Science fiction becomes reality: the Encyclopedia of Life

Posted on by

While getting caught up on news this morning, I came across one of the most amazing projects I have ever seen: The Encyclopedia of Life. You really need to check out the site for yourself (and namely the video on the home page) to get a full sense of what this project is about, but in short, it is an attempt to create a web page for each of the 1.8 million named species on the planet.

As I watched the video this morning, I was dumbfounded by both the boldness of the EOL project, and by how unbelievably important it is. Obviously inspired by Wikipedia (one of my favorite sites), I hope it enjoys the same level of media attention, participation, and collaboration.

I really feel like this is an extraordinary time to be alive, and to be working with computers and information technology. Concepts which were confined to the imaginations of science fiction writers are now becoming a reality. I believe Wikipedia was, at least in part, inspired by the Encyclopedia Galactica from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (ironically, searching for "foundation novel" on Google returns a link to Wikipedia as the first result), and Second Life (another project which I believe will prove to be revolutionary) was obviously inspired by the Metaverse create by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Both Wikipedia and Second Life are projects which, at one time, seemed entirely impossible, yet are both now easily accessible and freely available to anyone with a PC and an internet connection.

I can’t write about amazing information organization projects and technologies and not mention Google. I don’t know if Larry Page and Sergey Brin were inspired by any works of science fiction, but searching on Google has always reminded me of Captain Jean-Luc Picard conducting research by talking to the both omnipresent and omnipotent "Computer", especially now that you can interact with Google over the phone. Whether you like Google as a company or not, you can’t deny that they have changed the world with their mission of organizing its information.

I will be keeping a very close eye on the Encyclopedia of Life project, and even contributing where I can.

The new software model: less is more

Posted on by

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in software recently which, when analyzed, shows just how much opportunity there actually is out there right now:

Someone writes a piece of software to solve a particular problem.

  1. If it’s successful, several competing products are released.
  2. Driven by competition, each version becomes more and more complex and feature rich. Competition tends to be based primarily on features rather than price.
  3. Eventually one emerges as the winner. Nobody else bothers trying to compete anymore because the idea of implementing so many features is daunting. The victor becomes a de facto standard, and often makes obscene amounts of money.
  4. Someone eventually gets tired of being locked into a single overly complex solution, and creates a simple and disruptive alternative. It’s usually cheap or free, and it sparks an entirely new wave of innovation.

Several things may happen next, including:

  • A lot of internal memos get sent around.
  • A lot of people lose their jobs or quit.
  • A lot of other people make a lot of money.
  • We start using terms like "2.0" and "paradigm shift".

I’m not a venture capitalist, or a rich and successful entrepreneur, but for what it’s worth, here’s my advice:

  • If you’re passionate about something, don’t be afraid to reinvent it. A successful idea doesn’t have to be an entirely new idea. It just has to solve a specific problem, and it has to be simple.
  • Solve your own problems, and you’ll probably end up solving other peoples’ problems, too. If you find a particular piece of software too complicate, bloated, buggy, expensive, etc., more than likely, so do thousands of others.
  • Start simple. Solve one problem, and solve it very efficiently and effectively. Don’t worry about adding all the other features. That happens once you’re successful and competitors start closing in.
  • If you’re the one on top and you want to stay that way, try unseating yourself before someone else does it. Hire or assemble a small agile team of visionaries, give them some space, and challenge them with toppling you. If they’re smart, and if they can truly distance themselves from your existing corporate culture, they will tap into the inevitable pent up frustration over your product and create something potentially disruptive, revolutionary, and probably alarmingly simple. You might as well — chances are, someone else out there is already doing the exact same thing.

Before you sell, calculate your regret index

Posted on by

I sold some stock the other day. Not enough that I’m about to retire or anything, but enough that I had to give it some thought before pulling the trigger.

When trying to figure out whether to sell or not, I actually came to the realization that I had to figure out how to figure out whether to sell or not. In other words, I needed to come up with a way to quantify the decision. So I came up with what I call the "regret index". It’s very simple, and it works like this:

  1. Calculate how much you will make at the price you think you can get. Call this "real value".
  2. Calculate how much you would make at a price high enough that there would be no question in your mind as to whether or not to sell. Call this "potential value".
  3. Calculate the difference (potential value – real value). Call this "floating value".

Now imagine you were walking down the street with exactly the floating value in your pocket, and you just happened to get mugged. Would you feel:

  1. Just glad to be alive.
  2. Mildly inconvenienced.
  3. Very upset.
  4. Devastated.
  5. Suicidal.

The number you chose indicates your regret index. Obviously the higher the number, the more you should think about waiting to sell. If your regret index is a 1 or a 2, you’re probably safe to place the order.

Although the regret index is highly scientific, and was painstakingly devised, if it doesn’t work for you, here’s another approach. Think about:

  1. What you could do with the floating value at some point in the future.
  2. What you can do with the real value now.

With any luck, your gut will tell you exactly what to do. If not, your wife probably will.

As you can see, I’m clearly no financial wizard, but both of these approaches actually helped me quite a bit. In the past, I’ve tended to try to squeeze every last penny out of my stock, however after doing the math, I came to realize that with the amount of stock I have access to (again, we’re not exactly talking about entire fortunes here), a few cents, or even a few dollars, didn’t make that big of a difference. In some cases, it wasn’t even worth the stress of constantly refreshing E*TRADE in my browser, not getting any work done, and waking up at 6AM here on the west coast to watch the market (very little, I have found, is worth getting up at 6AM).

The last bit of advice I can offer is to never calculate the regret index after the fact. In other words, after your stock is gone, never calculate what you could have made if you had held on to it. Keep yourself ignorant. Focus on not doing the math. Blast music and stare into a strobe light if you have to. Believe me, absolutely no good can come of it.

Mirrors make great whiteboards

Posted on by

The other day, a friend of mine and I were plotting to take over the world when one of us suddenly had the need to diagram something. I have a whiteboard in my closet which I’ve been meaning to hang for the last 9 months, but the problem is that I never think to hang it when I don’t need it, and when I do need it, I don’t want to stop what I’m doing long enough to hang it. My friend had the idea of using the whiteboard marker directly on the mirrored doors of the closet in my office. I never liked those doors, so I figured the worst that could happen is that we would ruin them, and then I could replace them. We discovered, however, that mirrors make great whiteboards, and both doors have been covered with diagrams and various scribbles ever since. It turns out I had two huge, almost floor-to-ceiling whiteboards sitting right behind me all this time.

A second look at Google Reader

Posted on by

The first time I tried Google Reader (which was when it was first introduced), I found it to be one of the more technically impressive JavaScript applications I’ve seen, as well as one of the least usable.  It seemed that the Google Reader team was far more concerned with pushing the boundaries of Ajax and JavaScript wizardry than they were with building a functional, practical tool.  The good news is that I think they came to the same conclusion, and completely redesigned it.  It’s been some time now since they relaunched Google Reader, but I was so put off by their first version that I didn’t get around to trying the new one until about a month ago.  I’m happy to report that I think Google Reader has grown into an uncommonly good application.

It’s easy to get started using Google Reader, so rather than spending a lot of time reading my conclusions, I recommend that you go draw some of your own.  I would like to briefly point out some of what I consider to be the most compelling features, though:

  • It’s fast.  I think speed has always been Google’s secret sauce.  Speed is not a feature, as far as I’m concerned.  It’s a necessity, and Google has proven that they are the master of responsive web applications.
  • It’s optimized.  The UI, I mean.  Google Reader makes exceptionally good use of the browser window, and a lot of thought obviously went into how the user would interact with the application.  I’m able to take in a great deal of information at a glance, and easily uncover more information with a minimal number of clicks.
  • It’s focused.  Although Google Read is actually pretty feature-rich (it supports tons of keyboard accelerators, you can add bookmarks to your toolbar which automatically navigate through your new posts, and you can read your feeds on a mobile device), the features stay out of your way until you want them.
  • Sharing.  My favorite feature of Google Reader is sharing.  When you share a post, it adds it to your shared list which basically auto-generates a link blog.  Very slick.  I’ve just started using this feature, so I haven’t shared much content yet, but I think this concept has a lot of potential.  (If you’re interested in what I find interesting, you can find my shared posts here.)

I’ve done a lot of work with RSS and blog aggregation over the last few years (I wrote the Adobe XML News Aggregator, News Brew, and the open source ActionScript 3 RSS/Atom libraries), so I feel like I have a special appreciation for when RSS aggregation is done well, and I think Google has certainly gotten it right. What do you think of Google Reader?  If you’re not using it, what’s your aggregator of choice?

Using a mobile phone for real-time price comparisons

Posted on by

I’ve had phones and/or PDAs with internet connections and mobile browsers for about seven years now, however I’ve never found the ability to surf the web on a mobile device to be particularly useful. I’ve never had a device with enough bandwidth or screen real estate to make the experience bearable. Every now and then, I’ll look up a restaurant’s phone number while I’m out so I can make reservations or order take out, or if I’m insanely curious about something, I might look it up using wapedia, but for the most part, I use the data capabilities of my phone far more for IM and email than for browsing the web.

That said, I was at the San Francisco International Auto Show yesterday with my family, and was reminded of the value of mobile price checking. My kids came across something called a Wiggle Car that they instantly fell in love with, and since Christmas is coming up, my wife and I decided to buy a couple and smuggle them out to the car to be gifts from Santa. The price was a little steep, though, and since I’d never even heard of a Wiggle Car before, I had no way of knowing what they were worth. While my kids test drove Wiggle Cars and my wife distracted the salesman, I used T-Mobile’s EDGE network and my Sidekick 3 to do a little research. Since T-Mobile’s EDGE network is so slow and/or the Sidekick 3’s browser takes so long to render content (I suspect a little of both), it took about 10 minutes for me to come up with what I thought was a fair price. Since it was the last day of the auto show, and since we were buying two, I actually negotiated an even better price, and now have two Wiggle Cars stashed down in my garage waiting for Christmas morning.

My phone gives me reasonable price comparison tools, however there are some better options there. I used to use an application called Piranha Pricecheck on my Sidekick 2, although it doesn’t seem to be available anymore for the Sidekick 3. It’s a Java based mobile application for comparing prices and reading reviews from Amazon. It looks like it should run on most Java-enabled phones. Once I replace my Sidekick 3 (I’m working on that), I will probably start using it again.

I’ve used wishradar’s mobile price comparison service which works well, but it’s hard to use from my Sidekick because the email service is so slow (not WishRadar’s fault — another strike against the Sidekick). I’ve actually had very good luck with Google’s SMS price checking service,which is nice because it’s much faster than trying to use your phone’s web browser. I also came across a TechCrunch article comparing three SMS price comparison services, but I haven’t had a chance to test any of them out for myself yet (though I’m certain I will this holiday season).

If you have any useful tips on mobile price comparison, any services and/or techniques you like or dislike, or any good mobile price comparison stories, please share below.

How to recover a corrupt Parallels virtual machine

Posted on by

Parallels is a very impressive piece of software, but it’s not quite ready for prime time. In addition to using it on two different computers myself, I know many other people who use it on a daily basis, and although it’s by far the best way to run multiple operating systems on an Intel Mac, it’s also full of problems. If you use Parallels on a regular basis on different networks, you are likely already familiar with the various networking and VPN quirks, and if you have been using it for long enough, you might have also discovered that virtual machines will occasionally become corrupt and refuse to boot. And if you have ever tried to get free email support from Parallels, then you have almost certainly discovered that they are unable to keep up with demand. Again, I want to stress that Parallels is a remarkable piece of software, and it gets better with each update, however if you’re using it for mission-critical operations, be sure to make frequent backups.

But if you haven’t been backing up your data, and you’ve run into the dreaded corrupt virtual machine problem, there is actually a relatively painless way to recover your data:

  1. Create a new VM. Configure it any way you want, and get it to the point where you are ready to install the guest OS (presumably Windows).
  2. Before installing the guest OS, edit the VM by clicking on the edit button, then click “Add…” beneath the property table.
  3. Click “Next”, then select “Hard Disk”, then “Use an existing hard disk image”.
  4. Browse to your previous virtual hard disk (the one with the data you want to recover) and choose “Finish”.
  5. Install the guest OS. Be careful not to install it on the virtual hard disk that you are trying to recover.
  6. When you boot into your new installation of Windows, open Explorer, and notice that your old virtual hard disk is mounted and that all your old data is accessible.

I’ve had enough problems with Parallels that I’ve stopped using it on a daily basis and have gone back to trying to get by in a Windows-centric world using nothing but OS X. I haven’t given up on Parallels entirely, however, and with every update, I give it a fresh chance since I still believe that if you absolutely have to run Windows, the best way to run it is as a Mac app.

Using an external display with a MacBook

Posted on by

Here are some tips for using a MacBook or MacBook Pro with an external monitor. They range from the painfully obvious (for brand new Mac users) to one I actually just learned yesterday.

  1. When you connect an external monitor to your MacBook (or PowerBook, for that matter), you can combine your MacBook’s LCD and your external monitor to create one big monitor. That means when your mouse pointer goes off the edge of one, it will appear on the other. Open the Displays Preference Pane to configure the resolution and orientation of the two monitors. This type of configuration works well when you want to keep your main work on your larger external display, but still keep things like IM, iTunes, and email constantly visible on the smaller laptop LCD.
  2. Some windows act like they don’t want to be dragged on to your external monitor. If a windows is being stubborn, try dragging it up to the menu bar, and keep dragging, even if stays stuck below the menu bar. Sometimes once you have dragged it far enough that it has room to render the entire window, it will jump to the other monitor (Terminal used to have this problem, but Apple fixed it some time ago). If that doesn’t work, try dragging it from a corner of your monitor. My Adium contact list doesn’t seem to want to live on my external monitor, but I can coerce it up there by dragging up from either corner.
  3. When your laptop is open, you can’t switch to using the full resolution of an external monitor. I have no idea why, but it’s a fact of life for MacBook users. You can use both displays in "extended" mode, or you can mirror your MacBook’s display (which most likely doesn’t use the full resolution of your external monitor), but you can’t switch to using only the external monitor. Very strange.
  4. If you close your laptop, you can actually get the full resolution of your external display. Put your MacBook to sleep, connect your external display and an external monitor, and wake the computer up by pressing any key. You will have full use of your external display while your laptop is closed.
  5. If you really want to have your MacBook open while only using an external display, after following the procedure above, you can open your MacBook, and it’s screen will remain off, which means you can still use the MacBook’s keyboard and trackpad. Why you can’t get into this mode using F7, I have no idea. This is a good technique for allowing some heat to dissipate while still using an external display so the lid of your MacBook doesn’t melt or warp.
  6. You can boot your computer using just an external display. Just connect your external display, open the lid, hit the power button, and close the lid again immediately.
  7. In order to output only to an external monitor, you have to have the power cable connected. I tried for several minutes yesterday to get my MacBook to wake up with an external keyboard and monitor before unpacking my AC adapter from my backpack, and it wouldn’t work. It took me a while to make the connection (no pun intended), but I eventually discovered that with the power cable attached, everything works as expected.

And now for some other random tips:

  1. If you decide to buy the MacBook over the MacBook Pro (I actually like the MacBook slightly better, but that’s a topic for another post), don’t forget to buy a mini-DVI to standard DVI adapter. The MacBooks don’t have standard DVI port — just the mini.
  2. If you have a DVI to VGA adapter, stop reading this right now, go find it, and put it in your computer bag where it should be stored. You’ll thank me the next time you’re in front of a client or an audience, trying to mash a VGA cable into a DVI port.
  3. For the ultimate in multiple-display, multi-computer support, check out Synergy. Synergy actually lets you switch between different computers running different operating systems simply by moving your mouse from one monitor to the next. The first time you see it, you’ll swear it’s magic. Imagine two separate physical computers next to each other with two monitors, one keyboard, and one mouse. Just move the pointer from one monitor to the other, and you’re actually using the other computer. It even let’s you copy and paste between computers. If you’re a Mac user running Parallels, you might not see the point, but you still have to appreciate the technical wizardry.

Anything that I’ve missed? Post it in the comments.

Review of the T-Mobile MDA

Posted on by

After my less than inspired experience with the new T-Mobile Sidekick 3, I decided to try something completely different. I do this every now and again — try to ween myself off the Sidekick platform. I’ve tried it with Treos, I’ve tried it with Blackberries, and I’ve tried it with phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. But in the end, I always come crawling back to the Sidekick.

Continue reading →

Review of the Sidekick 3 (a big disappointment)

Posted on by

Fist of all, I have to say that I’m shocked by the almost unanimously positive online reviews of the new Sidekick 3. I can only assume that they were written by people who didn’t have extensive experience with the Sidekick 2, and who were content to simply regurgitate T-Mobile’s marketing collateral. Reading positive reviews of the Sidekick 3 has been like reading positive reviews of Matrix Reloaded. This review is written by someone who is (or was) a huge fan the Sidekick, and who has been using both the Sidekick 2 and 3 from the day they were each available.

I waited several weeks to write this review to make sure I had some real-world experience with the Sidekick 3. The first one I received was in some indeterminable way defective. About six hours after I started using it, while I was demoing it to someone, no less, the screen went completely black. I laughed at first, assuming I had found a software bug that would soon be fixed in an update, however after turning the device off and back on, soft resetting, and then hard resetting it, I wasn’t laughing anymore. T-Mobile forced me to sacrifice hours of my life speaking with well-meaning but ultimately powerless customer service and support representatives on the phone, the details of which I will spare both of us. The upshot was that I paid a lot of money to have another Sidekick shipped to me right away since once I get my hands on a device, I can’t rest until I’ve learned everything about it.

So now that I’m on my second Sidekick 3, and I’ve spend a few weeks with it in the field, I can honestly say that Danger got more wrong with the Sidekick 3 than they got right. To be fair, I’ll start out with I think they got right:

Continue reading →