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Updated on May 15, 2004 09:26 PM
May 14, 2004
Backing up OS X I recently bought a LaCie 500 Gb Fireware drive for use with my TiBook. Then I bought a copy of Synchronize Pro. Synchronize Pro can be set to start up automatically whenever the drive becomes available. That way, every morning when I plug my laptop into the Firewire hub, the back-up kicks off automatically. One of the things I did was partition it so that I had a partition about the same size as the hard drive on my laptop (60Gb in this case). I have Synchronize Pro to mirror my laptop harddrive to the partition as a bootable system back-up. Of course, I checked it to made sure I could really boot from it.
Business Continuity Planning Yesterday I attended the SIM lunch in Salt Lake. Michael Croy, from Forsythe was the speaker and the topic was disaster recovery and business continuity planning. This is one of the topics that every CIO knows they need to do something about, but no one really wants to discuss. When I was CIO for Utah, I tried to bring up the topic many times with business and IT folks alike and mostly got a cold shoulder. I even wrote a white paper tying it to Homeland Defense after 9/11. Still no interest. The common response was "oh, we did something like then for Y2K." As if dealing with the topic once were enough. You cannot begin to imagine the impact it would have on your life if a major disaster crippled the State's IT infrastructure. In any event, Michael made several points yesterday that caught my attention:
Bonj, who works for the State of Missouri, is excited to get a new blade server so he can move applications off system 390. My employees get excited about getting new blades also. Bonj stayed several years ago in almost the same hotel room that I was in for NASCIO.
Last week, Doug Chandler mentioned that the first regional 700 MHz plan has been accepted by the FCC.
I met with the Utah Business Portal committee yesterday. We are working out plans for phase 2 of that portal. Another group is working collaboratively on a new vortal, careers.utah.gov. It will be available around November.
The LinuxInstallFest is scheduled for tomorrow in Sandy, UT. Sounds like fun.
Utah Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff, announced dramatic success in fighting methamphetamie during last week's Republican state convention. Missouri has a new methamphetamine website.
Tim Bridgewater came by my home last night. It looks like he is kicking his primary campaign into high gear.
The Utah Campaign Reporting System makes it really easy for you to see who is contributing to various political campaigns. For example, I noticed that Jon Huntsman, one of the two governor candidates that will face a primary next week, received a contribution from Nancy Lieberman. I wonder if that is the same Nancy Lieberman who was a great basketball player.
California's State Comptroller announces $37.5 million savings through various e-government initiatives. Way to go!
Fund of Funds Two sessions ago, the Utah Legislature passed HB240 which created a $100 million fund of funds for Utah. Yesterday, after a year of legal wrangling and planning the board of directors was formed for the Utah Capital Investment Corporation, the legal entity formed to manage the fund. They'll soon be raising money. This is good news for Utah's high-tech community. Congratulations to Will West and the others on their appointments.
May 13, 2004
You heard it here first - The smart money votes The new CIO for the UK, advertised just a few weeks ago, needs the following key capabilities - A passion for seeing things from the customer view - A solid understanding of the issus of dealing with multiple stovepipes - A grasp of the metrics of co
Singapore's new Commercial-look Traffic Portal
Singapore's government, which typically ranks near the top in e-government, has just completed a new traffic portal. It breaks substantially from the typical government appearance and is managed through a private partnership. Take a look.
May 12, 2004
Science.gov is announcing version 2.0. Apparrently, the difference is in new enhanced search capabilities. My initial results from a search were not impressive. The first result looked good, but the link did not work, the next 5-10 results were dated information for a topic area where you really want current information.
Utah ranked sixth among states in an evaluation by the National Policy Research Council. The overall rating was helped by high ratings for technology (5th), health and welfare (5th), quality of life (8th), entrepreneurship & small business (7th)and education (10th).
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Going Beyond the Firewall Eric Knorr has an article called Guard the Application Layer at CIO Magazine. If you read it, beware--its pretty elementary. I wish it weren't necessary to talk down to CIOs about technology, but unfortunately, that's reality. CIO Magazine knows it audience. Nevertheless, there's some good advice there, like using application scanners and application-level firewalls. There's another thing you can do as well: get an XML firewall. Probably the most important thing you can do, however, is to learn how hackers work. For that, I recommend the book How to Own the Box.
May 11, 2004
Self-Organizing Motes I've been fascinated by stories of self-organizing network of miniature sensors. IEEE Spectrum has a story about researchers who use a host of small devices called motes to do research on a bird colony in Maine. The motes are shaped like film canisters:
SPF at IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force has formed a group to create a formal standard around SPF, the Sender Policy Framework, designed to reduce Spam. The group, called MTA Authorization Records in DNS (MARID), will focus only on MTA authorization and only on DNS-based mechanisms. MTA methods are concerned with authenticating the domain that the mail comes from, rather than the sender individually. As a consequence, MTA methods aren't foolproof (Spam frequently does come from domains that can be authenticated), but it cuts off a large source of Spam with no need to even transfer or read the message the first. The good news is that its likely to move fast:
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Accenture's Top Ten | |
| 1 | Canada |
| 2 | United States |
| 3 | Singapore |
| 4 | Australia |
| Denmark | |
| Finland | |
| Sweden | |
| 8 | France |
| 9 | United Kingdom |
| Netherlands | |
| 11 | Belgium |
| Ireland | |
| Japan | |
- Budget 2004: New Agenda for Achievement
- List of RSS feeds from Canada's government. The Prime Minister could use an RSS feed on his news site.
Commentary on the rankings from:
- The Guardian
- Globe and Mail
- Computer Weekly
- Government of Canada
- Information Week
- GovExec (which, by the way, has a new format)
- FCW
May 10, 2004
New blogger version Blogger looks really different today - there's a whole new version with lots of new features. It looks like it's been redesigned completely. I guess that's what you can do when Google owns you. Just because I thought I could, I've changed the template
The Census Tiger Mapping Service I'm not sure why I didn't know about this sooner, but the US Census Bureau has an online mapping service called Tiger that let's you input coordinates for places of interest as well as other mapping functions (like grids, regions, etc.) The service can map metro areas (here's a map of the Capitol mall the with White House and Capitol marked) or larger areas (here's a region with major cities marked). As they say on the site, this isn't intended to be a production quality Web service, so don't use it like one. But for quick maps of data, its very handy.
RMI and EJBs, An Introduction Alexander Prohorenko has an article at DevX introducing EJBs and RMI. Don't be confused, its not an introduction to EJBs, but rather an introduction to RMI and how its used in EJBs. I just went over this today with my 462 class (Engineering Large Distributed Applications), so it caught my eye.
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| The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869. My great-great-grandfather, a former engineer to the King of Sweden, was in attendance. |
NW Fusion sees RFIDs everywhere. I will be developing a summary of where they are in government as well as where they might potentially be used. We are exploring pilot RFID project ideas in UWIN.
The US Trade Representative recently released the 2004 Special 301 Report which details the adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property protection in approximately 85 countries.
135 years ago on this day, a golden spike was driven at Promontory Point, Utah to complete the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Here's the OECD's recent report on biometric technologies.
May 09, 2004
Stats To Compare With Stats on website availability, apparently from www.parallel.ltd.uk (where I couldn't find them), but eventually found on waller.co.uk: Site Availability ! The mean availability of all sites was only 98.72%, equating to over 111.13 hours or nearly fi
The 24hour web myth It's time to research car insurance again. This time I'm trying the AA which, overall, I think has a great website. One foible and one very strange feature though. The foible is that, early on, it says "type your email address in if you DO wish" to he
The Central Infrastructure Dilemma I've been off the conference trail for a while but this week will be presenting a couple of times. I've left the slides until it's too late, as usual, and I've spent some of the weekend thinking about the right topic. I've opted for "The Central Infrast
May 07, 2004
Deleting Spam With My Eyes Wide Shut I've been a long time user of SpamAssassin, but hadn't updated it for some time. About 6 weeks ago, I updated it to the latest version, which includes a Baysian filter. I spent some time making sure I correctly classified Junk and other mail and trained it regularly. For the last three weeks I've been checking my junk folder to ensure it didn't throw things away I wanted and I didn't find anything. Nothing. It lets a few things through, especially when its of a type it hasn't seen before, but after training again, that goes away. So today, I took the plunge and deleted over 1000 items in my Junk folder without even looking at them. Wow!
Elegant Interface Designs in Open Source Software Steven Garrity at Acts of Volition cites some examples of elegant interface design in open source software:
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| Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge meets with Utah emergency responders. He was very complimentary of the UWIN project and stressed the importance of integrated communications systems. |
Tom Ridge will be in town today. He will be giving the commencement speech at the University of Utah and then visiting with a small group of state and local government homeland security officials.
The May issue of Capitol Connections is online.
The Utah Wireless Integrated Network governance board meets today.
Accenture has a new eGov report. I'm having a little trouble accessing it.
Wow, New York State just awarded their wireless network contract to M/A-COM. Some say that the contract may be valued as high as $2 billion. Utah's approach (UWIN) is certainly less costly - and hopefully just as well integrated. The contract is the largest technology contract in New York's history, but will not include any coverage in wilderness areas of the Adirondacks or Catskills.
Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, just announced the Arkansas Wireless Information Network (AWIN). Phase I alone is projected to cost $27 million. What we could do with that kind of money.... Arkansas passed several bills to develop statewide wireless back in 1999. This is one of several collaborative projects for the state.
NENA will be holding a wireless E-911 conference here in Salt Lake City on May 23-25. NENA also has a couple of E9-1-1 presentations on how to deal with VoIP:
We are analyzing the benefits of VoIP in conjunction with a new building that is nearing completion.
Governor Ernie Fletcher, the new Governor of Kentucky, held his first online chat the other day. Governor Leavitt did that a few times here. Here is the transcript from Fletcher's online session. He discusses a few technology issues.
The New Hackers of Democracy For anyone who is interested in eGovernment or eDeomcracy, Doc Searls has a nice piece on the new hackers of democracy over at LinuxJournal. In the article, Tom Adelstien makes a good case for Republican's being the torchbearers of open source in government. Interesting.
May 06, 2004
Sassy viruses doesn't up the ante Sasser, the new blaster but not as tough apparently, seems to me to be causing pain. When you hear that the coastguard went back to pencil and paper, that banks in taiwan shutdown and the post office in germany shut for the day (and it wasn't a weekend),
Not google but gobbldegook The EU have commissioned some work into an authentication backbone. Apparently: Lia Borthwick, project director of the GUIDE consortium, said: "A multidisciplinary and multicultural structure such as ours is ideal to achieve the aim of developing a ci
CSI and Governments on the Web I've become a bit of a fan of CSI recently. I don't have a TV so I have to wait for the DVDs to come out and then catch up. I've just started series 3, sourced earlier than available in the UK from Amazon in the USA. One of the episodes had the team wa
Goggling at Google I'm fascinated by the upcoming Google IPO. For a few reasons 1) It's been a long time since there was a potentially explosive IPO to watch. The first that I remember was Netscape in, I think, August 1995 or so - followed soon after by Amazon. Those
Small Software Firms and OSS Dan Bricklin, inventor of VisaCalc, has an excellent essay on the small software firms and the use of open source software as a "defensive marketing move."
Customer Interaction Hubs Yesterday on Talk of the Nation the lead story was on Medicare's new prescription drug benefit card program. What caught my attention was the way that a government agency in a matter of months was able to put together a very sophisticated customer interaction system from a highly interactive and informative Web site to trained call center agents ready to answer questions.
Bad News for PDA Makers? Rich Luhr has an article full of bad news for PDA manufacturers at AlwaysOn. When I no longer had a company to buy my PDA for me, I stopped using one and other than not having something to play with in meetings, I haven't really missed it. My phone has all my contacts and making appointments by email is more convenient anyway. I don't think that the trend to smartphones mentioned in the article means that everyone will soon be carrying around a Treo or some other Palm-powered device. People still want small, convenient phones first and will quickly shed features if they interfere with that base functionality.
SuSE vs. Redhat in the Enterprise A review of SuSE 8.0 and Redhat ES 3.0 at DevX finds SuSE the clear winner.
May 05, 2004
We have reached a plateau Accenture News Release about their annual report on e-gov maturity: eGovernment Leadership: High Performance, Maximum Value PDF. The study identified...
Philip Greenspun on Open Source Economics In a recent IT Conversations, Philip Greenspun talks about the economics of open source. Ars Digita, a company he founded, was built around an open source platform. He makes two interesting points about open source:
Riding Radio Waves Baseline has an article on the use of RFID in theme parks.
Semantisk web going galore August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (Ftrain.com) A work of fiction. A Semantic Web...
OMB releases EA assessment tool Government Computer News (GCN) daily news -- federal, state and local government technology; OMB releases EA assessment tool The Office...
May 04, 2004
European Speaking Tour Conference season, I guess. I'll be doing a number of conferences in the near future. Next week, I'll be in...
ENUM: Electronic Number Mapping One of the pieces of infrastructure that makes all kinds of networks work and yet gets very little attention is the directory. Directories are big business. For example, there's directory of telephone numbers run by NeuStar, Inc. NeuStar has annual revenues of $92 million. Now, accoring to Light Reading, AT&T Corp. and MCI Inc., together with unidentified cable companies, telephone companies, and ISPs are preparing to form an LLC that will run a process to define a new company that will run ENUM.
The ENUM directory is the infrastructure that will link phone numbers to URLs, and thus IP addresses. ENUM is crucial to the development of widespread VoIP services. The ENUM directory promises to be more lucrative than NeuStar's business, so I'm sure there will be some hard fought competition to win the ENUM contract. In general, I think there's missed opportunity in directories and not enough businesses fully develop the potential of the directories under their control.
Wavetronics The Deseret News did a piece today on Wavetronics, a BYU spin-off. Wavetronics makes radar based traffic monitoring systems. I know one of the guys over there pretty well and I've followed them for a while. This is a pretty good business to be in because building roads is expensive and so IT applied to making traffic flow better can have some big pay-offs.
Haycock to leave OMB Robert Haycock, the Office of Management and Budget’s chief architect, will step down April 30.
DHS taps Verity for data-sharing net Homeland Security has chosen Verity’s enterprise software for its government intelligence information-sharing network.
Enough coddling—OMB demands results from IT After three years of holding agencies’ hands, waiting for their infrastructures to settle into place and putting up with systems chiefs’ anxieties, Bush administration officials think it’s time that federal IT deliver on the promised results. “We can get to where we want to be. It is just a question of making sure there is plenty of rigor and discipline to make sure agencies understand what their goals are,” OMB’s Clay Johnson says.
Network Hardware: Dell sets a new low (price) for high speed If speed is what you are looking for in your network connection-and really, who isn’t?-the PowerConnect 2600 can help get the junk out of your network trunk.
Project Management Business Case Forum You spent the better part of last year gathering data to build a business case to quantify your project's value. Time, energy, and funding went into this process. You filled out the OMB 300 form. Maybe you even earned a passing PART score. Now what? Are you going to let all that effort go to waste? Don't. Use your business case as a project plan.
May 03, 2004
Agencies told to assess EA capabilities The Office of Management and Budget’s Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office last week released an assessment tool for agencies to evaluate their enterprise architectures, set baselines and address problems.
Online Sex Offender Registries Causing a Stir in California Online sex offender registries are an interesting eGovernment application because they seem to be the focus of most of the major eGovernment issues. I've written before about transparency and sex offender registries when I was Utah's CIO.
FrogPad's one-handed, Bluetooth keyboard
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Sun's Blogging Policy Tim Bray has published a blogging policy for Sun. There are some common sense policy positions like "don't tell secrets," but mostly its about why Sun employees should blog and how to be effective when they do.
The Value of LiveHelp in the Portal
Gerry McGovern discusses Utah's Live Help service in his article "How Much Human Support should your Website need?" in WebProNews.
Bush Outlines Technology Goals
Last week, President Bush spent a few minutes talking about technology:
"...if we want the people to be working here at home, this country's got to stay the leader in innovation and change and the government can help."
He specifically mentioned increasing government spending on R&D, encouraging private investment in R&D through tax credits, developing a new energy strategy that reduces dependence on foreign oil, overhauling the medical system through the use of electronic records (here's his goal, "Within ten years, every American must have a personal electronic medical record. That's a good goal for the country to achieve. The federal government has got to take the lead in order to make this happens by developing what's called technical standards. In other words, there needs to be standards.")
Finally, this: "One, increase access to federal land for fiberoptic cables and transmission towers. That makes sense. As you're trying to get broadband spread throughout the company, make sure it's easy to build across federal lands. One sure way to hold things up is that the federal lands say, you can't build on us. So how is some guy in remote Wyoming going to get any broadband technology? Regulatory policy has got to be wise and smart as we encourage the spread of this important technology. There needs to be technical standards to make possible new broadband technologies, such as the use of high-speed communication directly over power lines. Power lines were for electricity; power lines can be used for broadband technology. So the technical standards need to be changed to encourage that.
And we need to open up more federally controlled wireless spectrum to auction in free public use, to make wireless broadband more accessible, reliable, and affordable. Listen, one of the technologies that's coming is wireless."
This was an important speech for the president to make. It has already generated a lot of talk. Here are a few articles from the media:
- eWeek
- NY Times (Newt Gingrich)
- Information Week (Tommy Thompson)
- Information Week
- Baltimore Sun
- SeacoastOnline
Angela Vivian Just over a year ago, I wrote here "I had the good fortune this week to spend some time with Angela Vivian down in Somerset. Angela styles herself TOL, or "The Old Lunatic", although I'd see the world a much saner place if we all had half of her wisdom
May 02, 2004
Den 1 maj var foreløbig sidste frist for at indsende høringssvar på referenceprofilen. Der er indkommet høringssvar fra:
Offentlige myndigheder
- Forsvarsministeriet
- Socialministeriet
- Amtsrådsforeningen
- Fyns Amt
- Indenrigs- og Sundhedsministeriet
- Sønderjyllands Amt
- Odontologisk institut, Århus Universitet
- Ribe Amt
Organisationer
- Dansk IT
- Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group (SSLUG)
- Digital Forbruger Danmark
- DKUUG
- Open Office
- Keld Jørn Simonsen
Virksomheder
- IBM
- Mærsk Data
- Skandinavisk Computer Teknologi A/S
Disse forelægges IT-arkitekturkomitéen, og indgår i det videre arbejde.
Det er stadig muligt at indsende kommentarer.
May 01, 2004
WS-Speculations Tim Bray writes about WS-Good Practices and WS-Theory and concludes: I think somebody needs to stand up and start waving...
Infosiden om webtilgængelighedsstandarden WAI er blevet opdateret med et fungerende link og med en ny ressource, KIA's udbudsværktøjskasse. Tak til Adrian Price for at gøre os opmærksomme på det fejlagtige link.
April 30, 2004
Context as an Integration Driver I just read a white paper at the Radiant Logic Web site on context. The article contends that hierarchical relationships provide context and that one of the primary drivers for integration on the business side is recovering context. As an example, when I combine customer service and customer billing systems, I gain more context surrounding any individual customer and the understanding I gain from that is what makes the integration worthwhile. The article hums right along and makes some interesting points until it gets to the "Context from a technical perspective" section and then is feels like the author lost interest and posted it before it was done. I wish that weren't so---I was anxious to read it.
Ravenous RSS Readers A Wired magazine article talks about the problems with bandwidth comsumed by RSS. Overall, I think the article is a little shallow, only getting to the interesting solutions in the last three paragraphs. There are plenty of interesting solutions to be developed and as Dave Winer says at the end of the article, once its in someone's economic interest to solve them, they'll get solved.
April 29, 2004
Super Jared Spool interview InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Jared Spool Jared Spool (JS): Well, lately, I've been thinking about chocolate chip...
Baltimore's Innovative Use of GIS
The U.S. Airforce is now requiring that all office supply purchases be made through online vendors.
Dickenson County, Virginia is creating an electronic village. The village will also provide space for citizen forums and businesses who want more online exposure.
Baltimore offers a couple of very nice, GIS-supported websites that help citizens identify what the city is doing in capital improvements, fighting crime, and art and culture.