Brother Jason’s new company Acesis decloaks their pilot program in Electronic Health Record startup.  Attacking the problem at it’s source - making the process of data capture better than paper, rather than pumping up the long-term benefits of electronic data, which are already well known but haven’t had any appreciable impact on physician behavior.

First public reactions are quite positive.  Look at other news reports too.

Wish them rapid success!

Suffering for almost 10 years at a max speed of 112K is over!  I’ve been trying to get broadband wireless service from the local provider (Newcastle Broadband) for a couple of years, but depsite repeated surveys and exploring relays and so forth, they were never able to complete a proposal to get service to the house (the barn gets great signal!).

Last fall Coy and I played with some wireless technology ourselves after completing the solar array installation.  At last we found a combination that worked - a 24" dish at home and a cantenna at the barn (two dishes didn’t work well - perhaps because of reflections off of the metal-clad side of the barn?

Then it took a couple of months of phone calls, web requests, and so forth before I reached the company CEO and was able to schedule an installation.  We mounted a 20′ pole to the barn to clear the trees and allow them some more room to grow.

Coming out of the Motorola Canopy reciever, I go directly into a Linksys 54Mb Access Point hooked up to the cantenna.  At home the dish hooks up into another Linksys 11Mb Access Point I’ve had for years.  That one gets set to "Access Point Receiver" mode and the output of that goes inside to my Linksys 54Mb Router/Hub/Access point.

I still have one bit of trouble - though the Canopy has DHCP, and my access points can get an IP address easily, my laptop doesn’t seem to get one very well.  That means I still have to have a router in the mix - which prevents me from getting directly to the Canopy’s web admin console unless I drive up to the barn.

I got one of the cheaper plans - 600Kb down, 300Kb up, but if that isn’t sufficient I can simply phone up and they’ll dial me up to 1.5Mb. 

Five times faster - one third the cost.  I’m a happy camper so far!

I find this kind of thing rather amusing.  Makes me sound far more important than I am…

• Microsoft XML Expert Joins Open-Source Middleware Firm

Yes, that’s where I’m landing.  I’ve known and admired Sanjiva since early in the XSL Working Group, and his year-old startup WSO2 is sure to be a rewarding place to work.  WSO2 is developing products around the Axis2 open-source Web Service Stack, and while Axis2 itself is open source, WSO2 plans to provide support and service to corporations making Axis2 a critical part of their infrastructure.  It’s a model that has worked well for MySQL and Red Hat.

My title is Director of Architecture, Mashup Technologies, and I’ll be working on ways to make the consumption of Web Services as trivial as possible, and the deployment of Web Services just as simple.  This is a perfect overlap for me - I’ve been working on Web Services, especially the Enterprise-level, back-office, strongly-typed variety for a long time, but my background and affinities are with the script-friendly, quick-and-easy, dynamically-typed web hackers.  If I’m successful, Web Services will become a more important part of the grass-roots Web toolbox.

Working at WSO2 will in some ways be completely different than working at Microsoft:

• Open Source Software versus Commercial Software (I know commercial isn’t quite right, as there is commerce in Open Source, but calling it Closed Source or Proprietary Software has a negative connotation that I don’t think is justified.  Neither model is inherently bad, they are just different.  In any case I’m looking forward to understanding the Open Source business and development models better.)
• Diplomacy versus Design (While I’ll continue to work on standards, the majority of my time will be devoted to designing new ways to make Web Services accessible to the grass-roots of Web developers.)
• Unstructured versus Bureaucratic (An organization the size of Microsoft requires a level of rigor, process, fixed roles, and yes even bureaucracy that I won’t miss all that much.  You can often get more done faster flying by the seat of your pants.  And you can have more fun doing it.)
• Time zones (I’ll continue to work at home in Auburn, but I’ll no longer be in the same time zone as the main office.  In fact, I’ll be 11 1/2 hours off.  That’s the only part of the new job that scares me!)

And in other ways it’ll be just the same:

• Web Services (I’ll be building on my recent experience rather than taking up something completely new like lion taming.)
• WS Description Working Group (I’ll continue to co-chair the WG, and in fact hope to be even more involved in proving implementation experience to move the specs out of Candidate Recommendation stage.)
• International travel (While I hope to reduce my travel somewhat, I still look forward to meeting my colleagues in exotic locations.  Now Sri Lanka will be on my repeat destination list!)

I’m very excited about this move, and it feels like it’s happening at just the right time for me.  Well, a few weeks later than I’d hoped, but now at last I’ve cleared the road and am ready to hit the gas.  Starting on Monday when I leave for the Apache conference in Austin.  If you’re in the area, let’s do tea!

Well, I can’t believe it’s been almost a decade since I joined Microsoft in May 1997.  I thought when I joined that I’d be lucky to last the 4 years of my initial stock option vesting.  Here I am well past that (and without the golden nose ring of steadily increasing stock values) and just now finding the fields irresistibly greener elsewhere.  As of tonight, I’ve turned in my badge, though it will probably be quite a while before I don’t feel part of the family.

It’s amazing how much software has changed in that decade.  Remember in 1997 Windows ‘95 was just getting traction as a usable GUI OS?  With rough parity with Mac OS at last, the final knell for DOS applications sounded and the GUI was ubiquitous.  Desktop publishing was still one of the killer apps, and Netscape was still the revolutionary darling of the stock market.  Then think about where we’re at today and the amazing new capabilities for Internet applications, rich yet connected clients, media everywhere every time, real-time communication and collaboration, the device ecosystem, unsurpassed processing power devoted solely to the user interface, video and computer games surpassing movies in gross revenue, Internet advertising profits surpassing other channels - I could go on and on - and 10 years seems like an eternity in software development.  Microsoft clearly has been central in many aspects of that continuing revolution.

Contrast that exponential pace to the glacial pace of standardization efforts, where I’ve focused for several years.  Back in 1997 XML was just becoming a standard, and since then we’ve slowly fleshed out XML-related technologies pretty well, with technologies to manipulate, display, and message XML.  Each of these fairly simple ideas was years in the conception, community-building, and standardization process.  WSDL alone has been under standardization for 5 years, not even counting the original development time for WSDL 1.1, and completion (let alone success) is still not assured.  Standards isn’t a career path for those seeking quick rewards on their energy investment.

However, what working in standards lacks in a rapid pace it often makes up in broad influence.  I have been involved in a number of technologies that have proven invaluable to the industry, such as XML 1.0, XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0, the XML Information Set, WS-Addressing 1.0, the WS-I Basic Profile.  I’ve pushed a few that haven’t been all that popular (to my bafflement) such as XInclude, the XPointer Framework and associated XPointer schemes, and xml:id.  And a number that are flops: XLink, XML 1.1 and XML Namespaces 1.1.  In hindsight I’m fortunate there weren’t more flops on my resume!

But beyond the contributions Microsoft has allowed me to pursue in these efforts, I’ve found one of the highlights of my job is the Microsofties I work with.  Some of them have had a lasting effect on developing my capabilities, and changing the way I look at the world, such as:

• Adam Bosworth (no matter how much you like abstract architecture, keep getting your hands dirty)
• Jean Paoli (keep your perspective on what’s important, and what’s not)
• Andrew Layman (keep your eye on the big idea, and big ideas take time)
• Paul Cotton (yes it is possible to juggle 1000 balls at a time)
• Jeffrey Schlimmer (don’t tell someone the answer, help them find it themselves)
• Asir Vedamuthu (you can’t be overprepared)

Being able to associate with the likes of these guys is worth sticking around for almost a decade - thanks guys!

You’ll get an earful about my new endeavors later, I’m pretty excited about them too…

Probably the last thing you’d be interested in, but after finding Paul’s nice shot of me kayaking, I made it easier to find photos of me (as opposed to by me) on Flickr by adding the AuburnMarshes tag to many of other folk’s, especially Paul’s, photos tagged as Marsh, Jonathan, Jonathan Marsh, and so forth.  Nice that you can add tags to photos (at least to most peoples - don’t know why someone would turn off this feature.)

I guess I’m not too vain though, considering my favorite pictures of myself are rather self-effacing (credit Paul for these.)

Just uploaded a few snaps during a wonderfully cool (compared with 108F at home) foggy day on the bridges and beaches of San Francisco.  Not a lot of interest there unless you’ve got friend permissions - the waves-chasing-kids shots are my favorites here.

As of yesterday, we have a couple of new family members, a little black Barbados lamb (a twin on the losing end of sibling rivalry for milk), and another little guy to keep her company.  They currently live in our shower at night while this cold snap lasts, and in their new paddock during the day.  Kids are loving the regular bottle feeding necessary to build their strength up.  And just like the rhyme, the lambs now follow them wherever they go…

Welcome to the ranch Samurai Jack and Lotus!

Photos here.

Last week I spent three days chaperoning the Sierra Montessori Academy Field Trip.  This interval it was about Science and Technology, with tours of Stanford and the Stanford Linear Accelerator, programs at the San Jose Technology Museum and The San Jose Museum of Art, and stops at the Intel Museum and the Computer History Museum.  Belated posting of the resulting set of photos on Flickr (mostly restricted).

Spending time with the kids was really rewarding, especially the final stop at the Computer History Museum where I gave a short presentation tying together the early computers used by the defense department (linked by a network), up through the semiconductor revolution spurred by Intel, from the early microprocessors like the Rockwell AIM and the first Apple II, where I could show the kids some of the ancient hardware we learned on, relating all this up to the development of the Internet and the Web, playing up the SLAC-Cern connection and the contribution of Tim Berners-Lee.

I’ve known my work has always been abstract to my kids, since the day in 2nd grade my daughter came home with stories of the Dad who visited the class in his work uniform - the flight suit he wears when flying U2s over Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or who knows were. After she finished telling me all about it she said "and what do you do again, Daddy?”

But this time, by the end of my short presentation, Gen said "Gee Dad, you know a lot about this stuff."  You should have seen my smile!

Last time I was in New York City I was pretty aware of being out of my element.  Walking down the street I’d look at the passersby but felt I had zero capacity to judge who was someone to steer clear of, who was harmless, which alleys should be avoided, whether to make eye contact with a panhandler, etc.  I felt like I had to be on my guard all the time, and even so I would be prone to what locals might call stupid mistakes.  Having no sixth sense about your environment can be fairly exhausting!

However, I also realized many city natives would have similar problems in my natural environment - living at the end of a long dirt road with no neighbors in sight (well ok, there are two, each a couple of miles away as the crow flies), but they don’t bother me much.  I have no problem with the lack of streetlights (moon and stars are better anyway), howling of coyotes rather than taxicabs, knowing which rocks might be attractive for a rattler, which foliage is poison oak, how to round up an escaped pony, or deal with a deer carcass.  A city person might feel the need to be constantly alert in my environment, just as I now feel in the city.

Anyway, what brought this on tonight was the presence of a baby rattlesnake in the kitchen.  (Only about 18", no buttons yet.)  Cute little guy, eh?  Just part of living in the country - no big deal.  But worth trying out the photo upload feature :-).