David Kellogg’s thoughts
Here’s my minekey widget.
There’s no magic here. I added my Stumbleupon favorites stream, Boing Boing and TechCrunch, and a nice cheery widget was created for me. These guys want to host a Lunch 2.0. I was looking for something like this.
If you already have POW installed on your browser, you can use this.
I created a secure proxy for POW. Mac and Linux users can now use a
personal secure server. Windows is not yet ready. Here’s how to
install it.
Download and install openssl.
Download spow.
tar zxvf spow.tgz
cd release/
# For PPC Mac users
./spow
# Or for all other *nix users
make clean
./configure
make
./spow
Go to https://localhost:6674/ in Firefox.
I included a test certificate. Generate your own certificates using
release/gen3/genkey.sh included in the source.
If you like the animation during the mouseover of the links above, visit Scrollovers.
Rumors galore showed up about Plaxo via the Lunch 2.0 event at Facebook. The ball keeps rolling for our little lunch hour.
Scoble talked to the vice president of marketing, John McCrea, about
Plaxo’s upcoming social network. This is a good move for Plaxo in an obvious direction. I’m glad to hear they found a way to make the leap.
I love leaks. I always see them as well-planned, intending to produce a good buzz. In this case the leak occurred at the number one live social network in Silicon Valley, Lunch 2.0.
I have a sick feeling for helping to kill paper publications. On the Internet, I work to bring information to the masses. The hoi polloi get what they want when they want it. Yet, I have a soft spot for great paper publications like Business 2.0. I subscribed for a meager $10 and fell in love with it very quickly. The writing is witty. They follow ideas and companies long before they are ripe. Business 2.0 covers my industry quickly, whereas Fortune covers only what already made money.
Today, I joined a Facebook group to show my support. It has grown to 1500 members in 4 days. I hope it works. Hopeful like Democrats, we may fail knowing we did the right thing.
Unfortunately, all paper publications are feeling the advertising pinch. I prefer at times not to choose my news but to have others choose it for me. I want to sit down and read an article end to end and see another perspective. Business 2.0 gives me the startup point of view. I would miss it.
SILICON VALLEY, California - Design Patterns (1995-2007) met its untimely demise during a code freeze today. A post by Slashdot user MillionthMonkey shot Design Patterns through the heart. Design Patterns, rest in peace. Design Patterns are survived by Algorithms and Anti Patterns.
I must admit in my 11 years of paid coding, I never used a single Pattern. Yet as I wrote code, I wondered if there was some order to it all. Design Patterns attempts to explain well written code and turn messiness into order. Unfortunately, the explanation was turned on its head, as trend-seeking professors encouraged their students to inject patterns into their code. It sounds like inserting great lines of COBOL into your C program. Sometimes the cure is not right for the disease.
Design Patterns attempt to take the art and science of writing code and turn it into an engineering discipline. Despite arguments to the contrary, computer science is not engineering. Engineering involves applying the same rules (gravity, chemistry, physics) to a large number of experiments and testing their results. Engineers can make predictions based upon scant evidence, like testing a few i-beams or wafers to test the whole, to make assumptions about the quality of a product.
Computer science is not yet engineering. The closest I have seen to real engineering is at Google, where statistics play a role in what they do. At many companies, they test several web page designs on the users to see which one works for the user. This is heading in the right direction. Engineering has little to do with writing code. Writing code in the right way enables good engineering to occur outside the code.
Adding design Patterns to working code to impress your boss creates code bloat. This leads to my favorite Anti Pattern: writing too many design patterns in your code.
Terry Chay made an interesting point about Yahoo management. It appears the Yahoo techie has it bad. But the Yahoo engineer looks down on the Ebay manager. The Ebay manager only belittles the Ebay engineer, but that’s the end of the line. There is nothing lower than an Ebay engineer. I’m not talking talent. That’s just the way the world is.
Ebay makes gobs of money. God bless them. Making money covers up all sorts of engineering and managerial problems. Google is a good example. Internally Google is a mess, but they have two products that work. That raises its managers’ score.
This is all too confusing. The whole process of superiority needs to be formalized. Here is an accurate hierarchy of who pecks whom in Silicon Valley. It has little to do with grunt engineering talent, only grisly managerial cluelessness.
This SBU chart is inspired by Luke.
As you can see clearly by the chart, Facebook engineers are managed by superior beings. Yahoo is in the middle of the pack, only because there are much stranger places to work. Ebay (excluding Paypal) is unfortunately the butt of all jokes. Just say “train”, and the Valley engineer will chuckle. Train you ask?
A train contains a fixed number of seats. An engineer has the privilege to sit in one of these seats. At some point, the eBay train will leave the station. Your train might leave at 3 am. You as an eBay engineer must stay up until 3 am to check in your working code to CVS. But the 2 am engineer already broke your libraries, so you must stay up until dawn to fix his problems. The train is so efficient that toolies must throw their bodies under the cogs of the Juggernaut to please the managerial gods.
Apple could not make the list due to secrecy. I only met one Apple employee who would divulge what he did. He works for Safari, which means, if you look in the upper-right-hand corner of your browser, he works for Google.
Just four weeks after reaching 20,000 downloads we passed another myriad mark. Early this morning, the 30,000th download occurred.
It seems there are more than a few takers for this Javascript server.
After encouragement from Herb and Scott, I jumped straight into embedded heaven with my first USB-drive Pow server. I found a 2 GB USB drive for $17 at Microcenter next to the AMC theater. There’s no bubble packaging, no shiny skin. You just pull them out of a candy jar at the register. It’s slower than my hard drive, but no matter, it costs only .85 cents per MB.
To assure a truly hard-drive independent server, I needed to load the Moz Profiles directory, the /pow root directory and the server app itself onto the USB drive. In the application.ini file, I changed the executable variable from “xulrunner” to “xulrunner -profile /Volumes/FIREBRAND/Profiles”. I loaded a Windows and Mac version of Pow for use anywhere. I copied my prefs.js file, because the Mac XULRunner appears unable to save to this file.
Now that all of this is done, I have a beautiful server app worthy of taking on any library or lab computer. The best part is when I run the server, I can unplug the USB stick, but the server still runs. Now that is pure hacking glory.
Dave
Pow 0.1.3 is available.
This is one of the most important
releases yet. It gets better and better. It is also the smallest
download yet. What other software package gets smaller and better over
time? Here are my release notes.
This version adds stability and bug fixes.
* Standalone server support
* Firebug support
* Auto-restart of server after window close
* startup.sjs file auto-created for new installs
* Saving to subdirectory fixed
* Changed mime-types to binary by default
* Added many binary mime-types
* Added loopback-only option
* Fixed root directory problem
* Fixed XML download problem
* Smallest download size ever 99K -> 89K -> 73K -> 63K
The standalone server on port 6673 offers Firebug support through
Firefox. The Mac standalone version is at http://davidkellogg.com/pub/Pow%200.1.3.dmg
Scott can post the PC version address. Linux users can download
http://davidkellogg.com/pub/pow-xr.xpi and a nightly at
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/nightly/latest-trunk/
and follow the instructions at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner_1.8.0.4_Release_Notes
Dave
A group I helped start, Lunch 2.0, is shown in the San Francisco Chronicle today. What is Lunch 2.0? Terry has a good description in The Lunch 2.0 story so far. It is a group of Silicon Valley workers and students that get together at each other’s companies for free food and great conversation. The party at Linked In drew around 250 people, a huge turnout. Terry and I wanted to sneak into corporate cafeterias back in 2000, but we did not get far.
We tried to start a networking event called a Junto, but that failed out of only being an intellectual networking event. The Lunch 2.0 concept created by Mark, Joseph, Terry and me, was only about trying to get a few free meals. We got good publicity through Mark, and it stuck. I’m happy the Chronicle article was written. Maybe we can hope for a few more lunches in the next year.
Dave