Blog Posts

October 2011

• 2011-10-04

  Nation Building

  Here’s a topic I have never written about before… Nation Building. I just want to point you to a great article I read in the Globe yesterday that puts some meat on the question of “Nation Building,” when has it happened before? How long does it take? What is really happening? How does it start and how does it finish?

  Here’s the crux of the argument in “How to build a nation” – The Boston Globe

  “Identities are chosen strategically, they evolve over time, and people make decisions about what identities to prioritize,” said Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at Stanford University who...

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  #politics
• 2011-10-03

  Update on Spotify II

  I have become a total Spotify addict. I have almost totally stopped downloading MP3s and am gradually locating all my favorite music on Spotify. I posed a couple of semi-sceptical notes when I first started using Spotify and so I am due for an update, right?

  Cancelled Rhapsory, trying Spotify

  Spotify, Genres???

  Update about Spotify I

  So what has happened since? I find that I am using Spotify on my iPhone and on my computer, all the time. Occasionally I will dip back into my large iTunes collection to remind me of artists that I want to list...

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  #culture #computing
• 2011-10-02

  Solid State Disk (SSD) links

  I’ve been looking into changing up the primary (and only) disk in my 2 year old Mac Pro to a Solid State Disk (SSD). Based on what I’ve seen on the new Mac Airs I think it will boost performance a lot more than adding more memory would.

  The problem is that these beasts are pretty expensive, so I am not going to replace my 400G Hard Disk with a 400G SSD. Instead I will have a much smaller SSD to boot from and run from, and leave the larger 400G to carry the load of large files that I don’t use a lot.

  Here are a bunch of useful links that I have gathered in case you are thinking of doing the same:

  ...

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  #computing
• 2011-10-01

  Check out CityPockets

  I’ve been using various Groupon-ish web sites to great advantage. Whether it’s Groupon itself, or LivingSocial, OpenTable and others, I send all their offers to an email folder and scan the 10-15 offers I get a day in one glance (2 seconds) to see if anything jumps out. I end up buying a coupon from one of them about once a month.

  Along comes CityPockets. The site solves the problem of how to remember what coupons you have and especially reminds you to use them if you lose track of what you have. It actually can log into each of your groupon-ish accounts and grab whatever new coupons appears there and displays them in one unified list.

  Free, useful and saves money too. I recommend CityPockets!

September 2011

• 2011-09-29

  My New EXCLUSIVE at Salon: National Security Lab Hacks Diebold Touch-Screen Voting Machine by Remote Control With $26 in Computer Parts

  Continuing my linking to Election related news, check out this post Diebold Touch-Screen Voting Machine Hacked by Remote Control With $26 in Computer Parts from The BRAD BLOG: "What makes this hack so troubling — and different from those which have come before it — is that it doesn’t require any actual changes to, or even knowledge of, the voting system software or its memory card programming. It’s not a cyberattack. It’s a "Man-in-the-middle" attack where a tiny, $10.50 piece of electronics is inserted into the system between the voter and the main circuit board of the voting system allowing for complete control over the touch-screen system and the entire voting process along with it."

  #politics
• 2011-09-28

  Swipely, cool but scary?

  So there’s this rather cool new service that says they will find and give you special deals to the stores and merchants you use already. The way they do it is to examine your credit card bills and help you find deals. They say:

  With Swipely, you can earn automatic cash back rewards at the best local places Boston has to offer. There are no coupons to cut, vouchers to buy or loyalty cards to forget – with Swipely you earn valuable rewards on every purchase with the credit or debit cards you already have, automatically. Best of all, Swipely is free!

  Sounds great, but you know how they do it? You have to give them your credit card info and login to the credit card company web site, so they ca...

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  #internet
• 2011-09-27

  New Jersey election fraud? Or coverup? Or just human error?

  Andrew Appelis one of the best known academics studying and commenting on elections and computer science and technology related to elections. He wrote a really interesting report, “New Jersey Elections Coverup“, going into great detail about a specific incident during the June 2011 New Jersey primary election where the reported outcome of a particular race was demonstrated to be incorrect.

  It was a small election and so they could literally get affidavits from voters to prove this. Mr. Apple was hired as an expert (apparently he does a lot of this, which for me colors his words to...

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  #politics #internet
• 2011-09-26

  Good e-book about software pricing

  Pricing software is a perennial challenge. I came across this ebook, “Don’t just roll the dice” by Neil Davidson. It’s a very nice introduction to a tricky topic. I am considering a major revamp of the BlogBridge web site, with pricing and feature changes and this guide helps me think through those questions.

  #business
• 2011-09-23

  Google+ – Professional Social Network?

  Some people are starting to wonder whether Google+will continue to grow and become a major social network. Even for Google, it will be quite an achievement to penetrate the already relatively crowded world of social networks and become a major player.

  Indeed they have had an excellent start and in my opinion built quite a nice little service. (By the way, do not underestimate how much they must have spent designing, building and now deploying Google+. I call it a ‘nice little service’ but I know we are talking many millions of dollars.)

  Here’s what one pundit said as criticism in a recent article:

  “In that respect, is it possible that G+, at the moment, is simply a soc...

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  #blogging
• 2011-09-22

  Useful quick reference for a ‘lean startup’

  Check this post How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition from Steve Blank. Of course you know that Steve Blank is one of the gurus of the Lean Startup. This blog post is meant I think for his students at Stanford but you too can benefit from it 🙂 ** "But for the rest of us mortals whose eyes glaze over at the buzzwords, the questions are, “How do I get my great idea on the web? What are the steps in building a web site?” And the most important question is, “How do I use the business model canvas and Customer Development to test whether this is a real business?” (from**: How to Build a Web Startup)

  #business
• 2011-09-13

  Nice bibliography for game designers

  I got some of this list from Lee Sheldon’s course syllabus. I have not read all these books but I want to:

  Designing Virtual Worlds. Richard Bartle.

  Character Development and Storytelling for Games. Lee Sheldon.

  Developing Online Games. Mulligan and Petrovsky.

  Massively Multiplayer Game Development. Thor Alexander et al.

  Synthetic Worlds. Edward Castronova.

  Community Building on the Web. Amy Jo Kim

  My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Julian Dibbell

  A Theory of Fun. Raph Koster

  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

  The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. Jesse Schell

  #culture #design
• 2011-09-11

  Instead of giving out grades in a class, give out experience points

  If you watched (or didn’t) the preceding video by Jesse Schellyou might have caught one throw away idea mentioned that really intrigued me: Eliminate grades and instead adopt a system modeled more like experience points in a game. The idea he mentions I believe came from a Professor Lee Sheldon. Here’s the link to his course, Gaming the Classroom.

  In my teaching at Brandeis, deciding how to handle grading is one of the trickier problems* to solve. While my experience teaching so far is quite limited I ...

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  #education #culture #politics
• 2011-09-10

  Game Design talk by Jesse Schell

  If you are interested in Game Design you have probably seen this video… I finally watched it and thought it was really worth sharing. I definitely recommend it. Jesse Schell is funny and engaging to listen to and has great insights to offer. The last 7 or so minutes is a fantastic riff on how gaming might / will invade our everyday life in the future. Very plausible.

  http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/44277

  Xbox 360 Games – E3 2012 – Guitar Hero 5

  #culture

August 2011

• 2011-08-27

  Quirky for Mobile Products?

  I read about Quirky.com in the paper the other day. From my perusal it’s a site where people (you and me) can submit ideas for manufactured products.

  For example, let’s say I have an idea for a dog leash with a built in flashlight. Clever eh? Well, you can describe it to the best of your ability and submit it to the Quirky.com site.

  Ideas are socially curated (translation: visitors to the site can vote on how much they like the product.) Once they reach a certain threshold then the Quirky staff analyzes the idea from a design, marketing, manufacturing perspective, ...

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  #business #design #computing #programming
• 2011-08-26

  One More Thing…

  Check this post One More Thing… from TechCrunch: "So instead I read what everyone else had to say. Some articles were excellent, many were very good, others read far too much like obituaries. More came today. I kept reading. Slowly, two things struck me. First, I’ve never seen anything quite like the outpouring of emotion that people are showing in response to this news. Second, what we’re witnessing right now is Jobs’ final masterstroke." (from: TechCrunch)

  A really good article about the topic that everyone is writing about. There are dozens of such articles that I’ve read in the last day or two which I will not be linking to. But this one strikes me as one of the better ones.

  #computing
• 2011-08-24

  Steve Jobs steps down as CEO of Apple

  This news saddens me:

  “Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs resigned today as chief executive officer from Apple. His place at the top of the company will be taken by Tim Cook, previously Apple’s chief operating officer.” (from CNET)

  I hope he’s doing alright and is with us for many many years to come.

  #computing
• 2011-08-20

  Is Software Eating the World

  Marc Andreeson has a really good, optimistic article in the Wall Street Journal about the future foundational role of Software in all industries of the world’s economy:

  “[…snip]Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.

  I’m privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell ...

  Read more →

  #business
• 2011-08-10

  Cool idea: Skillshare

  Check this post With Skillshare, everyone can be a teacher "The New York City-based startup launched its service in April, offering a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students. The service, which rolled out in New York first, is now poised to branch out to San Francisco and Philadelphia starting Aug. 15 and is looking to expand to Boston and Los Angeles later this year. It’s already built a strong community of users, who are leveraging Skillshare in much the same way Airbnb has transformed short term room rentals, Kickstarter has evolved project fundraising and Getaround is changing car sharing." (from GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends)

  I can’t wait to see this in Boston!

  #business
• 2011-08-06

  [GEEKY] Connecting Web Apps with Web Intents

  Check this post Connecting Web Apps with Web Intents "Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications. In the Intents system, the client application requests a generic action, e.g. share, and specifies the data to pass to the selected service application. The user is given a list of applications which have registered that they can handle the requested intent. The user-selected application is created in a new context and passed the data sent from the client, the format of which is predefined for each specific intent type." (from Chromium Blog)

  This is a really cool idea! If you are familiar with Android Intents it will make sense to you. Read the article if not. I wonder whether W3C will embrace this as a ‘good idea’. I think they should!

  #programming
• 2011-08-05

  [GEEKY] Why I am not yet developing for iOS

  Check this post A strong argument for why iOS development is winning "IOS platform competitors take note: Fledgling indie iOS dev Chris Eidhof has posted a smart list of the main reasons why a new developer finds Apple’s mobile operating system such an attractive prospect. Eidhof, who is in the process of developing his first software for Apple devices, broke down the appeal of iOS using six main points." (from TheAppleBlog — Apple and iOS News, Tips and Reviews)

  For me the biggest resistance, as a developer, to iOS is that I have to learn a new programming language (Objective C) and it’s tools, traditions, and bugs. And no one on the planet other than Apple uses Objective C.

  #computing #programming