Vedana - Eric Case's Weblog

Links for 2009-07-09 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-10T00:00:00-07:00

Interplanetary internet gets permanent home in space - space - 06 July 2009 - New Scientist
Awesome. Via Tom Stocky

On Leadership

2009-07-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

"The best leaders I know don't want the job of thinking for everybody else. They understand that if they can tap the hidden genius inside the organization, and the collective genius outside the organization, they will create ideas that will be much more powerful than what even the smartest individual leader could ever come up with on his or her own. Nobody alone is as smart as everybody together."

Links for 2009-07-08 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

Lifehacker - Resize Google Spreadsheet columns in a flash - Google Docs
Wish I'd discovered this earlier.

Links for 2009-07-06 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

LamsonProject: Lamson The Python Mail Server
This will be hella useful.

Links for 2009-07-02 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-03T00:00:00-07:00

Off The Charts Blog Archive Jay-Z says Death to the Auto-tune (D.O.A)
Hehe.

Links for 2009-07-01 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Official Gmail Blog: Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more
Excellent.
The MacBook's mysterious WiFi dropout problem is still unsolved | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com
This is happening to me at the office, and is quite annoying.
[whatwg] Codecs for <audio> and <video>
Hixie <3s cats. [via Gruber]
Flickr, Twitter, OAuth: A Secret History - Laughing Meme
Yay Kellan! Tragic that it took so long though.

Bike More

2009-07-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

Green by Design: "For now, the only real solution is the simplest one: Driving less. A lot less."

Links for 2009-06-30 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Xeric Design, Ltd. | a software development company
Earthdesk 5 is out, and is gorgeous. Highly recommended
Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard - O'Reilly Radar
This is so incredibly awesome.
Craigslist Map Thingie (Craigslist Apartment Maps for You)
sf bay area is the new United States.

Links for 2009-06-29 [del.icio.us]

2009-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

Cool Tools: Gorilla Gripper
This looks pretty good. I've been schlepping big unwieldy things lately at the house, and it's definitely annoying.

Ridin' with Dom

2009-06-15T20:25:00.000-07:00

Check 'im out!

Skating Across America - Skater Profile on Dom Sagolla from Mark Lukach on Vimeo.

Just Say No

2009-06-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

A snippet from The Pirate's Dilemma, a Kindle read I recently finished:

"The United States and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world where it is legal to advertise prescription drugs. The United States accounts for almost 50% of all monies spent on prescription drugs worldwide. But according to a 2006 report by the Journal of the American Medical Association, US residents are nearly twice as sickly as their English counterparts, despite the fact that the former spend almost twice as much on healthcare per person."

Spoiled

2009-05-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

J.J. Abrams in Wired, "on the Magic of Mystery"

This is why I don't read rumor sites.

How (not) to Lock your Bike

2009-05-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

Check out Streetfilms' three-part series on how to lock (and not lock) bikes in cities. I'm definitely still in the B-C range, but am learning fast.

Garbage 2.0

2009-05-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

This is incredible:

Taipei has strived to achieve "zero landfill, total recycling" by 2010, 30 years ahead of the UN's trash targets. It will probably fall short, but its policies are still exemplary. The city has encouraged the private sector to build composting facilities and recycling plants, and requires residents to pay for trash collection by the bag. Garbage trucks playing Beethoven's "Für Elise" and Badarzewska's "The Maiden's Prayer" collect trash, which must be in city-approved bags, from residents, who toss the bags into the trucks themselves. Taipei promotes trade in secondhand goods and introduced new methods of kitchen-waste disposal -- one pilot program turns food waste into pig feed. The result: The volume of trash has been slashed by well over 60%.

Emphasis mine.

[via Fast Company, photo from Wikimedia Commons]

Easy Kindle Clippings

2009-05-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

The main reason I use a Kindle is because I'm a chronic annotator*. It lets me highlight passages as I read them, which is minimally disruptive to my reading flow. The problem later though is, how to get those annotations into a human-readable format—the Kindle's MyClippings.txt file is definitely not this.

After some digging, I found Erik Lundqvist's MyClippings Java app for both Mac and Windows. It ain't pretty, but it'll export the file into HTML, CSV, or DOCX (for Word). From HTML, I just copy/paste into Google Docs, which makes my notes searchable.

How do you handle your Kindle annotations?

* Whenever I read anything (book, magazine, whatever), I take notes from it—quotes, passages that resonated, things to research further, etc. And because I'm a geek, I must eventually type up said notes, so that I can search them later. My nerdy note-taking goes way back—I've still got notes from 2000, when I used to scribble them into MacNoteTaker on my Palm V in Graffiti. Yikes.

Update: Dunno when this went live, but you can now see Kindle clippings on Amazon's site.

Pete Seeger

2009-05-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Give this 6-min PBS doco clip about Pete Seeger a watch, it's just fantastic.

Good Advice

2009-05-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

Via Dipanshu, from the Global Pagoda.

Scratch those Itches

2009-05-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

This is a great 37s post, and shows that everyone's capable of creating and innovating by scratching an itch. Doesn't matter what industry it is, or career, or materials, or place. Itch-scratching is hacking, plain and simple.

@cookbook

2009-04-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

Maureen and Blaine are in the Times!

Objectified

2009-04-22T19:55:00.001-07:00

This looks so good.

[via my homeboy Nick]

Stay Healthy

2009-04-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle:

"Unfortunately, the scientific findings on diet and disease are marginalized by the political power of huge, mutually reinforcing commercial interests - meat, dairy, sugar, drugs and surgery."

"These industries are desperate to sell a solution that obscures their part in the problem. If they can convince people that the cause of our health crisis has nothing to do with eating unhealthy food, and everything to do with increasing access to drugs and surgery, Americans will spend trillions more on health care without improving their health."

[via Mom]

Huge Props to the TSA

2009-03-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

You read that right. A few weeks ago I had an awesome experience with SFO's TSA (specifically, Covenant Aviation Security), and I'd like to share it with you.

In addition to my own distractibility (which is clearly at fault here), I blame Daylight Savings Time. For some reason we were flying out at 7am (just a few short, sleepy hours after DST kicked in), so I was already off-kilter. Going through the security screening, I unconsciously took off my shoes and belt, tossed my bags in the queue, and put my Air in a plastic bin. Showed my boarding pass and ID to the screening guy, waited for my gear to appear, re-robed, and headed off to the gate.

You can see where this is going, right? Still half-asleep and not really knowing what time it was (or was supposed to be), looking forward to going back to sleep on the plane, I didn't realize until somewhere over Minnesota that my Air was no longer with me. I'd left it sitting in that plastic bin back at SFO. Absentmindedly, I'd channeled Steven Levy. Apple's partially to blame here too—the Air is so damned light I didn't even realize it wasn't in my bag.

Virgin America's sympathetic flight attendants advised me to check in with their ground staff as soon we landed, who could get in touch with their SFO counterparts, who could contact the TSA. (Alas, they wouldn't check for me mid-flight). I wrote down all the details I could remember—what time we went through security, the color and texture of my Air's sleeve, that it had an iPhone sync cable in its pocket, etc.—and tried to put the whole thing out of my mind for the remainder of the flight.

But I couldn't stop thinking through worst-case scenarios. I reckoned it was already loose in the black market, what with this terrible economy and all. I didn't have FileVault enabled, nor an open firmware password set up—just OS X's "require password when waking from sleep or screen saver," and disabled auto-login. My 1Password pass was different than my login and system passes, so theoretically those should be safe. But given physical access to a machine, anything's possible, data access-wise. Oy! But it's an Air, which has no cd drive, so admin access to the machine would be a bit challenging.

Finally we landed at JFK, and I eventually found a kind and persistent Virgin America baggage services employee named Zarmina who helped me out. After a few telephone back-and-forths with some too-busy-to-help-us SFO/Virgin people, it became clear that I'd need to sort it out myself. Zarmina told me on the phone that evening that their SFO supervisor checked with the TSA, and they didn't have it.

Sigh.

Off to the Apple Store to plunk down for a new laptop. Ouch.

(An aside: my tale broke several Apple employees' hearts, and they very kindly tossed in a free case. A red one this time. Like, less easy to leave sitting in a plastic bin at airports.)

My last hope (to which a very small part of me still clung) was TSA/Covenant's official Lost and Found process, which I initiated via a voicemail on their SFO phone #. They said they'd call back during their normal business hours, which (sadly) never happened. I called several times a day until I got ahold of a real live person.

Her name was Asia, and she is my hero.

I described my laptop to her, and how and when I'd so carelessly left it back at SFO, and she said, "It's sitting right here."

Elation!

I nearly fell over. And she could FedEx it to me by 10am the next morning. Apparently this happens all the time, so they've got well-worn process for tracking and returning things to people. I faxed her the details, and had my laptop back the next morning.

And the Apple Store crew gladly accepted my returning the one I'd just purchased, and were relieved by the tale's conclusion.

--

The TSA takes a lot of heat while doing a difficult job, and much of it is justified. But here's one example of a great experience with them, where their organization and process worked exactly as it was supposed to.

What have I learned?

label my gear with my contact info, just. in. case.
customize it to distinguish it: when I got home I decorated it with stickers from Blogger, Fire Eagle and DollarApp
research Mac OS X security more deeply (which I've done, and will write more about soon)
and double-check bins when leaving a TSA booth. Duh.

Faith and Reason

2009-03-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

On first glance, this guy sounds kinda totally nuts. But by the end of the interview, he's saying some perfectly reasonable things:

Wired: Thorny ethical issues?
Horner: If you think we're playing God, maybe. But we're already modifying plants and mice. I don't see a lot of people jumping up and down complaining about better tomatoes.

...

Wired: Are you getting flak from other researchers?
Horner: Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.

...

Wired: It would certainly prove the creationists dead wrong.
Horner: Religion is about faith, not evidence. Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges—it's more like apples and sewing machines.

Matt Haughey fixed Obama's Blog Feed

2009-03-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

Indirectly.

Back on February 23rd, he twittered:

"The whitehouse.gov blog really needs to understand the guid. Google Reader shows every edited post 2 or 3 times as separate items. Annoying."

That had been annoying me too, but I'd just been paging by them. Matt's note reminded me that I have a friend who worked with the Obama Campaign and Transition Team's tech crew, and he probably knows the right people to sort it out. I sent him a quick email, and a day later it was fixed.

And Matt (and the rest of us) rejoiced:

"! Whitehouse.gov fixes their feeds! http://tinyurl.com/ahwg6b I can't imagine the last presidency going from complaint to fixed in 24hrs."

The Jellyfish: Doing the Math

2009-02-25T10:59:00.000-08:00

This Worldchanging piece about the Jellyfish caught my eye, but it sounded too good to be true. I emailed my neighbor Tony about it—he's all about science—and he responded with the following:

It is a toy but it has some attractive features.

First of all, the claim of 40 kilowatt-hours per month says nothing about under what conditions one might expect to generate this much energy. If you simply do the math, and assume that the thing is going all the time, this means that it is generating 55 Watts constantly, 24/7. We also see that it does nothing below 5 mph and it feathers out at 30 mph. As I sit here typing this, I'm guessing that it's blowing about 7 mph or about 3 meters per second.

So now we will estimate the power output of the thing. It is essentially a Savonius Darrius (actually a variant of a Gorlov) rotor, with a power coefficient of maybe 35% at best. The thing is about a meter tall and a third of a meter wide, so it has a rotor area of 0.3 square meters. The density of air is about a kilogram per cubic meter and the power output is one half the product of rotor area, air density, power coefficient and the cube of velocity.

Do the math: I get about 1.4 watts. If I plug in all the numbers and crank the windspeed up to about 23 mph, I get close to 55 watts. So you want 40 kilowatt-hours a month? It's gotta blow 23 miles per hour 24 hours per day, 30 days a month. What's it gonna generate today? Let's be optimistic and say it blows like this all day long. .0014 kilowatts x 24 hours = .03 kilowatt-hours. It comes with it's own grid-tie inverter (an attractive feature) that probably runs at 50% efficiency so you get .015 kilowatt-hours back to the grid.

So now lets compare it to a single 150 watt Sharp solar panel that you can buy at Frys for about 750 bucks. If positioned properly, it's out there right now generating perhaps 100 watts and averaged out over 24 hours, it will generate maybe .6 kilowatt-hours. Again, throw half away for the inverter and you're at .3 kilowatt hours. A small grid-tie inverter will cost you maybe as much as the solar panel.

So now we compare:

Jellyfish operating all day today: .015 kilowatt-hours for 400 bucks.
Sharp solar panel and inverter operating all day today: .3 kilowatt-hours for 1500 bucks.

Of course, perhaps I've picked a day that favors solar power and not wind power. But to get this thing up to competing with the solar panel, it's gotta blow a lot.

Now that said, there are a variety of competing systems out there that are a step up from this system that have better rotors (higher power coefficient), more rotor area, require a little better tower, a little fancier inverter, and cost quite a bit more. But they are a better investment, i.e. 2 real wind turbines is more cost-effective than 4 or 5 jellyfish.

And around here, solar beats wind. And if I lived in Nebraska, I wouldn't fuck with this tinkertoy, I'd put up a real wind turbine.

All of their assumptions about time-to-payback are based on how much the wind blows. Additionally, they are touting this thing as a "plug in the wall socket" toy while at the same time, talking about sticking them on top of power poles.

The rugged-izing needed to stick it on a power pole in a utility environment is an order of magnitude greater than that required for a "gee-whiz" home installation. How much did your simple breaker box cost that you stuck in your wall? And finally, cost efficiency goes up as the size of the wind turbine goes up. That's why industrial strength wind turbines are the size of a house, not the size of a suitcase. So they are being loosey-goosey with their numbers, i.e. they are comparing apples with oranges and frankly, being a little disingenuous. If you want to look at what a real system of roof-mounted residential turbines should look like, check out the AeroVironment wind turbine systems.

Over Yonder

2009-02-18T16:33:00.000-08:00

Sidenote: we're posting regularly to the Domainr and nbio blogs if you're curious about what we're up to.

Eric Case, Headhunter

2009-02-18T16:26:00.000-08:00

Not really, but I'm excited to see how well things worked out for Wendy and Get Satisfaction. I think it was June last year when Wendy and I were chatting, and she mentioned wanting to find CEO-level work at a mature SF startup in 2009—this was a career shift she felt she was ready for.

Satisfaction immediately came to mind, because they're both a startup and an actual business, and I knew they were growing and could probably use some deeper business experience at some point (Venture Beat has some good coverage).

Satisfaction's premise, that "customer service is the new marketing," is something I feel very strongly about. What they're doing is the only way to scale customer service—I know this first-hand from my time on Blogger Support—and I've been a fan of their product and vision since Lane and Veen first told me about it. Not only does awesome customer service make users happy, but it has the side benefit of implicitly marketing products.

Congrats to all involved!

Stay Well

2009-01-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

WSJ:

"Heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer and obesity account for 75% of health-care costs, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle. As Mr. Obama states in his health plan, unveiled during his campaign: 'This nation is facing a true epidemic of chronic disease. An increasing number of Americans are suffering and dying needlessly from diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and HIV/AIDS, all of which can be delayed in onset if not prevented entirely.'"

Great Mac app: Precipitate

2008-12-31T16:05:00.000-08:00

Stuart Morgan's Precipitate is good software—it gives you Spotlight access to all your Google Docs docs, runs invisibly, and Just Works.

My only complaints are that it doesn't yet support multiple accounts, and doesn't auto-update. Fortunately these are already on Stuart's radar.

Big Words

2008-12-22T16:15:00.001-08:00

Dolla?
Originally uploaded by shaderlab

Me looking for @ceedub, after his USF graduation a few days ago. With Big Words, @dom's rad new iPhone app.

Domainr Update

2008-12-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

Last night we pushed a big update to Domainr, then had the best horchata north of the border from Marta's Kitchen. In short:

IDN support so you can do ☺.com , 丿乀.com and ☃.net
.com/net/org support, Domainr's most-requested feature
better status for wildcard domains
full registrar support for the entire domain namespace

Ceedub and Ydnar are true hax0rs.

Jim Sinegal rocks

2008-11-20T08:21:00.000-08:00

Costco knows wassup.

"There's no sense in me BS-ing you. The reason we did it originally was exactly as you're suggesting -- to save money. We put the skylights in so that we didn't have to turn the lights on. But of course it's also environmentally correct. We also recycle all the boxes that the goods come in. And we're working on how we can simplify packaging and save on fuel. We just reconfigured our cashews. They were in a round canister, and we put them in a square canister. It sounds crazy, but we saved something like 560 truckloads a year of that one product. That's significant savings."