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April 30, 2005
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Just finished The Pilgrim's Progress in Modern English (Pure Gold Classics)
To grossly oversimplify the book, it is the story of a spiritual pilgrim, "Christian", as he progresses from initial knowledge of God, all the way through various trials and tribulations into the "Kingdom of heaven". Somewhat a long parable for the faith journey. Throughout the literal and metaphorical journey Christian meets with obstacles roughly out of the bible. The edition that I read had extensive footnotes that lead you to the passage that relates to what is going on in the journey. The cool thing is that the whole story of a faith journey is told without any of the traditional biblical lingo. No Peter, Paul and Mary. No Romans or Jews. These are replaced with characters named for themselves. Like Pliable, Obstinate, the Evangelist, Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Legality, Hypocrisy, Faithful, Wanton, Talkative, By-ends and Friends, and Mr. Money-Love. Christian leaves the "City of Destruction" to overcome obstacles including the Slough of Despond, House Beautiful, The Valley of Humiliation, The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle. You get a completely different perspective on the faith journey, any faith.
While the book was written to help readers understand the faith journey, I saw many parallels to the technology start-up process. In many ways it is a journey of faith. Many times I have met Obstinate, the Evangelist, Mr. Legality, Wanton, Talkative and Mr. Money-Love. More than once I have been in (and seen companies go through) the Slough of Despond, House Beautiful, The Valley of Humiliation, Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle. If they are lucky, they reach the Celestial Gates and the Promised Land. Most do not. Most get drawn off the path at some point. The technology start-up process requires a similar measure of faith, determination and eye-on-the-ballness that a spiritual journey requires. I would recommend this book to anyone contemplating either journey.
I rate this a 5 out of 5 stars.
Posted by Martin at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
Seattle local search
Was getting my latte at Uptown Espresso this morning, and on the counter was a cute little sandwich board flyer for: GetLocal.com | Your Neighborhood Connection. Hummm. Someone in Seattle attacking local search. From the ground up. The flyer had "example" stamped all over it and the web site is noticably thin (read no listings yet). They claim to have two primary consumer services (coming). First a "fresh daily" e-mail on what is new or happening in your neighborhood. Cool, I am into that. Second is a WiFi map of free wifi spots. Also interesting, but already available at scale at other sites.
Ah, but a little hunting shows the real face behind getlocal.com. It is Mike Apgar, CEO and founder of Speakeasy.
from Whois:
Mike Apgar
2222 2nd Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
US
Phone: 206-971-5177
Fax: 612-338-7332
Now it all makes sense... Speakeasy is providing local business DSL services. Now they can have their own directory listing to drive traffic, etc. Good job Mike.
Posted by Martin at 6:58 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
Novell will own open source (says them)
Have been in NYC for last two days for the RRE annual meeting. At cocktails I had a chat with Jack Messman, CEO of NOVELL. Two worthwhile comments:
1. Most of his staff would say that Google is their #1 competitor, although he would prefer Microsoft. Jack believes Google could whip up an OS anytime they wanted. I tend to disagree, but interesting perspective.
2. Open source stack support companies like Spikesource (KP funded) and SourceLabs (Ignition funded) will have a tough time getting to market (I agree) because Novell (through Suse) and others (Redhat) will just implement partner programs and the need will be gone. Jack argues Vendor consolidation around trusted brands. Now we can argue about if Novell makes that cut, but I would tend to agree in principle.
I guess we have some work to do.
Posted by Martin at 4:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2005
musing about mini travel aggregators
Been in Hawaii (Diamond Head on Oahu) since Sunday (therefor the low post rates). Doing alot of surfing and not much else. But while reading the local tourist rags, something interesting struck me. There are a bunch of local micro travel aggregators that specialize right here in Waikiki. Like: go Waikiki.com. When planning my trip I went to all the big aggregators (Expedia, Tavelocity, NorthWest Airlines, Hotels.com, Priceline, etc.) and was a bit depressed at how uniform the rates were across the large aggregators. And how bad the terms are. With the big ones if you book through Expedia for example, you pre-pay them. If you have to change any of your dates or times, you have to go back through Expedia and deal with Expedia's cancelation policies. Therefore I booked my hotel direct with no pre-pay and a 72 hour change policy.
But back to the local aggregators. Once you get here there are tons of specials and lots of resources (not the least of which is the local yellow pages) which are all way more robust than what I found on-line. GoWaikiki.com has rates about half what the big aggregators had. They don't represent all the hotels, but enough to be useful. There are also local publishers like Spotlight Hawaii (turn off the cheesy music) that do a far superior job of getting all the local resources in one place, usually in the form of flyers and the brochures you find in your hotel. Now, maybe a little more googling would have lead me to the smaller sites, but I bet 90% of your average travelor will never find them. The disparity is a result of breadth versus depth. Large aggregators go for breadth, small ones go for depth. It is always harder to find depth. Typically depth also sacrafices some breadth (gowaikiki's small hotel selection for example).
Humm a conundrum. Or an opportunity?
Posted by Martin at 11:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 14, 2005
Here are the biofuel productivity numbers
One comment you often hear about biofuels is that it takes more energy to produce a unit of energy than fossil fuels do. Well not quite right. It does take more Total energy (because more processing is required) but less FOSSIL energy. Here are the facts in a graph: Energy Balance of Biofuels Graph.pdf. Basically when you compare the non-renewable energy consumption between say diesel and biodiesel, Biodiesel requires 4x less FOSSIL fuels to produce the equivelent energy. Since the other energy is totally renewable, the net environmental beneifts are HUGE.
It always helps to compare apples to apples.
Posted by Martin at 4:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Hacking the hybrid
What if you could hack your Prius as easilly as you could hack your Tivo. These guys: Yahoo! Groups : calcars-news have. They have fitted the Prius with better batteries, given it a plug to plug it in at night, and changed the programming to run more often on electric. This has pushed the mileage up to 180mpg in some cases. On top of that if you run on Ethanol instead of petroleum gas, you use almost ZERO oil products. Now that is cool! I am sure you void your warranty, but for 180mpg, who cares?
Posted by Martin at 3:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 12, 2005
I am embarassed to live in King County
The Wall Street Journal had a column recently calling Washington "Florida with Rain". Ouch. After three recounts, the Governor race was decided in favor of the Democrat after "finding" enough ballots to push her over the top. It is really agreegous when the entire state votes in favor of one candidate and one county pushes the election to their candidate through fraud and outright incompetence. Ouch.
Florida With Rain
More funny business in the Washington governor's race. Will there be a new election this year?
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By John Fund
Washington state has supplanted Florida as the leading example of the need for election reform. The Evergreen State's voting system is so sloppy that you can't tell where incompetence ends and actual fraud might begin. Three Washington counties just discovered 110 uncounted absentee ballots--including 94 from Seattle's King County--in a governor's race that occurred more than five months ago and was decided by only 129 votes. Officials in Seattle's King County admit they may find yet more ballots before a court hearing next month on whether a new election should be called. Last Friday, they reported finding a 111th ballot.
The infamous 2004 governor's race was finally decided seven weeks after the election, after King County officials found new unsecured ballots on nine separate occasions during two statewide recounts. After the new ballots were counted, Democrat Christine Gregoire won a 129-vote victory out of some three million ballots cast. Even as she was sworn in last January, King County election supervisor Dean Logan admitted it had been "a messy process."
He wasn't kidding. During the two recounts, Mr. Logan's office discovered 566 "erroneously rejected" absentee ballots, plus another 150 uncounted ones that turned up in a warehouse. Evidence surfaced that dead people had "exercised their right to vote"; documentation was presented that 900 felons in King County alone had illegally voted and that military ballots were sent out too late to be counted. A total of 700 provisional ballots had been fed into voting machines before officials had determined their validity. In the four previous November elections, King County workers had never mishandled more than nine provisional ballots in a single election.
Slade Gorton, a Republican former state attorney general and U.S. senator, has joined with six Republican members of the King County Council in calling for a Justice Department investigation of the county's handling of ballots. Records indicate that some election officials in King County knew that the absentee ballot report they filed in November was inaccurate because there was evidence at least 86 ballots had been misplaced. Ignoring the requirement that they count the number of ballots received, instead they simply added together the number counted and rejected.
"That's appalling," says Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican who has frequently drawn praise from Democrats for being evenhanded. "You just don't do those things." Even the office of Democratic County Executive Ron Sims admits that "an outside review is probably a good idea" if for no other reason than to address Republican suspicions about the 94 new King County ballots. GOP lawyers point out that two-thirds of the new votes were cast in King County precincts that Republican Dino Rossi won. Ms. Gregoire won seven in 10 King County precincts.
All of this means that the May 23 date set for a trial on a GOP lawsuit seeking to declare the election invalid and to hold a new one this November takes on added significance. Mr. Gorton points out that "a court [can] void any election where the number of illegal or mistaken votes exceeds the margin of victory." In the case of last year's race for governor the number of uncounted ballots unearthed just this April is fast approaching Ms. Gregoire's margin of victory.
You'd think the Democratic Legislature would be appalled at the rampant mistakes and move to fix them. Indeed, separate election reform packages passed by both the House and Senate contain such good ideas as changing the appearance of provisional ballots so they aren't as easily mixed in with regular ballots. But both chambers also want to expand the state's already generous use of mail-in ballots, the system that directly led to so many mishaps last November. The state House passed a bill that would mandate that every election be conducted with only mail-in ballots, as Oregon does now.
What's more, the state's current widespread use of mail-in ballots provided an excuse for Kathy Haigh, chairman of the House committee overseeing election laws, to strip the election reform bill of a requirement that voters show photo ID at the polls. "Sixty-eight percent of the people are voting by mail," she explained. "When do they have to show ID? They don't, they have to sign." Precisely, which is a reason that expanding mail-in elections would only increase the potential for fraud.
It's no wonder that election reformers have developed a kind of gallows humor over how Washington, once renowned for its clean government, now finds its election system compared to those in Louisiana or Philadelphia.
Stefan Sharkansky, a computer engineer who runs SoundPolitics.com, a comprehensive blog on the election debacle, uncovered the errors in King County's absentee voter report through a state Public Disclosure Act request. He has filed additional requests for the audit trail created by King County election officials to handle all the ballots. He was told he would have the records delivered by March 31, but that date has slipped to April 15. Mr. Sharkansky reports that date may now move again because "county officials are scrambling to explain their latest mistakes and say they may not have time to answer my request." Let's hope they do before next month's trial.
Posted by Martin at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Trying out public records search engine Pretrieve
A frequent reader pointed me to his new venture: Free Public Record Search Engine - Pretrieve. Interesting front-end to multiple public databases. Of course, as with every new search engine, the first thing I do is put in my name. Here are some interesting things:
1. I didn't know I had a patent for a "thrust bearing".
2. The political contribution list didn't list all my contributions (probably because I made some through companies, good info to know).
3. The UI is ok, but not optimal. When you type in a name and a state, you still get results of names in other states (that aren't the right person). Also, I would prefer a tab view to the current nested HTML pages view. Not sure I want to click through to each database. Why don't you just show me all the results in tabs with the sources highlighted. With this current view, I still have to pick a database. What if I don't know which database? I want you to do the search work.
4. The front-end you are providing to the public databases needs to be thicker. Needs to provide more navigation help, more smarts. More Google. Just providing a nested tree of html front-ends to specific databases.
Good start though.
Here is how Paul Bunting (founder) describes the site:
Pretrieve is a public record search engine designed to help make finding and researching public record information from free sites on the internet faster and easier for everyone. Pretrieve is a Deep Web search engine, not a web crawler. Our engine is designed to query third party databases on the users' behalf to retrieve specific information related to the business, person, or address they are researching. We're not just a "List of Links" that dumps users off at the front page of a website to let them navigate their way to the information they seek. We execute java script that delivers the user directly to their results. We present our users with a categorized menu of information options and take them to their search results in one click - no more redundant data entry. The best way to experience Pretrieve is to test it yourself. You can use the quick search to see if the business or individual is listed in an online phone directory and start your research, or you can use the "Advanced Search" function and enter more specific information about your subject to get more refined results.
We are still a small technology start up, but we are focused on growing our library of valuable search links as rapidly as financially possible. We feel that free web based public records is a valuable information resource that most researchers and consumers fail to take advantage of because it takes too long or they simply can't find them. We believe that we can help our users make better decisions about the companies and people they choose to do business by helping them make better informed decisions. Our users are a diverse bunch that includes lawyers, journalists, Investigators, mortgage & title companies, real estate professionals, health care companies, and our most recent addition: online daters ! It seems that those tech savvy daters out there prefer "Pretrieving" someone to "Googling" someone because of the depth of information.
Sincerely,
Paul Bunting
President
Pretrieve, LLC
(404) 314-9653
www.pretrieve.com
Posted by Martin at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 11, 2005
Trying YASNS
Trying imeem connects people, Yet Another Social Networking Site. My friend vipul invited me. Some interesting twists. They have client software that looks much like AIM. You can chat, share photos, files, etc. But there is also a site. Looks like there are only a handfull of people there so it is not that rich yet. I am looking for an easier way to share large files. Grouper is good, but won't let me share music files (unless I zip them). while I applaud the founders of Imeem for trying to make a different approach, I still have to wonder why I need to join yet another site? I don't see any compelling feature here I can't get with any existing community tool (even AIM).
Posted by Martin at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
new pew study shows some numbness to spam
A new Pew study: komo news | Have We Surrendered To Spam? shows a certain numbness to spam. The number of people who trust mail less or are "bothered" by spam has flattened out . That doesn't mean it is any less of a problem, just that we are used to it. I am glad to see the number of people "trusting" mail flatten out. It would be a serious blow to the whole internet economy if a material number of people stopped trusting mail.
Posted by Martin at 8:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
King5 covers Biodiesel
Good story last night from King5. KING5.com | News for Seattle, Washington | KING5 Top Stories. I was down at Seattle Biodiesel for this, but they edited me out of the shots (with good reason). The spin that this is a very early adoptor thing is really not correct. Any diesel car or truck today could switch today. The problem is not "is there a market" it is more "when will people realized it is CHEAPER on the whole to buy biofuels. Soft benefits like less global warming are hard to sell to the masses. But the cost of petroleum diesel will keep going up and the cost of biodiesel will keep going down. Soon (i believe within two years) the lines will cross and the mass market will choose Biofuels simply on price.
Posted by Martin at 8:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 8, 2005
More windows users switch
More people are Switching from windows to MAC it seems. But not without their problems. I have mentioned a few, but the Switch blog chronicle's many in the lives to two people making the switch. Interesting reading.
Posted by Martin at 1:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 7, 2005
What the future of Apple ads could be
I have started a new category some of you may have noticed called Windows guy does Mac. Being ex-Msft and a life long Windows user, recently sucked over to the Apple Borg, it has been quite an interesting experience. An interesting tidbit along this path came across my in-box this week. A producer/director friend in LA, Art Brown (artebrown@earthlink.net) has done some spec ads. In this one, he imagines one future ad from Mac. Edgy and funny, this is totally in the spirit that Apple has been putting out. I believe this is the only place you can see it on the web. Feel free to e-mail Art about this spot or any of his others (he does films as well). Enjoy.Apple _Once You Go Mac_.mov
Posted by Martin at 2:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 6, 2005
Another reason to dislike iTunes
Will the torture never stop? I was using iTunes to rip the Screaming Trees album last night and remembering how much I liked the album, I decided to listen to the songs as it ripped. Oh, what a fool. There was a warble in the background. Sounded like maybe memory contention was keeping iTunes from pushing all the bits to the sound card fast enough. The songs played, but the base was choppy and it sounded like the singer was singing into a coffee can. Thinking it might be the version of the song, I skipped to another from the library. Same problem. Wondering if it was just iTunes, I fired up the browser and surfed over to Energy Radio. There was the warble again! Even when the music is not delivered by iTunes. Stopping the import function in iTunes makes the warble go away. Hey, Apple, I know on your own platform you are used to being in control of the whole stack and can force your users to do one thing at a time, but over here in the REAL world on Windows, people share. occasionally we like to have our computers do more than one thing at a time. If you can't play nice, you should go home. I am on the hunt for a more friendly ripper now....
Posted by Martin at 9:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 4, 2005
Uncle : Mini Apple!
Well when I fall off the wagon and belly back up to the bar, I tend to do it in a big way, so last week I bought a SECOND apple (actually it is the third in the house with my old iMac). I followed Johnlu's lead and bought a fully stoked Mac Mini as a home theatre PC. 80gig drive, DVD drive, 1GB memory, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, Wifi, DVI cable to the Samsung flat panel.
Ordered on Apple.com. Their site is so smart that they sent it to my mother (an Apple die-hard where my last purchase went) without even asking me. One e-mail and three days waiting later and two packages arrived at my door this afternoon. Again Apple excels at the OOBE. Beautiful packaging, a thoughtful handle to pull the Mini out of the box, simple easy recognition of the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, no software to install, just a charm. Immediately it did want to update some of that software though... First thing I noticed was that there was no DVI cable and I needed a Male to Male headphone jack to connect the MAC to the Samsung flat panel. Thinking to continue my Steve Jobs charity, I fired up the Touareg and headed over to the Apple store. Lots of fancy cables. No DVI cables. I asked the supercilious troll in a white doctors smock for a DVI cable. He said that they come with the Apple monitors and they don't need to sell them. I asked "what if you want to connect it to a non-apple monitor?". He looked stupefied and completely confused muttering "we don't have any demand for them..." Too bad Steve, I am off the Magnolia Hi-Fi for the cable. At the high-end flat panel store the cables are $175!!! Wow, ouch! I find a 3 foot one in the exchanges bin for $75, grab a Sony double male headphone cable and head out. Plug Plug and press a couple buttons and there on the screen is the telltale grey mac start-up screen. Walks me through the keyboard and mouse set-up, finds the Wireless network no problem, asks for password (connects to Cisco wow), and registers me. Then starts downloading 24mb of software updates. Hey, I thought this thing was just made for me last week? Their build disks must be old.
Again a problem getting iTunes to find and be happy with a library in the sky, but after getting it to work for Alex, the process is quicker this time. Everything streams fine. Wait, over on my laptop I am getting a "IP Address conflict" problem. Checked the Watchgaurd to see if it had handed out all its IP addresses. The IP address of the MAC wasn't even there. So I figured out that the Cisco Aeronet 340 was handing out IP addresses to. Reboot both devices got the IP addresses all peachy keen. Mac is accessing the Internet and so is laptop.
Played some music over the lan on the TV. That is cool, but I really want to route the sound into my home theatre rather than the crappy TV speakers. Then tried playing a DVD over the LAN connected with Wifi. Jerky and choppy. Not enough bandwidth. Scrounged up a cable and plugged the mini into my hub at 100mb. Played just fine. The picture had some overscan lines on it, but that was my edit, not the Mac. Had to do a horizontal adjust on the SAmsung to get the picture centered. But now plays Video over the Lan like a champ. Look out guests, the whole home movie archive is now available!
All in all, I gotta say I like the Mac Mini. As much as I didn't want to. It is
Posted by Martin at 10:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Uncle : Apple!
I have posted before my disgust with the Apple iPod juggernaut. Two weeks ago, I crumbled under the unrelenting pressure. I bought Alex (my wife) an iPod Mini. A nice cute, pink one. With an iscription on the back for our anniversary. Her two year old (and four times as large) Rio Riot just stopped turning on one day (switch broke). Alex only had about 2gig of music on the thing anyway and never used the radio feature (although I did). She wanted something much smaller that she could run with. And wanted it dead simple. Despite my personal misgivings, the iPod was the natural choice for my non-technical wife.
When the package arrived, the OOBE was very good. Super pleasing packaging. Easy software install. Immediate hardware recognition. But first problems came when I tried to get iTunes to recognize the vast song library up on my RAID server. iTunes is obviously only designed for local use. With the default settings, iTunes tried to import (copy) all the music from the RAID to the local (20gig) hard drive and soon ran out of space. IT took some hunting for the right settings to tell iTunes to just leave the music where it was. Then once it started, I had to stop it (it had taken over an hour) and then re-start it. The re-start left me with many duplicate song entries and no clear way to remove them. Then came picking the songs to move to the 6gig ipod from the 100gig archive. IT is nonobvious how to do this and Apple Help is no help. After a browse of the bulletin boards and a couple calls to other iPod users, I figured out to create a "playlist" and then drag/drop the music you want there and tell iTunes to keep the iPod synced with that playlist. Ok, fine, now I want to open two windows side by side (like you can in any Windows application) and drag/drop between them. No can do with iTunes. You have only one active window at a time and can't run two instances of the program. STUPID! So you have to view the library window and drag/drop the files from there onto the iTunes playlist. But you can't check the progress of that playlist or see the files in it as you go.
Well two days later (and me doing all the work), Alex has an ipod with her favorite music and is using it for work-out. But I noticed the thing tucked into her shorts this morning instead of in the holster (too much stuff for her). I got the Griffin iTrip, but haven't wandered down that road with the car yet. Alex says all she wants it for is to work-out and doesn't want that music in the car. One thing a friend does with his i-pod is record him reading books to his children at night. Sounds fun. But Oh, No, the iPod Mini's firmware doesn't support recording so no mics are made. You have to buy a different iPod for that. Like I said before, Apple you are BLOWING a great platform opportunity by creating forced incompatibility between your product lines.
Posted by Martin at 9:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Seattle Biodiesel is hiring
Well after receiving some initial funding, Seattle Biodiesel is hiring now: Seattle Biodiesel �Employment�. Get in on the ground floor.
Posted by Martin at 1:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack