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This situation has careened out of control...
A sheriff was shot this morning in the Santa Rosa Valley and then the suspect fled to Simi. The names in the story also fit with the sketchy details in last night's comment.
The shooting on Monday afternoon is going to be big news for several days to come around these parts. I was kind of surprised when I first heard there had been some sort of car jacking from one of the boys. It was only later that we learned of the shootings.
Such a tragic waste. And if this comment on the story is proven true, it will be even more unfortunate.
I've had a revelation this weekend thanks to our youngest son.
He's somehow become enamored with creating PowerPoint presentations. When he found out this week that his Mom's computer has PowerPoint installed he started planning his computer time for the weekend and he's been using it exclusively to play with creating presentations. One about his family, another one about him, yet another about how to improve his cub scout pack. He's used just about every feature of the application and I have no idea where he found some of the clip art (Sarah has a pretty large collection she uses for newsletters). The transitions and sound effects actually don't seem out of place when used by a youngster.
His joy is infectious in some ways. First thing this morning, he was crowing about how great PowerPoint is and how he thought he could do so much more than he'd already done. To him, PowerPoint is entertainment!
Can you remember the last time you woke up wanting to work on a presentation? Sadly, I can't. I've got one I'm working on this weekend which may be part of why the difference in our attitudes is so startling but I'm trying to remember what it was like when it was new.
Kids can rock your world is so many interesting ways.
Here we are at the end of a week and Monday's story about Apple and Intel (it appears to have started in the WSJ, but was widely echoed by Reuters and AP and then everyone else) is still running around. It might not have the legs it did on the other end of the week, but it's still out there.
Why was this story out there to begin with? We may never really know.
It's a certainty that Apple talks to Intel on a continuous basis. Ignoring the circling rumors of a Mac operating system running on Intel (they were true for several years in the 90's, MacOS X originally ran well on x86 hardware and it would be no surprise to hear they keep it alive in the labs), there are several other reasons that they'd be talking and even making agreements on purchases.
With all these real reasons for Apple to be doing a deal with Intel, the idea that they're going to change CPU's for their main gear in mid stream is ludicrous. Yet, the rumor is out there and deserves consideration. Assuming that some grain of truth can be attached to the rumors, what other options exist?
The tablet rumor is at least interesting. Do I buy it? Not really. A tablet would run on a slow CPU and a MacOS based tablet shipping with zero software and a really slow emulation layer would seem counter productive in the extreme. That said, I don't put it past them to do it just because they can.
The only other thing I can think of is a new device of some sort; be that a Video iPod, the mythical iPhone or some other gadget none of us have considered. And for all but video device (and perhaps even there), the XScale Processors (the successor to the StrongARM family) seem like a darned good fit.
Update: After finishing this, I finally went weeding through all the open tabs in Safari and found a post from Ask Bjørn Hansen that mentioned the XScale angle much earlier this week. One could consider this a negative aspect of long lived applications and many (far too many) open tabs in a multitude of browser windows. Virtual reading (having loaded it in a browser tab we still haven't focused on) isn't nearly the same thing as reading.
I'm delighted to report that Pages, one of the iWork applications, has greatly exceeded my expectations. Granted, they weren't very high. I bought iWork for Keynote, which I've found less useful than I'd expected. I'll keep trying to find a Keynote sweet spot.
I'd tried out Pages a couple months back and couldn't quite figure it out. It seemed like it would make a good substitute for PageMaker, which my wife has been using for years to create newsletters for various schools, but I couldn't think of anything I might be able to do with it. All of the templates just seemed so complicated.
Yesterday, I was struggling along working on a design document in Word (having finally given up on MORE where I've been doing design docs for more than a decade) and I decided to see if I could do what I wanted in Pages. After flailing around for about three hours, I had the basic structure for a document that seemed to look like I wanted. The secret (as if) was to ignore all the built in style sheets and start from scratch, building what I needed from the ground up. Outside of missing the ability to fold away all the other text to focus on a particular section, Pages has a very straight forward and easy to use style mechanism, pays a minimum of attention to style information on pasted text (and that's easily overridden) and seems to be quite responsive. It also deals quite well with modern (Mac) graphics information in a way Word never will.
I fought a bit with the page number stuff (I'm not sure if it really has a problem living in a table or if I removed the problem simply by moving to different page footer layout) and it worked eventually. The only real issue I'm having right now is that my PDF exports don't have working hyperlinks (not sure how to fix that one).
Sarah is going to take this year off from the newsletter grind and I think I'll continue to work on trying to get her to move to Pages (and MacOS X).
Chris Holland and I bumped into one another outside our building Monday evening and somewhere between his running back in to grab a book for me from Meng Wong and his departure, we got to talking about his recent post about configuring SJPhone for EarthLink SIP. He wore me down and I promised that I'd give it another shot.
I'd tried it a few months ago and run into some problems but figured it couldn't hurt to try again. Good thing I did. The current version and the one I'd tried before have little in common. The basics provided by Chris worked quite well out of the box and we had a short conversation on Monday evening during which he also demonstrated conferencing. SJPhone itself is comfortably minimal and seems to work quite well once you get past the step of defining a service. It is somewhat surprisingly a Carbon application. It's a new perspective for me after the welded metal interface of Xten which I'd basically given up on running.
The model for SJ Labs seems to be building a SIP stack for licensing while giving away basic clients everywhere. It's an interesting idea. I wish that it was the other way around, an OSS SIP stack with client competition, but for now, that's where things are.
More vCard spin off formats? It seems so.
The other night I stumbled onto X2V an XSLT transform from an hCa* encoded XHTML file into the corresponding vCard/iCalendar file.
That of course led to the Technorati wiki pages for hCard and hCalendar.
Trying to determine a definitive set of vCard related attributes is like tugging on a thread from behind a closed door.
Chris Holland recently described how Hermosa Beach Gets Fiber to the Home. We're also in Verizon Fios land, but not much is happening here yet.
Last I heard from an insider (about a month ago), they were just about finished wiring Malibu and were working hard to drop fiber into a new housing development in Camarillo with the intention of pushing on to the rest of the city soon (likely happening by now). So why did this process bypass Thousand Oaks?
The scuttlebutt is that the city council is still pretty pissed at Verizon about the heave ho they pulled off with the former GTE Americast cable customers when we were sold to Adelphia (and now we're in some kind of tug of war between Comcast and Time Warner). GTE (before the Verizon big bang) made quite a splash here when we were a flagship city for the Americast service, going so far as walking door to door to talk to prospective customers (like me) and sign them up (me again); granted it didn't take much to make me switch from a company I called Very Crummy Cable on a good day (later purchased by TCI and then I think Adelphia) but they really had terrific features and service for the time (I'm guessing late '95 or so). It'll take a little while before the feathers are sufficiently smoothed to allow Verizon to creep back in to play once again in the video wars.
Best guess? Sometime next year. Maybe. I hope.
Conforming to standards can be a challenge but it's often the case that making any particular technology work also involves working around all the slightly (or massively) incompatible edge cases. Web services are no different but as Confronting the Reality of Web Services points out, web services add a new piece to the puzzle.
Businesses have a need for a standard vocabulary, a way to describe every day things in a consistent manner. And if the need to do so externally is powerful, the need to do so internally is essential. I was struck by this statement:
A couple of years ago Cisco called a halt to all new IT efforts and spent over eighteen months and $300 million to resolve exactly these kinds of dissimilarities within the company. If any Web services tools could have made this work cheap, fast, and "easy," don't you think Cisco would have used them?
I stumbled onto a problem of this kind today where an enterprising group has created a web service on top of a system we took over some months ago. Unfortunately, they duplicated the simple structure of the old system and didn't describe things in reusable fragments, which is a problem that we'll need to sort out quickly. Argg! I'm busy enough already.
Anyway...
In a collaborative system of multiple IdP's, where precision of meaning in representation of claims and assertions is paramount, our vocabulary is going to be very important. Should we be documenting this publicly somewhere (is it already happening?) Perhaps something dangling off Digital identity would be a good place to start collecting the information? I'm not sure (and I'm already confused going back and forth between wiki short cut systems).
Among the more mundane (but interesting to me) things I have on my list is a need to learn more about the Internet2 (and Shibboleth) usPerson and eduPerson definition efforts. These sounded just like LDAP schema's which are under pinnings of todays directory systems. It's the boring part of creating an identity meta-system and at this point a lot of work appears undone.
I can never seem to remember this and it's not immediately obvious in the perl CPAN module help, but the way to force reconfiguration of the settings is this:
o conf init
That'll make it easier to find next time around.
It's been a busy and illuminating few days here in San Francisco. After the closing session, Mir Islam and I got together for a few minutes before his trip down to San Jose and while we were discussing impressions from today and our next steps based on what we've learned, he mentioned that this was the most useful conference he's been to in several years. We've certainly got a lot of follow up items to address as we leave here.
The Hyatt Regency is a very nice hotel and I've quite enjoyed my stay. I had a view of the waterfront looking off toward Vallejo and while I've noticed articles questioning the usability of the building (specifically the elevators), I can understand why things were done this way. It certainly makes elevator rides more interesting and the view from various places around the hotel are quite visually intriguing.
Tonight I got to see the last part of the hotel...
I took a taxi over to meet Adam at his dorm room at 6:30 and once he arrived from class we walked down to the Apple store with the intention of adding some RAM to his TiBook. After fiddling around for a while it was determined that they no longer carried that item so we'll need to deal with it when he gets home next week (I can't believe his freshmen year is almost over). So what to do for dinner? I was going to leave it to him, but he didn't have any ideas. There are several restaurants in the Market Square area, and we've eaten there before on family trips to San Francisco. We got to talking about the Hyatt Regency and he'd never seen the inside, so we decided to walk down Market, see the hotel and if possible we'd eat at Equinox. He was suitably impressed by the ride up to my room (to drop off his bag) and walking around the rim. Then we got started playing around trying to get to the top. The trick as we learned is to use the elevators on either end, both of which seem to go up to Equinox. In the end, we wound up doing so from the atrium (lobby) level.
As soon as we got off the elevator, they asked if we had reservations (now I worry). No, sorry; might we be able to get a table anyway? The answer was yes and we were seated without a wait (I wasn't expecting that). The unique aspect is a nice view of the eastern side of the city and the bay in a rotating restaurant. Even though this was the haziest day this week (we've had wonderful weather, something I wasn't expecting after running into rain on the way to Burbank on Monday) it was still a marvelous view and we got to watch sunset from many angles while eating. Are there better views elsewhere? Certainly if you want to see the north side of the city and over the years I've been to a few but this was pretty neat and not subject to where you are seated. In 45 minutes, you will see everything.
After we ate, we came back down to my room where I loaned Adam a Firewire drive until he gets home (he's perpetually out of room) and then took him downstairs and packed him into a cab (Dad, I can walk... Whatever, get in, here's some money).
I think it was an ideal addition to a really good trip. Tomorrow I get to do the airport shuffle (nearly 6 hours door to door, kinda crazy since I can do that driving if the conditions are right).
Focus is good and the last couple of days 'soaking in it' have been immensely valuable.
I wrote a rather scathing rebuttal on Saturday to Marc Cantor's indictment of Digital ID World and subsequent decision that he needed to hang around the halls to participate in the ongoing conversation. I'm sorry in some respects that I thought better of it and put it away. I like Marc; he's deeply involved in many aspects of digital media (and as a result, identity) but I think he's wrong for a number of reasons. Creating new venues to continue the conversation about identity is good; it's a deep subject which should undergo continuous review and evaluation and customer viewpoints need to be constantly brought to the fore. Whining that the next step in the conversation should occur elsewhere is not very helpful (certainly not the week before it starts) and ignores certain realities.
I'm caught in the middle in many respects. Given the choice, our customers would like to just have things work and retain as much anonymity as possible. Would it be useful if we could generate FOAF, Drupal, LID or other lightweight IDs for them (and provide simple editing and control tools)? Seems that way to me. On the other hand, they're also going to want to do things with big online vendors, despite their use of Liberty, SAML, et al. Our customers are only going to care if we screw up and expose data they didn't approve or if we make the process overly difficult (a hard egg to crack). At the same time, I want to be my own identity authority where possible. I'm not convinced that we can't have what Doc would call DIY identity.
DIDW may have a history of being an enterprise conference. I don't know. Having never been before, I have nothing to compare against. Certainly, there are a lot of people here talking about corporate IdM and plenty of sessions to make them happy. That said, the recent sleep cycle on identity seems to be ending and a host of new digital identity related activity is going on. Technology is like that; massive frantic activity and a bit of stagnation as things coalesce. We're on an upswing now and the subject I had trouble getting people to talk about last year is this years buzz. I've had no problem finding sessions of interest and people I needed to talk to to get a better picture of the entire spectrum of digital identity. Outside of yesterdays identity gang meeting I found time to corner Johannes Ernst and work through the issues I believed could be a problem for us with LID, ambush Drummond Reed (and numerous others like Bill Washburn and Andy Dale) getting a get much better understanding of XRI/XDI, and tie Dick Hardt to a chair for nearly an hour to help clarify many of my misconceptions and add many things I'd missed about Sxip. We also spent some time with the PingID folks to get a better idea of where they're at and how that could fit into our bigger picture.
I came to focus on identity and it seems to be paying dividends. That the customer focused discussion on identity happened on Monday before the conference actually opened and I managed to wrangle an invite (thanks Doc!) was even better (some have said it's half the conference). Not being a conference trotter, I feel this was a really good choice for a week of my time. If we're to get to Dick's Identity 2.0 vision statement (a fifteen minute, 300+ slide presentation; I wish everyone could see the first five minutes or so of Id 1.0 recap), a lot of things are going to need to change including DIDW. Perhaps that's begun and as Kim cautions, we need to add to the momentum that's already been built.
I don't know if he really wants the attention but I've been enjoying reading Yet Another Small Town Moment, the weblog created by a friend who relocated to a truly fish out of water environment (a lifelong Angeleno moves to a small town in mid america).
He's still working at it, but I've been quite surprised to see how much of the humor I appreciated in person bubbles up through his observations. While he might consider it surreal (that's up to him to refute), I'm enjoying the alternate perspective on so many things.
There are some other changes happening, but I'll let him lead us through it...
If you've been wondering what those itty bitty signs on the south end of Erbes Road are all about, here's what I've pieced together thus far.
The city is finally moving forward with a long shelved plan to expand the southern portion of Erbes Road and it seems they'll also be expanding the number of lanes at the intersection on both sides of Hillcrest Boulevard. If you've ever encountered the 'rush hour' traffic on east or westbound Hillcrest or, to lesser extent, southbound Erbes Road, you know how fun this intersection can be. I've recently seen queue's over half a mile long on Hillcrest, waiting to turn north on Erbes (and wondered... what the heck are those people thinking?)
A community meeting to discuss the environmental report for the Erbes Road Improvement Project is scheduled for this Thursday (May 6th, 2005) at the Civic Arts Plaza.
Here's my copy of the documents from April 30 (they're a bit hard to find elsewhere).
Sophia Fischer contributed a pretty complete (if understated) overview for the Acorn: Improvement project for Erbes Road slowly makes progress. What's happened? Quite simply, the two lane 23 North, which worked reasonably well even a decade ago was overwhelmed by two factors: the completion of the 23 / 118 Freeway connection (the Simi Valley and northern San Fernando Valley conduit) and the ever growing local traffic. The expansion of 23 to three lanes in each direction won't happen any time soon (and even when it does, my experience tells me the speed on the interchanges will continue to plummet).
Eventually, a lot of traffic bailed from 101 using Ranchero Road and Hampshire Road, and for a while the alternative routes worked pretty well.
Nothing is static, certainly not traffic. The opinion that 'the freeway' will take care of it is about to be overcome on the last major section of two lane road in town. I'm not overjoyed, this is my part of town, yet I see the inevitability of it. I gripe occasionally because the traffic light at Erbes and Hillcrest seems to be attuned to some weird biorhythm all it's own, but I have come to appreciate living just outside a weird eddy of the past.
The next place for stop light angst is going to be the day that a light is added to Erbes and Sunset. It'll happen if I stick around long enough (I don't want to be here that long I think).
