Knaddison.com - Technology

Herman Miller Chairs in Denver - Expensive Chair, Cheap Tables

greggles — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:01:34 +0000

So, I’m outfitting my office which has me thinking back to all the great articles I’ve read over the years about offices. There’s Joel on Software’s 12 Steps to Better Code which is largely just common sense of developer types explained using traditional business language. And Jason Calacanis about how to save money running a startup which is largely more of the same.

Cheap tables and Expensive Chairs (like… Aeron chairs)

Jason’s tip that really resonated with me was this one:

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon[sic] chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters… invest in it.

The desk I’m using now was $20 and it was from a used furniture store so there’s a bonus environmental feeling of warmth in my heart - instead of me buying “yet another dead tree” while this thing went to a landfill. The chair…was $450 from Craigslist. Increasingly when we need something for the office we get the rss feed (this one’s for herman miller chairs in denver) and wait a week and the perfect solution comes to the rss feed reader.

I still need to get some better monitors, but we already got a fridge, coffee machine and microwave.

July Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup Overview

greggles — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:00:34 +0000

This was the first “New Tech Meetup” that I’ve attended. It was quite interesting. Perhaps more interesting was the before the session I was at “The Cup” in Boulder talking to a VC/Consultant/Entrepreneur type and comparing Boulder to Denver he said something like “The thing about Boulder is that there’s more VCs up here so the Entrepreneurs from Denver have to come here.”

At that exact moment, sitting in the Cup working on their presentation was Dandyid. Point proven?

Without further ado - my notes on the sessions.

Gnip (Guh - nip)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and Ubuntu.

Basically they want to go from the “polling” model (think of all the rss requests that your rss reader makes in a day) to a push model. But it has to be polling, so they will do the polling in one big poll and then share the resulting data with you either by polling or pushing. Their model seems to be like Facebook, but in a B2B way. I’m not sure that I see the problem that they are solving, but they already have several big name partners which means that those big name partners see a business model which is really all that they need.

I like them more now that I see their website: “We got $h*t to pop”. Ok, fair enough. They had a real demo - well done. The demo didn’t 100% work. Oh well.

Question from the audience: Who saves money? Who spends money? What’s the revenue module?
Answer: Uh, this is the new _tech meetup. I’m not a business guy….Let’s say for now we’re doing this for public benefit._

mobileXware (nice site!)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and WindowsXP and they couldn’t get the presentation to work. Whoops.

All presentation, no demo (it’s hard to demo handheld stuff). Basically it’s a fitness guide via cell phone that’s for sale now.

Hiring “people across the board” interested in fitness.

DizGo

Used a Mac, Keynote, and Firefox, with a Verizon card to provide network access.

“Mobile discounts on-the-go.” “mobile … on-the-go” ? “redundant … and repetitive”

However - This was probably my favorite “business” of the night.

They had basically no slides - straight to demo. For businesses they can provide instant business. Create an ad, set a budget, get real time analytics on viewers, leads, and redemption.

As a consumer, you pick a keyword and send it via SMS to their system. Their “patented ontology” then maps it to one of the active offers and send you back useful information. Example: I SMS in “Sushi” and it sends back “1 Free Beer at Hapa”. This seems really compelling to me. When my favorite restaurants offer happy hours I will almost always go there that night of the week. If a business notices that they are slow, can’t send home employees, and has food that will perish this is a way to create demand on the fly. So, it’s great for products or services that have an “expiration” - things like food, bars, music events, etc. They said that their next step is to move into services - “A store which has extra adidas might need us”. Well, there’s nothing compelling to me about an instantaneous need to sell sneakers - that’s just a bad match for the solution. I hope their business model is based on the quick expiration items and not the more durable goods…

dandyid.org

Used Mac and Firefox. Real Live Demo!

They let you Store all of your “identities” with them (i.e. your URL on various sites). Other sites can send in an md5 of your email and get back the identities that are associated with that email in the dandyid system. Currently have 300 sites, 20 more per month.

Creates a single profile for all of your profiles available as a “dandyid” page or as a ball of “chicklets”. I think I’m too old for this - I’ve only ever entered my big list of “identities” on one site and it wasn’t that hard. So, either I’m too old or the limited functionality means it’s not enough to pull me in. I think I’ll just wait for the OAuth/OpenID Attribute Exchange stuff to get good enough and will use that.

mShopper

Used Vista, Powerpoint.

“Largest mobile commerce provider.” Which, I want to know, are there any other mobile commerce providers?

Let’s you browse/buy products from your WAP enabled phone. WAP is like the internet from back in 1994. I personally place more stock in bigger/more capable phones with real browsers. The browse seems powerful to comparison shop while you’re in a store, but buying via phone seems dumb.

They are also doing some stuff with sending text messages kind of like DizGo is, but that appears to be a lower priority.

lijit

First, they demo’d their current stuff. This was nothing new to me. Then, they said, ok, so how do we make money? Well, “we hired David Fero to figure out how to make money. Now he gets to talk.” Pretty funny.

Basically they have built an easy way to use the Google Custom Search Engine. They kept google ads on the side and they kept the revenue from those ads. Now they are going to open those ads up to more ad providers and start sharing the revenue with you. I’m optimistically skeptical (you’ll note that I added the lijit widget back to my sidebar after a …um… brief hiatus).

bilitzlocal

Mac, Firefox (couldn’t get the network to work so they stole Vista/IE from Robert).

Gave tips about advertising on FaceBook - in aggregate across all their customers, they spend $10,000 per day on Facebook ads. Wow.

Claim that the CPC and conversion rates on FaceBook right now are such that it is competitive with Google ads. This is basically true because nobody else is using FaceBook yet. So, you should start using FaceBook ads to target your niche (depending on the niche…) and test it out.

Wrapup - Good Event, but Mediocre Tech/Businesses

I wasn’t overly impressed with the businesses nor the technology in use. It’s hard to show off really good technology stuff in 5 minutes. But, I did like the event overall and definitely plan on making it part of my routine. Also, they have beer down front so you should show up early if you do go.

Some Research Before You Write That (Technical) Book

greggles — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:50:13 +0000

It appears that the costs of publishing have really fallen, otherwise how can I explain that there’s a good chance I’m going to be writing a book that might actually get published. In the last week two referrals came my way and I’m sitting here thinking “Should I do it?”

The major questions in my mind are: Is it profitable on its own? If not, can I do it in a manner which will be profitable (i.e. write about a niche that somehow brings in future business)? Should I partner with a publisher? Write it myself? Or perhaps “dead-tree” books are just “dead” and I should make it an e-book?

Oh yeah, and will I maintain the motivation to get it done? And done to a level that doesn’t suck?

John Resig Writes about Writing For a Publisher

In his post about Programming Book Profits (which, I’m not going to be writing about “programming” but it’s probably a useful comparison to what I would be writing) John Resig lays out exactly what his profits were 1 year after publishing. He also lays out some of the pros and cons and surprises that he found. In short: the paycheck from the publisher doesn’t seem like it will be worth it.

Note: he recommends pretty strongly against the e-book route.

Go It (mostly) On Your Own With Lulu.com or the Kindle

ProBlogger’s How to Be a Rockstar eBook Seller [Interview] mentions the use of Lulu.com for sales of their book. It appears that they’ve made a decent profit. Sadly though, while he gives revenue numbers he doesn’t give “books sold” numbers and the sales $ depends on several factors so you don’t really know how many copies they sold.

Note: they love the e-book.

Amazon has a program for authors called the Digital Text Platform where authors can sell their books. Amazon keeps 65% of the revenue (for what they provide - that seems a little high).

The “Writing the Book” Part

An hour a day? I think I can do that. Good enough to be happy with it? Hmmm…

Firefox Extensions that I Use

greggles — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:16:52 +0000

I use a lot of firefox extensions. You might call me a power user. Yeah, that’s right, powerful.

Here is the list of my favorites. They are broken down into extensions that make Firefox better, those that make my general life better, things for “geeky stuff” and things for my life as a web developer/sysadmin/competitve webmaster. Yeah, I’m competitive. My stable of sites is better than yours!

Enhanced Firefox

Cute Menus - humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
Download Statusbar - I want the information compact, in an overview, and readily visible. I hate new windows.
Flashblock - I hate flash. It’s amazing how much better the internet is without flash.
Google Gears - Since I’m in places without internet pretty regularly, it’s nice to be able to get my Google feeds in an offline mode.
PageStyle2Tab - again, humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
Image Zoom - Firefox lets me zoom text, image zoom lets me zoom images. Duh.
Locationbar2 - Prettify the URL bar. Also happens to make it safer by clearly identifying the domain and downplaying the importance of subdomains (i.e. the phisher phavorite ebay.com.shadysitestealpasswords.com/enter-username is clearly visible as “www.ebay.com” as a subdomain of “shadysitestealpasswords.com”. Whoohoo!

Enhanced Life

Google Browser Sync - if you use Firefox on two computers (work + home are separate machines - for the folks who haven’t embraced Nomad 2.0 yet) this is great. I turned it off a while ago, but it was pretty nice.
PearlCrescent Page Saver Basic - web-page screenshots…but better.
FoxClocks - Since Firefox is the application I use 75% of the day and I want clocks for multiple time zones…this is awfully convenient.

Geeky Stuff

Operator - handles my microformats and imports them and stuff
Skype extension for Firefox - makes phone numbers hyperlinks to launch skype - duh.
Tab Mix Plus - new tab, new tab, allow resized popups, Prevent blank tabs when downloading files.
Sub settings for this very complex extension…

Events - Open new tabs next to current one. Change opening order.
Display - Tab - Highlight Current tab, Unread tabs
Show tab icons for locked/protected. Porgress meter on tabs. Close tab button on pointed for 50 msec.
Tab width fits to tab title.

Web Developer Stuff / ‘SEO’

EC2 UI - Manage EC2 servers.
Firebug - if you are a web developer you know this.
Live HTTP Headers - is that a 301 redirect or a 302 redirect? Inquiring SEOs want to know.
MeasureIt - if I’m going to add a banner to this existing theme, how many pixels do I have?
SearchStatus - displays Google PageRank, Alexa, and Compete data about every site you visit (and sends you click stream to those three companies along the way…:( )
Tamper Data - For all the 733t (white hat) haxxorz so they can test the integrity of their website applications
XPath Checker - For you XML web-scraper types.
YSlow - Why oh why is your website slow? This extension tells you cheap and easy ways to fix it.

Hiring in Denver (Especially for Tech / Drupal Employees)

greggles — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:46:17 +0000

Recently the folks from the Democract Convention Committee were looking to hire a Web/Drupal savvy person in the Denver area. They posted to Craigslist, I added it to Groups.Drupal.org but what else can you do?

There are several good places in Denver to find tech-savvy employees (likewise, if you are looking for work, pay attention to these places that advertise jobs):

Craigslist Denver Web Jobs is of course the 800 pound gorilla, massive listings and traffic, and free. Always a good place to post your ad.
RMIUG (Rocky Mountain Internet User Group has probably the best email based job board via the rmiug-jobs Yahoo Group. Be sure to read the FAQ before posting.
Groups.Drupal.org’s job postings get a really targeted (Denver + Drupal) audience of folks.
Colorado Startups Job Board which is pretty thinly trafficked, but I have hope for this one.
Denver Webdesign Meetup Group has a message board that is pretty job friendly
Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup Group has a job announcements section at the beginning of the meetings.

And if emailing and posting on all of these fail, you might want to actually go to one or two of the meetings and get to know folks and mention your needs. That seems to work even better than just posting emails.

Did I miss any? What do you use?

Colorado / Denver Political Bloggers - Get Your Convention Blogging Credentials

greggles — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:02:58 +0000

This is awesome. The Democratic National Convention Committee has announced a credentialing process for bloggers so that bloggers can cover the event with permission and access that will help them get a scoop not unlike the old-school media. That blog post makes it clear that it will be in a separate “pool” which is a slight bummer, but giving bloggers the same access as old-school media is probably just forward leaning enough to make the old-school people pout. This is a great step for citizen media and freedom of speech.

Are You Cool Enough to Blog the Denver Democratic Convention?

The requirements they have for applying seem interesting.

To qualify as a state blogger, the applicant’s blog must have been in existence six months prior to requesting credentials and have at least 120 politically related blog posts. Bloggers must submit their daily audience and list their authority based on Technorati stats. Bloggers may also provide examples of posts that make their blog stand out as an effective online organizing tool and/or agent of change.

One other characteristic that I’d use if I were making the call would be the number of RSS feed subscribers. That’s perhaps the most important metric to me about a blog (google reader, bloglines, and feedburner are common sources for that information). A check of inbound links (yahoo site explorer) is probalby also a good measure of what the world at large thinks about the site. I don’t know much about how Technorati authority is calculated - maybe it tries to include things like this.

I think this is a decent vetting process. Surely they have similar rules for the old-school media - like the community newspaper from {random small town} may just have to get their DNCC coverage syndicated to them. This blogger-importance-verification seems like a reasonable set of tests.

Great idea. Looks like it will be reasonably executed. Thanks, DNCC!

Why "Google Gears" is a Bad Idea for Offline Doc Editing

greggles — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:24:42 +0000

WebWorkerDaily (which I read and love for the inspiration it gives to tech nomads) has an article today about how Zoho is offering an offline mode for document editing and how this is great and how it’s lame that Google docs doesn’t have this feature.

I started to leave a comment for them but 1) their comment system ate my comment and 2) I wanted to make a picture to explain my point which I can’t insert into their comments.

Complexity of Medium and Value in Editing On The Web

This feels pretty intuitive to me, but apparently it’s not that intuitive since Zoho didn’t figure it out (and they’re smart).

So, at the top left are situations like basic email, basic text editing. Think about your 10 year old kid writing a paper for school. If she uses Microsoft Word to do that it’s a waste of time and money. No one will argue the money aspect, but online document editing will be faster in terms of his time since it is simpler to learn and do what she needs.

In the middle imagine something like a spreadsheet for keeping track of your expenses or for adding up and assigning costs on a trip among a group of friends. If you use an online spreadsheet anyone can add to it and you get the sharing benefits. However, if you’re a spreadsheet jockey it’s tedious to use the online editors and you are prohibited from more complex capabilities built into desktop applications (monte carlo analysis? macros?).

At the bottom right imagine drawing tools like Adobe or Gimp or Inkscape and video editing. Editing high-definition video over the web? It’s going to be a while (and a revolution or two in bandwidth and HTML UI) before everyday people will do that. Sure, when you upload to revver you pick your thumbnail in a nice web UI, but 100% of revver users are doing some sort of off-line editing before uploading because…

Operating system native tools are going to provide better UI/Interaction than browser based tools for at least another 5 years. As long as that’s the case, we might as well take advantage of the off-line status and simply let the web provide the “not as good but available from any networked computer” features that it does. Zoho would have been much better off spending their time improving integration with cross platform open source desktop publishing applications (i.e. OpenOffice.org)

Offline mode for Google Docs

Offline features of Googles Docs are already available for free via File > Export As OpenOffice.org and Export as a ton of other things (html, Microsoft Office format, etc.).

All we need now is glue code that lets the OpenOffice.org “Open File” dialog include your documents from Google Docs and the Save dialog save to Google docs. That’s a stronger long-term strategy in my mind than simply providing offline editing via the relatively low-quality JavaScript tools like Zoho has done. It’s basically like IMAP for your documents. If IMAP makes sense for simple text editing in emails, it makes 5 times more sense for documents since editing needs in email are less sophisticated. The techy crowd already has this (we call it a revision control system) but it’s too complex for most people.

Green Building Supplies in Denver

greggles — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:04:30 +0000

One of the problems I have with a lot of “green” building ideas is that the products are so specialized you have to get them from across the country. At which point it’s not so green anymore…

From elephant magazine I found Sutherlands Lumber which sells all sorts of building products in Boulder and Fort Collins. Not exactly convenient to Denver, but not bad.

They also had some tips for running a “green” business like commercial composting and products made from renewable sources like potatos available from Eco Products.

Comparison of Predictive Electronic Options Trading Markets

greggles — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:45:27 +0000

I’m doing some research into how electronic options markets work - and specifically those used primarily for prediction purposes. I’m familiar with them (previously wrote about prediction markets and political contracts).

The two big exchanges that I’m looking at are the Iowa Electronic Market (IEM) and TradeSports.com. Both are “real money” markets. The IEM is focused on political events and on using the market as a “petri dish” that the associated business school can analyze to learn how markets work. TradeSports.com is strictly a business focused on making money by acting as a broker. They take fees for various events - trading and withdrawing money. TradeSports.com also provides their data to educational institutions, probably for marketing reasons, and have been reviewed and cited by the respected finance professor Jeremy Siegel.

I plan on writing more on Prediction Markets over the next months and here is a bit of a roadmap for things I know I want to talk about. You can find new articles by going to prediction markets page or by using the prediction markets rss feed.

Reason for Markets

The basic motivation for these markets is twofold: for the individual traders to make money and for the spectators to get high quality predictions about complex events. Both of these are easier said than understood. So, I’d like to gather resources and citations that make it clear how the fundamentals of trading work and why these markets are successful at predicting events.

Major Events in Markets

The major events in any options market are basically the same:

Initial Issues of Contracts - similar to an Initial Public Offering or IPO
Trades of Contracts the bread and butter day to day activity
Contract Expiration - where fortunes are made

Each one is relatively simple in theory - issuing contracts is when they first become available for trading, simple enough - but the reality of how these are structured and function can be complex - for example, the IEM uses contract bundles to create a market which is different from Tradesports margin based system. The possible ways to place a trade are myriad and complex as well - market order, “fill or kill”, “stop/loss” - what do they mean and how do their differences impact a market?

Problems with Markets

Aside from the most obvious problem - the complexity of markets for every day users - what other structural problems can markets face? How can different decisions in constructing markets lead to more - or less - efficient marketplaces. And of course what technical and housekeeping decisions need to be made to ensure smooth functioning of the markets.

Obligatory "Upgraded My Dell Inspiron E1705 to Ubuntu Gutsy" Post

greggles — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:11:50 +0000

Back in April I upgraded my Dell Inspiron E1705 (which is also known as a 9400) from MSWindowsXP to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04). It was not the easiest installation I’ve done, but with the help of linux on laptops directory and in particular this guide I was able to get it done. With the recent release of Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon I was excited to upgrade.

Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) Upgrade

I was expecting the worst, but got the best. I first made two backups of everything, just in case, and then followed the steps listed on the Ubuntu upgrade guide and it was a piece of cake. The only questions that seemed weird were about my Apache configuration file since I modified that. Otherwise, it worked flawlessly and was easy to understand.

New Features in Gutsy

In fact, I have to repent. For a long time I’ve been saying that the “eye candy” is pointless. Lots of it really is. There are all sorts of visualizations that people add to the desktop (e.g. drop shadows on alert boxes, windows that fade away, etc.) which I never really understood. I’m starting to like them. Nay. I’m starting to love them.

It looks something like that. You say you don’t want it, but when it’s in front of you every day it really does help your productivity.

The machine feels just as snappy as before if not moreso. I can only imagine this is due to updated graphics drivers.

This does make me wonder what new features in Leopard are going to blow us away if any. Now that we’ve got graphical goodies and ease of use from Free software, what will Leopard bring?