Oren Sreebny's Weblog

November 14, 2007

Upgrading to MT4 - posting with ecto

Trying to post with Ecto. If you see this, it works.

Technorati Tags: movabletype, blogging, upgrades

Posted by oren at 3:48 PM | Comments (0)

Upgrading to MT 4

So I just tried upgrading this blog to Movable Type 4.01. If you're seeing this post, the upgrade is successful.

Posted by oren at 3:29 PM | Comments (0)

November 8, 2007

Creating my own OpenID identity provider

Today, in and amongst meetings, phone calls, and emails, I managed to (with a little help from Adam Graffunder) set up my own OpenID identity running on my staff web account. Why OpenID? Well, more and more web sites and services are accepting OpenID as an authentication method. Here's a new article about it called How will OpenID change your site?

How did I do it?

I used phpMyID.

The process basically went like this:

I created a new directory on my web site (staff.washington.edu/oren) called myid. I uploaded the two php files from phpMyID into that directory (MyID.config.php and MyID.php) and followed the installation instructions in the README document.

When I then tried to log in, I got a 'Missing expected authorization header' error. No problem - the troubleshooting section of the document explains how to deal with that by using an included .htaccess file - on our server uncommenting the first option set in the file worked (if you're confused, let me know and I'll send you a copy of what worked for me).

I then added these two lines to the head section of my index.html file:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://staff.washington.edu/oren/myid/MyID.config.php">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://staff.washington.edu/oren/myid/MyID.config.php">

And then I was able to log into Basecamp by telling it to use the OpenID server at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/

Cool!

What would be even cooler? Well, phpMyID requires me to pick a new user name and password for its purposes. When I use the OpenID I then get prompted to enter that name and password, using HTTP Digest authentication. I'm sure somebody who knows their way around in this space could figure out how to make it use Shibboleth or Pubcookie and my UW NetID instead. But that's for someone more sophisticated than I - like Mr. Gettes, or Nathan, or Zephyr :)

Technorati Tags: authentication, openid

Posted by oren at 4:43 PM | Comments (2)

Tim O'Reilly on why Open Social falls short

Tim O'Reilly, in a commentary on a post about Open Social by Mark Cuban gets in far more eloquent way what I was saying about Open Social the other day.

Tim says:

While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don't think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building "social applications" misses the point. We don't want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn't about a social UI. It's about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google's breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn't give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created. And that will be the downfall of OpenSocial. If all you can build are Facebook-like applications, Facebook wins.

We all want what Mark describes: a definitive place under our own control where we can describe who we are and what we care about so that applications can use that data to provide us with smarter services. We don't really care whether that repository is at Facebook or Google or any other site, or perhaps even if it's an aggregation of data from many places, but we do want it to become more useful to us. Not just more useful to the holder of our profile, but to every site we touch on the internet. Whichever company gets there first, to a truly open, user-empowering, internet-turbocharging social network platform, is going to be the net's next big winner.

The more I think about it, particularly in higher ed, the more I think there's a place for an open profile platform, where people can store their professional data (and the social data that goes with that) and control what parts of it they want to make visible to which people and which applications, and for open ways of accessing that information can be used to embed "socialness" into applications.

Technorati Tags: facebook, google, open-social, profiles, social-software

Posted by oren at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

November 2, 2007

Open Social API

I was really excited to see the announcement about Google releasing the Open Social API, which provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Google's page about it is at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ and Marc Andreesen has a good writeup of the release on his blog at http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/11/report-from-the.html.

After I watched the video, though, I realized that Open Social doesn't do what I was thinking about - which was to allow me to easily build a new web site that would reach into the social networks on the many sites supporting Open Social (like Ning, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, etc.) to achieve functionality that leverages the social connections people have established in those spaces.

Instead, what Open Social is about is being able to write a single web application that can be embedded into each of those social networks' own sites without having to be rewritten. That's cool too, but not as cool as what I had hoped for.

Technorati Tags: google, social-software

Posted by oren at 4:08 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2007

Apple iPhone development TechTalk

Today we're hosting folks from Apple giving one of their iPhone Tech Talks at the UW in conjunction with the Educause 07 conference here in town. The content that's being covered is available at the Apple iPhone Developers' web site, but it's nice to spend a day getting it all in a bundle with other folks who are interested in these topics.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, development, web

Posted by oren at 11:50 AM | Comments (2)

October 22, 2007

Some interesting Facebook demographics

Over the weekend a friend who is a highly placed professional at one of the big medical centers here in Seattle (not the UW) told me that their IT department blocks all use of blogs and social software sites from employee desktops. That just seems inconceivable to me. It was well over a year ago when Rael Dornfest asked the audience at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference whether their feed readers were more important than their email inbox, and a significant proportion of the audience raised their hands. I can't imagine being professionally informed without reading regular blogs - they're far more important to me than what's being published formally, at least in my field. I also told my friend about how we're starting to use Facebook and other sharing sites for our work these days. Beth Kantner pointed out these two interesting slide shows (require Flash) on Facebook demographics.

I was particularly struck by these facts from the first presentation, which came from the Forrester Consumer Conference:

• 44 million active users, projections for 60 million by the end of 2007
• More than half the users are female
• More than half the users return daily
• 34% work as professionals

The second presentation, from French consulting firm Faber Novel, has a slide with some interesting ideas about metrics in measuring success of social media, on slide 28, which has some ideas for how to measure user engagement (e.g. ratio of visits to number of content pieces posted, or % of active users to the total), virality (if that's a word), and influence.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social-software

Posted by oren at 6:57 AM | Comments (0)

Using MoFuse to generate a mobile-friendly version of this blog

I just started using the MoFuse beta to generate a version of this blog that's tailored for use on mobile devices. MoFuse takes the RSS feed from the blog and creates a nice version of the site which loads up easily on cell phones and other hand-held devices. You can check it out by clicking on the MoFuse icon in the sidebar or at:

http://m.mofuse.com/orensr

Technorati Tags: blogging, mobile-devices, mofuse

Posted by oren at 5:13 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2007

Will email survive the spam siege?

James reports the statistics for UW email in September:

Sadly, 90.6% of the 137,001,383 messages we processed last month were classified as spam.

Another interesting item: sometime during the afternoon of the 10/7 we processed our billionth (yes, with a B) message for the year. That's more than we processed through all of 2003, 2004, and 2005 combined.

...we're now routinely seeing over 6 million messages a day and set a new percentage record on 10/14 with 96.8% of 5.8M processed that day being spam.

One has to wonder how we can (or why we should) continue to invest in providing robust technology infrastructure to provide a service that overwhelmingly serves to transport messages we don't (or would prefer not to) deliver.

While the recently released ECAR Research Study on Undergraduate Students and Information Technology holds that an overwhelming percentage of undergraduate students prefer to receive communication from their college or university via a university provided email account, a 2005 Pew study on Teens and Technology found that

The presence of email in teens’ lives has persisted, and the number that uses email
continues to surpass those who use IM. However, when asked about which modes of
communication they use most often when communicating with friends, online teens
consistently choose IM over email in a wide array of contexts.

and the ECAR study also found that 69.3% of 18-19 year-olds surveyed use social networking sites like Facebook daily.

Of course the Pew study also found that Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view email as something you use to talk to “old people,” institutions, or to send complex instructions to
large groups., and ECAR found that 85.1% of students had email as the first choice for campus communication.

My guess is that may change over time as people get more and more used to communicating via methods other than email. I know that in my life I find that what was once exclusively communication via email is now shared more and more with IM and Facebook and Twitter and the like.

Technorati Tags: email, spam, social-software

Posted by oren at 4:59 PM | Comments (1)

October 10, 2007

UW iTunes U now open!

As I blogged over at the eTech blog, our iTunes U site for the UW is now up and running. This lets people get at UW video and audio content from within Apple's iTunes software. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: iTunesU, UW

Posted by oren at 8:08 AM | Comments (1)

October 7, 2007

Legitimate uses of p2p - updated 10 October

UPDATE - There have been some comments that have come in with some additions to this list, and some folks who've said it's useful to have a list like this, so I'll try and add examples of legitimate p2p applications as they come in, and gather them all in this post so they're at a predictable permanent URL.

Sandy pointed out this weekend that as we have long been excoriating the entertainment industry for painting all use of peer to peer technologies as illegitimate, and for claiming that there are lots of legitimate uses for these technologies, that it might be useful to be able to provide examples of that kind of legitimate use that we can share with people who are part of these discussions with legislators.

I came up with this list and would be happy to have more examples to add to it:

Additions 10 October:

Jim Gaynor points out that Trent Reznor and his popular band Nine Inch Nails post multitrack audio files of their raw tracks in Apple's Garage Band format that they distribute via bittorrent.

It's also very interesting to see Reznor's post of 08 October that says:

I've waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.

Additions 09 October:

Thom Deardorff sent in a couple of very cool bioinformatics efforts:

Chinook, which is a Canadian project that aims to "facilitate exchange of analysis techniques within a local community and/or worldwide." and

Tranche, which says "In a nutshell, we're using peer-to-peer (P2P) concepts mixed with modern encryption to make a secure distributed file system that is well-suited for proteomics research data and independent of any particular centralized authority."

Jim Gaynor notes in a comment:

VMWare offers a catalog of "virtual appliances" - pre-built VMs that can be freely shared, made by members of the VM community. Most VMs have a torrent download.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft game (an immense commercial enterprise with over 9 million subscribers) distributes game updates via bittorrent. Sometimes major content patches exceed a quarter gigabyte.

Terry points out that Joost and Skype use their own p2p protocols for video and VOIP.

Oren's Original List (07 October 2007)

Red Hat and other linux distros rely on bittorrent to distribute the operating systems and updates. There's a site that tries to keep track of them at:
http://linuxtracker.org/

There are lots of folks who use various p2p filesharing services to share files wit friends and family. One thing I saw notes that p2p offers better error correction in file transfer than most other methods.

http://bt.etree.org/ is a bittorrent network used to distribute recordings of musicians who are "trade-friendly" (authorize fans to trade recordings of their performances).

The Democracy video distribution service uses bittorrent: http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/03/democracy_player_rev.html

There's a bittorrent interface to Amazon's s3 storage service.

Bibster is a project that aims to assist researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic metadata (e.g. from BibTeX files) in a peer-to-peer network. - http://bibster.semanticweb.org/

Project Gutenberg uses bittorrent to distribute CD and DVD images: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_CD_and_DVD_Project

iBiblio, which calls itself "the public's library and digital archive" uses bittorrent: http://torrent.ibiblio.org/

Librivox distributes audio recordings of books that are in the public domain via bittorrent. They have a page that explains why p2p distribution is important to them at http://tinyurl.com/2gw3by

The makers of the award-winning documentary film "The Corporation" are distributing a version of the film via p2p (bittorrent). The director says:

I think most people downloading the film understand what an enormous effort it is to make a film like this and will support it, if there’s a reasonably easy way to. So, I decided to release my own “shareware” version of the film, but with a short message at the beginning, asking viewers for a little financial consideration to help offset the costs of production and keep our outreach efforts going.

Technorati Tags: copyfight

Posted by oren at 4:51 PM | Comments (3)

October 4, 2007

ResearchChannel partners with NSF to bring science to the public

My colleagues at the ResearchChannel have just announced a new partnership with the National Science Foundation to develop programs about scientific research.

Under the partnership agreement, NSF will transmit to ResearchChannel up to 150 program hours a year in formats that include a series of lectures from distinguished scientists, including Nobel Prize winners; a series of panel discussions with scientists and journalists about ongoing NSF-funded research and current scientific issues; and an institutional research series that will feature new and archived video from different scientific research and educational communities.

Is that cool or what?

The partnership’s first co-production is “Frontier,” a weekly, hour-long show with researchers discussing discoveries made possible through NSF support and key issues at the research frontier. The first episode of “Frontier” will premiere on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, and will air on Wednesdays and Saturdays. “Frontier” will air Wednesdays at 2 a.m., 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. (all Pacific time). It will air Saturdays at 1 a.m., 7 a.m., 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. (all Pacific time).

Some upcoming topics on “Frontier” include marine biologist Donal Manahan looking at three centuries of exploration and research at the north and south poles and why they matter today; and engineering professor Richard Murray describing the world’s most grueling competition for self-driving robotic cars.

I know I'll be watching.

Congrats to Amy and the whole ResearchChannel crew!

Technorati Tags: nsf, science, research, researchchannel, video

Posted by oren at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)

October 3, 2007

Whither Vista?

I recently got a lovely new Toshiba Portege R500 laptop (can you say "under 2 lbs, including optical drive?"), and was surprised to see that it came with XP - I sort of figured new Windows machines would be shipping with Vista. But at least so far, I haven't seen any compelling reason to install Vista on it (I am running Office 2007, which I like better than the previous Office version).

And then yesterday I happened upon this opinion piece in eWeek by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols titled Night of the Living Vista which says:

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.

The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines.,

and goes on to say:

Now you might think some of this is legacy backlash. People don't like change. They'd rather use Windows 2000 than XP, Windows 98 SE than 2000,and Windows ME more than...well, OK, no one liked ME. But I've been through these cycles many times before. This is different.

XP SP2, with XP SP3 finally due to show up soon, is not only the best Windows to date, I can't think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. I'm not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.

Interesting, to say the least. Is this a serious issue, or just the inevitable major upgrade backlash/lag? (Just think about how many people took their sweet time upgrading their Macs to OS X, for instance).

Technorati Tags: microsoft, windows, vista

Posted by oren at 10:17 AM | Comments (3)

October 1, 2007

iPhone optimized clip of flyover of UW campus

The folks over in UWTV's production side have encoded a brief snippet of their HD video into H.264 video that looks great on an iPhone. To view the clip, download it here, drag it into iTunes, and then sync it to your iPhone. There's no sound, so don't worry if you don't hear anything.

I think you'll agree that it looks great. For those who are interested, Mike Wellings says it "was shot with a SONY HDW-700A and recorded to HDCAM tape."

Technorati Tags: hdvideo, iphone, UW

Posted by oren at 3:58 PM | Comments (2)

September 27, 2007

[CSG Fall 2007] Data Management / Data Governance workshop

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

Posted by oren at 5:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2007

[CSG Fall 2007] Google Apps and like

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

Posted by oren at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2007] Second Life for academia

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

Posted by oren at 9:31 AM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2007

[CalConnect Fall 2007] Time Zones discussion

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

Posted by oren at 6:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2007

Joel on Ajax and the near future

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

Posted by oren at 8:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2007

[CalConnect Fall 2007] vCard - afternoon discussion and wrap-up

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

Posted by oren at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)

O'Reilly's Women in Technology series

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

Posted by oren at 1:39 PM | Comments (0)

Missing apps on the iPod Touch

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.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, iphone, touch

Posted by oren at 11:58 AM | Comments (1)

eMusic to offer DRM-free audiobooks

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

Posted by oren at 2:44 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2007

On the road to MIT

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

Posted by oren at 7:17 AM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2007

Where's my (real) broadband, dude?

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

Posted by oren at 7:20 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2007

Steven Poole on abandoning Word

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...

Technorati Tags: microsoft, word, writing

Posted by oren at 7:10 AM | Comments (1)

September 6, 2007

spam - hoo boy

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.

Posted by oren at 3:25 PM | Comments (0)

September 5, 2007

Is the iPhone enterprise ready? Sure - why not?

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

Posted by oren at 7:14 AM | Comments (1)

Some Macs go missing at the Apple Store

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

Posted by oren at 6:56 AM | Comments (1)

The new Catalyst File Manager is here, and it's very groovy!

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:

Technorati Tags: catalyst, UW, web2.0

Posted by oren at 6:17 AM | Comments (1)

September 4, 2007

Things fall apart - including Macs

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.

Technorati Tags: apple, hardware

Posted by oren at 2:24 PM | Comments (1)

August 19, 2007

Microsoft and Sony Ericsson join CalConnect

The news that both Microsoft and Sony Ericsson have joined the CalConnect calendaring consortium is good news indeed!

During the past couple of years of work on interoperable calendaring has been making headway within CalConnect, Microsoft has been the elephant in the room - Exchange and Outlook have huge market share and any meaningful attempt at calendaring interoperability has to claim some level of working with Microsoft's products. So having the folks from Redmond in the room with the rest of the CalConnect membership will be a welcome addition to the discussions.

The Sony Ericsson membership is meaningful as calendaring on mobile devices continues to become more important. Sony Ericsson joins Symbian in the consortium as major voices of the mobile industry.

I'll be attending the CalConnect Roundtable at MIT next month, along with a workshop CalConnect is sponsoring on the vCard standard and interoperable address book/ contact management.

Technorati Tags: calconnect, calendaring, interoperability

Posted by oren at 8:14 AM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2007

Mozilla, Thunderbird, and the future of email

There's been a lot of discussion (much of it of the hand-wringing variety) of Mitchell Baker's Email Call To Action blog post where she talks about Mozilla splitting off the development of the Thunderbird email client software to a new organization. In today's follow-on post titled Thunderbird -- Why Change Things? she clarifies that the desire to split T-bird off arises from the phenomenal success of Firefox making it impossible for Mozilla to concentrate efforts on both products.

That seems fair enough to me. Thunderbird is a very competent mail client, and we depend on it here at the UW as an attractive alternative to the mail programs that come bundled with Windows and Macs, not to mention separate mail programs like Outlook and Entourage. It does strike me that the same could be said of Firefox, as an alternative to IE and Safari - but it can certainly be said that Firefox continues to drive innovation in the browser space, where Thunderbird has not achieved the same status for email.

My real interest, however, was in the part of the Call To Action where Mitchell talked about taking on a broader mail initaitive:

We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

It seems to me that with email crippled by the deluge of spam, the rise of social networking as ways for people to connect, the start of the mass adoption of really smart handheld connected devices, and the use of synchronous communications in addition to asynchronous, that there's room for some radical rethinking of the tools we use to communicate, and I hope we can work with the Mozilla folks to imagine that future.

Technorati Tags: email, mozilla, thunderbird, social-software

Posted by oren at 7:40 AM | Comments (2)

July 28, 2007

Bloglines now optimized for iPhone use

A couple of weeks ago I noted that Bloglines didn't work well with the iPhone - they've not got a version that does at i.bloglines.com.

Technorati Tags: feeds, iphone, bloglines, syndication

Posted by oren at 7:52 AM | Comments (1)

July 26, 2007

Greg Barnes blogging OSCON

My colleague Greg Barnes is attending O'Reilly's Open Source Conference this week in Portland, and is blogging the event over at our UW eTech blog. And while you're there, you can read Fang Lin's recent report from An Event Apart.

Technorati Tags: blogs, rss

Posted by oren at 8:33 AM | Comments (1)

July 24, 2007

Who's using RSS?

A question came up in a meeting I was at yesterday - to what extent are people actually subscribing to (and presumably reading) RSS (or Atom) feeds?

After casting around a bit all I could find on the web was this post from Feedburner's blog talking about the use of aggregators (hot news: Google, Yahoo!, and Bloglines are the tops).

The aggregators certainly make it easy to subscribe to feeds, but I wonder if that's the same thing as saying people are actually using feeds. When Rael Dornfest asked the crowd at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech Conference in 2006 how many people thought their feed reader was more important than their email client, a significant number of people raised their hands - but that's a pretty geekily self-selected crowd.

If you've got any data on how much you and the people around you are or aren't using feeds, and how they're being used, drop a comment to this post or send me an email.

Technorati Tags: rss, syndication, feeds

Posted by oren at 7:06 AM | Comments (3)

Update on the file sharing provision in the Higher Ed bill

Mark Luker from Educause reports that the Reid ammendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill was dropped after a groundswell of criticism. Whew. There apparently is some substitute language from Sen. Kennedy being included in the "Manager's Package" on the bill that asks colleges and universities to inform their students on the following points:

(P) policies and sanctions related to copyright infringement, including --

(i) information which explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer to peer file sharing, may subject them to civil and criminal penalties;

(ii) a summary of the penalties for violation of copyright laws under the US Code;

(iii) a description of the institution's policies with respect to unauthorized peer to peer file sharing including disciplinary actions which are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution's information technology system; and

(iv) a description of steps that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on its information technology system.

That's all stuff we're either doing already or working on, so no problems there. This is an important battle won, but it's not the end of the story by any means.

Technorati Tags: file-sharing, p2p, policy, politics

Posted by oren at 6:06 AM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2007

The Majority Leader wants to amend Higher Ed act to mandate controls on file sharing

From today on Inside Higher Ed:

Showdown Over File Sharing
College officials have been aware and wary of growing Congressional interest in student file sharing of music and videos — a practice many students consider normal and that the entertainment industry views as tantamount to theft. Colleges, generally feeling caught in the middle, have worried that Congress might try to impose an unworkable solution.

And that’s what they fear could happen this week — with the Senate majority leader (needless to say someone with whom colleges do not want to pick a fight) largely responsible. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada announced his plan to prevent “campus based digital theft” through a series of requirements that he is expected to try to attach to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, when the Senate takes up that legislation, most likely in the next day or so. The Reid plan would require colleges to:

Report annually to the U.S. Education Department on policies related to illegal downloading.
Review their procedures to be sure that they are effective.
“Provide evidence” to the Education Department that they have “developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.”
The measure would also require the education secretary to annually identify the 25 colleges and universities that have in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.

While those provisions are in the amendment Senator Reid unveiled last week, they could easily change today or tomorrow, and lobbyists following the situation described it as fluid.

Reporting requirements are already in the reauthorization bill, so they aren’t the reason colleges are upset. Mark Luker, vice president of Educause, said that the measure on “technology based” systems would force colleges to buy software or hardware to theoretically block file sharing when that technology hasn’t yet become effective. Some experts also question whether this technology in its current form would end up blocking file-sharing that does not violate anyone’s copyright and that supports teaching and research.

“These technologies do not work well,” Luker said. “They are really not ready for prime time and colleges should not be forced to install them.”

Our colleagues from Educause urge you to CALL today, not write, your state's U.S. senators' staff members for higher education issues and tell them how much higher education opposes this amendment. Please also call Senator Reid's office (202-224-3542), Senator Edward Kennedy's office (202-224-4543), and Senator Michael Enzi's office (202-224-3424).

Technorati Tags: copyfight, file-sharing, p2p

Posted by oren at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2007

A good iPhone review with an enterprise slant from Information Week

John Welch has a good review online in Information Week titled Two Weeks With An iPhone that talks about the iPhone with a particular slant of using the iPhone in enterprise environments. It's worth a read - though I have to admit to being biased to liking the only other person I've heard of who admits to having owned a Kyocera 6035 Smartphone (which was, not coincidentally, the last phone before the iPhone I owned that had the sense to have a dedicated vibrate/ring button).

One of the first things he talks about in the review is calendar syncing, and he agrees with what I've been guessing at, which is that we'll see over-the-air calendar synchronization via CalDAV when Apple releases the Leopard version of OS X. He also takes a guess as to what that might mean for Exchange users, who currently can't sync calendar entries to the iPhone, and he thinks it likely that the iPhone will also do LDAP in that time frame, which would be lovely:

The truth is, until Mac OS X Leopard is released, I doubt that there will be any options for over the air (OTA) sync of anything other than e-mail. Currently, Apple doesn't have a calendaring solution. They don't have a really good way to deal with networked user contact databases. Since there's no provision for OTA sync of contacts and events to any kind of server, third-party support for this is, shall we say, tricky.

However, come October and the release of Leopard Server, that changes. Apple will have a calendaring/group contact solution. I'll give you 80% odds right now that within a few weeks, if not days of the release of Leopard, you're going to see an update to the iPhone which will allow for OTA sync to CalDAV servers, and probably some OTA LDAP love, too. After all, why would Apple keep the iPhone from connecting to its own products? I quote from the Chewbacca Defense: "It does not make sense."

Once you have published ways to get contact and event data in and out of the iPhone over the air, then dealing with Exchange/Domino-style connectivity becomes far simpler, as you only have to make your server act in a way that's compatible with the iPhone. So I'll hazard that, post-Leopard, iPhone connectivity will get a lot easier.

We know that Apple is using CalDAV for its calendar client/server protocol in Leopard, and that Oracle will also be using CalDAV for Oracle Calendar (along with others like Novell and Kerio). Hopefully as this new protocol gains adherents we'll see Microsoft engineer CalDAV functionality into Exchange and Outlook, or at the very least we're likely to see third-party vendors build add-ons for those products that speak CalDAV. It's interesting to think that the impact of the iPhone could end up driving the adoption of this new open protocol.

Technorati Tags: apple, calendaring, iphone, mobile-sync, wireless

Posted by oren at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2007

Maybe Google's money can provide openness in the wireless spectrum

The closed nature of the wireless services run by telecom companies has always seemed outdated to those of us who've existed primarily in the open innovation model of the Internet for the last fifteen or so years, but it's been hard to make any headway in that world.

Now Google's showing its willingness to put its money where its mouth is - from a Business Wire story:

oogle (NASDAQ:GOOG - News) announced today that should the Federal Communications Commission adopt a framework requiring greater competition and consumer choice, Google intends to participate in the federal government's upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band.

In a filing with the FCC on July 9, Google urged the Commission to adopt rules for the auction that ensure that, regardless of who wins the spectrum at auction, consumers' interests are served. Specifically, Google encouraged the FCC to require the adoption of four types of "open" platforms as part of the license conditions:

* Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
* Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
* Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms; and
* Open networks: Third parties (like internet service providers) should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee's wireless network.

Today, as a sign of Google's commitment to promoting greater innovation and choices for consumers, CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, stating that should the FCC adopt all four license conditions requested above, Google intends to commit a minimum of $4.6 billion to bidding in the upcoming 700 MHz auction.

While I have mixed feelings about companies using their money to influence policy, that does seem to be how business gets done in Washington, particularly in the world of the FCC. Maybe having a company willing to throw billions around to do what I perceive as the right thing (for a change) is the only way progress will be made.

Technorati Tags: google, policy, wireless, telecommunications

Posted by oren at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

More iPhone stuff

The network folks say that in the first two weeks of the iPhone's release we saw 124 people with iPhones authenticate to our campus WiFi network, which they need to do to access off-campus resources. Given that it's summer, that's a pretty quick ramp-up for a new device. The breakdown was about two-thirds employees, one-third students.

There've been reports of iPhones causing network problems at Duke University - we're not seeing those problems here, so it may be specific to some types of network equipment in use at Duke.

Jason Ediger from Apple points out these iPhone Tech Talks that Apple is hosting - none in Seattle yet, unfortunately.

Josh Larios showed me the site for WebShell, an ajax-based ssh client for the iPhone. I haven't got it to work yet.

There's another twitter client designed for the phone, this one from thincloud.

Gizmodo likes JiveTalk as an IM client for the iPhone - does AIM, iChat, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ, and Jabber - currently in a free alpha.

Technorati Tags: iphone

Posted by oren at 8:15 AM | Comments (2)

July 13, 2007

What's Oren listening to - now with Twitter.

Over the years I've played with several iTunes scripts that generate web feeds of what I'm listening to. I just updated the "What's Oren Listening To Today" link on the blog web page to link to a Twitter feed called orenmusic that gets fed from iTunes via Doug Adams' Current Track to Twitter applescript.

Given that it's Twitter, you can also get an RSS feed or follow it from Twitter itself.

Slick!

Technorati Tags: music, twitter

Posted by oren at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2007

More iPhone stuff

I have to say that so far the iPhone is the first handheld I've used that I like more as I use it, rather than less. I think it's a game-changing device because it's primarily a WiFi enabled handheld computing device that also happens to have some well integrated phone features, rather than a phone with a bunch of computing features tacked on.

While lots of folks are complaining about the lack of ability to install native third party software on the phone, it may actually be that Apple's strategy of relying on rich web-based applications will pan out to be smart in terms of allowing lots of people to develop apps that work while keeping the core configuration of the phone stable. I am pretty impressed by some of the apps I've seen so far - check out Andrew Mager's list of the top ten apps that came out of last week's iPhone Dev Camp. I've already started using AppMarks. PocketTweets looks good for those of you who are looking to use Twitter from your iPhone.

David Pogue is working on the Missing Manual book for the iPhone and has some great tips up on Favorite iPhone Tricks page.

So far I haven't found battery life to be a problem, though I do plug it in every night, and I admit to being a very light phone talker in general.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mobile-devices

Posted by oren at 6:58 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2007

MT4 - Maybe *NOT* time to give it a try

So I tried to upgrade this blog to Movable Type 4 this morning. It was all going fine - the install process checked for the needed software and found it, checked my database and said it was fine, and then I got to this screen:

When I pressed that Begin Upgrade button I got this:

And I couldn't get any further. No amount of searching the forums held out any answers, and there hasn't been any response to my filing it as a bug with SixApart. So I've restored back to 3.14 (lucky I backed everything up before starting the process!).

I guess I'll try putting MT4 on a separate installation and see if goes better.

Technorati Tags: blogging, movable-type, MT4

Posted by oren at 4:50 PM | Comments (2)

July 10, 2007

UW email config instructions for iPhone

I'm pleased to say that we now have instructions available for configuring iPhones to work with the UW's smtp/imap systems. The instructions are online, linked from our Getting and Setting Up Email Programs page.

The page features photographic screen shots from my iPhone (it sure would be nice to have a better way to get screen shots).

Thanks to Rick Ells, Eugene Sherman, and Andrew Benton for the quick work on this!

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mobile-devices, email

Posted by oren at 3:19 PM | Comments (2)

July 7, 2007

iPhone impressions - day 5

While walking across Red Square yesterday, I noticed two students using iPhones. Given that it's summer and there were probably a total of about fifteen people in the square at the time, that might be an early indicator of a broader penetration of iPhones this fall than I had been thinking likely.

I spent some time yesterday with Eugene and Rick taking some photos of the iPhone email setup screens to be used in a set of instructions for how to configure the iPhone for use with UW IMAP email. Hopefully those should be in place soon, linked from the Getting and Setting Up Email Programs page. It's too bad there's not a screen capture utility on the iPhone.

So far it looks to me like Bloglines doesn't work very well on the iPhone, but Google Reader does.

Technorati Tags: iphone, apple, mobile-devices

Posted by oren at 7:05 AM | Comments (1)

July 3, 2007

Farewell to Peter Lyman

I was shocked and saddened to read on Danah's blog that Peter Lyman died yesterday from cancer.

Peter was the University Librarian at USC in the early '90s, at a time when I was living in DC and looking for what to do next in my life. I interviewed with Peter and John Waiblinger and they offered me a job at USC, which I accepted.

Shortly after I accepted the job, Peter came to DC and we got together to chat. He was heading out to CNRI to meet with Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and he invited me to come along. He was heading to Dulles after that, and asked if I'd drive to both CNRI and then take him to the airport. He was leaving on some overseas trip, and we soon realized that his huge suitcase and the Miata I was driving would present a challenge. We put the top down on the Miata, and Peter held onto the suitcase balanced on top of the trunk lid while I drove the Dulles toll road to Reston.

I still remember fondly sitting in the room with Peter and the two fathers of the Internet, soaking up the immense amount of intelligence that I was privileged to experience. The link between the library/information folks and the engineers forging the net was beginning to be formed in those early days, and Peter was one of those whose energy and intellect helped create much of what we now know as life on the net.

A week or so after that meeting the USC folks called to say that they had received a massive budget cut so wouldn't be hiring after all, so I never got a chance to work for Peter, which I've always regretted (though he left shortly thereafter to go to Berkeley, and I ended up at the UW a year or so later).

I hadn't seen Peter in a few years, and didn't know he was sick. He'll be sorely missed, though his presence will live on in the work of his students and those he mentored, like Danah.

Technorati Tags: people, peter-lyman

Posted by oren at 7:38 AM | Comments (0)

July 1, 2007

iPhone impressions - Day 2

Most of today was spent doing yard work and cleaning house, so not a lot of time to play with the iPhone, but I did manage to forward my Nokia's number to the iPhone. I also moved my contacts and calendar entries from the Nokia to the iPhone by using the Mac sync program over bluetooth from the Nokia to the Mac, and then by syncing contacts and calendar from the Mac to the iPhone in iTunes. That all seemed to work surprisingly well.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Nokia

Posted by oren at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2007

iPhone impressions - Day 1

We biked down to the Apple store in the University Village here in Seattle today and picked up an iPhone. I know there were lines waiting for them to go on sale yesterday, and I heard from someone who was down in the Village a couple of hours after us that there were lines then too, but I just walked into the store and purchased mine with no fuss.

When I got it home I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was already charged and ready to go. When I connected it to my G4 iMac, the iMac fired up iPhoto, which showed the iPhone as a device, but the activation process wants iTunes to see the phone - which it didn't.

I then moved it to the Intel Mac Mini that has all my music on it, and that machine's iTunes saw it right away and from that point on the process worked very well, walking me through registering for a plan and getting the phone activated.

Once the phone was activated it found my Apple Airport Extreme WiFi hotspot with no problem. Browsing the web with Safari worked fine right out of the box, as did Google maps and playing YouTube videos from the most popular list. The screen on the iPhone is bright and sharp, far better than any mobile phone device I've had previously. The menu structure is clear and intuitive, also a far cry better than my previous mobile experiences.

Setting up the phone for email Google Mail was very easy, and configuring the UW IMAP and SMTP servers was straightforward, though getting used to the touchscreen keyboard will take some time - so far I keep hitting P when I'm trying for O. The IMAP client is far superior to the experience I've had with IMAP on my Nokia E62 - the defaults are sensible, and the response (at least on WiFi) is snappy.

One confusing point I've found so far is in transferring music onto the phone from iTunes on my Mac. I was not able to just drag tunes from the iTunes library onto the phone's Music directory like I can with my iPods. Instead I had to set up a playlist of songs I wanted on the phone and then set the phone to sync with that playlist in iTunes.

I also encountered what seems to be a problem with YouTube search - I was at dinner tonight talking with my friend Ed about Jorma Kaukonen and Hot Tuna (those under fifty might not remember these icons of San Francisco psychedelic folk-rock) - Ed noted that there were some good videos on YouTube featuring Jorma, so I whipped out the iPhone and did a search. The phone was unable to connect to Ed's home Linksys hotspot, so I assumed it was searching on the cellular network, but at any rate it did not fine any results, and the phone kept wanting to search the term Norma instead of Jorma. Searching on my laptop at home right now shows about 123 results for the term "jorma kaukonen". I don't know what's up with that, but I'll prod at it some more over the next few days.

So far my impression of the iPhone is that it is indeed a revolutionary step forward in really useful handheld Internet devices, and I think it should have a great influence on the marketplace going forward.

I'll report more on my use of the iPhone as it happens.

Technorati Tags: apple, osx, iPhone

Posted by oren at 11:15 PM | Comments (1)

June 28, 2007

Future use of collaboration technologies

Harvard prof Andrew McAfee has an interesting post analyzing a recent Gilbane Group poll of 1000 Facebook users of ages 18-34 on which collaboration tools they believe they'll use on their jobs in two years.

Andrew writes: The largest difference, and a statistically significant one, is that the younger crowd has less faith that email will continue to dominate. As a group, the 18-24 year olds plan to make more use of text messaging (a channel technology) and social networking sites (primarily a platform technology, although Facebook does allow communication over private channels). Interestingly, they seem less enthusiastic about instant messaging than does the older set.

Given that we in higher-ed deal with those age groups as primary parts of our constituencies, and that these are the folks who are rapidly becoming our faculty and staff as well as students, we need to be thinking about what happens as these trends accelerate.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, social-software

Posted by oren at 6:54 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2007

Howard Rheingold's class on Virtual Communities next fall at Stanford

This is a great looking syllabus for a course Howard Rheingold will be teaching next fall called Virtual Communities and Social Media - wish I could take it!

Technorati Tags: academia, community, courses, media

Posted by oren at 8:11 AM | Comments (0)

Federated identities in action - Confluence and Shibboleth

One of the emerging themes at the UW (and in higher ed in general) is increased interaction across the boundaries of the institution. You can see that in action in the thrust to virtual organizations in research initiatives (see NSF's program in Engineering Virtual Organizations for example), in the establishment of the Global Health department, in the growing cross-institutional software development projects like Kuali and Sakai and in many other spaces.

I'm increasingly hearing (and experiencing) needs to work collaboratively with folks from other places. Unfortunately, most of our systems require a local identity (in our case a UW NetID) for access control. This is where the concept of federated identity systems like Shibboleth should help - and by golly, it does!

Here in C&C we use a Confluence wiki, which recently was Shibboleth-enabled (notes on how to do that are here), enabling users of our wiki to permit access to people with credentials from any of the members of the InCommon federation. One of the InCommon members is ProtectNetwork, an independent identity provider.

So yesterday, when a question came in about collaborating with people who are not UW folks (nor affiliated with any of the other InCommon higher ed institutions) I thought "they should be able to get ProtectNetwork IDs and then we could grant them wiki access in Confluence".

So I went out and got myself an ID and tested it out - and it worked! Here's a screenshot of the Confluence permissions-setting screen with my ProtectNetwork ID circled. How cool is that?

Technorati Tags: collaboration, confluence, digital-identity, federated-identity, federation, shibboleth

Posted by oren at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2007

What's with those Mac memory prices?

Now that the WWDC has come and gone and Apple didn't introduce the long-rumored light notebook, I was looking at Macbooks today, thinking about ordering a new laptop. Figuring that the laptop will probably be my main machine for the next while, I was looking at the Macbook Pros. I was thinking it would be good to trick one out with the full 4 GB memory config, but I was totally blown away by what Apple charges for the upgrade from 2 GB to 4 GB. $750 for 2 GB of memory? Are you kidding, I thought?

But it's not just Apple - Lenovo is charging $845 for the same upgrade on its Thinkpad T60 series. There must be something I don't know about DDR2 memory that causes the prices to be so high.

Technorati Tags: apple, lenovo, memory

Posted by oren at 11:27 PM | Comments (1)

June 12, 2007

[ECAR 2007 Summer Symposium] Human futures for technology and education - Michael Wesch

Michael is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State who made the very popular video about Web 2.0.

Any time you try to predict the future you magnify your assumptions - he realized that in the past three years all of his assumptions about education and information have been shattered. There may not be an "it" to teach any more. When we talk about "it" we're often talking about information.

YouTube gets 65,000 new videos a day - 91% are new original content.

71 million more blogs than in 2003.

Have we prepared our students for this world?

On paper, we thought of information as a thing...with a material form, you could point to it, and it had its own logical place in a specific hierarchy of categories. Managing information requires managing the hierarchies.

Search engines showed us we might not need hierarchies. Hyperlinks showed us that information can be in more than one place at the same time. Blogging taught us that anybody can be a creator of information, Wikipedia showed us that by working together our information can be better than the content of professionals.

Who is the author of this information? Who owns it?

Tagging taught us that we could organize this information explosion ourselves...without "folders".

RSS taught us that information can find us.

when we teach, information is no longer the point.

what was google buying when they bought YouTube? not the Tube, but the You.

Have we prepared our students for this world? Putting Time in perspective

Puts the last 12,000 years (since the last ice age) into one hour perspective. First farmers at 5 minutes - allows people to settle down first towns at 25 minutes ago, first alphabet at 15 minutes ago, industrial revolution is a minute ago. The last five seconds are the twenty years our students have lived on this planet - personal computers, the internet, mobile phones, wal-mart, the end of the family farm, mtv, exurbia.

Looking at spaceship earth - 1.3 billion live on less than $1 per day Over 1 billion people now connected by the Internet - almost as many remain illiterate. Are our students ready for the next fifteen seconds?

He asked his students what they need from their education. They're working on a video of this, which he showed a rough edit of - very powerful and moving to see students with their own words.

Students are learning in spite of us. Technology is not the savior, but a tool we can use (but can use us).

teaching still has not changed, but learning has. That's where the disconnect is.

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future" - Marshall McLuhan

Every medium has both enabling and disabling properties. He's trying to break this down in terms of various teaching techniques - e.g. what is a chalkboard teaching? What to students learn when they're looking at a chalkboard? What's missing? videos, images, animations, network. Chalkboard forces the writer to move around, makes you think on the move (as opposed to scripted presentations), encourages you to slow down and improvise, and interact. Chalkboard limits effective class size to those who can see the board.

What's different about PowerPoint? easy for the teacher, mindless (for the teacher), it's fast (too fast?), linear, helps the presenter remember their notes, often does great harm to the presentation. Encourages students to memorize key points, let the professor choose which points are key, encourages the students to regurgitate key points on exams. Good for teaching, but not for learning.

What does this world look like? People can make great videos in basements. Collaborated with a musician in the Ivory Coast, who put his recordings on the Web. He uploaded his original video. Had 253 views in the first day or so. Amazing when compared that he wrote an article a year ago which is just coming out, which might be seen by a couple of hundred people.

By the next morning it had a couple of thousand views, as a result of being Dugg up, rose onto the front page of the Digg tech industry news. As people blogged it it rose in Technorati's rankings.

The selection process is in a sense a peer review and criticism process on a much larger scale than academia ever dreamt of. Seven translation of his video appeared within three weeks.

This mediascape is only as good as our students are - are they going to be responsible participants in this world, or will we see more of Britney Spears' haircut?

Some references - Ian Jukes, Carl Fish, Unesco study on ethical implications of digital technologies.

Lots of the future predictions assume twoard ubiquitous networks and computing leading to ubiquitous information at unlimited speed about everything everywhere from anywhere on all kinds of devices. Why do people need to know things when they can ask Google anything at any time?

RFIDs in food products as an example of bringing the web into the physical world. VeriChip - RFIDs for people. The machine will learn more and more about you. We teach it with every search, tag, and note. Machines will increasingly be able to aggregate data without human intervention - e.g. photos from gps enabled cameras converted to geotagged images on flickr.

Imagine what could be if anybody anywhere could upload information about anything at any time that could be accessed by anybody?

Two scenarios for the future... what will today's fifth grader look like in the year 2020?

First scenario - schools have held on to idea that information is what it's all about and are trying to teach information. Student is not really sophisticated in use of information. A dystopian future - apathetic passive consumers.

Second scenario - we engage with this media, and teach students to be participants. Real information could compete with marketers and advertisers to get to people on their devices. Technology could be used to encourage real social interaction. Because student has been fighting for her rights, the system has evolved to serve her.

Technorati Tags: academia, ecar, ecar-2007-summer

Posted by oren at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)

[ECAR 2007 Summer Symposium] Yochai Benkler

Benkler is moving from Yale Law to Harvard Law

- Networked information economy and society
- The university and the rise of social production
- three design challenges: permeability; control vs. creativity; social applications

A story - attempts to improve vote counting by bringing in machinery, first tried in Georgia. Mainstream media didn't report any problems, but one activist got hold of source code and harnessed a new model of social production. She put the code on her site, which was replicated on a site in New Zealand - we've got hold of a source of data and here it is - read for yourself. Put together resources on the web, and asked for finding to be reported. Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins found issues, put them on his web site, and others responded. Then Diebold felt that they had to respond. The conversation led to State of Maryland asking for a review of the technology.

The next time around Diebold filed a DMCA complaint against ISP that the activist used, and against Swarthmore which had a replica. End of story? No - because its been replicated all over the web. The network resists the supression of information. The students go to district court and the court grants them the case and Diebold has to pay.

Radical decentralization
- research & analysis
- archiving, storage, retrieval
- accreditation through self-selected peer reivew, critiqaue
- radically decentralized
- done by individuals, for individuals
- alone and in ad hoc networks of diverse longevity
- dynamic problem solving and adaptation
- not impervious, but resistant

What makes this possible?
- in 1835 it cost the equivalent of around $10k to launch a mass circulation newspaper. Changes in the environment made it 2.5 million 15 years later. For the latter you need a business model. Bifurcation around passive audiences and professional commercial producers. f
- The alternative image is SETI@home becomes a huge supercomputer.

Networked information economy -
- radically decentralized capitalization
- computation, storage, communications capacity
- all in the hands of individuals

- the most important inputs, into the core economic activities, of the most advanced economies, are widely distributed in the population.
- Behaviors once on the periphery: social motivations, cooperation, etc. are core

Commons-based production - production without exclusion from inputs or outputs. Authority to act where capacity to act resides - at the edges.

Peer production & sharing - a lot of what we value on the web is done by individuals, without price signals or managerial commans. Sharing material resources - distributed computing, wireless mesh networks, distributed storage.

Four transactional frameworks

Market vs. Non-market; centralized vs. decentralized

new competitors and new opportunities - including platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Surfers - stuff will flow out of connected human beings - inputs into production. Example of IBM's linux-based services earning far more revenue than licensing its patents.

Social production -

A real fact not a fad - the ctiical long term shift caused by the internet
- in some context more efficient than markets or firms
- sustainable and growing fast
- but a threat to incumbent businesses
at level of infrastructure and content we're seeing a battle - law has largely allowed enclosure. What's pushing back is largely market adoption as well as the development of social practices of sharing and cooperation embedded in political engagement. We continue to see tightening of IP, but only through judges, who are largely looking at the past.

The University as Subsystem

A society's knowledge production system includes multipe subsystems - mass media markets, government, gossip/superstition, religion

The university has characteristics: relatively high autonomy, distinctiveness, remove, and self-reference
- high intensity communication
- narrative of commitment to a set of values of inquiry conversation critique and peer review
- perhaps not perfect, but still exerts a direct force on the knowledge production system as a whole.

Spatial and institutional remove - the campus plays a role in structure conversation and exchange as distinctly removed. A distinct kind of conversation in which there are certain ways to behave. Should we continue to retain this coherence? How do we do it when spatial remove is impossible. He doesn't tell his student not to do email while he's talking - he assumes they do it.

Opportunities and challenges of networked environment
- greater efficacy of nonmarket action - the cost of being effective has declined. as organizations universities can do more; touch more people. By individuals within the university,, with relatively more time than average.

Use fund raising capabilities, talent, and organizational form to provide knowledge tools and platforms for society at large. ibiblio, MIT open courseware, etc as examples. Universities also a center for connectivity.

University / individuals - number of participants in open software who are students or faculty in universities is very large.

Pper production and education - learning objects; textbooks (primitive at present); learning by doing in the world - students can engage - can we bridge the outside with the inside; collaborative authorship; identity formation (MySpace?); immersive learning environments. Some research (Charlie Nesson) finds some find it easier to speak up in second life; peer production and research - large scale collaboration across organizational boundaries (e.g. HapMap); open scientific publication - self-archiving; filtering and search; institutional repositories; distributed computing - folding@home, fightAIDs@home, etc.

Permeability - A system with sufficient coherence and "inness" to be a system; and a sufficiently permeable boundary to be part of the network as a whole. Sufficient openness to enable participation: cross-institutional research and education, access to data, resources, platforms across institutions; non-institutional efforts - volunteering as practice-based education

Creativity and control - creativity in the networked environment comes from locating capacity and authority to act at the edges - this is in the process of being a generalized understanding in high tech industries. That's where the observation and solution of issues can be undestood. The more you try to control (separate authority to act from capacity to act) the more you lose the ability to learn in the system.

Parallel claims in favor of end-to-end design principal, with loose, late-binding design. Freedom, looseness, creativity leads to uncertainty and risk. When you send creativity to the edges you increase the number of possible actions, and increase complexity.

Resist urges and pressures to control - experimentation with data, video, music. The urge to control is overwhelming.

The two major security threats - the nincompoops and the bad actors. Important to constrain the nincompoops at the edges, not to constrain the masses in the process. Misbehavior should not be solved by technology, but by disciplinary systems. Misbehavior is a n educational opportunity; people exist in multiple overlapping systems; no single system need solve all problems; technical systems lack transparency of the disciplinary choice andover-regulate users

Designing for cooperation - significant literature in organizational sociology, experimental economics, field studies in political science, etc. Designed to challenge selfish rational actor model; can provide a basis for synthesizing design levers for cooperation. Working on designing for cooperation. What people want to do depends on their relationships - communication is central in how people work. Metastudy of game theory - shows that if you allow people to communicate in any way before, cooperation rises by 50%. Humanization is important. Trust construction - not the output of a system, but as an input - I trust this person to act in ways that are cooperative with me. Norm creation, transparency, monitoring, fairness is important in terms of outcomes and processes, as an input to make system work.

Anonymity is not good for cooperation.

If you impose discipline you crowd out trust.

Wrap up -= the networked information economy creates new opportunities for the university; the university can find new ways to be more effective internally as an educational and research institute.

There was some good discussion during the follow-on panel. I couldn't blog it because I was a panel participant, but I've got some notes that I'll post later, along with the comments I made.

Technorati Tags: ecar, ecar-2007-summer, political-economy, benkler

Posted by oren at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

[ECAR 2007 Summer Symposium] The Tower and the Cloud - morning session

Richard Katz kicks off the symposium. He asks whether we in higher-ed are incrementally improving the state of the world just in time to fall off the edge of the cliff?

The Educause executive team perceived that there is a vision gap in higher-ed IT - something is changing - how do these changes need to be internalized by those of us responsible for higher-ed IT, so higher-ed extends its footprint and reach?

Rising competition - for talend (elite students and faculty), for resources (federal budget deficit, rising welfare costs, etc), fast growing for-profit sector, privatization of research. China now has a positive balance of surplus with Maylasia in higher-ed already.

Declining Affordability of education.

Changing students and parents - changing mores about information ownership, access and privacy; both "net gen" and those needing remediation. An increasing gap in how students present themselves and the culture of higher education. Students and parents increasingly view higher-ed as a consumer good. Students come to us and face a medieval academy with antiquated methods and practices. How do we interact with them and adapt our culture, systems, and techniques?

New accent on sustainability - greening of services; stewardship and resuse of hardware, software, tools, instruments, and data.

Changing political economy

Technology challenges - incredible complexity - how do we create resilient systems? The impact of Web 2.0 is important - lots of interesting and important stuff going on there. Talking to young people about information technology is like asking fish about water.

Changing tower, expanding cloud - A real transformation underway in higher education? physical or virtual; high cost physical plant or low cost; academic calendar or 7x24x365; academic oligopoly vs. algorithmic populism; fee for service business model vs. variety of models; bundled offering vs. extreme unbundling

history of institutionalization - in early Europe students banded together and pooled their resources to bring faculty to teach. Itinerant scholars roving the countryside, trying to prove their worth. How long will it be before we see this kind of activity in Second Life and Wikipedia? At some time we may lose our oligopoly on accreditation. It's not so good to be a monk anymore - or Britannica!

Questions to consider:

- Is a real transformation underway?
- IF so, can we trace some of the principal vectors of change?
- How might our institutions be affectex?
- What do our institutions need to consider to benefit from new opportunities, or to mitigate new risks?
- What must we in IT do to facilitate the needed changes?

Technorati Tags: academia, higher-ed, puppy

Posted by oren at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)

June 8, 2007

[ECAR 2007 Summer Symposium] Off to Boulder for the ECAR Summer Symposium

I'll be off to Boulder on Monday for the ECAR Summer Symposium.

Richard Katz has put together a terrific program on the theme of "The Tower and the Cloud":

Plato’s Academy was a marketplace of ideas with little or no intervening infrastructure or institutional bureaucracy. Even writing had no place in the Academy, as it was thought to get in the way of the direct exchange of ideas among academicians. Beginning in the 12th century in Europe, higher education was discharged in universities—gated groves where students and professors lived and studied in a close, apprentice-master relationship. Over time, universities grew to become “multiversities” in the 20th century: learning centers that hosted not only learning and research, but the full range of services such as housing, food service, entertainment, grounds maintenance, waste management, and so on. This is a history of institutionalization.

The Internet is challenging the power and authority of all institutions. The blogosphere, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other developments are eroding the institutions’ authority and markets. Blogging and podcasting are disrupting traditional news media. Wikipedia is challenging encyclopedias. The Google Library and others are redefining the institutional library. Synthetic worlds such as Second Life create the potential to redefine learning space. Virtual markets such as InnoCentive aggregate research talent and reward scientific innovation through financial incentives, and they may reshape the landscape of research. The network is empowering individuals by linking them to one another, to information, and to a wide variety of resources. At the same time, the network has the potential to disempower institutions and to destabilize financial and labor markets. Open content and new Web revenue streams are simultaneously empowering the individual and facilitating the corporatization of services formally financed as public services, such as the library.

This Symposium will look at the question of how higher education institutions (The Tower) may interoperate with the emerging network-based business and social paradigm (The Cloud).

I'm particularly excited to be on a panel that will discuss a talk by Yochai Benkler titled Education, Collaboration, and the Networked Information Commons. I've been reading Benkler's influential book The Wealth of Networks, and I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to hear him apply his work on peer production of knowledge to the academic enterprise, and to get to chat with him about it in person.

Technorati Tags: ECAR-2007-Summer, economics, meetings

Posted by oren at 4:50 PM | Comments (0)

Why isn't calendaring like email? A new article in Messaging News

There's a good article by Michael Sampson in the new issue of Messaging News (pdf file) (you knew such a magazine had to exist, didn't you?) titled Calendaring - Why Isn't It Just Like Email?

I particularly like the way Michael quotes Scott Mace to frame the issues:

“In 1997 I wrote an article for InfoWorld on the poor state of calendaring
interoperability,” recalls Scott Mace, currently a freelance author and blogger at Calendar Swamp.
“When I reviewed the situation again in 2005, I was horrified to discover we hadn’t come very far.
We still face the same problems today we did then.”

I'm mentioned in an inconsequential quote, but that's not why you should read the article. You should read it for the way it lays out the current set of issues and products and the work going on in the calendaring space.

Technorati Tags: calendaring

Posted by oren at 11:40 AM | Comments (2)

June 1, 2007

Google Reader adds Gears for offline use

I've been going back and forth between using Bloglines and Google Reader for reading my endlessly growing list of feeds. I had just decided that overall I preferred Bloglines, when Terry pointed out yesterday that Google has added offline access to Reader, using its new Google Gears technology, a browser extension that allows web applications to offer offline functionality.

That solves one problem, which is how to catch up on my feeds while I'm in places (like airplanes) where I have some time and no connectivity. This may, of course, be a transient phase along the road to truly pervasive network access.

.

Technorati Tags: google, web-development

Posted by oren at 6:17 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2007

[CSG Spring 2007] Policy discussion on Emergency Notification

Joel Smith from CMU is leading this discussion.

There's a bunch of activity in Educause and other forums around this topic.

Strategies around specific emergencies could be very different depending on the nature of the emergency.

A quick survey of the membership: 84% of the respondents said there have been situations in recent years calling for emergency communications, including environment and weather, environmental health risks, dangerous or damaged facilities, etc.

How long does it take to send messages? Fastest is web posting, email is pretty fast, and text messaging is the least deployed. Joel notes that composing messages is not something that is built into our emergency processes and it's difficult to do in many circumstances. At Columbia it took them eight hours to compose a message to inform people that the campus was closed in a snowstorm. It can also be hard to get hold of the right people to post and send messages.

Berkeley deployed PeopleLocator (http://peoplelocator.berkeley.edu/ )

Much is predicated on having good data, like cell numbers.

Bill notes that at Stanford they have an incident response team that's separate from the emergency operations process.

Joel notes that it's important to put the time that the next communication will take place in each emergency notification, in order to keep people from overloading the channel just to see if there are any updates.

MIT is looking very seriously at being able to send SMS messages. There's some concern that you have to work closely with vendors to not have mass SMS messages classified as spams.

A few institutions in the room have some cell contact information for students, but nobody claims to have good directories of cell information.

Texas students had brought Mobile Campus on campus - but it peaked at about 7,000 students (out of 50,000) and appears to be on its way down - they think it's because they get spammed with ads from them.

MIT is going to try some tests of emergency communications, asking people to respond if they receive the test messages. They are using mir3, which was contracted originally to contact emergency responders, but they expanded that to try to contact everybody. They hope to be able to use that test to gauge how good their contact info is, as well as how long it takes to get messages out. They'll try sending both voice and text messages.

At Wisconsin they're adding text asking people to update their contact info when they register for classes.

Several campuses have been updating PA systems on campus in the wake of recent emergency events.

Technorati Tags: CSG, CSG-Spring-2007, emergencies, emergency-notification, emergencies, notifications

Posted by oren at 8:20 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Spring 2007] Identity Management

Charlie Leonhart is leading off the morning with a discussion of identity management. He's asking the crowd who's running their first generation ID management system as opposed to as second or third generation system. Paul points out that their approach at MIT is more incremental, changing and adding to the original system every year, so it's more of a maturing continuum rather than generations. Georgetown's original ID management was a directory built for provisioning accounts in different systems.

RL Bob says that Internet 2 and MACE point to different products that handle this kind of thing, but there is no significant open source shared product in the space of core identity management and provisioning, as the institutions that have built these systems have done it in ways that are embedded so deeply in their systems that it's hard to share.

Several people have used commercial products in their identity management - Indiana uses Microsoft's identity management server, and it's working very well. Brad thinks we need to get better at federated identity - maybe 2008 will be the year of federated identity. Gary says NYU uses Sun's identity management products, because they didn't want to have to build it themselves. Michigan is going to go with the Novell services because they didn't want to build it themselves and the connectors to Peoplesoft and other systems were already there. Duke is also using Novell. Colorado is going with Sun. Georgetown has picked Oracle, primarily to automate feeds from backend systems and for provisioning and de-provisioning. De-provisioning is particularly challenging - the ability to do ubiquitous de-provisioning is important.

How much convergence is there with digital identity and physical id control. At Chicago the card office has always been part of central IT, and they're working on merging that system with card system, and they're working on a common system across the hospital and the campus.

How centralized is the process of creating identities - how many are taking feeds from departments to create identity? Tim says that at Harvard the issues are around SOA kinds of things - changes in data formats, scheduling, etc.

RL Bob says that we have a local community college that we share facilities with that needs NetIDs, and we are working with the Cancer Care Alliance who needs NetID. In both of those cases they run Active Directory and we've been using a federated approach, using Shibboleth - which raises some policy issues of what kinds of things they then might get access to.

At Stanford they're setting up a guest account service. Bruce also notes that the owners of the Peoplesoft and Oracle systems are likely to start asking about what value the separate registries bring, instead of just using the purchased systems.

Klara talks about Duke needing to create the ability for affiliates to create accounts in a delegated fashion. Charlie characterizes this as the "Martian" user issue - visitors, people who come just for the day, etc. Michigan is setting up a sponsorship system where departments can set up temporary identities for visitors.

Brad says to look at the strategic issue, the University is not going to be a fortress any longer, but will need to be much more porous. He cites the issue of the library which was using access to a University digital identity as a surrogate for meaning "faculty, staff, or student" to grant access to subscriptions.

Tom is talking about people who are "non-affiliated patrons", like those who have library privileges but no other connection to the institution. They're creating a separate store of identities for these folks. It was much easier to not bring those back into the main identity store and deal with all the policy issues, etc.

Phil Long notes that business process has to precede identity management.

At Wisconsin they have a formal decision making body for identity management that reports to the Provost. Just this month that committee has announced that they'll add two faculty members and student representation. Federated research has made this an academic as well as administrative issue.

Berkeley has a signle-sign-on management model, but there's not a good funding model - they've been considering some sort of identity-management tax on new system development projects.

At Georgetown they have a tax on all money transactions on their cards to fund the card office operations - 4% on internal purchases (like soda and candy machines, etc), more for external vendors (like local restaurants, etc).

Texas has multiple assurance levels of identity - for high assurance you have to show up in person with photo ID.

Technorati Tags: authentication, CSG, CSG-Spring-2007, digital-identity, identity-management, identity

Posted by oren at 7:22 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2007

[CSG Spring 2007] Enterprise Architecture and SOA, part 1

Jim Phelps from Wisconsin is kicking off the workshop by talking about the ITANA group, which had its first f2f meeting yesterday. Over 20 people attended that meeting, where many people said that there was a lot of discussion about what IT architecture actually is and who is an architect (Jim characterized the discussion as "navel gazing").

Now we've got a panel representing different practices in IT architecture and governance at different institutions. Bruce Vincent from Stanford notes that we have quite a range of practices reflecting the structures and cultures of different institutions. The panel includes Tom Barton from U Chicago and our very own RL Bob Morgan in addition to Bruce and Jim.

Bruce says IT architects are working as influence peddlers - that's in a discussion of governance. Most at ITANA agreed that influence is more practical than formal governance. Influencing architecture early is critical - bringing it in late (like an architecture review board) dooms it to failure.

Tom notes that Chicago is not big on process, and they're not sure what architectural process is. But it should result in simpler more sustainable services, and a more common infrastructure. To do that some of the challenges are that people aren't connected enough to be aware of or comfortable with leveraging other people's work. At Chicago they've done several things to try to move this. One is that they've started having meetings of the chief technical people in each of the directorates. It's been good contact, but hasn't resulted in tangible outcomes. The enterprise architect has been involved with purchasing of new software for the institution, to do some vetting of security and integration in new packages - result is they're not shooting themselves in the foot quite as much. They recently formed an architecture group, which includes senior decision makers and senior tech people - 12-14 people. Aim to get buy-in and resource commitment. The idea is to make "more harmonious" decisions - e.g. what kinds of operating systems can be run in the data center. Engaging in a virtualization strategy using that group.

How services get advertised and shared is a problem. The "IT Ecosystem" is a web database that is designed to help people know who to talk to and characterize the mess.

RL Bob starts off by saying that he's here to represent the incoherent view, which both he and his institution are well suited for. One of the roles of the architect is to get everyone else to think like an architect, to think about the long-term, sustainability, etc. We don't have a single person respsonsable for architecture or an architecture office. Bob describes the attempt at UW to have an Architecture group, which tried to list architectural principles, which ended up not being entirely successful. Much architecture ends up working as advice and engagement in specific projects, which might imply roving bands of architects engaging in lots of projects. But not all projects take advantage of seeking out architectural advising (nor would that scale too far). The development of the product and service lifecycle has been more successful, and while it's not specifically about architecture, it at least has touch points where architecture can be considered.

Bruce talks about Portfolio Management - architects are asked to give an idea of relevant amount of investment and how long it will last - there's relatively little in the way of formal structure for this. At Stanford they have a body called the Systems Governance Group, which controls project money in large. Annually large projects have to come and "defend their right to exist". There's also a faculty subcommittee on computing that they've used successfully to gauge faculty support for efforts. Stanford has a Technology Architecture and Strategy Council, which has practitioners who are the lead technologists in various areas and have to "put up or shut up" on strategic direction and think about how their areas integrate and overlap with each other.

It strikes me that this conversation really represents a classic industrial style of "architecture" as a controlling system that can prescriptively decide what's correct at an institutional level. I tend to think of a post-modern concept of architect as a bricoleur (see quote below), working in more of an ad-hoc manner to build structures that use the materials at hand to respond to ever-changing needs.

In response to a question I asked about whether any of these architecture review boards include people from outside the central IT groups, Paul Hill noted that MIT's architecture review board has included people from across the institution that have reviewed projects on a regular basis, but that recently the non-central-IT folks requested that the central organization do the detailed reviews and report back to the whole group instead of having everyone involved.

The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the 'bricoleur's' means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project (which would presuppose besides, that, as in the case of the engineer, there were, at least in theory, as many sets of tools and materials or 'instrumental sets', as there are different kinds of projects). It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the 'bricoleur' himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that 'they may always come in handy'. Such elements are specialized up to a point, sufficiently for the 'bricoleur' not to need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions, but not enough for each of them to have only one definite and determinate use. They each represent a set of actual and possible relations; they are 'operators' but they can be used for any operations of the same type.

Technorati Tags: architecture, IT-architecture, CSG, CSG-Spring-2007

Posted by oren at 6:39 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2007

Lots cooking at Microsoft

There's been a lot of general head nodding on the web in reaction to Paul Graham's essay titled Microsoft is Dead.

Paul's assertion is not that Microsoft is out of business, of course, but that it's not a serious contender in the development of new technologies that matter.

After some of the things we've seen in the last couple of weeks my opinion is that, like Mark Twain, the reports of Microsoft's demise may well be greatly exaggerated, though I do have to agree with Tim O'Reilly's comment that MS's recent assertion that Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents without being willing to name them is totally reminiscent of Senator Joseph McCarthy's famous claim about communists at the State Department, and Tim's right-on when he says: Whether or not it's true, citing such a number without providing any detail is such a classic FUD move that, to me at least, it just makes Microsoft look ridiculous.

Last week we had George Moore and Walter Harp from Microsoft out to talk to our campus web services discussion group. George is the group manager of the Windows Live platform, and Walter is the Product Manager for Windows Live@edu (Microsoft's online offering for universities). George showed recently announced developments, including Sliverlight, a new platform for developing rich Internet applications. If I understand it correctly Silverlight combines methods for combining video (including high definition video) and interactivity controls into applications that render within a browser - think of it as a competitor to Adobe's Flash. It's use requires a browser plug-in, which Microsoft has made available for Firefox and Safari as well as IE. In addition to the base technology, MS is also offering the Silverlight Streaming service, which offers 4 GB accounts for free to host Silverlight applications, with outbound streaming quality of up to 700 Kbps. That speaks of a very hefty investment of resources by Microsoft.

The best explanation of Slverlight I've seen so far is the post in Scott Guthrie's blog. Scott also talks in this post about the implementation of a Dynamic Language Runtime to .NET that allows people to program >NET apps in popular dynamic languages. Microsoft is releasing DLR support for Ruby, Python, Javascript, and something new they're calling Dynamic VB. Perhaps most interesting, the DLR can be used in cross-platform Silverlight application in the browser.

As Tim O'Reilly notes (in a different post than the one I quoted above):

The RIA game really is heating up. Macromedia (now Adobe) started evangelizing this idea a long time ago, but it was Ajax that made it on the tip of every industry strategist's tongue. It's going to be very interesting to watch whether Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX make headway against Flash and Ajax in this space, or whether it's already game over.

In addition to showing us Silverlight, George also demonstrated some of the APIs to Microsoft Live services and the easy-to-use drop-in controls they're making available that build on those controls. The idea is to make it easy for people to build mashups of the various Live services. One of the most interesting controls is one that allows you to see your Live Contacts (think buddy list) dynamically within a web poge.

The very next morning after George and Walter were on campus Microsoft released the Popfly alpha. Popfly is a new service that allows you to visually construct web mashups within a browser by dragging controls onto a canvas and connecting the dots with a mouse. George kindly arranged for me to be invited to the alpha. I haven't had time to play with it much yet, but I did walk through the excellent tutorial, which walks you through creating a mashup that displays the location of new Twitter posts in Virtual Earth. I then tried to create my own mashup of showing where the closes Metro bus was in relation to my house, but I couldn't get it working in the fifteen minutes I had available to mess around so far. I was, by the way, working in Popfly in Firefox on my Mac, which worked fine. Popfly strikes me as similar in concept to Yahoo! Pipes, and it will be interesting to contrast the two and watch them both evolve.

So while I haven't always been a big fan of either Microsoft's software nor its business tactics, I do think that there is evidence of a whole new generation of talented people there who really get the Internet and Web 2.0 and are working hard to create some new and truly useful and interesting software there. While it's undoubtedly harder to refocus the huge corporate empire of Microsoft than it was in 1995 when Bill Gates issued his famous Internet Tidal Wave memo, I think there are definite signs of new energy emanating from Redmond. There's some life left in the old corporation yet!

Technorati Tags: business, mashups, microsoft, popfly, strategy, WindowsLive@edu

Posted by oren at 7:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2007

Seattle electronics recycling this Sunday, May 19

This might be of interest to lots of folks - I know my garage and basement tend to fill up with old electronics.

Spring Cleaning? Responsibly recycle your old electronics!
E-waste recycling event to take place at Rainier Community Center in South Seattle.

Seattle, WA - On Saturday, May 19th, 2007, individuals, small businesses, and community organizations are invited to recycle computers, monitors and TVs.

WHAT: Responsibly recycle used computers, monitors and TVs! All computer boxes (CPU's), computer monitors, computer peripherals and TV's will be accepted at the event. Computers, monitors and all TVs will be charged recycling fees ranging from $5 for computers to $25 for TVs. These fees are comparable to or less than the fees charged by the city and other recyclers. Working computer and monitor d onations are tax deductible.

WHEN: Saturday, May 19, 2007 from 9 AM - 4 PM. Rain or shine.

WHERE: Rainier Community Center
4600 38th Ave S, Seattle WA! 98118
(The center is located one block east of Rainier Ave S & S Alaska St)

WHY: Computer boxes (CPU's), computer monitors, computer peripherals and TV's all have heavy metals and are illegal to dispose of with regular garbage service. Proceeds and computers from the event will benefit the RecTech Coalition and InterConnection in their effort to steward the environment and provide computers to underserved areas throughout the world.

For event details visit: http://www.computers.interconnection.org/ecyclerainier/

For more on RecTech, see http://www.seattle.gov/parks/Centers/labs.htm

Technorati Tags: recycling

Posted by oren at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)

May 3, 2007

UW Computing Support meeting talk slides

I spoke briefly about what we're up to in C&C Emerging Technology on Tuesday at a meeting of UW computing support staff. There were several hundred staff attending, and we managed to get some good suggestions from the participants about issues we should be investigating. We'll list those suggestions and have a space to add more of them over on our Etech blog site. In the meantime, my slides from the meeting (pdf) are here.

It was great to see everybody at the meeting!

Technorati Tags: UW

Posted by oren at 7:16 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2007

Panic's Coda - a killer app for developing web sites on OS X

I just took a first and all-too-brief look at Panic's new Coda application. Coda bears the simple tag line of One Window Web Development, and aims to consolidate a familiar litany of applications used by web developers:

So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we realized. “And much cooler.”

Coda has integrated that familiar workflow into a single app. My quick look included making sure that it could get to my web server using Secure FTP, read files from the site (which it does speedily), editing html and css, and previewing html files. I'm sure it's got a lot more in store, and I look forward to further explorations.

Technorati Tags: osx, coda, coding, web-development

Posted by oren at 4:49 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2007

Summertime and the blogging is easy... on Tumblr

Something I read the other day (maybe it was this post in TechCrunch) pointed me towards Tumblr, which says:

Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs.

which got me thinking about what you really need a blog service to do and what makes it easy to post?

Despite my best intention to use my blog to post insightful and well-thought-out original writing, most of the time I'm posting a quick comment, or a link to a cool site or video, or a picture, or quote. While much has been made of the "blogosphere as a conversational medium, I receive very few comments since I've required TypeKey authentication for comments (to defeat comment spam), and trackback is hopelessly broken.

So tumblr's interface, which makes it supremely easy to post a small text snippet, a photo, quote, link, conversation, or video link, makes a lot of sense to me. If anybody asks me now where they should turn to start blogging, I'll point them to tumblr first. This makes a whole lot more sense to me than Twitter, which I'm still having a hard time getting.

Technorati Tags: blogging, tumblelogs, tumblr

Posted by oren at 3:20 PM | Comments (2)

April 21, 2007

What's up with getting to Google this morning?

I don't know if it's just me, but I'm having a very hard time getting to any Google URL this morning from my Comcast connection at home. Not having a hard time with other network locations.

Some sinister plot, Google problems, or just network configuration issues somewhere in the cloud?

It sure makes me realize just how dependent on Google I've become!

Technorati Tags: broadband, google, comcast

Posted by oren at 8:49 AM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2007

Outlook Frustrations

I'm trying to use Outlook (2007) more as my mail and calendar client, but I'm finding it frustrating.

I've got both an Exchange account and an IMAP account set up, with an Exchange address book and an LDAP directory for looking up addresses. I can't figure out how I can get Outlook to search the LDAP address book automatically for names entered on the To: line as I compose an email.

And when I specifically go over to the Address Book search screen, the LDAP searching algorithm seems broken - for instance, if I search Jack Hoffman, I get no answer, but if I search Hoffman, I see he's listed as Jack D. Hoffman. Other email clients don't have this problem.

And one more minor nit - I, like most people I know, tend to sort my email so that the newest messages appear on top. Then I scroll down to where the unread messages start, and work my way up to the newest. Apple's Mac mail app knows that if I've got messages sorted that way it should move up when I delete the message I'm reading. Outlook, by contrast wants to move down, which necessitates two or three more key presses for each message. Multiply that by several hundred messages a day and it's not so trivial as it seems.

Are there some configuration options I don't know about that can fix these issues?

Technorati Tags: email, Microsoft, outlook

Posted by oren at 5:00 PM | Comments (1)

April 10, 2007

Thunderbird 2.0 release candidate is out

I just tried the release candidate for the next generation of Mozilla's Thunderbird desktop email program. Tbird 2 has some nifty new features, including tagging, phishing detection, and a nifty little popup summary display of recent message information when you hover over a folder with new messages.

Perhaps one of the features that will be most appreciated is pre-configured setups for reading Google Mail and .Mac mail, though Thunderbird doesn't appear to see tags on Gmail messages (probably because it's not part of the metadata that the antiquated POP protocol supports - maybe that will change when/if Google adds IMAP access). I also like the little toggle on the folder display that hides the folders that don't contain unread messages - it's almost as handy as Pine's Incoming Folder collection (a ridiculously useful concept that I can't believe hasn't become commonplace in all email programs).

I still bemoan the lack of a real IMAP expunge command - you still have to "compact folders" to get rid of messages that have been marked for deletion.

And I have gotten completely hooked on the way Apple's mail program knows that when you have messages sorted with the newest at the top, if you delete a message the cursor should move up to the newer message on top (if there is one) instead of down to older messages. I haven't seen other mail programs emulate that simple, but smart, behavior.

At any rate, it looks like this is a solid advance for a popular desktop email client. On a related note, Wired has an interview with Thunderbird lead engineer Scott MacGregor where he talks about the continued relevance of desktop email clients:

Wired News: With seemingly every aspect of our data moving toward online apps and away from the traditional desktop model, why is Mozilla still interested in a desktop e-mail client?

Scott MacGregor: We believe the Thunderbird experience is better for moderate to heavy e-mail use. It's much easier to process incoming mail -- anyone who's had to use web mail on vacation to deal with dozens of e-mails can testify to how tedious it can be.

Roger that, Scott!

Technorati Tags: email, mozilla, open-source, thunderbird

Posted by oren at 6:52 AM | Comments (0)

April 8, 2007

Colorjack Sphere

I don't know about you, but I don't understand much about colors and how they interact, and when I'm working on web pages that want to look spiffy I never know how to pick colors that work well together.

This Sphere thingy on the Colorjack site looks like it will help a lot!

Technorati Tags: design, color

Posted by oren at 6:53 AM | Comments (1)

April 5, 2007

Yahoo Mail - unlimited, but not perpetual, storage

Lots of people are commenting on Yahoo!'s announcement that they will begin offering unlimited email storage beginning in May.

That's nice - but my recent experience with Yahoo! mail was the discovery when I went to log in that they had declared my account inactive and deleted all of my mail. They said it was because I hadn't logged in in four months or longer. This despite the fact that I regularly log in and use Yahoo! instant messaging, using the same account name and password.

You'd think that a company that can offer unlimited mail storage, as well as one that makes their authentication available as a single-sign-on facility could notice that a user is logging in to their account on a different Yahoo! service before deleting all their mail.

When I complained to Yahoo! the answer I got was:

Once an account has been de-activated, it is not possible for the Yahoo!
Mail team to retrieve any previously stored information.

Yahoo! Premium Mail accounts do not require access to protect from
dormancy or possible de-activation.

Not very helpful, to say the least.

I for one, won't be relying on Yahoo! mail for anything I really care about, not matter how much storage they're offering.

Technorati Tags: email, yahoo

Posted by oren at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)

April 4, 2007

NSF Camp Shibboleth in Portland June 25-27

I've been way too busy to blog much lately - but I have every intention of doing more soon!

In the meantime, this should be of interest to folks working in the identity management space around the Northwest:

****************************************************************
UPCOMING CAMP MIDDLEWARE WORKSHOPS IN PORTLAND, OREGON
CAMP Shibboleth: Flexible Web-Based Authentication and
Authorization * June 25-27, 2007
http://www.educause.edu/camp072
Advanced CAMP: Scaling Secure Collaboration * June 27-29, 2007
http://www.educause.edu/camp073
****************************************************************

JOIN US FOR MIDDLEWARE WORKSHOPS offered by Campus Architectural
Middleware Planning (CAMP) this summer in Portland, Oregon.

LOW EARLY-BIRD RATES END MAY 29--register now to save money.

CAMP SHIBBOLETH: FLEXIBLE WEB-BASED AUTHENTICATION AND AUTHORIZATION
(June 25-27)
* OVERVIEW--This CAMP will offer concrete practice and real-world
experience from institutions running Shibboleth in production for
controlling access to both on- and off-campus services. Participants
will learn the answers to questions such as:
- What is Shibboleth and how does it work?
- What is the business case for it and how can I sell it on my
campus?
- What is the migration path to support intercampus Web SSO in the
future?
- How much identity management infrastructure do I need?
- How can I use Shibboleth to simplify my application deployment
and maintenance?
* AUDIENCE--higher education IT managers, project managers, middleware
architects, and systems analysts involved at a technical, management,
or stakeholder level in supporting Web-based services.
LEARN MORE and REGISTER TODAY at
http://www.educause.edu/camp072

* NEW TO IDENTITY MANAGEMENT? Consider attending the nontechnical,
preworkshop seminar, "Introduction to Identity and Access Management:
The Big Picture," 8:30 - 11:45 a.m. on June 25.
http://www.educause.edu/camp072/12930?product_code=camp072/sem01

ADVANCED CAMP: SCALING SECURE COLLABORATION (June 27-29)
* OVERVIEW--This exploratory CAMP will bring together experts from
across the research and education community to identify, clarify, and
coordinate next steps to support collaborative activities within and
among organizations. The focus will be on identity and access
management services, such as federated authentication and
group/privilege management, and their integration with applications
and application suites.
* AUDIENCE-- Central campus IT strategists, technology architects, and
those in related leadership roles.
LEARN MORE and REGISTER TODAY at
http://www.educause.edu/camp073

OTHER MIDDLEWARE RESOURCES
* Get started with identity management
http://www.nmi-edit.org/
* View NMI-EDIT's Enterprise Directory Implementation Roadmap
http://www.nmi-edit.org/roadmap/dir-roadmap_200510/index-set.html
* View NMI-EDIT's Enterprise Authentication Implementation Roadmap
http://www.nmi-edit.org/roadmap/draft-authn-roadmap-03/
* Access PROCEEDINGS from past CAMP meetings
http://www.educause.edu/camp
* Browse RESOURCES and sign up for E-MAIL ALERTS on middleware
http://www.educause.edu/Browse/645&PARENT_ID=285
* Subscribe to the Net@EDU Identity Management Working Group mailing
list
http://www.educause.edu/IdentityManagementWorkingGroup/928
* Learn more about the NMI-EDIT technical development lead by the
Internet2 Middleware Initiative
http://middleware.internet2.edu

CAMP SPONSORS
CAMP is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Middleware
Initiative-Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies (NMI-EDIT)
Consortium: Internet2 and EDUCAUSE. Additional support was provided by
the National Science Foundation OCI-0330626.

Technorati Tags: events, identity

Posted by oren at 1:42 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2007

Some good news on calendaring!

There's been a flurry of items of interest on calendaring interoperability that might add up to an indication of gathering momentum on this long overdue area.

The CalDAV spec for "accessing, managing, and sharing calendaring and scheduling information" was given official RFC (Request for Comment) status by the IETF, becoming RFC 4791. That gives CalDAV an official status within the Internet community that should encourage widespread adoption.

Membership in the CalConnect calendaring consortium continues to grow, with Google being the latest member to join. Google Calendar product manager Shirin Oskooi said this about joining: "We believe it is important to work towards a unified standard around announcing, discovering, and publishing events and to work towards overall interoperability. To this end, CalConnect's goals are right in line with Google's mission to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful." Now if only we could get that other high tech company across the lake to join...

InfoWeek has an article on Apple's fortchoming Leopard server software release that talks about the support for CalDAV within the iCal server. And Apple is touting the support for CalDAV in the forthcoming iCal desktop software. That means that you'll be able to use iCal to access CalDAV servers whether they're Apple's own or somebody else's.

I hope I'm not just being overly optimistic in feeling like this is beginning to all add up to something - we've desperately needed interoperable calendaring for years!

Technorati Tags: apple, Calconnect, CalDAV , Calendaring, google

Posted by oren at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2007

Big research and advanced networking

Last week at our annual all-hands meeting for C&C we were fortunate to have a panel discussion that featured Ed Lazowska, Ron Johnson, and John Delaney, all talking about the changing nature of scientific research and how research is being enabled by advanced cyber-infrastructure.

Ed talked about computational science becoming less about raw compute cycles and more about being "data-centric", and how competitive advantage is gained from how fast you can extract new knowledge from the same data everyone else also has access to. He said that the technological future is in managing, transmitting, synthesizing, and visualizing massive amounts of data and then in being able to collaborate with others working with that data in secure and authenticated ways.

John gave a captivating overview of the Neptune project as a great example of exactly the kind of large-scale research environment that Ed was talking about. This is an international effort to place fiber-optic cable and attached instruments on the sea floor around the boundaries of the Juan De Fuca tectonic plate off the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia to collect data wide range of oceanographic, geological, and ecological processes. This is a huge effort, with a proposed budget of $331 million over six years.

John pointed out that the key to being able ask new kinds of research questions is to provide interactivity and constant data collection from multiple locations in the sea. Those research processes are enabled by the provision of power and bandwidth to the sea floor.

There's good video on the Research Channel's web site of John giving a similar talk in January. Definitely worth a look if you haven't been paying attention to this project and what it says about the changing nature of science.

Technorati Tags: research, science, technology, University of Washington, UW

Posted by oren at 7:33 AM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2007

Recording music with the Sony PCM-D1

We had a chance last week to try recording our regular weekly jazz trio (sax, bass, drums) get-together with Sony's new-ish PCM-D1 portable recording device. The Sony device is probably the most high-end of a new class of recording devices that record from built-in microphones directly to common digital formats in memory. In this case we recorded at regular CD-quality resolution (44.1 Khz) to wav files.

Mostly I was trying to figure out if the sound from a single set of stereo microphones would work for this type of music. Our ears have become used to years of hearing recordings that are created with multiple microphones placed extremely close to instruments, so that the sound of microphones that pick up some of the quality of the room the music is played in tends to sound more hollow and "unnatural" at times. I have to say, I came away impressed. The quality from the built-in condenser mikes was really good, and while the mix isn't perfect, I think that by spending some time working on the placement of the device we could come away with perfectly useful recordings.

One of the tunes we recorded is available for listening as an mp3 from http://homepage.mac.com/oren.sreebny/ned-oren-kurt.mp3 - it's only a 128 bit converted file (and we didn't play great) but you should be able to get the general idea. Many thanks to Tony Tudisco from First Choice Marketing for arranging for the demo!

Technorati Tags: audio, devices, music, recording

Posted by oren at 9:28 PM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2007

Interesting article on Apple retail stores

There's an interesting article from Fortune on Apple's incredible success at running their retail stores.

"People haven't been willing to invest this much time and money or engineering in a store before," says the Apple CEO, his feet propped on Apple's boardroom table in Cupertino. "It's not important if the customer knows that. They just feel it. They feel something's a little different."

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy (Charts) stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. (Charts) takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany's for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone's lunch.

That astonishing number, from a Sanford C. Bernstein report, is merely the average of Apple's 174 stores, which attract 13,800 visitors a week. (The Fifth Avenue store averages 50,000-plus.) In 2004, Apple reached $1 billion in annual sales faster than any retailer in history; last year, sales reached $1 billion a quarter. And now comes the next, if not must-have, then must-see, product.

"Our stores were conceived and built for this moment in time - to roll out iPhone," says Jobs, summoning one to the table with a tantalizing I've-got-the-future-in-my-pocket twinkle. If sales are anywhere near expectations - Apple (Charts) hopes to move ten million iPhones in 2008 - the typical Apple Store could be selling, in absolute terms, as much as a Best Buy, and with just a fraction of the selling space.

Posted by oren at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 8, 2007

What goes around comes around - The Exchange Management Shell

I got a mailing from Microsoft about Exchange 2007 that points to an article on something called the Exchange Management Shell, which looks to be a pretty slick command line interface for managing Exchange. What's more, the shell provides more functionality than the GUI interface:

You can use the Exchange Management Shell to perform every task available in the Exchange Management Console and tasks that you can't perform in the Exchange Management Console.

It amuses me to see Microsoft touting a command line interface.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, irony, exchange

Posted by oren at 6:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 7, 2007

Nice short video on what Web 2.0 is all about

This is a nice under five-minute video by Michael Wesch, a faculty member in Anthropology at Kansas State.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, video

Posted by oren at 5:05 PM | Comments (0)

February 1, 2007

the rumored Mac Book Mini

Apple Recon is reporting on a rumored forthcoming 3.5 lb 12 inch notebook from Apple - I hope this comes to pass.

Display: Confirmed use LED backlighting (to conserve battery life), and will be a 12″ Widescreen, same resolution as Mac Book, 1280×800. Only possible wrench in this plan is getting enough screens to meet Apple’s demands, but all indications as of today’s prototypes is that this is the plan going forward.

CPU: 2GHz Core 2 Duo, sorry to say it won’t be faster, but to be small, you gotta use less watts and generate less heat…especially with the graphics card that this beast has been spotted with. Still, considering that the top end will be 2.33 - 2.5 GHz, that’s really not that bad.

RAM: 1GB standard, 3GB BTO.

Technorati Tags: apple, portables

Posted by oren at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

Almost two weeks (so far) with a Wii

I've never been a gamer, and we've never owned a game console. But Mo, who just turned nine last week, surprised and impressed the heck out of us by managing to save over a hundred dollars of his own money over the last year, scraped up from his $2 a week allowance, gifts, and picking up whatever change he finds lying around the house. His intent was to use the money to buy a Nintendo GameCube.

But when I showed him the advance trailer for Nintendo's Wii console in November, he decided that's what he wanted, and I told him I'd make up the difference in the cost between the two devices.

The problem, of course, was actually finding a Wii. Finally after several attempts over the holidays and almost daily calls to Fred Meyer, Gamestop, and Target ever since, I went and stood in line at a local Target store at 6:00 am on a recent Sunday. I was seventh in line, and by the time a store employee came out at 7:30 to announce that they had 26 Wiis in stock the line was over fifty people long. I emerged from the store, triumphant, with the Wii, an extra controller and nunchuck, and Super Monkeyball Banana Blitz.

Now, after a week and a half of playing with the Wii, it's easy to understand why Nintendo has such a runaway hit on its hands. In a season where Microsoft and Sony were battling it out head-to-head over which advanced console will take over the living room with super-powerful high-def graphics, dvd playing capabilities, and more blood and gore, Nintendo came up with a new and devilishly simple concept - wireless, motion-detecting controllers that get people up off the couch and interacting in real space with the video games. A few games on the Wii have now become a staple of our evenings at home, and Michele and I have spent more than one night playing, long after Mo has gone to bed.

Yesterday's New York Times had an article (link only good until they put it behind the paid subscription barrier) contrasting the reception of the Wii and the Playstation 3. The Times noted:

It appears that Nintendo has already created an unexpected three-way contest, while calling into question conventional wisdom that video games are the domain of testosterone-driven gadget freaks who can zone out for hours while conquering computer-generated foes.

“Nintendo came at things sideways — they made stuff that’s silly and fun,” said Jeff Gerstmann, senior editor of GameSpot, a Web site with video game news and reviews. “It has created a new style of gaming.”

Nintendo recently announced that during the holiday quarter, it shipped 3.2 million Wii consoles and sold 17.5 million games. Sony said it shipped 1.84 million PlayStation 3’s in the quarter, and sold 5.2 million copies of game software for the console.

I particularly liked the Sony spokesman's response:

Dave Karraker, a spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, said the Wii did not belong in the same category as the more powerful PlayStation 3. “Wii could be considered an impulse buy more than anything else,” he declared.

Yeah - all those impulse buyers in line at 6 am on a Sunday in winter weather. It's nice to see the market for silly and fun innovation.

Technorati Tags: nintendo, videogames, wii

Posted by oren at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2007

SOA Workshop with the Burton Group's Pete Lacey

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

Posted by oren at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2007

A couple of days last week at Microsoft

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

Posted by oren at 6:27 AM | Comments (0)

San Francisco releases study on municipal fiber network

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

Posted by oren at 6:05 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2007

Joining Seattle's Citizens' Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board

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

Posted by oren at 4:50 PM | Comments (1)

January 17, 2007

Digital Rendezvous - my ECAR research bulletin on social software in higher education

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

Posted by oren at 7:21 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2007

UW Vision discussion blog

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!

Technorati Tags: higher-ed, UW

Posted by oren at 6:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 5, 2007

[CSG Winter 2007] Quote of the day - Paul Hill on DRM

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

Posted by oren at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG 2007] Thursday workshop on collaboration tools

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

Posted by oren at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

January 3, 2007

[CSG Winter 2007] Storage at Indiana University

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

Posted by oren at 4:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2006

[The Home Music Project] Update on the Home Music Project

Back from vacation on Kauai, and starting to dig out from the mass of email messages (50 gazillion messages, of which 25 are important - but how to find those except by looking at all of them?).

In the meantime, an update on the Home Music Project.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I finished encoding all of the CDs that were in my CD cabinet, and those are now ensconced in boxes in the garage. There's still a few CDs lingering around - several in both cars, a pile on my desk at work - but that's by far the bulk of the CDs.

So far the total is 12,075 songs, from 965 albums, taking up 74.09 Gigabytes of disk space.

I'm thinking that at some point it might make sense to use a big iPod as both as an additional backup and as a portable version of the whole library. It would all barely fit on the current 80 Gb iPod, but that doesn't leave much room for growth. I wonder if we'll see a 100 Gb iPod unveiled at MacWorld next month?

For those who care about the details, I encoded in mp3 format, variable bit rate, with 192 Kbps minimum sample rate. I know there are some who will say that I should have encoded in a lossless format at a high bit rate, but mp3 is by far the most portable format, and the sound quality is good enough for my fifty-three-year-old rock-and-roll-veteran ears.

I created an iTunes playlist for each album - it's a pleasure to scroll through the albums and set them playing. For Thanksgiving day, when we had a house full of people most of the day, I created a long playlist of a bunch of mellow party music and just let it play unattended - that was great!

I grabbed what cover art iTunes could find, but it only finds cover art for albums that are being sold on the iTunes Store, which leaves out a lot of my music (starting, but by no means limited to, the entire Beatles catalog). I'm thinking I should write a mashup that would figure out which albums don't have cover art and go grab the covers from Amazon. So far, however, I haven't figured out how iTunes 7 keeps track of cover art - there doesn't seem to be an entry that represents cover art in the iTunes Music Library.xml file.

The Mac Mini came with a remote and Front Row software, which I thought I'd use a lot, but so far we seem to just wander over to the computer and use the keyboard and mouse to pick direct from iTunes.

Here's a picture of the setup - you'll notice I haven't yet removed the 6-disk CD player, though I will soon. The cabinet is now resuming its former purpose of storing table linens, candlesticks, and the like.

Technorati Tags: music

Posted by oren at 4:31 PM | Comments (0)

Second Life - some realistic coverage

Second Life has had an amazing amount of press coverage lately, with the mainstream press proclaiming the immersive environment the greatest thing since sliced bread - like this article in the Globe and Mail, for instance, calling Second Life a Signpost For the Future.

There are a couple of good responses to the hype from a couple of the most insightful and knowledgeable commentators on social technology, Clay Shirky and danah boyd.

Clay points out that lots of people are trying Second Life, but it's likely that not many are yet spending lots of time in the environment, or even becoming regular users.

He then goes on to note that we've seen all this before, in the hype a dozen or so years ago about MUDs and MOOs, and rightly points out that If, in 1993, you’d studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you’d have a better grasp of online community today than if you’d spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City. Ou sont les TinyMUCKs d’antan?

danah comments on Clay's post, correctly noting that the most successful social software environments, like MySpace, are being used as complements to the physical social world, not as virtual replacements for it, and that people don't want to socialize with lots of people they don't know from some other context.

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

I think Second Life is cool, but I think these well thought out perspectives from Clay and danah are spot on.

Technorati Tags: second-life, social-software

Posted by oren at 4:08 PM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2006

[ECAR 2006] ECAR 2006 Symposium - Sustainability is the topic

I'm at the Boulders Resort in the wonderfully named town of Carefree, Arizona, for the 2006 ECAR Symposium, where the topic is sustainability, broadly conceived.

Richard Katz kicks off the proceedings by announcing that ECAR now has 430 member institutions, which is much higher than they ever imagined.

Sustainability has become an issue that many are concerned about.

Sustain in music - a sound that lasts without appreciable decay.

Technorati Tags: ecar2006

Posted by oren at 4:45 PM | Comments (0)

December 6, 2006

National Science Foundation workshop on high performance computing, storage, and large databases

This workshop was sponsored by NSF's Division of Science Resource Statistics, which collects data on the US science and engineering enterprise to be used for policy making purposes. They have collected data on the physical environment for research at higher education and biomedical institutions since 1986, and since 2003 they have begun to add a survey on cyberinfrastructure. The initial effort was to collect data on networking infrastructure, but now they are interested in also collecting data on high performance computing, storage, and large databases used for science and engineering research purposes. These surveys go to all research performing institutions with greater than $1 million in research expenditures and all biomedical institutions with greater than $1 million in NIH funding.

The workshop gathered a group of about fifteen participants from institutions as large as the UW, Penn State, and UNC, as rarified as Princeton, as specialized as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Scripps Biomedical Institute, and as small as the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, to brainstorm on what data points might possibly be collected on these activities that would be both meaningful and possible to collect.

Most of these institutions, unlike the UW, host some central research computing facility where a central IT organization runs some large high performance computing resources that are used by faculty doing research. But even in those institutions there are many other research computing efforts on the campuses that are not run by central organizations.

Over the couple of days what emerged was a way of classifying high performance systems into: Clusters (which can be either tightly or loosely coupled); Massively Parallel (MPP) machines with distributed memory; Symmetrically Multiprocessor (SMP) machines with shared memory; and Vector Processors (PVP) which it was noted aren't seen too much in the US.

Common data that can be collected about those kinds of compute resources includes: number of processors (there was an interesting discussion of how to count this in this day of multi-core chip-sets); processor speed; amount of memory per processor; what kinds of interconnects exist between processors; total RAM, total attached disk (and what kind); and total estimate of flops the machine is capable of.

Some interesting items pop up in my notes from the two days:

• The needs of a research data center are qualitatively different from the needs of a business data center in terms of types of facilities, access policies, and tolerance for what kinds of down time.
• Support for data management and use of databases is the fastest growing demand for help among researchers using high performance computing.
• UCLA has grown a strong grid computing initiative, which is not only supporting the other UC systems, but also providing cycles to the Cal State institutions and K-12 institutions in California, through the "Kids On The Grid" program.
• Princeton has evolved their academic technology support to a new group in OIT, their central IT organization, to support research computing. That group works very closely with PICSciE, the campus' new center for computational science and engineering work. The group within OIT concentrates on administering high performance systems that are widely used by researchers. They currently run an IBM Blue Gene, an SGI Altics, and a Beowulf cluster. They're building a 35 terabyte shared storage facility.
• One institution is building a brand new 11,000 square foot data center with 8 tons of cooling capacity - they figure that amount of capacity will only hold them for a year or two.
• The University of Houston has an interesting model where the system administrators for their research facility are not university employees but contracted from outsourced firms - they have a lot of folks in Houston with those skills providing outsourced services to the petroleum industry as well as academia.
• Purdue is running Condor clustering to make unused cycles from student computing labs available to research efforts.

It was a very interesting couple of days - it was great to meet folks I didn't know, and to get a feel for what's happening out there in this fast-changing field.

Technorati Tags: HPC, NSF, research, science

Posted by oren at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)

December 5, 2006

Travel this week - NSF and ECAR

I'm traveling this week. First I'm in Arlington, VA, for a National Science Foundation workshop on high performance computing, storage, and large databases. NSF is starting to plan to survey research institutions on what's happening in those areas, so this workshop is going to center on discussions about what data will be useful (and/or possible) to collect. Should be a fascinating discussion.

For the second half of the week I'll be in Arizona for the annual Symposium from the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR). Richard Katz always puts together interesting and unexpected ideas for these meetings, which have been some of the most thought provoking of all of the gatherings I regularly attend. This year's agenda, which centers on the broad topic of sustainability, promises to be no different.

I'll post on both of these gatherings as I can during the week.

Technorati Tags: meetings, puppy, travel

Posted by oren at 5:14 AM | Comments (0)

December 1, 2006

It's the little things that make a difference - Firefox 2.0 tab behavior

One of the things I really like about Firefox 2.0 is that if you have your preferences set to "New pages should be opened in: a new tab", when you click on a link in a web page, Firefox opens that link in a new tab. When you close that tab, Firefox takes you right back to the tab you opened the link from, instead of the nearest tab. For those of us who typically have dozens of tabs open, that's a real productivity enhancer.

Technorati Tags: firefox, design

Posted by oren at 5:11 AM | Comments (0)

Calendar Mashups

I've been too busy lately to blog much, but I have been playing a bit with the ability to embed html views of Google calendars into web pages.

I keep a Google calendar of my travel and events, because it's much easier for me to see at a glance when I'll be out of town or unavailable that way rather than sifting through all the entries on my Oracle Calendar, which is cluttered with standing meetings, individual appointments, plane flights, and the like.

Google has now got a nice wizard called the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper that generates html for a view of a Google calendar that can be dropped into any web page, like so:

This month and January are particularly good examples, as I'm traveling a bunch. I've embedded this calendar into the sidebar of the blog, down below all the About Oren stuff.

The folks over at 30 boxes have built a nice calendar mashup engine called 30Boxed that lets you create calendar views from any icalendar feed. I tried that too, and I like the look and the fact that the month view scrolls a week at a time, but when I feed it my Google calendar ical feed it doesn't seem to realize that there are events I've deleted from my Google calendar. But there are some very cool mashups that can be made with this gadget, like timeline views of flickr photo sets.

Technorati Tags: 30boxes, Calendaring, google, mashups

Posted by oren at 4:48 AM | Comments (1)

November 20, 2006

Put this on your calendar - Cynthia Breazeal talk at UW on Social Robots - March 1, 2007

This should be a very cool talk, and there's plenty of advance notice to get it on your calendars:

Cynthia Breazeal: “The Art and Science of Social Robots”
March 1, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Kane Hall 120, University of Washington

Cynthia Breazeal (Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT) directs the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab. She is internationally known for seamlessly blending scientific theories, artistic insights, and engineering principles to create compelling robotic creatures that have a lively social presence to those who interact with them. She has participated in the development of some of the world’s most famous robots including the upper torso humanoid robot, Cog, and the sociable robot, Kismet. Her current research extends these themes in the area of human-robot relations to create cooperative and capable robots that can work and learn in partnership with people. Her research program strives to revolutionize the art and science of human-robot interaction and cooperation—to develop robots that engage with us as helpful partners that will ultimately play a valuable, rewarding, and unprecedented role in the everyday lives of ordinary people. For more information on Cynthia Breazeal, see http://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/.

Breazeal’s talk is part of a special initiative on the digital humanities sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. The collaborative context for the Simpson Center’s digital humanities initiative is InFormation 2006-2007, an ambitious nation-wide project involving campuses across the country under the rubric of HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. As a consortium, HASTAC is dedicated to leveraging its collective institutional resources to integrate humanists into the projects and conversations shaping the digital world.

For more information on Breazeal’s talk or the digital humanities initiative, please contact Linda Wagner, UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, at lmwagner@ascomp.washington.edu or 206-221-3191.

Technorati Tags: events, technology, UW

Posted by oren at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2006

Skip logic in Catalyst WebQ - Very Cool!

My friends and colleagues over in the Catalyst Web Tools team have released a new version of WebQ, their quizzing and survey software. This version includes a feature they're calling Skip Logic:

Skip logic (also known as branching) allows you to create custom paths through your survey or quiz, showing the participants questions based on their response to a previous question.

This ability to add logic to questions essentially turns WebQ into a very nice lightweight generalized web forms and workflow tool.

I'm using this feature to build a RSVP form for an invitation we're sending out for a training class. The first question on the form asked people if they're going to attend (yes or no) or send someone else in their place. If they reply that they're sending someone else, then they get asked for that person's name and email. If they just reply yes or no they don't get asked that question.

It's a trivial example, but it's not hard to think up lots of uses for this feature - though I have to admit to being disappointed that I couldn't base logic on textual patterns in narrative answers. Maybe that will come later!

Here's what the skip logic looks like when you're building a WebQ - the person filling out the survey gets sent to one of several different places based on their answer to the first question:

Technorati Tags: catalyst, software, workflow

Posted by oren at 6:53 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

The Hunch Engine

One of the first programs I ever wrote, back in the early 1980s, generated a random set list for the band I was playing in at the time, Eddie and the Atlantics (the program was written in Basic on a Timex/Sinclair ZX81). While the program didn't encapsulate any of the "business" rules we used for planning set lists (start and end with faster tunes, vary the song keys and rhythmic styles, feature each of the singers and soloists, etc.), it did tend to turn up interesting combinations of songs or parts of sets.

I was reminded of this when Jim Bruce sent around this article about Eric Bonabeau's Hunch Engine software, that uses evolutionary algorithms along with human choice to progressively refine solutions to problems posed.

No software can take all these things into account. So programmers shouldn't even try, argues Bonabeau. Instead, they should look to nature, in which random mutation and natural selection produce the features that fit an organism to its environment. Evolutionary algorithms start with a few solutions and a set of constraints, then breed generation after generation of new solutions by recombining selected elements from the previous generations. In order to steer the solutions in a certain direction, the algorithms need only be told which solutions in each generation to recombine. The choices can be made automatically, or they can be made by humans.

The article goes on to give an example of how the software has been used to come up with new routes for letter carriers to cover in a French town. Instead of trying to understand all of the reasons the letter carriers have for preferring one route over another, the software generated sets of initial possibilities, the mailmen (and women, one supposes) picked out the ones they liked the best and those were used to generate successive generations, getting progressively more refined. A simple yet elegant approach to problem solving.

Wish I had had the Hunch Engine hooked up to the old random set generator!

Technorati Tags: algorithms, software

Posted by oren at 8:23 AM | Comments (1)

November 4, 2006

Adventures with the Nokia E62 - Gmail works great

Just installed the Google mail mobile app on the E62 and it works great - it's incredibly fast and responsive. The only problems I've seen so far is that I get asked if I want to let the app use the network every time I click on anything (there's got to be a way to set that by app), and the navigation keys don't seem to work exactly as the prompts indicate.

It's definitely a lot snappier than IMAP on the standard installed email app that came with the phone.

Technorati Tags: e62, email, google, mobile-devices, Nokia

Posted by oren at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2006

New Blackberry with WiFi coming soon

And now this, from Gizmodo:

Seems like we were just talking about the Blackberry 8703e rolling out RIM's door, and now here's a picture and a partial spec list of the Blackberry 8800. Unlike its CDMA-only 8703e brandmate, this one will support GSM/GPRS, EDGE, and—wait for it—WiFi.

Technorati Tags: smartphones, wifi

Posted by oren at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

[The Home Music Project] Moving on from CDs

Last weekend I went to put away all the CDs that have piled up on various surfaces around the house, and realized that things had gotten completely out of hand and that it was (long past) time to do something about it.

I have a lot of CDs - somewhere around a thousand, and I can no longer fit them all into the cabinet where I've been keeping them for the past ten years, filed alphabetically by artist in jewel boxes. Michele's been wondering for years about when we could do something about the physical clutter of the ever-mounting CD collection, and after spending a lot of time looking in vain for affordable CD storage cabinets that can handle that size of collection somewhat gracefully, the technology solution seemed cheaper and better.

So I went out to the University Bookstore and picked up a Mac Mini, a LaCie 500 gigabyte external drive, and a 15.4 inch widescreen monitor from Fry's new online store - the monitor was $89, which I thought was great, but now I see it's come down to $69 in the last week! I had an Apple keyboard around, and I added a wireless Mighty Mouse, and set up the whole shebang on top of the cabinet with the CDs and plugged the headphone output into the stereo.

I realized last night that I now have over a terabyte of data storage capacity in my house - it wasn't that long ago that a terabyte represented the total capacity of the commercial data center the company I worked for had (okay - maybe it was that long ago - around the late '80s).

I moved the 30 gigabytes of music I already had in my iTunes library on the family room computer, and started ripping CDs that I hadn't yet encoded, starting with the ones that I couldn't fit in the cabinet. My goal is to spend time working through the collection until the CDs can safely be put under the house. It'll be interesting see how it goes and how long it takes to get there.

Technorati Tags: music

Posted by oren at 6:35 AM | Comments (0)

Maybe Apple will give us the integrated smartphone we deserve

I spend the other afternoon sitting in a conference room with good 802.11 (a,b, and g) but no cell reception looking at my Nokia E62 getting no updates, I again wondered at the way the cellular carriers are missing the connectivity point.

Stowe Boyd points out this article in the International Business Times predicting that Apple will release two phone models in the first part of 2007:

"Based upon our recent checks, we expect Apple to unveil two models of its widely anticipated cell phones in early [Calendar Year] '07," said Jesse Tortora, research analyst at Prudential Equities.

"We have learned that one model will be a smart phone, including integrated keyboard, video and music capability, while the other model will be a slimmer phone with music capability. At least one of the models will include WiFi."

It would be just like Apple to move the state of this art ahead while the phone companies waste a good opportunity yet again.

Technorati Tags: apple, broadband, e62, Nokia, smartphones

Posted by oren at 6:08 AM | Comments (1)

October 18, 2006

Adventures with the Nokia E62 - Transfering contacts, and getting iSync to work

One of the first things I wanted to do with the Nokia E62 was to transfer my contacts list from my old phone. I keep that contacts list synchronized with my Macs via iSync and .Mac, so I figured it would be a simple matter of paring up my desktop Mac with the E62 using Bluetooth and then running iSync. Unfortunately, iSync doesn't yet know about the E62 as a device - I will comment that the architecture of having to have the iSync application know about each specific device, rather than classes of device using the same software, seems broken to me from the get-go. I did manage to transfer the contacts directly from my old Nokia phone over Bluetooth using the Sync program on the E62, which solved my initial problem, but not the ongoing one of keeping contacts in sync between the E62 and my computers. Some searching turned up a German website called Mactomster that has an iSync Plugin that supposedly defines the E61 and E62 devices to iSync. I tried installing it, iSync still didn't recognize my device. Some further searching turned up a posting on macosxhints by a fellow calling himself (or herself) Serbian about how to get iSync to work with an E61 - it involves editing the plist file for iSync mobile devices to put in some XML for this device. Once I found the plist file and modified Serbian's xml to refer to the E62 instead of the E62, it seemed to work fine. I used the terminal and pico to edit the file.

The MetaClasses.plist file is in the directory:

/Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns/ PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources Make sure you make a backup copy of the file before you edit it. :) Below is the text I entered - I put it in at the end of the section where Nokia devices are defined - I don't think it really matters where it goes. The XML fragment is also here as a text file. The Mactomster isync plugin installation must have installed the Nokia E61 icon in the right place as it came up when I fired up iSync. The E61 looks just like the E62, so I didn't bother trying to find an E62 icon. Your mileage may vary.

        <key>com.nokia.E62</key>
        <dict>
                <key>Identification</key>
                <dict>
                        <key>com.apple.cgmi+cgmm</key>
                        <string>Nokia+Nokia E62</string>
                        <key>com.apple.gmi+gmm</key>
                        <string>Nokia+Nokia E62</string>
                </dict>
                <key>InheritsFrom</key>
                <array>
                        <string>family.com.nokia.serie60v2.3< string>
                </array>
                <key>Services</key>
                <array>
                        <dict>
                                <key>ServiceName</key>
                                <string>com.apple.model</string>
                                <key>ServiceProperties</key>
                                <dict>
                                        <key>ModelIcon</key>
                                        <string>NOKe61.tiff</string>
                                        <key>ModelName</key>
                                        <string>E62</string>
                                </dict>
                        </dict>
                </array>
        </dict>

Technorati Tags: e62, isync, nokia

Posted by oren at 6:42 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2006

Adventures with the Nokia E62 - Working with UW Email

The Nokia E62 works with UW IMAP and SMTP email.

You can subscribe to IMAP folders, which in this case appears to mean that new messages that arrive in those folders will be shown in the mail index and you can then look at the messages in subscribed folders.

Here are the settings I used:

Connection Settings:

Incoming Email:

User name: My UW NetID
Password: My UW NetID password
Incoming mail serv: oren.deskmail.washington.edu
Access point in use: Always ask
Mailbox name: uw
Mailbox type: IMAP4
Security (ports): SSL/TLS
Port: Default

Outgoing Email:

My e-mail address: My UW email address
User name: My UW NetID
Password: My UW NetID password
Outgoing Mail serv.: smtp.washington.edu
Access point in use: Always ask
Security (ports): SSL/TLS
Port: 587

Technorati Tags: e62, email, nokia, imap

Posted by oren at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2006

Adventures with the Nokia E62 - Where's the dang WiFi?

I just got a brand new Nokia E62 smartphone from Cingular. It's been a while since I had a full-featured smartphone - my last one was a Kyocera 6035 back in 2001.

I'll be writing about my exploration of this new generation device as I go, but first I already have a major complaint for Cingular -

WHERE'S THE DANG WI-FI?

I can swear that when I looked at Nokia's site for information on the E62 originally a couple of weeks ago it said that the E62 was equipped with WiFi (or WLAN, as Nokia calls it), as is the E61 that is sold in other (non-US) markets. But the phone doesn't, in fact, have WiFi, and it's been widely reported that the main difference between the E61 and the E62 is the neutering of the connectivity options.

I can only assume that Cingular and perhaps other carriers asked for removal of the ability to use high-speed connectivity that's not carrier-provided. This only points out once again how totally broken the US model of leaving control of the wireless market in the hands of the carriers is. The internet service providers don't dictate what features my computers have - thank goodness! And I don't buy my cars from the people who build the roads. So why should AT&T and the behemoths that the Baby Bells have become decide what phones I can use on their networks, and drive the (lack of) technological development in those devices?

In this respect the US lags far behind other parts of the world (like Europe, Japan and India) in the technology we use for wireless communication.

Other initial reactions to the E62 - the screen is bright and resolution is good, and the navigation controls seem easy to use. One problem I've noticed is that when I hold it up to my ear to talk on the phone, the screen rubs on the side of my face and gets smudged - it came with a wired headset, but I think I'll get a bluetooth headset for it.

The speakerphone is loud and has good fidelity, which is great.

The E62 is a little big and heavy (though nowhere near the brick that the Kyocera was), so I'm not sure how to carry it if I'm not wearing a jacket with big pockets.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, e62, smartphones, wifi

Posted by oren at 9:38 AM | Comments (2)

[Educause06] InCommon Federation Panel

I finished off my time in Dallas with an appearance on a panel titled Leveraging Your Existing Campus Systems to Access Partner Resources: Federated Identity Management and Tales of Campus Participation (whew - now there's a mouthful). The topic of the panel is how the InCommon federation is making it easier for universities and vendors of web-based services to work together to get to single-sign-on types of authentication and to arrange for the exchange of information in those contexts.

The panel was chaired by the always delightful Tracy Mitrano and panelists included representatives from Penn State, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and me.

I haven't been involved directly with our work in leveraging Shibboleth authentication software or our participation in InCommon, but I was well coached by Bob Morgan and Nathan Dors, who have been doing a lot of heavy lifting on these efforts.

We've used InCommon to ease the deployment of Cdigix's CTrax music download service (replacing Napster at the UW this year); to authenticate UW users to Washington State's Combined Fund Drive (a charitable giving program that uses a web service called CreateHope to power its online presence) and to hook the Chemistry Department up with WebAssign, a service they use for managing homework for some courses.

Other universities have used InCommon for other vendors, and one of the lessons here is that when dealing with vendors the work that's done by an initial institution working with a vendor can make it much easier for other universities to work with that vendor if they're all working within the federation.

I was surprised to see that all the examples we saw were about universities working with vendors, and that none of them were about universities working with each other on collaborative efforts. Maybe we'll see more of that in the future.

Technorati Tags: authentication, Educause06, federated-identity, federation, identity, shibboleth

Posted by oren at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2006

[educause06] Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is talking about being able to predict the advance of information technology. The key to success of being an inventor is in being able to estimate when technologies will be advanced enough to make an invention possible - timing is critical. Over thirty years of doing this he's found that the models he worked out to predict future technology trends has worked pretty well.

If we can measure information content of an area, we find that growth is exponential, with roughly a doubling every year - the power of technologies expands by a billion every 25 years, while the size of technology shrinks by a factor of a hundred every ten years.

Ray shows a new pocket-sized print-to-speech reading machine - he's been involved with reading machine technology for thirty years now. In 2002 he predicted that technology would be available for a pocket reading machine would be available in May of 2006, and that development of such a machine would take roughly four years. In July they introduced the pocket reading machine.

Ray goes on to talk about the extent to which artificial intelligence programs are providing generally useful functions now, and the narrowness of these applications are getting less narrow over time.

The Paradigm Shift Rate is now doubling every decade. People tend to extrapolate in a linear way, when progress is almost always faster. The rate is actually accelerating. He gives examples - the phone took half a century to be adopted by half of the US population - the cell phone did it in seven years. Another trend is the democratization of knowledge creation, which is fueling an explosion of knowledge. The amount of knowledge is also growing exponentially, doubling every year.

He shows a graph that he calls Countdown to Singularity, which shows technological evolution in a continuum with technological evolution, in a straight logarithmic trend line.

People criticize Kurzweil for thinking that exponential growth can continue - and it's true that each particular technology runs out of steam, but new technologies evolve that keep the trend going. When Moore's Law runs out in current chip design, we'll see three dimensional molecular computing rise to keep the growth going. There's nanotube-based memory set to hit the market next year.

By 2013 we should have computers that can equal the processing power of all regions of the human brain.

It's remarkable how smooth the trend lines are, given the vagaries of the activities of millions of people. It's like other examples in science where we see predictable activity come out of random, chaotic individual events. The classic example from the 19th century is thermodynamics. Technology evolution just such a case of predictable behavior.

Our consumption of information technology more than keeps pace with the growth of capacity.

In biotechnology we're using technology to reprogram biology. He's involved with one company that has cured pulmonary hypertension in animals by injecting a new gene - it's now going into human testing. There are thousands of these developments happening now. This is a new paradigm in drug development, designing drugs using technology instead of just discovering them.

He talks about repirocytes - robotic red blood cells that are already being tested by animals.

The ultimate source of utilizing the power of information technology will come from reverse engineering the brain - we're now getting to the point where we can scan brain data to see individual activities. The design information of the brain is a billion times simpler than the apparent complexity of the brain - we know this because of the amount of information the genome can contain. We will succeed in modeling the brain within the next twenty years - which will fuel truly intelligent systems.

Ray shows a video of a prototype of a translating telephone, where he speaks in English and the person on the other end hears him in German, and vice versa (also in French). He says these systems will be common in cell phones in the next ten years. This translation is done through pattern recognition informed by large databases.

By 2010, computers will begin to disappear - images written directly to our retinas with ubiquitous high bandwidth connections at all times and electronics so tiny they're embedded in clothing and glasses. Full immersion virtual reality will be feasible, and augmented reality (eyeglasses that tell you the name and birthday of the person you're talking to) and effective language translation will exist.

By 2029 we'll have 30 doublings. $1k of computation will buy 1,000 times the capacity of the human brain, reverse engineering of the human brain will be completed, computers will pass the Turing test, and nanobots will provide expansion of human intelligence.

Human life expectancy was in the 20s when life evolved. By 1800 it had reached 37, by 1900 it had reached 48. According to his models in twenty years we'll be adding more than a year of life expectancy to the lives of living people every year.

Technorati Tags: Educause06, kurzweil

Posted by oren at 9:04 AM | Comments (0)

[Educause06] Award for Course Management Systems

Educause has given its first ever "Catalyst Award" to Course Management Systems for their "broad impact on higher education".

This strikes me as a wrong-headed award to a class of software that is largely a prime example of a siloed environment provided by systems that really shouldn't have had to exist in the first place.

I've said this before, but just to reiterate - most of what you get in Course Management Systems are a set of common communication functions (easy web authorship with templates, discussion forums, group management, etc) wrapped in a thin layer of workflow management. But the blog or wiki or mail list management tool contained in a CMS is unlikely to ever be as good as the individual tools that are widely available - would you rather blog in Sakai or Wordpress?

If we really had the tools we deserve we'd be able to integrate the good tools that are continually appearing on the open market with our own workflow and data from our student systems to provide the rich functionality that our students and faculty really deserve.

I do seem to have a minority view on this one, but as I watched the video honoring our late colleague Howard Strauss while writing this post, I thought Howard would agree with me on this one.

Technorati Tags: Educause06, course-management-systems

Posted by oren at 7:51 AM | Comments (0)

[Educause06] Student Perspectives on Music Piracy

I'm in Dallas for the Educause 06 conference - just me an 7,500 of my closest friends. Most of my time here is committed to working meetings, but this morning I'm taking in a talk by Ross Housewright, a grad student at UC Berkeley, who's done a study of how students feel about the ways in which they download music.

There's nothing revelatory here, but Ross found that almost all students are using P2P file sharing to get music, and that the file sharing networks are (despite years of the industry battling against them) are still more convenient to use than any legal service - more comprehensive, less restrictive, and free.

Students know that file sharing is illegal, but they think of it as illegal like speeding or jaywalking. As far as education goes, they find industry efforts as unconvincing - it's seen as poor college students vs rich rock stars and the huge entertainment industry. Students don't know the details of the law, and they don't care to learn. They don't think they're likely to get sued.

Technorati Tags: music, Educause06

Posted by oren at 6:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 3, 2006

More fun with Windows Vista, this time RC1

I installed the Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 yesterday, over the Vista Beta 2 release, which had been stable, if unexciting.

I also installed Office 2007, with a fresh download from the Office Beta site.

The new release started crashing on me immediately. Vista crashed a couple of times, and even after a restart Office kept crashing. So I turned off the computer, and like any sensible professional, called it quits for the day.

This morning, I came in and rebooted, and Vista runs, but IE7 crashes right after launch. I gave it my assent to go look to see if there are any known solutions to this problem, and I got back the following:

A Micosoft analyst has reviewed this error report and determined the problem you encountered will be resolved in a Windows Vista release, which will be available in the future.

Not very informative.

It's really interesting to realize how much work you can't get done without a functioning Web browser in this day and age.

I did manage to create a second user account, and IE7 seemed to run ok there. So, fearful of the same problem happening, I decided to use IE to download Firefox, so I'd have a second browser available. I installed Firefox and the Foxmarks extension, and then Firefox crashed on me. Now, after a reboot, IE7 crashes on that user account too, but Firefox 1.5 seems to work.

This is a release candidate? Sheesh - c'mon Microsoft, you can do better than this.

Andrew Benton tells me that RC2 is due out later this week - we'll see if that's any better.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, vista, windows

Posted by oren at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2006

Gizmodo borrows (steals?) our UW Wireless Logo

I was sitting in the San Jose airport catching up on my RSS feeds yesterday when I saw a post in Gizmodo about a guide to wireless in airports. "Wait a minute!", I thought, "that's our logo in that graphic!" You be the judge - here's what was in Gizmodo:

Here's our UW Wireless logo:

And here's what I wrote to Brian Lam, Gizmodo's editor:

Hey, Brian -

I was reading through my feeds in the San Jose airport yesterday, and came across the Gizmodo post that's at:

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/wireless/airport-wifi-guide-atoz-200160.php

and I think you used (and modified) our university wireless network logo without either permission or attribution - surprised the heck out of me.

Take a look at our logo page at:

https://www.washington.edu/computing/wireless/wireless_logo/

and I think you'll see what I mean.

We'd appreciate you coming clean on it.

We'll see what happens from here.

Technorati Tags: images, theft

Posted by oren at 4:42 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2006

[CalConnect Fall 2006] CalDAV Scheduling draft

Cyrus is talking about the CalDav scheduling draft.

CalDav scheduling builds on CalDAV access, but does not require it - so you could do CalDav Scheduling without having a CalDAV access server. Scheduling uses iTIP as its model for scheduling, which allows clients to reuse existing capabilities. There's a "Message" oriented Inbox/Outbox design, similar to how iMip functions with email. It's designed for fast (immediate) free/busy lookups, and there is fin-grained access control, including delegation.

Each user has an Inbox and an Outbox collection. An Organizer deposits an "invitation", into an Outbox with addressing details for attendees (using HTTP POST). The server delivers the invitation to the attendee's Inbox and returns delivery success/failure status for each attendee. The attendee responds by depositing response into their Outbox and the server copies that to the Organizer's Inbox.

With regular invites, the Organizer has to wait for the Attendee to respond. In the case of Free-Busy requests, the request is fulfilled immediately by the servers of the Attendees.

Access Control - there's a global CALDAV:schedule privilege which controls who can do schedule - on the Outbox it determines who is allowed to schedule on behalf of teh 'owner' - e.g. allows 'proxies' that can carry out the HTTP POST method on behalf of the owner. On the Inbox it determines who is allowed to send scheduling messages to the owner.

CALDAV:schedule is actually an aggregate of three privileges - CALDAV-schedule-request: who is allowed to book meetings with me; CALDAV:schedule-reply: who is allowed to respond to meeting invites I send out; CALDAV:schedule-free-busy - who is allowed to see my free-busy info.

One or more calendar user addresses are defined on the WebDAV principal for each user who can be scheduled. The CalDAV server will take care of mapping the ATTENDEE calndar user address in the iCalendar data to the principal using the principal property. The Calendar User is multivalued, so allows for multiple addresses for a single user.

The spec is close to last call. There are some implementations already (Apple), with more in progress (RPI).

Technorati Tags: CalDAV , Calendaring, scheduling

Posted by oren at 9:05 AM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2006

[Calconnect Fall 2006] Federated Free-Busy

I'm in Cupertino, where Apple is hosting the fall CalConnect Roundtable meeting.

Gary Schwartz from RPI is talking about the proof of concept of federated free-busy information that was developed for the Open Group Challenge on the subject last spring. The idea of free-busy aggregation is that it solves the difficult problem of seeing when people have free time in common, even if they're on disparate calendaring systems.

The requirements of the challenge were to us open standards, could be implemented today, and cross timezones and geographic and network boundaries.

The proof of concept was constrained to a list of named attendees at a specified list of times, with all users having accounts on calendar servers.

The aggregator program provides the UI and business logic. A CaldAV compliant free-busy interface provides the interface between systems. Connectors translate from proprietary protocols to CalDAV. Systems that were interfaced included RPI's Bedework, Oracle Calendar, TimeBridge (via a CalDAV proxy), Exchange (via a connector written by Boeing), OSAF's Cosmo server, Lotus Domino (via a connector that IBM wrote), and Google calendar (via a connector that RPI wrote to the Google calendar API).

Users are registered with the aggregator by their email address.

Apple's iCal server is added for this demo today.

Gary notes that the advantage of the aggregator is that it takes an enterprise approach and doesn't require work on the part of the individual user, aside from just noting to the aggregator where their calendar is located.

Next steps include discovery, authentication and access control, and adding additional calendar systems. It would be nice to utilize the richer functionality of the new CalDAV Scheduling spec.

The aggregator toolkit is available at:

http://bedework.org/trac/bedework/wiki/FreebusyAggregatorOverview

Boeing is looking to "productize" their work to use with their partners.

Mike Douglas says that Boeing did a survey and found that it typically takes 20 hours of work to schedule a meeting, so clearly there's a business justification to make this happen.

Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring

Posted by oren at 11:35 AM | Comments (1)

September 19, 2006

The continuing asphyxiation of email

James Morris from our engineering group reports that yesterday for the first time we processed more than 3 million external email messages at the UW (3,270,489 was the exact number), and that 72% of those messages scored a greater than 50% possibility of being spam.

That's 2,354,752 spam messages. In one day. At one university.

Hoo boy.

Technorati Tags: email, social-software

Posted by oren at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2006

Joel on hiring good technical people

And speaking of hiring, Joel Spolsky has a great post on finding great software developers, which every technical manager, recruiter, and hiring official should read.

The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.

The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career.

The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because they’re brilliant.

If you’re lucky, if you’re really lucky, they show up on the open job market once, when, say, their spouse decides to accept a medical internship in Anchorage and they actually send their resume out to what they think are the few places they’d like to work at in Anchorage.

But for the most part, great developers (and this is almost a tautology) are, uh, great, (ok, it is a tautology), and, usually, prospective employers recognize their greatness quickly, which means, basically, they get to work wherever they want, so they honestly don’t send out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs.

Does this sound like the kind of person you want to hire? It should.

Joel goes on to talk about how to find these people, and one of the things he talks about at length is bringing people in as interns while they're still students. One of the great joys of working at the UW is that we get the opportunity to work with lots of really great students - they're our most valuable natural resource. Students are smart, energetic, and frequently they don't yet know what supposedly can't be done. And often, when we're lucky, we get the opportunity to hire the best of our student employees as full-time staff when they graduate (unfortunately, we have more talented students than we have the ability to create open positions for them - but I guess that's good for Microsoft, Google, and the rest of the companies that go on to hire these folks).

Joel's article has me thinking about the possibilities of using some students for some of the projects that may be coming up for us in Emerging Technology.

Technorati Tags: jobs, management

Posted by oren at 11:48 AM | Comments (1)

September 7, 2006

A couple of jobs open in Emerging Technology

I'm pleased to say that we've got a couple of jobs open in our little Emerging Technology group here within UW Computing & Communications.

One is a Project Manager, the other is titled Senior Strategic Integration Architect. The links to to the job descriptions on the UW's employment site, but basically the idea is that as we get involved in evaluating and germinating ideas for new applications of technology here at the UW, the Project Manager will be responsible for managing the flow of those projects and the interactions between our group and the rest of C&C and other UW units. The Project Manager will also play a role in the just now being invented process for doing regular planning for C&C's Service Lines.

The Architect will be involved in identifying new technology opportunities, investigating technologies that have possible application here at the UW, doing enough legwork to determine whether the technology is sufficiently useful and usable to pursue, and how that technology might interact and integrate with the UW's social, business, and technological environments. My hope is that when we organizationally decide that a new technology is worth serious pursuit, the Architect will have gathered and digested enough information to be able to work with the various engineering and support teams starting from a base of already established knowledge.

I did notice that in the process of getting the Architect job description listed it got edited, as often happens. I had included a quote about architecture that I thought was (at least metaphorically) relevant to the kind of person I hope to find:

In architecture, as in other arts, two considerations must be constantly kept in view; namely, the intention, and the matter used to express that intention: but the intention is founded on a conviction that the matter wrought will fully suit the purpose; he, therefore, who is not familiar with both branches of the art, has no pretension to the title of the architect. An architect should be ingenious, and apt in the acquisition of knowledge. Deficient in either of these qualities, he cannot be a perfect master. He should be a good writer, a skilful draftsman, versed in geometry and optics, expert at figures, acquainted with history, informed on the principles of natural and moral philosophy, somewhat of a musician, not ignorant of the sciences both of law and physic, nor of the motions, laws, and relations to each other, of the heavenly bodies.

- Vitruvius, circa 25 BC

If you're interested in talking about either of these positions, go ahead and drop me a line!

Technorati Tags: jobs, employment, UW

Posted by oren at 4:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 6, 2006

Google office applications

A couple of weeks ago I used my Gmail account to send someone an attached Excel spreadsheet file, and noticed when I viewed the sent message in Gmail that I was offered the option to view the attachment as HTML, and sure enough, I could view my simple Excel file right in the browser (Firefox, in this case).

I've also played around with Google's online browser-based spreadsheet and the Writely web-based word processor they now own.

I've long thought that Excel and Word offer far too many features for the average person (or at least me) to manage. I long for the original Word for Windows, which I thought was the best word processor ever - circa 1992.

All this activity at Google is obviously building towards something, and now Aaron Ricadela has an article in Information Week that lays it out:

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google's E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google's data center, branded with customers' domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.

That's the first step. Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.

Instead of trying to displace the hundreds of millions of copies of Office installed on business PCs, Google will try to snare users once they start sharing the Word and Excel files they've created. "The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn't necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel," says Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products at Google. "They're the collaboration component of that."

This is worth watching as it rolls out.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, google

Posted by oren at 5:49 AM | Comments (0)

i guess I'll have to stop using .Mac

Eddie Hargreaves writes a piece in the Apple Blog titled "Why I will (probably) not renew my .Mac account" that details changes made in iLife '06 that screw up the way longtime .Mac users interact with the online .Mac service, particularly for photo albums.

I've been using .Mac for our family photo site for almost three years now, because it's easy to publish photos from iPhoto and the software has taken care of linking the albums together, building the index, etc. But now it's gotten harder, and the new iPhoto '06 doesn't even know about the albums that already exist on .Mac as it sends you to the separate iWeb app to create a web page that it stuffs into an entirely new directory on .Mac.

Guess I'll have to look at moving my photo stuff to Flickr. What a pain.

And it makes me really glad I haven't yet upgraded the family room iMac to iLife '06.

But why now? If I’ve managed to rationalize the purchase in years past, what makes this year different? In a word: iWeb. You might think that the addition of iWeb to Apple’s iLife suite would be a reason for me to continue my .Mac membership. But instead it’s making me want to drop it.

Prior to iWeb, there was HomePage, Apple’s simple, online web page creation tool. The pages you could create with it were limited in their variety, but it was simple and easy to use. I could select a group of photos in iPhoto, hit the HomePage button and it would automatically create a new web page with those photos in the order I had made and with the captions I wrote. It would also link that page to all the others on HomePage and create a thumbnail link on the main menu page.

The benefit to me is that it’s easy to use and simple to keep updating. The benefit to Apple is that because it uses their proprietary software, it locks me into their system. And if I don’t renew my .Mac membership, my online storage disappears and all my online photo albums go away.

So imagine my surprise when I tried to easily accomplish this same task after installing iLife ‘06. The HomePage button has been removed from iPhoto and replaced with the iWeb button. I gamely give it a try, but the first test has failed: it’s not as easy as using the HomePage function. After publishing the page, I realized that it doesn’t link to my previously existing .Mac pages nor does it link from my previously existing main menu. In fact, it’s not even under the previously existing domain. It’s under the longer, more unnecessary web.mac.com/username/iWeb/Site/ instead of homepage.mac.com/username/

It is still possible to use HomePage on the .Mac site, and create photo albums, but it’s no longer a one-click operation. It involves exporting the photos from iPhoto to a new folder on the Finder, uploading them via the iDisk, creating a new page on .Mac, re-ordering them and re-captioning them. If I wanted to go through all of that, I could use any of a number of online photo-hosting services. And it wouldn’t cost me $99 per year.

Technorati Tags: apple, osx, iLife, dotMac

Posted by oren at 4:58 AM | Comments (1)

August 25, 2006

Servers in the cloud - Amazon's EC2

I was impressed by Amazon's S3 online storage storage service (web-services based storage priced aggressively - $0.15 per gigabyte/month, $0.20 per gigabyte of data transer), and now they've topped that with their "Elastic Compute Cloud", aka EC2.

EC2 lets you set up virtualized linux computing power, where you have complete control over the machine image. It's a remarkable and powerful concept. As Amazon says:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Given the issues that universities, including the UW, are having with trying to keep up with the space/power/cooling demands in our data centers, he vision of being able to easily outsource computing power at reasonable prices is very attractive.

Thanks to Rael for pointing this out.

Technorati Tags: amazon, data-centers, web-services

Posted by oren at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2006

Linus uses pine

Tim Bray's blog pointed me to this interesting post where a Polish blogger who calls himself Stiff interviews several well-known programmers, including Tim, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Dave Thomas, etc about programming. It's an interesting read.

In it he asks them what their favorite tools are, and Linus says:

Other than those three parts, the only thing I care deeply about is my email reader. I use „pine” - not because it’s necessarily the greatest email reader ever, but because I’m used to it, and it does what I need it to do with a minimum of fuzz.

While I've mostly been using the Mac mail application, there always seems to be something I can only do in Pine - lately that's been bouncing messages (where you want to resend a message from your email to another address, but have it arrive at that other address as if it came from the original address, not as a forward from you).

Update 23 August 2006

Jim Gaynor points out that the Mac mail app does indeed to bounces:

Apple's Mail.app can do that, they call it Redirect.

Select the message you wish to resend, go to the Message menu, and select Redirect (shift-command-E).

When the message arrives at its new destination, the From, To, and Date headers will be unchanged from the original. Mail.app adds Resent-From, Resent-To, and Resent-Date headers to denote the Redirect information.

Thanks, Jim!

Technorati Tags: email

Posted by oren at 5:02 AM | Comments (1)

August 22, 2006

[OSG 2006] One Grid Among Many presentations - EGEE

Bob Jones from CERN is talking about EGEE, an EU initiative which has 91 partners in 32 countries, encompassing 13 federations. Asia is a new federation, and US Partners: U Chicago, USC, Wisconsin (Condor), and RENCI.

The objective is large-scale production-quality infrastructure for e-science.

The infrastructure operation includes sites in 39 countries. Monitoring of grid services and automated site configuration/management.

They distribute production-quality middleware (glite), which they plan to use Apache2 license to distribute.

interoperability between grids is essintial - EGEE works with national grid projects and peer projects around the world. There are excellent relations wiht OSG on technical, operational, and policy issues. Further work is needed and the Grid-Interoperability-Now is providing a good environment for this.

The WISDOM project used grid for drug discovery. http://wisdom.healthgrid.org

They calculate how much money they're saving by doing this research "in silico" instead of in-vitro.

There's an EGEE conference in Geneva 25-29 September.

Technorati Tags: grids, osg-2006

Posted by oren at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

[OSG 2006] One Grid Among Many presentations - TWGrid

Simon Lin from Academia Sinica, Taiwan is now talking about the TWGrid infrastructure in Taiwan. The consortium started in 2002. They now have 2 2.5 Gbps connections to Amsterdam, which they use to connect to CERN. One link lands in Chicago, another on the US West Coast. There's a new link to Australia that reduces latency from 380 ms to 138 ms.

There are 12 LCG sites and 3 EGEE sites in Asia Pacific. Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre(ASGC) is acting as the coordinator and the WLCG Tier-1 Centre and WLCG/EGEE operation Centre for Asia/Pacific.

16 sites in 7 countries: australia, japan, india, korea, pakistan, singapore, taiwan. 700 CPUs, growing to more than 1000 by end of year.

Technorati Tags: grids, osg-2006, science

Posted by oren at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

[OSG 2006] One Grid Among Many presentations - NorduGrid

Konya Balazs from Lund Universityin Sweden is giving a tele-presentation on the NorduGrid. It started in 2001-2002 with a research project to enable Grid in the nordic countries. Since 2002 it's a research collaboration, focusing now on middleware. It develops its own Grid middleware. There are 13 countries participating, with 50 sites and about 5000 cpus.

When the Scandinavian High Energy Physics Institutes wanted to share computing resources and jointly contribute to CERN/LHC computing - they needed a Grid and there was no production ready middleware.

Their design philosophy, followed Scandinavian design phlosophy - lighweight, portable & modular, non-intrusive on the resource side. They wanted something flexible and powerful on the client side - easily installable, trivial tasks must be trivial to perform, no dependency on central services.

The goal was to have no single point of faulure.

He goes on to give some details of the ARC middleware, which is being positioned as general purpose open source European grid middleware. Many national grids in Euripe are using this middleware.

He notes that the major grid middleware providers need to become more dedicated to creating standards for interoperability. - Standards are needed in JJob description language, representation of grid-related objects, a standard interface to computing resources.

Technorati Tags: grids, osg-2006, science

Posted by oren at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

August 21, 2006

[OSG 2006] e-Science and Cyberinfrastructure - Tony Hey

Tony is Corporate VP for Technical Computing at Microsoft

We're goin gback to Licklider's original vision for computing - "all the stuff linked together throughout the world"

We're entering a new era of science - we'll be overwhelmed by data. The need to mine data from all over the place - satellites, telescopes, etc. Grad students have been given "database 101" and then told to go build things to scale to terabytes - not a good use of science talent. Hence the need for:

e-Science - data-driven multidisciplinary science and the technologies to support such distributed, collaborative scientific research. A shorthand for a set of technologies to support collaborative networked science. High performance computing and information management are two of the key technologies.

Vision for scientific workflow - instead of having scientists doing the data plumbing, you want to have a data workbench that combines visual programming tools with persistent distributed storage along with distributed computation. Legacy programs can be wrapped in xml and exposed via web services.

Scholarly communication is also changing the nature of research. Documents increasingly will be linked to data which can be updated, streams of comments, etc.

Two examples of e-science
- astronomy data grid IVO
- Comb-e-chem project

Vision of the grid - set of middleware services supported on top of high bandwidth academic research networks.

A set of services that allow scientists - and industry - to routinely set up 'Virtual Organizations' for their research - or business.
- the 'Microsoft Grid' vision is as much about integrating and managing data and information than about compute cycles.

Federated Trusts are a big issue - using institutional authentications.

Service-orientation for building distributed systems.

Progress in grid standards?
- We need to agree on a set of grid service standards - the GGF/EGA merger into the Open Grid Forum is a great opportunity. The grid research community needs to propose and explore new features in real experiments. What services? 1. Very simple HPC job submissions and simple scheduling; 2. Security - federation; 3. Data storage, metadata. Can we standardize in these three areas by end of 2007?

Scholarly Communication
- global movement towards permitting 'open access' to scholarly publications. Principle that results of publicly funded research should be available to all. The Cornyn-Liberman bill is supported by most top US research universities.

Tony notes that Microsoft is working with researchers to understand where Microsoft tools can help - databases are one example. Another is the possible use of Sharepoint technology to share data in communities - does that fit with the way these science communities work? Another is the use of Visual Studio to help write and debug code, whatever platform it runs on.

Technorati Tags: grids, microsoft, osg-2006, science

Posted by oren at 10:17 AM | Comments (1)

[OSG 2006] OSG Goals, Organization, and Planning - Ruth Pordes

This is the fourth consortium meeting

Few f2f meetings - this is the all hands meeting, which take place every six months.

There are more than 15 users organizations. There are 32 Virtual Organizations.

OSG is perceived as being a "mainly physics" grid.

They're expecting about $6 million in funding from DOE and NSF. This will fund the "OSG Project", which will fund about 33 FTE to maintain the grid and expand its use in new communities. Partnership with the TeraGrid is part of the plan.

Must support LHC and LIGO scaling

Over the next few years:
- EData distribution must exceed 1 DB/sec at 10-20 sites
- Workflow must support > 110k batch jobs per client
- Accessible storage greater than 10 PB

OSG software stack (from bottom up):

Built on NSF middleware - condor, globus, myproxy
Virtual Data Toolkit common services
OSG Release Cache - VDT + configuration, validation, vo management
Apps : LIGo grid, LHCS services & frameword, bio services && gramework, OSG VO framework

Technorati Tags: grids, osg-2006, science

Posted by oren at 9:39 AM | Comments (0)

[OSG 2006] Open Science Grid Consortium Meeting

I'm at the Open Science Grid meeting, hosted here at the UW by the Physics Department. I don't know much about grid computing, but there's a lot of it going on in science research, and I'm looking forward to getting a glimpse into what these folks are doing, and I'll be blogging it as we go.

Technorati Tags: osg-2006, science, grids, science

Posted by oren at 9:07 AM | Comments (0)

August 9, 2006

Rube Goldberg would've loved our calendaring interop situations

It's amazing what people have to do to get calendaring to work the way they want.

(from Ian Forrester)

Technorati Tags: Calendaring

Posted by oren at 6:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 7, 2006

iCal meets CalDAV in OS X Leopard

Though it only got the briefest of mentions in Steve Jobs' keynote speech this morning at the Apple World-Wide Developers Conference, the next major release of OS X (codenamed Leopard) will have a new version of iCal that supports the CalDAV standard for multi-user scheduling. This means that iCal should be able to be a client to any CalDAV compliant calendaring server, which will include Oracle Calendar and OSAF's Cosmo, with others hopefully following suit (is anyone in Redmond listening?).

There's also mention on Apple's web pages of an iCal server showing up in Leopard, but the web page for that isn't there yet - I imagine that will be a CalDAV server, which will allow other clients, including Chandler, to use that server.

And Apple has joined the CalConnect calendaring consortium, and will be helping to drive industry-wide interoperability along with the rest of the members (truth in advertising: the UW was one of the original founding members of CalConnect and I sit on the steering committee).

Great news all around!

Technorati Tags: caldav, calendaring, osx, wwdc06

Posted by oren at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

August 5, 2006

Kathy Sierra on innovation - users can't do it for us

This is a good post in Kathy's Creating Passionate Users blog:

n this Web 2.0-ish world we're supposed to be all about the users being in control. Where the "community" drives the product. But the user community can't create art. (And I use "art" with a lowercase "a" as in software, books, just about anything we might design and craft.) That's up to us.

Our users will tell us where the pain is. Our users will drive incremental improvements. But the user community can't do the revolutionary innovation for us. That's up to us.

Technorati Tags: software, puppy

Posted by oren at 8:22 AM | Comments (1)

July 24, 2006

Even Pacific Crest Trail hikers can blog

And speaking of family, our nephew and niece Josh and Jenny are spending their six-month honeymoon hiking the entire Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, all 2,650 miles (4,240 km) of it. They're blogging their experience as they go, entering their journal entries when they get to towns that have public libraries and other places where they can get Internet access.

It's a remarkable journey that they're undertaking, and their writing and photos of it are compelling and fun to read. And it's great that they can share it with us all as they're underway. Lots of family and friends are commenting and sending their love - social software at its finest!

Technorati Tags: blogging, family, hiking

Posted by oren at 3:04 PM | Comments (0)

What does it mean to "write" music?

My niece Rachel, a recent grad of RIT in film production, is here on campus this summer teaching summer camp kids how to make digital videos. We were watching some of the short videos her kids had produced yesterday (it's amazing what a group of creative kids can do in a week of summer camp!) and Rachel remarked that they had written the music themselves too.

Of course, what she really meant was that they had assembled some original combination of the stock Garage Band loops to go along with the film. Somehow, that didn't strike me as "writing music" - nobody had a musical instrument in hand, or a microphone, much less putting down marks on staff paper. It seems to me that we need another verb for this kind of bricolage activity that characterizes so much of current music-making.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not a valid way to construct music - just that it's helpful to distinguish between different ways of getting to a musical result.

Or am I hopelessly old-fashioned?

Posted by oren at 2:55 PM | Comments (1)

June 30, 2006

Wikis + RSS - the future of open collaboration platforms?

David Berlind has an intriguing post on his Between the Lines blog about how wikis with RSS notification of changes are set to become the standard collaboration platform within organizations.

David has some spot-on observations about the use of proprietary systems (including email systems like Notes or Exchange) for collaboration:

When you strip collaboration down to its bare essence, you have people, you have some record of their collaboration (eg: documents), and generally, there's some way of letting those who are collaborating know when something has happened or is about to happen (notification). The problem was, and to a large extent, still is that there are different and proprietary systems and protocols to technologically support all the activities associated with collaboration.

Collaboration is often too formal. In other words, you don't collaborate until someone says, "OK, let's collaborate." In order to say "Let's collaborate" you need to schedule a meeting with a proprietary group calendaring system. Letting everyone know that you're about to collaborate requires notification which 99 times out of 100 depends on email. Then once you start collaborating, a record of that collaboration has to be documented using a proprietary documentation technology (eg: word processors, spreadsheets, or presentation applications).

Even worse, there's another proprietary system (a content management system) for storing, searching for, and retrieving those documents; something that happens in the course of collaboration. Something else that happens in the course of collaboration is someone improves those documents at which point, they must be passed around again for another round of collaboration. Passed around on the proprietary email system using oft-forked threads of e-mail that resulted in out-of-synch document changes. To add insult to injury, the e-mail feedback loop which may or may not have involved revisions was completely out of context of the collaborative activities themselves and required tools that were overkill given the requirements. At the end of the day, collaborating involves a bunch of walled gardens of technology that all too often, are retrofitted to the art of collaboration and that end up being manually integrated.

He goes on to observe that the use of wikis and notification can replace much of the use of email and content management systems:

With RSS as both the notification mechanism and the content subscription mechanism, you basically have a single technology that takes e-mail, e-mail attachments, and far too many round-trips (of email, to fully facilitate the collaboration) completely out of the equation.

With wikis, which can notify you when their content is changed via RSS, not only can the collaborators use 95% standard technology (there is no standard wiki markup language, yet), any and all virtual expression of the collaborative activities (new content, revisions to that content, annotations, comments, approvals, etc.) happen in the context of the collaborative environment. It's all in the same one — one that involves almost no proprietary parts.There's no jumping back and forth between systems or even integration of multiple systems. No word processor. No special content management system. No e-mail. No strapped-on transfer stations to get it all working together.

You open a Web page on your browser, you review it's content, you make changes to the content, record the reason for those changes, press the submit button, and in one fell-swoop, a document is revised, a record of who revised it (and why) is made, and everybody else whose watching that document gets notified of the change through RSS.

It's worth reading the whole article.

Technorati Tags: email, collaboration, social-software

Posted by oren at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2006

Mapping sites

I've been playing around a bit with Google Maps and Windows Live Local and Virtual Earth.

When we were in Utah last week (in the 117 degree heat!) we rented ATVs and went up on some back country roads with some family who know the terrain. At one point one of our party took a GPS reading, and I wanted to create a map that pointed out that location on a satellite photo.

The recording of the reading I had was in the form of degrees and decimal minutes for latitude and longitude. Google Maps took that as a search term and converted it into decimal degrees, which is what it uses to actually display the map.

But for the particular area of the desert I wanted, the satellite photos on Google Maps didn't get as detailed as I had hoped.

Microsoft's Virtual Earth had the same resolution color satellite photos, but when I continued zooming in they had more detail available in black and white.

Windows Livc Local has good tools for remembering a map and sharing it via email, but that service doesn't offer a way to embed a map into a web page that's not on MSN Spaces.

So I turned to using Virtual Earth, which is the service that underlies Live Local, and that worked just fine.

I have to say that the documentation for Virtual Earth is truly excellent, particularly the Interactive SDK, which offers usable code snippets along with detailed API reference in tabs right along with the working examples. A great exemplar of a useable Web 2.0 kind of site.

Technorati Tags: google, mapping, microsoft

Posted by oren at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2006

Hotels using overly aggressive filtering

We're staying this weekend at the Best Western Coral Hills hotel in St. George, Utah, while visiting some of Michele's family who have retired down here. Like most moderately priced hotels I've been in lately, they provide free wireless Internet access - why is it the expensive hotels charge guests for Internet access, while the cheaper chains include it free of charge?

At any rate, when one of our party went to post some photos on her MSN Spaces account she found access to the site blocked. Sure enough, the hotel is using something called InfoWest Clean Internet, which not only blocks access to all MSN Spaces, but also all of MySpace and Facebook. Interestingly, they don't block access to Google Pages, at least not yet.

There's a site where InfoWest explains why they're blocking MySpace:

Here are the simple reasons we block MySpace.com:

1. It contains suggestive and pornographic images
2. It allows for the easy posting of way too much personal information
3. It is a context for dating and personal ads
4. It can be and has been used to exploit children and teenagers.

We welcome your comments.

I gave them my comments on blocking the social networking sites in their entirety. Might as well block the whole Internet while you're at it. Sheesh.

Technorati Tags: broadband, puppy, social-software

Posted by oren at 4:03 PM | Comments (4)

June 22, 2006

Windows Live @ edu discussion with Microsoft

I'm down in Mountain View, California, for a day long meeting on Thursday with Microsoft and representatives from a bunch of US colleges and universities about the needs of higher ed that might be met by some of the Windows Live offerings - specifically we'll be talking mostly about mail and calendaring services. I've said previously that I think the Windows Live folks are starting to offer some nice services, and I look forward to the opportunity to discuss the directions with the development teams.

I'll blog as much as I can from the meeting.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, WindowsLive@edu

Posted by oren at 12:18 AM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2006

Getting Outlook 2007 beta to connect to UW IMAP servers

I finally got Outlook 2007 to connect to the UW's IMAP servers.

To do so, I had to set the type of encryption connection to use SSL - not TLS on port 993 in Account Settings/Change Email Account/ Internet E-mail Settings / Advanced.

Stupidly enough, if I set the Root Mail Folder to be mail, which is where all the user folders reside by default on the UW's email service, Outlook doesn't see the Inbox, which lives above mail in the hierarchy. If I don't set a root folder it sees the Inbox, along with all the non-user folders that are their for processing purposes. This seems seriously broken, in a way that previous versions of Outlook were not.

Well, maybe I spoke to soon - now I've gotten a message saying Microsoft Office Outlook has stopped working - Windows is collecting more information about the problem, followed by a dialog box offering to turn on diagnostics, which just sent a bunch of info off to Microsoft.

Sigh.

Technorati Tags: puppy, Windows

Posted by oren at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Vista doesn't recognize the publisher of the Office Beta

I'm installing beta 2 of Office on my new Vista machine, and when I download the file and go to run it I get a Security Warning that says:

The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?

Name: OPPLUS-EN.EXE

Publisher: Unknown Publisher

Right hand, meet left hand.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, vista

Posted by oren at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2006

BIll Gates stepping down

I think Dan Gillmor has the best (and shortest) take on Bill Gates' announcement that he'll be focusing on the work of the Gates Foundation rather than Microsoft.

I also admire the great work that the Gates Foundation has been doing.

I also think that Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow who is undertaking some brave work in trying to orient Microsoft to the emergence of the open nature of the Web. I'll be down in Mountain View next week for a meeting with the Windows Live Mail and Calendaring teams, so I hope to get some first hand info on how that effort is coming.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, BillGates

Posted by oren at 6:42 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2006

Windows Vista beta 2 first impressions

So it took several hours to download and install beta 2 of Windows Vista on a brand new Dell Optiplex GX 620.

When Vista finally boots, the first thing I get is a message telling me that an unknown program (netfx?) is trying to access the network, and asking if I want it to have that access or not. I tell Windows no, even though I have no idea what that program is.

Next it tells me that I'm successfully connected to Network, and asks me to choose between a public network ("Use for networks in public places where you don't want people to access your computer") or a private network "Use for your home or personal network where you want to share files and devices"). I have no idea which to choose - I don't want random people accessing my computer, but I do want to share files between my PC and my Mac. There's no real information here about what I'm choosing. I randomly pick public network, figuring I can change things later (I hope) if I need to.

Now I get a Windows Security Alert telling me that Windows Firewall has blocked some features of the googledesktopindex program. I think Dell installed Google Desktop on the box when shipped (I know I didn't put it there), so I tell Windows to unblock it. I immediately get a User Account Control telling me "A program needs your permission to continue" and blocks the desktop until I hit "Continue" - when Zephyr comes in to chat. While we're chatting, the desktop suddenly clears itself up with no input from me. What's up with that?

Vista detects my two monitor display situation just fine and takes me automatically to the control panel to set that up.

The first task I undertake in Vista is setting up the new Windows Mail program. So far it looks a lot like Outlook Express. The Remember Password box is still checked by default in the setup wizard - that doesn't smack of enhanced security. Somehow while working through the configuration I manage to lock up the Mail program, but restarting after killing it in the Task Manager I mange to get it configured.

When I finish configuring the Mail program it asks me if I want to download a list of my IMAP mail folders - I tell it yes and immediately get a message saying "The server your are connected to is using a security certificate that could not be verified. The target principal name is incorrect. Do you want to continue using this server?" I assume that's because it doesn't like the wild-card certificates we use, so I tell it Yes. The download of folders is blazingly fast, and the following collection of my over 3,000 message Inbox doesn't take very long either.

More later...

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, vista, Windows

Posted by oren at 2:25 PM | Comments (0)

eWeek ranks Seattle #1 tech spot outside of Silicon Valley

In an article in eWeek titled "Beyond the Valley: 10 Blooming U.S. Cities for Tech", Deborah Rothberg ranks Seattle at the top of the list to become the next technology epicenter.

Seattle • City population: 570,430 • Companies that call it home: Amazon, RealNetworks, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile • The details: The June 2006 Dice Report ranks Seattle No. 10 in available jobs, with 1,901 listed, up over 300 from one year ago. Indeed.com ranks Seattle No. 4 in number of tech jobs per capita, with 13 jobs per 1000 people. And a WashTech/CWA report issued this week calls Seattle a "bright spot" of technology growth in a recovering market.

I wonder what that means for the already over-inflated housing prices...

Technorati Tags: technology, puppy

Posted by oren at 1:11 PM | Comments (0)

One of the things I love about Pine

For the past year or two I've mostly settled in to using the native Mac OS X mail program, which I like pretty well (keeping in mind that all my email is stored on the UW's central IMAP servers, not on my Mac). There's a lot to like about the Mac mail app - it does nice graphical things with keeping mail threads together, it handles forwards of multiple messages right (which Thunderbird doesn't do), etc.

But every once in a while I go back to using Pine, and I'm always amazed at just how it's got features which are so far ahead of any other mail program I've seen.

Today I was searching for someone's mail address - I had searched through the From field in several folders with no success, when I realized that the person I was looking for had probably been copied on some group emails. Pine allows you to do a search on all of the "participants" in an email - so that searches the From, To, and CC fields at once - and sure enough that brought the address right up. How sensible can you get?

Technorati Tags: email, puppy

Posted by oren at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

Will email survive spam?

Today I saw a report that yesterday the machines which process email external to the UW handled a record 2.1 million messages (in one day!), and that our spam detection software scored 65% of those messages as having a 50% or greater possibility of being spam.

That means, if we take it as a given that those messages scored greater than 50% really are spam, that we processed 1.36 million spam messages in one day. In one day. That's more than fifteen spam messages per second all day long.

The implications of this activity when multiplied on a global scale are staggering.

Technorati Tags: email, internet

Posted by oren at 10:21 AM | Comments (1)

June 10, 2006

More UW Blogs - The University President, and the Faculty Field Tour

The President of the University of Washington, Mark Emmert, is going to China on Monday. At the same time a group of UW faculty are heading out on a bus to tour the state of Washington on the annual UW Faculty Field Tour. Both Mark and the Field Tour want to record and communicate their experiences by blogging along the way. How cool is that? What better way for these highly articulate folks to communicate directly with people who are interested?

I've worked with Gina Hills and Harry Hayward, my colleagues in UW Media Relations, to get these blogs set up and going. Mark's blog is at http://www.presblog.washington.edu, and the Field Tour blog is at http://depts.washington.edu/fldtour/wordpress/.

For those interested in the technical details, these blogs are set up on the web servers that the UW provides for faculty, departments, and courses. The blogs are using the popular open source Wordpress blogging software, with MySQL as the database. We've used UW NetID for authenticating blog authors. Instructions for how to do this are available on the web.

While the instructions make it easy enough for your garden variety Unix geek to get up and running with a blog, it's clear to me from setting these two blogs up that it's not anywhere near easy enough for your average staff or faculty person to get blogging on our infrastructure - and it's also clear to me that the demand for blogs at the UW is increasing rapidly, so we'll have see if we can't figure out some ways to make the setup process easier for folks.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to read what Mark and the faculty on the Field Tour post from their travels!

Technorati Tags: blogging, UW

Posted by oren at 8:35 AM | Comments (0)

June 7, 2006

Another example of why we need real open standards

In case anyone thought that PDF is really an open standard, this from Brian Jones of Microsoft's Office group:

About 8 months ago we announced to our MVPs that we would provide PDF publish support natively in the 2007 Office system. We made the move due to overwhelming customer demand for PDF support, and it was received really well. The blog post I made around the announcement was probably one of my most widely read posts of the year.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to do the right thing for the customer now. There was a news article in the WSJ today (and now on CNet) indicating that Adobe didn't like that we provided the save to pdf functionality directly in the box, and so they’ve been pushing us to take it out. I'm still trying to figure that one out given that PDF is usually viewed as an open standard and there are other office suites out there that already support PDF output. I don't see us providing functionality that's any different from what others are doing.

It looks like Adobe wanted us to charge our customers extra for the Save as PDF capability, which we just aren't willing to do (especially given that other companies already offer it for free). In order to work around this, it looks like we're going to offer it as a free download instead. At least that way it's still free for Office users, but unfortunately now there is an added hassle in that anyone that wants the functionality is going to have to download it separately.

This really is one of those cases where you just have to shake your head. Adobe got a lot of goodwill with customers, particularly in government circles, for making PDF available as an open standard. It’s amazing that they would go back on the openness pledge. Unfortunately, the really big losers here are the customers who now have one extra hassle when they deploy Office.

Posted by oren at 2:50 AM | Comments (0)

June 5, 2006

Internet2 and net neutrality

I'm a huge fan of the work Susan Crawford is doing on net neutrality and other Internet governance issues. If you're not reading her blog, you should be.

But I was surprised to read a post titled What's the Internet2 Connection yesterday. In that post she reproduces some speculation that Internet2 might be up to some nefarious activities, and that use of the term "commodity Internet" to refer to the commercial Internet infrastructure could be taken to mean something bad, and might specifically relate to Internet2 conspiring to insert something like a Broadcast Flag technology into the core of the network to please the RIAA and MPAA.

I wrote to Susan with the following comment, which she kindly posted on her blog:

I think you've got the intent of at least the historical
context of Internet 2 almost exactly backwards.

When the NSF got out of the business of running the backbone network
of the Internet in the mid-90s, major research universities who
already depended very heavily on the net for not only common
communications functions like email but also for increasingly high
bandwidth research applications started to get very nervous,
especially when the telcos who took over running the backbone
networks started talking about charging by the bit instead of by
capacity of hookups.

Internet 2 was formed as a consortial effort, initially among those
top research institutions, to have a strategy of providing some level
of guaranteed, consistent connectivity among the institutions that
would provide for a safer haven in an uncertain world. It turns out
that the Abilene network that Internet 2 has operated has been very
successful at providing that consistency, and provided very high
bandwidths at far better pricing than individual institutions
could've gotten by themselves.

But, of course, it turns out that in the end Internet 2 still is, at
least theoretically, at the mercy of the telcos, as the bandwidth
provided is, in the end, leased from the telcos.

To that end, there is a newer consortial effort among some research
institutions that has actually bought its own fiber and is operating
a new backbone network - this effort is called National Lambda Rail,
which is attempting to provide a national scale infrastructure for
research and experimentation in networking technologies and
applications. (see www.nlr.net).

So I wouldn't read too much into the term "commodity Internet" - it
was merely meant as a way of distinguishing the at-that-time-new
commercialized Internet backbone from what the research institutions
saw they needed, which was a way to get some dedicated connectivity
among themselves to support research efforts.

I also followed up with an email to Susan on the relationship between Internet2 and the content industry:

Hi, again, Susan -

I realized as I cycled in to the office this morning that I hadn't addressed the whole issue of the RIAA and MPAA membership in Internet 2 and what that's all about.

From my viewpoint, (I'm not on the inside track at Internet 2, though I am friends with a bunch of folks who work very hard on some of the initiatives, so this is interpretation, not revelation) it's mostly about trying tto protect the reputation of organizations including Internet 2 itself as well as the member institutions.

The institutions that are Internet 2 members route traffic between themselves over the Abilene backbone provided by Internet2. That backbone is pretty high speed (10 gbps) and reliable.

Unsurprisingly, some enterprising students (in this case at U Mass Amherst) put together a new peer-to-peer application built to take advantage of the Abilene connections. This application, called i2hub (there's a wikipedia entry with more info) gathered a fair amount of attention, as might be expected, from the RIAA and MPAA last year. Predictably, this got played out in various hyperbolic pres releases from the industry that made it look like Internet 2 was somehow behaving irresponsible by allowing this trading to happen (for example, see the RIAA press release at http://www.riaa.com/news%5Cnewsletter%5C042705.asp, which talks about "an emerging epidemic of music theft on a specialized, high-speed university computer network known as Internet2." sheesh).

The folks who run Internet 2, as well as the Presidents and Provosts etc of the member institutions were worried about the activities of the students and the reaction to them by the content industry besmirching the reputation of a network that they had worked very hard to fund and build. So they opened up discussions with the RIAA and MPAA that eventually led to them joining Internet 2 as corporate members.

I don't know the extent to which they've been active members in any of the Internet 2 activities. I do know that there are people within Internet 2 who believe that there are possible avenues for discussion on coming up with open standards for digital rights management technologies that would offer some hope of interoperability in that contentious world. I know these folks are primarily interested not in the development of such standards for the entertainment world as much as they think they hold promise for allowing individuals to do things such as control the extent to which they want their private information released on such things as electronic medical records. My own opinion is that we'd be much better off furthering the use of rights expression languages for all these types of situations and dealing with abuse of the expressed rights as needed, but it's probably an area where reasonable folks can differ.

That may be more than you wanted to know :)

Cheers -

- Oren

Technorati Tags: academia, internet2, net-neutrality

Posted by oren at 5:02 PM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2006

Gilberto Gil praises hacking

I still haven't gotten over a country hip enough to even have a Minister of Culture, much less one as totally cool as Gilberto Gil:

Minister Gilberto Gil, a renowned musician who accepted President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's invitation three years ago to join his cabinet, commented at the opening of the Global Internet Congress here. Participants in the four-day conclave are discussing current tendencies in cyberspace and challenges facing the World Wide Web.

"I, Gilberto Gil, as minister of culture of Brazil and as a musician, work every day with the impulse of the ethics of hackers," he said.

Though hacking - or unauthorized access to Web sites or other Internet-borne information - is a criminal activity in most nations, he said hackers should be distinguished from those he called "crackers," or pirates intent on stealing or otherwise doing harm while overcoming Web security barriers.

Gil, 63, called hackers "counter-cultural militants who see in the computer a fantastic tool for communication."

He said the Internet allows good hackers "to create permanent spaces of equality" that give them, as they pursue universal free software, strength against "the reactionary orthodoxy" controlling much of the sector.

"Hackers create, innovate, solve problems and voluntarily exercise a mutual help organization," which he said meshes with the founding principles of the Internet.

from www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/29/1661679.htm.

Thanks, Bruce!

Posted by oren at 4:46 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2006

UW students object to staff looking them at their Facebook pages

There's an interesting article by Kate Rothgeb in last Wednesdays issue of the Daily, the University of Washington's student newspaper.

Students have accused members of Housing and Food Services (HFS) of going on Facebook and discovering pictures of resident advisers with cups in their hands. HFS staff assumed they were drinking alcohol and used that as evidence against them, said Hansee Hall resident John Stevens.

As a result, the Student Senate is calling for the university to let them know how students' online presences will be used.

The resolution requests staff and administrators to tell students how online social networks will be used "so students know what to expect," McCuin said. It also aims to protect admissions and awarding of scholarships.

If an administrator or admissions counselor is going to use online social networks to see what a student is involved in, students have a right to know what is being used against them, said senator Sam Al-Khoury.

There's a really interesting dynamic at work here. Students are living large parts of their lives in public on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but largely assuming that it's only their peers who will be looking at those sites.

But what do you expect if you belong to a group with a name like I'm Not Going To Lie, I'm Completely Wasted In My Face Book Pic...?

The students here are trying to paint this as a free speech issue, but that doesn't quite seem like the heart of the issue to me. I think it's actually more of an authorization and access control issue on the social networks. People using the networks assume that the use of the network is limited to their peers, without stopping to worry how that is defined or enforced.

Facebook, for example, limits accounts to people who have email addresses in the .edu space. While that includes most students, it also includes all faculty and staff of educational institutions, as well as alumni, donors, friends of the institution, etc.

This is all part of us learning how to live in the new social reality created by technology. It's a fascinating ride.

Technorati Tags: privacy, social software, social-software

Posted by oren at 7:08 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2006

What's old is new again - bye to Cingular, hello AT&T

People are always accusing government and academia of being inefficient, and saying they should be run more like businesses. Now Gizmodo is reporting this:

Not sure why we didn't see this earlier, but everyone's favorite wireless brand, Cingular, is going to go bye-bye. AT&T is currently purchasing Cingular's parent company, BellSouth, and will remove the Cingular name, replacing it with the euphonious AT&T Wireless. Gone, too, will be the dancing orange fellow we all know and love.

Branding and building the Cingular line cost BellSouth $4 billion. Oh well.

Does this mean when I need service I'll have to report now that I have a service that is AT&T that used to be Cingular that used to be AT&T?

Technorati Tags: telecom, puppy

Posted by oren at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)

May 8, 2006

Off to Madison for CSG

The rest of this week I'll be in Wisconsin. I'll be attending the Spring Common Solutions Group meeting in Madison, where there will be a workshop on data center futures and I'll be leading a short workshop on Thursday on social software. I'll be blogging those sessions as we go. CSG is a small meeting, usually in the 50-75 people range, where IT leaders from 25 leading US research universities attend. It's always a convivial and highly interactive experience, and I always learn a lot.

Next weekend I'll be in Milwaukee visiting my friend Jim Fricke, who is now directing curatorial efforts at the soon-to-be-built Harley Davidson Museum, and my old college bud Bryn is coming up from Chicago. Should be great fun!

Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006

Posted by oren at 9:56 PM | Comments (0)

The KEXP blog is now live

Over the last few months I've consulted some with the folks from KEXP radio, Seattle's famous indie station, about how to get going with blogging.

I'm pleased to say that the KEXP blog is now live and on the net at http://blog.kexp.org.

The DJs at KEXP are extremely knowledgeable and highly opinionated - that's a good thing in a DJ!

I look forward to keeping up with the posts from some of my favorite DJs, like DJ Michele, Jon Kertzer, Don Slack, Darek Mazzone, and (especially) John Gilbreath.

Nice work, Jason, Louis, and all!

Technorati Tags: blogging, music, kexp, radio

Posted by oren at 9:42 PM | Comments (0)

May 5, 2006

The Solstice development framework - from the people who brought you the Catalyst Web Tools

My colleagues and friends who develop the Catalyst Web Tools here at the UW have done an open source release of their Solstice framework. Solstice is a web app development framework for perl developers. It's what the Catalyst folks use to develop tools that we use heavily, including the highly regarded (and recent award-winning) WebQ quizzing and survey tool.

Solstice is a model-view-controller framework (as is Ruby on Rails) that can make it easier for perl developers to build robust, maintainable, and highly functional web applications.

Next up the Catalyst team is working on open sourcing the web tools code, which should be widely useful as both apps to use as-is and as starting points for how to develop and extend Solstice applications.

Technorati Tags: open-source, tools, software

Posted by oren at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)

May 1, 2006

Some more writings on net neutrality

There's a terrific article on the network neutrality debate by Farhad Manjoo in Salon. If you're wondering what the fuss is about I urge you to take the time to read it.

Dan Gillmor got eloquently passionate about the issue when he gave the New Media lecture at Columbia University:

I've talked a fair amount about openness here. This is not only an issue for journalists in their own work. It's one of the most important policy issues facing us all. If you think media consolidation is an issue today, it's nothing compared with what we're facing tomorrow.

Earlier, I mentioned a clear and present danger to the open Internet that has nurtured a more diverse media ecosystem. The threat, in America, is the dominance of the cable and phone companies in what we laughingly call broadband data connections. I say "laughingly" because the U.S. is falling way, way behind the rest of the developed world in providing broadband access, and one reason is the dominance of companies that grew up in an environment where they dominated their worlds, and really preferred it that way.

The cable and phone companies want to control not just the pipes through which our data moves. They also want to decide what will get delivered, in what order, and at what speed. They haven't pulled this off yet, but they're getting closer every day.

Yesterday, a committee in the House of Representatives voted down an amendment to a new bill that would have required what many of us call "network neutrality." This is the idea that the people getting data -- you and me -- should make the decisions on what we get and in what order, and if necessary pay more for higher speeds. It should not be a decision made by Verizon or Comcast or Time Warner or the fake new ATT.

If they succeed in capturing the kind of control they want -- and they're closer than I would have believed possible -- we'll all be harmed.

I beg you to write and call your member of Congress and U.S. senators, and your state representatives -- the duopoly is well-wired, in the wrong way, in our state capitals, too. Tell them you want an open Internet, not a walled garden or fortress where giant companies get to pick what innovations will succeed or fail.

Last week Dan posted about AT&T's apparent participation in helping the NSA perform what may be illegal spying against American citizens, and noted:

There's plenty of shame to go around, and you expect this from the current government. But one of the most disturbing parts of this is the phone company's seeming eagerness to give up its customers' most private information without appearing to care that it's violating basic rules of business and decency.

And these companies are run by the people who want to control the Internet by ending any semblance of network neutrality. Feeling safer?

Technorati Tags: net-neutrality

Posted by oren at 5:06 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2006

Nokia to open US retail stores

I've been using the same Nokia 3620 phone for almost two years now - it's been great, but I've been hankering to upgrade to something new.

I keep eyeing the latest models coming from Nokia, like the E61 Smartphone or those hot new N-Series phones. The US carriers never seem to offer the advanced Nokia devices, which makes it difficult to acquire them here.

Now Gizmodo is reporting that Nokia plans to open some US retail stores to bring its high end phones to the US market. Sounds like a good idea to me - I've never been able to figure out why you should have to buy your mobile device from the carrier that you get your service from.

Technorati Tags: mobile-devices, nokia

Posted by oren at 8:29 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2006

Paul Thurrott on Windows Vista User Account Protection (this is not good news)

In his review of the February Community Technology Preview release of Microsoft Windows Vista, Paul Thurrott had some discouraging news of how User Account Protection had been implemented.

Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don't get full access to certain features unless they provide an in-place logon before performing any task that might harm the system. This type of security model protects users from themselves, and it is something that Microsoft should have added to Windows years and years ago.

Here's the good news. In Windows Vista, Microsoft is indeed moving to this kind of security model. The feature is called User Account Protection (UAP) and, as you might expect, it prevents even administrative users from performing potentially dangerous tasks without first providing security credentials, thus ensuring that the user understands what they're doing before making a critical mistake. It sounds like a good system. But this is Microsoft, we're talking about here. They completely botched UAP.

The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.

As if that wasn't bad enough news, yesterday Paul posted a review of the latest build of Vista (builg 5365) and the previous version of account protection appears to have been made even worse.

In build 5365, UAP has changed dramatically. (This is the one major change I noted previously.) However, none of the changes are related to making this feature less annoying. Instead, it's been changed to obviate a potential security vulnerability in the original UAP implementation. Now, UAP consent dialogs open in a new environment called the Secure Desktop, where most of the screen goes black and only the consent dialog is available. This forces the user to deal with the dialog before doing anything else. So not only is UAP annoying, but now you can't even get something else done until you deal with it.

My sources tell me that the security team at Microsoft were able to develop a proof of concept cursor spoof attack that hid the real cursor under a fake one, letting exploit code click the Allow button when the user thought they were clicking Cancel.

All this is not giving me a good feeling about the possibilities of improved security in Vista, whenever it might actually ship.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, puppy, Windows

Posted by oren at 7:44 AM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2006

Mobile Calendaring Questionnaire from CalConnect

The folks from the Mobile Technical Committee within the CalConnect Calendaring Consortium want to find out how you would like to use your mobile device (phone, PDA, whatever) for calendaring. Please give 'em a hand when you have a few minutes.

Chris and Dave write:

Benefits to Participants: Direct input from individual users of mobile devices to the vendor community

Background: The Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium’s Mobile Technical Committee is working on a vision for interoperable calendaring on mobile devices.

To better understand what feature sets are currently supported by mobile devices and what users desire, CalConnect invites participation of consumers in a questionnaire on mobile device capabilities. CalConnect’s technical experts will use the questionnaire results to develop an approach to interoperability of calendaring solutions.

The questionnaire is at http://www.calconnect.org/mobileQs_v2.html

Completing the questionnaire will take 5 to 10 minutes.

Important Note: Any personal contact details provided will be kept strictly confidential and will only be used by CalConnect to clarify responses to the questionnaire.

The Technical Committee will compile responses over the next month and have a draft of results available for the CalConnect Roundtable VI meeting on 22-25 May 2006. Following review and feedback, a final summary of the results will be published on the CalConnect web site.

We would appreciate your response no later than 5th May 2006.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Chris Dudding, Symbian Limited
TC Mobile Chair
chris.dudding@symbian.com

Dave Thewlis, CalConnect
Executive Director

Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring, mobile-devices

Posted by oren at 7:03 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2006

My first adventure with programming Google Maps

I've been eyeing the Google Maps API for some time, but hadn't had any time to play with it. Having come down this week with some sort of bug that's going around, I've been spending a lot of time laying around with the laptop, so I decided to give it a try.

My first attempt is a satellite image of where Mary Gates Hall (the building my office is in) is on the UW campus.

Everything went very smoothly, using the Google documentation. The only thing I knocked heads with for a bit was trying to set the map type to be a hybrid satellite/street map instead of a plain street map (the street map doesn't show locations on the campus). There's a setMapType method, but apparently the API is sensitive to where in the JavaScript that method is used - it worked when I finally thought to setMapType at the very end of my load function.

I also found Joshua Siler's How to add a Google Map to any web page in less than 10 minutes to be useful, although his starter code didn't work for me (but the starter code generated by Google when I registered for my API key worked just fine).

Technorati Tags: google, mapping, web-services

Posted by oren at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)

MSFT hires former ask.com CEO to head online business

All sorts of sources are reporting that Steve Berkowitz, former head of ask.com, has been hired to be Senior Vice-President of the Online Business group, which includes include MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live.

There have generally been some signs of life in some of the recent activities in the Windows Live/MSN sphere, like MSN Spaces (if not their reaction to the Chinese government), Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Local (their technology demo of a drive through downtown Seattle is a gas), and the progress on opening up the online platform for developers to take advantage of the services.

I'm also really intrigued by Windows Live@edu, Microsoft's service for hosted email and online services for educational institutions - though to date I have not been successful (despite several attempts) at actually getting any contact back from Microsoft about this program.

I think Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow, and I admire his progress to date on trying to re-orient a huge corporation from the sales of desktop and server software to the heavily connected universe we now live in, where much of the software and services exist out in the network cloud somewhere.

While I've never been very impressed by ask.com (or its parent company IAC, who I interacted with some in previous professional life), my guess is that the Berkowitz hire is primarily about Microsoft trying to figure out a way to build a lot of advertising revenue to support these new online ventures. Hopefully they'll leave the technology directions to Ozzie and his colleagues.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, MSN, puppy

Posted by oren at 4:02 AM | Comments (0)

MSFT hires former ask.com CEO to head online business

All sorts of sources are reporting that Steve Berkowitz, former head of ask.com, has been hired to be Senior Vice-President of the Online Business group, which includes include MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live.

There have generally been some signs of life in some of the recent activities in the Windows Live/MSN sphere, like MSN Spaces (if not their reaction to the Chinese government), Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Local (their technology demo of a drive through downtown Seattle is a gas), and the progress on opening up the online platform for developers to take advantage of the services.

I think Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow, and I admire his progress to date on trying to re-orient a huge corporation from the sales of desktop and server software to the heavily connected universe we now live in, where much of the software and services exist out in the network cloud somewhere.

While I've never been very impressed by ask.com (or its parent company IAC, who I interacted with some in previous professional life), my guess is that the Berkowitz hire is primarily about Microsoft trying to figure out a way to build a lot of advertising revenue to support these new online ventures. Hopefully they'll leave the technology directions to Ozzie and his colleagues.

Technorati Tags: MSN, microsoft, puppy

Posted by oren at 3:56 AM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2006

NY Times Mag article on Google in China

There's a good article online (it will appear in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine) about Google's operations in China and the decisions they made on how to deal with the Chinese government's censorship of controversial topics. It shows some of the issues that Internet companies wanting to do business have to deal with, and how Google came up with some creative solutions.

Brin and his team decided that if they were going to be forced to censor the results for a search for "Tiananmen Square," then they would put a disclaimer at the top of the search results on google.cn explaining that information had been removed in accordance with Chinese law. When Chinese users search for forbidden terms, Brin said, "they can notice what's missing, or at least notice the local control." It is precisely the solution you'd expect from a computer scientist: the absence of information is a type of information. (Google displays similar disclaimers in France and Germany, where they strip out links to pro-Nazi Web sites.)

Technorati Tags: politics, google, puppy

Posted by oren at 6:12 PM | Comments (0)

Open Source Robots - how cool is that?

Gizmodo is reporting that Lego will release the software for its next-generation Mindstorms NXT robotics system as open source. It will be really interesting to see the kinds of activity generated by that release!

Technorati Tags: puppy

Posted by oren at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)

Google Calendar and Google Page Creator

I've been playing a bit with both Google Calendar and Google Page Creator. The calendar is easy to use - it allows you to set up multiple calendars, display them in a browser, and has both iCalendar export and Atom feeds of events. Public calendar sharing is supported by exposing public URLs for the iCalendar and Atom data feeds. More granular sharing of permissions for editing and creating events or just seeing free/busy schedules can be granted to other Google Calendar user accounts. You can import events in iCalendar or comma-separated formats. There are lots of things that Google Calendar doesn't currently support, most notably recurring events.

The Page Creator at this point is a fairly basic web-forms based system for creating and editing web pages hosted by Google. Nothing too revolutionary here, but easy to use.

One thing that surprised me is that there is no connection that I can find between these services. The first calendar that I created is a calendar for my son's Pony baseball game schedule. I then thought I'd create a web page for his team (the mighty coach-pitch Pinto Cardinals of the North Seattle Baseball Association league), and of course the first thing I wanted to put on that page was the game schedule. I could find no way of accomplishing that, aside from retyping the schedule onto the page. Given the amount that these kinds of schedules change over the season, maintaining the schedule in two places is not an ideal solution.

I hope Google shows some more integration between these services as they move forward with these new offerings.

Posted by oren at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)

April 5, 2006

HigherEdBlogCon happening now on the web

The Edubloggers link feed points out the online conference HigherEdBlogCon, which is now in its third day (it will be going on all during April). The conference is "an online event focused on how new online communications technologies and social tools are changing Higher Education."

So far the schedule has included:

>>Monday, April 3, 2006: Podcasting and Screencasting
>>Tuesday, April 4, 2006: Blogging Examples
>>Wednesday, April 5, 2006: Blogging Studies

Looks like some interesting stuff happening here.

Technorati Tags: blogging, higher-ed

Posted by oren at 2:01 PM | Comments (0)

Boot Camp - Dual boot Windows on your Mac

Apple has released a public beta of Boot Camp, allowing the new Intel-based Macs to dual-boot Windows as well as OS X.

But why would you want to?

Posted by oren at 6:48 AM | Comments (0)

April 4, 2006

Microsoft Says Malware Recovery Becoming Impossible

Mark McNair points this one out from Eweek. Not news to computing support people, but worth pointing out, especially when you couple it with how much time it actually takes to rebuild a Windows machine from scratch (assuming it's not one you can just build from a stock image).

I recently spent an entire day (like eight hours) rebuilding my dad's Windows XP laptop after he got infected from clicking on a link in an email that claimed to have been from McAfee - and he had the original disks. And I still don't think all the right drivers are reinstalled. That's not an effort that scales when you've got thousands of machines in an institution.

- Oren

1. News: Microsoft Says Malware Recovery Becoming Impossible

A MS security official at the InfoSec conference, who admits
the company is seeing over 2,000 attacks per hour, recommends
that big businesses invest in an automated process to wipe
hard drives and reinstall malware-infested operating systems.
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-3444-2-79-51488-405339-0-0-0-1

Posted by oren at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Podcasts at the UW - experiences so far

Scott Leslie, who writes the generally insightful EdTechPost blog up in BC, wrote a post the other day entitled The only post you'll ever see me write about podcasts, where he derides podcasts in education as a fad of the moment.

What has really annoyed me, though, about podcasts as a phenomenom and as hype, especially in the context of podcasting 'lectures' or other 'knowledge transfers,' is that it replicates what is already not a very good model of how to distribute information/learning - the synchronous spoken lecture.

I dropped Scott a note to let him know about our experiences with course podcasts here at the UW, and Scott wrote back to ask whether we've let the larger community know about our work. That made me realize that I haven't mentioned any of this here in this blog.

We've had a pilot project with some course podcasts going this year, starting with four courses in fall quarter, thirteen courses in winter, and more this spring. There's an early report by my colleague Cara Lane of some research on some of the first quarter participants online in a pdf file at http://catalyst.washington.edu/projects/podcasting_report.pdf. This report is based on a small sample - 41 students out of 148 enrolled in a single course, but it's at least interesting as an early indication of how some students enrolled in a course are making use of the audio recordings of the course.

The bottom line? Students find the audio recordings useful as supplementary material to enrich the course experience. Not exactly revolutionary, but certainly useful. One other finding is that the podcasts do not have a negative impact on course attendance. That's something some faculty have worried about, so it's good to have some data on the question - though to take Scott's point up, perhaps it would be more interesting educationally if this technology enabled more independent learning without attending lectures.

From a larger point of view what's attractive about capturing lectures, along with materials such as presentation slides, lecture notes, and syllabi is that it allows the University to share and publicize the wide array of expertise and knowledge of the faculty beyond the walls of the campus - which stands to be good both for the institution and for the faculty who participate.

While I agree theoretically that lectures are not generally the greatest way of imparting information or the best mode of learning, it's certainly a technique that's stood the test of time and there are many faculty in all disciplines who are very good at lecturing - and attending a really good lecture is a wonderful experience. Having technology to cost-effectively share those experiences isn't transformational, perhaps, but it's certainly worthwhile.

Technorati Tags: learning, podcasting, UW

Posted by oren at 7:24 AM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2006

My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts multitracks will be available for download and remixing

This is just too cool. Brian Eno and David Byrne are planning to release the raw tracks from their hugely influential 1981 album, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with Creative Commons licenses, allowing for their use in remixing and mashups.

The tracks aren't on the site yet, but I'll be waiting!

Thanks, Xeni!

Technorati Tags: music

Posted by oren at 6:15 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2006

Catalyst WebQ wins a regional award!

I just got a really nice phone call from John Kenagy, CIO at the Oregon Health Sciences University, letting me know that the UW's Catalyst WebQ online quiz and survey tool, has won the Joanne R. Hugi Excellence Award presented by the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium. The Hugi Award "is to recognize and share information about outstanding IT practices among the higher education institutions of the Pacific Northwest."

WebQ is one of the great group of Catalyst Web Tools that Tom Lewis and a small crew of intrepid perl programmers write and make available for folks here at the UW. It's a great survey and quiz tool and it gets used for all sorts of things - from research surveys (it's been approved as a tool for human subjects research at the University) to student government and faculty senate voting.

In our brief conversation, John mentioned that NWACC doesn't like to give the Hugi award to huge megaprojects, but to "the things that quietly propel us forward", which I thought was a lovely way of expressing the kind of value that we get from tools such as WebQ. It's another way of expressing the value that Dave Weinberger famously stated as "small pieces loosely joined."

As part of the award someone from the UW will be talking about WebQ and the Catalyst Tools at the upcoming NWACC annual conference in Portland in June.

Congratulations to the whole Catalyst crew for a great tool, and thanks to NWACC for the lovely bit of recognition!

Posted by oren at 4:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 21, 2006

Terry Gray on troubleshooting in the 21st centory

A good quote from Terry in a meeting I'm in:

"Troubleshooting in the 21st century is the art of correlating seemingly unrelated events."

Technorati Tags: quotes, troubleshooting

Posted by oren at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

Amazon S3 - Open web storage facility

This is really interesting - Amazon has released S3, which offers open web storage for $0.15 per gigabyte per month, accessible via web services (REST and SOAP interfaces provided) and BitTorrent. Authentication is via Amazon login, and you can use access control lists to control access to the files.

Interesting that there's no WebDAV interface to S3, at least from my brief look at the documentation.

They're guaranteeing 99.99% ("two nines") reliability.

This could point the way towards ubiquitous cheap online storage accessible via Web interfaces.

Technorati Tags: web-services, storage, web-services

Posted by oren at 7:12 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2006

Susan Crawford on network (substrate) neutrality

One of the problems with the way my feed aggregator (Bloglines) lists my many subscriptions is that they get presented in alphabetical order within a folder. There's now 63 blogs in my "blogs" folder. When I start to read I usually start at the top of the list, but rarely get to the bottom. Which means that I almost always read the Apple Blog and BoingBoing, and fairly frequently make it as far a Jon's Radio and mamamusings, I don't get to Susan Crawford's blog as often as I should.

That's something I intend to correct, because Susan is writing some of the most intelligent commentary on the state of the discussion of Internet law and regulation. Last week she posted a great essay on network neutrality, or as she thinks we ought to term it, substrate neutrality.

You should stop reading my blog and go read Susan's now.

But when users say "internet" they mean relationships. We forget, because so many machines are involved, that the internet is a social world. Users don't think about transport -- they're indifferent to the substrate. They care about what they do there. And what they do is create a complex adaptive system unlike any other communications network we've ever had before. The unpredictable ecology of the internet could never have been generated by a broadcaster or a newspaper. It's constantly revising itself in response to the feedback it's getting from everyone. And its value is almost wholly unrelated to the work carried out by the access valves, the gatekeepers to internet access. As I've said before, the internet is like an ocean, but formed through attention rather than nature. (And, just as we're almost totally ignorant of the life-forms beneath the waves, we don't know all that much about what's going on on the internet.) The essence of our relationship to this ecology, this complex adaptive system, is one of explanation/comprehension -- at the most. We can't predict what it will do next.

The point about this ecology is that it is largely indifferent to the substrate it's carried on. The CD is not the song. The term "network neutrality" doesn't capture this -- we should consider using "substrate neutrality" instead. Otherwise the network providers' arguments are so easy: "But it's our network!" they can say. (AT&T's new slogan is "Delivering your world," as if the online experience was a visual pizza. We won't even need to rise from the couch.)

Technorati Tags: network-neutrality

Posted by oren at 8:16 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2006

Recurring events in CalDAV

At last week's calendaring BOF at Etech, folks asked how CalDAV treats recurring events. I had to embarrassingly admit that I didn't know the answer. Just because I'm evangelizing calendaring interoperability doesn't mean I've actually read the spec! (he says sheepishly).

So for those who want to know, from the latest draft of the CalDAV spec - the answer is that recurring events are treated as a single object in CalDAV:

 Recurrence is an important part of the data model because it governs
   how many resources are expected to exist.  This specification models
   a recurring calendar component and its recurrence exceptions as a
   single resource.  In this model, recurrence rules, recurrence dates,
   exception rules, and exception dates are all part of the data in a
   single calendar object resource.  This model avoids problems of
   limiting how many recurrence instances to store in the repository,
   how to keep recurrence instances in sync with the recurring calendar
   component, and how to link recurrence exceptions with the recurring
   calendar component.  It also results in less data to synchronize
   between client and server, and makes it easier to make changes to all
   recurrence instances or to a recurrence rule.  It makes it easier to
   create a recurring calendar component, and easier to delete all
   recurrence instances.

   Clients are not forced to retrieve information about all recurrence

   instances of a recurring component.  The CALDAV:calendar-query and

   CALDAV:calendar-multiget REPORTs defined in this document allow

   clients to retrieve only recurrence instances that overlap a given

   time range.

Technorati Tags: calendaring, caldav

Posted by oren at 1:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2006

Dave Winer, RSS 2.0 and Atom and my notes from Tim Bray's Etech talk

Interesting - Dave Winer has taken my notes from Tim Bray's Etech talk, where Tim listed some specific problems with RSS 2 that caused the creation of the newer Atom protocol, and turned that into a list of things to avoid in doing a successful RSS 2 feed source, which Dave calls A Busy Developer's Guide to RSS 2.0

Technorati Tags: atom, RSS, syndication

Posted by oren at 5:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2006

[etech06] Final etech thoughts

I cut out from Etech before it ended, to get back to Seattle in time to see my son in a skit at his school tonight (gotta set some priorities, after all).

Some thoughts on themes that permeated throughout the conference:

Open APIs - Online apps are opening up web service APIs to the world, allowing people to create new combinations of services in creative ways. These are almost all web service APIs, some easier to use than others. This is being done by both the big guys (Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft) and the startups (Technorati, Ning, EVDB). As the Yahoo t-shirt and sticker said - "Mashup or Shutup",

AJAX interfaces - Ajax has arrived big-time. Offering more immediate feedback by allowing changes in web apps without round-trips to servers is a very powerful technology that resonates with users. Client-side Javascript is the engine that powers this, and has gathered a large following in this community as a very powerful language in its own right, because of its dynamic (lisp-like) properties.

Syndication is happening - while the question "Is the content in your aggregator more important than the content in your email inbox?" wasn't answered affirmatively by the majority in the crowd, the mere fact that it was being asked is indicative of the amount of information exchange happening via RSS and Atom. Between this and the open APIs for mashups, we need to adjust to a reality where we're not in control of the context in which people see our content.

Learning from gaming - We can now think about taking what makes games compelling to so many millions of people to design applications that have that appeal with the same emotional resonance.

Coping with community - We need to evolve new and better ways of dealing with very large online communities, numbering in the millions.

So, all in all, how was Etech?

It was really good to get a chance to meet some folks I had only had online communication with (like Tim Bray) or hadn't met at all (like Robert Kay from MusicBrainz and Matt Pasiewicz from Educause). And it was great to get a chance to hang out some with Ted Leung, Tantek Çelik and Catherine Yang from Educause. I wish there had been some more small-scale unstructured, or perhaps more loosely structured, time - but that's hard to do in a thousand person conference.

There were some very good sessions - I tended to be drawn to the talks that had the highest conceptual content, as opposed to those that detailed working code, perhaps because I don't spend a lot of time working with code these days. Linda Stone, Clay Shirky, Amy Jo Kim, and Danah Boyd were real standouts for me.

I felt good about going down and flying the banner of calendaring interoperability work - it's important work, and people were interested. I look forward to next year - maybe then we'll get a calendaring presentation on the agenda!

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 3:30 PM | Comments (0)

March 9, 2006

[etech06] Julian RushBleecker (USC) - Pervasive Games

Update - Julian Bleecker wrote to note that he enjoyed the notes but I got his last name wrong - sorry, Julian!!! That's the result of trying to take notes from the very back of the room while not having a conference agenda handy.

Looking at the way physical environments become computational grids - physical structures for play in the real world in which different kinds of social groups and formations come together and engage in playful activity.

The way the social network leaks into physical space - not just the Internet, but telephony an dother technologies.

Paths are the interface - the way people navigate the city - the city as a game board grid.

Teh things that we see around and turn away from can become pieces of the game expereience - Debris Become Legible. These can become instcription devices for game play. The way infrastructure becomes part of the game - goals or pieces or moments for power-up. different aspects of urban space become a way for the game to pervade physical space. Annotation rewrites the rules.

Movement = Power-Up. Traditional console gaming doesn't address physical mocement. Shows a room full o fguys staring at a screen - this iw weird - social play should have another register of interaction and engagement besides sitting still even when you're in a group of friends.

Pervasive games are ways of experimenting with social contexts and groups of people. Look at different ways in which social beings can be mustered to look at things in a different way.

So What?

The stakes are about a different way of seeing the world and how it works - hopefully in ways of making the world more inhabitable and sustainable. e.g. seeing debris as something that needs to be dealt with.

The "Big Urban Game" Large totems that were carted around the city - semicodes were the goals fo the game - got points for retrieving using mobile phones. Marketed for Qwest - ConQwest - getting people to navigate physical space and encountering poeple not involved in the game, and that interaction is interesting.

Superstar - at UbiComp in Tokyo last year - put stickers all over Tokyo, have other people find and take picture of them, and send them in to the "mothership" - the more pictures you have the more points you get. A cooperative game - you want to link to others and have them take your picture at the same time. One of the goals is to enlist other people and get them involved in the game play.

Pervasive Performance - games that are stage as a form of urban play - Blast Theory group in the UK. Create a mixed-reality experience - one level is online play And then there are real people in the world (the performers) A PDA equipped with a GPS and radio - the online players steer and guide the performers to a goal, through a 3d immersive interface. The physical players (who are actors) gather a group of people who follow them around.

Ludic component - Geocaching - a casual gaming experience. An interesting way of combining people who participate (the cachers) and the people who search. It's a global thing - use of the whole world as a kind of gameboard.

The Go Game - The object of the play is to do insane activities in physical space - turn the world upside down. Gets the players "out of themselves" in a whimsical experience. It also turns the world upside down, as you see activities in physical space that you woldn't normally see.

Mobile Phone Games -

Using mobile phone can become an interface not for games on the screen, but playhing games that pervade the physical world. clickr! co-located individuals interact with an experience. You don't need the latest, greatest, phone to do mobile phone games. Participating in largers social contexts.

Flirt Stampede - uses cell tower location to create a virtual stampede. IC you're closer you'd see the stampede on your phone screen.

Flirt Lost Cat - a lost cat wandering around the city - depending on where you were you might come across the cat. Using our movement through the city as a way of creating a casual, playful experience.

Twitcher - using your phone as a way of capturing birds that are flying around. Your phone buzzes - you need to capture a picture of the bird before it flies away. If you're standing next to someone else who has the game, you might both have the opportunity to capture the first picture, if you're within bluetooth range.

Viewmaster of the future - Using quicktime VR and a sensor for orientation sensing. You look into it and as you pivot around the view changes. You can think about ways that these kinds of experiences allow you to experience a cinematic or game moment as you move about the world.

Human PacMan

Catch Bob - Using gaming as a way of asking research questions - how does collocation inform social interactions? Identifying where other people were and trying to attain a shared goal on tablet PCs as you played the game.

Deeing Yoshi - depending on pervasive network doesn't work, so try to use the spottiness of the network get used as part of the game mechanics? Food that Yoshi can eat are identified by specific wifi nodes - as you pass them you get the food - so as people played the game over weeks they'd find where the good food was - sometimes the node was doen, etc.

piedimonsters - they have courseware called service design. Interested in nutritional fitness. Idea was to turn pedometers into physical game by combining it with tamegochi. Tying nutrition and physical activity by putting it into a game. What kid wouldn't want to power up their avatar by walking to school instead of getting a ride?

research.techkwondo.com

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Steve Yen (TrimPath) - Web Apps Without the Web

TrimPage Junction Framework

NumSum - a web-based spreadsheet. A single page app. Allows saving offline, through Save Page As in the browser.

Next Action - GTD to do list app. Nice code viewer in the app.

Persistence Technique 1
Modern browsers keep dhtml DOM tree intact during a File Save Page As

Keep you data in the DOM tree
myHiddenDataDiv.innerHTML=bigString
Whenever user saves the HTML page, you're ok

Might not work in Safari

Persistence Technique 2

Flash 8 Storage
Flash to JavaScript bridge
Seamless!Except, when you hit squantum level storage usage (Brad Neuberg)

Persistence Technique 3

IE'isms
IE persistence
IE offline data
(but nobody uses it)

Persistence Examples

DOM Page Saving Tehcnique
- IddlyWiki & Friends
Num Sum
Next Action

Flash storage technique
AMASS demos, Tiwywiki.

You need Synchronization in addition persistence
- can use data/record level semantics, track deltas, change requests, not changes; INSERTs only; unique ID gen. OR just punt

You also need a client side API - VB style? No - Rails Style? You can get tw write once run anywhere. Do do that you'll need SQL on both sides - we know it on the server, but what about the client? Will Firefox have something?

TrimPath Junction

A MVC Framework for JavaScript
raiels-like API with client-side SQL
Designed for write once run anywhere - server runs Rhino
Designed for pluggable client-side storage.

eval and with in JavaScript - changes dynamic scoping.

Why care about with?

Domain specific mini languages are easy - JSP, ASP, SQL are examples of mini-languages.

HST Templage engine
JST==JavaScript Templates 297 lines of code.

TrimQuery SQL Engine - RexExps to transform SQL to TQL

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 9:32 AM | Comments (1)

[etech06] Disconnection Tolerant Ajax

the problem -

Web 2.0 mantra:
- Apps run on server
- client is just a communication and display device

Ajax assumes constant connectivity

Connectivity may be flaky or slow or unavailable.

Leads to a style of work that can be termed Frequently Connected Computing
- a presumption of network availability
- bot both planned and unplanned outages occur
- you want to continue some work during disconnections

drive-through-internet.org

To do this, apps have to be disconenction tolerant and delay tolerant.

Hw to do this?
- put more of the interface on a single page
- do serious error checking
- don't lose user input

Reduce number of pages -
In disconnected mode you don't want to:
- change pages for routine operations
- rely on server data for routine operations
- fail mysteriously or verbosely on update errors

Leads to single-page apps, but with Ajax backend.
- Download "working set" with page
- this can be done with background ajax
- pace requests properly until page populated

- Structure UI, e.g. using tab-styled navigation
- don't forget bookmarkability (update location.hash)

In error checking there are bugs in browsers you have to work around - error-protecting the error detection. Keep in mind that responses may not come back in the order they were sent.

Don't lose user input - can be kept as page state (e.g. in text areas); JavaScript state (in variables) - both of those methods have problems if the browser or system closes. You can store it in cookies or in some storage made available by a plugin (like flash SharedObject).

PANIC - Persistency for Ajax in Networks with Intermittent Connectivity.

You need to plan for data changing on the server while you're offline. Use conflict resolution strategies, like server-based generation numbers an dlocal generation numbers. THe cookie size limitation is a problem.

Proof of concept implemented on Prototype library, server parts based on Rails before_filter.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 9:09 AM | Comments (1)

Real Google VPs use Pine for email

Terry Gray sends along this tidbit (click on the quote from Marissa Mayer) from Fortune Magazine, by Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience:

I don't feel overwhelmed with information. I really like it. I use Gmail for my personal e-mail -- 15 to 20 e-mails a day -- but on my work e-mail I get as many as 700 to 800 a day, so I need something really fast.

I use an e-mail application called Pine, a Linux-based utility I started using in college. It's a very simple text-based mailer in a crunchy little terminal window with Courier fonts. I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight. I almost always have the radio or my TV on. I guess I'm a typical 25- to 35-year-old who's now really embracing the two-screen experience.

Technorati Tags: email, pine, puppy

Posted by oren at 8:42 AM | Comments (0)

March 8, 2006

[etech06] Mary Hodder - Everybody's It: Tagging With Identity

ITags - something she and her colleagues are proposing to deal with some problems with tagging. She's started a company called Dabble, which is a video remix community.

There's a problem with technorati tags - people want to be able to publish their own stuff on their own sites and have people know that it came from their own sites. There are lots of different uses for tags and people want to participate in communities, but still publish on their own sites.

She did a usability study last spring, centered around text bloggers - what they asked for was the ability to create tags that didn't require a link. At same time they realized their categories were being treated as tags in aggregation systems. Tags needed to be trusted - wanted to know that tags weren't spam but didn't need to know the actualy maker. Visibility vs. invisibility. Want to create their own tag clouds, and to tag objects separately from blog posts.

35% of technorati tags are actually tags, but 65% are blog categories. In creating Dabble they're collecting media not just tagging it. They've collected 68,000 items so far - about half have tags. The richer the media, the more tagging you get. 10,000 of the videos come from independent sites with video on it.

What happens when people check out video is they look at the duration and the tags, much more than the titles.

What are itags - identity, creative commons license and an object. All of this can be bound to an object, which can move. The degradation of URLs is very fast, but the media lives on somewhere.

The identity piece - can be well-known, psuedonymous, or a blog url. You can protect the suer by obscuring who they are. When you trust tags (if you're an aggregator or host) you have to trust the maker of the material - so you need some sort of identity. This allows freeing of media from file location to be site-independent - could use XRI as a structured identifier.

http://itags.net/

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 2:27 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Eric Lunt (feedburner) - Feed to the Future

A few years ago you could argue that RSS feeds and blogs were synonymous - that's not so much the case now, with podcasts, watchlists, commercial publishers, other peer-produced content and rich media. People don't realize it's rss feeds powering this dynamic information.

Full or Partial Feeds?

- Feed subscriptions to full content feeds outpace subscriptions to partial content feed for the same source by up to 10x.
BUT
- Feed subscriptions with only partial feeds grow just as quickly as subscriptions to sites with only full feeds
AND
- experiments in decreasing the amount of content in the feed to NOT statistically improve clicks back to teh site (title only)
SO
- Content providers can choose to distribute more or less content but the feed may be all that a consumer ever sees.

Complexity breeds consolidation, simplicity doesn't

- 2004 - Couple hundred clients pulling feeds
"My Yahoo will eliminate these other things"
"Desktop readers will go away - it will all be web based"
"soon there will only be two or three of these"
- 2005 - Thousand Clients
"Google will jum in here"
"soon there will only be two or three of these"
- 2006 - serveral thousand clients
- "when IE 7 comes out all these other things will go away"
- "It will all be personalized Ajax Home Pages with filters and aggregation"
"soon there will only be two or three of these"

Subscription without recognition

The Feed is Your face - more people will interact with you through your feed, not your web site.

Have content, will travel - you can't be control how your content is going to be redistributed.

Feedburner allows you to attach "beacon gifts" to your subscriptions so you can get an idea of how many people are viewing your feed.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 2:02 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Bill Scott (Yahoo) - The Language of Attention: A Pattern Approach

Interactive language of attention.

Kathy Sierra talked about the power of the tribe - when you have a tribe you have attention. Putting the code libraries and APIs and patterns out is leveraging the power of the tribe, creating a tribal platform.

Opening the APIs internally has had a great impact in Yahoo - having hack days and mashup days internally to motivate and excite people. chaddickerson.com - mobile phone app to show location of your flickr group on the etech conference floor.

Two recent examples:

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
Yahoo! User Interface Library

Design Tribe - pattern library. a new model - the page goes away and you have rich interaction without page refresh. But it leaves lots of things in a quandry. Engaging the user: Wow! gets their attention, but unless it's relevant (Delight!) it's not going to be used, much less inspire loyalty (Love!).

Vocabulary - interactive patterns of attention.

Immediacy - the Live Suggest pattern and the AUto Complete pattern.
Directness - Drag and Drop pattern. Inline Editing pattern.
Invitational - (being polite and inviting) hover invitation, tooltip invitation
Without boundaries - Endless scroliing, in context expand, hover details
Light Footpring - remembered collection, rating an object
Cinematic - fade transition, self-healing transition, sliding, fading
Rich Content - shareable object

They'd like to get a more common vocabulary around these design patterns - so they're starting to put them out to the public. Surfacing a vocabulary.

Exposing solutions - on the devloper side they've released the UI code library.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] George Dyson - Turing's Cathedral

George Dyson gave a great exposure of the history of computing up through the last of the Von Neuman collaborators, drawing conclusions about how in the current age we are finally achieving the goals of Turing and von Neuman and the others in creating what is an intelligent set of machines - is Google alive?

The notes I took until I just couldn't keep up:

"Intellectual activity consists mainly of different kinds of search" - Turing

One of the arguments against artificial intelligence is that it can't be intelligent if it has ads - Butler thought in 1901 that intelligence would arrive from advertising.

The basic premise is that machines are both dumb and intelligent.

HG Wells thought of the World Brain, which is basically the Web, in 1938. He wanted it to be uncensored to prevent tyrrany.

Alfred Semee - Tried to figure out how the human mind worked electrically, in the mid 1800s. Wanted to build a search engine, but it would've been larger than the whole city of London.

Turing;s 1936 paper proposing a thinking machine was just as out there as Smee at the time - Godel argued that it couldn't doe things that the mind could, but Turing thought differently.

The real founder of the whole digital thing was Hobbes, who invented the idea of recursive functions. The bigger question is not whether the machine can think, but is it alive? Liebniz invented the binary calculus, and invented the idea of a shift register. Von Neumann took off from Liebniz and built the adders. Back then they let physicists build things - they didn't have Homeland Security and let Hungarians play with plutonium.

Exactly 50 years ago was the Von Neuman's first status report.

The machine was built at IAS at Princeton - On the first floor was Einstein, Veblen, and von Newuman. Godel was upstairs above von Neuman.

Up till then mathematics had been used to mean things, now numbers are used to do things.

Bringing engineers with soldering guns into the Institute was considered very odd. Von Neuman was interested in how to construct reliable machines from unreliable parts.

The real origin of the digital universe are tied up in the development of bombs, and much of the history is classified. Klara Von Neuman came over and learned to program the computer. Just a few weeks ago a filing cabinet turned up that has all of the letters between Klara and John.

Nils Baricelli created simulated organisms when the bomb guys went home at night
.

Ulam was working with Turing on multicellular processes - Von Neuman died in '57. His last book, the Computer and the Brain.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 12:24 PM | Comments (1)

[etech06] Michael Goldhaber - The Real Nature of the Attention Economy

This conference has its feet in two paradigms - one is the attention economy, and the other is the old economy. Michael thinks we don't know which world we're in - butterflies (or moths) that still think we're caterpillars - but maybe we're ready to sip the nectar and live in a new way of being.

A new level in the game known as Western Culture

An economy most generally...

is a massively multiplayer
single level game
that involves some kind of passing
....?

Economic History is a multilevel game:

The first level: Fuedal (800-1200)
Knights and their vassals - winning through fighting, aligning with other lords, or by marriage.

Second level: Market-Money-Industrial - 1650-1980
Nothing changed externally (1200 - 1650 was a transition period)

Coming next and already very powerful - the Attention Economy - a new level, a new kind of system. Can't think of it in the old terms any more than you can think about stock markets or unemployment in a feudal system

When enoguh players reach their implicit goals, we reach a new level. Each level has new rules, goals, moves, values BUT - there is no game designer. The new level emerges from basic human proclivities and gaps in old level.

Feudal - provided security to Western Europe (from external raiders). Success in MMI is material abundance. The openings in feudalism ungoverned city spaces, safe travel, mostly no slavery. Our current openings - large high schools, broadcasting, publishing, internet.

Lack in feudal system was material goods. MMI lacks - chance to get attention and personal uniqueness and self expression.

Goals - fuedal: loyalty, fiefdomes, security
MMI - material goods, money, jobs
Attention - Attention from others

Roles: Feudal - Kinights, Serfs; MMI- owner, worker/consumer; Attention - star, fan

Different moves too.

Different cycles and structures.

So what is attention?

Attention - is scarce, very desirable, nothing limits the amount of attention you could absorb (if you could get it). There will be an intensifying competitiion for attention. Paying attention amounts to temporarily (and therefore permanently) allowing another to shape how your mind works.

It's not about time. Who owns your attention? You own part, but the person you're paying attention to also owns part. Attention is a kind of property located in the minds of those who have paid attention.

Finding meaning in life comes from sharing meanings with others - that can only happen if you get some of their attention.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Christopher Payne, Frederick Saboye (Microsoft) - Microsoft Search -

They're announcing three things today:

Live.com new version
new version of Windows Live Search
Windows Live toolbar.

Live.com - launched in November. Wanted to give people rich control over information they view - what modules get shown on the page. Ajax based (of course).

The ability to add and name tabs (looks the new Catalyst web tools interface).

Does RSS aggregation - can hover over feed and see content from the feed.

Made performance improvements to live.com.

Search - can tab between vertical searches (images, news, etc) keeping the search term intact - like Google.

You can pop open a box to search within individual sites.

There's a smart scroll control that does dynamic fetching so you don't have to do individual page loads.

New Image search with some UI improvements.

Feed Search - can preview entire feed in search results before subscribing.

Search macros - ability to describe, save, and share a saved search with parameters. Can't yet create new macros, but will be able to in a few weeks.

Windows Live Toolbar - includes antiphishing filter, synced up favorites for IE, MS has acquired OnFolio - a browser add-in to help people organize info, including RSS aggregation and collections (gee, like Plum). Free with the toolbar.

Windows Live Local - being able to search for local info. Birdseye photo images - hired planes to take pictures. streetside - sent cars out with 10 cameras each to digitize images of downtown - Seattle and San Francisco so far.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Joel Spolsky - Blue Chip Products: 2006 Report Card

The concept of Blue Chip product vs. the Off Bran product - Julia Roberts vs. Sandra Bullock, iPod vs. Creative Zen, etc.

How you could make blue chip products - the formula:

- Make people happy (by giving them control)
- Think about emotions
- Obsess over the aesthetics

Ajax's instant feedback makes people feel like they have control and makes them happy.

The iPod has obsession in making the entire experience seamless.

Some apps and how they live up to the formula or don't:

reddit.com - people share links and other people can vote on it. The reddit mascot alien is adorable - why is he cute? He has large eyes and he's bald, so he looks like a human baby, which we think is cute. The alien changes with little stories from day to day, which creates an emotional bond. Happy: A, Emotions: A, Aesthetics: B Final score: A

motorola Razr - best selling phone of all time. A lot of obsession over aesthetics. There's also the PEBL - people love to feel smooth ocean beach stones, so they made a phone that people like to fondle. Motorola gets an A for emotions and an A for aesthetics, but they get a D for happy for not giving user good feeling of control. Final grade: B

Web-based calendars - Basic requirement was being able to enter a flight which starts and ends in different time zones. Tried Airset - not beautiful, but very functional - even has a java application for cell phone which works well. The first actual usable java application for cell phones. A for control, B for emotions, C for aesthetics.

There are three web design trends that have become popular in the last year - ugly, ugly, and ugly. Enough with the pastel arial, already! This is copying from Google - which is cargo cultism. Google design only makes aesthetic sense compared to the old cramped up portals.

Look at architecture 9 the Seagram building or LEver house of minimalist design - revolts against Beaux Art wedding cake monstrosities.

When Google came out with the stripped down design, it was making an interesting statement. WHen you copy their fonts you're not making a statement.

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Posted by oren at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Hans Peter Brondmo - First You Google But Then What?

The place I direct my attention when I have a question is to the search engine. There is intelligence on the web...and it's you. Great ideas, but can we rely on imperfect humans? What's the mechanism for doing that?

What if there was a way to collect almost anything from anywhere, and then share it in a way that matters to me, can I connect and discover things from other people?

so they created plum.

Lets you click on a page and plum collects it and caches it. You can collect anything - including people (within plum). You can collect live feeds. Other people can contribute to your collections.

You can collect email from your desktop or gmail or yahoo.

There's a little floating dock of icons called the plumber that has the controls for the desktop.

Today they're announcing (of course) an open source API. developer.plum.com

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Posted by oren at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

[etech 06] Brian Dear (evdb) - When do we get the events we want?

EVDB - Founded in 2004 to maximize event discovery.

Building a web services API platform and an event portal built on that platform.

The platform - REST-style API: api.evdb.com. Podbop is a mashup based on this.

The portal - eventful.com - a site to discover, post, and share events. Three dimensions to events -

Known events (search, calendars, tags, rss & ical feeds, groups, friends family contacts, auto-submit, iTunes import > calendar, AIM EventfulBot, Performers) everything tagged with hcal and hcard.

Expected Events - Prospective Search, notifications/alerts

Dream Events - events you wish would happen. tools for demand aggregation - not onlyh for fans, but for performers. Along with noticiations and alerts. ROlling out the first phase of this today - called eventful demand. Not just a "wish list" but the possibility of fulfillment. A marketplace for experiences.

They have some cool tools for creating and nurturing a demand for an event, including emailing people, and stickers you can put on your site.

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Posted by oren at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Kevin Lynch (Adobe) Rich Internet Apps and the Service Oriented Client

Client technology for web applications.

We have Ajax, but there are some things we want to do - vector graphics, safe cross-domain scripting, storage better than cookies, etc.

This morning he's announcing the connection of flash player to ajax. Open sourced in AFLAX (the framework around ajax and flash) and dojo.storage.

These are all enabled by Flash Player. The flex framework is a way of typing in xml and script code to generate these apps. Flex/Ajax bridge. All these components are downloadable free.

He shows a demo of a flickr browser app that uses ajax and flash, with server logic in Rails.

He demos another application that doesn't use flash but has a data connecter component that updates pages and local desktop data simultaneously in more or less real time.

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Posted by oren at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Clay Shirky - "Shut Up!" "No, YOU Shut Up!"

A pattern language is a tool adapted from architecture that's detailed enough to see how to build it, but not so detailed that it's tied to one domain.

Wants to propose a pattern language for moderation strategies.

Imagine a measurement of communal freedom - how much freedom does the software allow for users to communicate with each other as a group. Notepad is an example is one extreme, usenet is at the other.

Now imagine a y axis that is annyingness - flaming, trolling, unfunny cascades.

The problem - you'd like to launch apps that have a moderate amount of freedom with a moderate amount of problems - the reality is that once you cross the point of letting communication in you very quickly get into mitigating problems.

Slashdot illustration - over ten years has done a remarkably good job of not getting swamped by negative social effects - how do they do it? Members defend readers from writers. Users with high karma form a defensive membrane. But how do you design the system? Every comment is rated on a seven point scale. The members who moderate the system rank the posts. Most readers never see comments rated 1 or less - which is about 20% of the posts. Whether or not you can moderate takes four decisions. That's way complicated - there's very little use of the slashdot software by other sites. How can we get at that value derived from the knowledge of slashdot.

Slashdot faces the tragedy of the commons - each poster has an incentive to defect from the commons to get the most attention to their post. What slashdot does:

1 move comments to a separate page (reduces the size of the commons and lets people know that comments are somewhat ancillary)
2. Treat readers and writers differently - is able to defend readers from writers
3. Let users rate posts.
4. defensive defaults

You can imagine taking some of those systems and re-implementing them yourself.

Adding moderation system allows another problem - who will guard the guardians?

Another set of patterns:

1. Treat users and members differently
2. measure good behavior
3. enlist committed members
4. judges can't post

Clay is proposing building these kinds of pattern languages.

Bronze Beta (Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site) made a set of different decisions, which show other patterns.

1. Don't Have Features (not an accident, but a strategy to reduce complexity.
2. Make Comments Central (unlike slashdot)
3. Make Login OPtional

Pattern Language Wiki and List - social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki
moderation_strategies@yahoogroups.com

Hobbes and Rousseau Argue about Dave Winer

in 2003 Dave Winer was running a mail list called blogrollers. One day he turned it into a moderated list, which was not well received by the members. The conversation around the change was about what should have happened - what duty did Dave have to his users? That's part of why we need a pattern for the long time.

Thomas Hobbes in Leviaathan - a monarch is required to keep society from descending into chaos.

Rosseau took issue with this - Force is no reason. People have a moral right to depose their leaders.

This is the context in which the conversation about social software is taking place. You can imagine that conversation going on, leading to the title of the talk.

Best line of the morning so far:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philosophy, which doesn't even know it has an experimental wing.

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Posted by oren at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Jon Udell - Attention Focusing Strategies

We are all seekers of attention - we all have ideas we want to promote. To that end we make claims on other people's attention - how can we reward that attention?

There are sets of patterns here - four patterns:

1 - heads, decks, and leads

The information architecture of newspapers - give people the ability to scan what you're presenting at multiple levels of detail and work their way into the material.

It's hard to write titles - or name anything. There's a cognitive dissonance between our objective sense of what we're about and what we project - we think people can read our minds, so why should we have to externalize ourselves?

What do you present the world in search results, for example? He shows an example of Google where the search results from a blog only shows the name of the blog instead of the title of the entry. Put richer metadata in titles.

The tragedy of discussion threads - a huge amount of collaboration goes on in mailing lists, and the title gets repeated on every message on a thread - what would it be like if discussion threads had titles that told a story? You could get a sense of the discussion from reading the titles. But it breaks the threading!

2 - active context

A new pattern: What do you know about a topic? The answer is most frequently a set of URLs. An active resource collection. A bunch of effects can happen - what tags are related, who are other people with this interest. Scoping is interesting - right now there's me and the world, but not yet let me see stuff by my trust circle.

Active collection is futureproofed in an interesting way. Used to put together a set of things in a list, but now send a url, which in some sense is a promise to keep updating. The token you hand someone is actually a query.

We can help people visualize what's changing in complex information environments - e.g. walking through the history of a wikipedia page.

3 - canonical names

OCLC ISBN relationship mapping as a mapping of relationships.

Soundbites in IT conversations - can create a url that is a specific time snippet from media resources.

4 - multimedia storytelling

Storytelling is what we do as a tribe. The ability to remember information we've gotten from listening or viewing by where it happened in time is profound.

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Posted by oren at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Tuesday night activities

Last night I moderated a BOF session on calendaring. We had about a dozen people show up, which isn't bad for an 8:30 pm session at the end of a very full day (and in competition with a bunch of receptions and parties).

Ted Leung attended from OSAF, which was good because there was lots of interest in Chandler and Cosmo and Scooby - folks seemed particularly interested in reusable AJAX-y sort of widgets to use in managing calendar data on the client side before the actual presentation is done. There was the predictable interest in how to work with Outlook/Exchange. There was also a lot of interest in the hcal microformat, which seems to be gathering momentum.

Lots of interest in caldav, of course. We talked up the standards efforts and the CalConnect calendaring consortium.

After the calendaring BOF I stuck around for the microformat BOF - by that point most everybody was getting punch-drunk, so there was lots of laughing and joking, but I got to chat with Tantek a bit about hcard, and he helped walk me through generating an hcard for myself and putting it up on the web - it's downloadable here.

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Posted by oren at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 7, 2006

[etech06] Tim Bray - Atom as a Case Study

Tim Bray - currently working at Sun, is talking on the Atom protocl as a case study. What lessons can we take away from Atom - was it necessary, was it done in the right way, and what is the right way to try and standardize Internet interop protocols.

slides at tbray.org/talks/etech2006

At the moment RSS is the most successful use of XML in the world - 27 million known feeds - 2 million feeds being updated every week. So why try to replace it with something new?

The problems:

Enclosures - the current RSS spec says you can only have one per feed, though many podcast feeds use multiple enclosure - clients vary unpredictably in how they support them.

Silent Data Loss - if you put in a string like "AT&T" that's not well-formed XML, the kind of markup you have to do to work in the different clients vary widely. What happens when you want to post something like " up $1.32 - the ticker vanishes.

Especially problematic if you need to put characters like angle brackets in feed titles.

Links - RSS feeds don't know about relative linking paths.

Problems - URLs that aren't all ASCII - like characters with umlauts. There's a standard called IRIs for this.

Problem with APIs - the MetaWeblog and Blogger APIs are under-specified, under-secured, poorly debugged, offer little interoperability, and omit many important authoring features.

So we have issues in RSS. We have a lot of experience with RSS now and where the problems are. THe normal course of affairs with the Internet is that when you have a successfully deployed protocol that needs new features you revise it.

Once you want to fix these things the RSS road map suggests you ought to do it under a different name. Then there's the issue of syndication culture - apparently civil discourse is hard to have in the RSS community. The culture had become sufficiently toxic that it necessitated starting something new.

Sometime in 2003 Sam Ruby started a wiki to discuss this new syndication format. the email archive on the discussion on the format took 17,944 email messages to decide.

How could this been so hard? You can't imagine how insane the debate on publishing dates was. Feed aggregation was another set of issues.

In July of 2005 RFC 1287 was approved.

The publishing protocol - had it's own set of issues - took from Sept 2004 to March 2006 to get to a stable draft.

Was this a good idea?

Up till now all the standards were created by one guy or a few in a lightweight process.

The IETF process - all done by email/wiki - consensus decreed by chair; may be appealed. Trolls can be banned for 30 days; may appeal. General review by whole IETF. It's irritating and slow, and it takes time. Having said that, Tim's prepared to argue that it's a good thing. The whole notion of a civilized society is that you don't take out disagreements by force, but you go to court instead - it's not pleasant, but it's better than violence. The IETF process insures that nobody can say that the process wasn't followed, or that people didn't have a chance to have a say. The IETF review

Atom is a lot liek RSS2, except -

Feeds & entries must have unique IDs, timestamps, & human-readable labels. Text can provided plain, in HTML, or XHTML, with clear signaling. Can provide both summary and full content. Namespaces & extensibility are clean.

Atom seems sufficiently extensible that there shouldn't need to do an Atom 2.0.

Atom is the general-purpose collection idiom that XML has never before had. A whole lot of business processes require exchanging collections of various kinds.

In Atom Publishing you put something out on the server, and then the server comes back and gives the client a URI where it put it.

Atom publishing should allow for a proliferation of blog authoring software - the APP is the missing infrastructure link in making the WEb writable by everyone.

Most feed-reading applications and libraries handle Atom 1.0 well, except Bloglines.

Google uses Atom 1.0 in its AJAX APIs.

Will Atom be mainstream, or a footnote? The odds are pretty good that it becomes mainstream.

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Posted by oren at 5:25 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] playsh - the playful shell - Matt Web and Ben Cerveny

The logical conclusion of web services - the sea of knobs and buttons - APIs being extended like cilia from large databases and lots of ways to interact with ambient data. Right now we're barely squiggling along with the browser. As usual what we thought was the top of the mountain was the first plateau.

all that is mashable recombines - every API and RESTian web service can be combined with every other - what does that really mean? What does it mean that all these things are flailing along out there - how do we make personal sense of this, frame it up? As all these things are spreading and proliferating, we need to be able to control the experience towards us.

Culture emerges on objects - what is the story? The people that are involved in the construction of these services constructed a conceptual model - every couple of years there's a new fad or trend because it addresses some perceived problems with the old construct. These models actually are culture. We have collections of functions and we find different ways to reframe these - that expresses as tribe membership. We need to recognize that that is a playful process.

Collaborative Play transforms culture.

Wanted to build a platform that allows people to share mediated experiences. Started with abstract notions of how to create virtual communities and mediating extremely flexible space of shared experience online. The solution of how to deal with the models clashing is to make it playful - turn the conceptual banter into play. A living social organism that communicates with itself and creates innovation.

A history of Fabric

In a pre-web world there was the MUD, which then became the MOO. The MUD was a way to play D&D online, but the MOO transformed it to the idea that multiple people could become programmers who could create narrative objects. The differences between the user and the programmer were breaking down. You could begin to intuit what it is to participate in an object-oriented programming environment by extending existing objects. The critical planned piece that was never realized was a project called Fabric, which was to integrate the MOO kind of functionality into the operating system - access to networks, file systems, etc in a narrative fashion. At this point the windowing paradigm wasn't set in stone, so the idea of a more flexible paradigm seemed more possible.

Matt shows a moo that treats urls ond web pages and feeds as resources within the game space. You can grep for specific kinds of data in specific tags on a web page.

Verbs have small amounts of Python code that do things, and can be combined.

As Yoz says in the back-channel, "He's exploring the metadata and formats of the web through a text adventure interface."

It's an environment for mashups, combining small verbs.

Matt notes that navigating the text environment with commands like "north" or "east" is difficult when looking backwards at the projection screen.

He shows an alternative view of the space by controlling it as a card game.

There's a shared python interactive interpreter within the playsh environment.

We should use our powerful computers to make the APIs available to those of us who want to be mechanics. The APIs allow hiding of differences. The thickening of the verb layer hides everything underneath. Shows a little of Animal Crossing for the Nintendo DS. Compares this to telephone banking - there's no way of learning from what they operator is doing.

What if we could do all this stuff without xml parsing and learning apis, etc - that's what playsh is about.

Flow calcifies into artifacts. Able to play with the experience as you have it. You can start off the system in total play mode with multiple people, and as that progresses things like tool.. s will fall out of the experience. People in technology are addicted to that moment of play, interacting socially around not-yet-defined experiences.

flickr is an example of a service that grew out of building a game.

Object oriented?

How can we have things that are the same things but seen differently.

player carries around pattern-binding machines which get acturalized at the time of use. "the real is not one thing but gradients of resistance".

Playground Foundation in Amsterdam - multiple threads of investigation of the transfer of playful notions into tasks. How does the literacy in gaming affect the way we'll be able to design computing in the future?

Download available at paysh.org

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Posted by oren at 3:26 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Amy Jo Kim (Shuffle Brain) - Putting the Fun in Functional

Amy Jo Kim is talking about applying game mechanics to functional software.

She's trained in Psychology, Neuroscience and CS. She specializes in social games, networked communities, and mobile services.

The talk ais about using game mechanics to creat apps and services that are fun, compelling and addictive.

What is a game? a structure experience with rules & goals that's fun - when push comes to shove fun wins.

5 Game mechanics you can use

1. Collections - status and competition in competing the collection

e.g. Pokemon card collections

Completing the collection becomes a powerful motivator

2. Points

Social Points - e.g. amazon ratings, etc.

once you have points you can have Leader Boards - who has the most points.

leader boards drive player behavior. some systems had leaderboards and took them away - slashdot karma - encourage people to game the system.

Once you have points you can have levels - very very motivating.

e.g. bejeweled game levels, or ebay star levels of colored stars.

Levels punctuate the game expereience - e.g. reaching level 60 in WOW, or earning a new belt in karate.

Levels unlock new powers & access. Ebay has levels of power sellers.

3. Feedbacked -

Feedback draws attention through movement & change. e.g. feedback in Bejeweled. MySpace Mobile giv es you lots of feedback.

Feedback accelerates mastery - e.g.Karaoke Revolution or Brain Training (huge hit on DS in Japan) - math problems and color matching. Gives you both immediate feedback and long-term feedback.

Feedback makes an experience more fun & compelling - that's why Ajax apps are succesful - they feel more compelling become they give you immediate feedback.

Feedback makes mundane tasks more fun - Cooking Mama for DS - teaches you how to cook.

BIMactive - feedback on you physical activity - runner's training tool.

4. Exchanges -

Exchanges are structure social interactions - giving gifts, etc. A basic, primal form of social interactions.

Social exchanges can be explicit (e.g. taking turns in chess), or implicit (i.e. emergent) - eBay feedback has evolved into a tif-for-tat social game. Not built into the system, but evolved on top as a metagame. Trading is an explicit Social Exchange (e.g. trading in WOW or in MogiMogi).

"gifting" is an implicit social exchange - very powerful for driving behavior. Helios - a just announced mobile service targeting myspace generation. MySpace has both explicit and implicit exchanges - add friend is explicit, comments are implicit.

5. Customization -

Customization increases investment of the user.
... and creates barriers to exit.

Automatic customization is fun and engaging - e.g. Amazon customizing your home page based on your buying history. Flickr does this too.

Character customization is especially powerful - not just in games - e.g. profile customization of MySpace.

Looking ahead - expect to see more serious apps that feel like games, and more games that teach real-world skills.

Slides are available at shufflebrain.com

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Posted by oren at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Rod Smith (IBM) - DIY IT Enterprise Mash Up Makers

Enterprise Customer Pain Points

As Internet continues to evolve, it continues to expand enterprise partnerships - it's much easier to link businesses together than it was 10 years ago. This becomes integration work for the IT shop - it takes about 6 months for the IT folks to do an integration (that's down from 9-12 months a few years ago) - but the speed of change of business relationships is quicker than that. From the standpoint of businesses today, there's more information externally than internally - need to factor in external information into internal dashboards, etc.

There are a whole bunch of apps not being written today because they're not affordable.

Web 2.0 - rethinking application assumptions -

Think about how middleware is defined - if you assume business organizations and relationships are continuously changing - scalable and long term are not the most important criterai - solution needs are situational.

Line of Business teams have just enough IT savvy to create their own services/solutions that drive their part of the business (Igniting the Phoenix: A New Vision for IT/Sapir)

Applications are disposable in many cases.

"Situational" Apps - What does this mean for enterprises, is there a market for these lines of things? Scripting - people who can put together things in very short terms. "Enterprise Mashups". Lots of customers from IBM interested in these sorts of things - instant dashboards built by domain knowledge folks - can't wait for IT to do it.

Is there an infrastructure that can be built to support the creation of 5 minute applications?

QED WIki - a Wiki but also an environment for integrating data from multiple sources.

Shows a demo simulating a small business with stores across the US. Pulls together store addresses, inventories, maps, and weather data in a quick integration that was done in five minutes.

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Posted by oren at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Linda Stone

Linda Stone was formerly at both Microsoft and Apple.

Continuous partial attention - she coined the phrase in 1998. Something that is happening and getting refined to a higher art over the last 20 years - it's an adaptive behavior and we are on the way to adapting right beyond it.

continuous partial attention is defferentiated from multitasking by its impetus - multitasking is getting as many things done at one time as possible. CPA is motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network - we want to connect, to feel important, scan for the best opportunities at any given moment. There used to be a time when people wouldn't pick up a phone during lunch, but those times are gone.

In the golden time of CPA, it wasn't uncommon for people to go into a meeting at spend most of the time doing IM and email - as if we expected our personal bandwidth to increase with the stimuli.

CPA fits into a larger context and set of patterns - theory: we operate with a collective sense of attention. Consider the years 1965 - 1985 - they were about individual expression - it's all about me. We were all about achieving our full potential. We multi-tasked to increase our productivity. From 65-85 the collective ideal was to value self-expression above all else. But being a species that's good at taking things to extremes, we did that and found ourselves yearning for what's missing - a connection to others.

1985-2005 is the era of connecting - the network is the center of gravity - we trust the network and collective intelligence. Playdates replaced the dancing and violin lessons for kids. Enhancing our network and sense of connections. In the early days of Friendster the barroom boast was "I have 3,000 friends." We were everywhere except where we actually were.

Now the 24/7 thing isn't feeling so good - people want strategies to cope. The always on era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. Is everything really such an emergency? Our ways of using technology would have us believe it is. We're feeling overwhelmed, overstimulated, and stressed.

There are new desires as a result of the start of the pendulum swing, which will create new opportunities. Always-on doesn't respect the fact that there should be cycles. Take email - how effective is it for decision making and crisis management? Not! After all these years of using it we still use it. Wikis are better for brainstorming, IM is better for making a plan. Conflict resolution best done synchronously with high bandwidth, crisis management best done synchronously at any bandwidth. Is it time for some guidelines on how to use these technologies? She thinks email is an attention chipper-shredder (think Fargo).

We're yearning for protection - we've gone from an era of creating opportunity to scanning opportunity, and now are moving into discerning opportunity. Meaning, belonging, protection, and trust will increasingly be what we seek and resonate with.

For the last two decades ease of use has been the mantra of technology - but it's no longer good enough. The new mantra will be improvement of quality of life - does it help protect and filter?

The new opportunity is to move from being knowledge workers to be wisdom and understanding workers.

Great talk!

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Posted by oren at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] David Sifry, Technorati

Attention Economics - A 15 minute course

The first question - what is attention? Are the rules of the attention economy similar to other economies?

Attention is fundamentally about time - while David could talk for hours about this, he really only has 15 minutes.

Attention is time directed to a purpose by people. In a captialist system we talk about scarcity of resources, space, money, capital. An economic system isn't only defined by what is scarce, but it's a good tool to use to determine tradeoffs.

What's scarce in the attention economy, and how does it express itself on the net? CPU cycles are not scarce, nor is storage. Network bandwidth is not really scarce, though people in the US might think so. Money is plentiful, at least for those in advanced economies. Time is scarce - there's nothing we can do to extend the amount of time in a day, lifespans don't increase very quickly. Information is not scarce in this new world of abundance, as a matter of fact we all feel information overload. If you combine the relatively finite set of people with the finite amount of time, people only have a certain amount of time to have meaningful social relationships with a limited number of people.

The scarce resources are time and people.

You can't hoard time- use it or lose it - a perishable resource, like fruits and vegetables, or hotel rooms.

Aggregate attention artifacts - whatever we can do to capture the artifacts of how we spend our time should be valuable - look at how google and yahoo value their clickstream data. It's implicit metadata

Productivity - one of the core insights from Technorati was "how do I make it easy to find out what people are saying about me, right now?". Technorati helps save time.

How can this be applied? Incorporate an understanding of TIME and PEOPLE into your design of your applications. Look at memeorandum - builds fundamentally an understanding of time (when something was created or posted) and linking behavior, to show people what's popular at the moment.Or in Technorati, you can use your friends as a social filter.

Attention is both a currency and a perishable - make it easy to create and express attention.

Hyperlinks are votes of attention

Create opportunities for economies of scale.

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Posted by oren at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06]Corey Ondrejka - Second Life

Runs on about 2000 CPUs in SF. Second Life is a virtual world, about 4000 people online at the moment.

As the pain of creation and participation gets harder, participation goes down - but in Second Life the pain is high, but lots of people make things from scratch, building objects or textures.

35% of adults say they spend more time online than working.

Second Life is not a game - no winning or paths or anything. Everything is built by the residcents in second life. Not a subscription model - you pay for permanence. 240k items were bought and sold in the last 30 days. The average transaction price was > $1 US.

Unanticipated consequences - some users created alien abductions, and they'd then give you a t-shirt that said "I've been abducted and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".

They have about 90k hours of use per day. They're growing at about 15% per month.

About 15% of users write code, in a c-like language with lists - not an easy environment.

UC Davis - virtual hallucination project, to simulate the symptoms of schizophrenia - created by one resident in two months.

Use is gender-neutral, median age is 36.

Virtual worlds seem to embody good learning practices - there are hundreds of classes a week in how to use Second Life.

There's lots of legitimate peripheral participation as a way to learn.

There are 17 universities teaching classes in second life.

Party 906 10oth Ave 9 - 11 tonight for those interested in being recruited.

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Posted by oren at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)

[etech06] The wireless sucks here

Yesterday the wireless network at the conference worked great, but today performance is just really awful.

As the fellow sitting next to me just said "There's nothing like an emerging technology conference to remind us of how bad we are at the basics."

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Posted by oren at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Seth Goldstein - Root Networks

Root is an "attention exchange"

Web 2.0 = Attention 1.0 (huh?)

Is attention about money, or is it about time? He's from NY, so he focuses on the money part of attention.

Information attracts attention. Receiving attention makes you influential.

Attention macroeconomics - why attention now? Because web services have enabled the recording andsharing of attention choices in real time (a la last.fm).

Root is an open exchange for the attention economy (huh?). The back channel expresses confusion about what this talk is about.

He's now talking about something called promise to pay attention, which leads to attention bonds. They think those attention bonds can be pooled and traded.

By sharing your online activities (who are you emailing, what are you reading online, etc) these impressions become worth money.

They've founded something called the Attention Trust, a non-profit to work on these ideas.

They have something called a Root Vault - you can send your clickstream to your Root Vault, and then actually see what you've been paying attention to.

This one left me sort of confused - but it seems like there's something worth thinking about here maybe.

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Posted by oren at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Felix Miller - Last.fm

Felix starts out talking about MyWare, which sounds like Spyware, but is basically people spying on themselves - if people tell last.fm what music they're listening to all the time, last.fm can infer other music they might like and make recommendations, based on the "knowledge of the crowd".

They have some plugins for audio players that submit what tracks you listen to to last.fm - they currently get 8 million submissions a day. That builds up a catalog. There is a lot of noise, but currently 8 (out of 25) million tracks in the catalog have clean metadata.

They can calculate user-to-user similarity (who else likes what I like, and what else do they like?) and artist-to-artist similarity (what other artists might I like).

The backchannel chatter has it that you have to let last.fm record what you listen to for about two months before it really works well for you.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06, music

Posted by oren at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Dick Hardt (SXIP)

Dick is giving his highly anticipated followup to his identity 2.0 talk from last year, this time entitled "Who Is The Dick On My Site?"

Dick is talking, in a highly entertaining way, about identity issues in the online world.

After briefly outlining the problem he talks about federated identity (Liberty and Shib) and delegated identity (like SalesForce.com), then talking about Yadis (a lightweight identity model which doesn't require explicity trusts between identity provider and service provider). Now he's talking about what he calls Pull models - including MS infocards, and SXIP. They're hosting a Digital Identity Exchange BOF at IETF in Dallas.

Ning used SXIP to create a user registration app in twelve minutes.

SKIP 2.0 works with existing browsers. Doesn't require trust between IdP and SvP . Has some nice UI for user controlling granular release of personal data to service providers. There's also the implementation of something called the authoritative site, which vouches for good info on the user (like verified email address). If I understood it right, there does need to be explicit trust between the service provider and the authoritative site.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 9:58 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06]Emerging Question from Etech

Last night Rael asked the audience "who cares more about the content in their RSS aggregator than their email inbox?" - only a few raised their hands, but other presenters are asking the question or remixing it into their presentations.

Perhaps an emerging thought string.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 9:41 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Felipe Cabrera, Amazon - Mechanical Turk

Felipe is the VP for Software Development at Amazon web services.

They are trying to enable humans into the software process. Normally you think of AI as being human asking something of the computer - they've turned it around into something they're calling "artifical artifical intelligence". They're providing a Web services API for computers to integrate this by allowing programs to make requests of humans. People can get paid for this work. This is what someone in the backchannel last night called the sweatshop of the future.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 9:37 AM | Comments (0)

[etech06]NYU Touch screen graphics tablet from NYU research lab

I didn't catch the name of this guy, but he's demoing a very responsive multipoint touch for very intuitive physical interaction with objects on the screen.

He shows a photographer's lightbox app where you can drag photos around with one finger, and then with two fingers can zoom in and out on the screen.

Then he shows a video app where he's running all 36 channels of Time-Warner cable in windows simultaneously.

He shows a mapping interface that allows for easy zooming and rotating of map data from.

THe photo app features a resizable virtual keyboard.

He gets the loudest round of applause yet heard at the conference.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)

[Etech06] Ray Ozzie Keynote

Ray Ozzie, now from Microsoft, gives the opening keynote of the morning.

RSS as the DNA of the future Web

Enables the weaving together of composite apps, much like people do on
unix with piping, or with GUUI apps using the clipboard.

But the Web is a bunch of silo'ed sites. We've done work with interchangeable
data formats, but where is the clipboard of the Web?

Why isn't the clipboard for the Web the clipboard?

Demonstrates a new feature, Live Clipboard, which allows cutting and pasting of structured web data - he demonstrates copying calendar data from Eventful and pasting it into Windows Live Mail calendar - bridging data from one place to another. He shows this using Firefox instead of IE - I guess to make the point that it's not an IE thing.

Now he demos putting feed data into the ckipboard. Clicks on a clip icon on a blog and pastes the feed url into Bloglines.

Next he shows clipping his current location data from his MSN Spaces profile (which it gets from his Wifi enabled Windows Mobile phone) into his Facebook profile - then he subscribes Facebook's profile to an RSS feed of that data from MSN Spaces. Then he feeds that data into a map service, and subscribes the map service to the location feed of several folks.

Then he pastes that data into Excel, where it displays the structured location data in cells.

Finally he shows clipping thumbnail photo data from Flickr and pasting directly into Windows photo viewer, where it gets not only the thumbnail but the whole photo.

Ray asks for the community to get involved, and promises details will be posted on his blog.

Technorati Tags: etech06

Posted by oren at 8:50 AM | Comments (0)

March 6, 2006

[etech06] MusicBrainz

When I went into lunch this today, I saw a fellow with a bass clef dyed into the hair on the back of his head - so of course I had to sit down and chat with him.

Turns out he's not a bass player, but he is Robert Kay, the brains behind MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is working on becoming a public source of the kind of musical metadata like is commonly found in the commercial Gracenote CDDB service, or (as the web site says), a "community music metadatabase."

Robert told me that he got pissed off when, after he had, as a volunteer, input data on hundreds of CDs that CDDB didn't have, they went commercial and claimed the data as private property. He decided to do something about it and create an alternative.

They've currently got over 225,000 artists and 4.5 million tracks indexed, and more coming in all the time. They've also got some cool software that compares audio signatures and matches music in your personal library against tracks in the MusicBrainz database and adds the proper tagging to them.

Very cool, even if I didn't get to meet another bass player.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06

Posted by oren at 7:48 PM | Comments (0)

[etech06] Creating Passionate Users 2.0 Tutorial with Kathy Sierra

I'm in San Diego this week for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Concerence. This morning I'm taking Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users 2.0 tutorial.

The first thing Kathy says is that we'll be talking about passion - not people who like your products, or use products, but the kind of passion that they bring to hobbies like skiing, music, their pets, etc.

Reverse engineering passionate behavior - People with a passion... learn, show off, connect, continuously improve, spend time, elevate the meaning, evangelize, spend money.

Look at attributes of passion, and see if we can encourage passionate behavior by working on those.

The one thing we find where there is passion, there is a user kicking ass. Nobody is passionate about something they suck at. That requires constant learning, growth, and progression - people are not passionate about something that has no potential for growth. Passion requires learning and improvement. Learning increases the resolution of the experience. How can we make that investment of time worth it?

Need to think about what that thing is that we're going to help users get better and better at. Many companies only help people find out about the company and its products, but don't help the users actually get better at doing something.

Nobody will stay passionate about something where there isn't more to learn. Kathy asks how well you're doing know at helping your users kick ass at what it is they care about.

There are things that the brain cares about - we can use those things to get our foot in the door to get someone's attention.

The brain has a built-in crap filter - there's a lot of new research on this, coming out medical research in Alzheimer's (like Eric Kandell) . What does the brain care about? Weird stuff, that's new or novel - the brain is constantly looking for expectations to be met, and it's jogged by that which doesn't meet the expectation. The brain also cares about sex, and beauty, and innocent and cute, and having fun (all mammals have a high play drive, because it's how we learn to survive) - don't underestimate the power of fun. We tend to suck all the fun out of technical things - why? There are simple tricks to use to keep people's brains awake. Leaving things unresolved can get the brain's attention - advertisers use this a lot to get your attention.

Things the brain cares about: Unexpected/Novel, Scary, Sexy, Beautiful, Innocent (young, cute), Funny, Faces, Unresolved.

Conversation beats formal lecture!

Conversational language in any form of documentation makes the brain think it's in a conversation and it has to hold up its end. There's lots of research to support that conversational tone improves involvement and subsequent recall. Thre's some study of this in The Media Equation.

We want to talk to the BRAIN, not the mind. They don't operate on the same goals.

Now that we have their attention we need to keep them involved and engaged. We have to get past the "suck threshold" )how soon do they stop hating it?) - the longer that takes the more chance you have for attrition. But some products have a long term out into the future of progression, but takes longer to get pas the suck threshold.

Why does anybody snowboard twice? There's a clear picture of what it looks like when you get up that curve. In your product or service, have you painted that picture? And then, make sure there's a path to get there. It can't just be "here's the end state, figure it out".

You need - A way to recognize expertise, a meaningful benefit, and a clear path to get there.

Why? Who cares? So what? The technically accurate reason is often not compelling. "make sure you connect the abc to the xyz" is common, but not compelling. Then they often explain why you need to do that, (who cares?) and at the end when you're just about to kill them, they finally give you the answer about why it's important. Honda calls this the "5 whys" - when you ask "why" five times, you finally get to the heart of the matter - you should give that reason first! One other technique is to get to that final point where you say "because you'll never have sex again", or "because you'll get fired", and then take one step back, and that's the thing you should say first about "why".

Need to think about imparting understanding, not facts. The crap filter controls long term memory - so invoking emotion or providing motivation will make the brain more willing to actually store information.

Neurons must fire! People learn from mistakes. Can you provide users some experiences where things go wrong without pissing them off?

The Smackdown Learning Model - Offer two conflicting but compelling viewpoints - people will think about the unresolved part of this.

Just in Time vs. Just in Case - the "oh crap, oh cool" method. We want users to feel the need for something ("oh crap") and then offer the solution ("oh cool"). It's not about the answers, it's about the questions.

We have to keep users engaged - Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience They way to think about when you're in "flow" - e.g. while you're programming you keep thinking you're just one compile away - then you look up and seven hours have passed. You're so engaged and focused that you don't even know that time is passing. You get into that state because Knowledge and Skill are in balance with perceived, meaningful Challenge. Game developers have this down. And it's important that you know it's important to solve the problem. If the challenge is too hard they'll perceive it as not worth it and drop out. If the challenge is too easy, people won't care and they'll drop out.

Another interesting book: "Don't Make Me Think : A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)" (Steve Krug)

Need to think about how to help people stay in character - if they have to break character to think about the interface, for example, they've lost the flow.

What do game developers know about putting people into flow? The spiral experience model - build interestt, provide motivation, then give a payoff. What do you do during the payoff phase? The longer you take to get to the payoff, the better the payoff needs to be. Games have the concept of the "next level" - spend some time thinking about levels. There can be obvious explicit levels (like the belt system in martial arts), but it doesn't have to be so obvious. In Java Ranch, which Kathy founded as a community website, they have the concept of levels for users, based on how many posts people make, and then there are different levels of moderators. They found that people are really motivated by levels. They found the value of the levels went way down when they started offering them for sale instead of by experience.

You want to have as many levels as you can. Now that you have this superpower, imagine what you can do with it - that's the motivation into the next part of the spiral. Use it to hook them again. The idea of achieving levels can be very powerfully motivating for people.

What do filmmakers and novelists know?

User as Hero - What is the user's journey?

Life is normal -> something happens to change that -> Things REALLY suck -> Hero overcomes bad things -> Return to a new normal

We need to play the role of helpful side-kick and mentor when things really suck, so they don't drop out.

Somewhere along this, the user changes. At some point, the protagonist needs to have been changed by the experience in some way. They tell authors they can't start writing a book until they can tell them what the user's journey will be and how they will be changed by the experience.

How do you define "meaningful" - if we help someone have a better experience and spend more time in flow, then it's meaningful.

People who are passionate about something assume that if you're not, you just don't get it. Kathy showed Sara McLachlan's powerful World On Fire video as an example of Meaning (with a capital M).

Do users have a sense of what you're about - what could be meaningful for them?

The Tribe - where there is passion there is always a sense of belonging. e.g. people who identify with Apple products. The t-shirt metric. The t-shirt first development approach - before you do anything else, create the t-shirt. Start priming the tribe pump. e.g. the ThinkGeek site. The Yard Gnome phenomenon.

What can I do to get people involved - fueling the tribe - bumper stickers and t-shirts matter in much more significant ways than people think.

Part of being in the tribe is that you know things that other people don't. That creates evangelists. The use of Easter Eggs. People get motivated by sharing the secret information. Are you giving people anything interesting to talk about?

Legends/Gossip/Stories. Where there is passion there are always stories. If you're not that interesting, find a great user story.

Encouraging community- forums, user groups, affinity clubs, conferences, at least a blog? Can you prime those as early as possible. Help external groups to do it, rather than controlling it yourself. You have to really think about culture. In Java Ranch they've been militant about being the anti-Slashdot - friendly to beginners and newbies. Now there's over a hundred moderators, with one rule - you have to be friendly.

If you have a community where you want people to help others, you have to provide a way for people to take risks and get it wrong in helping folks without getting slammed.

There has to be a way for people to connect. People who are part of the tribe want to connect to others of their own kind.

Experts vs. newbies - experts like to communicate with other experts in the jargon. You want to encourage the experts in using that exclusionary language - that's part of the reward for being part of the tribe. But you have to find a way to keep the newbies happy and bootstrap them in. One size does not fit all.

How will you know when you've got passionate users?

You'll hear words like this: Sheep, It's just a Fad, People use that because they're ignorant, There's nothing new here... When people start criticizing your users, yolu know you've arrived - the Koolaid point- when anyone starts accusing your users of "drinking the Koolaid" you know it's worked. The more polarization the better.

You'll feel a magnetic pull towards the center - you'll never make the people that hate it feel better about it. You have to resist.

Paul Graham - "Dignity is deadly" You loose capability when you become dignified and professional. How can you keep the capabilities?

"The Wisdom of Crowds" (James Surowiecki) - where there's group consensus, people get dumber. But agregating individual knowledge you gain capability.

You can only get so far with incremental improvements.

Listening to Users - focus groups are notoriously bad - what people say is different than what they really need. Asking people to explain their choices changes what choices they make. If you ask people something, they can't tell you something new - they can only think incrementally - you have to figure out what they really care about, not what they suggest.

Until recently scientists thought that primates didn't generate new brain cells once they reached a certain point of maturity - but it turned out that all the studies had been done on animals in raised in cages.

Watch out for going past the peak on the Featuritis curve.

We have to get over our fear of marketing. It's about helping users get better, not buying ads.

The Secret...it doesn't matter what they think about you ... It's not about YOU. It's about how they feel about themselves as a result of their interaction with your organization.

About everything...ask - how does this help someone kick ass? The user must have an "I Rule" experience.

Technorati Tags: etech, etech06, passionate-users

Posted by oren at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2006

Using PMWiki with UW NetID authentication

I have not been a big fan of wikis - some of the projects I've been associated with have used wikis for managing lots of project information, and they always seem subject to the digital equivalent of southern California suburban sprawl - pages proliferate beyond any control, and it's very hard to keep a grasp on where the current discussion is within all those pages.

But lately I've been working on a couple of projects that call for some collaborative editing, so I thought I'd try out using a wiki.

I went looking for a lightweight wiki to install on my UW staff web publishing account. I was hoping to find something that was easy to install and worked within the file system, without requiring the support of a database. I also wanted a wiki that has an active community around it, and one that might have a hope of integrating with UW NetIDs. Doing a completely non-scientific and not comprehensive survey by browsing the Wikipedia article Comparison of wiki software, I decided to try Patrick Michaud's PMWiki.

After a few hours over three days of tinkering, I now have PMWiki installed and working under UW NetID authentication on staff.washington.edu. My current setup requires everyone who wants to view my wiki to do a UW NetID authentication first, and any editing or authoring of content has that UW NetID recorded as the author. I've been very pleased by the quality of the documentation - the install is straightforward, and there's a great Cookbook full of all sorts of "recipes" for how to accomplish different things with PMWiki.

I make no claim for this being the best wiki in the world, nor do I know if every function will work with the UW NetID stuff, but it's at least good enough for my current purposes.

At some point we may very well put some instructions on how to accomplish this on the Do It Yourself section of Creating and Publishing Web Pages, but if you're interested in how I did it, read on.

Basically to install PMWiki, I followed the excellent installation instructions -

First I downloaded the latest version of PMWiki into my web publishing space. Working from a terminal window logged into my public_html directory, I used this command:

 wget http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/pmwiki-latest.zip

Then I unzipped the software - the unzip process automatically created a directory named pmwiki-2.1.beta25 and placed all the files and subdirectories within it:

unzip pmwiki-latest.zip

Then, for ease of reference, I created a symbolic link (that's like an alias) to that directory called pmwiki:

ln -s pmwiki-2.1.beat25 pmwiki

That was enough to get PMWiki running on my account at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/pmwiki/pmwiki.php

Following the instructions on the Initial Setup Tasks page I then started editing (using pico, of course) a config.php file in pmwiki/local to get the configuration options I wanted to start with. I've done just the bare minimum of configuration for my purposes - I gave the wiki a title (Oren's wiki) and gave it an administrative password.

Then, following the instructions for Password Protection by UW NetID, I put a .htaccess file into my pmwiki directory that requires a valid UW NetID login for all users of any part of the wiki - whether viewing or editing.

Then, using the Cookbook recipe for RequireAuthor I changed the config file (pmwiki/local/config.php) to automatically set the author name to the HTTP authenticated user (in this case the UW NetID).

That worked ok yesterday, but overnight a new (more secure) version of PubCookie (the software used by the web servers for UW NetID authentication) went into production, and this morning my wiki couldn't find any of its formatting information. It turns out that I had to explicitly set the ScriptUrl and PubDirUrl paths to use https instead of plain http.

So in the end, I ended up with a config.php file that looks like this:

<?php if (!defined('PmWiki')) exit();
$WikiTitle = "Your wiki name here";
$DefaultPasswords['admin'] = crypt('YourPasswordHere');

# $ScriptUrl is your preferred URL for accessing wiki pages
# $PubDirUrl is the URL for the pub directory.
$ScriptUrl = 'https://staff.washington.edu/oren/pmwiki/pmwiki.php';
$PubDirUrl = 'https://staff.washington.edu/oren/pmwiki/pub/';

## Require an author name.
$EnablePostAuthorRequired='1';

## If no $Author is set, set it to the authenticated user name
if ($action == 'edit' && !@$_COOKIE['author']) {
if (@$_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']) {
$Author=@$_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'];
setcookie('author',$Author,0,'/');
}
}
?>

Posted by oren at 3:49 PM | Comments (2)

February 14, 2006

Synchronizing Firefox bookmarks with Foxmarks

I use Firefox as my primary browser on all of my systems, Macs and PCs.

I've been using del.icio.us as a place to store my links to things on the web that I'm interested in for over a year now, and that works great - plus I use a feed from del.icio.us to generate the list of "Recent links I'm Tracking" on my Recent links of interest and blogs I read page.

But I tend to use the browser bookmarks, particularly the Bookmarks Toolbar, for the pages that I use all the time - my Oracle Calendar web page, the Catalyst Tools pages, lots of UW pages, the All Music Guide, several links of mountain weather forecasts, my bus timetable, etc. One problem I've always had is keeping those bookmarks synchronized across the multiple computers I use at work and home.

Now I've started using Foxmarks to synchronize my browser bookmarks across instances of Firefox. Foxmarks is a Firefox extension that synchronizes bookmarks, storing the authorotative copy of your bookmarks on a server (I'm using the default foxcloud.com server) for the process. It's not perfect (on one machine I had to manually force an overwrite of the bookmarks from the server before it took), but it's pretty cool, and I find it very useful.

Technorati Tags: bookmarks, browsers

Posted by oren at 10:37 AM | Comments (2)

February 13, 2006

Terry Gray - the State of the Network

I'm listening to Terry Gray give his annual State of the Network talk at the UW Computing Support meeting.

A couple of choice quotes from Terry's opening remarks:

"sometime in the last ten years the Internet has gone from being designed to being perpetrated."

"Is there such a thing as intellectual post-traumatic stress syndrome?"

There are lots of transient problems that people encounter every day. The benefit of our dependence on the internet is enormous, but the mean-time-between-glitch may be getting worse. Terry tends to be on the side that things are getting worse.

The open internet died in 2003 at the hands of slammer and blaster, and now we have pervasive TDAs - Traffic Disruption Appliances like firewalls. It's moving to a two port Internet - port 80 and 443. Threats are moving to the inside - like phishing. Because of firewalls you can't ascertain the health of the end points. If policy enforcement points are imposed in the middle of the network then the user thinks the network is broken and calls the NOC.

There are also industry failures - like having router vendors tell you more about packets they throw away.

Some of the original design goals of the internet were overtaken by events - like having the complexity at the end points of the network and keeping the core simple, or the idea of pervasive symmetric connectivity everywhere - it came as a shock to find that not everybody wanted that. Another one is the core characteristic of the Internet as being packet switched - we're no seeing high end users with less faith that a shared infrastructure can give enough predictability and diagnosability to perform - so that's behind the move toward personal lambdas for research.

The window for super-good deals on dark fiber is shrinking as a result of mergers and acquisitions. The commodity networks are in worse shape - there is saturation of some of the commodity links, especially across the Atlantic to Europe.

On the Network Security front, there's now an Intrusion Protection System at the UW, commercial option from Tipping Point. It's gotten us out of the battles of which ports to block at the border. We also have some Intrusion Detection System capabilities out of the netflow information from the routers - detects slammer, nacho, etc and does some automatic action, like shutting of ethernet ports. Can't do it everywhere because of old switches - would like to eventually move to a more sophisticated quarantine strategy.

We have private addressing in the P172 project, now with NAT. We're doing vulnerability scanning - 80% of hosts appear to be behind some sort of firewall and not available to the scan.

There will be more work on the security tools portal that allows people to do self-scans.

As far as campus network status goes, we still have buildings with cat 3 wiring which limits our performance. There are nearly 100k hosts on the network these days. There are roughly 1000 subnets - many in the data center. We have access to multiple 10 Gbps research nets via the PNWGP.

C&C manages approx 5,000 network devices (routers and switches).

We're replacing Foundry routers with Cisco 7600.

Our next generation network architecture work is going on - allowing partitioning for new features for minimum risk. Phase 2 will move to a 10GigE backbone. The Med Centers are now more isolated and there's lots of upgrade work going on in both UWMC and Harborview.

We now have more than twice as many network devices as phones, and now slowing of the growth. For outbound traffic we're getting perilously close to peaking at 1.5 Gbps. Inbound traffic is about .5 Gbps - so we're a 2-to-1 producer of bandwidth.

For the SC05 show this fall at the Convention Center we supported some novel research network applications, including world-wide multicast videoconferencing at 1.5 Gbps. We also did a lot of work to support the event itself - provisioning 50 10Gbps optical fibers into the convention center - half a terabit per second of bandwidth!

The UW gets both its commodity and research connectivity through the Pacific Northwest GigaPop.

Future issues - What's the future of perimeter defense when all traffic is encrypted and tunneled over ports 80 and 443?

What's the future of VoIP or even desk phones, when everybody has cell phones? What does it mean if the cell phones come with pretty good data service? Would we still need WiFi?

Do we need Network Admission Control, where you have to authenticate to get on the network? Why do we want this? For traceability and increased scanning access. In some contexts people do asset management - there are a bunch of tradeoffs.

Network convergence - could mean using the same network over a wide geographic area, or a different classes of service for different uses. For instance, only a certain kind of traffic without authenticating. The motivation is to save money by avoiding building up separate networks, but is it worth it? For instance, should we use the same network for monitoring patient care traffic as we do for student labs?

Is it going to be important to offer organizational subnets?

Should we keep over-provisioning network capacity, or do we need separate classes of service?

CALEA (the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) - last fall the FCC decided to update the CALEA rule to account for Internet technology. There are lots of scary possibilities here - the answer to all questions are "we don't know yet." There are lawsuits and discussions galore.

Posted by oren at 1:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2006

A new title and some exciting new projects

I wrote back in November about how I was changing my job focus, and turning over the reins of the Client Services part of my job to Tammy Stockton.

Now I have an official new title, Director of Emerging Technology, within the newly named Technology Engineering group of Computing & Communications. In my new capacity I'm reporting to Terry Gray, which is great - I've been a huge fan of Terry's for many years now, and I always enjoy working with him (though I'm a little sad to no longer report to Ed Lightfoot, who I have learned a tremendous amount from over the years).

I'm already immersed in lots of interesting ventures in this new capacity - the last two weeks alone brought meetings with Apple about the iTunes U program, Google about their Google Search Appliance product, and Xythos about their products, along with meetings about local projects well under way, like the UW Wireless Initiative, and some brainstorming with colleagues about possible future services like content management, windows authentication services, and wikis.

It's already clear to me that the number of opportunities are close to boundless, and the trick will be in getting some staff to help with these efforts and to figure out effective processes for deciding which efforts to pay attention to.

And, of course, I'll be attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference next month - it's in my job description!

Technorati Tags: C&C, puppy, UW

Posted by oren at 4:17 PM | Comments (0)

A congressman who gets it - Rick Boucher of Virginia

This article by Rep. Rick Boucher (D, VA) on network neutrality, is really worth a read -

Recently, executives at some telephone companies have indicated that their business models for providing broadband service include not only charging their end-user customers for an Internet connection but also assessing a fee on websites for users to reach them more quickly. They claim that to offer advanced content such as multiple video-programming channels in competition with cable they need to prioritize their bits to deliver quality programs. They then propose that they will give the same priority access to other companies that pay them for it.

Essentially, what these executives are proposing is the creation of a two-lane Internet where larger, more established websites with financial resources could squeeze out smaller, emerging websites. One clear victim will be the innovation that has thrived on the open Internet. Startups simply could not afford to pay for fast-lane treatment nationwide. One must ask where the next Google or Yahoo will come from if new innovative companies can receive only inferior, slow-lane Internet access.

Internet2, a nonprofit partnership of universities, companies and affiliate organizations, including federal agencies and laboratories, has been studying this matter and has demonstrated that a multitrack Internet model is unnecessary to assure quality of service. Internet2 has for the past seven years deployed an advanced broadband network to more than 5 million users and has learned that in a network with enough bandwidth there is no congestion and no bits need preferential treatment because all of them arrive quickly enough to assure excellent quality, even if intermingled.

In countries such as Japan and Korea, network speeds over the last mile of 100 megabits per second (mbps) are common. In the United States, our typical speed is less than 1 mbps. If broadband providers would increase their network speeds to approximate those in other countries, all content would reach consumers with assured quality. No prioritization of bits would be needed.

Thanks, Doc!

Posted by oren at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

February 9, 2006

Upcoming Educuase Live event - Scott Bradner on The Myth of Network Neutrality

This should be worth a listen - register at http://www.educause.edu/RegisterNow%2521/9988.

Scott Bradner
University Technology Security Officer
Harvard University
Topic: The Myth of Network Neutrality
Date: February 15, 2006
Time: 1:00 p.m. EST (12:00 p.m. CST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 10:00 a.m. PST);
Duration: 1 hour

At a recent Senate hearing, Vint Cerf said that "nothing less than the future of the Internet is at stake" in the government's decisions about network neutrality. Meanwhile, the managers of the country's mega-ISPs assert that they can't continue investing billions of dollars in high-speed Internet infrastructure without the freedom to explore multitiered services and other nonuniform business models.

During this presentation, we'll discuss the pros and cons of network neutrality with Scott Bradner, a well-known network activist who’s been involved in the design and implementation of the Internet from its earliest days.

Technorati Tags: economics, events, puppy

Posted by oren at 12:18 PM | Comments (2)

UW rated #1 university!

Mike Tung, a grad student at Stanford, was fed up with US News's ranking of America's Best Colleges - so he did his own. building a quite interesting statistical analysis using Google to rank the US's best colleges and Universities.

The factors he used to determine "best" were:

1. Peer assessment [link:www.stanford.edu] - This is how some search engines approximate "peer assessment", by counting the number of other pages citing you
2. Size [site:www.stanford.edu] - a larger school would have a larger web, right? =)
3. Number of faculty [dr. "home page" site:www.stanford.edu] - hopefully those professors have websites that mention "dr." and "home page"
4. Scholarly Publications["Stanford University" in scholar.google.com]
5. News mentions ["Stanford University" in news.google.com]

The bottom line - the UW came out #1! Very cool, not just for that result, but for the methodology of data mining the Web for this kind of purpose.

Technorati Tags: academia, statistics, University of Washington, UW

Posted by oren at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

Intel-based Macs and Seahawks in the Superbowl? Has hell frozen over?

Spent the last week trying to dig out from having been gone for two weeks - I'm glad to not be traveling for work again until March.

I'm not much of a football fan, but we enjoyed watching the Seahawks win the NFC championship yesterday - a Seattle team has never gone to the Superbowl before, so it's all very exciting (though not exciting enough to skip a Sunday of skiing with my son in two weeks).

We saw the Apple Intel cleanroom TV ad during the game - the folks watching at my house, who are not following the whole technology story of this switch, enjoyed the ad a lot.

I think Ted leung has the sanest take on this that I've seen so far:

It looks like Apple did the most expedient thing that it could, which is to take an Intel 945PM chipset and stick it into a PowerBook case, and add a small number bells and whistles (like the built in iSight and remote control). That explains the ExpressCard slot, and the FW400. If I didn't have to measure the MacBook Pro against something like the Lenovo T60 (see preview), which has 5 hours of battery life with a 2.16GHz Core Duo T2600 in a 4.8lb package, I might be happy. But this is hardly the top to bottom revamp of the pro notebook line that you'd expect for the Intel transition. And let's not even discuss the name.

That's what it looks like to me too - that Apple did what they could to get some Intel-based product on the street as quickly as possible. Craig Wood's got some performance testing data that shows that the new MacBook Pro is quite a bit quicker than the G4 Powerbooks, though nowhere near the four times as fast as Apple is touting.

My primary uses of a laptop don't include a lot of CPU-intensive tasks - for me it's a web-browsing, blog-writing, emailing, presentation-making, IMing machine. So I'm not jumping on the upgrade bandwagon just yet (though the built-in ISight camera and Front Row remote software are a nice touch). I'm still hoping for something lighter, cooler, and with longer battery life from Apple.

Technorati Tags: apple

Posted by oren at 6:51 AM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2006

[CalConnect Winter 2006] Event Calendaring and location

Chuck Norris from EVDB is talking about how to store detailed location information in calendaring objects.

iCalendar specifies just a single text field that contains location - that's not specific enough for much event calendaring.

They are proposing an extension to iCalendar to handle more structured location data. The concept is that there is a location ID that is referred to in the Location field of an iCalendar file, then there is a Location block that has contains all the detailed data on that specific location.

There's some discussion about why not to just embed Vcard into iCalendar - apparently there are some syntax differences that would make iCalendar parsers choke on vCard data. Another reason is that vCard is really oriented towards people, not location (though it contains some location data).

Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring

Posted by oren at 8:12 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

Paul Andrews bids farewell to the Seattle Times

I was sad to read Paul Andrews' final column for the Seattle Times on Monday. Paul has been a consistently sane voice for the knowledgeable users of information technology in a world that has gotten progressively less sane.

Paul's joining the folks at Green For Good - I wish him all the best in his new endeavors!

Technorati Tags: journalism

Posted by oren at 1:38 PM | Comments (0)

[CalConnect Winter 2006] The Open Group's Federated Free/Busy Challenge

Mike Lambert from the Open Group is talking this morning about a challenge for achieving federated free/busy. The Open Group's Messaging Forum is the descendant of the Electronic Mail Association.

The Vendor Challenge approach is a method for bringing vendors to work on real problems presented by users. The problem is defined in terms of a Business Scenario (Use Case) which defines the problem, the business and technology environment, measures of success for the solution, and the constraints. Vendors of relevant products are invited to accept the challenge. On completion, vondors demonstrate the solution.

Afterwards they work to ensure that the solution is deployed in commercially available products in a consistent form. If the activity has identified the need for standardization work (which often happens) they try to make sure that happens in the proper forum. They also have a certification program to recognize and promote products that embody the solution.

Wen Feng from Boeing is presenting the Federated Free/Busy challenge. Why bring this question at this time? Boeing's aircraft programs are increasingly collaborative between Boeing and other partners. The 787 program is being designed in a global collaborative environment - brings up issues of how to exchange data securely, how to work collaboratively. This program has around 300 first tier partner companies. The problem of getting people together in this virtual collaborative environment brings up the issue of scheduling.

Even within Boeing they have multiple calendaring systems, despite concerted efforts to standardize.

Currently they've built an internal system that allows authenticated users to use a web page to retrieve a table of free/busy time for anyone with a Boeing email address from their Exchange servers. But they need to broaden it outside the company - the Boeing free/busy is probably only 30% of the problem in the collaborative environment.

Current calendaring systems do not all contain sufficient information to solve the problem - for instance, if I'm usually in Pacific timezone, how does the free/busy time reflect the fact that for a week I'm travelling in Asia and am on a different time zone?

Free time is not always reliable - just because you're not busy doesn't mean you're available.

Few organizations have corporate policies on updating of calendar information (e.g. you must keep your calendar updated).

The challenge:

By the end of Q2 2006 there should be a real-time mechanism that is able:
- to extract and c ollate/display free/busy information
- from at least 3 major groupware packages
- using open standard protocols
- for a constrained list of named attendees
- and a constrained list of times.

"as large corporations, we do not use proprietary protocols."

Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring, scheduling

Posted by oren at 8:22 AM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

[Calconnect Winter 2006] Calconnect at Novell - timezones and more

This week I'm at the Calconnect roundtable, which is being hosted by Novell in Provo, Utah.

We're starting off the roundtable with a report from the technical committee on time zones. That group is proposing the establishment of a formal timezone registry (for reasons why this is necessary, see my post from October 30).

The whole group here think that's a great idea, and votes in favor of it.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, Calconnect

Posted by oren at 1:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 6, 2006

[CSG Winter 2006] Chandler Westwood Advisory Council

Yesterday afternoon the Westwood Advisory Council, the CSG group that works closely with OSAF on development of Chandler for higher education, met.

Mitch Kapor and Katie Parlante laid out the current status of Chandler work and the plans for moving forward. Katie's slides are here.

One of the important themes was the emergence of the OSAF work as being about a whole ecology of related projects, including Chandler (the desktop PIM client), Cosmo (the *DAV server for PIM data), Scooby (the web PIM client), and others, including work on clients for mobile devices.

OSAF is very interested in fostering community work on Chandler and related projects, and we talked a bit about how to encourage people within higher ed institutions to participate. If anyone is interested in finding out more on how to take part, drop me a note.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, CSG-Winter-2006, PIM, OSAF

Posted by oren at 3:43 AM | Comments (0)

January 5, 2006

[CSG Winter 2006] Mimi Yin on triage and information lifecycles

Mimi talked a lot about focus, and integration of PIM data allowing you to focus - answering the question "what should I be doing right now?" instead of "where should I look for things I should be doing now?"

Mimi notes that task lists are themselves artifacts of a pre-digital era. For information workers, the item itself (the draft of an email, a meeting that needs scheduling, the document you need to work on) should be on the list - just like we leave the video to be returned in the hallway, instead of writing "return video" on a list. That's what the Chandler "stamping" concept is about.

Chandler has "bi-directional" references, where each item that belongs to a collection contains data indicating the collection(s) it belongs to, and the collection knows what items it contains.

Three categories: Tagging, Capturing, and Monitoring. Just as items have a life cycle, so do collections - you don't realize the first time you see a topic, you don't realize that it will be a project (or collection), so maybe you tag it. But later, when more items come in on the same topic, you want to change that tag into a collection without having to go back and find all those items and create a folder and drag them into it.

In response to a question Mimi brings up the idea of collaborative triage of a shared mail list - an intriguing concept.

- Update - Mimi's slides are online here.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Winter-2006, PIM

Posted by oren at 6:01 AM | Comments (0)

January 4, 2006

[CSG Winter 2006] Transition to a saner set of IT funding models - What will work going forward?

Bill Clebsch from Stanford is giving this presentation.

He starts with a slide saying "Funding: The Final Governance".

He notes that funding evolved from two different models:

That of Communications, which evolved from a culturally accepted phone billing model and monopoly necessity, which gave universities a major windfall, which got used to fund other programs (e.g. networking and data services, which weren't then necessities). That created within the university a false sense of what IT really costs.

Computing, otoh, had no culturally accepted billing models. The services were perceived as optional. There is a constant influx of new services which require a constant influx of new funding, and those services become necessities - but the funding was based on an optional model.

Admin Systems and Services - automation of tasks cost more than anticipated - e.g. the dispersion of PCs on the desktop was a very difficult transition. It's a problem because we never pick up the savings on the other side.

The current state is a perception that IT is too expensive without seeing hte corresponding value, and there's very little "Budget Dust" left to throw at systems. There's a tenuous link to academic program, and people perceive central IT as administrative computing (including course management systems), and all faculty mistrust everything administrative.

The objective for funding models should be to spread costs equitably across the multiple funding sorces, to link funding with perceived value, to scale IT with university growth and success, and to allow the introduction of new services.

some possible bases of funding could be based on people, facilities, machines, or usage - all of these have to be tempered by how much it costs to bill for it. It was amazing how much the support costs at Stanford went down when they went to flat-rate long distance service. B-School 101: All allocation is arbitrary, but you need one that is consistent and defensible. Several people are recommending the book "Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner)Freakonomics.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Winter-2006, IT-Governance

Posted by oren at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

January 3, 2006

Cool looking Internet 2 workshop on Performance and Master Class Production Worksho

This looks cool -

To all --   

This is a notice that the room block cut-off date has been extended till this Thursday, January 5th 2006, for the jointly hosted Internet2 and New World Symphony workshop.  Be sure to make your travel plans in the next few days!  For registration and hotel details, see:  http://events.internet2.edu/2006/NWS/index2006.html

What:     Performance and Master Class Production Workshop
When:   30 January - 1 February, 2006
Where:  New World Symphony, Miami Beach, FL

Internet2 and the New World Symphony are hosting a hands-on audio/video production workshop on 30 January--1 February 2006 on the campus of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL. The workshop will emphasize real-time experience connecting with remote sites over Internet2 advanced networks, setting up incoming and outgoing audio, creating a multi-camera shoot, placing lights and projectors and operating codecs. This year's workshop will include demonstrations of state of the art codecs for producing events, will explore in depth the elements needed to do everything from simple one-on-one interactions to larger scale stage productions, and will highlight the latest network testing tools developed by Internet2. The workshop is designed for an audience of technologists responsible for setting up distance learning and remote interactive media events. Administrators, deans, CIOs, network and audio engineers, and other hands-on technicians will also find this workshop useful and are encouraged to attend.

Ann Doyle
Arts & Humanities Initiatives
Internet2
(734) 352-7011

Technorati Tags: music, Internet2

Posted by oren at 1:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2005

Now here's a reason to upgrade your WIndows machines to Vista

The Ziff Davis folks have a story showing some of the enhancements in the latest build of Vista, Microsoft's next version of Windows.

While I'm sure all of the new security and stability features are the real reason you should think about upgrading when this becomes a production release of Windows (MS says late 2006), I think this new volume control, which allows you to adjust the volume of sound from different applications independently, is a terrific enhancement to Windows:

Posted by oren at 6:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 8, 2005

[ECAR 2005] New Media Literacy

Kristina Woolsey (New Media Consortium)

Working on a research study funded by McArthur.

Most of us were raised on flat paper, but now we're moving into sequenced and immersive worlds. We don't know how to represent ourselves in these new domains.
There's not a media revolution, but a language revolution - now we have tools that allow us to represent things we couldn't before. But it's not a language revolution, but a lifestyle revolution - the density of representation has increased dramatically. The rules of being a productive human have changed.

The New Media Literacy project has four questions they're working on. What are the media afforances? What are people doing? What should everyone be able to do? (what is public education? what is the social contract?) How might people gain new media fluencies?

Pachyderm - new display technology for presentations - San Francisco Museum developed.

New technology trends -

Mobile devices

The telephone is it.

Digital photography.

Publications are being redefined - includes the notion of representation of self. If everybody can publish, of what value is publication?

Standards are developing.

iLife defined digital lifestyles.

Media characterizations -

We have a participatory media. That might change democracy and governments. It's multimodal media. Print, movies, and graphics have changed - e.g. hypertext is a changed form of print. Not only do we have new things, but the old things have changed, and they've combined to form new forms. It's interactive. Collaborative infrastructure - networks connect people, who work in teams. It's any time, any place. It's about managing that lifestyle.

What are people doing?

Affiliation structures - you see this in IM buddy lists. Ou rways in which we connect to other people are changing drastically.

Flow - the addiction of being connected to the stream. Being connected and engaged. Reciprocal attention over the network. Psychological moment - you can get the answer when you have the question. Multitasking.

What should everyone be able to do?

Judgement - opportunity, how to determine reliability, develop better judgement skills...

Use images and text to tell stories withmultimedia. Design - use images to communicate, including critique, collaboration, debate.

Mobile communication, global connectivity, and real space navigation.

Technorati Tags: ecar2005

Posted by oren at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)

[ECAR 2005] Jonathan Murray (Microsoft) on Bridging the GAP

Bridging the GAP: Unified Approaches to Governance, Architecture and Procurement

Jonathan Murray is VP and CTO of Microsoft for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. This is a new role for the corporation. He runs a group of 30 technology officers around the world that work with government, educators, and others on policy implications of technology.

The World Bank today spends about $1 billion a year on ICT related projects. Sixty percent of those projects have been failing, which has major implications on emerging markets. Jonathan had worked as a technology officer at ARCO before coming to Microsoft, so had a background in enterprise scale IT issues. An example is Siemens, which has 350,000 desktops in 120 countries - highly complex environments. At Microsoft he put in measures to gather data on customer satisfaction with their services. When they started that process they were surprised by a couple of things - one was the larger the customer was the less satisfied they were with Microsoft. So they then formed a group to manage those set of customers separately from the rest of Microsoft business.

Out of that work came some interesting insights. One thing they learned is that all those companies were mired in complexity. What are some of the core issues from those complexities, and what are some of the best practices that come out of those companies?

They went and looked at the Educause data on most important issues, and were struck by the parallels with the private sector. The issue of funding for IT is high in both areas, as are security and identity management, and strategic planning. The issue of ERP implementation has largely been dealt with already in most large enterprises. In private enterprise security is still important but has become part of the system.

He's surprised by how low the issue of Governance, Organization, and Leadership turned up on the latest Educause survey - in private sector companies it ranks much higher as an issue - governance is the glue that makes this all work.

He puts the issues into a taxonomy of Governance, Architecture, and Procurement.

Governance includes strategic planning for IT, faculty development support and training, Governance organization and leadership for IT.

Architecture includes security and ID management, Admin and ERP systems, infrastructure management for IT, elearning, portalks, web services

Procurement includes funding, strategic planning, and support and training. How do you make sure the procurement cycles map to the rapid development of technology? This is a huge issue for governments.

In plain terms:
- in governance you deal with competing needs of many diverse stakeholders (how do you satisfy demand while keeping control of stability?), more demans than capacity, everyone is an IT expert

- Architecture - unless you have good architecture that is well managed and has a long-term plan it is very difficult to plan for an manage the complexity.

- Procurement - the budget process.

The GAP principles - derived from the best in class companies in how they manage IT.

Thesis
- Economic pressures of the early 200s lead leading companies to develop a set of best practices in IT governance, architecture and procurement: The GAP principles.

- Many higher ed institutions continue to implement GAP approaches which leading companies evolved away from in the late '90s

- Higher edu adotpion of the GAP principles would enable accelerated deployment of new services and technology

What are the principles?

Governance:
1. IT is a service provider to the business. - Buiness units and information technology organizations need to be intimately linked through managed engagement processes.

2. The CIO requires real authority - CIOs need effective authority to mandate architecture standards across organizational boundaries. This is absolutely critical. The best of class companies have CIOs with the authority to set and enforce standards. This is a thin layer of authority which runs horizontally across the entire organization.

Architecture - Good architecture demands abstraction. Too much of what we build is tightly vertically coupled. Increasingly what we need to do is build flexibility built on open standards.

Procurement - Architecture is the foundation - a long term strategic model is required for core architecture procurement. Service orientation in architecture enables flexibility. SLAs are ok, but they tell the service provider the minimum they need to know, so they're not the end-all.

Over the history of enterprise computing, nothing has gotten simpler over time. The late 90s we saw the IT "abyss", with IT spending growing rapidly (no old stuff was being switched off), operations and maintenance dominating IT budgets (that's still the case today - about 60% of budgets are spent on this, with only 28% being spent on adding new value), the complexity of distributed computing environment was exploding, and new development was ineffective. (1997 McKinsey research study).

Three catalyst events:

- Remediation of systems for Y2K - this was the first time organizations understood what IT systems they actually had, because they had to inventory.
- Stock market crash and bursting of the internet bubble
- september 11 attacks - told companies that the world is not predictable, which had a big affect on the trend towards outsourcing.

What do leading private sector organizations look like today?

Architecture:
- the web as the fundamental fabric - open stanadards, xml, http, etc. internal as well as external
- application abstraction through service orientation. So need to know what the core services are that need to be developed and then delivering them in abstract ways
- Systems abstraction through virtualization - fully virtualized data centers. This is very big in the financial services industry. Compute, disk, memory, IO are just a pool of resources in the data center, which can be allocated on demand.

Governance:
- Federal models. There is a CIO empowered to set standards for infrastructure that have to be implemented company wide. Includes desktops, middleware, and service infrastructure. CIO has the board's authority to mandate that all development will use these standards. Having account managers, sitting day-to-day inside the client units is a best practice - making the standards understandable to the clients and feeding back the information from clients on business needs to the IT organization.
- Architectural "hegemony" - Shel points out that in research institutions you need to plan for those disruptive technologies that will arise and break the architecture.

Procurement:
- strategic partnership - picking vendors whose products are committed to the set of standards that are being implemented.
- The rise of shared service models - how do you make systems and services work together across units to service the customers. One example is in South Africa where they are trying to combine individual institutions into a system, and want to offer common services.

Benefits of good architecture - not about specific products, but about standards.
- Abstraction of complexity - making sure that applications all go through the same middleware layer, for example, to allow changes in the back end without application changes.

I asked about the conflict between abstraction and ERP implementations, and Jonathan replied that most well managed companies implement ERP in order to enforce standardization of business policies and practices in order to get a global view of their business, and use the ERP as a transaction engine, and then build a series of data warehouses that people interact with to get information. Not everybody gets access to the ERP, and nobody gets custom reports. At Microsoft the data warehouse applications provide HR data, for example that's no more than 20 minutes old.

Technorati Tags: ecar2005, IT-architecture

Posted by oren at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[ECAR 2005]What Researchers Want (From IT)

Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin-Mulwaukee)

Why does it matter?

- Research success is mission critical for many institutions, which means you need researchers. The Ability to do work is central to researcher identity. Serious researchers are willing to trade salary or switch institutions to improve support. It's clear to researchers that IT are collaborators, not just service providers.

How do we know what we know? Direct and indirect info from national reports, conversations with faculty, anecdotal & systematic reports from CIOs, scholarly publications on research trends and methods, and trade press reports.

Factors affecting research use of IT - Disciplinary cultures; professional development on computational techniques (more widespread at elite institutions); institutional and general incentive systems - there are many ways in which research trends (like collaboration or development of new algorithms) are being undermined by incentive systems; Efficiency - how do we evaluate the efficiency of research? Trade-offs will be made in how people use technology based on efficiency - if I have to add metadata to get data into an archive, it won't likely happen; Relationship between research & teaching - the use of research computing among grad and undergrad students is growing; Diversity of research approaches - people use high performance computing in conjunction with other research methods.

Institutional issues: competition for resources; history of privileging certain faculty and units; emphasis on homogeneity - can generate problems for researchers; assumptions about activity in units - IT may not be engaged with units new to research computing, but the assumption that support is happening in the unit may not be correct; inertial regarding institutional motivations.

Research culture issues: the rapid spread of computationally-intense research across disciplnes, e.g. music and dance or databases of videos in humanities; speed and continuous nature of innovations in research methods (needs for training); generational issues.

Decision making about IT for research: Hiring commitments by deans etc without discussion with IT units; Resource allocation - faculty may want to participate; collaborative infrastructure development (Princeton's new supercomputer purchase from funds shared across units); policy implementation - if faculty are in on development of policy they are more likely to abide by it.

Collaborative Decision making - multiple options not mutually exclusive. They are quite rare at present. MIT has multiple working groups that orient differently around research problems. Deans and chairs don't often really have any idea what's going on in the research areas in their units.

Computing needs - capacity; stability (and help with transitions); architectural flexibility - people who know about OS and research app architectures are usuall not talking to each other.

Training - there's a gap between how you were trained in grad school and current practices. Inadequate reliance on current students - lots of issues with use of students in terms of knowledge transfer, security, etc. speed of innovation. Range of diffusion techniques - working groups for getting peers in communication. Institutional and inter-institutional synergies. Linkage with methods courses.

More about software - needs range from simple scripting to custom software creation; software specialization as national institutional niche; finding researcher-authored software (NSF is talking about funding software archives)

Data needs: Collection; storage; preparation; presentation

Storage & preparation - multiplicity of types of storage (project-specific repositories to long-lived data collections of global importance) - UCSD is offering up 100 years of data storage to researchers from any institution. Multiplicity of storage venues. Rising & complex preparation needs. Policy issues (access, control, raw vs. cooked, - feds are pressing for release of raw data to federally funded research; etc).

IT & Ontologies - NSF is funding lots of work in metadata and ontologies. Driven by effort to bring info architects and disciplinary scientists into system design. One approach to user-centered design.

The new big two issues - more support for learning, adatpting, and writing software specific to their research problems; Researchers need help managing their data as it enters worlds of public presentation & long-lived data archives. UMich has a lib school training work for disciplinary specialists to do ontological and metadata work. Peter Murray from UMBC quarrels with these two issues - the hot topic is sophisticated pre and post-award information systems. Faculty and PIs want to reduce the administrative burdens. Everybody's dealing with compliance.

I didn't see any mention in this presentation of what is probably the biggest issue for us, which is demand for housing research computing in a centrally run data center environment. That need is being driven by security and recoverability issues.

Greg Jackson makes the great point that this analysis doesn't recognize that many of the shortcomings are the results of tradeoffs made as a result of incomplete analyses of cost, risk, and opportunities. We need to do the analysis of which services are actually worth spending scarce money on.

Technorati Tags: ecar2005, research

Posted by oren at 9:28 AM | Comments (0)

[ECAR 2005] When Everyone Connects to Everyone...

...and Everything Connects to Everything

Lee Rainie (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Meet the Millenials, born 1982-2000. Might be a bigger generational cohort than baby boomers, the most diverse in American history - 31% minority. They think of themselves as a special generation apart. They are sheltered and more confident in every measure. Less individualistic and more team-oriented - date in groups, travel in packs. Highly achievement oriented - a rebellion against their baby-boomer parents. They feel pressured - the generation of the hurried child.

The most distinguishing thing about them is their special relationship with technology. They started elementary school when the Internet became something of interest in the culture. There are striking differences within the cohort - divide by class, sex, race, etc.

There's an interesting study of very young children and media by the Kaiser Foundation.

8 realities of Millinals' lives and 8 implications

1. They are immersed in technology. 87% of kids 8-18 live in homes with computers. 46% have high speed internet access in their home. The presence of a minor child in the home is a strong predictor of having a computer and Internet in the home. The implication is that teens expect to be able to gather and share information in multiple devices. They shrewdly sort out what communication and what information "belongs" on what device and under what circumstances. "Email is for old folks." - It's what you send you teacher, your uncle, your parents.

2. The internet plays a special role in their world. It's how the get information on movies and TV, tnhey play online games, use IM (75%), download music, read blogs. Teens share their own creation - they are contributors to the online commons. They're much more likely to do this and to create blogs than adults. They want to manipulate, remix, and share content. They love to play with the media, to have fun, and show off. They think of themselves as participants in a dialog more than consumers of media. They live in an "always on" world. They think of the internet as a: virtual textbook and reference library; virtual tutor and study shortcut; virtual study group; virtual guidance counselor; virtual locker, backpack, and notebook; and as a trusted, smart friend.

3. They are multitaskers.

From the Kaiser Generation M study - they spend to 8.5 hours of media access per day in 6.5 hours of time. The live in a state of "continuous partial attention" - Linda Stone. "scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon". Plans aren't firmed up until the very last minute. We're in a state of "mild social panic" about the new rules of civility in this new environment. The number of possible interventions has grown beyond those in the immediate physical environment.

4. Their technology is mobile - 45% have cell phones, etc. They're constantly interacting and forming "smart mobs" and "presence" is a concept that is less physical and more virtual to them. They act on information in real time. This is causing all kinds of social strains as boundaries break down between public and private' work, school and home' and consumer and producer.

5. They are unconscious of being "on" technologies. The internet and other technologies have become the wallpaper of thelives. Implications: The use of technology for time shifting will be commonplace. THe importance of "appointment media" will fade and the value of ever-better search strategies will elevate. Long tail content will matter more.

6. They are often unaware of the implications of their tech use

75% agree: "Music downlading and file sharing is so easy to do, it's unrealistic to expect people not to do it". 55% say they do not care much whether what they download is copyrighted or not. They are often uncaring about their own privacy and they enjoy "soft surveillance" of others. This may change as they grow, but some of the smartest companies are using this to their advantage. There will be new models of things that grow up as a result. Greg Jackson makes the point that they're very jealous of their privacy when someone they don't want to finds them (e.g. spam) and they don't get the connection between their voluntary disclosure and its sometimes unintended results. There are opportunities for "teachable moments" in here.

7. Different teens use technology differently: boys and girls; young and old; broadband and dialup, etc.

Jack McCredie asks if there's any information on why, given this level of technology savvy, there's fewer students wanting to go into computer science or math - there doesn't appear to be any real data here.

8. Technology world will change radically in the next decade

Trends - a smarter environment (the extreme example being rf devices embedded in the soil); mor mobility will be built into the system; content creation will explode; search will get better and more social; the pressures on the internet to break into layers will intensify.

Implication - there are no Jedi masters for educators to consult in this new world.

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Posted by oren at 8:21 AM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2005

[When 2.0] Wrapup and other links

While I had to stop blogging due to dead Powerbook batteries, the conference wrapped up with a cocktail reception hosted by Stanford's Media X group.

I got to use the time to chat with O'Reilly's Rael Dornfest about having some calendaring events at the Emerging Technology conference in March, to talk with Rael and IBM's Stephen Farrell about managing activities as opposed to projects or calendars, to introduce myself to Joyce Park and Adam Rikin from Renkoo, to carouse a bit with Lisa Dusseault and Tantek Celik (how do you make that C with the thing hanging down?), and to finally meet Dick Hardt from Sxip.

There's some video from the event up on CNET, as well as link to more coverage.

I thought that all in all it was a terrific day - kudos to Esther for organizing and leading a really thought provoking event that brought together a lot of disparate threads - I'm not sure it all melded together, but I think that there are definitely some themes - the merger of organizational and personal calendaring is one (which obviously has implications for identity management too); the closeness of discussions of time and place; and the whole world of event management and notification. This feels more and more like a set of topics that is rapidly reaching critical mass - at last!

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Posted by oren at 9:15 PM | Comments (0)

December 6, 2005

[When 2.0] Will Wright

Will Wright (Maxis/Electronic Arts, and the creator of Sim City)

Models are a good way of abstracting data to make it understandable - building physical models is a good way of starting.

The idea that there could be a whole world living in your computer is fascinating. He showed the first version of Flight Simulator and the latest as a comparison.

One of the interesting things about games is that you can restart games from the begining - an iterative way of experiencing time. Games are a good way of understanding chaotic systems because you can see how small changes can create large differences in outcomes.

Possibility space - the shape of the landscape of possibilities is how you model the difficulty of achievement. Tried to model the Sims so that people needed to balance material and social success - but people tend to go for one side or the other. Now they're doing dynamic tuning of the game based on data from real players and how they negotiate the space.

A story is a way of how to displace someone's experience in time and space to apply it to another person. While you're seeing one linear path of events, the drama is created by imagining all the other things that didn't happen ("what would've happened if he had tripped here?").

Kids will mash all the buttons, look at what's happening on the screen, and build a model of the cause and effect relationships - kids are great at building a mental model of arbitrarily complex systems. Hey - just like science!

Games are doing the same thing - looking for simple compact rules that can create large spaces of possibilities.

Dynamics - the change of structures through time. We tend to think in terms of topologies, which are the parts of the systems, then there are the dynamics that occur to these things, then there are paradigms (network theory, adaptive systems, chaor theory, etc). Game player intuitively understand topologies within two or three minutes of playing.

A unique property of time is nested interaction loop with success and failure at each level. First you have to learn basic control, then you can deal with their needs, then you can get to the next level. The most intereseting side for most players is the failure side - that's where people spend the most time. As long as people understand why they failed they are willing to go back and try it again.

Interesting book - the User Illusion. Most of our intelligence is pre-conscious.

When players look at games a similary thing happens - use visuals in the game to tell the player what the nouns and verbs are. In first-person shooters you discover things by going around and bashing everything with the noun you have.

Games run on two processors - the computer and the player's imagination. A lot of what gets built in games is scaffolding for the player's imagination. A lot of the trend lately in games is to go to more open-ended games where the player has a role of authorship.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Posted by oren at 4:48 PM | Comments (0)

[When 2.0] Time and Detection Panel

Using time and time patterns to detect things.

Bob Pinner (CDC) - An internal medicine and infectious disease doc, now working on epidemiology - three major dimensions are time, place, and person. The structure of things they think about are similar to events. Infectious disease surveillance is what he works on - monitoring trends, or more recently, early detection. Can you go earlier than a specific diagnosis, to a syndrome, or even earlier, to a set of conditions. The earlier you get the less specific the signals are. Public health functions are organized locally by state and county - that's good for local response but not so good for national distribution of medicine, for instance.

Steve Hofmayr (Sana Security) - Trying to detect malicious software on a single computer. Gathering information can leave you vulnerable. If you're looking at time on your computer, looking at dynamic behavior of a system. When it behaves a little strangely, it's not enough to define it as bad, but when it's a lot strange it's too late. With machines you can roll back what happened once you know. Analagous to the immune system, which doesn't mount a massive response right when it sees something new, but waits to gather more information before responding. A classic example - You'd think if something on its machine that tries to hide itself is bad, but it's not necessarily. Or if a process survives a reboot. But if enough of those kinds of events are correlated in time, then it becomes more likely that there is some malware.

Dan Doman - At doubleclick they had a vision of highly targeted advertising. Keeping track of demographic data is difficult - he got interested in inferring demographics - e.g. people who go to sports sites are likely to be guys, etc. Contextual advertising is delivering advertising within the context that the consumer is in now. You look for the numbers of times people are looking at things ("velocity") over a period of time which indicate an intensity of interest.

Omar Tawakol (Revenue Science) - Behavioral targeting - advertisers and marketers have always wanted to reach people based on what they care about. Behavioral targeting talks about the person reading the page, not the text on a page. It also brings the notion of time into the equation - if you go to a car site, and then to an entertainment site, the entertainment site can show you car ads. In advertising there are two uses for time - one is branding, which is all about your interests; the other is direct response, where the goal is immediate response. Branding is more time independent - it you're a golfer you probably will be in five years, but if you're looking to buy a mortgage, you probably won't buy again for five years.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Posted by oren at 3:59 PM | Comments (0)

[When 2.0] Afternoon Panel - Time and Functionality

Had a good time at lunch chatting with Lisa Dusseault from OSAF and Tantek Celik from Technorati about the hcalendar microformat, calendar urls, and lost of other interesting things.

The afternoon panel, on time and functionality is just starting.

Munjal Shah (RIYA) - Tagging lots of digital photo data - uses face recognition and text recognition to infer what and who are in a photo, and turn it into a searchable database. They do it for consumers on the desktop, and have a permissioning model for letting people search their friends. One insight is that consumer photos come with timestamps, which they used to enhance face recognition through time-based clustering. For instance, if there are ten photos of you at a party wearing a particular shirt and only one of them is full-face, they can infer that the other photos of the same shirt around the same time are also you.

Tantek Celik (Technorati) - Time searching on the web is terrible - try looking for just this year's version of the conference. Technorati relies on pings from blog software for indexing. Before an event people are talking about it, during the event people are blogging it, after the event people write about it. What happens in short time windows? We find that humans are the best at knowing what's going on right now - the most popular ten searches on Technorati. News - let's look at what bloggers are linking to in the last forty-eight hours - turns out to not being the same topics a newspaper editor would choose. They see the names of bloggers in far-flung places around the globe that we may not have heard of - it dramatically flattens our view of the world.

Esther asks when most documents will have timestamps on the web - Tantek asks whether you can trust time information in documents? The ping is a more reliable time stamp, because Technorati knows when the ping was received and when they went out and retrieved the information. As we get used to copying info from the web we'll make much more use of time-based information. Technorati is working on microformats, small extensions to html that enable information within web pages to identify the same kind of information as ical and vcards.

John Arenas (Worktopia) - Worktopia is about the premise that the ubiquitous network and collaboration tools are freeing the workforce from physical limitations. Matches demands such as temporary space with supply. Enables companies to have a distributed workforce. This kind of relationship allows hotels and other meeting spaces to tap short-term markets between big meetings, for example. John notes that Sun now has 1.5 workers per desk, so this is an accelerating trend.

Ben Cruze (Demand ID Systems) - enabling users to request live music events, and over time other kinds of events. Provide a market intelligence to show level of demand for a performer in any part of the country - that doesn't exist today. On the back end, when an event is scheduled, they alert consumers who requested the event, so they can purchase tickets and merchandise. They can also alert sponsors to how many people might be likely to attend an event, so they can better plan and target their sponsorship dollars. The consumer service is under the brand name of Tourvote. Enabling people to have a voice in creating an event is important.

What's the business model? Munjal - Search is the model - you'll search for places, products, and things - not professional pictures but user generated pictures, which reflect reality better. The premise is that travel advertising will support the business. Tantek - Marketers are using Technorati to do research on their brands.

Mark Johnson from Intuit on how does time influence decision making? The (somewhat silly) example he gives is the decision of whether to spend $4 a day on a venti cappucinno vs. $4 a day on Starbuck's stock. Esther comments on making latent demand visible - knowing that you're part of a larger group that all want Bonnie Raitt to show up. How is our discount factor changing with respect to time?

Ben asks Munjal the question about whether people have the right to put up pictures of buildings and other businesses that they don't own, and about the tension between business owners who want to link to photos of their businesses and the reality of what user photos might actually show (e.g. the cockroach in a hotel).

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Posted by oren at 2:35 PM | Comments (0)

[When 2.0] Pavel Curtis (Microsoft)

Working Together Should Be Easier

Collaboratively constructed work products - stuff people put together with other people - e.g. presentations, documents, schedules, source code, etc.

Pavel would argue that we support this kind of activity very poorly.

Collaboration via email - everybody writes their own section, sends their section to one owner/victim, who pulls it together, unifying styles, sends it out to everybody, and everybody makes an edit. Victim coordinates and goes quiethly insane.

Collab via shared files - put draft out on a file server, each author editing on a single copy - but can't author at the same time or when disconnected, so they make a copy...etc.

What do we really want? Never prevented from editing, can edit while disconnected, owner needs to review edits and selectively undo them, and to control who can edit what when.

Better collab vie email - send first draft as attachment, each user edits, application aggregates edits and sends back to everyone..

Really we just need to send the edits, not the whole documents - "delete N characters ad position P"

How do we make this work? Goal is that everybody sees the same story, including the order in which things happened - the order that "God" saw the edits, including disconnected edits. Involves some mucking about with the incoming edits coming by email. What makes a good order? Everybody can compute locally without talking to the server - given two edits which one comes earlier? Everybody gets the same story everywhere. Respect causality.

How to implement order - label every edit with its potential "causes" - what other edits were received before this edit? If edit A knew about strictly more edits than B, A comes later in the story. If neither edit knows more, use arbitrary rule to order.

Transform edits - can't just take your edit and apply locally as if nothing else had happened, because I've been working on the doc. Must transform edits with knowledge of what's changed. If i know what you knew when you made your edit, I can do that. It gets a little bit complicated, but it's doable. Need two kinds of tools - transform before, and transform after. Then all becomes possible.

Current status - About sixteen years ago some guys in Texas defined the problem. People have been coming up with algorithms but not the transformations themselves. Pavel solved this problem - putting together an advanced team at Microsoft and building an app-indepndent toolkit. Resolving intellectual property issues within Microsoft.

Tantek asks whether Pavel's used SubEthaEdit - Pavel is familiar with it, but hasn't looked at it in depth. Solves some of these problems in a restricted domain.

Pavel - Collaboration is not a product, but it should be part of nearly every product. He's looking forward to openly publishing this whole set of technologies, but there are other people at Microsoft who may have other opinions.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0

Posted by oren at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)

[When 2.0] Panel continued

Esther - We have a lack of standards - would having standards free up resources?

Mitch - it will free up developers from re-inventing the wheel. ICal is fine for representing the data of the event. But when you're trying to coordinate multiple events among multiple people, that's the realm that CalDAV and SSE are trying to get into.

Question - is Microsoft a part of the discussions? Ray - Not yet, but he'll be chatting with Mitch shortly. (Huzzah!)

Raymie - it's good that people are working toward interoperability of read/write of events, but the next frontier is the kind of things Yori is working on, the social aspects of scheduling and rescheduling.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0

Posted by oren at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)

[When 2.0] Mitch Kaopr, Yori, Ray Ozzie, Raymie Stata

The first panel has:

Mitch Kapor, from OSAF: Why has Chandler focused on calendaring? Because we learned that with a gigantic vision it can't all get done - need to innovate in a series of leaps. There's much more pain around calendars than mail right now. The killer feature for the rest of us is to make it easy to share calendars in a variety of ways. Nothing has gotten above the bar so far, and when there is something usable there will be a lot of users who will adopt it. Outlook and Exchange have an enterprise focus when you get to calendar sharing - 200 million of them but zero of everybody else. We bring a bunch of skill and a good team, and a commitment to see something through. To get something that a big corporation might use is a huge undertaking.

Yori Nelkin - Timebridge is a coordination platform - view is that a scheduling is not a database loolup problem of free/busy - you may be free but not unless certain conditions are met. It's a transactional exchange that, even in a business environment is very social. They plug into email as well as calendar - Outlook initially. There's a lot of hidden motivations behind what people are doing, their goal is to keep as many balls in the air as people want until they make decisions - waiting to see who else is attending, what the agenda is, etc. Make a decision when it needs to be made, not before. Esther notes that the amount of disclosure is an issue - Yori provides some control of disclosure, but leans towards openness. Continuing conversations "out of band" in email is consistent with Timebridge. Shooting for release on Feb 8 or March 12.

Ray Ozzie - Esther asks - what would you like to do? Ray notes that he's not in the Outlook group. Outlook in general - the things he's seen indicates that it's continuing to make forward progress, in a classic MS Office way each release continues to bring new features. Release 12 brings significant UI enhancements - no menus! Calendaring module now supplies overlaid calendars and integrated tasks. One of the pain points is managing many different sets of calendar entries and contacts with many different people - would like to have a mesh of sharing. Uses Outlook as an agregator, but would like to have co-editing of things with other people. Got together with some lead developers with Outlook, Exchange, MSN, Windows Mobile and asked why can't we share among the products? Brainstormed and decided on agreement of two very simple things: vcards to represent contacts and icalendar to represent single events. Publish those with RSS, including some categorization. SSE is a way of synchronizing subscriptions bilaterallly. Individual products should take these things deep - whether it's Chandler, Trumba, or Outlook.

Raymie Stata (Yahoo!) - Started Bloomba with an email client, with a specific vision to make email better - found that calendaring is really where the pain is - the tag line of the company was "change your outlook". But learned that Exchange was really where the pain was. The innovation was to put the conflict resolution into the client so that the server side is simple storage, like WebDAV. There's a mindset around these products - there's what Exchange and Notes do today, but what we see in new products like Upcoming (not part of Yahoo) is a view of scheduling and event management that breaks out of that box - view of social relationships that is not contemplated in corporate products - the desire to talk about and discover events. The work around events at Yahoo will lead to being able to do "bloomba-like things" within a social network.

Esther - you can't really manage time, but only what you do with it. What you really want to do is manage specific kinds of activities - the challenge is to represent activities, knowing which people, documents, etc are part of an event. The challenge is to represent the activity in software as something that happens over time, whether it's a budget cycle or your kids' college application process.

Mitch - Chandler made a choice to start out delivering the basics - in their case calendar with sharing, in order gain momentum through adoption. The price is that it will take them longer to get to fancy features. There's a lot of web momentum around David Allen's Getting Things Done. OSAF has drunk some of that kool-aid, which is activity oriented - tasks, projects, next actions. Your can use that system with a word processor, but that puts a lot of burden on the individual. Chandler will have some facilities to enable this kind of activity - tasks, emails, etc are all stored in a unified store, and have stamping, where you can make one item be multiple kinds of things - e.g. turn a task into an event so it has calendar-type attributes so you can structure its meaning in time. A lot of this is inherited from Lotus Agenda and will be experimental at first. Most open source projects do something that's been done in other ways before within an open source context, but Chandler is trying to architect a project to do new things in an open source way. There's a server piece called Cosmo, based on CalDAV for sharing. Mitch hopes to have some conversation with Ray later today about CalDAV and SSE and how to make things work together.

Esther - Innovation in calendaring seems to be coming from the consumer side, rather than the enterprise. Being enabled by the huge increase of people online.

Raymie - as we've been decomposing calendaring, at the end of the day what you manage is your commitments to other people at specific times. The calendar is to help you deal with that baseline commitment in ever more complicated lives, to make sure that you don't overcommit. In introducing search into email, the amount of filing people do goes way down, saving people's time. His theory is that the amount of time people spend organizing is constant - you can spend that time managing your past, by filing, or by organizing your future, by engaging in activity management.

Ray notes that the calendar is more than just commitments, but a shared space for exchanging information, including notes related to the calendar events.

Mitch notes that the 0.6 chandler release has shared read/write calendar sharing with a notes field - that's the beginning of the kinds of things that Mitch is talking about.

Steve Farrell (IBM) - the hard thing is drawing links between disparate things that are part of the same activity.

Esther notes that she's never seen a calendar that understands location - there's general agreement. Mitch notes that there's a timezone feature in Chandler, which is a step towards understanding location. Events have timezone attributes. It turns out that it's difficult and nuanced to get something as simple as timezones right.

Mitch - read Getting Things DoneECAR 2005 Symposium - when that soaked into OSAF culture the way they did things really changed. If you're looking to add value, look to make groups effective at working together - they all need help and tools and service, and that will drive innovation, more than what we do individually.

Esther - The role of the assistant is intriguing. More people in the room have lost assistants in the past three years than have acquired one. That's a market.

Hans Bjordahl - The Outlook guy at Microsoft. It's clear that time management is undergoing a shift from paper-based to electronic. They're on board with ICal in the new release.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0

Posted by oren at 9:13 AM | Comments (0)

[When 2.0] Esther's intro

Esther introduced the conference workshop with a quote that "two is a conflict of interest, three is synergy", and went on to talk about events as being good and productive things - they happen, they create content including photos, and connections between people. Until recently this has been unstructured information that needs to be sorted out after the fact. This event came together rather quickly, and is accompanied by content, including a newsletter distributed to participants.

The morning will be about time-management, and the afternoon will be about how people are using time to enable other sorts of things.

Technorati Tags: When 2.0, Calendaring

Posted by oren at 8:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[When 2.0] Travel and conferences this week

I'm in Palo Alto today for Esther Dyson's When 2.0 gathering. The meeting topic is "Time and Timing" - featured speakers include Mitch Kapor, Ray Ozzie, and others. There's a fair amount of overlap between attendees here and the Calconnect consortium, and I imagine calendaring standards will be a hot topic here. I'll be blogging the proceedings as best I can.

Later in the week I'll be in Arizona for the ECAR Symposium 2005 , where Richard Katz always pulls together some thought-bending topics and speakers.

Should be an interesting week!

Posted by oren at 8:04 AM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2005

Doc's Saving The Net, Universities, and NLR

I spent a bunch of time this week working my way through Doc Searls' long article in Linux Journal titled Saving The Net, where Doc lays out in some detail how the ever consolidating major carriers (both telco and cable) are working to recreate the internet in their own familiar image, into a "content delivery" system instead of the freely open space for exchange of all sorts that it has evolved into. It's a great rant, and if you haven't read it, you should.

Dave Weinberger, commenting on the piece, thinks Doc's too optimistic about the possibility of having an impact on these trends, and invites us to join him "in his trough of despair". But Dave does note that the Berkman Center's Charlie Nesson "made a case for universities becoming such a bastion of the open Internet and the intertwingling of knowledge that they make it impossible to close our Internet. They could be champions of our Net."

We shouldn't forget that the current Internet evolved in universities and other research institutions (like CERN, where the Web was born) and that much of the real innovation on the net has been created to serve the research communities that live in higher-ed institutions around the globe. Having just taken a turn around the exhibit floor at SC05 last week, I can say that the continued drive for innovation in high performance networked computing among the research communities has not abated a bit. The demonstrations on the show floor were nothing short of breathtaking. And the engine that makes this research work is the network - it's noticeable that at SC05 the Pacific Northwest Gigapop provisioned the show with more than half a terabit per second of network connectivity.

One thing's for certain - the telcos and cable companies, and their partners in the mainstream entertainment industry, who together are relentlessly focused on building networks to satisfy the demand for music, movies, games, and porn, are not going to be primarily interested in providing lots of unfettered bandwidth to support creativity, innovation, or connectedness.

And what can we do about it? Well, thinking about all of this over the course of the week has sure given me new insight into and appreciation for the sheer audacious chutzpah of folks like Tracy Futhey, Tom West, and Ron Johnson, who have gone out and actually bought and provisioned a new high-speed national network of dark fiber. This new network, called National LambdaRail is owned its members, which are universities, research labs, and regional research network providers. The true brilliance here is not these partners are running their own network - universities have been running the Internet2 network for some years now, running on leased fiber - but the fact that with NLR the members actually own the physical layer that the network is built on.

While the focus of NLR today is to "to provide a national scale infrastructure for research and experimentation in networking technologies and applications", I have to think that these far-sighted folks are at least thinking about how to provide for continued innovation and creativity across the board, as the commodity Internet is pressured to become an ever more controlled environment. I particularly like this statement on the NLR home page:

NLR puts the control, the power and the promise of experimental network infrastructure in the hands of our nation’s scientists and researchers.

It's enough to give you at least some hope for the future, which on Thanksgiving Day 2005, feels pretty good to me.

Posted by oren at 7:34 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

Cultural Environmentalism At 10 - Conference at Stanford Law School

Boy, does this ever look like an interesting conference for those concerned with what's going on with the intellectual property wars:

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society will host a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism" over the course of ten busy years for intellectual property law. We've invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works.

Molly Van Houweling explores voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights as a tool for cultural environmentalism. Susan Crawford extends Boyle's analysis to the age of networks. Rebecca Tushnet, looks at the ways in which the law's impulse to generalize complicates the project of cultural environmentalism, and Madhavi Sunder looks at how the metaphor affects traditional knowledge. Professor Boyle will also offer some remarks, as will Stanford Law School's Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Thanks to Donna Wentworth for pointing this out!

Posted by oren at 7:11 AM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2005

Teenagers increasingly prefer IM to email

CNET is reporting on a study commissioned by AOL that finds that teenagers are preferring instant messaging to email even more this year than last.

Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year, according to an America Online-commissioned study of instant messaging trends.

Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails.

I don't do anywhere near as much IM'ing as email, but if you want to chat, I'm orensr on Google, AIM, and Yahoo, oren.sreebny on .mac, and oren@cac.washington.edu on MSN.

Posted by oren at 9:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2005

Looking for a new phone, but have to provide SSN to Cingular?

I was thinking it might be time to move to a new mobile phone, so I went over to Cingular's site to see what phones they're currently carrying. I clicked through the process saying I wanted to upgrade a device on an existing service plan as a former AT&T Wireless customer, and then it asked for my mobile number and the last four digits of my Social Security Number!

All I wanted was to see the list of current phones and features - whassup with having to provide personal data to see the catalog? A perfect example of bad marketing at work.

Of course what I really want is the not yet available Nokia E61 - wow, looks like a phone that does it all. That probably means the US carriers won't have it.

Posted by oren at 8:47 AM | Comments (0)

November 9, 2005

Comcast at 6 mbps? Maybe they misplaced a zero.

Comcast has been advertising 6 megabits connection speed lately - my experience sure doesn't feel like that, so this morning I ran some tests.

Here's what I got. First, using the test at dslreports:

2005-11-09 09:18:00 EST: 6197 / 736
Your download speed : 6197 kbps or 774.6 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 736 kbps or 92 KB/sec.

And then using CNET's test:

644 Kbps - You 644 kbps

Am I experiencing problems, or is this typical?

Update
Brian points out that the dslreports test above actually did show that I was getting 6 megabits per second download speed, and he's right. I should've seen that myself, though why the discrepancy between that and the CNET test?

Today I'm getting:

(from dslreports):

2005-11-11 11:49:23 EST: 3058 / 302
Your download speed : 3058 kbps or 382.3 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 302 kbps or 37.7 KB/sec.

Cnet reports 1758.6 Kbps.

Posted by oren at 6:23 AM | Comments (0)

November 7, 2005

Note to Apple - DRM gets in the way of my adoption of innovation

Hey, Apple -

I like iTunes - it's an elegant user interface, it works on both my Macs and Windows boxes, the Music Store has a good selection and is nicely integrated with the software, I like the fact that you can write scripts and Automator actions using iTunes.

BUT -

Your DRM is getting in my way. My personal way. This is not about abstract rights. It's about the ways I want to use my music after I purchase it from your store.

It's also not about wanting to share music over peer-to-peer networks. I don't want to do that. I *don't* do that.

But I use other devices that aren't made by Apple. I use a Squeezebox to stream music to my home stereo. I am on the verge of ordering an Olive Musica. I will probably convert at least one of my Windows machines to Ubuntu soon. And none of those environments can play music as it comes from the iTunes Music Store.

Up until recently this hasn't been a problem, as I've been able to use JHymn to strip the copy protection off the files. Yeah, it's been a hassle to have to go through the extra step of doing the stripping every time I purchase music from iTunes, so in some sense it probably has had the effect of limiting my purchasing.

But now JHymn doesn't work on the new iTunes version (6.0 and above) at all. Luckily I thought to check first before upgrading iTunes on my machines. If I cared about getting video content from the iTunes Music Store this would probably be a serious drawback. But I'm really not interested in video - just the music.

I don't know enough of the details to know what made JHymn break with this new upgrade - but I suspect it's not accidental.

So the ultimate deterrence to innovation here is that I'm not upgrading iTunes from version 5 until I can either get JHymn to work or Apple provides me the equivalent functionality. So come on, Apple - show some real leadership here!

Posted by oren at 3:47 PM | Comments (1)

November 4, 2005

A change in focus

I originally came to the UW in April, 1994 - more than a decade ago - to manage the Client Services group for Computing & Communications, the UW's central computing and networking organization.

After we did some realigning of C&C organizational structures last year, we ended up with two large client support units in different parts of the department. While the two units have managed to coordinate activities without letting too many things slip through the cracks (thanks to the hard work of many people), this bifurcated organizational structure has felt to many of us like a piece of unfinished business.

Yesterday we announced to our staff that on January 1 we will be combining the two organizations (Client Services and Customer Care) under the able leadership of my colleague Tammy Stockton. This will allow us to really focus our client support efforts in ways that will provide better and more integrated services for the faculty, staff, students, and others that we serve.

It's a great move, and one that serves the institution well. There is definitely a part of me, however, that will miss being intimately involved in the day-to-day operations of supporting the users of the computing and networking services we provide.

It's been a remarkable decade in customer support - when I started the Web browser was brand new, email was a text-only tool, and things like streaming video and instant messaging were just a project in some research lab. Over this period of time we've seen the use of Internet-based computing move from being the province of a few thousand alpha-geeks to something that's used (and abused) in most households in the developed world. It's been remarkable to be a (very small) part of such a fundamental shift in how the world works.

At the local level, we now support almost 300,000 active UW NetIDs, around 2,000 Nebula workstations, and a growing array of services and products for an increasingly diverse and technology-savvy set of people. This support is done by a small group of very dedicated and talented folks, and it's been a real pleasure and an honor for me to be a part of that effort.

So what will I be doing?

I'll be spending more time working with the other parts of C&C and EPLT I am engaged with (MyUW and Catalyst) looking at the array of services offered by C&C, evaluating and promoting new UW technology services, working with the institutional technology advisory structures we've put in place over the past two years, and furthering strategic technology efforts, like our work in evolving calendaring standards.

One thing for sure, it won't be boring!

Posted by oren at 6:06 AM | Comments (0)

Pew Internet poll - More than half of teens have created online content

This is a remarkable report from Pew - (warning for Mac users: use Adobe Acrobat Reader instead of Preview to view the full report):

American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.

Teens continue to actively download music and video from the internet and have used multiple sources to get their files. Those who get music files online believe it is unrealistic to expect people to self-regulate and avoid free downloading and file-sharing altogether.

Posted by oren at 5:10 AM | Comments (0)

November 1, 2005

Susan Crawford on the telco mergers

Susan Crawford has an all too accurate post on the ultimate meaning of the mergers between major telephone companies approved yesterday by the FCC:

Today's mergers signal that the big carriers are now even bigger, and it's increasingly difficult to imagine real competitors for broadband internet carriers emerging (although I keep hoping -- go, BPL!). They're becoming confident that complete dominion over the internet, complete control, is possible. That's the big news from today.

I'm adding Susan to my list of regular reads.

Posted by oren at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2005

Upcoming UW CSE colloquia

I keep forgetting about the fabulous Colloquia series at our Computer Science and Engineering department. I'm really kicking myself for having missed a couple of recent ones, like Patrick Baudisch (Microsoft) on Making Sense on Small Screens and Jeff Dean (Google) on BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. Fortunately, both of those are available on archived video and audio.

There are a bunch of good ones still to come, including:

Gail Murphy (University of British Columbia)
The Emergent Structure of Software Development Tasks
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium

Tony Hey (Microsoft)
Cyberinfrastrucure for E-science
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium

Lenhart Schubert (University of Rochester)
Turing's Dream and the Knowledge Challenge
Thursday, November 10, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Turing Center Distinguished Lecture Series

Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft)
From Scatterbrained to Focused: User Interface Support for Today's Crazed Information Worker
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium

I'm going to try to attend more regularly.

Posted by oren at 7:36 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2005

Even the Wall Street Journal is against DRM

Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities by Walter Mossberg.

The beauty of digital media is the flexibility, and that flexibility shouldn't be destroyed for honest consumers just because the companies that sell them have a theft problem caused by a minority of people.

Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates -- people who upload massive quantities of music and videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs.

Cool - hope it helps.

Posted by oren at 2:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2005

Publishers join the Recording and Movie industry associations in rearguard actions

I'm glad to see that the Association of American Publishers can be just as determinedly nearsighted in their approach to the Internet as the RIAA and MPAA.

Woman arranges a book shop display
Google reckons its plans will raise awareness and sales of books
Internet search engine Google is being sued by a group of book publishers over plans to put millions of titles online.

The Association of American Publishers, which includes firms such as Penguin, has filed a suit in New York claiming Google will infringe their copyrights.

As part of its Print Library Project, Google plans to index and scan millions of books from five major libraries.

Google countered that the lawsuit was "short sighted", claiming its idea will lift exposure and demand for books.

Posted by oren at 3:18 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2005

Dick Hardt's OSCON Keynote video

I finally got around to watching Dick Hardt's keynote on Identity 2.0 from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in August.

Dick's brilliant presentation style, which violates every rule you ever heard about how to use presentation software, kept me totally engaged at 6:00 am while watching a fifteen minute presentation on what is, let's face it, not the most scintillating of topics.

Dick credits Lawrence Lessig for inspiration on the style, but I think it's a direct descendant of Bob Dylan's brilliant performance of Subterranean Homesick Blues at the beginning of Don't Look Back.

It's a whirlwind ride that does a great job of outlining why digital identity management really is a big issue that is extremely important and has a lot of work remaining to be done. Check it out!

Posted by oren at 7:04 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2005

Fredric Paul on Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry

Fredric Paul has a good piece in TechWeb titled Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry, as a response to a Forrester Research study titled Music Lessons: Is Your Industry At Risk?. One question I have is whether we should trust research opinions about record companies from research companies that charge US$249 for an eighteen page report. Anyway, Fredric's opinion piece is worth a look:

the record companies' real problem is that everyone hates them.

He Hate Me
Musicians hate them for habitually sucking the creativity out of the music and the profits from the CD sales. Usually they do it legally, if not morally, but all too often naïve musicians with few options end up swindled out of their rightful earnings.

And music lovers—don't call us consumers; music can't be consumed—see the record companies as greedy, clueless profiteers quick to jack up prices while placing limits on what music gets released and how you can listen to it.

Record companies add little real value to the process of creating and distributing music, and technological advancements make their role increasingly irrelevant. Movie studios and publishing houses still stand for something, some artistic orientation, but the big record companies don't. These days, who knows or cares which label their favorite artists happen to have signed with?

Posted by oren at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2005

Harvey Danger - my new heroes

Seattle alt-popsters Harvey Danger (former UW students) have put their new album up for for full download with no copy protection or anything.

Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

...

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships.

These sound like smart guys. I've never listened to Harvey Danger, but you can bet I'm starting tonight.

Posted by oren at 4:02 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Nano, nano - it's an iPod Nano!

Chuck Kenney, our local Apple rep, dropped by an iPod Nano for us to take a look before I left for last week's meetings on the East Coast. I finally had time to take it out of the box this morning and play with it just a little.

As many others have commented, the Nano inspires pure techno-object lust. Apple has managed to package the incredibly nice iPod user interface into a tiny package, including the scroll wheel, full color screen, and all. Four gigabytes of data in an incredibly small package with no moving parts - wow!

One thing I managed to do today on it (in addition to putting a bunch of music on) is to export an ical file from Oracle Calendar, import it into Apple's iCal software and synchronize that onto the iPod. With one of these, maybe I won't forget where I'm walking as I'm grooving my way across campus to my next meeting!

Posted by oren at 3:16 PM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2005

The Research Channel: Live streaming video of underwater volcanoes

Oh, man - this is too cool.

This coming week my colleagues at The Research Channel will be broadcasting a live stream of volcanoes on the ocean floor, along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which lies 200 miles off the Washington coast. The live feed will be Sept 28 and 29 from 10 am to 6 pm, Pacific time.

The images will be shot in high-definition by a camera mounted on the Jason rover, tethered to the UW's Tommy Thompson research vessel, then beamed to shore via satellite. If you're at an Internet2 site with multicast enabled, you'll be able to watch it in 6 Mbps high-def, but anybody with a broadband connection can watch the Windows Media versions. More info is on Visions05 pages. High definition video over the Internet live from ocean floor volcanoes - how cool is that?

This expedition is precursor to the Neptune project:

The expedition’s goals include mapping and video coverage of areas along the northern portion of the NEPTUNE program study area. NEPTUNE is a planned U.S./Canadian underwater observatory. An instrumented network of 2,000 miles of fiber-optic/power cable will give researchers real-time, interactive observations of and experiments within the ocean, seafloor and subseafloor, as well as the biological communities that thrive there.

Posted by oren at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

[CSG Fall 2005] Software devleopment stages a la Chandler

Sheila has shown us the timeline for Chandler development. I like the five stages of software feature development they're using:

embryonic -> initial -> plausible -> dogfood -> usable

Posted by oren at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Chandler WAC

Sheila is showing the Westwood Advisory Council for Chandler the latest build of the coming 0.6 Chandler software.

The calendar is now displaying colors, supports recurrence, and display of multiple calendars. One big new feature is that individual events are specific to a timezone - this will help a lot with those of us who travel.

There's a new web page of the Chandler development timeline that makes it far clearer which sets of features and usability are targeted for which releases.

Lisa is giving a presentation that started with articulating the current vision of the project - Mitch noted that this is the first time in four years that anybody other than he has given the vision statement.

Now she's talking about paradigms for email usage and the implications of that for workflow UI in Chandler.

All of the slides for the WAC meeting are available on the OSAF Wiki.

Posted by oren at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Security Panel

Jon Giltner from Colorado notes that they respond to about 50 incidents per week. They have a formal documented process established in 2004 that requires notification and involvement of central IT. They use the CERIAS open response database for tracking.

If the incident involves compromise of PII they form a team and mandate independent forensics with a third party company that takes the machine and does the forensics. The team's primary role is to handle communications - notification to affected individuals (via US postal mail using); any press release, etc.

Who's involved? Legal Counsel, compromised department head; IT security coordinator; tech lead from dept; campus police; university communications; university privacy officer; university officer with oversight for compromised departments.

They take pains not to point the finger too quickly at the local IT admin - they're usually overworked, underfunded, and not always properly trained.

There follows some discussion of some specific incidents at some our institutions, and lessons learned.

In one incident a visiting researcher from another institution had a file obtained from the state that contained names and SSNs. The researcher put a laptop containing that information on the campus network despite not meeting campus minimum standards for up-to-date patching and OS levels, and sure enough it was compromised.

The issue of who ends up paying the bill for notification of the people whose information was compromised may well end up in court.

This institution has very good policies about security - but that doesn't really make much difference as what they have is massive non-compliance across the campus. And that's not just because people don't know about the policies. It takes massive culture change, and the top leadership of the institution is now very concerned about it. They have an online security tutorial, and the cabinet has now approved a requirement that everyone complete this tutorial.

They are now doing proactive scans of machines on the network, using a product from MacAfee.

A CIO is describing another incident where a machine containing personal and financial information in a department was compromised. Again, this was an incident where the information was being gathered in violation of institutional policy.

What lessons were learned?

- funding security matters, and it's difficult to obtain on an ongoing basis.
- distributed computing environments are difficult to secure, due to social factors, not technical. In this instance the time-to-market for a web site took precedence over a known security hole.
- the institution had no list of where sensitive data is stored - how can you do a risk assessment?
- patch management and antivirus installation is ad-hoc - who's responsible? Often it's students bringing up servers, and they don't always have a clue about securing the machines.
- How do we help system administrators respond responsibly to unreasonable demands from their management?
- Central IT is frequently aware of compromises in departments before the department itself.
- Unpatched web servers are often a vector for compromises

Posted by oren at 5:56 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Dinner cruise and conversation

Last night featured a lovely cruise on Pittsburgh's three rivers - the weather was lovely, the beer (Iron City) was free, and the company was great.

Jack McCredie from UC Berkeley regaled us with tales of growing up in Pittsburgh when it was still the steel city with all the mills going on along the river - now it's all been converted to restaurants, parks, and ball stadiums.

The evening ended with a long chat between Terry Gray, Lisa Dusseault and me. While I won't try to recap the conversation, it revolved around IMAP, HTTP, connection vs. connectionless protocols, authentication for WebDAV, etc.

Here's a photo of Terry and Jack Duwe on the boat.

Posted by oren at 5:34 AM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2005

[CSG Fall 2005] Cliff Lynch on random musings

Cliff Lynch is noting that we talked a tremendous amount about repositories today, and that the approach was largely technical. If you talk to administrators, faculty, or librarians, you'll get very different views on what these are for, even though when you peel away the social and political layers you get something that looks very similar.

CNI has been concentrating for the past year or two on what are referred to as Institutional Repositories - a service that has a significant insitutional commitment behind it that documents the academic or cultural life of the institution. That covers a place where you put digital materials created by faculty, documenting performances that happen in a university community. Typically it's not a place where you're doing frontline teaching and learning - it's not a course management system. Course management systems generally have lots more specialized services than repositories. There are lots of questions about how rich the functionality in institutional repositories should be.

If you think about putting documents in and getting them out and perhaps migrating document formats over time, that's a good set of functions. Now let's think about video - you can think about it in terms of a large file - put it in, pull it out - what you do with after is not the repository's business. But you can think of video in the context of including streaming, handling different bit rates, etc etc. These are the types of scoping questions we see around institutional repositories.

There are lots of repositories on campus besides just institutional repositories and course management systems. All kinds of research groups setting up repositories - often on the same software used for the institutional repository. What's different is the scale of implementation and the extent of institutional commitment.

There are two major streams of argument that have been used to support deployment of institutional repositories. One talks about the move to production of scholarship in digital form - scholarship that is more than page images, but encompasses datasets, software, simulations, etc that don't fit into the tradition of scholarly journals or monographs. In order to keep scholarship healthy institutions need to take responsibility for archiving and maintaining these materials.

The other argument runs around a set of issues that go around the rubric of "open access" - a policy position that says that the reporting of scholarship should be free and openly accessible and that the Internet makes that possible at a low cost and that it breaks down barriers to scientific progress, bridges equity gaps between nations and communities. On other argument that has some political traction is that a tremendous amount of research is paid for by the government and that citizens have the right to access it. This is the open access thesis. One of the strategies is for scholars to deposit copies of works into public repositories, either institutional or discipline-based. This approach is getting traction in both the US and Europe.

You have these two justifications, but we don't really know much about what is in institutional repositories or how many of them are deployed. CNI did a project on repositories in 13 countries and then pulled together a meeting in Amsterdam to understand similarities and variations in implementations. There are two articles on this in D-LIB magazine last week.

A couple of significant highlights - there are a couple of nations in Europe that have an institutional repository deployed in every higher education institution in the country. There are other nations where deployment rates are very low. In the US they looked at CNI membership which is primarily research institutions. They found around 40% had some sort of repository deployed, and around 80% of the rest had some planning underway.

In almost all institutions the intellectual leadership for this activity has come from the Libraries.

If you look at the European data they are doing this mostly about open access, and if you look at the material in repositories it's mostly textual material. If you look in the US the picture is quite different - there's lots of stuff that isn't textual. Everything from architectural models, video, datasets, software, etc. Institutional repositories may be picking up the need for places to store data that are filled by national data centers in other countries.

While we thought we had a reasonable working definition of institutional repository, the thing that came through very clearly is how chaotic the campus environment is. The relationships of repositories and course management are confused, there are lots of departmental repositories where people don't talk together or to the central repository. Lots of confusion over what's a digital library and what's an institutional repository. It would be useful to try to get some working definitions at least at a campus level.

There is considerable interest at the policy level in the US in starting to get a handle on the datasets that produced as a result of research activity. The NIH put a requirement on all grants over $.5 million to have a data plan. The grant holders naturally want to hand over long term responsibility for this to the institution. The National Science Board issued a set of policy recommendations around long-lived data standards. It's worth looking at because this is the beginning of setting policy principles that will affect grant awards at institutions that will drive us to deal with data stewardship. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has also picked up on this report.

CNI as of earlier this week started an informal call for experience from institutional representatives to get additional insight into what's going on.

Posted by oren at 1:55 PM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] UMichigan's Google Library digitization project

John Wilkin from U Michigan is talking about the University's deal with Google for digitizing library content.

Larry Page from Google is a Michigan grad, and at a dinner on campus he said he'd like to digitize the entire library collection, and they took him seriously. They agreed on non-destructive conversion that would produce files of sufficient resolution to serve as a stand-in for the physical object, and the University would maintain rights to the materials.

The bound print content of the Library will be digitized - the Library holds seven million volumes.

The contract between the University and Google is online at http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/. There is a lightweight set of indemnifications in the agreement. There is agreement that the materials will not be out of circulation for long.

Copies of the images go to both Google and the University.

Why did they do this? Ubiquitous access is part of what it means to be a research library. Having access through Google widens access.

Why would Google do this? To "help maintain the preeminence of books and libraries in our increasingly Internet-centric culture..."

They University gets a package of files for every volume that's identified by barcode - 600dpi bitonal images for print and 300dpi JPEG color/grayscale for illustrations. Michigan reports that the OCR quality is good.

Posted by oren at 1:16 PM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] UVa Virginia Digital Library

Tim Sigmon is talking about the development of the UVa digital library, where they area attempting to really offer integrated searching and delivery of digital library content.

One of the issues was coming up with common metadata for describing these digital objects. There was a steering group to review formats and come up with standards. There are descriptive and administrative metadata standards.

They also needed new specs for how images would be stored in these collections. Three content models were developed uvaHighRes, which includes preview, screen-sized and high quality large image; ivaLowRes - only preview and screen-sized images; and uvaBitonal- bitonal TIFFs only. One content model and production standard were set for image metadata.

Texts are represented in a local extension of the TEI DTD, along with encoding guudelines. There are three content models for text: uvaGenText - transcription with no page images; uvaPageBook - page images with no transcription; and uvaBook which has both transcription and page images. All page images must conform to the image standards.

Archival finding aids were specified - uvaEAD (encoded archival description 2002). Images and texts must conform to the content models.

There are two default disseminators on every object: Default access behavior, including getPreview, getFullView, getLabel, getDefaultContent; and Admin and descriptive metadata behaviors. There are also class-specific disseminators for different kinds of objects.

They built some tools for users of the DL, including a "shopping cart" for people to collect their digital objects as they search and browse, and then do things with that collection, e.g. to create a slide-show for a lecture.

They had to create processes to convert legacy images, texts, and finding aids, as well as the work flow for getting content into the repository - this wasn't primarily a technical issue but changing the way library catalogers do business.

There's a demo at http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/collections/

Posted by oren at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Hypercontent

Alex Vigdor from Columbia University is talking about HyperContent - a web content management system that is a JA-SIG project.

Alex's slides are here.

The client is browser-based, with data kept in XML. It maintains a history of file revisions and has granular permissions. It allows set up of approvals, notifications and scehduled publications and emails.

The resulting content is pushed out to be served by Apache or whatever web server you use.

It automatically generates navigation and site maps.

Content authoring tools include wysiwyg html and xml editing, image conversion, drag & drop navigation and site map amanagement, dublin core metadata, vcard contact info w/ldap lookup, spell checking in multiple languages, etc. It also provides image watermarking.

Access to the repository includes local, FTP, & SFTP. They have plans to support WebDAV in the future. The publishing is handled by a queue system that handles the staging of processing and distribution among cluster members.

There's a simple but functional workflow model.

There's pluggable authentication which uses JAAS LoginModules. They've made it compatible with CAS too. They will integrate with JA-SIG groups and permissions that have been split out from uPortal.

They can feed XML or XHTML to uPortal channels.

Version 2 beta is winding down.

WSRP and UDDI portlet publishing will be looked into soon.

Posted by oren at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Carnegie Mellon's Content Management selection

Update 22 Feb 2006 - Doug (not Tom!) wrote to let me know I got his first name wrong - sorry, Doug!

Tom Doug Blair from CMU is talking about their selection process for a Content Management system.

Tom Doug notes that there are institutional problems and that you have to have institutional will to solve the problems. They have about 120 web practitioners in a group that is guiding the process. THere are six committees: Portal, Search, Standards & Practices, Infrastructure, Marketing, and CMS.

The CMS committee interviewed a couple of dozen people across the campus about their web publishing practices. They brought them back in the room to reflect back their findings - they found that having that discussion changed the answers and refined the results.

From that they wrote an RFP, which they checked with a consultant to make sure they were using the same terminology as vendors use. That RFP was released today.

Tom Doug notes that there are several things a CMS will not do - including improving the quality of content, changing human processes, or making content more timely.

He also notes to expect some resistance from practitioners. It's important the process is transparent to the people participating - and requires thinking broadly about governance of the process.

Posted by oren at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Content Management at Georgetown

Piet Niederhausen from Georgetown isn talking about their content management.

Piet differentiates managing departmental content from institutional content.

They have a graph of their institutional content and how the major pieces relate to each other. For instance the CMS manages content about people, so a faculty member would have CG, Media profiles, publications, etc.

The idea of syndicating content to be used in different forms such as RSS, podcasts, etc becomes important. This implies a cultural shift where presentation of content is driven by topics rather than organizations or units. The CMS tools should be able to gather content and aggregate it and syndicate it. So they find themselves working on a separate syndication layer which is separate. It's about collecting data from different places, caching it, and making it available in different forms.

The CMS should be able to easily reference information stored in various repositories, such as in the course management system, institutional filesystems and departmental websites, etc.

This is an interesting and holistic view of content management that bears thinking about.

Posted by oren at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Content Management Survey

Tom Dopirak is going over the survey that was done on Content Management for the CSG meeting. Slides are online at http://www.stonesoup.org/Meeting.next/repos.pres/

Only about ten institutions offer institutional level CM systems, and they're mostly vendors instead of open source implementations.

The primary business drivers were to distribute responsibility for content development and to separate content from design.

Most are using Web browsers as publishing targets but many also target mobile devices. Delaware targets both RSS and email for publishing.

Almost none of the respondents are using complex workflow. Most are using just two roles. In response to a question Georgetown stated that they found that most departments do all of the review of content offline before it gets into the CMS, and that almost no roles are used.

Posted by oren at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] OKI Repository OSIDs

Jeff Merriman from MIT is talking about the OKI Repository OSIDs.

Jeff makes the distingtion between Data Specifications, Interface specifications, and protocol specifications as separate parts of interoperability that should be separated out explicitly.

The Repository OSID is a Service Interface only - it's silent on protocol/access technology. There are Java, PHP, and Objective-C instantiations of the binding. The spec is supportive of various metadata through "typing".

Jeff demonstrated a number of applications searching and retrieving data from a range of disparate repositories using the OSIDs. One compelling application is the Vue2 image-enabled concept mapping tool, which allows hierarchical narratives as presentations.

Documentation is online at http://www.okiproject.org/specs/osid_12.html

In response to a question about the relationship between this Repository OSID and the JSR170 content management spec, Jeff talked about how the OSID is more narrowly focused (JSR170 includes things like workflow that will be in other OSIDs), but that it should be possible to map from one to the other and they plan to work on that at some point.

Posted by oren at 8:31 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Twin Peaks Navigator

Brad Wheeler from Indiana is talking about the Twin Peaks Navigator which is intended to connect course management systems with repository content.

One of the issues this hopes to solve is the issue of students having to buy course packs containing photocopies of data the institution already has online.

They wanted to be able to store pointers to all sorts of digital content, even if it's in a protected source such as a library database.

The idea is for a faculty member to be able to easily embed links to data sources within the online course content. In the implementation there's a button that invokes a library search within the WYSIWYG editor. Very cool!

http://www.twinpeaks.libraryinfotech.org/
https://twinpeaks.dev.java.net/

The hope is to have this integrated into the next version of Sakai.

Posted by oren at 7:50 AM | Comments (0)

Chandler in a Nutshell

Mimi Yin from OSAF has posted a great set of slides titled Chandler In A Nutshell. These slides show the real innovative work the the OSAF folks are doing on re-envisioning the ways in which people actually interact with their personal data. It's worth looking at this.

Posted by oren at 7:05 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Long Workshop on Repositories: DSpace update

David Millman from Columbia is giving an update on MIT's DSpace repository. David notes that the first year of DSpace was a focus on how to approach the idea of an institutional repository, not particularly on the technology.

There are 103 live DSpace sites, 38 in the US and 65 outside the US. Those numbers are from a CNI survey.

Posted by oren at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG Fall 2005] Long Workshop on Repositories: Fedora update

Tim Sigmon from UVa is leading off with an update on the Fedora repository. Tim's slides are here.

The repository functionality exposes a number of APIs through web services: management, access, search, index search, and an OAI provider. Authn and Authz modules will be coming out in release 2.1, at the end of this month.

Different diseminators "vend out" different views of an object - for instance, a gif and a tif of the same image.

Version 2.0 is the current version, came out in Jan 2005. It changed the underlying description of storage to an XML description called FOXML. They also added representation of object-to-object relationships with an RDF schema - that's the "resource index". For instance you can store that objects are members of a collection. The RI search allows querying of those relationships.

In 2.1 they're converting from a Mozilla license to an ECL license. It will have Authentication Plugins for Tomcat user/password, LDAP, or Radius, and an Authorization model using XML-based policies written in XACML. Policies can be repository-wide or on specific objects. There will be a Policy Builder Client with a simple UI to create access policies that will generate the XACML. They're also adding a Directory Ingest Service and client tool to facilitate ingest of hierarchical directories and zip or jar files. The tools will allow automatic representation of that hierarchy in Fedora.

Fedora was not built with an easy UI in mind - it was built as a repository that applications could be built on top of. But development will begin this fall on an web-based Institutional Repository client.

They're planning a lot of work on federating repositories. Shibboleth implementation is almost done.

VTLS is offering commercial support for Fedora, and have done a bunch of work on enhancements, including making Fedora repositories visible to Google searching.

Posted by oren at 6:43 AM | Comments (0)

Don Norman on the limits of Human Centered Design

Usable design expert Donald Norman has written an interesting article that discusses the shortcomings of the currently popular approach to designing systems based around human input, usually called Human Centered Design or User Centered Design. I think he articulates far better than I can some of the factors that cause me to be uneasy with a blind commitment to UCD methodologies. Definitely worth a read.

One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their complaints and critiques seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their software gets more complex and less understandable with each revision. Activity-Centered philosophy tends to guard against this error because the focus is upon the Activity, not the Human. As a result, there is a cohesive, well-articulated design model. If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.

Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the suggestions and evaluate them in terms of the requirements of the activity. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Paradoxically, the best way to satisfy users is sometimes to ignore them.

Posted by oren at 3:37 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2005

[Internet2] General Session - Richard Bendis

Richard Bendis is prsident & CEO of Innovation Philaselphia.

Wireless Philadelphia is the local effort to be one of the first totally connected wireless cities in the US. The rollout effort will start this month. Interestingly enough, one of the objectives in the vision statement is to reduce the cost of city government. There will be 2,500 WiFil access points on light poles connected to WiMax installations on rooftops.

The City is viewing this as a way of encouraging and enabling the growth of small and mid-sized businesses throughout the city, as well as enabling learning for students across the city.

Wireless Philadelphia is a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit. It issued an RFP for the network in April. There were two finalists, HP and Earthlink, and decision will be made this month. The entire city network is expected to be available in Summer/Fall 2006. Is this cool, or what?

Posted by oren at 8:03 AM | Comments (0)

[Internet2] Identity Management Session

I came in late (east coast early morning sessions are hard the first day) to a session on identity management to hear Bob Morgan talking about how we're likely to see two different kinds of federated identity management in the future: one that is driven by compliance and legislation where there are a small number of large identity providers at a national level; the other being lots of small loosely-federated identity providers in an ever-shifting tapestry as needs require.

Now Kirk Brown from Sun is talking about their concept of federated identity management. While there's not a lot of detail here, it strikes me that their solution is a broker between multiple identities and identity providers. The example he gave of this in use is at Wells Fargo in their bill-paying service, which brokers lots of identities behind the scenes.

Mike Jones from Microsoft describes himself as a "protocol evangelist" within Microsoft. He's talking about how identities work within contexts - coffee cards work at a given coffee stand, bank cards work at an ATM, etc. He gives the old example of using a SSN as a student ID as an example of misuse of a context. The lessons MS learned from Passport. Posport was designed to be an identity provider for Microsoft's online properties - where it's been a huge success (250+ million users). But it was also hoped to be a global Internet id provder - where it was a complete failure, for social and political reasons, not technical.

Mike is going through Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity. The conclusion they came to from those laws is to define a Metasystem of identities - something that will do for identity what IP did for defining a common layer of internetworking. Like IP did not replace ethernet, this metasystem will not replace SAML or Kerberos or X.509. This is the basis of WS-Trust and WS-MetadataExchange web services. He showed a mockup of how this might look to a user, where information about the identity of a site is presented to the user for their perusal so they can decide to accept it or not, and then the user can choose which of many of their identities they want to present back to the site. They're talking to Apple, Mozilla, Sun and others about these protocols.

Posted by oren at 6:56 AM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2005

Fall CSG icalendar file

I put together a icalendar format ( .ics) file for next week's CSG meeting at CMU. It should load into Apple ical, Oracle calendar, and perhaps others with no problem.

If anybody uses this besides me, note that I did not include the Westwood Advisory Council meeting on it, as that's not an event that everybody at CSG goes to.

Posted by oren at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2005

[Calconnect SF] Lots of calendaring details... and interoperability testing

Well, we've spent the last two days going over lots of details about calendaring interoperability - Yesterday was mostly about hammering through a long list of use-cases. While I haven't typically been a big fan of use-cases for designing software, they are critical for being able to define success in interoperability between disparate pieces of software. If we do this right, and the interoperability tests eventually meet the use-cases, then we will know we have success.

Eight of us had a great Thai dinner last night and talked about trying to get to a point where we actually have a set of roadmaps that define the work we're doing in the CalConnect group - and in a moment of weakness I volunteered to coordinate that effort. If anybody has good examples of technology roadmaps they want to pass along, I'd appreciate it.

Today we spent most of the morning in talking about domain models, without, I think, achieving complete clarity, but seeing more of the issues.

This afternoon has been spent catching up on the work on the CalDAV standard - lots of great work going on in further defining the standard, and it looks like there will be a final call on the draft sometime soon.

Then we talked about authentication models for CalDAV - there's lots of problems with web authentication, and WebDAV has inherited those problems, and therefore CalDAV inherits those problems.

Then we discussed time zones. Hoo-boy - can you believe that there is no authoritative listing of time zones? The best available is the so-called Olson database, which is something put together as a hobby by someone named Olson who works at NIH. Sheesh. And who knew that there are some time zones that vary from others by 15 minutes? Yikes.

The interop wrapped up - no detailed results shared yet, but everybody felt that it went really well. We had six different implementations of CalDAV attempting interoperation with each other - fabulous!

Posted by oren at 5:18 PM | Comments (0)

Ben Goldacre on bad science journalism

Ben Goldacre has a great column in the Guardian Unlimited on how badly science gets represented in the media.

Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.

Why? Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word "biophoton" on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

Posted by oren at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)

The vision thing - CNET talks to Bill Gates

Is it just me, or does Bill Gates sound really confused and muddled in this CNET interview?

The architecture we are interested in we call server-equals-service, so that we will have the full Exchange capability that you can subscribe to, where we run it, or you can have it on-premise with the traditional licensing approach. At this conference, we do give out APIs (application programming interfaces) for the MSN Search and the MSN Virtual Earth capability, so things that have been cloud-based services, you can have client applications that other services can connect to. So, I'd say the evolution is server to service, and bringing that symmetry in.

Posted by oren at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Carlo Longino - Embracing The Mobile Hacker Ethic

Carlo Longino has a good post over in Gizmodo that talks about Nokia's new Python implementation on its Series 60 phones - I look forward to trying it out.

The port of Python is a full implementation with a high degree of portability from the desktop environment, opening mobile development to a whole new class of programmers—which was its primary goal, says Erik Smartt, the program manager of Python for Series 60. “By choosing a developer-friendly, easy-to-learn language, Nokia is making it possible for casual developers to tinker with their mobile phones and innovate without the typical investment costs for embedded system development,” he says. “Bringing a language like Python to Nokia devices changes the rules on who can create applications.”

Posted by oren at 4:55 PM | Comments (0)

[Calconnect SF] Timezone changes

I'm in San Francisco again, this time for the Calconnect Calendaring Consortium meeting, hosted by OSAF.

Cyrus Daboo just spoke about the upcoming changes in Daylight Savings Time in the US, which have impacts for calendaring software. The bill that got passed by the US Congress pushed the changes back to 2007, instead of the originally proposed 2006.

There's some discussion about the fact that when this happens it will likely put US DST dates out of sync with the Canadian ones, which will make owners of devices pick between, for instance, US Eastern timezones and Canadian Eastern timezones.

Posted by oren at 9:22 AM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2005

Andrew Rasiej runs for Public Advocate of NYC

Last month I noted Tom Friedman's op-ed in the NY Times calling for more public broadband connectivity. In that piece he mentions Andrew Rasiej, who's running for Public Advocate office in New York on a platform calling for citywide municipally-owned WiFi.

Micah Sifry dropped me an email last night noting that there's only three days left until the NY primary.

We've certainly seen the devastating results of underinvestment in public infrastructure all too tragically demonstrated.

In the next decade, the fabric of network connectivity will be an even more critical part of the infrastructure that we depend on to work, whatever might happen - so calling for making those investments now seems prudent to me.

And I like the fact that Rasiej contrasts the cost of a wifi rollout with proposed investments for sports facilities:

Philadelphia has already begun to implement a universal Wi-Fi network
that will cost only $6-$7 dollars per resident to build. That means for
about a quarter of what the Mayor wanted to spend on the failed West
Side stadium project, we can connect New York. So we have the technological know-how. We have the resources. All that’s missing is the political will.

It certainly seems self-evident that widespread network connectivity throughout New York City is likely to generate more positive and higher-order economic activity in the city than a football stadium.

While I suspect that there's a lot more to Rasiej than just his call for city wireless (he's a cofounder of the Personal Democracy Forum, for example), and I don't know all the issues involved in this race, nor what the Public Advocate of the city actually does, his forthright stance on this issue certainly shows more leadership than we've seen in other quarters lately.

So if you live in NYC, get out and vote!

Posted by oren at 8:06 AM | Comments (0)

September 9, 2005

Microsoft, Massachusetts and open document formats

A lot of fuss is being made of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' move towards mandating open document formats.

I can understand the desire to make sure that government documents remain readable for the long haul - who wants to try to open the Declaration of Independence a hundred years later only to get a message like "Windows cannot open this file"? (well hopefully we'll have something better by then).

On the other hand, this is being widely interpreted as an anti-Microsoft move. Apparently the Commonwealth is requiring documents be in either Adobe PDF format or the recently approved OASIS Standard OpenDocument format.

Something seems really wrong here to me - Microsoft announced in June that the next version of Office will use their new XML formats as the default file format, and that those formats will be well documented and royalty free. And they're walking the walk on that front. While these XML formats are not real standards, debated and approved in open forums, at least it gives some hope that documents created in them will be able to be decoded in the far distant future regardless of the fate of the particular software that created them.

Microsoft's support for it's XML formats seem more open to me than Adobe's support for PDF, although it's far newer.

This move seems to have technology religion overtones to me - and while I've been a frequent critic of some of Microsoft's technologies and business practices, this seems like one area where they're doing something that is more open than many, and I think they should be encouraged to do more of it.

Posted by oren at 4:23 PM | Comments (0)

September 8, 2005

Sometimes things really do get fixed: ical import/export in Oracle Calendar

About a year-and-a-half ago I wrote about the problem with importing and exporting ical standard (rfc 2445, not Apple's confusingly named calendar software) calendar data from Oracle Calendar.

I had some conversation with the Oracle Calendar crew about this when I was in Montreal last summer, and they assured me that it was a known problem that would eventually get fixed.

I hadn't thought about it for a while, but while I was out on vacation last week Kathy Christoph from the University of Wisconsin dropped a note to say she was trying to import some ical data from the Educause Conference Itinerary Builder into Oracle Cal and was having problems, and asked if I had any advice.

At the time I wrote a short Python script to handle converting data back and forth, but it looks like I didn't save that when I changed to the new iMac G5 last month.

So being a curious type, I installed a recent version of the Oracle Calendar client, version 10.1.1 and tried importing data from Educause. And it worked!

So thanks to Kathy for prodding me into looking at this again, and thanks to the Oracle crew for making progress in interperability!

Posted by oren at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2005

Moving old tapes to hard disk using Audio Hijack

I'm getting ready to spend the weekend in Bellingham at the 25 year reunion (I couldn't possibly be that old, could I?) of the band I played in during the early '80s, Eddie & The Atlantics.

Last night while rummaging through old band stuff I came across the first demo tape we did and the recording of our wild first birthday gig at the Rainbow Tavern (our home in Seattle), and I decided that I'd try to get them on my computer.

I dug up a cord to connect the RCA output jacks on my tape deck to the line-in mini-phone plug on my Mac, downloaded the excellent Audio Hijack application from Rogue Amoeba, used their LineIn app to get the line input into the audio subsystem, and I was off to the races!

I stayed up much too late working my way nostalgically through both tapes, and now have them safely ensconced in iTunes, where I can burn them to CDs for my old bandmates.

That oughta impress them.

Audio Hijack is a great small app and a great value for only $16.

Posted by oren at 5:00 PM | Comments (0)

My Op-Ed piece in the Register

As you may recall from July, Ashlee Vance had some critical commentary about our Dell/Napster deal in the Register.

That prompted a rather lively email exchange between the two of us, that started out sort of flamey on both our parts, but then turned into a substantive discussion of the issues around institutions getting involved in providing music downloading services for students. I'll post some of that discussion soon, but one result was that Ashlee invited me to write an op-ed piece on the topic for the Reg.

That piece has just been published, under the headline How Napster and DRM arrived at University of Washington. They even put in a picture!

All in all, it's been great chatting with Ashlee about the topic, and it's very nice of the Reg to offer the opportunity to get my opinion in.

Posted by oren at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2005

Google talks about Google Talk

Google has released it's IM service, dubbed Google Talk. There's a native Windows client that does voice as well as text, and there are instructions for configuring other IM clients for use, including iChat, Gaim, Trillian, and Adium.

I haven't tried it on Windows yet, but it works fine with Adium on OS X.

I'm orensr if you're looking for me - see you online.

Posted by oren at 9:43 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2005

[OSAF/CSG Recalibration] OSAF / Mozilla relations

Mitch is talking about the future of the Mozilla projects and how they relate to OSAF projects. He likened Mozilla to being similar to Harry Potter - having lived with the repressive aunt and uncle while it was Netscape, and having blossomed into unanticipated success with Firefox.

In this conversation Mitch is very careful to note that his role at Mozilla is as the chair of the board of the Foundation, not as someone in charge of product direction or priorities.

The new Mozilla Corporation is organizing around the product development at Mozilla, working very hard on Firefox 1.5 and looking ahead at 2.0, with a lot of work going on in the graphics rendering engine, etc.

There is a Mozilla project that is working towards making Python a first-class language for Mozilla development. Mitch notes that it's just not realistic to expect devlopers to write Mozilla extensions in Javascript these days. This could make integration between Chandler and Mozilla easier.

There is a Chandler project getting started to look at whether it makes sense to look at moving Chandler's cross-platform GUI development tools from wxWidgets to XUL (the platform used by Mozilla). This would be a large long-term shift which would not take place before Chandler 1.0 is released.

One possible Chandler parcel that could integrate with Firefox - Integrating web-browsing stuff with email, tasks, and calendaring. Effectively types everything you look at in Firefox as Chandler items that can be searched and integrated with other stuff in the Chandler repository, synchronized, and shared.

Mozilla is kind of a platform and kind of not - it's very hard to build applications other than a browser on top of the code base. That is slowly being addressed, but certainly makes it difficult for Thunderbird to progress. There are questions about how good is good enough - what should be the aspirations for Thunderbird?

Posted by oren at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

[OSAF/CSG Recalibration] Talking about mobile devices

We're talking this morning about the requirements for calendar access from mobile devices. There are widespread deployments of SyncML in the mobile device space. There also is talk about creating CalDAV clients on mobile devices - there is at least one proof-of-concept implementation on a J2ME platform. OSAF is gathering information about where the CSG schools are with mobile devices.

Posted by oren at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

Jon Udell - Universities as bellwethers for IT's future

Jon Udell attended the PKI Summit at Dartmouth College. He writes about that over at InfoWorld, but in his blog he shows that he really gets it when it comes to higher-education IT:

Universities differ from other large enterprises in ways that make them bellwethers for IT's future. The user population is transient, hardware and software monocultures cannot be imposed, and collaboration across institutional borders is mission-critical. These are excellent circumstances in which to evolve methods of identity management that will also meet the requirements of corporations as they increasingly outsource work, connect with customers through the web, and engage with partners in federations of web services.

Posted by oren at 11:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 16, 2005

Carl Longino - Why DRM Will Kill Mobile Music

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing points out this insightful post by Carl Longino.

What's funny about all of this is that the DRM doesn't work anyway. The latest Foo Fighters CD features similar copy protection, but that didn't stop it from topping the file-sharing charts. Not only that, you've got bands and labels telling people how to circumvent the DRM -- the Dave Matthews Band tells buyers to rip the CD through Windows Media Player, then burn a copy with it, then rip the copy into iTunes to get the music onto an iPod. Just so we're clear: you've got one of the artists with DRMed CDs telling people how to work around the DRM and make "unprotected" MP3 files of the songs, with one of the labels giving the same advice. Why bother having DRM if you're going to tell people how to get around it? If that's not a tacit admission of its ineffectiveness, I don't know what is.

Posted by oren at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

August 7, 2005

Creating Passionate Users blog

One of Ted's OSCON posts pointed me to the Creating Passionate Users blog. Some great reading.

An example:

Remember, learning is like a drug to the brain (actually, it is a drug). The best user experiences--combined with a clear path to greater expertise and the promise of more time in flow--are like a healthier, happier form of crack. One of the best examples of this drug-dealer model in software is Apple.

With iMovie, for example, the first one is free. But once you're hooked, you find yourself wanting capabilities found only in the $299 Final Cut Express. You find yourself wanting, no needing to do things you never even imagined before you started playing around with iMovie. And for a certain percentage of users, even Final Cut Express will have limitations. Now you need the $999 Final Cut Pro or--for just a few dollars more, what the heck--might as well go for the whole Final Cut Studio. They've managed to teach you to want the most expensive versions of their products. Then they do the same thing with sound (Garage Band --> Logic Express --> Logic Pro). It seems Apple has figured out the optimum price points for their "next levels", in order of FREE, $299, then $999.

But even if the goal is not to teach or inspire users to appreciate your higher-end products, just having goals to strive for is what matters. Whether the promise is that you can become a first-level moderator, a church usher, one who can use the RAW features of Photoshop, a CSS guru, a Sun Certified Business Component Developer, a double black diamond snowboarder, or a 3-dan go player... never forget that where there is passion, there is always a next level.

Posted by oren at 9:08 AM | Comments (0)

August 6, 2005

John Gruber replies to Cory's rant on Apple's use of Trusted Computing

A few days ago I noted Cory Doctorow's rant about Apple's rumored use of the Trusted Computing platform, where he paints a picture of Apple trying to lock down content in many nefarious ways. Now John Gruber has what seems to me to be a very sensible take on this:

Certainly such a scenario is a potential use of Trusted Computing DRM mechanisms — and such a scenario would indeed be dreadful — but it’s a far stretch to call it the “point of Trusted Computing”. In the actual case here, Apple’s Developer Transition Kits — which, I’ll remind you, may bear zero resemblance, internally or externally, to the actual Intel-powered computers Apple will eventually ship to real customers — are (reportedly) using TPM for one and only one purpose: to prevent the OS from being run on non-Apple hardware.

There is no indication, none, zero, not even a whiff, that Apple intends to enable, let alone encourage, developers to create software with the TPM file-access authorization-locking described by Doctorow above. None.

This is not about third-party software developers limiting access to your data. This is about Apple limiting access to their operating system.

Sounds like there's no need for alarm. Move along folks, there's nothing to see here.

Posted by oren at 8:21 AM | Comments (0)

August 4, 2005

Tom Friedman to politicians - wake up and smell the wi-fi

I've been watching as the telcos use their lobbying muscle to try to get state legislatures to pass measures prohibiting municipalities from building their own wireless infrastructure.

In a NY Times op-ed piece today Tom Friedman is sounding a wakeup call:

Congress is on the case. It dropped everything last week to pass a bill to protect gun makers from shooting victims' lawsuits. The fact that the U.S. has fallen to 16th in the world in broadband connectivity aroused no interest. Look, I don't even like cellphones, but this is not about gadgets. The world is moving to an Internet-based platform for commerce, education, innovation and entertainment. Wealth and productivity will go to those countries or companies that get more of their innovators, educators, students, workers and suppliers connected to this platform via computers, phones and P.D.A.'s.

A new generation of politicians is waking up to this issue. For instance, Andrew Rasiej is running in New York City's Democratic primary for public advocate on a platform calling for wireless (Wi-Fi) and cellphone Internet access from every home, business and school in the city. If, God forbid, a London-like attack happens in a New York subway, don't trying calling 911. Your phone won't work down there. No wireless infrastructure. This ain't Tokyo, pal.

Posted by oren at 7:58 AM | Comments (0)

Yahoo audio search beta

Yahoo has a beta of a new audio file search service. They're indexing songs available from many online music services, including not only iTunes, Napster, etc, but also Audio Lunchbox and other web sites (there's a list of services indexed ).

Using it turns up that Musicmatch has the Jethro Tull album I was looking for the other day.

Searching "Whispering Johnson" does indeed turn up my own band's tunes (though not first on the list).

It seems to me that aggregator services such as these should, in the long run, increase pressure to distribute music in standard formats.

Posted by oren at 6:23 AM | Comments (0)

August 3, 2005

Open format music downloads from Audio Lunchbox

I think I've glimpsed the future, and it's available now at Audio Lunchbox!

Chris Anderson pointed me to Audio Lunchbox in his Long Tail Blog posting on niche aggregators.

AL offers downloadable music for the same 99 cents a song as the other downloading services, but the songs are available in regular mp3 or ogg vorbis formats.

While there isn't the same breadth of major label coverage as at iTunes or Napster, it's not just totally obscure artists either. Names I recognize from an initial perusing range from Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Doc Watson, and Steve Earle to Al Jarreau, Albert Ayler and the Rebirth Brass Band. Not to mention my childhood neighbor Stu Goldberg.

That's right - legal, downloadable music from real record labels in open, non-copy-protected digital formats.

I know that Audio Lunchbox will be the first place I stop when looking for new music online.

Posted by oren at 4:06 AM | Comments (1)

August 1, 2005

Joel hits the high notes

I really enjoyed Joel Spolsky's latest essay, Hitting the High Notes, where he talks about how to have a successful software company you really need to hire the best programmers. It's full of good lines, like:

The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.

Five Jim Davis's -- creator of that unfunny cartoon cat, where 20% of the jokes are about how Monday sucks and the rest are about how much the cat likes lasagna (and those are the punchlines!) ... five Jim Davis's could spend the rest of their lives writing comedy and never, ever produce the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld.

The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful, satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And they're not going to make a dent in Apple's market share because the magical design talent is just not there. They don't have it.

The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen of the Night without that famous f6.

You really should go read it.

Posted by oren at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)

Online music: The whole is less than the sum of the parts

What's wrong with this musical picture?

I gladly admit to being a music junkie - I spent a good part of my younger life playing music for a living, I still play when I can, and I am constantly looking for (and finding) new things to listen to. Sure, I still go back and listen to old favorites, but that has no impact on the drive to discover music yet unheard, artists yet unknown.

I am also pressed for time and have enough income that I am willing to spend some money to acquire music the easy and convenient way.

So the emergence of commercial online music sources should be exactly what I need - lots of information about the artists (usually from the All Music Guide), ways of cross-linking performers and genres, wide (if not comprehensive) selection, and good (if not great) quality sound files.

I've been an avid user of the iTunes Music Store since it first went live, and lately I've enjoyed trying out the Napster To Go subscription service with a Dell DJ portable player.

So what's not to like?

It's the damn copy protection, of course. Let me explain.

I have two computers at work - one Mac and one Windows box. I have a Mac laptop. I have two computers at home, again one Mac and one PC, plus I have a Slim Devices Squeezebox for streaming digital music to my stereo. I have a Rio flash memory mp3 player and would like to buy a hard drive player.

The music purchased from iTunes will play on both Mac and Windows (as long as I use the iTunes application in both places), but not on the Squeezebox or on the Rio or the DJ. The Napster music will work on Windows PCs (as long as I use the Napster application) and on the DJ, but not on the Macs, the Squeezebox, or the Rio.

In addition, there is no way to integrate music from Napster and iTunes together into a single collection, which should be one of the great advantages of managing a music collection on a computer.

All this in the interest of trying to lock up the music so I won't put it up on a peer-to-peer filesharing network - which I wasn't going to do do anyway.

Do I occasionally make copies of songs or even entire albums for my friends? Sure - we've all been doing that since the advent of cassette recorders in the early '70s. I didn't notice that having a negative impact on record sales over the years - did you?

At least with iTunes there are ways of making the files work on other systems. Funny thing - I haven't noticed Apple's sales declining either.

So, as much as I'm enjoying the all-you-can-eat model of the Napster subscription, I'm not going to buy an account. I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to let my choice of computing environments be dictated by what music service will play where.

Astute historians will recall that none of this is new - the music industry has a long history of combatting the rise of new ways of enjoying music:

In 1907 the sheet music industry fought against player-piano rolls:

White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company 209 U.S. 1 (1907) was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that manufacturers of music rolls for player pianos did not have to pay royalties to the composers. The ruling was based on a holding that the piano rolls were not copies of the plaintiffs' copyrighted sheet music, but were instead parts of the machine that reproduced the music.

This case was subsequently eclipsed by Congress's intervention in the form of an amendment to the Copyright Act in 1909, introducing a compulsory license for the manufacture and distribution of such "mechanical" embodiments of musical works.

You can see Chapter 11 of Donald Clarke's The Rise and Fall of Popular Music for details about the running battles among the record companies and radio stations and publishers during the 1940's that led to ASCAP publishers boycotting radio stations and a musicians strike.

Right up to the late '70s where the industry blamed a sales slump on the advent of home taping on cassette recorders:

...anyone who rewinds to the last major music-biz slump will find some interesting parallels. In 1978, record sales began to fall, and the major labels blamed a larcenous new technology: cassette tapes. The international industry even had an outraged official slogan: "Home taping is killing music." The idea was that music fans—ingrates that they are—would rather pirate songs than pay for them, and that sharing favorite songs was a crime against hard-working musicians (rather than great word-of-mouth advertising). Cassettes were so anathema to the biz that Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren could think of no more provocative way to launch his new band, Bow Wow Wow, than with a ode to home taping, "C30, C60, C90, Go!''

By the time Bow Wow Wow bowed in 1980, however, the crisis was almost over. It turned out that home taping had not killed music. Instead, the central problem was the collapsing popularity of dance-pop—lively, sexy, but personality-free music whose appeal was broad but thin. They called it disco back then, and the name has never recovered from the era's backlash. Although usually termed teen-pop, the music of 'N Sync and Britney Spears is not unlike disco: Both are intellectually underachieving, cookie-cutter styles that have made stars of performers not known primarily for their skills as singers, songwriters, or musicians.

And so it continues to the present day. Mark Cuban hits the nail on the head yesterday with an essay titled "The definition of insanity.. The Music Industry", where he says:

There is an old saying that the definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting the outcome to change”

I think of this saying everytime I hear about music industry efforts to impact piracy.

After some great summations of the details he goes on to conclude:

The music industry has a very unique opportunity to really re-establish itself as a growth industry. It’s not like they don’t know all of the above. For whatever reason, they just love to do the same things over and over… Which to me is just insane.

One has to think that sooner or later the folks in the music industry will come to their senses and offer music in open formats at reasonable prices. I'll be waiting with my wallet open when they do.

Posted by oren at 9:58 AM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2005

UW's Dell / Napster deal - finances and terms released

The UW Daily obtained the details of the University's deal with Dell and Napster to offer Napster services for the students in the residence halls this fall.

The article by Kayla Webley is here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Blog has this to say:

How much does a college have to pay to give its students an academic year's worth of legal music downloads? Not quite as much as you might think.

As part of a deal announced earlier this month, the University of Washington at Seattle will fork over $24,000 to Napster, the online music service, to provide students living on campus with eight-month subscriptions. The money will come from royalties generated by the university's own technology licenses. The price tag isn't cheap, but it's not terrible for a university with almost 6,000 residential students: According to most estimates, colleges can expect to pay $2 or $3 a month for each student who signs up.

Ashlee Vance in The Register, on the other hand, is outraged, in a story headlined "University bans iPod adverts":

But here's the real rub.

"Under the provisions the University must exclusively promote the Dell branded DJ, secure two Dell kiosks on campus to feature Dell products and services, facilitate a Dell launch event in the back-to-school timeframe, host Dell information on the UW website, execute an email campaign and participate in a case study," The Daily reported.

So students have been put on a music meat market where they're being force fed a service that doesn't work with Mac OS X, Linux or even older versions of Windows and that doesn't work with the leading MP3 player. Instead, the kids will have to listen to a sales pitch for Dell's embarrassing device and nothing else.

Not that Ashlee ever actually checked with the University to see what really is going on here - he prefers to get all his information second hand.

And not that he's got an opinion to grind here - but you might want to check his other stories:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/21/dell_land_nc/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/12/dell_nc_photos/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/dell_napster_college/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/02/cornell_apple_shame/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/12/ou_napster_tax/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/08/apple_napster_letters/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/09/napster_rochester_survey/

Just for the record, Ashlee - the exclusive promotion on the Dell DJ is within the Napster / Dell deal.

As we've told every one of the dozens of reporters who've called us about this story (As far as I know Ashlee has not called), we have been talking to Apple about possible ways we might leverage the iTunes Music Store for our campus population. If Apple comes up with a program that makes it possible for us to offer iTunes music to our students at any affordable pricing, we'll be very happy to participate. So far Apple don't seem to be very interested in the university market (perhaps the advantage of being the market leader by a long shot).

As everyone probably knows, I'm certainly not a fan of copy-protected music that only runs on one operating system or one type of portable player. I know from talking to them that the folks at Napster would be very happy to make their content available on iPods, if Apple was willing to offer them the copy-protection that they use (and that the record labels require). I also assume that Dell would likewise be happy to put iTunes Music Store content on their DJ players, if Apple would make that possible.

I'm just as sick and tired as the next guy of online music being locked up in such a way that makes the only good choice to go buy CDs and rip them myself (though even CD's are being copy protected now). But I think Apple's just as guilty as Napster and the others.

And at least Napster is interested in our business.

Posted by oren at 4:54 PM | Comments (1)

July 26, 2005

NINJAM looks very cool

What is NINJAM?

NINJAM is a program to allow people to make real music together via the Internet. Every participant can hear every other participant. Each user can also tweak their personal mix to his or her liking. NINJAM is cross-platform, with clients available for Mac OS X and Windows.

NINJAM uses compressed audio which allows it to work with any instrument or combination of instruments. You can sing, play a real piano, play a real saxophone, play a real guitar with whatever effects and guitar amplifier you want, anything. If your computer can record it, then you can jam with it (as opposed to MIDI-only systems that automatically preclude any kind of natural audio collaboration).

I can't wait to try it out!

Posted by oren at 7:20 AM | Comments (0)

Syllabus Executive Forum

Despite the presence of some of my favorite folks in higher-ed IT leadership (Vijay Kumar, MIT's Phil Long, Ruth Sabean, Kathy Christoph, etc) the day-long Syllabus Executive Forum didn't seem terribly enlightening to me.

If I hear one more IT person say that faculty rewards and promotion systems should change to recognize use of technology in teaching I think I'll scream.

Phil did make one point that resonated with me about how our in trying to perfect the services that organizations offer we can do all the right things in listening to clients, managing processes, and measuring quality, and totally miss the next big development that will cause disruptive change.

He pointed out "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Harvard prof Clayton M. Christensen which I picked up yesterday.

Posted by oren at 7:00 AM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2005

In LA for Syllabus Executive Summit

I'm in LA (Hollywood, to be precise) for the Syllabus 2005 Excecutive Summit tomorrow (Sunday), at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel.

The last time I was in Hollywood was when we lived close to here in the early '80s. In true LA fashion, despite being in the middle of the city, this conference is in a huge hotel which is attached to a theme mall (HOLLYWOOD AND VINE) so you never actually have to go out on the street.

I'm sad to say that given how burned out I am at the moment, that suits me just fine - having a drink and watching baseball highlights in the hotel room is just my speed this evening.

Syllabus is a big higher education computing trade show that I've never been to before. Topics for the Executive summit include serving student populations, aligning IT with institutional goals, and information security as a strategic issue.

Unfortunately, I won't see any of the rest of the conference as I fly back to Seattle tomorrow night.

I'll try to blog as possible during the day tomorrow.

Posted by oren at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)

KEXP begins podcasting

KEXP, Seattle's wonderful independent non-commercial popular music station has begun KEXP.

The first two podcasts are a roundup of some local Northwest US music from KEXP DJ John Richards and a live, in-studio appearance by Seattle hip-hop group Boom Bap Project.

They're both available by searching "kexp" in the podcasting section of iTunes or from the KEXP podcasting page.

Congrats to Tom Mara, Kevin Cole, and the whole KEXP crew. While the technology behind podcasting is simple, securing the rights to share music with audiences this way is anything but.

Posted by oren at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2005

Mark Cuban on podcasting

I find myself increasingly drawn to people who can peer through the hype surrounding the evolution of technology with a good dose of common sense. Tim Bray is one of those people. So is Mark Cuban (cofounder of broadcast.com and current owner of Landmark Theatres and the Dallas Mavericks basketball team).

Mark has a nice post in his blog about the future of podcasting - worth a quick read:

Finally, when those formally known as podcasters do an accounting of the net dollars they earned and compare it to the time they invested, they will realize they made about 17 cents per hour all in.

All that will be left of profit motivated individual podcasters will be the few and far between and probably less than half of a percent of all podcasters (and please don’t anyone post a comment saying…if there are a million podcasters, 1 pct is 10k, half of that is 5k. That’s a ton. I’m making up these numbers to prove a point, not to be literal…Ok?).

And like personal blogs, tens of thousands if not more will stay on as labors of love that we enjoy because of their creativity.

So in about 3 years, the Podcast phenomena will have run its course and will just be a normal part of the digital media landscape.

Posted by oren at 7:30 AM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2005

Trying out a Dell Pocket DJ

Jennifer brought a Dell Pocket DJ by for us to try out yesterday - it's a 5 GB portable music player, basically Dell's equivalent to the iPod Mini.

I've never had a hard-disk portable player (I do own a couple-year-old Rio flash memory player), so I can't compare directly with an iPod, but thought I'd comment on my experience with the DJ so far.

I charged up the battery (there's a cord that connects the USB port to a wall outlet) and installed the Dell software on my Windows box. The Dell software included both the Dell DJ Explorer and Music Match Jukebox 9.

I then connected the DJ to my box with the included USB cable. The first thing I got was a note saying that data transfers would be faster if I connected to a USB 2.0 port - but unfortunately, my box (which is a couple of years old) only has USB 1.0 ports on it.

I then fired up Napster, to see how it would go transferring music to the DJ from Napster To Go. The first thing I got was a message saying that I had to upgrade the firmware on the DJ so it could support the copy protection scheme used by Napster To Go (Microsoft's amusingly named PlaysForSure). The firmware upgrade went ok after some futzing about (I suspect it would have been smoother if IE was my default browser instead of Firefox).

I was then able to transfer songs easily (if slowly, due the USB 1.0 connection) from Napster to the DJ. I continue to be impressed with the breadth of material available on Napster, and having a subscription-based service (as opposed to paying for each song individually) definitely encourages me to explore artists and whole genres I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to (Zephyr turned me on to Cassia Eller and Maria Rita yesteday).

When I went to transfer some of my mp3 files to the DJ things got a little more complicated. The DJ Explorer software could no longer see the DJ at all. Musicmatch 9 seemed to work, but then crashed so hard it locked up Windows, and the songs it said had been transferred did not show up on the DJ.

I figured these problems were a result of the firmware upgrade, so I went looking for corresponding software upgrades. I couldn't find an upgrade for the Explorer software, but there is an upgrade to Musicmatch Jukebox version 10. Of course it's not easy to find the free version (as opposed to the paid versions that have way more features than I needed) - the free one is here.

Once I had installed Musicmatch 10 and had it index my mp3 collection I could move files onto the DJ easily enough - ahh, sweet success!

The DJ seems pretty easy to use, and it's a great size and weight. The sound on the included earbuds is not great (us bass players tend to like a lot more bottom end), but seems good when played through my Koss The Plug in-the-ear buds.

I did try connecting the DJ to my iMac, where I do have USB 2.0, but the Mac and the DJ refused to even acknowledge each other's existence. That seems unfortunate to me - my Rio works fine on the Mac, and the iPods can work on both platforms (with iTunes software).

I'm assuming that Dell will update the firmware and the included software bundle by the time they start shipping product for school to start in the fall. As long as that's done the attractively priced DJ line will be of interest to those who live in a Windows-only environment.

Posted by oren at 7:27 AM | Comments (1)

July 11, 2005

Comparison of coverage of iTunes and Napster

As I threatened to do in last week, I've taken the list of songs from Nick Hornby's book Songbook (known as 31 Songs outside the US) and compared the availability of the 31 songs he wrote about on Napster and iTunes.

The complete results, and appropriate caveats, are listed here.

The bottom line?

The services are pretty close in coverage, at least for this somewhat random sample of songs at this particular point in time. There was one case of an artist carried on one service but not at all on the other (Ani DiFranco shows up on iTunes but not Napster).

There were two cases where Napster had the specific song but iTunes didn't, but had other songs by the same artists (Van Morrison's Caravan, Pissing in a River by Patti Smith) and two cases the other way around (A Minor Incident by Badly Drawn Boy and The Calvary Cross by Richard and Linda Thompson).

Conclusions?

At least at present I wouldn't pick one of these services over the other based on at least this look at coverage.

Posted by oren at 4:19 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2005

The MIT weblog author survey

I took it - spread the word!

Posted by oren at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 7, 2005

The UW makes a deal with Napster and Dell for online music for students

It was announced on Wednesday that we've made a deal with Napster and Dell to provide online music for students in the dorms this coming academic year.

This deal came as a result of the UW Daily (our student newspaper) having published a story in May about how we had been having discussions about whether to provide access to a commercial music download service for students. When I spoke with the Daily I had been hoping to get some gauge of student interest in having a commercial music downloading service available.

We didn't get much student response, but Jennifer Clark, our local Dell representative, did read the article and approached us a few days later about our interest in being the first campus to offer this new joint Dell/Napster service. After a frantic couple of months of discussions, we arrived at final agreements last Friday.

So what's in the deal?

Starting this coming fall, students who live in the dorms will be able to sign up for the Napster Premium service for free. This will allow them to use the Napster application to download music to their PC (Windows XP and 2k only) and play it on that computer. The student can authorize up to three computers to play the files. The files are protected with Microsoft's copy protection scheme so that these files cannot be transferred to portable devices or burned to CDs.

For an extra fee, students will be able to register for the Napster-To-Go service, which allows them to transfer tunes to a Napster-certified portable device. Certified devices include the DJs from Dell as well as others from Creative, iRiver, Samsung, etc - but not Apple (one interesting thing to me is that all the companies call these portable devices "mp3 players" even when the music files they're talking about are definitely *not* in mp3 format).

The subscription will be good for the academic year. Over the summer students will be able to play music they downloaded previously, but will only be able to download new music if they pay for an additional summer service.

When the free subscriptions are over, the student will have the option to convert to a paid subscription. Once the student is no longer a subscriber, the songs will not play anymore.

So how do I feel about the deal?

I'll be very curious to see what the reaction is to this service among the student body in the dorms - how many of them sign up, and what the usage is over time once they do sign up.

I've been playing a little bit with the service, and I think the Napster folks are doing a nice job of trying to build a compelling piece of software - the community elements such as messaging and sharing playlists look intriguing, and the library seems pretty full so far. I'm starting to think that the subscription model is actually a pretty interesting one for music junkies like me, who are always looking for new music to play. For me, the success or failure of such a service will depend on how the library matches up with the particular niches of the long tail that I'm interested in.

Just before we left on vacation my friend Ed gave me Nick Hornby's Songbook (known outside the US as 31 songs), where he writes about, logically enoough, 31 songs that he finds compelling. It's a great read, and, I think, typical of lots and lots of listeners who are listening to some new songs, some old songs, some popular songs, and some way-outish acts that won't be on any Billboard list. The thirty-one songs, by the way, are listed on this Dutch web site). After reading the book I of course want to go listen to the songs mentioned that I'm not familiar with, and I think that will be one interesting test of the extensiveness of the Napster library.

The one big drawback of Napster and all the other commercial music downloading services continues to be the reliance on various copy protection schemes (I refuse to buy into using "Digital Rights Management" (or DRM), the industry's favorite term for this protection - the only rights being managed are those of the distributor - the rights of the listener are mostly trampled in these schemes see Cory's brilliant talk to Microsoft last summer.). It seems obvious that by making it difficult for people who love music to do what they want with the music that they will continue to drive people to use the non-commercial peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and/or buy CDs to do their own ripping. The first thing most people ask me about Napster is if they can put tunes onto their iPods. When they hear they can't, they lose interest fast.

My experience with the major online p2p services is that finding and retrieving the music you want from them is unreliable, slow, and the files you get are completely inconsistent in quality. Who wouldn't want to get files from fast and reliable servers with consistent quality and good searching and cataloging? The main questions are price and flexibility. I firmly believe that if the majority of songs were available with no copy restrictions at a reasonable price (I think at a buck a song they're still too expensive by a factor of four) that the music industry would see a phenomenal growth in the market for their products that would dwarf anything they've ever experienced. I also believe that the right price for fast, reliable, flexible service would offer a value proposition that would be hard to resist, and would discourage the spread of piracy.

But we don't seem to be getting there anytime soon, at least not from the major labels and online distribution services. Instead they seem to be descending daily further into a complex set of conflicting schemes about under which restrictive scenarios their licensing schemes will allow. You can download, but only play on your computer. You can put it on some portable devices but not others. You can only burn to CD for another fee. True ease of use and value for the consumer seems to play a small part in these schemes, and that's unfortunate, because it limits the success of the entire online music world.

Posted by oren at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2005

iTunes and mp3 disks - did I just imagine this?

I just went to burn some mp3 tunes onto a CD to move to my computer at home. It seems to me that at some time in the past when I tried to burn a CD with iTunes and I had more songs than could fit onto an audio CD iTunes would come up with a box that told me that the songs wouldn't fit on a single audio CD and asked if I wanted to burn an mp3 CD.

It's been quite a while since I did this, but this time the dialog asked if I wanted to create multiple audio CDs.

Of course I went and set the preferences setting to burn an mp3 CD and it worked fine, but it seems like an interesting change in default settings.

Posted by oren at 4:56 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2005

OSAF Blog

Ted points out that OSAF now has a group blog where they're keeping track of what's happening on Chandler and Cosmo development. This should make it easier to keep an eye on the progress as it happens. I don't know about anybody else, but I find the clutter of Wikis to be too depressingly similar to the piles of unlooked-at paper in my office.

Posted by oren at 7:34 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

My response to Dan Gilmor on online calendars

Dan Gilmor has a short post today in ressponse to a piece from the Mercury News about Trumba, a new web-based social calendaring service. Trumba is the brainchild of Jeremy Jaech, a UW Computer Science MS grad and one of the co-founders of Visio.

Dan's take is that online calendaring is not yet ready for prime time, and he notes that he's hoping that Chandler will be the product usable for real people in this space.

I commented on Dan's post as follows:

Dan -

The big missing piece in online calendaring remains the lack of widely adopted standards for interoperability between different calendar systems - in calendaring we remain stuck where we were with email some twenty years ago, where you could exchange information easily only among people using the same system.

While I also hold out hope for Chandler (a group of us computing folks from higher-ed institutions have been very involved in contributing funding and working with OSAF on the genesis and development of Chandler), it may very well be that one of Mitch and OSAF's greatest contributions may be the work of OSAF people on helping to define and agree on standards in the calendaring space.

While there's a long history of failed attempts to get going on calendaring standards, the latest attempts actually give me some hope for success - there is work going on both in simplifying the existing Icalendar data standard (rfc2445) and in achieving real interoperability via a new protocol called CalDAV (latest draft at http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-dusseault-caldav/ ), that layers calendaring extensions on top of the WebDAV protocol. CalDAV takes the approach that Apple and Mozilla have started and pumps it up to be more truly useful in many more scenarios.

There are a bunch of companies and other organizations working towards achieving interoperability in calendaring through the CalConnect Calendaring Consortium ( http://www.calconnect.org/ ). This group has been holding regular roundtable and interop events since last year, and we're starting to see real progress be made on achieving disparate implementations of calendar software work together. The membership of this organization includes commercial companies such as Oracle, Novell, Yahoo, Symbian, MeetingMaker, and Isamet; open source organizations including Mozilla and OSAF; and academic institutions with an interest in this space. This is exciting work, and bears watching by anyone with an interest in online calendaring. The big missing piece in this work so far is the decided disinterest on the part of Microsoft - but I believe that if most of the other software products can work together in common ways that our friends in Redmond will be willing to come aboard in the long run.

Posted by oren at 5:24 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2005

Trackback spam and MT-Blacklist

I've been getting increasing number of trackback spams lately. Some of them I don't understand, as the web sites that are mentioned in the trackback don't appear to actually be accessible - so what's the point?

I'd been meaning to install Jay Allen's wonderful MT-Blacklist since I re-installed Movable Type, and finally got around to it this morning.

Since around 7 am this morning, MT-Blacklist as blocked 63 85 spams.

Posted by oren at 2:53 PM | Comments (1)

June 11, 2005

I hate animated web page ads

What's up with the dramatic increase in animated ads on web pages? I find it almost impossible to read any content while there are things blinking at me in my peripheral vision.

Note to self - stop reading web sites that flank content with animations.

Bye-bye - Trusted Reviews.

So long Eweek.

What? no more news.com?

hoo boy.

Posted by oren at 6:50 AM | Comments (0)

June 8, 2005

BBC's Beethoven Symphonies available as mp3s

Cory points out that the Radio3 is putting up the BBC performances of Beethoven's symphonies as mp3 files for download.

Is it the height of post-modernist copyright irony that you can freely download Beethoven's 19th century masterpieces, but not the latest from Sleater-Kinney? (though you can stream it in QuickTime).

And, speaking of Sleater-Kinney - KEXP has a performance from them live in the studio on May 20 up for streaming too.

UPDATE -- I have not yet been able to get the link to stream the Sleater-Kinney's The Woods to work for me - anybody have better luck?

Posted by oren at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)

June 7, 2005

Gee - Microsoft reinvents IMAP

Terry Gray points out that Microsoft has announced that Exchange will be able to "push" email to mobile devices. While I'm sure they've invented some clever and entirely proprietary way of accomplishing this, Terry sez:

I sure must be missing something... all this hubbub about "push" mail, which sure sounds like what we've been calling "online" access mode in the IMAP context for over a dozen years.

Why use a real standard when you can invent one of your own?

Posted by oren at 1:23 PM | Comments (0)

It's the operating system, stupid

So the big news is that Apple is switching to use Intel processors (from IBM) in their computers. There's lots of speculation as to what the motivating factors are, but as Tim Bray notes: there are a few Really Big Secrets that very few people and no journalists know: one of them is how much box-builders like Apple, HP, Dell, and Sun pay chip-builders like Intel, IBM, and AMD. I bet that when whoever at Apple sat down across the table from whoever at Intel the negotiation was complicated and involved lots more than the per-chip cost.

I don't think this switch really makes much difference for users of desktop computers, and it shouldn't be seen as a big deal. Those of us who choose to use OS X on the desktop find that it's a compelling user experience for a variety of reasons (I wrote about my reasons last year). As long as Apple can continue to build on that user experience and people all over the world can provide good applications for the platform, I believe that Apple will continue to be successful.

There will of course be the inevitable transition pains for application developers, particularly those who write compiled applications in languages like C++ (another reason to like scripting languages).

And, as I wrote to our local Apple rep yesterday, if switching to Intel means I can get a faster and/or lighter and/or cooler OS X notebook, I'm all for it!

Posted by oren at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 6, 2005

A new G5 iMac - getting set up with mail, syncing Firefox bookmarks, and more.

Last week I got a new desktop machine for the office - a 20-inch G5 iMac, complete with Tiger installed. The 20-inch screen is gorgeous and actually feels far larger than the 17-inch I've been using. The response of the 2Ghz G5 does indeed feel somewhat snappier and quicker than the 1 Ghz G4, but not hugely dramatic for everyday use - though I'm not rendering video or doing lots of audio processing that would really test processor speed.

It's always interesting going through the process of setting up a new machine to work with all my quirky ways.

Lately I've been primarily using the Mac mail client as my primary desktop mail software - the main reason I shifted away from Thunderbird is the difference in handling forwarding of multiple messages to a single destination - In Thunderbird, when you select multiple messages in a folder and click on Forward, it opens up a separate window with one message in each window, and you have to address each message individually.

The Mac mail app, on the other hand, puts all of the forwarded messages sequentially together inside a single message which you can then send off. That feels far more logical to my way of thinking (though I do think Pine's handling is probably even better - it asks you if you want to forward the messages as a MIME digest and then bundles them up as attachments to a message).

I configured the mail client and then sent it off to get my mail. Because the Mac mail app wants to grab a lot of your mail to manage locally on the desktop, even with a 100MB connection to the mail server it took overnight to import all of my mail into the app - I hate to think of what it would've been like if I had tried that at home through my so-called "broadband" Comcast connection, where I typically am lucky to get 500kb/sec transfer speeds.

The mail app seems to be working just fine, though in the Tiger version I notice that occasionally it opens new messages with the window positioned in the middle of the message instead of at the start.

I installed the latest Firefox and made it the default browser (there are still too many pages that don't work right with Safari, including some UW NetID authentication pages) - it seems like there's something a little counter-intuitive about having to use Safari's preferences to set the default browser to not be Safari. I used Torisugari's excellent Bookmarks Synchronizer Firefox extension to get my bookmarks synced via .Mac (I'll have to try it with a local WebDAV server too). There's a good page on how to install and configure Bookmark Synchronizer on Jonathan Hudson's studio2f blog.

I've got Ecto installed for blog authoring, and BBEdit for text editing. I need to move OmniGraffle over and then my most-used applications will all be on the new machine.

When I upgraded the 17-incher to Tiger, the apps for handling Microsoft Office documents got reset from Office 2004 to Appleworks (!). On the new machine those documents are opened with the test-drive version of Office 2004. I went to the trouble of installing the full Office 2004 so I wouldn't get the annoying message from the test drive about how many days are remaining on the test license. It's interesting - I use Excel occasionally, but I almost never use Word any more - it's just gotten way too big and cumbersome for my needs these days. I find almost all of my text editing needs can be handled in an email editor, in BBEdit, or in Ecto. If I need to do any formatting, it's almost always for a web page rather than printed paper.

I'll report more on further adventures with the new machine as I go.

Posted by oren at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2005

Copying image location - Safari vs. Firefox

I was writing my previous post, about the new Nokia 770 Internet Appliance, and I wanted to insert a remotely linked image in the post (from Mobile Gazette).

I was using Safari on my iMac. I ctrl-clicked on the image, selected Copy Image Address and got:

nokia-770-3.jpg

Obviously, pasting that into my post is not very helpful, as the image doesn't reside on my web server.

So I fired up Firefox, ctrl-clicked on the image, selected Copy Image Location, and got:

http://www.mobilegazette.com/images/nokia/nokia-770-1.jpg

Much more gooder.

Posted by oren at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

Good writings about the music biz

There's a terrific article by James Surowiecki in last week's New Yorker (May 16 issue) titled Hello Cleveland, where he describes the ways in which musicians are making more money from playing live than they are from selling recorded music. Well worth a read.

The upshot is that the fortunes of musicians and the fortunes of music labels have less and less to do with each other. This may be the first stage of what John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Dead, once called the shift from “the music business” to “the musician business.” In the musician business, the assets that once made the major labels so important—promotion, distribution, shelf space—matter less than the assets that belong to the artists, such as their ability to perform live. As technology has grown more sophisticated, the ways in which artists make money have grown more old-fashioned. The value of songs falls, and the value of seeing an artist sing them rises, because that experience can’t really be reproduced.

I was encouraged the other day to see Yahoo's new Yahoo Music Unlimited service announced. Unlimited downloads of music for $5 a month (if you pay for an annual plan). Currently there's over a million songs to pick from. Unfortunately, at the moment it's for Windows only, and the songs are in the heavily DRM'ed version of Windows Media, but it's a good indication that there's starting to be the right kind of downward pressure on prices in the legal download world.

Barry Ritholz points out in his blog that this brings the value of ten years of unlimited music downloads to the low, low, price of $600. He further notes that this Kinda makes it hard to argue that losses per P2P user are in the 10s of thousands of dollars annually when $600 per 10 years is what it costs for a comparable substitute.

Mark Cuban (owner of the Landmark Theater chain, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and the angel funder of the Grokster defense) writes that this means that :

The RIAA can no longer claim that students who are downloading music are costing them thousands of dollars each. They can’t claim much of anything actually. In essence, Yahoo just turned possession of a controlled music substance into a misdemeanor. Payable by a $5 per month fine.

Of course, RIAA staffers won’t go quietly into the night. They will continue to scream loud and hard about evils of illegal downloading. The question is, will they move the money they are currently spending on court cases and filing suit, towards promoting the new subscription services that are available. Particularly Yahoo’s dirt cheap service.

Posted by oren at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2005

Larry Smarr on research computing and networks

Larry Smarr is one of the people at the center of the use of high speed networks and high performance distributed computing to move scientific research forward.

There's a new video online of the keynote talk he gave in January at the JGN II symposium. Interestingly enough, he gave the talk in Seattle, and it was shown on HD video, streamed live over the Internet to Osaka.

The talk is an illuminating survey of some of the scientific activity that is being enabled by very high speed networks and some of the work that's being done to create the networks that these scientific efforts require.

In order to get the most out of the talk, you need to watch Larry in one window and click along with his presentation slides in another window.

I watched this in my office, viewing the high def 5 megabit per second version of the video, and it was amazingly clear and detailed - by far the best streamed video I've seen yet on a desktop computer. At this kind of resolution video really does become something rich and compelling, instead of just something annoying (which is what I usually find streaming video to be).

Unfortunately, the video only works with Windows Media on Windows - on the Mac I could get the audio but not the video.

It's well worth watching this presentation if you have any interest in how science is actually being done these days.

Posted by oren at 7:24 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

More on widget security

In response to my earlier post on security in Apple's new Dashboard Widgets, John Gruber, who writes the Daring Fireball blog, replies:

It's interesting that you're not getting the first-run warning, but I don't think the overall threat is any more serious than with normal Mac software. What's to stop *any* of the apps listed every day on VersionTracker from doing these things? Trojan horses are easy to write.

Exploits would be tough, because it would imply they could spread from one machine to another, or that you could have a malicious widget injected into your machine without knowing.

So, no, I don't think widgets are going to pose a security problem. That's not to say I'm certain, however.

And he's got a point.

But I do note that with Tiger, Apple has really beefed up the warning about installing executable software files, precisely at the same time as they're encouraging everyone to download and install lots of widgets.

Zephyr pointed out a Slashdot post about zaptaastic, which actually demonstrates installing a "slightly evil widget" (don't visit the page with Safari). This demonstrates the autoinstalling of widgets done by Safari. Zap makes the same point I just did above:

"So what?" you may say, "The user gets warned.". Two words: social engineering. The Macintosh user base is rapidly being conditioned that widgets are harmless little toys, and Apple's warning is fairly innocuous:

goatse.cx is being run for the first time.
Are you sure you want to run this widget?

That doesn't look particularly threatening. I haven't tried any actually destructive things; I would assume that getting root is a lot easier when you're starting from inside the host box. I wonder how many of the gmail passwords entered by users in flores and coras are the same as the root password?

It would be obscenely easy for me to harvest passwords in those applications, by the way... but I don't. I could just generate hits on http://stephan.com/watch.html?username:password and then go read my system logs.

127.0.0.1 - - [05/May/2005:02:49:11 -0400] "GET /widgets/flores/index.html?foo:bar HTTP/1.1" 200 5758

Even without root, though, there are some pretty interesting things you could do. A widget, for example, could use time when it is hidden to add tags to every .html page stored in the users home directory. If the user happens to be running a web server - or even uploading files to one - this could propagate a widget to other machines. I'm not really a security expert, I'm sure others can think of worse things to do.

Apple has significantly lowered the bar for malicious entities to install and execute damaging code in OSX. Honestly, I don't think this is that big of a deal - causing real damage is likely a bit harder than I make it sound.

Posted by oren at 1:20 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2005

DJ Spooky on sampling and copyright

Wired News has a good interview with DJ Spooky, who has a new book out called Rhythm Science. He talks about the culture of sampling and the legalities around copyright and re-use of materials.

WN: There was a recent case of NWA using a snippet of George Clinton's music, and a court ruled that even though the sample was unrecognizable, NWA still had to secure rights to use it.

Miller: That means they didn't change it enough. Basic rule of thumb: ... you don't want to get sued.

It's a nightmare. There (are) lawyers. There are websites who filter through all records -- everything. People are paid to just listen to music at this point and listen for samples....

In the same way a lot of people involved with internet hacking culture will hack your site and then call you up and say "By the way, we have security services we'd like to offer you," you might get a little phone call saying, "There is a sample on your record that we heard, and we'd be more than happy to clear it for you." Of course implying that if you don't, the next phone call will be to the people you sampled.

It's a paradoxical world. On one hand, sampling is a homage to your favorite records and favorite sounds, but you have to pay through the nose if you feel like doing that.

Posted by oren at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)

May 9, 2005

Endless Frontier Postponed - Ed Lazowska editorial in Science

There's an excellent editorial in the new issue of Science magazine (May 6, 2005 issue) by our very own Ed Lazowska (professor of Computer Science here at Washington) that takes the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to task for abandoning its responsibility for funding visionary basic research in computing.

Next month, U.S. scientists Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive computing’s highest prize,
the A. M. Turing Award, from the Association for Computing Machinery. Their Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP), created in 1973, became the language of the Internet. Twenty years later, the Mosaic
Web browser gave the Internet its public face. TCP and Mosaic illustrate the nature of computer
science research, combining a quest for fundamental understanding with considerations of use. They
also illustrate the essential role of government-sponsored university-based research in producing the
ideas and people that drive innovation in information technology (IT).

Recent changes in the U.S. funding landscape have put this innovation pipeline at risk. The Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded TCP. The shock of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 led to the creation
of the agency, which was charged with preventing future technological surprises. From its inception, DARPA funded
long-term nonclassified IT research in academia, even during several wars, to leverage all the best minds. Much of this
research was dual-use, with the results ultimately advancing military systems
and spurring the IT industry.

U.S. IT research grew largely under DARPA and the National Science
Foundation (NSF). NSF relied on peer review, whereas DARPA bet on vision and
reputation, complementary approaches that served the nation well. Over the past
4 decades, the resulting research has laid the foundation for the modern micro-
processor, the Internet, the graphical user interface, and single-user workstations.
It has also launched new fields such as computational science. Virtually every
aspect of IT that we rely on today bears the stamp of federally sponsored research.
A 2003 National Academies study provided 19 examples where such work
ultimately led to billion-dollar industries, an economic benefit that reaffirms
science advisor Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision in Science: The Endless Frontier.

However, in the past 3 years, DARPA funding for IT research at universities
has dropped by nearly half. Policy changes at the agency, including increased
classification of research programs, increased restrictions on the participation
of noncitizens, and “go/no-go” reviews applied to research at 12- to 18-month
intervals, discourage participation by university researchers and signal a shift from pushing the leading edge to “bridging
the gap” between fundamental research and deployable technologies. In essence, NSF is now relied on to support the
long-term research needed to advance the IT field.

Posted by oren at 4:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 5, 2005

Security in Mac Dashboard Widgets?

Apple's new Dashboard in the Tiger version of OS X allows you to place lots of handy little applications, called widgets, on a translucent layer over your main desktop, making it easy to call up the weather forecast, current time, measurement conversion utilities, etc.

It's a very nice addition to the OS, and I foresee lots of use of it.

Widgets are built using simple html, javascript, and stylesheets - all pretty easy and widely known technologies.

I was wondering what the security model for Dashboard widgets is. In Apple's Dashboard Programming Guide says, in its Security section:

sing certain resources within your widget may pose a security risk for users. In these circumstances, the widget security model provides a method for Dashboard to be aware that your widget may perform insecure tasks. If your widget is working with resources that pose a security threat to the user, the user must approve before access is granted.

Dashboard allows you to “declare your intentions” when you:

* Access files outside of your widget bundle
* Use a Web Kit or standard browser plug-in
* Access network resources
* Run a Java applet
* Run a command-line utility
* Using a widget plug-in

It also says:

If any of these keys are present in your information property list file and it’s located outside of /Library/Widgets/, a dialog is presented to users upon your widget’s first load. The dialog asks them whether or not they want to use your widget. If the request is approved, your widget is loaded and granted access to the resources that it requested. The request is not repeated on subsequent loads if approved. If the request is denied, your widget is not allowed to load. If your widget is loaded again, the request is made to the user again.

If you attempt to use any of these resources without first specifying them in your widget’s information property list file, your attempt fails.

So I loaded a sample widget from Apple's Developer tools called Which - it gives you a little box that calls the command line which utility (a unix command that shows you where a given program resides in your file system).

I installed it on both my Powerbook and my iMac - and got no warning whatsoever.

Dan who sits in a cubicle outside my office, tried installing a widget called QuickCommand, which gives you a basic terminal environment in the Dashboard and allows you to store four basic unix commands to execute in that terminal. Dan reported getting a message on installation that said:

QuickCmd is being run for the first time. Are you sure you want to run this widget?"
[Decline] [Accept]

I tried downloading the widget and again, got no such message.

But even if everybody saw the warning, there is no wording in there about the fact that this widget contains commands that could cause security risks, nor anything about what the risks of installing a random widget might be.

It would be trivial to write a widget that appeared to do something useful while executing all sorts of unix commands - like searching your disk for credit card numbers and passwords and forwarding them on to random email addresses.

Am I the only one who's worried about the security implications of Dashboard? I expect it's entirely possible that we'll see the kinds of widespread exploits on the Mac platform that we've been fighting for years on Windows.

Sigh.

Posted by oren at 1:40 PM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2005

Safari on Tiger - not my favorite so far

The new version of Safari that comes with Mac OS 10.4 has been giving me (and lots of other people) problems when trying to use it with pages authenticated by UW NetID (via our use of the PubCookie web authentication software).

Because of that I switched back to Firefox as my main browser, and I also notice that FF seems much faster than Safari.

I don't find having a built-in RSS reader in the browser enough of a compelling reason to use a browser that breaks on lots of pages. I'm plenty happy using Bloglines to read my RSS feeds.

I know the C&C security middleware team is busy trying to resolve the problems with Safari and PubCookie - maybe this will get better over time.

Posted by oren at 1:46 PM | Comments (0)

Desktop pricing

I'm getting ready to order a new desktop computer, so I was pleased to hear that Apple yesterday bumped up the G5 iMac processor speeds a notch, included gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth and bigger hard drives. No FireWire 800 yet, though.

Still, I thought I'd do a bit of comparison shopping, and here's what I found out.

The 20 inch G5 iMac, with a 2GHz G5 processor (fastest available), 2 gigabytes of memory, 250 GB disk, and a wireless keyboard and mouse, prices out at $2,180 (that's without AppleCare).

A Dell OptiPlex 170L (which I figured is conceptually similar to the iMac, not being the top high-tech performer of their line), with a 3.2 GHz P4 processor (fastest available), Windows XP Pro, 2 GB of memory, a 16X DVD+/-RW, a 160 GB disk (largest available on this model), and a 19 inch digital flat panel comes out to be $2,017.

That's pretty close. But the Dell doesn't come with a wide format screen, has slower networking, no wireless keyboard, less disk, no wireless networking or Bluetooth or a firewire interface.

I don't think I buy the argument that Apple is more expensive these days. While it's true that you can't get Macs for the complete bargain basement rates that you can buy Intel boxes for (except the Mac Mini), by the time you get all the add-ons you need to be really functional the iMac looks like the clear value winner here.

Posted by oren at 6:51 AM | Comments (1)

May 3, 2005

Why do they (Apple) do this?

I just upgraded my work iMac to Tiger. Lo and behold, not only was the default browser reset from Firefox to Safari, but the association for .doc files was reset from Word to Appleworks. What's up with that?

Posted by oren at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 2, 2005

Gruber on Adobe - jerks wearing suits

John Gruber has an interesting article in Daring Fireball about the evolution of Adobe from a company run by passionate engineers, focused on producing great software for creative production, to one focused on sales for their own sake.

Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that’s completely at odds with the creative market they’ve dominated for nearly two decades.

Adobe’s best and core products are their oldest, and they are graphics products: PostScript, the Adobe Type Library, Illustrator, and Photoshop. InDesign is relatively new but genuinely fits alongside these products. This is why Adobe’s core customers — who still use and love many of their products — are dismayed and confused by the company’s direction in recent years. But is it any surprise that a company that is run by jerks-wearing-suits is now targeting the jerks-wearing-suits software market?

Posted by oren at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)

May 1, 2005

Oldies but goodies - Joel on Software

The dog having gotten me up twice to go outside between 3:30 and 5:00 this morning (a Sunday, no less) I've been up for hours.

Somehow, in trying to catch up on various readings in that time I got started reading old entries from Joel on Software that I never read before - and there is some terrific reading there!

Some favorites:

The Joel Test

I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. With all the time you save, you can go to medical school.

Painless Software Scheduling

When you start with a schedule with rough tasks and then break it down into smaller tasks, you will find that you get a different result, not just a more precise one. It is a completely different number. Why does this happen?

When you have to pick fine grained tasks, you are forcing yourself to actually figure out what steps you are going to have to take. Write subroutine foo. Create dialog such and such. Read the wawa file. These steps are easy to estimate, because you've written subroutines, created dialogs, and read wawa files before.

If you are sloppy, and pick big "chunky" tasks ("implement grammar correction"), then you haven't really thought about what you are going to do. And when you haven't thought about what you're going to do, you just can't know how long it will take.

Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother?

Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.
...
When you write a spec, you only have to communicate how the program is supposed to work once. Everybody on the team can just read the spec. The QA people read it so that they know how the program is supposed to work and they know what to test for. The marketing people use it to write their vague vaporware white papers to throw up on the web site about products that haven't been created yet. The business development people misread it to spin weird fantasies about how the product will cure baldness and warts and stuff, but it gets investors, so that's OK. The developers read it so that they know what code to write. The customers read it to make sure the developers are building a product that they would want to pay for. The technical writers read it and write a nice manual (that gets lost or thrown away, but that's a different story). The managers read it so that they can look like they know what's going on in management meetings. And so on.
...
Writing a spec is a great way to nail down all those irritating design decisions, large and small, that get covered up if you don't have a spec.

Painless Functional Specifications - Part 2: What's a Spec?

Nongoals. When you're building a product with a team, everybody tends to have their favorite, real or imagined pet features that they just can't live without. If you do them all, it will take infinite time and cost too much money. You have to start culling features right away, and the best way to do this is with a "nongoals" section of the spec. Things we are just not going to do. A nongoal might be a feature you won't have ("no telepathic user interface!") or it might be something more general ("We don't care about performance in this release. The product can be slow, as long as it works. If we have time in version 2, we'll optimize the slow bits.") These nongoals are likely to cause some debate, but it's important to get it out in the open as soon as possible.

Painless Functional Specifications - Part 3: But... How?

program managers at Microsoft gather requirements, figure out what the code is supposed to do, and write the specs. There are usually about 5 programmers for every program manager; these programmers are responsible for implementing in code what the program manager has implemented in the form of a spec. A program manager also needs to coordinate marketing, documentation, testing, localization, and all the other annoying details that programmers shouldn't spend time on. Finally, program managers at Microsoft are supposed to have the "big picture" of the company in mind, while programmers are free to concentrate on getting their bits of code exactly right.

Program managers are invaluable. If you've ever complained about how programmers are more concerned with technical elegance than with marketability, you need a program manager. If you've ever complained about how people who can write good code never do a good job of writing good English, you need a program manager. If you've ever complained about how your product seems to drift without any clear direction, you need a program manager.

Painless Functional Specifications - Part 4: Tips

Rule 1: Be Funny

Yep, rule number one in tricking people into reading your spec is to make the experience enjoyable.
...
Every time you need to tell a story about how a feature works, instead of saying:

• The user types Ctrl+N to create a new Employee table and starts entering the names of the employees.

write something like:

• Miss Piggy, poking at the keyboard with a eyeliner stick because her chubby little fingers are too fat to press individual keys, types Ctrl+N to create a new Boyfriend table and types in the single record "Kermit."

Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers

Software has bugs. CPUs are outrageously finicky. They absolutely refuse to deal with things that they weren't taught to deal with explicitly, and they tend to refuse in the most childish of ways. When my laptop is away from home, it tends to crash a lot because it can't find the network printer it's used to finding. What a baby. It probably comes down to a single line of code somewhere with a teensy tiny almost insignificant bug in it.

Which is why you positively, absolutely, need to have a QA department. You are going to need 1 tester for every 2 programmers (more if your software needs to work under a lot of complicated configurations or operating systems). Each programmer should work closely with a single tester, throwing them private builds as often as necessary.  

The QA department should be independent and powerful, it must not report to the development team, in fact, the head of QA should have veto power over releasing any software that doesn't meet muster.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

First of all, the #1 cardinal criteria for getting hired at Fog Creek:

Smart, and
Gets Things Done.

That's it. That's all we're looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night. Our goal is to hire people with aptitude, not a particular skill set. Any skill set that people can bring to the job will be technologically obsolete in a couple of years, anyway, so it's better to hire people that are going to be able to learn any new technology rather than people who happen to know SQL programming right this minute.

At the conclusion of the interview, you have to be ready to make a sharp decision about the candidate. There are only two possible outcomes to this decision: Hire or No Hire. Turn to your computer and send immediate feedback to the recruiter. The subject line should be the name of the candidate. The first line of the email should be Hire or No Hire. Then you should spend about 2 paragraphs backing up your decision.

There is no other possible answer. Never say, "Hire, but not in my group." This is rude and implies that the candidate is not smart enough to work with you, but maybe he's smart enough for those losers over in that other group. If you find yourself tempted to say "Hire, but not in my group," simply translate that mechanically to "No Hire" and you'll be OK. Even if you have a candidate that would be brilliant at doing 1 particular thing, but wouldn't be very good in another group, that's a No Hire. Things change so often and so rapidly that we need people that can succeed anywhere. If for some reason you find an idiot savant that is really, really, really good at SQL but completely incapable of ever learning any other topic, No Hire. They don't have a future at Fog Creek.
Never say "Maybe, I can't tell." If you can't tell, that means No Hire. It's really easier than you'd think. Can't tell? Just say no! Similarly, if you are on the fence, that means No Hire. Never say, "Well, Hire, I guess, but I'm a little bit concerned about..." That's a No Hire as well.

An important thing to remember about interviewing is this: it is much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people's time fixing all their bugs. If you have any doubts whatsoever, No Hire.

This is great stuff - I also look forward to reading Joel's book on UI design.

Posted by oren at 8:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2005

Ecto 3.2 seems groovy

I've been using Ecto as my main blog-editing application for a long time now.

I wasn't completely happy with the upgrade to version 2.x - the rich text editing seemed clumsy to me when I wanted control over the html, and it really bugged me that I needed to go all the way up to the menu to insert a link to the url from the clipboard - well, ok I know there's a cmd-U keyboard control for that, but who remembers that when they need it?

So even though I installed version 2.x on my Powerbook, I decided to stick with version 1.x on my iMac at work.

But I just installed the latest update, 2.3, on my laptop. It easily allows setting the default editing mode to html instead of rich text, and there's a little dropdown list at the bottom of the editing window that lets me get to inserting a link from the clipboard - that's enough to make me happy.

All of the new graphics look fresh and friendly. I think I'll upgrade my iMac tomorrow.

Posted by oren at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)

Dilbert nails it

I thought yesterday's (Sunday April 24) Dilbert comic strip nailed it right on the head:

Wally: My accomplishment this month was opening a file that someone e-mailed.

Pointy-haired-boss: That took an entire month?

Go read the rest of it here.

Posted by oren at 9:52 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2005

How to get audio email attachments from Thunderbird to play in ITunes?

Every so often someone sends me an email with an audio file attached (all strictly legal stuff, of course).

I've been using Thunderbird as my primary email client on my Macs (and on Windows too, for that matter), and I'm pretty happy with it.

But whenever I click on an audio attachment (usually .mp3) in Thunderbird the sound file opens up in Quicktime instead of in iTunes. I have iTunes set as the default application for Internet music playback (set within iTunes Preferences).

The Thunderbird Preferences Attachment panel has a section for how to handle File Types, with entries for DOC files (handle with Word) and PPT files (handle with PowerPoint), but I don't see any controls for adding new file types.

Anyone got any ideas?

Posted by oren at 5:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2005

[chandler update] Scooby - the chandler web-browser interface

The other big news today at the Chandler update is that OSAF is planning to build a web-browser interface for Chandler functionality. This project is being called Scooby. The slides Mitch used to talk about it are here.

The idea is that instead of creating a separate version of the desktop Chandler app to support nomadic usage, users could get at calendaring and other Chandler items that reside on a Cosmo server from a browser.

The Scooby software would be something that runs on a web application server (in this case Tomcat) that talks to a Cosmo server on one side, and the web browser on the other.

This is still at a very early stage - I believe Mitch characterized it as "proto-molecular". Stay tuned for further developments..

Posted by oren at 3:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[Chandler Update] The Cosmo sharing server

Brian Moseley talked to us this morning about the work on designing a server for sharing calendaring and other items. This is a separate, but coordinated, project within OSAF. The server is called Cosmo.

Brian's presentation slides are here.

It's interesting to see OSAF move closer over time to a more server-oriented view of the world. Of course, those of us in the CSG have been trying to tell them all along that servers make a lot of sense :)

Why a sharing server? More than a file server but not a content management service - it's "content aware".

Cosmo is being built on the Java/J2EE platform, instead of in Python like Chandler.

They decided to use the Java Content Repository (JCR) as a base, rather than Slide. Apache's Jackrabbit is the reference implementation, incubating at Apache
- in pre-alpha
- provides core implementation of JCR interfaces.
- stateful repository server
- Analagous to JDBC but non-relational
- allows abstraction of content store from server, unlike Slide
- "Content repository API for Java"
- main query structure is xpath

They're using the Spring Framework for lots of functionality.

for security they're using Acegi Security Framework
- built on top of spring
- security of channel?
- where do we send user if unauthenticated logins come in?
- Authentication
- handles role-based authorization and ACL authorization
- secures both the web layer and the JCR repository

Web UI
- struts, jsp,
sitemesh for JSP view layout
- wraps business object components commonly used
tiles - struts subproject for JSP view composition

DAV: Jackrabbit jcr-server

Jacrabbit jcr server provides a simple WebDAV servlet
Cosmo extends jcr-server to:
- incorporate Spring for config and depndency
- secure access to the JCR repository via Acegi
- will implement CalDAV
- will ticket based access control

External Authentication
Mechanisms under consideration: LDAP, SQL, CAS, Shib, others?
Providing a simple Cosmo interface for external auth plugins
Cosmo user management API for synchronizing with external user databases.
There will be an interface for automatically synching accounts with external data sources e.g. with LDAP.

Cosmo 0.2 planned for release with Chandler 0.6. Won't include external authentication, but will include:
- Account self-management
- ticket-based security
- iCal interop
- CalDAV interop

Posted by oren at 3:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gruber tells the Adobe Macromedia acquisition like it is

John Gruber does a brilliant job on his Daring Fireball blog of translating Adobe's marketing speak in their press release answering questions about the acquisition of Macromedia.

This line particularly rang true to me, where he describes PDF and Flash as

the two leading technologies that irritate people when they’re used in lieu of regular web pages.

I feel exactly that way.

And while we're at it, how about people who make me open a Word attachment just to read a few lines of plain text?

Posted by oren at 2:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Newly formatted version of Pine vs. Gmail

Ryan Barrett, who works at Google, writes that he's got a newly nicely formatted of his gmail vs. pine article available.

The bottom line?

I ended up using it for five weeks, and while I eventually switched back to Pine, I liked Gmail a lot more than I expected. It made me question lots of things I took for granted, and showed me that there's plenty of innovation left in email clients. I'm currently writing patches for Pine to implement the features I miss most from Gmail.

Posted by oren at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[Chandler update] CChandler update session at OSAF

I'm in San Francisco today for an update on Chandler being given for CSG members, who've invested a bunch of money into the development for Chandler. I'll be blogging it during the day.

Posted by oren at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2005

Email, Calendaring, Open Source, and Chandler

I've been meaning to write something about the very auspicious release of Chandler 0.5, but was waiting to get a bit more experience with it before saying anything.

Chandler 0.5 is meant to be show working core functionality of calendar and email, the ability to integrate those things in a single repository, and the ability to share repository items over WebDAV. It is not meant to have any sort of good-looking UI, nor to be bulletproof - as Mitch says in his blog:

PLEASE NOTE IT'S NOT READY FOR REGULAR USE YET. NOT READY YET. NOT. (Am I afraid of this point being missed?)

So far I've managed to read email on an IMAP server, send email (both using encrypted authentication), and imported ICAL format calendar data exported from Oracle Calendar, after munging it the same way I have to for import into Apple's iCal product.

I have not yet shared my repository items succesfully, but that seems to be a problem with the WebDAV server I have an account on.

All in all, this is great progress, and I congratulate Mitch, Lisa, Pieter, Chao, Brian, Katie, and the rest of the OSAF crew!

Posted by oren at 3:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2005

spam comes in many flavors - all distasteful

I've been receiving a steady stream of totally distasteful trackback spam for the last couple of days. So I've now totally disabled trackbacks on ths blog. Too bad - another nice, useful, network feature ruined by avarice. Hey, I've got an idea - why don't we go back to the old days and disallow commercial use of the network? Well, one can always dream...

And then I was cooking dinner this evening when the phone rang, and a male with a strong southern cracker sort of accent says:

"Hello, is this Oren?"

"yes."

"This is the Internet guy."

"What Internet guy?"

"The Internet guy...the reason I'm callin' is, we see you've been on your computer...we've got just what you wanted - you can make lots of money at home in your spare time."

"Take me off your damned list and don't you ever call here again."

Sheesh.

Posted by oren at 9:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2005

Where have all the sales gone?

I've been saying for years that the music business is splitting into two almost mutually exclusive camps - one where corporate entities are grooming superstars for the mass market (think Britney, Christina, Justin, etc) and the rest of the world, where all the interesting music is being made and listened to by people who really like music.

Now Kevin Kelly notes in his very cool Long Tail blog that the mass market will actually shrink to become less important over time. An astounding fact he brings up:

By my count only ten of the top 100 best-selling albums were released in the last decade, and only four of those were in the last five years.

Wow!

And John Pareles notes here in the NY Times that major record labels have almost entirely lost interest in non-maintream music made outside the United States and the UK.

With the Internet, CD's manufactured abroad are a few clicks away at large retailers or dedicated specialists like the Latin-music experts at descarga.com. Digital distribution brings the music even closer. World music has its own clearinghouse for downloads at calabashmusic.com, where it's easy to stock an iPod with music from Uzbekistan or Curaçao or just read up on them. Subscription services like Rhapsody and eMusic have a surprising amount of international offerings.

And the Smithsonian Institution has just gone online with the ethnographic answer to iTunes: smithsonianglobalsound.org, with museum-quality annotation and royalties paid to musicians. Information and recommendations are also available at sites like worldmusiccentral.org and afropop.org.

I wonder if the RIAA has sued anybody who's file sharing Celia Cruz and Salif Keita?

Posted by oren at 4:44 PM | Comments (0)

Felten on the RIAA suing I2hub

I've been meaning to post something about the suits filed this week by the RIAA against users of the i2hub file sharing software, which they managed to publicize as "RIAA sues Internet2".

But I got caught up in moving the blog over to MySQL, and in the meantime, Ed Felten has put it much better than I would've.

Given all of this, my guess is that the RIAA is pushing the Internet2 angle mostly for policial and public relations reasons. By painting Internet2 as a separate network, the RIAA can imply that the transfer of infringing files over Internet2 is a new kind of problem requiring new regulation. And by painting Internet2 as a centrally-managed entity, the RIAA can imply that it is more regulable than the rest of the Internet.

Another unique aspect of i2hub is that it could only be used, supposedly, by people at univerisities that belong to the Internet2 consortium, which includes more than 200 schools. The i2hub website pitches it as a service just "by students, for students". Some have characterized i2hub as a private filesharing network. That may be true in a formal sense, as not everybody could get onto i2hub. But the potential membership was so large that i2hub was, for all intents and purposes, a public system. We don't know exactly how the RIAA or its agents got access to i2hub to gather the information behind the suits, but it's not at all surprising that they were able to do so. If students thought that they couldn't get caught if they shared files on i2hub, they were sadly mistaken.

Posted by oren at 4:26 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2005

Upgraded to use MySQL for this blog

Last week our Vietnam Ride Blog suffered a corrupt database while I was adding some entries. I'm not sure how it happened, but there doesn't seem to be any graceful way to recover from it aside from exporting all the entries, re-installing Movable Type, and importing all the entries again.

In the meantime, we can't update that blog at all, which is a drag, as there's lots going on.

That's one of the downsides of using Movable Type with a Berkeley database for storage.

So, now having been made suitably nervous about Berkeley db I decided to upgrade this weblog to use MySQL for its back end storage.

Our support folks here at the UW (which happens to be the group I direct, he says proudly) have done a bang-up job of documenting how to use MySQL on our central unix servers.

I followed the documentation, and then used the Movable Type documentation on how to upgrade from Berkeley DB to MySQL.

All went mostly smoothly, though it took some hunting through the MT documentation to learn that I needed to add DBSocket and DBPort entries to the MySQL configuration section of mt.cfg. And I needed some help from our web guru Adam to understand that in my mt.cfg file I needed to specify ovid.u.washington.edu as the DBHost instead of localhost.

So if you're looking at this post, it's a sign that all went well and this blog is now running on MySQL.

Is that cool, or what?

Posted by oren at 2:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 8, 2005

OmniGraffle does the trick

Between lots of other things I've been working on updating the org charts for my part of the world here in Computing & Communications.

For years I've done org charts using Visio. I've been using Visio since it first came out. The early releases of Visio were small, fast, easy to use, and reliable. Over the years, since Microsoft acquired the product, it's had more and more features layered on to it, and it's become (for my purposes at least) far harder to use and far less reliable. Why is this story so familiar with Microsoft applications? The original version of Word for Windows was one of my favorite pieces of software ever - now I can rarely fire up Word except to read .doc files that come attached to emails.

As an interesting aside, Jeremy Jaech, UW alum and one of the co-founders of Visio, is now working on a social calendaring effort called Trumba.

The other day I fired up Visio on my WinXP box and worked away at the charts for a couple of hours. When I went to save, Visio crashed - poof - all my work, up in smoke.

After spending a couple of days resolutely ignoring the problem, I decided yesterday to think about alternatives.

I went online and bought a copy of OmniGraffle 3 for Mac OS X (I bought the professional version).

After spending a couple of hours I now have updated versions of my org charts (pending a couple of edits to get the latest job titles), and I'm sold on OmniGraffle. It's easy to use, the features all seem to work as you think they ought to (or at least as I think they ought to), and it hasn't crashed on me yet. I am particularly taken with the way centering lines just appear as you drag objects around to try and align them with other objects on the page - brilliant!

The current version of OmniGraffle has a Visio XML import/export feature - I haven't tried that yet, but it might encourage people to try OG.

A really fine product from an even more local company - they're even on this side of the lake!

And for creating the web links between the layers of the organization, I used the nice Taco freeware html editor, which makes a breeze of creating image maps!

Posted by oren at 7:30 AM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2005

Chris Anderson on Grokster in the LA Times

Chris Anderson (Wired's editor-in-chief) has a great editorial on the potential terrible impact that a finding for the entertainment industry in the Grokster case might have.

The main flaw in the case against Grokster is that the action attempts to criminalize a technology rather than a specific use. It also fails to distinguish between commercial content and noncommercial content. Restricting these powerful new distribution tools to fight piracy would hobble the new emerging creative class too. The potential collateral damage to legitimate users is much higher than in the Betamax case.

Posted by oren at 4:59 PM | Comments (0)

Cory Doctorow - Ethics are the new craft

A nice editorial from Cory in The University of Edinburgh's SCRIPT-ed online journal. This excerpt will give you a flavor, but go read the whole thing.

Time was companies shipped products that sat at the intersection of the limits of engineering and what the public could be convinced to buy: jukeboxes, cable TV, radio, VCRs, MP3 players, you name it, if it was dodgy, cool and likely to freak out an entertainment exec, someone out there would offer it for sale.

Time was that copyright changed whenever some entrepreneur invented something cool and infringing and compelling and the courts or lawmakers legalized it with reforms to copyright.

Times have changed. Today, businesses shrink away from offering general-purpose technology whose suite of uses includes ones that fall outside the confines of today's copyright -- like automatic commercial-skipping in PVRs. They run screaming from businesses that are clearly infringing by today's standards -- like DVD-ripping movie jukeboxes.

And why not? After all, the penalties for guessing wrong about what the courts will find non-infringing are substantial. Shoplifting a CD might get you a slap on the wrist, but uploading one track off that disc to the Net will earn you a $150,000 penalty under the USA's No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act). With stakes that high, who can blame a company for being a little gunshy?

Of course, that's exactly why the penalties are as high as they are: to discourage risk-taking. That's a raw deal for the public, but so long as all the companies are equally risk-averse, it's not so bad for the sell-side. It's one thing to be a conservative company offering copy-restricted digital music players in a world of open MP3 players (you'd get clobbered), but it's another entirely to inhabit a market where every firm is part of a gentlecompany's agreement not to roll out any really disruptive, novel, dangerous features.

Posted by oren at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2005

David Byrne tells it like it is

Xeni Jardin interviews David Byrne (from the Talking Heads) on the debut of his new Internet radio station (also in iTunes radio section under Radio David Byrne).

XJ: How do you feel about the fact that some of your fans are downloading your music for free?

David Byrne: It's a mixed bag. Sure, I would love to have compensation for that. But the argument of record companies standing up for artists rights is such a load of hooey. Most artists see nothing from record sales -- it's not an evil conspiracy, it's just the way the accounting works. That's the way major record labels are set up, from a purely pragmatic point of view. So as far as the artist goes -- who cares? I don't see much money from record sales anway, so I don't really care how people are getting it.

Anybody who has Gilberto Gil, Miles Davis, and Moby Grape in the same playlist is going to gain my ear!

Posted by oren at 2:58 PM | Comments (0)

Notes from the Grokster argument

Timothy Armstrong, an attorney who is studying at Harvard Law, attended today's Grokster case arguments at the Supreme Court and has published his notes here.

I would say the argument went a little better for Grokster than I would have expected it to. Not to the point where I’d actually predict victory for them, but to my mind at least, the questions Grokster got were not as difficult as those MGM got.

The big issue that the Justices were wrestling with, it seemed to me, is what the standard ought to be for deciding whether services like Grokster can be secondarily liable for their users’ copyright infringement. The Justices did not sound especially satisfied with either MGM’s or the government’s answers to this question.

Posted by oren at 1:32 PM | Comments (0)

Grokster Day

Today is the day that the Supreme Court will hear the Grokster case, where the massed forces of the entertainment industry attempt to prove that companies that offer online file-sharing systems are responsible for acts of copyright infringement committed by the people that use those systems.

There's a good article about the issues in the Economist. There was an incredibly lame editorial about the case in yesterday's New York Times, which Ernie Miller debunks thoroughly here.

One of the possible outcomes of this case is the overturning of the 1984 Betamax decision, where the Court held that companies are not liable of contributory infringement if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses. That was the landmark case that made VCRs legal for purchase in the US.

The EFF has been running a series on their website called Countdown to Grokster, where they feature devices that could've been illegal if the Betamax case had gone the other way - the list includes the Xerox machine, the CD burner, TCP/IP, Photoshop, and others.

There are lots of good resources about the case on the EFF site, including the all of the amicus briefs filed on behalf of both sides. Two of our UW faculty have signed on briefs on behalf of the respondent (the file sharing companies). Those two are Tom Anderson in Computer Science and Jane Winn in the Law School.

Given the current tenor of the political climate and makeup of the Court, I don't hold out a lot of hope for intellectual depth and enlightenment during this process...let's hope I'm wrong.

Posted by oren at 7:35 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2005

How they work at Pixar

I'm still only beginning to catch up from having been gone for two weeks and sick for an additional one, but I thought this was an interesting look behind the scenes at Pixar, paying particular attention to the physical design of the work space. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out.

As it was explained to me later, Steve Jobs originally proposed a building with one bathroom, something that would drive foot traffic to a central area all day long. Obviously, they’ve got more than one bathroom in the building, but just standing there and watching as everyone arrived to start their day, it was obvious that Jobs had managed the feat.

Posted by oren at 7:42 AM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2005

Cliff Lynch recording now available

Cliff Lynch from CNI was here at the UW on Valentine's Day, and the talk he gave is now available from from the Catalyst Spark Sessions web site as both mp3 and Real streaming.

I wasn't able to attend the talk, and haven't yet listened to the file, so I can't comment on the specific content. But Cliff is always worth listening to.

Posted by oren at 4:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2005

Tim Bray on platforms of thought leaders

I like this quote from Tim Bray's Ongoing weblog:

The proportion of thought leaders who use IE on Windows is trending to zero.

and his resulting conclusion (when talking about Google's new tagging feature):

releasing anything IE-only generally sucks.

Posted by oren at 6:08 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2005

Einstein express comes to digital cameras

At work in a previous job we used to joke about sending packages "Einstein Express - when it absolutely has to be there the day before yesterday."

I was reminded of that when I saw CNET's blurb on the new Casio Exilim Pro EX-P505 camera in their coverage of the PMA 2005 trade show:

The novel Past Movie mode uses a buffer to start recording 7 seconds before you press the shutter release.

Wow.

Posted by oren at 6:51 PM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2005

Pine vs Gmail

Ryan Barrett, a Silicon Valley software engineer with a distinguished resume, has put together a brief look comparing Pine and Gmail.

Posted by oren at 5:12 PM | Comments (1)

Shooting Myself Squarely in the Foot

I started off this morning by managing to delete all the messages from my Inbox, which had almost 3000 messages in it.

Somewhere on the OSAF Wiki there was a page where they described several different common patterns of using email. One of them was methodically deleting or filing each email into a folder as it is read. Another was leaving all email in the Inbox and coping with it there (the fact that I can't find that page now might suggest something about the effectiveness of wikis for managing lots of into) . Much as I'd like to behave in the former fashion, I'm much closer to the latter.

I was setting up a new account in Thunderbird on the Powerbook, looking at the same set server and folder set as my existing account, in order to use a different From: address. That worked fine, but I then realized there was a better way of accomplishing the same thing, so I deleted the account.

It was only after deleting the account that I realized that I had mistakenly set up the account using the default access method, which on Thunderbird (like many mail clients) is for POP instead of IMAP, and set to delete messages from the server after retrieving them.

Why would anyone ship an email client that by default deletes your messages from the server?

While there was a certain degree of liberation in suddenly being freed from all of the tasks I had facing me, I quickly realized that I was going to be in deep doo-doo without some of the messages in that Inbox.

Luckily, I was able to discover that, since I have Thunderbird on my Powerbook setup to make my Inbox messages available offline, there was a file named Inbox in my ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles directory. Seeing as the file was almost 66 megabytes and had a timestamp of just before I made my boneheaded mistake, I figured it was likely to be my Inbox - and it was!

The next task was how to access the Inbox, or the copy of it that I quickly made.

My first thought was to use Thunderbird's Import facility, which can import mail from other programs, including Eudora, which uses the same mbox mailbox format as Thunderbird.

But the filenames for the Inbox file and the copy were greyed out when I ran the Import utility, so I couldn't select them.

My colleague Zephyr suggested opening the file with Pine on the Powerbook.

I created a new collection in Pine, navigated to the Inbox file, and opened it - which worked beautfully! I was then able to save the 3000 messages back up to a new folder on the IMAP server, and all my messages were again accessible. Whew.

That's no way to start a day.

But the moral of the story is, when you really need flexible ways to work with email, Pine is your friend!

Posted by oren at 3:51 PM | Comments (2)

Good news on European software patents

Finally some good news on the intellectual property front!

From the BBC:

EU software patent law faces axe

The European Parliament has thrown out a bill that would have allowed software to be patented.

Politicians unanimously rejected the bill and now it must go through another round of consultation if it is to have a chance of becoming law.

During consultation the software patents bill could be substantially re-drafted or even scrapped.

Posted by oren at 7:07 AM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2005

Joel on the importance of bug tracking

Joel Spolsky, who produces the FogBugz bug tracking software (as well as writing the popular Joel on Software blog) has written an introduction to a new book called Project Management with FogBugz.

The introduction is terrific reading.

He starts by talking about restaurants in his neighborhood of Manhattan, particularly a very popular one called Isabella's:

Here’s a clue as to why Isabella’s works. In ten years living in this neighborhood, I still go back there. All the time. Because they’ve never given me a single reason not to.

That actually says a lot.

Then he talks about other restaurants that have lots of problems, even though the food may be better than Isabella's. And then he says:

Eventually, Isabella’s became a fabulously profitable and successful restaurant, not because of its food, but because it was debugged. Just getting what we programmers call “the edge cases” right was sufficient to keep people coming back, and telling their friends, and that’s enough to overcome a review where the New York Times calls your food “not very good.”

Great products are great because they’re deeply debugged. Restaurants, software, it’s all the same.

Great software doesn’t crash when you do weird, rare things, because everybody does something weird.

Microsoft developer Larry Osterman, working on DOS 4, once thought he had found a rare bug. “But if that were the case,” he told DOS architect Gordon Letwin, “it’d take a one in a million chance for it to happen.”

Letwin’s reply? “In our business, one in a million is next Tuesday.”

Posted by oren at 5:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 9, 2005

How to use a Mac Mini for a recording studio

Engadget has a nice tutorial on how to build a low cost multitrack recording studio around a Mac Mini (though it applies to using any Mac or Firewire-equipped computer).

(thanks to Matt Haughey for pointing this out)

Posted by oren at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)

Neal Stephenson Interview in Reason

There's a good interview in Reason with author Neal Stephenson. Public Knowledge's Mike Godwin does the interview.

It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out.

Posted by oren at 7:07 AM | Comments (0)

February 5, 2005

Three cheers for Elise!

I was looking to change the content of the RSS feeds over on our Vietnam Ride blog and wondering how to do that, and of course I found the answer at Elise Bauer's wonderful Learning Movable Type site.

If you're using Movable Type you really need to know about this site.

Thanks, Elise!

Posted by oren at 7:14 AM | Comments (1)

February 4, 2005

Memory stick problems

I've got a Memory Stick problem.

I was downloading some photos from my Sony DSC-S75 camera into iPhoto when the camera ran out of battery and shut down.

After plugging it into the wall power, the iPhoto wouldn't resume the download.

Looking at the camera volume on the Mac desktop I see one folder, DCIM, which has a subfolder named 100MSDCF that has all my pictures in it.

There's also file on the camera volume named MEMSTICK.IND which has a lock icon next to it. I suspect the lock on this file is my problem.

I copied the photos off the volume and imported them into iPhoto just fine, then erased them from the camera volume. Then I shot a new photo on the camera, but when I attach it to the Mac, iPhoto won't even recognize there's a camera there.

When I use Command-I on the MEMSTICK.IND file it shows that it's locked, but when I uncheck the "Locked" checkbox, it just gets reset again a minute later.

Am I going to just have to give up on this particular memory stick? Seems like ungraceful error handling, to say the least.

Posted by oren at 10:30 PM | Comments (1)

February 2, 2005

Steve Jobs talks in Business Week

Doc points out this good interview with Steve Jobs in Business Week.

Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That's a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren't the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It's the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they're no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn't.

Posted by oren at 8:26 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2005

Sophisticated Phishing schemes

Kay Pilcher pointed out this CNN article on how phishing schemes are getting more sophisticated.

Apparently these crooks are now installing entries in host files on compromised desktop systems so that even if the unsuspecting person types in their own URL in the browser they can be directed off to the scam site.

And there are even reports of compromised DNS servers being used to redirect people to the wrong place.

If you can't trust DNS, the Internet is effectively over.

Posted by oren at 1:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2005

[NLII 2005] Cliff Lynch on Learning Management Systems

Cliff gave a terrific talk on how many places are missing the boat on several fronts with Learning Management Systems. My notes:

Acutely different cultural viewpoints that are now colliding in the realm of so-called 'learning management systems'.

What are the connections between learning management systems and the broader educational landscape? LMS got on the radar of librarians about two years ago, when it was noticed that LMS were getting installed all over the place and being managed in a "policy-free" environment, getting information into them from library-operated systems is difficult, and, as LMS vendors get into licensing content to go into their LMS, raised the spectre of institutions may be licensing the same materials multiple times.

Things become "learning objects" by context. The articles of faith here are highly granular objects with large amounts of metadata and that if we do it right these objects will be highly reused and a whole ecology of these things will evolve. Somehow this hasn't happened - this area stubbornly resists scale-up, and people are constantly inventing new objects instead of reusing old ones.

On the other hand, LMS systems have come from nowhere in six or seven years and been installed as infrastructure. But if you look at what's in an LMS it's mostly not learning objects- exercises, syllabi, copies of lecture notes, threaded discussions, etc. Plus there's no relation between these and the kinds of collections that are used for recording and passing on knowledge to support inquiry - books, articles, photographs, images, scientific data sets, etc.

One of the interesting things in the learning objects space has been the struggle to understand what metadata to apply to objects. In the broader world of digital content the whole metadata paradigm is becoming unglued.

In libraries there is elaborate metadata applied to items. The only reason we've been able to afford that over the past thirty years has been because of shared "copy" cataloging, where only one person catalogs the item and other libraries make use of that.

As libraries and museums begin to digitize their special collections, these are unique, not shared. It's not uncommon to discover that an institution is spending more to describe the collection than to digitize it. Applying metadata is basically unaffordable at this point except in very special circumstances. One of the fundamental problems we're facing right now is a flood of material that is growing much faster than our capacity to describe it.

So we're seeing the evolution of methods to cope - cataloging collections of objects at a time, letting the computer do it (works well for text, but not for images so far).

What's in LMS? The stock in trade is an artificial but large entity called a course. It's not always clear where courses start or end or who participates in them. It's starting to become clear that an LMS is really a collaborative environment with some extra special things glued on to it. That leads all sorts of projects to have to masquerade as "courses" - student projects, administrative efforts, etc. Could it be that this entity of a "course" could be a better unit of object than the highly granular learning objects?

Then there's the content that's generated by the interaction of people over the time period of the course.

Cliff brings up the example of faculty who don't want the course to start again each quarter but to accrete over time, building on the previous record.

This leads to another set of policy issues. The observation was made that LMS collect all sorts of wonderful statistics that will be a boon to faculty in their teaching. The library has never sent this kind of data to faculty - instead has operated on very strict policies about privacy of the data on what users are doing, including students. Libraries now design systems to minimize the amount of data they hold, so they can't be forced to share it by law enforcement. One of the things that's actually happening now is that people are realizing that the web has a long memory. It has amassed enough knowledge of people's history to provide for a wealth of embarrassment. As people move from being college students to political candidates it's often awkward to have this material around.

What does this mean for LMS systems? Are we going to have closed systems where the records live and they'll be destroyed after a year? Or are we going to have very open environments? In many graduate courses the expectation is that student work will get posted to the web for global inspection and review. How long will they stay there? Where does this sit in terms of student policy? As we start to regard LMS as student publishing environments, these issues will become real.

Do we really want to keep everyone's first year calculus problem set for a hundred years?

The trend is towards more openness in scholarly communication. Those will inform the evolution of policies in this area.

Use environments are not necessarily the same as management environments. As institutions want to manage digital collections over the long haul they're looking at repositories - keeping authoritative copies safe, accessible, etc. These are different from use environments. It's possible that the LMS is the use environment, and things will roll out over time into the institutional repository for preservation.

Persistent references have been a problem for a long time in the networked world. We have not dealt with this very much in the LMS environment. As we want to be able to cite these works we'll need that and it's important to deal with this sooner rather than later.

There's a belief that if you design systems right you can pick up all sorts of useful metadata as part of the process of creation, but if you have to go back to add it later it's very expensive. Like in images, the camera can tell you when it was taken, what the light settings were, etc. If we were simply able to collect provenance information at creation (where it came from) we would be way ahead of the game in understanding how to obtain rights. Wouldn't it be nice to tag items in the LMS when they're added? eg. this is a student paper, this is a faculty contribution, this is a third party piece. Coming up with the right taxonomies instead of sending people back to tag things would be better.

Posted by oren at 1:48 PM | Comments (0)

Web Services and SOA in higher ed - what's the state of the art?

I had a brief conversation this morning with Richard Katz about the state of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures in higher education.

My going-in opinion was that lots of web services activity is happening in all sorts of places within institutions.

Richard's take is that there's a lack of progress on, or even discussion of, component based architectures for essential institutional services, and that the new large open source efforts like Sakai and Kuali are, to a large extent, rebuilding the same monolithic approach to business systems that we've seen from the commercial world.

These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive conclusions, but I think there's some work to be done to really ascertain what's up with web services and component architectures in higher ed.

Any opinions out there?

Posted by oren at 8:51 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2005

I guess I am a nerd after all

I don't usually think of myself all that nerdy, but -

Hey - if Geoff Arnold can do it, so can I :)

Posted by oren at 5:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2005

Interview with Mitch Kapor

Dan Updegrove sends along this nice interview with Mitch Kapor in news.com

Mitch has become a wonderfully influential person in the high tech Internet community, as well as continuing his role of encouraging social responsibility among us, and it's nice to see him get more widely known.

It's especially nice to see him give Mitchell Baker her props for her amazing quiet leadership work at the Mozilla Foundation.

I think it was like the Harry Potter of open source. You know how all the movies open with him living with his aunt and uncle, who give him no respect and lock him up? People had written off Mozilla on multiple occasions. I felt like and continue to feel like she does a remarkable job in a low-key way in shepherding that project through unique and difficult circumstances. I think the renaissance with Firefox and Thunderbird--without her this would not have happened. Mozilla was like the Harry Potter of open source. I respect her leadership, which is very low-key and not charismatic--the opposite of the Larry Ellison style. She has been effective in the face of real challenges.

Posted by oren at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

Progress on calendaring standards

Last week I attended a meeting of the CalConnect Calendaring Consortium (well, I attended the first day of the meeting and then had to go off to a workgroup retreat of our Learning Technologies group at the wonderful Sleeping Lady retreat center near Leavenworth, WA).

While I'll wait for the official press releases and reports from interop testing so as not to steal anyone's thunder, this meeting saw significant real progress made in achieving interoperability between disparate calendar systems. Several different systems actually demonstrated that they could schedule with each other using the new CalDav protocol. That's the most progress we've seen on this front in years!

It looks like CalDav is gathering a good head of steam to actually be a widely adopted protocol. This is good news, and it's largely due to the efforts of Lisa Dusseault from OSAF, along with Cyrus Daboo from ISAMET and Bernard Desruisseaux from Oracle. Nice work, all!

Posted by oren at 7:57 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2005

I've changed things here

Over time I have managed to mess up my configuration of Movable Type, mostly as I tried to recover from the comment spam floods. I'm tired of dealing with errors, and with not being able to turn comments on.

So now I've completely reinstalled MT, using version 3.14 (the latest and greatest) at a new address: http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog2/

The RSS feed also has this new address: http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog2/index.rdf

I exported the database and imported into the new installation, so absolute URLs to previous entries have changed (this must be the result of having deleted some old entries over time).

Comments are enabled, but you'll have to have a TypeKey identity to leave a comment.

Other changes include moving my list of blogs I read to a different page, which also includes a list of the latest links I'm interested in enough to bookmark in del.icio.us but not to write about. That page uses RSS Digest to generate the html dynamically from the del.icio.us rss feed, and the list of blogs is generated automatically from my subscriptions at Bloglines, which is the web-based aggregator I use to read weblogs. It is extremely cool that there are all of these services out there that can be used in this building-block fashion to cobble sites together - definitely an example of Levi-Strauss' bricolage:

To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to "bricolage": "Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual 'bricolage'" (p. 17). The French verb, "bricoler," has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The "bricoleur" performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from "odds and ends." He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society. "The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events" .

- from Janine Mileaf on Levi-Strauss, "Science of the Concrete"

Update

I realized when I looked at the link to my old home page that I hadn't changed anything there in years, so I removed the link to my old home page from the weblog, and I've made the weblog synonymous with my home page. I guess that means the blog is my online home. Well, duh.

Posted by oren at 8:02 PM | Comments (2)

January 11, 2005

Very cool new Apple stuff!

I've just perused the announcements of the new Apple gear that Steve Jobs must've announced this morning at MacWorld (why did they decide not to broadcast the session?).

The coolest new thing in my view is the Mac Mini - a G4 Mac that's 6.5 inches square and 2 inches high for $500 - wow! (no keyboard or monitor included). I think this will sell a whole bunch for personal media servers, low cost web servers, etc.

The iPod Shuffle is a flash-memory based iPod with 512 MB or 1 GB of capacity. It's got features that many people may like that grab random tunes from iTunes playlists and play them in random order. The feature that I really like is that it plugs right into a USB port.

iWork is the bundling of the new version of Keynote with a new word processor called Pages. These might be useful for lots of folks. I'm still astounded that Keynote doesn't export html files, though the new version exports QuickTime and Flash in addition to PDF. I'm sticking with BBEdit and Eric Meyer's S5 web standards presentation software.

There's also new versions of the iLife programs (iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, iDVD, and iMovie) and of Final Cut Express.

Posted by oren at 1:12 PM | Comments (0)

January 6, 2005

[CSG-Winter-2005] Chandler Westwood Advisory Board Meeting

We had the usual Westwood Advisory Board meeting this morning. It was good to touch base with the OSAF folks, and I finally got to meet Ted Leung face-to-face (after all, he only lives just across the Sound from us on Bainbridge Island).

The agenda from the meeting is here.

Some points of interest were work on Chandler 0.5 is proceding, with a March release planned.

There's a lot of progress on the draft CalDAV standard, and there is an upcoming CalConnect interop test and roundtable meeting in Seattle next week (that we're hosting. We expect to actually see some folks testing initial implementations of CalDAV at that meeting - now thats exciting.

OSAF is working with ISAMET (formerly Cyrusoft) to develop a version of the Apache Jakarta Slide WebDAV server to be a CalDAV server. The intent is that this will end up as part of the main Slide distribution as much as is practical over time.

The Chandler folks are working hard on making it possible for Python developers to develop applications and extensions to Chandler - Ted's experience on the Apache project is particularly relevant in that effort. The plan is to do both a Sprint and a Chandler development tutorial at Pycon 2005.

There was a spirited (if inconclusive) discussion of what the relationship is between Chandler and the current Mozilla calendaring effort which is also working on CalDAV. This is an interesting set of topics, particularly given Mitch's recent blog posting titled When Browsers Grow Up.

It was nice to see Chao, Mitchell, Mitch, Lisa and the rest of the gang - we're likely going to schedule another Chandler-Higher Ed calibration meeting before the next CSG meeting.

Posted by oren at 2:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 5, 2005

Moving Image Contest Finalists at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain

I've written before (here and here ) about Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain and their Arts Project Moving Image Contest, where entrants were asked to "create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film."

Jennifer Jenkins from the Center wrote while I was on vacation to tell me that the finalists have been announced and are available on the web here. They can be viewed online and you can pick your favorite entry too.

The finalists include films on topics like:
A documentarian trying to cover army recruiters in the North Carolina Piedmont...
A Polish animator's science fiction vision of music's apocalyptic future...
A college student's efforts to make a Public Service Announcement about the Civil Rights movement..
A dissection of the law behind "Super Size Me"...

I haven't had a chance to view these yet, but I'm really looking forward to checking them out.

Posted by oren at 2:33 PM | Comments (0)

[CSG-Winter-2005] Ben Teitelbaum (Internet2) - VoIP Service Opportunities

Ben Teitelbaum is talking about "From Ma Bell to Your Bell: voice, VoIP, and the Potential Role of Internet2"

The slides are available on the CSG web site.

Ben notes that Voice is the dominant real-time communications medium among homo sapiens - that's a good and worthy observation!

VoIP is not just a cost-saving hack - open standards and the Internet are revolutionizing telecom, forcing new industry structures, architectures, services and applications.

The trends are toward greater empowerment not just of campuses and institutions, but of end users.

There are many ways we can do better than conventional telephony - in fidelity, privacy, presence (who's available now), mobility, integration with IM and video, etc.

Today, campuses using VoIP are talking to each other across the traditional PSTN telephone network. Some campuses are starting to use Internet Telephone Service Providers (ITSPs) for some of this traffic, but that's basically the same thing - aggregating traffic before it goes to the PSTN. There is a fair amount of p2p VoIP traffic with people who've downloaded various software packages like Skype and are using them over Internet2 between campuses.

One possible future might be end-to-end IP transport over Internet2, avoiding the PSTN altogether.

There is an Internet2 committee called VSAC (don't know what it stands for) that is considering whether it makes sense for I2 to provide voice services to its membership - that committee will be issuing a report shortly.

Options they have been considering have included:

- A VoIP routing registry, with gateways at each campus and a centrally managed private directory of phone numbers at each campus, routing intra-I2 calls across the Abilene backbone.

- An exchange point for ITSPs. That might encourage the proliferation and success of smaller ITSP players.

- I2-Mobile (Cellular-WiFi) - work with Verisign, which provides a cellular roaming clearing house used by most of the little cellular providers, They can make the campus WiFi network look like cellular roaming. This could enable people on campus to receive inbound calls through the campus network on their cell phones.

- Voice Disaster Recovery - where surviving members provide PSTN connectivity to school with TDM voice failure.

It will be interesting to see which of these scenarios get recommended in the final report and how this progresses.

Posted by oren at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG-Winter-2005] VOIP - Denis Baron on SIP

Denis Baron
SIP (IETF RFC 3261) - is a Voice Over IP protocol that runs over http. It's an application layer protocol for session initiation and management.

SIP components include User Agents (the usual clients and servers). Gatewaother addresses, like ISDN or H.323. Gateways also tend to translate audio.

SIP is very lightweight to set up conversations, which can then enable SIP agents to communicate directly with each other.

Session Description Protocol (IETF RFC 2327) describes sessions - used for bodies of SIP messages. Used, for example, to specify which codecs are preferred, in which order of preference.

While the SIP REGISTER dialog includes authentication (using http digest authentication) that is typically used today to hard code your user name and password into the phone device, which provides the same level of identity as do traditional telephones, but don't really identify the user. Denis note that the Pingtel phones register themselves as a device and that the future is likely to be in systems that maintain individual user accounts on the phone devices themselves. There's a draft proposal for SIP authenticated identity management.

Posted by oren at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

[CSG-Winter-2005] CSG at Stanford

I'm down at Stanford for the winter meeting of the Common Solutions Group.

Last night Bob Morgan and I went to see the UW Huskies play the Stanford Cardinals in women's basketball. Our colleague Bruce Vincent from Stanford somehow finagled us great courtside seats - unfortunately the UW lost, 74-61. Kayla Burt, one the Huskies stars, sprained her ankle in the second half, and was back playing a few minutes later - how do they do that?

Today's long workshop topic is Voice over IP. I'll be blogging bits I find interesting, but for those who are really interested the workshop is being webcast. From the CSG web page you can find the webcast link by clicking on Next Meeting and then clicking on CSG Workshop Video.

Here's Bob at last night's game.

Posted by oren at 8:21 AM | Comments (0)

January 3, 2005

Where are the details on Office 2004 updates?

I like the fact that Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac has an auto-updater that notifies me when new updates are available. And, being the cautious type that I am, I always click on the "tell me more" button to get some information about what's included in an update.

What do I get?

This update to Microsoft AutoUpdate in Microsoft Office 2004 is part of Microsoft's continued effort to provide the latest product updates to customers.
System requirements

This update has the following system requirements:

Processor: Mac OS X-compatible processor that is a model G3 or higher.
Operating system: Mac OS X version 10.2.8 or later.
Memory: 256 MB of RAM.
Hard disk: 2 MB of hard disk space.

Absolutely no details about what's included in the update, or why I need to update at all.

That's not good.

Posted by oren at 10:46 AM | Comments (1)

December 31, 2004

John Dvorak on the Mac - credible or not?

I've been reading John Dvorak's IT opinion pieces since the early 1980's. He's always entertaining, and frequently provocative, if not always right.

This week he posted a piece where he extrapolates from browser statistics to conclude that the Macintosh platform is irrelevant and doomed in the marketplace.

You can choose to agree or not with his conclusions, but he's got his data sources confused.

In the piece he says he's using data from the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium founded by Tim Berners-Lee and others. The W3C is a highly respected organization that develops and maintains standards for the Web.

But the statistics Dvorak links to are actually from w3schools, a site of web tutorials owned and maintained by Refnes Data, a Norwegian software development and consulting company. The w3schools web browser statistics are derived from the log files of their particular site. While these might be globally indicative of browser and platform market share, there's no guarantee that this is an accurate inference.

I don't know about you, but I'm leery of opinions expounded loudly by people who can't properly identify their data sources.

And, interestingly enough, the w3schools stats show a significant increase in Mac market share - from 1.8% in March of 2003 to 2.7% in December 2004. That's a pretty dramatic increase if it's indicative of global trends.

Perhaps more interesting is the growth of the Mozilla browser use to over 21 percent. Now that's impressive!

Posted by oren at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2004

Presentation slides from our quarterly computing support meeting

I gave two short presentations today at our quarterly meeting for campus computing support staff. One was just a bunch of announcements from UW Computing & Communications. The other was a very brief (two slides) update on the calendaring software landscape.

We'll have audio files from all of the presentations from today's meeting online next week.

Posted by oren at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

I've got nasty habits

I hate to admit it, but I have bad email habits...

I get several hundred emails a day, and I just can't cope (who can?).
If I actually have one of those rare days when I'm sitting in front of my computer in my office most of the day I can just about keep up with what's coming in. But a day of meetings, or days spent travelling and at conferences, and it's all over.

And I'm one of those people who let email pile up in my inbox if I haven't finished dealing with the issue. So the size of the inbox just grows and grows and...

So my admittedly poor technique for dealing with it:

When I'm about to go out of town I save all the messages in my inbox, read or unread, to a folder named "pending". Before I do that, I delete any messages that were already in there from the last time I did it. Then I have a perfectly clean inbox for a few minutes, and when I get home I read the messages that are in the inbox first, referring to messages in the pending folder as needed.

If anybody has a better technique, I'd love to hear it.

Posted by oren at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2004

p2p software in fifteen lines of Python

Ed Felten has written a P2P application in fifteen lines of Python code - cool!

TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.

Pointed out by Donna Wentworth on the indispensable Copyfight.

Posted by oren at 3:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2004

Java and dynamic languages get-together

Tim Bray (who now works for Sun), reports on an interesting get-together to talk about bringing Java and the dynamic languages (Perl, Python, et al) closer together. Intriguing.

Even if Sun didn’t approve of other languages on the Java platform, they’d happen anyhow. I approve, and when I started going around Sun asking, it turned out that everyone I asked did too. So I asked Graham Hamilton, who’s kind of at the centre of the Java universe, if he thought it would be a good idea to bring in a roomful of dynamic-language experts to help us figure out how Java could be made a better home.

Posted by oren at 1:27 AM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2004

Thunderbird goes 1.0

Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has gone to full official 1.0 release.

So far I don't notice a lot of difference from 0.9 (though I do like the new icon for search-based folders).

Congratulations once again to the Mozilla team!

Posted by oren at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

December 5, 2004

Pine for OS X

My colleague Josh Larios has put together a version of the UW's Pine email client for OS X.

While Pine isn't the prettiest email client in the world, being bascially a character-baased unix terminal application, it is very full-functioned, including features that I haven't seen in any other email client I use - like being able to search all the messages in a folder for any participaing in the mail (including To:, From:, Cc:).

Pine also allows you to keep your address books and configuration info in an IMAP folder on a remote server, which is really handy if you use multiple computers regularly.

The advantage to using Pine running natively on a desktop operating system, instead of using a terminal connecting to a unix host is that you can open attachments and urls in the email with just a click instead of having to separately download or copy and paste.

I don't imagine that there's a large audience for Pine on OS X, but I know it will come in very handy on my desktop. Thanks, Josh!

My only question is why he didn't call it Pineapple :)

Posted by oren at 8:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 3, 2004

A question about web links in Tbird/Firefox

Is it just my imagination, or has the behavior of opening web links from within email messages changed with Thunderbird 0.9?

It seems to me that with previous Tbird releases when I clicked on links within email they opened up a new browser window to display the page.

Now the links open up in the currently active browser window, replacing whatever content was previously in that window.

I think I liked the old behavior better. I don't see any preference settings about this, and a quick google search didn't turn up any obvious help on the question.

Comments are still off, so email any suggestions, please.

Update - Michal wrote in saying "In Firefox, check Preferences -> Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing. There should be three behaviors for you to choose." And indeed there are three preferences for "Open links from other applications" in either a new window, a new tab in the most recent window, or the most recent tab/window. Cool! I choose to open in a new tab in the most recent window. Gotta love that Firefox.

Thanks, Michal!

Posted by oren at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2004

Outlook 2003, IE, and things Microsoftian

I've been testing some things using Outlook 2003 on my Windows machine. Something happened when trying to view a particular PDF document from a link in an email and Outlook stopped responding. I killed it with the Task Manager, and consented to send the error report to Microsoft. The error report process nicely came back noting that there is an update to Office 2003 available that I should probably install. When I clicked on the link, it went off to the Microsoft site, but then came back with a message saying that I needed to use Internet Explorer to get the update (Firefox is my default browser).

I thought it was interesting that you have to use IE to get Office updates.... especially to see that on the same day that real-life exploits of the latest IE vulnerability have been reported.

Of course, my Windows machine is running XP SP2, so it wouldn't have been affected, but it still seems silly that Microsoft should tie updates to other application software to its browser.

UPDATE 24 September
Bruce Fulton points out that it's probably due to Firefox not handling ActiveX controls. I'm not sure I think updates to an application *should* be handled by active code running from a browser. It seems more architecturally sound to me to handle updates to an application (or an application suite) by having the update code run as part of the application itself - which is how Office updates are handled on the Mac.

Posted by oren at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2004

I've turned comments off for now

I'm so tired of dealing with spam comments that I've turned comments off at the present time. I've been getting over a hundred comment spams every day, and even with MT-Blacklist I've still got to go through and delete them all, which is just too time consuming for me.

I'll probably re-enable comments that have been authenticated using TypeKey, but I've got some work to do to reconfiguring Movable Type before I can do that - maybe I'll find some time over the long weekend to do that work.

In the meantime, if you've got a comment you'd like posted, email it to me at oren at washington dot edu and I'll put it in.

Sigh.

Posted by oren at 9:04 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2004

[ECAR 2004] ECAR in San Diego

I'm down in San Diego for the 2004 ECAR symposium. As usual, Richard Katz and his merry band have put together a very stimulating conference.

This morning started off with a talk by Larry Smarr from UCSD. Larry's been involved with many of the developments of modern information and networking technology over the last 20 or so years, so it's always wise to listen to his perspective.

This time Larry was talking about the sea change in computing that is coming about due to the evolving ubiquitous availability of high capacity fiber linking researchers around the world. He noted that the development of storage and networking technology is outstripping the development of computing power. The growth of projects like National Lambda Rail point us to a future where it is perfectly possible for researchers to have dedicated fiber links running independently of other network traffic at very high speeds.

He pointed to projects like hurricane forcasting or online microscopy (150 megapixel images) presenting real needs for this kind of bandwidth - in projects like these, the lack of high capacity, low latency bandwidth is limiting the amount of work that can be accomplished.

Larry and his colleagues are working on a project called the Optiputer, which is a "is an envisioned infrastructure that will tightly couple computational resources over parallel optical networks using the IP communication mechanism.".

Very interesting and powerful stuff.

Posted by oren at 10:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2004

Wired - a music production suite for Linux

This looks cool - Wired is a new music sequencing and recording package for Linux, now available for download in a 0.1 release. Via Slashdot.

Posted by oren at 8:36 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2004

Got MT-Blacklist working!

I seem to have gotten MT-Blacklist working now - hopefully that will ease up on the amount of comment spam I have to deal with!

Posted by oren at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)

Switching around instant messaging apps and identities

I haven't been regular about being on instant messaging for quite some time - in general the synchronous nature of IM tends to be too much of an interruption to the way I work.

But recently I've been using Apple's iChat AV and enjoying it, so I'm making myself a little more available - if you want to chat, I'll be on iChat or AOL IM as oren dot sreebny at mac dot com. I'm also on MSN as oren at cac dot washington dot edu. See you online!

Posted by oren at 3:52 PM | Comments (0)

Comment spam continuing - sigh

I'm getting something on the order of a couple hundred spam comments a day now.

When I tried to install MT-Blacklist it blew up on me, so I've got to go back and figure out what went wrong, which I haven't had time to do yet.

So in the meantime, I'm moderating all comments and deleting most of them. Hopefully I'm not deleting real comments as I go, but if you post a comment and it doesn't show up on the blog within a couple of days you might try again (and I apologize!).

Shelley notes the same problem, and wonders if she finds a solution if she'll be crowned Queen For a Day. Heck, Shelley - if you solve this problem I think you ought to be nominated for a Nobel Prize!

Posted by oren at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)

More on Thunderbird and compacting IMAP folders

Matthew is also having problems with Thunderbird compacting folders, but his problems appear to be with folders stored locally on his hard disk rather than on an IMAP server.

Further testing here turns up the interesting fact that if I use the "compact folders" menu item from the File menu Thunderbird ends up crashing on my Mac (not on the Windows version though).

BUT - if I do a Control-Click on the Inbox folder and then pick Compact This Folder from the popup menu, it seems to expunge the deleted messages from my Inbox just fine. That's good enough for my everyday use, though it might be nice to have a button on the toolbar that acts as a "Compact Inbox" click. Thanks to Dave Wall for showing me that I could do that!

So I now have two different theories on why the Compact Folders is crashing T'bird on my Mac - one is that I just have so many folders that if it actually has to go through them all and open them to see if there are messages that need to be expunged that it might well be receiving some sort of time-out before it completes, and perhaps T'bird isn't prepared to deal with that particular error condition (I have 200 IMAP folders on the server, using up about 1.2 Gigabytes of disk space). The other theory is that there is some sort of corruption in one or more of my folders that causes T'bird on the Mac to throw up.

But I'm still using it!

Posted by oren at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2004

Words from another mac user

An interesting post from last weekend by Shelley Powers, that somewhat echoes my own platform experience. I've added Shelley's Burningbird blog to my list of regular reads.

A few years ago, I never would have thought this could occur. I had written a best-selling book on COM/COM+ and ASP for O’Reilly, I was a member of the Microsoft Development Network, had passed several Windows certification tests, attended Windows conferences almost exclusively, and programmed primarily in VB and VC++ and just a little Java. In addition, I scoffed at the Macs with their cute graphics, and decided if I were to go with a second environment, away from my beloved Windows, it would be Linux.

This weekend, though, I was able to install several open source applications far more easily than I ever could on Linux, primarily because Mac users won’t tolerate piecemeal packages, cryptic installation instructions, and a hackers attitude of “well, if you have to ask how something works, you shouldn’t use it". Best of all, they work out of the box on the Mac – no mucking around with Windows ‘tweaks’.

I'm also increasingly finding OS X to be the *nix for the rest of us.

Posted by oren at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

Firefox goes 1.0

I hereby join the rest of the tech world in noting that the Firefox browser had its official 1.0 release yesterday. Congratulations to Mitchell Baker and the rest of the Mozilla crew! It's a great browser - I use it as the default browser on all of my computers. If you're still using IE, especially on Windows, you really ought to switch.

Posted by oren at 6:28 AM | Comments (0)

Maps and data

Some very interesting uses of cartogram mapping techniques to visualize the US Presidential Election results from Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan. Thanks to Dave Weinberger for pointing this out!

Posted by oren at 5:44 AM | Comments (1)

November 7, 2004

Thunderbird 0.9 is out

For the last couple of months I've been living with Thunderbird as my primary email client. The good folks at Mozilla have released Thunderbird version 0.9.

So far I've tried it on my Macs and it seems much faster and more responsive overall than previous versions.

There are new features that enhance usability, and it seems to me that both of these features will exacerbate the trend towards very large inboxes, which has implications for those who have to manage large mail servers - generally speaking, the larger an IMAP folder is, the more processing time it takes to open, read, or perform other operations on it.

The big new feature is "saved-search folders", which creates what looks like a folder in your folder list, but is really just a view into your inbox based on a filter. So I can have, for example, a "folder" of all messages from Joe Blow, based on the string "Joe Blow" occurring in the

from:

line of the email. This means that I don't have to find and drag all those messages into that folder, and new messages are automatically added to the folder as they come in, but without being removed from the inbox. This is similar to how views work in Google mail.

The other new feature is "message grouping", which lets you organize collapsing groups within your folders, based on criteria like when it arrived. Here's the example screenshot, of an inbox with groups based on arrival date.

0.9 does not fix the problem I'm having on the Mac platform of the software crashing when I try to compact folders (which, as far as I know is the only way to expunge deleted IMAP messages in Thunderbird). This seems to be something peculiar to my account, as it doesn't happen on my other test accounts, nor can I find anyone else who's seen this problem. It is very odd, though, that it doesn't happen if I use the Windows version of Thunderbird. I'll continue trying to track down the details on this one...

Posted by oren at 5:39 AM | Comments (3)

November 3, 2004

What is the deal with the current comment spam

Overnight another 103 spam comments posted to the blog.

What the heck is the deal with these?

I used to think that the idea was to get the links published in lots of places so that those links came up higher in Google searches for those particular uhhh.... topics.

But I took a couple of the latest batch and tried the links - and they don't even go anywhere or resolve at all! What the hell do these folks hope to accomplish with these ads? It don't make no sense to me... color me aggravated.

Posted by oren at 4:19 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2004

Critics of DRM copy protection schemes chime in

Following up on my own bad experiences with Apple's copy protection schemes (I'm no longer going to call these technologies Digital Rights Management, the current IT industry euphemism that can only have been thought up by the same people who brought you Military Intelligence), comes a great rant in the Inquirer by Charlie Demerjian. He hits the nail squarely on the head:

The fundamental question is simply this. Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions? I have asked this question to junior members of the companies to the very top CxOs, and from people on the street to fellow journalists. No-one can give me an answer.

The only answer is greed. They don't give a rat's ass about you, what you think, care or do, as long as they get your money. If you don't want to give them your money, they will take it, and make resistance a crime.

Venture capitalist Tim Oren has a more reasoned, but no less conclusive, take on it:

Copy protection DRM always destroys end user value, in both convenience and robustness. When you see DRM in a business plan or analysis, it is always there to benefit someone other than the end user. Find out who, it will indicate where power lies in a content value chain.

The mere presence of DRM indicates a failure to deliver end user value. If the information object were to lose value when extracted from the bundle or service from which it was derived, DRM would not be felt necessary. Therefore the presence of DRM suggests a vendor that is behind the curve, failing to find a new value to deliver as their chokepoint disappears in the digital world.

DRM almost always means there is trouble afoot for aggregators ('infomediaries'). If it's an aggregator inserting the DRM, their value added is in question. If it's information originators mandating DRM, then they feel they can damage the aggregator's value with impunity, and will likely try to drive end users' attention to themselves.

Posted by oren at 7:22 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2004

Chandler 0.4 is out!

This week, as promised, OSAF released Chandler 0.4, the first experimentally usable version of the open source, cross platform PIM client.

While this is still a very early pre-release primarily of interest to software developers and other brave souls who don't mind living out on the edge, it's good to see a real desktop program that can send and receive email and synch calendars via WebDAV.

As the documentation says, I wouldn't trust it with my real data, but I got it working fine on a test account here, using the UW imap and smtp servers, and a webdav server I have an account on at UC Santa Cruz.

This is real progress!

Congratulations to Mitch, Chao, Lisa, Pieter, Katie, Heikki, Andi, Ted, Brian, and all the rest of the OSAF gang!

Posted by oren at 3:05 PM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2004

Apple's DRM stymies my personal use

The other day I bought the Neville Brothers fine funky new album Walkin' in the Shadow of Life from the iTunes Music Store, putting it on my iMac at work to listen to while I worked.

That evening while at home, I wanted to finish listening to the album. So I mounted my work computer's disk onto my iMac at home and dragged and dropped the song files over into iTunes and happily listened away.

Yesterday morning I decided I'd burn the album onto a CD to listen to in the car on the way to work. Uh-oh. No dice.

iTunes reports "None of the items in this playlist can be burned to disc."

What's up with that?

The tunes burn fine from my work iMac - but not from home, on a machine that's authorized to play the tunes.

This, IMHO, sucks. No wonder people keep using the mp3 p2p file sharing services, as reported here in Wired, talking about a new study of p2p traffic done by folks at UC Riverside and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.

>"In general we observe that P2P activity has not diminished," says the study, which will be presented at IEEE Globecom 2004 next month. "On the contrary, P2P traffic represents a significant amount of internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding."

Get with the program, Apple. Sheesh.

Is anybody besides me old enough to remember the old Warner Brothers Records Columbia Records ad campaign from the early '70s 1969 that had the tag line "The man can't bust our music"? That was the good old days.

Posted by oren at 7:50 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2004

S5 - at last, a good web-based presentation package

Last week for my presentation on Chandler and the CSG at Educause 2004 I used Eric Meyer's S5 package instead of Powerpoint for the first time.

It worked like a charm!

In case you're wondering, S5 stands for the "simple standards-based slide show system", which simply explains what it is.

I love the fact that it's entirely web standards compliant, requiring nothing more than a browser to view the slides. And, even better, the same content can be viewed with multiple formatting applied - for instance, here are the slides, and here is the content in an outline view.

Eric's now released version 1.0 of S5, along with a primer on how to use it.

I recommend it highly - a big thanks to Eric for making this simple and elegant tool available.

Now I just have to figure out how to convert our organizational Powerpoint template into an S5 template.

Posted by oren at 9:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2004

Calendaring woes in real life

There has been a bunch of talk on the calendaring standards lists about how to handle time zones, and sure enough, last week I ran into a real-world example that pointed out the issues (but not the answers) in maddening fashion.

The Educause 2004 conference web site has an Itinerary Builder where you can select which conference events to attend and build an personal itinerary. I did that, then exported the itinerary to an ical file, which I then imported into iCal on my PowerBook. So far it worked great all the events showed up at the right times.

I then synched the Powerbook with my Nokia cell phone, figuring I could then just keep track of where I needed to be next by checking my calendar on the cell phone as I wandered the conference.

But lo and behold, all the conference events showed up on the cell phone eight hours earlier than their scheduled times!

When I looked at the data that the Educause ical export put out, I noticed that it came through with no time zone information. iCal on the Mac didn't pay any attention to that and put it on my calendar as if it were local time. But the Nokia apparently decided that any event without a time zone must be taking place at that time in Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) and shifted the event times accordingly.

Aargh!

Posted by oren at 9:52 AM | Comments (1)

[Educause 2004] Open source is all the rage

It seems like the theme, intentional or otherwise, of this conference is the increased visibility and progress on open source projects in higher ed.

Brad Wheeler from Indiana gave a heavily attended talk where he spoke about the process by which Indiana came to the conclusion that it's better in many (though not all) instances to collaborate with other like-minded institutions on developing software than to either purchase it from major vendors or build it themselves.

Dave Lambert from Georgetown spoke about the general software dilemma faced by higher ed institutions - where we can't afford to build all of our own applications but the vendors don't meet all our requirements so force us to either heavily modify code or build workarounds. He emerging consolidations and the depressed investment climate are causing new uncertainties in the commercial vendor space. He contrasted that with the strengths of open source projects. He did suggest that it's possible that higher ed needs a new organization to coordinate and provide a locus for fostering and sustaining the many open source projects in progress. He painted a nice picture of topics which clump together into something he calls Scholarly Information Systems, where he said that it makes sense for campuses to collaborate on projects.

I met in the afternoon with Brad Wheeler and Rob Lownden and some other folks to talk about the new Kuali project to build an open source Financial Information System. The core partners in this project at present are Indiana and the University of Hawaii. This project sounds like it's taking off, and it's one I predict we'll be hearing lots more about.

This morning I participated with Mitch Kapor, Jack McCredie and Lisa Dusseault on a panel about the Chandler Project. The significant news here is that Mitch actually gave a demo of the 0.4 release of the software! Huzzah! He managed to create a collection of calendar items, upload them to a WebDAV server, tell the client to share them with another user, communicate the sharing invitation by email, and (on the other client) receive the invitation and accept the items into the second client's calendar. That's progress! 0.4 is scheduled for public release next week.

Posted by oren at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)

[Educause 2004] Keith Hazelton on leveraging campus directories

I was lucky enough to be the convener for Keith Hazelton's talk on leveraging campus directories for authorization and group management. Keith did a terrific job of setting the background for the use of directories for group management - this is extremely important work and I think a lot of people could benefit from a look at Keith's slides.

Posted by oren at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)

[Educause 2004] Duderstadt's keynote

James Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan, opened the conference on Wednesday with a talk about the impacts of social transformation and technology on higher education. He spoke mainly about the National Academies Forum on Information Technology and Research Universities, and their activities to engage the executive leadership of universities in discussions about how technology is changing the way students and researchers work, and the social relations of researchers and educators.

The National Academies have issued a report on the topic, titled Preparing for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research University, available here.

Posted by oren at 9:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

[Educause 2004] Opening reception and dinner with Meeting Maker folks

Tonight was the opening reception for the Educause 2004 conference in the Exhibit Hall. Educause has gotten huge - something in the neighborhood of 6-8,000 people!

Is it just me, or do the exhibits at these trade shows seem completely off the mark? I wander around, wondering if there's anybody who can really talk to me about the things I want to know about product lines. I went by the Novell booth to see if I could talk to somebody about their upcoming desktop Linux product, but nobody at the booth knows anything about it. Then I went by Apple to see if anyone can talk to me about whether the WebDAV client in Tiger will be able to work over SSL and to find out more details about authentication in the Jabber server in Tiger server - but again, nobody at the booth knows details about that kind of stuff. Oh, well.

I had a nice time chatting calendaring with Debby Umbach, Ed Karish and Michael Harris from Meeting Maker. They are trying to understand the lay of the standards landscape. One thing we're all wondering is what's the state of RSS event standards. I talked up the CalDAV and Calsify efforts, and it sounds like they'll participate in future interop and CalSched consortium meetings.

And now to sleep, in order to make it to the 7 am speaker's breakfast tomorrow (ugh).

Posted by oren at 9:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2004

Sheryl and company get a grant to study automatic conversion of graphs and charts to tactile forms. Way to go!

I wrote a couple of months ago about my colleague Sheryl Burgstahler and her DO-IT projects to help students with all kinds of disabilities work with computing.

Now Sheryl, along with Richard Ladner and Rajesh Rao of the Computer Science department and Melody Ivory-Ndiaye or the Information School have won a big new grant from National Science Foundation to find the best ways to represent in tactile form the graphical images found in scientific, engineering, and mathematical books and papers, as well as in digital formats, and to automate as much of this work as possible.

The project web site is here. Nice work!

Posted by oren at 1:56 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2004

Going to Educause next week

I'll be in Denver most of next week for Educause 2004.

I'm on a panel Thursday morning at 8:10 (ugh) with Mitch Kapor from OSAF and Jack McCredie from UC Berkeley talking about the collaboration between the Common Solutions Group and OSAF on the Westwood version of Chandler. Mitch is supposedly going to actually demonstrate the 0.4 version of Chandler (you read it here first), so come on Ballroom 4 by if you're at the conference and up that early.

Wednesday morning I'm the convener at a program on using LDAP directories for Authorization and Group Management featuring Keith Hazelton from the other UW - the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I think being a convener means I'm supposed to introduce the speaker and remind everyone to fill out the evaluation forms, which I myself rarely do. Keith is a smart guy, so this should be an interesting session. 10:30 in Room 201.

As usual at a conference with thousands of people, most of the interesting activity will be in hallway and private conversations with interesting folks. I'll try to blog from the conference as much as possible. If you're going to be there and want to get together, drop me an email or IM (on iChat or AIM as oren dot sreebny at mac.com) !

Posted by oren at 3:58 PM | Comments (0)

Now this is what I call strong authentication

From today's NY Times:

The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.

The article is here.

From today's NY Times:

The Food and Drug Administration has cleared the way for a Florida company to market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records.

The article is here.

Posted by oren at 7:12 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2004

Places to read about new gizmos

I've been browsing sites that take note of new technological toys. In particular, I'm waiting for the perfect phone/email/browser combo, I'm wondering if the Canon i80 is the right compact printer to buy for my family room, and I'm thinking I should have a digital camera to take to Vietnam in February that could use regular AA batteries in a pinch.

I've been using the rss feed from Gizmodo to try to keep up with what's coming out (an impossibe task), and I like that pretty well.

A couple of people have noted lately that there are a couple of sites covering technology specifically from a woman's angle (not that I am a woman, but it's an interesting twist) - these might be worth a look if you're interested in seeing whether women have a different take on gadgets:

Popgadget and Shiny Shiny. After a quick glance, I like Popgadget better - they seem a little more substantive, and don't cover things that seem just sort of silly to me, like LCD monitors that turn into handbags. Plus, Popgadget did cover the Octodog Frankfurter Converter, pictured here:

Posted by oren at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

MIT's Amy Smith - technology for communities wins her a MacArthur award

There is a great article over in Wired about Amy Smith, an mechanical engineering instructor at MIT who won a MacArthur award for her work using real-world (read old-school) technologies to help communities around the world, like helping people in Haiti make charcoal from agricultural waste rather than trees. Really inspiring!

Posted by oren at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 8, 2004

The recording project is finished! - some thoughts about implications

The latest Whispering Johnson recording project is finally complete!

You may recall I wrote previously about the actual experience of being in the studio, and how the technology had changed the way music is recorded.

Now we've seen the process all the way through - we have several boxes full of shiny shrink-wrapped CDs and a redesigned web site.

I have to admit that there's something very emotionally gratifying about actually having the tangible physical items representing the product which I don't get from just the web site. But perhaps that's just the old fuddy-duddy in me. I noticed as I was listening to the pressed CD for the first time that one of the things I missed from making records in the old days was being able to watch my band name on label in the middle of the record spin around on the turntable.

The web site features downloadable files of all of the tunes we recorded, and also has the scanned images of the sheet music for most of the tunes. All of this has been released under the Creative Commons ReCombo (which apparently got renamed Sampling Plus 1.0) license, which allows others to "sample, mash-up or otherwise creatively transform this work" as long as the authors are given credit and as long as the work is not used to advertise for or promote anything but the created work.

How are we going to make any money on this? Well, we probably won't - but what's new about that? As musicians, we're a lot more interested in getting the work heard and appreciated than we are in making money from it (that's why we have jobs :) ).

As far as I know, this is the first time that the sheet music for original tunes has been released under Creative Commons licenses. We'd be very excited if people actually played these tunes, and even better, evolved them into new iterations. For instance, it would be cool to see if somebody could put words to and sing some of these tunes!

This, of course, is no different than what musicians have always done, appropriating what they've heard and fashioning it into something new. There's a great video of a presentation from composer Anthony Kelley of Duke University (available from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain site) called "Great Composers Steal" where he talks extensively about this topic. The whole history of jazz is full of examples of jazz's greatest geniuses taking chord progressions from popular tunes and writing new melodies for them - for instance, Charlie Parker's Donna Lee is a rework of Back Home In Indiana. And if you look back in the history of music and intellectual property, you find that there have been long and intense battles over the legalities of all these kinds of appropriations of intellectual content, most of which end up having only a tangential relationship with actual practice by musicians.

There's a very good article in Wired by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail about the effect that new distribution technologies are having on sales of popular media. Anderson notes that with the abundance of inventory carried by online distribution freed from the constraints of shelf space (think Amazon, iTunes Music Store, Netflix)

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

So I'm hopeful that our little recording project will find an audience out there and that the tunes will touch some responsive parts in people we wouldn't ordinarily come in contact with, and I'm proud to be a small part of changing the way music is shared around the globe. And if you want a real CD, let me know.

Posted by oren at 1:17 PM | Comments (0)

October 4, 2004

Help needed with a CSS conundrum

Here's a question for all the web authoring gurus out there:

While working on updating a web site last week I had an inline CSS stylesheet that used the

 background-image

property in a

body

tag (using a jpeg image as a background). That worked fine.

When I moved the stylesheet into a separate file as a linked stylesheet, the background image ceased to work, though everything else worked fine.

Both the html and css files are in the same directory, with the relative path to the image being exactly the same.

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE -

Karl Nelson from the Digital Learning Commons tracked this one down - I had html

style

tags in the external css file, which is a no-no. It's interesting that the only thing this seemed to affect was the background-image. Thanks, Karl!

Posted by oren at 1:07 PM | Comments (1)

Taco web editor

While working on updating a web version of an organizational chart last week, I needed to build an html image map. Looking for a good tool to do that with on OS X, I came across the Taco HTML Editor, which has a nifty image map wizard - highly recommended. It's even freeware!

Taco HTML Edit is a full-featured freeware HTML editor. It is designed exclusively for Mac OS X and uses many of the core technologies built into Mac OS X including image transparency (in the image map wizard), toolbars, Webkit (for live previewing), and much more.

Here's a screenshot of the image map editor:

Posted by oren at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

Duke's Moving Image Contest

Jennifer Jenkins from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes to note that they've extended the deadling of their Moving Image Contest till November 1.

What is it?

A contest to create a 2-minute moving image that explains to the public some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing particularly on either music or documentary film.

Prizes include a Dual G5 or Alienware Roswell, a cool Handycam, and an iPod.

These folks are doing important work - so check 'em out!

Posted by oren at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2004

Report from the Montreal Calendaring Roundtable

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Montreal for a Calendaring Roundtable sponsored by the new Calendaring and Scheduling Consortiumand hosted by Oracle.

The purpose of the roundtable was to get some of the major players in the calendaring software world
around the same table to see if we could make some concrete forward
progress towards real interoperability.

Bob Morgan, Michael Gettes (Duke), and Jeff McCullough (UC Berkeley), and I attended from
CSG-member higher ed institutions. Many of the commercial companies
with calendaring products were represented - The big-guns (IBM, Oracle,
Novell, Yahoo), the open-source community (Mozilla Foundation,
OSAF), and the smaller companies (Stata Labs, Cyrus), as well as one
other major player who did not want to be named in public communiques.
Noticeable by their absence at this gathering, though they
were invited, were Microsoft, Sun, and MeetingMaker. A person from the
Outlook group at Microsoft had intended to participate, but was told
two days before the meeting that he did not have corporate approval to
participate. MeetingMaker responded that they were not interested in attending at this time.

The meeting went extremely well - there was a great deal of enthusiasm
towards achieving short-term progress in interoperability, and people
generally seemed to be ready and willing to get on with working
together on the nuts and bolts. While it's hard to tell whether this
will be sustained with real ongoing effort, the folks at the table
appeared to be willing to commit real resources towards this end.

There was general agreement around this table that the CAP protocol has
proven to be unworkable and may now, for all practical intents and
purposes among this group, be considered at least moribund, if not
entirely dead.

Several of the companies represented (Mozilla, Stata, Novell) have
reverse-engineered the method Apple uses for publishing calendars from
its iCal product to the web. There was an agreement to work on
documenting that method so that others can more easily implement it.

There was a very general enthusiasm for the new CalDAV proposal , and
several of the companies represented are starting to code to the
current document, while acknowledging that their implementations may
have to change as the draft evolves. It seems possible that we may see
some early test implementations as early as next spring. Future
CalConnect events will include interop bake-offs to demonstrate the
state of success (or issues arising) of this approach.

There was agreement that the activities of the Consortium would be
complementary to IETF work in this area. There will likely be an IETF
Working Group on revising the base calendar formats, and there may be
one on CalDAV.

This event will likely be followed by an interoperability event in January.

I think we all came away feeling like a log-jam in the calendaring
standards world might at long last be breaking apart, and we came away
quite hopeful.

Posted by oren at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2004

[csg fall 2004] Mitch Kapor's list of lessons learned

As I reported separately, OSAF has slipped their development schedule for Chandler and have made significant changes in their architecture and plans.

During the Westwood Advisory Council meeting today, Mitch Kapor presented a list of lessons learned that I think generalizes for all sorts of development efforts, so I share it here:

Things learned

• Underestimated cost of ambition


• Hard decisions about product strategy and focus could have been made earlier


• Proved harder to build engineering organization


• cross-platform and rich clients are hard


• build and integration work is non-trivial

Now them's some words to live by.

Posted by oren at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)

[csg fall 2004] Chandler developments

The Chandler Westwood Advisory Council met today with Mitch Kapor, Chao Lam, and Pieter Hartsook from OSAF. The Chandler folks have, unsurprisingly, found that their development timelines are longer than originally predicted. The plans now call for a 0.4 release in late October that will support a basic user interface for email, calendar, and sharing items via WebDav.

After 0.4 there will be a 0.5 release in the first quarter of 2005 that will be designed to be usable for basic individual and collaborative tasks in a small workgroup - OSAF intends to adopt that release for their own uses, hence the nickname "dogfood" (as in "eat our own...") for this release.

The "Kibble" release, coming in the fourth quarter of 2005, will have enough functionality for use by groups of early adopters.

We had a lot of discussion about whether it would make sense for OSAF to elevate the priority of adding calendaring client functionality (using CalDAV) earlier rather than later (that of course begged the question of who was going to build a CalDAV server). The prevailing sentiment in the group was that sounded like a good idea, but we wanted some more detail on the level of effort required and which other features were likely to be deferred to make that happen.

Chao's slides for the meeting today are available from the agenda page on OSAF's Wiki.

Posted by oren at 1:07 PM | Comments (0)

[csg fall 2004] iPods at Duke

Tracy Futhey, the CIO of Duke University, is talking about their experiment where they are giving iPods to all incoming freshmen this year.

One thing I hadn't realized is that they are handing out a recording device with each iPod, so it can be used to gather audio information as well as just playing the content. This plays out in courses like an introductory engineering course, where the students have to gather audio as data for signal processing experiments.

One thing the Duke folks are already noticing is the iPods have elicited interest in use from faculty who have not previously been involved with using technology in their courses.

I had a "d'oh!" dope-slap sort of moment (is that an epiphany?) listening to Tracy - while much of our talk in higher ed about
multimedia and pervasive computing devices has been about text devices (Palm, PocketPC, Blackberry) and video, the actual technology that is currently pervasive is the mp3 player. We could realize some tremendously effective educational enhancements by concentrating on providing audio content and making that widely available. Note to self: see what campuses are doing with audio content and whether there are any large scale sites for university audio content.

Posted by oren at 6:06 AM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2004

BBEdit 8

On the plane flight over I was reworking one of my web sites, basically rebuilding from the ground up with content, look & feel, and navigation. I was using the latest version of BBEdit, version 8. I have to say that the more I work with BBEdit, the more I find it to be my favorite editor, on any platform. It does all the things I want to do with text and stays out of my way.

Now keep in mind that my basic text authoring approach is that most of the time I can use plain old ascii text, because it's going to be in email. When I am writing something that needs formatting, I'm going to do it as a web page, not as a Word attachment. Why not Word, you ask? Well, for one thing, lots of people don't have Word - don't forget that Microsoft Office costs hundreds of dollars. But pretty much everybody has a web browser. For another thing, Word just gets in my way too much - it thinks it's smarter than I am, which I can't stand.

But BBEdit just puts it all in plain visible text on the screen, and it highlights markup and syntax from common languages, and it's fast and just plain works.

John Gruber has his finger on what makes it a great application, and why the new version is a worthy update, in a recent post on Daring Fireball.

The appeal of BBEdit is in its balance of powerful text-editing features and an elegant, intuitive, and unabashedly Macintosh-style interface — and where by “interface” I don’t mean in the sense of superficial cosmetic appeal, but in the deeper, interactive sense.

Posted by oren at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)

[csg fall 2004] Exchange mail at Brown University

Molly Baird - Brown U - Exchange 2003

Migrating from an imap/pop service to Exchange. About 95% migrated.
Hosting about 12k users

Two 2-node clusterd Exchange mailbox servers
Four load-balanced Exchange front-end servers (OWA, IMAP, POP)
250 Gb total storage

Brown has a central Active Directory
- people container is totally separate from the departmental container that has machines and groups/lists.

Two kinds of databases in an exchange information store
mapi store (available to mapi clients)
direct access by imap, pop, OWA
on the fly conversion of content when accessed by the other kind of client

Exchange public folders

Not in heavy use at Brown, but some use - e.g. for storing vacation calendars, shared contacts, shared lists, collections of project files.

Converting shared IDs into shared mailboxes with ACLs.

sizing -

DB size based on wanting to recover single database based on backup needs.
Many small databases on each server (about a dozen)

Exchange costs:
1 FTE for migration and maaintenance
- One time costs:
-- migration 1.5 fte split between admin and tech duties
- license - Microsoft CAL license requred
- license: OS and Exchange sw - $11k
HW - four front end servers - $30k
HW: staff cluster - $60k
HW- Student cluster $60k
SAN storage - $70k
Provisioning changes - coincided with provisioning avehaul (automatic password creation and sync, print services, etc).

Total one-time cost: $231k

(by my math that's about $50/user/year just for hardware, based on a four-year life cycle)

Quotas - fac/staff 100Mb quotas, students 25 Mb

Students don't get MAPI access - pop, imap, or web client only

Have to recover an entire database to recover a single mailbox or folder.

Posted by oren at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

ProAms - Professional Amateurs - changing the face of disciplines

An interesting article in Fast Company about how communities of commited, networked amateurs are changing professions, including computer games, pop music, and information technology.

Pro-Ams could fuel mass participation in formal politics and in social entrepreneurship. They will play important economic roles as coproducers of services and sources of ideas. Democracy will be livelier, innovation more vibrant, social capital stronger, and individual well-being more securely grounded. After a century in decline, amateurs will rise again. And they will change the world.

Thanks to Dan Krimm for pointing this out on the Pho list.

Posted by oren at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

Technology companies want hearings on the Induce Act

Wired News reports here that

Over 40 technology companies and consumer rights advocates sent a letter to Sens. Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy on Friday urging them to hold public hearings on the Induce Act, in hopes that Congress won't act hastily in passing a law that would have huge effects on the tech industries.

I hope they're successful - the Induce Act is a terrible piece of proposed legislation.

Thanks to virtualaw for pointing this out on the Pho list.

Posted by oren at 9:10 AM | Comments (0)

[csg fall 2004] laptop census

In this room of senior technology people from 25 or so major US research universities, I count 21 Mac Powerbooks and 19 intel-based machines. The question is, are these folks leading indicators, or just outliers?

Posted by oren at 8:05 AM | Comments (0)

[csg fall 2004] email workshop - Harvard's presentation

We're at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge, across the street from where a tree used to stand that supposedly was the place where George Washington accepted command of the Continental Army in the 1770s. That tree was mistakenly cut down by a Cambridge street worker in the 1920s. The subsequent fate of the city worker was not mentioned :)

Vace notes that 1/3 of his staff are involved with supporting email

From the informal survey, institutions identify over 30% of email is spam or virus email. That sounds low to me, at least from our UW experience.

Susan DeLellis - Harvard - Evaluating Email/Calendar Soutions

Harvard email environment - about 50k accounts, 60% students. less than 5k calendar accounts. Currently Central Admin provides for-fee service, individual schools (8) provide accounts, plus others, using lots of different solutions. No central authentication for email or calendaring (but there is a harvard ID/pin system used for applications and wireless authentication).

Central IT provides a central email aliasing service (first_lastname@harvard.edu). There is a central voice-mail to email service.

There is a University-wide email broadcast applications (presmailer) developed for emergency and cticial university correspondences.

They sent out a suvery to users - 13% of 6300 email customers responded.

97% rated email as most important communications services (over phone and mobile phone service!)
Provide better integration between calendar and email and IM (single client)
Provide more robust web client and remote access
Improve reliabilty of claendar system
develop central group calendar system

Focus groups with staff and managers
- reliability of messaging is critical
- effectiveness of antispam and antivirus solutions directly impacts day-day productivity
- remote access growing in importance
- sensitive to change and cost

Did an RFP and got back around a dozen reponses
- emergence of collaboration suites, including file sharing, portals, web conferencing, unified messaging, IM in addition to email and calendar.
- how does that integrate with existing solutions and tools - what's the right infrastructure?
- clear trend towards database architectures as the message store.

Initial TCO show total proices in the $8-12/user/mo range. Fully loaded cost includes hw, sw, maintenance, facilities, monitoring, backups, storage, labor, disaster recovery, implementation, training and help desk services.

Posted by oren at 8:03 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

This week: CSG (Cambridge) and Calendaring (Montreal)

I'm in Cambridge, Mass, for the fall meeting of the Common Solutions Group. wjere the workshop topics include: Messaging and collabaration services; the impact of "pervasive computing" on teaching and learning.

We'll also be having a meeting of the Westwood Advisory Council, talking about developments to date on OSAF's Chandler project.

There will be a policy discussion on Security Incident Response, Remediation, and Policy which should be timely.

On Thursday I'll be off to Montreal for a couple of days at Oracle's calendar unit, discussing calendaring standards with some interested folks.

And then I'll be in New York for the weekend, celebrating my mother's 80th birthday.

I'll be blogging the events as they happen (except for the birthday).

For those who are interested, I believe the CSG workshops will be webcast live, starting at 9:00 am Eastern US time on Tuesday, Sept 21. Check the CSG web site under Next Meeting for the URL.

Posted by oren at 8:47 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2004

Pet Peeves - Unannounced mailto: links

I spent some time recently catching up on reading various blogs. One interesting thing I've noticed as my time's gotten busier over the summer and into the fall is that my blog reading habits have changed - while there are lots of blogs I think have regularly interesting information and perspectives in them, I tend to have a handful that I make a point of reading faithfully, and they tend to be blogs of highly intelligent writers who don't post all that much - as opposed to those of highly intelligent writers who post a whole heck of a lot. I put Tim Bray, Liz Lawley, Jon Udell, and Clay Shirkey in the first category, while relegating folks like Joi Ito and Marc Cantor to the second. It's not that I don't ever read those folks - but I tend to skim through their postings looking for relevance, instead of making a point of reading each post.

At any rate, I was following a link from Marc's Voice to Shelley Powers' Burningbird blog, which I hadn't previously read, and I clicked on a link on the left that just said "Shelley Powers", thinking it would give my some background on who Shelley is and what she's up to. But instead, of course, it was a mailto: link, and just launched my mail client.

I wish people would clearly mark those kinds of links, like "Contact Shelley" or something.

Posted by oren at 10:28 AM | Comments (1)

September 8, 2004

Calendaring standards developments

Yesterday saw the end of the IETF Calendaring and Scheduling Working Group.

What this means, in effect, is an end to work on the Calendaring Access Protocol (CAP). CAP was supposed to be the standard for client-server interaction on shared calendar servers. My (admittedly non-developer) perspective is that over the years of discussion, CAP grew to be so large and inclusive that nobody was going to bother to implement it in any interoperable way.

It will be interesting to see if the problems with CAP were due to the inherently complex nature of calendaring and scheduling, or whether there are some lighter-weight approaches that will solve most, if not all, of the problems of interoperable Internet calendaring.

Activity on calendaring standards has now morphed into two separate discussions:

- A proposal for a new client-server protocol being dubbed CalDAV, based on the WebDAV protocol. Lisa Dusseault from OSAF has an initial draft for this protocol, and there is an IETF mailing list for it here. CalDAV standardizes the type of approach taken by Apple's iCal and Mozilla Calendar (now dubbed Sunbird), using a WebDAV server to store calendar events. OSAF has (unsurprisingly) stated that they are planning to support CalDAV in Chandler.

- A new effort to revise the base iCalendar data format (rfc 2445), based on real-world experiences gained from actual products trying to achieve some level of interoperability. There is an active IETF mailing list for this topic - lately the discussion there has centered around whether or not alarms on events should be supported in the data exchange and to what extent access control should be supported in the format (which is necessary to support features like preserving confidentiality in specific calendar items when exchanging data).

Keep watching this channel for further developments :)

Update - 09 September 2004

Doug Royer, the author of the CAP protocol writes:

No - It is not the end of CAP. It is the first revision of CAP.

CAP will be released as EXPERIMENTAL until the next revision. This has been under consideration for months and all of the authors and primary IETF chairs and area directors are in agreement.

Posted by oren at 6:38 AM | Comments (1)

August 30, 2004

Geek protest sign in NY

From the haacked.com weblog, this picture of an html tag I haven't seen before :)

Posted by oren at 2:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2004

Cheap network storage for iTunes

Terry Gray points out this article on using the NSLU2 Linksys Storage Link for providing network access to an mp3 collection for iTunes.

The Storage Link is a nifty looking little under-a-hundred-buck device that connects USB 2.0 hard drives to an Ethernet network. This could be very handy.

Does the NSLU2 have the right stuff to be a music server? It's small enough to tuck into your entertainment center. It's silent, and its storage capabilities are limited only by the the size of the disk you plug into it. It looks promising to me!

Posted by oren at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2004

Paul Graham on Great Hackers

Paul Graham's essay entitled Great Hackers (based on a talk he gave at Oscon this year) is both great fun and insightful commentary on the social context of great programmers.

Productivity varies in any field, but there are few in which it varies so much. The variation between programmers is so great that it becomes a difference in kind. I don't think this is something intrinsic to programming, though. In every field, technology magnifies differences in productivity. I think what's happening in programming is just that we have a lot of technological leverage. But in every field the lever is getting longer, so the variation we see is something that more and more fields will see as time goes on. And the success of companies, and countries, will depend increasingly on how they deal with it.

If variation in productivity increases with technology, then the contribution of the most productive individuals will not only be disproportionately large, but will actually grow with time. When you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose big if something (whether Viking raids, or central planning) drags their productivity down to the average.

If we want to get the most out of them, we need to understand these especially productive people. What motivates them? What do they need to do their jobs? How do you recognize them? How do you get them to come and work for you? And then of course there's the question, how do you become one?

Posted by oren at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2004

MT-Blacklist v2.0e released for Movable Type 3.0x

Jay Allen was kind enough to drop a comment to tell me that he has now released MT-Blacklist v2.0e (e for emergency), which will work with Movable Type 3.0x! Great news!

You can find out all about it here. Thanks, Jay!

Posted by oren at 6:19 AM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2004

State of things with Chandler

Later this week I, along with several colleagues from other universities, are heading down to San Francisco for a "re-calibration" meeting with the Open Source Applications Foundation about the future Westwood version of the Chandler personal information manager. I'm looking forward to catching up with folks at OSAF about their latest thinking.

Recently, Mitch Kapor announced that OSAF's initial implementation of Chandler will not be a true peer-to-peer application as was originally envisioned, but instead will be based on a client-server model, with the Chandler repository residing on a WebDAV server. This is a huge change of focus, and, I think, an overall positive realization of what is possible with the current state of technology.

Trying to understand the relationship between OSAF's P2P vision and the enterprise server architectures that are widely deployed at universities has always presented unresolved issues in the discussions between OSAF and the Common Solutions Group about the use of Chandler in higher education.

I've always wondered what technology problems are solved by P2P applications that aren't better addressed by having well managed servers instead - the environment where P2P came of age, music file sharing, was largely a response to the legal issues raised by the music companies as they clamped down on people distributing files from ftp servers. I wrote about this in this post last October.

In the case of sharing personal information the problems of authentication, authorization, and synchronization in a P2P environment are extremely complex and largely unsolved, at least in the open source community (Mitch points out in a later post that Groove has largely dealt with these issues in a closed, proprietary p2p application).

Mitch notes, I think I've unfairly maligned servers in the past. It's not the server I dislike, it's the idea that as an end user I am disempowered if the work I want to do depends on the administration of a piece of software I don't control, can't get access to, and plays by a different set of rules. The PC-era pioneer in me says, "get rid of it". Another approach might be, "tame it and make it serve me".

I think that's largely what we've been trying to within higher ed for many years - putting highly available, high performance, highly reliable, servers within the reach of average computer users in our institutions. Sometimes we've succeeded better than other times, but in general I think it's been a good approach.

I have been impressed with Mitch and the OSAF organization for some time now, and I think his willingness to reconsider approaches speaks well for both his intelligence and for the future success of this important project.

A learning: We wound up focusing on the client software first, not the network architecture. Having had my formative software design experiences in the era of stand-alone PC's, it was easy to repeat the pattern of paying more attention to what is going on on the local machine than to what is happening across the network. While the repository is network-aware, and, in fact, very early versions of Chandler supported a simple form of accessing items from a remote repository, I didn't fully appreciate until this year the importance of considering issues of network availability, reliability, and performance as first-rate issues in and of themselves. You're never too old to learn (or to admit mistakes).

Posted by oren at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2004

iPod vs. the cassette tape

Highly amusing, and a reminder not to get too swept away by hype.

http://homepage.mac.com/danielturek/PhotoAlbum50.html

Posted by oren at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2004

security and zip files

A couple of months back we started blocking all email containing .zip file attachments, as a lot of security exploits were showing up in zip attachments. The block has caused a continuing number of complaints from people on campus, as zip files are common ways of bundling information and attaching it to email.

But just in case anyone thought there wasn't still a reason to keep the block in place (from Eweek):

Another variant of the ubiquitous Bagle worm is now making its way across the Internet, flooding in-boxes with infected Zip files. The newest member of the Bagle family, named Bagle.AQ, arrives via an e-mail message with a spoofed sending address and no subject line. The only text in the message body is typically one or two words, either "price" or "new price."

The name of the infected Zip file that accompanies the message is some variation on that theme as well. The files often are named Price.zip or New_price.zip, and may have a number appended to the end of the file name.

Bagle.AQ first appeared Monday and began circulating in earnest in the early afternoon Eastern time. Some users reported getting as many as 100 infected messages in an hour. Virus researchers said they first began seeing Bagle.AQ at about 8 a.m. Monday and have been seeing thousands of copies an hour.

If a user opens the Zip file with an application such as Windows Internet Explorer that is not a standalone Zip file handler, the user will see an HTML file that contains exploit code. The file will then execute an included .exe file, which is a Trojan, according to McAfee Inc.'s analysis. The Trojan then connects to a number of remote sites to download the actual viral code.

Posted by oren at 4:25 PM | Comments (1)

DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology)

For the last dozen or so years my colleague Sheryl Burgstahler has been at the forefront of making sure that computing and networking technology is accessible to people of all sorts of abilities. She founded and has continued to manage (including finding funding for continuing) the DO-IT program, which among other efforts brings a group of disabled high-school students onto the University of Washington campus for two week every summer to take classes in technology and science. Sheryl's got a paper on the program here, and there's a nice article about DO-IT in todays Seattle PI.

More than 90 percent of DO-IT participants go on to complete college, she said. Program alumni include a blind student who earned a Rhodes Scholarship and another, largely paralyzed from the neck down, now enrolled at Harvard, Burgstahler said.

Sheryl's devotion, talent, and amazing energy have made a real different in hundreds of kids lives over the years, and it's an honor to get to work with her.

Posted by oren at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

Shibboleth gets noticed by Jon Udell

While I was gone on vacation, Infoworld's Jon Udell had a nice posting about Shibboleth, the Internet2 Middleware project developing technologies to support inter-institutional authentication and authorization for web-based resources.

Shib is an excellent example of the continuing tradition of the higher education and research IT community moving forward to solve complex networking problems while the large commercial interests agonize and argue (see in this space, for instance, the years of wrangling between Microsoft and Sun about Liberty vs. Passport).

Posted by oren at 6:51 AM | Comments (0)

The constant battle of comment spam

Since upgrading this blog to Movable Type 3, I've been fighting the comment spammers on a daily basis - usually having to delete somewhere around fifty bogus comments with embedded links to various porn or cheap drug sites each morning. I've really been missing Jay Allen's wonderful MT-Blacklist plug-in, which allows you to block spammers as they attack your blog with bogus comments.

So I'm pleased to see that MT 3.1 will feature a pack of plug-ins including the return of MT-Blacklist. 3.1 is due to be released at the end of August. Huzzah!

[update] Call me slow, but I just discovered the Concerning Spam page from Elise Bauer's wonderful Learning Movable Type site. She recommends renaming the MT comments script, which Jim Flanagan told me to do months ago - so now I've done that and we'll hope for the best!

Posted by oren at 5:30 AM | Comments (2)

August 9, 2004

Back from the UK and trying to catch up!

We're back from our trip to London, mostly over our jet lag (jeeze, eight hours is a big difference, and my response to time change seems to get worse as I age). We had a great time, mostly seeing family and friends and doing a little sightseeing (I highly recommend the Victoria and Albert Museum, especially with kids) and some recreational activities - like punting on the River Cam in Cambridge - one of the stupidest and labor-intensive means of moving a boat I've ever experienced!

In the meantime, this not surprising but sad news just in:

MARINERS ALL-TIME LEADER IN GAMES PLAYED TO RETIRE

Edgar Martinez, the Mariners all-time leader in hits, walks,
doubles, runs, RBIs and games played announced today that he
will hang up his spikes at the conclusion of the 2004 season.

"I have decided that this will be my last season," Martinez
said.

The full story is here.

Posted by oren at 4:30 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2004

In the recording studio

Last week I spent a day working with my trio at Audio Logic recording studio. This was the first recording we've done in almost five years, and I was struck by how the recording process has changed since I first started recording in the early 1970s, both for the better and the worse.

One of the biggest differences, of course, is the digitization of the recording process. One of the dominant features of any 1970s or 1980s recording studio control room was the big multitrack tape machine. This time in, I don't think I even saw a single tape machine in the studio. And while the mixing console still has the recognizable sliders and eq modules, much of the control of the actual recording process is now done from a PC keyboard and mouse (wireless, of course). The recording is done onto a bank of hard drives that is hidden from sight - no muss, no fuss.

The current studio is superbly set up for the modern style of recording popular music - a combination of digital instruments and regular instruments (whether acoustic or electric - perhaps we should call them "analog" instruments) recorded primarily one at a time, building up tracks as you go, editing digitally, adding samples, etc.

But it's clear when you work in a modern studio that the studios and the engineers themselves are no longer set up (for the most part) to record a group of musicians playing non-digital instruments in real-time together. If you look at photos from old recording sessions (say up through the 1960s) you'll see that for the most part musicians recorded together in the same room, and that the studios had all sorts of movable baffles and half-height walls (known in the trade as "gobos") that allowed for acoustic isolation between instruments (better for recording each instrument optimally) while allowing the musicians to see each other. Current studios accomplish the same thing by isolating the different instruments usually in different rooms, with double-pane glass windows allowing for site lines. The problem with this approach is that it requires the musicians to hear each other with headphones, which is very different than generating the kind of feeling you get playing together in the open air in the same room.

When you tell a young recording engineer that you want to record all together in the same room, and you want to do it directly to a stereo mix, meaning that you're unable to go back and fix things (either in the performance or the recording) later, you're likely to get stares of incomprehension, followed by a look of stark terror. Jay Kenney at Audiologic is not young enough for that response (sorry, Jay!), and he did a fine job of getting a respectable jazz sound for us, even if it wasn't quite the Rudy vanGelder classic sound I had imagined - hard to say whether that's because of the studio or the players...if you know what I mean.

There are some photos of our studio adventure here, and drop me a line if you're interested in hearing the results when we finish editing them.

Posted by oren at 3:07 PM | Comments (1)

July 20, 2004

New (and less expensive) iPods

Apple announced new iPods - the best news is that the 20GB and 40GB models are both $100 cheaper than they were previously! Might be getting just close enough for me to buy one....

http://www.apple.com/ipod/

Posted by oren at 2:53 PM | Comments (0)

Ecto working again

Upon reading through the Ecto FAQ, Question 11 pointed me to installing SOAP Lite, which seems to have fixed things.

My advice is to be careful about upgrading Movable Type!

Posted by oren at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

Can't get Ecto working again

Since I upgraded Movable Type to v 3.01, I can't get Ecto working - which makes me realize just how much I've come to depend on it for authoring my postings.

It's strange, though - I have MT 3.01 set up as a clean install in another directory, and Ecto works fine with that install, so it doesn't seem to be an Ecto problem.

The error message I get back (reproduced below) is the same kind of message I get when there is a cgi module that can't find where perl is installed. But I've checked all the cgi modules and they all point to perl in the right place. And I've tried copying the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file over from the working version, to no avail. All help welcome with this one!

The server encountered an error attempting to retrieve the requested resource. Please notify the owner of the problem.
Error notes: Premature end of script headers: /hw54/d90/oren/weblog/mt-xmlrpc.cgi

Posted by oren at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)

July 19, 2004

Comments back on, but moderated

I've upgraded my installation of Movable Type to version 3.01.

I've turned comments back on, but I have used the new feature which allows me to approve or disapprove each comment before it's posted. So please go ahead and comment at will, but don't be surprised when your comment isn't visible right away.

I'll be working on getting TypeKey authentication and authorization for comments going, but it may not happen this week.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize until after I had upgraded that Jay Allen's excellent MT-Blacklist software doesn't yet work with MT 3.0 and up....sigh - now I've got to go delete all those spam comments one by one.

Posted by oren at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2004

What's up with the All Music Guide?

For years one of my most (maybe my single most) frequently visited web sites has been the All Music Guide - an invaluable resource for looking up details about musical artists and recordings.

Now AMG has redesigned their web site - my first impression is that the user interface has gotten much less usable, but that may be a false (or incomplete) impression, because it is SO DAMN SLOW! I'm getting browser timeout errors much more frequently than I'm getting content - definitely not acceptable.

And, in this day and age, how can anybody be doing thls:

Notice: You are accessing allmusic.com with a browser that is not currently supported. The appearance and functionality of the site could be impacted. allmusic.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.5 and above for Windows.

sheesh - I hate to see a good resource go bad. sigh.

Posted by oren at 2:34 PM | Comments (1)

July 12, 2004

Updates on things Mac

I finally solved the ISync problems I reported in June on my office iMac. It looks like something got really corrupted - I had totally remove iSync from the Mac and reinstall it. Just deleting the preferences files didn't do it. Now I'm syncing away between my various Macs, .Mac, and my Nokia phone.

Just last week I got my brand spanking new 20-inch iMac for my kitchen and family room at home - what a sweet, sweet, computer! I spent a couple of days fighting networking only to finally figure out that it was the ethernet wiring in my wall that wasn't working. Went down to the Apple Store, picked up an Airport Extreme card, put it in, and all's well. Watching video on the 20-inch screen is extremely groovy. In an effort to reduce clutter (Michele hates wires), I added an Apple wireless keyboard and a Kensington wireless mouse (to get two buttons). Here it is looking quite at home in its new place of prominence.

But - right after I got it, Apple announced that they've stopped taking orders for iMacs, as a whole new line will be available in September. The rumors have it that the new iMac will sport a vertical "pizza box" display and a G5 processor. While I'm sad to not get the faster processor, I *love* the "desklamp" display on my iMac - it makes viewing from lots of different parts of the room possible, especially for watching DVDs.

On another note, Apple previewed the next version of OS X, codenamed Tiger, at its WorldWide Developer's Conference last week. Apple's official preview site is here, and there is lots of detailed coverage of what's known so far at the Apple Insider. Some interesting tidbits include an RSS-enabled version of the Safari web browser, and something called the Dashboard, which seems to be a way to put html and Javascript applets directly onto the Mac desktop.

And just to finish off the Mac news, Apple announced with much brouhaha that 100 million songs have been sold from the iTunes Music Store. Lucky Kevin Britten won a bunch of booty from Apple for being the one to purchase the 100 millionth song (“Somersault (Dangermouse remix)” by Zero 7, if you're wondering). While the proprietary rights management encoding on the iTMS songs bothers me more and more as I want to make my music available to a wider range of devices (not all of which are produced by Apple), they clearly are the market leader here, with the best product. I'm waiting for prices to come down as a result of the volume - but not holding my breath.

Posted by oren at 5:08 PM | Comments (0)

[ECAR Summer Symposium 2004] Croquet

On Thursday afternoon Julian Lombardi from Wisconsin and Mark McCahill from Minnesota demonstrated Croquet, an open-source, interactive, networked, 3D immersive environment they're building.

If I understand this project correctly, the goal is to provide a platform where building and sharing interactive objects in a social 3D space becomes as easy and accessible as it has been to write and publish web pages.

While I'm not currently in any position to judge the specific technology or implementation, I think the concept of an easily manipulated shared immersive environment is incredibly powerful and is likely to be very important in the evolution of computing in education. Watching my six year old navigate around the space in his Harry Potter game on the Mac is very instructive - he takes to the environment and the challenges with incredible glee as well as sophistication. Croquet may well be one glimpse into our professional future.

Posted by oren at 4:34 PM | Comments (0)

July 8, 2004

Business Week - Why I'm Staying Away from IE

Even Business Week says to stop using Internet Explorer -

In late June network security experts saw one of their worst fears realized. Attackers exploited a pair of known but unpatched flaws in Microsoft's (MSFT ) Web server and Internet Explorer browser to compromise seemingly safe Web sites. People who browsed the sites using Windows computers -- without downloading anything -- were infected with malicious code. I've been increasingly concerned about IE's endless security problems, and this episode has convinced me that the program is simply too dangerous for routine use.

Posted by oren at 4:40 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2004

Educause Leadership Institute

I'm in Boulder for the Educause Leadership Institute this week, along with my colleagues Sara Gomez and Lori Stevens, and about 60 other participants.

So far there have been some really interesting sessions - most notably (for me, anyway) a session on emotional intelligence by Mark Sheehan from Montana State University. This was a new topic for me, and I liked the emphasis on how mood is a determining factor in leadership. Mark noted that while managers spend most of their time dealing with process, policy, and culture in organizations, leaders spend much time working with vision. That seemed like a deep insight to me.

Today there was a terrific session on IT policy in higher education from Tracy Mitrano from Cornell's Office of IT Policy , talking about all of the people that have to be involved in formulating institutional policies around IT and how having policies can be very advantageous.

That was followed by a talk by Brian Hawkins, President of Educause. Brian talked about what is necessary to be a CIO in higher education. He stressed the need to be more than an person knowledgable about IT - that it's necessary to be able to think and act knowledgeably in the interests of one's institution no matter whether it's in the realm of student recruitment and retention, faculty tenure matters, athletics or whatever.

And of course, we're taking advantage of Boulder to get out and do some professional team-building - here's some pictures of Sara, Lori and I taking a hike to to Boulder's Red Rocks this afternoon.

Posted by oren at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

More thoughts from the Sakai SEPP meeting

I realized that I've been carrying around some more impressions from the Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting last week in Denver without communicating them.

While it's still too early to assume that the Sakai effort to create an open source collaborative learning platform will be ultimately succesful, there is certainly a lot of momentum gathering behind the project. It seems like there is a fairly solid (though still evolving) technical architecture being created, a lot of smart people from major institutions around the country are thinking about how to contribute specific tools to the project, and (perhaps best of all) the community is forming around the project and learning how to express common concerns and work towards common goals.

While I still have some major concerns, most notably the thorny issue of how really good teaching/learning tools that have been created in languages other than Java (like our own Catalyst tools from the UW) can be integrated into this platform, I think that there's enough there there to warrant spending a considerable amount of time and effort with the Sakai folks.

Posted by oren at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2004

[Sakai SEPP] Mara Hancock & Josh Holtzman - UC Berkeley Gradebook

Mara is a beekeeper, and she points out that her experience in listening to the level of the buzz is applicable to her work on the Sakai board ...

Berkeley is planning to use their new gradebook in pilot mode in Fall 2004, and then integrate it into Sakai. It has been developed as a Sakai application, but for the initial deployment they are wrapping the single tool with a "psuedo-Sakai" layer.

MIT is also developing a Sakai gradebook. MIT and Berkeley will look at possible convergence at some point.

Berkeley has a nice graphing option in the gradebook that shows a box-and-whisker graph of grade distributions. If you're only looking at a single student it shows you a bar graph instead.

The psuedo-sakai approach uses JSF, Hibernate, and Spring as basic technologies.

Posted by oren at 9:33 AM | Comments (1)

[Sakai SEPP] Willie Pritchard - The ETUDES Alliance

ETUDES is the course management system used at Foothill-DeAnza College, developed by a Computer Science professor in 1995. Foothill created the Etudes Alliance in 2002 to ensure long-term sustainability of ETUDES for community colleges, mostly in California. They began a redesign and redevelopment of the software in 2002.

They undertook a needs analysis among faculty, and identified a list of some 50 features that would be necessary in a CMS for community colleges - about 30 of those are present in the initial release of Sakai.

In 2003 Hewlett Foundation approached Foothill with an invitation to develop something equivalent to MIT's Open Courseware Initiative - they went back to Hewlett to say that in order to do this they need to have a common CMS platform for the content, at that point proposing developing ETUDES as an open source effort for community colleges.

They ended up with a scaled back program to create 20 sets of open courseware during 2004 - created an organization called SOFIA - (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets). In addition they submitted a second proposal to extend Sakai to meet the needs of community colleges, which Hewlett funded. They are contributing two developers into the Sakai effort. Their priorities are designing/building a simple content authoring tool, migrating current ETUDES users to Sakai, and faculty training adn support.

Willie points out that there are pressures on the Sakai effort that need to be addressed. The formation of alliances with other areas is critical - e.g. bringing Educause more into the effort. It's more than just technology - there has to be a strong communication layer to this effort, both among the partners and outside - we need to work together to unify efforts to avoid unnecessary duplication.

Posted by oren at 8:52 AM | Comments (0)

[Sakai SEPP] Chris Copola - Open Source Portfolio Initiative

Chris Coppola from the rSmart group is talking about the Open Source Portfolio Initiative

OSPI is currently at release 1.5 - was derived from U of Minnesota's software. It's a Java-based piece of software.

The big realization for me, about two minutes into Chris' talk is that an electronic portfolio is centered around an individual - not a course, not an institution. The portfolio will ideally persist throughout an individual's career and will want to move with the person as they wander through their life. Portability that would enable this kind of persistence is one of the visions for OSPI.

OSPI is up to about 1,200 members in 77 countries - mostly people looking at the demo, "kicking the tires". The reality is that they don't know a lot about what people are doing with the software.

Version 1.5 features an XML/XSLT presentation engine.

For version 2.0, schedfuled for Spring of 2005, they have received funding from Mellon, U of Indiana, and rSmart. One object is to make the development process more transparent to the community. Individuals will be able to subscribe to some number of "common interest groups" which will provide structures. Examples of "common interest groups" might be a chess club, or undergraduate biology majors, or (in Indiana's case) the set of common rubrics (large scale student learning objectives) used for undergraduate education.

The goal is to have the Portfolio as a Sakai tool.

Posted by oren at 8:07 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2004

[Sakai SEPP] Charles Kerns and Lance Speelmon - SAMIGO Sakai Assessment Tool

SAMIGO is an assessment tool that uses an Asynchronous, Web-based Interaction model:
- instructor asks questions
-student responds; gets feedback (immediate or delayed)
- instructor grades and makes comments

A Sakai tool for creating, distributing, taking, and grading assessments. It grew out of previous work at Stanford and Indiana.

Features an item or question bank for instructors to keep their questions to pull from.

It allows for file upload and audio recording as types of question types (in addition to all the usual suspects).

They decided to support the IMS Question and Test Interoperability spec as their base data schema.

Posted by oren at 1:53 PM | Comments (0)

[Sakai SEPP] Ken Winer - uPortal

I'm at the first Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting in Denver.

Ken WIner is talking about uPortal and it's relationship with Sakai.

uPortal is the open source portal software that is a project born from the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG). uPortal began in December 1999 and has a lot of traction in the higher ed community (over 130 implementing organizations in at least 13 countries).

Two emerging standards for portlets (portal channels) - JSR168 (a java community process) and WSRP (a web services approach).

WSRP is a presentation-oriented web service - once you get the SOAP message back from the web service it already contains markup so it can be thrown right to the screen.

You can imagine uPortal acting as a WSRP consumer or producer. It allows the portal to communicate with other applications across heterogeneous technologies.

Pluto is the Apache project that is a portlet container, that is used in uPortal. In uPortal 2.3 (the current release) you have to use a "Portlet Adapter Channel" in uPortal.

SAKAI has thre different versions of interaction with uPortal:

- Embedded - Sakai runs as a portlet within a stock uPortal
- Injected - Sakai tools run as individual channels within a modified version of uPortal
- Integrated - Sakai tools able to run as inter-communicating processes within a future stock version of uPortal.

Posted by oren at 1:36 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2004

Ed Felten on Educating students about copyright

Paul Beard points out a new entry from Ed Felten about "The Future of Filesharing":

The best role for a university in the copyright wars is to do what a university does best: educate students. When I talk about education, I don't mean a five-minute lecture at freshman initiation. I don't mean adding three paragraphs on copyright to that rulebook that nobody reads. I don't mean scare tactics. What I do mean is a real, substantive discussion of the copyright system.

My experience is that students are eager to have serious, intellectual discussions about why we have the copyright system we have. They will take seriously the economic justification for copyright, if it
is explained to them in a non-hysterical way. They'll appreciate the wisdom of the limitations on copyright, such as fair use and the idea/expression dichotomy; and in so doing they'll realize why there are not exceptions for other things.

I'm not sure I agree that it will make a difference at this point - I think sharing music files has likely achieved too much of a lifestyle-as-usual status among students to be derailed by any talk about the legal or economic system.

Posted by oren at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2004

Cory talks to MS Research about DRM

Brian pointed me to this terrific talk that Cory Doctorow gave the other day to folks at Microsoft Research about why DRM does not and will not work. It's a great read.

The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip
their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced
smaller, better-sounding rips that the MP3 rippers, but you also
fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their
PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to
another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the
spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they
discovered that after they restored their music that they could
no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different
machine, and locked them out of their own music.

There is no market demand for this "feature." N