I'm giving a lecture on Cloud Computing

This post is basically just to try out embedding a google wave post in a blog post :) There is some news however.

I am giving a lecture to a Masters of IT class at Monash. This wave is the place where I am gathering information about what I will present. I will also provide access to the students during the class, if they wish to participate or continue the discussion at a later date.

Date and Time: Friday 4th June 2010,
Location: Rooom H125, Monash University, Caulfield Campus

EDIT: Hmmm, it seems that Disqus, the service I use for managing comments on this site, includes the script that is used to view google wave. This means that there will be an unfortunate doubling of the content below.

Google Reader also strips off the google wave component, which makes sense considering the content is added by javascript. We wouldn't want nasty javascript content sneaking out there into reader land, would we?

Good to know.

Distributed social networking

With Facebook's recent stumbles in online privacy, a lot of people are now calling for distribtued information sharing systems, which people can use to interoperate between different servers, different providers, or run your own if you so choose. The Diaspora project has been started by a bunch of grad students to do exactly that, and it looks like they've gone viral.  At the time of writing, they had raised over $160,000, when all they were looking for is $10,000.  Not bad for a first round of funding, especially considering all they've done so far is produce a video.

After talking about this at the pub on friday (the pub is where I do most of my best theorising :)), a friend suggested that I look at the Friend of a Friend Project. He suggested that distributed social networking has been around for ages.  Unfortunately, foaf does not deal properly with security or webs of trust, so I feel that it is useless for what most people would want.

There's no technical impediment to stop distributed social networking from working.  In the end, it would be a much more secure, robust and scalable solution.  As we've seen a number of times, Twitter sometimes struggles with stability and when it goes down, all of Twitter goes down.  These are the original principles upon which the Internet was founded.  The problem is that modern, slick systems take a lot of resources to put together.  Many people and companies don't view the internet as a way of speaking together in an interoperable fashion any more; they want to make money which means not being interoperable.   Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook provide these services so that they can make money of the information we give them.  We make a choice to trade our privacy for the service that we are provided.

I wish the Diaspora guys good luck.  The biggest hurdle they will face is getting the masses to care.  In order to get enough take up of their solution, they will need to either convince your average user to host their own server, or find companies that are willing to host the service but not get access to any of the data. I can't think of any big company that would want to do that.   There's nothing in it for them if they can't mine all of your data.  Most ISPs will host email for you, but they do it as a method of lock in.  once you're on me@localisp.com, it provides a reason to stay with that ISP rather than taking your email with you.  Besides, email was well entrenched before the rise of the ISP.  Every ISP had to provide email. It was just expected.  There's no reason to start hosting a social networking server unless everyone else does, which means you've got a chicken and egg problem.

Its something I've been thinking about a lot this weekend.  How do we make the general populace care enough about their personal data to protect it?  I don't know the answer.

Easy Exchange Email Extraction

Okay, that should be forwarding, but I wanted some alliteration :)

Some time ago, I posted a very technical approach to forwarding email properly using Microsoft Exchange, which is useful if you work at an organisation that uses it. At the time, I was aware that the steps involved were to technical for some people, so I didn't really expect too many people to take it up.

Some colleagues at work expressed some interest in using themselves, but didn't want to go to the effort of setting up their own man-in-the-middle server to fix the emails. To combat this, and to make it easy enough for anyone to set up email forwarding for exchange, I updated my forwarder to work for any email address. I now present this work to the public, in the form of the Crimson Cactus Exchange Redirector. If you would like to perform exchange redirection easily, this might be of some use to you.

In fact, I set this up quite some time ago, but I've been too frightened to publicise it until now because I was concerned that it might become a source of spam or too much traffic on my web server. I've finally gotten up enough courage to try it out now, but please consider it a beta service. It may have to be turned of at short notice if it is abused.

Please give me your feedback if you find this service useful.

Bruce.

Presentation

I'm presenting a session at EJA tomorrow, entitled "Choose Your Cloud". I'll be comparing the different cloud vendors, with a particular focus on Google App Engine.

As an experiment, I've done my presentation in Prezi. I'm not sure if its cool or distracting. I'll check with my audience tomorrow to find out :)

Choose your Cloud on Prezi

How predictable are you?

Ars Technica has posted about research that has been conducted about prediction your location, based upon data gathered from mobile phone towers.  The research shows that it is possible to predict where you will be at any given time with 93% accuracy, even before additional information such as calendars is taken into consideration.  That is spectacularly good, and just goes to show how good the information that is being gathered by our gadgets really is.  What this article makes me think about is how well adaptive user interfaces, once provided with the appropriate data, will be.  I want it... now.

How I would design a forms workflow system for google wave

Yesterday, I posted a quick reply to a post on the google wave developer blog about creating a form based workflow system for google wave.  I was quite busy at the time and i think in my haste I may have been a bit brusque.    By way of making amends, here is how I would set up such a system.

A forms workflow engine needs a number of components in order to operate correctly.  In particular:

1. A way of specifying relationships between people.  The Manager-Employee relationship is probably the most important here, but there are others too (like whom is in the HR department).
2. A way of specifying what information is needed in the form.  What fields, how they are validated, that sort of thing.  Calculated fields would be important here.
3. A way of specifying the workflow for the form, and working out which relationships to use and which form to use in that workflow.
4. A way for a participant in a group to select which form he wants to fill in.  A particular person may be engaged in multiple organisations, so having a single form library to choose from isn't enough

All of this could be managed in Google Wave, but it would not be trivial.  If set up correctly, it could work quite smoothly however.  First, we need a bot that performs multiple functions, or multiple bots that co-operate to provide the functions listed above.  I think it would be more understandable for users to just have one bot, so lets use that model.  For the purposes of this discussion, I'll call it FormBot.

Next, we need a way of creating the models that are specified above.  An operator would create a wave, tag it with its function (so that the bot can tell what purpose the wave serves) and then adds FormBot to the wave.  FormBot adds a gadget to the wave which allows the operator to edit the data.

For the relationship diagram, the gadget/bot combo would be able to work out which users they were dealing with by looking at the participants of the wave.  This effectively becomes your personnel database, in lieu of having it hooked up to an LDAP server.  The gadget would then allow the operator to drop people into relationships.  The robot would detect any changes, and then suck up the information into its own database (this bit is quite important, as it is how the bot, when processing an instance of a form, will be able to find the information in needs).

The Form & Workflow models are linked together in a one-one relationship, so they can be added on another wave, this time tagged with workflowmodel.  There would be a couple of gadgets to allow the models to be edited, which are then sucked into the database again.

So finally, how does the bot process an instance of a workflow form?  A user would have an extension installed on his client which adds an entry to the "new wave" menu which would say "New Form".  This would create a new wave and add FormBot.  FormBot would check its database to see what Form Waves it has which are linked to relationship models with the user as a participant.  It would then present these as a list to the user to allow him to choose which form he wanted to fill in.  The Bot would then create the form and allow the user to edit it and progress through the workflow.  

In summary, what we've done here is create a couple of setting waves that the bot uses to configure the application, and to allow it to provide different form libraries to different groups of people.  I think its quite elegant and would work really well.  There'd be a lot of work to get it implemented though.  The gadgets to allow the editing of the models would be the key bit.  I'd love to do it but I doubt I'll find enough time to do it myself.  I did create a proof of technology some time ago, but it wasn't configurable, nor did it hook up to a proper user database.

Google wants a workflow engine/robot for wave too.

Google just posted on their Wave Developer Blog that their "wishlist" would have on it a way to process document workflow using google wave.  This reminds me of a post I wrote a while back on what google wave could be used for.  I did a proof of concept, but taking the concept to production would take too much effort for one guy in his spare time.  Probably the biggest barrier is integrating with HR systems.  How does the system plug into your corporate HR system to work out who your manager is when you post?

Either way, its good to see that other people see the same value in wave that I do.