thu Sep 2 09:55:00 2010

Yesterday was the OAuthalypse--the day when Twitter stopped accepting HTTP Basic authorizations on theis API. I had a few apps break--like almost everything I've done with Twitter. To get them back working I'll have to spend some time on each moving them over to OAuth. For some that won't be hard--they're already using a library that supports OAuth. For others it will be more work. All of them are single user apps (like the UtahPolitics retweeter and so will use the OAuth single token pattern. The reason for moving to OAuth is so that apps won't need to ask
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