Ignite Boston 4 - Tonight!

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 7

The fourth Ignite Boston is this Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at The Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston. Don't miss out on hearing a special keynote by Tim O'Reilly. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will be other giveaway items like tee-shirts and O'Reilly books that will be distributed during the event.

(continue reading)

Ignite Boston 4

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 0

The fourth Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at the Hooley House, one block from Faneuil Hall in Boston, MA. THIS IS A LARGER VENUE. So the acoustics will be better than our last event and there will be room to sit, stand and mingle.

From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we'll have a couple of special keynote presentations to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto guest speakers who'll catch you up on the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. Don’t blink or you’ll miss their lightning-fast, five-minute presentations. During intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and O’Reilly’s own editors. Join us Thursday, September 11th, for a fun, energetic evening of talking, learning, collaborating and drinking!

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend. Presentation Guidelines

Ignite is a user-generated event. If you’re interested in speaking, then submit a proposal for consideration.

Presentations must:

* Be no longer than 5 minutes

* Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!)

* Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint and Keynote, and PDF] with standard AV equipment

* Did we mention, no Sales Pitches.

For anyone that's never been to Ignite, you may find it useful to see a talk or two. Here's a link to examples from the Boston Ignite 3 talks.

Guessing gender from browser history

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 21

I just found a clever trick for guessing gender from browser history. I tried it and then realized that I'm a crappy test for the system: yes, likelihood of my being male is 99%. But if I read a hardcore geek tech blog, then that's probably the case anyway. I could emulate that behaviour with a simple return(G_MALE) in the code.

I pushed the link to a few women for some more strenuous testing. Penny Leach was told she's 52% likely to be female, and Laurel at O'Reilly was told she's 50% likely to be female. Perhaps on the internet, everyone surfs like a MALE with probability 50%. How'd the test work for you? Let me know in the comments ....

Philly's First Ignite was a Smash

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 3

At the risk of exposing my provincial roots, and now that the videos are up, I'd like to throw out some props to Philadelphia for last Wednesday's Ignite. I attended with a bit of trepidation and didn’t know quite what to expect but I was really blown away. While Boston has MIT, SF has Berkeley and Seattle has, well, Starbucks, Philadelphia proved it had a really fantastic mix of arts and socially oriented projects / talks that were uniquely Philadelphian.

Without a hint of Philly’s perennial shoulder chip, the mood in Johnny Brenda’s was two parts giddy, one part sweaty as we listened to talks from Philly Bike Share, the 100K House, Art and Poetry from UArts, Fab@Home, Etsy, The Food Trust, Indy Hall Worksharing, Jeff Stockbridge and his wonderful photographs from inside abandoned industrial era homes, No Carrier talking about Chip Music, Blake Jennelle’s talk about Philly as a vibrant locale for startups, an oddly prescriptive but delightful talk from Rick Banister about "establishing your personal aesthetic", and too many others to list... It was absolutely not what I expected and thoroughly wonderful. Attendance was over 300 and probably 50 or more were turned away from the perfectly gritty Fishtown venue. I was turned away too, but I’m pretty resourceful.

UArts is a real force in Philadelphia's emergent arts scene and it made a significant contribution to the evening both in participation and attendance (as an aside, they also provide space for Make:Philly's monthly meetings).

Thanks to Geoff DiMasi, Alex Gilbert, Vanja Buvac and Far McKon for putting it all together. Bravo Zulu.

Satan is on My Friends List...

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 8

Today I was invited to a Black Hat Briefings webcast that included the intriguing topic "Satan is on My Friends List - Attacking Social Networks." Naturally I registered; but that's not what this post is about. That title just sort of got me thinking about contrasting worldviews and how they relate to those frames Nat mentioned in his post on the enterprise the other day.

While both O'Reilly and Black Hat conferences attract alpha hackers, their editorial points of view tend to occupy opposite ends of some kind of Internet worldview continuum. Whether from the influence of their founding personalities or some kind of Sebastopol vs. Las Vegas center of gravity, they both represent what is possible but they tend toward different visions of that possibility. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but for what its worth, I've attended both Black Hat and O'Reilly conferences and can't recall Satan making a single appearance in an O'Reilly conference program.

(continue reading)

Ignite Philly Tomorrow Night

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 0

I'm looking forward to Philadelphia's first Ignite event tomorrow night (the 11th) at Johnny Brenda's on Frankford Ave. I won't bother repeating all the details that you can find here but the doors open at 6:00 and a great lineup of talks starts at 7:00. You can RSVP on Facebook here if you'd like (it's not required). However, based on the number of RSVP's so far, I'd suggest getting there early. Hope to see you there.

Web 2.0 Is From Mars, Enterprise Is Up Uranus

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 9

Jim brings a welcome "inside the firewall" perspective to Radar. We were talking about Web 2.0 vs SOA vs "Enterprise SOA" (which had us all reached for the barf bags) and Jim came up with this great line about the mindset that could coin the phrase "Enterprise SOA": "Their worldview is one of control over the enterprise". I agree completely.

The Enterprise and Web worlds use different frames, like Lakoff's political frames: one is the stern father (the IT department) with strict rules, transgressors to be punished; the other is the nurturing parent (the API provider) who encourages experimentation, self-development, and happiness. These two have trouble seeing inside each other's world-view.

By way of illustration, SOA reminds me of the engraving over the entrance to the University of Wyoming's engineering department in Laramie: CONTROL OVER NATURE IS WON, NOT GIVEN. That fits with the command-and-control mentality. Web 2.0 would never say "CONTROL OVER USERS IS WON, NOT GIVEN".

We could reframe all the Web 2.0/Internet rules as Enterprise rules quite easily.

Metcalfe's Enterprise Law: The security risk of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

Reed's Enterprise Law: The downtime of a network grows exponentially with the size of the network.

Moore's Enterprise Law: If you wait 18 months you can buy twice as much computational power for the same money, therefore you should never upgrade.

Torvald's Enterprise Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are exploited.

Godwin's Enterprise Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a lawsuit due to someone being offended approaches one.

Brooks's Enterprise Law: Adding more people to a late software project is the only way to appear to be doing something about it.

Enterprise Definition of Social Software: software that wastes more time as more people use it.

I appear to have left my point behind, but that's okay :)

Ignite Boston 3 - Next week

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 0

The third Ignite Boston will be next week - Thursday, May 29, from 6 to 10pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend.

From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we'll have a couple of special keynotes by Jonathan Zdziarski and John Viega to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto the lightening talks.

(continue reading)

Data Center heating the Town Pool

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 4

According to GreenerComputing.com:

A public swimming pool in Zurich will soon be heated for the comfort of local residents, thanks to an innovative solution: heat generated by a data center that would otherwise be classified as waste. The new data center in Zurich is one of three projects in Europe and the Middle East that IBM has announced in recent days. The Zurich project is a new data center for GIB-Services, a hosting and co-location company. In Austria, IBM has announced a plan to construct a green data center for green furniture company kika/Leiner; IBM has also landed the contract to build what it calls the most energy-efficient data center in Egypt, for Telecom Egypt.

For more see IBM Big Green and The Raised Floor blog.

Simplicity

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

I got a chuckle out of this comic on app simplicity and usability. So true, so painfully painfully true.

Given Enough Eyeballs - Art Meets Open Source in Philly

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 1

If you are in or near Philadelphia tonight, stop by the Esther M. Klein Gallery to check out the opening of Given Enough Eyeballs.

Like ETech's Emerging Arts Fest, the show curated by Annette Monnier explores the nexus of art, hacking, and collective authorship.

From the exhibition description:

"The artists in the exhibition, Given Enough Eyeballs, explore, in varying degrees, concepts of open-access and sharing, individual versus community, and ownership and appropriation, as it relates to the idea of open source software, software that is free to use and free to be adopted any way the user sees fit."

For more, see this review from the New Museum at Rhizome.

Details:
Esther M. Klein Art Gallery
3600 Market Street
opening 5-8 March 14
Exhibit up March 14 - April 26

Cable cuts, conspiracies, and submarines...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 3

It is 3AM at Social Graph Foo Camp and it seems conversations about data portability and authentication will continue until breakfast. As I was leaving to find my sleeping bag, several people insisted that sharing conspiracy theories about the three recent transcontinental fiber cuts was of greater importance than my own desire to sleep. Here goes...

It's no secret that many governments tap undersea communications lines to install surveillance systems. One theory is that the cuts, initially reported as being caused by ships anchoring in rough seas, are actually a diversion to cover taps installed by a special submarine hundreds of miles away or by the repair ships themselves.

The USS Jimmy Carter is an example of a United States submarine equipped for this kind of mission, although other nations probably have this capability too. If such a submarine were doing this it seems unlikely that it would cause such massive interruptions. The whole point would be to do this covertly and so interruption would be momentary if it were noticed at all. More importantly, a tap is useless when the lines are out-of-service.

If the outages are intentional I suspect that there is something else going on.

(Updated: Feb-04 12:30 PST) I've edited this post and removed the "lolsub". These theories are getting more attention after Egypt retracted an earlier statement about this being caused by ships and a fourth cable had problems. I don't want to confuse the issue with humor that might not translate well outside of the technical community.

Hand of Google

by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 20

While looking at a library book scanned by Google, I found this image, the hand behind the scanner revealed.

Greatest error message ever?

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 18

Adobe pushed out an upgrade of its Creative Suite. I installed it, as prompted. This is what happens when I try to run any element of the Suite after the install:

Click on the modal dialog box and the program closes. For extra redundancy, there's a second error message that reads "licensing for this product has stopped working." But I am impressed that I wasn't merely able to get the programs to fail, but that I got them to fail "catastrophically."

Now where are those install discs?

Update: I was able to fix it, thanks to restarting a cranky DRM engine. (MSCONFIG is truly a Windows user's best friend.) Yet another case in which copy protection and productivity don't go hand-in-hand. The problem is solved, but the great error message lives on.

Fast Forward for December 29th, 2007

by Marc Hedlund | comments: 11

• I would buy more music if my iPhone held more music. I wonder how much demand is suppressed only by device capacity.


• I can't believe Leno and company aren't turning to the Internet for jokes. A little Digg-style interface for submitted jokes and an on-air namecheck and away you go. Submit ten jokes that get used on the air and we'll fly you to Hollywood for a job interview. Done.


• Katie Hafner is wrong; it's not personal attention that makes the Apple Stores work. It's making computer users feel smart. There are few enough choices that anyone can reasonably understand them. The people are approachable enough that anyone can talk to them. The aesthetic is open and clean and, above all, simple. None of those words are usually associated with computers. The Apple Stores teach people that even they can use computers, and that expands the market.


• Virgin America is great and all, but there's something downright unpleasant about flying an airline with "Beta" software on it. I mean come on. I got Red to crash -- reboot! -- very reliably by switching rapidly between the maps and the media player. The DirecTV thing said "your receiver has not yet been authorized" and then asked if I wanted "immediate upgrade without a call" for a premium channel (certainly!). One of the games (Rocks 'n' Diamonds) told me that my username was root. Really?


• My wife got all rank with the iTunes Music Store for not letting her move music from one of her computers to another. "Try Amazon," I told her, and that was that, no more iTMS for her. The true idiocy of the RIAA is that they've made DRM simple enough for everybody to understand why they don't want it.


• My friends keep joining GoodReads, but my heart still lies with LibraryThing. Come on, peoples!

My favorite iPod accessory is my EFF Membership...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

If you are searching for accessories for your new iPod or other music player, please consider membership in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF helps people fight abusive file-sharing lawsuits and is working to provide ways for artists to be paid for their work. The EFF helps ensure we have fair use of our media, which makes membership the ultimate iPod accessory.

Tab bankruptcy

by Marc Hedlund | comments: 28

I'm no Larry Lessig, but I get a fair amount of email these days. Still, I'm not yet at the point, and hope never to be at the point, where I would ever declare email bankruptcy. I already get over 200 non-spam email messages a day, but if at some point I can't deal with that, I won't delete my inbox -- instead, I'll refactor my definition of spam.

I do have a much more serious problem with browser tab overload, however. I'm trying to follow a lot of topics right now, and that number declines only with great effort. I wind up pushing Firefox to its limits. Firefox is a huge help with this problem, though: it crashes a lot, and session restore fails a lot. Thanks, Mozilla! Man, otherwise, I'd be completely screwed.

So, for the record: Dear person whose feed sent me a surely fascinating but yet-unread blog post, I apologize, but I am declaring tab bankruptcy. I will do so every Saturday from now on. If I haven't gotten back to that tab by Saturday morning, I'm force-quitting Firefox and no, dammit, I won't try to restore my last session.

I very much like what Jeremy Zawodny wrote about this last February:

The hardest thing I have to do every day is to decide what to ignore.

Running a startup is a great way to learn how to, and how not to, ignore the right things. You should mostly ignore your competitors and mostly ignore the minor ups and downs that feel fantastic or terrible when they happen. You should pay a huge amount of attention to the unbiased people who are actually using your product or service -- not friends or enemies or professional commentators, but people who show up through a search, sign up and give it a try. Ignore everything that makes you miserable, pay tons of attention to everything that makes you happy and productive. Ask someone for help every day. And call your friends, you nincompoop.

If you're spending more time dealing with browser tabs than any of the above, don't wait for the browser to crash. Just quit. "You are about to close 67 tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?" Oh, yes, I'm sure.

Why Global Warming Is Bad for the iPhone

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 7

Last night, in chilly Boston, I had to go from one event to another, but didn't know where the second one was. I asked a colleague where to go next. He took out his iPhone and started pecking out the address in the Google Maps app. The following dialogue is guaranteed repeated verbatim:

Me: Sorry. I've got one of those. I could do it myself.
Him: No problem.
Me: Anyway, you're typing that out a lot faster than I can with my fat fingers.
Him: I've been outside for an hour, so my fingers are frozen. That makes it a lot easier to hit the right letters.

Thankful I'm Not Bill O'Reilly

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 30

I was thinking that I really ought to do some kind of Thanksgiving weekend post, and I finally found my topic. I'm thankful that I'm not Bill O'Reilly, the conservative pundit, and that my readers are smarter than his!

It's amazing how much email we get for Bill O'Reilly. And it's gotten worse since we put up the Satisfaction widget on oreilly.com. It bemuses me that someone can come to a web site that's clearly selling technology books and conferences, and still ask questions about the O'Reilly Factor, Bill's show. We don't get questions about O'Reilly Auto Parts, the Fortune 500 company, or questions for David O'Reilly, the CEO of Chevron, so I can only conclude that, unlike customers of these other notable O'Reillys, Bill O'Reilly's viewers can't read. We've been moving all the Bill O'Reilly questions over to the O'Reilly Factor page on Satisfaction, but I still see them all as they come in (since I see all the posts to our Satisfaction page.)

One complainer writes:

Is this just a website to make more money for O'Reilly????? How can I get in touch with him? This is very important!!! I am more interested in the news than in buying something. Please contact me.

Sorry, wrong O'Reilly.

Meanwhile, over on the real satisfaction site for O'Reilly Media, we see one reader who has the opposite problem:

Just a quick note: For the longest time I wouldn't visit your site because I thought you were The O'reilly Factor LOL

And I remember Rael Dornfest telling me that he once sat next to someone on a plane, who, when he learned Rael worked for O'Reilly, told him "I hate your boss," and started ranting about Bill's sexual harrassment of employees. Rael was glad to tell him we're not that O'Reilly. But I wonder how many people do mix us up.

It's sad. Especially since we like to think that, while we're focused on technology and not on politics, "fair and balanced" is indeed a key part of our brand appeal. For the other O'Reilly, it appears to be only rhetoric. Apparently, when he was on the Colbert Report, he almost admitted as much, saying "This is all an act." He said it in the spirit of Colbert, but I suspect it's true. So many of the TV pundits are engaged in theater, which is why Colbert's send-up is so refreshing. But it's amazing how many people take the O'Reilly Factor as gospel.

I also note that O'Reilly, and his employer Fox News, are quick to censor and redact any bloopers that bloggers catch them on. My various Google and Yahoo! alerts also pick up Bill O'Reilly stories. I recently clicked through to one such story, and saw that the YouTube video was no longer available...

Meanwhile, we get some real humdingers showing how out of touch with reality some of the O'Reilly Factor fans are. This one came in to our customer support email alias rather than Satisfaction:

I have read in The Onion newpaper, that Bush has cut off diplomatic relations with Congress. I found this to be unbelievable and I thought it would be illegal! Can you check it out and see if it is true? How can you run a government and not talk to the Congress??

Not only can Bill O'Reilly's fans not distinguish between a technology publisher and a right wing pundit, they can't tell that the Onion is a satire! Or else they are just trying to yank his chain. (But someone smart enough to do that would know that oreilly.com is not theoreillyfactor.com.)

Over on the other side, I'm sure we cause some heartburn for Bill O'Reilly. I remember a few years back, when our familiar tarsier was on the cover of Publisher's Weekly, Bill O'Reilly apparently called up to complain, asking "What the hell is my name doing on the cover of your magazine with a picture of a monkey?"

Rogers Chocolates, Ajax, and Customer Service

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 5

Rogers Chocolates has a fabulous Ajax interface for choosing a custom box of their famous Victoria Creams, a Christmas staple at our house since we discovered them on a family holiday in Victoria, British Columbia some fifteen years ago. These are large, lush chocolates -- 1.6 ounces apiece. It was always the height of excess to have one for yourself rather than dividing it in half (or even in quarters), a choice between hoarding a favorite flavor or tasting more by sharing.

To build a custom assortment of your favorite flavors, you first place an order for the standard assortment, then click on items to take them out of the box, and choose from a list to put others in. I'm still working on the box below.

Rogers also has fabulous customer service. Last year, we had an error in our custom selection, the first we'd done with the web interface, which they made up to us spectacularly. I've been meaning to give them some link love ever since, though Mothers' Day and other holidays slipped by under the pressure of various deadlines. If you're a chocolate lover, they deserve your attention -- the quality of their chocolates, their web interface, and their customer service all adding up to a real treat. Delivery is prompt. and they are still surprisingly affordable, despite the sad state of the U.S. dollar.