Sandhill Trek - On The Road

2006-08-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

"One too many Mornings" and "Queen Jane"

2006-07-14T18:11:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality

Gerbils on wheels?

Look for me at http://sandhill.typepad.com/

2004-01-05T19:19:00.000-08:00

I've bounced around some over the last few years... and the Sandhill Trek blog has finally found a home. If you have a link that's pointing here, then you would do me a favor by pointing it THERE!

Thanks for checking in here at the blog that used to be my blog-away-from-home. But you won't find much happening here any more. Nor will you find me at my old home Blog: http://www.sandhilltech.com/weblog/blogger.html/

Nope. Sandhill Trek has moved. I won't take down the old stuff so your content won't suffer link rot, but I will encourage you to link to me in my new location and subscribe to my RSS feed there too!.

Aggregators

2003-10-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

Roland Tanglao blogs this workshop best... thanks to Lisa Williams for the pointer.

Amazing... I read Doc's blog which is fairly real-time right now. He was sitting right behind me. He notes that the guy he was sitting next to is Dean Landsman who i wanted to meet face-to-face here because I love his sense of humor as displayed on a couple of email lists on which we share membership. So I now I know what the guy looks like!

NewsGator - plug-in for Outlook: Jon udell says it's confusing to process email and news in the same cognitive space because email puts demands on him, but news doesn't.

Sharpreader - one of a number of three pane aggregators.

Waypath - Stephen Dulaney mentions it.

Betsy wants Tivo functionality... trainable and inferential if I get what she's talking about.

Bloglines will publish a list of readers' feeds ?? NetNewsWire

"Nobody normal knows what RSS is."

Reputation systems...

AggregatorCon 2004... Amy asks if there is a market for feature requests?

Privacy issue associated with sharing our aggregator lists... FOAF people call this the "wines versus chains" issue. We can be open about our participation in the wine group, but we want to be very careful to whom we disclose our interst in chains.

Silly interactive comment chat going on right now with Lisa Williams sitting across the room

Mail bucket...

What kind of a conference is this???

2003-10-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

Scott Brodeur, Masslive guy asks that question.

Simple is good. It's about text, it's about content, images are cool too... But flash integration... Audio... Not needed yet.

Persistence, low barrier to entry...

The definition of a newbie is that he's thrilled with the tools...

Martin Roell has joined us on the IRC feed in this session!

Somebody has pointed out that blog migration and portability is perceived as difficult. Joi Ito on the IRC feed says that there are lots of import/export tools... Just Google.

So here's where we are... I'm sitting next to Betsy, Kevin is managing a wireless feed to the web, and a projection of an IRC chat on #joiito where people are tuned into the webcast and discussing it. People I know from online (but not face to face) who are on the IRC chat include Martin Roell and Liz Lawley.

This mixture of the IRC chat and the webcast and the real time face to face discussion is unique in my experience.

My all time favorite conference blogger...

2003-10-04T20:53:00.000-07:00

Well, this is a hard prize to award. There have been conferences I was at blogged by Doc Searls, and he hasn't done a bad job today. And Denise Howell blogs a mean conference but she's home in major nesting mode right now with a baby due any month and a major remodel in prog. AKMA usually blogs a good conference but he's sitting back a bit and providing us links to others who are annotating the event. I think maybe he's still recuperating from surgery.

Nope. The bloggista who takes my prize today for most notemanlike notesmanship in recording the BloggerCon the way I remember it while I was sitting there is Ms. Betsy Devine.

Everyone who's reading this over breakfast [as if] don't forget that day 2 is free and Dave Winer would really like to see a lot of bloggers here at BloggerCon day 2. That's day 2 of BloggerCon in Cambridge Massachusetts on the Harvard Law School campus somewhere, just off Harvard Square near Harvard Yard take the MBTA Red Line to the Harvard station and follow the extensive signage to BloggerCon. That's at Harvard. In Cambridge. BloggerCon. Don't miss it.

How's I do Dave?

I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra

2003-10-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

"The "I" of "I am a cowboy" is a descendent of the expansive and incorporative selves of Whitman and Emerson. Reed's cowboy hero, confronted with the double-consciousness of a divided self, adopts a strategy of inflation, an "unrealistic aggrandizement" of the ego. This process is part of the "shifts from communal modes of self-validation to a psychic self-reliance [that] have always been part of magic and religion, and perhaps of action itself," and have characterized classic texts of American literature. The transition from the Blakean notions of artist and community to the model of the gunslinger reverses the transition from sacrifice to performance in the second stanza and reincarnates the artist as sacrificial priest."

I think this is about bloggers. Not enough of the people gathered here have a sense of Ishmael Reed as a cultural reference point.

Chris Lydon is moderating the Cluetrain 2003 panel... he's heavy into Emersonian self-reliance. Nobody is giving a nod to Ishmael Reed, but this is a gathering of privilege and power, heavy in the center with margins not well represented.

"You can blog and have your TV on at the same time." - Chris Lydon

"I've got [a] problem with the self congratulatory tone of this gathering." - Esther Dyson

Looking around and doing a "facial" ethnic survey, I'm aware of only a few non-white people in the room. One with whose work i'm familiar is Oliver Willis, sitting in the back of the room. What's that about?!? Get down front Oliver... you're as well informed and literate as anyone here, and your ethical foundation is among the most solid.

in medias res

2003-10-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

Dan Gillmor sitting right in front of me and to the left of Doc Searls comments on this group as being US centric. Glenn Reynolds suggests a translingual newsreader.

Pat Delaney teaches at Galileo in San Francisco and has wonderful experience enabling blogging at his school. I'm tempted to ask how the students at Balboa High are served technology-wise.

But I've used up my shit disturber points today with my question about what happened to John Robb.

Name Dropping

2003-10-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

Who'd I say hello to at the BloggerCon party? Betsy Devine and Susan Mernit, of course - I came with them! The first famous blogger I saw on arriving was Harvard's Redhead in Crimson, Wendy Koslow. And Chris Locke was there, too briefly. And I met Halley Suitt with her red chinese dress and Mandarin foot binding gear. I felt like I had met her before, but of course I had only talked with her on the phone when I was interviewing her and seen her picture in the blogs of a thousand a-list bloggers. (Are there a thousand A-list bloggers?)

I said hello to Doc Searls, and chatted briefly with AKMA (Si was waiting patiently in the restaurant below because he was a skosh too young to get inside the bar in this college town, original home of the blue laws). I said hi to Dave Winer, Lance Knobel, Glenn Reynolds, and Dan Gilmor. I spoke with Kevin Marks about MPEG4 and video blogging... What charming guy! I met Kaye Trammel and Amy Wohl. I saw Ed Cone and Jeff Jarvis, but didn't so much as introduce myself.

The food was great, the company was way A-list, and I had a chance to buy a copy of "Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism" by Paul DeMan at the Harvard Bookstore next door at a bargain basement price. (This will provide more ammunition for future anti-intellectual rantings, I promise).

Built in the 20s

2003-10-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened on my way to the party. Betsy Devine! Okay. That's not funny. How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? Okay. That's not funny either. Betsy is a warm and wonderful person. She's an accomplished writer with a whack sense of humor and I was enormously happy to visit her at home before last night's BloggerCon party. On the way out the door I couldn't help but notice the ironworked hinges, the antique closures, a lot of details that made me wonder about her ever-so-elegant well lived-in red brick house in Cambridge. Here in New England, especially in the more rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire, it is common to place "vintage numbers" on antique houses. Driving along a country road you can see the colonials (with numbers predating 1780) and the Federals (with numbers in low 1800s) and the numbers actually help you learn to distinguish architectural types.

Last night I asked Betsy when her house was built. "Oh, in the twenties," said she. I internalized that and actually thought for a moment that someone had gone to a lot of trouble in the 1920s to "antique" the place. Forehead slapping moment came a while later down the road as we looked in at the magnificent colonial Longfellow house on Brattle just down the road from Betsy's house on the way to Harvard Square - of course she meant the 1820s. I'm not used to thinking with such a deep local historical referent.

But I could get used to it!

RSS and the Blogroll

2003-10-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering how the shift to RSS can be formatted to maintain a sense of community. Jenny (four-on-the-floor) Levine has an approach that looks like it works nicely for her. In her right side bar she has a link titled "Blogroll - Sites that I read in my aggregator." When you click on the link, voila! Lots o' linky love.

IRC In the Public Domain?

2003-10-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

Here's why your IRC tool needs to support screen scrape... (from Mark Pilgrim's blog, Dive Into Mark)

jcgregorio I like this new schedule, I can squeeze a whole days worth of bitterness and cynicism into one hour
f8dy irc is a good medium for that
f8dy blogging takes too long
f8dy blogging bitterness, i mean
f8dy you post, then people have to visit your site, or download your feed, then they have to find your comment form, or post something on their own blog (and that assumes they have trackback or that you have some sort of referrer auto-discovery)
f8dy i just don’t have that kind of time anymore
jcgregorio yeah, by that time the bitterness is stale
f8dy yeah, i need instant bitterness gratification
jcgregorio IRC: for that fresh sqeezed bitterness
jcgregorio lol
f8dy can i blog that

If You're a Democrat or Better....

2003-10-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

You'll probably enjoy some of these bumper stickers. Presented here on the off-chance that some other liberal do-gooder hasn't already spammed you with them:

George W. Bush. The buck stops Over There

George W. Bush:
Leadership without a doubt

George W. Bush: It takes a village idiot

George W. Bush: A brainwave away from the presidency

Bush/Cheney '04:
Assimilate. Resistance is Futile.

Bush/Cheney: Asses of Evil

Bush/Cheney '04: We're Gooder!

Bush/Cheney '04: T h i s t i m e, e l e c t u s !

Bush/Cheney '04:
The last vote you'll ever have to cast.

Bush/Cheney '04:
The economy's stupid!

Bush/Cheney '04:
Thanks for not paying attention.

Bush/Cheney '04:
Putting the "con" in conservatism

Bush/Cheney '04:
Over a billion Whoppers served.

Bush/Cheney '04: Or else.

Bush/Cheney '04: Making the world a better place, one country at a time.

Vote for Bush & You Get Dick!

Bush/Cheney '04:
L e s s C I A -- M o r e C Y A

Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind

Bush/Cheney '04: In your heart, you know they're technically correct.

Bush/Cheney '04: Get used to it!

Bush/Cheney '04:
Don't Change Whores in Midstream

Bush/Cheney '04: Deja-voodoo all over again!

Bush/Cheney '04:Compassionate Colonialism

Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough.

Don't think. Vote Bush!

Bush/Cheney '04: Apocalypse Now!

BU_ _SH_ _!

Peace & Prosperity Suck: Big-Time

Vote Bush in '04:
"I Has Incumbentory Advantitude"

God Save the King!

Vote Bush in '04:
"Because I'm the President, that's why!"

Vote Bush in '04:
"Because every vote counts -- for me!"

Vote Bush in '04: It's a no-brainer!

Vote Bush in '04:
Because dictatorship is easier

Who would Jesus bomb?

Made it to Massachusetts...

2003-10-03T12:33:00.000-07:00

Last night a Quaker lady said to me, "I'm not sure I approve of the way you seem to revere this opportunity." While I know few whose opinion carries more weight with me than Kathy, and while I know exactly what she was pointing at in me that could use a little moderation, I am still just tickled pink to be here in Cambridge at the Hotel@MIT, writing a brief blog post, and winding down from the day's travel.

There's a BloggerCon party tonight and I'll be heading over there with a lovely lady on each arm. Susan Mernit, Betsy Devine and I have promised ourselves a walk around town before the fete.

The trip was not without its minor hassles. The security queue in Madison was huge. In Detroit I found a paperback Jane Smiley novel to take my mind off it. Arriving in Boston I didn't recognize my bag because it had this odd little blue tag on it... Couldn't be mine, I didn't put it there. Turns out it's some kind of Bush family thing to control domestic retail drug smuggling or something. I'm convinced that the Colombian cartel and the Southern Bushies are in this together and the whole thing with the Arabs is a bad rap. Can you imagine a casual Arlo Guthrie singing "Flying into Los Angeleez. Bringing in a couple of keys... Don't check my bags if you please, Mr. Customs man." They'd be checking that boys bags coming and going. So, as I said, this is an interruption in the retail dope smuggling trade but I doubt it's dented the bad guys' ability to do bad stuff when they put their minds to it.

Speaking of a waist being a terrible thing to mind, I came up with a beauty product that's a sure fire seller... One nice thing about travel is all the nice looking people one gets to try not embarrass with frank glances. Anyway, the product is: abdomen make-up, belly blush. All the young ladies showing off their midriffs can certainly be convinced to be self conscious about this fashion necessity and then the self consciousness can be spackled over with belle-belly-beauty blusher... The name needs a little work.

Testing an Image

2003-09-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

Friends, Romans, etcetera...

Ramping up to BloggerCon

2003-09-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

Sandhill Trek will go dark next Friday and come back online on Tuesday October, 7. I'll be at the BloggerCon meetings in Massachusetts, posting to this temp blog that I more or less maintain when I'm on the road.

Blogger Pro has been through some changes since I was last in this space, so I guess I'd better look around and figure out how to blog all over again.

Google Toolbar Options Help

2003-06-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

Google Toolbar Options Help

Google seems to have sucked me back to blogger, at least for notes and such. I wonder if an integrated approach using Radio on my own website and blogger on the road will work for me.

Identity Infrastructure: Fingernails on the Chalkboard of my Mind

2002-10-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

Doc Searls presents a very entertaining end to the conference today. David Weinberger says he wishes Doc had spoken on the first day to frame some of our conversations and I agree.

Doc sez that in 1996 Esther said "Chris [Locke] has a lot of rage," and Rage Boy was born. Doc pulled his post from last night about RB and Esther ("Chris and Esther sittin' in a tree...").

Personality on parade...
Buzz Phraser, an early Doc Searls programming effort.
Now he's doing the Martha Rogers thing, using old slides to present today's topic... Wi Fi infrastructure in London... War chalking... I saw this at Gnomedex. The Ben Hammersley bits and all...

Somehow I think that while the net "is fundamentally gonzo," this isn't the Identity Infrastructure thing we're looking for. Doc hasn't seen the digital identity knock-your-socks-off thing here: yesterday he was at the XNS presentation. But it didn't blow him away like it blew me away I guess.

Craig Burton is now being quoted and the presentation is gaining some substance... "One of the virtues [of the net] is the emptiness in the middle."

Vint Cerf: "The history of the net is the history of its protocols." How has Doc missed XNS? It was the happening thing here!

In July, Doc presented at OSCon: "I'll be speaking in Dave's slot in the Emerging Topics track at 1:45 this afternoon. Before OSCon, Tim had wanted me to give something like the Infrastructure talk I had given at Jabberconf in Munich. Yesterday, Phil Windley, who had seen the slides from that talk when I still had them up on the Web, suggested I look into filling one of today's schedule openings. I did, and now I'm on. The title is Infrastructure: how geeks build it, why Hollywood doesn't understand it, and how business can take advantage of it. I'll talk about blogging, but the focus will be more along the lines of my favorite one of Dave's slogans: Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet."

Sorry I missed his Open Source Con presentation, but I guess I saw it today... the Burton Matrix and all. Doc is so connected and tuned in.... he knows everyone and he has opinions on a lot of things. Most of these I agree with, by the way, but if this post seems churlish or if you get it that I'm a little out of sorts... there is a company called OneName and they deserve visibilty and support. They are driving an infrastructure standard called XNS. Drummond Reed has spent 10 years working toward this, and he won an award for this last night at this conference. Doc has mentioned XNS only once. I hope I get a chance to talk with him about this.

Roundtable: Privacy in the Real World

2002-10-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

Kevin O'Neil from ISTPA is talking about the Presdient's Critical Infrastructure Board... highlighting some of the privacy and security components... drivers license at the airport is a security tool. Included is a National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.

Informationelle Selbstbestimmung - 15.12.1983 German Federal Constitutional Court: Informational Self Determination is a human dignity right, as an individual I have a right over the tracking of my own information.

ISTPA focuses on the protection of personal information.

Check this out...

[Go to Gary Turner's blog to see if he caught this material. I fat-fingered this post and lost most of it... perils of real-time blogging]

Here's a link to the draft National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.

The Identity Web

2002-10-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

XNS -- Extensible Name Services -- contracts are the heart of what this is about. Drummond Reed is talking. All the detail he provides reinforces my own conviction that this is the winner. This whole approach finesses the issues that the passport people, the liberty alliance people, and all the marvelous panoply of biometric vendors, smart card vendors, certificate authorities, and the rest of the privacy/identity/security marketplace concentrate on. It provides a standards based overarching identity service application architecture as rich and as varied as XML, on which it is based.

An OASIS XNS technical committee is forming. This is an effort to integrate SAML and WS Security. It will implement SAML assertions and provide the infrastructure, the vocabulary support for metadata exchange.

Privacy management will be a bread and butter application here. More important than single sign-on.

What can I say? This appeals to me a whole lot more than Passport. I think the best thing to do is ask Dave Winer what he thinks about it!

Liberty Alliance

2002-10-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

The Liberty Alliance wasn't born in a fight, contrary to popular opinion. Hasn't died yet, contrary to popular expectations. So what is it anyway? John Beatty, Sun's lead architect on the project is talking. The problem is that distributed identity services are not presently possible, therefore continual re-authetication to various systems is required... and Liberty Alliance is aiming at solving this problem without the drawbacks of single sign-on schemes. Goal is to increase consumer confidence and usage in electronic transactions, simplify B2B and so forth...

Liberty Alliance includes 130 organizations that have over a billion customers, managed by 16 founding sponsors.

The mnission is to establish an open standard for federated network identity through open technical specifications that will support a broad range of identity-based products and services... (among other things).

A centralized control model (Microsoft passport??) bites. Lots of reasons, but basicaslly it's about centralized control by a single organization is not a god thing nor is the limit to linking similar systems. An open federated model is a better thing.

Steve Himmer and Gary Turner

2002-10-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

Steve and Gary, like the snake that eats it's own tail, are blogging our blogging of this event. Now that I've blogged their blogging of our blogging I'd like to take photo credit for the snap of AKMA and Doc that they're both displaying in their hyper-recursive metabloggery.

Panel: The Role of DNS and Registries in Identity Management

2002-10-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System. Mark Foster drove number portability (presumably 800 services) in 1994 and is working on voice number to TCP/IP portability now. His company is responsible for routing voice across North America. Elliot Noss (Tucows) is Canadian, but passionate none-the-less. Esther Dyson of course is the former chair of ICANN, among her many other accomplishments. This is the best panel I've attended so far, with content so rich and conversational it defies my limited ability to blog it. Much food for thought.... for example, spam is not a privacy problem. Spammers who mine the whois database are therefore not compromising privacy, no matter how annoying they are.

Elliot thinks that DNS is a subset of some future identity database, indeed will be subsumed by this hyper-authentication engine. But at dinner last night he expressed political opinions different from my own, so it's hard to take him seriously. Mark thinks DNS is here to stay. Like me, Mark is brilliant and hirsute. Elliot blows.

CNRP, enum, roll your own TLD... creative ideas are spawned by the dozens. See you in Shanghai in a few weeks where this stuff will shake out further.

Whoops it's over. Time to rush the stage and get autographs.

Digital Rights Management Panel

2002-10-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Brad the Microsoft guy, Ken the Internet2 guy, Bala the privacy management guy, Denise the litigator. David Weinberg - moderator.
Denise: DRM is a system of technological protection measures that are used to control access to digital material. Pay for use model... encryption, digital containers, copy control, identity (serial numbers, watermarks), anti-tampering technologies... access and use...

[DW] Why don't we have DRM? Microsoft says that the desire of people to get access to content without paying is ubiquitous, and the security on PCs is as good as the security in areas like smart cards in set top boxes. Brad says that we have DRM e.g. pay-per-view movies. Bala says that the Morpheus and Casa (spelling?) create business problems... an application can be protected at the time of creation... music or other digital content - the problem is what happens uponb receipt... how do we achieve persistent access control? Ken agrees with Brad that we have it but we're losing it. An enterprise acquiring material in bulk and redistributing... how do we enable appropriate access versus enforcing copyright protection.Brad makes the distinction between implementing policies at the hardware level versus at the software level. Denise says that implementing protection does away with the need for copyright protection. But Brad says that DRM is an area of enforceable contracts. Denise suggests that DRM systems arfe less than perfect, so a user is frequently frustrated because the new functions are different from what we're used to. Binding policy choices to the technology is the number one flaw in a lot of DRM discussion, according to Brad.

So there's a lot being chewed on... copyright regulation shouldn't be tied to identity... the attribute for a control mechanism shouldn't compromise anonymity, according to Ken.

Transparent enablement is critical according to Bala.

Too much to talk about, too little time.

Smarte Solutions' assumptions: "pillars of protection" must enable management of digital rights... transparent deployment...

Martha Rogers on Privacy Strategy

2002-10-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

Recession drives creativity...
Martha Rogers was named by Business 2.0 as one of the nineteen most important business Gurus of all time in October of 2001. Chris Locke is in the top 50 business thinkers list. Martha Rogers is kind of a... dare I say it? Hell, she's a babe. Locke is a babe magnet. The way Martha talks about "relationships" and brand loyalty... Harley customers tattooing logos on their bodies... these two should get together...

Relationships are iterative... successful relationships generate trust... a context develops over time...

We know what a memorable customer experience could be... Martha fantasizes about simplification of these relationships... Martha dreams of having a dry cleaner like mine.

Interact, remember, respond... customer service words to live by... but so far we haven't drilled down into the privacy part of the presentation... tracking customer interactions looks like the place we'll be vulnerable to privacy issues. I'm hoping Martha says this soon.

I'm sitting next to David Weinberger. Great product and service and brand... Martha says that CRM is more about people than not. I'll want to talk to David about the cluetrainista implications of this Rogers presentation.

Martha is into cookies... she's into identifying customers, differentiating them according to their value to her, and other stuff... but she hasn't wrapped privacy into her talk yet. Maybe she won't.

I am enormously impressed with Dr. Rogers, and respect the customer strategy she advocates... making each customer more valuable to the firm... grooming the customer base to find the better customers and letting the less valuable customers go... but where does customer privacy actually enter the equation?

Measuring relationship equity... managing relationship equity... there's database stuff in here, but the presentation is orthogonal to the intentions of this conference I believe. Is privacy a relationship building opportunity? Probably. Okay... she's starting to define a context... but hasn't really defined a privacy problem, nor - obviously - has she posed a solution. But the privacy issues associated with Tivo (I infer) will be really huge in a future bidirectional Tivo networked environment. The last few slides of the presentation have some privacy stuff referenced, but we breezed right by them. I have a sense that there may be some ethical dilemmas here...

Nikolaj Nyholm blogs from Digital Identity World

2002-10-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

It's good to know that others whose talent and insight I respect have the same difficulty blogging live that I do. Nikolaj will be on the "Who owns your information panel?" this morning.

Here We Are Again... Conference Blogging

2002-10-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

He wants to write words down
On pieces of paper
Recording them now
And recalling them later.

Denise Howell is a master of realtime capture of conference proceedings. We're lucky she's here at the Digital Identity World conference in Denver this week. Other great writers and bloggers aboard include Doc Searls, AKMA, Kevin Marks, Phillip Windley (CIO of the State of Utah), and others listed in the right panel at the "Real Time Coverage" page of the conference's website.

I don't give good real time coverage. This is my second Wi Fi enabled conference in as many months. At both conferences my attempts to annotate presentations in decent blog posts have been thwarted by a) talent limitations - I don't type fast and my attention-engine works differently from a good court reporter's; b) the tiny heartbreak of the bloggers' bit bucket - some of my most choice observations have been lost to Wi Fi base station hiccoughs; c) the knowledge that there are others out there blogging better, more objective posts about the same material.

So I am returning to my notebook (hard copy) to capture conference info. I'm grateful for the Wi Fi hook-up though. Right now I'm blogging BC... before coffee... from the conference reception area. On my schedule for today: Esther Dyson (Esther and Doc are talking across the lobby from me even as I blog). Esther first will moderate a panel called "Who Owns Your Information?" Later in the day she's leading another panel on DNS and registries.

Other events: Denise will take off her blogger's hat for a while today to participate on an Digital Rights Management panel; Liberty Alliance information will be forthcoming; and Drummond Reed will offer info on "the Identity Web." XNS fascinates me. Is it an elegant key to the solution for the Digital Identity gestalt, or is it - less charitably - a solution looking for a problem? Tune in later to find out!

2002-10-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

Look out. Get your speed reading tuned up. Had coffee with Doc and Denise and Doc said Golby might be coming. I'm goofing around with RSS feeds in Blogger. Last I heard from Golby he was watching 737-400s pancake on the runways in Capetown. But he's on his way to Boulder with a carry-on full of camouflage gear. Some fantasy about saving Gretchen from the clutches of RB.

Current event at DIDW is GM guy talking about digital id ... This month's MIT Technology Journal also covers some of this material.

What is Kevin's RSS feed from Halley's Conference doing on the DIDW Feed

2002-10-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Just a question... I'm fresh out of the opensource panel discussion that Doc Searls moderated. Doc is the only guy who can use the verb form of "ubiquity" (to ubiquitize?) with charm and grace and style. Good panel on Open Source... particularly Shibboleth... google it. "Shibboleth Internet2."

Phillip Windley - Utah CIO

2002-10-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

The State CIO of Utah has a clear, professional, expert understanding of the issues associated with setting up digital id standards and services in a public setting. Check out his blogging of these proceedings. Check also: Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Denise Howell, and AKMA. I'm sure other clear excellent blogging voices will emerge here too. Personally, I'm taking notes in notepad and hardcopy so I can stay with the discussion instead of getting hung up in my bloggery.

Multi-tasking at DIDW

2002-10-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Privacy, security, authentication, identity management... the guy from General Motors is sharing their experience. More on this topic can be found in the recent issue of MIT's Technology Journal.

Maybe as importantly, we hear that Golby will be here... dropping in on his way to Boulder where he will act as Devil's advocate in the RB canonization investigation.

2002-08-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

Wes Snile For Sure...
I'm hacking and coughing and snurfling and spewing mucous every which way. Rarrrch, hunnch-hucc, kak-kakhuweeze-snurfsnurfsnurf... pass me a tissue will ya? Anyway, if you're still reading posts over here, well, you should return with me now to those thrilling blogs of yesteryear, the thud of hooves, a cloud of dust, a mighty "Hi-hooo Sandhillllll, AWAYYYYY!!!"

I mean, I'm back at my own URL, blogging from Madison, Wisconsin.

This gave me an idea about goofing with Daypop. What if I set up like SEVERAL blogs, and published links one day to a boring posting on my main blog? Could I hit number one on Daypop?

2002-08-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

In Columbia, MO today... going out to dinner with Ben and Ella. Returning home tomorrow. Watch for a pic of Ben and Ella and the tale of the whole terrible road trip back on my main blog on Tuesday. I think I have Wes Snile Virus. I met Mr. Snile in the bar at Gnomedex. There was a cloud of mosq2uitoes in there and dead crows on the floor. I should have known better than to hang out there.

I hope LockerGnome continues to run the small easily assimilated Gnomedex in Des Moines, even though they are clearly ready for a bigger venue. They could call the Des Moines event Down Homedex and have their growing pop cult event at the Moscone center too!

2002-08-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

Irritation
I blogged Ev's whole presentation and it got richer and deeper and by the end I thought there was some really informative stuff, then I lost my connection and my last post didn't upload. So forgive me if I don't try to recap it all. It was my most brilliant and witty post ever, but it's in the bit bucket now.

I met Doc Searls
A very nice guy... geekdom is full of nice people in general. I was very pleased to meet the good Doc Searls, and I think I have George to thank. Doc was sitting at a table nearby and I was yakking with a guy named Paul from Minneapolis, and George was table hopping. Soon the two of them showed up and George introduced us and I was just happy. What a great size for a conference. What a marvelous community feeling.

I still don't get why I lost my connection during Ev's talk. Probably just at the outside of the range for the 802.11b. When I blogged from the back of the same room the connection was solid for hours.

Tomorrow on to Mizzou to see if I can suss out who the new University of Missouri system president will be, to discuss blogging as journalism, and incidentally to hook up with Ben whom I haven't seen all summer.

2002-08-24T12:53:00.000-07:00

Evan Williams
Ev's mom lives in Des Moines. Ev's just back from the Brazilian launch in Rio.
He enjoyed "signing autographs for Brazilian chicks."

Blogger was launched 8/23/99...

Ev doesn't think blogging is mainstream yet.

2002-08-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

Chris Pirillo is introducing Doc Searls...

Linux users... google, 10000 plus servers
Home Depot, like 65,000 cash registers
Amazon saved $70 million or so by converting to Linux
Burlington Coat Factory has Linux on the desktops
Reynolds and Reynolds... auto sales document management
and of course... IBM
1999 IBM was "just assessing" Linux... Linux on Websphere
by 2000 it was everwhere -- peace, love, & Linux

IBM/Sun/HP/Dell... Linux is pervasive... it's in all kinds of tiny devices... cash registers, sprinkler systems... anything that needs a TCP/IP stack...

...aside, watch Jabber it's happening

What Infrastructure Is... 17 easy steps... I've seen this presentation on Doc's Blog!

The origin of warchalking! That was only two months ago!

Nobody owns it
everybody can use it
anybody can improve it

The history of the net is the history of its protocols. Vint Cerf

"Be conservatri

An operating system is just a device driver. Marc Andreesen

Be conservative in what you do and liberal in what you accept from others."

Linux is trees. It's a lot like lumber and business is Paul Bunyan using the lumber.

Lots of designers and builders
What matters is what needs to get done
It's mostly project work
No dominant supplier

What's the Net's nature? The net is a world. Think of the net as a hollow sphere made entirely of the people and resources it connects. -Craig Burton
One of its virtue is the emptiness in the middle.
viz. "The Stupid Network"

"It's all end to end." David Reid

Technology trends start with technologists. The net's founding fathers built it to support civilization. Civilization doesn't move all at the same speed.
(longnow.com
nature/culture/governance/infrastructure/commerce/fashion...

The battle between metaphors....
Hollywood sees the net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other content.
Geeks see the net as a place, a common, where we can not only make culture but we can do business.

The challenge is that hollywood doesn't understand infrstructure that forms and changes faster than they can control it.

Infrastructure supports markets.
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

Open and closed on the y axis
proprietary and public domain on the x axis
upper right corner open/public domain tends toward ubiquity...

Proprietary and closed live in the commerce layer
Open and public domain live in the infrastructure layer

EFF/OSI/AOTC/FSF/GeekPAC/Creative Commons

We are at the implementation phase of the cluetrain manifesto now. -- Dave Winer

What can we do about all the DRM DMCA etc bullshit?

BLOG

Blogs call people on their bullshit.

***

Check into the Sony PC110 digital video camera

2002-08-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

Gnomedex Saturday 8/24/2002
Today's schedule of speakers includes:
Phil Kaplan
Mark Thompson
Doc Searls
Evan Williams
Leo Laporte

I wanna blog Doc and Ev for obvious reasons.

Check out the links to the left for real coverage of the conference. My postings are more personal notes than blog-journalism.

Right now, in the breakout session...
Jeff Orr of Proxim is presenting on Wireless Networking...

All the 802.11a, b, g, i, whatever is the part I probably need to grasp... the part about wireless benefits is transparent... gee, I don't need to put a cable drop on every wall, I can locate anywhere and talk via wireless to the router... that's the easy part.

Wireless Protocols - designed for particular types of data...
PAN/LAN/WAN... PAN example is Bluetooth - personal area network - wireless connectivity around yound your person.
2.4GHz Freq hopping... unlicensed band, no FCC hassles
1Mbps xfer rate
10 meter range

Replaces Infra Red and cable in apps like remote controls, wireless headsets, print adapters.
Microwave oven and cordless phones are sources of interference.

Home RF:
Home applications include computer adapters, cordless phones, audio receivers
2.4GHz Freq hopping... unlicensed band, no FCC hassles
10 Mbps xfer rate
50 meter range

Benefit is that interference is held to a minimum because mnost devices are on the network and their commo is coordinated.
Leaves the microwave oven as the sole source of rf interference in the network

Integrating cordless phones, in the home network without interference is the Proxim facet of specialization in CTI

802.11a
5GHz 50 meter range extensible via access points or external antennas, up to 54Mbps
Office applications include video streaming, LAN adapters

Jeff claims 802.11a is coming into its own and we should consider using it instead of 802.11b in the near future.
802.11a - 54Mbps in 5Ghz band
802.11b - 11 Mbps in 2.4 Ghz band
802.11c -Mac layer wireless bridging subclause under 802.1d
80211e - multimedia streaming enhancements
802.11f - client handoff between multivendor access points
802.11g - 54Mbps in 2.4 GHz backwards compatible with 802.11b (Jeff says there will be interference issues)
802.11h - HARMONIZATION OF 5 gHZ BAND WORLDWIDE
80211i - AES security (replaces WEP)

LAN/WAN - old stuff..

2002-08-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

Well... that last post sounded rude.
Sadly George is back on dial-up in his room and I'm in the lobby near the WIFI access point. I wish I was a better tech support guy.

Here in the lobby, Jennifer Goodenow has been kind enough to provide lots of background info on the Merle Hay Mall tricycle sculpture. It has vanished at this point. Anyone with information on the current locatiopn is asked to contact me directly here at Gnomedex and/or via email at fpaynter@sandhilltech.com

Jennifer is big into Geocaching. Looks like there are a lot of Wisconsin Geocachers (including cache cows).

2002-08-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

I Feel Better Already
George's machine is hosed and I didn't do it. BSOD after the Proxim guys did their stuff. We're hanging it up for now.

2002-08-23T15:18:00.000-07:00

Why I (Sometimes) Hate Computers and Networking
The Proxim WiFi card doesn't work under NT for George. So we swapped my Linksys for his Proxim, and both of them work fine under Windows Me on my computer, and we can see that the Linksys is working under NT but we still can't get George to connect to the Proxim router. We used DHCP. Maybe they'll tell him he needs an IP number? Maybe not. When things work, life is good. When they don't work, then life kinda sux. George took his NT/Linksys platform over to the Proxim guys who are the authorities on these matters. He should be online in a matter of nano-seconds. But I hope not. If I can't fix it, I don't want it to be an easy problem. It's an ego thing.

If George had a kinder gentler IT staff, they'd fix him up with a dual boot on his laptop so that he could run something friendlier than NT when he's undocked from the Mother-LAN.

2002-08-23T14:25:00.000-07:00

What Beth from Microsoft thinks about the mobile world...
Four key components:
1. Actual devices... lotsa form factors pagers, pda, cell phones, etc
2. Connectivity.... Personal Area Network... bluetooth, IRDA
LAN... dial-up, WiFi
WAN...GSM, CDMA, TDMA
From disconnected devices to integrated wireless
3. Software and Services... voice, data access, messaging, alerts
4. dum-dee-dum-dum... Marketing...

2002-08-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

"Live from Silicorn Valley!"

Wish I'd said that.

2002-08-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

Steve Gibson is talking about Internet attacks... Raw sockets are a next generation more potent tool for hackers to play with.

When I get home I'm typing netstat -an on the XP machine to see who's exploiting it! Am I zombie at the office? I don't think I am at home because I've got a pretty good firewall, but at the office I've got more stuff than I understand... I'm probably a zomboid and don't know it.

2002-08-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

August 23, 2002
From Gnomedex... Des Moines, Iowa

Proxim is providing the WiFi... blogger is providing the hosting, and I'm live and online. This is hot. Let's consider this the test post, with more to follow!