tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30221939785641549372024-08-30T11:55:13.652-07:00Arma virumque cano... O koinon autadelphon, Ismenes kara... And other passingly interesting thoughts from an addled mind.Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-60761664209137289342011-03-29T21:13:00.000-07:002011-03-29T21:16:42.397-07:00

I've been fascinated at the recent debate over funding for public radio.  I completely understand that we need to find sources of expense to reduce.  It's hard.  No one likes the outcome, no matter what it is. But, here are a few thoughts that I had in the past few weeks. NPR receives about 2% of it's funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and federal grants (source

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-67805537247846539652010-03-05T09:22:00.000-08:002010-03-05T09:22:54.643-08:00

Recently, Ira Glass encouraged membership to public radio stations by asking existing members to "out" friends who listen to public radio but are not members.  After identifying these free-riders, Ira called them on-air to ask them to pledge.  Of course, the "out-ed" non-member quickly signed up.  After all, who wants to be publicly chastised by Ira Glass on the radio? After

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-63419282771060604262010-02-09T10:06:00.000-08:002010-02-09T10:43:50.927-08:00

Recently, Dave McClure posted an entry about Subscriptions as the future of online business.  I couldn't agree with Dave's sentiment more.  He asserts that "The default startup business model from 2000-2009 was based on growth (aka acquisition) and CPM- or CPC-advertising".  There's no doubt that there's a lot of money to be made in the advertising model. But, here's

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-91808930707409715092009-12-13T17:24:00.000-08:002009-12-13T17:24:01.451-08:00

I've been playing with Amazon Mechanical Turk for a project, and I think it's really, really powerful.  So far, I've done a bunch of research and some tests using the Requester UI, but have not yet dug into the API.  But, over the past few days, I've finally started my research and experimenation using the API directly.  However, my very first time trying to use the modules that

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-49114926228109912292009-12-02T14:02:00.001-08:002009-12-02T14:35:28.117-08:00

A few month ago, I posted about using Jquery to re-imagine simple things. Recently, I've been working with jQuery and jQuery UI quite a bit - in particular in building simple administrative interfaces. Simple admin interfaces almost always require a table of stuff - users, comments, posts, actions, jobs, whatever - the "things" being administrated. jQuery has a really cool plugin called

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-29885796766257241782009-12-02T12:08:00.001-08:002009-12-02T12:12:04.830-08:00

Recently, Tony Karrer posted an article where he described a pretty interesting new idea - which he termed Visible Networking. I think this concept is really cool. I've always thought that we should use blogs to have more open debates on issues, thoughts, etc. Too often, blogs seem like a one-way broadcast about something - but I think that the most interesting ideas and thoughts are

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-87745538834429362792009-11-03T18:22:00.000-08:002009-11-03T19:15:38.329-08:00

Occasionally, I think of crazy business ideas. I have no idea if they are practical, but they're fun to imagine. Today, I thought of another one.Imagine a plugin/widget that enabled a DVR to replace ads in a program with ads from a different decade - of your choosing.I thought of this while watching the original V miniseries on SyFy. It's from the early/mid 80s. The hair, clothes, special

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-64526219623576902582009-10-23T20:22:00.000-07:002009-10-23T20:26:41.751-07:00

Ever wonder how to get ImageMagick to work well in a PHP environment on CentOS? I have done it a few times, and here's a simple recipe to follow. I use this recipe when I have yum managing the basic libraries, but not managing the libraries in active use on the site (like php, apache, perl, imagemagick and a few others).% sudo yum install libX11-devel% sudo yum install libjpeg libjpeg-devel%

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-42669178208878939882009-09-24T08:33:00.000-07:002009-09-24T08:37:03.284-07:00

Just wanted to pass the word on a cool new event coming up. It's aworkshop put on my the DealMaker team which also brings you theStrategy Series and Startonomics. I've been to several of theseevents, and I have to say that they are really, really good - veryhigh signal-to-noise ration. Here's the next big thing they areputting on here in LA.Details are below. Enter "STARTUP LA" in the ""how

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-13280169761835597232009-09-24T08:32:00.001-07:002009-09-24T08:33:21.278-07:00

A client of mine (based here in LA) is in need of Drupal expertise very soon (in the next few weeks). The project is a consumer-facing Q&A site that is in open beta now, but in need of additional work in the coming months.Please contact me if you're interested.

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-2036148943253759492009-02-27T16:22:00.000-08:002009-02-27T17:05:43.788-08:00

For the past several months, I've been using jQuery more and more in various ways. Every time I use it, I totally love it. It's so freeing not to use a library that is compact, flexible, powerful, cross-platform, and that doesn't require a crapload of programming paradigms or force a whole regime of programming on me.This isn't meant to bash any other frameworks or libraries. But, I've used

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-3336857233092121062009-01-28T10:49:00.001-08:002009-01-28T12:14:07.564-08:00

I have been working on a new set of Rest web services for Aboutmybaby.com and I keep coming across interesting challenges in defining a meaningful, REST-compliant API. I'll post more details as I work through the whole API.Now, for the first challenge. I've discovered that PUT and POST are pretty complicated. Well, not complicated, but their proper use is not always obvious. I've read several

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-20699707601147871802009-01-20T12:25:00.000-08:002009-01-20T13:33:32.566-08:00

I think that this post - "The 37Signals Effect" by Louis Brandy - is a great article and really points out a useful lesson. In short, Louis argues that by simply following the precise advice of a successful company or blogger, you will achieve your own success. I firmly believe that far too often, people blindly follow the exact words of successful predecessors. Just think about it. Someone

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-59435434717233965512009-01-16T12:37:00.000-08:002009-01-16T12:51:41.418-08:00

My day job is the Director of Technology for 60Frames Entertainment, a digital studio making, distributing, and monetizing original video content for the web. A lot of people have told me that video online will never be more than low quality, "watch me as I set myself on fire and ride my bike around" junk. Some people have duly noted that there is that kind of low-grade fair, and then there

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-52675510307420817192009-01-16T10:53:00.000-08:002009-01-16T10:57:20.732-08:00

After much delay, I've decided it's time to blog again. I have about a zillion mini-posts in my head that I just never bothered to write down. I know they won't all be fascinating, but what blog is 100% interesting all the time?My posts will be a mix of technology, business, politics, sociology, and god knows what else comes into my mind.So, enough of the introductory crap... let's get on with

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3022193978564154937.post-74911527680164527372007-07-31T12:46:00.001-07:002007-07-31T12:46:56.110-07:00

This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. Were this a real emergency, this message would be followed by instructions from your local authorities.

Dave Vinerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11903200059049798072noreply@blogger.com0