the jeffmincey.com Firehose

jeffmincey: got my wave invite! thanks @marshmelones !!! .... now what? :D

jeffmincey — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:56:20 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5301503031

jeffmincey: @marshmelones do you have any spare wave invites? :D you're the first person I actually know that's has gotten on! http://myloc.me/1glLm

jeffmincey — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:44:28 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5297257300

jeffmincey: Hey Lucky, you should really teach you baggers how to put thing into bags!

jeffmincey — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:43:41 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5216705091

jeffmincey: Home at Last.

jeffmincey — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:35:36 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5136692241

jeffmincey: @brandimincey hey love, i hope we can go home today!

jeffmincey — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:15:27 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5127954377

jeffmincey: We're home! http://flic.kr/p/796gn4

jeffmincey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:11:28 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5028742207

We're home!

jeffmincey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:11:23 +0000

We're home!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffmincey/4029699817/

jeffmincey posted a photo:

jeffmincey: We're home!

jeffmincey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:02:30 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/5028548357

Motorola Droid hands on! : Boy Genius Report

jeffmincey — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:12:54 +0000

External Link:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/10/19/motorola-droid-hands-on/

Shared by jeffmincey

i'll take one!

Bag Check

jeffmincey — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

External Link:

http://xkcd.com/651/

Sneaky Microsoft plug-in puts Firefox users at risk

jeffmincey — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:42:11 +0000

External Link:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=5CF0A4A7-1A64-67EA-E45F5A54F2136086

The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing

jeffmincey — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:52:43 +0000

External Link:

http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009/10/the-lost-lesson-of-instant-typing/

Shared by Kevin Marks

Live typing is really useful in the co-editing a document situation, like SubEthaEdit, Etherpad or Wave in edit mode; it is off-putting in chat mode. Wave should default it on when editing, and off when writing a new blip.

Farhad Manjoo writing in Slate about Google Wave:

The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.

… Maybe I should just delete what I’d written and say, “Twitter works because it’s simple.” But I couldn’t do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I’d gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: “Don’t let the live-typing get you down!” The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.

The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the reasons Manjoo describes: it makes you self-conscious. We took it out in the next release.

(Interestingly, I hate video chat for a very similar reason. Somehow, the fact that my picture is being shown in real time to the remote person makes me horrifically self-conscious, even though it wouldn’t bother me at all to talk face-to-face with that person. I don’t know whether it’s the little preview on my screen, or the fact that the person is spookily both present and not-present, but the few times I’ve tried video-chat have been really unpleasant.)

I’m usually on the side of more technology. I believe that our online communications tools are still horribly primitive and have only scratched the surface of what’s possible. But this was a case where more technology was bad.

The low-tech alternative that lots of people use in IM,
is to write in short fragments,
each a separate message,
so the other person can see them one by one
without waiting for you to finish the whole sentence.

The difference is that you’re in control over when to send a partial message, and the other person knows you’re in control, and so on. I still think it might be possible to do this in a higher-tech way, like using a hot-key to send a partial message on demand without having the funky line-breaks, but the current approach isn’t so bad as long as you’re not embarrassed about unintentional free verse.

I could have told the Wave people about what I’d learned, except I didn’t know Wave existed until April (shortly before the public announcement), and even then I was just some guy lost in the crowd at the demos….

Part of the problem, in both cases, is that live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app’s gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can’t be removed later on because they’re so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren’t actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately. (The clever sync algorithms and rapid-fire network messages Wave uses would be needed even without live typing, but the fact that they have to run on every few keystrokes, not just every minute or so, pushes those things so much harder.)

What problems does Google Wave solve?

jeffmincey — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

External Link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/danieltenner/~3/gRbDG8c0_54/0012-google-wave.html

[ Partial Portuguese translation ]

There are countless pundits and other tech gurus describing Google Wave as a disappointment, lately. Most of that seems to come from the fact that nobody seems to get what Wave is for. So they compare it to social media.

Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.

I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. The way Google should have advertised Wave is: “it solves the problems with email”.

At Woobius, we’ve been working at resolving the problems with email for some time. Woobius is a solution to some of the problems of email within the construction industry. We’ve blogged and given talks about it. Perhaps that’s why it was immediately obvious to me and my team why Google Wave is awesome.

What’s the problem with email, anyway?

To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam. They don’t have a problem with online collaboration – they use Google Docs, Etherpad, Skitch, screen sharing tools, or any number of collaborative whiteboard applications. So the main problems for geeks are that they’re signed up to so many services that they get inundated with notifications, monthly newsletters, automated messages, and shreds of spam that manage to get through GMail’s spam filters. But when they want to collaborate on a document or picture, they can find the tools they need, most of the time.

But then again, most geeks don’t do all that much document-based collaboration, by email or otherwise. Programming doesn’t require a whole lot of collaboration, beyond that provided by source control tools and bug tracking system. Being Robert Scoble probably doesn’t require you to spend days working on a specification document for some finicky aspect of project X, or at least not very often, and he’s probably not the one collating everyone’s suggested changes and resubmitting the document for further review.

In your average corporate environment, though, this happens all the time. People work on documents, presentations, etc. They have lengthy discussions over email. Pieces of work bounce back and forth across one or multiple organisations for weeks before they’re finalised. People are brought on to the conversation late in the day. Attachments get lost. Inboxes fill up and emails bounce. It’s a major pain.

So what are the problems with email in a corporate environment, and what does Wave do to address them?

Problem 1: Collaborating on a piece of text

It’s hard to use email like you would use, say, Etherpad – to collaborate on a document that later needs to be sent out. Most such collaborations end up being done either via a Word document with change tracking, or, when they’re more ad-hoc, via a long thread of email with corrections coming in from every direction. It’s a nightmare to keep track of and collate all that feedback. Even giving the feedback is difficult sometimes: you have to quote the context and make sure your change is clearly outlined.

Google Wave resolves that by effectively integrating Etherpad’s features into the email client. Putting an email to an important client together, with feedback from the team, becomes a breeze.

Problem 2: Adding new people to the conversation

With a typical email thread, you can forward the whole thread to a new participant, or add them into the next reply, but they’ll only get a garbled, over-indented mess, in reverse chronological order. If you’ve ever been added late into an email thread that had already been going on for a week and involved two dozen replies, you know what I mean.

Google Wave solves that by giving exactly the same view to everyone, regardless of when they’ve been added.

Problem 3: Keeping added people added

Many times, when you add new people into a conversation, they get dropped again later, when someone replies to all from an earlier email that didn’t include the new participants. Sometimes it takes a while before you realise that key people have been dropped out of the conversation. That costs time and hassle both for the people who were dropped and those who weren’t.

Wave solves that by making “dropping people” an explicit action, rather than something you can do by mistake.

Problem 4: Attaching files

Most large companies have an email storage problem, so they limit the size of people’s mailboxes. Because of that, it’s not uncommon to see “Inbox full” bounces when sending large documents around. Not only that, but sending documents is iffy at best. The SMTP protocol doesn’t seem to be all that good at sending large files.

Now, to be fair, Wave will probably suffer from the same limitations as any HTTP upload applications – but that’s still a whole lot better than your average email. Sending emails over 10MB usually fails. Attaching a 10MB file to a Wave is no problem at all.

Problem 5: Lost attachments

When you reply to an email with an attachment, the attachment is dropped. This is a good thing with email, because it stops a single email thread from unnecessarily clogging up both the mail server storage and its bandwidth. Since the whole email is transmitted down the wire when you click “send”, this kind of limitation is unavoidable.

What this means, however, is that if you bring new people into a conversation, by adding them as recipients or by forwarding them the latest mail in the conversation, they won’t get any of the attachments. Not only that, but if you’re looking for that first attachment, and the conversation has been going on for weeks (and, like everyone else, you receive upwards of 50 relevant emails a day), finding that attachment can be quite difficult. If there were multiple attachments throughout the life of the discussion, gathering them all to send them to a new participant is exponentially more tedious.

With Wave’s model, however, the attachments stay there, where you put them. They’re only sent down the wire, from you to the email server, once. You never need to re-forward an attachment to someone. When you add new people to the conversation, they get access to all the attachments right away.

Problem 6: Multiple conversation branches

Email conversations are, basically, flat. If you try to have multiple branches of conversation in email you end up with a sordid mess. You might do that a few times in your life, but you quickly learn not to. But flattening everything has its own share of problems – every email ends up containing replies to several other emails. It becomes very difficult to track what was replied to and what wasn’t. And it’s hard to collate all the suggestions effectively.

Google Wave resolves this by allowing clear, obvious threading. Yes, if you use a lot of threading in an instant messaging context, it will be hard to manage. But within the typical email collaboration context, it will keep things a lot more clean and tidy than not having threading.

Problem 7: Small corrections

With email, if your only comment on someone’s email is to fix a dozen typos, you still have to do almost as much work as if you were making substantial changes to their proposed text. You need to quote the context, highlight which bit you corrected, and then rely on the other person applying your changes back to the original document (which they often forget to do — after all, it’s just a few typos).

With Wave, no such problem – you can just edit the original text and make those changes. If the person who submitted that document wants to review your changes, they can play them back.

Problem 8: Email to IM to Email

Instant Messaging is a powerful, useful technology that has proven its worth. But it’s not very well integrated with email. If you rely on your inbox to keep track of conversations, there’s still this gaping black hole of IM which is tracked somewhere else (if at all). GTalk tried to resolve that by storing IM conversations in your inbox – and that was a good step.

What Google Wave does, however, is much bolder: it recognises the fact that a lot of IM conversations, in corporate environments, begin with an email exchange that’s just getting too rapid. When you send more than 3 emails to the same person in one minute, it usually makes sense to either pick up the phone or IM them. With Google Wave, this doesn’t need to be a conscious decision: if you’re replying quickly, Wave smoothly turns into an IM-like platform. When your replies get slower again, it, once again smoothly, turns into an email-like platform.

This means that the whole conversation, whether email-like or IM-like, is tracked and searchable in the same place, and visible to all those who are invited to the conversation.

Conclusion

I believe that people who don’t see what Google Wave is for are simply looking at it from the wrong angle. Wave is not a social tool. It’s not Twitter, it’s not GTalk, it’s not Facebook. It was never designed to appeal to the crowds of geeks who are currently trying it out.

Wave is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage.

It will probably take years before Wave fully penetrates large corporations and replaces the email systems everyone is used to. But it solves so many thorny problems with email that it might well manage to do so, where so many other tentative “email fixes” have failed.

In the meantime, we should stop judging it as a social tool and start looking at how we can use it for real work. Invite your colleagues to it, and get working.

Comic for October 15, 2009

jeffmincey — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:00:00 +0000

External Link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DilbertDailyStrip/~3/thZtE2r8Huw/

Create & Collaborate Interactive UI Mockups for Your Sites

jeffmincey — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:01:06 +0000

External Link:

http://www.webappers.com/2009/10/14/create-collaborate-interactive-ui-mockups-fo...

MockFlow is an online tool for creating wireframes of software and websites. It helps to enhance your planning process by enabling to quickly design and share interactive UI mockups. It also comes with ready-to-use 70+ Components and 200+ icons, all designed to suit wireframing.

Nothing to download or install, create and access your mockups from anywhere. You can share your mockups in private/public mode and get feedback from your clients & users, As simple as sharing an URL. The Basic account is completely free with 10 MB storage.

Requirements: -

Demo: http://mockflow.com/

License: License Free

Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. "Hacking"

jeffmincey — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:53:00 +0000

External Link:

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/10/applied-philosophy-aka-hacking.html

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform "miracles" -- things which violate the perceived rules.

Hacking is most commonly associated with computers, and people who break into or otherwise subvert computer systems are often called hackers. Although this terminology is occasionally disputed, I think it is essentially correct -- these hackers are discovering the actual rules of the computer systems (e.g. buffer overflows), and using them to circumvent the intended rules of the system (typically access controls). The same is true of the hackers who break DRM or other systems of control.

Writing clever (or sometimes ugly) code is also described as hacking. In this case the hacker is violating the rules of how we expect software to be written. If there's a project that should take months to write, and someone manages to hack it out in a single evening, that's a small miracle, and a major hack. If the result is simple and beautiful because the hacker discovered a better solution, we may describe the hack as "elegant" or "brilliant". If the result is complex and hard to understand (perhaps it violates many layers of abstraction), then we will call it an "ugly hack". Ugly hacks aren't all bad though -- one of my favorite personal hacks was some messy code that demonstrated what would become AdSense (story here), and although the code was quickly discarded, it did it's job.

Hacking isn't limited to computers though. Wherever there are systems, there is the potential for hacking, and there are systems everywhere. Our entire reality is systems of systems, all the way down. This includes human relations (see The Game for an very amusing story of people hacking human attraction), health (Seth Roberts has some interesting ideas), sports (Tim Ferriss claims to have hacked the National Chinese Kickboxing championship), and finance ("too big to fail").

We're often told that there are no shortcuts to success -- that it's all a matter of hard work and doing what we're told. The hacking mindset takes there opposite approach: There are always shortcuts and loopholes. For this reason, hacking is sometimes perceived as cheating, or unfair, and it can be. Using social hacks to steal billions of dollars is wrong (see Madoff). On the other hand, automation seems like a great hack -- getting machines to do our work enabled a much higher standard of living, though as always, not everyone sees it that way (the Luddites weren't big fans).

Important new businesses are usually some kind of hack. The established businesses think they understand the system and have setup rules to guard their profits and prevent real competition. New businesses must find a gap in the rules -- something that the established powers either don't see, or don't perceive as important. That was certainly the case with Google: the existing search engines (which thought of themselves as portals) believed that search quality wasn't very important (regular people can't tell the difference), and that search wasn't very valuable anyway, since it sends people away from your site. Google's success came in large part from recognizing that others were wrong on both points.

In fact, the entire process of building a business and having other people and computers do the work for you is a big hack. Nobody ever created a billion dollars through direct physical labor -- it requires some major shortcuts to create that much wealth, and by definition those shortcuts were mostly invisible to others (though many will dispute it after the fact). Startup investing takes this hack to the next level by having other people do the work of building the business, though finding the right people and businesses is not easy.

Not everyone has the hacker mindset (society requires a variety of personalities), but wherever and whenever there were people, there was someone staring into the system, searching for the truth. Some of those people were content to simply find a truth, but others used their discoveries to hack the system, to transform the world. These are the people that created the governments, businesses, religions, and other machines that operate our society, and they necessarily did it by hacking the prior systems. (consider the challenge of establishing a successful new government or religion -- the incumbents won't give up easily)

To discover great hacks, we must always be searching for the true nature of our reality, while acknowledging that we do not currently possess the truth, and never will. Hacking is much bigger and more important than clever bits of code in a computer -- it's how we create the future.

Or at least that's how I see it. Maybe I'll change my mind later.

See also: "The Knack" (and the need to disassemble things)

The Leaper

jeffmincey — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:14:30 +0000

External Link:

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/10/12/the_leaper.html

On my short list of professional competitive differentiators, I would list my inbox strategy. I have a zero tolerance policy for unread mails. Zero. Any mail, however big or small, which lands in my inbox, is instantly read. There is an industrial strength set of mail filters that move mailing list noise out of the way, and yes, that means I ignore a good portion of my incoming mail, but most mail addressed directly to me is consistently and expediently read.

There are other inbox strategies I employ to figure out when and how I respond, too, but I admit the combination of these strategies is not foolproof. I read mails and never respond, despite having good intentions to do so. I passively aggressively ignore mails I just don't want to answer, and sometimes I just forget to respond. I have a carefully constructed excuse when I'm called on these mail transgressions. It's a standard preface in all emails and phone conversations where there needs to be an acknowledgement of neglect and it's...

"Sorry, I've been swamped..."

This isn't a lie; it's an excuse.

Now, there is a bit of pride in that I have a life where I'm scrambling. Yes, I'm proud that I'm busy. I'm a happy member of the busy club because I've been to the bored club meetings and, well, they're boring.

The pride vanishes in the guilt that there was neglect. I forget to respond, I fucked up in some manner, and here I am with my standard disclaimer: "swamped". The guilt is the emotion that lingers. I just checked my Sent box of 20,483 messages and found the word swamped 712 times... in the last year. How unoriginal and pathetic.

And then I remember the worst part. It's pathetic because when I use the excuse that I'm swamped, I'm telling you absolutely nothing.

On Excuses

I had a boss -- we'll call him The Leaper for reasons you'll understand in a moment. The Leaper was a bright guy, a worthy mentor, politically savvy, and generally a person who would look out for his team. The Leaper had a lot of responsibility as VP, so his management strategy was to randomly sample his teams looking for -- you guessed it -- places to leap.

The Leaper's skill lay in his ability to detect bullshit. Being bright, a former engineer, and familiar with the problem space, he could tell when he was being spun. He knew when he was hearing less than the truth. Generally he was understanding when he sampled ambiguity, but there was one sure way to get him to leap: answer a question with an excuse.

The Leaper attacked excuses as a personal affront. He wouldn't let anyone leave the room until it was painfully clear that the excuse card had been played, that it was unacceptable, and that the proper steps were taken to make sure it would never happen again.

For first time excusers, it was a painful perspective adjustment. See, when The Leaper asked a question where the answerer wasn't comfortable answering, they did what I did when I ignored a mail -- they made an excuse. It's a knee-jerk reaction with seemingly little consequence, but that's not what The Leaper saw. He saw the lame diffusion of blame and a weak defense.

An excuse is an abdication of responsibility. There are no healthy excuses. I'll explain.

On Delivery

"But Rands, it's really Antonio's fault! He owns the deliverable, he missed the date, it's his fuck-up." Calm down. You're arguing about the wrong part of the excuse.

An excuse has two parts: the content and the delivery. Your Antonio content may be spot on, but the reason The Leaper is going to leap on you is your delivery. It sounds like you're diffusing, it sounds like you're spinning. You're not delivering the facts, you're delivering emotion and weak opinion. The best data in the world is useless if your means of conveyance is suspect.

Yes, with confidence, you can deliver weak content and not trigger a leap, but this only delays the inevitable. Your chutzpah may disguise the content, but since your content is weak and you don't actually know what you're talking about, you're eventually going to take the reputation hit... twice. First, when the crap content is discovered and then again when everyone realizes you were pitching your facts on false confidence.

Well done there.

The irony is thick. In order to avoid looking like you didn't know what you were talking about, you opened your mouth and only added to the confusion. If you told The Leaper, "I don't know, but I will know tomorrow," he'd be cool.

Life in a big or small company is an information game where you are judged by the amount and accuracy of your information. This game becomes more complex as you leave the individual contributor role for management, but even as an individual, you are expected to be aware of your surroundings and able to describe them to others.

I know that feeling when someone in authority spends 30 seconds looking at something you've been working on for six months and immediately finds a painfully obvious flaw. The mental conversation starts with, "There's no way he could..." and it finishes with "Holy crap, how could I miss that?" It's disorientating, and when the question is asked of you: "Why didn't you think of that?" I know where the excuse comes from. It's alarmed spin, it's poor marketing, it's the uncomfortable admission of guilt.

So, what are you going to do? Clearly, there's a reputation hit here, so what's the right move?

My advice is to take a small amount of time to say something real. Honest, clear, and brief. Sure, these are executives and they might be pissed, but the last thing to do in that scenario is to add fuel to the fire by actively demonstrating your discomfort.

There are executives who like to see you squirm, who revel in the discovery of flaws. While they might be right, this does not give them the right to be cruel. I'm talking about that deliberate dead silence after the flaw has been exposed, and everyone sees it now and everyone is wondering, "How could we miss that?" In that moment, someone is expected to say something. This is your opportunity to say something of value.

An Opportunity to Communicate

Working for The Leaper for years, I can now sense the moment before I'm about to employ an excuse. I can feel the chain of events that are about to occur as I construct my weak redirection of responsibility. I hear what I'm about to say in my head -- It's not my fault -- and then I stop.

I want you think of the very last conversation you had and I want you to think of one thing that you did not say. Maybe you were in a hurry and you blew off someone's question. Maybe you were in a great conversation. Perhaps you were talking to your Dad. What is the topic you should have brought up? What is the small thing you could have said to make that conversation more valuable?

This is everything that crosses my mind after I stop with the excuse. I think about all the throw-away phrases I use where I could have actually said something valuable. I once wrote, "Every time you say blah blah blah, a creative writing teacher dies," and I meant it. Each time you open your mouth, you have an opportunity to build something. That's the perspective you want during the uncomfortable dead silence, not the victim-based emotion of excuse.

I'm in a hurry, but being in a hurry isn't an excuse for not taking a small amount of time to say something real.

kevinrose: a little surprise for Stacy, a diggnation fan [vid]: http://bit.ly/W1hU0

jeffmincey — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:44:10 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/kevinrose/statuses/4796842867

kevinrose: a little surprise for Stacy, a diggnation fan [vid]: http://bit.ly/W1hU0

jeffmincey: Well, there's the remnants of a super typhoon headed towards NorCal. Oh. http://j.mp/G7Zuk #hellowinter (via @rands) Oh is right!

jeffmincey — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:27:34 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/4793016574

jeffmincey: Well, there's the remnants of a super typhoon headed towards NorCal. Oh. http://j.mp/G7Zuk #hellowinter (via @rands) Oh is right!

Conan O'Brien talks to the co-creator of USB on The Tonight Show

jeffmincey — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:52:35 +0000

External Link:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/10/conan-obrien-talks-to-the-co-creator-of-usb-o...

PICTURES: New Cloud Type Discovered?

jeffmincey — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:42:49 +0000

External Link:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/photogalleries/new-cloud-picture...

Shared by jeffmincey

wild

This apparently new class of clouds is still a mystery. But experts suspect asperatus clouds' choppy undersides may be due to strong winds disturbing previously stable layers of warm and cold air.

T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger’s Servers Crashed, And They Don’t Have A Backup

jeffmincey — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:49:23 +0000

External Link:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-sidekick-disaster-microsofts-serve...

Shared by jeffmincey

oops!

There is some speculation that this was not actually caused by a server meltdown, but by Danger’s failure to make a backup before a Storage Area Network upgrade that was botched.

T-mobile's Contacts Roach Motel loses them all

jeffmincey — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:33:00 +0000

External Link:

http://epeus.blogspot.com/2009/10/t-mobile-contacts-roach-motel-loses.html

I've had a Sidekick since 2004 when I was at Technorati - it's great keyboard and integrated support for web, email, instant messaging and the built-in app store that meant I could add an SSH terminal was perfect for being on call to fix servers while commuting by train.
Another great innovation was storing all contacts, calendars, emails etc in the cloud, so upgrading phones—even to new models—meant that you just turned it on and it quickly synced up.
When I switched to Android last year, I kept the Sidekick contract (and my wife's) because the info was there. It didn't have an export option, and I put a 'write a GreaseMonkey export for t-mobile's website' on my to-do list, but never quite got to it.
Now, they say we've lost all of this data. The moral of the story is not to trust data Roach Motels that only import and don't export. Demand that your contacts store supports the Portable Contacts API, or at minimum vCard export. Check it today, before you lose yours.

in reference to:

"Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low"
- Sidekick™ - T-Mobile Forums (view on Google Sidewiki)

One way to start a small group.

jeffmincey — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:17:23 +0000

External Link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LeviteChronicles/~3/Nfu9RKGTqq4/

Last spring, Nancy and I decided to start a small group.

If you are in church circles, that is a code phrase for “people getting together to talk about spiritual things and is the most important thing in the church ever and everyone should be in one and if you aren’t or your church doesn’t have a massive program of small groups you are a complete spiritual failure.”

If you aren’t in church circles, that means a group of people getting together regularly to talk about something that matters to them. Think book club.

We asked about 12 people from our church if they would like to meet for six Saturdays from 6-8 pm in a lounge space at the church to eat soup and talk about six basic spiritual practices: praying, fasting, silence, service, celebration and confession.

And people said yes. And showed up.

Here’s what I learned.

We just asked. We didn’t worry about some big program, or everyone in the church doing it. We wanted to get to know some other people.
Having a limit on the number of weeks let people know that it was a limited commitment. That helped a lot.
We had food together. The hour we spent eating together (and cooking for each other) was delightful.
I had questions that would foster conversation, but we didn’t stick to the questions. Each week we looked at a few paragraphs from the Bible. Sometimes people would have additional questions about what it meant. Sometimes people would talk about what they had previously been taught. Sometimes people would ask each other questions.
I did more talking at the beginning of the study than in later weeks. I worked hard to ask more than tell, to deflect answering until other people answered. But I still struggle with talking too much and with not creating a safe space for everyone to talk.
Not everyone wants–or needs–to talk.

Have you ever started this kind of group? What has worked? What was the coolest thing? And what more would you like to know about our group or about leading/teaching? (I working on a list of specific teaching things as a post for next week.)

Tagged: small group, teaching

$10 billion takes fiber to every school, hospital in the US - Ars Technica

jeffmincey — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:02:44 +0000

External Link:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/gates-foundation-hopes-to-bring-...

Shared by jeffmincey

idk what you think about how he ran microsoft, but gates can sure get things done.

The US has more than 120,000 schools, hospitals, and libraries, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes that they can all have fiber optic Internet for $5 billion-$10 billion.

Scary

jeffmincey — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

External Link:

http://xkcd.com/647/

How Long is Your City's Tail?

jeffmincey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:53:07 +0000

External Link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/oreilly/radar/atom/~3/QN-BxpSmFqU/how-long-is-you...

Shared by Kevin Marks

Very good point here - San Jose, you listening?

Here's something that everyone doing business on the web knows today, thanks to Chris Anderson: it's all about the long tail.

When the cost of each individual transaction falls to nearly zero, marginal and low-performing items, grouped together, can account for a lot more of the overall value of a company than the top-performing ones. Amazon.com makes more money from the aggregate of all of the books that sell one or two copies a month than from sales of best sellers. And Amazon is a much stronger, healthier, and richer company because of the extremely long tail of books it sells.

Everybody gets that.

What almost nobody realizes yet is that the same is true for cities - or can be.

Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. To use Amazon.com as an analogy, cities today are like an Amazon that only allows the #1 best-selling book from each category into its system.

A good number of cites are beginning to do deals with mega companies like Google and IBM, giving them access to city data so that they can build excellent tools for residents to use. This is a great thing. I love looking at Google Maps and seeing that bulging red line right next to my house indicating that traffic there is at a standstill so I should consider biking instead. Makes my life better.

Still, to use the Amazon analogy again, now these cities have allowed not just the #1 best-selling book from each category into the system, but best-seller #2, #3 and #4. It's still a closed system of cherry-picked agents with privileged access.

And that's about where a lot of people would choose to end the opening of cities' data - giving unrestricted access to the Googles, Microsofts, and IBMs of the world. The rest get limited access, or access contingent upon satisfying some governmental board or other. (New York's Mayor Bloomberg, who launched his Big Apps contest yesterday, is seemingly among this group.)

If we do that, of course, we're missing out on what is potentially the biggest piece of the pie - the tail. That's where a huge chunk of the value comes from.

So, imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they've always provided - that's not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM's Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities - they're used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.

That's the healthy, long tail city of the future in action: head, "meaty middle" and tail, all working together, all reinforcing each other, all driving each other forward.

And that's the future of cities.

So it might be time to ask yourself: how long is your city's tail shaping up to be? The answer may determine, to a large degree, how much your city is a thriving place to live in decades to come.

Is a Bike With Collapsing Wheels Really a Good Idea? [Concepts]

jeffmincey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:20:00 +0000

External Link:

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/u806EtZX1R0/is-a-bike-with-collapsing...

We know, this pitch of a folding bike with collapsing wheels sounds a tad precarious, but this sequence showing how the wheels fold up is pretty darn convincing:

Well, it's convinced us that the wheels fold up, at least. But when you're weaving in and out of city traffic with just a few pounds of metal and rubber differentiating you from the pavement, that very function will be your primary concern. Trust us. [Treehugger via DVICE]

jeffmincey: Top it off with BACON! http://flic.kr/p/75uQK9

jeffmincey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:32:01 +0000

External Link:

http://twitter.com/jeffmincey/statuses/4670824066

jeffmincey: Top it off with BACON! http://flic.kr/p/75uQK9

Top it off with BACON!

jeffmincey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:31:57 +0000

Top it off with BACON!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffmincey/3989033702/

jeffmincey posted a photo:

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