InformationWeek: In Defense Of Complaining

Even weirder is the idea that companies shouldn’t be criticized because in a market, you should just take your business elsewhere. Free markets thrive on good information. For a market to function, customers need to have good information about which goods are worth buying and which ones should be avoided — that’s why we complain in public, to help companies make better decisions.

When corporate apologists say, “Well, it’s a free market, shut up and buy someone else’s product,” or “Well, it’s a free market, they’re a commercial company, they have to make a profit,” they’re not really talking about a free market at all.

They’re asking for the kind of market where companies get treated like charities (at best) or like promising toddlers. If you’re in business to turn a profit, you’d better make a product we want to buy. If your partners won’t let you do that, get better partners, or a better line of work. It’s not our responsibility to buy your halt, lame products because you can’t do a better job.

— via Boing Boing Blog

Traditionally, complaints are sometimes an effective method for influencing corporate decisions. Does restating “complaints” as “negative feedback” resolve the inherent badness of complaining in general? What form of positive feedback can influence a megacorp?

TechGuys: How to change and inspect spark plugs

In this how-to article, we will cover the removal, inspection and installation of spark plugs. Spark plugs are covered in most manufacturer maintenance programs and are generally supposed to be changed every 2 years. Having fresh, properly installed spark plugs will help increase mileage, power output, and reliability of your vehicle.

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Before you start this procedure, ensure you have all of the tools and consumables listed above at your disposal. Be sure you purchase the proper spark plugs as indicated in your owner’s manual. If you don’t already have anti-seize compound, be sure you purchase the high temperature variety (copper). Similarly, a tube of dielectric (tune up) grease is an excellent investment at the same time.

Good, clear instructions explaining all the minor steps involved in replacing spark plugs. It’s probably doable with a basic wrench and knowledge of how to find them, but this avoids a lot of simple mistakes.

TripIt is awesome

You know what I really like? TripIt.com. It’s amazingly simple. You take all those travel confirmation emails that you get from your travel agent, hotels, car rental agencies, etc, and you just forward them to plans@tripit.com. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to sign up for an account. You don’t have to log on. You just forward those emails. You can do it right now.

You get a link back by email, with a beautifully organized itinerary, showing all your travel data plus maps, weather reports, and all the confirmation numbers for your flights and address for your hotels and so on.

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TripIt is a beautiful example of the Figure It Out school of user interface design. Why should you need to register? TripIt figures out who you are based on your email address. Why should you parse the schedule data? Everyone gets email from the same 4 online travel agencies, 100-odd airlines, 15 hotel chains, 5 car rental chains… it’s pretty easy to just write screen scrapers for each of those to parse out the necessary data.

— via Joel on Software

Combining automated data extraction with simple, password-free services results in TripIt. I was able to post my SXSW trip in less than 10 minutes, including registration. Great stuff.

Five Whys

Keeping internet services online suffers from the problem of black swans. Nassim Taleb, who invented the term, defines it thus: “A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations.” Almost all internet outages are unexpected unexpecteds: extremely low-probability outlying surprises. They’re the kind of things that happen so rarely it doesn’t even make sense to use normal statistical methods like “mean time between failure.” What’s the “mean time between catastrophic floods in New Orleans?”

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Somewhere between the “extremely unreliable” level of service, where it feels like stupid outages occur again and again and again, and the “extremely reliable” level of service, where you spend millions and millions of dollars getting an extra minute of uptime a year, there’s a sweet spot, where all the expected unexpecteds have been taken care of. A single hard drive failure, which is expected, doesn’t take you down. A single DNS server failure, which is expected, doesn’t take you down. But the unexpected unexpecteds might. That’s really the best we can hope for.

To reach this sweet spot, we borrowed an idea from Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. He calls it Five Whys. When something goes wrong, you ask why, again and again, until you ferret out the root cause. Then you fix the root cause, not the symptoms.

— via Daring Fireball

Every additional “nine” of uptime costs exponentially more in two ways. Improving architecture design often requires extra engineering, testing, and hardware investments; most startups defer at least one of these until later. Employee work hours frequently make up for the lack of investment in architecture, often with great impact on those first responders.

I Can Has Rezearch Papar? by Cyle Gage

Where do the lulz come from? There are varying histories and an array of websites dedicated to them, but I will largely cover the following places: 4chan, You’re The Man Now Dog (YTMND), and Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED). There are dozens of other sites I will reference, but none are as central as those main three. 4chan and YTMND serve as not only aggregators of internet culture, but creation points.

In a more semantic sense, the lulz found on 4chan and YTMND is a perfect example of pure simulacrum. There is nothing real about the lulz: it is entirely fake, yet original. It uses representations of things like pop culture icons in a totally virtual space. The map of 4chan precedes the territory it covers. The proponents of the lulz – specifically Anonymous – also embody the collective hive mind that the internet presents.

Now-common internet jargon like “lol” and “brb” were once words confined to a nerdy few. Suddenly YTMND and LOLCats are known and popular on the internet at large, having started from the obscure lower-levels of the internet like 4chan. Furthermore, these obscure artifacts, once popular, rarely change form or content in the process.

— via Hack the Planet

If you don’t yet understand the lulz, this will clue you in.

Troika | art and design studio | london | Sms Guerrilla Projector

In response, we created ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. Flip-dots were conventionally used in the 70s and 80s to create signs in train-stations and airports. We were fascinated by their materiality, by the way they physically flip from one side to the other. The sound they generate is also instantly reminiscent of travel, and we therefore decided to explore their aesthetic potential in ‘Cloud’.

By audibly flipping between black and silver, the flip-dots create mesmerising waves as they chase across the surface of ‘Cloud’. Reflecting its surrounding colours, the mechanical mass is transformed into an organic form that appears to come alive, shimmering and flirting with the onlookers that pass by from both above and below.

— via Gizmodo

Reminds me of the snowcrash product line for some reason. I bet it sounds like the digital sign at the Hult Center. Swoosh, swoosh.

Kevin Kelly’s must-read article on what’s “better than free”From there Kevin goes on to list eight “generatives,” or features, that he argues are “better than free.” These are the building blocks of new products and services and they’re worth studying, sharing, memorizing, drilling your team on:

• immediacy (getting the bits now)
• personalization (bits tailored to your own preferences)
• interpretation (for-pay services that operate on the free bits)
• authenticity (any hint of “realness” in the virtual world)
• accessibility (getting to the bits on any device, not just your home computer)
• embodiment (higher-resolution bits)
• patronage (feel-good process of supporting the bits’ creators)
• findability (the new version of distribution: drawing users’ attention)

I’d add one other feature, simplicity, which allows users to engage the bits with a minimum of user interface annoyances interfering with the experience.

— via Good Experience Blog

Great ideas on how to cultivate reputation. They apply to personal and product marketing, on and offline.

Geotagging Expands Uses of Digital Images

Armed with such data, Higham didn’t have to search endless combinations of keywords and guess how photographers would describe images in captions. By zooming in on the map, he could easily find geotagged photos along the Via Alpina and gain a fresh perspective.

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Professional aerial photographer Allan Goldstein gave up selling archival images from the Chicago area years ago, finding specific photos too cumbersome to locate on demand. He started the business again in October after discovering he could simply tag each image with its GPS coordinates.

— via Wired News

Recent DSLR cameras support a GPS add-on device, used to incorporate the geodata into EXIF image data on the camera memory disk. It becomes as simple as “plug in the dongle and take pictures”, and anywhere you upload them will recognize the data. I’m glad that a dongle is required. Integrated GPS is prone to accidentally giving away location information.

Fixing ptrace(pt_deny_attach, …) on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

PT_DENY_ATTACH is a non-standard ptrace() request type that prevents a debugger from attaching to the calling process. Adam Leventhal recently discovered that Leopard extends PT_DENY_ATTACH to prevent introspection into processes using dtrace.

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For Leopard, I decided to find a public symbol that is placed in the data segment, nearby the sysent array. In the kernel’s data segment, nsysent is placed (almost) directly before the sysent array. By examining mach_kernel I can determine the offset to the actual sysent array, and then use this in my kext to patch the actual function. To keep things safe, I added sanity checks to verify that I’d found the real sysent array.

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Once we have the address of the array, we can find the SYS_ptrace entry and substitute our own ptrace wrapper:

— via Hack the Planet

OS X allow applications to say “don’t trace me”. This kernel extension directly modified the kernel to cripple that ability. Which makes debugging a whole lot easier in general. Apple’s attempt to do this has been worked around in the last three revisions of the OS. I suspect they have to make a good faith effort for various corporate reasons.

TransitCamp Ideally: Promote Simplicity and Ubiquitousness

Tara Hunt has a post up about TransitCamp (a camp held in about a month at SocialText with the help of Heyward Robinson, Menlo Park city council, Adina Levin, Co Founder of Social Text and avid Menlo Park community activist, Margaret Okuzumi, from the Bay Rail Alliance and MTC).

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The common thread across all those cities is that the interface, and the metaphor, is simplicity and instant access with little mental overhead. In other words, you don’t have to know much to use them, other than to find an outlet and get in. Then after locating a map, you buy a pass and unless it’s very late (after midnight or 2am depending) or very early (before 6am), you wait a few minutes and your train, bus or trolley shows up. And you’re off. And it works from the airports too! Yipee!

The way Bay Area transit works is: you are a commuter, you already know the complicated and dysfunctional system section you use all the time and the rest is a byzantine mess of mismatched numerous connections, so therefore the regular user only will move say, one leg to get where you are going or maybe two at the most. Oh and you are doing this almost exclusively during commute hours in order to have any efficiency at all.

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I’d rather not drive, but how the heck do you manage my typical day of meetings like say, last Thursday?
AM: 9:30 meeting in the mission, 11am in Cole Valley, PM: 12pm in the outer Sunset, 2pm in San Bruno, 6:30pm in SF for dinner, 10pm in Emeryville, 11pm home. All of which I easily made in the car, but with transit in the BA, I’d have to plan two hours between each meeting and an hour home on the last leg. In NYC, each bridge to the next event would be 15-30 minutes (what I’d planned for driving between each thing I needed to get done).

— via Napsterization

There have been two prior TransitCamp events in Toronto and Vancouver, both using the BarCamp conference model. Based on what I can see on their sites, they were a valuable experience. I’ve been using Bay Area transit for three years, so I’ll definitely attend. There’s a clear statement of “How do we improve this?” rather than “What do we hate about this?”, which is immensely cheering.

How to Change the World: The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption

Here’s a compilation of silly and stupid ways companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. I must admit, some of the companies that I’ve invested in have made these mistakes—in fact, that’s why I know these mistakes are (a) silly; (b) stupid; and (c) hinder adoption.

2. The long URL. When you want to send people an URL the site generates an URL that’s seventy characters long—or more! When you copy, paste, and email this URL, a line break is added, so people cannot click on it to go to the intended location.

3. Windows that don’t generate URLs. Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? You’ve got a window open that you want to tell someone about, but you’d have to write an essay to explain how to get that window open again. Did someone at the company decide that it didn’t want referrals, links, and additional traffic? This is the best argument I can think of for not using frames.

— via inluminent/weblog

Guy lists some very clear how-not-to’s for all internet applications. The latest Gmail release resolves #3 – I can now go directly to a certain folder or message just by bookmarking the URL. It’s really improved my opinion of the product, and it was done without CNET-style URLs.

Fairplay casinos

If we’re going to finance public programs on the backs of the desperate, we at least ought to give our local pigeons fair odds. So, why not require Massachusetts casinos to pay out at odds that factor in no cut for the house? If there’s a 1:38 chance your number will come up at the roulette table, your winning number would be paid at 38:1, not 36:1. Even without their edge (5.26% in roulette), the casinos would make money selling food, liquor, lodging, parking, pay-per-porn in-room tv, and tickets to entertainers you thought died fifteen years ago.

Not only would this keep the state from profiting from an industry predicated on unfairness, it would also give Massachusetts casinos a competitive edge against the casinos in those other states. Why would you gamble in a place where the odds are stacked against you if you could instead “A mass more wealth in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts…the Fair Play State.”

— via Joho the Blog

The first casino to do this will force everyone’s hand, and probably get sued by competitors trying to stop them. Chaos will ensue. I think this is a grand idea.

Have you registered your copyright?

Although you don’t need to register your images with the copyright office to own the rights to them, when you’re putting your assets in a place where nasty types can steal them, it does pay to register them. Carolyn Wright a photographer and lawyer specializing in photography law explained: “If the photo is properly registered when infringed, statutory damages are available. If the photo was not registered when infringed, the photographer can [only] get actual damages (the license fee plus profits that the infringer made from the infringement).”

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Simple Copyright Registration

Place captioned images in slide pages.  Place on light table. Use digital camera to shoot one frame of each page. Place images in folder on desktop. Print contents of folder or use contact sheet feature in Photoshop. Burn CD and include hard copy print out.

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Check for $30.00 payable to Register of Copyrights

— via Photopreneur – Make Money Selling Your Photos

Ingredients: Light table; Color printer; CD burner; Forms; $30. Result: Registered copyright for an entire collection of photos. I have several thousand raw images, of which a few hundred were processed successfully. Maybe I should just register all of them.

Startup Says It Can Make Ethanol for $1 a Gallon, and Without Corn

Coskata uses existing gasification technology to convert almost any organic material into synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Rather than fermenting that gas or using thermo-chemical catalysts to produce ethanol, Coskata pumps it into a reactor containing bacteria that consume the gas and excrete ethanol. Richard Tobey, Coskata’s vice president of engineering, says the process yields 99.7 percent pure ethanol.

Gasification and bacterial conversion are common methods of producing ethanol, but biofuel experts said Coskata is the first to combine them. Doing so, they said, merges the feedstock flexibility of gasification with the relatively low cost of bacterial conversion.

Tobey said Coskata’s method generates more ethanol per ton of feedstock than corn-based ethanol and requires far less water, heat and pressure. Those cost savings allow it to turn, say, two bales of hay into five gallons of ethanol for less than $1 a gallon, the company said. Corn-based ethanol costs $1.40 a gallon to produce, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

— via Wired News

It works with any leftover crap biomass. So instead of having to make fuel from fresh and edible food, we can make it from discards and waste products. Kind of strange to see “bioreactor” in a fuel context.

Move Over Godzilla, The Loch Ness Monster Terrorizes Tokyo

The upcoming movie “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep” has prompted one hell of a publicity stunt in Tokyo Bay. The extremely cool effect illustrated above is achieved using a large water screen and some very well timed water fountains.

— via Gizmodo

It turns out that water mist makes a great projection surface for large three-dimensional objects. Or smoke, if you don’t want to get people wet. I don’t think advertisers have figured out how to mix this with naturally occurring fog, yet.

Chris Harrison – Visualizing the Bible

As I developed the cross-references visualization, it became increasingly clear that the data woven into the Bible was incredibly rich. Although the data Christoph shared with me was interesting, it told little about the people and places mentioned in the tome. In response, I set out to derive a new data set from the Bible, one that would capture relationships between people and places – essentially a biblical social network.

The first thing I had to do was build a list of biblical names – Wikipedia already had a comprehensive one (2619 names!). Using this list, I parsed the text of the King James Bible. When two names occurred in the same verse, a connection between those two entities was created. To make this information visually meaningful, I ran the network of connections through my WikiViz engine, which caused highly connected groups of entities to coalesce. I through it would be fitting to render the visualization using an ‘old world’ color scheme.”

— via Boing Boing Blog

I like the aesthetics of the social network graph, seeing the minor and major players all represented on one graph.

Slate Magazine on the market for “Zenware”

There’s an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you’re used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you’ll benefit most from their absence.

— via 43 Folders

I use WriteRoom on OS X and Dark Room on Windows. When I’m unable to write and need to, I use these applications to create an environment that maximizes focus. They are absolutely the most effective writing environments I’ve ever used on a computer.

Cocoa Dev Central: Learn Cocoa

This tutorial shows you how to create your first Cocoa app. It assumes no previous experience with programming or Xcode.

The app you will not write any code for this app, but it will still have some impressive features. The screenshots and descriptions refer to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (click here for Tiger version).

— via inluminent/weblog

A brief introduction to using XCode to bind together system objects for a Notepad program. Handy for learning a bit about how Cocoa applications are linked together, but doesn’t cover any of the written code required for complex applications.

Connect a Desk for Stand Up Computing

… the Connect-a-Desk may actually prove useful by allowing users to work while standing or walking. I know that something like this certainly would have come in handy during CES, instead of constantly fighting for seats in the press room.

— via Gizmodo

Cute idea. I’ve got a device packed away somewhere that provides back support when you’re sitting cross-legged. Maybe they’re compatible, and using both provides the ultimate in sitting-down laptop ergonomics. (Or not.)

Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind: book explains magic, hypnosis and the rationale for rationalism

Tricks of the Mind starts off explaining many of the mentalist’s techniques for remembering things, from long lists of numbers and names to grocery lists to memorizing entire packs of cards.

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From there, it seems like a straight technique book that explains the principles behind Brown’s flavour of magic, the way that magicians can exploit out brain’s own blind spots, minor malfunctions and quirks to fool us about what we’ve seen.

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This segues neatly into an even-more-fascinating section on performing hypnosis on your friends and yourself and what hypnosis can and can’t do. I’ve used clinical hypnosis and self hypnosis to solve some of my most pernicious problems in life (writer’s block, smoking, stress) and while I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, I found Brown’s take on it more lucid — and practical — than pretty much anything I’ve read in the field.

— via Boing Boing Blog

At first glance, it looks like a book about mentalism with a scientific approach. I’m very curious to read it, especially for the hypnotism bit.

Futzing as the Future of Work

And it is a very very valuable skill to have. The rate of your success as a knowledge broker is the length to which you can connect those structural holes, which are filled with a great amount of information, connections and crazy ideas (usually from another batch of useless information).

In fact the amount of useless information one can amass plus the confidence at which one can deliver it is directly correlated with the amount of money one will make disseminating this information.

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Knowledge brokers are good futzers because, well, futzing leads to more knowledge. Maybe someday, bridging those structural holes will be automated, but for today, it’s an incredibly creative and valuable job done by master futzers all over the world.

— via Kalsey Consulting Group :: Measure Twice

This is why i so enjoyed ETcon 2003. Wandering around between different rooms filled with knowledge, bridging people’s information to each other. By the end of the conference I’d brought together several folks who otherwise might not have met so clearly. How can I develop a career out of this knowledge bridging?

With friends like these…

Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries – and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

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Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.

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“… we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”

— via cityofsound

Excellent rant about Facebook. Explores the political and ideological background of the funding and makes several very good points. The first lesson I learned from Google? “All information is public, given the right search terms.”

Boing Boing Blog: Tool for mindfulness: Powerseed

[W]hile it is marketed primarily for weight loss, it turns out to be a useful reminder/timer for virtually any activity where mindfulness is important. It’s a sleek, battery-powered pod about as big as the end of your thumb. It offers both visual and audible queues, and operates in a couple of different coaching modes. The basic idea is that it is a discrete coach that prompts you to “check-in” with yourself. It signals both short and long regular intervals, which are useful for being aware of time passing, as well as performing different routines are each mark.

— via Boing Boing Blog

A handy little device with one purpose in life: reminding you. It doesn’t keep a task list, it doesn’t care what you’re reminding yourself about, it just reminds and gets on with life.

Smart Mobs: Subliminally morphing your face into a candidate’s photo can persuade you to change your vote

The finding is simple — using the same morphing software you can buy online for twenty or thirty dollars, researchers morphed subjects’ faces into the photographs of political candidates. Without knowing that their own faces had been incorporated, potential voters who either weakly favored one candidate or had not yet made a decision decided to choose the candidate that subliminally resembled themselves — even though they were not told about the morphing until after they made their choices.

— via Smart Mobs

Rigorous testing and a repeatable result. Coming soon: advertising that uses your own face to sell you things. Yuck.

Jun Murakoshi: Abstract seashell that fits your ear

What has not been done by using rapid prototyping technique? My answer is making sounds. It must be difficult to make music but it could be possible to make noise. When you put a seashell on your ear, you can hear something strange noise. It is noise but it makes us feel good. This product is a wearable instrument for listening the noise like seashell makes.

— via Boing Boing Blog

Careful application of evolving algorithms, fractal mathematics, and humans to rate the aural effect could develop the “seashell” into a serious audio enhancement device.