TedPage

I think more parents need to have bumper stickers like this:

Originally these type of stickers started out as parents showing that they're proud of their children. Thinks like "My kid is on the honor roll." But, now it has really gotten insane. There are now "my child is a good citizen" type stickers. All in all, life mimics Dilbert.

posted on Tue, 31 Jul 2007 at 14:18 | permanent link

In a recent blog post Mark Cuban predicted the end of the Internet. Basically saying that the edges of the network will dominate as that is the only place where the bandwidth rates people will grow to expect can be maintained. Expectations will outpace the ability to expand both the backbone and ISPs connection to that backbone. I disagreed, but it got me thinking.

I think the real solution here is that CDNs need to transition to ADNs, or application delivery networks.

Imagine that instead of delivering images and HTML to your distribution network, you instead give a copy of your application. Not a bunch of PHP or Perl code, but a virtual machine that runs what ever you want your application to be. Similar to a CDN today, when someone accesses your site they get redirected to use the application somewhere physically closer to their connection. All the AJAX calls go back and forth to this local server as the connections that need to be are aggregated up to your main site. Bandwidth is minimized and the application feels very fast independent of how many people are downloading the new Paris Hilton video.

Case Study: Google Think about Google's architecture. They have all these distributed data centers, which many people have identified as them building their own CDN. That's not really the case at all because they are putting their main application in these data centers. They are just pushing out data updates to them, and letting the search happen at the leaf nodes. Google is an ADN.

With technologies like Xen and VMWare the virtualization software is already in place. The bandwidth is already in demand. Anyone have a billion dollars they want to fund my idea with? <smile>

posted on Mon, 30 Jul 2007 at 19:25 | permanent link

Commonly people believe they have to invent Google to be innovative. The simple innovations are the ones that excite me the most. I was at Williams-Sonoma this weekend and saw and appliance with this plug. While it's hard to see in the cell phone picture basically it's a plug with a hole in the middle. This means that when you want to remove this plug from the wall you can hook your finger into the hole and pull. Much easier than grabbing the outside. Very innovative.

posted on Tue, 24 Jul 2007 at 14:20 | permanent link

The title may be cliche but it describes my impressions after reading an interview with Mark Cuban in IEEE Spectrum. Before the article I pretty much knew Mark Cuban as the eccentric owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. He's known for being loud and basically letting his thoughts be known in a more public way than the NBA would like. He made is money with broadcast.com and now owns HDNet. These are probably the reasons he should be known.

What struck me most about the interview was his understanding of how the movie industry is hurting itself. And, that they shouldn't be scared of change as much as they need to embrace the new media landscape.

If you're going to create content, create it digitally and then just find out how consumers want to consume it. Sometimes they want to consume it in the home. Sometimes they want to consume it on their PDAs. Sometimes they want to get out of the house and go into a theater. And they want to consume it in different quality levels: Super hi-def, regular hi-def, on a small TV, analog to download, whatever.

And what are we selling anymore? We're selling the experience of viewing the content. Yes, there is something in the content, but the experience is a large part of overall package.

The movie theater industry has a long way to go. They still think they are in the movie business. They still think owning a theater is about showing movies. It's not. It's about being a great place to go on a date; it's about being a great place to go with your friends. It about a great way to get out of the house so you can get away from the kids and enjoy yourself. They just can't figure that out, so they feel threatened.

Yes! I also thought it was interesting his take on why some cable networks are not going HD. I imagine this is also why we're seeing a lot of cable networks start their own shows.

You can't convert Roseanne to hi-def; it was shot on tape. Or, if they have special effects that were mastered on tape, the show doesn't convert to HD, it doesn't work...When you watch something on ESPN or CBS, it looks great. And then you watch something on one of your other [channels] and it looks like something's wrong. That's because it's been converted. Why? Because some of the stuff just won't convert....The networks, the cable networks in particular, aren't willing to convert all their stuff over, because they already have so much licensed that's not HD-compatible. If it goes to HD, they look [terrible].

Overall the whole interview was a breath of fresh air into an industry that seems to be choking on the dust that has collected. I can't say where all of the media landscape is going, but it's clear that it is changing to include more consumer choice. And that it's fracturing. The new players will be those that turn the shards into diamonds.

posted on Mon, 23 Jul 2007 at 20:20 | permanent link

I was amazed to find out that Netgear is now selling an open source router. Really! They actually call it that. I'm very impressed that a hardware company is opening up the hood for hobbyists and developers and letting them do cool things with it. They've included an Open Source Development guide which (quoting the guide itself):

...provides information including the hardware memory spec, the software modules, the console interface for code debugging and development, guide for building the source code, the example program, and the device recovery procedure. For further info please contact Netgear customer support.

I think that this can only be attributed to the hard work of the OpenWRT folks. But, it is still exciting to see a major corporation saying "make something cooler" with their product.

posted on Sun, 15 Jul 2007 at 15:02 | permanent link

At work we're using the Freetype library. I realized that for our application we needed both the patented and the unpatented hinters for various purposes, but I couldn't get both to work. Odd. So I started looking through the code. I figured out why both couldn't work together and I created a patch to fix the problem. It's one line. I was more surprised by the response from the developers:

...there is absolutely no use for the unpatented hinter if you already have the patented one.
     -- Dave Turner, Freetype

Yes, I went through learning the code of the library trying to find out why the feature wasn't working because I didn't need it. What a silly response. I guess I'm stuck maintaining a 'patched' version of freetype. I'd recommend you do too.

posted on Mon, 09 Jul 2007 at 11:49 | permanent link

In discussing Linux PDAs I was ask what I used my Nokia 770 for on a daily basis. I posted a rather long list of uses. You might notice that list contains no items that are features listed by Nokia for the 770. Nokia marketing in their development of this device got every feature wrong for me except one, open. Now I have a device that I use daily and is critical to my work flow. That is the power of open.

posted on Mon, 09 Jul 2007 at 11:39 | permanent link

A feature for Inkscape that I've been working on for quite a while is getting the scripting extensions transferred over to using GLib calls, specifically Glib::spawn_async_with_pipes. The big advantage of this is that the script will be run in another process, so we can have live update of the screen while the script is running. It isn't perfect as we're not truly making Inkscape multi-threaded. But, I think it is a huge usability improvement.

To show off the feature I'm trying my first screencast. It's not perfect, a little jumpy, but I think it shows a little of what is going on. Take a look, I'll explain some below:

What I'm doing is drawing a calligraphic line and then calling the effect "Jitter Nodes." What you can see is how when I change the parameters in the dialog the canvas updates. What's hard to notice in the video is that I hit cancel on the dialog to show you can always go back, and then bring it up again and hit okay (just to prove that works too). There is still work to do on this feature, but I think it's showing a lot of promise.

posted on Sat, 07 Jul 2007 at 14:31 | permanent link

As I was uploading photos I noticed that it has been 4 months since I last did it. Wow, a long time. I wish I could claim that I was solving some epic problem, but no, I've just been busy. The sad part is that I haven't stopped taking photos in that time, so the problem is now worse than it was. Bah! Anyway...

With no further delay I'd like to introduce two albums of pictures. The first is from the wedding of our friends Janet and Chris which took place in Birmingham, AL.

   

Next up is pictures from a trip to Monterrey, CA that we took over Memorial Day. Lots of fun and Monterrey is always beautiful.

   

Hopefully, it won't be another 4 months!

posted on Thu, 05 Jul 2007 at 15:02 | permanent link