March 06, 2008
Thursday at ETech
8:45am Thursday, 03/06/2008
The Case for Africa as a Mobile Development Hothouse
General Marina Ballroom F
Joel Selanikio (DataDyne.org)
Dependence on mobile Internet access gives developers in Africa a unique perspective, free of the baggage of the desktop browser. Learn how we can reap dividends, new perspectives, and the potential for as-yet-unimagined applications.
9:35am Thursday, 03/06/2008
OpenMoko and Ubiquitous Computing
General Marina Ballroom E
Michael Shiloh (OpenMoko)
The promise of Ubiquitous Computing has been with us for a few years, but have the goals really been achieved? In this talk we will explore the obstacles to Ubiquitous Computing, and why I believe the OpenMoko project can help further the development of true Ubiquitous Computing .
11:00am Thursday, 03/06/2008
Las Vegas: Behind the Scenes. What Sensors? What Privacy? What Anonymity? The Whole Story
General Marina Ballroom E
Jeff Jonas (IBM)
Jeff Jonas, who has architected and built numerous casino systems, takes you behind the scenes to describe the scams and "trip-wires" that make it possible to detect the unwanted—even before the opportunist arrives at the casino. .
11:50am Thursday, 03/06/2008
Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away, Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon
Mission Hills
W. James Au (The Making of Second Life)
Overpraised in 2006 then dismissed in 2007 by the media and Internet gurus alike, Linden Lab's user-created virtual world keeps growing, attracting companies and organizations and millions of accounts. How is this possible, and what does it say about the Internet's future? The company's former "embedded journalist" and author of *The Making of Second Life* explains. .
2:00pm Thursday, 03/06/2008
Building a Bright Green Future
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Alex Steffen (Worldchanging)
If everyone lived like a typical prosperous American, we'd need ten planets to sustain our way of life. What might a sustainable future look like? How do we use ingenuity to design a future that's both bright and green? .
2:30pm Thursday, 03/06/2008
Twine: The Social Graph Meets the Semantic Web
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Lew Tucker (Radar Networks)
We'll discuss and demo an innovative new service: Twine.com, built on a semantic web platform and designed to grow and enrich communities of interest. Semantics are used throughout as the system automatically annotates information with meta data, tags, and relationships. .
2:50pm Thursday, 03/06/2008
Digital Democracy 2008 and Beyond
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Micah Sifry (Personal Democracy Forum)
Four years ago, at ETech 2004, O'Reilly hosted a seminal one-day Digital Democracy Teach-In, focused on how internet technologies were "putting power back into the hands of the people." In 2008, the internet has become a central battlefield for the presidential campaigns, but how much are they actually using the net to empower their supporters? .
3:00pm Thursday, 03/06/2008
The 4-Hour Workweek
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-hour Workweek).
March 05, 2008
My Wednesday at ETech
8:45am Wednesday, 03/05/2008
How to Kick Ass
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users)
What does it take to be really, really, really good at something? Are our tech tools making us smarter, dumbing us down, or...? The good news: having a "natural talent" for something is a lot less crucial for expertise than we thought. .
9:15am Wednesday, 03/05/2008
An Open Source Platform for Personal Robots
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Steve Cousins (Willow Garage)
In this talk we introduce an open source platform for personal robots that integrates the best technologies from various areas of robotics and work from top research institutions, within a flexible and lightweight modular architecture. .
9:40am Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Personalizing the Device: How Communities Will Help Actualize User-generated Hardware and the Long-tail of Gadgets
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs)
Open innovation and advances in collaborative development will help usher in the era of user-generated hardware. This talk will focus on user-driven personalization and specialization as it relates to personal hardware devices. .
9:55am Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Elephant 2000: A Programming Language for the year 2015 Based on Speech Acts
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
John McCarthy (Stanford University)
Elephant 2000 is a proposed programming language good for writing and verifying programs that interact with people (e.g. transaction processing) or interact with programs belonging to other organizations (e.g. electronic data interchange) .
11:00am Wednesday, 03/05/2008
The EFF's "On A Brighter Note..."
General Marina Ballroom F
Danny O'Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Cindy Cohn (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Kevin Bankston (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Emily Berger (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Tim Jones (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
A more-optimistic-than-usual Electronic Frontier Foundation reveals: near-future technology that will help defend your rights, policy initiatives that could help save the Net, and techniques you can bake into your work that will help preserve freedom online. .
11:50am Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Context Hacking: Some Examples of How to Mess with Art, the Media System, Law and the Market
General Marina Ballroom F
Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom, and University of Applied Sciences Graz)
The term "context hacking" refers to unconventional forms or intervention of communication. Johannes Grenzfurthner will present projects by monochrom, a worldwide operating collective from Vienna. .
2:00pm Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Hackers Built My Motorcycle
General Marina Ballroom E
Pablos Holman (Komposite)
The process of innovation begins with discovery. Hackers are constantly disassembling the world around them. Pablos Holman will show all kinds of delightful and surprising things that hackers are capable of. .
2:50pm Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Disaster Tech: What is working and what is coming
Mission Hills
Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar), Mikel Maron (Mapufacture)
Twitter and Google Maps are being used in mainstream emergency management, and projects like InSTEDD will push them even farther. This session shows you what is working, what isn't, and what's next in Disaster Tech. .
2:50pm Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Really, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces
General Marina Ballroom E
Kyle Machulis (Nonpolynomial Labs)
Fitt's Law applies a lot of places in UI design, but sex isn't one of them. What can we learn from sex hardware interfaces? If an interface is inviting enough that someone is willing to have the most intimate of experiences using it, can we apply these ideas to, say, installing printer drivers? .
4:05pm Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Reality Mining: Inference in Complex Social Systems via the Mobile Phone
General Marina Ballroom D
Nathan Eagle (MIT)
Teaching mobile phones to learn from people's behavior: predicting future activities, inferring relationships, quantifying organizational rhythms. .
7:00pm Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Coding Against Corruption
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons)
More info will be provided soon. Lessig has discussed corruption on his blog (lessig.org/blog).
8:00pm Wednesday, 03/05/2008
Emerging Arts Fest
Event Marina Ballroom D
Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art), Kati London (area/code), Natalie Jeremijenko (NYU), Scott Varland (NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)), Adam Simon (NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)), Michael Dory (NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)), Paul Torrens (Arizona State University), Ryan McManus (Barbarian Group LLC), Andrew Bell (Barbarian Group LLC), Andrea Vaccari (Senseable City Lab, MIT), Tucker Balch (Georgia Tech), Stewart Tansley (Microsoft Research), Eric Kabisch
The first ever Emerging Arts Fest provides a showcase for artists to present their vision of the intersection of art and technology. .
March 04, 2008
Great Conversation And a New Day
I had a great time yesterday which ended up with great conversation and drinks and meeting fun folks. My session schedule for today:
8:45am Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Energy Literacy
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Saul Griffith (Makani Power/Squid Labs)
The world has known, calculable amounts of energy are available. We'll take a science look at all of the earth's energy resources, both stored and renewable.
9:20am Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Your Phone is Your Controller: Collaborative Gaming in Public Spaces
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Jury Hahn (MegaPhone), Dan Albritton (MegaPhone)
MegaPhone makes digital signage interactive using a regular phone call. Learn about this phone-controlled, real-time, multiplayer collaborative gaming platform that can be used from ANY phone, ANY service provider, in ANY country as a game controller.
9:30am Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Information Visualization is a Medium
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design)
Information visualization is emerging as a medium with a wide range of expressive potential. Stamen Design’s work in visualization and mapping is among the most high profile online. Eric Rodenbeck will provide an overview and insight into the studio’s working process.
10:00am Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Multi-Touch Displays in the Real World
Keynote Marina Ballroom D
Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research)
This session will discuss how socially oriented experience and activity-based theories of interaction drive the design and evaluation of technology.
11:00am Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Designing Magnets: Connecting with Audiences in the Wired Age
General Marina Ballroom E
Elan Lee (Fourth Wall Studios)
Your ability to connect with your audience will often define the success or failure of your project. This talk will use Alternate Reality Games to explore how this new genre of entertainment can give us insight into building, maintaining, and growing an audience.
11:50am Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Users, Socializers, and Producers: How Internet Technologies are Changing Our View of Ourselves
General Marina Ballroom D
Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research)
This session will discuss how socially oriented experience and activity-based theories of interaction drive the design and evaluation of technology.
2:00pm Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Projecting Surveillance Entertainment
General Marina Ballroom F
Merci Victoria Grace (GameLayers), Justin Hall (GameLayers)
This session will explore current systems of surveillance entertainment and imagine them working in other contexts. including how our personal data trails yield raw material for play.
2:50pm Tuesday, 03/04/2008
The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism
General Marina Ballroom E
Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices)
The Web was invented so physicists could share research papers. The tools of Web 2.0 are showing themselves to be extremely powerful in the hands of digital activists, especially those in environments where free speech is limited.
4:05pm Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Sexual Identity Online
General Marina Ballroom E
Violet Blue (Violet Blue)
People seek sexual expression online and encounter disaster or success, plus a steep learning curve about privacy, anonymity, 2.0 skills, and identity. Applicable outside the context of sexuality, online identity is a deliberate act.
4:55pm Tuesday, 03/04/2008
My Daughter’s DNA: A Father’s Odyssey in His Daughter’s Genome
General Marina Ballroom D
Hugh Rienhoff (MyDaughtersDNA.org)
Hugh Rienhoff's daughter was born with an undiagnosed syndrome. Not getting results from conventional medicine, he searched to find and sequence her genome. This talk focuses on the resources in the public domain to identify and understand genetic information.
6:00pm Tuesday, 03/04/2008
Exhibit Hall Reception
Event Marina Ballroom F
Visit the exhibitors, mingle with other attendee, and enjoy great refreshments and drinks at the evening reception.
Motivation Overload
After a session on storyboarding for non-fiction that made me just about start a new book (on top of the one I started Friday), the O'Reilly Radar talk, 5 minute app demos (mostly facebook and some Open Social apps), 5 minute Ignite talks and dinner with a serial entrepreneur who just launched a new social shopping site using rails, Amazon S3 and the Elastic Compute Cloud, I'm feeling like I should really be creating a startup before breakfast. I love ETech. I'll come back and add links later.
March 03, 2008
ETech Session Schedule
Here's my ETech schedule for today.
8:30am Monday, 03/03/2008
Storyboarding for Nonfiction
Tutorial Marina Ballroom D
Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users)
Can a PowerPoint business presentation be riveting? Can a tech manual be a page-turner? In this workshop, you'll map your presentation, nonfiction book, or even a user guide into a compelling three-act story template.
1:30pm Monday, 03/03/2008
Debugging Hacks: What They Never Taught You About Solving Hard Bugs
Tutorial Marina Ballroom D
Marc Hedlund (Wesabe)
If you're working on anything at all interesting, sooner or later you'll hit a bug that will drive you mad trying to fix it. This workshop will give you a set of tools and practices for finding, reproducing, fixing, and not regressing bugs that "println" won't pinpoint.
7:00pm Monday, 03/03/2008
AppNite Live Demo Contest
Event Marina Ballroom E
AppNite features 10 awesome developers doing 5-min App demos, with prizes for the best apps, as chosen by the audience.
8:00pm Monday, 03/03/2008
The O'Reilly Radar
Keynote Marina Ballroom E
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
Tim shares his views on the technology's latest trends.
8:30pm Monday, 03/03/2008
Ignite ETech
Event Marina Ballroom E
If you had 5 minutes on stage what would you say? Would you pitch a project? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? We’re going to find out when we Ignite ETech.
9:30pm Monday, 03/03/2008
Monday Night Werewolf
Event Mission Hills
Werewolf is a game of paranoia and group behavior and a fun way to get to know your fellow conference-goers.
March 02, 2008
Checking-in at Etech
I'm at the O'Reilly ETech conference this week in San Diego. I came up Friday evening to have a couple of days to enjoy the city and visit friends. I finished checking in about an hour ago and I'm about to go knock around and see what's happening this evening. More later.
December 05, 2007
Stephen King: The Haven Foundation
Like most people in the U.S. I have friends and family with limited access to health care due to the broken system which either ignores or actively punishes entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses, the elderly and the poor. This effects artists especially since most are freelancers. Based on his own near fatal experience and those of his friends, Stephen King has founded a new charitable organization called The Haven Foundation which hopes to help freelancers with catastrophic injuries or illness make it through. It's a tax deductible charity and worth it to support those who have spent their lives make us laugh and cry and comforting us through those long nights with their work. Consider making a donation this holiday season.
Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for bringing this to my attention with her blog Making Light.
December 29, 2004
Tsunami Relief
With the death toll now nearing 80,000 people from the recent Tsunami, Google has posted a list of links to aid organizations which are accepting private relief donations. Amazon.com has created an Amazon Honor System page for Tsunami donations through the American Red Cross. So far, through the Amazon site alone, 34,716 donations have raised 1.9 Million dollars.
July 01, 2004
Former Secretary of Agriculture to Head MPAA
According to the Washington Post, the former Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman, is set to be the next stormtrooper for oligarchy rights.
The selection of former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman to replace Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Association of America won't result in any changes in the industry's policy of aggressively fighting online piracy, the two men said Thursday.Yahoo! News - New MPAA Leader Committed to 'Net Piracy Fight
So now Dan will join those brave few who will help guide the U.S. toward becomming a demon haunted technological backwater by harassing 12 year-old girls and grandmothers.
Now there's a Slashdot link quoting a Fox news report.
And I submitted it to boingboing.
May 30, 2004
Real Death and Danger in the Antiquarian Book Trade
My Google news filter for "Science Fiction Fantasy Publishing" turned up a fascinating story in the Salt Lake City Weekly:
Ken Sanders has a multitude of friends, most of them long dead and on a shelf at his funky Salt Lake City bookstore.He has enemies, too, the kind who call and make death threats. As chair of the security committee for the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), Sanders knows the once genteel rare-book business has fallen prey to Internet fraud, credit card theft and e-auction forgeries. Even international cartels, not content to limit their business to arms and oil, drugs and extortion, have discovered that rare books are portable, can be moved quickly across several time zones, fetch huge sums from collectors and can be liquidated swiftly, when necessary, through an Internet auction site such as eBay. The kinder, gentler days of the book trade, where deals were sealed simply with a handshake, seem over.
Salt Lake City Weekly - Book 'em Ken!
April 12, 2004
What Vinod Khosla is up to These Days
Boing Boing: Big name VC gets into microfinancing
A great story about applying leverage where it will do the most good. Way to go, Vinod!
gotta love them Sun alumni ;)
"I was completely blown as I listened to the stories of these tenacious women," Mr. Khosla said. "I started crying." In his view, the microfinance initiatives he visited in India and Bangladesh in February ran more efficiently than most Silicon Valley organizations. "They have sophisticated credit algorithms," he said. "Does the woman own a buffalo? Some chickens? Does she have a toilet in her home? What kind of roofing material does her home have? Does she bring a shawl to the village meeting?"In India, microloans are usually disbursed to poor women whose total family assets are less than 20,000 rupees ($459) and whose monthly income is smaller than 350 rupees. Yet microfinance initiatives have a phenomenal repayment rate averaging more than 95 percent, better than the best commercial banks in the world. Many of the programs are highly profitable, Mr. Khosla said, adding that "microfinance is one of the most important economic phenomena in the world in the last 50 years."
January 13, 2004
The Terrifying "Power of Cheese"(sm)
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things blogged this story of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers who are using gigawatt, nuclear pumped X-ray lasers designed for the Star Wars Program(TM) to finally achieve that most ancient dream of humankind, finely sliced cheese in the shape of Barney(TM) . (Actually it's a pulsed UV laser that, "produced 10 ns long pulses with an average power of up to 10 W at 355 nm and 3.5 W at 266 nm," but X-Ray lasers sound much cooler, don't you think?)
January 09, 2004
Is There a Prize for Worst Science Article?
What might have been a fascinating article on the possibilities suggested by the discovery of a new heavy particle in a Japanese collider, instead became a sad exercise in ways to try to force a scientist to claim physics is a life science. Mystery particle may hold clues to universe
Note the bizarre explanations like:
which is made up of quarks, the basic building blocks of not just life, but everything that exists in this universe--as we know it.It's rare for me to be so critical publicly, but this is a disturbing trend I've seen in more than one place. Articles about the migration of genes across species (see Dawkin's Extended Phenotype) turn into appologies for why this kind of discovery might be related to the disease of the day (SARS). Maybe I'm over reacting, but is there really a need to continuously justify fundamental research in terms of some topical news item? (outside of a grant application)
January 08, 2004
"Monsters" online
If you've never read Monsters - a novelette by James Patrick Kelly now is your chance. When you finish there's a great "making of" over at sfwa.org.
December 30, 2003
Greg Egan is Amazing
Those of you who know me (or who have poked around this site sufficiently) will know that I am sometimes under the delusion that I am a Science Fiction writer. (Capitalization and all). I will even admit to having suffered on occasion a sense of superiority because I am a computer programmer. But I've just happened across an author's website which has cured me of any such pretension, probably permanently. Greg Egan's Home Page is unavoidable proof that he has more imagination and skill as a programmer and as writer than I can ever hope to develop. The site is full of text from his stories, illustrations, graphics and working simulations of some of the incredible experiments and radical science from his stories. I should really take more time out to do the same sort of thing. I can write an applet! Heck I work for Sun! I, uh, just need to wait until I finish this other thing that I have to do, and I have this thing I have to do in Dallas, and then there's this pain in my left wrist when I hold it just so...
December 23, 2003
Screams and Laughter
Slashdot linked a story from NPR's "On the Media" about the "Wilhelm Scream" a sound effect that has appeared in dozens of movies and has a cult following among sound editors. The sound effect is still being used and heard by millions while the anonymous actor who originally created it has probably long since passed away. "The Wilhelm" (transcript with sound)
Harlan Ellison wrote about an eerily similar laugh in "Laugh Track" from the Angry Candy anthology. If you haven't read the book, please do so immediately. I'll wait.
The Best Clichés Are Free
Cliché Finder is a web collaboration started and maintained by S. Morgan Friedman which currently lists over 3,300 Clichés! It's a barrel of laughs/fish/monkeys.
Molecular Motors in Australian Rainforest
This rainforest weevil grows perfect opals for a stunning insect fashion statement. And it may be using some very interesting nanomachinery to do it.
thanks again, Ben.
December 20, 2003
Breadboards with Alternative Bread
This is a brilliant hardware hack, and a pretty awesome Earth friendly bit of recycling.
Tortilla-Board: A New Breadboard Technique
thanks Ben
November 19, 2003
Ah, the Old Days
First off, I have such an easy life you would spit in my eye for whining if you knew me. But today I spent time on the job with some old friends who install mill control computers. These systems do an awful lot of things in pretty ingenious ways. It brought back memories from when I used to do the same thing, but made me sad in a way. I had always wanted to write a mill control language. I have plenty of experience in many, very different, mills and it seems like a natural evolution beyond the very limited and esoteric products that are available commercially. But I don't work in that field anymore and don't have access to the test equipment and live customers a decent project would require. Instead I spend my time these days creating interfaces to systems that have several existing interfaces, architecting systems that do things other systems already do for large companies with websites, and peace making. Diplomacy is eternal and is probably at least 80% of my paycheck by volume. It's amazing how far I've come in my quest to just write some interesting code, and how hard it still is to get the chance. Most of the really interesting work is owned and kept by former employers along the way. What I have available to put up is trivial and rushed because I find it hard to work very long on something that doesn't pay the bills and will probably never be used.
Anybody interested in a mill control language that can run on an x86 processor and use a PLC, RS232/422/485 devices including Opto22, various scale heads, and anything else you can reasonably come up with? Will work for test hardware, manuals and a sense of purpose! Of course, if you want it fast you could pay me too and limit my distractions. Interested parties may inquire below.
No, it wouldn't be like anything I've ever done for a previous employer. (or even seen before) And I would probably want it put under an Open Source license of some sort, and no, it wouldn't look like toadskin.
Langsmith Languages
LtU had a great link to a collection of Langsmith Languages. Many languages I hadn't run across anywhere else, all from langsmiths@yahoo.com. Enjoy.
November 18, 2003
Charles Fort Institute
For devotees of the legitimately strange, Charles Fort is a cultural hero for approaching unusual circumstances with an open mind free of superstition. Now a group is hoping to continue his work with a new professional research institute, research collection and museum known as The Charles Fort Institute (CFI)
As a proper institution, CFI will work towards improving the standards of scholarship in our subjects and will speak out for writers and researchers, especially in the pursuit of fair pay, copyright and proper credit. Nor will we shrink from speaking out against attempts to mislead the public through shoddy scholarship, bigotry, deceit, fraud and malice as these demean our profession and confuse the public.
I hope it rains fish the day they open.
November 13, 2003
Watch Out! There's an Ice Age Behind You!
Many things changed suddenly 5,200 years ago at about the same time as the famous "ice man" was suddenly frozen in glacial ice. Ice cores and ancient DNA recovered in Peru may shed light on just what kind of world-wide climate change might have inspired nomadic hunters to settle down to agriculture and city building. All of which eventually led to golf on the moon, botox injections and someone shoving a bunch of foam and chickenwire into a perfectly good mummy. (see below)
Ice Cores May Yield Clues To 5,000-Year-Old Mystery
Tricky Mummy Has Last Laugh
"Nellie, who dates back to the Ptolemaic period between 305 and 34 B.C., has four feet. ... Scans of the skull also revealed Nellie's lips faintly curled, enigmatically, like some Egyptian Mona Lisa."
This mummy has four feet, few bones and a new home
November 07, 2003
MenuetOS Tiny, Complete
MenuetOS is an amazing operating system written entirely in 32 bit x86 assembly. You can develop for Menuet using only Menuet apps and it boots and runs from a 1.44 M Floppy. The GUI is excellent and supports some cool things like transparent and free form windows. The most interesting thing for me was how simple software development can be without eight miles of crap between the developer and the hardware.
Going to Movable Type
I finally caved and decided I wasn't going to bother reimplementing features like trackback etc. from scratch. The folks at Six Apart have worked hard and deserve some users and some cash. I'm debating if it's worth moving the previous posts over. I may do that this weekend.