Ted Ritzer: GOV IT

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:41:13 GMT

<oXygen/> XML Editor

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:38:42 GMT

Flash Animations With No Flash Expertise-the answer is Qarbon

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:36:15 GMT

from their website:

" No time to give one-on-one software explanations and demos to everyone?

Camtasia Studio records high-quality videos of your Windows computer screen, enabling you to share your PC knowledge with everyone in your office and around the world. Easily edit, enhance and publish your screen recordings in all the popular multimedia formats."

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:30:23 GMT

RSS and TiVo.

Yesterday's item provoked a flurry of responses. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who wrote the Washington Post story I dissected, points out that the nature of his assignment precluded broader coverage, and that he'd otherwise gladly have included bloglines. There's been lots of chatter about bloglines lately -- Chad Dickerson mentions it today -- so I was interested to hear from Martin Thornell about another web-based product, Rocket RSS reader. Doubtless there are others too. An implementation of one of these licensed for behind-the-firewall use, as Chad suggests, would be handy. As a matter of fact, that's how I use Radio UserLand's reader. It's nominally a desktop product, but I run it as a server and authenticate to it over SSL. ... [Jon's Radio]

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:29:12 GMT

The following article makes InfoPath a non-starter at my worksite:

Customer demand for a ubiquitous InfoPath runtime. The last time I asked Microsoft why there's no plan to make the InfoPath runtime ubiquitous, the answer I got was: "We don't hear customers asking for it." Well, I do. Here's a typical rant from one customer who, because his company has a relationship with Microsoft that he doesn't want to jeopardize, asked me to anonymize his comments:

I believe a primary requirement of a forms application is to make it possible for the form to be completed by a wide audience of people from whom I wish to gather data. A key driver, at least in the world of my customers, is to be able to distribute the form widely to people who aren't necessarily connected to the network and get them to fill it in and return it. I don't want to authenticate these people in my network. They won't install software on their computers just to fill out my form. They don't want to learn a new application.

It seems InfoPath has completely ignored the question of how the form will actually be filled in by the responder. There is no free viewer as there is with Adobe Acrobat. There is no ability to save the form template as an ASP.NET web form. It appears that Microsoft expects everyone to purchase a full copy of InfoPath--the complete form design application--just so they can fill out a form. They can't possibly believe the product will gain any traction with this licensing and deployment model, can they? [1] What are they thinking? [2]

So my main question is, is there any way to deploy InfoPath forms without putting full InfoPath on every desktop? [3] Do you know whether Microsoft understands this issue and are planning anything to address it? [4] The two applications that are widely available on everyone's desktop are a web browser and Adobe Acrobat, and it seems like it would be a good idea for InfoPath to support forms deployment via one of those means. Am I missing something here? [5]

... [Jon's Radio]

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:04:01 GMT

Gleanings from Tim Bray's Blog:

Tim introduces people to how to blog from OpenOffice

Tim points to:

yet another discussion of how to use Open Office for blogging

a InfoWorld article on MS's Don Box's opinion re SOAP and getting results with it

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:22:09 GMT

David Temkin's new blog.

David Temkin's blog. My friend David Temkin is the CTO at Laszlo Systems, and he's just started up his blog. His first post explains the difference between Laszlo and Macromedia's new Flex server. [Ted Leung on the air]

It's great that Ted got to blog David's blog before me. Now I can say that I just blogged Ted.

Watch this column soon for a more indepth analysis of this momentous occasion.

[Marc's Voice]

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:21:00 GMT

W3C works out DOM kinks. The Web standards body recommends a third version of an application programming interface that lets scripts act on part of Web pages. [CNET News.com]

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:20:28 GMT

Carriers add SSL string to their bow. A browser-based VPN technology is gaining popularity among corporate buyers, and carriers are making a bid for their business. [CNET News.com]

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:19:01 GMT

Networked DVD players.

Networked DVD Players Go Mainstream

Category: Streaming Media Devices - March 9, 2004

By Alexander Grundner

With the ever-increasing popularity of networked DVD players, PC World has posted coverage of the current crop of devices that are making their way into our homes. The article also reveals plans for a couple of new digital media servers (all-in-one devices with built-in TV-Tuners, DVR functionality, large-capacity hard drives, and network connectivity) from Toshiba and HP, as well as a streaming media capable, 20” LCD TV from Sharp expected later this May.

News Link: Melissa Perenson, "DVD Players Anchor Home Nets," PC World, March 8, 2004.

[eHomeUpgrade]

I wonder if they support ZeroConf?

[Marc's Voice]

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 16:13:46 GMT

Achieving Results through Effective Project Management.

Our portfolio / project management effort is moving ahead quickly and will enable us to align projects, goals, and resources more effectively in the future. We are using an open source project management system which we implemented very quickly and are now managing all of the UWIN projects there in addition to ITS projects. Here is a high level view of the process:

One of our goals has been to better define roles and responsibilities of the employees within the matrixed organization of which project teams are only one dimension. Here is a view of how roles might fit in the project management view as designed by Bob Woolley and the service delivery team:

[David Fletcher: Utah Government]

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 15:26:03 GMT

Adam Curry's Weblog - ptvn. Weblog: Adam Curry's Weblog
Source: ptvn
Link: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/2004/04/04.html#a5480

Looks like Jim Moore is thinking about Personal TV Networks as well, something that can easily be handled by rss enclosures... with a bit of bittorrent thrown in. [PubSub: RSS]

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 15:24:05 GMT

Linux on desktop gaining in OS race. SiliconValley.com Apr 4 2004 10:42AM GMT... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 23:40:08 GMT

Truth and honesty please.

It's great to see Jon Udell mention Laszlo in his review of Flex. Congrats Jon!

I wish Macromedia would just say: "we think Laszlo is great. It sits on top of our Flash technology and we decided it was such a great idea, we'd make one of our own." Perhaps because Macromedia doesn't make any MONEY off of the Flash player?

Gee - now who's idea was it to give away the player in the first place?

Jamie Fenton - that's who! And me - I went along with it - back in 1984.

Apparently there are a couple of innovations in Flex that Laszlo doesn't have - wow! Coolio! Congrats to Kevin Lynch on that!

One interesting note in the sidebar, Udell points out:

Bottom Line:
With Flex, Macromedia continues to move the widely deployed Flash player away from its roots as a boutique animation viewer and closer to the mainstream of enterprise development. Competition looms in the form of Microsoft's forthcoming Avalon, but Flex is here today, offering a cross-platform solution that works with existing Web infrastructure and skills.

This is something folks are missing (including Jon) Laszlo (which is at a 2.0 BTW) can easily adapt to new rendering systems, like Avalon. So any investment in Laszlo today, will be able to transition to Avalon smoothly.

Can Macromedia make the same statement about Flex? Will Flex output Avalon compatible code for Lomnghorn three years from now?

Here's Jon's blog post.......

Macromedia Flex.

The Flex strategy first began to crystallize two years ago when Macromedia rolled out the Flash 6 player, Flash MX development tools, and ColdFusion MX server. The possibilities were exciting, and the back-end environment was comfortably based on Java and Web services. But the client-side discipline was alien to the corporate programmer.

One obstacle was the ActionScript 1.0 language, which lacked the strong typing and formal class model that a Java programmer would expect. The solution to this problem arrived last fall when Flash MX 2004 introduced Flash Player 7 and support for ActionScript 2.0. Yet the Flash IDE was still built around the concept of making a movie, not coding an application. Flex presents a development model that will make immediate sense to an enterprise developer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

The sample Flex app that appears in the story is the RSS reader that Macromedia's Christophe Coenraets wrote. I guess RSS readers are now the official benchmark for next-generation markup-driven development. Here's the same thing done in XAML. ... [Jon's Radio] [Marc's Voice]

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 23:36:19 GMT

Jim Louderback gets BLOGGY. Congrats to Jim Louderback on getting the Ziff IT folks to get it together and set him up with an official blog. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Jim is one of those industry veterans that always has a unique angle on things - but is refreshingly honest, straight forward and clear. And I happen to have an office four doors down from him - right now.

I just wonder what happens to Jim's TechTV gig? Does he suddenly become a gaming expert? Maybe he will - once 1Up.com v2.0 ships. :-) Oooops I'm not supposed to mention that - right?

Or maybe it's time to?

[Marc's Voice]

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 06:12:08 GMT

Microsoft, others preview Web services metadata spec. IBM Corp., BEA Systems Inc., SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. have published an initial draft of a new Web services specification for retrieving Web services metadata, Microsoft said Tuesday. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 06:05:47 GMT

Collaboration over the net. Today I received a draft version of my article on net collaboration software. This is a short introduction to the available choices, and covers the basic requirements (audio/video, instant messaging, file transfer, shared blackboard, application sharing, etc.). I reviewed software such as Marratech Pro for the article. The text is written in Finnish and will appear in the next issue of the magazine. [Juha Haataja: Universal Digital Ideas]

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 06:05:07 GMT

Xgrid: High Performance Computing for the Rest of Us: "Getting Started with Xgrid [...] Step one is to download Xgrid and install it on a single machine. Step two is to install Xgrid on other machines and configure them to be available for grid calculations. There is no step three. Xgrid is designed to take care of most of the details of distributing your calculation so that you can concentrate on the problem you are trying to solve." [Juha Haataja: Universal Digital Ideas]

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 17:13:07 GMT

IBM's Linux Upgrade Roadmap. petrus4 writes "IBM have put together a nine-part series on upgrading from various incarnations of Windows (NT in particular) to Linux. Although it's mainly ... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sun, 28 Mar 2004 17:10:59 GMT

"It's just a matter of time before Open Source prevails." Mitch Kapor

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 20:01:00 GMT

Who should govern the Net?. A U.N. summit ends with a consensus that developing countries must have more influence on the way the Internet is run, but conclusions about what should be done are vague. [CNET News.com]

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 18:48:08 GMT

The Firefox opportunity.

The future of "great Windows applications," we're told, lies with Longhorn's next-generation presentation subsystem, Avalon, which will reboot software development sometime in the latter half of this decade. Of course, even Microsoft can't wait until then. Consider InfoPath. It's a great Windows application and a rich Internet client that had to ship in 2003. Its foundation is none other than Internet Explorer -- or rather, the suite of components and Internet standards on which Internet Explorer depends. Could InfoPath have been built on a Mozilla foundation instead? You bet. And the result wouldn't just be a great Windows application. It would be a great application, period. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

After I wrote this column, I checked out an interesting new application that I wish had been built on a Mozilla foundation: Onfolio. You can't fault Onfolio's creator, J.J. Allaire, for targeting the overwhelming majority platform: IE/Win. Of course as a .NET app, Onfolio targets a minority within that majority. We live in interesting times! ... [Jon's Radio]

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 18:41:10 GMT

Microsoft to Offer Blog Search Tool. Mercury News: Microsoft plans search site for Weblogs. Microsoft became the first big Internet company Friday to say that it would create a special search Web site just for Weblogs. The company said MSN Blogbot will debut in the first half of the year, along with MSN Newsbot, a search site devoted to news. Another Microsoft "innovation" that's already been invented -- see, for example Technorati and Feedster -- but overall I'm glad to see the big guys getting behind blogging as a form ... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 14:23:45 GMT

Utah's Enterprise Architecture.

In an attempt to diagram Utah's enterprise architecture, we can look at the overall architecture like this:

Each of the layers can easily be broken down into a more detailed look. For example, the business layer looks something like this:

The application layer at the enterprise level is comprised of a large suite of applications that cut across the entire enterprise:

These applications are built on a data and infrastructure layer that reside mainly in two central data centers, a primary and alternate site. The alternate site was built with the concept of redundancy and business recovery in mind and is geographically remote from the central data center. A robust, redundant wide area network connects the two centers with network users / state facilities. Here is a look at the data layer:

Finally, the technical infrastructure looks something like this:

All of these resources which extend across the enterprise provide a foundation upon which we can build (and have built to some extent) an extensive set of user applications using a service oriented architectural model to integrate where necessary, data and services in boundless ways, particularly as we combine enterprise level data and services with the abundance of data that reside at the agency level. This will drive us to integrated government (igov).

thanks to Bob Woolley for help with strategic design

[David Fletcher: Utah Government]

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 14:17:44 GMT

PluggedIn: RSS Readers Offer New Ways to Read the Web (Reuters). Reuters - Noticed those little orange boxes on the Web lately with the letters "XML?" [Yahoo! News - Technology]

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 01:36:32 GMT

Top Ten Tips to Make Attacker’s Lives Hell. Chris McNab breaks down his top ten tips all network administrators should follow to protect their networks from opportunistic threats and make it hard for the more determined attackers to get anywhere. Chris is the author of the recently released Network Security Assessment. [O'Reilly Network ONJava.com]

Lawrence Lessig's new book

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 01:04:19 GMT

Professor Lawrence Lessig has published a new book "Freeculture". Starving student with no money? Not to worry the kind doctor has released a free PDF version of the book!

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 03:09:17 GMT

HP to Globally Launch Linux-Based PCs. Rade T. writes "Reuters UK reports that HP, the No. 1 personal computer and computer printer maker, said on Wednesday that its putting its weight behind ... [Slashdot]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 23:47:50 GMT

Switching from PHP to Zope/Python. Occasionally, when working with computers, you get to experience a completely new way of thinking about problems long thought solved. Rarer still does one find a new set of solutions that are so well thought out and integrated that older approaches seem clumsy by comparison. Recently I discovered Zope, and having understood its principles I decided to abandon my years of PHP experience in pursuit of a better way. [kuro5hin.org]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 23:42:01 GMT

Raising the Bar for Toolbars.

"Dogpile Toolbar has launched its newest toolbar, which comes with an an RSS Tool for grabbing RSS and Atom-syndicated content. The Toolbar can display feeds constructed in RSS .91, .92, and 2.0 formats. The Toolbar also supports the Atom feed format." [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]
Index and Search Your Computer, RSS Feeds, and the Web With New Desktop
From an overview article that that I've co-authored with Barbara Quint, 'Lycos has launched a free toolbar search product [IE, Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP] from HotBot, their search service,which is 'the first product to integrate traditional desktop search with Web search within the browser.' The same search tool can now reach the Internet, e-mail folders for Outlook or Outlook Express, and user documents stored on a hard drive. The free application does not even require registration. It also incorporates a blocker for pop-up ads and an RSS News Reader syndication. Searching reaches six file types: MS Office, PDF, RTF, and text. Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remain stored locally to protect user privacy.' " [Resourceshelf]

So toolbars are continuing to evolve, with library services nowhere in sight. I'm more intrigued by the Hotbot toolbar, with its ability to index my hard drive. I love the Lookout search toolbar for Outlook, so combining that functionality with searching my RSS feeds could be incredibly efficient. I'm confused as to what list of RSS subscriptions the toolbar indexes, though. Hopefully it's not a second list that needs to be maintained separately from any existing user aggregator. I'll have to find time to give it a whirl, especially to see if I can add SWAN to its list of search engines.

Oh, and an important note from Gary's article: "Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remain stored locally to protect user privacy," and it's Windows only.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 23:39:49 GMT

Power Up Internet Explorer with Three Shells. Supercharge Internet Explorer with one of three wrappers. Once you use them, you won't be able to imagine how you got along without them. [O'Reilly Network ONJava.com]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 23:37:56 GMT

Blogs and Print, Working Together.

Jon Udell: Blog/print synergy: my strategies. For almost a decade I've used the Web -- and most recently my blog -- to research, develop, and enhance the articles I write for magazines. When I ran into Dan Gillmor at SXSW we discussed some of my strategies, and Dan asked me to write them up. Seems worth doing, so here goes. Much of this concerns the IT trade pub ecosystem specifically, but I think the principles will generalize. The basic pattern is simple: a story gestates in blogspace, appears in print and online, and then matures in blogspace.

Great advice here for journalists.

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 03:08:25 GMT

Firefox May be Better, But Internet Explorer is Entrenched. Jon Udell says Firefox fills the IE void by being a better browser than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has stagnated since Microsoft destroyed serious competition in the browser business. I use it, too,but unfortunately it doesn't fill the void at all. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 01:06:52 GMT

Novell heralds Linux in the enterprise. Salt Lake City-- With the refrain of "Novell is back," the opening keynote address here at BrainShare on Monday made one thing clear: Novell is throwing its full weight behind Linux with the aim of driving the technology into the heart of the enterprise datacenter. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 17:56:12 GMT

from David Fletcher's blog:

The Second Superpower

Ethan Zuckerman's essay, "Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower" is an interesting piece on the future of social networks.

San Luis Province in Argentina has developed a very nice gateway onto the information highway (Autopista de la informacion).

What would you expect to see for egovernment in Papua New Guinea? Take a look.

John Robb has a different take on The Second Superpower:

"An amalgam of transnational terrorism and crime is the dark underbelly of the second superpower. If so, how big is its economy? Estimates are that transnational crime and terrorist organizations generate between $1.5 and $2 trillion a year..."

7:35:52 AM comment [ 0]

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 17:32:14 GMT

FolderShare 3151 [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 17:31:27 GMT

OpenOffice for Windows 1.1.1rc3 [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 16:50:03 GMT

RSS in Government. News about how RSS is being used by international, federal, state, and local governments [Recently approved feeds from Syndic8.com]

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 16:47:44 GMT

CNET Novell Stories:

Novell GroupWise 6.5 for Linux is collaboration software for managing computer communications on Linux systems. The software, which is slated to be released to the public April 15, mirrors functions the company provides in its applications for Windows computers.

GroupWise 6.5 also offers features for controlling e-mail, instant messaging, contacts and documents. Novell said that later this year, it will release a version of its Ximian Evolution software that features support for the product. Novell acquired Ximian in 2003. In the next 30 days, Novell plans to announce plug-in support for Gaim open-source instant messaging.

And the company will release YAST under the General Public License (GPL),

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 03:03:52 GMT

Novell Readies New Linux Release. SuSe Linux 9.1 will be the first commercial version of the open-source operating system based on the new 2.6 kernel. Users will get a performance boost and increased hardware compatibility. [Wired News]

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:12:45 GMT

Commoditization indeed. Notes From OSBC 2004.

Yesterday, I hosted a panel on software commoditization, with some of the top minds in the open source world. They all made some interesting points and I just wanted to recap what they said. Since I was moderating, I think most of the recap is from scribbles on the back of a single sheet of paper. So there maybe some missing elements here. One of the questions I asked the panel was which companies or what products were at most risk to commoditization pressures. Interesting answers:

Rob Page: Microsoft Office Suite
Ian Murdock: EMC Corp.
David Anderson: x86 Unix (SCO & Solaris)
Anthony Awtrey: High End Middleware like BEA Systems & IBM’s middle ware properties.

It was widely held assumption that MySQL will eat Oracle & Access for lunch, Sun will continue to dwindle and Cisco’s routers business will come under pressure.

What gets commoditized?

David Anderson said: Products that don’t change much and have low margins get commoditized. Such as operating systems. Palm got into this business, when they should have gone into selling applications built on their OS. As Clay Christensen says, when something gets commoditized the profits move elsewhere in the value chain.

Rob Page said: Commoditization starts at the bottom and then moves up the stack.

How to Stay ahead of the commoditization curve?

Ian Murdock said: Since every company needs a proprietary advantage of some kind, though, we’ve chosen to focus on proprietary advantage through process, not technology—in other words, how we can leverage our expertise in distribution building to help other companies assemble commodity software components from disparate places into cohesive wholes, and to do so in a scalable and flexible way. Note that this is not too far from Dell’s strategy, and they have thrived in a commoditized hardware market while the proprietary technology vendors have receded.

How to differentiate in a commoditized market place?

Anthony Awtrey said: We could also point out that the value of a commodity good is not only how useful it is as a product, but its value is also in the associated value network that is created by its wide-spread use. Sometimes tapping the value network that exists around a functional commodity is actually the real value, for example:

Commodity = Cell Phone // Real value = Convenient communication
Commodity = Free / Open Source operating system // Real value = Control over how it can be used

Currently listening to Dj Spooky’s Abstrakt Blowback Mix

[Om Malik on Broadband]

Marc's commentary,,,,,,,

This is a really important lesson to learn.

As soon as I saw Ryze and Friendster - my instinct immediately told me that a) there would be 10,000's of these things that b) they'd soon turn into a new commodity and finally I extrapolated that c) this would be a FINE area to plant a stake in the ground and lead an open source effort.

That's called PeopleAggregator.com - an open source social network - built on FOAF.

[Marc's Voice]

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:12:01 GMT

Wichita School's PDA Experiment. JOEL JOHNSON -- Teleread has a story about the success of Wichita Unified School District 259's decision to distribute Palm PDAs to all their students. Students use the Palms to keep track of schedules and to take home notes from their teachers to their parents. I carried an organizer throughout... [Gizmodo]

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:11:28 GMT

TomTom Go. JOSH RUBIN -- Navigation software developers, TomTom, have announced the TomTom Go-- a standalone in-car navigation system. Go has all the features of a built in nav system and sports a touch screen for easy control. You can even buy different color front plates to match your car. With 5... [Gizmodo]

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:09:52 GMT

ATM Media Player. JOEL JOHNSON -- What happens when an ATM crashes and reboots into a regular copy of Windows XP on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University? The world's first Diebold Brand Media Player. Using the touch screen and the character mapper in Windows, the ATM was reprogrammed to play various looping... [Gizmodo]

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 14:09:07 GMT

Sun to Extend Java with Linux, New Price Points. Systems vendor looks to offer Linux on key infrastructure software and unveils subscription pricing models. [internetnews.com]

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 06:27:22 GMT

Google goes local. With Google Local, the search giant is determined to help Web surfers find cafes, parks or even Wi-Fi hot spots in their area. It also wouldn't mind getting a chunk of the huge market for local advertising. [CNET News.com]

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 06:21:27 GMT

Sun embraces, takes aim at Red Hat Linux. Sun is porting its Java Enterprise System server software bundle to Red Hat's version of Linux, which it resells as well as SUSE Linux. But executives from Sun's software group said Solaris now can run at least as fast as Red Hat on low-end servers. [Computerworld Software News]

RSS in Government

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:12:02 GMT

RSS in Government

This site is worth a look if you work for any level of government, and you are considering the use of RSS feeds.

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 05:18:02 GMT

CNET News.com. Tech news and business reports by CNET News.com. Focused on information technology, core topics include computers, hardware, software, networking, and Internet media. [Recently approved feeds from Syndic8.com]

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 04:19:04 GMT

Dept. Of Homeland Security Chooses Groove, P2P. Ryan Barrett writes "Groove Networks has announced that their P2P infrastructure will power the Homeland Security Information Network, an initiative to ... [Slashdot]