How I spent my Sabbatical

As I mentioned earlier, I took advantage of my 3 week sabbatical recently. I accomplished less than I hoped but still managed to do the following:

• Attended Startup Camp (Day 1, Day 2)
• Took a trip to Chicago with my wife
• Read the following books:

  Fooled By Randomness, Nicholas Nassim Taleb	The Pragmatic Programmer, David Thomas	Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Christopher D. Manning, Hinrich Schütze
  Refactoring, Martin Fowler		Getting Real, 37 Signals

• Created a new blog about Randomness called Survivor Bias.
• Built a rock garden in my back yard
• Had lunch with some former colleges to catch up.
• Finished a Ruby on Rails app I was building in my spare time at work.

Button cracks a rib in Kart

Formula 1 driver Jensen Button cracked a rib racing in a go-kart in the off-season - glad to see this happens to everyone and not just me! A few years back, I broke a rib driving a go-kart at the local in-door karting place. I didn't crash or anything, but I'm quite tall and the karts were extremely small so it was quite difficult for me to sit in them without the seat bashing into my rib cage. So somewhere about half way through a 50 minute race I broke a rib and suffered through the rest of the race. Breaking a rib is a lot more unpleasant than breaking say your wrist because they can't set it so you spend 1-2 weeks in agony as the break in the rib moves around. I don't recommend it.

Dean Karnazes does 50 marathons in 50 days

I wrote about seeing Dean Karnazes speak at REI some time back. One thing that he mentioned was that he was going to run 50 marathons (each in a different state) in 50 days which he did. This should surprise no one however the day after finishing the 50th (New York Marathon) he ran the course in reverse and then ran another marathon distance the next day (52 marathons in 52 days). So how does he top that? By running back to San Francisco!

Also, the trail running shoes that Dean was developing with North Face that I mentioned (or some variation thereof) are now available - I tried them out in Chicago recently and the lace ratcheting thing really works well.

Via Brad Feld.

Chicago War Protest

I was recently in Chicago and there was a anti-war rally going on in front of the Art Institute of Chicago on Michigan Ave. Making masks out of paper mache that actually look like the people is fairly difficult but clearly the artist was able to accomplish that here - more pictures here.

Startup Camp Day 2

Day 2 of Startup Camp was a little more subdued than Day 1 but the sessions continued to be interesting.

Business in virtual worlds / Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr led another great session giving a guided tour of the emerging world of commerce in Second Life - you can really start to see the first glimmers of how this might work. Jeff mentioned that Amazon was in the process of creating a specific island (it's about $1600 and $200 / month for an island which more or less corresponds to a server run by Linden Labs). You can create 3D object in Second Life, apply textures to them and add scripts to them. Jeff showed an example of calling out from Second Life to his own webservice that returned a custom image. Objects can be sold with DRM to prevent resale or copying within the universe. There are already some commercial sites in Second Life as well as a growing community of consultants to help you build things within it. One of the cooler things Jeff showed was fabjectory.com which uses a ZCorp prototyping machine to convert objects in Second Life to physical 3D objects. Tim Bray mentioned that Sun has done some presentations in Second Life with mixed result and Jeff Barr also has used it to do remote presentations.

There was a healthy amount of skeptism about Second Life as the multiverse. Some people said that the UI / rendering was clunky compared to various MMORG games like Everquest and that we really need better input / display tools to work in this environment. Tim Bray contrasted it with the Web in 1994 but said this didn't feel the same. No one really said it but a big difference was that the Web was an open system whereas this is a closed platform run by a single company that you can build upon. If I could set up my own server that provided an island in Second Life, it would be a different story. As a specific example, I became a bit wary when Jeff mentioned that there is a recurring charge to have your property listed in the global directory. You can't really blame Linden Labs for trying to profit from this, but I think if Second Life aspires to replace some portion of the web in the long term, it can't be controlled by one company.

Dealing With Analysts & Media / Stephen O'Grady

Stephen O'Grady and Michael Coté from Redmonk led an excellent session on the role analysts fill, how startup companies can deal with them and how your PR person needs to operate with the press. Like a lot of industries, the world of technology analysts and press is being radically changed by the world of blogs and social media. Rather than carpet-bombing people with press releases to drive buzz, startups need to focus on building a groundswell of favorable attention through blogs, discussion groups and wikis. I think this is in general an improvement in the state of affairs because the whole process is a lot more open and less subject to coercion. Of course, it also means you need to have a great product.

In summary

It's been an entertaining two days. I appreciate Sun Microsystems for putting on the event - I hope they got something out of it. I'd especially like to thank Amazon and Redmonk for treading the fine line of providing useful information while resisting the urge to club us over the head with a sales pitch.

Startup Camp Day 1

As I hoped, I'm at startup camp today and tomorrow. The sessions I attended today have been focussed on technical infrastructure and financing. It's an unconference which means the sessions are determined on the fly. This makes the content of the conference much more dynamic and focussed on the interests of whoever shows up - as you would expect this is a little more chaotic than a structured conference. When it works, it's great.

The day started with a big empty schedule and various people suggested sessions. This is what I went to:

Web Scale Computing / Jeff Barr from Amazon.com

A session on Virtual Hosting for startups - basically it turned into a discussion about using Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and S3 as a hosting service with the ability to add capacity as needed. Jeff Barr from Amazon made a concerted effort to keep it from being a product specific session and I found it quite interesting.

The feedback from some was that the services are a little pricey and that setting up a machine image for EC2 (which is still Beta) can be difficult. Jeff made the point that Amazon expects a lot of value added services to be built on top of EC2 - this is really utility computing. For example, EC2 doesn't provide load balancing or dynamically adding machines based on load. It's possible 3rd parties will be able to resell this capability - you also get bare (virtual) hardware so building up a linux distro images is up to you. Since some segment of customers are going to want somewhat vanilla web hosting with dynamic load (along the lines of what MediaTemple offers), I suspect Amazon will add this at some point.

It also seems to be the case that if you want to store data persistently, you really need to use S3 rather than something like MySQL. Jeff has a post on using EC2 / S3 to avoid a "Success Disaster" (aka slashdotting) which makes a lot of sense.

Financing Startups with Angel Financing / Jeff Clavier

Jeff gave a series of sessions on different aspect of startup financing and there were a couple of other VCs (Rick Segal) and Angel Investors on hand more or less just answering questions from the audience. It seemed apparent that in a lot of cases, a startup can get at least to the prototype phase by self financing and maybe only needing angel money to get to profitibility - being focussed on the product rather than focussed on chasing the ethereal VC money seems a lot more sensible to me. My favorite quote from the session: "Don't get on the train if you don't like where it goes"

Lunch / Best Startup Contest

The Best Startup Contest (aka "Speed Geeking") is 5 min startup company pitches times 30 companies - every 5 minutes an air horn goes off. You get woozy after a while. When you see a startup that you want to vote for, you give them your wooden nickel. All I will say is it's a tiny window into what being a VC must be like...

Cost Effective Web Tier Infrastructure / Joe McCabe of Sun Microsystems

This was one of the better sessions I attended. Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress talked about many of the things they did right (and a lot of the things they did wrong) along the lines of Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Websites. Some of the highlights:

• Wordpress.com doesn't use sessions - all of the state is in the cookies so they don't have to replicate session data across all the web servers (requires carefully thinking out the security issues)
• They use MySQL replication to replicate the database between datacenters.
• They store Wordpress.com blogs into a MySQL database partitioned into 4096 separate databases based on the first 3 characters in the name. Partitioning the database is the only way to increase the number of simultaneous writes in MySQL.
• They use a 5 min TTL on the DNS entry and round robin DNS - if a datacenter goes down (and apparently it does), it can be removed from the DNS list.
• There was some suggestions from Joe McCabe about using Amazon EC2 as a failover mechanism when sites have high load - running the site on a hosted solution and just adding EC2 machines as necessary.

More Startup Camp Photos

Timbuk2 Blogger

I've been using a Timbuk2 messenger bag as a laptop bag on and off for a while (8 or 9 years) so I know that Timbuk2 bags are basically indestructible. However the messenger bags are not the most suited to holding a laptop. I've used a padded laptop sleeve in the bag to protect things but messenger bags only work well if you have a huge number of packages to deliver. Enter the Timbuk2 Blogger.

Timbuk2 has a variety of bags that are designed to hold laptops which generally consists of a padded sleeve. The Blogger is supposed to be designed specifically for the "blogger" on the go. I'm more of a programmer than a blogger but I guess the Timbuk2 "Propeller Head" bag wouldn't sell as well. The Blogger keeps the laptop vertically which makes it hang a little more naturally than messenger bags. The shoulder strap for the bag has a big pad on it (I suspect most self-respecting bike messengers would scoff) which makes it a lot easier on the shoulder. I take the train pretty much every day to work which involves about a mile of walking so I really appreciate this. The should strap pad is the same color as the bag which in some cases looks a little weird - I got the black bag just so it would be a neutral color!

It has a pocket for your cell phone and mp3 player (for the blogger on the go!). The mp3 player pocket is only just big enough for my iPod mini and you can't really manipulate the buttons without taking it from the pocket so I pretty much don't use it.

As I said, my last Timbuk2 bag lasted for many years and pretty much looks like new so I think this one will also last for quite a while. One important point is that it only fits 15 inch Windows / Mac laptops so if you have a 17 inch bohemeth, it probably won't work for you.

On Sabbatical

One of the perks on my job is a three week sabbatical after 5 years of service which I am now taking advantage of. I don't think I've had a three week vacation in > 10 years but I'll probably spend the time reading and catching up on chores so vacation maybe inaccurate. At any rate, blog posting will either be a lot more frequent or a lot less frequent.