In the spirit of transparency, Kynetx has published our operational procedures and practices online. As we gain more control over our infrastructure automation, we'll also have real-time operational information and statistics.

I'd appreciate feedback on what's there. Keep in mind, this isn't out "dream" but rather we're trying to present a true picture of where we're at. We obviously have goals to make this better and have quite a bit of experience in mature operations so we know where we need to be and where we currently fall short. I don't believe that there's anything there that would compromise operational security, but i you think there is, please let me know.

Obviously we're taking some risks in being open and honest about the true nature of our operational capability as a young start-up. But I believe that in the long run transparency will win out and our customers will appreciate the openness, recognize that we're a start-up with lots of competing priorities, and not punish us for places where we may fall short compared to more operationally mature companies.

Image via Wikipedia

Today I had to do a job interview with a candidate in Chile. He had Skype and wanted to use it. I was leery because I had four people on my end who needed to be in on the call, so USB headphones weren't going to cut it. We decided to press forward and try the call with the MBP's internal speakers and microphone.

It worked beautifully! We could hear him fine and he could hear us--even with some people sitting 8-10 feet from the laptop. So much so that this evening when I was getting ready to get on another call, I decided to Skype out to it rather than use my Polycom. Skype plus my Macbook Pro is the best conference phone I own.

Image via Wikipedia

Jordan Hubbard, Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies, spoke at LISA '08 last week. Most people are commenting on the date he gave for the release of Snow Leopard (10.6), the newest version of OS X. I have to admit, I'm ready for some stability improvements, but I was much more intrigued by the details of his talk (PDF).

He spent the bulk of his talk on technical features in Leopard (10.5) that many aren't aware of. He starts with a number of security improvements in Leopard: file quarantine, sandbox, package and code signing, application firewall, parental controls, non-executable (NX) data, address space layout, and randomization. I was completely unaware of most of these improvements.

Jordan also talks about the Unix improvements in Leopard. Leopard is fully Unix compliant. But more than that includes a number of additions like DTrace, Launchd (complete), ASL (replacement for syslog), a read-only version of ZFS (for future compatibility) with a read/write version available. He also talked about Apple's evolving open source strategy.

Last, he talks about improvements coming in OS X that will help developers take better advantage of the multicore chips and sophisticated GPUs that already ship with most Macs. Future kernels will provide better facilities, along with APIs, for managing multi-threaded programs. He says:

Forget everything you thought you knew about multi-threaded programming (and, as it turns out, most developers didn't know much anyway). The kernel is the only one who really knows the right mix of cores and power states to use at any given time - this can't be a pure app-driven decision

I don't know if there's audio or video of the talk available, but it would be very good to hear firsthand.

BTW, anyone know what "LWFLAF" stands for? Jordan uses it as some kind of metric in discussion the various versions of OS X, but I couldn't figure out what it meant.

Doug Kaye, who actually wrote a book on hosting, has been beta testing Amazon's CloudFront service--a high performance front end for Amazon S3. Doug's favorably impressed.

My calculations show that Kynetx would be able to put 80% of our bandwidth load on CloudFront (most static JS libraries) for $1.19 per day and if Doug's experience is typical get better performance to boot! Seems like a no-brainer to me given that we're paying several hundred dollars per month for a 750 Kbps circuit that I'd rather not upgrade for a while. Offloading 80% of that traffic would give us a lot of head room!

The topic of P2P file sharing inside the enterprise recently came up in a conversation I was having. I count myself as pretty enlightened on these kinds of things, but beyond getting large Linux distros quick or sharing disk images, virtual machines, and virtual appliances, I had a tough time thinking of legitimate reasons an enterprise might support it or even allow it.

The other side of course is that there are bandwidth issues, both network and people. If you're just supporting people watching the latest episode of The Office in the office, then you've not accomplished much. I did a couple of searches on Google trying to find discussion about P2P in the enterprise and mostly found stories about how to block it.

There are, I'm sure, security and legal issues surrounding some of the more notorious uses of P2P file sharing. Has anyone cataloged them and worked out mitigations?

So, what do you think? Is there a legitimate reason for a CIO to support P2P file sharing? What do they tell the CEO or board about it?

Image via Wikipedia

There's been considerable discussion about Obama's intention to appoint a Chief Technology Officer for the United States. Count me as a supporter of that move. It's almost cliche to say that Technology plays a vital role in the US economy and our place in the world.

Of course, when I say CTO, I mean CTO and not CIO. And I think that the job would be vastly different than what CTOs do in a high-tech business. America's CTO would be focused almost 100% on policy issues. After all that's what government does.

To be qualified, you need to (1) pass the ethics tests, (2) understand how technology relates to government and the public in a wide range of areas, and (3) be a policy wonk. Items (1) and (3) disqualify most of the people who've been suggested.

Given these requirements I think Mike Leavitt, the current Secretary of HHS would make a great CTO. He understands technology very well and relates it well to policy. He'd be an able spokesman. I can imagine no one better. Of course, he's a Republican--in fact his name has been put forth as a candidate for the next Chair of the RNC. Still, if I got my wish, that's who would be the CTO.

A story in Sunday's NY Times about Obama surrendering his Blackberry caught my attention. Until Jan 20, 2009 whatever he writes on it is private. After that, it's all public. Who among us could live with that kind of requirement? Not many.

It's a sad irony that we've constructed a public world--and believe me, this extends far further than the President--where public figures must eschew the kinds of tools we all lean on every day. I know of what I speak. I used to work in Governor Mike Leavitt's office and "channel" was a constant thought in the back of everyone's mind. Pick the wrong channel for certain types of messages and you might find yourself answering questions you'd rather not.

You might be thinking, "if you're honest, you've got nothing to fear!" Oh how I wish that we true. The fact is that there will be people out to get Obama who care nothing about the truth. That's true of anyone in public life.

Here's the acid test: anything that would take more than two sentences to explain is something you'd rather the other side not get a hold of an twist. If you need 5 minutes to counter their 30 second sound bite, you lost.

So what will Obama do? The obvious answer is give up the Blackberry. But Obama has surprised before in like situations; maybe he'll hold onto it. If you're curious about what this might feel like, go back through the last week's email and consider whether you'd post them all online. Then reconsider that thinking how someone opposed to you and your agenda might twist them. It's a sobering exercise.

papalars via Flickr

This post on the death of advertising was my 4000th blog post on Technometria. Kind of snuck up on me. The mountain picture has nothing to do with blogging or anniversaries or milestones. I just liked it.

John McCrea, David Recordon, and Joseph Smarr recorded a special edition of their video podcast Social Web TV at IIW this week. Their guests were Max Engel of MySpace, Eran Hammer of Yahoo, Dick Hardt of Sxipper, Paul Trevithick of Parity, and Doc Searls of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Steve Gillmor recorded a TechCrunchIT show with David Recordon of Six Apart, Kevin Marks of Google, and with the help of Echovar's Cliff Gerrish. where they talk about the open standards debate.

Dave Winer

Dave Winer wrote yesterday about the death of online advertising. He says:

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

From Online advertising is now dead (Scripting News)
Referenced Fri Nov 14 2008 08:02:18 GMT-0700 (MST)

I don't know that I'd go as far as saying it will not come back at all, but merchants will find new, innovative ways to reach customers without advertising when their budgets get tight.

Of course, we might call these new things "advertising." I get that frequently when I explain what Kynetx does. People call any message from a merchant an advertisement even though, in many cases, it's not widely broadcast.

There were plenty of discussions relevant to Dave's post at IIW this week. The VRM crowd was there in force with grounded discussions about how the implicit contract between merchant and shopper can be rewritten in ways that are better for both.

Most exciting to me, the discussions about r-buttons were getting down to the level where you could see real protocols and standards developing behind the talk.

I was troubled by some VRM discussions that still see to border on being hostile to merchants and even commercial efforts in general. I think that only hurts the opportunity to have to redefine what commerce is and how it takes place. I also think that some of the discussion gets lost in relationships in general, not just those that exist between the merchant and shopper. Nothing wrong with figuring out infrastructure for relationships, but it's nice to keep things focused on the task at hand.

The next steps we take can be as important as the final end state. Dave's insight that the economic downturn opens up opportunity is a good one. At Kynetx we're working on new ways for shoppers and merchants to relate. We're creating new channels for relevant messages--both from shopper to merchant and from merchant to shopper. Not advertising--just plain old communication.

Computer History Museum

About a month ago, Kaliya and I had a serious conversation about possibly having to cancel the Internet Identity Workshop this time. Registrations were not coming in as fast as usual and no one had committed to any of the major sponsorships. I was concerned I'd end up personally eating the cost of the conference if we moved forward. Shortly after that, Ping Identity and Microsoft both stepped up and gave us confidence to move forward. That's a good thing because this turned out to be the best IIW I can remember.

There seem to be peaks and valleys for when people need to com together to cooperate and this must have been one of the peaks. There was a lot of energy from start to finish and I had many people tell me how much they'd accomplished. I'm glad that the workshop was able provide the venue for that progress.

Thanks to the sponsors and especially to the attendees for coming ready to work. Kaliya did an amazing job, as usual. The next IIW will be May 18-20 in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. I hope to see you there!

I'm sitting in a session at Internet Identity Workshop that is discussing what standardized support browsers could provide to all authentication systems. Right now all browsers support one: Username/Password over HTTP Authentication. Authentication's come a long way since 1993.

Dick Hardt of Sxipper made the observation that users view what's "inside the chrome" as the application. The browser chrome is largely ignored. That seems right to me.

Authentication systems like basic form-based, openid, and information cards are all existing without explicit browser support. Forms have password fields, but that's just so that the browser blanks out the characters. Beyond that you're on your own.

This kind of discussion is a good example of how far the Internet identity discussion has come. When you get to the point of talking about getting these protocols "understood" in HTTP in the same way as BasicAuth, you're getting past the plumbing issues that have been part of the ID discussion for the past 3 years.

Ultimately this is about taking the discovery process that started wit YADIS and XRDS to the next level and letting it work across even more protocols.

Once the discovery protocol is decided upon, standard plugins could be written for Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari that would implement the discovery process for identity enable the browser for whatever identity system(s) the relying party supports. Four open source, community supported plugins could replace the myriad proprietary plugins available today. That would lead to greater penetration and also give browser manufacturers something to code against when the time comes that they want to build the discovery code into their product.

Yesterday I found out about Tweetdeck, an Adobe Air application for managing twitter. Tweetdeck is much more than a way for watching your tweet stream and posting tweets. Tweetdeck is a dashboard for Twitter. You can create separate panels, for example, to follow searches. Yesterday I was using it to follow three different searches related to Internet Identity Workshop and seeing tweets from all kinds of people who I don't normally follow. Of course, I found more people to follow!

One of the reasons I love reading Jon Udell's blog is that he shares the results of his curiousity. Not only is Jon curious in general, but he's especially curious about data and how your can mundge it to produce information.

The latest example is Jon's look at where Oil comes from--not from where you think probably. The answer, if you live in the US is Canada and Africa. 33% of US oil comes from North America (with Canada being the largest "foreign" supplier) and 20% comes from Africa.

How did Jon find this out? By importing the data into DabbleDB, manipulating it, linking locations to maps, and then publishing it. It took him about 45 minutes. These kind of tools are freely available, but not widely used. Amazing information at our fingertips.

Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood built Stackoverflow.com, a site for programmers to ask other programmers questions. If you haven't been over there, you ought to check it out. They have some very nice concepts for building a community site and it's nicely done. Joel and Jeff have been discussing programming, and the building of Stack Overflow on their weekly show on IT Conversations.

In this article in Inc magazine, Joel talks about seven iron clad rules he has for starting a technology venture:

1. Vet programmer carefully
2. Put everyone in one office
3. Plan
4. use bug tracking
5. Test software before releasing it
6. Measure the success of your venture by its profit

Ironically, Jeff and Joel broke all seven of these and nothing bad happened. In fact something very good resulted. Joel explains why he thinks they cheated the devil in some detail in the article. He concludes with this, however:

The truth is, the three guys who coded Stack Overflow are great programmers. They're smart, and they get things done. And in the end, that's what really matters. Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done. Need proof? No problem: Check out stackoverflow.com.

From How Hard Could It Be?: The Unproven Path - technology ventures - Joel Spolsky
Referenced Sat Nov 08 2008 16:03:05 GMT-0700 (MST)