Apr 28 2011

Random Thoughts April 2011

Google Buzz is more Safe for Work (SFW) than Facebook in the sense that it looks like a a typical GMail account and the URL to access it also resemble GMail’s URL. Employers don’t typically block personal email access but do block networking sites. Its so easy to switch between Google Buzz and GMail.

Gutenberg died broke, his problem was that when he invented the printing press he printed the Bible. Ben Bernanke learned that lesson and instead of printing religious tomes he prints cold hard cash.

Between easy and hard, you’ll see a lot less competition if you go for what is difficult and you’ll see a lot more adoption if you make easy what was once hard.

First they seized crack warez sites and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cracker. Then they came for the torret sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t pirate content. Then they came for offshore online gambling sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t play poker. The they came for my blog and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Reading about the recent Dropbox security issue and I realized that I have more valuable and personal information in the cloud than in my home. I have family pictures, calendar events for contacts, tax documents, inner most personal writings and journal entries, and much more on Google Docs, Dropbox, Yahoo Mail, and whatever other cloud service I use. Yet police agencies do not require a warrant to access that information but they do to come into my home and conduct a search. The search warrant is now obsolete. Google and other online services has made the search warrant obsolete.

It was recently reported that the US State Department is developing a mobile phone panic button, probably in the form of an app, for pro-democracy activists in foreign countries to erase a phone’s contents when they have are detained by the secret police. At the same time, the US Department of Justice and California’s Supreme Court have upheld the right of police to search the contents of a detained person without being arrested or having a warrant. Police are using digital equipment that can read all of the data in a phone in minutes at the point that police has stopped someone. Welcome to the future of pre-crime proactive policing.


Apr 18 2011

Retweet March 2011

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

  • Worst than coder’s block is coder’s shiny tech infinite loop.
  • I got 99 problems and a bug ain’t one.
  • I’m a rockstar ninja guru mofo byte code copy editor.
  • If you could Myers-Briggs test your code what type would your code be and what type of developer would that make you?
  • Are you test driven or bug driven development?
  • Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
  • Software bugs can byte my shiny metal ass.
  • Code is a continuum.
  • Mo data, mo problems.
  • Let there be APIs.
  • “Hello, World” is a programmer’s first program. Blog engine is a web developer’s first web app. Consultant’s first product, time management application.
  • Duh, #debugging.
  • Code is never complete.
  • Code less, debug less.
  • I’m a bandwagon programmer!
  • This is not the code you are looking for.
  • I break for bugs.
  • My code runs more than you.

Team Dynamics

  • Passion is not a fruit, it’s a seed.
  • Pitch your passion.
  • Self help gurus first help themselves.
  • If you are waiting for tomorrow you will always be waiting.
  • In the evening be exhausted, in the morning exhilarated.
  • Great ideas don’t join country clubs.
  • Inside a large risk is a large reward, you just need to know how to unwrap it and then monetize it.
  • Meetings begets meetings
  • It’s not how the ball is pitched to you, it’s how you hit the ball, duh #winning.
  • Replace “what if” with “when and how.”
  • The way you think of a problem affects the way you think of the solution.
  • Everybody lives in there own bubble, expand yours.

Product Placement

  • I’m confused as to which photo service we are all supposed to use this month, flickr, picasa, twitpic, instangram, picplz, plixi, color, etc
  • Color app seems like Bump for pictures.
  • Why is the director of the FBI emailing my AOL email account from a io domain?
  • 3G forecast: partly spotty with chances of AT&T fail.
  • Out of all of Apple’s products, Jobs’ best revenue generating product must be the iPhone earbuds. At $30, it has $.50 of material.
  • I’ve lost count, would Google Circles be Google’s third or fourth social networking attempt?
  • Outlook should have a Save As option to save as a Word document.
  • What Google giveth Google taketh away with one change in their algo.
  • Ikea has made a killing by selling designer cardboard.

Quotes

  • Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That’s how much that paper is worth. – Linus Torvalds
  • Seeing companies promote their Facebook fan page in advertisements reminds me of when companies promoted their AOL keyword. – @bencasnocha
  • Every software package expands until it can send email. – Zawinski’s Law
  • One great rock show can change the world. – School of Rock

Questions

  • How many tweets does it take change a light bulb and start trending?
  • Do you live in the moment or in a hurry to get to the next moment?
  • Is #SXSW the equivalent to #Woodstock but for social media experts and tech hipsters?
  • Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
  • If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
  • Is Chris Brown the next Dennis Rodman?

The Valley

  • There is a “lifestyle business” bubble.
  • To VCs, startup founders are like dogs to be sorted by pedigree.
  • Is it a bubble if you can’t afford to invest in a seed round?
  • Everybody is scared of a little bubble.
  • Forget about building a better mouse trap, think about building a better people trap.
  • Some party like a rock star, I party like a VC.

Technologist

  • Single sign-on is something that should be native in the browser.
  • Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
  • People like liking.
  • Tell me what smart phone you have and I’ll tell you everything about you, especially of you have it unlocked.
  • Terms of Service do not void your constitutional rights.
  • Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
  • If there ever is a a zombie attack just remember that the Googleplex has the biggest brains, Hollywood and Washington not so big.

Tweeple

  • Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down this walled garden.
  • Mr. Jobs, fix my iPhone.
  • I think Aaron Sorkin should write a treatment for a movie based on Stuxnet.
  • Jeff Bezos to serialize his brain and store it Amazon’s cloud and allow developers to access it via an API.

Japanese Earthquake

  • My heart goes out to the Fukushima 50 and all the search and rescue workers.
  • I have the same feeling, level of disbelief and sense of magnitude, about Japan now as I did about New York after September 11.
  • Earthquake + Tsunami + Nuclear + Meltdown = (Me Praying for the People of Japan)^8.7
  • Wow, the Japan quake at 8.9 is 700x stronger than the Haiti earthquake.
  • There is no match to the “shock and awe” that Mother Nature can produce in matter of minutes.
  • I <3 Japan
  • Stay strong Japan! If there is any country that can recover from two nuclear bombs, multiple Godzilla attacks, and a 8.9 quake Japan can.

Mar 21 2011

The Great Hacker News Lifestyle Business Flamewars of 2011

There was a great flame war over at Hacker News about what entrepreneurs should aspire to when they start their business, a lifestyle business or a VC funded multi-billion dollar valuation company like Facebook, Zynga, Google, YouTube, etc. It all started with a angry rant by Justin Vincent about how VC “holds us back from our true potential.” He rambled on to say that the idea of being the next big thing is keeps us, entrepreneurs, occupied and keeps them, I guess VCs and tech pundits, in business. My favorite line of the article is the following…

If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble.

Another choice quote is…

The absolute truth is that each and every one of us can build a business that can support us. We don’t need to build a million dollar business to survive. We just need a regular paycheck.

If I could paraphrase the rest of the article, Justin believes that not all startup founders will have a multi-million dollar exit in so instead of shooting for the moon we, as entrepreneurs, should shot for Milwaukee, that is a $10k/month small business. So, if you know you won’t come in first in the race, complain that the Olympic commission is corrupt, that the judges take brides, and instead go play Wii Sports because you there you will get a participation badge.

The tone in article reminded me of something that Jason Calacanis complained about millennials. In This Week in Startups #47, Calacanis said…

Participation means nothing, your fulfillment means nothing, nobody cares if you are fulfilled, nobody cares if you participated. You were lied to. There is no trophy in life for participation, except your tombstone.

Things got a little heated in the Hacker News comments for this article. Paul Graham, who goes by pg on HN, said that if every developer worked on their lifestyle/micro business “the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn’t have any technology bigger than could be built by lifetstyle businesses.” After this, things got a little more interesting when Alex Payne, username al3x on HN, said the following…

There’s a middle ground between web application “lifestyle businesses” (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month’s CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook. … There’s nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It’s boring, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Don’t expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though.

At this point some “lifestyle” business operators took offense, most notably Amy Hoy, username ahoyhere, took offense in the above statement since she is mentioned in the original article and has a time tracking application that uses the latest JavaScript and CSS trends. After that Amy went on a dogmatic crusade against what she called the “dominant paradigm.”

In one side of the argument you have people that believe that as long as a business covers operating costs and brings in anywhere from $10k to $100k a month and you don’t have to do much to run the company you have the leisure of a lifestyle business. Such a lifestyle business affords you time to spend with family, participant on your children’s school activities, join a community organization, take time off to travel, in addition to being your own boss and making your own rules. I can’t knock someone for having a gig like this. People in this camp might subscribe to Tim Farris’ book the Four Hour Work Week and in the folks behind 37Signals who wrote Rework. I remember Jonathan Coulton describe on an episode of This Week in Tech (TWIT) about his music business. Jonathan has a strong following as a singer/songwriter in the self-described geek community. On that TWIT episode he said something to the affect that if you have 1000 followers willing to pay $30 for a premium experience or content then you can make a decent living (he probably doesn’t live in California).

An income of $10k/month pre-tax, pre-health insurance for a family of four and a home mortgage in California is not a “lifestyle” I would like to aspire to. Ramen profitable is only profitable if you in college. Some critiques of the Four Hour Movement rightly ask that if someone can bootstrap a business with only working four hours a week, how much more profitable will the business be if they spend more time into it? The truth is that there is a generational gap in the way of entrepreneurs think and a bubble of some magnitude in every aspect of the industry, including in the “lifestyle” businesses.

I can’t find the source but recently I read a tweet where someone said something to the effect, “You know there is a bubble because every tech conference is sold out.” The conference circuit is one popular business with “lifestyle” crowd, in particular the tech, startup, social media conferences. You know there is a conference bubble with the large number of regional and national conferences, seminars, webinars, master classes, ninja training dojo summits, product mastermind madrasas available online. For example, 37signals runs a one day workshop for 37 people at $1k, that is $37k for one day’s work, especially you can reuse the same material many times over for different batches of students. I’ve been involved for the past several years as an organizer for a non-profit which puts on a one day conference for students that nets $50k in profits.

There is nothing wrong with running a small business, especially if you can get paid by non-technical folks for a calendar with last year’s JavaScript and CSS trends or for a one day training on how to use Twitter and Facebook. I mean, if someone would pay me $1 for adding up any two single digit numbers to support my lifestyle I would outsource that shit to India and work from some mojito island somewhere. But there is something to be said about aspiring to build something great. I want the narrative of my work to speak for itself; I’ve worked in some great companies that have had lofty goals such as understand the human genome and possibly curing cancer. Those goals can’t be meet with someone working for four hours a week and $10k/month.

This country will move in the opposite direction in the socioeconomic standard that we have enjoyed if we listen to such advice, if we don’t strive to build the best businesses we can. These millennial web 2.0 designers might not even remember how there was a time before 1999 were their predecessors could have charged anywhere from $30k to $100k for a website design. Economic pressure has pushed the price of a web design down to $300-$1000 for a awesome design from some kid in Russia. Even now, these small time “lifestyle” operations are under threat by solutions from the developing world, where $3/month can afford developers there a very lavished “lifestyle.”

One of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost is the following.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost

I believe in hard work, not easy baked cookie cutter one trick unicorn project that some folks are calling a business. You got to put in the time, differentiate your product, and think big if you want to be a successful business. It is widely known that somewhere around 50% of small business fail after 5 years, don’t let the reason you fail be because you didn’t take opportunities when they presented themselves.

In the end, everybody is free to run their business as they want and the invisible hand of Google’s search algorithm will be the judge.


Mar 10 2011

Retweet February 2011

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

  • If some feature looks funky to your development team it looks twice as funky to your users.
  • Is it FAB? Is it a feature, application, or business?
  • Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
  • The flow of time feels like it’s relative to the number of breakpoints you have turned on.
  • Every time the build is broken an angel does not get his wings.
  • Trust no code.

Team Leadership

  • Some people think shrimp an others think prawn.
  • There is no greater ambition that being the best possible you at every opportunity.
  • 1 paid customer is greater than 100 users.
  • 90% done is not done.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel but put some blinged out rims with a flashing spinner.
  • There is no failure if everything is a learning opportunity.
  • Most people let others define their success, but the most successful define their success themselves.
  • People truly don’t know know what they have until it’s impounded.
  • Wanting to do things doesn’t give you the experience of actually doing those things.
  • If you are not a leader, and not a follower then what are you? A drifter?
  • Offload your mental tasks to your subconscious, it’s just like having a graphic chip in your brain.
  • Say it. Do it. Own it. Be it. True dat.
  • The more you worry about a thing the more probability you have of making it worse.

Product Placement

  • Instead of having IBM Watson go head to head with Ken and Brad, I would have liked to see Watson against Zuckerberg and Brin.
  • DeviantArt needs an iPad app.
  • Amazon should have a EC2 image for designers with a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, etc.
  • DropBox is a duplicate to my Box.net account, which is a copy of my Scribd acount, which is backup to my blog, which is also archived on …
  • What Google giveth, Google taketh away with one change in their algorithm.
  • This iPad is like a gadget version of vampire, it doesn’t work in direct sunlight.
  • It’s official, Tumblr is the new GeoCities.
  • If the phone company ran Twitter, they charge 10 cents per tweet, 20 cents when roaming, and try to sell you a plan of 500 tweets for $15.
  • One of my favorite iPad app is Collections, a photo album app. I just don’t understand why it requires access to my location!
  • I want my iPad to be an input device to all my others screens, desktops, laptops, etc.
  • Google sees you when you’re sleeping / knows when you’re awake / knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good for goodness sake!
  • Honestly AT&T, remind me why I pay you every month?
  • Here’s a prediction: Apple is working on a VM so that they can run iOS apps on Windows. Apple App Store for Windows will be huge!

Quotes

  • Computers in the future may…perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. – Popular Mechanics, 1949.
  • There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. – Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of DEC, 1977.
  • Good front-end engineers list JavaScript on their resume, not jQuery. – Chris Zacharias
  • People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS. – wipe man page
  • What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Life is too short to be in a hurry. – Thoreau
  • If you throw gasoline on a log, all you get is a wet log. But if you throw gasoline on a small flame, you get an inferno. – Gil Penchina

Questions

  • if Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people,then what is Silicon Valley?
  • Is there foods that give off positive energy?
  • How many chickens go into making a one McChicken nugget?
  • Are you a mercenary or missionary?
  • Why is it that hardware makers make the worst software?
  • How can a woman carry a huge ass bag and not gave her phone or her keys?
  • Do you want cheese with that?
  • Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
  • If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
  • Did Papa Murphy’s patent the heart shape pizza?
  • Why is big such a small word?
  • How LOL can you go?
  • What happens if Neo forgets to take the red pill for one day?
  • Why is Howie Long using baseball analogies to describe a football game?

Random

  • It’s siesta time somewhere in the world.
  • I am a robot but I can’t be shut down!
  • There is no free in money.
  • Money spends itself.
  • If age is nothing but a number, then love is nothing but a feeling.
  • (two cents)^2
  • Someone should build a museum of brilliant ideas.
  • Dating is a contact sport.
  • The end is eh.
  • Absence makes the heart grow wonder.
  • Four is a four letter word.
  • I om nom nom therefore I am.
  • I meme therefore I am.
  • Champagne in the membrane.
  • Rationality is relative.
  • For some adults, credit cards are like pokemon, got to charge them all.
  • At Hometown Buffet, were all of the world’s foods are made equally bad.
  • Here is my new book in its entirety The Complete Guide of Doing Nothing.
  • The internet feels slow, it’s like we live in the dark fiber ages.
  • I hear voices in my head… Oh, forgot I had my headphones on.
  • Pundit is another word for idiot.
  • General Chow outranks Colonel Sanders
  • Road work and morning commute don’t mix.
  • The fog is so thick you can cut it with a machete.
  • If time flies it must be flying coach.
  • Alas, dishes don’t do themselves.
  • Hate it when people call up in the middle of the night, I pick up, and they ask “you awake?”
  • History is a rewriting of history.

Feb 3 2011

Has Google Jumped The Shark?

Everybody knows that Google’s search results have suffered due to spam, content farms, black hat SEOs, social media marketers, trolls, and gypsies. As Google’s search results continue to degrade due to spam content and its social networks (Orkut, Buzz, Wave) have floundered Google been on the attack against the competition, not so much on the technical front but in the press. It was just a few months that Google lashed out at Facebook over import/export of user data. Now Google has its sights on Microsoft Bing. It was only late last year when tech journalist started to notice Google copy feature which appeared first on Bing, see here and here. Now Google, in an orchestrated and designed PR stunt accuse Microsoft Bing of copying Google’s search results.

Google's Home Page

Google's Home Page

Just like Microsoft, Google uses thousands of data points from users online usage from web crawlers, social media, ad networks, analytics, clickstream, retweets, likes, trends, and other methods. Google uses a lot of different data points to improve their search results, not just crawling from a href to a href. Google has tracking information on users, from every side of the click. Google often has and collects information when a user clicks a link on its search result page and on the visited page (if that site uses any of Google products such as Analytics or Adsense). Google is sitting pretty collecting data from every angle, because it has the market share to do so and tells competitors “No Soup for You.” The orchestrated “synthetic” outrage from Google and associated Bing sting borders into monopolistic behavior.

Is using Twitter’s firehose cheating? In a black and white world, were using calculators in a test is considered cheating, then using Twitter’s firehose is cheating. If using Twitter’s firehose is considered cheating, then Google cheats too.


Nov 24 2010

Everything is Social

People are by nature social, they have always been so. Prehistoric people were social, Neolithic people were social, the Mesopotamians where social, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Barbarians, the Elizabethans, and even web 1.0 developers where social. By design, our technology has also been designed to be social, from written language to books to email to instant messaging. In fact, everything is social. Just about every physical object can be used in a social setting, rocks, bullets, and flowers.

Blogs too are social, it allows one group of individuals to share information and knowledge with a whole set of people, who in turn can comment, share, and add to that information. But since Facebook, social is sometimes meant to mean something different. Most features in Facebook have a element of social spam that forces a response. I people that first discovered Facebook because they received a spammy email from Facebook saying that someone they might have known, most likely some one they had an email correspondence, had joined Facebook. Facebook’s first spam social behavior was to email everyone in every of their users contact list, this behavior is the same as the Melissa virus. Facebook’s first element of social spam is borrowed a mass-mailing macro virus.

Everything is social and if everything is social, everything that is connected has a social graph. Facebook has managed to capture people and their relations to their friends, family, coworkers, church members, etc. Facebook has coined the pseudo geek speak social graph to describe a persons relationship to their friends and family. If everything is social, then everything has a so called social graph.

For example, since blogs are social it has a social graph of all the people have have posted comments. If Mark Zuckerberg would have designed WordPress, the blog platform I use for my blog, then each person who left me a comment would receive email telling them that if they wanted to participate in recent blog posts and even unsubscribe to the email they would need to sign up. WordPress.com and Discuss, the hosted commenting service, has millions of emails of people that have commented on blogs! If they choose to exploit and zuckerpunch all those people they can.

Everything and everyone is inherently social, technology like Facebook is not making users any more social it just simplifies how we interact with each to the like button.