Archive for Jan 2011

10 entries

My LinkedIn Map: Visualizing Your Connections

Tue Jan 25 10:29:00 2011

LinkedIn Labs has released a visualization tool called an InMap that shows your connections and how they're related to each other. Mine is linked from the thumbnail on the right. A few things I noticed: The two large lobes that look like the upper wings of the butterfly are my Utah tech links on the left and my Non-Utah (mostly identity) links on the right. Very little cross-over. At least for the people I know, I'm the link between many people in Utah and many people in the Bay Area and the Identity Community. The Utah tech community represented
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Reading for January 24, 2011

Mon Jan 24 08:01:00 2011

I'm supposed to be posting these weekly, but the book writing keeps getting in the way. I guess that's better than the other way around. Why Google and Demand Media Are Headed for a Showdown - Interesting play out here since DM is headed to an IPO soon. They're in a quiet period and can't respond. This would be a good way for a 3rd party to damage the IPO to their own ends. Is Law School a Losing Game? - I hear this more and more. I wouldn't advise my kids to go to law school even though
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Contextually Correlating Events: The Power of Emergent Behavior in Loosely Coupled Systems

Wed Jan 19 16:42:00 2011

One of the real powers of event-based programming is the ability to contextually correlate events. That's a pretty dense phrase. I'm writing this blog post to unpack it a little in my mind. Hopefully it will do you some good as well. Single events, like web:pageview, mail:received, or phone:inbound_call can be interesting. We've made money on Kynetx apps that rely exclusively on these kinds of primitive events. In spite of that, we can create even more interesting applications when we start to correlate one event with another. This is analogous to building Web applications. While there are plenty of
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VARs, Clouds, and Silver Linings

Wed Jan 19 09:46:00 2011

Hunter Richards has a nice article on the challenges facing value-added resellers with the ongoing move to the cloud. He makes some excellent points about what parts of the VAR business are going away and which are expanding, giving five moves VARs can make to gain a foothold in the new cloud computing market: Specialize Develop competancy in PaaS poducts Make the cloud's efficiency work for you Offer technology-enabled services Promote the cloud to your existing customer base One of the things I like about Hunter's thinking is that he's not focusing, as many do, on the IaaS plays.
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KRL App A Day

Sat Jan 15 12:06:00 2011

Mike Grace, probably the most experienced KRL programmer and without a doubt the most prolific, has been doing a Kynetx App a Day and publishing them on a special blog. When he started we teased hik about doing the Twelve Days of Kynetx, but he's up to 33 now. Most of these are small useful little apps designed to teach a particular feature of KRL or technique for programming in KRL. Here's the list so far: Day 1--Basics and Notify Day 2--Dual Execution Environment part 1 Day 3--Web events and debugging Day 4--Explicit Events Day 5--MD5 and SHA1 hashing
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Alerts and Peace of Mind

Fri Jan 14 09:52:00 2011

I've been on blood presure medication for years--ever since the iMall days. Recently, with the holidays and all, I'd let my prescription get too close to needing refilling. On top of that, I was due to get the prescription renewed from my doctor. And on top of that, I was headed out of towm. I hurried to the doctor Wednesday afternoon but he wasn't there to just take care of it. They said they'd leave him a note to call in the prescription the next day. Uh huh. I anticipated a day of missed calls and the hassle of
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Agent or Endpoint?

Wed Jan 12 10:29:00 2011

Before the New Year, I put up a poll asking what the word "endpoint" meant to people. Overall there were 68 responses. The following table summarizes them: QuestionAnswersPercentage Other answer... 18 \t26.47% \t an entry point for an online service \t13 \t19.12% \t any node on the Internet \t13 \t19.12% \t a node on a communication bus \t11 \t16.18% \t a URL \t8 \t11.76% \t a participant in an event network \t5 \t7.35% While other is the largest category, some of the answers, could be grouped broadly with ones I gave to slightly shift the answers: QuestionAnswersPercentage Other answer...
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Engineers Do for $1.00 What Any Fool Can Do for $2.00

Fri Jan 7 15:12:00 2011

Guest post by Wade Billings, VP Operations, Kynetx When we started Kynetx, we had a very limited IT budget due to fact that the company was bootstrapped with the proceeds of selling the founders Piper Turbo Arrow airplane. From the beginning, Kynetx was built upon the conviction to be initially self funded and very strong beliefs regarding system performance and stability, so from day one, we lived inside a paradox: how do you maintain a high level of reliability, accessibility and stability when you have little in the way of resources or capital to expend. Had we started Kynetx
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Reading for January 7, 2011

Fri Jan 7 14:35:00 2011

Beekeeper Who Leaked EPA Documents: "I Don't Think We Can Survive This Winter" - I sure hope my bees survive! The U.S.S. Prius - from Friedman in the NY Times In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm - Corporate America wants help coming up with fresh ideas. Can a new breed of consultant teach companies how to think? The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies - An app that depends on a dozen APIs has a dozen new ways to fail Live Web, Real Time . . . Call It What You Will, It's Gonna Take A While To Get It
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Architectures and Patterns: Hitting the Sweet Spot

Mon Jan 3 14:53:00 2011

The Web, indeed the Internet, has a rich tradition of being made from "small pieces, loosely joined" to use David Weinberger's excellent phrase. The beauty of the Web is that it's all built from a handful of relatively simple standards: HTML, a standard for marking up documents with formatting instructions and creating rudimentary user interfaces called "forms," HTTP, a simple request-response protocol for moving resource representations (which might be documents formatted in HTML) from place to place, and URIs, a standard for how resources will be universally reference on the Web Using those simple pieces, the Web has evolved
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