The more time I spend studying companies and company stock, the more I realize how fucked you are if you take a job with a company and they issue you RSUs instead of options or stock. They’re usually handed out to people who show up too late in that particular startup’s lifecycle to matter. The new employees aren’t founders, they’re not startup people, they’re just workers. Unlike the first 20 employees, they are taking little risk as the company is already established, and they will see little reward in the end.

Google and Facebook have been doing this for years. In reality, the prevalance of RSUs is a direct response to much of the legislation issued after the .com bust. It’s easier to stall on the IPO and continue to accumulate capital than to deal with the IPO itself. Remember that the stock market was originally designed to allow individuals to pump capital into companies, a job now largely taken over by VCs.

With those companies, their growth is so good that you might get a nice upside working for them, but nothing like you would with options. Worse yet, you get few rights if you have RSUs. No voting rights, nothing. No common stock. If you hold them for ten years and your company doesn’t IPO, you get nothing (average IPO time these days is 9+ years and the market is slow) when they expire. The SEC will even grant special privileges to your company (easily upon request) so they can avoid the registration requirements for stock, which is around 500 stockholders and/or > $1M in assets.

Why is that important? Because around 500 registered stockholders, the company is forced into an IPO; The reporting requirements under Sarbanes-Oxley will cost as much as the IPO does, for the most part.

RSUs come with many restrictions. You can’t transfer them (to your spouse, or anyone), if you die, your successor is stuck with the same restrictions, and you can’t sell them. Guess what else? If your company gets bought, the acquiring company can just terminate RSUs during the acquisition. Whoops. You lose your stock.

At least if you get fired, you (might) get to keep your RSUs. If they manage to IPO, it’s going to be a good year or so before you can sell. It’s standard though, during the IPO, to convert RSUs directly to Common Stock during a Liquidity event, though.

If you’re taking a new job, take options or direct grants only, and make sure you read Know your Options. If you’re offered RSUs and you want serious upside stay away from companies that are issuing RSUs. You’re going to get fuck all in the end. Go find an early-stage startup instead. If you want a safe job, take the RSUs.

Here’s an example of what a company can do with the SEC. It’s Twitter asking for an exemption from Section 12 of the Exchange act and it contains some very interesting information about how the RSU program works.

http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-noaction/2011/twitter091311-12gh-incoming.pdf

Here’s facebook’s for comparison (but they’re written by the same lawyer and even have a similar filename, so don’t expect too much difference.)

http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-noaction/2008/facebook101308-12gh-incoming.pdf

For more information, have a look at the Bloomberg article, here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-15/twitter-gets-leeway-from-sec-in-issuing-restricted-stock-units.html

It’s a very small, 50MB distribution of linux that is not that easy to install if you don’t have a linux box to start with. Despite the large number of Linux boxes that I once owned, I’ve replaced all of them with Mac OS. Fortunately, there is a simple way to install DSL on a USB boot drive from Mac OS, using VMWare Fusion.

You’ll need a 1GB USB drive. The smaller the drive is, the better. Some systems cannot boot off of very large USB drives. 512MB or 1GB is recommended.

Here’s the how to…

Download the latest copy of DSL from a mirror.

Do not use syslinux, but get the ISOLINUX version. This is the ISO named dsl-x.x.x where x.x.x is a version number. I used dsl-4.4.10.iso, although in retrospect I should have used the VMWare VMX Image. Either works.

Insert the pendrive and format it.

Mac OS will auto mount the pendrive. Open Disk Utiilty.
Format the device as MS DOS FAT and MBR.
One Partition.

Important: Unmount the pendrive before starting VMWare Fusion.

Create a new VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine

The general idea here is to create an empty VM using fusion, and to boot off of the ISO you have just downloaded.
It can be reasonably small. You do not need to allocate disk space on your HD.
Configure the VM as Linux/Ubuntu and to mount the CD.

Mount the pendrive as an “Alcor Micro Mass Storage” device. It will appear to your VM as /dev/sda.

Install DSL

When DSL boots up, at the “boot:” prompt, type “install”
Then, select “5″ for “USB Pendrive HDB boot install”

Answer yes to all prompts, and the install will (hopefully) complete.

Now What?

You’re done. DSL is great for password recovery, emergency repair, or system rescue. So long as your system supports booting from USB drives, you’re good to go!

Apple’s new iPhone4 has created quite a stir, even though consumers are paying slightly more for the same phone with a slightly better display, dual (improved) cameras, and flash. I’m sure by now you know about the antenna problems and the lame way that apple chose to fix it, but I wanted one of these wonderful gadgets, so I signed up on the reservation list and finally got my email notification to pick one up this morning.

The Apple store was helpful as always, but as soon as I got the phone in my hands I realized that it was going to be another iPhone upgrade with a different goddamn dock. I tried the easy way out and wasted $9 on a “universal dock adapter kit”, which didn’t work at all with my Apple iPhone 3GS dock. I assumed it was meant for the dock that I owned, but this adapter was meant for some device which clearly didn’t match anything that Apple has ever produced. Nine dollars wasted and no working dock.

The dock is an essential device to me. Without it, I’d forget to drop my phone into the dock at work and keep it charged. How to fix this? Apple wants $29 for a new iPhone 4 dock. This is completely unacceptable to me, considering that the iPhone 3GS dock is now selling at $7 on many sites. Why pay again for a similar connector and janky audio-out contraption? (Did you know the audio out is provided by a microphone in the base of the dock, which connects to an amplifier and then the audio out jack? It does.)

There was only one way to fix this — time to make this right with some hacking.

So, out comes the dremel tool:

Let the hacking begin. We start with the 3gs dock, and go from this…

…to this, a few moments later. I hacked it into the shape of the 4g:

But guess what? Hacking the dock to fit the iPhone4 doesn’t work, because Apple’s modified the dock to only recognize the 3GS. If you connect an iPhone 4 to that very same connector, the phone and iTunes will not recognize the phone.

Sure, my 3gs still works, so I haven’t damaged anything:

Connecting the cable directly to the 4g works, just not the dock to the 4g through the very same cable.

Apple’s position on this is worsening. The iPhone 1g’s came with working docks. Then, they stopped supplying them. on the 2g and 3g models, it was an extra $20 and $25. Now it’s $29.

This is awful. There’s a custom plug that you can’t easily purchase, and all iPhone models, even though they use the same plug, are incompatible with each other’s docks because of artificial incompatibilities created by a series of resistor codes hidden inside the cable or device.

Thanks, Apple. I love the iPhone, but the way you’re treating your customers is bullshit.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/04/twitter_and_the_end_of_the_sysadmin_as_we_know_it/

The author captures many of my points well, and applauds us for our open sourcing of our back-end infrastructure.

The talk is located right here on slideshare, if you’d like to view it.

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/03/unicorn-power.html

SXSW starts this Thursday, and I’ll be attending. You can catch me speaking on a funny panel called “How not to be a Douchebag at SXSW”, which Ed Huntsinger is hosting. But hey, it won’t be about tech. So maybe you won’t like that.

SXSW Interactive is great, but it’s like work to me; I always have to be on and make connections with people for work. Sometime around next Tuesday, the music portion of the event will start, and it’s a blissful mix of music, people, and madness.

I’ve spent the last couple of days or so going through the torrents for SXSW Music. 646 songs on the first one, and another 309 on the second torrent.

You can grab both of them here if you want to download them. They’re huge, but worth it.

As is the case with most submissions, about 90% of it is crap, but if you’re willing to sit through and listen to the music there’s a wealth of wonderful artists here.

Here’s my top 15 or so, in no particular oder

Allo Darlin- My Heart Is A Drummer

Something like the 60′s, yet reminiscent of Sing-Sing and some of the more country inspired 4AD artists.

ELEW – Mr. Brightside

Eric Lewis, AKA ELEW is a mindblowing pianist, playing what he likes to call Rockjazz on piano, He’s played TED, our own DNA Lounge. This is his cover of Mr. Brightside by the Killers.

The Golden Filter – Hide Me

Blissful, female vocal based, bouncy disco-electro perfect for the dancefloor.

The Heavenly States – Oui Camera Oui

A terrible recording with little to no dynamic range that reminded me of early Julian Cope.

Kill The Noise – All Too Vivid

I’d expect to hear this song at 1015 (a house club here in SF) at about 3:30 in the morning. Incessant, bouncing, house beat with heavily vocoded nothingness on top. Who just bought an access virus? You did, yes you did.

Lights – Saviour

This is what it would sound like if Canada tried to produce the LA Wall-of-sound pop sound. Female Vocals, Big, big bridges and choruses. Expect to hear this on MTV soon. I love this piece of pop aside from the minor Auto Tune glitches that exist all over it. Nice harmonies, but the lyrics? Forget it. It’s pop.

Luder – Sing to Me

I think I picked these guys because I’ve been on a strange metal bent lately (I blame Jack Black and too many late night PS3 sessions of Brutal Legend). Unfortunately this sounds like a goth band trying to complete for vocal bandwidth with slayer. It sort of works.

Maren Parusel – Dear Love

The likeness of Maren’s voice to Feist is what does it for me here. Breathy female vocals on a solid rock background with minimal rhythm guitar. A string quartet pops up unexpectedly to lift the chorus.

Margaret Cho – Eat Shit and Die

Can’t go wrong with Marget Cho.

Minipop – Precious

Minipop is the sort of breathy, reverb laden beauty that attracted me to bands like Love Spirals Downwards and whatever Project Records was vomiting up in the 90′s. The thing here, is that Minipop throws away all of those pretentious for perfect, blissed-out shoe gazer wonderfulness. I saw them at the Independent in SF last year and fell in love with them on the first listen. It helps that the singer is a 5’2″ elf-like creature. Loads of delay, lots of chorus. Love it.

Noush Skaugen – Run Baby Run

Guitars meet keyboards with a driving bass that reminds me of early Jesus and Mary Chain, but there’s far too many drums to really make the comparison hold true. The sort of music you’d want as the wind rips through your hair at 80mph down the highway.

Resplandor – Downfall

A reincarnation of Slowdive. Wall of guitars everywhere. I feel like I’m back in 1992. Excellent stuff.

Ruby Isle – So Damn High (Will Eastman Club Edit)

Big, giant kick drum and vocal samples everywhere. Electro at it’s most base.

Sex with Strangers – New City Anthem

Think first album Shiny Toy Guns with far less production and a bit of Human League thrown in for fun.

Sofia Talvik – Jonestown

Think Suzanne Vega and the Sundays coming together, without all that needless strumming of the 12-string. I won’t go to see her play at SXSW, but I’d listen to it with the lights out.

Web 2.0 Expo 2010, San Francisco, CA
May 3rd-6th
In the Belly of the Whale: Operations at Twitter

Chirp (Twitter’s Official Developer Conference)
San Francisco, CA
April 15th, 2010, 4:30PM (Hack Day)
Scaling Twitter: I’ll be speaking on some of the issues we’ve experienced in scaling twitter and you’ll get to meet members of our Ops team.

Velocity 2010
San Francisco, CA
June 22nd-24th, 2010
Waiting for proposal approval, but probably will be similar to my talk at Chirp

The blocks on both services are easily removed through the use of a proxy that can replace the browser’s header in the outbound HTTP request.

I have both professional and personal experience in media convergence; Throughout my career I’ve worked for three companies that did streaming video, from adult content (Gamelink), to mainstream media and Independent film (Ifilm/Viacom). On a personal level, the flooding of my loft space has forced me into some temporary housing where I currently cannot not install Internet or Cable service, and I’m forced into using the slow (but not entirely awful) landlord provided WiFi.

Initially the WiFi service was a nightmare, but after the introduction of a pair of Meraki mesh access points, I was able to boost the signal to the point where the PS3 and laptops in the living room could access video. Meraki’s hardware has proven to be excellent under poor signal conditions and simple to use.

On the big Samsung TV that I own, this leaves me with a few options for video at home:

• Hulu/Youtube via the PS3
  
• The same, via laptop
  
• Pay-to-play via the Playstation Store

• Pay-to-play via iTunes
  
• Basic Cable (no DVR, no channels, no time-shifting)

Most of these are great options (basic cable not withstanding). Laptop based options require me to connect cables, to lose the use of my laptop for the duration of the show, and because of the way the Mac supports full-screen websites, I can’t use fullscreen and the laptop’s screen at the same time. The PS3 is slow to download (although some of the best video I’ve seen on my TV), all Laptop options inconvenient (because of the cables)

It’s not about the technology either; We have the technology! It all works, just not as smoothly as the experience of loafing one’s self in front of the TV and pressing a couple buttons on a remote.

Content creators should be making every attempt to make it easier to consume their content, with advertising. There’s a duality here, where the online video world treats the laptop as a 1st class citizen and the TV as a second class citizen, and vice-versa when it comes to the Big Media world of Television.

All of this is about money — whom is paid and whom is not for the big business of the media world. The blocking needs to stop, and ad revenues shared between the content creators and the new distribution world of digital devices connected to large screens. There is fundamentally no difference between a large monitor, and the large flatscreen in front of my couch.

First, turn your laptop into an access point. These scripts work on MacOS X running 10.5.4 or better — good luck!

I call this script ‘make-me-an-access-point.sh’:

#!/bin/sh

#Edit your /etc/rc.conf to set the option firewall_enable to YES
# Edit your /etc/rc.firewall to add lines:

/usr/sbin/natd -dynamic -interface ppp0   

sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=1

/sbin/ipfw -f flush
/sbin/ipfw add 1000 pass all from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.0.1
/sbin/ipfw add 2000 divert natd ip from any to any via ppp0
/sbin/ipfw add 6500 pass all from any to any

ifconfig en1 192.168.1.1 up netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255

dhcpd

and when you want this to go away, do:

laptop:bin jna$ cat undo-make-me-an-access-point.sh
#!/bin/sh
#
# undo the make-me-an-access-point script
#
sysctl -w net.inet.ip.forwarding=0

sudo /sbin/ipfw -f flush
sudo kill -9 `ps -efl |  grep dhcp | egrep -v VMware |  awk '{ print $2 }'`

echo "Now turn off the Airport, then wait a moment, and turn it back on."

The contents of my dhcpd.conf are very simple:

# dhcpd.conf
#
# Sample configuration file for ISC dhcpd
#
ddns-update-style ad-hoc;

# option definitions common to all supported networks...
option domain-name "retina.net";
option domain-name-servers 209.183.50.151;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

# If this DHCP server is the official DHCP server for the local
# network, the authoritative directive should be uncommented.
authoritative;

# Use this to send dhcp log messages to a different log file (you also
# have to hack syslog.conf to complete the redirection).
log-facility local7;

# No service will be given on this subnet, but declaring it helps the
# DHCP server to understand the network topology.

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.1.100 192.168.1.200;
  option routers 192.168.1.1;
  option domain-name-servers 206.13.28.12;
  option broadcast-address  192.168.1.255;
}

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle‘s “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“.

Read that, perhaps while watching/listening toKevin Kelly‘s riveting talk (from the TED EG conference) on the next 5000 days of the web (that’s right, we’re only 5000 days old) and the future of the Semantic web. Kelly says we’re building not a series of small machines on the Internet, but one gigantic thinking machine, approaching the connectivity level of the human mind.