September 2007 Archives
Bill Clebsch from Stanford is leading a discussion on campus emergency respons
- University-wide Governance Bodies - there are various campus bodies that think they're running emergency communications. This is not making for a coordinated effort.
Shel notes that at Berkeley the gray areas are around when to declare activation of emergency response systems.
Tracy notes that there tends to be too much focus on systems and technology rather than the process - nobody's working on the hard problem of how will we get quick responses from administrators who need to activate the systems.
Steve Sather says that at Princeton there's a good working process for deciding whether the campus closes for snow, so that's easy to leverage for other emergencies.
At Yale they have telephony tools including broadcast voicemail and some phones with PA speakers. THey have some homegrown tools for sending mass emails. They could send text messages to phones, but don't have good cell number data.
Steve Sather observes that the usual perception is that when communication happens quickly it's perceived later as having been a job well done, and when people wait in order to be prudent it's usually seen as having been not good. The lesson is to communicate quickly and as much as possible.
Princeton has an emergency preparedness task force with executive membership from across the institutions. People who deal with emergencies carry a card with home, cell, work, and alternate phone numbers for all the members of that task force. At Chicago they've distributed that info to people in a spreadsheet and taught them how to import that into Outlook. At Berkeley they've distributed campus maps and blueprints on thumb drives to emergency responders.
Princteon baught Connect_ED. They did a lot of work to sort the campus community by department, buildings, etc. They tested Connect-ED on May 11. They then used it for bomb threats in grad student housing and the engineering quad. They used Connect-Ed to notify just the people in affected areas - 192 people in one area, 471 in the other. Information was delivered in ten minutes once they decided to deliver it.
Princeton maintains the data on people and then feeds it into the system. This was the first year they've asked the incoming class for cell number as part of the regular packet of information they have to fill out. In previous years when they've asked students for that separately they've gotten less than 20%. This year, because the parents fill out the packet, they have 92%.
Yale is also collecting parent cell-ohone info as part of collecting emergency information.
Collecting information on affiliates who aren't students or employees is difficult.
People are doing regular tests, ranging from twice a year to monthly.
Technorati Tags: CSG, CSG-Fall-2007, emergency-communication
The rest of the morning was spend in some excellent discussions of data management issues, with presentations from MIT, Washington (Bill Yock), and Berkeley, with some lively discussion. The presentation slides are on the web site, so I won't try to recreate them.
This afternoon kicks off the meeting portion of the week, with Tom Barton giving an update on grid technology. Tom asked Carlie Catlett, Bob Cowles, Ian Foster, Von Welch, and Christoph Witzig, Jill Gemmill, David Lifka, Jim Pepin, John Paul Robinson, and Renee Schuey, along with Ken Klingenstein what they'd like CIOs to know about grids.
What is a grid? (Jim Pepin) - Grid is an overloaded term. Grid today almost means cyberinfrastructure - different question than what's a grid in the Globus Infrastructure sense.
Why bother with Grids? it's a way of pooling resources, as both an economy of scale and because of how science gets done.
Charlie Catlett says "...the biggest problem is identity management". Witzig says rolling out PKI credentials to everybody is not a viable option.
Teragrid are working on joining InCommon. Their initial plans are to use Shibboleth to the TeraGrid portal, to get TG credentials.
Bob Cowles - "Would you want to fly in an airplane designed using the Storm botnet?" - the resources contributed to the grid need to be high quality.
EGEE is probably the most successful of the grids - European e-science grid. They've made the most progress towards federated identity management.
Ken notes that grids are good for finding fungible computing resources, but not for real multitasking.
Sometimes the latency in networks is a real issue (Terry - "Physics Rules").
Ken - the campus more than the national Grids deserve some play.
Jim Phelps - these things are commodities - they're in a grid in that some of the people who use them might not be located on campus, but not in the classic sense of being largely available.
Technorati Tags: CSG, CSG-Fall-2007, grids
Shel Waggener starts off with results from a survey on the topic -
All 16 respondents said data management is a highly critical issue - not just an IT priority but an institutional one.
Most schools have a system for classifying data by risk level, but only about half have audit processes to verify compliance. Most of those that don't classify data by risk level also don't have a plan to develop such a system. Only about half of respondents have a system for classifying data by retention requirements.
Everybody has an enterprise data warehouse. Most are concerned about misinterpretation of data from the warehouse.
Most people are deploying Web Services and SOA.
5 institutions have plans to host research data, 11 don't.
Technorati Tags: CSG, CSG-Fall-2007, data-management, data-governance
All of the presentations are at:
http://www.stonesoup.org/Meeting.next/
Talking about email, primarily for students.
Why do we want to talk about this? Save and re-purpose money and other resources.
Why are the corporate players motivvated?
Targeting email accounts for life - a highly valued demographic.
Decision points -
Opportunity and real costs; client-driven service model; Identity management; security and privacy; functionality, features, and services.
Dennis notes that their internal auditor says that this evolution is inevitable.
Jim Jokl - UVa - They've been working on this for a while. They're migrating student mail to commercial providers - two choices available - Google Apps for Education and Windows Live@edu
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/email/student.html
Their current environment is IMAP with WebMail and POP, and 2 GB quotas and IronPort anti-spam, 50MB max message size, Oracle cal licensed for all students, with a small percentage of off-site forwards (single digits, though was increasing slowly).
Some reactions to the announcement - "Rarely is a decision by the University met with near universal praise. The decision to outsource student e-mail accounts to Google and Microsoft might be the exception." Students don't seem to be worried about privacy issues. Most of the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
The single best thing people will get is a seamless transition from student to alumni. They're doing single-sign-on integration.
White-list control to enable guaranteed delivery of messages to/from students.
The state of current migration tools aren't as good as you want, but they're coming along quickly.
They're doing single-sign-on - using pubcookie. SOAP-based interface to WindowsLive, SAML to Google, using Google's java app.
USC has been testing Google with Shib 2.0.
They'll use the same third-level domain name for both Google and Microsoft, as all their mail routing is done at their LDAP directory.
Steve Worona is talking about legal and policy issues with outsourced email
Common issues that come up - FERPA and E-Discovery (the latter more in the context of faculty and staff).
FERPA background -
1974, aka the "Buckley Ammendment"
Limits what you can do with "education records" that you "maintain"
FUD says don't tell anyone anything, but there's been a huge change as a result of the VaTech shootings. There will be Educause Live! events on FERPA on Oct 17 and Nov 5.
What's an "education record"? Anything that can identify a student. A piece of email, e.g.
What's "Maintain"? Maintained by the institution. There are lots of nuances.
FERPA is administered by a unit within the Dept. of Education called FPCO, run by Leroy Rooker. THeir interpretation is a lot of the actual law, embodied in letters written to campuses. The penalty for FERPA violation is complete loss of student funding, but that's never been applied. In practice, Leroy sends letters telling people to stop what they're doing. Gonzaga v. Doe (2002) holds that there is no private right of action for FERPA violation - only the FPCO can bring FERPA actions.
State privacy laws can be more restrictive than FERPA.
FERPA and Outsourcing -
Do you want student mail to be a maintained education record, protected by FERPA? If the mail's not in the control of the university, then it's not maintained, so it's not FERPA protected.
Mail as a vehicle for FERPA-protected data.
What FPCO really says - "protect education records in ways that are reasonable and appropriate to the circumstances in which the information or records are maintained."
E-Discovery -
New federal rules as of late 2006. Document, enforce, formalize maintenance and backup standards. Know where your corporate data is, prepare for "litigation hold". Case law and refinements eagerly awaited. Attorneys think law will be refined over time, but there's a lot of angst and energy being spent right now.
You should figure out your business practices first. Then - treat outsourcing in the context of "agency" - a well-established legal concept of contracted terms of relationships and responsibilities.
It may be that you want the student email provider to not be your agent, but the fac/staff provider to be your agent - there are some issues to explore.
Bruce explores the survey results -
Clemson is offering Google Apps for students as of last week. USC for Spring 08 will get to use Google.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Fall-2007, email, outsourcing
Serge Goldstein from Princeton starts out talking about Second Life by noting that Second Life has outages every Wednesday morning from 9-11 which may be great timing for online sex, but not for academia. He goes on to point to an article in the Princeton student paper where students are complaining that they don't want their academic experience put into Second Life - they want it in their first life.
The New Media Center consortium has purchased a continent in Second Life and helps member institutions build islands. Princeton built some buildings that replicate real campus spaces and others that are new, fanciful structures. Serge notes that you can render 3d environments in very compelling ways in Second Life.
Second Life now supports sound in addition to text.
There are faculty who are interested in various simulations and interaction spaces in Second Life.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Fall-2007, second-life
The meeting opens with a workshop on Shared Media & Data Repositories, and What's New in Scholarly Systems.
Elli Mylonas and Patrick Yott from Brown lead off the morning talking about Librarians, Academic Support and the Faculty: A dialogue towards planning a digital repository. They enact a conversation between a librarian, a technologist, and a faculty member about digital repositories. The conversation revolves around the tension between a static view of digital objects that allows preservation and access vs. a dynamic view of content that allows for development of the objects over time and reuse over time.
Jim DeRoest, from our very own UW, is talking about the Digital Well asset management system, and how it supports the Research Channel. Digital Well is metadata-centric - the storage is abstracted, which allows for use of different storage back ends. Research Channel has thousands of hours of video stored in the Well, with about 30k objects. The total number of objects in the Well is around 300k ranging from jpgs to high-def uncompressed video (1 hour is several terabytes of data). A good collection to look at is kexp.org - all of the content there is being driven from the Well. The next step is Research1, which will be announced at Internet2. It's a YouTube-like interface that acts as a portal for research content.
There's a bunch of discussion of what the funding models for this sort of repository are like. Jack Duwe suggests that one place we might look for business models for "forever" storage is the cemetery industry - what the call "perpetual care".
Jim Kerkhoff and Peter Keane from the University of Texas at Austin are talking about DASe, their Digital Archive Service. It's a PHP-based system. This came out of the need to digitize a slide archive in fine arts, containing about .5 million images used in multiple courses. They've built it to be flexible, to be able to adapt to changing needs as they emerge, like private collections, modules for custom interfaces, etc. They're talking about using folders in Xythos as an ingest mechanism for DASe. There's a question from another campus that's losing customers to Google Images. Peter notes that it's very important to remain agile and figure out how to be quickly responsive to needs and understand how to meet the needs.
Qing Dong is talking about Thalia at MIT, an enterprise image storage and management application. It's designed to support both departmental and personal academic needs, part of a long-germ content management strategy. It's built on AlFresco, using OpenLaszlo and Flash for the web interface. They've built a REST interface.
Tim Sigmon is describing U Virginia's Academic Information Space, which has a goal to enable users to work with diital resources in an integrated environment. It's a partnership with the Libraries. The core is the Digital Library (Fedora-based) and the Scholar's Workbench (based on Sakai and a Fedora-based object repository).
Gary Worley from Va Tech (this must be the Virgina portion of the morning) is talking about how they support digital collections.
Technorati Tags: digital-well, CSG-Fall-2007, repositories
Mark McCahill is talking about Duke's use of Elluminate Live for synchronous conferencing. It started with a dream for a university-wide web conferencing system, where people could easily create their own meetings. They wanted to integrate with the ID management system and to be able to archive and retrieve meetings on demand.
There are uses for new purposes, like providing live classroom support via web conferencing.
All of the vendors are using boutique proprietary software, whether hosted or locally provisioned. There's no way to integrate.
Mark shows a video of provisioning a web conference in less than a minute.
Duke's experience after a year of use is that 308 used the meeting set-up page, with around 636 meeting spaces created, some which have ongoing multiple visits. About 150 meetings have been recorded.
Over 100 departments have used it, about half have created multiple spaces. Most meetings are small, 2-4 participants, 25% have 5-10.
Costs are $2/seat license. There's a brain (server) plus a cold spare, 2 session pool servers, each running 200 live sessions. Storage space is 50 Mb with screen capture, or 0.5 without.
Support issues - ad-hoc usage peaks outside business hours - 8-10 pm for professional schools, and other hours for the Duke Singapore campus.
There's overlap here with audio conferences, video conferences, and immersive virtual worlds.
One of the issues is being able to record and archive meetings to standard formats.
In response to a question, Mark notes that there are definitely some learning issues in participating and hosting online meetings, no matter what technology is used.
In discussion, dimdim is mentioned as a new, open, service that is not as full-featured as the commercial offerings but holds promise.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Fall-2007, web-conferencing
The last morning of CalConnect starts off with a discussion on Time Zones.
There was a committee that looked at the experience of people going through the US Daylight Savings Time change of March 2007 (the first change to DST in the US in twenty years). The biggest problem they found was time zone information not being stored with events. The document that the committee wrote is available here.
As you'll recall from posts several years ago, there is no central registry of world time zones. The most commonly used reference is the Olson database.
Calconnect's Timezone committee is chartered to come up with a proposal for a Timezone Registry. The rough draft is going to request that IANA create and maintain a registry of timezones, with data derived initially from Olson, data stored in xml format which has a 1:1 mapping to icalendar. The proposal is for a DNS-like service where clients can query local servers and local servers can then query other servers. The general feeling is that http should be used as the protocol for this.
The idea here, as Cyrus notes, is to move the timezone data and information about changes into central server-based systems so each client won't have to always store its own version of authoritative information.
Technorati Tags: calconect-fall-2007, calconnect, calendaring, timezones
Steven is talking about some of the ideas that Microsoft is working on for data interchange - like taking a contact from an address book and past it into a web page - they call this live clipboard, created with scripts on a page.
Steven also talks about the Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS, that allows bi-directional data synchronization using feeds. This depends on having well-defined formats for data, like vCard and iCalendar.
CalDAV -
There's a bunch of progress being made on various CalDav scheduling standards drafts.
We had a long discussion about how to handle floating events in free/busy as people travel among different time zones.
EventPub -
VVenue - proposed extension to rfc2445bis that provides detailed information about a place where events occur. It extends the Location property on VEVENT. draft-norris-ical-venue. Next steps include waiting for rfc2445bis to be approved before VVENUE goes therough the process. VVENUE could be used to attach venue information to calendar items from, say, address books, and then publish that info. Cyrus brings up the issue of VVENUE information not necessarily mapping well into VCARD for purposes like import/export. There's a bunch of discussion on the relationship of VVENUE to VCARD.
Chuck goes on to talk about the Event Sharing Framework, which makes it easy for event owners to publish their event data to the public event space. Data is published into "the cloud", where it can be retrieved by anyone who's interested. The EventMap is modeled after Google's SiteMap. Chuck notes that small organizations don't necessarily have the amount of technical knowledge needed for providing this event sharing.
XML BOF
There's a discussion of whether and how to represent iCalendar data in XML - how rich does such a representation need to be, and how faithful does it have to be to iCalendar?
Mobile -
The group has been working on publishing a synch focused Mobile Calendar Interoperability Test Suite. That resulted from a May 2006 survey that found that improved calendar synchronization was high on the desired list by mobile users. They published a white paper recommending the use of iCalendar for syncing.
The purpose of the test suite is to assess a mobile device's capability to synchronize calendar data with a calendar store. Covers basic calendar and contact synch, but concentrates on known problem areas. There are event tests for Basic Sync (create, update, delete), reminders, long fields and truncation, access & priority mapping, special characters, and multi-byte characters. all day events (with time zone handling), "holiday" events, anniversary events. There are a large number of tests around repeating entries (create, update, delete), bidirectional from server-device and vice versa. There are test cases for scheduling - syncing attendee info, accepting/declining invites, and initiating invitations. There are test cases for time zones and daylight savings time issues. There are similar set of tests for tasks as well as events. There's a special set of tests for task completion. There are a set of tests for Contacts as well - including addresses, phone numbers, email and URLs. Some mobile devices don't decompose addresses into discrete elements, which causes problems.
Andrew makes the point that it's good to have the mobile device makers in the consortium, and it would be even better if the carriers were involved in this activity.
There's some discussion about how to prepare for an interoperability test event.
The next work item for this group is to work on a white paper on CalDAV implementation for mobile devices.
Technorati Tags: calconnect, calendaring, mobile-devices, mobile-sync
The other day I was trying to get some data out of a Google spreadsheet and into a document on a wiki or into Catalyst or somewhere else I could use it in some basic formatted text version - and I couldn't do it! I thought "how hard can this be?".
Then I read Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter VI - and I thought "right on Joel - can't happen fast enough for me".
So if history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of Ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got Microsoft Windows. Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API.
If you’re a web app developer, and you don’t want to support the SDK everybody else is supporting, you’ll increasingly find that people won’t use your web app, because it doesn’t, you know, cut and paste and support address book synchronization and whatever weird new interop features we’ll want in 2010.
Once again we'll see that interoperability will be a technology trump card.
Technorati Tags: software
Gary is introducing the demos - Server-to-Server; Free/Busy; and CalDav Scheduling.
Cyrus starts off by demoing CalDav Scheduling - the Scheduling spec defines how clients can send scheduling messages between users on the same server. He shows one user inviting another to an event, using Apple iCal, Mulberry, and the Bedework web interface, all running against a Bedework server. CalDAV scheduling sends iTip protocol over http.
Bernard then demos Server to Server scheduling, between three people all living on different servers, using Apple, Bedework, and Oracle servers and clients. He then shows using Firefox with the Lightning and Lightning Enhancements plug-ins to display free-busy displays from multiple servers using just free/busy URLs.
Very cool - interoperable scheduling among multiple clients and servers! The demos aren't slick and ready for the media, but this is real progress!
Technorati Tags: calconect-fall-2007, calconnect, calendaring
Last night we had dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company, where we disappointed Gary Schwartz by not ordering a tower of beer. I had a good chat with Vince Rubino from Yahoo! about the tension between the need to make social networks open and reusable (why should we have to define the same people over and over again in different places?) and the desire to build closed gardens for monetization.
After dinner Paul Hill led us on a tour of MIT's Stata Center, home of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), as well as the building where such luminaries as Richard Stallman and Noam Chomsky have their offices, and down the Infinite Corridor - MIT has an appeal for the inner geek in all of us - the Roundtable is meeting in the Vannevar Bush room - how cool is that?
Technorati Tags: MIT
We spent most of the afternoon consolidating a list of ideas that had come up during the morning. We didn't get as far as prioritizing them, but we did come up with a whopping big list of 20-some ideas for issues that need addressing in some form.
The rest of the afternoon is spent on thinking up next steps.
Technorati Tags: calconnect, vcard
As I sit in a room of a couple of dozen geeky types that included a high of one (count 'em) woman today, I notice that Tim Bray points out the new Women in Technology series of articles created by Tatiana Apandi.
This series is comprised of articles written by women on the topic of "Women in Technology," which will run through September. My hope is that the myriad of experiences you read about here will showcase how valuable it is to hear from different women at all stages of their careers and lives.
Technorati Tags: gender, technology, women, women
We spent most of the afternoon consolidating a list of ideas that had come up during the morning. We didn't get as far as prioritizing them, but we did come up with a whopping big list of 20-some ideas for issues that need addressing in some form.
The rest of the afternoon is spent on thinking up next steps.
Technorati Tags: calconnect, vcard
I confirmed with folks at Apple yesterday that the new iPod Touch does not include the email client application that is on the iPhone. Not having an email app makes this appealing device far less useful. Also be aware that while the Touch has a calendar application, you can't use the Touch to add appointments - only to view them.
As the folks at iProng say:
Steve Jobs seemed to imply in his keynote that the iPod touch only has wifi so you can buy music from iTunes, and it only has a web browser so you can sign onto public wifi hotspots and then proceed to buy music from iTunes.
That's too bad - it could've been a really useful general purpose wifi communication device.
Cyrus is running through related standards.
Liberty Alliance has an ID_SIS Contact Book Service. Uses XML abstraction of vCard and XPATH-based queries. Web services infrastructure used for the service itself. Liberty also has a people profile.
OASIS: CIQ (Customer Information Quality) Defines XML based formats for names, addresses, and relationships. Doesn't have any direct correspondence with vCard. Has a much richer format for mailing address information and relationships between different contacts.
LDAP - well established directory service application protocol. Used for much more than just contact information. Uses a "tree" model for relationships/boundaries. White Pages schema used for representing contacts. RFC2798 is a common one. Compared CardDAV to LDAP at the BOF in Chicago. COnclusion was that mapping vCard into LDAP is hard and you can't get a good mapping - so it's worthwhile to have a vCard-serving service.
hCard - 1-to01 mapping between vCard and semantic XHTML. Suitable for embedding in XHTML, Atom, RSS, and XML. One of several microformats.
CardDAV - WebDAV-based address book access protocol. Uses vCard as the data exchange format. Similar to CalDAV. Uses proven web technology to provide a low barrier to entry.
Jon Miner notes in the back channel that there's a RDF vcard format at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf
Technorati Tags: calconnect, vcard
Mark Paterson from Oracle is talking about the relationship between OMA DS (the standard formerly known as SyncML) and vCard. We asked the OMA Data Sync group about what the issues are with vCard in that world.
it's a method for synchronizing contact and calendar information between a handheld device and a computer. You can use it for syncing any data.
OMA doesn't want to be in the business of defining information payloads - wants to use existing information. For instance, supports vCal and iCal. Supports vCard 2.1 or 3.0. So any problem in vCard affects synchronization.
There are too many Type combination possibilities in vCard. Would be nice if there were a more stringent definition of order of types and possible combinations.
There's no good way of knowing what a device can store or provide.
There's no support for enumerating contact methods.
Phone number formats aren't probably defined, nor are addresses.
Formats for numbers, addresses, date/time stamps aren't specified enough.
Obsolete methods of communication are supported while new methods are not.
OMA DS would like a Vcard standard that solved these issues (like calsify for vCard) and test suites that help with conformance and interoperability. So if CalConnect could sponsor some vCard exchange events that would probably help.
Despite its problems, vCard has been successful and is supported in lots of places.
Chris is talking about the vCard BOF at the recent IETF. To have a successful working group in the IETF there needs to be one or two chairs. Allowed up to two BOFs to form work. There was quite a bit of interest, but a little short of people with the energy to keep the work happening. He's looking for the second co-chair. Then charter can be completed and a working group can be formed pretty quickly. Next IETF is first week of December in Vancouver.
Nice to see Google Presentations join the Google Docs family! It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Powerpoint does - bug or feature?
Dave Thewlis, in his intro to the day, notes that vCard is one of those things that everyone complains about, but nobody has stepped up to try to fix. The goal of the day is to try to understand what the problems are and what some likely approaches might be to solve them.
Cyrus is giving the Overview of where we are today with vCard.
vCard history - was developed by Versit Consortium in 1995, based on X.500, brought into text format as IETF standard.
Transferred rights to Internet Mail Consortium in 1996. Vcard 2.1.
Later IETF standardized vCard 3.0 in 1998. A few IETF extensions have been done since then to add specific fields like Jabber ID etc. But hasn't been any formal enhancement work since then.
vCard is in heave use today as a contact interchange formate - most desktop email programs support it, mobile devices, etc. There are spinoffs like hCard microformat standards, Jabber XML variant. The hCard people did a detailed analysis of the vCard format and what the problems are with it.
Issues - Interoperability - we need all apps and devices to exchange data without loss or corruption in either direction. That's where users experience problems.
We're seeing new technologies that need to use contact info in new ways - like social networking. We need extensibility in the format that allows adding new parameters while maintaining interoperability. Lack of formal extensibility (e.g. a registry for new properties) has led to loss of intereop.
Why are we here? Various groups interested in improving the state of vCard interoperability. The IETF are also assessing interest. Goal is to determine what the interest is and what steps we should take to move the work forward.
Experiment - let's all exchange vCards right now.... We ought to be able to easily do this. Instead we all still have paper business cards - our goal should be to put the business card scanner people out of business.
Questionnaire comments - about 20 received.
Multiple vCards in one file is not always supported
Better UTF-8 support. Relates to internationalization issues.
Easier way to drag and drop vCards between apps
Incompatible TEL attributes on mobiles. Or work, home, preferred, etc. Attributes don't make sense together.
What extensions are supported? distinguished name. lists of x- properties, many IM related. Do we want to go out and survey what x- properties are out there and figure out which should be standardized?
What are the alternative contact formats? XML formats with SDKs. CSV variants (Outlook, Tbird, et al), LDIF, Updateable vCard (goes back to an address book service - keeping vcards up to date over time), LDAP schema, RDF/XML.
Things to consider: Consider issues arising from use of hCard microformat; Sync IOP issues caused by current limitations; Lack of groups; Linking vCard info to other directories and repositories; get vCard IM and Calendar extensions deployed.
Other issues: Get everybody on same version (mobile systems still tend to use vCard 2.1); Use for things other than people (organizations, venues, etc).
Technorati Tags: calconect-fall-2007, vcard
I'm glad to see that eMusic will be offering audiobook downloads with no copy protection.
I'm not a major audiobooks listener, though we do tend to listen to them on long car trips a few times a year, and Michele likes to listen to books when she exercises. I've been frustrated by trying to get audio book content into the digital shape I want - which is on an iPod. Ripping CDs from the library is a royal pain because many of the audiobook CDs either aren't in or are inconsistently coded in Gracenote, which means you have to manually edit all the track information in iTunes. The format of online audiobooks that the King County and Seattle Public libraries offer has Windows DRM encoding, which doesn't work at all on Macs or iPods, and buying the books from iTunes at $20 or more a pop seems way out of line to me.
eMusic has been my major source of new music for a while now, and I've been really happy with the selection - for my eclectic taste the lack of major label content is mostly a feature rather than a bug.
This quote from the New York Times story on the new audiobooks rings true to me:
“Our customers don’t steal music,” said David Pakman, chief of eMusic, of the company’s 300,000 subscribers, who pay from $9.99 (for 30 songs) to $19.99 (for 75 songs). “A lot of them are technically sophisticated, but they’re not prone to piracy.”
I have to say that to my mind, $10 for one book a month still seems a bit pricey - I would think that they'd at least undercut the price of a paperback the market for audiobooks would really take huge leaps.
Technorati Tags: emusic, audiobooks
I'm off to MIT for two consecutive weeks of meetings.
This week it's the CalConnect get-together, starting with a workshop on the state of the vCard standard tomorrow. It seems inevitable that a group dealing with calendaring and scheduling would at some point have to start asking questions about the lamentable state of interoperable ways to store and use information on contacts and address books, and this is the start of that conversation. The rest of the week will be taken up with the CalConnect Roundtable.
The following week is the Common Solutions Group meeting, including workshops on Shared Media & Data Repositories, and What's New in Scholarly Systems (that's all one workshop), Google Apps and the Like, and Data Management / Data Governance.
I'll be blogging the conversations from the meetings as we go.
I also hope to catch up with colleagues from Boston while I'm there - if you're around in Boston over the next two weeks, drop a line!
Technorati Tags: calconnect, CSG, meetings
Bill St. Arnaud points out this August 29 article from the Washington Post about the development of fiber to the home in Japan, where people can routinely get 100 mbps in their houses and businesses.
The burgeoning optical fiber system is hurtling Japan into an Internet future that experts say Americans are unlikely to experience for at least several years.
Shoji Matsuya, director of diagnostic pathology at Kanto Medical Center in Tokyo, has tested an NTT telepathology system scheduled for nationwide use next spring.
It allows pathologists -- using high-definition video and remote-controlled microscopes -- to examine tissue samples from patients living in areas without access to major hospitals. Those patients need only find a clinic with the right microscope and an NTT fiber connection.
"Before, we did not have the richness of image detail," Matsuya said, noting that Japan has a severe shortage of pathologists. "With this equipment, I think it is possible to make a definitive remote diagnosis of cancer."
Japan's leap forward, as the United States has lost ground among major industrialized countries in providing high-speed broadband connections, has frustrated many American high-tech innovators.
The article traces the roots of this capacity to the competition in Internet services that was unleashed by the Japanese government requiring the big telcos to open up access to their transport in 2000. A pertinent case study in network neutrality, for sure.
I was at a meeting recently where it was suggested that our rallying cry for municipal broadband should be for a gigabit to the home. Sounds a lot better than the (up to) 12 mbps Comcast is advertising as "high speed".
Technorati Tags: network-neutrality, broadband
Once upon a time, I loved Microsoft Word. Back in the last century, when Microsoft released Word 2.0 for Windows in 1992, I was in word processing nirvana - it had all the features I needed for regular writing, whether it was expository writing (I was doing a fair amount of user documentation for online databases back then) or system specs. It was fast, clean, and elegant. Remember this screen?
Over the years, however, as Word has gotten more and more feature-rich, I find I use it less and less. Now, though it's still installed on all my computers, I basically only use it for viewing documents other people send me. For writing I tend to use a plain text editor like TextMate on my Macs or Crimson Editor or Notepad on PCs, or I write in the Ecto blog editor (which might just be my favorite) or the email editor, or in a wiki.
I've been thinking that I'm in a tiny minority on this, as some sort of tech geek, and that most people are happily living a great portion of their lives using Word and getting lots out of it.
Today, however, I happened across Steven Poole's Goodbye, Cruel Word blog post, and here, eloquently expressed, were the same sentiments, coming from the hands of a real, you know, writer, and over a hundred comments, mostly agreeing wholeheartedly.
Sadly for me, although it wasn’t strictly necessary, after a few years and a colour Performa I “upgraded” to Word 98, and somehow the magic was gone. Yes, I turned off all the crappy lurid toolbars and tried to make the compositional space as simple as possible, but by this time Word was stuffed with all kinds of “features” that let you print a pie-chart on the back of a million envelopes or publish your cookery graphs to your “world wide web home-page”, and it already felt to me that Word was only grudgingly letting me write nothing but, you know, words. Trigger Happy got out of Word 98 and onto the streets, but not without routine crashes and the occasional catastrophic loss of a few finely honed paragraphs.
I was still somehow brainwashed, though, as perhaps many people still are today, into believing that Word was the “serious” word-processor: the professional tool for anyone who did heavy lifting with language. Part of the reason for Microsoft’s success in this propaganda trick, I think, was its brilliant choice of file-name extension. Think about it: .doc. That means “document”. A .doc just is a document, right? And a document has to be a .doc. Stands to reason. Anything else would look amateurish. If they had called their files .mwd or something, we might have all jumped ship a lot sooner.
Maybe I'm not so iconoclastic after all...
The latest stats -
From off-campus we processed 127,405,366 messages, 80.1% of which were classified spam. That brings us to over 827 million for the year, which is more than we did for all of 2006. By the second week of October we'll have exceeded 1 billion messages processed.
Man - that sucks.
I didn't listen to the Burton Group briefing on whether or not the iPhone is "enterprise ready" (apparently Burton thinks not), but I agree with Bob Blakeley's view as expressed by Phil Windley:
While you can certainly make a case that encrypting data on the device (even contacts) is necessary for many enterprises, the model that keeps apps and data on the Web–removing the need for these to be remotely managed–is exactly the kind of mobile platform enterprises ought to want.
There are applications you can think of–field technicians in areas with poor connectivity who need access to large amounts of data–but those are probably the exception, not the rule. Most road warriors could use Web-based tools with little loss in productivity. I have been amazed at the richness of some of the iPhone applications that I’ve seen and it’s only been a few months.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, enterprise
When I was in the Apple Store at University Village on Monday waiting to talk to them about my deadened iMac, I noticed that there was not a single Mac Mini nor a Mac Pro to be seen on the floor, nor any mention of them.
Interesting.
Technorati Tags: apple
My colleagues over at Catalyst have released the File Manager web tool, and it's a great addition to their suite of web tools. File Manager does just what you'd think - allows you to upload, download, and manage files stored in UW file stores, including the Catalyst WebFiles space and the Homer or Dante clusters. Performance is snappy and the interface is self-explanatory - what more could you ask for?
A couple of screen shots:
The day before I left for vacation the screen went blank on our family room iMac (a 20-inch g4 "desk lamp" model). When we got home on Sunday, Michele impressed on me how important that computer is in the life of our household.
The screen had a barely discernible glow to it, so I knew the screen itself wasn't totally dead, and the computer continued to serve up documents to its locally attached printer from other machines in the house, so the computer was working.
So yesterday I trotted it down to the Apple Store to see what they could figure out. The verdict was that the part of the logic board that drives the internal display was dead. The machine works fine with an external display. That's a bummer with an all-in-one device that I bought particularly because of the gorgeous 20-inch wide screen.
Of course the machine's Apple Care extended warranty program expired on June 29. Sigh..
$635 estimated repair bill. Growl.
This boy is not a happy camper. Wail
I'm not about to sink that amount into a three year old computer. More sighs.
I guess I'll buy a new iMac for the family room and stick the old one downstairs with an external display on it (alongside the five year old Dell that has been chugging along with no problem).
But I'm not happy about having to spend that kind of dough right now.
