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Jon Udell

Biography

Jon Udell is lead analyst for the InfoWorld Test Center. He is the author of "Practical Internet Groupware" published in 1999 by O'Reilly and an advisor to O'Reilly's Safari Tech Books Online.

Articles

Blog

Jon's blog posts are hosted at:
http://blog.jonudell.net/

iCalendar validation issue #3: Quoted-printable vs HTML

January 06 2009

Next up in my series of iCalendar validation examples: The Frost Free Library feed. It fails in three of the four parsers I tried here, and should have failed in all. It begins like so: BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 X-WR-CALNAME:Frost Free Library | January 06, 2009 - February 05, 2009 PRODID:-//strange bird labs//Drupal iCal API//EN BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20090106T203000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20090106T203000Z SUMMARY;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:Library… read more

iCalendar validation issues #1 and #2: blank lines, PRODID and VERSION

January 05 2009

Sam Ruby offers the following advice to those of us who would like to improve the interoperability of iCalendar feeds: Identifying real issues that prevent real feeds from being consumed by real consumers and describing the issue in terms that makes sense to the producer is what most would call… read more

A conversation with Jeff Jonas about connecting dots

January 05 2009

On this week’s Interviews with Innovators show I spoke with Jeff Jonas whose work (and narration of that work on his blog) first captured my interest in 2007. If you follow Jeff you’ll know what he means when he uses phrases like perpetual analytics, non-obvious relationship awareness, semantic reconciliation, sequence… read more

Feed validation revisited: The parallel universe of iCalendar feeds

January 02 2009

If you were tuned into the blogosphere back in 2001, you’ll recall lots of chatter about RSS feed validation. RSS came in multiple flavors. Anyone could whip up a feed purporting to be in one or another of those formats, and many of us did. There were all kinds of… read more

Visible Workings (redux)

December 30 2008

For me, one of the 2008’s most important (but least remarked-upon) ideas was spelled out in this post which details how Ward Cunningham implemented Brian Marick’s notion of Visible Workings. The idea, briefly, is that businesses can wear (non-confidential aspects of) their business logic on their sleeves, observable to all.… read more

Databasing trusted feeds with del.icio.us

December 30 2008

In my last entry, I sketched a strategy for maintaining lists of the Eventful and Flickr accounts that I consider trusted sources for the elmcity.info event and photo streams. I didn’t spell out exactly how I plan to maintain those lists, in the Azure rewrite of the service that I’m… read more

Lightweight event syndication with trusted feeds

December 24 2008

If you check the elmcity.info events page for March 7, 2008 you’ll see that Beau Bristow is performing at Keene State College at 8PM. The Eventful item that has syndicated to the events page doesn’t say anything else. There’s no link to beaubristow.com, though it’s easy enough to find. And… read more

Azure calendar aggregator: Part 1

December 22 2008

For about a week now, I’ve been running a service in the Azure cloud that aggregates calendar events from Eventful.com and from a diverse set of iCalendar feeds. As I mentioned last month, my aim is to recreate and then extend my experimental elmcity.info community information hub, while exploring and… read more

My rationalization for buying a Wii Balance Board

December 20 2008

This week’s ITConversations show features a cameo appearance by my wife Luann, who came home a couple of weeks ago raving about the Wii Balance Board that she’d been using in physical therapy. I talked with Luann about how her therapists, Anna Domyancic and Darren Gerber, are using the Balance… read more

A recipe for industrial transformation

December 12 2008

When Tom Raftery pointed me to this gloomy assessment I had to go back and remind myself of what I found hopeful in Saul Griffith’s extraordinary energy talk at ETech. Saul concedes a 2-degree-C rise in temperature by 2033. The question is what it will take to hold the line.… read more

Two IronPythonic spreadsheets

December 09 2008

I should get a life, I know, but I can’t help myself, one of my favorite pastimes is figuring out new ways to wrangle information. One of the reasons that IronPython had me at hello is that, my fondness for the Python programming language notwithstanding, IronPython sits in an interesting… read more

Wiring the web (redux)

December 04 2008

Information technologists often recite David Wheeler’s famous aphorism: Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. Often, though, they omit the corollary: But that usually will create another problem. Those problems used to plague only IT folk. But now we’re all involved. Effective social information… read more

Mind, hands, and heart: John Leeke on Internet video for sharing knowledge about historic home preservation

December 01 2008

This week’s ITConversations show suffered a tragic glitch that rendered the audio unusable, but I was able to transcribe it as text. My guest is John Leeke, a carpenter who takes care of old buildings and shares his knowledge of the tools and best practices involved in doing that. His… read more

IronPython/Azure status report

November 25 2008

As I mentioned here, I’m exploring the viability of Python as a way of programming the newly-announced Microsoft cloud platform, Azure. Partly that’s because I love Python, but mainly it’s because I believe that the culture surrounding Python and other open source dynamic languages can fruitfully cross-pollinate with the culture… read more

Carl Hewitt on cloud computing, scalable semantics, and Wikipedia

November 24 2008

It was my great privilege to interview Carl Hewitt for this week’s Innovators show. He is principally known for work dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he helped lay the foundations for a declarative, message-oriented model of computation. Then, and for decades thereafter, the virtues of… read more
Jon Udell