Counting to 1023 on your fingers

How do you count to 1023 on your fingers? Binary of course. You could probably use this to multiply two numbers together too...

Neighborhood Blogging

An idea that occurred to me during BloggerCon III was organizing the neighbors in my housing sub-division with a blog. Since in Silicon Valley, most homes have two working parents (especially if you somehow managed to buy a house!) and people work odd hours so it's very difficult to get to know people in anything but a superficial way (in the past, I rented and never really got to know any of my neigbours). This becomes problematic if you need to organize your neighbors for a community related project (for example, I'd like to have a stop sign added to my neighborhood). So I set up a blog for this and that's about as far as I got with it. However now I have a little more free time, I'm hoping to put a flyers on peoples doors with the blog location and see if anyone shows up. I've never used blogger for a multi person blog so we'll see how it goes.

Amazon Services

MIT Technology Review has a article on Amazon and there use of web services. Amazon has been a leader in this for online services - on some level, they give you the tools to make your web site into a direct competitor to them. This is a more workable strategy for Amazon because at the end of the day they get a bite of the pie as part of the order processing infrastructure. This probably won't work for other service oriented companies (for example, ones that are ad driven) unless syndicating the advertisments is tied to using the service.

Black hole projects

This is a great article on Black Hole Projects. This is the sort of "Change the world" type projects which all large tech companies seem to be required to embark on every few years - in this case it's a project at Microsoft called NetDocs -- which suck up lots of resources but never amount to anything useful. I've seen more than a few of these and (when possible) I try to avoid them like the plague - I definately prefer the "Skunkworks" projects. While it's true that Silicon Valley success is built on the many failed ideas that came before it, a bit part of the culture of failure is failing fast and Black hole projects are antithetical to this. This article makes an excellent guide to knowing when you are about to go over the event horizon.

Don't see "holes"

Via Scoble is a warning to avoid the movie "Holes". I've got to concur. I don't remember the circumstances under which I saw it but I sat through the whole thing and it was utter crap -- I felt dumber for having seen it. The whole thing reminded me of the Simpsons IMAX movie spoof Nature's Biggest Holes - starring Rainier Wolfcastle with a soundtrack by Sting. Probably would be a much better movie!

Apple's Skunkworks Graphing Calculator

I had heard the story of how the Apple Graphing calculator came about from an ex-Apple employee years ago - it's kind of a Silicon Valley legend. But now the full story is available online and it's even more hi-larious than the variant I had heard:

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

They go on to convince people to help them and manage to get it shipped as part of the power PC without Apple ever paying them a dime.

In October, when we thought we were almost finished, engineers who had been helping us had me demonstrate our software to their managers. A dozen people packed into my office. I didn't expect their support, but I felt obliged to make a good-faith effort to go through their official channels. I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs." Afterward, they asked, "Who do you report to? What group are you in? Why haven't we seen this earlier?" I explained that I had been sneaking into the building and that the project didn't exist. They laughed, until they realized I was serious. Then they told me, "Don't repeat this story."

The Skunkworks project is, frankly, a lot of what keeps Silicon Valley going. For every massive project designed to "change the world" with scheduling milestones and project planning meetings, there are dozens of projects like this. Okay, not exactly like this - usually working on the Skunkworks project also entails slogging away on NextBigThing 3.1 so that you still get paid. But the reality is nothing can really stop the crazy engineer from going off and doing what they want if they set their mind to it and Silicon Valley owes a lot more of it's success to the skunkworks projects than to the "great" ones. If your an engineer, no one is going to tell you to go off an do something like this - you pretty much have to develop a thick skin and not care what anyone else thinks. As a former boss of mine (who was also importantly an engineer too) used to say "To ask permission is to seek denial".

WiFi blocking paint additive

Need to totally lock down your Rec Room WiFi network? Then you definately need this paint additive - it makes the paint into a Faraday cage to block radio waves in the WiFi band. This will also block incoming radio interferance (aka your neighbors WiFi network). Since it reflects the WiFi signal, it should (theoretically) improve the signal strength inside the room to. Assuming, of course, it really works. They should do something similar for cell phone signals to allow restaurants and movie theatres to passively block signals so people can't get cell phone reception (actively blocking cell phones is illegal in the US).

BloggerCorps

Rebecca MacKinnon (who ran the Newbies session at Bloggercon) has started BloggerCorps - the idea is the BloggerCorps connects Bloggers with non-profits who need help starting blogging or building an online community.

Dangers of Blogging: Kottke in Jeapordy

Jason Kottke has moved beyond the theoretical dangers of blogging and is now living it. He published details of when Ken Jennings would lose on "Jeapordy" some months back - probably ok - but recently he published audio footage of the final episode - almost certainly not ok. Now Sony (who owns Jeapordy) appears to be leaning on him fairly hard - he took down the footage but that doesn't seem to be the end of it. Blogging is journalism and part of journalism is getting sued. Nevertheless, I certainly hope Jason can get this sorted out before that happens.

RSS for Service Notifications

Something that I notice quite a bit is that RSS is being used for a whole bunch more than just reading blogs - it's really a fairly general platform for doing lightweight notifications. In addition to things like mail and earthquake notifications, you can also get notified about the availability of online services. EBay has a dedicated feed just for this and Flickr seems to do a really good job of letting people what is going on and for how long (albeit sometimes they just don't know).