Archive for Feb 2010


HB150 Gives Too Great a Power to State

Utah House Bill 150 is a bad bill that will give government too much power to invade your privacy without a warrant. The bill has passed the house and it now awaiting action in the Senate. Read this post, read the bill, and then take a minute to contact your senator and express your hope that they will vote against it. If you don't know who your senator is, you can find out here. HB150 would allow law enforcement agencies in Utah to use an "administrative subpoena" to ask for the records of people suspected of
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Using Social Media Badly: Novatel as a Case Study

Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr I'm a pretty happy MiFi owner, but I've had a problem with my battery and would like to buy a new one. They're not easy to find, so I was plesantly surprised to find that Novatel (the maker of the MiFi) had a Twitter account: @MyLifeMyWayMiFi. I followed and when I saw some activity, replied to @MyLifeMyWayMiFi asking where spare batteries could be purchased. Nothing. I tried a few more time when I saw activity and have never received any kind of reply. It's clear that Novatel is using it's Twitter account
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KRL Supports International Characters

One of the things we often get asked at Kynetx by partners is whether or not KRL will support international characters. The answer is "yes" as shown below: This support extends to reading international characters from data feeds and operations on strings.
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Beyond Aesthetics

This week's Technometria podcast is with designer Thomas Petersen on the topic of data overload and design. Late last year he wrote a blog post called Slaves of the Feed that talked about a problem almost all of us face: too much information. It was the start, rather than the end, of a conversation and so seemed a good jumping off spot for a podcast. Thomas has a designer's take on the problem and we ended up talking about design in a more general sense. I enjoyed it.
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Jon Udell to Speak at Spring Kynetx Impact Conference

I'm excited to announce that Jon Udell will be speaking at Kynetx Impact in April. I've known Jon for years--we met though blogging while I was CIO for Utah. He's the perfect person to keynote Impact because he's first and foremost a developer who understands the core nature of the Web. Jon's topic will be (loosely) "why the decentralized architecture of the Web matters." That's a great topic for Impact because what we're trying to help developers do is create applications that leverage that decentralzied architecture rather than trying to figure out ways to get what
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CTO Breakfast on Thursday

This Thursday is the CTO breakfast. We'll start at 8am in the Novell cafeteria. See the link for maps and calendars. I hope you can join us. The CTO Breakfast is open to anyone interested in high-tech businesses and products. It is a free-form discussion of topic. If you've got something that you're interested in, come prepared to talk about it. Future CTO Breakfast times can be found on the CTO Breakfast Google calendar. The CTO breakfast for March will be help on March 26th in conjunction with Podcamp SLC. Details to come.
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Build 424: Functions and Array Operators

The latest build of the Kynetx Rule Language (KRL) provides a significant upgrade in capability with the addition of functions. We've also added some new array operators that take advantage of functions to make using arrays easier. KRL supports functions as first-class objects in the expression language. KRL supports only anonymous functions, but they can be given names by binding them to a variable in a declaration. Here's an example: pre { add5 = function(x) { x + 5 }; } Functions are evaluated statically (e.g. the environment they are defined in, not the environment they are executed in
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Redirectionless OAuth Credentials Exchange

Image via CrunchBase Am I missing something here? Twitter is working with select partners to test what is variously being called OAuth delegation or browserless OAuth credentials exchange method (not sure why browserless since it's not about the browser, it's about the redirection). The bottom line is that in an effort to be more user friendly, this removes the redirection to the Twitter site where you authoirize access by letting the third-party site (the site being delegated to) collect and then pass along the user's username and password to get the OAuth credentials. Abraham Williams captured the POST headers
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Subscription Models are Chic

Image via CrunchBase A recent blog post by Dave McClure, the investor in charge of the Founders Fund seed investment program makes the assertion that "subscription models are the new black" and we've lost a decade of innovation by people living off the table scraps of Google's $10B pay-per-click ad system. (Warning: the blog post is pretty raw.) In a seeming non-sequiter, he moves on to talking about passwords. But pay attention, because what he's really doing is talking about friction in subscription models and the friction that they inpose. I think it's interesting that the iPhone app store,
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