Structure of a Typical Week (of a founder)
- Tuesday thru Thursday, I am an engineer.
- Friday, I am an artist.
- Weekend, I am a reader.
- The whole week, I am a student.
Circulation pump of our building's heater is broken and National Grid can't fix this until tomorrow (Sat) noon. Here are some things we are doing to keep ourselves warm (besides the obvious layering, etc.):
I grew up watching a lot of BBC programmes. Horizon, Panorama, Top Gear (ever since Jeremy Clarkson was a pimpled-faced-poofy-haired-adolescent), and Mastermind are some that I recall enjoying a lot. Since I moved out of BBC's reach I haven't seen much of quality TV productions, especially documentaries. I have always been very curious about BBC's production methods. How much research they do? How many people are involved in a production? How many and how long are the interviews for each program? Well, recently I stumbled on BBC's latest production called Digital Revolution. It is indeed a revolution in TV programming. The entire process is open and transparent. Online research they have done for the program is available at delicious, there is a blog that reports on the progress, a Twitter feed for your "real-time" needs, and raw, uncut film footage of interviews with web pioneers, a mashup contest of some sort using these footage, etc. The program is not finished yet but there is already amble content on their site to keep me busy. One of the interesting interviews is the one with Estonian President discussing the cyber attack on Estonia.
Entire site is worth spending some time on, so go check it out!
Image via Wikipedia
I went to bed last night trying to recall what is it that I was looking for a few days back when I thought "Umm... Google is pretty useless..." Looking back at my @kulesh I believe it must have been something to do with i18n and I recall finding what I was looking for from Stack Overflow instead.
Yesterday I found three discussions on the same topic:We constantly try hard to get better ranking for our content and products at Digital Assembly. Therefore, I have some vested interest in search engines and their ranking of content. More on that later.
When the keywords you're looking for return lots of advertisements on Google, rest assured the search results are pretty useless. In such cases I move on to localize my search to expert sites like Consumer Reports, Stack Overflow, and the like. Sometimes I use Google itself with site:www.example.com [my keywords] to carry on but most of the time I am on the site itself. Given that Google knows which keywords are popular among advertisers, I am sure Google can help make this process a bit easier on their users. The question is how and what can Google do that is hard to game.Edit: Lot more conversations happening since I posted this. I have added a couple of more links above.
Every year The New York Times editors look back in their rearview mirror and pull out "the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world." I have missed a bunch of them this year and haven't heard about them until now. For example, did you know cows with names make more milk? Didn't think so.
Here are some of my favorites:
Here is the entire list. Certainly worth spending some time reading all of them.
I have been meaning to write this post since Thanksgiving but never got a chance. Reminded of it, again, today when I saw this little article on Washington Journal about U.S. Mint facilitating free airline miles, unintentionally of course. Here is how it worked:
At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off.Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.
I am surprised U.S. Mint didn't put a limit on the number of purchases per household on these items. That would have prevented this little scam.
Anyway, I was recently made aware of a risk of leaving your car with a valet that I never thought about. Whenever you leave your car keys with a valet you're essentially leaving your house key and directions to your house with the valet. Most of us leave a garage door opener in our cars and our navigators know how to get us home. All a thief has to do is hit the "Home" button on a car's navigator and he will be home and back before you! Think about it next time you leave your car keys with someone. It's almost exactly like writing down your home address on your key-chain except it is not as explicit. One way to reduce such risks is to setup a password for your cars navigator or label a friend's address as "Home" and let the friend know why you did so. Related articles by ZemantaImage via Wikipedia
[This is a copy of a previous post. I was testing Zemanta. Zemanta doesn't support Posterous; So, ended up posting this from Gmail, and had to hand-edit HTML. Defeats the purpose at the moment. Will try a few more times before quitting.]
Earlier today Google announced Google Public DNS. Change your DNS settings to use servers 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4 to use this service. I am sure lot of people have already chimed in their analysis and opinions. For what it's worth, here is mine:
One of Steve Jobs favorite quotes is "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware" by Alan Kay. I don't know when exactly he said it but I'd say early eighties when he was at Apple. That's exactly what Apple has been doing since and it has worked well for them. Note that Apple didn't stop at hardware and software they also made languages and frameworks that help make software for their hardware; for example, Open CL and GrandCentral Dispatch.
That's the eighties and the nineties. Now if we extend Alan Kay's insight to 2010, "People who are serious about software should make their own hardware and (network) infrastructure." I believe this is exactly what Google is doing with this DNS offering.
DNS is not just name resolution. You can do wonders with and people have done wonders with it; including making it carry MP3s. It is one of the best protocols to carry meta data on the web. So, Google has its own browser, Google has its own OS, Google has its own productivity line, supposedly Google is also making its own phone (hardware). Only piece of the puzzle that's missing was infrastructure and I believe GPD is the first step towards that. It's about user experience and what you need to control to provide the best user experience.
Related articles by ZemantaFirst responders around 18:30 on Lafaytte and South Portland (Fort Greene). Couple of trucks responding to the building on the northwest corner. Didn't see any sign of fire (or cats on any trees near by).