Archive for May 2010


Getting Quotes and Comments Right

Poor decisions in language design are tough to hide because fixing them is akin to changing the API of your library. You can hide all kinds of sins below the covers, but errors in the syntax and semantics can only be fixed by confessing those sins to the world. Consider this a confession. One of the niggling little details of Kynetx Rule Language has been comment treatment. The parser we user, Parse::RecDescent, does not include a lexer--tokens are specified as regular expressions in productions. That works fine for everything but comments. Because there's no lexer, you can't flag a
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Starting a High Tech Business: The Dark Side of Using a PEO

I'm starting a new business called Kynetx. As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the twenty-third installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way---if so, please let me know! At Kynetx we use a professional employee organization (PEO) to reduce the overhead we have with managing all the details surrounding having employees. The way it works is that your employees officially work for the PEO and you "lease" them back. This works very well
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Forms, Events, and Dialoging in KRL

As part of the push for Impact, I released a preview functionality of using KRL with Web forms and demonstrated it at the conference. The ability to interact with forms is built on KRL's new event capabilities. In my previous blog post on this, I hinted at primitive events beyond pageview, but didn't go into much detail. In this blog post, I introduce three new primitive events in the web event domain: change, click, and submit. The change event is based on the change event that most browers support. The event fires whenever a form element changes. You set
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The Future of Internet Identity: Data Access and Modeling

In my previous blog post, wrapping up IIW X and discussing what wasn't discussed, I talked about what was missing at IIW: discussions about authentication. What was hot at IIW were discussions about authorization and personal data. OAuth, UMA, and PDX talks were happening in every corner this time and these topics (with data access and modeling as their unifying theme) will be a major area of focus as IIW continues. Back in the dark days of the Web, if you wanted access to data in your account in someone's system via an API, you had to pass along
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IIW Wrap-Up: Moving Past Login...Sort Of

The 10th iteration of the Internet Identity Workshop wrapped up yesterday in Mountain View, CA. Since Kaliya, Doc, and I started IIW in 2005, we've always wondered when (or if) there would be a "big bang" when internet identity just took off. If this IIW wasn't the big bang, it was certainly a great indication that we're headed toward one. There were about 240 people at IIW this time, 80 more than the highest past attendance. There were companies represented that you'd not think of as "early adopters" in internet identity. And the discussion has finally, mostly moved on
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Switch to XMission

You might remember that I am lucky enough to live within the boundaries, of Utah FTTH project, UTOPIA. UTOPIA is a wholesale service, so you don't buy connectivity from them, you buy it from one of several retail providers on the network. Since I first signed up in 2007 I've been using MStar, a service from Prime Time Communications. They were pretty good at first, but recently I've had lots of short duration network outages (5-10 minutes each). I decided it was time for a change. I've been a big fan of Pete Ashdown's company XMission
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What's Facebook Thinking?

Image via CrunchBase Jesse Stay knows more about social networking and Facebook than anyone else I know. And I'm fortunate that he's a friend and lives close by. So this week Scott and I sat down with him to record a Technometria podcast on Facebook's latest moves. We talked about the recent changes and issues with Facebook and other networking sites and discussed the relevance of Twitter, data availability, and privacy.
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