September 2003 Archives

This morning we're talking about Web Services and how they're being used in higher education institutions. Mark Franklin from Dartmouth is giving a quick rundown of what Web Services are either "a great way to unfetter apps from security restrictions" or "a conspiracy to circumvent firewalls by opening port 80 to all sorts of things" :)

I'm now the proud owner of this candy-apple red Fender Roscoe Beck 5-string bass guitar that I bought over ebay (got a great price on it too).

This is my first venture into 5-string basses - for those who might not know, a five string bass adds a low B string, down below the regular low E (six string basses add a high C string too).

I can't wait to start playing it with the band - being able to get down to the low root for tunes in C and D, and the low fifth for tunes in F and G should be just killer!

Here's a story about this model of bass, and here is a review. I'll report back on the bass once both it and I arrive in Seattle later this week (the bass is coming from Michigan, I'll be coming from New Hampshire).

During a session here at the CSG meeting, an assertion was made that with large ERP implementations such as Peoplesoft, SAP, or Oracle, that the products were sufficiently driven by database tables that the business logic of an institution could be captured in the tables and not through programming the core products.

I asked whether people could comment on the truth of that assertion from their experiences.

The telling comment that turned up after some discussion was that more than one institution used the inflexibility of the core ERP products to actually force changes in their business processes - in other words, rather than looking for a product that was flexible enough to support their complex business processes, they specifically looked for a product that would require the business processes to change to a pre-determined model. Wow.

Carl Jacobson, from the University of Delaware, further noted that in their research on ERP implementations, the ratio of cost of licensing the software to the cost of integrating and implementing it ran from 1 to 9 up through 1 to 17. Yikes.

Bernie Gleason is talking about the business models for open source business applictions. From his experiences so far thinking about this, he echoes the earlier conversation that people are most comcerned about support and sustainability of open source software. "Believing is the easy part - trying to find models and ways of selling this to higher administration is the hard part - it's so difficult to get buy-in and to have people consider changes in the way they do things."

Bernie notes that brand names are used to suggest quality and sustainability, and that the well-known open source brands (Linux, Apache, Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL) are no exception.

I'm here in beautiful Hanover, New Hampshire where Dartmouth College is hosting the fall Common Solutions Group meeting. The first workshop topic is about the issues involved in the tradeoffs in buying or building software, and the place of open source software, within higher education institutions. The slides I've prepared for a panel I'm participating in this afternoon are available here.

There's a very nice interview with the always wonderfully common-sensical Tim Bray on Cnet news.com where he talks about the state of the use of xml:

"There is no doubt whatsoever that if you go into an environment where XML is really, truly being used right now, it's ...lightweight, quick and dirty enterprise application integration."

and searching:

"There are really two ways to get information: search and browse. And browse has a lot of potential. But to work, the drill down has to be intuitive. It cannot be stupid. You have to be really aggressive about bringing the relevant stuff to the top. You can't force the person to go through multiple levels to get to what they want."

(or those who never learned it) are dooming all of us to repeat it. A great editorial by former US Senator Max Cleland in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on the lessons that those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam war should have known before committing us to the current conflicts...(thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out in BoingBoing.

Next week I'll be at the Common Solutions Group meeting at Dartmouth University in beautiful Hanover, New Hampshire.

The Common Solutions Group is a group of senior central computing folks from a self-identified group of major research universities in the US. The group is small, consisting of something like 25 institutions, and meets three times a year. That makes it a really interesting forum for considering topics of common interest and actually making real connections with really smart people working on the same sort of things we do.

I don't know about anybody else, but I am growing really sick and tired of the fact that the major IM vendors apparently have no interest in making an interoperable protocol a reality. In the latest news, Yahoo is announcing changes that will disable the ability of third party clients such as Trillian to access Yahoo IM. This is ostensibly being done to protect users from IM spam.

I don't buy it - if these folks (Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft) wanted to they could surely come up with an open protocol that would both protect users from unwanted commercial messages and allow me to use IM without having to have three or four separate clients running on my desktop. Sheesh - it ain't rocket science.

I've really been enjoying listening to the latest Rodney Crowell album, Fate's Right Hand (which I purchased from the Apple online music store - but why did I have to buy every track individually?).

While I don't listen to much contemporary "country" music these days, this album has a certain maturity of voice and inner vision of self that really appeals to me right now, plus the arranging and playing are interesting in a deep sort of way that most Nashville-produced country music isn't. I was a big fan of Diamonds & Dirt when I lived in the DC area in the 80s (and played with a country-rooted swing band called Sassparilla), but haven't paid attention to what Rodney's up to lately until this week.

As the Thom Jurek says in his All Music Guide review,"Fate's Right Hand is the finest record Crowell has issued since Diamonds & Dirt and may turn out to be the finest of his entire career -- and that's saying a lot." Check it out.

A couple of interesting developments in the music file-sharing wars:

- The current print issue of Wired magazine has an article about how the record companies are using a company called Big Champagne that reports on what tunes are being downloaded, how frequently, in what locales. Are they using this data to capture these inveterate music pirates? NOOOO! They're using this service as [gasp] market research to push their product! Will wonders never cease?

- Today's NY Times is reporting that SBC, the nation's second largest regional phone company, is refusing to respond to the RIAA's subpoenas asking them to name their customers.

"We are going to challenge every single one of these that they file until we are told that our position is wrong as a matter of law," James D. Ellis, general counsel for SBC, said yesterday in a telephone interview..."Clearly, there are serious legal issues here, but there are also these public policy privacy issues," Mr. Ellis said. "We have unlisted numbers in this industry, and we've got a long heritage in which we have always taken a harsh and hard rule on protecting the privacy of our customers' information."

When will someone put us out of this misery? Another patch for RPC exploits from Microsoft.

As the remodel of our kitchen progresses, we're starting to spend some time in my parents' condo in downtown Seattle. Last weeked I was down there and had no problem attaching my laptop to a couple of different wireless access points that I assume were nearby in the building. Sure beats tying up the phone line by dialing in. I hear that this is typical in multiple unit buildings...a nice benefit of urban density.

By now everybody knows about the RIAA suing 261 file traders for up to $150,000 per song traded. Yep - now that's good marketing for your product - sue 12 year old girls living in NY public housing projects. One has to wonder about the sheer gall of such actions.

The United States Congress has declared 2003 the Year of the Blues..

Guess all those congresspeople will be movin' themselves on down the line from Chevy Chase to the Mississippi Delta where they'll be waiting to sell their souls at the crossroads...oh wait...most of those souls have already been purchased.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has another pretty good story quoting me, this time on the impact of the current widespread security problems on college campuses. The PI seems to have found me as a news source :)

Waxy.org has a great article and comments about Steinski's Lessons remixes (Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out on BoingBoing). These remixes are historical mid-80s examples of just how compelling an art form this can be. In addition to actually hosting the remixes, there are links to interviews with Steinski. Check it out! And if you ever get the chance to hear Steinski's Nothing To Fear, go out of your way to find it...amazing. Here's what Dave Marsh had to say about it last year. Excerpt:

"Over 59 minutes, it hits you with Ed Sullivan, Dion and the Belmonts, James Brown, fuzz guitar licks, Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Marx Brothers, synth riffs so elusive you can barely remember them, and anonymous singer you know you'll never forget. Beneath all of it the beat, the beat, the beat, stuttering, stomping, chattering, clattering, scratched and battered back and forth among turntables and samplers and who knows what other technological wonders. Gene Krupa beats. Clyde Stubblefield beats. Afrika Bambaataa beats. "

Here's an interesting article on the default open ports on Windows XP Professional and at least one unix sysadmin's questions about those ports. Worth a read.

I got quoted not too badly in a story in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer on college students and file sharing.

At this point I think most of us are far more worried about the security issues posed by thousands of students returning to campus (which for us luckily doesn't happen for another couple of weeks) than about file sharing issues.