Phil Windley's Technometria

March 17, 2009

Participate in Usability Testing for HP

A friend of mine at HP is looking for small business owners (1-20 employees) to participate in some usability testing of online tools for marketing their business. Participants will receive a $50 gift card to Amazon.com or Best Buy, or a discount on design services like brochure creation, for an hour of their time at the HP office in American Fork, Utah. If you’re interested, just send a note to Esther at HP.

March 13, 2009

Continuous Deployment

This morning Steve gave a presentation on context automation and Kynetx at the Utah Technology Council’s CTO P2P forum. The presentation was great and the audience asked a lot of good questions. One thing that came up (I don’t even remember why) was the subject of continuous deployment. I decided I’d pull a few URLs out of my head and put them in a blog post for people to mull over.

The first URL I think of when I consider continuous deployment is code.flickr.com. If you’ve never been there, the bottom of the page lists when the last deployment of Flickr was, how many deployments have happened in the last week, and who was involved (pictures). Here’s a screenshot:

When I first saw that I was astounded. Sometimes there are a dozen or more deployments in a single day. The questions that spring to mind: why? and how? Both are answered in a few posts by Timothy Fitz.

In Continuous Deployment, Timothy discusses the concept. Basically, it comes down to “fail fast.” Deploying a few small changes is less likely to break something and when it does, you’ll know more quickly what caused the problem and be able to correct it.

In Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day Timothy goes into more detail about how they do this. The idea comes down to

Commit early and often
Automatically test on commit
Automatically roll the code out if the tests pass

There are, of course, some problems to solve to get that done. First, you need a good, thorough test suite. Timothy points out that you also need tests that

run fast and
execute reliably.

The test suite Timothy is describing takes 4.4 machine hours to execute. That’s a lot of testing. To make it run fast enough to deploy continuously, they have a buildbot that runs tests across 36 machines in parallel.

The point about test reliability is important too. Intermitently failing tests will ruin this process. Timothy says:

When I say reliable, I don’t mean “they can fail once in a thousand test runs.” I mean “they must not fail more often than once in a million test runs.” We have around 15k test cases, and they’re run around 70 times a day. That’s a million test cases a day. Even with a literally one in a million chance of an intermittent failure per test case we would still expect to see an intermittent test failure every day. It may be hard to imagine writing rock solid one-in-a-million-or-better tests that drive Internet Explorer to click ajax frontend buttons executing backend apache, php, memcache, mysql, java and solr. I am writing this blog post to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s just one part of my day job.
From Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day. « Timothy Fitz
Referenced Fri Mar 13 2009 10:54:22 GMT-0600 (MDT)

I love this whole idea. I’ve lived the life of infrequent deployments and it will suck the soul right out of your engineering and ops teams. That’s why when we started up Kynetx, I was determined to not repeat those mistakes. Our system is not as sophisticated as the one Timothy describes, but my goals is to get there and we make specific goals about things that need to happen to get there.

You may not be able to get to 50 deployments a day overnight, but you can increase the frequency of deployment and prioritize the development efforts necessary to increase that frequency. Set some goals and take your life back.

March 9, 2009

We Are the Ten

Steve Fulling articulated some principles a few years back on business, leadership, and life that he called “We Are the Ten.” While the ideas in general were not necessarily original with him, the document was a powerful vision ofhow self-actualized people go about working together. Here is the preamble:

We believe teams are only as good as the values that bond them together. We reject the notion that in a team of one hundred, ten do the work. We are the ten. We believe values and culture can fundamentally transform the behaviors and actions of a team. We reject the idea that policies and procedures can fill the gap of individual accountability and responsibility. We believe that through individual practice and patterning we can break old school techniques that taught disengagement and laziness. To this end, we have identified our cultural values that are necessary in order to successfully become part of the ten.

Dave McNamee, a mutual friend and someone we’ve both worked with has started blogging about the principles in We Are the Ten in an “every Monday” series. Follow along. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Registration for IIW8 (2009A) is Open

You’re invited to the 8th Internet Identity Workshop to be held May 18-20, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.

Registration for IIW2009A (IIW8) is open now. Early Bird Rates are in effect until April 1st. This is a $50 discount for independents and a $75 discount for regular tickets from last year’s price.

We need to get 75 people registered by April 1 to make a final confirmation for our conference space at the Computer History Museum. All those who book early will get a special thanks.

Sponsorship opportunities are still available for the following:

Morning Break, May 19 and 20 ($1000 each)
Afternoon Break, May 18, 19, and 20 ($1000 each)
Lunch on May 19 and 20 ($3000 each)
Barista and Coffee Bar, May 18, 19, and 20 ($800 each day)
Monday Dinner, May 18 ($5000)
Documentation Center ($1000)

We’re grateful for Microsoft and Plaxo being early sponsors. If you or your company can sponsor one of these events, it will help IIW greatly and ensure that we can continue the same high energy event we’ve had in the past.

If you’re planning on coming, please take a minute to register now. In any event, please help us get the word out by blogging about IIW registration and putting a blog badge with a link to the registration page.

March 6, 2009

Pluto and the Importance of Nomenclature

This Moira Gunn interview wth Neil deGrasse Tyson , director of The Hayden Planetarium and author of the book The Pluto Files is a fun and humorous discussion of the importance of nomenclature. Calling Pluto what it is—a drawf planet—makes some people mad, but it’s better science and leads to better science education.

I’ve long been a believer in the importance of nomenclature and my experience in going through nomenclature discussions at Kynetx with Craig Burton has only strengthened that belief. We’re a different company because of how the right words help us understand and explain ourselves in powerful ways.

March 5, 2009

Using Grep and Find

Image by dannyman via Flickr

One of my favorite tools is “grep.” That gives away the fact that I spend more time on the command line than many. One of the things I originally loved about OS X was that I could fire up a terminal and use the machine just like Unix (yeah, Linux was a new fangled thing for me).

Recently I complained about always having to look up a certain switch for grep and Weldon Dodd tweeted “if you write a blog post about grep, maybe others will commit the switch to memory too, and when I say others, I mean me.” So, here it is.

Grep is an acronym from “global, regular expression, print” three commands you often did in a row inside ed, a primitive Unix editor (vi is slightly better, emacs is the best, of course). As an aside, knowing some rudimentary ed commands is a good thing for any sysadmin because it’s always available, even in single-user mode.

Grep is used to searching files. I was using it this morning to search for strings in old email mailboxes to find a Quicktime registration. The fact that grep accepts regular expressions makes it a very powerful tool for finding data in files.

There are only a few flags I commonly use:

-H - print the filename of any matching files. If you grep a file glob and get match you want to know which file in the glob the match was in
-P - use Perl-style regular expressions

There are others, just grep —help to see them.

One thing you will commonly want to do is grep through directories. Grep allows you to recurse, but I am in the habit of using it within find to do the same thing:

find . -exec grep -H "Quicktime" {} \;

Why do this instead of using the built-in recursive features? simply because I know find well and when I want it’s powerful filtering features to work with, this makes them readily available. For example, if knew I wanted to search for “Quicktime” in files that were created in my Documents folder within the last week:

find ~/Documents -ctime 7 -exec grep -H "Quicktime" {} \;

So, why not use Spotlight? I do. But sometimes I want a scaple rather than a chainsaw and grep combined with find give me that.

March 4, 2009

Top Ten List of Valuable Web Sites and Services

A while ago Christian Gray asked a number of people (Joe Andrieu, Tony Winders, Mike Reid, Michael Lodge, William Hayes, Richard Weddle, Scott Lemon, me and Ian Palmer) to send him a list of Web sites and applications that they found valuable. Here’s the list (in no particular order):

http://www.kiva.org — microloans, loans that change lives
http://www.linkedin.com - professional social networking (free and premium) - best way to leverage your professional network
http://www.getfriday.com — virtual assistant, we first read about them in the book The World Is Flat
http://www.ning.com — start your own social network/project group today, very easy for non-techs
http://www.google.com/alerts + http://www.google.com/reader - stay on top of info in an automated fashion
http://www.zemanta.com - automatic links, associated photos, related articles and tags for your blog
http://www.zoho.com - Online apps for business. Free for individuals. Small fees for business.
http://www.twitter.com — if you don’t know about http://blog.mrtweet.net/?p=69
http://www.tweetdeck.com — makes twitter easier to manage/use
http://www.helpareporter.com — get you quoted in news stories and position you as the expert

Christian has a list of all the contributions on his site.

Guy Kawasaki: How to Drive the Competition Crazy

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Guy Kawasaki is speaking at the Infopia ecommerce conference in Salt Lake City today. (You might also enjoy reading my notes from the last time Guy was in Utah.) His topic is how to drive the competition crazy. In standard Guy style, he gives his talk as a list of ten things:

Find a mighty opposite - find a great enemy who is trying to do something in direct opposition to what you’re doing. Portray them in ways that emphasize how you’re different. It doesn’t have to be a company. It could be something like “ignorance.” Finding an opposite allows you to make meaning instead of just making money.
Know thyself - you can’t fight the competition unless you know what you’re about and where you stand. Guy recommends creating a mantra (not a mission statement) as the first step. Here’s Kynetx’ mantra: automate context.
Know thy customer - everyone says this, but the key is the degree to which you do it. Don’t farm it out; do it yourself. Making sense of who your customers are and what they want will drive you crazy—not just your competition.
Know thy enemy - the best way is to become your competition’s customer. What’s the shipping policy, their credit policy, etc.? How do they do it? Get first hand knowledge. Go to their conferences.
Focus on the customer/create good shitake - too many companies focus on their competition. People don’t care about your battle with the competition; they only care about whether or not you serve their interests. The most important aspect of focusing on your customer, you have to build a good product that your customers want to buy. He takes a swipe at SEO: Google is in the business of finding good stuff. If you build good stuff, Google will find it because their interests are aligned with yours. Great products aren’t a little better; they’re 10 times better. Your product ought to be emotive and be polarizing. He references his DICEE advice.
Turn customers into evangelists - if customers are emotional about your product they will talk about it—for free. Guy uses Nike as an example: they’re not selling cotton and leather stiched together as shoes. They’re selling ideas and emotion.
Create your own day - Levi Strauss commissioned a study on the effect of casual dress on workplace morale and productivity. They made this available to the press and created a “casual dress implementation kit.” Lots of papers picked it up. They created their own opportunity.
Make good by doing good - align yourself with good causes.
Turn your competition into allies - find ways to work with, rather than against your competition. Where can you be collborative to engage new markets? He gives the example of J.B. Hunt trucking teaming with railroads to put semi trailers on flatbeds.
Play with the minds - Once you’ve done everything else, play games with the competition. He tells of a pizza company that offers 2 for 1 pizzas if you tear out and bring in the yellow pages ad of their competition. He talks of a small business person sitting next to a Home Depot who renamed his business “Main Entrance” to get people coming to Home Depot to come into his store.
Use Twitter - A bonus 11th tip. What good is a cell phone that allows you to listen to random snippets of conversation? Use search to find out what people are saying anything about you or your company? When you see people talking about things your sell they are potential customers. Guy gives a demo of Twitter to a room of people who aren’t Tweeple (for the most part). He demos Tweetdeck (FTW). He recommends using TwitterHawk but staying away from the autopost features.

Good marketing pisses people off. If people aren’t getting mad at you, then you’re boring and bland. You can’t let a vocal minority tell you what to do.

I enjoyed this talk a lot. First of all Guy is an entertaining speaker. Second, and more important, even though he’s using some material from older talks I’ve heard, he’s constantly refreshing and rearranging his content. There’s new stuff here and it adds new interest.

March 3, 2009

Augmentation Gone Wild

Joe Andrieu has written a blog post on Netizen Developers wherein he makes this assertion:

As netizen developers, we have an obligation not just to do what makes us money, or even what makes users happy, but to build systems that work at Internet scale, when everyone does it. If the systems we build don’t work when everyone tries to get into the game, then we are just being selfish, hording value just because we are first-to-market.
From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen Developer
Referenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:07:56 GMT-0700 (MST)

He mentions systems like the one we’re building at Kynetx, others like ad blockers, as well as his own toolbar-based SwitchBook. You might view his point as altruistic given the quote I use above, but his real point is “how to we make this all work?”

It comes down to a question of open systems. Open systems that work, work when everyone does it, because that’s where you get game-changing economies of scale. The network effect only happens if the value of the system increases when more and more people use it and open systems are all about the network effect.

What happens if everyone uses TCP/IP? WhoohoO! Seamless interconnected networks.

What if everyone uses SMTP, POP, and IMAP? Yes! You can email anyone, anywhere, anytime!

What if every company, government agency, and organization uses HTML and http to build online services for their users? Mega efficiency. 24 hour engagement. Low-cost quick answers. Happier people and happier organizations.

Those are good open systems.

From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen Developer
Referenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:10:59 GMT-0700 (MST)

I don’t know that I or anyone else can answer Joe’s questions completely at this point. The ultimate answer will include standards involving the execution environments that augmentation services operate in and how they interact with each other. This is a tough problem. There’s not a single, elegant answer. To this point standards that have been written have mostly been security related and been something that makes mashup writing more difficult, not more reliable.

I don’t see this as an “ethical” issue the way that Joe seems to—in terms of being a good “netizen.” I see it through a practical lens. If we don’t solve this, then users will solve it for us by just not using our stuff. That said, the problem with simply looking at this as an issue that vendors must solve is that it means that no one may build a true “system” that works in the way email, the Web, and the ‘Net itself do.

Such a system is the solution that Joe proposes:

Ultimately, what we need is an open system that allows all of these types of augmentations from Adaptive Blue, SwitchBook, Kynetx, Azigo, Google, Skype, and others, to mingle smoothly in the same interface.

From joeandrieu.com » Blog Archive » Netizen Developer
Referenced Tue Mar 03 2009 09:44:04 GMT-0700 (MST)

Kynetx sees itself as that system. Azigo is built on top of Kynetx and ultimately so could most of the others.

Joe says we need an “open system” and I agree. The word “open,” however, comes with a lot of baggage that may not be helpful. Kynetx is not open in the sense that it’s not open source. What it does provide, however, is an open API and a language specification that anyone could implement (note that this is still in development). We may open more in the future as we determine how this works and discover business models.

I look forward to discussions about the model and requirements for adoption. I’m especially interested in figuring our how what Kynetx is building can better serve as a platform for creating web augmentation services that work well for users and don’t conflict.

February 27, 2009

Area Code Change in Utah on Sunday

Image via Wikipedia

This Sunday, the new, 385 area code will become available in Utah. Unlike past changes to area codes in Utah, this will not be geographically based, but an overlay. Plenty of other places in the US have done this already, but this is a first for Utah and the first time most people will have to dial a 10-digit number for all calls. So, updte your phone directories in your cell phone to include the area code and bask in the joy of knowing you live in a growing, vibrant area instead of complaining about the extra three digits.

There’s a bill in the Utah House HB 215 (PDF) that would stop this and force the phone companies to split the geographic area now served by the 801 area code and assign 385 to part of it. Silliness. I’m not sure how it would work anyway given that the change is happening before the legislation would be law. That would be ugly.

February 26, 2009

Safari 4 Public Beta Kills MailGrowl

Image via Wikipedia

I’m a big fan of Growl, an OS X add-on that creates a universal messaging system on the Desktop. Various plug-ins for Growl allow other applications to send messages. One is GrowlMail, a plug-in for Mail.app, that sends notifications of incoming mail.

Last night I installed Safari 4 Public Beta and then Mail quit working. After a little exploration, I found this notice from Apple that “After installing Safari 4 Public Beta in Mac OS X v10.5.6, Mail may unexpectedly quit when opened if a third-party Mail plugin is installed.” It specifically references GrowlMail. I removed it from ~/Library/Mail/Bundles and all is well.

As far as Safari 4 goes, it’s pretty cool. Lots of neat features. Some of them have been in Chrome, but of course OS X users don’t have access to Chrome. Someone remarked that when Chrome finally comes out for OS X, Safari will have taken all of the wind out of it’s sails. Safari 4 is fast, beautiful, and has lots of fun toys. There’s only one fatal flaw: it’s not reliably or easily extensible the way Firefox is and that’s why Firefox will win this battle—at least on my desktop.

Making Sense of Digital Identity

Image by dsearls via Flickr

Gabe Wachob is going to be teaching a course on digital identity as part of the Blue Oxen Associates Sense Making series. From the intro:

Digital identity has always posed unique social and technical challenges centered around security, privacy, and convenience. The Internet has made these challenges even more complex. The good news is that a number of new technologies are creating new opportunities for creating a secure and private Internet, where individuals are in control of their own data. This is a win-win scenario, because it creates new opportunities for service providers. The challenge is that this area is complex and rapidly changing.

Our coach, Gabe Wachob, will help you navigate this space quickly and act on this information intelligently. He will:

Help you understand the challenges unique to Internet-scale digital identity and how these new technologies fit into Web 2.0 and the enterprise.

Walk you through the alphabet soup of Internet Identity (from OpenID to Information Cards to oAuth and XRD), including how these technologies are being used, how they’re evolving, and what their practical limitations are today.

Give you insight and access into the community that is developing these technologies, and explain how you can influence their evolution.

Work with you on the aspects of Internet Identity that are most relevant to you.

If you’re in the Bay Area and have wanted to understand the ideas behind digital identity better and especially find out how it can affect your business or project, then this is a great place to start.

February 24, 2009

CTO Breakfast this Thursday

Utah Lake from the mouth of American Fork canyon

Image by windley via Flickr

We’ll be holding February’s CTO breakfast this Thursday (Feb 26) at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G, Provo campus - map). Whether you’re a CTO or not, you’re welcome to come. The discussion is about building high-tech products, building companies, and what’s hot right now. We’d love to have you join us.

Here are future dates to mark on your calendar:

Feb 26, 2009 (Thursday)
Mar 27, 2009 (Friday)
Apr 24, 2009 (Friday)
May 28, 2009 (Thursday)

I have created a Google Calendar with dates for the CTO breakfast that you can subscribe to.

Or if you’d rather subscribe from iCal or Outlook, here’s the iCalendar link.

I hope to see you there.

February 20, 2009

SMS Phishing Attack

Image by Chaddycakes via Flickr

I received several texts this morning, allegedly from my bank that said:

FRM: FARWESTBANK MSG: Urgent Far West Bank message AUTHORIZATION. To verify call TOOL FREE 8662249038.

Being the curious sort, I called and played around with it. The system was an IVR that asked for credit card information (all of it). I recorded the call so you can listen too. Click here for the MP3 file.

The places with low audio are me typing my responses. Of course, I didn’t give it a real credit card number but I did give it a good test number so that if they were doing CRC checking on the number, they would accept it.

First time I’ve been phished via SMS. I’m afraid that many might see it as legit just because of the infrastructure involved and fall for it.

I tried to contact the Utah Div. of Consumer Protection. They offer a convenient PDF form that you can print and mail in for reporting things. Ended up just sending it to the AG’s office.

February 17, 2009

Context Automation

Judith Burton has written a good piece on context automation and what we’re doing at Kynetx. She says:

When browsing the Internet, each web site encounter throughout the browsing episode is a separate or ad hoc experience. There is no thread or connection from one site to another except in the user’s mind. The user must hold the context of the browsing episode outside of each web site encounter.
From Context Automation
Referenced Tue Feb 17 2009 09:30:53 GMT-0700 (MST)

And then later:

To create a context across multiple sites, an abstraction layer may be employed that is capable of gathering information from the user and from each site throughout the entire browsing experience. This interactive cross-site abstraction layer is called Structured Browsing.
From Context Automation
Referenced Tue Feb 17 2009 09:31:45 GMT-0700 (MST)

Having an abstraction layer that is easily programmed on one hand and easy to interact with on the other is the key. Such an abstraction layer can be programmed to manage different kinds of context while giving the user a consistent experience.

We’re working hard to get the Kynetx abstraction layer, which we call KNS, ready for a more general deployment. We hope to offer limited access to developers interested in creating contexual Web experiences in the next several months. In the mean time, I’ll be blogging thoughts here. Also, if you haven’t read the white paper (PDF) it will explain much of this in more detail.

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