Fractals of Change

Note to Newbie Jack

We’re here in London now, Jack; will introduce ourselves as soon as hospital rules allow. Strange as it’ll seem to you, your mother was once a baby, too. Here’s what I wrote about her when she was a newbie.

A few weeks ago my daughter Katy was born. She started out terribly; grey, streaked with blood, and with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Central Vermont Hospital took care of all that very well and now she is less the worse for wear than I am.

But she is helpless, incredibly helpless. It’s been a few years since I’ve had an infant to watch and I’d forgotten. She can’t hold her huge head up; she can’t use her hands; and her eyes discover the world piece by piece at random.

No other mammal has babies nearly as helpless as ours. Even blind puppies walk to their first nursing.  And the reflexive curling of Katy’s toes reminds me that, if she were a monkey, she’d already be able to hold onto a branch.

One theory is that the head is the problem. For better or for worse, humans have brains proportional1y far bigger than those of other species. The head built to contain this giant brain has run into an evolutionary trap. It’s almost too big to be born.

That is why humans have more trouble with childbirth than other species. And so, the theory goes, in order to be born at all, humans must be born prematurely. In other words, human babies are so helpless because they are still in an advanced state of fetal development. If they waited until they were as developed as other mammal babies, their heads would be too large for delivery.

I think there is another reason in the grand scheme of things why our babies are born with so much to learn.

The babies of other species come preprogrammed. They already have most basic motor skills. In general, the lower down the evolutionary ladder a species is, the more adult skills its babies have built in.

Our babies know how to nurse. Everything else they have to learn. It seems very inefficient that we have to learn to lift our heads, then learn to roll over, then creep, then walk. But I think this inefficiency serves a purpose.

While my daughter Katy is learning the simple task of making her hand touch what her eye sees, she will also be learning how to learn. As she tries and fails and tries again, her mind will learn how to retain experience. As her left hand learns what her right hand knows, her mind will learn to reason and extrapolate.

As Katy takes a year to learn the motor skills a monkey is born with, she will be preparing herself for the great task of mastering a spoken language. As she struggles pitifully to make a rattle work right, she will he learning to learn to read and write.

Above all, we are nature’s best learners. We have very dull eyes, puny teeth, a weak sense of smell, and we don’t hear very well. Our physical prowess is probably the laughingstock of the animal kingdom. But we can learn. We learn how to learn while we learn how to walk.

Welcome, Katy, to a genuine learning experience. And good luck.

And welcome, Jack, from Grandpa Bear and Grandma Mimi.

Jack is Here!

Jack Isaac Morris was born today, our first grandchild courtesy of daughter Kate and son-in-law Hugh. Three weeks early but over seven pounds, he, she, and he are all doing fine.

Mary and I are overjoyed and about to board the flite for London where he is granting his first audiences.

Metered Pricing – Is Sauce for the Goose Sauce for the Gander?

Reader and friend Aswath is a supporter of metered pricing by ISPs. We disagree on this and he commented, fairly enough, that I’m apparently contradicting myself when I praise the metered pricing at Amazon S3:

“I share your enthusiasm for S3. Indeed I have been using it for my application as well. I have been hoping that you will touch upon the metered pricing, since in other contexts you have expressed a preference for fixed pricing model. There are other storage providers who charge for only storage and nothing for bandwidth consumption. I surmise that these providers have modeled usage pattern and have included it in the storage price. But I understand S3 pricing model and feel it is more transparent than the bundled model. I am curious to know your thoughts.

“On a related point that ISPs, especially WISPs should use Amazon's pricing model. Then they do not have to worry about P2P and they do not have to place restrictions on which applications are permissible and which are not.”

Good question.

I do agree that it’s far better for ISPs to charge explicitly for usage than that to surreptitiously, or even openly, disadvantage or restrict certain services in their network. ISPs do have the right to make this kind of pricing decision (and some do); I just think that ISPs will both make their customers happier and make more money if they offer flat-rate all-you-can eat plans, perhaps in addition to metered plans which charge by the byte transferred.

My experience, which I’ve written about before, comes from my time as head of AT&T WorldNet Service where we popularized (but certainly didn’t invent) flat-rate pricing for dialup Internet access. Our experience was both that the flat rate attracted customers who may have been afraid to sign up for a metered plan AND that customers, on the average, paid MORE for flat-rate service than they would have paid if the meter had been running (we also offered a metered plan). Our conclusion was that they were willing to pay us a premium for taking the risk of “excess” usage and for the simplicity of a predictable bill whose detail they would never have to check.

Interestingly, when we introduced this plan, Dan Hesse, who is now head of Sprint, was my boss at AT&T. Without his support I never would have been allowed to do this sort of radical pricing even though I argued that local phone service had been priced at a flat rate for years.

Dan is apparently also still an advocate of flat consumer rates. I was overjoyed to see him, himself, in a TV commercial explaining that Sprint offers one flat rate for all voice, web-surfing, and data transfer on its mobile phones. He needs to change the game to succeed in a tough turn-around of Sprint. Flat rate is a game changer.

The argument against flat rate pricing is that there will be “abusers” meaning those who really do find a way to use scads of service. I would certainly agree that resale of a consumer service is an abuse. But what about becoming a volunteer hub for P2P file sharing?

Most of the time (because capacity is only limited during peak hours) it doesn’t matter whether there’s a lot of file sharing going on. In fact, moving files around off-peak can be considered a service to the network because it puts content closer to where people consume it and makes the network more valuable. At peak times networks may experience congestion. Networks certainly should force equal sharing when capacity is over-subscribed rather than targeting certain applications; especially when we don’t have a competitive broadband industry in the United States and have to worry about providers using traffic management as an excuse to handicap apps (like VoIP or video) which come from their competitors.

Networks may choose to do what Verizon Wireless has recently done, put a high upper limit which most users won’t come near on what was formerly an unlimited service and turn the meter on when you go over the threshold. Other networks slow down the data rate of those who exceed a certain usage. These aren’t evil strategies if they’re properly explained and advertised. But they might not make good marketing sense. Competition will help sort that out (I hope) but the movement of the wireless carriers to unlimited voice (and data for Sprint) is some indication of what the market wants.

So back to Aswath’s question: why do I like Amazon’s very metered pricing for S3 if I’m such a fan of flat rate pricing? It’s because S3 is NOT a consumer service; it’s a service which is designed for resale; a service which is built to be baked into other people’s services. I’m sure some users of S3 are tens of thousands of times bigger than other users. It’s a real advantage to us small users to buy exactly what we use – not what we think we’ll use but what we actually use – and not a bit more.

Those of us who use S3 as a backend resource for services that we sell to consumers benefit from paying for just what we use. We benefit again if we sell to consumers on a flat rate basis and both have an easier time signing them up and receive a premium for predictability and simplicity. 

Let the Market Regulate Investment Banks

In the recent credit meltdown, the Federal Reserve has made emergency financing available to investment banks which is normally reserved for commercial banks. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says, according to the New York Times, that there will need to be more “oversight” (meaning regulation) of the investment banks since they are getting protections which used to be reserved for their heavily regulated commercial brethren.

Investment “banks” are companies like Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers etc. Although they have to follow the law and all kinds of SEC regulations, they are allowed to keep many more secrets than commercial banks and do not have to be transparent about their assets. They are also not subject to the kind of proactive auditing and examination that commercial banks undergo. They are, by design, more freewheeling than commercial banks are allowed to be. Often that freedom is a good thing and has made possible creative (in the good sense) financing of growth. Sometimes that freedom is a bad thing and it lads to creative (in the bad sense) financing of dubious (as opposed to risky schemes) and the invention of incredibly elaborate “investment” vehicles with a suspicious resemblances to Ponzi schemes which yield more in fees to the bankers than yield to the participants – especially once they unwind (the schemes, that is; bankers never unwind).

Paulson is right that the investment banks shouldn’t be allowed the backstopping services of the Fed (like the $30 billion credit line JP Morgan gets to help it buy Bear Stearns) without getting regulated in the bargain. If they get public “investment”, the public gets to protect its investment. But, IMHO, the solution is don’t give them the public help in the first place.

The prospect of market failure should be the regulator of the investment banking market. No matter what the short term pain, the country would have been better off letting Bear Stearns fail than bailing it out – and enriching JP Morgan further in the bargain. Yes, other investment banks might then have failed as well. Stock prices probably would have plummeted in the short term. On the other hand, investment banks might have become more creative in working things out with the homeowners whose mortgages are underwater. Now the banks can take a tough line with the borrowers knowing that the Federal Reserve is behind them.

If we bail them out, we encourage irresponsible behavior so we then need to regulate. But regulation discourages risk taking – and we need risk taking. We actually need investment banks. Moreover, regulation of the 24 hour worldwide online market the investment banks operate in is impractical. Regulators would have to slow the flow in order to watch it which would simply mean a faster exodus of the financial community to more hospitable shores. Only the lazy who like bailouts and regulation will be left here.

The market’s a cruel but effective regulator. It’ll remove the foolish (and the unlucky) and allow the wise (and the lucky) to survive even bad times. The prospect of failure will lead to an appropriate degree of both risk-taking (because you’ve got to make money) and caution (because you’ve got to survive). Might even be that without the prospect of a Fed bailout the banks would reduce executive compensation or defer bonuses until the long term consequences of short-term profits are more clear.

The best way to assure that the credit crisis is not quickly resolved is to shield investors in both houses and mortgages (and lots of other risky stuff) from the consequences of their actions. The best way to assure that the economy does not become robust again is to increase both regulation and bailouts.

The best course for the economy is to let failure take its toll and clear the decks for further growth.

Google’s Gigabit Gambit

Want a gig (1000 megabits per second) of Internet access bandwidth? Google says you could have it by the end of next year “from Manhattan to rural North Dakota (sic, I think they meant Vermont)” if their proposal to the FCC is accepted forthwith according to CNET’s newsblog. Not only a gig but a mobile gig, accessible by cellphone or roaming computer – no fiber required. Sound too good to be true? – it isn’t, IMHO!

Engineering is not the problem (more below). Politics, entrenched interests, and bureaucratic inertia, however, make it unlikely this dream’ll come true as quickly as it ought to despite the fact that America could lead the world in broadband penetration and accessibility within two years if the FCC accedes to the request Google made yesterday to open up “whitespace” for use by broadband devices. Rural areas – most deprived of broadband service to day – would be the biggest beneficiaries; but urban America has plenty to gain as well. Google also has plenty to gain by FCC agreement – nothing wrong with that.

How’s this possible? In short, open spectrum. But I’ll explain.

A huge swath of frequencies is reserved for over the air use. Even after TV stations give up a relatively small amount of spectrum in February of next year by switching to all digital broadcast format, there will still be enough spectrum available for channels 2 through 51 in every market in the United States; there is also unused space between channels which modern technology makes safely usable. In rural areas, as much as 300Mhz of spectrum may be completely unused; even in rural areas there are unused swaths and the space between the channels can now safely be used thanks to modern technology. In the recently completed FCC auction, Verizon promised to pay over $4.7 BILLION dollars for just 22Mhz of spectrum so 300Mhz is a really big deal.

Although this whitespace is nominally reserved for television use, no one has paid for a license to use any of it. It’s fallow, as we say in Vermont. It’s time it was grazed.

Unlike the 22Mhz band which Verizon just bought, the whitespace is a patchwork. Different frequencies are available in different places. Radios, whether in cellphones or attached to computers, which use this spectrum have to either know where they are (trivial with GPS) or have some way to listen to see what frequencies are usable locally and be able to change their frequency as you drive down the road much as you change radio stations to adapt to local conditions. Mobile phones already do this within a narrow range of frequencies; wifi has much of this technology. Google is suggesting that only radios which have passed FCC licensing criteria for safe operation be allowed to operate.

Despite the fact that the radios will be licensed, the operators will not! A cellular operator has to get a license to use a specific frequency from the FCC; a WiFi operator does not. Google calls its proposal WiFi 2.0 for this reason. Google is proposing that these frequencies b made available for UNLICENSED use (albeit with licensed radios). Experience has taught us that much more signal will be crammed into a given swath of spectrum if the spectrum is unlicensed than if it is licensed. (BTW, some smart people disagree on this and point to real instances of wifi congestion. I think this is a consequence of the relatively tiny slivers of junk spectrum wifi shares with microwave and cordless phones and will not be a serious problem in the wide open whitespaces).

Moreover, innovation thrives in unlicensed spectrum. From Google’s letter to the FCC:

“In short, FCC rules should specify only what is allowed, not how that result is to be achieved, or by whom. Much like the Internet itself, the agency’s specifications should as much as possible enable “innovation without permission” (although with necessary technical constraints). For example, the Part 15 rules permitting WiFi were written years before the IEEE 802.11 technology was even contemplated, much less existed. If those rules had been contingent on the pre-existence of WiFi, one of the most successful and efficient uses of spectrum in the history of wireless communications likely never would have happened.”

Google is not asking for any special privilege. However, the availability of open spectrum would not only create a huge opportunity for their proposed Android phone design but also protect them from the threat of the established carriers finding a way to establish toll booths which divert revenue from Google’s coffers to those of the carriers. Because Google has such a large stake in making open spectrum a success, they’re offering help to those who will do the actual implementation:

“Google also would be willing to provide, at no cost to third parties, the technical support necessary to make these plans happen; this could include intellectual property and reference designs for underlying technologies, open geo-databases maintained by Google, and other supporting infrastructure.”

Why won’t this happen?

Remember Verizon just promised to pay $4.7 billion and change for the 22Mhz C block; how much is that 22Mhz worth if huge blocks of unlicensed spectrum with similar propagation characteristics become available around the country? Google made a pass at this spectrum and probably forced the Verizon bid up. Was this rope-a-dope?

Don’t feel to sorry for Verizon though; they cited the upcoming rulemaking on the whitespaces as a reason why the spectrum they bought at auction should be auctioned rather than released for unlicensed use.

Americans pay more for less Internet access bandwidth than people in most developed and many developing nations. These prices will plummet per megabit when over-the-air competition becomes available. Those who benefit from this pricing will not be happy to see the competition – and they have lobbyists.

Cellphone calling costs much more than the price of providing the service. Control of spectrum lets the major carriers keep these prices up. What happens if spectrum is open? There goes another rubber tree plant.

I’ll be speaking at David Isenberg’s always worthwhile F2C conference next Monday morning at 8:30AM. Even though it’s only the day before April Fool’s Day, I’ll be giving a history lesson from a 2018 perspective of how almost all spectrum got unlicensed. The Google proposal is a milestone in that “history”.

More on open spectrum:

Internet 2.0 is Open Spectrum

Backstory of Open Spectrum Epiphany

Spectrum Serendipity

Google’s Brilliant Proposal (this one wasn’t adopted)

Amazon S3 – Backstory for Nerds – Part 2

Note to non-nerds – back to English tomorrow; you may want to skip this one.

Here’s the problem: My broadbandwiki browser application does two things for users: it shows them what broadband access people around them are using and it enables them to add themselves to the map so that their information can be helpful to others. Clearly the data the users provide needs to be stored. However, only some of this data is meant to be visible to other users. Street addresses, for example, are used to generate latitude and longitude but are not meant to be publicly accessible even though they may later be used for engineering studies.

Controlling who has access to what data would be relatively straightforward if there were an application running on a server somewhere between the app running in the browser and the Amazon S3 servers where the data’s stored – but there is no such server application in this case. Nevertheless, the needed security CAN be maintained using available S3 tools.

Data on S3 is stored in buckets. The model is simple; you put objects (lumps of data) in buckets. Each object has exactly one key by which it can be retrieved from the bucket. Objects can also have reasonably elaborate headers.

You, the owner of the S3 buckets, get to decide who can read or write (or change the permissions) on a bucket by bucket basis. Each object also has an object control list (ACL) associated with it which it does NOT inherit from its bucket; the ACL is set when the object’s created and may be changed later by those who have permission to change it.

So I set up a bucket called broadbandwiki for my beta; anyone can read this bucket but only I can write to it or change its permissions. Reading the bucket, however, doesn’t mean reading the contents of the objects in the bucket (they have their own permissions). In practice, the right to read the bucket means the right to read the index of objects stored in the bucket which includes keys and creation dates for objects but does NOT include headers or payload.

Offline I used my secret key (which should never be transmitted) to generate very specific permissions to write a very specific type of object to this specific bucket. The permission restricts the access policy of created objects so it can’t be used either to create objects which are user accessible or which I can’t access. These encoded permissions signed with my secret key are safe to imbed in a browser page and to transmit.

The keys of the objects created and stored by the browser app include all the data which is supposed to be visible to ordinary users. The payload of the objects contain the data meant to be protected. When a user launches the browser, it reads the index of the broadbandwiki bucket (which anyone can read) and uses that to put pins on the map representing data supplied by prior users. A beneficial side effect is that there are usually a thousand index records returned per read of the directory. Much cheaper to get the data most users need out of the index than read each of a thousand records (because Amazon charges for GETs).

When users put their own pin in the map, the presigned permission is used to make sure this is only the kind of object we want here and that other users will not have access to this data.

Problem pretty much solved. The protected data – actually all the data – is retrieved by an administrative utility – whose user must know and input the secret key – but which never transmits that key. The administrative program converts the data to an XML file before downloading so it can be fed into nearly any analysis tool. Excel works fine.

An invaluable tool for anyone doing S3 development is a free Firefox addin called S3 Firefox Organizer. I did donate to the tip jar, though.

More on the broadbandwiki project is here.

Nerd tips on using AJAX GET, PUT, and DELETE with S3 are here.

Economics of S3 and possible implications are here.

And the code for this browser app is here.

Amazon S3 – Backstory for Nerds - Part 1

It’s practical to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) as the backend for a web application WITHOUT any intervening application server. I have the code to prove it and I’m sharing it. If you’re a nerd, read on otherwise you may want to skip this post

S3 clearly was designed to for use with an application server between browser and desktop applications and the actual data store. To Amazon’s credit, that server doesn’t have to be Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (although pricing somewhat favors this) . The Getting Started Guide, for example, gives examples only in PHP, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby and Python because they assume that you’ll be using one of those languages on a server. The implication is that you can’t do it in JavaScript/AJAX – but you can.

The Developers Guide also gives short shrift to JavaScript. It does explain that you can let “your users” upload certain data directly (bypassing your server) through HTML forms although it assumes that access keys will be delivered to the browser by a server just prior to upload for all non-trivial cases. There is a also a description of a way to prepackage a very specific authorized retrieval request so that the browser can get data directly from S3 – but, again, the assumption is that the browser first asks “mother may I?” and receives a specific and time-limited key from the server before making an XMLHttpRequest GET.

My application – broadbandwiki – lets users put pins on a map in order to indicate what type of Internet access they have available at their locations. S3 is the place that the locations, access types, and access providers are remembered. Google’s examples assume that, if you want to save the locations you gather with an application like this, you’ll have a LAMP stack operating on a server somewhere. They give good examples of the PHP and mySQL you’d use to do this.

My problems were both that I don’t have a server on which to run said LAMP stack and I would have to learn a lot about Linux, Apache, mySQL, and PHP. The first problem could easily be solved by any of a number of hosting services including EC2; but all the learning seemed a lot to wade into when I just wanted to store a little data and have access to it later. Probably ended up being harder to get S3 to do what I wanted than if I’d just swallowed my medicine and learned the server-side stuff but I got stubborn.

The good news is that, once you know the tricks, this is easy.

Here’s the main thing you need to know even though the documentation doesn’t say it. XMLHttpRequest works for not only GET but also PUT and DELETE (That’s all I’ve tested). I didn’t need PUT and DELETE in the user application but I did need them in the batch-like administrator application. Note that the administrator application does all sorts of privileged stuff but it can still be run safely in a browser because the Amazon Secret ID is supplied by the administrator at run time. It is used to develop a time-limited hash key on the administrator’s computer but the secret key itself is NEVER transmitted.

Note that XMLHttpRequest is usually limited to making requests from the same domain as the web page was served from and this is no exception. The solution is to host the web page on your Amazon S3 account (it’s got to live somewhere, anyway) so that there is no cross-domain violation. However, the page hosted on Amazon can be in a frame of a page hosted elsewhere if that’s important to the look and feel of what you’re doing.

Sample code for the administrator app (which borrows liberally from every other bit of sample code I could find) is here. It won’t run for you until you have an Amazon S3 account and fix the places where I bound the name of my own bucket on S3 in the code but it is meant to provide an example of how to use XMLHttpRequests with S3. It is NOT a sample of clean, well-documented  code, however; it’s a work in progress. It also needs more functionality and more error checking so I will post later versions as I clean it up.

Next nerd post on this subject will be on how to let browser users write data, some of which is meant to be seen by other browser users and some of which isn’t – all without a server of your own.

Once I have done some cleaning up and packaging, I’ll also post the user application although all you good hackers know you can already get it just by downloading it from its web address or viewing source in a browser.

Amazon S3 – Very Cheap Storage in the Sky

When I was building the Vermont Telecom Authority’s broadbandwiki web page, I had a problem: where do I store the information that users provide? Obviously, the data has to be somewhere that is accessible from anywhere on the web; it has to be reasonably secure against accidental or malicious destruction; and there has to be enough space and Internet connectivity to that space available for an unknown amount of use. The answer turned out be a Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Because Amazon is sharing its buying power with you, the storage is very, very cheap. My bill for the couple of weeks I was testing on it (granted, small volumes) was $.04 – and I suspect there is some rounding up to the nearest penny in that.

With a little more packaging by Amazon and a lot more promotion, there could be a whole wave of Internet innovation enabled by the availability of S3. Note to developers: I did not use any application server; all the communication is directly between the web pages of the application and S3. There’s no PHP; no LAMP stack, no use of Amazon EC2. The web pages themselves are hosted on S3. More in a subsequent howto post.

When you use S3 your data is stored on Amazon’s servers. In fact it’s replicated (copied) to a number of different Amazon servers to make it both more secure and more accessible. You pay for the amount of data you actually store and the amount of access there is to that data. You DO NOT reserve any amount of storage or access in advance so your costs are not affected by the fact that you don’t know in advance the quantity of resources you’re going to need or what your usage is going to be. If you should be so lucky as to have a huge spike of interest, it’s unlikely that Amazon’s servers will notice the difference.

One alternative to using Amazon would have been to buy a server, put it under my desk, and make it accessible through my Internet access. That would have been at least a thousand dollars up front, more as more capacity is needed, and would not have provided either redundancy or reliability. Moreover, I would have had to do some additional programming to get my server to talk to the browser application.

More realistic would have been to have my server hosted at any one of a number of hosting services or to rent access to a server at a hosting service. Still, I would have had to make a minimum volume commitment and would be restricted to using the amount of capacity – both storage and bandwidth – that I reserved. Relatively easy to set up (I hear) but almost certainly more expensive and more limited than Amazon. This is, however, the way most new Web applications are launched.

LocalReplay.com, a company in which I’ve invested, has its very professional and very large data store including video clips hosted on S3. They’ve been as happy with it as I am. They’ve experience less outages than any other startup service I’ve been involved with. Moreover, when traffic is low between sports seasons, their costs go down. When a tourney gets huge attention, costs are up some but the capacity is there.

In the future, I’ll want to know why any web application company I advise or invest in DOESN’T use S3 (or a competitor should they emerge). If providing storage is NOT a key talent of a company and a key differentiator, it’s hard to see why it would want to compete with Amazon. No Amazon brand at all needs to show through, just quality and price. There’s even a mechanism for having Amazon bill your customers on your behalf if that’s appropriate.

Even companies which are not in the web business but use the web as part of their business should think about S3 as an alternative to both self-hosting and traditional hosting services. Here are the rates for storage including access in the US (Europe slightly higher).

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

BroadbandWiki Beta Begins

Please help test the broadbandwiki project at http://s3.amazonaws.com/broadbandwiki/broadbandwiki.html. There’s no doubt it has bugs and it can certainly be improved. Bug reports and suggestions as comments on this post would be great.

The purpose of the broadbandwiki project, which was built with the GoogleMaps API and stores its database on Amazon’s S3 Service, is to enable Vermonters to help Vermont reach its goal of becoming the first e-state in the nation with both cellular coverage and usable broadband everywhere – which means everywhere – in the State by the end of 2010. However, in the spirit of open source and open competition, I’m happy to make the application available to any state or organization with a similar mission. In fact, I’ll make the code openly available, period, very soon. One problem may be to avoid too many databases soliciting the same information and leading to fragmentation.

The concept of the application is simple. You enter your address, type of Internet access, and provider. The app puts a pin, which is color coded to show your access type, on a map. Once there are enough pins (as there already are in Stowe, Vermont), they are immediately useful for seeing what type of access is available in a neighborhood. They also graphically illustrate where lack of access is a problem for residents and an opportunity for a provider.

Like many Web applications, this database is not really useful until it contains a critical mass of data – at least on a location by location basis. People can – and I hope will – go directly to the site and place their pin. The plan is to have this incorporated soon in the site of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority. It can also be imbedded in or linked to from the sites of the many towns which are taking an active role in providing for their broadband future. But the best way to get this populated will be for other towns to do what Stowe did while we were testing – set up a table at an event where a lot of people come together and get the people to pin their locations on the spot. After one day of work, Stowe’s part of the map reached critical mass.

If you live in Vermont, entries you make in the map are “live” and will be immediately useful. If you don’t live in Vermont, your entry will appear on the map while you are looking at it but you’ll be warned that it’s not really being stored in the database. Either way, I’d appreciate your help both in supplying the data and testing the application.

Thanks.

Top 'o the Mornin' from the Top o' the Hill

Guess which one of us is Irish.