Software Development

• Being into computers today is not the same as it was in my day when you had to solder chips into boards, now it means you are on Facebook.
• I don’t know why you would fake such a thing but there are a lot of fake self described geeks.
• This holiday season remember to backup if don’t already have a backup system in place.

Thought Leadership

• Life has a funny way to keep you humble.
• Focus on simplicity, complexity is overrated.
• Whether I see the glass half full or half empty largely depends on what is in the glass to begin with.
• To much of a good thing is a bad thing. Not enough of a good thing is also a bad thing.
• No brain, no gain.
• There is no such thing as cheap thrills, only cheap tricks.

Product Placement

• I just realized that I have five phone numbers connected to my iPhone.
• Not feeling the new Twitter app. It feels like it requires too many clicks to do anything.
• Every parking lot should be covered with an array of solar panels. Some parking lots take more area than the base of the building.
• I hate when sites and apps require Facebook Connect to sign up. #pinterest
• I bet that Taco Bell taco shells are made in China.
• Like a true politician, Go Daddy flip flopped on the issue and now claims it does not support SOPA. #WhoDroppedTheSOPA
• Google Grinch: No Ice Cream Sandwich for Galaxy S, first Galaxy Tab, or original Nexus.
• The one feature that had been overlooked in Android is the ability to take a screenshot of your Android device.

Quote

• I’m putting you on the do not kill list. – Bender Bending RodrÌguez
• The truth is often stupid. – Bender Bending RodrÌguez
• Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what’s good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers. – jwz
• Let’s go and invent tomorrow. – Steve Jobs

Question

• Who moved my cheese and then cut said cheese?
• Who is doing some last minute shopping?
• How many domains do you own?
• Church’s or Popeyes?
• Ancient Aliens or Modern Morons?
• If you could go back in time and would be stuck in prehistoric time, what skill would you need most to survive?
• If Mr Grinch is so mean what do you think Mrs Grinch is like?
• If the world is flat why aren’t international phone rates flat themselves?
• A touch device is a complicated device with many components, what are the chances that the Galaxy Tab would look identical to the iPad?

Randumb

• Looking forward to the future!
• Old Internet memes don’t die, they go remixed, go viral, and trend.
• It’s rumored that the same maker that built a weight scale with a built it twitter client that tweets your weight is working on a toilet.
• Money can’t buy you love but it can sure buy some lap dances.
• When it comes to teenage love, forever doesn’t last long.
• The surprise is the prize.
• Empty space is the enemy of clutter.
• You are the chaos/cause of you.
• You are the cause of you because you.
• It is what it will be and it will be what has been.
• Happy whatever the fuck you celebrate tonight.
• The Internet was invented for the sharing of funny cat videos and pictures.
• Make a right at the 3rd dimension and you are here.
• The best part of nothing is everything.
• Negative ideas manifest into real feelings
• Gift wrapping ain’t going so merry.
• If there is a way to hurt yourself with a tape dispenser I’ve done it… Why is my lip bleeding!?
• I think that The Terminator is the beginning of a long war against the machines that culminates with The Matrix.

Overheard

• OH: Annoying people are really annoying.
• OH: I would love to enjoy my own depression if I only I didn’t have to deal with other people’s depression.
• OH: I wish my life was an 80′s movie.
• OH: To be honest, I’m not being honest.

Even though Google’s latest attempt at a Facebook killer, Google Plus, has been well received it has also generated some of the most passionate arguments against any of their policies. Google Plus does not allow users to use pseudonyms, alias, nicknames, or any online handle other than their real names. There has been opposition against this stance from even within Google engineers tasked with implementing such draconian technology. The reasoning behind this rule makes no sense, and goes against a fundamental human right of self identity. I have the right to go and respond by any name I wish to be known as. In fact, many celebrities often use names other than their real names. Vic Gundotra, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google does not go by his real name that was given at birth so this all seems hypocritical.

The second misstep is their self serving stance on patents as written in a recent corporate blog post When Patents Attack Android. In this post, David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Google, practically accuses Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle of conspiring against Android with “bogus patents.” These are the same “bogus patents” that Google itself had tried to purchased from Novell for $3.14 billion. I doubt that any publicly traded company would bid $3.14 billion on “bogus patents” and in fact publicly complaining about having lost those patents demonstrates that they are not entirely bogus. Having lost the auction for said “bogus patents” Google went on to buy over 1000 patents from IBM for an undisclosed amount.

Google Plus does innovate on a few areas where Facebook has lagged and dragged it’s feet, such as in the concept of circles. That said, Google Plus is largely a clone+ of Facebook, which is a derivative of whatever social trend we’ve seen in the last five years. Depending on how you count, Google Plus is Google’s fourth attempt at this social networking thing. The current trend in social networking sites is that anonymity is to be banned. Facebook was the first social network to demand users use their real and legal names in their profiles and Google Plus has followed this trend.

Since Google Plus is the newest social networking site to see an exponential growth, it is now going through some growing pains in the way Google is policing the community. There have been a large number of reports of Google banning and disabling Google Plus profiles that don’t use “real names.”

The worst part, for those whose accounts have been locked out, is that there is no customer support, no due process, and not even a G+ profile to contact if your Google account is disabled or banned our right. If your Google account is disabled you may be locked out of GMail, Google Docs, and other Google products you may use, which might be have years of data.

The natural progression of these policies is that in the near future people will need to show their government issued identification card, passport, DNA sample, work history and resume, retinal scan, and perhaps a Google history scan to use Google Plus or similar social network. I can appreciate that Google wants to encourage people to use their real names, but there are so many instances beyond their automated algorithmic logic that people use nicknames, pen names, aliases, alternative spellings, stage names, witness protection name, and more. Is Google Plus going to force Jon Stewart to use his birth name? What about Lady Gaga? What about Dear Abby? Larry Brin uses the short form for Lawrence, is that okay? And don’t get me started with folks that are known by their initials or by their profession title such as Dr. Dre.

So why is Google, and Facebook for that matter, so against anonymity? It’s all about the data. The more data Google has on each user, the better they can serve ads targeting them. Google Plus is a user data collection service as much as it is a social network. Google Plus gives Google a new platform to collect even more data that it can then sell, trade, and use to target ads. Currently, most of Google’s ads work on the intent of the user. The more Google knows about the people in your circles, their name, age, background, location, work history, interests, trends, and communication patterns it can easily develop social ads that target you and your inner most circle members.

This whole debate is a red herring, the real issue is about the identifying data that Google is collecting on each profile.  There are already a large number of third parties that are forming a “fourth bureau” of sorts that collects any and every piece of information such as if you pay a phone bill on time or if you spend 6 hours in the middle of the day playing FarmVille.

There are assumptions built in in every input field and user control element in software. Common assumptions baked in the User Interface of applications is that your users live in the United States, that they have a zip code or a telephone of a certain pattern. I’ve seen problems with file upload mechanisms when users try to upload a 500 MB PDF document and the server crashes, or when a user tries to enter 10,000 character comment and the database truncates 90% of it.

Facebook and Twitter have learned how to hedge users behavior that could lead to problems with limitations. Twitter best exemplifies this by the 140 character limit of each status update and the 2000 limit on the number each twitter account can follow. The 2000 follower limit can be increased but only when at least that many people follow you back. Facebook has a similar hard coded number of friends you can have.

The less assumptions you built into the software, the easier to use it will be. But as you remove assumptions, consider having caps, limits, and restrictions in case you start to have scaling issues.

Software Development

• Thread.sleep(28800000);
• You don’t need a PHD in PHP to be a great Web Developer.
• Not Another Expression Language. There should be one expression language to rule them all.
• I am not afraid of rolling up my sleeves and debugger.
• It’s a thin line between feature and bug.
• Code is a blunt instrument.
• We ain’t afraid of no code block.
• Web designers are modern day alchemists.
• If developers are a dime a dozen, then product idea people are a silver dollar a dozen.
• I don’t read romance novels or non-fiction before going to bed, I read programming language technical specifications.
• New Name For Rock Band: Death By SQL Injection
• Let there be code.
• Just code it.
• Code the future.
• Crack the code.
• Don’t be a code donkey.

Team Dynamics

• Are you a value creator, subtractor, divider, or multiplier?
• AWS failure is the perfect storm to the cloud.
• Stress is excess, we don’t need it in our lives.
• You can’t buy the scrappy mentality.
• Scale your thought process.
• The right time is right now.
• Strive to do what you do well better.
• People don’t scale and multi-task as well as computers do.
• Give a man a thought, and he will think for a day. Teach a man to think, and he will think for himself.
• You don’t want someone to reinvent the wheel, you need someone that makes it turn!
• Everyone has great ideas, what is needed is great execution of great ideas.

Product Placement

• Is Automattic, the company behind WordPress, working on an ad network? With millions of WP blogs out there, maybe it should.
• Jiffy Lube peeps are great at up selling you on add-on services.
• Forget HAL 3000, I’m afraid of my iPhone 3000. “I’m sorry Dave, but I’m afraid you can’t do that and I’ve notified the authorities.
• Google announcing that better ads are coming to GMail is like the power company announcing that a better billing system is coming.
• I feel like I get more snail mail spam than email spam. I wonder if GMail can also filter out my snail mail spam.
• If you add up all the zero-day holes in Adobe products, you get a lot of days spent patching and upgrading buggy software.

The Valley

• Welcome to the Blubble 2.0.
• The trouble with the blubble.
• I think we are in a #bubble when a website for listing free crap is valued at multiple millions of dollars.
• Don’t pivot while you pitch.
• How do you monetize the bubble?
• Ah, Silicon Valley, the land of vanity startups, founders with ADD, fan boi VCs, me-to products, one trick apps, companies on pivot mode…
• Bubbles are like snow flakes, there are no two alike, so we can conclude that this tech bubble I’d different from previous ones.

General Technologist

• If Arthur Miller were alive today he would have written a sequel to Death of a Salesman called Death of a Social Media Marketing Ninja.
• You know your service or product is successful if GOOG wants to buy you for a billion dollars, FB copies you, and if MSFT doesn’t get it.
• Any lawmaker who proposes any bill related to technology should be able to correctly setup a wifi router, Facebook privacy settings, …
• My iPhone knows too much about me. I think I want a dumb phone, instead of a scheming evil genius phone that is tracking my every move.
• If TinyUrl was a utilities company it would force upgrade everybody to use smart grid meter and charge us extra to use green friendly links.
• Twitter management seem to play musical chairs with titles. It seems like everyone at the company has had a turn at being CEO.
• There are different degrees of open in open platforms, from marketing buzzword open to data portability open.
• What I learned by reading Rework by 37signals: Emulate drug dealing celebrity chefs and up sale the by-products of what you do.

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.

Programming Rants

• Software Engineering in Pictures
• The Resume is Dead
• Resume and Interview Tips
• Programmer Pickup Lnes
• More Hats, More Problems
• Working Code is Just One Corner Case

Products and Features

• Foursquare Missing Features
• Apple vs Android
• The Future of Apple TV
• Facebook Was My Idea
• Facebook Zuckerberg and Plain Text Passwords
• Google Has Lot Its Focus
• Google Dead Pool
• Amazon Should Buy Blippy

Tutorial and Resources

• Use Google Forms for Surveys and Polls
• Model Business in Google Docs
• Check if GMail Account Has Been Hacked Into
• Apple iPad Top Resources
• iPhone Frameworks

Patents and Trademarks

• Us Patent: Virtual Currency
• US Patent: Linked List
• Cease and Desist Trademark Craziness

Code Conversations

• Captcha This, Byatch!
• Mushroom Life Cycle
• Zombie Code
• The Mayor of Dead Space
• Remote Debug Your Thinking Process
• All Code is Inherently Evil

Retweet 2010

• Retweet December
• Retweet November
• Retweet October
• Retweet September
• Retweet August
• Retweet July
• Retweet June
• Retweet May
• Retweet April
• Retweet March
• Retweet February
• Retweet January

Random Thoughts 2010

• Random Thoughts December
• Random Thoughts November
• Random Thoughts October

Year in Review

• Year In Review 2009
• Year In Review 2008
• Year In Review 2007
• Year In Review 2006
• Year In Review 2005

Which is worse, a developer that will fight you every inch when you ask him to add a feature that upsets the balance of his understanding or the isometry of his code or a developer when asked to add a feature simply does it without question?

It is estimated that up to 90% of Internet traffic is spam. For some product searches up to 80% of Google results are spam because of black hat SEO.

In the span of year a typical teen on Facebook would have written more text than the whole of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and would contain more drama than Shakespeare’s plays combine but it won’t be considered literature.

I travel for business a bit. I usually stay in the same hotel chain, if not the same hotel. I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in. In fact, if I am already in their reward program, and if they already have my credit card, they already know all pertinent information about me, why do I even have to check in or out at the front desk? Here is a million dollar idea, have a way book a hotel from you iPhone, you are immediately given a room number, if available, and your credit card in file or reward card is used to open the hotel room door. There is no need, unless you need more towels, to deal with the front desk.

Saying that listing to rap long enough will make you want to shoot someone is like saying that listening to country long enough will make you make love to your truck.

• @techknow: In addition to moving into the automotive industry, Google should get into the airline business and revolutionize it from the ground up.
• @SchemaCzar: Google did get into the airline biz a few months ago by buying ITA Software.
• @techknow: You are right, I totally forgot about that acquisition. Okay, the business they still haven’t entered into: home loans! They could fix the mortgage industry

Spam and spambots are a big problem for website operators, but their solutions to get around spambots is hurting the web just as much as the spam. Personally, I despise captchas. Captchas are those cryptic and distorted letters or words that look you have to type to prove that you are a real person when signing up for a web application or service. I recently had to do an eye test and I have 20/20 vision and I have trouble entering captchas, imagine the accessibility issues that people with disabilities have to deal with because of these.

• @techknow: I get personally insulted when I am prompted to prove my humaness with a captcha. It makes me wanna bust a cap-tcha on some webdeveloper!!!
• @AaronBoynton: I so agree! There are better ways #downwithcaptcha
• @techknow: The worst part is that I start thinking that maybe I am a robot because I can’t read the damn captcha. A robot with poor vision.

I’ve written about missing features in Foursquare and other location based web services before. There is little or no utility in checking into a location though Foursquare. In check into hotels more than I check into Foursquare. In check into a restaurant more than I check into Facebook Places. I want to be able to check into a restaurant and make an order. I want to check into a hotel and check in without talking to the front desk. I want to check into a parking structure and pay for parking. The following conversation started with that idea.

• @techknow: I would like the hotel check-in process to be as easy as Foursquare check-in.
• @ButtercupD: cool would be something similar Fastrak for bridge tolls–what about frequent guest card and walk in and autochecks you.
• @techknow: We should patent that. ;)

I was fortunate enough to get a free CR-48 Crome notebook from Google. People outside of Google had the opportunity to sign up for one and this was the first raffle/lottery that I have ever won. This is the first time I have ever heard of a company making available a test pilot product to people outside of the company in this fashion. I think it was marketing genius and Google engineers will mine a lot of real life usage data from pilot users.

• @techknow: My Google wish came true, and it came in a UPS box!
• @aaronhalford: aw, everyone is getting a CR-48 but me. Enjoy it!
• @techknow: Thanks! I hope you get one too! I also wish that Apple had a similar program. I also wish for world peace.

Depending on the business or product or simply to proactively protect your business from competition and spammers, you should think about snapping up domain names that reference your company or trademarks. For example, try to buy the .net, .org, .me, and other TLD versions of the domain name you are considering if available. In addition try to lock up domain names that reference your company or product in a disparaging way.

Because most single word domain names are already taken, people often combine two words or more. It is common practice to not hyphenate two or more words in a domain name. But when placing two words together be careful that it doesn’t accidentally read something different than what you intended. For example, There is s site called Therapist Finder whose domain name is therapistfinder.com which can also be read as The Rapist Finder. The is a website called Speed of Art whose domain name is speedofart.com whose domain name can also be read as Speedo Fart.

Try to avoid using a name that ties your product or service to a particular technology. Find an inspirational name that denotes a feeling of though about what you are doing but not the technology you are using. For example, Twitter is a great name for their product. No most people use Twitter with mobile device apps over 3G, but SMS was a key aspect of Twitter in the early days. The word tweet denotes so well what people do on the service, they simply post a tiny comment. Once Twitter became a success and they opened up their API to third party applications then you saw the opposite, company formed around Twitter and named themselves a such like Twitpic. Twitpic is successful despite their bad choice of name but they it does narrow people’s view on you. In the case of Twitpic, they also have the problem that they misspelled the word tweet with twit. Twit has a completely different meaning than tweet.

Another example of a company name that relied heavily on a particular technology was PodShow. PodShow later rebranded itself to Mevio but only after the whole podcasting industry was threatened by Apple copyrighting and trademarking the term podcast. The term podcast itself relies on Apple iPod product line. The industry as whole talked of using netcast instead of podcast, but that never took off. By rebranding themselves to Mevio, the company speaks to broader audience, does not tie itself to one technology or open itself for legal dispute over trademarks or copyrights issues. In the case of Mevio, the name suits it well. The prefix is me and postfix vio sounds like the last syllable of video.

In the current state of search, short and clear domain names are known to get more Google juice to complicated, hard to spell, hyphenated domains. Your domain name should be easy to say and understand over a phone, it should evoke your industry, product, or service. The right domain is worth its price for the right entrepreneur. Not to take anything away from the founder of diapers.com, but I believe that the domain name had a lot to do to the online retailers credibility with customers which ultimately lead to diapers.com being purchased for over $500 million dollars by Amazon.

Owning the right domain name can help to take your business to the next level.