TechneBlog

The Shellee Hale Show

2012-02-12T15:26:00.001-06:00

Added RSS feed for The Shellee Hale Show http://shelleehale.com/

missingpersonsnews.com

2012-02-12T15:20:00.003-06:00

Added RSS feed for missingpersonsnews.com

Watch this space.

Will Allen Growing Power Aquaponics and Greenhouse

2011-10-01T18:33:00.000-05:00

Great for local food, local jobs, and encouraging innovation. Originally posted by GreenLearning on YouTube as "1 MILLION pounds of Food on 3 acres. 10,000 fish 500 yards compost."

A Few Days of TechneBlog Redesign

2011-08-25T19:12:00.000-05:00

So if the colors look insane... there is a reason!

Selected Economic Gardening Links for Canada

2011-07-20T12:06:00.000-05:00

Economic Gardening Canada
www.economicgardening.ca/ - Cached
What is Economic Gardening? Economic Gardening refers to community economic ...These key statistics far outpaced those of any other center in the USA, ...
►
Economic Gardening Canada resources
www.economicgardening.ca/resources.htm - Cached
Private and Free for Canadian Tax Professionals. Littleton Colorado Where ...
Show more results from economicgardening.ca
Supporting Economic Gardening through GIS - Spatial Roundtable
www.spatialroundtable.com/post.cfm?entry...economic-gardening... - Cached
Hopefully as more Canadian communities embrace Economic Gardening and the use of GIS, the data will improve. The usability of the US BA online application ...
'Economic gardening' helps B.C. SMBs revive economy
www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=62635 - Cached
May 26, 2011 – IT Business.ca Mobile IT Business Canada blogs. IT Business ... is helping them by providing free market data research using mapping technology. ... Through theEconomic Gardening initiative of the government funded ...
Community Futures - Economic Gardening Home
www.cfokanagan.com/page.asp?PageID=109 - Cached
Economic Gardening Home. Community Futures wins the ESRI Canada. "Innovation in the Field of Geographic Information Systems 2011" Award ...
ESRI Canada - News Releases
www.esricanada.com › Home › Company › News - Cached
May 12, 2011 – ESRI Canada - Map your way to decisions that matter ... With their effectiveeconomic gardening system, they are helping numerous ... The solution combines GIS and extensive geodemographic data for efficient site ...
[PDF]
Economic Gardening Second Meeting of the Steering Committee To be...
www.economicgardeningcanada.com/assets/april%2019th%20agenda.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
Apr 19, 2011 – Economic Gardening. Second Meeting of the Steering Committee ...business in Canada and the US. It included sales data, employee numbers, ...

Selected Economic Gardening Links

2011-07-20T12:04:00.000-05:00

Just a quick scan of Economic Gardening. The city of Litteton, CO, still comes up at the top of the search.

Economic Gardening
www.littletongov.org/bia/economicgardening/ - Cached
Jun 2, 2006 – PDF file. GLYI Blueprint Program Data and Outcomes (148k) ... PDF file. Free and Low-Cost Resources for Economic Gardening (120k) ...
Econ-Dev Mail List - Research Databases - Other Resources - The Staff
►
Economic Gardening
growinglocaleconomies.com/economic_gardening - Cached
This ICMA report describes the key elements of an economic gardening program, provides overall implementation considerations, examines the features of ...
Economic Gardening - Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission...
www.orlandoedc.com/articles/economic-gardening.shtml - Cached
When it comes to the benefits of Economic Gardening, Florida economic development executives considered the statistics. Companies that were in the ...
Center for Economic Vitality: Economic Gardening in Washington state
www.cevforbusiness.com/Economic-Gardening/FAQs/37.aspx - Cached
FAQs about economic gardening at the Center for Economic Vitality. ... the counseling and assistance you provide with secondary market research and data. ...
Florida Economic Gardening Institute / GrowFL - Statistics - LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com/company/...economic-gardening.../statistics - Cached
View key statistics about University of Central Florida - Florida Economic Gardening Institute / GrowFL, including where University of Central Florida ...
Economic Gardening and Propelling a New Economic Direction for ...
www.crainsdetroit.com/.../c?...uid...statistics... - Cached
Mar 10, 2011 – Posts tagged as statistics. Entrepreneurship Score Card Hints at Economic Recovery ... Economic gardening and the governor's tax/budget plan ...

Browncoats: Redemption | A Firefly Fan Film for Charity

2011-02-15T14:34:00.000-06:00

Browncoats: Redemption Final Trailer from browncoatsmovie on Vimeo.

I thought this was unbelievably clever and good.

All money goes in equal shares to five charities (more):

Equality Now
Kids Need To Read
The Dyslexia Foundation
The Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center and
Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation

Background interview with the creator, Mike Dougherty at http://scifimafia.com/2010/01/exclusive-interview-with-the-creator-of-browncoats-redemption/

What's cool about this is that they cleared everything up with Joss Whedon and Universal to get their blessings prior to going *too* far ahead with this. Very clean approach for doing social good through art. And thank you Mr. Whedon and Universal for seeing the good of this.

More background at http://browncoatsmovie.com/

Steep Canyon Rangers Free Track from "Rare Bird Alert"

2011-01-24T09:39:00.000-06:00

I love the Steep Canyon Rangers. Got a piece of email from them with a free download from their new album "Rare Bird Alert" with Steve Martin.

Wrong Rare Bird Alert? Try http://www.birder.com/birding/alert/

Blockhead and Eggbuster - Small Ubiquitous Gizmos and Content

2010-09-23T17:47:00.000-05:00

It all gets small and ubiquitous.

1960 console stereo 1970-1990 Component system big knobs 1990s Smaller Bookshelf speakers and so on. Then an iPod.

IBM PC, Compaq Luggable, Laptops, Netbooks, iPads

Deconstruction of publishing. It's a LuLu

Writing, editing, publishing, and delivery of physical or electronic product already happen across a network of individuals and organizations. With publishing on demand or with electronic delivery, writers get closer to readers and disintermediation takes out the monolith. Editors won't "go away".

They'll form a needed guild.

Writers, for that matter, could peer review other writers to drive up the quality. Readers can themselves have a sample of writing and with software like Netflix, the electronic "book" can have recommendations ("You might also like...") based upon your tastes and the tastes of other readers.The iPad and Kindle represent "first pancakes" that are tasty, prove the market and will be improved by the market by Apple, Amazon, and others. Even in these early days, Amazon sold the heck out of Kindles and ebooks this season. Wait till somebody goes Gillette on the "readers", or when the thin screens drop to < $100.

Publishing stalled on console stereo.
Remember Egghead Software Stores? On demand publishing quality keeps getting better, and in five years we'll remember the good old days of that enormous iPad or Kindle and have a few thin "electronic sheets" laying around the house. Xerox PARC looked at "pads" back in the late 80s. Mark Weiser, Scientific American, covered this in 1991. Maybe RedBox adds a printer to their kiosks if you want hard copy.

With the Internet, the inventory can be infinite and benefit from the Long Tail effect. A big publisher will veer away from "Morris Dancing: A Life" but there are enough Morris Dancers to support that kind of niche, and the "book" inventory costs next to nothing. Those shoes though...

Excellent ePub observations from Joe Shuren on DRM etc. and various impediments to Next Big Things.

Quick note on "80 Essential Blogs for the Modern-Day Marketing Student | Online Colleges"

2010-08-05T18:05:00.000-05:00

80 Essential Blogs for the Modern-Day Marketing Student | Online Colleges

Ok. 80? Let's say 20 of these are high value, and it's chunked into B2B, General, etc.categories.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Guy Kawasaki #win, but no Seth Godin.... de gustibus.

Been a tad busy driving forward with my friend Tommy Sower's campaign for Congress. The hubris of the failing insurance lobbyist Incumbent is ineffective, but amuses my 83 year old mother. Me? I take the high ground. As Tommy says, "Home is worth fighting for".

But, back to marketing and online social media. Which the Sowers campaign groks most excellently.

Above is an example of asocial media. Christabel chewing on Dumplin on top of Good Dog Red.

A return to the land, and fresh food, in the backyards of the Delta | Grist

2010-06-16T11:35:00.002-05:00

A return to the land, and fresh food, in the backyards of the Delta | Grist

Great simple framework, mostly low tech and high impact.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Cabarrus County forms up a Food Council http://www.cabarruscounty.us/News/2010/May/May28_FoodCouncil.html

Lots of good models showing up with solid effect. Let's get through the secondary research before we all go grant crazy for primary research. Google, not grants!

Another addition: http://www.ethicurean.com/2010/06/10/usda-looks-at-local/ For USDA discussion of "what is local food"

Shout out to http://www.localdirt.com/ for excellent newsflow @localdirt

Via Local Dirt: Rooftop gardens from around the world - Garden Plants and Gardening Forum - The Grow Spot

2010-06-08T15:16:00.001-05:00

Rooftop gardens from around the world - Garden Plants and Gardening Forum - The Grow Spot

Beautiful photos and many examples - via http://www.localdirt.com/

Reporting from Sankalp 2010 | Blog | NextBillion.net | Development through Enterprise

2010-05-10T12:29:00.001-05:00

Reporting from Sankalp 2010 | Blog | NextBillion.net | Development through Enterprise: "In sum, panelists concluded that the role of government is to create an enabling legal, regulatory, and policy environments, which include the removal of market distortions stemming from preferential government policies or excessive regulations."

Beyond PowerPoint: Prezi

2010-04-30T11:33:00.001-05:00

Imagine my amusement when I see my old company "PA Consulting" at the bottom of the amazingly complicated slide.

De-Spaghettization of a PPT slide on Prezi

OSLOOM Open Source Manufacture of a Jacquard Loom

2010-04-30T11:16:00.000-05:00

Looking forward to some projects like this for food processing systems, but this is a great example of what's going to be common in ten years. Dream then build.

Cellphone Payments Offer Alternative to Cash - NYTimes.com

2010-04-30T10:16:00.000-05:00

Cellphone Payments Offer Alternative to Cash - NYTimes.com

Good overview of mobile payment systems; would be great for Farmers Markets. I believe, though, that the Federal "food stamp" program requires a hard wired terminal or a token system.

My friend Tommy Sowers on the Road in Missouri

2010-04-19T14:07:00.000-05:00

cias.wisc.edu on Distribution Models of Local Food and Maps

2010-04-05T20:56:00.000-05:00

Once again, Wisconsin's Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems rocks! I can't believe I missed this the first time around.

Lovely open source map of food distribution systems, and model descriptions. And supporting reports at

Distribution Models for Local Food

View National Distribution Models in a larger map

Additional reports at "CIAS and the UW-Extension Ag Innovation Center have written a report featuring case studies of some of these distribution models: “Scaling Up: Meeting the Demand for Local Food.”

On Job Creation—Local Fruits and Vegetables vs. Corn and Soybeans | CommonDreams.org

2010-04-05T18:11:00.003-05:00

On Job Creation—Local Fruits and Vegetables vs. Corn and Soybeans | CommonDreams.org

Informative writing on regional economics (upper midwest) and the driving potential of local production.

From CommonDreams.org's blog:

Some key findings on the economic impacts on the region as a whole:

Increased fruit and vegetable production in the six states could mean $882 million in sales at the farm level, and more than 9,300 jobs. Corn and soybean production on that same acreage would support only 2,578 jobs.
If half of the increased production was sold in farmer-owned stores, it would require 1,405 such stores staffed by 9,652 people.

The full study new study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

This is consistent with findings in numerous local food studies: economic, profitable, sustainable, and not requiring extensive subsidy beyond instantiation of infrastructures (say, processing facilities).

See also Grower To Grower from cais.wisc.edu for some of the dynamics of smaller scale farms. Big bucks from small acres. University of Illinois Extension circa 2002 found a lot of "takers" for small scale farming; some of it purpose-driven, funding college, a new boat, or to pay down a mortgage, etc. I don't have a link at hand for that one.

Photograph: Mike Glodo, Small Jonathan and Stayman Apples from Southern Illinois

Once Upon a Honeymoon

2010-04-04T23:00:00.002-05:00

Internet Archive: Free Download: Once Upon a Honeymoon

Color Telephones! Better than deploying rural broadband... Awesome!

Found this while doing real research. Likely more invested here by incumbent telcos than on real rural infrastructure.

The Brass Figlagee: Gene Shepherd on iTunes

2010-04-04T22:19:00.001-05:00

The Brass Figlagee

Wonderful set of his work. Woot @BrassFigalagee

Official Google Blog: Model Your Town Competition: Cast your vote!

2010-04-02T14:20:00.001-05:00

Official Google Blog: Model Your Town Competition: Cast your vote!

Tools for thought. More mashup potential.

"Local and Regional Foods in Community and Economic Development" from Cornell et.al.

2010-04-02T12:05:00.002-05:00

Well crafted presentation. Concise tutorial.

Cornell Presentation

View more presentations from Ed Morrison.

Kudos to the authors, Rod Howe, Katherine Lang, Bernadette Logozar, Heidi Mouillesseaux-Kunzman, and Duncan Hilchey

My friend Dayna Conner at Food Works here in deep Southern Illinois pointed me to an upcoming webinar on Local and Regional Food Systems by Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD) that led me to that presentation. Her organization's blog is here.

Discussion and Reception w/ Paul Polak on Poverty | NYU Stern School of Business

2010-04-01T11:27:00.001-05:00

A Discussion and Reception w/ Paul Polak on Poverty | NYU Stern School of Business

Thoughtful, pragmatic, effective views on successful design for the world. Market driven = sustainable.

More about Paul Polak's work at http://www.paulpolak.com/

The NYT highlights a key food-system gap: infrastucture | Grist

2010-03-31T19:05:00.000-05:00

The NYT highlights a key food-system gap: infrastucture | Grist

Here in Southern Illinois, this is a biggie. Good writing.

One problem here - we need milli, not mega. Fish processing facility way overbuilt, resultant low utilization.

Guy Kawasaki writes about "good problems" = high demand for customer service because you sold more than expected.

Compare to "bad problems" = low utilization in early market.

Kudos @grist

Small Scale Fresh Food Prototyping With Rusty Bookcase + Ladybug

2010-03-31T13:38:00.000-05:00

Good Bugs and Good Eats

But fresh, even small scale, makes the winter days brighter.

Got started late this year and have only anemic prototypes of growing tomatoes, but have achieved proof of principle.

I use a rusted out metal bookcase in a south window. That works too. It's been a safe house for the many ladybugs that pop out during the warmer days here. They've been munching some kind of pests on the plants and it seems a fair deal. (Introducing exotic species generally a very poor idea. Finally starting to see native lady bugs again).

So the bookshelf's not really a bona fide prototype, but I bought a bunch of end of season seed geraniums for a dime on the dollar which faded, then came back and made me smile throughout the winter.

Even had success with some cherry tomatoes that I started in September. They're horribly abused but I have a few green ones now. Brandywines started at same time about a foot high, and wintered over not much the worse for wear. Nice early start for spring (if something doesn't eat 'em when transplanted from the pots).

Urban food, local food, good eats. We'll get there.

More urban farming at Will Allen's www.growingpower.org/

Jo Ann Emerson (Incumbent Insider) fear v Sowers (Smart Outsider)

2010-03-28T21:40:00.000-05:00

Some people run on their record. Others hide from their record.
The good, no, great news is that Jo Ann Emerson's PACs will be wasting their money.

Next hoot:

This is a Missouri political bloviator's site:
The J. Harris Company's ethics page.

I believe it is well and truly false goods.

They apparently believe that by publishing a web page on "ethics" it makes them ethical.

I disagree.

They are backing amazingly dim Republicans and have gone so far as to (lamely) squat on the domain of a gifted Kosovo-Iraq-West Point veteran running against a PAC'd up incumbent in Rush Limbaugh's home district (e.g., Cape Girardeau)

If you want to see the *real* campaign, please go to: http://www.sowersforcongress.com/
Give anything (the more the better, of course) but let's put a thumb in the eye of RUSH LIMBAUGH'S HOME DISTRICT.

Ok. I'll drop the caps lock. Feel better now.

Domain squatting = smell of fear.

Just for grins, send these people a howdy at the domain squatter at tommysowersforcongress,com

Harris, James
      The J. Harris Company
      122 East High St.
      Suite 200
      Jefferson City, Missouri 65101
      United States
      (573) 761-7875

If y'all could give 'em a phone call from time to time, I am sure they would appreciate it.

Leave a message that asks an earnest complex question.

What was Jo Ann Emerson doing in Cuba?
What was "awesome" in Scotland junket. Was there any involvement with Abramoff?
Why has the district lost so many jobs since 2000?
How many years has Jo Ann lived in the district?
Is there an ethical problem with taking insurance or pharmaceutical money and being in Congress?
How is your district better off now as opposed to 1996?
Why didn't anything happen on insurance and health care in the district since 1996.

Pile on, it's fun! The honest answers are "hammena hanmena".

Whee! Jump in!

Ask them if they are trying to confuse voters. Ask them if they are afraid by squatting on an Internet domain that rips off Tommy Sower's own.

The thing about sunlight: it scares the heck out of roaches.

I urge you all to read and tell friends to read. This election matters. Because someone tells you time after time that they care for you does not mean that they care for you.

Some people run on their record. Some hide from their record.

Fun time for all!!!!

Party On!

Ask. I'm sure it will inform you.

Thanks,
Mike

New Rural Economy from MetroFarm Online Magazine, Food Chain Radio and Via Campesina

2010-03-28T15:05:00.001-05:00

MetroFarm Online Magazine + Via Campesina + Food Chain Radio

Good scan of new food production opportunities. I picked this up from http://www.foodchainradio.com/

Literate conversation, looking at small scale farming "close" to urban markets. This becomes sustainable.

Interview with Guest: Nettie Wiebe from Via Campesina http://www.viacampesina.org/en/ who farms in in Saskatchewan.

Fly to 3rd Avenue, Turn West

2010-03-27T13:48:00.002-05:00

View Larger Map

Devil's Backbone, Grand Tower, Illinois

2010-03-27T13:44:00.002-05:00

View Larger Map

Watch this space: Shared Lands

2010-03-27T13:34:00.001-05:00

Shared Lands

Some really good things will happen with this.

Vertical Farming, Livingry Systems: windowfarms.org

2010-03-27T11:00:00.002-05:00

our.windowfarms.org | Home

In situ solutions for local food. Paul Polak pointed me at this via Engineering for Change.

Open source design. I submitted a proposal yesterday for the Google Fiber project speaking about the reinvention of rural through open source manufacturing.

The windowfarms systems seem pretty low power; I'd be a tad careful about wall sockets myself (they have a warning about drip loops).

I got our KWH down by ~30-40% in peak months by pulling kit off the grid and improving insulation and criminally bad windows installed in the 1970s. Even with the reduction in energy I'm warm in winter and eating well.

Really uncomfortable green technology will not be adopted by consumers other than the Deep Granola side of the conversation. Sustainable means there's a viable market that does not require ongoing subsidy.

Windows and Tomatoes and Herbs

Herb Booth. Jamie Oliver's Happy Days video has an herb booth roaring like a jungle. That'll be a tactic this fall. I've been playing with making pesto with dried basil and fresh garlic - not bad. But the idea of going over and plucking some fresh basil in January does appeal. He does a great quick pizza crust with just flour and water - I like it a lot and I can prep, mix, and have it out of the oven before I could even get to town for a (lesser) pie. If you're not familiar with Mr.Oliver, he's a socially responsible food rock star - helping teens stay out of trouble and into work see www.fifteen.net for more. Really like his chops - a few ingredients, don't sweat it too much, and just do it. Friend the gentleman on FaceBook and read his recipes.

A mash up of Jamie Oliver from YouTube: Note the shed greenhouse at 0:19

Good Bugs and Good Eats

But fresh, even small scale, makes the winter days brighter.

Got started late this year and have only anemic prototypes of growing tomatoes, but have achieved proof of principle.

New chilli grenade packs a punch Ananova + NPR Interview

2010-03-26T10:09:00.000-05:00

Ananova - New chilli grenade packs a punch

Try the new Extreme Pepper Spray Nachos with this.

This just in 25 March 2010: NPR has an interview with a chef who's making burgers with this. EMTs have had to go to the restaurant several times to help patrons. NPR's News Blog covers this http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/03/pepper_bomb_india_ghost.html

The podcast and transcript is here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125184572

They share also a video

Company gets $22.7 million for broadband expansion in Southern Illinois - Breaking news - bnd.com

2010-03-25T15:17:00.000-05:00

Company gets $22.7 million for broadband expansion in Southern Illinois - Breaking news - bnd.com

Heartland Papers - policy wonking on rural development

2010-03-19T12:14:00.000-05:00

Heartland Papers

Excellent papers on rural economy development (stop chasing smokestacks) and Mexican immigration in the Midwest (3rd rail, but data are data.....)

Read at least the executive summary of "Transforming the Rural Economy in the Midwest".

Very consistent with good practices/emerging wonking on building sustainable local economies.

The USDA has started a new series of reports on Micropolitan areas (above) link at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Rurality/MicropolitanAreas/ and also analysis reflecting the influence of Urban areas, notable "no town no center" for the SE corner of the bootheel, for example. Link at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Rurality/UrbanInf/

The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

2010-03-18T16:14:00.000-05:00

The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Stop chasing smokestacks.

Heartland Papers - Midwest Economic Issues

2010-03-18T15:58:00.000-05:00

Heartland Papers

Excellent thinking about the rural economy here in the Midwest. Strong sense of regionalism.

Issue 2 - "Past Silos and Smokestacks: Transforming the Rural Economy in the Midwest," by Mark Drabenstott, director of the Center for Regional Competitiveness at the Rural Policy Research Institute and chairman of the Territorial Development Policy Committee for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Unrequited Notes on Google Broadband

2010-03-18T13:58:00.000-05:00

A redacted email I wrote about a week ago.

Ahoy XXXX!

I don't play in a league J

I just read the Google RFI, and they do seem pretty focussed on the town, etc. as the model for their trials. XXXXX in Governor Quinn's office had a conference call on this last month with the Broadband Deployment task force; I do not know the outcomes.

XXXXXXXX

NPA-NXX-XXXX

The economics of 1G via fiber really tend toward a more urban (or at least moderate density) deployment. The complexities are not so much in the technology - bury cable for about $40K/mile or hang it for about $15K a mile - but in the negotiation and management of rights of way.

Hence, my take is that the complexity of trying to do a state-wide deployment might push it to the bottom of the pile for Google.Getting agreement from a town's more manageable than moving across jurisdictions; legislation is antique and anticompetitive.

What might be interesting would be to understand a deployment model of a 1G wireless infrastructure hubbed from fast fiber (or reasonably fast wireless as a backbone). Google has been big in open access advocacy (Whitespaces - unregulated bandwidth).

There might be something to go at with a conversation about connected community.

A fast, low latency implementation could allow, for example, cultural entertainment shared amongst, say, Chicago and some of the old theaters downstate (Varsity in Carbondale, Liberty in Murphysboro) that have become 501c3 community spaces. The entertainment / community really drives the build out of networks beyond the "must do this" segments. Although the vision of high res tele medicine is laudable, the toughest technical requirements are for gaming (by far), audio, and video. "Play Halo and get your MRI data shipped for free."

1G also offers immersive environments / shared spaces of very high video resolution - 3d capable. I have friends in a group called DigItSignal that do weekly performances together from New York, Florida, Sweden, and England over the Internet. Maybe something to encourage the transport of Chicago Blues exchanged for Makanda Bluegrass? I'm thinking art/music/fun will be a differentiator. Everyone else will cite obligatory "medicine, education, yadda yadda" and that's necessary. But Google wants to learn how to, in the old Internet tradition, MAKE MONEY FAST. And that will come from entertainment / social applications.

I think it quite important to stress the emerging vision as one of a *shared* network. I say this because I've seen failure in thinking and implementation of single-purpose networks (which will suffer unsustainably low utlilization, viz, a pure medical network, or unshared infrastructure running to/from schools, etc.).

XXXX'x point on the regional model - say a river basin - makes very good points.http://techneblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/rural-america-jobs-and-wireless.html covers experience in the Oregon with additional case studies of a West Virginia project from a few years ago. Similarly, the "beyond the state" issues for regional approaches matter greatly here in Egypt. http://techneblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-regional-markets-matter-driving.html points out that this part of Illinois is closer to Nashville, TN than Springfield, IL. What might be interesting is rural very high speed "thin" network provided by Google. Even <1M wireless broadband down here (via Alltel) has driven out satellite internet quite quickly; the adoption of broadband by existing dial up users likewise very rapid.

As far as downstate regional broadband efforts, XXXXXXX would be an appropriate place to "funnel" potential alliances. I just got off the phone with XXXXXXXXXX He's at NPA-NXX-XXXXand would be happy to hear from you. He's also quite fluent in some of the practical argot of getting broadband put in "down here". I know some progress has been made in mapping broadband extant infrastructure; he'll have far more recent insight into that.

Quick Study Planning Resource

Another source http://www.newamerica.net/broadbandstimulus consolidates additional materials in infrastructure "OTI prepared five application guides as well as a primer to funding opportunities and a strategic guidance document regarding BTOP infrastructure funding. "

With apologies for somewhat scattered editing, but I wanted to get this out quickly. I'd be happy to help.

Best,

Mike

How to Change the World: The Elements of Guyle: British Blogging

2010-03-16T22:38:00.000-05:00

How to Change the World: The Elements of Guyle: British Blogging

Maryland PR Firm Runs For Congress : NPR

2010-03-16T20:04:00.000-05:00

Maryland PR Firm Runs For Congress : NPR

And why not? Corporations = People

British Blogging: The Elements of Guyle : The World :: American Express OPEN Forum

2010-03-16T19:24:00.000-05:00

British Blogging: The Elements of Guyle : The World :: American Express OPEN Forum

Lovely set of ideas for more gooder blogging :-)

Una Pizza Napoletana Great Cooking Videos

2010-03-16T13:07:00.000-05:00

Una Pizza Napoletana

When Anthony Mangieri's NY restaurant Una Pizza Napoletana closed, he planned to open a new one. The SFGate article has him showing up in San Francisco with a May 2010 opening.

The New York venue now holds Motorino (also what looks to be stunningly great fresh pizza & eats.)

NATURALLY RISEN from michael evans on Vimeo.

More of Anthony Mangieri's work in an interview at http://www.chow.com/stories/11065 including a good look at his wood burning pizza oven.

The Technology Chronicles : Facebook edges past Google for weekly traffic

2010-03-16T09:55:00.000-05:00

The Technology Chronicles : Facebook edges past Google for weekly traffic

It's people.

How Do You Make A Yugo Cool? Turn It Into A Book. : NPR

2010-03-13T16:54:00.001-06:00

How Do You Make A Yugo Cool? Turn It Into A Book. : NPR

Nice update to http://techneblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/1969-trabant-was-fur-ein-sues-fahren.html for the Trabant.

Send in the Clowns - The Coming Spin Cycle from Incumbent Broadband Providers

2010-03-13T09:21:00.001-06:00

New York Times reports on FCC plans for credible broadband infrastructure.

As always, read the 100+ comments which will make you want to turn the car around and go home. Believe me, facts hamper vigorous debate!

The incumbents will take on roles made famous from great traditions mixing Noh, commedia dell'arte, mystery plays, and s(l)ideshows featuring tethered services provided with consultants (Slideshow Bobs?) and lobbyists to avoid the public ever having to be informed.

Ah, the incumbents. Service providers. What Newspeak. I want common carriers with firewalls to keep them from owning content and applications. I believe in markets, innovation, and low frictional cost structures.

Here's to physics over monopoly. (And I don't think this FCC vision's close to what it needs to be, but direction positive.)

New America Foundation has a series of policy papers emphasizing intelligent spectrum management at http://wirelessfuture.newamerica.net/archives/policydocs. This is quite important for empowering rural areas, in particular, with modern broadband.

It doesn't take a carrier. Watch this space.

Cue the duckspeak.

F.C.C. Plan to Widen Internet Access in U.S. Sets Up Battle

By BRIAN STELTER and JENNA WORTHAM

Published: March 12, 2010

The 10-year plan would reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/business/media/13fcc.html

More more at http://www.fcc.gov/ on spectrum policy, consumer broadband test tools, etc.

Great Overview of Health Care from KUOW

2010-03-12T14:30:00.000-06:00

Worth a listen: how we're getting messed around with status quo and insiders.

T.R. Reid: Health Care Explained, Simply

www.kuow.org

KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio: NPR News and Information

Arcosanti as Holiday Village

2010-03-12T11:54:00.001-06:00

Heard a fascinating piece on NPR this morning: an Indiana developer, Leroy Troyer, wants to put a vacation destination under glass in Indiana. This has taken off in Europe. Families drive to these venues, park the car, stay for a few days and walk everywhere.

http://www.centerparcs.com/ describes "Holiday Villages" across Europe and the UK. They speak to "Short Breaks and Family Holidays". Maybe a bit Disney, but I find these places appealing, along the lines of a Dude Ranch. These types of projects could be an interesting addition to an agro-tourism regional development model. Sort of a chunky nougat for an industry cluster. Sorry.

The Indiana project is with NPR's Morning Edition at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124593116 and the comments range from support to cynicism.

For some other projects, take a browse through http://www.buckminster.info/ for Fuller's Old Man River City (an intimate dome for 125,000 people) and http://www.arcosanti.org/ for another big vision of an urban living system from Paolo Soleri's work.

Local Food, Local Economy, Bad Governmental Policy

2010-03-11T19:48:00.000-06:00

Why we need transformational leadership in government. Status quo is hurting families and limiting choice.Florida and California apparently dominate policy. Where are we?

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)

By JACK HEDIN

Published: March 1, 2008

Ultimately, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price if the federal government continues to prevent the local food movement from expanding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/opinion/01hedin.html

White Lily Flour from The New York Times

2010-03-07T13:30:00.000-06:00

Upon recommendation from my friend Mark, I got a bag of White Lily flour. It's been around as a southern brand since the early 1880ss, and was acquired by the Smuckers company a few years ago.

Results

Made amazing biscuits this morning with it. Lard *and* butter cut into the package recipe. Very nice biscuits reminding me of my Grandma's (a goal to strive for - she always used Crisco and kept the works in the fridge at home). Will keep tweaking recipe - maybe add some baking soda and repeat.

Grandma used buttermilk. Her sister Louise always suggested clabbered milk (which can be found at http://www.ehow.com/how_2192640_make-clabbered-milk.html)
see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crème_fraiche
I've used whole milk yoghurt with decent results in biscuits; provides similarly good taste.

Also going to check on Nunn Better http://www.nunn-better.com/flour-corn.htm (Evansville, IN) and Virginia's Best which seem to have a following of their own. Likewise, soft red wheat flours with low protein.

Meanwhile, the debate about what Smucker's did when they closed the plant and moved operations is found at

DINING & WINE

Biscuit Bakers’ Treasured Mill Moves North

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: June 18, 2008

For generations of Southern bakers, the closing of the White Lily flour mill is causing ripples of anxiety that Southern biscuits will never be the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/dining/18flour.html

Fish and Salad In Situ Ville: NY Times on Aquaponics

2010-02-18T10:03:00.009-06:00

New technology has enabled smaller scale livingry systems. (That is a Bucky Fuller word.)

Fascinating overview. Fish-Sun-Water-Plants

The New York Times discusses aquaponics as practiced in the US, with a ton of Australians in the mix. See http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/ for more on that. I just discovered the Australian site and am gleeful from the experience. The Times article mentions also Aquaponics Journal, which has doubled subscriptions every year for the last five years.

The Spotless Garden

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

Published: February 17, 2010

Aquaponic gardens use fish, water and no soil — and may be the future of food growing.

This technology/approach dates at least to the early 1970s - see New Alchemy Institute's innovations in bioshelters. I had mentioned New Alchemy Institute in November 2005 in the context of Sustainable Architecture at http://techneblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/sustainable-architecture.html

More New Alchemy materials at The Green Center http://www.vsb.cape.com/~nature/greencenter/ which includes reports on aquaculture, bioshelters, and agriculture.

Good stewardship + good eats.

Strawberries: High Margin Greenhouse Food

2010-02-17T08:14:00.002-06:00

Perfect example of in-situ agriculture yielding ~ $20/pound. Systems. Systems. This is what physicists do when they change jobs: geek and eat.

Readily tweakable for other environments and economies. From Smithsonian Magazine.

High tech greenhouses in the desert, physicist. Lovely. "In 1991, a French nursery called Marionnet introduced Mara des Bois, a deep red strawberry with soft, melting flesh and a fantastically intense perfume... it fetches a premium price, and accounts for about a tenth of the nation's strawberry harvest."

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/strawberry-side.html?c=y&page=1

What Matters Most: NY Times dot earth blog

2010-02-15T17:26:00.002-06:00

Andrew Revkin writes:

Ecoartspace, an organization that focuses on addressing environmental issues through the visual arts (the image below, from a 2009 exhibition, is by Nils-Udo), got in touch with me recently about a planned spring exhibition of small works on paper devoted to a simple question: What matters most?

Lovely selection of thinkers at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/what-matters-most/

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

2010-02-14T09:20:00.001-06:00

Jamie Oliver has a record of good works. He founded Fifteen

"Fifteen is a commercial business with a purpose – a global social enterprise with young people at its heart. Fifteen has four restaurants worldwide - Amsterdam, Cornwall, London and Melbourne – all of which operate a pioneering apprenticeship scheme for young people, between the ages of 18 and 24, alongside the day-to-day running of the restaurants."

Starting working in his family's pub at an early age, he later became famous as The Naked Chef, and has a direct, wonderful approach to food and sensible nutrition. He's recently won the TED Prize.

"Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food."

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

Strongly recommend his books and his elan for great simply prepared food. (Pizza crust: water. flour. bash it about. EZ PZ Bob's Your Uncle.)

TechCrunch The Long Tail of Video

2010-02-09T10:19:00.004-06:00

From the five cents a glance validation crew:

The Long Tail Of Video Sites Capture Half Of All Viewing Minutes

Back to writing here...

Environmental Restoration in Texas from All Things Considered

2010-02-03T10:40:00.004-06:00

Wonderful interview long on practical stewardship.

Texas Rancher An Unlikely Environmentalist: NPR

"David Bamberger converted 5,500 acres of some of the most badly damaged and overgrazed hill country in Texas into a showpiece of environmental restoration. Bamberger has been hailed by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and has won the state's top voluntary land stewardship award.
A visit to Bamberger Ranch is like a trip back in time. Instead of cedar brush and barren limestone breaking the soil's surface, large hardwood trees surround grassy meadows. Wild turkey and deer wander in the open, and bobcats lurk in the hollows hunting game"

The New Amazon iSnit

2010-01-31T14:02:00.004-06:00

Amazon announces the new iSnit in reaction to new publishing dynamics.

I wrote a piece (private working paper) anticipating this kind of disruption in broadband media planning back in 1992:

"Discussion of micro-transaction models “5 Cents A Glance” driving new media and businesses." which was strongly influenced by Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu publishing infrastructure.

The Amazon-Macmillan brouhaha below.

From the New York Times

TECHNOLOGY

Bits: Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement

By By BRAD STONE

Published: January 29, 2010

Amazon removed Macmillan books from its site in a dispute over prices of e-books.

Story at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/amazon-pulls-macmillan-books-over-e-book-price-disagreement/

In-Situ Ville, 3D Printer Update

2010-01-27T08:38:00.003-06:00

As often, boingboing.net provides beautiful images of 3D printer projects in a first post by Lisa Katayama

In-Situ Ville, 17 Years Later

2010-01-20T14:00:00.000-06:00

Fascinated by the potential of 3D printers.

Although CrunchGear reports the demise of Desktop Factory, I met a friend of makerbot.com an open source 3D printer project at the SIUIS4 conference.

3D printers create a solid form "layer by layer" from plastic (for now.)

These flexible gizmos would appeal to the folks back in the day of Drop City and (more likely) the New Alchemy Institute for generating one-off or pre-production prototypes.

One app that appeals to me is the idea of creating the "Shopsmith TNG" for use in extreme or isolated places (like shipboard). I'm provably not an engineer, but the tech suggests rapid lost wax casting of parts, etc.

My concept of in-situ ville came from 1992 working papers and presentations on the interaction of ubiquitous networks presented in New York in 1993 called "The Information Superhighway". Essentially, the forecasting and behaviors of people using networked communications suggested strongly the ability to support smaller-scale communities and businesses. "The arrival of new corner groceries" captured that idea. Now, much more of the future can be shaped with local manufacture and mass customization, often using open source designs and materials/feedstocks coming through a closed loop consumption-distribution-production cycle.

" Metals recirculate on a sum-total-of-all-metals-average every 22 1/2 years....
I was able to arrive at that figure of a 22 1/2-year metals recirculating cycle in 1936. I was working for Phelps Dodge Co., which had asked me to give them some prognostications about the uses of copper in the future of world industry."
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
Cited by me in "Say watt again. SAY WATT AGAIN" on the subject of Green Computing

NOTES BY ACTOR HIMSELF ON PLAYING YAKOV IN THE SEAGULL 1973 OR SO

2010-01-18T12:59:00.003-06:00

Gave myself a 30 minute vacation from technical writing and research to produce this screed in response to a friend's comment on my acting experience in South Pacific. This was followed by my work in The Seagull. I think that's what drove me into math and econ. Full text of The Seagull at archive.org.

NOTES BY ACTOR PLAYING YAKOV WORKING ON MOTIVATION FOR THE ROLE, BY MIKE GLODO, REFLECTING PERSONAL EXPERIENCES IN 1973-1974 AS AMENDED IN 2010 BY THE ACTOR HIMSELF

ACT I

The sun has just set. On the stage, behind the curtain, which is down, are YAKOF and other workmen ; coughing and hammering.

THIS FORESHADOWS YAKOV'S FATE TO BE BEHIND THINGS, OFF STAGE, OR CARRYING SHIT FOR PEOPLE

LATER

YAKOF (from the stage, to TREPLEF). We're going to have a bathe, Constantine Gavrilitch. TREPLEF. All right. But you must be back at your places in ten minutes. (Looking at his watch.) It begins very soon. YAKOF. Very good, sir. (Exit.)

LATER...

TREPLEF (hearing footsteps). Who's there ? Is that you, Yakof ? YAKOF (on the stage). Yes, sir. TREPLEF. Get to your places. It's time to begin. Is the moon up ? YAKOF. Yes, sir.

HMM. PERHAPS "THREE BAGS FULL" WOULD WORK IN HERE?

LATER STILL

SHAMRAYEF (loud). Yakof, pull the curtain up, my lad, will you ? Curtain is raised.

AKA THE BIG YAKOV NUMBER THERE.

MORE MENIAL CRAP

MASIIA. He's jealous too. However, it's no affair of mine. (A pause. YAKOF crosses R. to L., with a portmanteau. Enter NINA, and stops by the window. )

A PORTMANTAU YOU PONCE??? IT'S A DAMN SUITCASE. OK. FOR ART THEN: PORTFUCKINGMANTEAU

LATER ON - LOTS OF TEXT, LITTLE YAKOV

At the same moment enter ARCADINA, R., SORIN in swallowtail coat, with the star of an order ; then YAKOF, busy with luggage ARCADINA (to SORIN). Stay at home, you old man. You oughtn't to go gadding about with your rheumatism. (To TRIGORIN.) Who was it just went out ? Nina ? TRIGORIN. Yes. ARCADINA. Pardon! We interrupted you. (Sitting.) I think I've packed everything. I'm worn out. TRIGORIN (reading the inscription on the medallion). " * Days and Nights,' page 121, lines 11 and 12."

YAKOV EXCELS AT BUSY WITH LUGGAGE. HE *OWNS* THAT ROLE.

YAKOF (clearing the table). Am I to pack the fishing rods too, sir ? TRIGORIN. Yes, I shall want them again. And you can give the books away. YAKOF. Very good, sir.

YAKOV REALLY WANTS TO KILL THESE FUCKERS, BUT TURNS ON THE SHINE. MAYBE YAKOV WILL PUT SOME HEROIN IN THE LUGGAGE AND CHANGE THEIR TICKETS FOR SINGAPORE GODDAMN RUSSIAN YUPPIES. ANACHRONISM? WELL FUCK YOU TOO.

Mail. He was playing at that tune at Elizavetgrad with Izmailov the tragedian, another remarkable man. . . . No hurry, my dear lady, we've still got another five minutes to spare. They played the conspirators once in a melodrama, and when they were suddenly found out, the line was : " We are caught like rats in a trap " ; but Izmailov said, " like trats in a rap " ! instead. (Laughing.) " Trats in a rap " ! While he is speaking YAKOF is busy with the luggage;

YAKOV NOW SEETHING - HAS SPENT ALMOST TWO FUCKING HOURS IN THIS GODDAMN PLAY FOR WHAT - FIVE LINES, CARRYING SHIT, AND SAYING VERY GOOD SIR. THERE'S A GODDAMN ALLMAN BROTHERS CONCERT THE SATURDAY WE'RE SUPPOSED TO DO THIS AND I WILL BE THERE AT THE FUCKING THEATRE FOR THREE HOURS DOING FIVE MINUTES OF BUSINESS OH FUCK ME. BUT HEY: YAKOV ROCKS WITH LUGGAGE BUSINESS. THAT'S A FACT.

AND THEN...

ARCADINA. Good-bye, everyone. If we're alive and well we shall meet again in the summer. (Housemaid, man-cook and YAKOF kiss her hand.) Don't forget me. (Giving the cook a rouble.) There's a rouble to divide among you. 1 COOK. Our humblest thanks, lady. A good journey to you ! We are very content with you ! YAKOF. Heaven send you happy times !

KISS MY KULAKS, BITCH A FUCKING RUBLE SPLIT THREE FUCKING WAYS

LATER

ARCADINA. Where's Constantine ? Tell him that I am off. We must say good-bye. (To YAKOF.) Think no evil of us. I've given the cook a rouble. It's for the three of you. [Exeunt all, R. Stage empty. Noise of farewells and departure behind the scene. Housemaid comes back for the basket of plums, and exit with it.

DIE DIE DIE THANKS FOR FUCKING REMINDING ME

HOME STRETCH:

Enter ARCADINA and PAULINE ; behind them YAKOF, with and MASUA ; then SHAMRAYEF and TRIGORIN 86 THE SEAGULL ACT iv ARCADINA. Put the claret and beer here on the table for Boris Alexeyevitch. We'll drink while we play. Now come along and sit down, all of you. PAULINE (to YAKOF). And bring tea at once. (Lighting the candles and sitting at the card-table.)

NOTE: BEHIND THE MOTHERFUCKERS

NOW SERVING

ARCADINA. Put the claret and beer here on the table for Boris Alexeyevitch. We'll drink while we play. Now come along and sit down, all of you. PAULINE (to YAKOF). And bring tea at once. (Lighting the candles and sitting at the card-table.)

YAKOV NODS AND MOVES I GUESS BECAUSE ANTON C. WAS LIMITED ON WORDS FOR THE ONLY GUY DOING ANY FUCKING WORK ON STAGE, ME, YAKOV

THERE'S A SUICIDE AT THE END OF THE SEAGULL. BULLSHIT. I DID IT, FUCKERS.

-30-

St. Louis Musicians for Haiti benefit Doctors Without Borders

2010-01-16T14:13:00.002-06:00

Event: Notes From Home presents

St. Louis Musicians for Haiti
Proceeds benefit Doctors Without Borders

When: Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30p.m.

Where: Sheldon Concert Hall

Tickets: $15 general admission.

Tickets on sale Saturday, January 16 at 10 a.m.

Call MetroTix at314-534-1111 or visitwww.TheSheldon.org.

Tickets also available without a convenience fee in person at the Fox TheatreBox Office.

An all-star line-up of St. Louis musicians will donate their time and talent for St. Louis Musicians for Haiti, a one-night-only event, Tuesday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m. to benefit Doctors Without Borders' Haitian Earthquake Relief efforts. Hosted by Julius Hunter, the event will feature soul and R&B singer Brian Owens, folk group Mayor Taylor, the Bottoms Up Blues Gang, jazz pianist Peter Martin, jazz vocalist Mardra Thomas with husband Reggie Thomas on piano, and jazz, soul and R&B singer Kim Massie, soprano Christine Brewer with Phillip Dunlap on piano, and Pianist Peter Henderson.

DoctorsWithout Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe.www.doctorswithoutborders.org.

For more information, call The Sheldon at 314-533-9900 during normal business hours, Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Haiti - Crisis Camp Today - Design/Coding and other solutions

2010-01-16T09:42:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note to make you aware of an initiative to develop quickly some infrastructure pieces for the Haiti rescue/recovery mission. Activities are taking place today (Saturday 16 January). I just found out about this. My sense is that this is only the beginning, but figured that any of you with interest would be self-starters on following up. A top level overview is at

http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2010/01/this_saturday_volunteer_coders.html

http://j.mp/8bCr0k

http://haiti.crisiscommons.org/ has links and updates with project wiki etc. Meetings taking place in

This immediate project is pointed toward software/gis and resource matching (family finder, have/need), but I am trying to find more mid-longer term solutions groups working toward recovery of water, housing, etc. I do not have any particular information on projects beyond what's at the site listed above - and do not want to be a bottleneck (since I cannot promise to turn around info requests promptly) but will do what I can to push info around.

I will post this at my site techneblog.blogspot.com which has an rss feed, etc. My apologies for sending this as a bcc to you all, but I figured that this would allow for benign forwarding of this note without getting people onto the many wonderful mailing lists on the Internet....

Thank you for your consideration.

With very best wishes,

Mike

Donation for Haiti Disaster Relief to Mercy Corps

2010-01-13T15:12:00.001-06:00

Sustainable Local Foods Farming Program at John Wood Community College

2009-11-30T12:28:00.004-06:00

JWCC’s new Sustainable Local Foods Farming program provides courses and hands-on training in sustainable fruit and vegetable production, entrepreneurship, and marketingJWCC’s new Sustainable Local Foods Farming program provides courses and hands-on training in sustainable fruit and vegetable production, entrepreneurship, and marketing. More athttp://www.jwcc.edu/instruct/agriculture/LocalFoodsFarming/default.asp

Course brochure (pdf) athttp://www.jwcc.edu/instruct/agriculture/LocalFoodsFarming/docs/SustainableFoodsBrochure.pdf

Startup Funding FAQ From Y Combinator

2009-11-20T10:39:00.008-06:00

A nicely written quick read on startup funding and dynamics at How to Fund a Startup
by Paul Graham of Y Combinator.

In 1995, Paul Graham and Robert Tappan Morris created the systems of Viaweb which became Yahoo Store (as shown in the Waback Machine from 1998.)

I've been following Y Combinator for a couple of years now; very refreshing perspectives. I particularly find his take on incubators spot on. Old post of mine Growing Startups has some other resources.

Adding on a copy of Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check would be a good "required reading kit" for the n00b or pro on either side of a deal.

My review of Reality Check

"This is one that I wish I had had during several startups. Long on common sense, and many good sources identified throughout "for further study.""

SIU Innovative Systems Conference SIUIS4 First Light

2009-10-29T19:39:00.018-05:00

A very quick look at some photographs from the Southern Illinois University Innovative Systems conference, SIUIS4.

Flyover Country No More!!!

Tight security involved gas powered weaponry capable good for three to five rounds of T-shirt bombardment in this backpack-mounted platform. I'm sure 2.0 will be good for ectoplasm.

I'm all for elegant code, but there's something about cannon that just says one *really* cares about the project.

See also http://www.punkinchunkin.com/ for more insights into the Sport of Geeks. Now *that* is art.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Anil Mehta, sweating the small stuff to make a good conference even better.

The weather's been outstandingly North Sea here in the Carbondale Illinois area, but I say that will make the Seattle area visitors feel right at home.

There was a nice level of enthusiastic chaos amongst the student volunteers pulling together services for the conference, and a pretty comfortable, smiling group of people moving through the event.

Like a said in another post: World View, Intimate Venue. Nice, bright folks pumped about what they're doing and the potential of it all.

Cheeze Pizza Cheese Pizza Cheese Pizza

The "Green Room" loaded with Pizza, coffee, and volunteers. (And hungry people like me sneaking pizza.)

Logistics were a little shaky, but this is the kind of conference where a few more bucks would really make it sing. Parking permit in advance would have been nice, 'frinstance.

I want to see another conference here in six months, oh please.

Low cost, low hype, high content, real people. Sahweet mercy what a refreshing spin on tech. All here in Southern Illinois.

Robots? Got 'em. UAVs? Sure.

These guys had just torn down a 4H robotics demo from the night before and bless their cotton sox were back putting it together for this conference. The group's also working on some interesting UAV concepts and I hope DARPA, et.al, pick up on the potential.

All for now. Two more good days of the SIUIS4.

-30-

The Illinois Way of Beautifying the Farm 1914

2009-10-28T16:02:00.004-05:00

From the Internet Archive:

University of Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, 1914

The Illinois Way of Beautifying the Farm

Chamber of Commerce Membership

2009-10-28T11:17:00.004-05:00

Just took a look at the .doc application. Somewhere, there's got to be an abused MS Word application support group.

The writer exercised all possible font collections.

But wait. There's more.

$175 could get me, among other things, "INCLUDED IN CHAMBER BUSINESS DIRECTORY ON WEBSITE. FREE LINK TO YOUR WEBSITE."

So how much to keep them from linking to my website?

Verizon Growth from Soaring Inside Wire Maintenance

2009-10-26T13:10:00.003-05:00

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/verizons-quarterly-earnings-drop-10-2009-10-26

1969 Trabant: Was für ein süßes fahren!

2009-10-24T19:11:00.005-05:00

From archive.org

More information about the (in)famous Trabant can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

World View, Intimate Venue: SIU Innovative Systems Conference October 29-31

2009-10-24T11:27:00.021-05:00

Thursday, October 29 through Saturday October 31, the SIU Innovative Systems Conference will afford a world view in an intimate venue.

If you are a coolhunter, this little event will, I am confident, amaze you.

Go To The Conference

If the conference were in New York, Mumbai, Melbourne, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Toronto, Beijing, Moscow, etc., you would want to go. Don't assume because it's here that it will not be amazing.

It's in Carbondale, Illinois and I am glad that I will not have to fly to it.

Innovation isn't a new-fangled thing here. We had R. Buckminster Fuller and Anne Fuller right here, and there's even one of his surviving domes in town just a short hop from the conference. (The local non-profit taking care of restoring the dome could use some bucks so cough some, please at http://www.buckysdome.org/)

Thought Leadership from Leading and Emergent Technology Companies

Speakers represent, generally, technology leaders from senior positions in companies with a heavier emphasis upon network systems and electronics. Topics include exploration of new algorithms for network design in wireless communications, panel sessions on the economy, dynamics of networked information, a MATLAB tutorial, and topics which I would characterize as growing Social Entrepreneurship.

Companies: Cisco, LSI, Mathworks, Motorola, The Danda Group, Teradata, Calit2, Colorado Timberline, Avaya Labs, New Blankets Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Synopsis, Columbia University, Joule Labs, Equitech International LLC, The Element, Medergy, Bell Laboratories, Z.S. Associates and others.

This small conference has assembled truly impressive slate of presenters from the thought leadership of global technology:

Amar Nath Ray
Amit Sethi
Bonnie Horner
Brian Savin
Dewayne Hendricks
Dinesh Hiripityage
Flavio Bonomi
George Vanecek
Giampiero Campa
James Debelina
John Waclawsky
Joseph Deken
Nathan Nobbe
P. Krishnan
Paul Fleming
Qi Wang
Rich Goldman
Terry Galloway
Vijay Gurbani
Viswanath Annampedu

Das Blinkenlights! This kit rocks.

Based upon what I saw at the recent SIU Technology and Innovation Expo (TIE 2009), the serendipitous, intelligent, and enthusiastic demonstrations of student project demos will be the hidden gem of the conference.

Wind and water power, new interactive and immersive display technology, prototypes and "almost ready for prime time exhibits" are well worth the time. Many of these innovations need comparatively little funding (say, from a few thousand up to $500,000 to get product out the door, if even that much.) I've been calling it the milli-loan emergent market to contrast with the wee and wonderful micro-loans.

Rapt Musing: Human Beings At Conference! Hooray!

This is real. This is not synthesized by a soulless corporate puke (and I have been a corporate puke, albeit soulful). Yes! The guys with the pocket protectors who if I did not see during a due diligence meeting or a "strategic partnership discussion" with a somethingdotcom I'd move along fast to the next conversation. At the TIE 2009 last month, someone was having a problem with a demo (it was only batteries) but that is a wonderful experience. Real stuff. Maybe some blue sparks and flames. Something that does not represent distillation into a mega media sound byte.

Friends.

Some of the SIU student work evokes the efforts of organizations like Stanford University's Social Innovation Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability and very much reflects a growing maker culture (DIY, but I extend maker philosophy to manufacture of artifacts of all sorts, including code, hence techne in the name of this blog.)

In short: local (to me), smart, inspiring, and making me get "all hope up" which my great grandma Keneipp always warned against over in Saline County here.

The conference, now in its fourth year, owes its beginnings to the efforts of Anil Mehta, here also pictured in an article on the First SIU Intelligent Systems Exposition in 2007.

conference schedule is provided here at the main website.

PS: Fall Colors all over the place down here.

More Information Below

Website: http://innovativesystems.siu.edu/

Location:

View Larger Map

Viva Las Vegas

2009-10-16T12:18:00.002-05:00

Very good friend is heading out to that joint.

This little homage seemed appropriate:

The town can be found here:

View Larger Map

USDA Policy Encouraging Local Economic Growth

2009-10-15T10:26:00.011-05:00

USDA changing policies to encourage local food production in an All Things Considered interview with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsak.

Know your farmer know your food is focusing on creating wealth in rural communities.

Note that the policy of emphasizing the economic clout of smaller scale producers on the local economy has become more of a focal point for policy: entrepreneurs matter, throughout the network that produces food.

This production network goes well beyond the farmer or rancher. It encompasses the systems and people supporting markets. Distribution companies, information technology, newly transformed landscape companies, web designers, broadband providers, retailers...

So the first law of ecology from Garrett Hardin: "You cannot do only one thing."

More of the story at: NPR.org - Farmers Markets: Fresh, Local, Government -Approved

Get People to Food to People

2009-10-14T11:20:00.009-05:00

Transportation systems for schools have high utilization at peak times and no utilization at others.

The Gothamist reports "Real Seniors Take School Buses To Buy Fresh Food"

This has been a recurring issue for me for a couple of years now: how to use things like transportation systems more intelligently.

Other things to fix:

Integrate scheduling for county-based transportation systems in Southern Illinois (now only 5 days a week, inter-county complexity in routes/fares/extra fees/etc.
Examine more efficient utilization of transport (for example, to pick up or deliver food) and manage health and safety issues through "intelligent boxes"which have telltales regarding handling of foods. These could even have features to allow only a certified operator to open the box (e.g., with a little bluetooth app for the food person at either end).
Design for multi-use (buses with removable seats, etc.)

Ok. Time to weatherstrip the front door.... chilly day here.

Oh yeah. Most of the code for this exists in open source, I'd wager. Google Apps work too.

Reporting on SIU Technology and Innovation Expo (TIE 2009)

2009-10-08T15:57:00.006-05:00

Back on the network, just in time to cover Technology and Innovation Expo (TIE 2009) at Southern Illinois University on Friday 9 October 2009.

The event will showcase SIU research projects.

I'm sorry that it's on a Friday before a three day weekend, but looks like a solid crowd.

And who could resist "'Electronic Nose' Research at SIU"?

They opened for Jefferson Airplane, I think....

New Look For More Widgets

2009-09-18T15:21:00.001-05:00

Finally changed the look of Techneblog to take advantage of google widgets.

City of Littleton Annual Report

2009-08-06T15:13:00.002-05:00

The city of Littleton Colorado has produced a visually impressive annual report found at http://www.littletongov.org/bia/docs/biacc-report-2007.pdf

Will Allen: Urban Farming

2009-07-07T13:56:00.001-05:00

Good summary article of Will Allen's commitment and innovations in urban local food in the New York Times Magazine, 5 July 2009. Good summary article of Will Allen's commitment and innovations in urban local food in the New York Times Magazine, 5 July 2009.
Street Farmer
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
Published: July 5, 2009
Can Will Allen make the inner city the next front in the good-food movement?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05allen-t.html

Mama Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

2009-06-30T13:39:00.006-05:00

When I first got seriously into photography as ~~a spoiled~~ an only child, my first serious camera was a Canon FT-QL with a 50mm f1.4 lens. It was my eighth grade graduation present. I still have it.

In the meanwhile, Kodak has 86d Kodachrome.

There's a stack of slides circa 1968 with a lot of experimentation using Kodachrome. Long night exposures of backyard flowers using a small aperture and a flashlight, intentional oversaturation, some blurs on purpose.....

I want a drop in 35mm gizmo to allow me the benefit of the old, comfortable optics, but that may be a while. Of course, I might need a caddy to carry the damn thing around.

But, I did find an Adobe plug-in in a quick search at DxO FilmPack that might do the trick with my wee digital camera. All sorts of simulated films (about 50). For Open Source, GIMP offers Silicosaur PhotoFX

Memo: Ephemeralization. All kit is a lathe.

PS: A nice article at Wired on the The Cheap Russian Camera That Could: Lomo Turns 25 also contains some nice tweaks of lens and film effects.

Milli Market Segments for Local Food

2009-06-23T15:49:00.002-05:00

Although Eric Sink, managing partner of Champaign, Illinois Source Gear LLC, writes about the software business, his article "Whining by a Barrel of Rocks" applies to ways of thinking about the structure of food "as a business" and the many opportunities for collaboration and economic growth with both large "production agriculture" firms and more narrowly focused specialty/local/boutique businesses.

Mr. Sink writes:

"Now let's suppose we're considering a market opportunity with realistic potential for $3M USD annual revenue. The big vendors can't even consider pursuing a market that small. It's not worth their time. But a $3M annual revenue stream will easily sustain a small company of 15-30 employees. That niche is an opportunity, and somebody is going to build a nice company inside it.

Identifying all the opportunities for software products is like filling a barrel with rocks.

We start by putting in the really big rocks like office suites and desktop operating systems. Soon the barrel is full and will hold no more large rocks.

But smaller rocks can still be added easily. In fact, we have to add a surprising number of small rocks and pebbles before the barrel can be considered full."

More at http://www.ericsink.com/bos/Whining_by_a_Barrel_of_Ro.html

The Need for Broadband Networks in Local Food Systems

2009-06-07T09:02:00.000-05:00

Although some "local" farm telecommunications can take place with relatively slow speed private networks (such as those which support remote low data rate sensors for water or nutrients) and basic "telephone" calls, the bulk of the information needed for the Local Food farmers and eaters has trended along with the Internet traffic patterns generally: more and more information comprises richer media: video and audio.

"Digital Divide" has been used to describe the disparity of computer and network access - typically in the context of relative incomes. In other words, poorer people use (or have access to) significantly less computing (and networks) than wealthier people. With respect to Local Food Systems, the Local Food System digital divide breaks along geographic disparities - especially population densities - and the willingness of incumbent network providers (telephone companies and cable companies) to provide access to the "thinner" parts of their service areas.

And these poorly served areas are rural, holding farmers, ranchers, and consumers who cannot reasonably gain access to higher capacity networks. The network potential benefits resemble the effects of Rural Electrification during the 1930s. Illinois citizens - particularly at the south end of the state - are merely one generation removed from kerosene lanterns and battery powered radios.

History Does Not Repeat Itself But It Often Rhymes

Attributed to Mark Twain

Regarding Rural Electrification from http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva10.htm

"In 1935 the Rural Electric Administration (REA) was created to bring electricity to rural areas like the Tennessee Valley. In his 1935 article "Electrifying the Countryside," Morris Cooke, the head of the REA, stated that
In addition to paying for the energy he used, the farmer was expected to advance to the power company most or all of the costs of construction. Since utility company ideas as to what constituted sound rural lines have been rather fancy, such costs were prohibitive for most farmers. [ footnote]
Many groups opposed the federal government's involvement in developing and distributing electric power, especially utility companies, who believed that the government was unfairly competing with private enterprise (See the Statement of John Battle ). Some members of Congress who didn't think the government should interfere with the economy, believed that TVA was a dangerous program that would bring the nation a step closer to socialism. Other people thought that farmers simply did not have the skills needed to manage local electric companies.

By 1939 the REA had helped to establish 417 rural electric cooperatives, which served 288,000 households. The actions of the REA encouraged private utilities to electrify the countryside as well. By 1939 rural households with electricity had risen to 25 percent. The enthusiasm that greeted the introduction of electric power can be seen in the remarks of Rose Scearce.

When farmers did receive electric power their purchase of electric appliances helped to increase sales for local merchants. Farmers required more energy than city dwellers, which helped to offset the extra cost involved in bringing power lines to the country."

Small Business Econometric Study / Trends From SBA

2009-03-15T15:03:00.000-05:00

Highlights from " An Empirical Approach to Characterize Rural Small Business Growth and Profitability"

• Education was a significant explanatory variablein assessing the growth of rural small businesses.The number of high school graduates increases thenumber of rural small businesses. Moreover, one of the challenges facing rural communities is how to retain a younger, more educated population.

• The amount of “natural amenities” available in an area can impact rural small business growth. This is defined as the attractiveness of a place to live,based on factors such as climate, topography, and proximity to surface water.

• Rural areas have difficulty attracting profitable,high-tech businesses, primarily because of a lack ofboth an educated labor force and necessary infrastructure.

• Rural policy initiatives are geared primarilytoward specific topics or regions, which often proveseffective when there are sufficient resources to helprural small businesses. According to individualsinterviewed on the topic, rural development centersand non-profit organizations are vital components foreconomic development.

• Some explanatory variables were specific to particular states. These range from the number of ruralprimary care physicians per capita in North Carolinato immigration growth in Maine.

Interesting read (for wonks and mortals).

The New of the New

2009-03-06T14:20:00.002-06:00

If one looks at the real and virtual "stuff" we produce and consume, one of the big state changes comes from new economies of scale mediated by networked information.

Adoption rates for all sorts of things begin more and more to look like vertical lines (e.g., faster broadband versus slower) and better product architectures afford no small degree of modularity and component based systems.

What used to be called information float has become, to a great extent, less of a factor because federations of "smart friends and strangers" can rapidly vet vapor and mojo.

This new "component based and interoperable" lot of hardware, software, bio, and info means that the friction of creation and status quo form less of a barrier than before. This is the kind of environment that welcomes punctuated equalibria (evolution by jerks, as they say!) and disintermediation.

Removing (or mitigating) other frictional issues such as health care in turn improves the formation of new, and I assert, generally smaller organizations. From personal experience, I can say that the 1990s recession spawned a good number of high quality companies and think tanks.

With the provisioning of fractional services (payroll, HR, storage, webservers...) that reflect almost atomistic (and often "free") marginal costs compared to the big box running at 1% capacity, the formula for the production function begins to take rational, versus whole number or integer, steps. Again, with health care, the exploitation of the quaint statistic of large numbers in a common pool.... well, you do the math.

Trust in God but lock your car... I do believe that opportunities will be exploited if only from the fatigue of status quo and the inertia of the known.

Conservation Economy (via Ecotrust)

2009-03-03T15:20:00.000-06:00

Portland Oregon's Ecotrust.org has made extensive use of a pattern language (see Christopher Alexander Pattern Language) as a design framework for sustainable systems.

"A Conservation Economy

When the health of ecosystems and communities is not integrated into economic activities, all three suffer. In turn, economic dependence on destructive activities creates apparent conflicts between work, nature, and community. How can we create an economy that effectively meets human needs while regenerating natural systems? An economy which grows organically — and fills new niches — by working with nature and enriching human capacities?

In A Conservation Economy, Economic arrangements of all kinds are gradually redesigned so that they restore, rather than deplete, Natural Capital and Social Capital. This will create extraordinary opportunities for those who foresee and drive these changes. The Fundamental Needs of people — and the Ecosystem Services which sustain them — are the starting point for a different kind of economic prosperity that can endure generation after generation."

The details can be found at http://www.conservationeconomy.net/conservation_economy.html

Destination Cloud Computing

2008-10-13T14:35:00.002-05:00

Just a lead in: cloud computing will be vital for "small" businesses because "a man's got to know his limitations."

Now we might twitter, and for all that companies growing from startup to second stage, usually around 5+ employees, all at once notice a rumble in the fuselage.

We had service bureaus, used ADP for payroll, and edge into Quicken to run the books. Cloud computing, next big thing (and has been for years).

Disaster. Recovery. Invention.

2008-08-12T14:32:00.000-05:00

In most of this last year's pieces here at the land of SANNAS (a fine team of wonks and also a fantastic snack with a good lager) the theme often centered upon increasing demands of distributed ephemeral data and the challenge of managing the process of custody and validation.
This article's being typed into a 1Gb stick; about 2Mb of that stick contains an encryption program; acceptable overhead IMHO for the promise of securing the Next Great Novel and Sudoku downloads, as well as the launch codes for the Acme ® ‘Lil Armageddon family of products, my sonnets to Paris Hilton and other juicy bits.

I do not, as they say, keep a tidy desk. My brain stays healthy by understanding my own LIFO filing system and an ability to understand the strata and the high probability parts of the piles wherein nestles the Airline Magazine or the clipping of a local paper's crank I wanted to riff upon at leisure. This represents an elegant strategy promoting mental health albeit with a risk of structural collapse of the entropy-friendly piles of the arcane lore.

Somewhere, someone must be working on a desktop computing metaphor that allows for significant standing loads. Bearing walls. Like that. At the very least, maybe something like "The Clapper" to find that 1Gb slice of memory...

So, here's the thing: data all over the place, connected and unconnected with the not so subtle growth of metadata to describe the context and provenance of information along with the burden of incremental data to manage the data and thereby the added processing cycles for data management itself. Extremely bright designers have delivered high value tool infrastructures, and I, for one, am not worthy of holding their pocket protectors in the area of difficult code and algorithm implementation, and generally customer focused implementations.

But in the realm of Disaster Recovery mechanisms and services, preemptive trumps reactive. Some scenarios of the mode of disaster, use cases, deliver an example.

Pandemic Flu, Weather, Earthquake, Toxic Spill, extended outages of power, water, other broken infrastructure should be the object of sandtable exercises, at a minimum, to game through what (might likely) work in these scenarios.

Rather makes removable media a bit of a problem during times of "saw fan, engaged same", not to mention getting to the unnetworked unautomated and unavailable mélange of annotated manuals and Post It notes which, don't you know, are the keys to the kingdom, whether one acknowledges that or not.

The adhocracy of portable data (iPhone, et.al.)seems to drive the industry towards some sort of nexus, wherein the overall practice and form of storage management and optimization will trend toward something that looks very much like Open Source toolkits and standards. For some this will be the defining disaster; however, other mature technology (e.g., MVS et seq) informs us that the core functionality and benefits of the "mature" technology do not by any means always disappear, but become the subject of new core businesses and invention. Ye Olde Virtual Machine has shown a tenacity in meeting the market need, albeit in quite new forms.
So, vis a vis Disaster Recovery, the pressure is on for shifts that make for highly interoperable and fungible networked storage resources (think Googleplex) with arbitrarily attached processing and storage tools. A lot of the "math" to predict the future comes from the good works of people like Gene Amdahl and Jim Gray (of Microsoft fame) in that a feasibility test can be accomplished with relative ease; with new cost factors and performance factors in hand, the maxim of "in the long run, all costs are variable" will again prove in with new invention. Of particular interest will be the results of open standards initiatives (akin to Web 3.0 posited mechanisms)where ontology will bloom like kudzu in Dixie.

And that, as the young lady informs us, is "hot".

Disk Payload Management

2008-07-17T14:29:00.001-05:00

Transfer of data has an upper bound of the speed of light and a lower bound of amount of a budget, excluding strange action at a distance and physics not yet known. It's all fun and games until something divides by zero.

In a delightful teaser article, Neil J. Gunther's "The Guerrilla Manual" delivers a bolus of refreshing views on capacity planning and performance management with a cleansing amount of terse common sense.

In particular, he notes, "You never remove the bottleneck, you just shuffle the deck."

Network Effects and Blinkenlights

Back in the mid 1980s, at least one large financial institution allocated IT budgets using a simple ratio of numbers of customer accounts by type, with appropriate finagle factors. At least it was a model that, assuming a lot of linearity, had simplicity and apparent transparency going for it.
Of course, these were the times of data centers with big boxes, and the occasional minicomputer. The unit costs of processing, networks, and storage were significant vis a vis cycles or bits or bytes per dollar and cycles per watt.

Of course, also, the use cases for the technology moved rather slowly, with occasional punctuation with growing online inquiry from, say, customer service agents or the addition of Automatic Teller Machines to the CICS olio of the big iron code.

More gadgets and new approaches to programming by the end users (unclean!!!) resulted in rather surprising effects upon infrastructure through rampant flaming queries (what did he say?) and even complete suites of large scale computing systems dedicated to new types of models. In the case of financial services, one big dude jammed with APL for determination of fixed income dynamics. APL, for those who don't recall, was developed for passive aggressive savants who didn't want management looking into what they'd written. But, with letting the punishment fit the crime, APL rocked for matrix operations and was a darling of the early generation of quants, including those laugh a minute actuaries.

Somewhere, someplace, someone is hacking FPGAs to stick into the Beowulf cluster of X Boxes. I gotta feeling.

So where were we... Oh, so the point is that the common factor around these early instances of "end user" computing involved moderate and increasing network effects. Transactional data could be used as feeds to these user managed systems, and network effects with emphasis upon storage and I/O tuning became significant as a means of moving the bottleneck back to the cpu. Now pick another card.

The disk to disk discussion comprises several use cases, ranging from performance optimization (e.g, put the top 10 movies on the edge of the network) to business continuance to the meta issue of secure transfer and "lockup" of the data. Problem is, how does one deal with this mess which embraces Service Oriented Architectures and Halo dynamism?

Intelligent Payloads?

This problem of placing data and copies of data in "good enough" sites on the network seems encumbered by how these data are tagged in such a way as to inform the "system" itself on the history of the atomic piece of interest as it transits other systems and networks. Perhaps something that appends usage information to the information itself, rather like appending travel stickers to an old steamer trunk tracing its owner's tours of Alice Springs, Kenosha, and Banff.
And no, I'm not advocating still another inband system monitor... more MIBs than MIPS and all of that problem.

This could, I believe, be a fertile area for new types of automation that begin to apply optimization (satisficing, most likely, in the sense of "good enough" strategies, see Herbert Simon for more G2) thereby, maybe (he qualifies again!) to reduce the amount of time and money spent upon forensics and weird extraction of information needed to govern surprisingly fluid dynamic systems.

Zipf's Law (think top 10 lists, 80/20 rule, The Long Tail issues, etc.) and other power law behaviors will still apply to the end product of such analysis, but perhaps the informed payloads will ease the analysts' management of these turbulent parcels. (Some insights to the framing of the problem of getting top level insight into systems structures and how they express emergent behaviors can be found at the Santa Fe Institute and their many papers on "Small World" problems.)

So, the bounds on this problem of course reduces to time and money. That topic also is taken up by Gunther, with emphasis upon what some of my old gang at the Wall Street joint referred to as "the giggle test" for feasibility.

This is a brief piece about an intriguing problem where more insight can be gained from Operations Research methodologies than from Information Technology praxis per se.
It nets out to (sorry) not only if it is not measured, it isn't managed, but add to that the cautionary insight of "if it isn't modeled, it isn't managed."

Trusted Infrastructure

2008-06-13T14:25:00.000-05:00

Every day someone (or... something) with 218 dot et dot cet dot era out of China intently checks my TCP port connectivity. Relentless, time after time, again and again it seeks what I do not know, just that it signifies.

Cut us a break? Not likely.

Good old 218 (we're on a first octet basis) and his kin know that the herd, large and lacking vaccine, eases the pursuit of new zombies and kindred grift keep those who are far, far, more than "script kiddies" hard at work.

More than to get through spam filters (v149ra, 'frinstance or his sister of ill repute, C. Alice) or help to facilitate commercial dealings involving so often the sad demise of the spouse, uncle, client, former ambassador... tragedies all. I never knew how much wealth sloshes around as the result of corpses. Ambulance chasing seems quite profitable.

"Make Money Fast" now like a Madeline evokes the time and place of a 14.4 "golden age" before a simple "delete" command would be replaced with protocols that put a Level 4 Biohazard facility to shame (and this hinkey mess o code just for a desktop!)

Nothing to see here, move along!

Richard A. Clarke, of US National Security fame, describes in his new book "Your Government Has Failed You", the results of a security exercise with Department of Defense systems. White hats commenced to do that hoo doo that they do so well... and pretty much it was "game over" in a trice: penetration aptly describes what happened.

The guvment got Intrusion monitors installed. They lit up like Bay Ridge Brooklyn on Christmas Eve with all sorts of dubious packets from UnKn0wn U53r types. Clarke quotes managers telling him that until the hoods started setting off the intrusion alarms there had never been any putative bad guys. Somehow the security tech now attracted the bums, etc. Familiar story that I'm inclined to believe.

He also advocates a partitioned Internet, hardening part of the services for secure transactions and communications.

I've been there philosophically myself; and nonetheless am avidly in favor of an unrestrained Internet as well. No hobgoblins here.

The company I was with in 2001/2002 had a trusted client server implementation that did very serious authentication (non repudiation, yadda yadda rather like Moody Blues lyrics, those shalts and shants in them there specs ballyhoo optional). Pretty much good 2 go, add Series A and shake. Well, we had the hip but not the audience.

But the big deal was that our technology needed a pretty well suborned geek to break it (it wasn't open source, and in that I now trust it less but I'm just sayin'). It kept things nice and shiny and very private as an overlay to the Big I at large. Other Big Problem though comes from oceans of distributed data.

In a world: Queue Don LaFontaine

In a world where everything moves to an emergent ad hoc architecture of networked promiscuous storage services, where devices (picture frame, 1Gb wrist bracelet, virtualized server storage complexes, distributed p2p/p4p, DRM, TiVo, and even instrumentation motes reporting on movement of RFID tags and small area hydrology and nitrogen measures, etc.etc. containing massive amounts of data) often in surprisingly readable formats.

In a world... where consumers have started to put health records within the uberplexes of Microsoft and Google (getting the providers en masse to adopt it, different problem) and the concept of insurance moves from shared risk to, well, greed seems a good word.

In a world... where the laptops of one government are targeted and tossed (usage as in noir cant) for records of another government's dissidents and the bon mots of "gentlemen do not read each others mail" have no standing...

In a world where the retiring Secretary of Health and Human Services says "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do." (NYTimes, December 2004)

In a world where a friend takes an extended business trip, returns to find that his kids have made five movies and posted them on YouTube from his Mac.

In a world where cameras come free with the printer, and a postage stamp of silicon tells me I'm on shot one of eighteen hundred.

Trusted Infrastructure Elements

So, here's where it goes, maybe. I have two things: things one and thing two.

Ubiquitous One Time Pads: All private, all the time.

Perhaps standing the security and privacy on end makes sense. Processing cycles and (good grief I actually typed core but stet!) core become pretty inexpensive, so running an algorithm to encode everything might not be a bad way to go. Heck, with some of the new word processing file formats alleging "open" protocols we seem to be half way there already; I can't open the attachments. We already see the unit costs of solid state "drives" precipitously dropping; headroom for small processing to encrypt onchip data could be a value added feature. The great thing is that these solid state devices are so small and hold so much data. The problem is that these solid state devices are so small and hold so much data.

Distributed Spread Spectrum Storage Service

Pseudorandom multi channel information paths, with a "big enough" local store to allow for unreliable networked service. The signal (information) hides in the noise. A form of this unreliable network appears as "The Byzantine Generals" problem, specifically Byzantine fault tolerance, wherein unreliable communications mechanisms become designed "around". Reason for this part of the puzzle is that there's so much data in so many places (cheap, dense, ubiquitous) that the use case for managed services around security and recovery needs to account for mobility, and placement of user data in many places. Key point though, is that a number of public and private researchers have been going at the reliability from unreliable infrastructure for a good while now (like, even ARPANET embodied this meme) and those wacky folks at Bittorrent (for example) have large amounts of distributed secure services in their beginning gene pool plus the understanding of how to reliably place data all over whilst maintaining service levels. If the Bit folks seem too edgy, then take a look at the Akamai technology model, and throw in a dose of Meraki Networks or perhaps Spain's FON.

Point is, seems that "the industry" has a pretty solid base of knowledge in sundry places that can be applied to the secure distributed data problem, and that the notional risks to private data help to monetize the innovation's value. The architects/designers Ray and Charles Eames explored the concept of "kit of parts" for building; I think that much of that "kit of parts" exists in the public domain and will be amended with patent expiries over the next several years.

Your Mileage May Vary

That vision above, if it merits that moniker, ignores some Big Problems like distributed key management for starters, twenty volumes of USENET rants about Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), in band versus out of band control, and a whole lot of other things. I believe the joke ends with the physicist saying "we've solved the problem for a sphere." Managing distributed data "in a world" of ubiquitous storage seems the next grand challenge.

Good hunting.

Compliance CENTREX

2008-05-14T14:21:00.000-05:00

What went around comes around.

Compliance, to pass an examination or be prepared for a contingency, has foundation from commercial good practice and regulatory (including legal) conformance.

Higher level compliance concerns evoke the wisdom of first do no harm, eat green leafy vegetables, and get moderate exercise. Business continuance, or continuance of the entity or ones job, ripens with common sense. The broader topics include fiduciary stewardship, management of proprietary internal information, and of client, patient, supplier, et.al. privacy, and, fundamentally, the determination of trust.

In forming the deeply connected systems involving the customers, the organizations, and the suppliers the challenge of determining trust provably is, well, not easy.

In a recent national survey, respondents uniformly agreed that this validation of a system, the compliance issues in managing the archiving and retrieval (or demise) of data worked, by degree, well in larger organizations but was woefully lacking in many others.

Be advised that this national survey involved three people I know.

But they were pretty far away from each other.

A couple of common themes though, on the broad area of what's up with that compliance thing?

Small Organizations Getting Crushed

Many smaller organizations encounter compliance, in the broad sense, only after something has gone quite wrong. The data systems come under the management of one "s/he who knows" and typically that s/he who knows avers that all's under control, nothing to see, move along. Quite often, that's a correct assessment but the Black Swan of Something Wicked will assuredly appear like the first tulip of spring.

The many conceivable test cases and demonstrations available to exercise a procedure or software implementation become quickly incomplete; the "many eyeballs" of the Linux community or MSDN or the SAP experts or Cisco herders or System Z mavens or Wii Wunderkind and the rest may already have the fix in hand, but the bolus of healing code remains unknown to the many.

So staying current with what's on with the system in the technology sense underpins meaningful compliance.

The management of even a small system, when networked, overwhelms or at least distracts from the business at hand, the getting the work done part of work. Script kiddies, malware, and zombie makers test test test the borders and their numbers still grow. Firewalls capture the IP of pinging drones with the tireless cold focus of The Terminator.

But enough of the light side.

Somewhere there's a law waiting to bite you.

In addition to the issues of compliance with securing systems from perpetrators and miscreants, somewhere one can find comfort in some legislation from someone who should, but does not, know "better" that will increase costs for compliance if not explicitly be purely intractable by the placement of the liability of non compliance with an impossible dream.

Those public policy decisions might include draconian warnings for browsing a Goya Maja or a 1970s Sears Catalog, and more seriously issues of record retention and access for, among other things, financial and health transactional data, and emails (which increasingly go beyond text and have average object sizes growing like Kudzu). I wonder if Wall Street still drives those tapes around in the vans, and whether aging tape drives live on to read archaic media. This leads to still more policy decisions, internal to an organization and implementations driven by external policy makers.

For the smaller organization, staying on top of the goat rodeo that entails version management of desktop OS and warring tribes of antiwhatever software chewing through silicon to the joy of chipkateers and the anguish of people just trying to get along with recreational and the oh so serious land of business computing, now that goat rodeo builds character in and of itself.
To overlay "unfunded mandates" on the already maxtasked elves of IT, well that's just Bondo on the cake.

Hence: Compliance Centrex

In the dark ages of the 1970s and 1980s, telephone companies in more urban climes implemented a product called Centrex (Centralized Exchange) service.

The mainframe (Central Office) provided features from a bunker managed by truly serious professionals empowered to code the forwarding of phone calls from one line to another, implement restrictions on calling privileges to certain telephone lines (local only, for example) and wield other powers on the users, who enjoyed very reliable consistent service. Each line got its own phone bill. Later generations of the Centrex miracle provided limited administration by the customer.

Point: a small team of skilled people can provide a lot of oomph across a customer base. 37signals with their millions of subscribers being one example already covered here.

Somewhere I hope there's a graduate student looking at the marginal utility of willingness to pay with notional conjoint analysis studies.

More fun than Facebook!

Now, the code to be cracked appeals most to small and medium scale enterprises; bundling policy based compliance features as a software overlay or a true "tin can with widgets + code inside" offers some hope. Think of an XML (etc.) publishing service informing the installed base of gadgetry on the latest rules for archiving, say, emails. Recognize also that the "big" end of the market also may actively seek compliance services: Collaborative Software Initiative's reference implementation for custodial information is but one example.

Towards the Compliance Appliance?

Here in the US, a couple of firms now warrant identity protection with a $1,000,000 guarantee($400 Loonies thereabouts). Will we see participation of new risk instruments, insurance akin to errors and omissions, appearing as part of new "tough" compliance appliances?

Compliance as a service has, I believe, legs in the same sense that an antivirus automatic update does. Some "professional compliance" process exists for food companies: third parties provide certification of the supply chain end of the food pipe to ensure that custodial information, security and hygiene of premises, etc. conform to regulatory standards. Beyond "audit" the service economy for compliance is likely quite amenable to a service provided for fee relationship, increasing service revenues for the storage company (or the applications company) along with driving new purpose into the consigliore side of the bidnez.

Continuous monitoring already available for "tested hacker safe" affirms the underlying business model.

The management of the infrastructure, especially for the smaller companies, takes too many cycles and depends upon people who rarely encounter a Black Swan in their Sarbox, eh?

Teams matter; effective new ones will cross borders of all sorts.

Ephemeral Hardware

2008-04-14T14:17:00.000-05:00

Someone, somewhere, once quipped that hardware is out of date software. One can just about take that at face value; Wall Street quants run engines out of FPGA arrays to rapidly calculate banyan fibonacci mojo ratios, let alone the insights given to March Madness here in the United States coming, no doubt, from hijacked cloud computing resources.

Meanwhile, the "not all gigabytes are created equal" applies to this industry where unit costs of storage hardware drop precipitously (and mostly predictably) whilst total storage management costs increase....but at typically lower unit costs.

Then the state diagram of "where does the market find equilibrium" sloshes in another direction with emergent nano densities (we visited that topic in November or December 2007 in here) which sloshes further with announcements of IBM Racetrack topologies (updating previous announcements from neoBUNCH forces on the development of first gen nano which was expected to ship late this year) for chips with billions of atomistic nanowires and even higher densities.

It's interesting to note that Buckminster Fuller, for whom the nanostructures of carbon called "Buckyballs" due to their resemblance to his Geodesic Dome (we've got the one he built and lived in when he taught at the local University here around 37.5W and 89N) also coined the word "ephimeralization".

Do more and more with less and less until you're doing everything with nothing basically sums up that principle; however, what is added to that koan? Haiku? whatever is information.

Seems that, to me, information is what holds that airy ship aloft, information represented as software and rules. So, the perfect storm (strike that, cliché) the fuzzball of storage becomes a witches brew of rapidly increasing "consumer driven" data (oodles of video, oodles of endpoints). And boy howdy, don't them metas get busy?

Problems of managing versions (dedupe, mirrors backups, recoveries), placement of data to manage service levels (cache, multiple copies, P2P or P4P) and (jargon alert) semantic web wherein constructs of tags of tags and winding hyperlinks reflecting states and relationships, not just for catching the great Diet Coke and Mentos research but to get the skinny on what the latest method is to build something, cure something, learn something, share something, price something, buy something, sell something.....

Or use the stored images to catch a thief (or worse) or provide compliance (not just for the SEC; as part of researching video applications for education, a fine gentleman named Mike Fink advised that some hospitals and emergency rooms are adopting video as anticipatory evidence when conducting particularly parlous procedures. (Perspicacity!)

The technology and methods approach not only Kurtzweil's "singularity" of intelligent machines, but the holodeck (hold on, Chief!) appears in the form of a walk about simulation of the hours before Pompeii's demise. The user of the system can move through that simulation by walking. (Heard that one on late night radio just before a discussion of alien abduction but I'm all about eclectic.) This, plus Wii systems have seen rapid adoption in physical therapy....

Consumers all over the joint.

Explicitly: this does not (yet) forecast the immediate demise of spinning media or tape, but the pricing pressures are and will continue to approach "unit costs of zero", with improving wide area connectivity which, while not allowing (for now) ignoring special relativity, multiple managed instances of information and stateful knowledge will appear more and more as abstractions within a deeply interconnected network. Seems not unreasonable to expect some form of bid/ask mechanisms to appear for dynamic allocation of, particularly, entertainment or thematically oriented information linking secure objects, generating additional copies, cleaning out the old data, and optimizing data (and processing) placement based upon dynamic needs.

Given that software itself decays, through maintenance in particular as cited in COCOMO models, etc., the management of storage more becomes the art of software as an increment to the art of understanding the more physical mechanisms of striping, RAID, densities, and mirrors. And the dark force of entropy, lo, will drive more preemptive testing and quality assurance (said the winner of sundry service packs).

And with the flat out impossibility of exhaustively testing every combination of lines of instructions (NP completeness means never having to say you're done) more nuanced and practical methods have emerged to do statistical measures akin to Design Of Experiment methods; however, still better hang on to that last working version.... Given that pretty much every buzzword required in a tech oriented article has been used here (oops, yeah, and Social Networking too!) we might as well toss in quantum computing.

And part of the quantum and string theory models is the many universes theory, which comforts me because it suggests, if true, I might finally be one of the smartest guys in the room, albeit a Cub Reporter.

Happy Spring!

What: availability. A how: Continuous Data Protection

2008-03-12T14:14:00.001-05:00

Took a look at the published "inventory" of information on Google to give myself some orientation to the development timeline of what folks have been saying about availability (specifically"High Availability") and "Continuous Data Protection" to see when people started turning ideas into products.

The HA issues zipped right along from around 1985 or so (this is a survey, not a census, dear reader) with articulated specifications, formation of managed service offerings, products, etc. zipping right along to our current worlds.Continuous Data Protection, and by that, *that* particular search term shows up circa 1991 as prelim to disk mirroring products appearing later that decade.

The pre Sysplex days (and more people were working on the distributed problem than IBM) rested upon dark fiber, to me, reflecting the some people longing for dial tone at 40 pfennings a minute. SMDS, SONET offerings hadn't yet shown up, but the results were pretty convincing among some (rumored) blue sparks and flame that having trusted data in at least two places at once with a prayer (improvement) in recovering ones systems from the distributed data, well.... very good thing.

I'd argue, however, that the Continuous Data Protection model is the converged solution for how to answer the question of applications availability; the economics of (planned) redundancy favor that information distribution. Kindred concerns of custodial, compliance, and reliable connectivity, while significant, do invite innovations in putting the data objects. Market momentum for how to build higher availability into applications comes from known good libraries of "how to do this".

The DeDupe market space, as well, offers cost relief from the ability to recycle and realize more efficiencies in net storage capacities. The cautionary tale here comes from distributed computing, wherein some applications resemble Yorkie Terriers. Very very good at playing "this, all of this, is mine!" to the tune of "Big Boss Man" resulting with a conundrum of which manager manages the manager managers and a stack of dueling control systems oh heck lets put another piece of monitoring software in there that ought to hold 'em....

Which in turn brings back memories of notoriously brittle High Availability systems from the 90s, wherein the prudent management discipline was to establish that it was at last working and hanging up a sign that said "Was working fine when I left it. You broke it."

Some local use cases (involving moderate storage requirements and a thin network infrastructure) indicate that Continuous is the way to go (assuming that the data "containers or objects" allow for incremental updates). Saves network, and keeps one closer to the point in time when the fan will make a rude noise. Seriously looking at the peer to peer model has some wonderful attributes of survivability, and redundancy (boy, you can say that again) also with the potential for borrowing resources across networks.So in no way is it a motherhood issue as to how.

Barbie: Math is hard. She caught H E Double Hockeysticks for that but that's a fact.

Meanwhile, the what is of the motherhood issue (viz, a requirement to keep things going). But that how (one's chosen implementation). Hoo Wee! That how's a poser. But to me there's something in the thought that "this system swaps things about all of the time and keeps running with a provable audit trail of service levels" as more comforting than "it's in Lou's truck". One can always, as it were, burn a disk. Demonstrating recovery during system operation as a normal course of business.... cool.

"Say watt again. SAY WATT AGAIN"

2008-03-12T14:06:00.000-05:00

Joules, old boy.

The conversations around the topic of "Green Computing" have focussed very much upon the management of heat loads in the metaphor of power. The technology itself heads toward a lower unit consumption of power production of heat due to smaller geometry as balanced against higher densities.

Once upon a time, R. Buckminster Fuller looked at the Spaceship Earth problems of electrical distribution and posited that the total capacities of power could on a global basis (more or less) be reduced (ceteris paribus) if the power grids of the whole world were deeply interconnected.
Sunny side of the planet, dark side of the planet, lighting from the sun, lighting from electricity, factories on, factories off. With some nit picking regarding transmission losses, etc. the proposition yields an interesting gedanken experiment vis a vis networks of computers and networks of storage. With some form of daily (whatever) variations, moving workloads, comprised of payloads of data and eventually application pieces, could let one reduce a given site's "peak capacity" through clever movement of processing.

Yes, latency. Yes, transmission capacities. Yes, etc.

But forms of this more agile distributive model come to us from, gasp, BitTorrent and other computing structures. For anyone who lives with real technology, the working model is that the solution will not be perfect (obsolete as it gets plugged in, in fact) but that the solution should be measurably "better".

We're living in a material world. You go girl.

" Metals recirculate on a sum-total-of-all-metals-average every 22 1/2 years....
I was able to arrive at that figure of a 22 1/2-year metals recirculating cycle in 1936. I was working for Phelps Dodge Co., which had asked me to give them some prognostications about the uses of copper in the future of world industry."
R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

Part of the Green computing ecosystem has been and will be the interaction of design for life cycles from a Cradle To Cradle point of view, increasing pressure on key materials in the computing industry (rare earths, gold), and improving recognition of the value of these materials in the cycle of creation, use, deconstruction, and re use. Fuller looked in particular at copper cycling through the system; the recycling of component materials in computing, however, has only recently become a design requirement. (LeRoy Budnik noted the "drive that will not die" in a recent post here.)

But the materials will be better "designed" to enable reuse in part because of "goodness" but principally because it makes sound organizational sense from the view of economics.

That the trend of ephemeralization (the less is more than more koan) cuts into this olio will be saved for another time.

When I have the erg.

With apologies.

Why regional markets matter: Driving Distance and Times. Chicago's 35 minutes closer than Kansas City

2008-02-26T13:09:00.007-06:00

From Goreville, IL	Miles	Hours:Minutes
	Paducah, KY	45	0:50:00
	St. Louis, MO	131	2:08:00
	Evansville, IN	144	2:21:00
	Nashville, TN	180	2:50:00
	Springfield, IL	201	3:20:00
	Memphis, TN	205	3:00:00
	Louisville, KY	232	3:33:00
	Chicago, IL	332	5:18:00
	Kansas City, MO	379	5:53:00

Hi gang, I'll pretty this up at some point but the message is clear: we have export markets which have little to do with upstate. Louisville's about 2 hours closer than Chicago. Nashville, TN is closer than Springfield, IL. Memphis is 2 hours closer than Chicago.

This matters, and I want "regional" to get into the vocabulary ASAP. Geography's a hard thing to grasp, and when any of us (me included!) say Illinois it means a lot of things that I, for one, don't always understand it to mean. The latitude down here is the same as Roanoake VA and San Francisco..... It matters. Thanks.
Yours for good eats,
Mike (Born in Memphis, raised in Grand Tower Illinois, boomerang and proud of it!)

Network Based Language Learning: Crowdsource Model

2008-02-20T08:52:00.000-06:00

Learning From a Native Speaker, Without Leaving Home

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: February 17, 2008

If you can’t manage a trip abroad to learn a foreign language, the Internet and a broadband computer connection may do the job, too.

Commentary: Trend O'Rama!

One of the challenges of learning the foreign language becomes the available time to practice, and to a great extent learning the agility required for fluency.

"LiveMocha (livemocha.com), for example, is a free site where members can tackle 160 hours of beginning or intermediate lessons in French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi or English. There is no charge for tutoring; instead, members tutor one another, drawing on their expertise in their own native language."

The "technology" has great potential (and testimonials from its users) and solves problems of time, location, and costs. Expect with time that these services will have certifications; institutions might well consider how to interoperate with these networked educational programs and leverage the resources offered.

Over time, both "real" video and improving audio will continue to enhance the "being there" experience (referred to as telepresence). For the shy, virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) will be used to shield identities (as well as promise French instruction from, say, Pepé Le Pew).

Rural Telecommunications: No Dial Tone

2008-02-15T13:07:00.000-06:00

During the recent ice storm, turns out that the telco central office to the south of me does not have a permanent power generator (UPS). They had to truck in a generator on a truck. Apparently, people were quite well up the creek; one institution was effectively out of service for two days.

Bilbo! 'sup?

2008-02-12T14:04:00.000-06:00

Just got power back here (ice storm, my woods went going off like rifle shots last night, my 125 pound dog skidded off front porch, and just got coffee at noon here).

Client to my south is MIA: the entire chunk of the state 10 miles south of me still goes without power. Could be a ton worse, I know.

It’s Tuesday, and I may have the truck chipped open by Thursday.

Regarding Virtual Tape I'm trying to find some kind of angle on it that hasn't been taken in before. Going back to some stuff I wrote earlier, I don't know that anyone would go into a tape environment if they didn't have existing backup software that expected to work with tape. Legacy apps hold back some of the transition.

The industry seems to consolidate towards Disk To Disk To Tape now; I'm trying to get to some true Disk Wallah friends to get better interpretation of that particular issue *but* seems that at least with that middle tier of disk I may be able to do more of the dedupe optimization because I don't have to muck with the serial access of the tape media.

I don't want to proclaim tape is dead, but it surely seems, from reading the "talking heads" usual suspects out there in the analyst community that it has really transformed: what matters is the virtual, not the tape. Still smelling intrinsic lock in, (so what, like, get a manager application to manage the manager manager application?) and there are many extant rants about the "who runs this" and unhappy back doors into the system to enable features like "if 2+2=5 then 2+2=5" kinds of kludges.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" as Tolkien wrote.

I'm all over the caveats for the emptors, and suggest a vigorous scrubbing of any proposal to ensure that total costs and operational implications are walked through in detail. Something has to be "running" the infrastructure with assurance of the integrity of the data. De Dupe could be the planner who really doesn't game it out. I, truly, glaze over and turn to the serious people with scars and pocket protectors. My sense though is that tape fades: spinning moves to solid state, and even solid state becomes ephemeral with nano and finer grained media. The Virtual Tape business has saved millions of dollars (dozens of Loonies at today's rate) and solves a serious problem by abstracting the media, to a great extent, from the implementation. But a full model of "the business" can work wonders.

Think “The Sims” for Storage.

So maybe I should just post this? Another tree broke, dog is needy.

Failed US Rural Broadband Policy

2008-02-09T11:19:00.000-06:00

I posted a shorter version of this comment at the Chronicle of Higher Education in response to their article "Government Report Lauds Broadband Progress."

The two reports discussed are:

“Networked Nation: Broadband in American, 2007” (pdf) by the National Telecommunications And Information Administration (NTIA) and

"A Blueprint For Big Broadband"presented by EDUCAUSE at the recent "State of The Net" Congressional Conference

Poor, Known Faulty Sample Method Used

The NTIA report continues to rely upon illogical survey information for broadband: five digit zip codes.

In rural areas, some zip codes cover large areas, but if the respondent at the edge of a city with broadband can say “yep, I got broadband,” that entire zip code counts as having broadband service.

This sampling defect is well known and has been a point of annoyance for policy makers who understand the desire to game the system.

US Rural: Slow Deployment, Low Penetration, Stifled Innovation

With reference to regional and rural economic development, educational facilities here (in Southern Illinois) quickly find the limitations of broadband infrastructure. It’s minimal, and localized, at best, and expectations have been worn down by the incumbents.

Rural broadband is essential to sustainable, self sufficient, United States economies. Not sufficient, but certainly necessary.

This NTIA report will, unfortunately, be used as a rebuttal to those trying to make for rural change.

Those who tout its statistics should note that it is a lampoon of good policy, the data are blurred, and the myth of “competitive market solutions” continue apace.

The changes are coming, but the innovation seems to come from upstarts; the incumbent providers apparently move only when threatened.

Educause Report Substantiates Failed US Policy

EDUCAUSE raises good points vis a vis relative US position, but the emphasis (from my own self interest!) is not so much the 100Mb services as the need to get deployments of above 1Mb services, at a minimum, into the “flyover country” and economically depressed towns.

Netflix, for example, needs at least 1.0 Mb for good video quality, with best quality at 1.5+ Mb services.

But the use of a network adds value to all the connected.

These higher speeds will enable new educational models, new business forms, and new sources of entertainment on demand. Applications (payroll, hr, product catalogs, customer relationship information, health records) are becoming more a Service In The Cloud, and designers are improving the effectiveness of "local" and "distant" cooperative applications.

A small business can deliver much of its own infrastructure as a service reached across a reliable, high capacity, network.

Apple continues to drive innovation in the educational segment: iTunes U delivers digital content for free to students from Kindergarten and up. Apple provides free materials for "how to do this" type of education. But this all depends upon a robust ubiquitous broadband network into the communities served.

And we in the rural parts of the world haven't got that network yet, although this was promised in deals made back in the mid 1990s in exchange for "deregulation".

Poppycock.

And the network latency of many "well you could do this" proposed solutions of EDGE, satellite, etc. is a fable best told to the illiterate.

Of course, the further parts of the guile includes capacity lids for numbers of bits passed through the network to "protect the infrastructure". Balderdash.

Market Failure

Because of the low population density of the rural US, providers using old school thinking and relying upon old economic models give a great example of “market failure”; precisely the sorts of conditions which drove rural electrification and taxes for “Universal Service” for the regulated Bell monopoly.

The relief may well come from initiatives that resemble the TVA/REA works and rural electric coops. By other measures in the news these days, history seems to be repeating itself in other ways as well.

Nonetheless, when my neighbor's copper wire from the road to the house broke, the local telco rolled out a truck and crew to replace the copper wire with.... more copper wire. Three times. Not the crew's fault, but it is a grand example of failed policy. Give those telcos out here the Hobgoblin award.

Virtualization, Consumers, Networks, No Spin

2008-01-15T13:55:00.002-06:00

A small company of 9 people called 37signals.com has a base of over 2,000,000 customers using one of their lead collaborative products. The company's excelled at "Goldilocks" design:not burdening software products with too much function.

From their blog at http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/749-ask-37signals-numbers

Overall storage stats (Nov 2007)

5.9 terabytes of customer-uploaded files
888 GB files uploaded (900,000 requests)
2 TB files downloaded (8,500,000 requests)

They're going Xen, and reducing the number of servers by a little more than half.

What's more: they're a poster child for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Now, there's Google moving in this storage space, plus new players in the scrum, such as Nirvanix, and the Cleversafe, and who knows what that could be spun out from projects like (US) National LambdaRail.

Consumers

For a current project, looking to use "in the cloud" storage to host multimedia consumer "objects" and also musing upon the potential of little gadgets like iPod Touch to hold 10 hours of video with a price tag for the "1.0" of $300 US (which is, I think, about 80 Loonies this week). Since there's going to be a goat rodeo in producing content and control mechanisims for versioning and etc..... it becomes likely that we'll serve the content itself on an external network.

I'm lobbying for the Storage as a Super Hierarchy (wait for it: StaaSH) involving nothin' but net.

Life's too short.

Virtualization

Meanwhile, I keep looking at virtualization, and virtual tape. Spoke with a friend or two, and the interactivity of virtualization and de dupe starts to get interesting. I'm also of the opinion that no one would by choice run down the road of short tape for their application given the (wave hands) shifting cost curves of spinning drives, and especially considering the growth of solid state drives (I know, I know....) but in recognition also of nano tech showing up in what now..... 14 months.

So, my conjecture is that if one approached the problem set as a greenfield exercise, the pressure's very much in favor of non removable, and probably, non spinning media sooner rather than later. I'd be very interested in anyone's "fully burdened" cost analysis of this tech over time.

We used to have pizza boxes and pickles in the data center.....

No Spin

Spring Peepers Awake

2008-01-06T12:16:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note that on this day, the Spring Peepers have started up.

Chakra and Feng Shui of Site Privacy and FCC Policy

2007-12-25T11:21:00.000-06:00

I dunno.... maybe its the haze of the pork roast slices I grilled off for a whupass stew that's now biling in the oven.... but I swear like I truly saw an insightful piece in [here] and when I clicked the thingie was taken to a page that began:

"Our site visitors’ privacy and trust are important to us. We provide this notice in order to make sure that your expectations and our practices are aligned, and that you are aware of your choices with regard to our use and disclosure of the information you provide to this site."

1. The policies are even more important to me, t'ellwith "us".

2. Aligned expectations and practices? Oh for the love of....

I'm too unaligned with damn few chakras left these days, and the colors I'm projecting just are purely inconsistent with Feng Shui best practices.

In any event, upon careful reading (ty to the coffee now kickin in) I found the piece to be a rehash of things already published regarding the flat out goofy practices of collecting user data for broadband by zip code (which has the approximate granularity and utility of keeping mosquitos off of the porch with chicken wire) plus an attempt to define broadband with 2meg down, 1meg up as a starting point.

So, in the great blogging tradition, this is a string of ad hominem, invective, and futile musings with no discernable purpose.

Time to go stir the slow cookin good eats.

Happy Christmas & Best

1977 by God

2007-12-20T14:19:00.000-06:00

A ~~wanker~~ old friend today had the temerity to suggest I lived in a situation involving a 1966 Ford Pickup with further vile and presumptive opprobrium in reference to the Southern End of Illinois.

This beauty is from 1977 with extensive customization (sort of a security feature, when you think about it.... plus there's no gas tank since July 2007).