Archive for Oct 2010

15 entries

IIW XI Is Next Week

Tue Oct 26 09:36:00 2010

IIW begins in a week on Tuesday November 2nd. We are really excited about all the attendee's who are registered so far. The emerging themes we have identified are reflected in the topics proposed: Personal Data Ecosystem Federated Social Web User-Centric Identity applied (OpenID, OAuth, XRD, SAML, InfoCard, Activity Streams, etc.) Vendor Relationship Management Active Clients (tools in the browser and other clients) Identity in the Cloud It is not to late to register. If you want invite friends to IIW-Nov still you can give them this 10% discount code good for Regular that ends at Thursday at midnight:
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CTO Breakfast on Friday

Tue Oct 26 09:06:00 2010

This Friday we will hold October's CTO Breakfast at the usual place, Novell Cafeteria (Mountain View Room) in Provo. We'll start at 8am and go until we're tired or they kick us out. As always, the topics come from you, so come prepared to discuss your favorite tech happenings. You don't have to be a CTO to come, just someone who's interested in technology, high-tech products, and building high-tech businesses. The next CTO Breakfast will be on Thursday December 2, so mark your calendars.
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Voting at API Hack Day: A Kynetx App

Mon Oct 25 14:29:00 2010

Sam Curren and Brad Hitze were at API Hack Day yesterday. In a fit of meta hacking, Sam created a voting app that was, at the same time, an app competing in the hackathon and the app recording the votes for who won. The API Hack Day results we computed and communicated in real time using a twitter account from votes made via phone or SMS. Sam's app combined Twilio, Twitter, and a Google spreadsheet. Sam reports that a few people gamed it by provisioning and then dropping telephone numbers, but that's OK. It was still fun. Next time
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Kynetx Platform Update

Fri Oct 22 14:48:00 2010

We've had some changes in the Kynetx platform, KNS, over the last few weeks that I wanted to update people on. First, a few weeks ago, we cut over to a new parser. Yeah, if you're keeping score, this is number 3. The first parser was based on HOP. We replaced that with Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent as chronicled in a blog post I did in September of 2008. The third (last?) parser is based on the ANTLR parser generator. Cid Dennis did most of the hard work of creating the new Parser and Mark Horstmeier did the Perl integration
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Events, Webhooks, and the Realtime Web: Kynetx Dev Days

Thu Oct 21 08:07:00 2010

At Kynetx we're very bullish on the real-time Web. There are several trends that are leading us inexorably toward better use of real-time data including webhooks, Restful APIs, streaming data from sources like Twitter and Facebook, and Internet identity protocols like OAuth. At Kynetx, we use the term "event-driven" to descibe systems and architectures that make use of these ideas. Kynetx is a system for building event-driven applications that make use of webhooks, APIs, stream data, and user-centric identity. As I said in my post on Static Queries, Dynamic Data: Enabling the Real Time Web, In a traditional database,
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Matthias Felleisen at BYU CS Colloquium: Adding Types to Untyped Languages

Mon Oct 18 10:53:00 2010

Mattahias Felleisen from Northeastern University will be delivering the CS Colloquium at BYU on Thursday Nov 4 at 11am. Here's the abstract of the talk: Over the last 15 years, we have experienced a programming language renaissance. Numerous scripting languages have become widely used in industrial and open-source projects. They have supplemented the existing mainstream languages---C++ and Java---and, in contexts such as systems administration and web programming, they have started to play a dominant role. While each scripting language comes with its own philosophy, their designers share an antipathy to types. As a result, these languages come without a
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Building a Programming Layer for the Internet: Audio from Impact

Thu Oct 14 12:34:00 2010

We held our Impact conference for 2010 last April. There were a lot of great talks. Some of them we were able to capture and have published on IT Conversations. If you have yes listened to Steve Spencer, Joe Vito, Steve Gillmor, or Jon Udell, take some time and put them on your playlist. They are great talks with great messages. The audio from my talk from Impact wasn't quite good enough for IT Conversations--there were cutouts in some spots--so we didn't publish it there. I recently got around to cleaning it up and was going to publish it
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Jeff Lindsay on Webhooks

Wed Oct 13 07:31:00 2010

This week Scott and I interviewed Jeff Lindsay, the creator of the term webhooks and an avid promoter of the concepts. I love webhooks, we you'll know if you've read my post Beyond the API: The Event Driven Internet . Here's the IT Conversations write-up: WebHooks are meant to do something. The concept of a WebHook is simple. It is an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when something happens; a simple event-notification via HTTP POST. Developer Jeff Lindsay talks about what a WebHook is and how it works as a programming API. Jeff reviews how WebHooks are
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Kynetx DevDay After IIW on November 5

Tue Oct 12 11:16:00 2010

Kynetx will be hosting an Impact DevDay on November 5th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. This is the Friday after Internet Identity Workshop XI at the same place. Impact DevDay is an all-day, intensive training designed for programmers interested in creating apps that are cross-platform, context-aware, cross-browser and event-driven using the Kynetx Rules Lanaguage (KRL). I've written extensively about KRL and some about why I believe event driven APIs are critical to the Web we all want to build. This is a chance to understand the platform we've built to support this vision and learn
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Startups in Non-Traditional Places

Tue Oct 12 09:24:00 2010

Tim Spaulding who runs LibraryThing, a startup in Portland...Maine asked me on Twitter if I had any thoughts on startups in non-traditional places. The short answer is I've always got thoughts, but I'm not sure how relevant the are. The truth is that while the Wasatch Front isn't Silicon Valley by any stretch, it's got a thriving high-tech community, thousands of software developers working at hundreds of companies, a nascent, but active angel investment community, three strong universities pumping out graduates and ideas, and ahost of support services including legal and PR that understand high-tech business. Just looking at
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Language Design Gives Leverage

Tue Oct 12 08:41:00 2010

Last Friday I spoke at the Utah Open Souce Conference on designing and building domain specific languages (DSLs). The slide from my talk are online (PDF). Our experience building KRL served as the catalyst and gave me concrete examples to talk about even though I'd hesitate to call it a DSL anymore. Yesteday, I had an experience which reinforced my enthusiasm for building languages. Writing the post on building event intermediaries, thinking through the patterns, and talking to some of the Kynetx engineers who have the most experience with raising explicit events led to thoughts about how to generalize
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Smartphones as the ProtoPDS

Mon Oct 11 11:04:00 2010

Last week I had an interesting discussion with Sam Curren where we hit on the notion that the smartphone is a prototype personal data store (PDS). If you think about it, a smartphone--be it Andriod, iPhone, or one of the new Win7 devices--provides a common calendar, a common address book, and common photo library (among other things) with APIs for interacting to all of them. For example, I can change out my calendar app to something like Calvetica (a popular alternate calendar for the iPhone). Doing this doesn't change the underlying calendar data or interfere with any of the
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Putting Your Own DNS Servers in ClearOS

Thu Oct 7 19:25:00 2010

I've been using a CentralPointe server as a gateway server in my home for years. DirectPointe (I'm on the board) used to offer these, but no longer does, so it had gotten out of date and wasn't being supported anymore. Fortunately, the same system (based on Point Clark Networks code) is available from the Clear Foundation as ClearOS. I like this software because it allows me to manage content filtering, etc. for my family centrally rather than relying on filtering software installed on each machine. It also provides intrusion detection and other services. The whole thing is based on
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Kynetx and Personal Data Services: Project Neck Pain

Tue Oct 5 13:37:00 2010

One of the technologies that seems to be picking up steam lately is the PDS or personal data service. The PDS goes by other names as well. David Siegel calls it a "personal data locker" in his book Pull. Drummond Reed has determined the right name is personal data service rather than "store." I talked about the problem with the name and enumerated some principles for personal data services after IIW DC. I'm certain that the PDS will be a significant topic of conversation at the upcoming Internet Identity Workshop XI in Mountain View, CA (register here). Why all
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CTO Breakfast Meetup this Thursday

Tue Oct 5 09:31:00 2010

In honor of the Utah Open Source Conference happening this week, we'll be holding a special CTO Breakfast meetup on Thursday morning at 8am. The conference is at the Larry H. Miller campus of SLCC. We'll be in room MFEC 123. Kynetx will supply bagels and juice. We'll be done in time for Sam Curren's talk on Webhooks at 10am (you don't want to miss this talk--the Sammage will be incredible). The next regularly schedule CTO Breakfast is on Friday, October 29 at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria.
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