Technology: January 2007 Archives
A group of 30 of us from the UW are spending a couple of days at a workshop on Service Oriented Architecture presented by Pete Lacey from the Burton Group.
It's a high level overview of a lot of detailed technical concepts, but it's very useful, and should provide a common starting point for a group of us who are likely to be discussing implementation of services orientation in the technical framework of the UW.
Interestingly enough, while the material in the Burton presentation is almost entirely oriented towards the use of SOAP to implement web services, Pete was surprised to find that we're also interested in ReST style interfaces. He says we're the first group he's given this workshop to that's even knowledgeable about the SOAP/ReST discussions, and (happily for us), he really knows this area like the back of his hand. He's an self-acknowledged ReST partisan, being the author of the much-cited S Stands for Simple.
Technorati Tags: soa, web-services
A bunch of us from UW spent last Thursday and Friday getting an extended executive briefing at Microsoft. We got to hear about new and future development efforts on a bunch of the product and technology lines and got the opportunity to meet with some of the product development folks. While the content of what we discussed is under NDA (not that we were privileged to any great secrets that I noticed), I do want to note that, as is always the case when I get to spend time with the actual development folks from Microsoft, I came away impressed by the intelligence and knowledge of the folks that work there. Many thanks to Frank Lobisser, our local MS rep, for putting together a couple of interesting and informative days.
Technorati Tags: microsoft
The city of San Francisco has just released its draft (200 pg pdf file) of a major feasibility study for building a "fiber to the premise" network for the city, titled Fiber Optics for Government and Public Broadband:
A Feasibility Study.
The press release is here.
What did they find?
FTTP is the holy grail of broadband: a fat pipe all the way into the home or business--but in the near future only available for a privileged few located in the limited areas of private-sector deployment.
But private-sector networks3 are not meeting this growing demand for bandwidth and speed in an affordable manner. Though there are private-sector FTTP deployments underway in some, limited areas of the United States, none is planned or foreseen for San Francisco.
In this context of private sector disinterest, municipal FTTP would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities -- by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives.
The report proposes building a fiber network first to provide capacity for city government, then to targeted "enterprise zones" in the city, and then to expand it city-wide. The report details various fiber networking technologies and topologies for deployment in San Francisco, examines costs and financing alternatives, and looks at operational options.
This is definitely worth a look, and it will be fascinating to see how the report is received and what comes next in SF.
Technorati Tags: broadband, networking, municipal-networks, fiber
I'm honored to say that I've joined the The Citizens' Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board (CTTAB) for the city of Seattle.
CTTAB has the responsibility to study and make recommendations to the Mayor and the City Council on issues including cable franchising, municipal networking, technology access, and others.
As part of the process I had to go have my nomination to the Advisory Board approved by the Energy and Technology Committee of the City Council today. They told me to be prepared to talk for a couple of minutes. What actually ended up happening was that Committee Chair Jean Godden and Vice Chair David Della asked a couple of questions about my background and what I thought about providing equitable access to technology for all citizens (you can watch the video (requires RealPlayer) if you're really interested - that part of the meeting starts at about 27 minutes into the video).
What I had prepared to say is, I think, more interesting than what I ended up talking about, so here it is:
I am honored to have an opportunity to serve on the CTTAB.
It will surprise nobody in this room to say that the future grows out of the conversations of the present, or to observe that those conversations are increasingly taking place in ways that we could not have imagined a couple of decades ago, in venues that are enabled by the telecommunications and technology infrastructure that is the very subject matter of this Advisory Board.
The innovative technologies that empower those conversations (such as email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual immersive environments, etc) did not grow out of any grand government or corporate scheme, but are the product of thousands of individual innovators - engineers and academics, business people and students, people with ideas and the will to make them happen. It's important that those of us who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about technology participate in the conversation and work to ensure that those innovations that enhance connections between humans continue to be nurtured and encouraged, and that the environment for individuals to innovate be allowed to flourish.
Thank you for this opportunity and I look forward to working with you on the CTTAB.
Technorati Tags: policy, seattle, technology
I'm happy to say that my ECAR Research Bulletin on social software, titled Digital Rendezvous: Social Software in Higher Education is now available to folks at ECAR member institutions. This bulletin grew out of a workshop on social software at the CSG meeting in Spring of 2006, and talks a bit about what features define social software and make its use interesting in higher education, and what the current state of adoption of some of the social software technologies was at the CSG institutions at that time.
It was fun to get to write this piece - the ECAR Research Bulletins are short (12 page) pieces aimed at executive management in higher education institutions. Toby Sitko at ECAR was great to work with on this project, helping me get the bulletin down to the allowable size from my original draft, which was twice as long. It did lose some detail in the process, so if any of you from ECAR institutions are interested in seeing the original draft I'd be happy to share it.
Those of you who are not from ECAR institutions can at least see the slides (pdf) from the CSG workshop presentation.
One thing I'm not happy about is the way that ECAR's pdf publications don't allow copying of text to the clipboard. If these publications hope to be influential (and I know they do), then making it easy for people to quote sections in other venues is essential - and having to retype text in order to quote a publication in this day and age is simply a barrier to reuse. Given that one of the most stirring sessions at the recent ECAR Symposium was given by UBC's John Willinsky on Sustaining Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Publishing, the use of copy protection on ECAR publications seems antithetical to ECAR's own aims. I know that I myself have been dissuaded from blogging about ECAR publications because of the extra effort involved in copying text into my blog. I urge those of you from ECAR member institutions to let Richard Katz and his crew know how you feel about this - I know I have and will continue to.
Anyway, if you have comments on the bulletin, feel free to leave them attached to this post or send them to me - I'd love to hear them!
Technorati Tags: higher-ed, ecar, social-software
UW Provost Phyllis Wise has set up a blog for discussion and comment on the UW's new vision statement, which includes the great tag line:
Discovery is at the heart of our university
It's a terrific way of using blog technology, and I look forward to following the conversation!
While leading a policy discussion on the mis-named Digital Rights Management technologies (aka copy protection).
"...these technologies have the shelf life of sushi."
Technorati Tags: CSG-Winter-2007, DRM
We had a great workshop on Thursday on collaboration tools and how to approach them in higher education. I was part of the panel that led the presentation, so I wasn't taking notes, but I'm sure the notes will be posted to the CSG web site after the meeting.
For my part in the presentation, I reiterated some of the points I made at last spring's discussion of this topic, and went on to comment that what we're now experiencing in the collaborative tools space is somewhat analogous to the Cambrian explosion, where we have a tremendous proliferation of new species of software appearing almost on a daily basis and combining and evolving at a very rapid rate, making it very difficult to figure out which ones we should engage with at an enterprise level, or even how to construct a meaningful taxonomy of these applications.
Technorati Tags: collaboration, CSG-Winter-2007, social-software
Managing very large files in research computing at IU.
Task force two years ago on research cyberinfrastructure had recommendations concerning storage - Continuing to deliver centralized facilities to support research computing as well as dependable archival storage were identified as important. Large file storage is just a piece of the storage strategy for IU.
They have about a petabyte of spinning disk available for researchers, as well as 4 petabytes of archival storage (the Massive Data Storage System). The "Data Capacitor" captures data from instrumentation.
Data Capacitor uses Lustre OS.
MDSS designed to provide a deep store for large files. Runs HPSS. Interfaces include FTP, Samba, and tar. Radiology is one of the biggest users. Also working with digital library programming. They give the researchers 500 GB for free, and after that they want to discuss it.
Preservation, curation, and long term management of data is a big issue - need to link librarians, computer supporting, and IT professionals. Serge notes that finding ways of accomplishing persistent URIs for data is important.
Backup with mirroring is if you accidentally delete something or introduce bad data in big data sets is a serious problem.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Winter-2007, cyber-infrastructure, storage
