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This weeks's Technometria podcast features Cydni Tetro. Cyd is with NextPage and recently took over responsibility for managing development in addition to her product management duties. We talked for a great deal of the interview about the use of Scrum and what works and what doesn't. Of course we also got in some discussion of Twitter.
We've had some problem getting TechNation shows for IT Conversations since Christmas due to a variety of problems. We finally got a big batch in and now we're playing catchup. There will be a few more TechNation shows that usual over the next month or so as we get through the backlog.
First up was Moira's interview with Mario Livio about his latest book Is God a Mathematician? This is classic TechNation and just a delight to listen to. Moira is a great interviewer and Mario was a great guest. And their names are anagrams. What more could you ask for?
We just launched a new series on IT Conversations: Money:Tech. You might think "I don't care about financial services" (especially now), but they have some interesting, relevant problems. The first show illustrates that well.
In Data and Capital Markets, Michael Stonebraker discusses why traditional relational databases don't work for many of the problems that financial systems face. Along the way he talks about the power of linguistic abstraction and gives the reason that Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and other "elephant vendors" products run 30-100 times slower than the best solution in a range of problem spaces. For anyone who's interested in data, there's plenty of meat here.
Tags: itconversations databases
Image by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr
One of the advantages of being the Executive Producer of IT Conversations is that I get to see what's in the queue. When I saw that r0ml was coming up on OSCON, I was really looking forward to it. I published the show yesterday and listened to it this morning on my drive to Salt Lake. I wasn't disappointed.
In his talk, which takes a little while to get going, Robert combines Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory and the Compendium of Juggling to develop an open source software development methodology. The real point, I think, is to elucidate important philosophies of open source development.
Tags: itconversations open+source
Last week Jon Udell interviewed me on Interviews with Innovators about Kynetx and Contextual Browsing. It was fun to be the one answering questions for a change and Jon asked some good ones. If you've been wondering what Kynetx does, this podcast is a pretty good intro.
Tags: kynetx itconversations
Image by orcmid via Flickr
When Bob Blakley presented his ideas on relationships at IIW a while back I blogged it and so did others (like Drummond). After Bob released his paper on the subject to Burton Group subscribers, I blogged about relationship providers (with pictures even). Then Scott and I interviewed Bob on the subject for IT Conversations. Needless to say, I think this is an interesting idea. Now, I'm happy to report that Bob and Burton Group have made the paper publicly available. Go get it and read it. There are some great ideas in there.
Doug Kaye has launched SpokenWord.org, a "new free on-line service that helps you find, manage and share audio and video spoken-word recordings, regardless of who produced them or where they're published." SpokenWord lets you build collections of programs or follow someone else's collection. There are a number of things you can do with a collection (from the FAQ):
Very nice stuff. I think SpokenWord.org is going to set a new standard for helping people find and manage their podcasts.
Tags: itconversations podcasting
Image by crazbabe21 via Flickr
At the first of the year, Anne Thomas Manes wrote a provocative blog entry stating that SOA is dead. This week's Technometria podcast is a discussion with Anne about her thesis and what it means for practitioners and technologists. I think you'll enjoy it whether you're a fan of SOA or not.
From the description at IT Conversations:
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides ways to group functions around business processes, packaging them as services. This allows for better coordination between services. Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group joins Phil and Scott to discuss whether SOA is dead.
Many of her ideas are built around the idea that people are bad at architecture. She reviews examples of concrete architectural practices, including arch and process normalization. As part of her review of SOA, she shows why spectacular gains come from spectacular efforts.
From Anne Thomas Manes
Referenced Tue Feb 10 2009 14:30:26 GMT-0700 (MST)
You ought to also read Anne's post on the responses to her original article for a few laughs.
Tags: soa web+services itconversations technometria podcasts
This week Scott and I speak with Aaron Iba about EtherPad and the AppJet platform that it's built on. There are plenty of interesting problems involved in creating a real-time collaborative editing environment with Javascript in the browser. I loved the discussion and got a few ideas about designing collaborative services.
Image via Wikipedia
Paul Figgiani, the Senior Audio Engineer at IT Conversations, sent me a link to a program called ExpanDrive, that allows you to mount any remote directory to which you have SSH access on your Mac. The cost: $39.
ExpanDrive is based on MacFUSE, an extension which extends OS X's native file handling capabilities to programs in user space (that is, outside of the kernel). I first heard about this when Scott and I interviewed Amit Singh on IT Conversations. Amit is probably the world's leading expert on OS X internals and the creator of MacFUSE.
Because MacFUSE allows filesystem extensions to live in user space, you can write a regular program that looks like a file system. That's what ExtenDrive is. Another example is the Cryptomfs which creates an encrypted directory that can be mounted and then read in plain text. I've used the ntfs-3g filesystem to read and write NTFS files to a USB drive. It also works great for accessing Bootcamp partitions.
If you're geeky, there's a free Fuse FS called sshfs that does essentially the same thing but without all the bells and whistles. You can use the OS X automounting capability to automount sshfs volumes.
Having something like this--where a remote directory just shows up in your file system is nice for backups. Mount a directory on a remote machine and then use rsync and a cronjob to perform automated backup over the 'Net. All for free.
Update: CIO has a feature on dynamic languages where ExpanDrive (written in Python) was the major factor in turning someone from C to Python for a project involving ZFS.
Tags: ssh osx fuse macfuse expandrive. itconversations
In this week's Technometria podcast, we talk about the new year and some new projects. With the beginning of a new year, it's always a good time to look ahead to upcoming activities and products.
In this podcast Dion, Ben, Scott, and I talk about what we're are expecting in 2009. We also discuss the problems with having to raise funds for a business startup, a necessary but often difficult process. We also talk about some of the new products announced at CES and Macworld. Scott also talks about his download of the Windows 7 Beta. The discussion ends with the upcoming transition to digital TV.
As you're probably aware, IT Conversations, and other Conversations Network Channels, are made possible through the efforts of a small army of Web site editors and audio engineers.
We have a terrific team of people who help out and Doug's put together a great system for managing the workfow of producing shows Now, with a bit of attrition in the ranks of both our website editors and series producers and a new channel on the way, it's time to add to the team once again.
If you'd like to help us write descriptions for our programs, track down and crop photos and sync the occasional slideshow, here's your chance. The word "volunteer" isn't quite right since in fact Web editors are paid (thanks to donations from our paid members), but you're not going to get rich. You'll get a whopping US$15 for each description you write - US$25 if you also sync a presentation's slides to the audio.
You'll find details on TeamITC (as we call it for historical reasons) and our Apprenticeship Program on The Conversations Network web site.
Tags: itconversations
In this week's Technometria podcast, Craig Burton joined Scott and I to discuss some of his ideas about innovation. Craig reviews topics covered in three of his recent essays and talks about how innovation is often misunderstood. He reviews how technology companies make mistakes with customer demographics, as well as how to distinguish innovation myths from innovation realities. He also presents an example of true innovation as he describes how Novell created software infrastructure as a new software category.
Here's links to the essays:
Image via Wikipedia
I this week's Technometria podcast, Scott, Ben, and I are joined by Tyler Whitaker and Dion Almaer, who both discuss some of their recent technology activities.
Ben and Dion have recently been hired at Mozilla, where the company is working on new open web tools for developers. They talk about some of their long-term and short-term goals, including plans on ways to make it easier to deal with browser differences. In addition, Tyler discusses some of his recent internet connectivity problems and Scott talks about his recent delayed flight and how a website helped him better understand the cause of the problem, as well as quickly inform him when his flight would be arriving at the airport.
Tags: itconversations mozilla firefox
Today I published the 100th Technometria podcast on IT Conversations. The show was a conversation with Elias Torres and Ben Adida about RDFa. I learned about RDFa from Elias and Ben when we were in Beijing for WWW2007 last April. The idea is simple: RDF is nice but requires people write metadata separate from the content it describes. Why not embed that semantic information inside the HTML as attributes? This is a pretty cool idea--complimentary to the idea of microformats, I think--that just might make the semantic web palatable enough that it actually happens.
Bonus: Here's an RDFa Primer
Image via Wikipedia
This morning @dberlind and @kevinmarks were tweeting about microformats in Twitter. David was positing something he called the "TwitterCard." Kevin points out that unbeknownest to me, and I suspect almost everyone else, Twitter supports the hCard microformat.
If you'd like to make use of them, you need a client that supports microformats. Fortunately for Firefox users, Mike Kaply has an addon that does just that called Operator. Simply install operator, go to a Twitter page and use the handy pulldown menus under the toolbar to export any hCard data as a vCard. The OS X picked it right up and offered to add it. Very nice.
I'm not sure this is everything David wanted a TwitterCard to be. But it's a start. As a bonus, the tool will also alert you to events, locations, tags, and other microformat, RDF, and RDFa data in a page. I'll be posting an interview Scott Lemon and I did with Elias Torres and Ben Adidas about RDFa on IT Conversations tomorrow.
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:
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)
I just put up Episode 26 of Stack Overflow on IT Conversations. I've really enjoyed listening to Joel and Jeff over the last few months. And the Stack Overflow site is simply the best place to get answers to programming questions. From the show description:
Joel and Jeff answer five listener questions, mostly about social software design. Warning: this podcast features cowbell. Really.From IT Conversations | StackOverflow | Episode 26 (Free Podcast)
Referenced Wed Oct 15 2008 18:31:15 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by download) for September 2008.
Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.
In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.
In this special "developer edition" podcast, Jeff and the Stack Overflow development team discuss the development processes and decisions that go into building a public community web site for programmers.
Wouldn't it be amazing if you could hold a "book" in your hands which had hyperlinks? Why would that be amazing, you ask? Well, what if the hyperlink triggered a process that makes a nearby computer, for example, play an MP3 of animal sounds that match the story? In this keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, Manolis Kelaidis introduces blueBook, his prototype that merges the analog and digital worlds of books.
Joel Spolsky is a highly revered software pundit, an eminent author, the host of one of the most widely read blogs, the co-founder of New York based FogCreek Software, and a witty and intelligent person to listen to. He believes that the three key ingredients that make great software are: making users happy, obsessing over aesthetics, and observing culture code. In elaborating these ideas with plenty of examples, he doesn't spare his wonderful sense of humor.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." That is the goal of Wikipedia's creator, Jimmy Wales. He has set his sights on Google and the other corporate Search Engines with his new project "Wikia," a personal search engine-builder.
Joel and Jeff discuss the perils of programmer design, the purpose of a private beta, the importance of quality chairs for programmers, and the mysterious cone of uncertainty on software projects.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Pete Blackshaw, author of "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends," about consumer megaphones -- the folks who get extremely displeased and upset with products or services.
People learning to read will soon be able to use a handheld device to practice their reading skills when trained teachers and the Internet are not available. Using inexpensive hardware, Literacy Bridge plans to provide Talking Book audio players/recorders in developing nations starting this fall, with a goal of selling them for $10 per device or less. Listen to Cliff Schmidt describe the Talking Book and the benefits it will bring to people in far-flung locations.
It's the special listener question show! Joel and Jeff answer questions from the audience on making the transition from developer to manager, how to Get Things Done, the hidden value of in-person code reviews, and more.
Tags: itconversations
This past week, I published Larry Lessig's talk from ETech on Changing Congress. This is a very good talk on what's wrong with Congress and how it can be changed. The talk is not partisan--it's about the ways that the system, more so than the politicians, is corrupt and needs reform. I highly recommend it.
After you listened (or before), head over to Change Congress and fill out this petition on earmarks.
Update: To see earmarks more clearly, check out the earmark visualization tool from the Sunlight Foundation.
Tags: itconversations politics
Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for last month. I'm a little late because I had to modify the program that produces these slightly due to some backend changes that Doug made. All's good again!
Sxipper is a free Firefox add-on that saves you time by keeping track of an unlimited number of usernames and passwords as well as the personal data you share every day over the web. Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben, to discuss the product, as well as the entire issue of privacy and identity on the web, as well as how to market plug-ins as products.
In this special "developer edition" podcast, Jeff and the Stack Overflow development team discuss the development processes and decisions that go into building a public community web site for programmers.
In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.
Joel and Jeff discuss the perils of programmer design, the purpose of a private beta, the importance of quality chairs for programmers, and the mysterious cone of uncertainty on software projects.
Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.
Relating anecdotes from the past, Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit, reflects back on the impact his ideas have had in the last 20 years, especially with respect to the history of Test Driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, and Extreme Programming (XP). According to him, good ideas take about that much time to mature and come to fruition.
As our lives increasingly straddle the physical and the virtual worlds, the management of identity becomes increasingly crucial from both a business and a social standpoint. John Clippinger, Kaliya Hamlin, and Reid Hoffman examine how online identity can foster relationships and deepen value creation. They discuss OpenID, including how America Online has chosen to adopt it, and answer questions related to such issues as anonymity and restricting information.
Identi.ca is an open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The product's developer, Evan Prodromou, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the project, including its open source license.
For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.
Maurice Franklin, a Microsoft software engineer who is passionate about the space elevator, recently organized and hosted a conference on that topic at Microsoft's Redmond conference center. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, Franklin discusses the reasons to build a space elevator, and describes how the concept, first proposed by Arthur C. Clarke, is evolving toward a practical implementation.
Tags: itconversations
Doug has put code in place to post new IT Conversations podcasts on Twitter. You can follow the IT Conversations twitter account and see new podcasts as they're published (about one per day).
Tags: itconversations twitter
Doug has put together a Podtrac survey to help us understand what IT Conversations listeners listen to and who you are. We're really appreciate it if you could take a minute and fill it out. You may find some of the demographic questions a little intrusive, but remember it's anonymous and that information is extremely helpful to us when we try to find underwriters for shows. It will take you 5-10 minutes, but it's very helpful to us, so I hope you'll give us a little of your time.
Tags: itconversations survey
A few days ago I wrote about federating with Identi.ca. Yesterday I had a great chat with Craig Burton about that whole idea. He's not buying. I asked him to respond on his blog so we could move the discussion online.
My argument was essentially that moving Twitter-like functionality onto a distributed platform was a good thing and likely to make more people comfortable with the idea of building out additional functionality in the micro-blogging space (what people have started to call the space that Twitter is in). The fly in the ointment, from my perspective, is the additional friction engendered by the need to subscribe to people on federating systems. Much harder than clicking "follow" on the Twitter page.
Craig's argument is that the advantages of a single namespace are so huge that the friction I mention is a deal-killer. He goes on:
With all of the downsides of Twitter, I still love it. Why? Because it has the big names already in it! Don't you get that?
I chortle at my cohorts--- @stevegillmor and @jessestay (twitter names) that are bad mouthing twitter and claiming that somehow other systems are better from some tech reason or another. The big names are already in Twitter. Ample reason to stay and stick out the growing pains.
From Federated Twitter Look alikes---Ho Hum
Referenced Thu Aug 14 2008 13:07:08 GMT-0600 (MDT)
Craig's got a point that goes beyond what I was considering. The namespace issue and the friction of subscription collide in unpleasant ways. But as I thought about it, I realized that with Laconi.ca based systems, URLs are the namespace. Laconi.ca, and hence Identi.ca, don't create a private namespace. That's why federation works.
So, the friction that subscription creates might the death of these federated systems. Or it might be it's salvation. Things like the gateway that WebDevStudios' put up to link Twitter and Identi.ca might make the whole discussion moot. Or, it might be something else entirely like the fact that Identi.ca doesn't do SMS.
I'm going to be talking to http://evan.prodromou.name/, the man behind Identi.ca and Laconi.ca on Monday as part of my Technometria podcast. I'm really looking forward to it--this whole thing is really heating up.
I'm stil catching up on my IT Conversations listening after being gone on vacation for 10 days. This morning I listened to Mark Rolston's talk from the Emerging Communications conference entitled The New Singularity. Contrary to what you might think from the title, this isn't about "the" Singularity, but rather the idea that we typically have one concept about what a product should and the phone belies that. I really enjoyed the thinking about products and designs. I found myself wishing I could ask a few questions!
Tags: itconversations design phones iphone
Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for June:
Joel and Jeff discuss Apple's WWDC (and the correct pronunciation of OS X), the use of JavaScript on modern web sites, affiliate programs, and much more.
Joel and Jeff discuss the fine art of listening, source control, the risks of being an internal IT developer, and the state of current mobile platforms. Oh, and how to clean the toilet.
Joel and Jeff try to avoid talking over each other while discussing data generation, full text searching, cross-site scripting, Markdown, Microsoft's Silverlight, and how to get a job at Fog Creek software.
A presentation by Scott Ambler at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series in 2003 entitled "Are You Agile or Are You Fragile?" The software industry is shifting from large-scale, prescriptive processes that mandate rigorous procedures and policies to lighter, more agile methodologies. Are these agile processes appropriate for your organization? If so, which should you consider adopting? What challenges can you expect and how can you overcome them? (Audio from IT Conversations. This is a long one: nearly two hours.)
In the first episode hosted by the IT Conversations, Joel and Jeff discuss Joel's keynote address at the recent Rails conference, the attitudes of some of those who don't use Macs, and Clay Shirky's recent book, "Here Comes Everybody".
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with biologist and author Stuart Kauffman, about his latest book "Reinventing the Sacred," which discusses a new way to look at science, the universe, and the mystery of life.
Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis are co-authors (with Hal Abelson) of the forthcoming book "Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion." All three authors are veteran information technologists. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks to Ledeen and Lewis to reflect on the rapid and sweeping changes these technologies bring.
The Connected Innovators program showcases emerging technologies and new business ideas likely to make an impact on the networked future. After a competitive application process, Supernova's Kevin Werbach and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington invite a dozen top company leaders on stage to present their best, quick pitch. Then, a panel of start-up experts analyzes the offerings, judging their potential in the marketplace, and their meaning for the tech industry.
"You Thought it was Easy: Wrestling Gold from Today's Software Projects." The benefits of Agile are many, the implementation is easy, and the problems are daunting. Ken Schwaber, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium & Chairman of the Agile Alliance, discusses the obstacles to wresting the gold from today's software projects. (IT Conversations audio from SDForum Agile Summit.)
Mark Shuttleworth began Ubuntu in 2004 with a dedicated group of developers intent on creating a revolutionary new Linux desktop. Now, many in the Linux community are calling it the Linux desktop for real people. After three years of phenomenal growth, Shuttleworth sat down with Tim O'Reilly at the first ever O'Reilly Media sponsored Ubuntu Live Conference. During the interview, Tim asks Mark for insight into Ubuntu's meteoric rise and about key challenges for Ubuntu going forward.
Interestingly the Ambler and Scwaber shows are not recent, but getting a lot of play and quite a few ratings (in the hundreds). Stack Overflow is doing well, as you'd expect given the audience both Jeff and Joel bring to the podcast.
Since Doug put up the new ratings system, the overall number of ratings per show are up considerably--all of these ratings numbers have enough behind them to make them credible.
Tags: itconversations
David Eaves posted a piece overlaying the Firefox 3 Pledge Map and Thomas Barnett's map that divides the world into the "the functioning core" and the "non-integrated gap."
As you might expect, there's a high correlation. People in the gap aren't connected, so they have less access to computers, use the 'Net less, and participate in open source projects less. There are some exceptions--like Scandinavia on one side and Columbia and Turkey on the other.
David makes this comment:
Non-Integrated Gap countries with the most pledges are Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Peru, and Indonesia -- interesting list. Seems to suggest that many of the countries the US tries to isolate are actually the most connected.
I too find this ironic. I think that the Bush administration has made a huge mistake in not pushing these countries to integrate more fully. Forget their governments, their citizens want to be connected and once they are, the policies of their governments will follow them into the functioning core. They have to.
As Tom points out, terrorism is "what's left" after the cold war and I see it as a reaction to connectivity. Terrorists, while exploiting the connectivity of the 'Net, would deny that connectivity to people because it leads them away from the fundamentalist societies that the terrorists promote.
David's analysis is just one more data point in the argument that some of the world's seemingly most dangerous countries have citizens who are ready to connect. The world (i.e. functioning core) needs to take advantage of that.
As an aside, I just pre-ordered Tom's new book 'Great Powers: America and the World After Bush' from Amazon. I'll schedule another IT Conversations interview with him after the book comes out. I had a great conversation with him a few years back.
I'm going to be at O'Reilly Velocity conference next Monday and Tuesday. Scott Lemon and I talked with Jesse Robbins (conference chair) and Adam Jacob (presenter) for a Technometria podcast a few weeks ago and got a lot out of it. I decided the conference was something I needed to be at.
Tags: itconversations travel events
Doug Kaye has turned the resources of the Conversations Network on the 2008 election with '08 Conversations. The idea is to team with the Public Radio Exchange to publish stories about the election you might not otherwise here.
Joel Tscherne, who has been a great help to me as th Series Producer for the Technometria podcast, the Executive Producer for '08 Conversations. Right now the shows are coming out about once per week. As the election approaches that rate will increase. Here's a few shows that have been on 08Conversations recently:
If these interest you, you might consider just subscribing to the '08 Conversations feed so you don't miss any of them. Give it a listen!
Tags: itconversations politics
IT Conversations is five years old today! Doug started ITC before the word "podcasting" was even a word. Doug mentions these milestones on his blog:
I was one of Doug's first interviews and now I'm the Executive Producer. It's been a fun ride and I've enjoyed my association with Doug and the other members of TeamITC very much.
Tags: itconversations podcasting
Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror have been doing a podcast called StackOverflow for a couple of months. I've been a regular listener for since the first episode and have loved it. Since the first episode, I thought "this would be a great show for IT Conversations."
Today I'm very happy to announce that my wish has come true and the debut episode of StackOverflow on IT Conversation went live today! Take a listen and be sure to let us know what you think with a comment or by leaving a rating.
One note: This is a weekly show that will usually appear on IT Conversations on Wednesdays. We still have lots of great conference material too, so there will be days that we publish more than one show. Make sure your podcatcher is set to capture more than one show a day. This is especially important if you use iTunes to grab IT Conversations since it downloads at most one show per day by default.
Tags: itconversations software
Here are the top ten IT Conversations shows for May 2008:
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and author of "Physics of the Impossible" about the improbable, and the very likely in the near future: phasers, force fields and time travel.
Mathematician, magician and lightening fast human calculator Arthur Benjamin delights and amazes the Etech crowd with some stunning numerical acrobatics. In an interactive, high energy performance, he demonstrates and explains the secrets of rapid mental calculation, providing a fascinating window into how the mind thinks. If you've been wondering how to square 73,542 in your head, be sure to listen through to the end of the show.
Memetics is an intellectually rich but controversial field which seeks to explain how our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on replicating information, just as organisms evolve by natural selection acting on genes. Sue Blackmore, one of the field's leading thinkers, skillfully unfolds the major arguments for a meme's-eye view of the world, and explores the implications for humanity. Are our brains best seen as machines invented by and for propagation of selfish memes?
Dr. Moira Gunn and David Ewing Duncan host a panel at the seventh annual Bio-IT World Conference on Changing Biotech.
Many of the current attributes of Web 2.0 were first exposed in work done on Wall Street. Bill Janeway and Peter Blook, two Wall Street veterans, discuss some of the changes that have taken place over the last three decades in the investment banking and trading industries, like the shift from sales to use of proprietary information, the reduction of latency, and collaboration of ideas. The ideas in this discussion should give insight to anyone looking to the future of Web 2.0.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with author Steve Cone about his new book "Power Lines," in which he writes about words that sell, grip fans and sometimes change history.
In his recent presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Adam Jacob talked about why a start-up needs an automated infrastructure. He covered the components necessary for any automated infrastructure to be successful and also presented use-cases. Along with Jesse Robbins, Adam joins Phil and Scott to talk about the automated infrastructure process.
Lucas Gonze founded the playlist-sharing site webjay.org, and currently leads the development of the Yahoo! Media Player. He's also an amateur guitarist who records and performs 19th-century parlour music. In this wide-ranging conversation on Interviews with Innovators with Jon Udell, Gonze reflects on the ways we discover, share, and experience music in the digital age.
The first generation of Open Source has been a wild ride unimaginable at the time it began. But Mitch Kapor, President of the Open Source Applications Foundation and chair of the Mozilla Foundation, thinks the end is not in sight and that we can influence the future of Open Source by our actions and contributions. Open Source has some great virtues that deserve to be spread through all of society, not just the computing industry.
In this panel discussion from the Emerging Communications Conference, experts from wireless carriers, application developers, and entrepreneurs discuss the potential, and the obstacles to wireless innovation. They present a range of viewpoints on topics from open networks to software for handsets.
The Susan Blackmore talk from PopTech showing up is interesting given that it's three years old.
Since moving to the new ratings system and site design, we're getting a lot more ratings per show, so I'm more confident of them than I have been in the past. It's interesting that the most downloaded shows are not always the highest rated. I think that that shows the gap between expectation and satisfaction, to some extent.
Tags: itconversations
We all know that Intel and AMD have punted. They can't keep building larger, faster chips for a variety of technical and economic reasons, so they have started placing multiple cores on a single chip. This, in theory, maintains the overall processing power and is easier to build. There's just one catch: it's much harder to program because to make use of that power, you have to program concurrently.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Microprocessor engineers have saved programmers from the hassles of concurrency for years. That's as it should be: get it right once at the lower level to free programmers higher up the abstraction hierarchy to think about the domain problem being solved.
But, alas, that world has come to an end. It's only a matter of time before chips with 8, 16, 32, and, eventually, 1024 cores appear. How will we program them?
Traditional tools for managing concurrency fall short. Processes and even threads are too course grained. Fine grained concurrency primitives like monitors and conditional variables are prone to error. Fabulously prone to error.
But a new abstraction based on transactional memory is gaining traction and will probably land in your favorite programming language in the near future. Simon Peyton-Jones or Microsoft Research spoke about transactional memory at OSCON. We've got it on IT Conversations:
Simon Peyton-Jones of Microsoft Research introduces a new tool called Transactional Memory to simplify concurrent programming. Due to the increasing prevalence of multi-core hardware, concurrent programming is becoming more and more important. Unfortunately, the most common tools for handling concurrency, locks and condition variables, are over 30 years old and fundamentally flawed. Problems that are simple undergraduate assignments in sequential programming become publishable results when done with concurrency.
Transactional Memory borrows the concept of an atomic transaction from databases. Rather than locking resources, a code block is marked as atomic, and when it runs, the reads and writes are done against a transaction log instead of global memory. When the code is complete, the runtime re-checks all of the reads to make sure they are unchanged and then commits all of the changes to memory at once. If any of the reads are dirty, the transaction is rolled back and re-executed. This, when combined with additional tools for blocking and choice, allows program to remain simple, correct, and composable while scaling to many threads without the additional overhead that course grained locking incurs.
Listening to this talk will give you a fair understanding of what transactional memory is all about. If you're a developer and have only enough time to listen to one IT Conversations talk this week, this is the one.
Tags: itconversations concurrency haskell programming+languages
I really enjoyed this discussion on Web 2.0 and Wall Street from ETech with Bill Janeway and Peter Bloom. There are some interesting parallels and some great discussion from a couple of financial jocks who clearly get technology and, especially, the 'Net. Recommended.
Tags: itconversations web
I'm still trying to make sense of the news that Comcast is buying Plaxo (reported value of the deal between $100 and $200 M). I can't tell you how happy I am for Plaxo and especially Joseph Smarr who I have great respect for (see our Technometria interview with Joseph Smarr here).
Still, the discontinuity between what Plaxo is and what Comcast does is jarring--at least on the surface. I believe there is a fundamental conflict o interest between a company that does both transmission of traffic and sells other Internet services. Yeah, I know they all do it, but if the FCC wants to do something useful, they ought to separate those functions.
The fact that they have little real competition leads to problems like not treating customer fairly and throttling BitTorrent. That's a problem--but one that I believe will work itself out with more competition--and that's going to come one way or another. But the real problem is that Comcast offers many services that directly compete against the traffic they carry. Do we expect them to act in an unbiased manner in that regard? Sorry, I don't. Where's the Anti-Trust Department when you need them?
Tags: media internet itconversations
 IT Conversations redesign! (click to enlarge) |
Doug Kaye has been working for months to redesign the infrastructure for the Conversations Network, including It Conversations. Much of that work hasn't been visible to IT Conversations listeners, but it's made the management of the network and production of shows much nicer. Now, that hard work is showing on the site as well with today's launch of the new IT Conversations.
The new design is cleaner, brings lots of features, like ratings and playlists, out to the homepage, and automates things like "current series" and "topics" so that they're more up to date. Ratings are also more reliable in the new system--I'm already seeing more meaningful ratings data come through. The old Personal Program Queue has been updated and is now called a Personal Playlist (under "My Programs" on the top menu bar).
With all the great changes to the homepage, you might be tempted to stay right there, but take time to click through to the program detail pages. They've also been reworked with better ways to comment and share programs with your friends. Also, the new recommendation box on the right hand side shows other programs you might like.
As with any launch, there will undoubtedly be things that don't work. Be sure to let us know and we'll try to get things fixed as soon as we find out about them.
Tags: itconversations
In doing this month's top ten for IT Conversations, noticed two things:
First, since Doug put in our own code for ratings, the number of ratings per show is way up. I think with the new homepage design (oops! Did I let that slip?!?) we'll see even more ratings. We've not had enough in the past for me to put a lot of confidence in them, but that's changing.
Second, the number of overall downloads is down. We recently had to update the feed URL and this didn't get propagated correctly in all feedreaders and podcatchers. Please take a minute to check right now and make sure you're still getting IT Conversations on your MP3 player. The correct feed URL is:
http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itcOr just head to feed subscription page and resubscribe.
The following is the list of the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for April 2008.
Phil Libin was the CEO of CoreStreet when he appeared as the first guest on Interviews with Innovators. Now he's back as CEO of EverNote, a company that aims to build the memex, or personal outboard memory, that Vannevar Bush famously imagined in his 1945 article "As We May Think."
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Scott Sigler, who talks about his bioterror thriller "Infected." While it's based on the premise of a biological weapon on the loose, he's actually a modern day Charles Dickens.
Well-designed buildings not only conserve energy and reduce costs but also create conditions for better health and wellness. Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, uses several examples to show how the right mix of materials, resources, and expertise can create structures that celebrate living. From MAP.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Journalist Wagner Au, who embedded himself in the virtual 3D online world, Second Life, and talks about its incredible growth.
There has been a lot of talk about the difficulties of parallel programming, but Intel has decided to do something about it. Intel representatives announce the open sourcing of Threading Building Blocks, a product used to simplify parallel development. TBB has been around for several years as a proprietary tool, and Intel hopes that by opening it up, it will reach a broader audience and be adapted to more situations.
Despite amazing strides, computers are still relatively poor at performing high level activities that come naturally to the human brain. Co-founder of Palm, Inc., Jeff Hawkins, describes recent breakthroughs in the modeling of brain functions based on the theory of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. New insights into how the neocortex supports cognition, inference and prediction can be applied to a variety of problems using Hawkins' Numenta computing platform.
Matt Zimmerman delivers exactly what his title promises: a technical roadmap of where Ubuntu has been and where it is going. He discusses the collaborative development process, an overview of past and future releases, the expansion of Ubuntu from the desktop to server and mobile environments, and what's next for Ubuntu. Highlighting key features of the latest releases, this presentation will be of interest to existing Ubuntu users as well as anyone considering migrating to this popular linux-based operating system.
Developers are increasingly using Amazon, not only as a source of technical books, but also as a web services platform to build robust and scalable infrastructure. Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, reveals how to make the most of the popular S3 service and uncovers some of the features underpinning the new EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. As a bonus for Conversations Network listeners, there's even a cameo appearance from our own Doug Kaye, who explains how Gigavox Media is exploiting the web services functionality Vogel describes.
Technology is becoming more entrenched in every part of our life, and we need to be aware of where that might lead us. Jamais Cascio gives four possible scenarios based on whether technology is used to augment or simulate reality and whether it is internally or externally focused. Because of the human bias inherent in any technology, he argues that we need to democratically include all of the world's stakeholders to avoid having these scenarios become dystopias.
Today a complement of new energy technologies exist, but are they economically feasible? Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn, from the Environmental Defence Fund, about their new book, "Earth: The Sequel."
Tags: itconversations
A few weeks ago, I talked to Roberto Ostinelli and David Orban, founders of OpenSpime.org, an open source infrastructure that supports spimes, small objects that can be tracked in space and time (hence, "spime"). Bruce Sterling coined the word.
You can hear the interview or read it, if you'd rather thanks to David making a transcript available.
Tags: itconversations spimes
Below are the titles and descriptions of the top ten shows on IT Conversations for March 2008.
Michael Lenczner is one of the founders of Ile Sans Fil, Montreal's community wireless network which comprises over 150 hotspots and serves almost 60,000 registered users. By any standards the project is a huge success. On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Lenczner whether Ile Sans Fil has really enhanced community life in the ways the founders hoped it would.
Raph Koster, author of the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design", describes the grammar of fun. He gives a checklist of ways to make social media more fun based on his work in online games. Most important is to give users context and feedback for every action they take, and that fun comes at the edge of failure.
Adrian Holovaty recently launched EveryBlock.com, a service that generalizes ChicagoCrime.org's style of hyperlocal news to other cities and to a broader range of data types. Six months into a two-year project funded by a Knight Foundation grant, he discusses EveryBlock's accomplishments and aspirations.
As more companies examine the issue of environmentally friendly products, it is not surprising that the concept of green computing would grow in importance. IT professionals are examining power consumption, the hazardous materials used in manufacturing computers, as well as how best to recycle older devices. Jeremy Faludi, a product designer currently working for Project Frog, discusses the subject with Phil and Scott. He talks about the issues in general, as well as how companies are working to keep up with the problems.
In the last few years, telephony prices have dropped to ridiculously low levels and today, one doesn't need a telephone instrument to receive or make calls. Personal services are disappearing from the landscape while technology rapidly replaces them, albeit with a divide between what a customer wants and what he gets. What change is behind this revolution? Moshe Yudkowsky, President of Disaggregate, offers his theory on why emerging telephony is revolutionary.
WiMAX, a new wireless broadband standard, is coming, and the buzz is growing. How is it different from what is available today, and where will it take wireless broadband in the future? These and other questions are answered by Tim Sanders, a leading industry expert and champion for this new wireless technology.
Phil Windley regularly holds CTO meetings where IT professionals discuss current events in technology. In this show he talks with four individuals who work in and write about computing. The group reviews the current status of Twitter, whether companies are using blogging in useful ways, and other similar topics.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Jigsaw's CEO, Jim Fowler, about keeping an online, global directory with millions of business contacts up to date.
"Practice safe VoIP," is Dan York's appeal to the new entrants in the digital telephony landscape. In a spicy, fictional anecdote, CISSP's Director of Emerging Communication Technology cleverly reveals the possible security vulnerabilities VoIP networks are amenable to. Like all happy tales, in the end, the bad guys lose; VoIP security tools are to the rescue. But in real life, Dan warns, the potential threats are only increasing.
On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham, who discusses the two most recent phases of his career. At the Eclipse Foundation in 2006, he pioneered a transformative new approach to making software-supported business processes transparently understandable both to developers and to users. Now, as CTO of aboutus.org, he's helping to create a new wiki culture for companies and organizations to explain themselves to the world.
Tags: itconversations
Clifford Thomson sent me a link to a talk Dan Solove gave at Google on his new book The Future of Reputation. I interviewed Dan on Technometria a while back about his earlier book The Digital Person.
Dan's a very interesting speaker and raises important issues in his books and in this video. This is well worth watching if you're interested in the intersection of privacy and reputation in the Internet age.
One of the consequences of IT Conversations leaving Gigavox Media and returning to the Conversations Network fold is that eventually we needed to remove 'gigavox' from the feed name. Unfortunately, Feedburner will only forward a feed for 30 days and many RSS readers don't seem process permanent redirects well (change the URL permanently, not just follow it).
As a result, you might not be seeing updated IT Conversations shows in your favorite podcatcher. So, take a few minutes and make sure you're using this URL in your feeds:
http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc
I checked the feed URL on my copy of iTunes and it seems to have dealt with the permanent redirect just fine (click on the "i" icon at the far right of the podcast name in iTunes to see info related to that podcast).
Tags: itconversations
Yesterday I posted Jane McGonigal's talk from ETech 2007 on creating alternate realities. This is the first show on IT Conversations that features our new slideshow tool for playing audio sync'd with the slides. For some talks this can make a real difference in the quality since they rely on the visuals so much. In the past we've sometimes not published good content because it relied too much on the slides. No more! Check it out and let us know what you think.
Tags: itconversations etech
I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Udell's interview with Ward Cunningham on IT Conversations. They talk a lot about Ward's efforts at the Eclipse Foundation to build transparent workflow systems. That is, as Jon puts it:
But what if you could find out, before pressing the Save button, what's going on in that black box? And what if your way of finding out wasn't by reading bogus documentation, but instead by probing the system itself using its own test framework?From Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings « Jon Udell
Referenced Thu Mar 20 2008 08:42:43 GMT-0600 (MDT)
You'll want to read Jon's description of Ward's visible workings along with the podcast to get the most out of it. Better yet, I'd love to have a screencast of the system at work.
At one point Jon and Ward talk about how this might apply to eGovernment. Think about a button you could push at any point that would tell you how your current interaction with a government Web site was likely to proceed. I'd love to see it.
Tags: testing programming workflow itconversations egovernment
 Saul Griffith (click to enlarge) |
This morning's opening keynote at ETech was Saul Griffith who ran down the steps he used to calculate his own carbon footprint and then what he had to do to put himself on a "carbon diet." It's not pretty. Doing the calculation is relatively straightforward in terms of the math, but gathering the data isn't easy. I'm hoping that we can get his slides when we put the audio up on IT Conversations because there's some great data there.
Speaking of IT Conversations, a recent IEEE show has a section on home co-generation. You can buy a furnace for your home right now that generates electricity to create the heat. You get power and heat from the same plant, making it much more efficient than buying power separately. You're still burning a hydrocarbon, but you're essentially getting the electricity for (close to) free. Retrofitting an existing home isn't a problem.
On a similar topic, today I put up the latest Technometria show on green computing. The guest is Jeremy Faludi, an expert in green computing. We talk about the carbon footprint of various parts of the computing industry and also mention where computers can help by reducing carbon use.
Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (ordered by number of downloads) for February 2008:
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and author of "Creating a World Without Poverty."
At British Telecom, VoIP technology and the Internet are seen to provide some exciting opportunities to grow new business models. Jerry Thompson, Chief of Applications at British Telecom, talks about BT's transition from being a traditional voice-based telecommunications enterprise to a VoIP-based service provider.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who talks about how words relate to thinking, and how they also don't.
Technical skill is just one piece of the open source consulting puzzle. Business skills are also crucial. Will Glass-Husain puts it all together in this popular tutorial on running a successful software consultancy. Combining business philosophy with practical tips and case studies, he highlights principles of customer service, time management, sales and pricing to help guide aspiring consultants manage their own business.
Dr. Joel Selanikio is the co-founder of DataDyne, a non-profit consultancy dedicated to improving the quantity and quality of public health data. He works mainly in developing countries where the dominant computer is the cellphone, and the dominant network protocol is SMS, a phenomenon that he calls "the invisible computer revolution."
ITConversations executive producer Phil Windley, who teaches computer science at Brigham Young University, has worked with students to develop a general framework for online reputation. In this conversation with Jon Udell he discusses the goals and status of the project, and explores ways in which online and offline reputations are both similar and different.
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. It is also one of the hottest websites in today's world, and is having a major impact on career and business. Jesse Stay, co-author of the upcoming book "I'm on Facebook--Now What???" joins Phil and Scott to discuss the book and the current status and future of Facebook, both as a social networking site and a place for business.
Bill Buxton, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, is the author of Sketching User Experience. In this conversation he talks about design thinking -- a way of producing, illustrating, and winnowing ideas about how products could work.
How close are we to the era where intelligent machines will make decisions for us? As systems become ever more autonomous, machine decisions may outstrip our ability to predict them, creating the need for an artificial morality. Yale bioethicist Wendell Wallach takes the role of friendly skeptic in this deeply thoughtful and balanced look at the promises and perils of artificial intelligence, computational ethics and the singularity.
From the Tech Nation archives: the 1993 interview with Sir Edmund Hillary, who together with Tenzing Norgay in 1953 was first to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
It looks like Interview with Innovators and TechNation take the prize this month with three shows in the top ten each. Good work!
Tags: itconversations
I was listening to Jon Udell's interview with Valdis Krebs on IT Conversations and Valdis tell the story of seeing hotels guests self-organize to deal with hotel management about the awful Wi-Fi service. He says:
Hotels are used to dealing with disconnected customers -- hotel guests who do not know each other. They can tell these guests anything. Since most guests do not talk to each other, nothing is verified, no action is coordinated. In terms of social network analysis: the hotel staff spans structural holes between the guests -- occupying the power position in the network.
When INSNA arrived, the hotel guests were no longer disconnected -- many people in INSNA know each other and after initial greetings started to talk. The conversation soon went to the lack of connectivity in the hotel -- no one could get a connection out of the hotel to the internet. Not only did everyone discover they were having the same bad experience, but they discovered they were receiving the same lie from the hotel staff -- "everything is fine, no one else is complaining". Being lied to made "being disconnected" all the more infuriating.
From Network Weaving: Connected Customers
Referenced Sat Mar 01 2008 13:36:21 GMT-0700 (MST)
Valdis goes on to make the point that power dissipates when people in a hub-and-spoke network start to talk to each other.
I think this kind of insight has huge ramifications for government. Doc recently wrote about US 2.0. How will this happen? I think it happens when the disconnected nodes that have formerly been only hearing what the middle (government, big media, corporations) has to say start talking to each other. Britt, with OrgWare (disclaimer: I'm an advisor) and other ideas he has is starting down this road with real commitment (i.e. dollars).
I've said, and still believe, that eGovernment--focused on how we run things in between election cycles--is at least as important as eDemocracy--focused on how we run the election cycles. eGovernment has been seen primarily as the responsibility of government. "Give us an online vehicle registration system!!!" we say and government complies. "Yeah!!! eGovernment!!!" and everyone's happy.
But as Valdis points out, we can effect much greater change when we start to talk about how we want the government run. Power dissipates when we're all connected. The power becomes us--government "by the people." Social networks are the real future of eGovernment and eDemocracy. For the first time, we may have the ability to really make that a reality. I think it's inevitable.
I'm sick and after lecturing for two hours this morning, I had no voice left. Unfortunately, when I recorded the program intros this week, Jon Udell's latest show wasn't ready so I needed to record it today before I published it. I came home tonight and tried to record an intro, but it sounded awful--just think "frog." My wife, Lynne, said "let me do it." You can hear the result in the intro to Jon's interview with Valdis Krebs. My fear is that now that you've heard her, you won't want to hear me anymore!
Tags: itconversations
As I listened to Udi Manber, the head of core search team at Google, I was impressed by something that most of us understand in a different sense: engineering matters at Google. Most of us think about this in terms of the other things we know about Google; like the one day a week people get to work on their own project, or the fact that they build their own custom servers.
Manber talked about making search queries meaningful--understanding intent rather than just doing text matching. He outlines a number of upgrades to Google search that I've noticed over the years but never thought much about. These all require a commitment to engineering and constant product development.
A simple example of this that I thought of while he was talking is internationalization, or i18n. Google has deployed search engines in myriad languages and countries. Anyone who's done i18n knows it's not glamorous, it's not easy, and there's little you can do in the way of innovation to leverage technology. It just comes down to a commitment to good, solid engineering and working it out.
Of course Google isn't alone in doing i18n. Lots of companies do it. But plenty of companies put it off because they can't afford or don't want to afford the commitment that it takes. In general, no one's giving Google press over the increased utility of their search. Lots of stuff gets the media attention before that. But it's core to Google's business and it's clear it gets the engineering attention it deserves.
Tommy Weir of Tiny Planet wrote a nice review of IT Conversations. In particular he enjoyed the interview with Billy Hoffman about AJAX security. He says:
If I had to pick one tech podcast and discard the rest it would be the originator of the species, IT Conversations. This blend of different shows has a wide-ranging remit from biotechnology to web development. They have a number of presenters who interview innovators and leading technologists, and they also put out recorded presentations from top conferences, which can be especially valuable. They're all free and available via iTunes.
I listen to them regularly, good meaty discussions which can be satisfying in the midst of the other more newsy, gossipy fluff that fills the tech podcast world. Sure, a lot of it is not for me, I usually have my thumb poised, ready to click through to the next one, there's a lot in the feed so you have to be selective.
But quite frequently you hear something that's well informed, interesting and current, covering an aspect of technology that you don't really see discussed anywhere. So I thought I'd point out ones that have ticked those boxes as I come across one. So, that's why I have a #1 up there in the title, it's going to be the first in a series.
From IT Conversations - pick #1: Ajax Security : TinyPlanet.eu
Referenced Thu Feb 21 2008 11:21:06 GMT-0700 (MST)
Tags: itconversations technometria
Here are the top ten shows (ordered by number of downloads) on IT Conversations for January 2008.
More and more Web sites are being rewritten as Ajax applications and traditional desktop software is rapidly moving to the Web via Ajax. But, often, this transition is being made with reckless disregard for security. Ajax developers desperately need guidance on securing their applications. Billy Hoffman, co-author of Ajax Security, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the book.
Phil regularly holds a meeting that he calls the CTO Breakfast. It is an opportunity for people who work in technology to discuss current issues. In this episode, Phil holds an online version of the meeting. The group review such topics as the recently released Amazon SimpleDB, MIT's open courseware project, and how LinkedIn just open their site to developers. They also discuss the status of open source social networking and the problems of monetization. The group finishes with their predictions for early 2008.
Neil Giarratana, president of a small web software firm called Lucidus, is bucking a demographic trend. According to the United Nations, 2007 was the tipping point for world urbanization, and migration to big cities is expected to be a huge continuing trend in the 21st century. But Neil moved from Fairfax, VA to Keene, NH to combine high-tech business with small-town New England life.
In a keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, Brian Murray, Group President for HarperCollins Publishers, provides a textbook business strategy analysis of dealing with rapid change. During his presentation, Murray provides details of the 6 step process HarperCollins used to react to the dramatic changes in the publishing industry.
From the start, phones have been a point-to-point communication method: pick up the receiver, dial a number, hope for an answer. Jyri Engestrom's microblogging app, Jaiku, changes all that by interfacing your mobile phone with pervasive internet connectivity. What we get is a handset that is used increasingly less for calling and more for sharing what you're doing, where you're going, who you're with, and the photo you just took. These microposts broadcast a river of rich presence information about you: from one-on-one to many-to-many.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with John Kao, the former Harvard Business School professor who believes America is losing its innovative edge.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Stuart Smolkin's conveyor belt manufacturing company, Intralox, had no disaster plan in place. Although central operations weren't decimated, the company had to deal with the disruption of electricity, phones, and computer systems in order to organize evacuated employees into recovery teams. How did Intralox handle this challenge and get running in a mere 30 days? Smolkin offers lessons on preparedness for businesses faced with disruption.
The O'Reilly Media founder and CEO presents one of his regular Radar updates, with the focus this time squarely on open source software. The world in which open source now operates is very different from the world in which it started. O'Reilly believes that the problems of scaling caused by the growth of the web and large on-line applications means we need to examine the freedoms we associate with open source in a new light. It's more important than ever that we rediscover the freedoms we care about and learn how to protect them in new and more relevant ways.
In this talk, Giovanni Gallucci, a search engine optimization and social media expert, a speaker, blogger and co-founder of Dexterity Media, spills out the secrets of a successful online marketing philosophy that leverages the communal strength of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, etc. He contrasts social media against traditional marketing by providing case studies of companies that succeeded as well as those that've failed at it.
OpenIDDevCamp was a gathering to develop web-based applications that use OpenID. Attendees included web designers, developers and testers all working together over the weekend to enable OpenID on their sites or just learn more about this technology. Scott joined Phil to discus the event as well as the OpenID concept.
 Adding your IT Conversations profile to Action Streams (click to enlarge) |
The more you use sites on the Web for keeping track of our online lives and sharing things with friends, the more you'd like to have a place on your blog to gather them all together. I've had my del.icio.us feeds on my blog for a long time. I also used to put my tweets on my blog. I experimented with a Flickr widget and gave it up.
Now Mark Paschal has released a plugin for Movable Type called Action Streams that does that all nicely. There are dozens of services that you can add. I've included all that I use. You can see the result on the right side of this page under the "What I'm Doing" heading.
I also created a page about what I'm doing around the net that's an expanded version of the sidebar.
Mark has made it easy to add services. I created a plugin to add my personal program queue from IT Conversations in about 15 minutes. If you'd like to do the same, I've made a tarball and some instructions. Now whenever I add a program to my personal program queue, it will show up on my homepage automatically. I like automatic.
A while back Jon Udell interviewed me for his Interviews with Innovators podcast. We talked about reputation.
In the old days, you could reference a section of audio in an IT Conversations program using a handy tool that Doug Kaye created. Jon Udell was among the most frequent users of that service, but others, including yours truly, used it as well.
Then, IT Conversations started auto assembling so that the show always had fresh sponsorship promos in every show--even those from long ago. The problem is that this created variable length intros and so the excerpt, which was measured from the start of the MP3 file moved around. Not good.
Doug has fix that with a new technique: basing the excerpt timing on the start of the show body. Of course this means that the MP3 file has to care metadata about when the body starts. Doug's done that using EXTO frames inside the MP3 file. Doug's documented the process. Anyone who needs to tag variable length MP3 files will be interested.
For those not interested in the details, here's how you create a URL that points to a portion of an IT Conversations show:
The start and stop times are relative to the beginning of the show body. You'll have to calculate that yourself just find the start and stop times on your player and then find the start of the body and subtract it. Enter the resulting times in the form and you're good. From then on, the excerpts will be right no matter how the intro changes. This excerpt FAQ will help with anything I've missed.
Tags: itconversations
My pick of the week on IT Conversations is Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? from Supernova 2007. The discussion, about money made on the Web--from exploiting inefficient ad networks using arbitrage to the downright illegal, offers a fascinating look at the dark underbelly of e-commerce.
Tags: itconversations pickoftheweek
Here's the list of the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for all of 2007:
Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Phil and Scott talk to Bruce Johnson, one if its co-creators. In addition to discussing its development, Bruce gives a number of examples of projects that took advantage of GWT.
People lie. We lie to each other, we lie to ourselves, and these deceptions cause no end of problems for human society. In this talk from Pop!Tech 2005, biologist Robert Trivers discusses the biological basis for deception in humans and other species. He shares the evolutionary imperatives that created the skills necessary to deceive others and also explains why self-deception has a biological basis.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with author Maryanne Wolf about how human brains have adapted since we invented writing and along with it reading.
Rich in linguistic play and delivered with both wit and panache, Eben Moglen's talk is an intellectual delight. Beginning with a look at the history of memory from the public recording of England's 11th century Domesday Book, Moglen leads us through the private memory palaces of 14th and 15th centuries to the problems of privacy that started with photographic technology. Convincing us that we have willingly given away our data and that those who now possess it have the right to use it, Moglen proposes voluntary data collectives as the answer.
For many years, only very large businesses could afford to create and deploy innovative voice applications, such as looking up account balances or tying voice applications into their existing business applications. Now, with Asterisk and other open-source applications, the field is wide open for businesses of all different sizes. Jared Smith, Community Relations Manager of Digium, the creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the industry's first open source telephony platform, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the present and future of open source telephony.
On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Beth Kanter describes the strategies she uses to teach digital immigrants in non-profit organizations how to use Web 2.0 strategies to communicate and collaborate more effectively.
Guy Kawasaki has a long history working in technology, both in established companies and as an entrepreneur. He worked for Apple at the time of the development of the Macintosh and later returned as an Apple Fellow. In this keynote speech, he gives what he believes are the important stages towards successful innovation. He presents the steps in both a humorous and intelligent way, showing what companies must do to be successful.
Some technology companies founded and headquartered in the United States aren't outsourcing to India and China, but are spreading technology centers around the world instead. Rob Levy, CTO of BEA Systems Inc., explains to Dr. Moira Gunn how BEA is making things work when their staff works in wildly different time zones.
On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio listen to Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf speak about his favorite work of fiction. Also, hear about Spectrum's Senior Editor Tekla Perry's cell phone shopping experience , and why an old shoe box might be better storage than your hard drive. Finally, Spectrum interviews the Swedish mobile technology engineer Stig Nordqvist on his vision of future news reading.
Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, has been working with the Canadian government on a new virtual ID card that will streamline online interaction among government agencies, public-sector organizations, and citizens. In this conversation with Jon Udell, Hardt explains how this new program will work, and offers perspectives on a variety of online identity issues.
I was pleased that one of my shows made the number one slot. There's a lot of interest in the Google Web Toolkit and this was a fun show to do and Bruce was a great guest.
While I don't release actual download counts, you wouldn't be surprised to know that it's a power law distribution. After the top ten or so, the rest aren't that much more popular that most shows.
Tags: itconversations
Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by number of downloads) for December 2007:
While the Internet is quickly becoming an indispensable part of our lives and business, it still remains a challenging environment to achieve a secure and private experience. In this moderated panel from the Trust Online Conference, Lise Buyer leads an insightful discussion of trust with the help of an extremely qualified panel. Scott Charney, Mozelle Thompson, and Dr. James Ransome share their experience while addressing some of the fundamental challenges of managing risk on the Internet.
Matt MacLaurin, who works for Microsoft's Creative Systems Group, is developing a game -- and game-development platform -- called Boku. On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Matt about his own early experiences writing software for systems that invited hacking.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Bob Drogin talks with Dr. Moira Gunn about the person and the sham perpetrated by the source, presciently code-named "Curveball." The result? The idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Has artificial intelligence failed? Eliezer Yudkowsky, from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, humorously examines the three leading schools of thought concerning the singularity and considers AI's successes, failures, and ways to actually judge artificial intelligence.
As online fraud continues to grow as a major issue, enterprises are trying to come up with new ways to reduce the problem. Unfortunately, we have traded convenience for strong authentication, so other methods must be used. Dan Lulich, Vice President of Technology for iovation, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the concept of end-user machine reputation as a way to establish identity. He talks about how authenticating the device is a better method to identify users.
Avi Bryant is a Smalltalk developer who joined the Ruby community in its earliest days. He is the author of Seaside, a web-application development framework for Smalltalk, and of Dabble DB, a user-friendly web-based database developed with Smalltalk. In this address, he weighs Ruby against Smalltalk, pleading similarities between the languages and arguing that Smalltalk provides lessons that the Ruby community can learn.
What started out as a search for different quality experiences for Gigi Sage, has become a life long pursuit to create harmony in all area of her's life and how to make all kinds of relationships work. In this interview, Sage pulls from over twenty years of teaching and working with women to offer help for men and women everywhere who are looking to build harmonious personal and professional relationships.
Everyone is leaving an electronic slime trail behind them on the internet, according to Bob Lucky. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Bob Lucky shares his thoughts on the records we're all creating on the internet, and Spectrum takes a look at the Homebrew Computer Club's illegitimate child: the Homebrew Cellphone Club.
Exploiting Online Games takes a frank look at controversial security issues surrounding MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. The book comes fully loaded with code examples, debuggers, bots, and hacks. Co-author Gary McGraw joins Phil and Scott to discuss this important topic. Of interest to gamers, developers, and security professionals, Gary talks about how gamers cheat, as well as why software companies are slow to combat the problem.
How many buildings do you know that can produce oxygen? William McDonough, the man Time magazine recognized in 1999 as a "Hero for the Planet," has designed buildings for clients such as Ford and Gap that can do just that. McDonough -- architect, industrial systems designer, and proponent of eco-effectiveness -- urges his audience of business school students to set goals not toward an efficient bottom line of doing the wrong thing less badly, but rather toward the effective top line of doing the right thing.
Interestingly, the top two shows show "No rating yet." Actually, that's not quite accurate. They've been rated but not by enough people that I consider it credible. I have a threshold that has to be met before I report a rating.
Tags: itconversations
Here's the top ten shows, by download, for IT Conversations during November 2007. I'm late because some recent server changes means that I didn't have access to the logs for a bit. Also, unfortunately, we lost 11 days worth of logs, so this data is based on 19 days of November 2007.
As described on its website, Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. It is designed to help young people As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Phil and Scott discuss Scratch, along with a number of other current technology topics.
The next evolution of Rails isn't going to be a unicorn, according to David Heinemeier Hansson. In this keynote address at the 2007 RailsConf, Hansson talks about what the Rails community has and where it's going, and the gradual improvements Rails will see in the coming years.
On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Jon Udell's guest is Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons. Her company's new software aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons.
In the keynote presentation from the 2007 Singularity Summit, Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, explores many possible singularity futures based on decades of experience researching, inventing, and commercializing robots. During this presentation Dr. Brooks examines why we need robotics and AI as well as how the singularity will not be like it is portrayed by Hollywood.
On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Norma Nowak, who looks at some interesting new discoveries which could some day replace amniocentesis. David Ewing Duncan returns with Bio-Issue of the Week.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with science writer David Bodanis, author of "Passionate Minds", about the scientist Emilie du Chatelet and the Poet Voltaire.
Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, has been working with the Canadian government on a new virtual ID card that will streamline online interaction among government agencies, public-sector organizations, and citizens. In this conversation with Jon Udell, Hardt explains how this new program will work, and offers perspectives on a variety of online identity issues.
Amory Lovins continues his discussion on energy efficiency in transportation by presenting the business case for lighter, more slippery vehicles. However, despite the superior economics of fuel efficient vehicles, there remains a lack of will on the part of automobile manufacturers to fully embrace the radical changes necessary to transform the commercial transportation industry. From MAP.
On this edition of IEEE Spectrum's Cooking with Engineers series, Spectrum's Suzan Hassler speaks with Brian Young, the Executive Chef at New York's Tavern on the Green. Young discusses his task as architect at a restaurant serving over a thousand diners for lunch and dinner, and the immense logistics involved in getting food onto the tables.
The internet has opened up previously unimagined space for innovation, but unintended consequences befuddle our ability to assess risks on the technological frontier. Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky launch Supernova with a lively rethinking of risk, serendipity, and the power of love in a socially networked world.
I'm disappointed that we don't have better rating data on shows. I wish there were a way to get the ratings data while people listened instead of requiring them to come back to the site to rate shows. Too much friction and not enough kinetic energy.
Tags: itconversations
Here's the top ten shows, by download, for IT Conversations during November 2007. I'm late because some recent server changes means that I didn't have access to the logs for a bit. Also, unfortunately, we lost 11 days worth of logs, so this data is based on 19 days of November 2007.
As described on its website, Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. It is designed to help young people As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design. Phil and Scott discuss Scratch, along with a number of other current technology topics.
The next evolution of Rails isn't going to be a unicorn, according to David Heinemeier Hansson. In this keynote address at the 2007 RailsConf, Hansson talks about what the Rails community has and where it's going, and the gradual improvements Rails will see in the coming years.
On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Jon Udell's guest is Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons. Her company's new software aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons.
In the keynote presentation from the 2007 Singularity Summit, Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, explores many possible singularity futures based on decades of experience researching, inventing, and commercializing robots. During this presentation Dr. Brooks examines why we need robotics and AI as well as how the singularity will not be like it is portrayed by Hollywood.
On BioTech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Norma Nowak, who looks at some interesting new discoveries which could some day replace amniocentesis. David Ewing Duncan returns with Bio-Issue of the Week.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with science writer David Bodanis, author of "Passionate Minds", about the scientist Emilie du Chatelet and the Poet Voltaire.
Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip Identity, has been working with the Canadian government on a new virtual ID card that will streamline online interaction among government agencies, public-sector organizations, and citizens. In this conversation with Jon Udell, Hardt explains how this new program will work, and offers perspectives on a variety of online identity issues.
Amory Lovins continues his discussion on energy efficiency in transportation by presenting the business case for lighter, more slippery vehicles. However, despite the superior economics of fuel efficient vehicles, there remains a lack of will on the part of automobile manufacturers to fully embrace the radical changes necessary to transform the commercial transportation industry. From MAP.
On this edition of IEEE Spectrum's Cooking with Engineers series, Spectrum's Suzan Hassler speaks with Brian Young, the Executive Chef at New York's Tavern on the Green. Young discusses his task as architect at a restaurant serving over a thousand diners for lunch and dinner, and the immense logistics involved in getting food onto the tables.
The internet has opened up previously unimagined space for innovation, but unintended consequences befuddle our ability to assess risks on the technological frontier. Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky launch Supernova with a lively rethinking of risk, serendipity, and the power of love in a socially networked world.
I'm disappointed that we don't have better rating data on shows. I wish there were a way to get the ratings data while people listened instead of requiring them to come back to the site to rate shows. Too much friction and not enough kinetic energy.
Tags: itconversations
Scoble is doing a video column at Fast Company called Scoble on Tech. Interesting format: Scoble and Ed Sussman from Fast Company are chatting on video. There's pretty high production value--it's edited down so that you see each person when they talk and there are out takes to sites they talk about and graphics.
I just heard about it from Brad Baldwin while we were meeting about Podcamp SLC (Jan 26--more later). I watched the show on Open Social and learned some things. There's definitely meat here.
Still, I'm not convinced that lots of people are going to take the time to regularly watch video. Do you watch much video online (besides the funny YouTube videos people send you in email, I mean)? Really? Doing something like Scoble on Tech is considerably more expensive than an audio podcast. I'm reticent to make that kind of time commitment without a compelling reason.
Tags: itconversations podcasting
The Gillmor Gang is back and still the same. If you loved if before, you'll still love it. I laughed out loud twice in the first 15 minutes of show II.
It's only on Facebook, so you'll have to join if you're not already a member. If you do, feel free to add me as a friend.
Tags: podcasts itconversations