Stuff from 2010
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 4, 2010)
There is no doubt that in the tech world, the combination of the shift to "cloud" computing (which to me means both the growing relegation of the desktop PC as nothing more than an intelligent cache that can power more responsive UIs, and the ability to leverage at-scale virtual compute environments run by the big web companies) plus the explosion of post-PC ubiquitously connected mobile devices, are going to be two most important ingredients in the cocktail that gets mixed up over the course of the coming year.
In the context of those two undeniable trends, here are three predictions for the coming year:
Privacy on the net is going to become a big deal. Facebook's recent snafu was just the start of this. Every year people do more important stuff online, and when combined with big companies whose emergent business models are predicated on targeted media accelerating attempts to ramp revenue, you get an explosive combination. This will only be exacerbated by mobile devices streaming all sorts of interesting metadata (starting with location) to these same web services. It will not take long for one of these location-based features to mix with lax privacy in a way that causes real harm in the physical world— theft, adultery, rape, or murder style— and when it does, it will create one of the big stories of 2010. It will also result in a groundswell movement on the part of normal users to take control over their information, be it what gets clicked on from their web browser, or emitted from a mobile.
And while on the subject of mobile, Android is poised to be the only alternative to the Apple juggernaut (goodbye RIM, goodbye Symbian, goodbye Maemo)— and in some key ways, it will surpass the iPhone this year. The obvious one is what is being repeated all throughout the tech blogosphere: that as everyone BUT Apple depends on Android, their installed base will quickly eclipse Apple. While I think this may be true, I am not sure that it matters all that much, as the installed base we should be talking about is that of the Webkit-derived mobile browsers that are common to both the iPhone and all of the Android devices. From a developer perspective, I think that this will increasingly become the relevant target (especially as the AppStore mania settles)— and will continue being so until the smartphone form factor settles down, x86 PC style (which I personally hope doesn't happen for a long time).
Where Android's ascendancy does matter is that as a more open system, it will enable hardware manufacturers and service providers to play with deep web service integration in much more interesting ways that any sandboxed developer environment ever will. Obvious choices will be things like data synchronization and content delivery— both of which a big company would see as ways of making users more "sticky." But there are other more interesting deep integration efforts along the "smartphone as a remote control for life" which innovative companies will be able to play with.
And finally (and I realize that this one is a geek aspiration and a stretch), I hope to see 2010 begin the process of turning regular users into programmers. Right now we are almost there without realizing it: every time someone sets a Google News alert, uses an eBay sniping program, or customizes a Pandora list, it is a form of programming. A few years ago, when millions of kids where learning rudimentary HTML and CSS to trick out their MySpace pages, I thought we were heading in this direction, but it didn't seem to catch on. This year, with the notion of APIs being front-and-center among web service developers, we may start to see something that goes beyond the geek efforts that were Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor. Already, I am amazed at how many regular folks seem to be interested in the Facebook API, and the other day, while helping a friend with a Wordpress installation, I was shocked to see how vibrant and turnkey its plug-in ecosystem has become.
The best part of anticipating the coming year is that, no matter how you cut it, it promises to be more exciting than the last one that just passed!
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Posted by Antonio
1 month, 4 weeks ago (Jan. 11, 2010)
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has a fascinating and incredibly well-written editorial in the WSJ today called "World Wide Mush" where he looks at the dark side of what he calls "digital collectivism," or the ethos behind the platforms and projects that have most benefited from user contributions.
As a huge fan of open source over proprietary software, and insightful bloggers over established journalists, I was particularly taken by his claim that the era of digital collectivism is destroying the ability for the folks engaged in intellectual work to make a decent living. As he writes:
We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.
This is a bold claim— however it is one which he supports with a number of interesting arguments that make the piece a gem. Curious as to whether I could do some of my own quick research on the peasantization of the folks at the frontier of digital culture, I turned to Indeed's fantastic salary comparison search engine to try to tease out the differences in jobs available to folks playing in similar but distinct positions.
I started with my favorite: bloggers versus traditional journalists: according to Indeed, the average salaries for jobs listing "blogger," "reporter," and "journalist" in their title or descriptions are $34K, $44K, and $52K respectively. Ouch!
Turning then to software, where there is little doubt of the leverage and impact of open source, I was similarly surprised. I wanted to look at web developers according to technology of choice so I picked "PHP" (the most prevalent and totally open source), "Struts" (a Java-based middle ground between both worlds), and "ASP.NET" (Microsoft's completely proprietary stack) and came away with: $75K, $89K, and $83K respectively.
Now there are all sorts of problems with this type of quick-and-dirty analysis, but the pattern that emerges as you play out the types of job descriptions more aligned with this new era of digital collectivism against their predecessors is that Larnier is right— digital collectivism is no panacea for making a living.
A similar theme has emerged around the notion of "digital sharecroppers" or platform purveyors that leverage millions of small user contributions to build accrue most of the value for themselves. With the exception of eBay, and possibly Google (until now), this seems to be the case among all of the other "platforms" that have emerged in the last decade. So much so in fact, that I often tend to read the vision of many of these platforms, "X is going to democratize Y," as "X is going to really reap the investments of users who will do Y for next to nothing."
Examples:
Facebook is going to democratize communications and publishing = Facebook is going to reap the creative investment of users who will pour their lives into the largest privacy violation cesspool ever known to man.
Apple is democratizing mobile applications = Apple is going to reap the hundreds of millions of hours invested by developers for apps that are either free or sell for next to nothing so that they can maintain and possibly widen their lead selling expensive small computers.
The combination of these two trends makes Larnier's parting message in the piece something we should all be paying close attention to:
The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?
Certainly worth at least keeping in mind as we plow forward into this brave new world.
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Posted by Antonio
1 month, 4 weeks ago (Jan. 12, 2010)
I am skeptical of people who claim to want touchscreen laptops for the simple reason that I detest smudgy screens and thus can't see myself ever wanting to dirty up my laptop.
That said, I find the new extra large trackpads on the aluminum Macbook Pros to be the single most upgrade worthy feature in the laptops. Along with Apple's new Magic Mouse, they really do represent a new kind of human interface peripheral.
Except that for the last few months, my three and four finger gestures have completely stopped working. I know it may sound like overkill to anyone from the Wintel side of the house, who is used to at most the two finger trackpad scroll, but 3 fingers to navigate forwards/backwards (this is mapped to 2 fingers on the magic mouse) and 4 fingers to toggle Exposé (a desktop-clearing UI thing) become incredibly useful to anyone who has bothered to train themselves to use them. Trust me.
In case you are among those Mac users afflicted by the trackpad gimping software upgrade that took away my 3/4 finger gestures, here is the solution:
1. Run Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) and click the "Repair permissions" button.
2. Reboot your Mac. Before it starts its reboot sequence hold down command-S (also known as Apple-S) to boot into single user mode. When you get a prompt, type in:
fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2s
3. When it finishes, type reboot. Voila, your third and fourth fingers just became useful as well.
I have no idea how disk permissions can affect the trackpad/mouse driver, but after some Googling and experimentation, I discovered that this fix did the trick for me.
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buddies
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Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 14, 2010)
The story of the clever Chinese hackers compromising Google's data center (along with 20 other companies) is almost too juicy to believe. Everyone likes the notion of a super smart hacker enemy who can, at a whim, bring crashing down the electronic infrastructure on which we are increasingly dependent. Especially if, along with the jingoistic fud, we can get a picture of a Chinese cyber cafe with scads of young men passionately pounding on computers (nevermind that they may be playing WoW).
All of which is why I think I might be more in the camp of Douglas Rushkoff, who suggested today that this might be Google's red herring for the fact that running all of your life from a server which you can only access through a leaky and insecure browser (HTTPS "fixes" notwithstanding) might not be the best plan— unless of course your entire engine for growth consists of getting more eyes to do just that.
I'm not sure that it is as stark as Rushkoff claims, but it certainly seems plausible that some brilliant PR person who has read a few too many Michael Crichton books giddy over the spin that could take care of two birds with one stone: the potential flaws with our favorite new mode of computing and the oopseys around making an "Evil" deal with the Chinese censors a few years ago.
And then again, may this is all just the Daemon just getting started...
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buddies
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 21, 2010)
Amazon opening up the Kindle with an SDK strikes me as an incredibly stupid move, or at the very least, one which is more based on the current wave of hype around SDKs or fear around the impending Apple tablet. Having been part of many "app platform" discussions over the last couple of years, I can't help but feel that most people need to stop reading the iPhone informercials that pass as "analysis" in the tech and business media and remember that most devices really are just appliances and don't need the overhead and potential instability of letting 3rd parties get up close and personal. And that most app efforts require developers, a generally non-bozo crowd that won't sink precious time into things that smell bad just because they looked good on a Powerpoint slide outlining the "stickiness strategy."
For instance, would you want your toilet to have an SDK so that third parties could build apps that listened for the onflush event and did fun things therein?
What really matters is that these connected appliances be extensible in ways that make sense, not that each one brings some new proprietary app environment that developers will have to learn. In the case of the Kindle, Amazon achieved this brilliantly with the "email to Kindle" feature that allowed anyone to send in a list of pre-approved document types for display on the device. I would even argue that for most smartphone platforms, the extensibility should come form the capable HTML5 mobile web browsers that allow for very specific app-like experiences without going down the SDK rathole.
It is app store mania continuing its mad rush, and I for one don't get why we are so ready to jump back into the days of developing with different libraries, toolkits, and operating systems like we did in the pre-web days.
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Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 25, 2010)
Chris Anderson has a piece in the latest issue of Wired, "Atoms Are the New Bits" (not yet online) which chronicles the emergence of DIY hardware development. Covering the basics of prototyping tools like 3D printers and CNC machines, he goes on to make a connection to the newly emerging short-run Chinese manufacturing supply chain to explain how a new industrial revolution might take place, even going so far as to quote from my favorite fiction book of 2009, Cory Doctorow's Makers:
The days of companies with names like "General Electric" and "General Mills" and "General Motors" are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.
As with his article on the Long Tail from five years ago, I think Anderson is on to something very big here even if he doesn't get all the causation correct. Short run manufacturing could be the basis for a whole new industrial base here, but not necessarily because of the democratization of prototyping tools (which as the story of Makerbot Industries shows is indeed happening along the same story arc as the PC revolution), but because of the powerful combination of the Internet as a collaboration channel (for ideas) and the Internet as a demand aggregation and distribution channel (for niche interests, passions, and ultimately sales).
This is the story of Threadless, a company which exists today because it is perfectly evolved to take advantage of these two forces in the apparel space. But increasingly it may also become the story of much more complex products. The Wired piece covers a local Boston startup called Local Motors which is trying the approach with cars— a complex multi-component electromechanical product that has all sorts of safety and regulatory challenges. If they can pull it off there is no reason not to wonder about other similarly complex products.
For instance, just the other day I was commenting to someone that I'd love to have a smartphone that had an internal 3000 mAh (they mostly have 1/2 of that) and a cheap low-power 7-segment display for most of the notifications that it would normally power up the battery for— "the longest lasting smartphone in the world." One can argue whether such a monster might end up being the Spruce Goose of the category, but with Android we've got the software to be able to do just that, and looking through any of the iSuppli teardowns, you quickly realize that most of the internal components of these devices are increasingly as "standard" as what goes into your typical PC.
How far are we from the day when someone can start the Threadless of smartphones? Then we could go from custom cases and wallpapers to devices truly tailored to our specific needs.
There are many wrecked ships that have fallen victim to the siren song of mass customization, but given enough relevant customization in a product category that has enough demand and you may just have something here.
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Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 26, 2010)
The humble and most underappreciated client of the RSS revolution, Google Reader, has just launched an interesting feature: the ability for a user to subscribe to a page that doesn't natively emit a syndication feed and still receive changes as a stream of events.
As RWW reports, this is not the first time a product has attempted to do this (and more significantly, geeks have been scraping webpages since the dawn of Perl), but the fact that it is Google, doing it at Google scale, is particularly relevant.
For a while now, we've had available both the page-oriented web that is best suited for humans to consume, and the stream-oriented publishing formats that blogs and RSS pioneered and that Facebook and Twitter popularized. In the middle, a few services have willing to take the step of translating the torrent of the stream into something page-oriented that people can consume in a page format (look at Techmeme or Tweetmeme for two great examples), but the promise of the programmable web is to lower the required investment in making a million such efforts not only possible, but easy.
And there lies the rub: Google providing any webpage's diffs as a stream is bound to lower the barriers to anyone looking to build on top of streams to create their own page aggregators. This was the promise of Yahoo Pipes (or Google Mash Editor), two products that couldn't overcome the complexity of incorporating content that was not readily digestible in one of a few syndication formats.
It's easy to imagine the possibilities, especially because we've got a good set of aggregators that scrape e-commerce, travel, and finance sites already. However I suspect the real promise of this particular Lego brick will come in scraping public data websites that have previously been ignored, either at the local level or around particular topics.
And I for one would much rather see Google spending engineering cycles in useful extensions to the web like this one than on bashing it out with Apple over the next dominant consumer computing device.
Tags:
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (Feb. 2, 2010)
I wanted to wait a week to put down my preliminary thoughts on the iPad both because of the crazy outpouring of people venting some very real emotion on all sides of the debate, and because I've learned that when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs, it often pays to let the reality distortion field fade a bit.
I am not a fan of netbooks— as I've written before, they are nothing but cheap laptops. Thus I was sort of excited to see Apple try to reinvent the category with the iPad. After a week of reading reviews though, I'm sad to say that this seems like a fairly incremental product— taking the best parts of the closed ecosystem of the iPhone/iPod touch and hitting the 4x magnify button on the form factor. It'll be a fun and possibly lucrative product— and in the end I could see Apple selling 1/3 to 1/2 as many of these as they have iPod touches (which is about 40MM to date). But here is where they fell short:
1. New formats: the Kindle sucks not because of its screen or hospital ID but because despite the connection to the Amazon web service and the persistent data connection, it fails to be as good as a paper book and doesn't reinvent any of the parts of the book that could use some social/cloud juice. From what I could see, Apple is doing nothing better here (at least with version 1). They haven't defined a new format that would allow publishers to take advantage of video and audio and they didn't do anything to make the experience of finding, reading, and sharing books any more social. Could be that the publishers weren't hip to it, but if anyone could crack that particular cartel, I thought Apple could.
2. Ergonomics: Ned wrote this one up, and frankly, I can't believe the Reality Distortion Field has kept other people from noticing that the idea of a non-tactile keyboard without a place to rest one's palms renders this a piss poor input device. This is ironic as Apple was the first company to do the palm rest design for laptops with the Powerbook 100/140/170 series that was even shown during the keynote.
3. Closed ecosystem: I'm less worried about this one than the people who feel that Apple is starting us on the road to being like the bio-sacks that pass as humans in the movie Walle, because it does seem as though the combination of HTML5 and the A4 CPU will make webapps really sing on this machine, but it would have been nice to have given people some sort of mechanism for side-loading applications (even as "untrusted" like Android and S60 do). Again, this is ironic coming from the company that had its first hit product (the Apple ][) succeed because some crazy hackers in Boston wrote a killer app and distributed it with little involvement from Apple. That said, I do think if the iPad becomes ubiquitous enough, Apple will have to open up (or be subject to aggressive jailbreaking as the FUD around "messing with the carrier settings") doesn't exist for this type of device.
Finally, perhaps the biggest disappointment for me is that because of 1-3 the iPad seems to be primarily a content consumption device, a sort of modern-day version of the portable TVs that Sony and others started selling in the 1980s. That may be what the market wants, but I find it hard to muster the same level of excitement as I would have had for a more general computing type of device. In the case of the latter, creativity really is the upper limit on what can be done. With a closed, content consuming device, we'll end up where we are with the iPhone: with small widgets that all basically do the similar types of information retrieval and display. If this is the new world of personal computing, it looks a little boring.
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digerati
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Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (Feb. 3, 2010)
One of the great things to come out of Apple's snub of Flash during the iPad launch has been the discussion around whether Flash is really needed for a first-class web browsing experience. In reading the various opinions, I came across a brilliant Safari plug-in, ClickToFlash, which shims the Flash player so that you have to explicitly approve any Flash widgets that are loaded on pages. The plug-in provides a whitelist so that certain domains will always load Flash (say Pandora and Hulu) widgets. Apparently there are also versions of this same general idea for Firefox and Chrome.
I've been using ClickToFlash for 4 days and there is no going back for me. Apple's claim that the Mac crashes most because of Flash seems well supported by the fact that I can now have 20-25 tabs open regularly without Safari hogging all of my machine's resources. It's awesome.
What is most nefarious about Flash is not all of the explicit video embeds that people use, but the fact that it has snuck into display advertising. If you install any of these plug-ins, you'll quickly realize how many of the standard IAB ad sizes are now actually being powered by Flash widgets— which do nothing but pulse in annoying ways— and perhaps more significantly— suck down system resources.
Just say no to Flash.
Posted by Antonio
4 weeks, 1 day ago (Feb. 11, 2010)
For a while I loved Twitter. Not because it was realtime. Not because it was easier than blogging. And not because it was cool.
Mostly because it was a quick way to get a feel for the things that were going on in the lives of folks one level beyond those who I interacted with every day. In having invented a new format (140 characters) and brought into mainstream the asymmetric follow relationship, Twitter brought into the world something really interesting.
But then the marketing people got on it. Or if they were already on it, they got super aggressive about polluting the Twitterverse. Link velocity increased by orders of magnitude, and what started out the types of interesting articles that you might share on Delicious, quickly became links to people's companies, blogs, or special "deals" (thin affiliate scams).
Sure, you could always curate the list of your followers and keep only that 0.01% of folks who had not started using Twitter as a new form of direct marketing. But as Twitter climbed to a billion updates per month something happened to the way in which everyone uses the medium such that even folks who were funny or insightful one third of the time spent the other two thirds plugging their blogs or the new startup they'd just gotten involved with.
And this, it seems to me, is how a new medium gets "typed" by its early adopters. So that now, no matter how many people get on Twitter (and I suspect it won't be many more), it will forever remain the place where the marketing people should have STFU.
Which is why I am excited about Google Buzz. Though in many ways it seems like a copy of the most social/sharing parts of Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed, I think its got a few key differences that may help it move adoption-wise beyond what these services pioneered. Chief among these attributes are the easy integration with existing communication patterns (Gmail), and the ability to create fine-grained groups and direct the stream of updates at say, just "family" or "college roommates" or whatever.
This last one is important and will be critical to Buzz's eventual success. During the first phase of the Internet, a lot of products struggled and crashed on the reef of privacy controls, and it wasn't until the 2004-2005 era of "default to public" that a lot of the same services started catching on in a meaningful way. The "default to public" era culminated with Facebook's claim that people needed to abandon the notion of privacy online and just get used to being public. For most of the non-tweeting, non-Silicon Valley crowd, this statement is about as alien as claiming that people needed to abandon breathing and get used to hypoxia.
If this right, and the Buzz team gets all of the small affordances right (no small feat despite an impressive 1.0 effort), this blend of email and status updates (in a controlled way) may create a new format— one which which I hope will not again be typed a new kind of weird direct marketing vehicle.
Here's hoping...
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digerati
Posted by Antonio
3 weeks, 6 days ago (Feb. 12, 2010)
Chris Dixon had a provocative post on how young engineers choosing to join big companies like Google is bad for the startup ecosystem, a common sentiment among the folks that I have been meeting over the last few weeks here in the rekindled Boston startup scene.
But I'm not sure it is right for one simple reason: for the most part, young founders tend to breed stupid startup ideas. Not because they are themselves stupid, but because they lack the proper execution context.
And while there is a lot of merit to apprenticing at established (funded) startups, I'm not sure that most of these provide adequate execution context either.
So if context truly is king, what does the proper execution context look like? Ideally, the right context exposes one to a whole host of business problems that need solutions because the current ones are being provided by big dumb companies that have grown fat and complacent of the profits produced by innovations whose progenitors are long gone. This is even better when the problems can be solved through new innovation that is itself only possible as technology is shifting.
Let me take a local example: here in Boston we have an existing cluster around storage, anchored by one of the biggest, dumbest tech companies I've ever seen: EMC. If I were betting on disruptive startups, I'd much rather take the folks who have spent time selling billions of dollars worth of storage into big companies, government contracts, and just about everyone else. Certainly more so than the folks that have spent burned cycles trying to copy Dropbox or Carbonite because that is the context they understand.
One of my heroes, Alan Kay, said that the right perspective is worth 80 IQ points. In my experience, execution context is not dissimilar.
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Posted by Antonio
3 weeks, 1 day ago (Feb. 17, 2010)
Liz Gannes over at Gigaom has a coined new term for what Google is doing now that it is back in the $3-15MM acquisition game for former Googlers that have left the nest: "acquiring," a mixture of acquiring and hiring. In the case of companies that have received external funding, this is a fast way to poison the well (after all no fund, no matter what the size, has its needle moved by such low dollar exits) so it's pretty clear that it is a bad thing for the ecosystem. In the case of bootstrapped companies however, I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
It is a good thing because the founders of these projects walk away with two really important things: some cash in the bank and the confidence that they can build something that is valuable to someone— valuable enough that the mighty Google is willing to pay an especially outsized hiring bonus for it.
It is a bad thing because it creates the feeling that shooting for feature on products is a viable (and relatively safer) way to achieve success. This is an illusion for two reasons: first, future real investors and employees are savvy enough to see these types of exits for what they are. And second it allows entrepreneurs to focus on incremental "pickoffs" from the guessable product roadmaps of mainstream products instead of completely disruptive ideas.
Another way to put it: I've met with a few folks in the Boston ecosystem recently who are trying to get this "Think Big" meme jumpstarted with entrepreneurs and investors. And sadly, these "acquhires" seem to be taking us all in exactly the opposite direction.
Tags:
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 6 days ago (Feb. 19, 2010)
It's been 4 years since I left Emacs for Textmate for many of the same reasons that I left desktop Linux for OSX— I was just tired of configuring everything instead of having it just work.
That said, Textmate's slow development cycle has been bugging me as of late. It is a terrific text editor— fantastic even in some cases— but the fact that almost a half decade into its existence, you still can't split a window to see multiple files side-by-side is just ridiculous. In fact it makes it too hard to review code changes or take notes on a document that you are editing, or any of a number of other important tasks that text editors have been able to do.
I get the whole "opinionated software" thing, I really do. But being at a geek conference (Pycon) and seeing all of those Ubuntu desktops configured just so (some with Emacs and some with Vim), something just snapped. So I'm going back to Emacs. Eddie recommended Aquamacs which is supposed to be a nice Cocoa port, so we'll see if that works as a nice "tweener," If not, it's back to XWindows for me.
As a side note, I'm still blow away to see the developers at this Python conference running Eclipse to work in Python (and mostly on webapps). While it may be acceptable for the Java/C/C++ world, seeing Eclipse at Pycon is sort of like watching the soccer mom getting out of the mongo SUV at the local Starbucks— way too much of a tank for something that should just be lighter.
Finally, if you like this kind of geek rumination, I highly recommend the blog The Setup.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 5 days ago (Feb. 20, 2010)
During my last job at HP, I got a chance to get up close and personal with a few big partnerships with other tech companies which had similar goals with respect to specific product roadmaps. In all of these cases, the point of the relationships was to work together on projects that would result in a bunch of software that would ultimately be better for both companies.
Now hold that thought for a moment.
Over the last few days I've been having a blast at Pycon, the main annual conference behind the Python programming language. It's fantastic to see how far it has come over the last two decades, almost entirely on the back of committed volunteers who burn nights and weekends maintaining and building a high quality software project which is so critical to many industries, and especially for the future of the open Web OS.
And yet, there are still a few warts on Python that could benefit from the focused effort of sponsored work. Of all of the big companies, Google has done the best job to date here— sponsoring projects like Unladden Swallow, a needed speed boost. There are other big companies that occasionally sponsor Python work, but not as many as you would think— especially not given how strategically important the language is to them.
There are two things that hit me this conference that might provide a solution. The first is that as serious as these warts might be, it would take relatively little manpower to remove them. Specifically, paying for something like 2 engineers for a sustained year of 100% work could go a long way towards solving speed, packaging, or concurrency issues in a really deep way. The second observation is that by the standards of big company budgets— and specifically as applied to the kinds of partnerships I mentioned above— this is an insignificant rounding error when it comes to dollars spent— even for really senior folks.
Instead of spending the money on needlessly flying executives back and forth to regurgitate the same 20 slides over the "partnership possibilities," I wonder whether there isn't the possibility or reallocating these Steaks&Strippers budgets to fund open source wart removal as a kind of joint venture where each side dedicates a couple of engineers to something that would benefit both companies and allow meaningful longterm partnerships to develop.
It would take more thinking to see exactly how this could be fit into something like removing the Python GIL (a impedance to really good concurrency and multicore support), but I'm sure it could be done. Each big company usually has its cash cow business model: Google and web advertising, Intel and chips, HP and ink, etc. And each of these cash cows often generates a whole host of "ecosystem partnerships" that companies go into to ensure the long-term continued growth of X, where X is whatever makes the cash register continue to sing.
In effect, newer projects like Android may provide the perfect test for these types of partnerships. Except of course that a mobile OS is pretty strategic to most big tech companies which is usually code for more Steaks&Strippers and less meaningful partnering.
Something to think about.
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Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 5 days ago (Feb. 21, 2010)
I am doing the closing Pycon keynote this morning, so apologies to anyone who isn't there (feel free to skip this post, though I'll put up the notes and slides later today if you are interested).
To the other thousand of you, you are here because you're not listening. You've gone to The Google to figure out who this guy is and why he is so animated this early on a Sunday morning. Go back to listening and I promise by the end of the talk— agree or disagree— you'll know why.
Trust me, The Google will still bring you back here after the talk.
For those that just won't take no for an answer, who'd rather listen to frozen me talking to you from the bitstream of the Internet instead of live and in the flesh, I just have one more thing to say:
Python rocks because you do. As a community you do an amazing job of growing, maintaining, and evolving what I think is the greatest treasure that open source has delivered. Whether you agree or disagree with the argument in my talk, I hope at least you'll be entertained.
This talk is for you guys. Python works because you do.
Thank you.
Now go listen!
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 4 days ago (Feb. 21, 2010)
Pycon has always been a fantastic conference— especially given that it is run entirely on the backs of volunteers. Much better than most paid for-profit conferences for sure.
I've posted the notes and slides from my closing keynote this morning— a small contribution to this excellent conference. If you are interested in reading how it was supposed to go (and I think I got close), feel free to go read it.
Looking forward to PyCon 2011.
Tags:
hackers
,
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 week, 6 days ago (Feb. 26, 2010)
Over the last 3.5 years I've logged almost 3,000 miles with my Nike+ system, a low-cost pedometer that uses the iPod/iTunes ecosystem to submit my runs to a site for online competitions and other interesting data-oriented tasks. I have come to rely on the Nike system so much that if I find myself without it, I won't run. By just collecting data and transparently uploading it to a place where I can go back and look at it, it has managed to alter my behavior.
This trend appears particularly powerful for health related issues. The Withings scale (WIFI and with the ability to broadcast your weight to various social networks) seems to be popular among the folks I follow on Twitter and the always "almost here" Fitbit promises to track all sorts of activity related stuff for subsequent analysis. As dorky as it sounds, it would appear that "what gets measured gets done" at least by a certain part of the population.
Today I ran into an ingenious mass market personal telemetry device that appears suited for children: simple, stylishly designed (but easy to to personalize), and best of all, cheap, the S2H Replay is essentially a low budget Fitbit/Nike+ system that fits inside of a color rubber wristband and tracks activity. What may make the Replay the Flip of personal telemetry devices though is that rather than relying on any sort of Wifi signal or a complex base station, it just emits a code that details the amount of work you've done to the site where you are then able to earn points.
Fans of the fully automatic will think of this as an ugly hack that disqualifies the Replay from the pantheon of early personal telemetry devices— after all, the user has to remember to go enter his code to claim credit for the exercise done. However, if my experience with the sometimes buggy Nike+iTunes combination is any indication, users will be very motivated to "get credit" for work done.
Which incidentally is where S2H performs its second great hack: getting users to compete for prizes in the forms of certificates to various different e-tailers. Think of it as a credit card reward program used for good.
I'll have more to say in a few weeks after I've used my own two guinea pigs for a test (boys, 7 & 4), but for now I sure am glad that there are so many creative approaches being taken towards kickstarting the personal telemetry revolution!
(And here is the Russell Davies's excellent review that tipped me off to the existence of this neat gizmo).
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 days, 14 hours ago (March 7, 2010)
It is a mystery to me how the hobbyist hacker community can make Android so much better than the stock images that Google ships, but if you've got a Nexus one, Cyanogen has just made things much much better. As an iPhone owner from day 1, I can tell you that the simple fact of moving from the stock 2.1 image that comes with your Nexus to the latest Cyanogen creates about the same feeling of improvement that moving from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS provided— except that in this case, you aren't changing your hardware. It is software's true magic!
If you've got a Nexus One, and are interested, read on.
Unfortunately, the process is far from simple and the Android mod community has a lot of new jargon that you have to get used to. If you've ever jailbroken an iPhone or iPod Touch, I'd say this is about 30-50% more involved, so get ready to rumble.
Fortunately, I had the benefit of Eddie's amazingly good notes to guide me through it all. I am reproducing them below, along with a mini glossary at the front, and some comments in places that I found tricky. Your mileage may vary on these, and be aware that you could in theory brick (or destroy) your phone, though practically speaking, I've found this to be almost impossible to do with how well the boot loading sequence has been thought out on Android.
--
Some basic terms:
In Android land, the equivalent of jailbreaking is "rooting" which refers to getting access to the root directory of the phone's ROM (which is not really Read Only since both Google/HTC and you overwrite this with every update). In the steps below, you will be using a command line program called "fastboot" to do the unlocking on that root directory and install custom software. Fastboot is also the name of a mode in the Nexus when you first boot up (it is actually available to all Android phones) that gives you a sort of minimalist OS/boot loader thing to take actions that affect the OS in the phone. It's not quite like a PC BIOS menu, but it can be helpful to think of it that way. Below you'll see the key combination required to get the phone to that which can vary a little by model.
Also, there are three basic software bundles you will be applying after the phone is "rooted:" the recovery image which basically provides a more powerful fastboot environment (to do things like unlocking and backing up), the baseband update (which is just like the iPhone one is that it updates the separate system that runs the radio), and the Cyanogen custom ROM which is the magic that will make your Nexus instantly better.
There is an additional step required which has to do with the crappy licensing around the proprietary Google apps (that you will definitely want on: Market, Gmail, Maps, etc.). Because Google asked the Cyanogen guy to stop including those with his mods, you'll have to apply them as a sort of patch when you are done. This is ok and is actually the easiest part of the update.
We did all of this on a Mac and the instructions below are for that platform— however, I am sure the Android SDK is good enough that it will be a relatively simple exercise to transpose the instructions for Linux and Windows. We did assume however that you are comfortable with the command line.
Finally one important note: in doing this, you will lose all of the data on the phone. Because of Google's phenomenal sync, this won't affect email, contacts, or calendars, and because the media (pictures) are stored on the SD card, you will be fine there, but depending on which apps you've installed, you may lose some local data. You will also have to reinstall all of your apps. You have been warned.
Let's get started:
1. Take a deep breath. It is just software and you are going to master it!
2. Download and install the Mac OSX Android SDK. I am going to assume for the purposes of this list that you have put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/ but it doesn't matter.
3. Get fastboot-mac from here. Rename it 'fastboot' and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
4. Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img,
update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip AND gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip
from here and put them in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
5. Get recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img from here and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/
6. Put Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img,
update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip and gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip
on the root of the SD card. You can do this by mounting the phone via a USB cable (this works just like any USB stick except you have to click a button on the phone's UI).
7. In your phone settings > applications > development, set usb
debugging to enabled.
8. Turn off your phone and put the SD card with the 3 files on it
into your phone.
9. Hook up the USB connection to your phone and your mac.
10. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power
button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot
screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
11. In Terminal on your mac, cd to /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools
12. Type ‘./fastboot devices‘ to make sure your phone is recognized
(it should list a device number rather than simply returning to
command prompt with no feedback).
13. Type ‘./fastboot oem unlock‘ to unlock the bootloader (wohoo, your phone is now rooted!)
14. Use volume keys on the phone to navigate to yes and press the
power button to confirm.
15. When the phone finishes booting, in your phone settings >
applications > development, set usb debugging to enabled, then power
it down.
16. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power
button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot
screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
17. (you're still in terminal in /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools)
Type ‘./fastboot flash recovery ./recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img‘. (Note
filename will change as recovery image is updated)
18. Type './fastboot flash radio ./Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img'
to also update your radio at this point
19. Once the Recovery flash is complete (should be almost instant),
press the Power Button. The highlighted blue text should now say
HBOOT. Use the volume down button to highlight "Recovery" and hit the
power button to reboot into recovery.
20. if this step fails, power down the phone, and try this: hold down
the VOLUME DOWN button and then hold the POWER button until you get to
the skateboard screen; use volume down to highlight RECOVERY and hit
the POWER button
21. You should now be in the Recovery screen after a reboot -- this
screen has 9 green text options at the top and an android x in the
center of the screen
22. Once in Recovery Mode, use the trackball to scroll down to
"Backup/Restore" and press the trackball three times, and wait until
the backup is complete.
23. Once backup is complete, wipe, since you're coming from stock
(even fastboot oem unlock may not fully wipe, do it just in case) many
users report the phone not booting properly without a wipe at this
point.
24. Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
25. Select the CyanogenMod update (update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip),
and press the trackball again to confirm. Wait until the flash is
complete. (Note: this will take a little while).
26. Once again, Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
27. This time, select the Google Apps File
(gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip), and press the trackball again to
confirm. Wait until the flash is complete.
28. Once you are back in the main menu, press the trackball select the
first option (Reboot system now) and reboot the phone.
29. If everything was done correctly, the phone should boot into CyanogenMod!
Eddie's extra bonus section— only for the adventurous (I have not tried this!)
Follow the instructions here to download your kernel and associated .ko module, your overclocking tool, and go
to town with undervolted and overclocked goodness!
Good luck. If it works correctly, it should take about 35-45 minutes to do it. And at the end of it, you will not only have one of the coolest hacker phones, but you will have done it! And trust me, it is worth it!
[A big thanks to Eddie, who both plied me with drinks last week to convince me that I should take this on, and then produced the first draft of this document so that I could not end up bricking my own iPhone]
REFERENCE
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=611829
http://androidandme.com/2010/01/hacks/video-how-to-unlock-and-root-a-nexus-one/
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=559
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/ADB
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=459830
http://andblogs.net/fastboot/
http://developer.htc.com/adp.html
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/Full_Update_Guide_-_Nexus_One_Firmware_to_CyanogenMod
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-hack-a-nexus-one#cite_note-4
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-5-0-nexus-one
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=633238&page=66
Tags:
hackers
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digerati
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I'm a software entrepreneur living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.