Soldier Ant

Software Trends

2010-08-13T16:02:59Z

Offered without much analysis, I just think these comparisons are interesting. These graphs show New Business formations in various facets of the computer software industry over the past 29 weeks (since ~January 22nd of this year.)

Service Bureaus

Computer Programming Services Businesses in the U.S.

Prepackaged Software

Apparently, not a growth industry these days. Prepackaged Software Businesses in the U.S.

Kirby

2010-07-01T02:46:31Z

Will you comfort me in my time of need?
Can you take away the pain of hurtful deeds?
Cause I will come for you when my days are through
And let your smile just off and carry me —Ryan Adams

]]> It's been several months since our Kirby passed. Soon after he died, baby Evan came on the scene and things have changed so rapidly. It's almost like we're a different family than we were this time last year. But I suppose that's life, right? A Hericletian state of flux.

We haven't forgotten Kirby, by any stretch. I keep intending to write something suitable here for him. Given that so much of his life with us is documented here, it doesn't seem right to let his epitaph be a few short tweets. So maybe someday soon, I'll write something a little longer. But for now, just know that we gave Kirby what we could in his too-short stay with us, but what we got in return was immeasurable.

Edison still asks about his fluffy buddy. The other day he asked "Daddy, where's Kirby's tail?" Kirby's tail is sleeping, son.

Fast-Food Velocity

2010-06-29T21:34:45Z

We launched a new feature at work this week—the ability to embed charts from our New Business Select offering. (Which itself is a pretty cool offering, if you're in the business of selling to or otherwise tracking newly-incorporated businesses.)

I, of course, am fascinated by much sillier things. I'm just curious to see the comparative growth rates between various fast-food chains. So, with no further ado, here are...

Arbys

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "arbys"

Chipotle

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "chipotle"

McDonalds

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "mcdonalds"

Starbucks

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "starbucks"

Five Guys

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "five guys"

Panera

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "panera"

At my friend Gary's insistence (see comments), I checked out Subway. Oh. Em. Gee. Look at those numbers.

Subway

Restaurants in the U.S. that match "subway"

Cool in Columbus: Protonight

2010-03-05T08:27:18Z

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural run of a new user-group that Craig Muth is getting off the ground here in Columbus. The idea behind Columbus Protonight is simple: 2 people, 1 project, 0 commitment. (All in 2 hours.)

Craig's ambition is to take the most productive and engaging aspects from Pair Programming and blow them out a bit to include “Idea People” as well. Based on my experiences at the first protonight, I think he may be on to something.

]]> Last Tuesday's gathering was lean and mean (weather, reschedulings and mixed communications all contributed.) Though the interest list was long, and ~30-some people had confirmed, we ended up with 4 of us attending. But… hey, perfect, right? Just enough for 2 pairs. We even had the proper split—2 idea people and 2 coders.

Truth be told, I didn't know what to expect when I showed up. I brought a Sharpie-scrawled list of 5 ideas (more on those in a minute) but I was also prepared to drop into the role of stumbling, bumbling coder if need be. Fortunately, we didn't have to go there. I had the honor of working with Craig himself (who was working in his wicked-cool-productive emacs/wiki environment/thingy Xiki) which helped a lot because we had quite a few candidate ideas to consider.

Minus some lost minutes upfront for chatter and administrivia, we had two hours to do something together—anything. The ideas that I brought were (I thought!) all scaled back for achievability. Future Idea People, take note: this is not the venue to bring your “Facebook meets Flickr, but for dogs” grand, sweeping idea. No, you should be ruthless in paring down your ambitions. 2 hours, starting cold with a person you've probably only just met? Think small, fun and do-able.

Here's what Craig and I considered, from my list:

I had some decent front-end code (HTML/CSS/JS) for a modest little web store that I've been meaning to launch for forever. I thought we could wire it to a lightweight CMS (Wordpress, maybe) to automate the publishing of new SKUs.
I've been thinking of a nice little site to showcase a certain kind of artisan, and goods that they may have for sale on Etsy. With no designs or code to start from, I thought maybe we could scaffold the basic functional outline of the site in Rails and get a simple listing/detail page/submit form running.
I have a number of photos (diagrams, actually) on Flickr that have received a lot of comments & favorites. Those people could form the nucleus of a community of likeminded folks. (And I may want to communicate with them at some point in the future.) I thought that a script to grab the Flickr-names from comments and favorites, for any arbitrary photo, would be a handy thing to have.
This idea came from Nate Koechley (the very day of protonight, in fact): a Greasemonkey script for Gmail to display an addressee's most recent tweets.
And, finally, I had some really nebulous idea that it would be cool to have some Javascript code that would, when inserted on a page, make any formatted phone number dial-able with Google Voice.

So, as you can see, I had a number of ideas, sketched out to varying degrees—for some I had actual code to start from, others some technology suggestions, while some were just the barest puff of a thought or a tweet.

How far did we get? Well, we kind of took a 'dip a toe in every idea' approach. We discovered that Craig is, like me, an itinerant tinkerer. So neither of us were too hung up on having something finished at the end of the night. No, as long as our misteps were taking us through APIs and documentation for Flickr, google Contacts and Voice, with a side-foray into greasemonkey, then it was all good.

Ideas 1 & 2 got almost no consideration—too ambitious, and (I suspect) just didn't tickle Craig's fancy enough. That was fine, I was happy to eliminate them. We actually worked a bit on Nate's Greasemonkey request, long enough to run up against Google Contacts authentication mechanism for their API. We decided: more than a 2-hour exercise. We moved on. Likewise the Google Voice thing was first scaled back to a bookmarklet and then 'later'-ed altogether.

We finally settled on the Flickr idea (what I'd taken to thinking of as 'Flickr Ad-Hoc Communities'—the ability to point at a photo and instantly get back a list of all parties who'd expressed interest.) Craig's weapon of choice? Well, by this time, we were getting really spare on time—something like 30 minutes left—so it was nothing fancy: a Ruby script to grab photo pages and scrape the data out. (It turns out that there are API-driven ways to get a photos commenters or favorite-ers but… hey man, clock was ticking and we'd long since past the “dig through the docs” phase of the evening.)

So, some HTTP Gets, a little RegEx love (Craig kindly taught me the 'non-greedy' syntax for matching an expression which is something I really wish I'd payed attention to a long, long time ago. Would've put days back on my life) and we did walk away with a functioning Ruby script that grabs comments only. (The favorites are a little more complicated, cause they're paginated. But I bet Craig would'a got there with 10 more minutes.)

In the end, Protonight was a lot of fun. As a new Dad (and trying to buy my way back into my wife's good graces after writing a book last year) I have to be pretty judicious with my time (especially my evening hours.) But I really wanted to make time for Protonight. I've known and liked Craig for a while now, and I know that he's been instrumental in getting several local tech user groups off the ground. (The CRB Code Jam, and a Javascript interest group among them.) Protonight very much feels like a natural evolution of those types of events: leaner, lighter-weight, a little more directed.

Craig hopes to grow the concept slowly and iron the kinks out, and I know that some of my User Experience compatriots on twitter have expressed an interest (for good reason—the IxDA folks and Protonight should be a match made in heaven.) I too hope to attend again, and frequently. (Tho' um, there's that New Dad thing again… I may have to skip every other gathering or something.)

But YOU?! You'd be crazy not to at least join the list and make some time for an upcoming event.

I Killed This Dog

2009-09-15T04:57:38Z

Found Dog - Please Retweet, originally uploaded by soldierant.

Well, not really, but it sure feels like I did. I surely had my part in it. This beautiful, sweet terrier was young and healthy on Thursday of last week when I found her wandering in an alley near our home.

She's dead tonight, Monday, put out of existence by an overly efficient and overtaxed animal control system, by an owner who failed to step forward and save her, by pitbull regulations that seem deeply flawed, and by… me. Someone who was trying to do the right thing, but ended up failing her like everyone else. I'll never know her name, but I'll never forget her.

I was going to write much more about this, but I don't know that there's much more to say. The wife and I are rather upset, but we're glad this girl will never be hurt again.

Good Deeds

2009-08-24T16:19:11Z

Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces, originally uploaded by soldierant.

This is a brilliant piece of motivational design on Typedia, a wiki-esque encyclopedia of typefaces. Right on the top of the site, they greet you with 3 things you can do to make Typedia a better site. These are generally related to building out the completeness of a typeface's page (providing examples, or gussying up the page's presentation.)

There is obviously some primary value here (if visitors actually do these things, then the site benefits!) But there's a sneakily-awesome secondary benefit as well: just by virtue of seeing these suggestions, it's already imprinted upon your mind that this is a community effort site. This is a site where you're being asked to contribute in a positive way. The corollary may also be: jerks need not apply.

Even if you don't ever take up one of these Good Deeds, their presence helps set the tone for your engagement with the site. If you want to be a helpful person, this may be the place for you.

(The language helps too. It's friendly and approachable.)

Heaven in a Wheelbarrow

2009-01-23T06:03:10Z

This is a couple-years old entry from my sad neglected Yahoo! 360 profile. It mildly amuses me still, so I thought I'd give it a reasonably respectful home here.

I saw an amusing bumper sticker today... plain black text on a white background.

Where are we going?
And why am I in this handbasket?!

Very cute, and like most good bumper stickers, it made me pause to consider it (for slightly more than the 2.3 seconds it took me to get the joke.) Strangely enough, my first question was "what exactly is a 'handbasket' anyway?" It sounds kinda metrosexual.

This of course, led me to question the origins of the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket." This page cites an early 20th century origin for the phrase, but points out at least one earlier (18th century) citation of a similar alliterative turn of phrase, 'head in a handbasket.'

Another source points out that going to heaven in a handbasket was perhaps the earlier iteration of the phrase. And going to heaven in a wheelbarrow perhaps trumps all!

Which, like saying Texas is just South of heaven is actually just a clever misdirection of the 'going to hell' meme—you can't get to heaven in a wheelbarrow, so you must be goin' someplace else!

Coworking in Columbus. An Update.

2008-12-23T04:16:55Z

So, I've been bloviating about coworking on this blog for… um… damn. A while now. Since September of last year, I guess. (Tho' as I mentioned then, it's been on my mind for longer than that yet.) I wanted to post some current thoughts, and give some history about progress of the past year.

]]> Open Discussions

We kicked the coworking-in-Columbus discussion off with a couple of open forums, one in November of 2007 (invite | meeting minutes) and a second one (invite) in March of this year. While a number of plans were presented, and promises made, I think the most significant outcome of those meetings was to get the conversations started and we established a semi-organized 'casual coworking' group that met on Fridays throughout most of the Spring and Summer of this year.

Casual Coworking Was Fun While It Lasted

From our inaugural run upstairs at the North Market (verdict—decent Wifi, awesome lunchbreak, but we all left smelling like the rafters in a smokehouse) to the eventual groove we settled into at Cafe Apropos, these sessions were a lot of fun for me personally. (Companion blog.)

Most weeks we had decent turnout, some weeks excellent turnout (I think our record was 13 for one Friday at Luck Brothers Coffee.) In fact, we struggled with a problem that I can only imagine all coworking arrangements have to deal with at some point: the fine balance between working together and socializing. (Most weeks, we were a little more 'co' than 'working.')

What finally ended up killing these gatherings? I'm not 100% sure. I'd like to say that it was simple attrition: group morale suffered when coworking favorites Issac Kelly and Jim Cropcho moved away from our fair city (Issac has since moved back—In your face, North Carolina!) But in reality, I think it was simple sloppy planning and coordination. Venues not published until the night before. 10am start-times that actually were closer to 1pm. That kinda stuff.

But we had fun, and a bunch of us got to meet face-to-face and bootstrap a little community.

Choices, Choices

There've been a handful of space-options in town over this past year. Some of the Friday coworkers and I checked out CoSpace on Brickel, in the Short North. I'm not sure how much of a 'pure play' coworking space this was intended to be (desks were limited, and after talking with proprietor Chris Hamrick, it felt more like a 'subsidize our extra space' arrangement.) I've since lost touch with Chris, but—if anyone's worked out of CoSpace (or, Chris if you're listening!) I'd love to hear about your experience. Please leave a comment.

Another group of folks have proffered up space at "The Garage" at 1st & High for free drop-ins as well as a membership arrangement. Yury Tsukerman was a regular attendee at our casual Fridays, and has worked out of The Garage space since early summer.

It never felt like a good fit for me, personally (as I read it, the space has more of a 'business incubator' vibe that my BigCo-telecommuting self couldn't partake in) but I understand that the folks involved have plans to expand the operation and push across High Street to what looks like a pretty cool location, so we'll see—it could be a great resource for coworking in the coming year. We've invited the folks behind that space to come and talk at the info-session we're hosting on Jan. 13th (more on that below.)

Update Jan. 4: The new space in the Short North will be called 'Sandbox' and they've got a site up.

Corkboard

For me, the ambition is and has always been to have a place to build a coworking community. Though I sometimes feel it more than other times, one thing has remained constant for much of the past two years: I don't enjoy the greatest work environment from my home. So, yeah, I'd like to establish a workday beach-head somewhere. Somewhere not a cafe.

And—with various folks at various times throughout the year—I've been working to just that end. I won't bore you with all the ups and downs of the project, but I will say that "It's still on" and we're working to make early 2009 an eventful one.

Andrew Hunn came to one of those original public meetups, was a regular attendee at the casual coworking events throughout the Spring, and told me, straight up, that he was interested in establishing a space and would make active use of it himself. (Andy's the "Head Jerk" over at gaming site Elitist Jerks.)

Andy and I have a lease on a space on E. Long Street, and will be holding a coworking information session on January 13th (a Tuesday.) Totally informal (we won't have chairs yet!) Hopefully just a conversation—going two ways—about what folks would find valuable in a coworking space in Columbus.

We're trying to get the space ready for a late-January move-in. I personally have some crushing deadlines coming up early this next year, and every last one of them will be assisted greatly be having access to a quiet-but-energetic, friendly, casual workspace. To be honest, if it's just me and Andy working in there for a couple of months, that'll be fine with me.

But I know, from a number of inquiries on Twitter, through email and more than a couple of face-to-face conversations, that there's a lot of interest in coworking in and around Columbus. I look for a number of spaces to start up in the coming year. There's just too much demand, spread across a wide geographic area (Dublin coworking, anyone? Hilliard?)

One of the things we had wanted to discuss at the 13th session was the formation of another casual coworking group. And—wouldn't you know it—someone beat us to it!

Jelly Columbus

Which, we're actually very happy about—it was our hope all along to encourage a group to formulate under the Jelly moniker, but neither Andy nor I find ourselves with much spare time lately to think about coordinating such a group.

Fortunately, at last week's co\elaborate unconference, it seems as if coworking was on people's minds. (I bet the conversation was helped along by the afore-mentioned Issac Kelly, who attended #ce08.) The outcome of that breakout group? Columbus has a Jelly chapter! They're meeting on January 15th at the Columbus Metro Library (the main one.) You can bet I'll be there! (Doesn't hurt that it's only about a mile from my house! If it's not toe-eating cold, I may even try to walk that day.)

And It Gets Better!

In the midst of all this momentum (and perhaps caught up in the good will of the holidays?) Mark Henson has opened up the (extremely cool) Sparkspace for a couple of weeks of free coworking! I've been to a couple of seminars at Sparkspace, and I always enjoy the experience. Not just the space, but the friendly familial vibe has to be experience to be believed. (Check out Mark's latest project, btw—he's challenged himself and his staff to come up with 100 "Sparks" or ways to please and delight their customers. Yeah, that's the kind of ship that Mark runs over there.)

So tomorrow afternoon, you'll find me at Sparkspace, gettin' some work done! I'm officially on vacation from Yahoo! this week, but there's always book stuff… or Corkboard… or blog-entries, or…

Colm Nelson Interview at Boxes & Arrows

2008-12-21T22:00:34Z

I've been horribly remiss in mentioning that an interview I conducted with an old friend and colleague has been up over at Boxes & Arrows for some time now. (The second part just went live a day or so ago.)

Colm Nelson was my colleague when we worked together at AOL in Mountain View, CA. We never worked in the same group during those years, but—even then—Colm stood out as a super-talented and capable designer. For the longest time, he was the UI lead for AOL's Screen Name Service. SNS was a type of 'federated login, single-sign on' solution for AOL's corporate-owned brands—Netscape, Compuserve, AOL—as well as third-party partner sites. It was a lot like today's vision for OpenID (only using your AOL/AIM screen name, therefore 'closed') and—from my comfortable observational distance—it looked like a gnarly, nasty project: a buncha different stakeholders to please; a buncha interdependent schedules to account for; a million oddball technical details to track, edgecases to account for; 3d party partners to handhold; AND taking design direction from 'the AOL mothership' in Dulles. Colm, to his everlasting credit, handled it all with aplomb.

It didn't surprise me in the least to learn—a couple years later, only after I'd moved away from CA—that Bungie Studios hired Colm away from AOL to handle the interaction design for their (as yet unannounced and still-super-secret) Halo 3 title.

Colm became my friend later, during our regular Thursday-night Halo 2 fragfests for, oh, most of 2005 I guess. Some weird amalgamation of AOL people from the Bay Area, and LAN-party friends of the same formed the nucleus of Colm's TLC (Thursday Live Crew.) You really haven't taken the measure of a man until you've watched your wife hurl a sticky grenade into his face from the passenger seat of a racing Warthog, you know. (Yes, my wife was a regular participant in the mayhem—motherhood's mellowed her out a bit, though.)

Anyhow, I really wanted a chance to get some more of Colm's story out there. He's a 'classically trained' UX/interaction designer who spent some time in the consumer web world, and he's gracefully made the transition to the gaming world. He's got a unique perspective on how those skills translate, and how the game industry can best utilize folks like us. So, please do read and enjoy: Flowmaps & Frag-grenades, Part 1 and Part 2.

My Book Deal

2008-12-19T05:17:44Z

This is exciting. And it feels like it warrants more than this simple, dashed-off blog entry. But, unfortunately, it's late and I want to get up early tomorrow to hit the gym. (I've fallen off the fitness wagon lately and I'm really starting to feel it.) So… dashed-off it is…

I am very proud to announce that Randy Farmer and I are thisclose (close enough that I feel perfectly comfortable writing about it, and not worried in the least that things won't go through) to signing a contract to author a new book in the Yahoo! Press line (published in partnership with O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

The book is entitled Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems and there's a companion site, buildingreputation.com that went live today! The subject, of course, is an extension of work at Yahoo! in building a cross-company platform for modeling reputation on social media properties. (And I've posted several related entries here on Soldier Ant as well.)

Obviously, I couldn't be more pleased about the book. It's going to be a lot of work over the next 4 or 5 months, but I'm ready to rise to the challenge.

Yahoo! OpenID SREG

2008-12-01T21:14:33Z

I've known this was coming for some time now, but just spotted it 'in the wild' today. I worked on elements of the UI for attribute exchange between sites with Open ID (the SREG extension.) I tag-teamed on the interaction design with the (awesome) Rob Metzgar, then the (equally awesome) Marc Perry brought the visual love.

Dining in SF

2008-12-01T20:45:06Z

If you're visiting San Francisco soon, or live there now, heed the dining advice of my homeboy Bradley. The guy's a native (well, Sunnyvale—close enough when you're from Ohio) and he's got a talent for sniffing out delightful experiences that are off the beaten trails. Regard, Bradley's recommendations...

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Some Weak-Ass Shit

2008-11-25T05:37:32Z

Man, I bet this cartoon was crap.

My Ignite Columbus Talk

2008-11-19T02:47:12Z

Last week I did a quick, 5-minute thing at the inaugural Ignite Columbus event. Met a fun group of folks (many of whom I'd already met at this summer's Startup Weekend Columbus.) My talk, Algorithms for Interesting was a riff on the Reputation Systems one I've been pimping around most of this year, but I altered it quite a bit, to focus on content reputation (and also to fit within the brutal Ignite-format constraints—15 seconds a slide, and exactly 20 slides.) So... wander on over there and enjoy the slides and a little Flip-video as well.

Yahoo! Open

2008-10-13T17:47:39Z

Chris Heilmann does as good a job as I've seen of explaining the changes coming to Yahoo! (and a bit of "why they're coming" as well.)

Opening up Yahoo! to Users and Developers

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fowalondon futureofwebapps)