Integrated hand held devices

This week I have been taking my annual trip to CES and then IEEE CCNC.  I only spend one day at CES and I can see everything I want.  CCNC is the real reason I come.  It is a great conference, balancing academic and industry research.  A good friend of mine, Alex Gelman, is on the steering committee and I come also to see him.  

When I spend so much time away from home,  I really learn to appreciate my iPhone.  I imagine the same is true of other integrated mobile devices,  but the iPhone really rocks.   The ability to have a cell phone, email, web, music, SMS text messaging, calender, google maps, photos on that one device makes it so convenient for travel.  Last night I sat in the hotel lobby reading, while plugged into the iPhone listening to music, while text messaging with my wife (also on the iPhone), while pulling down email in the background (on the iPhone).  Very cool.

Is anyone passionate about technology any more?

I've been think a lot about Bill Evans lately.  I own almost all of his early music and have built a rather large collection on my iPod.

Bill Evans did one thing well - he was a jazz pianist. One of the earliest and one of the best. That's all he did in his career.  He never produced music,  never sang, never acted.  Only jazz piano.  

When I first got started in this business, as a software developer,  I was passionate about what I did.  I loved algorithms in graduate school and ate up operating systems.  I still feel passionate and love what I do.  I never want to do anything else - marketing, sales, etc... I am a technologist.  That's all.  

At some point in this business, perhaps around the time of the bubble,  people came into this industry to make it rich and strike it big.  Several left after the bubble.  I know a couple of guys who left and went into real estate.  

I wonder if this has changed our business permanently.  Is anyone in technology because of passion anymore?  Are there any other Bill Evans in this industry?

Open Source, linux powered PVR

Man, I wish I had time to work on cool stuff like this.

behold the power of sed

I am an old unix hacker. I admit I get a thrill out of sed, awk, the shell and regular expressions. Here is an IM exchange I just had. Names changed to protect the innocent:

joe : got a second for a sed question?
el_jefe: uh-oh
el_jefe: ok
joe : I've got a filename, foo_293849723.txt, I want to rename it to foo.txt
el_jefe: ok
joe : so I want to strip everything from the _ to the .
el_jefe: ok
joe : I've stripped the _ and the ., but not the stuff in between
el_jefe: sed 's/_.*\./\./' ?
joe : that's it!
el_jefe: whew
el_jefe: good to know i can still do that
joe : I'm going to stare at that one for a while and figure out how it's any different from what I was trying
el_jefe: good luck

Alternate port websites

I like to consider myself in tune with 'Underground' culture (although as I've aged I'm sure I've lost touch somewhat). I've always wondered if there was a whole hidden universe on the internet that wasn't being served on port 80. It seems like a fairly simple way to keep a website underground as most internet users probably aren't even aware that there's a port setting involved when they visit a website. Anyone out there know of any websites being served on a port other that 80/443?

Blog as Project Tool, Revisited

A month has passed since I first install a multi-user blog for use as a project tool for our team.

We've accumulated 145 posts, and the general feedback on the tool (and the data captured through posts) has been positive. Adoption by the team was higher than I thought it would be, given it was a completely new tool.

We use it to capture information that would generally be lost - quick notes regarding this or that, out of office notices, and the like. But the most important data we have found is

Additionally, we've added users to the blog from outside our organization - while my boss sees it as a way to share information, I see it as an important aspect of transparency. It shows the external users that we aren't hiding anything from them.

If you're looking to do something similar for your organization, I found a round up of multi-user blog tools linked from Chad Dickerson's blog. Again, we're using Blojsom, which, after a h

How much is that old Palm Pilot worth anyway?

My wife was cleaning out the bonus room in preparation for turning it into a play room for our daughter. (There goes my last refuge at home.) She found my old palm pilot and asked me how much we should sell it for in a garage sale. I started thinking. How much was that gadget worth to me?



To be honest, it never was worth very much. It was difficult to enter data into and I never used it. Now there are cell phone/palm pilots, usb storage you put on your keychain, and of course the iPod is all the rage. These gadgets seem to complicate my life and they inevitably end up like the palm, discarded in the bonus room. What is the attraction to these gadgets? Is it just the cool factor of being the first one to own it or does it really improve the quality of life? Maybe I lack the patience to learn to appreciate them. Maybe the killer gadget that I can't live without hasn't been invented yet. Maybe someone out there could clue me in.