Boris Mann's Link Blog

Lunch at Broken Rice

2015-05-11T04:58:36.614000Z

May 10, 2015

Lunch at Broken Rice

Broken Rice

Mango salad with prawns. The best mango salad I've ever had.

Uncle Hing's chicken wings with Uncle Hing's hot sauce.

Duck confit bau

Dinner Log: Tuna from Steveston

2015-04-21T05:38:59.649000Z

April 19, 2015

Dinner Log: Tuna from Steveston

Rose Manor

Bought a 15lb frozen tuna and had to process it before it thawed. Then made epic tuna dinner.

Excuse the butchering. A big fish that I sectioned into chunks while still frozen.

Red onions stood in for shallots, sautéed in canola oil. Adding some peanut oil & ponzu sauce marinated frozen tuna steaks.

The onions caramelized nicely. Finished with a knob of butter and some fresh lemon juice for a brown butter style sauce.

Also did long beans with a chilli peanut sauce and a variant on kale salad that also had spinach.

Kind of tuna poke or spicy tuna. Shaved tuna bits plus peanut oil, ponzu sauce, lots of green onions, rice vinegar, and some Louisiana hot sauce.

Dinner at Sai Woo

2015-04-21T05:51:17.989000Z

April 17, 2015

Dinner at Sai Woo

Sai Woo

First time at the new restaurant that took over the old New Town space. They cleaned out 30 years of grime and made a lovely room.

View from the front windows looking into the restaurant.

Salt cod fritters with lemon aioli. Tasty appie.

Kale salad with seared tuna and tea smoked egg. Egg had a gushing yolk. Whole dish was awesome.

Veggie of the day -- bok choi with garlic and chillies. A bit small for the price.

Cheek to cheek -- agnolotti stuffed with fresh peas with guanciale and more fresh peas in a ham broth. Very excellent.

House made almond tofu with shiso lead and a sweet syrup. Needed more syrup.

Cocktail menu

Sai woo sour. A sour made with Bombay Sapphire gin. I wasn't expecting the gin, and it didn't really work for me.

Tequila guava cocktail. Better. Refreshing.

Syncthing - open decentralized sync framework

2015-03-06T04:58:48.854000Z

Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet.

Photo by Steve Janosic / CC BY-NC-ND

Get Started

Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and Solaris

 Download from GitHub

Make sure to check out the Getting Started Guide if you need help. Releases are signed as described on the security page.

Third party contributions

Android app

Cross platform GUI wrapper, filesystem watcher, and other community contributions.

Secure & Private

Private. None of your data is ever stored anywhere else than on your computers. There is no central server that might be compromised, legally or illegally.
Encrypted. All communication is secured using TLS. The encryption used includes perfect forward secrecy to prevent any eavesdropper from ever gaining access to your data.
Authenticated. Every node is identified by a strong cryptographic certificate. Only nodes you have explicitly allowed can connect to your cluster.

Open Development

Open Discourse. Development and usage is always open for discussion.

Syncthing Discussion Forum
Open Source. All source code is available on GitHub — what you see is what you get, there is no hidden funny business.

Syncthing Source Code
Open Protocol. The protocol is a documented standard — no hidden magic.

Syncthing Protocol Definition
Open Development. Any bugs found are immediately visible for anyone to browse — no hidden flaws.

Syncthing Issue Tracker

Easy to Use

Syncthing is still in development, although a large number of features have already been implemented:

Web GUI. Configure and monitor Syncthing via a responsive and powerful interface accessible via your browser.
Portable. Works on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. Run it on your desktop computers and synchronize them with your server for backup.
Simple. Syncthing doesn't need IP addresses or advanced configuration: it just works, over LAN and over the Internet. Every machine is identified by an ID. Just give your ID to you friends, share a folder and watch: UPnP will do if you don't want to port forward or you don't know how.
Powerful. Synchronize as many folders as you need with different people.



Discuss

Join the talk on the forums



Docs

For Users and Developers



Contribute

Clone, Fork, and start tinkering

All donations help fund costs incurred by the development and maintenance of syncthing—such as domain fees—but not as salary or compensation for the development work.

Star 6,192

Fork 393

Fermented bean curd and pig's feet | Chinesefood

2015-03-06T04:58:48.801000Z

Fermented bean curd and pig's feet

Submitted by chinesefood on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 08:25

Combine fermented bean curd's fragrance and pig's feet's taste,less oily.

Ingredients:

pig's feet,fermented bean curd,green onion,ginger,chilli,salt,crystal sugar,chinese spirits,five spice powder,chicken essence ,sesame oil,light soy sauce

Instructions:

Cook pig's feet with water,add minced ginger,chinese spirits,bring to boil.

Cut green onion ,chilli and ginger to pieces,mince fermented bean curd

Clean pig's feet with cool water.

cook pig's feet with oil in wok till become a little yellow,add crystal sugar

add green onion ,chilli and ginger,cook for a moment,add minced fermented bean curd,

five spice powder,stir fry.

add water,light soy sauce and salt.

bring to boil over high heat,then cook over low heat for 1.5 hours.

add salt,thicken food liquid over high heat,finall add

sesame oil and chicken essence

Build products

2015-03-06T04:58:48.894000Z

Build products

christinacacioppo.com | December 4

Around this time a few years back, I started taking seriously the idea that I – not just one, but literally me – could build things on the internet.

I spent the first few weeks working alone from Hunch; starting alone has its benefits and drawbacks, as does every other tack. If you’re more the bowling-together sort, Orbital Boot Camp might be the place for you – and they’re accepting applicants for their second session until December 8.

Original Page: http://christinacacioppo.com/blog/build-products

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Camlistore is your personal storage system for life.

2015-03-06T04:58:48.756000Z

"Things Camlistore believes: Your data is entirely under your control Open Source Paranoid about privacy, everything private by default No SPOF: don't rely on any single party (including yourself) Your data should be alive in 80 years, especially if you are"

Camlistore is your personal storage system for life.

camlistore.org

It appears that this may be a homepage or an index page with non-article content. To accurately view it, you may want to switch to the Full Web Page view.

If you know there should be an article here, help improve the article parser by reporting this page. Thanks!

Camlistore is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.

Camlistore (Content-Addressable Multi-Layer Indexed Storage) is under active development. If you're a programmer or fairly technical, you can probably get it up and running and get some utility out of it. Many bits and pieces are actively being developed, so be prepared for bugs and unfinished features.

Join the community, consider contributing, or file a bug.

Things Camlistore believes:

Your data is entirely under your control
Open Source
Paranoid about privacy, everything private by default
No SPOF: don't rely on any single party (including yourself)
Your data should be alive in 80 years, especially if you are

Latest Release

The latest release is 0.8 ("Tokyo"), released 2014-08-03.

Follow the download and getting started instructions to set up Camlistore.

Video Demo

FOSDEM 2014 Camlistore presentation:

See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBCQq5hfsug

Or see the older presentations.

Contribute

In addition to user feedback, bug reports, and code contributions, we also accept Bitcoin:

Original Page: http://camlistore.org/

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Strategy in the Age of Specialization

2015-03-06T04:58:48.828000Z

Strategy in the Age of Specialization

by John Ounpuu, medium.com

As modern marketing grows more complex and specialized, it’s getting harder and harder to hold it all together.

THE GIST:
Rising complexity and specialization is driving the full-service agency model into extinction — and leaving many marketing leaders without a single strategic partner who can help them string all the pieces together.

Fun times for CMOs

It’s a fun time to be marketing leader … if this is your idea of fun.

Complexity is on the rise. You’ve got more channels and functions to manage than ever. And news ones are cropping up all the time trying to get your attention.

Mobile.
Social.
Data.
Native.
Programmatic.
Real time.
Drones.
Wearables.

Some of them are not worth your time, but others are too good to pass up. So they’re added to the mix.

And for many brands, more channels means more specialization across the board. Specialization on the internal team. And specialization on your (ever expanding, or at least ever-shifting) agency roster.
And then there’s the technology side of things. Many of the new channels and functions that power your brand are backed by technology. And more than ever, it’s your responsibility to choose and use the right ones.

It’s not an easy task. Especially if (like most marketing leaders) technology isn’t your core strength.

And of course it’s the source of even more complexity and specialization. Because above and beyond your internal team and your agencies, the extended team under your leadership also now likely includes a growing roster of technology partners as well.

It doesn’t stop there.

In fact, it never stops. That’s kind of the point. Instead it just keeps changing. Faster than ever. New channels. New tactics. New technologies. Each with a new wave comes with a new array of specialists.

Like I said … fun!

Meanwhile in Agency-Land

I come from the agency world and I can tell you — all this complexity is causing changes and challenges on that side as well.

The most obvious trend: the vision/fantasy of being truly “full-service" is growing more difficult and less attainable every day.

Some are making valiant efforts through acquisitions, high profile hires, and other means. But more and more clients are losing patience with the pretence.

“I wish sometimes that the agencies would stick to what they are good at. You can’t do everything, and if you try to do everything, you do nothing. It drives me crazy when the agency is trying to pitch you every single service available.

—An anonymous brand executive vents to Digiday

Instead of a single full-service partner, more clients are opting for some mix of strategic new hires (insourcing), multiple specialist agencies and multiple tech vendors.

This new model makes sense on paper. No question. And many specialists can indeed turn their specialized knowledge into truly great, truly impactful work.
But in practice, the new specialist-heavy model also brings with it a new set of challenges.

New CMO woes

You’re a modern CMO. Fed up with too many promises, you’ve jettisoned your AOR. Or maybe you’ve just demoted them. Added them to a growing list of specialist executors you can count on to do one or two things really, really well.

Things are better in many ways, but there are some new cracks forming. Let’s imagine a few of them.

The brand is slipping out of the drivers seat: Not surprisingly, a channel-centric model yields channel-centric thinking. Which means that if you’re not careful, the brand experience can become disjointed and fragmented.
Customer experience inconsistencies: Speaking of disjointed, more players on a wider field means more silo-ed decision making. And that doesn’t bode well for a unified (call it “omnichannel" if you like) brand experience.
Prioritization and decision-making is difficult: Which part of the giant motor should get the most oil next fiscal? Ask ten different team members and you might get ten different answers.
Orchestration is hard, too: You’ve got all the instruments in place, but trying to get them to play the same song at the same time ain’t easy. Never mind actually sounding good.
The model is more agile in some ways, less agile in others: Individual channels can pivot quickly and respond to changing customer needs. But the whole machine is bigger, more complex and harder to manoeuvre. Bad news, when change is the only constant.

“We need to find ways to lead with brands and not channels.We need to find ways to orchestrate an integrated approach."— Unilever CMO Keith Weed, speaking at Cannes 2014

All of this adds up to more pressure at the top, at the marketing leadership level. More pressure to stay nimble. To keep pace with shifting consumer habits and expectations. More pressure to make the right technology decisions for today and tomorrow — not just the right tools for each channel, but the right integrated tool set across the whole mix. And more pressure to orchestrate the disparate pieces to deliver a great brand experience, and protect the brand from fragmentation.

That’s a lot of pressure.

And to make matters worse, in the face of all of this pressure, marketing leaders actually have less help than ever figuring out how all of these pieces add up to something that really works.

A missing piece

As the agency roster has grown and become fragmented, and much of the thinking and planning has moved down the chain to each of the channels, that place at the CMO’s right hand — the place where holistic, brand-level envisioning and planning happens — has often been left empty.

The result — marketing leaders have less help than ever. And the job they’re doing is more difficult and complicated than ever. Not a pretty picture:

harder job + less help = ☹

Something is missing. But what does the missing piece look like, exactly? To my mind, this new breed of strategic partner would need to be able to assist the CMO in envisioning, creating and evolving the complete marketing machine, creating a whole that’s truly greater than the sum of its parts.

So let’s think about the defining traits that this partner would need to possess . . .

A big picture POV
They would need a good strong generalist’s understanding of what each piece of the marketing machine should be doing, and how all the pieces can work together. And an ability to break down silos to make that vision a reality.

A digital mindset
A deep understanding of how digital brand-building works, grounded in first-hand experience, from data to social to mobile and beyond.

Solid technical chops
An equally deep grasp of the tools and technologies that can power and propel modern brands — and how they can work together to create a great brand experience.

A strong grasp of the business
The ability to put connect the marketing mission to the larger goals and priorities of the business.

A brand-driven view of the world
A belief in the power of brand as strategic weapon, creative catalyst and guiding light — a higher power than any channel or tactic.

A sense of comfort with change and ambiguity
An appetite for big problems and a willingness to leave old ways of thinking behind and embrace change.

An immunity to hype
The ability to resist the magnetic lure of hot trends and enticing bright shiny objects.

Strategy: the next hot specialization?

Savvy reader that you are, you may have guessed by now where my conclusion is heading. And you’re right. I am, I admit, the co-founder of a strategy-focused agency that has been built especially to fill this emerging need.

And I do, in fact, believe that the the team we’ve put together possesses all of the traits I’ve listed above.

But I also believe that this challenge is real. And much, much bigger than me and my agency (we’re certainly not the only ones equipped to tackle the issue).

If you don’t believe me, marketing leaders, I suggest you pause right now, turn your head, and look towards your right hand.

Now tell me honestly — is there anybody there?

Original Page: http://ow.ly/FzDJc

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Squire: FastMail’s rich text editor

2015-03-06T04:58:48.851000Z

Dec 8: Squire: FastMail’s rich text editor

by CKEditor, blog.fastmail.com
December 8

This blog post is part of the FastMail 2014 Advent Calendar.

The previous post on 7th December was about automated installation. The following post on 9th December is on email authentication.

Technical level: low-medium.

We’re going to take a break from talking about our backend infrastructure in this post and switch over to discussing our webmail.

In the beginning, there was text. And really, it was pretty good. You could *emphasise* things, SHOUT AT PEOPLE, and generally convey the nuance of what you had to say. But then came HTML email. Now you could make big bold statements, or small interesting asides. Your paragraphs were no longer hard-wrapped, but instead flowed according to the size of your screen. Despite some grumblings from a dedicated band of luddites (including a few of the FastMail team :-)), most people decided that this was, in fact, better.

To support rich text editing in our previous interface, we used . While not a bad choice, like most other editors out there it was designed for creating websites, not writing emails. As such, simply inserting an image by default presented a dialog with three tabs and more options than you could believe possible. Meanwhile, support for quoting, crucial in email, was severely limited. It also came with its own UI toolkit and framework, which we would have had to heavily customise to fit in with the rest of the new UI we were building; a pain to maintain.

With our focus on speed and performance, we were also concerned about the code size. The version of CKEditor we use for our previous (classic) UI, which only includes the plugins we need, is a 159 KB download (when gzipped; uncompressed it’s 441 KB). That’s just the code, excluding styles and images. To put this in perspective, in the current interface the combined code weight required to load the whole compose screen, including our awesome base library (more on that in a future post…), the mail/contacts model code and all the UI code to render the entire screen comes to only 149.4 KB (459.7 KB uncompressed).

After considering various options, we therefore decided to strike out on our own and wrote Squire.

Making a rich text editor is notoriously difficult due to the fact that different browsers are extremely inconsistent in this area. The APIs were all introduced by Microsoft back in the IE heyday, and were then copied by the other vendors in various incompatible ways. The result of applying document.execCommand to simply bold the selected text is likely to be different in every browser you try.

To deal with this, most rich text editors execute a command, then try to clean up the mess the browser created. With Squire, we neatly bypass this by simply not using the browser’s built-in commands. Instead, we manipulate the DOM directly, only using the selection and range APIs. This turns out to be easier and require less code than letting the browser do any of the work!

For example, to bold some text, we use the following simple algorithm (actually, this more generally applies to any inline style, such as setting a font or colour too):

Iterate through the text nodes in the DOM that are part of the current selection.
For each text node, check if it’s already got a parent tag. If it does, there’s nothing to do. If not, create a new element and wrap the text node in it. If the text node was only partially in the selection, split it first so only the selected part gets wrapped.

I’d like to give a quick shout out to the under-appreciated TreeWalker API for iterating through the DOM. True story: when first developing Squire, I came across a bug in Opera’s TreeWalker implementation. The first comment on my report from the Presto developer team (this was pre-WebKit days at Opera) was, and I quote verbatim, “First TreeWalker bug ever. First TreeWalker usage ever? :)". Sadly, due to the lack of common use, other browsers have also had the occasional bug with this API too, so to be on the safe side I just reimplemented the bits of the API I needed in JavaScript. The idea is sound though.

Squire also completely takes over certain keys that are handled badly by default, such as enter and delete. This lets us get a consistent result, and allows us to add the features we want, such as breaking nested quotes if you hit enter on a blank line. And of course we’ve added our own keyboard shortcuts too for actions like changing quote level or starting a bullet list.

At only 11.5 KB of JavaScript after minification and gzip (34.7 KB uncompressed) and with no dependencies, Squire is extremely lightweight. If you’re building your own webmail client, or something else that needs to be able to edit rich text, give it a go! Squire is MIT licensed and available on GitHub.

Original Page: http://bit.ly/1A8F9ea

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On Corporate Ownership of Open Source

2015-03-06T04:58:48.793000Z

can any company be trusted with the ownership of a community driven open source project?

On Corporate Ownership of Open Source — Medium

by Mikeal, medium.com

On Corporate Ownership of Open Source

Can companies be more than just participants?

I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. This isn’t about one project or one company or one instance of poor management or leadership. This is about the simple economic conditions we find in open source and the question I’ve continued to ask myself over and over again is, can any company be trusted with the ownership of a community driven open source project? And the answer I’ve finally come to. No.

The Park

Let’s imagine a block of land in your neighborhood owned by the city. The city says the residents are free to build a park there but will have to do so with their own money and resources.

Over time different people from the neighborhood pitch in with money and elbow grease and build a really great park. Even though only a handful of people put in the effort to build and maintain this park the entire neighborhood benefits from using it. Everyone’s property value rises a little, being that their houses are now close to such a great park.

Why did neighbors participate in building the park? They don’t own the park, but they clearly benefit from having the park. None of them could have built the park on their own, so they worked together. They don’t mind that their other neighbors benefit from their work, instead they have a sense of pride watching their neighbors use the swings and slides they built.

But what if this block of land the park has been built on wasn’t given to them for use by the city and instead was owned by a company. What if the company said “You can use this land and the park will be open to the public but we’ll own the land and what is built on it."

The same incentives apply for the park to be built. Neighbors still want a park, it’ll still increase the value of their property, and so they still pitch in and build the park. The company even pitches in and helps with some of the build out because they share the same incentives as the neighbors for the park to be built.

A few years pass and there is an active community maintaining the park. But the incentives have changed for the company.

While they could see clear benefit working with this community to build the park what is their incentive to continue to maintain it? They might like the nice articles written about their park, but that isn’t enough to justify being as involved as the community, and the park, would need them to be.

Meanwhile, the neighbors that are maintaining and wish to improve the park become more and more frustrated with the owner. They’ve done all the work, they feel as though the park is theirs and they should be able to do what they need. The neighbors who just use the park every day but don’t work to maintain it dislike the atmosphere this drama is adding when they use the park and want everyone to just shut up.

Now that the relationship between the park maintainers and the owning company has mostly dissolved, maintaining the relationship no longer plays in to the incentives of the company. They might take over the park on weekends and charge admission while a rock band plays to pull in some money and as these people pay admission the maintainers who once would have been proud to watch someone swing on the swing they built are infuriated that their swing is being capitalized without their consent.

Now the company is portraying itself as an expert in park building, offering its services to other richer towns. When the maintainers attempt to build another park they are told they can’t name it anything similar to the park they previously built because it has been trademarked. When they try to build a similar swing to the one they had previously built they are told that the design has been patented. And every time the park builders and maintainers get mad their neighbors shout at them to keep it down, they’re trying to use the swing.

Or maybe the company never does any of these things. Maybe they do a great job working with the maintainers and are being a good participant but they forget to make any money and are sold for parts to another company who decides to extract value from the park.

Community and the Commons

In a community the participants usually have similar motivations and incentives. By participating and contributing to the project they gain more value than they put in to the project but at the same time the project gains even more value than any individual participant. The key to success in an open source ecosystem is to incentivize the creation of widely accessible common value.

However, if a company owns the project in any way (trademark, website, project governance) there is an incentive for them to extract value from the project rather than create it. At first that incentive is never great enough to act upon but I am now convinced that, given enough time, the temptation is too great and it will eventually happen. I find this scenario inevitable and have recently dedicated myself to investing in commons that aren’t owned by any particular company.

You hate companies, you’re a communist!

The obvious question becomes “what is a company’s role in open source?" to which the answer is “a participant."

Companies can have a positive role in open source when they share the incentives of the other participants. In fact, I find it best when a company has a closed source proprietary product that relies on an open source project they are investing in. In the park analogy that would be like owning the biggest house in the neighborhood right next to the park. As long as they don’t own the park they share the same incentives as all the other neighbors, maybe even more so.

I have very easy and healthy relationships with companies who participate in open source. For a while, I was attempting to maintain and repair relationships with owners but I’ve finally given up. Perhaps others can succeed in those kinds of negotiations but I have a hard time dealing with the kind of entitlement owners have and I don’t like it when people threaten to sue me which I’ve found is a relatively common response.

Instead, I’ve resolved to work on growing the community and improving the commons. We can create alternatives where necessary and put new investment in to projects not owned by companies.

Original Page: https://medium.com/@mikeal/on-corporate-ownership-of-open-source-786ebd15847e

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Building Vim from 1993 today

2015-03-06T04:58:48.974000Z

compiling a C program from more than 20 years ago is actually a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work

Building Vim from 1993 today

by Wikipedia, passy.svbtle.com
September 10

Because of a conversation I had on Twitter earlier today, I felt compelled to compile the oldest version of Vim I could find.

As it turns out, compiling a C program from more than 20 years ago is actually a lot easier than getting a Rails app from last year to work. If you want to try it yourself, these are the steps you need to take:

According to , vim 1.22, released in 1992, was the first version of vim to run on Unix and thus compete with vi. I couldn’t find a tarball of that release, so I went with vim 1.24 instead which was released a year later.

Edit makefile.unix and change CC to cc -g so we can run gdb later. Remove -DTERMCAP from DEFS and -ltermcap from LIBS. A friend found a version of libtermcap that was almost working, but in the end I got a bunch of linking errors and decided to drop it altogether.

A new error, this time in unix.c. It turns out that the preprocessor condition that switches between Linux/BSD and System V includes is the wrong way around. By changing #ifdef SYSV to #ifndef SYSV we can make it work.

Almost there! I didn’t know operating systems other than windows include the cwd in their PATH, but we can fix that easily:

$ PATH=.:$PATH make -f makefile.unix

cc -o ../vim alloc.o unix.o buffers.o charset.o cmdline.o csearch.o digraph.o edit.o fileio.o help.o linefunc.o main.o mark.o message.o misccmds.o normal.o ops.o param.o quickfix.o regexp.o regsub.o screen.o script.o search.o storage.o tag.o term.o undo.o version.o
$ file ../vim
../vim: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=0x4aed816b36b1b4b65cbbd3a599bd547a338f5b53, not stripped

Boom! We now have a 64bit binary of vim 1.24. However, the joy doesn’t last long, because as soon as we try to execute it, we see this:

./vim ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~Segmentation fault So close.
— Pascal Hartig (@passy) September 10, 2014

Luckily, we compiled vim with debugging symbols, so lets turn to gdb for help:

$ gdb ./vim
(gdb) r
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x000000000040e326 in expand_env (src=0x42067e "$HOME/.vimrc", dst=0x62b010 "",
    dstlen=1025) at misccmds.c:694
694                     *tail = NUL;
(gdb) bt
#0  0x000000000040e326 in expand_env (src=0x42067e "$HOME/.vimrc", dst=0x62b010 "",
    dstlen=1025) at misccmds.c:694
#1  0x00000000004079c7 in dosource (fname=0x420683 "/.vimrc") at cmdline.c:2121
#2  0x000000000040c016 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffed60) at main.c:278
(gdb)

Vim is trying to expand $HOME/.vimrc to an absolute path and attempts to overwrite a character of the string with \0 which leads to a crash. I don’t exactly know why. My uneducated guess would be that this area of the memory is marked as read-only, which we could certainly turn off through a GCC flag. But if we go up the stacktrace to the main function, we can spot a nice shortcut:

The crash happens when we source the SYSVIMRC_FILE which we can actually prevent from happening by setting the environment variable VIMINIT.

$ export VIMINIT=""
$ ./vim

~
~
~
~
Empty Buffer

That’s it! We have a running version of vim 1.24 on a modern Linux computer. You can convince yourself by typing :version and enjoying the fact that this version still went under the name of Vi IMitation before it was renamed to Vi IMproved with version 2.0. And hey, it can even load files bigger than 2MB.

Original Page: https://passy.svbtle.com/building-vim-from-1993-today

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Before the Drama

2015-03-06T04:58:48.797000Z

I am completely behind node. It might be called something else in the future, and there is probably going to be more than one server-side JavaScript platform (which is a good thing), but the foundation of running node-style code to build powerful server solutions is not going away. It is the future of the web.

Before the Drama

by Eran Hammer, hueniverse.com
December 4

I am going to comment on the recent node fork. Soon. I am not happy about it. I also don’t think it’s bad. I’ve been involved in the conversations with most sides since May and am in a unique position being (probably) the only “guy in the middle" that I think I can provide a perspective that is more complete than most. However, before I do that I would like to defuse the drama.

Given my position at Walmart and the fact that I knew a fork is highly likely for half a year, you can imagine I had a few internal conversations about node and its future inside and outside of Walmart. A large(st) enterprise has to ensure its investments are durable and sound. I shared the situation with my senior management and the message I delivered to them is the same one I am going to deliver to you now.

If there was no new release of node ever again, I would still use and recommend it. I understand people’s desire for faster releases and quicker availability of new JavaScript features but I consider these to be “rich people’s problems". I spend most of my time writing and managing node development and I feel empowered and productive with the platform I have today.

Can things get better? Absolutely! But this concept of an evolving language and platform is pretty new. I have never imagined new features working a decade on Wall St. building high frequency trading systems in C++. The language barely changed (remember when template supported matured in 1998?). New features were mostly better optimizers and IDEs but not really the language or the platform. I am not being dismissive of progress, but I want to make sure people understand that the node we have today is pretty fucking awesome.

If you are in a decision making position and the recent events make you reconsider adopting node, don’t. Do it – you will not regret it. The current version of node is already fantastic. Again, it can get better, but after two Black Friday events running on this version of node at the biggest eCommerce scale (we did kick some ass this year against major competition) I can tell you without any hesitation that node is production ready today. Cross that. A year ago.

I also want to point out to all the delicate, sensitive souls out there who keep complaining about “all the drama" and “why can’t we all just get along" that the node community drama is amateur hour compared to other platforms. We don’t have lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars like Java. We don’t have key members of the project writing pages and pages of nasty blog posts calling the entire platform shit like Rails. We don’t have insane multinational standard bodies debating features of the platform over 10 years like C++. And we don’t start every mailing list response calling the new guy asking the question a fucking asshole like PHP.

I am not dismissing the importance of what is going on, but these events and the way they have evolved shows tremendous maturity and civility that I have not seen in other communities (and unlike most of the brilliant commentators on Hacker News, I have been writing code since 1983). All this drama is a healthy debate about the future of our platform and community and the way it has been handled is something to be proud of.

Original Page: http://hueniverse.com/2014/12/04/before-the-drama/

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Code of Ages

2015-03-06T04:58:48.863000Z

For developers, then, choosing a language is like choosing citizenship in a country. You’re not only buying into syntax and semantics. You’re buying into economics and culture, the rules that shape how you earn your livelihood and the forces that channel your hopes and dreams.

Code of Ages

by Scott Rosenberg, medium.com

Go and Swift take another step up the programming-language ladder

If you are a very large, rich technology company today, it seems it is no longer enough to have your own humongous data centers, luxurious buses, and organic lunch bars. You need your very own programming language, too.

Google has Go, first conceived in 2009. Facebook introduced Hack last spring. And Apple unveiled Swift not long after.

In war, as George Orwell had it, the winners write the history books. In tech, the winning companies are writing the programming languages. The Internet was built on open standards and code, but the era of social networks and the cloud is dominated by corporate giants. And they are beginning to put their unique stamps on the thought-stuff of digital technology — just as inevitably as William the Conqueror and his Normans imported tranches of early French into the nascent English tongue, in ways that still shape our legal and financial language. (Something to think about the next time you make a payment on your mortgage.)

The new languages give programmers some helpful legs up, to be sure. Google’s Go is structured to simplify the work of making code run “concurrently," smoothing the way for programmers to create and juggle portions of a program that execute simultaneously — and thus take full advantage of today’s multicore chips and multiprocessor machines. Apple’s Swift offers iPhone developers some of the terseness and agility of popular Web scripting languages, such as PHP and JavaScript. Each comes with its own logo, too: Swift a stylized bird, Go a goofy gopher.

Neither of these projects aims to blow up the status quo. Instead, they’re smoothing out wrinkles and optimizing code for the dominant waves of today’s technology. If we want to know what it means for our digital lives when big companies control and shape the very languages in which technology is developed, that’s one clue. If this is programming’s Age of Imperialism, should we sing along or raise our fists?

Let’s start with how Google banished semicolons and embraced braces.

The Essence of Go

Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, three coding gurus at Google, dreamed up Go in 2009 while — as they only half-jokingly say — waiting for their C++ and Java code to compile. These widely used workhorse programming languages were getting pokey, particularly when hitched to the kind of massive programs Google deploys. Every time you added or changed something, you had to wait for the compiler to “build" the binary version — to boil your code down to its machine-readable essence.

“Builds were taking 45 minutes," Pike explains in one of his many talks evangelizing Go. “I considered that painful. When builds take that long, you have a lot of time to think about what you might do better."

Designing a programming language is all about tradeoffs — between what’s easier for the programmer and what best suits the machine.

Crafting code that runs fast demands more effort from the programmer. How much time and energy should humans devote to writing code that runs swiftly? How much busywork and heavy lifting do you instead let the developer hand off to the computer? Another major tradeoff lies in the amount of direct access to machine memory that the language provides. Here, as in so many other places, the language inventor must choose: How much freedom do you give programmers, knowing they might screw up? How many pillows do you surround them with to cushion their stumbles, knowing that each one you add will slow programs down?

The undertaking of language design is Miltonic, you see: formal, majestic, riddled with dilemma and paradox. There’s no right answer — just different choices to suit changing hardware, changeable users and picky programmers.

Go’s creators had plenty of experience making such choices. Thompson co-invented Unix; he and fellow Bell Labs veteran Pike devised the style of character encoding, called UTF-8, that most of the Web uses today. So they knew that little decisions can have big consequences. Every rule added today could mean gazillions of future keystrokes for the programmers of tomorrow; every rule omitted could mean countless crashes to come.

For instance: Programming languages commonly use semicolons to separate statements; braces group related statements together. Here’s the classic “Hello, world" program in the venerable C language:

main()
{
printf(“hello world");
}

Braces were essential, Go’s creators felt. Some languages, notably the popular Python, have tossed them aside, allowing programmers to use indentation — white space, or “invisible characters" — to lay code out for both the human eye and the machine. The Go team believed that was a “profound mistake." Braces meant programmers could tell the computer, explicitly and unambiguously, how to chunk code in larger blocks. (At one meeting with Sergey Brin, the Google founder suggested Go’s designers use square brackets rather than curly braces, saving developers countless trips to the “shift" key. “He didn’t win every argument," Pike recalls.)

So braces made Go’s cut. But in December 2009, the Go brain trust decided to stop requiring programmers to end statements with semicolons. “Semicolons are for parsers" — behind-the-scenes tools that break programs down into chunks of related code — “not for people, and we wanted to eliminate them as much as possible," their FAQ now explains. Henceforth, the language’s machinery would “inject" the semicolons for you after you handed it your code.

Go’s great semicolon purge saved labor and eyestrain. But in order for the semicolon injections not to go haywire, programmers would now have to deploy their braces with a tad more rigor — otherwise, a semicolon might get injected in the wrong place.

These choices are not without controversy. “They poisoned the language with redundant braces!" complained a commenter on one of Pike’s lectures. The language could just as easily have been designed so that mere white space served the same role as braces in breaking up different segments of code. To which Googler Andrew Gerrand responded, “At scale weird shit happens every day. That means that, semi-regularly, someone will sneak an invisible character into the code base that causes a subtle bug. This has happened more than once in Python programs at Google."

Just as William Blake imagined seeing a world in a grain of sand, a programmer can see a punctuation mark as a door between dimensions. For the rest of us, of course, not so much.

However headily syntax may intoxicate the programmers who fill software forums with ardent disputes over its nuances, what interests most people about Go, or any other language, is the “superpower" that makes the language fly. For Go, that would be its approach to concurrency.

Unlike the languages we speak — what programmers call “natural" languages, ones that emerge in the wild over time — programming languages are crafted for specific ends and uses. Go, as Pike puts it, is “designed by Google to help solve Google’s problems. Google has big problems… We needed a language that made it easier for us to get our job done, and our job is writing server software."

Google runs its very own global supercomputer in the cloud, and that is precisely the kind of computing Go is optimized for. But Google has never made a cent selling software, and Go has been a free, open-source project from the, er, get-go. That has helped it quickly make its way into the technical arsenals of other outfits. It is becoming, as an analyst at the Redmonk consultancy put it, “the emerging language of cloud infrastructure" — because, in 2014, every platform could use a little extra efficiency and oomph on the server side.

And it’s catching on. For instance, Dropbox has moved most of its backend code from Python to Go. And Automattic, the company that runs Wordpress.com, has begun tinkering with Go as well, even though Wordpress itself has always been in PHP, a 20-year-old scripting language. I talked with Demitrious Kelly, an Automattic developer who has begun to use the language. “There’s a dozen new frameworks and methodologies and whatnot a week these days, it seems," he says. “Everything is a new killer something. You have to ask: Is it better than what we have? But that in itself is a complicated question. Better how? What does it let us do that we couldn’t do before? And is it worth the hassle?" Kelly says Go fares well on these tests, in part because the language is small: “Go is actually really very easy to pick up for a week, bang out a project, put back down, and go back to PHP."

Given that Go was designed with Google’s particular problems in mind, the syntactic choices—the semicolons-and-braces philosophy—may seem like a “how many angels can dance on the head of a punctuation mark" kind of question. Yet these matters are not so trivial. It takes a passion for detail and, typically, a willingness to flout tradition for a programmer to bring a new language into the world. What may ultimately drive a language’s adoption is its designers’ studious attention to the rough spots of everyday coding — what programmers everywhere call their “pain points."

The Origin of Swift

Every programming regime has such pain points. But the rapid rise of iOS, the iPhone operating system, has given developers more than the usual quotient. Until the advent of Swift this summer, if you wanted to write a program for iOS, you had to use a language called Objective C. Steve Jobs’ Next had adopted Objective C in its youth, in the ’80s, and after Jobs’ return to Apple the language grew to become Apple’s workhorse tool for Mac OSX; when iOS came along, Objective C moved right in with it.

Today developers say the language is showing its age. “Apple had decades-old cruft in the face of anyone who wanted to write for any of their platforms," says Andy Hertzfeld, a software veteran who wrote much of the original Mac operating system and recently retired from Google. “I got pretty excited about Swift when I saw the announcement, because I’ve always despised Objective C. I like the principles behind it, but I hate the syntax, and have never been able to really enjoy programming in it."

Apple entrusted its next-generation programming-language project to a computer scientist named Chris Lattner. He had won acclaim as the leader of a powerful and popular open-source project called LLVM, which is a kind of toolkit for writing compilers that can run on disparate platforms. (Both Apple and Google make extensive use of it.) After joining Apple in 2005, Lattner continued working on LLVM and related projects, then disappeared from view for a couple of years — to emerge last June with Swift at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

Swift aims to be “the first industrial-quality systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language." In other words, Swift is promising that you’ll be able to write crash-resistant code that runs fast without having to break a sweat. And you’ll be able to do it with the instincts and habits of a Web developer circa 2014, rather than having to wrench your brain back into the ‘90s, or earlier.

Cue loud cheers from legions of iOS developers and onlookers. “Beautifully done," says Hertzfeld. “It relieves enormous pain points right in everyone’s face. So the only iOS developers who are not going to get on top of Swift are the dumb ones." Since Swift is built to co-exist with Objective C code within the same project, toe-wetting is easy, even for developer sticks-in-the-mud.

But if you sign on for Swift, you are buying into an entire universe that is shaped and owned by Apple. You will develop your programs inside toolboxes built and sold by Apple; you will run your programs on Apple machines, and have to rewrite your code in another language if you want it to run anywhere else; your fate is joined at the hip with Apple’s.

“You have to commit to the walled garden," Hertzfeld says. So he’s resisting the temptation to work in Swift — though, he adds, “If they had an open source implementation and had shown a little bit of interest in making it cross-platform, I probably would."

An open-source version of Swift would mean developers could find ways to port programs to different platforms and would provide some assurance that Swift could have a future even if Apple lost interest down the road. Developers who have been burned in the past by sojourns in other “walled gardens" often care deeply about this. And Apple isn’t completely allergic to the open-source approach, though it appears determined to hold tight rein over the iOS world. Shortly after Swift’s announcement, developers on the (fully open-source, cross-platform) LLVM project began pestering Apple and Lattner on Swift’s closed-off nature. Lattner responded:

Guys, feel free to make up your own dragons if you want, but your speculation is just that: speculation. We literally have not even discussed this yet, because we have a ton of work to do to respond to the huge volume of feedback we’re getting, and have to get a huge number of things (e.g. access control!) done before the 1.0 release this fall. You can imagine that many of us want it to be open source and part of llvm, but the discussion hasn’t happened yet, and won’t for some time.

Sorry to leave you all hanging, but there is just far too much to deal with right now.

By now, Swift’s 1.0 release has come and gone. I could not pierce Apple PR’s cone of silence to get further comment from Lattner. But a note such as this gives some sense of the struggle between openness and ownership that may be playing out in his soul, and Apple’s. (Peter Wayner provides a usefully exhaustive rundown of the issues in InfoWorld.)

Swift hasn’t been around as long as Go, so most developers have yet to kick its tires. In any case, its future in Apple-land is secure — it’s the trust-fund baby of programming languages. If Apple says Swift is the future for a billion iOS devices, then it will be the future. That inevitability, really, is its superpower. People like David Wheeler, an independent iOS developer in Portland, Oregon, will adopt it, not only because they have little choice in the long run, but because it makes sense. Wheeler says Swift took him by surprise; he figured Apple would just keep patching new improvements onto Objective C. “It has great promise, and I’m excited to see where it goes — I expect to write my first app in it within the next few weeks."

But elsewhere its uptake will be problematic. That’s because Swift inherits so much from Apple’s DNA: As so many Apple creations do, the language creatively bridges worlds — in this case, those of systems programming and scripting. But it protects those beautiful bridges behind an impenetrable moat.

The Language Instinct

There’s nothing terribly new about spawning programming languages at large technology businesses. The dominant languages of the mainframe computer era had similar origins: FORTRAN emerged from IBM, and COBOL was largely based on Grace Hopper’s Flow-matic, created for Remington Rand’s Univac. In the 1990s, Sun gave us Java; in the 2000s, Microsoft gave us C#.

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of computer languages are products of big institutions — corporations or universities — because they have to be.

“Birthing a new programming language takes a lots of resources," says Hertzfeld. “It’s a decade-long project to get a new language fully tooled and established and used. You can’t do it as a small company."

Despite the impediments, the lament that there are “too many languages" has echoed through the computer industry at least since the early 1960s, when the Association for Computing Machinery first put a tower of Babel on its journal’s cover. And the lament is as futile as ever today. Programmers are unlikely to stop devising new languages or agree on one to share because — as Alex Payne, an early developer at Twitter who co-founded an “emerging languages" conference, puts it — “There’s no incentive. The history of language is filled with standardization efforts that went terribly, terribly wrong — wasted a ton of time and didn’t really produce results that anyone was happy with. I think it’s going to be a Tower of Babel for a while longer."

(I don’t mean to ignore Hack, the new language that Facebook has developed. Nothing Facebook does should be ignored. But even though Hack is open source and essentially a variant or extension of the widely used PHP language, it has not yet fostered much enthusiasm outside the company. No doubt Facebook would like to see that change, but it’s not something the social network is aggressively pushing. The most positive reaction to Hack these days outside Facebook is “wait and see.")

Not a single developer I talked to for this piece felt strongly that the new wave of programming languages represents a competitive power play on the part of the companies sponsoring them. Instead, they point out, every new language begins as an obsessional seed in the brain of an individual or small group: This has always bugged me. We can do better. Anyway, it takes patience and effort to learn a new coding language; developers choose carefully. Says Payne: “What I look for more when picking a new language is the other people who are flocking to that language — because those are the people you’re going to be dependent on for libraries, for documentation. You want to know if you’re moving into the right town, I guess."

One thing we can say with some confidence is that these new languages are good. They help make programmers’ lives easier. They streamline the craft of programming. They incorporate promising new ideas. And they earn respect from developers inside and outside the corporate tent.

For all these reasons, imperialism is probably the wrong historical comparison to make for this wave of new programming languages. Instead, we’re talking about something more like what foreign-policy types call soft power: the cultivation of influence by example, diplomacy, outreach and the spread of your worldview. In very specific ways, both Go and Swift exemplify and embody the essences of the companies that built them: the server farm vs. the personal device; the open Web vs. the App Store; a cross-platform world vs. a company town. Of all the divides that distinguish programming languages — compiled or interpreted? static vs. dynamic variable typing? memory-managed/garbage-collected or not? — these might be the ones that matter most today.

In other words, the real reason for anyone to worry about the world of corporate-bred programming languages is probably not, “OMG they want to take over the world!" Rather, it’s that, no matter how big they grow, they will always be shaped by their roots.

The thing about programming languages is that, once they get into programmers’ heads, you never really know where they’re going to end up. The object-oriented programming enthusiasts who created Objective C in the ’80s could not have known it would become the programming language of necessity for a massive global ecosystem of mobile devices a quarter-century later. When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side. Meanwhile, Javascript, which was released simultaneously and then widely ignored, makes most of the Web move today.

As they used to say in a dead language that once ruled the world: caveat emptor.

Follow Backchannel: Twitter | Facebook

Original Page: https://medium.com/backchannel/my-computer-language-is-better-than-yours-58d9c9523644

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Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language

2015-03-06T04:58:48.989000Z

Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language

wilfred.me.uk | July 30

Markdown is fast approaching ubiquity. In addition to massive sites such as GitHub and Stack Overflow using it, it’s a default choice for many developers for everything from comments to wikis.

I’ve built two bespoke wiki sites using Markdown, run a blog in Markdown, and used a variety of Markdown sites. I’ve concluded that Markdown is ill-suited for wikis, and often a poor choice in general. Let me count the ways.

You don’t want normal markdown

Out of the box, a standards-compliant markdown parser is confusing, insecure and limited in functionality. The largest users of markdown, such as GitHub, all end up providing their own modified version. This produces fragmentation and prevents reliable, bug-free implementations gaining traction.

Security

Markdown allows embedded HTML. Since this is part of the markdown standard, simply enabling markdown rendering on your site will introduce XSS bugs. Some implementations provide a flag to disable embedded arbitrary HTML, whereas others require you to use a separate HTML sanitisation library.

Since Markdown does not require implementations to offer this flag, too many developers are not even aware there is an issue. Using a templating language with XSS protection does not help, since the rendered Markdown must be marked as not needing escaping.

Gotchas

I built a wiki for a software development company where even the developers would get caught out by the syntax. The Markdown syntax is surprising in a number of ways.

One of the most common issues is mixing bulleted lists (which can start with *) and code snippets (which start with four spaces). A user might write:

* A bullet
* Another bullet

    System.out.println("hello world!");

To their surprise, the code snippet would get treated as normal text, part of the previous bullet point. This is an unfortunate consequence of Markdown supporting multiple paragraphs in a single bullet:

The standard is actually ambiguous on this point, although in practice all implementation behave as I describe. The user is forced to either indent by eight spaces, producing code that is part of the preceding bullet:

* Bullet point

        foo(); // indented by eight spaces

Or forced to use an invisible marker, such as or a comment:

* Bullet point


      

    foo();

More invisible syntax is required if the user wants a single line break. A simple newline is ignored by Markdown:

This is all on
a single line.

The only solutions within standard Markdown is to insert a literal , or to use two trailing spaces:

This is one line ending with two spaces  
So this is on another line.

This makes editing Markdown files unreasonably difficult. Many well-known sites using Markdown convert a single newline to a . This fixes the immediate problem, but the resulting fragmentation means that users’ experience with Markdown does not necessarily carry over to other sites.

My favourite gotcha with Markdown is the numbering syntax. In many other text markup formats, a specific character is used for numbering, such as #. With plaintext, the user must manually increment numbers themselves. Markdown supports the worst of both worlds, by recognising and renumbering lists. I saw one user write the following:

1. This is my first point.

Since I have a lot to say about my first point, I wrote some more
text here.

2. This is my second point.

I have a lot to say about my second point too, which I am putting
here.

3. This is my third point.

Markdown renumbers this, so every point is number one. This is not what a simple reading of the input would lead you to expect.

Limited features

Despite Markdown’s ubiquity, it is missing several features that my users frequently wanted. It does not support tables, unless the user writes raw embedded HTML. You cannot automatically generate a table of contents based on the headings on piece of Markdown source. Text that is obviously a link is not automatically converted to a link, forcing a rather heavyweight syntax:

Our primary landing page is [http://www.example.com](http://www.example.com)

Stack Overflow supports an alternative syntax for this use case:

Our primary landing page is

Again, this is not knowledge that the user can take with them to other Markdown based sites.

There’s also no support for labelling the language used in code snippets, making highlighting less convenient. There are good tools (for example this) which autodetect the language, but they are unreliable for short code snippets.

Several Markdown implementations offer plugins for some of these missing features. Sadly, some implementations do not support plugins at all, and most do not have plugins for all the features I have listed here. I have also been disappointed with the bugginess of several plugins I tried, as they hadn’t though about nesting correctly. For example, a user wants their code snippets to be rendered as written, even if the syntax overlaps with table plugin’s syntax.

Evolution

The Markdown specification is essentially unchanged from 2004. There’s no standard test suite, no updates to resolve ambiguities, and no work being done to standardise the syntax for these language extensions. This would greatly benefit the language today, and make it easier to use in the future.

Alternative 1: ReStructuredText

ReStructuredText (ReST) is a popular text markup developed by the Python community. It provides many more features than Markdown, in a well specified language. ReST replaced an earlier language called StructuredText, but suffers somewhat from the ‘second-system effect’. Whilst it learnt many lessons from its predecessor, it is a big, complex language with few implementations.

ReST requires more learning, a monospaced font, and ‘recompiling’. The Python community replaced LaTeX with ReST for their documentation, so these requirements seem straightforward next to learning TeX and LaTeX. However, ReST is less suited for a simple website where the user is writing in a text box. For example, the following syntax will give an error:

Heading
------

This is because a heading must have an underline that is at least as long as the text. This is fine when using a dedicated text editor, but a pain in a simple browser text editor.

When the syntax is incorrect, ReST shows an error. This is reminiscent of LaTeX where you must fix all your syntax errors before it will render your document. With ReST, these errors are often just shown inline with the rendered HTML. For websites such as wikis, Postel’s law (‘be permissive in what you accept’) is much more suitable. Rather than an ‘edit, view errors, edit, save’ paradigm, a better approach is to use a JavaScript renderer so the user can see a live preview of the output.

Sadly, ReST has no JavaScript implementation. Integrating the major implementation, docutils, is a little more involved than most Markdown implementations (“no, I don’t want the first two headings to have their level ignored and used as page title/page subtitle").

Whilst ReST has far fewer gotchas, the syntax is more heavyweight and complex. For example, the syntax for headings:

Main heading
============

A subheading
------------

This appears to be using = to mark top-level headings, but ReST treats the first heading as top-level regardless of which underline character you use. Furthermore, ReST often requires two characters where Markdown would require only one – for example two backticks for inline code, two colons for code blocks:

Call the ``foo`` function::

    foo(1, 2);

Finally, ReST syntax for creating links is very awkward. Inline links require a heavyweight syntax:

See our `home page 
      
       `_

For many uses of online text markup, this is too common a use case to require so many characters. Links are a fundamental part of HTML.

Alternative 2: Creole (recommended)

None of the largest wiki engines (MediaWiki, MoinMoin, etc) use Markdown. Most provide their own markup language, but the syntax between them is usually very similar. However, their syntax is not well specified, and the only existing renderer is an inseparable part of the engine. (This is a common problem for people seeking to do natural language processing of Wikipedia.)

Creole is a project to find a common syntax between these different wiki engines. They have produced a comprehensive specification, and many implementations exist. Importantly, there are JavaScript implementations, making it straightforward to build a real-time preview. This is difficult in Markdown because any plugins or non-standard modifications must be replicated in both the server-side code and client-side preview rendering.

The Creole specification is evolving, adding new features and fixing problems as they arrive. The syntax is lightweight, tried and tested in a large number of environments. Common use cases are simple. The syntax is a best-of-breed result, avoiding the mistakes made in the engines which first implemented a wiki syntax.

Whilst the syntax supports fewer features than ReST, you’d be hard pressed to find things you will miss in practice: you get basic formatting, links, headings, code snippets (though no way to specify language), tables, and images. This more than enough for the vast majority of use cases, without plugins.

Next time you’re looking for a simple markup to HTML solution, try Creole.

Original Page: http://buff.ly/15KYZDa

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5 Things University Marketing Programs Aren’t Teaching (But Should)

2015-03-06T04:58:49.049000Z

"after I’m done presenting, students approach me feeling scared — due to the overwhelming lack of knowledge and job readiness"

5 Things University Marketing Programs Aren’t Teaching (But Should)

by Travis Wright, marketingland.com
November 3 09:20 AM

First of all, if you get into Marketing… you’d better love learning. This space changes more frequently than Lady Gaga’s weird outfits. If you stand still for too long, you will get passed by. You have to be on top of your game, to keep learning and growing.

When asked what my secret to success in marketing is, my answer is immediate: continual education. You can’t graduate with a degree and be amazing at marketing – especially since many business schools that teach marketing aren’t giving their students the right information.

There are going to be some exceptions to this list, of course, as some programs are more innovative than others. However, one thing is certain across the board: marketing programs aren’t doing their best to get students ready for real marketing careers.

The Typical Marketing Degree

The Washington University Olin Business School is regularly ranked by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the top undergraduate schools for marketing in the United States. Sorry to pick on you, Washington U., but looking at the requirements for your Bachelor of Science in Business Administration for the class of 2015, you’re left wanting.

There area variety of course options, with students required to complete “42.5 units of professional business requirements," “12 units of business electives," “17.5 units of additional electives" and “48 units from the College of Arts & Sciences" to earn their degree in marketing.

Here’s a sampling of available courses, with the ones most applicable to Real Life Marketing highlighted:

Capital Marketing and Financial Management
Principles of Marketing
Market Competition and Value Appropriation
Financial Intermediaries and Market Econ.
Capital Market Imperfections
Marketing Research
Intro to Entrepreneurship
Web Development
Venture Consulting
Brand Management
Marketing Strategy
Leadership in Organizations

None of these listed courses have any “Part 2s" – what you see is what you get.

While there’s a hint at relating to real world marketing in courses like Web Development and Intro to Entrepreneurship, a single course on the subject isn’t going to do anything except give students a whiff of what they’ll be expected to have mastered.

So, what should a truly helpful undergraduate marketing degree course load look like? Here are a few ideas.

Do Marketing Degrees Include Analytics?

In marketing these days, every decision is based on data. We are in a data-driven world – and if you don’t understand the basics of analytics, you’ll be passed up for someone who does.

If you look at a slide from Rise Interactive‘s latest marketing deck, it has the perfect slide for describing why analytics is so important. Look at the customer journey cycle, from awareness, consideration, conversion and advocacy — analytics is the one channel that ties it all together.

Analytics is the channel that drives all decisions across other channels.

Shouldn’t Marketing Degree Courses Teach Mobile Readiness?

Everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket – so where’s the course on mobile marketing?

I don’t see any classes on responsive design, mobile readiness and inbound marketing, either (which is worlds away from traditional marketing). Using poor ol’ Washington U.’s example, maybe it’s included in that single Web Development course – but probably not.

Can you really learn in one course everything you need to be competitive from a marketing standpoint in a mobile-ready world? No.

Credit: A slide from Travis Wright’s MarTech deck.

When you consider that most people check their phone 150+ times a day, you’d better learn how to market to and design for mobile.

It again shows how antiquated these professors and marketing schools are at many U.S. Business Schools. It makes me wonder about the last time many of these instructors actually marketed anything.

Isn’t Content Marketing Important For A Marketing Degree?

It might be a smart move for marketing majors with a plethora of electives available from any department to head to the English department. “Content is king!" is the rallying cry of today’s marketers, and it takes a special kind of writer to script fantastic content marketing pieces.

This is something no strictly business-angled marketing course can help students with. If they can’t write marketing content, who’s going to hire them?

This is where I lucked out in my education; I wanted to be a sports broadcaster originally… so I studied journalism at the University of Kansas. Having that skillset under my belt in today’s marketing world has been a boon for business. I love writing. So, if you are in school studying marketing, you’d better love to create content. :-)

What About Optimizing Your Site & Content For Search?

Every single website needs to be optimized for search engines and, if applicable, local SEO.

I had fallen into SEO by intuition before Google was even launched. While working for GTE Yellow Pages in 1997, I started instructing small business owners to buy their keyword-rich domains, if they were available.

It was amazing how many great domains that I’d score people. I helped a KC area plumber score KansasCityPlumber.com and helped a Branson MO attorney get BransonLawyer.com, etc.

Keywords have always been important. Much of what you write about is based on the keywords your prospects search for and want to read about.

Nowadays, SEO has changed so much, it’s difficult to keep up with Google’s every animal name and algorithmic whim. However, there are some very basic site architecture things that you need to do to ensure that your site is indexed correctly.

SearchEngineLand’s SEO Periodic Table

However, looking at the business school requirements mentioned above, there’s not a single SEO course listed in the vast majority of marketing departments.

Someone applying for an entry-level marketing job may very likely be asked about their SEO skills — and they won’t have any if they depend just on their education. While marketers (usually) aren’t expected to be SEO whizzes themselves, they at least need to know the basics.

Do Modern Marketing Degrees Teach Social Media Management?

A course on overseeing Facebook, Twitter and the like? That would be one seriously popular course — and it would also prepare students for the reality that social media management isn’t fun filled with days of scrolling through newsfeeds. The world needs SM managers with skills, and they’re tough to come by.

By looking at Brian Solis’ and J3SS3′s Social Media Conversation Prism 4.0, you can see that there are a lot of channels and social media networks to consider. According to the above business school requirements, it appears they miss the mark on social.

The Conversation Prism, by Brian Solis and J3SS3.

Other Things Missing From Modern Marketing Degrees

Where are the classes on tag management, conversion optimization, marketing automation or classes on becoming a thought leader? Where are all the courses that are actually applicable to a marketing department?

Once these grads get their diploma and the celebrations are over, they’re realizing they’re ill-prepared to actually be a marketer – even at the entry level.

In Paul Roetzer‘s book, The Marketing Agency Blueprint, he mentioned a statistic that inspired this blog post.

“As demand for performance-driven, digital-savvy talent rises, universities are struggling to prepare students for the reality of a rapidly changing industry. Courses in analytics, automation, content, email, mobile, social, and other critical areas are rarely deeply integrated into marketing programs.

While digital-related courses are commonly offered as electives, our research of the top 10 undergraduate marketing programs in the United States, according to the 2014 U.S. News & World Report rankings, showed only one, Indiana University Bloomington (@IUBloomington), has a required digital marketing course—Analysis of Marketing Data.

College students generally have opportunities to learn digital marketing strategy and tactics. However, because of the way the higher education system is structured, many can earn undergraduate marketing degrees without taking a single digital class."

I’ve spoken at several business schools, including the University of Chicago’s, Booth School of Business and the University of Utah, David Eccles School of Business. Each time after I’m done presenting, students approach me feeling scared — due to the overwhelming lack of knowledge and job readiness they have. I let them know what they didn’t know that they need to know.

It’s time for a marketing degree course load makeover for the digital era, so who’s going to lead the evolution?

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Original Page: http://marketingland.com/5-things-university-marketing-degrees-arent-teaching-grads-marketing-105422

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Tech Superstars Build ‘Startup Factories’

2015-03-06T04:58:49.070000Z

as the cost of building a product decreases, the number of new products being built would increase

The Next Big Thing You Missed: Tech Superstars Build ‘Startup Factories’

by Issie Lapowsky, wired.com
January 2

The startup world is driven by a familiar formula: you get an idea, you build a product based on your idea, you start a business to sell your product, your business succeeds—or, more likely, it fails—and you start all over again, looking for a new idea.

Lately, however, a new formula has begun to take hold, one that challenges the very idea of how a business should be built. It plays out quite differently: you start a business, your business experiments with lots of ideas, many ideas fail but some succeed, you turn these ideas into new businesses, and the formula repeats on its own. Or at least, you hope it will.

There are lots of names for companies that follow this formula. Some call them “startup studios" or “startup factories," while others refer to this style of business building as “parallel entrepreneurship." But whatever you call it, it’s a model that’s catching on with some of the top names in tech.

Just last month, Zynga founder Mark Pincus unveiled Superlabs, a new project that he said would allow him to “launch products, experiment, try stuff, and be ready to look stupid." In March, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp raised $50 million for a similar project called Expa, which he runs with help from Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. And a few months later Digg co-founder Kevin Rose announced he was stepping down from his full-time gig at Google Ventures to launch his second startup studio, North Technologies. Rose sold his first, Milk Inc., to Google back in 2012 as a talent acquisition.

There’s also PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s HVF Labs, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams’ Obvious Corp, former MySpace CEO Mike Jones’s Science Inc., serial entrepreneur John Borthwick’s Betaworks, and Vimeo co-founder Jake Lodwick’s Elepath. The list goes on.

These are businesses started explicitly to start other businesses.

Some of these businesses generate all their ideas internally. Others invest in and acquire other companies as part of their portfolio. But the common goal among all of them is to experiment with lots of projects, welcome failure, and hope for a hit—or two or three. These are businesses started explicitly to start other businesses. “It’s the reverse of the way people think businesses should be created, that they have to start organically by one team with one idea," says Luke Williams, executive director of New York University’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship.

The question is, why are so many successful entrepreneurs embracing this counterintuitive model of entrepreneurship? And why now?

The Economics

The economics of building a tech business today, of course, have a lot to do with it. Thanks to mobile technology, it’s cheaper than ever to launch a new product. It makes sense, then, that as the cost of building a product decreases, the number of new products being built would increase. And historically, when technology comes along that radically changes the economics of business, inevitably, the people with the knowhow and the means will want to seize on every part of the market.

“It’s a race for the digital economy," says Caroline Daniels, a teaching professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College. “The people who have the capital and time and experience can see that the digital space is still wide open."

But there’s more to it than that. Those who are launching these startup studios are doing it not just because they can, but because they truly believe it’s a better way of building businesses.

The Two Camps

The founders of these businesses seem to fall into two camps. For some, it’s a way to speed up the process of serial entrepreneurship. “With each company, you’re applying for a seven to ten year journey at the very least," says Max Levchin, who has launched two companies out of HVF, including the fertility app Glow and the financial services startup, Affirm. “Now, the recent trend is a bunch of people who have had success in the past are asking themselves, ‘Why does it have to be one idea per decade?’"

In that way, these startup studios often become the perfect place for successful founders to discover their next big projects without hanging their hats on the wrong idea and falling into the sophomore slump. Vimeo’s Jake Lodwick compares his studio, Elepath, to a stem cell. “It was like, ‘This will turn into one thing, but we don’t know what — let’s find out,'" he says.

Ev Williams took a similar approach with Obvious Corp., the studio he co-founded back in 2006 after launching Blogger. Twitter was the most successful idea to come out of Obvious, so Williams wound down operations at Obvious and worked on Twitter full time. But after stepping down as CEO of Twitter, Williams relaunched Obvious with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Once again, when Williams found his next big thing—the blogging platform Medium— he pulled back from Obvious to focus on Medium full time.

The second camp, however, takes a more meta approach. For people like Mike Jones of Science Inc. and John Borthwick of Betaworks, the factory model is as much about building new innovative products as it is about innovating on the business model, itself. By starting, investing in, and acquiring a slew of companies within a larger company, there’s far less pressure on any one product to generate a quick return. That’s rarely the case with venture-backed startups. “We can drive companies to quick profitability or we can build companies with long term equity that we’re excited about," Jones says.

When Things Go Wrong

Another advantage of this approach is that each company within the portfolio can prop up the others. “We build companies in one space, and we seed invest around it, in order to help support it and draw capital to it," says Borthwick. When something goes wrong, as it always does at startups, the companies within Betaworks have more resources available to them than they’d ever have access to on their own.

When Giphy, a Betaworks-backed search engine for GIFS, launched last year, it was flooded with demand, so much so that the system completely melted down. It was 3 am on a Saturday morning, and the Betaworks team was able to pull together an operations person from Betaworks, one of the company’s hackers in residence, and an engineer from Digg, one of Betaworks’ most successful portfolio companies. By the end of the weekend, not only was the system back up and running, but Giphy had four full-time staff members working on the company.

“We saved the tech infrastructure, so we could sustain the demand, and essentially printed an amazing team, all in a matter of days," says Paul Murphy, a partner at Betaworks and CEO of another Betaworks startup, the mobile gaming company Dots. “The typical process would have been, ‘Let’s start fundraising, and then build the team.’ By that point, you’ve lost momentum. You can’t even put into numbers how much that’s worth."

The Success Conundrum

But there are some drawbacks to a model like this. What happens, for instance, when one company becomes a breakout hit? Does it overshadow every other project and the people working to build them?

Jones, for one, says he never plans to become CEO of any one of these companies. Science Inc., he says, is the product. Borthwick feels the same way about Betaworks, and yet, he understands that some day, an idea may come along that demands all his time and attention. “I’m certainly never going to compromise the opportunity, if one of these companies gets so big that I just need to feed it," he says. “But on the flip side, my hope is we can build a brand and platform over time that can sustain a massive hit."

The other worry is that this kind of thing can end up killing what startups are good at. Startups are often immune to the kind of innovation stagnation that larger companies face, because the ideas and the teams behind them are fresh, but what happens when you begin to codify how a startup is made and begin pumping them out like widgets on an assembly line? How much gets lost in the process?

You Can’t Manufacture Magic

What’s more, there’s no guarantee that lightning will strike twice, no matter how successful that entrepreneur was the first time around. That was the case for YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the very twosome that launched one of the defining tech companies of a generation. But when they tried to replicate that magic with a startup studio called Avos Systems, they were much less successful. Earlier this year, VentureBeat reported Avos was laying off 80 percent of its staff.

“A lot of entrepreneurs are motivated to understand how to make their success repeatable," says Prof. Williams. “But what they have to recognize is there’s a lot of luck involved in entrepreneurship, and most entrepreneurs in the tech sector might only get lucky once."

For more great coverage of science, technology, culture, business, and design, visit WIRED.com.

Original Page: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/startup-factories/

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Canada should focus on startup communities, not an ‘innovation ecosystem’

2015-03-06T04:58:49.060000Z

"fund staff to help entrepreneur-led community groups grow and scale"

Startup Day on the Hill: Canada should focus on startup communities, not an ‘innovation ecosystem’

by Ken Bautista, business.financialpost.com
November 27 12:49 PM

Around the world, cities are refocusing on supporting — not leading — startup community building initiatives. They’re realizing that if you want more elite players, you need a deep farm system led by entrepreneurs.

Government spends a lot of resources over-architecting grand innovation ecosystems and national accelerator networks to stimulate high-growth entrepreneurship in Canada. Unfortunately, a lot of grassroots, entrepreneur-led work in local communities often gets overlooked or downplayed.

Five years ago, we mobilized Startup Edmonton to bring together tech entrepreneurs in the community. At the time, we were unsatisfied with the hierarchy of economic development and incubator incumbents. We started organizing DemoCamps, Startup Weekends, and meetups, bootstrapped with our credit cards.

With momentum, city and business leaders provided seed funding to help us go to another level. We opened a 14,000-square-foot space in an old downtown warehouse that now hosts 150 events yearly, 170 resident members, and 50 companies.

Edmonton’s startup community is growing because of entrepreneurs leading, but it’s also working because local government understood how to be a supporter when it counted. In Edmonton, proof is overriding politics.

Edmonton has a fast growing population, billions in development, and a hot economy driven by energy. We could ride this for the next 10 years without having to change a thing. Across the board, everyone is doubling down on talent, education, and entrepreneurship from the mayor to the CEO of Edmonton Economic Development, on down to the presidents of post-secondary schools and chief executives of startups and large corporations.

If you want startups, community should be the first goal for every city and town across the country. Yet, the national conversation about high-growth startups often devolves into: how Canadian venture capitalists don’t invest (which they are), how we need more top-down consolidation of incubator programs (which we don’t), how our schools aren’t outputting good enough talent (which they are), and how our founders need to be more ambitious like Americans (which is debatable if you look at successful founders in European communities).

Investing in community is simple. Free food and beer and a space to gather goes a long way at community meetups and hackathons. You can also fund staff to help entrepreneur-led community groups grow and scale. In fact, funds spent on national conferences should be redirected to mobilize local entrepreneurs working inside communities.

Supporting growing companies in communities can also be simple: Founders need funding to travel and connect in international communities. Instead of funding more service providers, incubators and mentor networks, how do we help companies directly develop and recruit key talent in Canada? Tackling immigration reform and apprenticeship programs around senior talent would be game changers for growing startups that could become the next Hootsuites and Shopifys.

Imagine if Canada took 10% of what it spends nationally on the “innovation ecosystem" and put it into the hands of entrepreneur leaders in communities — no strings, no politics— just go. Watch what would happen.

This is the reason I’m involved in the Startup Canada Communities project. It’s all about taking a bottom-up approach to arm and mobilize community leaders coast to coast. We’re providing shared tools, resources, and mentorship to strengthen startup communities one at a time.

Globalization of Canada’s talent and companies is already shaping and strengthening its innovation and entrepreneurship brand worldwide. But we need to keep doubling down on our startup communities to increase the output tenfold.

Ken Bautista is a national advisor to the Startup Canada Communities initiative, co-founder and CEO of Startup Edmonton, and recently appointed director of entrepreneurship at Edmonton Economic Development. He has founded two tech companies including Rocketfuel Games.

Original Page: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/11/27/startup-day-on-the-hill-canada-should-focus-on-startup-communities-not-an-innovation-ecosystem/?__lsa=23be-6b3a

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Why I don’t like hackathons, by Alex Bayley aged 39 1/2

2015-03-06T04:58:49.208000Z

"There are no incentives for sustainable projects, long-term collaboration, or maintainable code"

Why I don’t like hackathons, by Alex Bayley aged 39 1/2

by Skud, infotrope.net
November 28

I seem to have had this discussion a few times lately, so I’m going to save myself the trouble of repeating it and just write down all the problems I have with hackathons. (Yes, I know lots of people have previously posted about what they don’t like about hackathons; I’ve linked some of them at the bottom of this post, if you want some other opinions too.)

They’re too much commitment

Me: I’m kind of interested in your thing. How can I get involved?
Them: We have a hackathon coming up. You should come!

Here’s how that sounds to me:

Me: I’d like to get a little more physically active.
Them: You should come run a marathon on the weekend!

The suffix “-athon" should tip you off here. Hackathons are intense and exhausting, and they’re meant to be. They’re usually a whole weekend of focused work, often with insufficient sleep, and too much encouragement to use masses of caffeine to stay awake and coding for 48 hours.

Sorry, but I’m not going to do that for my projects, let alone yours.

They exclude people with lives and responsibilities

This follows naturally from the marathon nature. A hackathon usually takes up a whole weekend, often starting Friday night and going through until Sunday evening. Sometimes you’re expected or encouraged to stay on-site overnight, or sometimes the norm is to go home to sleep, but either way it chews up multiple consecutive days.

I have other things going on in my life: errands to run, friends to see, a veggie garden to keep watered, and other community events and commitments to schedule around. Attending a weekend-long event means massively rearranging my life. And I don’t have kids or other people to care for; if I did, it would be pretty much impossible.

That exclusion is not evenly distributed

I see fathers of kids at hackathons pretty often, perhaps because their wives are looking after the kids. I see mothers far less often. Domestic and carer responsibilities are unevenly distributed, which means women are more likely to be too busy to attend hackathons than men are.

Until I did some research for this post, I’d never yet seen a hackathon with childcare or which provides information or assistance for parents; not even the women-only hackathon held recently in a city near me. (After some research, I now have heard of one.)

Sure, most younger women don’t yet have childcare responsibilities, but that just points out another unequal exclusion: the older you are, the more responsibilities you are likely to have, and the less energy you have for all-night Red Bull fuelled hacking sessions. Unsurprisingly, hackathon participants are generally on the young side.

It’s well documented that diverse teams have more creative ideas. So why exclude entire categories of people by holding an event that is hard for them to participate in?

They’re unhealthy

I’ve been to a few of these events, and I’ve never yet felt like I didn’t come out of it less healthy than I went in. Speaking for myself, I like daylight, moving around, eating lots of veggies, and drinking lots of water. I work at a standing desk part of the day (looking out the window at trees and birds), take lots of breaks to clear my mind and move my body, and usually make lunch with homebaked bread and something from my garden. I also like getting a good night’s sleep.

I’m not saying that everyone can or should do what I do. It’s entirely up to you to do what makes your body feel good, or to balance feeling good with other priorities. But I know that for me, when I attend a hackathon, if I spend two long days in poor lighting and poor ventilation, sitting hunched over my laptop at a meeting table in an uncomfortable chair, eating pretty average catering food or pizza (almost always especially mediocre because I go for the vegetarian option), I feel like crap.

Now, sometimes I’m prepared to feel like crap for a weekend for a good cause. But it has to be a pretty convincing cause.

Competition, meh.

One thing that doesn’t convince me: competition. For so many hackathons, the end-game is “create the best X and win a prize". I really, really don’t care. In fact it puts me off, and makes me less likely to attend.

To start with, I know how to do a cost-benefit analysis. The last hackathon in my area, I think the average prize awarded per attendee (i.e. dividing the prizes won by the number of people present) was around $100. Though, of course, most attendees actually got zero. I might be broke, but not broke enough to consider that a good use of two whole days of my time.

Surprise: extrinsic motivation isn’t all that motivating!

Quite apart from that, though, I’m not motivated by competition. Tell me you’re going to judge whose hack is the “best" and I get crippled by stereotype threat, instantly flashing back to being the last picked for the team in gym class. And I’m a developer with 20 years’ experience under my belt, who’s worked with dozens of APIs in several languages, and is comfortable with everything from wireframing to git. Imagine if I was new and less sure of my abilities?

You can tell me all you like about how collaborative the atmosphere of your event is, but if you are awarding prizes for the “best X", you just sound hypocritical. If you want me to believe the event is collaborative, don’t make it a competition.

Why can’t I work on an existing project?

Every hackathon I’ve been to has required that you come up with a new idea to hack on. At some hackathons, I’ve seen people complain that teams are cheating if they come with anything prepared or have done any work ahead of time.

I spend most of my time working on projects that I think are important and worthwhile. My head is full of them, I know my way around my toolkit and the codebase, and I have endless ideas for improvements and new features I want to work on.

Now you want me to show up at your event, put aside all the investment and focus I’ve built up for my project, and work on some new toy for the weekend.

They’re just toys

The result is that people build quick hacks that are cute and flashy, but have little depth. Meh.

And then they’re gone.

People say that hackathon projects are just prototypes, and that great things can later emerge from them. However, hackathon projects seldom survive beyond the weekend of the hack. Sure, I see hackathon organisers trying to take steps to ensure that projects have longevity but does this actually work?

I reviewed a handful of hacks, including many of the prize-winners, from the last hackathon I was at — the one with the longevity page linked above — and found not a single one with a code commit since the hackathon five months ago.

Here’s why: hackathons intentionally select for people who work intensely for a weekend, then give prizes for the flashiest results that can be produced in that short time. There are no incentives for sustainable projects, long-term collaboration, or maintainable code. Therefore, none of those things happen.

So what are hackathons good for?

They can be a pretty good PR exercise.

They can raise awareness of new technologies, APIs, or datasets among developers and give them a space to experiment with them.

They can be stimulate your creativity, if your creativity happens to be stimulated by short deadlines and so on.

They can be a feel-good networking experience for the (overwhelmingly self-confident, young, and male) participants.

Here’s what I want instead

Ongoing projects, that are maintained and used over several years.

A welcoming environment for people of all skill and confidence levels, with opportunity for mentorship, learning, and working at your own pace.

A schedule that makes it possible to participate without having to make heroic efforts to juggle your other responsibilities.

My main project, Growstuff, holds a monthly get-together called “Hackstuff" to work on Growstuff or any other project people care to bring along. It seems to be working well for us so far, and we have several participants who have become regular contributors to the project. I’d like to set up a similar civic hacking meetup in my town, if I can find a suitable venue.

I’d love to hear whether anyone else has experience running recurring, collaborative, low-commitment civic hacking events. If you’re doing something like that, please get in touch and tell me about it!

And some links

Who’s (not) welcome at hackathons?

Finding childcare for a UX sprint showed up when I searched for childcare and hackathons, and I was delighted to find that almost every woman named in the article is a friend of mine :)

Hackathons and minimal viable prototypes talks about what you can actually build at a hackathon (it’s not a product).

On hackathons and solutionism (do hackathons actually solve problems?)

National Day of Hacking your own Assumptions and Entitlement (a spot on satire).

Why Hackathons Suck from Thoughtworks, who I note sponsor an awful lot of hackathons. Huh?

Original Page: http://infotrope.net/2014/11/28/why-i-dont-like-hackathons-by-alex-bayley-aged-39-12/

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Thoughts on Google+

2015-03-06T04:58:49.141000Z

Thoughts on Google+

by Chris Messina™, medium.com

I fucked up. So has Google.

It’s been over a year since I left Google. Over 450 days, actually. During that time, I joined and left a startup; traveled to Paris (twice). I got divorced. I started a new relationship, moved, and became a bonus dad. Now I’m on the cusp of starting a new company (I think, details pending).

Any of these changes could be significant on their own, but I bring them up merely for comparison’s sake. I’m and these things happened to me over the course of a year. If there are roughly working on Google+, what have they doing during the same period?

one person 3000 people

While this post touches on the recent-past, present, and future, I’m going to start with a stupid mistake I made earlier this week.

I fucked up

I need to make a retraction. I fucked up. Publicly.

I cast aspersions where none were warranted. I called out Google+ on Twitter (in front of 68K followers no less) for a bug that — I argued — proved that they’d stopped doing QA (an essential step in the launch of any product at Google) and must have therefore and finally abandoned its social network:

But I was wrong.

The problem — as diagnosed by Googler Melissa Chang —was interference from Jesse Middleton’s Better BCC extension. Once I disabled it, the problem went away. (He tells me that he’s updated his extension to address this.)

Egg on my face. My bad. And apologies to my Googler friends Ade and Paul, in particular, for calling my accidental bluff.

So what the fuck is Google+ for anyway?

When I thought about what motivated me to lob this snarkbomb, I realized I was looking for a reaction. I wanted some kind of defiant response to questions that’ve recently bugged me —

What’s going on with Google+? Where is it headed? What the fuck is it for, anyway?

The last time David Besbris (Vic Gundotra’s successor and top exec on Google+) was interviewed by Recode, he said nothing. Literally.

No vision. No insight. Just pollyannish platitudes:

“We’re … very happy with the progress of Google+."

The most salient thing he said was, ", which at least suggests how the team must be thinking about the network internally. But if they’re more worried about Facebook, Snapchat, or Pinterest — I can’t tell. And if they have a plan and a vision for creating something new and wonderful in the world, I certainly can’t deduce it from their Oct 9 feature release: Polls (a feature I contributed to over a year and a half ago when I was a UX designer on the team).

“[The Google+ audience sees] Google+ as a social network for their interests.

Furthermore, if you simply look at the velocity of iOS releases across the most popular social apps over 2014, you’ll see that Google+ and Hangouts lag significantly behind (WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook this year, which likely explains their lack of updates):

Why do I care about Google+?

Dear reader, I wouldn’t fault you if you’re wondering why I give a shit. It’s not like I work there anymore. Sure, I have a few friends who do but most rolled off to work on other projects at Google, left, or started new companies. And yes, I run a popular mixology community, but it’s not like it’s blowing up or anything.

So why do I care?

Simple: for the same reason that motivated me to join Google in 2010— that (namely, Facebook). I still believe that competition in this space is better for consumers, for startups, and for the industry. And Google still remains one of the few companies (besides Apple, perhaps) that stands a chance to take on Facebook in this arena — but Google+, as I see it, has lost its way.

the future of digital identity should not be determined by one company

(Or maybe never found its way. I dunno.)

But it matters because there’s a lot at stake here — way more than the success of a mere social network. What’s at stake is how individuals participate in the web ecosystem, and whether one company will determine how we get online, gain access, connect and communicate through the increasing number of apps, devices, and digital experiences that we rely upon.

If you take the long view, you’ll understand why this moment in time is important: the companies and apps that solidify their position in our lives today will likely live on far into the future. Google is one of those companies that has already done this. I believe Facebook will too. So the fundamental problem that I have with Google+ is that I just don’t understand it. And what I don’t understand makes me nervous — and should make you nervous too.

Digital identity, circa 2014

I’ll be the first (well, maybe the second) to admit that we’re no longer living in the golden era of social networking. We’ve migrated away from the mouse and keyboard era of computing and replaced them with glossy, touchable surfaces that we carry around in our pockets and alert us to all of our friends’ most recent doings. We have access to our contacts, to information, and to superpowers that we’ve never had before. And not only are we starting to take this all for granted — there’s a younger generation growing up without any conception of a time and are living .

Before Siri , Post Browser

All this is perfectly normal to them. Things are exactly as they should be, and always have been.

So why does the competition for control of digital identity matter anymore? Frankly, because as I’ve long held, identity is platform — the killer app of networked personal computing devices (even more so as we increasingly depend on more than one authenticated device at a time!).

the

Digital identity unlocks universal personalization (i.e. better ads), payments and commerce (i.e. Snapcash), environmental adaptation (i.e. an Uber that plays your Spotify music), communications (i.e. Path Talk), and access (i.e. Sosh Concierge). Today’s most exciting apps are barely scratching the surface of what will be possible when there are years of preferences data stored up on each of us, that we can leverage at a moments notice, in any context.

Privacy is a four-letter word

But before you go get your pitchfork and scream bloody murder about the loss of individual “privacy", stop for a second.

This word, ?— it’s a problem.

privacy

It’s one of those words that puts a stop to useful conversations and prevents us from actually engaging with what’s going on in our digital lives. It obscures and glosses over.

WAKE UP!

Maintaining your privacy doesn’t strictly mean keeping people from having data or information about you. Certainly not preventing yourself from having access to data yourself. Privacy is about the ability to be left alone, or about not being watched, if you don’t want to be. Which is fine. Turn on . There — you’ve got a bit of your privacy back. But that has nothing to do with the huge amounts of data you’re still producing and is being tracked.

about Do Not Disturb

So, given that expectations of privacy are changing (or being changed), I challenge you: what if you to be watched? What if you were offered an outsize amount of value in exchange for allowing someone else to watch you? What would you do? would you want to watch over you? Who would you want to look after you and your best interests? Who would you trust? Do you feel like you have reasonable choices in today’s marketplace?

want Who

This, my friends, is the dilemma presented and the opportunity omitted by an overused term like “privacy".

Taking the perspective, it seems completely reasonable to me that companies would vie to become my lifelong “data bank". Ultimately I want companies to know more about me and to use more data about me in exchange for better, faster, easier, and cheaper experiences. But I also want to be treated like an adult when talking about my data. Watery terms like “cloud" or “dropbox" or “backup" sound utilitarian but mask the true aspirations of these service providers. They should just come out and say it: they want all this information to have build up a competitive advantage to delivering more personalized services to me and people like me. Backing up my files is the long game.

data-positive do absolutely not

Seizing your data capital

Here’s the thing: you and me, we’re being tracked whether we like it or not. Use a web browser, use apps —and there’s a company or companies out there amassing huge amounts of data about every click, tap, photo, notification, or icon in your digital life. Sometimes they anonymize it so that your preferences or behavioral data can’t be easily tracked back to you, but then have no way of auditing that information, accessing it, or perhaps granting access to some other trusted party of your choosing. This may reassure you that your data won’t be that valuable if its leaked when there’s another breach, but this also means that you’re leaving a ton of value on the table. And frankly, most of these companies (especially the ad-driven ones) don’t really care about specifically. They can target you just as effectively through other means. And frankly, most would rather anonymize it to avoid embarrassing moments than do the heavy lifting to make your data accessible to you in more useful formats.

you your data

Taken at the individual level, you’re just a rounding error at the millionth decimal. And yet this data could be hugely valuable to you if you collect and let it accrue for long enough. This is why I’ve called this kind of information exhaust “data capital". If you think of this data as your money being burned, maybe you’ll rethink what “privacy" is all about, and what stake you should claim in the data being captured about you.

So what about Google+?

So what does this have to do with Google+?

As it stands, Facebook, Apple, and Google (and to some degree Amazon) are in a battle to know you better than you do. Facebook is pretty clear about what they’re doing, and do a fair job explaining it — and have improved over the years. Apple recently came out aggressively about their own commitment to user privacy (but they make money from hardware, rather than ads). Google’s efforts, meanwhile, seem disjointed and confused, despite significant improvements to their settings and security features. If Google+ was intended to serve as Google’s “social backbone", it should be the locus of control and access over the kind of information I’ve described above. And yet… it’s not. Far from it, in fact.

To my point, most people would likely describe Google+ as a newsfeed, a kind of Facebook-lite. Sure, it’s got neat photo and video chat apps hanging off of it. And die-hard users would call out the interest-based communities as the reason they return, as Bez did. But few if any would say that it’s where they go to understand the data that Google holds about them, or where they go to adjust their preferences, or to adjust how people see and find them online. And maybe that’s intentional and maybe that’s the point — but if so, then I don’t get it. Why did the world need another Facebook, unless to benefit Google by making their ad targeting more effective? Why wasn’t Google+ one of Google’s famous moonshots, intended to improve personal social networking by 10x? Why did they take a conventional approach to social networking rather than think about about what controls people might need in the next in their digital lives? Moreover, how does Google+ help deliver better, richer, more interesting, and more personalized experiences, to motivate people to store more information with Google? I mean, why did Google hitch their digital identity strategy to 2004-era social networking trends?

5–10 years

And damnit all,

why am I so disappointed?!

When it comes right down to it, maybe I just don’t want to admit that I spent 3½ years working on something that will become irrelevant. Even if Google+ regains focus and simplifies its mission, I want to believe that we were working on something significant and that had an opinion about what the world should look like. Lately, I just feel like Google+ is confused and adrift at sea. It’s so far behind, how can it possibly catch up? I mean, Facebook launched a polling ad unit ; five years later, Google+ launched their own. Is mentions really a differentiator? (Nope, Facebook has a dedicated app for that, and it’s been baked into Twitter for how long?) Is this kind of slow-following going to win the future?

in 2009

I’m disappointed because I expect better from Google. Like, self-driving cars better, or hot-air balloon internet access better. I don’t want excuses. I don’t want to hear about how competitive or political the internal environment is. Larry is a strong leader. Sundar is too. And I know that they’re getting a ton of mileage (and cash) out of ads, Chrome, and Android —there are plenty of resources. Leaving internet identity in Facebook’s hands would be a massive fail. At least Twitter is making a go at it with Digits. But how does Google[+] fit into this picture? Will it ever? (And no, Google+ Sign In isn’t enough.)

Is there any hope that Google+ will find a compelling reason to continue to exist, and perhaps deliver on the data-positive vision I’ve outlined above?

The missed opportunity

I remember the primordial days of Emerald Sea (the codename for Google+). Its original name was Google Me (at least until Kevin Rose leaked the name and a new name needed to be chosen). I loved the name, not because it was a name, but because of what it implied: . Google Me was necessary to improve Google’s profile and social graph to make search more and . It was like Google was saying, It was a functional search-oriented value proposition, rather than a social networking one.

good “Just google me and I’ll be there" personalized humane “We’re going to be your trusted partner in cyberspace, and we’ll help you surface the right information to the people you choose, at the right time."

Thus, for me, when I searched for my mom’s phone number on Google, I actually find it — because it would be on her profile and she would have shared it with me. Suddenly a query like would work.

“mom phone number"

“Google is where I search for things and I should be able to find useful information about my friends if they’ve shared it with me."

But when the name to (cue terrifying echos of Microsoft Plus!), the focus shifted. Now, not only was Google+ fast-following Facebook, but the name of the product was a hedge against another Buzz-like debacle. If for some reason the product failed (and lots of Buzz veterans actively worried about this), Google could just drop the “+" and pretend the “project" never existed. Genius.

Google+

But this was all wrong. By starting off on a defensive footing, Google+ didn’t defiantly stand for something special in the world. Instead it defined itself by what it wasn’t — i.e. Facebook — though it was positioned internally as chasing after their success. And while Facebook executed a bold, ambitious (and uncomfortable) plan to create a “more open and connected world", Google+ confusingly claimed to be rethinking real-life sharing on the web, with “", even though we clearly hadn’t figured it out. Indeed, our solution (Circles (read: ) put the onus on the user to manually curate groups of people — a great concept in theory, but too arduous and awkward in practice.

nuance and richness “lists"

Now, it’d be one thing if Circles and “better privacy" (there’s that word again!) were merely a launch ploy to drum up interest (it’s worked for others in the past). Instead, Google+ continued to throw its weight behind this narrative long after Facebook overhauled its privacy features, and “grew up". To this day, I still don’t know what Google+ is for, let alone better at than Facebook. Some might argue it’s “cleaner" and has fewer ads, but even that won’t be a lasting competitive advantage.

What’s sad to me is that the promise of Google Me could be found in launch post:

“We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests."

Yes!

Yes!

But by launching a conventional social network, Google missed the pivotal opportunity to establish a data-positive paradigm for sharing, individual control, and personalization that set itself apart from Facebook. Ultimately it offered too little, too late.

More recently, the Google+ marketing team came back to the message of personalization— at least for Google’s own apps. Instead, Google+ was about uniting Google products with one user account —something that should have been inevitable after Eric Schmidt’s tenure ended anyway.

So now what?

I read this passage from the launch post for Google+ and I get excited, to this day. The sentiment here echoes Ello’s claims upon their launch. The difference is that I actually believe Google to make good on these promises.

You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus — on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data; and more ways to let us know how we’re doing. All across Google.

Yes!

Yes!

But now what? Google’s work here is far from over.

The Google+ feed does nothing towards addressing the issues I’ve raised about data capital and privacy. Sure, Google give you controls to set your ads preferences, but this framing is all wrong. Whereas Pinterest helps you express your aspirational self, Google pigeonholes you into what you already are, based on your previous search activity. This is where improving the data that Google has about you — in turn trusting Google as a steward of that datachanges the nature of the conversation by making it less about “privacy" and more about empowerment. While some people will freak out (as they always do), this would be a bold, productive, future-forward direction to take. Hell, we’re living in this reality already—but few give straight talk about what’s going on, and how their data is, or be could, be used for their benefit. If Google took the approach I’ve suggested here — becoming more user-centric — I’d finally understand why what they’re doing is different. And then I could evaluate Google on a steward of my data, and acting as my in my digital life.

— being universal user agent

But until that happens, [object Object] makes just as much sense to me as their strategy.

Original Page: https://medium.com/p/8883844a9ca4

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The Downside of Eating Too Locally

2015-03-06T04:58:49.142000Z

"we should continue developing local food systems — in both urban and rural areas. But we also need to build strategic partnerships between affluent urban consumers and rural producers in environmentally sensitive, low-income areas"

The Downside of Eating Too Locally

by LIZ CARLISLE, nytimes.com
November 26

BERKELEY, Calif. — TO appreciate the depth of our national political divide, look no further than our Thanksgiving tables. The organic turkeys and farmers’ market produce of coastal urbanites face off against the frozen Butterballs and rich gravies of our rural interior, each side equally contemptuous of the other. Or so it might seem.

But as climate change begins to take its toll on farm country, this geopolitics of “alternative" and “traditional" food is changing. These days, the call to change our food system is coming straight from the heart of red-state America.

I realized this when I went home to Montana to research a book about Timeless Seeds, an organic lentil and heritage grain business that weathered the devastating drought 0f 2012. I interviewed people like Jerry Habets, a barley grower in Conrad, Mont. Three dry years at the turn of the millennium left him desperately searching for answers. Bankrupt, divorced and about to lose his family’s 87-year-old homestead, Mr. Habets tried the Bible. Then he went to a psychic. And then he went organic. That improved his soil so it could store more water.

Tuna McAlpine, a rancher down the road in Valier, made the same decision 10 years earlier, when he stopped using chemicals and converted to a grass-fed livestock system. A libertarian who is concerned that the Republican Party has gotten too soft on guns, he doesn’t want anybody infringing on his constitutional rights. Not the government — and not Monsanto. “I’m a stubborn Scotsman," he explains.

Mr. Habets and Mr. McAlpine are part of a powerful rising tide of the movement to change our nation’s system of growing food: family farmers in the heartland who are determined to get out of the commodity trap.

Central Montana is not the type of place you might expect sustainable food to blossom. It’s heavily Republican. It’s hundreds of miles from the closest major metropolitan area. Frequent droughts and early impacts of climate change make it a tough place to farm, and struggling rural economies make it a tough place to earn a living.

And yet, if you look closer, there’s a host of reasons sustainable food has taken root here in central Montana. Many farmers are the third or fourth generation on their land, and they’d like to leave it in good shape for their kids. Having grappled with the industrial agriculture model for decades, they understand its problems better than most of us. Indeed, their communities have been fighting corporate power since their grandparents formed cooperative wheat pools back in the 1920s.

For the food movement to have a serious impact on the issues that matter — climate change, the average American diet, rural development — these heartland communities need to be involved. The good news is, in several pockets of farm country, they already are.

There are dozens of efforts happening across the farm belt, from the antibiotic-free Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative in Missouri to David Brandt’s soil-building cover crops in Carroll, Ohio.

But just as these rural efforts started gaining steam, an unfortunate thing happened to the urban food movement: It went local. Hyperlocal. Ironically, conscientious consumers who ought to be the staunchest allies of these farmers are taking pledges not to buy from them, and to eat only food produced within 100 miles of home.

By all means, we should continue developing local food systems — in both urban and rural areas. But we also need to build strategic partnerships between affluent urban consumers and rural producers in environmentally sensitive, low-income areas. We’re used to this fair-trade paradigm for tropical commodities like bananas and coffee. It’s time to apply it to rural America, too.

Even if you live hundreds of miles away from Montana, eating organic lentils grown there helps farmers responsibly steward their land.

Eating food that is grown responsibly — no matter where it is grown — is a smart strategy for combating climate change. Transportation to the final point of sale accounts for only about 4 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the average American diet.

The bigger problem is the way we produce that food, particularly the fossil-fuel-intensive manufacture of nitrogen fertilizer. Since lentils can pull nitrogen from the air and work with bacteria to convert it into fertilizer, organic farmers rotate lentils and other legumes into their fields, planting them between cycles of other crops, as a substitute for industrially produced nitrogen.

The next step in overhauling our food system is large-scale change in the American heartland. Farmers like Mr. Habets and Mr. McAlpine are up to it. We should all support them.

© 2014 The New York Times Company.

The content you have chosen to save (which may include videos, articles, images and other copyrighted materials) is intended for your personal, noncommercial use. Such content is owned or controlled by The New York Times Company or the party credited as the content provider. Please refer to nytimes.com and the Terms of Service available on its website for information and restrictions related to the content.

Original Page: http://ow.ly/F4plj

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Airtable

2015-03-06T04:58:49.272000Z

a mobile first DabbleDB - make your own "apps" (including link tables) that can be shared / collaboratively edited.

Airtable

airtable.com

Undo & redo

Undo any change you make, including deletions.

Original Page: https://airtable.com/features

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The Case for Optimism and Risk at Startups

2015-03-06T04:58:49.264000Z

But a blog post saying “this is what is wrong with tech investing today?" Give me a flipping break. If anything I’d like to fund 5 more teams and projects this ambitious. And if one of them succeeds it would have been worth doing. But my chips are in on uBeam and I’m not afraid to put my reputation on the line the same way entrepreneurs must each day.

The Case for Optimism and Risk at Startups

bothsidesofthetable.com | November 5

Last week a company we enthusiastically backed, uBeam, led by a very special entrepreneur, 25-year-old Meredith Perry, announced a $10 million round of financing. The press around the raise & company was fantastic and the promise of their technology – wireless charging that works as easily as WiFi – would positively affect many of our lives. What person hasn’t crouched at an airport to get 18% extra on one’s battery before boarding an airplane?

But then one person – who happens to be a physicist – wrote a back-of-the-envelop calculation of uBeam and said it’s not physically possible. His math was correct and I can hardly blame him for taking a guess at what uBeam does but every assumption that he used was wildly inaccurate. uBeam’s tech does work and I have safely seen it demo’d in the real life many times. Most of those that have been privileged enough to get a look at what they are actually doing have moved from skeptics to believers.

One is reminded of the famous quote often attributed Mark Twain

“A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes." **

There is a battle between entrepreneurs who try to change the world and solve a meaningful problem and those who write take-down pieces with no apparent personal benefit other than attention. Here I make the case that entrepreneurs must stay focused on the prize, not the doubters. I make the case that optimism for new breakthroughs should be higher in the minds of those of us that watch from the sidelines rather than schadenfreude.

Entrepreneurs

There are those amongst us the are willing to abandon the comforts of a job with a salary and perhaps the prestige of being able to tell family members, loved ones and friends that “I work for Google, Goldman Sachs, Apple, FedEx, Verizon or Coca Cola" and instead put out selves out there to potentially look stupid one day.

Working at a big company is honorable and I don’t believe the narrative that all of this tech disruption is to kill off big companies.

Entrepreneurs accept that failure is a possibility but are highly motivated by not letting it happen to them. Even bigger is the desire to stick one’s middle finger up at all of the people who doubted you all along. Who sat on the sidelines from the comfort of their keyboards risking nothing and criticizing everything. I’m not talking about professional journalists who have an obligation to skepticism but rather arm-chair quarterbacks questioning every pass.

Entrepreneurs are driven to pursue their passions no matter the personal costs, societal pressure, family head-scratching or financial consequences. They are driven more by the journey than they are about the destination.

I was fortunate enough recently to be invited to a private sitting with the president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, along with 18 other entrepreneurs. She is trying to build a “creative economy" in South Korea and wanted to learn from some Americans what made us so innovative and what they could learn from us. I thought I was pretty sell suited to answer that question because having grown up in Northern California but lived and worked in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain & Japan over 11 years I had seen quite a few societies and work environments.

I told her that I believed America’s best asset – driven initially from software innovation mindset in the San Francisco Bay Area and media innovation driven from Los Angeles – was our willingness to accept failure. If a society shuns people for TRYING you discourage people from creating truly breakthrough innovation out of fear of failure. The beauty of Silicon Valley and the ethos it has driven in all of us is acceptance of failure and a profound respect for those who at least try.

Optimists

When I think about the people in our generation I most respect: Elon Musk, Larry Page, Richard Branson – they are optimists to a fault. They have a can-do attitude that is infectious. Who else would publicly try to launch people into space so that one day we might be able to fly people from New York to Tokyo in 90 minutes.

And in the tragic events of Virgin Galactic’s crash this week Richard Branson didn’t say, “yeah, it’s too risky, we were wrong" he said “Space is hard – but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together," to which the CEO added “The future rests in many ways on hard days like this, but we believe we owe it to the team to understand this and to move forward. And that is what we’ll do."

When Elon Musk set out to build SpaceX he wasn’t greeted with enthusiasm from the space community not used to having a private enterprise challenge the government funded space exploration of NASA. Now they are partners. Who in the auto industry believed Tesla, a totally electric car, was a good idea? The collective wisdom of the establishment to this huge innovation? Bupkis. Who else but an extreme optimist and entrepreneur could have imagined and then publicly spoken about “The Hyperloop" – a system of transport that envisages transporting people from LA to San Francisco in 35 minutes. Of course the naysayers are out again. I’d love even 0.5% of Elon’s ideas to come to fruition and let him fail on the rest.

No true innovation is ever accepted by the establishment precisely because it pushes the boundaries of what people think is possible

It was really gratifying to read Larry Page’s interview in the FT this past week. As you may know Google recently restructured so that Larry could spend more time on big innovations – on “moonshots." In the article is cites:

Page estimates that only about 50 investors are chasing the real breakthrough technologies that have the potential to make a material difference to the lives of most people on earth. If there is something holding these big ideas back, it is not a shortage of money or even the barrier of insurmountable technical hurdles.

When breakthroughs of the type he has in mind are pursued, it is “not really being driven by any fundamental technical advance. It’s just being driven by people working on it and being ambitious"

Amen.

People. Working on it. And being ambitious. And not enough capital embracing these moonshots.

Backbenchers

Backbencher is a term from British Parliament to represent those that are neither in government positions where they have to enact policy nor in the opposition front bench positions of having to suggest counter policy. Of course backbencher has also become a slang term for “someone who exaggerates their actual power, influence, or importance, usually for nefarious purposes."

Backbenchers never do anything. They get to sit in the back of the room, snicker, criticize and yet enjoy the benefits of our efforts. They aren’t just free riders – they are negative with no personal ideas for how to make things better.

Backbenchers love to criticize. It reminds me of Glum from Gulliver’s Travels (60-second video clip), “It will never work." “We’re doomed." “We’ll never make it."

I wasn’t shocked this week after we announced we funded uBeam, a company that seeks to transfer electricity wirelessly to have some public Glum’s question its viability. In fact, the headline of one read, “How Putting $10m into uBeam illustrates everything that is wrong with tech investing today."

Juxtapose this: Larry Page telling us we need more ambitious projects and one person with a blog writing a very negative take-down piece on a company that is truly innovative and trying to change an industry and free us from having to crouch in airport corners to get 18% more juice on our phones before catching out flights. Or trying to save old people from having to constantly change the batteries on their hearing aides.

In his post this blogger imagines the math of how uBeam works and says, “I’m no physicist – oh, wait, I am" – a cheap, funny line to establish authority. Except that each of his calculations and assumptions about how uBeam works is totally wrong.

Here’s what you need to know for now:

It does work. I have witnessed it working. So anybody telling you the physics is impossible is simply wrong.
I did not lose my hearing. I was not fried. I was not scared. I was not scarred. It is safe.
We hired outside experts. We kept our skepticism and like many who initially doubted we were convinced.
We checked patents. We checked regulatory rules. We checked efficiency calculations. We checked safety. We checked charge times.
Will it work at scale? Are we right in all of our assumptions and diligence? Time will tell.

Some people have publicly or privately asked me to define exactly what uBeam IS doing and why this backbencher is wrong. We will do that. Of course. When we ship product. And then feel free to judge the team’s accomplishments or failures. I, of course, am betting on the former and am not 1% swayed by the doubters. If you have no doubters trust me you aren’t pushing the boundaries far enough.

But would you expect Apple to reveal its product details before launching? Would you expect Tesla to pre-announce what battery innovations they are working on? Of course not. And that’s why uBeam is rightly focused on perfecting their product, innovating, hiring and building for the future not on responding to every criticism from those without details of what we’re actually doing.

Has any truly novel innovation ever been greeted with universal approbation before its ultimate success?

Heads down, entrepreneurs. Carry on, optimists.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude.

“A feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people."

Schadenfreude is not an emotion I possess. What surprised me most about the post launch snipes at uBeam is not the doubting Thomas. 99% of the articles about the company were positive. The overwhelming public reaction was “hell, yeah, I’d love to be able to ditch the wires" yet some entrepreneurs and investors felt the need to quote this one blogger through authority of saying “See! Physicists say this isn’t possible!"

Do they REALLY know what uBeam’s plans are? Are they really so sure it can’t work? Do you really believe one blogger who uses wild assumptions over a company that has committed itself to innovation in this field?

What makes America great, as I told the president of South Korea, is our willingness to accept failure. To root for failure is not what our industry does. It’s not what we’re made of. I know many people with physics backgrounds question how uBeam will work.

Time will tell. And I can’t wait to engage with all of you when we ship product. And I hope the skeptics will join in from a perspective of “how can we help?" vs. “how can we tear you down."

I’m betting on success. If I’m wrong? I stand by my decision 100% and will both look for equally ambitious future projects as well as be first in line to ask Meredith and Marc what they want to do next.

But to Larry’s broader point, “breakthroughs … are being driven by people working on it and being ambitious."

Meredith Perry is 25. She has withstood 2+ years of backbenchers questioning what she’s working on. My experiences with her have been amazing. She never lost enthusiasm for her pursuit. She never lost confidence in the team’s ability to innovate and execute. She never got distracted from her core mission. She has never given up despite setbacks. The determination, grit & pluck are inspirational. I wish I had 20% of her confidence, focus and leadership skills at 25. The world needs more Meredith Perry’s, not fewer. Could you withstand the public scrutiny every day of being a young tech founder and show up every morning filled with enthusiasm?

Marc Berte, the CTO, and a masters from MIT, is exceptionally gifted. Of course we threw at him every skepticism of the market that we had heard or thought. What about loss of efficiency? What about battery charge times? What about safety concerns? What about competing patents. Of course we brought in outside experts. At each stage Marc and the team gave us confidence they really did have a novel approach and that it would work safely and efficiently.

Let’s embrace those trying to push the boundaries while acknowledging that many of them in the end will fall short. We’re an industry filled with naive optimists, with can-do attitudes and a desire to change the world no matter how many back benchers want to ridicule us for trying. Don’t join that chorus – even when companies do fail. Schadenfreude is such a terrible sentiment.

And for entrepreneurs waking up everyday to backbenchers public and private?

The doubters will question you. The trolls will swipe at you. Competitors will undermine you. These are the signs of innovation. Carry on

— Mark Suster (@msuster) November 1, 2014

Note: Today’s beautiful image courtesy of Alissa Evangelista who can be found on Twitter or 500px.

** – While this quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, the great irony is that it appears that Mark Twain wasn’t the person who coined the phrase

Original Page: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2014/11/05/the-case-for-optimism-and-risk-at-startups/

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Why servers should be seen like cows, not puppies

2015-03-06T04:58:49.293000Z

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing is fundamentally about managing hardware resources, and the CTO of OpenStack company Piston Cloud Computing has an interesting way to think about the issue.

Mineblock - A Small Affordable Minecraft Home Server

2015-03-06T04:58:54.366000Z

easily upgradable Raspberry Pi 4 USB slots and HDMI display port Includes 5 volt power supply and Wifi dongle How does it work? Once plugged in, Mineblock looks for a network to connect to.

Your Community Door

2015-03-06T04:58:49.319000Z

What are the real world consequences to signing up for a Twitter or Facebook account through Tor and spewing hate toward other human beings? Facebook reviewed the comment I reported and found it doesn't violate their Community Standards. pic.twitter.com/p9syG7oPM1

calling all engineers: uncle sam needs you

2015-03-06T04:58:49.383000Z

a year ago today, i began one of the most interesting stints of my career: i became part of the technology surge team brought in from the private sector to fix HealthCare.gov.

The cloud landscape described, categorized, and compared

2015-03-06T04:58:49.302000Z

“I work for a PaaS company” I answered him. “Ah, okay, great”, and he moved to another subject. It was a cold winter day on a hipster cloud conference. He wasn’t the only one that directly knew what my company did.

Hacking Talent — iNovia Capital — Medium

2015-03-06T04:58:49.544000Z

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the first Talent Hackers event in NYC. A very insightful event! There was plenty of practical advice that came out of the event. The TalentHackers NYC team put together a more detailed summary here if you’d like to learn more about the event itself.

NOBL's 2 client filters

2015-03-06T04:58:50.058000Z

1) Are you committed to having a positive impact? 2) Will you put solutions above silos?

"NOBL's 2 client filters : 1) Are you committed to having a positive impact? 2) Will you put solutions above silos?"

NOBL's 2 client filters: 1) Are you committed to having a positive impact? 2) Will you put solutions above silos?

Original Page: https://twitter.com/bud_caddell/status/522543412654784513

Middling

2015-03-06T04:58:49.498000Z

Twitter's for 140-character short-form writing and Medium's for long-form. Weirdly, there really isn't a great platform for everything in the middle — what previously would've just been called "blogging." Mid-length blogging. Middling. So I think I'll try doing the same thing here.

This new “Apple SIM” could legitimately disrupt the wireless industry – Quartz

2015-03-06T04:58:49.670000Z

Perhaps the most interesting news about Apple’s new iPad Air 2 tablet is buried at the bottom of one of its marketing pages: It will come pre-installed with a new “Apple SIM” card instead of one from a specific mobile operator. (Credit to Julien Theys for noticing this.)

High-level language implementors being bad asses

2015-03-06T04:58:49.535000Z

This reads like science fiction -- in a great way.

Vector, the Journal of the British APL Association

archive.vector.org.uk

It began badly. We were walking along the South Downs Way in early summer, the sun glittering on the English Channel on our right, the Weald of Sussex stretching away to our left. “How big," asked Arthur, “should a text editor be?"

I’ve known Whitney most of my life. I know what he does. I know his stupid questions. And still I can’t resist trying to give helpful answers. “I don’t know. One could find out, surely? What do Emacs and Vim weigh – tens of megabytes?"

“I’ve got a text editor in four lines of K. Just need to add Copy and Paste."

Ah, we’re back to that. Of course. K is the language part of kdb+, Arthur’s frighteningly fast column-store database, used by trading rooms to handle huge real-time data flows from financial exchanges. It started off at Morgan Stanley in the 1980s as an APL stripped for speed and became A+[1], and for two decades the bank’s development environment for trading applications. For the last twenty years it has evolved as kdb+, trading as Kx Systems, Inc.[2] It’s a two-orders-of-magnitude sort of thing: two orders of magnitude faster than industry-standard database, two orders of magnitude smaller code volume. Four lines of K equate to about four hundred lines of C.

The kdb+ interpreter is tiny: about 100Kb. (And yes, kdb+ programs are interpreted, not compiled.) As the code base improved, kdb+ releases became faster – and smaller. Kdb+ has sharp elbows. Impatient with the speed of Windows, kdb+ wins a ×3 performance improvement by managing memory itself.

Whitney is no respecter of rules. One of the scariest things I ever did as a young man was following him through central Toronto on a bicycle.

An apocryphal story. At the first of the three universities he claims to have been thrown out of, Whitney’s class was given an assignment: write a program that will print the most successive prime numbers possible with limited CPU time and limited green-striped paper. (Yes, that long ago.) His solution won by a handsome margin and was disqualified on two counts. In the first place he had ignored everything the class had been taught about modularisation and code re-use. He just wrote code optimised to solve one problem spectacularly fast. He had also noticed the problem did not specify printing spaces between the primes. The printouts were a sea of ink. And his code looked like woodgrain.

As a rule, it was the fittest who perished; the misfits,
Forced by failure to emigrate into unsettled niches,
Who altered their structure and prospered.
— WH Auden

Kdb+ is a testament to the rewards available from finding the right abstractions. K programs routinely outperform hand-coded C. This is of course, impossible, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy likes to say. K programs are interpreted into C. For every K program there is a C program with exactly the same performance. So how do K programs beat hand-coded C? As Whitney explained at the Royal Society in 2004, “It is a lot easier to find your errors in four lines of code than in four hundred."

What would computing be like if it were all done this way? The decades-long sleigh-ride of Moore’s Law[3] has ended. What if we could get another two orders of magnitude of performance out of the hardware?

This question has been asked before, notably by Alan Kay at the Viewpoints Research Institute.[4]

Whitney means to find out. The first phase of the project is to escape the bloated embrace of the operating systems and run kdb+ on the bare metal.

“If you keep on chipping at that rust, eventually you’ll reach flat, bright metal." Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

Whitney started replacing calls to Linux, working, alone as always, in his garage office. Characteristically, it’s a simple workplace: a pool table, a desk, a chair and a PC with a single monitor. When I saw it in 2007 it was running Windows XP and had five windows open: two MS-DOS and three Notepad. Brutally simple IDE. Doubtless things have improved since.

Oleg and Pierre had heard of Whitney and kdb+. They study computer science in St Petersburg. (Russia, not Florida.) With a great deal of trepidation and some support from a teacher they wrote asking Whitney what he was doing. He replied with some C code he was working on.

Everyone knows how C programs look: tall and skinny. Whitney’s don’t. I first encountered them in the 1980s. I was working for I.P. Sharp Associates in Sydney. My boss wanted to port the SHARP APL interpreter onto the fast new Hewlett-Packard HP1000 minicomputer. I recommended Whitney, then the youngest member of the IPSA systems-programming team, for the job. (Probably the best thing I’ve done in my professional life.)

There was, of course, a catch. The interpreter was a 500Kb program developed over 15 years and supported by an 11-man team. The original language had been considerably extended – most recently with ‘general’ or ‘nested’ arrays – and all the extensions had to be ported too. Although the target machine was attractively fast, most of the speed disappeared for programs larger than 80Kb. The interpreter had not just to be ported, but also made six times smaller. Game over?

Whitney’s strategy was to implement a core of the language – including the bits everyone thought most difficult, the operators and nested arrays – and use that to implement the rest of the language. The core was to be written in self-expanding C. As far as I know, the kdb+ interpreter is built the same way.

Unlike the tall skinny C programs in the textbooks, the code for this interpreter spills sideways across the page. It certainly doesn’t look like C.

In Sydney we assigned Whitney two coding assistants. Not that he needed or wanted help, but when he eventually left we’d need some idea how it all worked. His assistants had a very hard time. They would struggle through the week, get their assignments half finished, then on Monday discover Whitney had dropped in over the weekend, rewritten most of the interpreter, and included their assignments. (The interpreter got finished. A decade later I saw one of the HP machines still running on Westpac’s trading floor. Not long after that, Whitney started work at Morgan Stanley on what became A+.)

Whitney sent Oleg and Pierre some of the C code he was working on, and notes on a problem he didn’t know how to solve. They emailed back a solution, coded in his style. A partnership was born: a garage in California, a school in Russia.

Whitney demonstrated his “research K interpreter" at the Iverson College meeting[5] in Cambridge in 2011. We had visitors from Microsoft Research. The performance was impressive as always. The tiny language, mostly familiar-looking to the APL, J and q programmers participating, must have impressed the visitors. Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this."

Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C." Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling," he mumbled.

At Iverson College in 2013 he demonstrated the new graphics layer, z – 9Kb of code to replace the X Windows system. For the first time we saw the kOS desktop, solid black with a Tolkienesque legend top left: one system/all devices. Arrayed on the right edge, the icons of five kOS apps. He launched the text editor app and then wrote a new one, working out the key callbacks in front of us and explaining them as he worked. As he defined each callback the new app acquired it: no compile, load, install cycle. In eight lines of K he had replicated the core function of Notepad. At this point, with the new z layer in place, kOS weighed 62Kb.

Last autumn the kOS team recruited a fourth member, Geo, and in November announced it had removed the last connection to Linux. kOS was running on bare metal. Whitney announced the project would now go dark and return, perhaps in the summer of 2014, with a platform on which apps can be built.

kOS is coming.[6] Nothing will be the same afterwards.

Original Page: http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320

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Vancouver Entrepreneurs: Hockey Community

2015-03-06T04:58:49.528000Z

Both a Bootup Labs and personal shout out from Alex, founder of The Hockey Community. Appreciated.

Vancouver Entrepreneurs: Hockey Community

by Paul Davidescu, vancitybuzz.com
October 17

How has Vancouver’s rising startup community played a role in the development of Hockey Community?

Our first office was in BootUp Labs in Vancouver (equivalent to GrowLab) where we learned a lot about the latest technology available, thanks to folks from Summify for example (which was then acquired by Twitter) and Phonegap (acquired by Adobe). For almost every big technical decision we took I can tell who from Vancouver has influenced us. On that note, I want to thank Boris Mann, Cristian Strat, Jerry Tian and Brian LeRoux. They’ve been more helpful than they think.

What core problem is your company specifically solving and/or what’s the main value you provide?

We try to make it super easy for you to play hockey. That means if you search for a team, goalie, league, stick and puck or even a coach, we will make sure to connect you to the right person. But that’s not all. Making hockey more accessible also means reducing the cost of hockey. For example, we work with rinks to give them great software so they can run efficiently and, in the end, reduce the cost of their service. There’s a lot of hidden reasons that explain why hockey is so expensive and we are working hard to fix them.

How did you end up becoming an entrepreneur and what challenges did you personally overcome to succeed?

I think we are lucky that a lot of people are really passionate about making hockey more accessible. We managed to build an extremely strong team that deserves all the credit. This was the first thing that I had to personally realize; this idea isn’t about me.

What entrepreneur has inspired you the most for running your business and what makes them so special?

Here’s a shortened list of entrepreneurs that I follow intensively and admire for the following reasons:

Elon Musk, Tesla & RocketX: for his willingness to innovate to benefit the world, not just his company.
John Lasseter, Pixar: for his incredible gift at story telling.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook: for pushing the world to become more transparent and trying to push us out of our comfort zone.
Larry Page, Google: for mastering patience and trying to teach the world “We can’t solve big problems in 4 years." 10 years is good.

What Vancouver celebrity/influencer would you most be excited to have as a member of the team and why?

Definitely, Trevor Linden. We always try to surround ourselves with business-savvy hockey players and he’s highly experienced in both areas. We could reach our goal must faster if we were to receive his help!

If you could tell your younger self something what would it be?

If I could write this on a piece of paper and give it to my younger self, that would be great: “One day you will have an idea. Make sure to contact Ryan Samson, Madison Wallinger, Jack Hayter, Amrit Kahlon and Brett Alton. They will make it happen."

What are some accessible resources used and winning habits you have developed to learn and grow as an entrepreneur?

Every year we go on a "Vision Trip" with our team and set a vision for the next two, then five and then ten years. It really gives a great perspective of how much impact we could have if we continue to follow our vision.

What’s your advice for current or future entrepreneurs?

So many books have greatly covered the topic, but if I had to give advice that is a bit harder to find I would say “Stay quiet and focus on your product". A lot of entrepreneurs value press articles and the size of their personal network, using these factors to define success. At HC we often decide to stay at work and invest 99% of our time in our product instead of going out. I think our product line will speak for itself in the next two years.

Original Page: http://www.vancitybuzz.com/2014/10/vancouver-entrepreneurs-hockey-community/

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Embracing Open: Tech Evangelist danah boyd

2015-03-06T04:58:49.559000Z

Embracing Open is a series that celebrates the voices that make the world more open. Join them by using #EmbraceOpen on Twitter and Facebook.

Why Microsoft matters more than we think

2015-03-06T04:58:49.592000Z

I’m guilty of it myself, and I see it a lot: making fun of Microsoft in a presentation. Sure, it is easy to do, gets a laugh every time but it is also a cheap shot and – maybe – more destructive to our goals than we think. Let’s recap a bit. Traditionally Microsoft has not played nice.

Linh Cafe - French Cooking

2015-03-06T04:58:49.643000Z

Sometimes, fusion is not necessarily a bad thing. Take the French colonization of Vietnam - it yielded such delicious creations such as Pho and Banh Mi. We can denounce the colonization part of the equation, but the culinary by-product is the world's gain.

Stripe, San Francisco, and Velocity.js — Medium

2015-03-06T04:58:49.809000Z

A few months ago, I applied for a grant at Stripe. The premise was simple: Stripe will select two developers to pay $7,500/mo to work on their open-source projects in the comfort of Stripe’s San Francisco office. Catch-free.

Cinch

2015-03-06T04:58:49.787000Z

Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as 'hot zones'. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place.

Apple on Hamburger Menus

2015-03-06T04:58:49.765000Z

But I feel like I would be remiss If I didn’t use this opportunity to talk with you about hamburger menus. AKA Slide out menus, AKA sidebars, AKA basements, AKA drawers. Now, these controls are very common on iOS, and on other platforms.

Thanksgiving Dinner with the Sherretts

2015-03-06T04:58:49.818000Z

October 11, 2014

Thanksgiving Dinner with the Sherretts

We had a lovely early dinner with James, Monique, and Finlay, and my mom came over from Bowen to join us.

I made a cauliflower purée - 2 parsnips, 4 cloves garlic and a 1/2 head of cauliflower cooked in butter, a bit of cream, and chicken broth. Another 1/2 head was roasted and then added to the pot. I used a hand blender to mix it all together. Separately, I pan fried some cauliflower steaks and added lemon zest and juice.

I made my sort-of-standard Brussels sprouts and bacon. The Brussels sprouts have the bottom chopped off and are quartered. Cook bacon until crisp, then sauté the sprouts. I added fresh lemon juice, some maple syrup, and salt and pepper to taste. It needed a bit more salt and some more maple syrup.

Other items listed below next to their photos.

James made a delicious turkey with stuffing

I made the cranberry sauce. A little allspice & nutmeg, and lots of sugar. I sometimes do orange juice and some ginger.

The stuffing I made. A loaf of white sourdough, cut into squares and toasted with fresh rosemary and olive oil. Shallots, leeks, carrots, mushrooms all sautéed, then fresh flat parsley mixed in. I puréed a cup of roasted chestnuts with an egg, a clove of garlic, and chicken broth.

A finished plate.

James' "Guacamole Salad" - guacamole ingredients like lime zest, cilantro, and avocados over baby spinach leaves.

My mom's German apple cake.

Dinner at Gyoza Bar

2015-03-06T04:58:49.898000Z

October 10, 2014

Dinner at Gyoza Bar

Gyoza Bar

We tried out Gyoza Bar, although we were mainly in the mood for ramen.

It's quit clubby, with serving staff that are a little too familiar and a little too attentive. And not in the "we are a busy ramen shop and people are waiting" that I'm used to.

The Teppan Gyoza were really tasty, and priced right. The drinking Shochu was great and well priced. The ramen is over-priced, and the terribleness of the chazu means I won't have the tonkotsu again.

The cocktails and mix drinks are interesting, and seem to be more of a focus than the food.

There are actually aren't that many types of Gyoza.

Rachael had a non-alcoholic Basil Grapefruit smash. Tasty, but lots of ice. I had a small glass of Shochu with grapefruit juice on the side. I liked it, and I like the different liqueurs with fruit juice on the side.

The Teppan Gyoza. Very tasty, and the dipping sauces -- sweet / umami on the left, garlic / spicy on the right -- were very good.

The tonkotsu ramen. Broth: good, 4/5. Noodles: good, noticeable al dente chew. 4/5. Chazu pork: terrible, maybe 1.5/5 at best. Thin and gristly.

Parrot's new headphones are made for the world's pickiest music lovers

2015-03-06T04:58:49.886000Z

I'm sitting across the table from two Parrot representatives, who are telling me about the impressive adaptive capabilities of the company's new Zik 2.0 headphones. I'm wearing a blue pair, listening to Lou Reed, holding a connected Android phone in my hand.

No Title

2015-03-06T04:58:49.986000Z

Building OS X Apps with JavaScript

2015-03-06T04:58:50.068000Z

OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for Automation. This makes it possible to access native OS X frameworks with JavaScript. I’ve been digging in to this new world and putting together examples along the way. In this post I’ll explain the basics and step through building a small example app.

How I Learn: Trading books at the corner (Siri's book exchange)

2015-03-06T04:58:49.985000Z

Steven Forth writes about a book exchange in his Kits neighbourhood. It's great to see these springing up everywhere in Vancouver.

« Some August Notes | Main

September 28, 2014

Trading books at the corner (Siri's book exchange)

Book exchanges have been sprouting up all over Vancouver over the past couple of years. In my neighborhood there are three on my walking paths. South towards Broadway there is one at Fifth Avenue and Trafalgar. West on the way to my granddaughters there is one along Third Avenue just past Macdonald. But my favorite is to the North, at Fifth Avenue and Trafalgar. Siri’s book exchange.

Walking by the book exchange, leaving a few books, and picking up one or two has become an important part of my day. I tend to drop by most mornings as I cycle to work to see what is new. And on weekends I often walk up with my granddaughters in tow in a rusty red wagon and a load of books to drop off.

Siri used to garden around the edges of the fence. She liked to seed flowers and give them a bit of guidance and support, a nice balance of wild and cultivated plants, cosmos, some black-eyed Susan’s, long fine grasses, and the tougher plants that grow closer to the ground. And she liked to talk with people that walked by, and would sometimes slip in to get a book to share. She is missed and the book exchange keeps her memory alive. I have even dropped in some books of my father’s (he died in 2011).

Siri’s husband John Kidder included a bench when he built the book exchange and this has made a difference. For a while this summer, when I went in to work early, I met the fellow who was painting a house on the block. He would be sitting, having a smoke, reading a book from the box. And he brought in a lot of books too, mostly collections of short stories (not my favorite genre, but I did pick up a copy of the From Ink Lake collection edited my Michael Ondaatje). One Saturday morning I happened by when a fellow was dropping off a load of books. I focused in on Jean Yoon’s play The Yoko Ono project. I have become entranced with Yoko Ono’s early work over the past few years and the sort of action haiku (my term) in her book Grapefruit. As it turned out, this guy was also fascinated by this work, and we talked and tried to imagine actually following some of Yoko Ono’s instructions.

CLOUD PIECE

Imagine the clouds dripping. (Not hard to do in Vancouver)

Dig a whole in your garden to

put them in. (I have tried that, they keep seeping out)

1963 Spring

MAP PIECE

Draw a map to get lost.

1964 Spring

(Google does this for me now – and it does help me get lost some days.)

I later gave The Yoko Ono book on to one of the people I work with.

The book boxes have changed what I read and sometimes how I read it. There are a lot of interesting books around, most of which I have never heard of. The book exchange feeds my curiosity and blows open some of the barriers in my mind.

One of the first books I read from a book box was Elizabeth Lynn’s The Sardonyx Net. An odd book published back in 1981 that unpeels slavery, S&M and the abuse of prisons for economic gain. All are important themes today. I had never heard of this book, I live a sheltered life, but I am glad I read it.

This September I read the harrowing book of poems Children of Air India by Renée Sarojini Saklikar. I was aware of this book, but it is not easy to find and I probably would not have read it if I had not found it at the corner. It is a harrowing collage of memories and evidence from Air India Flight 182. Seek this book out. Memory is important. And Siri’s book exchange is becoming part of our neighbourhood memory.

I return most of the books after I read them. And I have noticed that other people are doing this as well. The books are being shared. A local, practical example of the sharing economy not dependent on any apps or virtual social networks.

In the past I tended to hoard books, and only gifted on those that were the most important to me or those that I really didn’t care about. The book exchanges have changed this. I am contributing some books that I think are important, books that matter to me and that I think may matter to others. Why has my behavior changed? One reason is the opportunity of course, it is easy and fun to drop off books at Siri’s and look to see what is new. But the availability of eBooks is also a factor. It is easier to give up a book when one knows it is easy to get a copy on-line and that you can probably find that elusive quote you are looking for when you need to. Having easy access to eBooks has made me more willing to share the books in my physical library.

The exception is poetry. I have kept pretty much all of my poetry books and I continue to buy more every month (I am waiting to buy Lisa Robertson’s new book Cinema of the Present at The Paper Hound down on West Pender near Cambie). The exception are the books where I have somehow ended up with multiple copies. This morning I contributed a copy of In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish. And I have a few copies of Yoshioka Minoru’s important work Kusudama translated by Eric Selland. I will put a few more copies of this wonderful book into local circulation. And I know I should let go of more poetry books. And I will. One day. Not yet.

This morning I ran into Siri’s husband, widower I suppose. He noticed me walking slowly by, my nose in John Webster’s The White Devil (seems like a good play to be reading as the political season begins). We started to talk (we share interests in the start-up economy, in books, and our sons are best friends) and he asked me what I had picked up. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnnameable and Paris and London in the 18^th Century: Studies in Popular Protest by George Rudé. I was delighted to find the former, had sort of been looking for it, and was intrigued to find the latter, a book I had never heard of or even imagined.

John told me about his plans for the corner. He is going to build a children’s book and toy exchange. Something down low, with a door that opens down to make it safer for small hands. I can hardly wait to go by with my granddaughters. I hope it becomes a place where kids go and meet each other

Posted on September 28, 2014 at 01:06 PM in Books, Kitsilano, Sharing Economy | Permalink

Technorati Tags: books, Kitsilano, sharing economy, Vancouver

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Pallet Coffee

2015-03-06T04:58:50.035000Z

September 28, 2014

Pallet Coffee

Pallet Coffee Roasters

New coffee roasters / shop in the neighbourhood.

Dinner at Chicha

2015-03-06T04:58:50.076000Z

September 24, 2014

Dinner at Chicha

Chicha

Octopus & chorizo skewers. Very tasty, but the large chunks of octopus were a bit too chewy.

A mixed ceviche that they prepare fresh, so it takes 20 minutes to "cook" the seafood in the acid.

Pork belly sliders. Just two of them, but delicious and very filling.

iOS 8, iPhone 6, Conditional Call Forwarding - Marcel Brown

2015-03-06T04:58:50.219000Z

I really need to investigate alternate voicemail again. Google Voice doesn't work in Canada, so…

iOS 8, iPhone 6, Conditional Call Forwarding

September 22, 2014 By Marcel Brown 10 Comments

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Are you getting this error after buying a new iPhone?

If you are like me, you use a different voicemail service than the standard voicemail that your wireless carrier provides. For example, I use Google Voice voicemail (which, by the way, I mention extensively in my book, The Cheapskate’s Guide to Traveling with Your iPhone) because it can transcribe my voicemails into text messages and it lets me check my voice messages on a computer. When purchasing a new phone, one must reset the alternate voicemail setting or else messages begin to be delivered to the standard voicemail again. Usually, this isn’t a big deal to do. It simply requires dialing a particular code on your phone, hitting send, and presto! However, when I recently purchased a new iPhone 6, it was not that easy.

For some reason, the Conditional Call Forwarding (CCF) code I normally used returned error messages. Being the first day of the new iPhone 6, I thought that perhaps AT&T’s system was overloaded. I tried a few times that day and still no luck. Being a Friday, I tried a few times again on Saturday and Sunday and thought for sure it would work. No luck at any of those times. Assuming it was a problem with my account, on Monday I went into my local AT&T store and figured they could “fix the glitch". However, the knowledgable person I talked to said he was having the exact same problem with his new iPhone 6 as well. He said he believed it was a problem with iOS 8 and there was nothing he could do at the store to fix it. So off I went to do a little research on the Internet.

The first thing I found was an App, Divert Calls, that claimed it could set up Conditional Call Forwarding. I wondered if it could work around the problem I was having, so I downloaded the App and tested it. As it turns out, the App itself doesn’t actually change the CCF setting. It merely creates the code for you so you can paste it into the Phone App dialer and send it. Once I found that out, I thought I was dead in the water. However, Conditional Call Forwarding is actually three different settings. The code I had been using (which starts with **004*) changes all three settings at once. The Divert Calls App gives you three individual codes for CCF (*61*, *62*, and *67*) . So I went ahead and tested the first code. I was pleasantly surprised that it worked! So I went ahead and tried the other two codes and they worked as well! It was a little bit of a pain, but at least my Google Voice voicemail was operational again.

I did a little more research and found information that corroborated my findings (such as this forum thread for Google Voice). I also found out that you can call AT&T and have them set up Conditional Call Forwarding for you. So let me sum up what I know and don’t know:

The iPhone 6 and/or other iPhones running iOS 8 have a problem setting up Conditional Call Forwarding (CCF) on AT&T’s network using the usual **004* CCF code.
I am not sure if this problem exists on other wireless networks, such as Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile.
The problem can be worked around by setting up each individual call forwarding option (Unanswered, Unreachable, Busy), or calling AT&T and having them do it for you.
The codes can be generated by the Divert Calls App, but it is not necessary if you know how to generate the codes yourself.
I have no idea if AT&T and/or Apple are aware of this problem yet

For the record, here are the various Conditional Call Forwarding codes (replace 1234567890 with the number you are forwarding to):

Set all CCF options: **004*1234567890# <- This is the code that is currently NOT working with iOS 8 and/or the iPhone 6 on AT&T’s network
Call Forward if Unanswered: *61*1234567890#
Call Forward if Unreachable: *62*1234567890#
Call Forward if Busy: *67*1234567890#

If you have any further information on this issue or are experiencing it on other wireless networks, please comment below!

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Dinner at Koko

2015-03-06T04:58:50.128000Z

September 22, 2014

Dinner at Koko

Koko

I was nervous about going here, but it turns out it's a hidden gem that has been here forever.

Secluded booth rooms where you take off your shoes, very traditional, classic options, and a really long menu that has everything from sashimi to ramen.

Dynamite roll

House special roll

Saba

Gyoza

Tempura

Ask GH: What are your tips and takeaways on measuring NPS?

2015-03-06T04:58:50.223000Z

What have you learned through your experiences measuring NPS? For which segments of users do you measure it, and how often? Depth of integration into your product? Doing it in-house vs. paying for a service?

Boris Mann's Link Blog

Lunch at Broken Rice

Lunch at Broken Rice

Dinner Log: Tuna from Steveston

Dinner Log: Tuna from Steveston

Dinner at Sai Woo

Dinner at Sai Woo

Syncthing - open decentralized sync framework

Get Started

Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and Solaris

Third party contributions

Secure & Private

Open Development

Easy to Use

Discuss Join the talk on the forums

Docs For Users and Developers

Contribute Clone, Fork, and start tinkering

Fermented bean curd and pig's feet | Chinesefood

Fermented bean curd and pig's feet

Build products

Build products

Camlistore is your personal storage system for life.

Camlistore is your personal storage system for life.

Latest Release

Video Demo

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Strategy in the Age of Specialization

Strategy in the Age of Specialization

As modern marketing grows more complex and specialized, it’s getting harder and harder to hold it all together.

Fun times for CMOs

Meanwhile in Agency-Land

New CMO woes

A missing piece

Strategy: the next hot specialization?

Squire: FastMail’s rich text editor

Dec 8: Squire: FastMail’s rich text editor

On Corporate Ownership of Open Source

On Corporate Ownership of Open Source — Medium

On Corporate Ownership of Open Source

The Park

Community and the Commons

You hate companies, you’re a communist!

Building Vim from 1993 today

Building Vim from 1993 today

Before the Drama

Before the Drama

Code of Ages

Code of Ages

Go and Swift take another step up the programming-language ladder

The Essence of Go

The Origin of Swift

The Language Instinct

Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language

Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language

You don’t want normal markdown

Security

Gotchas

Limited features

Evolution

Alternative 1: ReStructuredText

Alternative 2: Creole (recommended)

5 Things University Marketing Programs Aren’t Teaching (But Should)

5 Things University Marketing Programs Aren’t Teaching (But Should)

The Typical Marketing Degree

Do Marketing Degrees Include Analytics?

Shouldn’t Marketing Degree Courses Teach Mobile Readiness?

Isn’t Content Marketing Important For A Marketing Degree?

What About Optimizing Your Site & Content For Search?

Do Modern Marketing Degrees Teach Social Media Management?

Other Things Missing From Modern Marketing Degrees

Tech Superstars Build ‘Startup Factories’

The Next Big Thing You Missed: Tech Superstars Build ‘Startup Factories’

These are businesses started explicitly to start other businesses.

The Economics

The Two Camps

When Things Go Wrong

The Success Conundrum

You Can’t Manufacture Magic

Canada should focus on startup communities, not an ‘innovation ecosystem’

Startup Day on the Hill: Canada should focus on startup communities, not an ‘innovation ecosystem’

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