Geodog

Library Lookup

This has undoubtedly been blogged from here to eternity, but it is too cool not to mention, if only so that I can find it again easily: Jon Udell: LibraryLookup homepage Find a book's ISBN number, see if your local library has it. Works with the Berkeley Public Library, as well as thousands of others. May save me hundreds of dollars.

Thanks, Jon.

Internet Econ 301

It has been a long time since I studied economics at Oberlin College, and most of the economics that I have done since is strictly of the applied variety, but I am fascinated by the theoretical economics discussion going on between Eric Norlin and Ross Mayfield on their blogs. How is the internet "a unique economic force, as it is a resource without scarcity." How is the net "accelerating the process of commoditization"?

Check them out. Highly recommended.

Japanese-American internment camps again?

I don't know enough to be sure, but the recent LA Times report of the internment of hundreds of Iranians living in America sounds a lot like the internment of Japanese Americans at the beginning of WWII. And American citizens are paying as much attention as they did in 1941.

Must we be participants in yet another injustice?

Updated 12/21/2002. Upon further reading, I don't think that the internment is on the same scale or involves the same types of rights violations as the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans, but it is still a really stupid idea. "Dear terrorists, please present yourself for arrest and humiliation." Yeah, right. I wonder how many more terrorist sympathizers were created yesterday?

Brave Judge

I was proud to see a judge of the 3rd circuit court of appeals, Theodore A. McKee, write an eloquent letter on the Lott affair. What a disgrace to American democracy that such a racist politician was elected to Senate Majority Leader.

Is it not ironic in this day when the nation's elected leaders are rallying the country against terrorism, that the majority leader of the U.S. Senate would publicly endorse the terrorism that once governed a significant region of this country and greatly influenced politics at the national level?

Congratulations to Judge McKee for understanding what democracy is about.

Bush to Taxpayers: You're Potted Meat

Catch this great commentary from Texas on Karl Rove's recent ideas re taxes.

North Korea, what North Korea?

Nicolas Kristof has an excellent piece in the NYT about how much bigger a threat North Korea is to international peace than Iraq, and how little attention the US is paying to it. Choice quote:

President Bush finally turns out to have a clear, forceful plan to deal with North Korea's defying the West by restarting its nuclear warhead assembly line.

The plan is to invade Iraq.

Read it and weep.

Smallpox: Are you going to vaccinate your kids?

I just saw this NYT article on the smallpox vaccine and wondered again: "Will I vaccinate my kid?" A lot to process.

At the moment I am leaning against doing so until there is proof of a real threat, in part because of an article I read, that suggested that the USSR had developed smallpox variants that the vaccine doesn't provide immunity for, and that those variants may have been passed on to countries like Iraq. Nice world we live in, huh? If I think about it a lot, I feel like a failure, raising a child in a society where such a thing is possible.

Other resources:CDC Smallpox Home

What are you planning to do when the vaccine becomes available?

Stress' effect on the immune system is real

A fascinating article in the NYT about what scientists are discovering about the real connection between stress and disease. People have known about the connection for a long time, but only now are researchers able to prove the connection, and, more importantly, understand the mechanisms that control it. If I was going to medical school today, I would study endocrinology -- that seems to be a field that is just now coming into its own.

What Next? Attorneys Hacking Websites

Thanks to Mike of Techdirt for this fascinating WP story about attorneys from Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue who are accused of breaking into an expert witnesses' password protected website to find material to discredit him. This story has everything: overzealous attorneys, self-important judges, gadfly expert witnesses... Check it out. Favorite quote:

Asked who paid for Stewart's clever Web searching on Egilman's site, Stewart said Occidental Chemical, though the material ended up in the Brush Wellman suit. Asked why, Stewart said, "We have to bill someone."

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again: I bet this story makes it all over the net, and within a week the top result of a Google search for "Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue " will be a link to this story. Bet they didn't expect that.

J. M. Marshall sums it up

In an article on the whole Trent Lott controversy, J. M. Marshall cites a WP article quoting White House officials saying "the absence of news from the war on terrorism last week contributed to the focus on Lott."

Marshall writes:

[this is a] revealing statement of how much the White House has to come rely upon and use the war on terrorism to muffle down domestic political problems.

You can believe in the necessity of the war on terrorism and still recognize how crassly the White House sometimes exploits it for the narrowest political purposes.

Marshall hits the nail on the head with precision, as he so often does. The lengths that the Bush administration goes to to exploit of the war on terrorism for its political ends are cynical and evil in and of themselves, but I also fear that they will have long lasting and deeply harmful effects. If people around the world come to see the "war on terrorism" as simply a cynical exercise for domestic political gain, how much support will the U.S. get for combating terrorism? All the sympathy that the US garnered after 9-11 is being thrown away, and we, the citizens of the US, will have to pay the price in the end.

Sergey Brin of Google in Wired

A fascinating Wired article entitled Google vs. Evil from the January 2003 issue of Wired. It discusses all the choices involved when you have an effective monopoly on search in the internet. It is in part a profile of Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who is supposedly tasked with making policy decisions like how much to bend to Chinese government requirements in order to get Google "turned back on" in China.

I met Sergey Brin at SuperNova 2002 and was very impressed with him. He came across as very young, very smart, and not into pandering to the audience. Although the Supernova2002 audience loved how engineering-centric Google is, there was a fair bit of grumbling about the monopoly position that Google currently occupies. He was not shy about pushing back on questions from the audience. My favorite quote from his talk at SuperNova 2002 was in regards to RDF and the Semantic Web:

The way that people write isn't the way that computers read. There are two ways to deal with this, change people or change computers. My preference is to change computers.

That made a lot of sense to me. However, the mantra he uses in resolving questions like how much to compromise with the Chinese government or the Church of Scientology (at least according to the article), "You have to look at the total value picture," isn't very comforting. Total value for whom? Why should this one young man decide who and what gets found and who and what doesn't get found on the internet? The market libertarians would argue that he should get to decide because the market (users) have decided that his company does a great job of it. Plus, who else do you want to decide? This is a powerful argument. The only effective counterargument is to try and imagine what would dethrone Google from its commanding market position as the king of search. Would any search engine, no matter how good? If Google is effectively a monopoly, not subject to market discipline, how do we ensure that its actions serve the greater good?

The article doesn't address the latter questions, but it is a pretty good read, even if it is a little bizarre to read the January issue in mid-December.

Alternative search engines to check out occasionally, if only to keep Google on its toes:

alltheweb

Teoma

AltaVista

5 Easy Steps to a Movable Type Photoblog

I have a photography section on my regular website where I put family photos, but I like including pictures in postings, and was thinking of downloading pMachine, which is supposed to have good support for photos. Then a link from Doc Searls to Mike's Weblog led me towards A five step photoblog in Movable Type. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks perfect. I certainly like the examples on The Kingdom of Squirrels. I suspect that a lot of Movable Type users will want something like this after they get digital cameras over the holidays (Robert?)

Great One-Liners from Supernova 2002 Day One

I was planning on writing up all my notes and thoughts and posting them, but I'm not sure that it would be worth the time and effort. Supernova 2002 must be the most blogged conference to date. Instead, at least for now, I thought I'd post my favorite one liners from the conference.

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

-- William Gibson

This must have been the most oft repeated quote at the conference, and with good reason. It is a profound statement about the nature of change, especially technological change. We tend to assume, for no good reason, and against experience, that the rate of change and its spread are both linear. But they aren't. The rate of change tends to be logarithmic, and the spread of change discontinuous. This has a lot of implications for looking at technology trends. Change tends to come faster than we assume it will, but doesn't become as widespread nearly as fast as we assume it will.

Only geeks change their preferences

-- Howard Rheingold

Geeks are good at inventing the future. They aren't so good at making it available to ordinary people. They have a much higher tolerance for complexity and the need to tinker than ordinary people. What I like doing in product management is bring technology invented by geeks to the rest of the world.

Technology trends start with technologists, not customers.

-- Doc Searls

There were multiple examples of this over the 2 days of the conference. Geeks invent things that nobody else has thought of before. Often times, they don't get used for what the geeks expect they will be used for, the classic example being Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, but focus groups or customers don't invent new things. They may tell you how to package or modify them.

Macromedia can upgrade 97% of the internet in one year.

-- Jeremy Allaire

Very interesting statistic from Jeremy. Macromedia Flash has reached such a level of ubiquity that they can upgrade 97% the Flash players in one year. This is fantastic distribution, and a fantastic level of upgrading that very few players have. Just that fact that it is possible is amazing, and is a sign of the rate of change that is coming. Just compare it with all the people you know who are running Windows '95, a seven year old technology.

After you have a nerve center taken out by crashing a Boeing 757 into it, you start to appreciate the P2P virtues of resilience, self healing, and no "key" nodes.



-- Mike Helfrich

In this age of terrorism that we live in, the value of strong P2P clients is strongly enhanced. Centralization makes fat targets.

Kissinger resigns as chair of 9/11 Panel

AP is reporting that Kissinger Quits As Chairman of 9/11 Panel. The story says "The decision was another blow for the fledging panel and the families of Sept. 11 victims." I disagree. I think that getting war criminal Kissinger out of there will prove to be a victory for the truth. Kissinger quit because he couldn't stand the idea of having the light shone on him and his firm -- who was he to shine a light on the failures of our intelligence establishment?

The appointment of Kissinger to the 911 commission struck me as an incredible act of cynicism. Let's hope that it isn't repeated.

90% of programming today is knowing the API's

Joel of Joel on Software has an interesting article in which he argues that 90% of today's programming involves knowing which API's to call and how to call them. He says:

Very few people get to work on low level C algorithms that just move bytes around any more. Most of us spend all our time these days calling APIs, not moving bytes ... Someone who is a fantastic C++ coder with no API experience only knows about 10% of what you use every day writing code that runs on an API.

I had always believed the opposite, that it it is more important to be a really good programmer than what specific language/API you know. However, I have mostly worked with homemade/new operating systems, with people who do spend most of their days moving bytes around, and calling homemade API's. Maybe it is different when you are spending all day writing Windows applications -- in fact I suspect that it is. I guess this is one of the reasons that it is fun to stay on the cutting edge, and away from a deep knowledge of MFC. Worth reading.

Tim O'Reilly on Evolution of Online Distribution

I'm sure everybody and their brother will be linking to Tim O'Reilly's article, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution, and with good reason. Tim O'Reilly takes a good look at his experiences in the book publishing industry and comes up with 7 lessons for the music and film industry:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation

Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.

Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service

Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

A far cry from the "it's stealing" vs. "they want to take away all our rights" debate so frequently heard. Highly recommended.

Media Unspun, RIP

Media Unspun's last day of publication was today, unfortunately. It is sad to see so much great journalism shutting down due to the economic situation. I was a big fan of the team when they were at the Industry Standard, and I admired Jimmy Guterman's chutzpah in starting a new publication in the face of the downturn in advertising. But all that remains is their weblog.

Obstacles

Well, I had planned on writing about the Supernova 2002 conference, but returned home to find that:

1. My cable modem, or the LAN nearby, had gone on the fritz, so that my connection was dropping 25-50% of packets. Basically, it was unusable. I called AT&T tech support, and after spending an interminable amount of time after midnight with first line tech support (have you power cycled your modem -- do you know what power cycle means. Please reboot your system. etc, etc.) found somebody who agreed that yes, I was dropping packets. She told me that someone would come out to take a look at it, and offered me an appointment December 24, 13 days away. As well as incredibly frustrating, after listening to Andrew Chapman of Narad Networks talk about bandwidth so large that you didn't have to worry about bandwidth, tech support's response seemed incredibly clueless. Yes, your broadband isn't working, we will have someone look at it in two weeks ... I had a little more sympathy for people who suggest that we charge for various Quality Of Service levels. I would certainly be happy to pay more to guarantee next day service when there is a problem with my broadband connection. What are these people thinking?


2. I found that the email address that I use for my consulting businesses, tim@twjb.com had been bouncing for at least a day.



3. The email address forward I have been using for years for personal email was taking email and delivering to to a black hole instead of forwarding it.

So I have spent all day wrestling with those problems. Tomorrow, I hope to write up my impressions of SuperNova2002.

WiFi in action

Well, I am at Supernova 2002. It was amazing to sit down in the conference room and plug into a wireless network, and have it just work. Geek out! Amazing sound of tons of keyboards clicking. Also ran into lots of people I know, but also lots that I just know online. I am sitting across the aisle from Phil Wolff, of a klog apart fame, who lives about 10 miles away from me, but whom I have never met before.

On the other hand, it is hard to concentrate on the speaker with all these cool toys. I wonder how much of a distraction factor it is. I see lots of people blogging as Howard Rheingold talks. I suspect that some people are better than others at doing this. I prefer to wait until I can figure out what I think.

Going to SuperNova 2002 after all

Thanks to a generous benefactor who agreed to make it possible for me to attend the SuperNova 2002 conference in return for some consulting work, I'm heading down to Palo Alto tonight to spend the night at friend's house, and off to the SuperNova 2002 conference in the morning. I don't know if I will be able to blog at the conference, because my laptop's battery is on the fritz, so this may be my last entry for a couple of days, but I will certainly blog it when I get back on Wednesday. There will be an official blog and a neat group blog that has the possibility of aggregating everybody's comments.

I'm excited about going to this conference. There will be a lot of really smart people talking about their ideas for the immediate future we will be creating in technology. I have been involved in technology for a long time, but so much of the time I have been heads-down, working on calming an upset customer or making the next milestone or getting the next round of financing. It will be a real treat to step back and look at things from a higher perspective. Plus, I am looking forward to meeting so many people that I only "know" online.

Geodog says Yippie!

Philip Berrigan, American Hero, is Dead

Philip Berrigan died at home yesterday. I never met him, but I read about him often over the years, from the 60's onwards, and I was always impressed with the lengths he was willing to go to for his beliefs, and the sacrifices he was willing to make. As someone who was raised Catholic, I've always loved his description of himself as a "a Catholic trying to become a Christian." He was an American hero.

The Washington Post has a sympathetic obituary, while the NYT has a fairly unsympathetic one. There are more details on his life at Voice4Change.

If you live near Baltimore, the wake and funeral will be held at St. Peter Claver Church in West Baltimore, (1546 North Fremont Avenue, Baltimore MD 21217); calling hours are 4-8 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8 with a circle of sharing about Phil's life at 6 p.m.; funeral is Monday, December 9, 12 p.m.

Tip o' the hat to the alternate patriot for the link.

Wavy Gravy needs your help

According to my (real, not virtual) neighbor, Wavy Gravy, the new corporate Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream company is planning on taking Wavy Gravy Ice Cream off the market. Wavy Gravy was one of the flavors that built the Ben & Jerry's brand. Wavy uses the small amount of money that he gets for the ice cream to fund Camp Winnarainbow for kids, which I have heard is a great place.

Please help Wavy out and buy a pint of Wavy Gravy ice cream and send an email to:wavygravycomments@benjerry.com asking them not to drop the flavor.

Get ready for the sequel, Clone of the Attack

Who knew that Mad Magazine and Warner Brothers had it in them? I volunteer in the library at my child's school, and last week she passed me a copy of Mad Magazine that had apparently been making the rounds of the teachers. In it was this poster. I remember being a big fan of Mad Magazine when I was about 12 years old, but I don't remember any political satire, beyond the Spy vs. Spy. This is brilliant. Check out the full size version to get the full effect.

Apparently, I'm a Left/Libertarian

The People's Republic of Seabrook referred me to a site, The Political Compass, that purports to define your politics on two axes, Authoritarian/Libertarian and Economic Left/Right, on the basis of your response to about 30 questions. I tried, just for fun, and was ranked a Left Libertarian, with a score of Economic Left/Right: -5.50, and Authoritarian/Libertarian: -6.36

That seems about right. I'm a strong believer that the government should stay out of people's personal lives. I also believe that the market is the best to way to motivate people and allocate resources, but the government is needed to set the ground rules that markets need in order operate, to keep the players honest (and punish the dishonest), and to ameliorate the inequities and externalities that arise in a market economy. But how much easer it is to reduce it to a number. I'm a Econ -5.50, Lib -6.36.

Eliminated the blog calendar

Apparently, I'm incapable of stopping myself from messing around with my template and my style sheet. I decided to get rid of the calendar (for now -- I've actually just commented it out) because I couldn't see what use it really was. I figure if that anyone wants to read something, they can skim the page, skim the headlines, or search for it. I never quite understood what the calendar was for, as it is a lousy navigational tool.

If anyone stopping by this site feels differently, I'd love to hear about it.

Fun from the People's Republic of Seabrook

I'd forgotten how much fun it can be to find a quirky site. The People's Republic of Seabrook appears to be the blogging equivalent of Molly Ivins.

The PRS reminds you that liberals in Texas are made of stronger stuff than the rest of us, presumably because they have to be. They are funnier too. Check out this argument about the anti-americanism of vegetarians.

As a resident of the People's Republic of Berkeley, I'd like to salute The People's Republic of Seabrook, from whom I stole the graphic above.

W.Bloggar 3.0 First Look

The last three posts have been done sitting in bed with the laptop hooked up to the net via 802.11b, using W.Bloggar on Win2K. It's a very nice setup, although it's not helping me with the midnight deadline.

W.Bloggar is a way cool client, much improved since the last time that I checked it out about 6 months ago. You can cut and paste text into the app and do reasonable HTML formatting. If you want to do your blogging in a desktop application, a la Radio, it makes a great client. And, unlike browser based clients like Radio, you don't run the risk of losing all your work every time you click on a link.You can even click the save icon as you go, if you are the paranoid type after having been burned too many times by Radio's bugs. (But I'm not bitter, am I?)

The only downsides I have found so far are the spell checker, which is functional but pretty limited, and the fact that it requires IE. In conjunction with Movable Type, W.Bloggar makes a great blogging system. Plus it is free, although donations accepted. Highly recommended.

PGP 8 Shipped, drops support for Eudora

It looks like PGP 8.0 has shipped and that that the new PGP corporation is making a freeware version available for non-commercial use, which I am glad to see. unfortunately, it looks like they have dropped support for Eudora. Bummer.

Luckily, Eudora is still supported by the international version of PGP, so if I have occasion to use encrypted email, I know where to get it. I must confess however, that as much as using encrypted email makes sense to me, especially the way things are going politically, I probably used the Eudora PGP plug-in that I had less than 5 times in the last 5 years, and I lost it when I migrated my desktop from Win'98 to Win2K. It would still be nice to have, though.

Kelsey's Text Ads

Just for fun, I added myself to Kalsey's Textad Exchange. I'll see how much it traffic it brings in (if any), what the quality of the ads served onto my blog is, and how much it slows my page load down. It's funny, having a small text ad on the page makes it look more professional, at least to me. Looks like Google, right?

My Way?

Ran across My Way today, which I had read about a while ago in the Merc. It does look like the old Yahoo, or Yahoo without all the ads, and it does load rapidly. It has a reasonable, if barebones, set of offerings. The Southwest Airlines of Portals. I don't know how they plan to make money, but the two guys who started it, Bill Daugherty and Jonas Steinman, do have a good track record in that respect. I'll use it for a week and check it out. I did register the geodog email address, just in case.

RIP, Berkeley Daily Planet

I was on my way to the office today, and I noticed that the news racks for our local daily newspaper, the Berkeley Daily Planet, were empty again, as they have been all week. Then I saw a story in the local media conglomerate weekly advertising circular, The Berkeley Voice, saying that the Daily Planet is no more. I checked online, and while the website is still up, clearly operations have ceased. It isn't only dot coms that are the victims of the current bust, which in the Bay Area looks a lot like a depression.

We have some good alternative newsweeklies in the Bay Area, which focus on cultural events and progressive political events, but the Berkeley Daily Planet was a great little independent town paper. It had a couple of reporters who covered all the interesting people who come to speak at UC Berkeley, as well as the school board, the zoning board, and the city council (always entertaining in Berkeley). The rest of the paper was filled with AP news and ads for local events and businesses, and of course, the ever popular Police Report. Part of my daily routine was to pick up a copy on the way to work, and read it while I walk to the office, munching on a goodie from the Cheese Board, our local collective bakery. It was the only source I had for local news -- what the school board is up to, problems at the local high school, what developers are trying to get variances, etc. While Berkeley gets a high profile for UC Berkeley and for its sometimes zany politics, for most of us it is like any other small town, struggling with the same kinds of problems -- trying to preserve a downtown that often appears to be on the verge of dying, trying to improve the schools, which are a mess, and trying to be a safe community to raise children in. Without the Daily Planet, I will know less about the problems, and about all the efforts to solve them.

There has been a lot of press coverage about the increasing concentration of the media in the hands of a few conglomerates, but little about the demise of small town newspapers across the country. A small town newspaper is a vital part of what makes a town a community, bringing people together (sometimes in groups in opposition to each other, human nature being what it is). It also lets people know what the politicians are doing, and allows politicians to get known without spending tons of money. The loss of these newspapers is a loss of community, and a loss in the chain of accountability between citizens and their public servants. RIP, Berkeley Daily Planet. I miss you already.

Register interview with Scott McNealy

The Register has a good interview with Scott McNealy today. McNealy is less mouthy and Microsoft bashing than he often is. Some interesting bits on Star Office and Sun's support of Linux, and he tells one funny story:

Ken Olsen used to give a turkey every Christmas to every employee. And when the company got to 70,000 employees someone came to him and said, why don't we have a turkey farm? Why don't we vertically integrate it all?

Books on usability, info arch & sw project management

Robert links to a great list of books on usability, information architecture and software project management. I've read some of them, but there are a lot more that I'd like to read.

Super looking conference

There is a really interesting looking conference focused on decentralization coming up next week in Palo Alto, SuperNova 2002. This is the kind of thing that I was always too busy to go to when I was working, and now that I am not employed full time, it's the kind of thing that is too expensive to go to.

There is a superstar list of speakers, including a quite a few stars from the blogsphere. If you can afford it, I'd advise taking the time off to check it out. It's almost always worth taking time out to back up and get a 10,000 foot perspective. I just wish that I had taken my own advice.

The Dream Job that Got Away

I was reading Dan Gillmor's Weblog a couple of weeks ago and saw his piece on Mitch Kapor's new Open Source Application Foundation and their project to make an open source PIM, code named Chandler. I followed up and checked out the website, and got really exited. I have been frustrated by the lack of a decent PIM on Windows, and as a result use a combination of programs (Eudora for email, Outlook/Palm for calendaring and contacts, MyBase, AskSam, and Ticklist for information capture and retrieval, and NoteStack and TickList for to dos. I would love to have a decent Windows PIM that did all those things. I looked at the team, and was very impressed - a lot of smart people who have built good stuff. Then, as I am wont to do these days, I looked at the job listings. I saw that they were looking for a product manager.

My first thought was: "That would be a dream job -- Work with really smart people, building a really great product that lots of people will want -- I want that job."

My second thought was "Everybody and their brother is going to apply for this job."

So I wrote up a cover letter and sent it and my resume to the mail link that OSAF had posted, but I also decided to campaign for the job. I racked my brains trying to think of who knew me and my work well, and also knew someone at OSAF. I sent mail to people who I had worked with in the past, asking them if they knew anyone on the OSAF people page. I hate doing this kind of thing, and haven't done it for any of the other jobs that I have applied for, but I figured that I needed to make some connection, otherwise my resume would just get buried in the pile of hundreds. It turned out that my first boss in high tech, at GO Corporation, knew one of the people at OSAF and was willing to put in a good word for me, which he did. Then I signed up for all the OSAF mailing lists, lurked on them, checked the OSAF website and Mitch Kapor's Weblog daily, and waited. And waited.

A week later I came down with the flu, and was lying in bed when I heard the home office phone ring, and someone leave a message. I stumbled upstairs and heard that it was soneone from OSAF, wanting to talk to me. I jumped up, grabbed a few tylenol and drank a few cups of coffee, then called back. I had a very pleasant phone interview with John Anderson that went on for a about an hour, at the conclusion of which John told me to hold myself in readiness for a call inviting me to an in-person interview in a couple of days. I was so eager I couldn't stand it. I spend the next two days doing everything I could think of. I did my own competitive analysis, downloading and reviewing existing PIMS, email clients, and P2P groupware (Groove). I read up on Python and wxPython and ZOPE. I googled all the current members of the OSAF team. I thought about what problems I would attack first, and how I would attack them (requirements, competitive analysis and user scenarios -> specs). I skimmed though some of my project management books just to remind myself of some of the issues. I even read up on the other person Kaitlin Duck Sherwood who I knew had applied for the job.

I got the call to come in, and went down to OSAF for an afternoon of interviews. The interviews lasted 4 1/2 hours, and I met with nine people. I actually had a great time, although I was pretty wiped by the end of the day. As always happens in our industry, I found that I had at least remote connections with half the people on the team, and in one case discovered that the wife of the engineer interviewing me was best friends with the wife of one of my best friends - so goes Silicon Valley. I would only give myself a B+ for my interview performance -- I was still recovering from the flu, and it has been so long since I have sat at that side of the table that I didn't have answers ready for all the standard questions (what was your worse mistake, what was your greatest accomplishment...), but it was a lot of fun and energizing to talk to these really intelligent people about the exiting product they were building, and how I could help them with the challenges involved. I wanted that job so bad I could taste it. But it was not to be.

I was told that I would hear in 4-5 days whether or not I had gotten the job. Five days went by without hearing anything. Even though I knew it was foolish, and that odds were strongly against my getting the job, I put my job hunt in suspended animation. Who could apply for a job as a PM managing the company wide upgrade of Peoplesoft version x when it was possible that I could get this job? 6 days went by, then 7. I was nerving up to call and check on the process, when I got the phone call. I was very nicely told that someone else was going to get the job. I was told that while I was well qualified for the job, this other candidate was even more qualified, having founded a company during the dot com boom which he later sold for $74 million. Plus, salary wasn't an issue for him. How can you compete with that?

I am getting over it slowly. I am trying not to hate the person who got the job, which as far as I can tell he is well qualified for, and I am actually planning on sending him an email offering to help him out, since I still hope that Chandler is going to be a great product, and they clearly need some help in defining it. I'm not checking the OSAF site daily. And only once a day do I fantasize about how I would be doing the job now. Most days.

Dial-up? I'd never go back

An interesting mini-article in the NYT, Price Is Limiting Demand for Broadband, arguing that the price of broadband, $40-$50 per month, is limiting its adoption. The article says only 15% of households get broadband, although 70% are technically capable of doing so.

I agree that it is hard to sell the benefits of broadband, especially to someone who isn't a regular net user. But, having been one of the early adopters (3 years ago), I can't imagine going back to dial-up, and I can't imagine anyone who has broadband going back. Waiting for a connection? Waiting for a page to load? Opening one window at a time? No thanks. We have had to cut a lot of expenses in Geodog's household over the last year, but the extra $300 per year we pay for broadband is at the bottom of the cut list. I suspect that my experience is a common one. So, while the rollout may be slower than some would like, it seems inevitable. It is like the Tivo/PVR features. Hard to explain and sell, but once experienced, it is sold.

The article is also flawed in that it fails to discuss all the supply side constraints on provisioning broadband to the 70% who are technically capable of receiving it. The author has apparently never had to deal with Pac Bell or his local cable company. Check with Mike Masenick of Tech Dirt, who lives in one of the most wired places on earth, for his hilarious saga about his efforts to get broadband.

802.11 Planet Report

I spent the day at the 802.11 Planet trade show in Santa Clara. It's too late to write up a complete trip report, but I thought I'd mention a few highlights.

Blogging was well represented. I ran into Glen Fleishman of WiFi News and Paul Boutin of Sousveillance. I got a chance to chat with Glen for a little while, and he is just as smart and as nice as you would guess from his sites. Look for his article on WiFi forthcoming in next week's NYT Circuits.

I attended Sky Dayton's keynote speech (which Glen blogged his notes on) and was impressed with it. He is clearly a smart guy, who has thought a lot about the business of WiFi, and he has a cogent argument as to how everybody in the value/supply chain can make money, something I was (and still am) pretty skeptical about. I was also impressed by his presentation, and his presence and graciousness. Some people just have great stage presence and give a talk as a well put together show. Packaging is important. He just seemed much more professional than some of his competitors who were exhibiting, who didn't have the unified graphic design of the collateral materials, nor his easy manner of speaking. On the other hand, when I got home and downloaded Boingo's client software he had been touting, it installed without giving me any choices about where it installed or anything else, and it has crashed every time I have tried to run it. So packaging isn't everything.

The 802.11 Planet show had a lot of exhibitors touting security solutions for the enterprise, a fair number of hardware/RF geeks, some with really cool looking antennas that I didn't try to understand, being a software guy myself. The coolest hardware that I saw at the show was Sychip's tiny WLAN chip embedded on a SD card -- so tiny you really could believe the hype about how ubiquitous WiFi is going to be. Check out the picture.

The coolest software was a demo that a couple of friends of mine from Blue Mug gave on the floor of the show. They had two Compaq iPaq's running Linux, and they have written a peer to peer app that let them whiteboard, do Voice over IP, and exchange MP3's, all over WiFI in a saturated environment. Way cool.

This is Conservatism?

Noted in passing: Robert has some nice comments on an article by Wired (and comic by Danziger) on how a provision of the No Child Left Behind law is requiring high schools to hand over to military recruiters the name, address and phone number juniors and seniors.

This is conservatism? The federal government requiring schools to hand over personally identifiable information about kids? Imagine the outrage of the right if Clinton and the Democrats had required the same information to be given to, say, condom manufacturers, so that they could market to kids and help prevent unwanted pregnancies and kids getting AIDS.

One hates to use that overloaded word which has been robbed of its meaning by its constant use by the left as an epithet, but really, this smacks of fascism.

Google is fast to find me

To my surprise, Google found my new blog already. #6 in the search for Geodog. My, that's fast. I am impressed.