Comments off, and no ey.

Comments are hosed again. I'm in the process of junking the MT cgis entirely and switching to PHP for the mt-comment and mt-trackback scripts but it's not a priority. If you need to comment, send me a note via the handy dandy contact form or email if you know one of my email addresses.

Also, my eyboard seems o be having some problems with cerain eys. his sared some ime his morning and as a resul i loos lie I can' ype a all. I'll fix i in pubs when I return to New Yor.

etech day two

Let me start by admitting that choosing to stay at the Hilton San Diego by the airport was a huge mistake. First, on Monday when I arrived they didn't have a room for me. Seems they lost several rooms due to an unspecified problem. So they shipped me off to the nearby Sheraton for the night.

Yesterday morning I was able to switch back before heading into town for the conference. Now, taxis to and from downtown San Diego cost $10. Not bad, but it takes forever to get a taxi (somewhat surprising given the massive queue of taxis at the airport, I guess that when you call they dispatch someone from downtown or further, like L.A.).

Today I called for a taxi and it took nearly 30 minutes...tomorrow I'm toying with walking to the conference.

I saved some money by staying at the Hilton over the conference hotel, but not much when considering the inconvenience.

Anyway, notes from this morning's session in the next post

etech day two, morning sessions

Neil Gershenfeld

The morning opened with Neil Gershenfeld from MIT, talking about manufacturing technology using computational assemblers. That is, getting the systems to manufacture components directly, without the manual intervention that is normally required. So, you hook a bunch of CAD/CAM systems together with various devices to automate manufacturing.

He also talked about spreading micro-fabrication labs to places in India, Ghana, the Samis of northern Finland. That there's value in teaching people how to build the technology directly, not just the abstract technology concepts. Ie, give people the ability to build computers, don't just send them the computers as-is.

After Neil there was a discussion about this hardware type of hacking. I didn't take many notes but captured this quote from someone on the panel: Put creativity in the critical path.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow gave a great speech starting with the problems we see with technology today like spam, and possibly logical solutions like charging for email and how that only creates further problems because it raises the cost of email for everyone. He then went into a riff on DRM and how DRM is simply a system of control, which collapses if any one component is compromised. In the interim it serves to constrict technology development.

Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled

He's put the text of the speech online: All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites.

Justin Chapweske

Justin Chapweske presented on Swarmcasting. Unfortunately I think his session got picked for trimming (because the others had run long) so he sort of had to rush through. Basically swarmcasting is some technology to sit on top of HTTP and enable distributed downloads alá BitTorrent, except that you replace your HTTP stack with the Onion Networks stack so your applications don't need to be modified to use the technology.

Jimmy Wales — Wikipedia

Jimmy took the audience through Wikipedia. I don't have much to note about the talk, however it lead into a great group discussion on folksonomies.

Panel discussion: folksonomies

The panel consisted of Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia, Stewart Butterfield from Flickr, Joshua Schacter from del.icio.us, and Clay Shirky from NYU's ITP and other places.

This is just a collection of notes and quotes:

• When wikipedia introduced its taxonomy it was chaotic for several weeks in the English articles but settled down eventually.
• Tags are for noting aspects of things and not necessarily a replacement for taxonomy/classification
• Flickr tags started as retrieval method for people but became a way for people to group content
• Joshua Schacter noted that while all three groups use tags, they're tags for different purposes:
  • Wikipedia has one or more people who categorize articles into their hierarchical taxonomy. Since it's a wiki, anyone can change the categorization but the group as a whole will correct it if the consensus is that the categorization is incorrect.
  • Flickr's tagging consists of people tagging content they created as a way to recall (and possibly as a way to group content with similar photos by others)
  • del.icio.us' tagging consists of people tagging pages created by others
  • Technorati's tagging consists of authors/content creators tagging their own content.
• A questioner asked if there was a way to link all the tags together, but would that have any value since the tags may be the same word but have different meanings depending on the context they were tagged in.
• Joshua Schacter: When you categorize something it's your instinct that's the most reliable and reproducible thing.
• Question: that these systems would be perfect for RDF…why don't they use it? Joshua Schacter: that tags and RDF can work together, it's not either or. That RDF is complex and the delicious version on top of RDF was measurably slower.
• Question: wouldn't tags be more useful with various sorts of meta data (eg language). Answer: Tags are lower barrier to entry. If you encumber them and make them more complex it lowers the usability and utility of tagging.

13 things that do not make sense

New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense - Features. Here's the 13 things, read the article to learn the details (and perhaps cause your head to spin a few times):

1. The placebo effect
2. The horizon problem
3. Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
4. Belfast homeopathy results
5. Dark matter
6. Viking's methane
7. Tetraneutrons
8. The Pioneer anomaly
9. Dark energy
10. The Kuiper cliff
11. The Wow signal
12. Not-so-constant constants
13. Cold fusion

etech day two, afternoon sessions

I don't have much to report from the afternoon sessions today, generally I'm disappointed in the sessions I sat in on, two were just total fluff though they got lots of applause.

Jason Fried -- 37 Signals

One high point was Jason Fried speaking about lessons learned at 37 Signals from building Basecamp. He organized his speech around four themes:

1. Reducing mass
2. Embracing constraints
3. Getting Real
4. Managing debt

Reducing mass — keep things small and controllable. Implement changes incrementally, don't pack a lot of features into one big release.

Embracing constraints — that many organizations fear constraints and go to great lengths to avoid them, and are unprepared when they encounter them eventually. Constraints create creativity, they're where creativity happens. He cited an example that when they launched Basecamp, they had not figured out how to implement billing. They had 30 days to resolve that little problem since they had a 30 day free trial. The tradeoff was that they got to focus their time on developing the base product, rather than get distracted by the development and implementation of billing.

Getting real — they started by designing the UI and focussed on "real" prototypes, rather than churning code for awhile and then looking at the prototype.

Managing debt — covering both financial debt as well as project debt. That debt in projects is the payment you have to do sooner or later when you make tradeoffs in decisions. If you implement a hack to get around a certain problem, some time down the road it may (will) resurface and you'll have to deal with it...that's debt. It's not necessarily something to avoid, but you need to be aware of it.

He also talked about decisions...that people spend a lot of time trying to make the right decision, make it, and then thrash afterwards. Decisions are transitory events. You mae the decision you make based on the information you have, and move on. If the context changes (and it always does), the decision may no longer seem wise, or may even be proven incorrect. You can't hold off on making the decision on the fear that it may or may not be correct.