Archive for the 'Blog' Category

My Word Cloud - What Wordle Says About the Words I Use Here

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on July 7, 2008
. 0 Comments
Wordle for TinyScreenfuls.com

A cool little Java app, you give it a bunch of text, or a link to a site with an RSS feed, and it generates this highly customizable “word cloud” visualization.

This is one I just did for this blog. Seems about right - me talking a lot about Twitter, books, Kindle, FriendFeed, and people.

You can try it out for yourself at http://wordle.net. Java required, and I couldn’t get it working in Firefox 3 on Mac (worked fine in Safari, though). Post a link in the comments if you come up with an interesting word cloud! :-)


Two Month Kindle Review (and full text of my Washington Times interview)

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on July 7, 2008
. 10 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Kelly Jane Torrance, a reporter for the Washington Times. She was working a piece about the Amazon Kindle ebook reader, and had seen my Kindle unboxing and initial review video. We conducted an email interview, part of which went into her final article in the Washington Times (”The Carry-On Library” - beware popups).

Of course, all of my lengthy replies didn’t make it into the article, so I’m posting them here. Consider this my “two month” review of the Kindle - that’s about how long I’ve been using it. Read on for the rest of the interview/review.

(Update: I forgot to refer you to a couple of other posts I’ve written about the Kindle, namely, my Rebuttal to Kindle Critics, in which I talk in depth about the limits, real and perceived, of the DRM on Kindle books purchased from Amazon, and “Why eBooks are a Better Entertainment Value Than Almost Anything Else“, which is pretty self-explanitory. Both are good background on my thoughts/stance on the Kindle in general, and DRM in particular. I didn’t get into DRM much in the newspaper interview.)

How long have you had your Kindle?

I’ve had my Kindle for about a month and a half, since they became reliably available in mid-April. But I’ve wanted one ever since they were released in November 2007 (and subsequently sold out in 6 hours).

Why did you decide to purchase it?

I’ve been a long time fan of ebooks. I’ve read hundreds of them on various PDA and phone devices over the last few years. Needing to touch a physical book as part of the reading experience stopped being an issue for me a long time ago. The convenience of being able to take a library of hundreds of ebooks with you on a small device is very appealing. Already a fan of ebooks in general, I wanted a dedicated reader device with an electronic ink screen (super high contrast and DPI, low power usage). Among the dedicated eInk reader devices out there (Sony Reader, etc.), I chose the Kindle for a couple of reasons.

First is the Kindle Store - the almost-150,000 books that Amazon has made available to purchase and read on the Kindle. You could have the greatest ebook reader device in the world, and without a great library/store, it would fail. I figure if anybody can do the “electronic bookstore” right, it’s Amazon.

Second, the Kindle has a built-in unlimited cellular wireless data connection. That means it can access the internet and the Kindle Store almost anywhere there’s cell phone coverage, with no monthly fee. Besides being able to look things up on Wikipedia, or browse the web, this means I can go from “I want to buy a new book” to having the book purchased and downloaded to my Kindle in a matter of minutes, from anywhere.

You mentioned you have an iPhone, so are you the sort of person who tends to buy the latest gadgets?

I’m definitely the kind of person who always wants to have the latest gadgets. I’m a geek all the way down to the core. Interestingly, it was when I bought my iPhone that I stopped reading ebooks, because there was no ebook software for the iPhone, and it replaced the other mobile gadgets that I used to carry. So when the iPhone came along, I went back to buying “dead tree” version of books. I lost the advantages of ebooks, and the paper books I was buying started piling up all around my house.

Have you always been a big reader?

Yes, I’ve been a voracious reader all my life. It drives me crazy to have a few minutes go by without something for me to read (either on my Kindle, or reading the web on my phone).

How many books do you read in a month/year?

I read probably 6-8 books a month, around 100 per year (first time I’ve counted that up - yikes!).

What sort of things do you find yourself reading on the Kindle?

I find myself reading mostly books from my favorite genres on my Kindle - science fiction, history, computer books. Besides the books that are available for purchase from Amazon, I read a ton of free books that are available from places like Project Gutenberg, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive. Many of my favorite authors, like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, have embraced Creative Commons (”Some Rights Reserved”) as a way to distribute their work for free in order to gain new fans. Cory Doctorow has written extensively on why he follows this model (the basic argument is that for most authors, your enemy isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity), and in my case, at least, it works. I buy hard copies of Cory’s books to give to friends, as well and recommending they get the free versions of his books. He and others like him have gotten way more money out of me this way that they would have if they followed the traditional publishing model.

Are you happy with your purchase?

I am very happy with my Kindle purchase. I use it every day, and I love it more and more. I read to my daughter from it every day (she calls it my “magic book”, the best way I could think of to describe how it works to a 5 year old). I highly recommend it to anyone who loves reading.

What have been the best things about the device?

As a concept, the best thing about the Kindle and ebooks in general is being able to hold hundreds (or thousands) of books in one physical device. As a device, I love the electronic ink screen on the Kindle, and the built-in wireless connection (and the fact that Amazon doesn’t artificially block you from using the web with it). The battery life is stellar (with the wireless radio turned off, battery life is measured in thousands of page turns, which translates to days and days of active use). The design and layout, while controversial, becomes immediately comfortable when you start using it - you can tell why it’s designed the way it is as soon as you hold it in your hand. For me, it has changed reading the same way MP3 and iPods changed music. It’s a real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Anything you’ve been dissatisfied with?

My only real complaint with the Kindle is that I wish the page would refresh faster when you “turn” it. The refresh time is about 750 milliseconds - three quarters of a second. I understand why this is - the electromechanical eInk screen just can’t flip all those pixels very fast. This will improve as the technology matures. But it’s still irritating sometimes, when the Kindle can’t keep up with me and my page turns. I also feel a little guilty when visiting my favorite local independent bookstores. I still go there, browse, and buy books that aren’t available or wouldn’t work well on the Kindle (photography books, etc.), but I’m spending a lot less time and money there than I used to.

Have you shown your Kindle to others through the forum on Amazon?

Yes, I posted a “See a Kindle in Portland, OR” in the forum that Amazon set up for this purpose. A couple people came, including another Kindle owner (at the time, the only other Kindle I had seen “in the wild” besides my own). Since then, I’ve been keeping loose track of how many people in Portland have a Kindle - we’re up to 8 or so that I know of (and a whole lot more that I don’t know about, I’m sure).

Do you find people coming up to you to ask about the Kindle? And do you enjoy showing it off?

People often come up to me and ask about the Kindle, and I love to show it off, and tell them all about it. I know several people who have decided to buy a Kindle after hearing me sing the praises of mine. Sometimes I feel like I’m working for Amazon and Jeff Bezos, and they should pay me a commission. (Actually, I am an Amazon affiliate, and I get a small percentage of Amazon credit when someone buys a Kindle through the links on my website.)

Have you traveled with your Kindle?

I have traveled with my Kindle, and it’s one of the most brilliant uses for the device. A few weeks before I got my Kindle, I took a two week trip to Shanghai, China. I brought a “dead tree” book with me to read during the trip. I finished the first book before I even left my home airport, and bought another one there. I finished that one by the time I got to San Francisco, and bought another one there. I finished that one before we landed in Shanghai. While I was there, I bought a couple more books, which were sufficient for the rest of the trip. By the time I got home, I had been carrying these five or six books in my luggage all over the world. It was that experience that gave me concrete evidence of how a Kindle could simplify my reading.

Could you see yourself taking it to the beach and places like that?

I take my Kindle with me everywhere I go - it has a semi-permanent place in my cargo pants pocket. I take it to work, to appointments, to meals, everywhere. I love being able to read for a few minutes when I have the chance.

Did this factor into your decision to buy — To me, this seems like one of the biggest benefits, being able to get what you want wirelessly, without having to carry books or worry you’ll run out of reading material.

This is exactly why I love my Kindle - being able to read what I want, when and where I want, and get new stuff to read easily and quickly, and I can carry it all around in my pocket.

/end of interview

Do you have a Kindle? If so, what do you think about it? If you don’t have one, what would it take for you to get one? Have any questions about mine? Post a comment, and let me know! :-)


Bit Stories 2008-07-02: Recording Screwups, Moblin.org, Linux, MIDs, and NetMeeting

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on July 3, 2008
. 0 Comments

Here’s this week’s show! Have a listen, and check out the download/subscribe links and detailed show notes below.

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click to play

This week’s show is only 30 minutes long and weighs about 28MB (it’s a 128kbps MP3). You can download the file directly, listen using the streaming player above, or (BEST OPTION!!1!) subscribe to the Bit Stories podcast feed in your favorite podcast aggregator (like iTunes). If you subscribe to the feed, you’ll get each show delivered automatically as it becomes available - probably once a week or so, with the occasional bonus video or audio segment thrown in for fun. Plus, we’ll love you forever if you subscribe! :-)

Bit Stories Podcast Recording Setup

Here are some free form notes from today’s show:

  • Yet Another Audio Setup

  • Embarrassing Confession: We recorded the last two shows using the built-in mic on my MacBook Pro, instead of the elaborate mixer/condenser mic that we have set up. Because I’m an idiot. The saving grace? It sounded pretty darn good! :-)
  • Have developers let the Tablet PC community down?

  • Brian paved and reinstalled Windows XP on his Samsung Q1 UMPC
  • Why XP instead of Vista? Not quite enough horsepower.
  • Josh has done the same thing (gone back and forth between XP and Vista) on his Asus R2H UMPC
  • Speaking of mobile device operating systems… Moblin.org
  • What the heck IS Moblin? Is it an OS?
  • Moblin is a stack of tools to help create OSes and applications for Mobile Internet Devices. It’s sponsored by Intel, and hosted by Intel Software Network
  • Ubuntu Mobile Edition (UME) sneak peak is out there, if you have a Samsung Q1 Ultra
  • Brian feels that he won’t be able to use a Linux-based MID because of the lack of mature ink/handwriting input support
  • It’s really hard to do an ink interface well
  • Will Atom-based devices ever have the horsepower to do handwriting well? Is this a hardware or a software problem?
  • Do open source projects do better when there’s a common, widespread demand and need for the result (like a web browser)? Do enough people in the open source community need and/or want good ink and handwriting support to motivate them to write it? Would enough people use it and care about it to make it worth their time?
  • Since Mobile Internet Devices are all about the Internet, having a good browser is going to be essential.
  • Windows versus Linux on these small, pocketable internet devices.
  • In general, lack of UI “polish” in Linux applications is a deterrent for non-geeks to adopt it.
  • Brian’s “essential” applications on his Samsung Q1: Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Microsoft Money
  • Is Firefox the exception to the “Linux applications don’t have a good interface/user experience” stereotype?
  • How easy is it going to be to “install any app you want” on the upcoming Linux MIDs?
  • The challenges of adapting applications to devices on smaller screen.
  • UMPCScrollBar - a great little app that lets you scroll windows around the smaller UMPC screen, so you can get to the “Install” and “OK” buttons that get pushed off the bottom of the screen.
  • Intel Software Network’s mobility community makes tons of resources, tools, and smart people available for people writing applications for these devices. Take advantage of us!
  • Without great software, Intel products are just a bunch of really tiny hot plates. :-)
  • Have we discovered the REAL reason Intel has chosen not to deploy Windows Vista? Is it because NetMeeting is no longer there? Microsoft stopped distributing NetMeeting in 1998 - TEN YEARS AGO. But Intel lives and breathes NetMeeting - old habits die hard. (Update after the show: according to Wikipedia, Microsoft released a hotfix that allows you to download and install NetMeeting on Vista. Guess we were wrong! ;-) )

  • Macs do Screen Sharing, based on VNC, but there’s NO way on a Mac to participate in a NetMeeting call, because it’s a closed, proprietary Microsoft protocol.
  • Google Docs is GREAT for live collaboration.
  • PowerPoint is a great presentation tool, but it is NOT a collaboration tool! It gets abused WAY too often. PowerPoint abuse starts early - Brian’s 7th grade son is already doing it!
  • New recording time - Wednesday morning instead of Friday afternoon. Hope this gets the show out faster, and Josh and Brian perkier.
  • Josh’s morning voice - he’s not a morning person. Brian gets up at 5:30 AM.
  • Stuff we didn’t get to this week: Brian dips his toes into the world of Twitter and FriendFeed, and next week is iPhone 3G day! Come stand in line with us!

The show is picking up steam - we’re hitting our stride, and cranking them out. Many, many thanks to our listeners - we love you guys! We love connecting with people through the show, and getting to know who’s listening. But the only way we can do that is if you talk to us, so leave a comment, email us, or find some other way to say “hi”, and let us know what you think of the show! :-)


Twitter is Old and Busted. FriendFeed is the New Hotness.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 27, 2008
. 10 Comments

(This post started as an email to @verso on Twitter, in response to her question “I’m wondering how much longer #pdx will take it from Twitter. “Come on baby, you know I love you” won’t work forever will it? Alternatives?“) I had been trying to reply via Twitter itself, but it’s been either down or eating my updates - oh, the irony!)

FriendFeed finally sucked me in this week. I finally “got” it. It’s the next logical step up from Twitter, because it is a superset of Twitter - I see my friends tweets, often before I do through Twitter itself, and I can reply to them once, and have it go to both places (FriendFeed and Twitter). Plus there’s so much MORE FriendFeed can do - import and show people’s blogs, shared items, photos, etc. It kicks ass, seriously. I highly recommend you give it a try. Twhirl, the popular Twitter client,  works with it (though I haven’t got that working well yet), and http://fftogo.com is an awesome mobile interface for it for your phone (looks and works great on my iPhone).

The thing that got me to accept it (I’ve been resisting for a while now) was there was finally enough “social gravity” - enough of my network was participating there, and there were conversations happening on FF (a LOT of them) that I was totally missing out on because I was staying completely in Twitter.

It’s not a Twitter-alike, with a few differentiating features (like Jaiku and Pownce). It’s a whole new, better, crack-like way to interact with people. It is the evolution of what Twitter started.

I’m jabancroft on FriendFeed - feel free to subscribe to me. I’m still going to use Twitter as my “micropost” method, until it croaks completely. But in my FriendFeed, you’ll also see my blog posts. photos I upload to Flickr, things I share on Google Reader (with my commentary), and more. And the coolest thing about it all is that there’s CONVERSATION happening around ALL of those things. It’s amazing. I love it.

So come join me. You don’t have to give up Twitter, or Jaiku, or whatever. You can connect them up in FriendFeed. But don’t limit yourself to just one channel of conversation, when you can have so much MORE on FriendFeed. It’s fun, it’s easy, it makes me smarter, and a big part of my network is already there. I’m convinced! :-)

Update: Phil mentioned below that he posted his comment to this on FriendFeed, and that reminded me of something. If you’re not a FriendFeed user, you’d be missing out on the discussion around this post that’s happening there. That’s why I’ve installed Glenn Slavin’s excellent FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin. If you are looking at this post on its own page, where you can see the “normal” comments people have left, scroll down, and you’ll also see the “Likes” and comments that people have left for this post on FriendFeed. Post get sucked up into FriendFeed, and great discussion happens there, but this plugin brings the relevant discussion back here, to the original post, so you don’t miss out if you’re not on FriendFeed. I love it.


Why “Social Media” is Compelling

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 23, 2008
. 1 Comment

Quoting myself from an email I wrote this morning, because this is my blog, and I can do that if I want.

The most compelling reason to promote “social media” is the power it has to let people create connections with each other. By turning the internet into a way for people to express themselves, and know what their peers (in all senses of that word) are expressing, these tools build a network of human connections and trust, which can then be used to commiserate, collaborate, entertain, educate, complain, overthrow, take a stand, and just plain have fun. It is truly empowering.

I always put “social media” in quotes, because of my uneasy relationship with the term, but we have to call this bunch of tools something.

Apply that to how you think of and use this stuff, and see if any interesting thoughts shake out.


Tonight we Ignite Portland for the Third Time

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 18, 2008
. 0 Comments

Tonight is Ignite Portland 3. We’re having it at the Bagdad Theater again, because that venue was just awesome last time, and it fits the spirit and character of Ignite Portland to a tee. The presentation lineup is just stellar, and we have a (hopefully) more streamlined “advance tickets + general admission” that should reduce the size of the lines (which stretched for BLOCKS for Ignite Portland 2) but still let people just show up and get it. The 450+ free advance tickets were gone in less than 24 hours, and there’s every indication that we’re going to pack the Bagdad to fire code again (700+).

If you’re coming, look for me and say “hi!”. I’ll be the geek in the cargo pants, black t-shirt, and bright orange Crocs. ;-) If you can’t make it, you can still partake in the parts of the event that will take place online (the backchannel chatter on Twitter, watch the videos tomorrow, etc.). I just put up a post on igniteportland.com with details on how to experience Ignite to the fullest.

I’m very proud to be one of the organizers of such a cool, popular event. The folks from Legion of Tech (a non profit organization we formed to manage organizing events like Ignite Portand, BarCamp Portland, Startupalooza, and the monthly LoT Happy Hour meetups) are awesome in every way, and I’m humbled and honored to get to work with them (I’m on the board). I can’t wait to see how IP3 turns out tonight, and I’m already looking forward to Ignite Portland 4! :-)


Teach Skills and Tools, not Programs and Rules

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 17, 2008
. 4 Comments

You probably go to too many meetings. I feel like I do, sometimes. Some are worthwhile, others are a waste of time. Thankfully, for the ones that aren’t that interesting/engaging to me, I can usually pay partial attention, and either let my mind wander and chew on things, or perhaps even do a little reading online to make myself smarter and better informed. The topic of this post materialized in my brain over the course of a couple of these meetings where I was paying partial attention. Specifically, someone asked the question “how do we make our blogs less boring, and less self-referrential?” After some discussion, an answer bubbled up from the group: we need to acquire the skills to be un-boring. And that’s when the little light with the bell went off in my head.

When you’re dealing with the online world (and this extrapolates to a lot of offline stuff, as well), it is much more important, productive, and effective to teach and learn skills and tools, rather than focusing on programs and rules. Teach people useful skills and correct principles, and let them govern themselves. Let me give a made up example, to illustrate my point. Try to think of how you could apply this to your job and your life.

Say, for instance, it was part of your job to take your company’s employees, and encourage them to write on a group blog (this is a generic example - this applies to almost anything, I think). You’re a very process oriented individual, in a very process oriented company. You decide to create a “strategy”, outlining the goals and ends you want to achieve by having an active community of bloggers. You could then work backwards from that, and get some milestones and metrics that will help you measure how well you’re doing. Say, a certain number of blog posts from a certain number of contributors per month. This many visits per month, and a growth rate of n percent. And then you could have lots of brainstorming sessions focussed on those milestones - “How do we get more bloggers?” “How do we get the bloggers to write more?” “How do we sound less boring and less self-interested, to get more audience engagement?”

Based on brainstorming sessions like that, you come up with a plan. You’ll have more meetings for everyone involved. Mandatory training. Rules (call them “guidelines” if you wish) for how to write a good blog posts. Rules about what NOT to write about. Rules about who can and cannot be a contributor. Rules about how you count and measure hits and visits and comments and contributions. At long last, you have a “strategy” for your blogging “program”.

You get a few enthusiastic participants - people who seem to be natural bloggers, and take to it with gusto. But on the whole, you end up feeling like you’re having to constantly keep after the bloggers, to get them to post. You’re always encouraging them to write more, to be more engaging and personable (so more people will read the blog, and leave comments). You may go so far as to cook up some bribery/reward schemes to entice them to post more (a carrot instead of a stick). You feel like you’re exerting a lot of effort for diminishing returns, and eventually, you get tired of it, and stop trying so hard (so the whole program starts to fall apart).

Any of that sound familiar?

Now let’s imagine a different approach. Instead of falling into the trap of process and programs and rules (which is easy, because it’s what you’re used to, and besides, everyone else is doing it!), you should think of ways to achieve your objective by teaching skills and tools - actively helping people learn to do new things, or old things in new ways that are more efficient, and more fun. Your goal should be to help people find that “I kick ass!” feeling, and you should trust that doing so will induce them to achieve your “other” goal, be it a vibrant community of bloggers, or more sales, or whatever.

Teach people to find a way to deal with the things they hate most about their job or their life. Show them better spam filters, or how to use a feed reader to bring the web to them and give them more time by reading more efficiently. Show them tips and tricks, and teach them how YOU learned the tips and tricks.

What’s different about the “skills” approach? Do you think it can be just as effective? Which do you prefer? Can you still have a “strategy”, and if so, should you? How you find out what skills are important, and then learn them well enough that you can teach them? Or should you find experts to teach the skills? Is this really better than programs and rules? Let me know what you think. I’ve deliberately held back some of my thoughts on this approach, until they’re a little more developed. I’ll post more on this, soon. Plus, I love kicking ideas back and forth with you. So let me know what you think! :-)


I’ve Come to Hate the Tech Industry (or: Technology as a Lifestyle vs. Technology as a Business)

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 12, 2008
. 9 Comments

I’ve been trying to make time, at least once a week, to sit down and write something substantial. Something more than excited gadget/software lust, more than a collection of 140 character microposts. I’m really enjoying it. I’m learning a lot about myself, my goals, and my motivations. I try to go to a place where there’s no internet connectivity to minimize distractions - I’m easily led afield by my feed reader - and do some reading before I write (which always stirs up ideas). So far, so good.

Yesterday, I was in Mountain View, California, at Research@Intel Day. I was there to shoot video and otherwise cover interesting stuff for my group, Intel Software Network, and our developer community. Research@Intel Day is Intel’s annual public science fair, where the researchers and groups in CTG (the Corporate Technology Group) get to show off the stuff they’ve been working on to the press. Most of it is future freaky science fiction-type stuff - a biological microprocessor, dynamic physical rendering, etc. I’ll have some videos, photos, and blog posts up soon about what I saw there this year.

As I was on the plane at the San Jose airport, coming home to Portland, I reflected on the culture of Silicon Valley. It is the heart of the technology industry - hardware and software, startups and ancient tech companies like Intel, side by side. Their names are all over the buildings you pass on the freeways. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a technology company. Usually more than one. There’s Yahoo, next to EMC, next to McAfee, next to Sun, next to Intel. And oh, look - there’s Moffett Field, where the Google guys park their private 767.

The airports, hotels, restaurants, and roads are crammed full of people who obviously work in tech. Tan slacks, polo shirt with a company name or name of some conference they attended on the sleeve, maybe a sport jacket if they’re really important. Bluetooth headset stuck to the side of their head, BlackBerry in hand, or doing that weird walk-around-with-their-open-laptop-perched-on-their-forearm thing. There’s no mistaking them. They’re everywhere. Doing business. Talking about business. Exuding business.

You’d think I’d feel right at home there, among “my people”.

But I don’t. I feel like an alien every time I go there. A vague, uneasy feeling like I don’t really fit in. It’s not just an “Oregonian in California” thing, or because I actively thumb my nose at fashion, walking around in orange Crocs, cargo pants, and a faded black geeky t-shirt from Penny Arcade or O’Reilly or ThinkGeek. I’ve got my uniform just like they have theirs. So what’s the difference? What keeps me from feeling like the Valley is my homeland, and making plans to move there (besides the insane real estate prices)? I’d never really given it much thought before, but sitting in the airplane yesterday, waiting to take off (my eyes being involuntarily drawn to the laptop screen of the Boeing guy in front of me, who was broadcasting how important he was by looking at some obviously confidential spreadsheet long after the crew told us to turn off and stow our electronic devices), I had sort of an epiphany.

I’ve come to hate the technology industry.

Hate is probably too strong a word, and that statement doesn’t mean what you might think it means at first, so let me explain.

I love technology. I was born practically surrounded by it, and grew up as a citizen of that world. It was clear that I am 100% geek by about age 5 (and remember, this was before it was cool to be a geek!). Every job I’ve ever had has been in the technology industry. Web development, support, QA testing, community building, and teaching. It pays my bills, buys me gadgets, and I’m not really suited to do much else. So how can I say that I hate the technology industry?

It’s because I make a distinction between technology as a business, and technology as a lifestyle.

Silicon Valley, and it’s culture, is all about technology as a business - all about the money. And that is what I realized I hate. I don’t think it’s wrong for people to be in the technology business - in fact, I depend on them. I need them, like you do, to keep churning out the improvements, upgrades, and new stuff that makes our lives easier, more efficient, and more fun. And I’m not blind to the fact that this industry pays my paycheck, and always has. In fact, I absolutely love my job. Does that make me a hypocrite?

I don’t think so. And here’s why. I have no problem with the fact that the business-centric tech industry culture exists. It’s a good thing. I wish it huge success, and I’m willing to work to make that happen. It’s just not who I am, or where I’m going. People for whom technology is a business go home after work, and become who they really are. I am a geek 100% of the time. I couldn’t turn it off if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. ;-) I choose to find my culture, the things I care about deeply, and obsess over, and do in my free time, elsewhere. I would like to think of myself as “in the tech industry, but not of it”.

So what culture DO I feel like I belong to? The one where technology is a lifestyle, not just a business. The culture of geeks, and people who use technology in new and useful ways because they can, because they see it as a challenge. The culture of makers and hackers and people who read science fiction not just for entertainment and diversion, but for inspiration. The culture of people for whom reputation, and whuffie, and being recognized for contributing something useful or clever is its own reward, and not just a way to make more money. People who learn programming languages for fun, and for what can be learned through the experience. In my culture, technology can be a business, but it’s often SO much more than that.

I devour books by my favorite sci-fi authors - Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, Vernor Vinge, etc. - and I yearn for the easy, natural way that people use technology in their stories. Wearable computers, data-enhanced visual overlays, subvocal communication and silent messaging. Direct, fast, effortless connection to information and other people. I look forward to a time when the exponential growth in technology eliminates more and more of the mundane, cruel, painful, tedious problems that affect us as meat creatures. A post-scarcity economy when we’ve finally found way to get rid of poverty, and disease, and death. The natural extensions of our increasingly connected world.

Now, I’m not a Utopian. Or even really a Singulatarian. No matter how often I half-jokingly say I’ll be first in line as soon as they figure out how to do a direct brain-to-Internet connection, there are things outside the world of technology that I care about even more. My relationship with my wife and children. Being a good person and serving others. Right and wrong. You could take away all of my technology and it’s accompanying culture, and as long as I had those things, I would be fulfilled and happy. I recognize and am grateful for the luxury of having time, and money, and access to all of these technological artifacts that I talk so breathlessly about. I recognize that it’s all “extra”.

This was my epiphany - this distinction, in my mind, between technology as a business, and technology as a lifestyle. It helps me make sense of the conflicts and irritation I sometimes feel when I see practically the entire world around me start talking about “social media”, and “Web 2.0″. Things that were once the sole domain of geeks. For a long time now, listening to non-geeks expound upon these topics twisted my stomach - even though it was the stuff I love, and have been promoting and teaching and evangelizing, I felt resentment as more and more people around me (remember, I’m surrounded by the “industry”) started picking up these tools. Until now, I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I think I’ve figured it out. It’s when they’re rooted in the business culture, different from mine, and eyeballing things in my world that they want to use for their own ends, that my hackles go up.

Want to hear something strange? Now that I’ve figured that out, I don’t care any more. It doesn’t bother me, now that I understand my feelings about why it ever did. I can’t explain why, except perhaps to say that now I know better who I am, and how to reconcile the two cultures. Now, when I think of the marketing department (of any company, not just mine) trying to “leverage” some social tool, like Twitter or blogs or podcasting, instead of feeling defensive (”They’re marketers! They don’t really “get” it! They’re going to screw it all up!”), I see it for what it is. And I’m happy to try to help them do it right. To impart cluefulness to anyone willing to listen (those who AREN’T willing to listen still make me mad). Business is important, too, and they’re just trying to do the best they can at fitting in with this rapidly-changing world. That’s a GOOD thing, one that I’m willing to work towards.

Now, instead of wondering if I really am an arrogant hypocrite for getting defensive when marketing catches up to something that was heretofore the realm of geeks, I can accept it, because I understand why they’re doing it. The internet, as a whole, is better off for having been adopted by business. Sure, it has its annoyances: spam, intrusive ads, threats to privacy, etc. But there are ways to deal with them. Would we REALLY prefer to have stayed with a wholly non-commercial internet, a throwback to the days where there was no free webmail with gigabytes of storage, comprehensive lightning fast search engines, and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, because no one could figure out how to pay for it all? I, for one, welcome will tolerate and coexist with the internet’s new corporate overlords.

See? I told you that hate was too strong a word. :-)


Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Reading from the Intel Cookbook

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 10, 2008
. 1 Comment

The Apple WWDC 2008 keynote has come and gone, and my wild speculation about what Apple might say about the next version of OS X, 10.6 code named “Snow Leopard” (and affectionately christened “Snot Leopard” thanks to a typo during my WWDC liveblogging ;-) ), that it would be announced as the operating system for a “netbook” or Mobile Internet Device powered by the Intel Atom processor, didn’t come true. In fact, besides a brief reference to an after-lunch WWDC session (under NDA), Steve Jobs didn’t say much about Snow Leopard at all. Since then, a few more details have become available, and Apple has put up a page with the (limited) info:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Much has been written about the more controversial questions - are they really not adding any new features? Are they going to drop PPC support? Is it going to be 64-bit only (and if so, what about early Intel Core Duo chips that aren’t fully 64-bit capable?). I’ll leave all that to the people who know what they’re talking about. But what strikes me as interesting is that the few fundamental technologies they HAVE discussed looks like a mirror image of the technologies Intel, and specifically, my group Intel Software Network (we’re Intel’s developer community), have been promoting and evangelizing to software developers for quite a while now.

First, I have to cling to my hope and dream that one day, Apple will release something along the lines of a “netbook”, like the Asus Eee PC or the MSI Wind. Something like the MacBook Air, but much smaller. Apple’s throwing fuel on that particular speculative fire with statements like this:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.

Having recently paved and done a clean install of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I can tell you that the operating system itself only takes up about 5.5 GB of hard drive space. Hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price at an astounding rate (did you ever dream you’d be able to pick up a terabyte of disk space for a couple hundred bucks?). So why would Apple care about reducing that 5-6 GB footprint, when drives are huge and cheap? Think SSD. Solid State Disks. Like the ones in the netbook devices. The Asus Eee PC I got to play with a while ago had a 4 GB SSD. Current models have 12 or 20GB. Fast, efficient, and no moving parts. Perfect for mobile devices. But still really expensive - you can get a 64GB SSD in a MacBook Air instead of the much slower 80GB hard drive, but it will cost you a cool $999 for the upgrade. SSDs are coming down in price, but they’re still going to be expensive in any really large sizes for a while. So, if Apple was thinking of doing a Mobile Internet Device or netbook, it makes sense to squeeze OS X down as much as they can, to make, say, an affordable 16GB SSD a viable option that won’t get hogged by just the OS.

Next, there’s the new “Grand Central” technology, that focuses on taking full advantage of multicore processors:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Emphasis mine. Intel Software Network has been banging on the multicore drum for quite a while now, ever since it became clear that the future of processor performance was more and more cores working in parallel, rather than ever-increasing clock speeds. In fact, we have a whole multicore developer community (hosted by my awesome colleague, Aaron Tersteeg) dedicated to multicore programming resources, tools, learning, and access to the Intel experts who literally wrote the book on this stuff. I’m sure as Snow Leopard gets closer, you Mac developers will (hopefully) be seeing a lot more details from both Apple and Intel on how to make your apps sing on many-core processors. It’s the biggest fundamental shift in computing since, say, the x86 architecture became the standard. I can’t wait to see this gain broader acceptance and implementation.

Finally, Apple teases us with this little tidbit on the vaguely-named Open CL (Open Computing Language), apparently aimed at taking advantage of upcoming super-powerful GPUs for other computing tasks:

Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

They don’t name any one company’s products or technologies, but it’s well known that Nvidia and Intel are both working on many-core GPUs that support “GPGPU” - General Purpose (Computing) on the GPU. And again, my group, Intel Software Network, has a whole community (this one just freshly minted!) dedicated to what we call Visual Computing. Steve Pitzel hosts this community (Steve has more interesting stories than ANYONE I know - ask him some time!), and the super swanky page design came from our resident web development wizard, Kevin Pirkl. Intel has a little upcoming product called Larrabee that we think is going to really turn the notion of what a GPU is for on its head. Have you noticed how Nvidia has been getting very aggressive towards Intel, some might say even attacking? Yeah, it’s because of Larrabee. And knowing Apple, they’ll be right there, ready to take advantage of all of the advances in the visual computing world. Competition is a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s dose of idle speculation, and listening to me play armchair industry analyst. I have to say it feels pretty cool to work for a company (Intel) that has such influence over the world of technology. I get to see SO MANY COOL THINGS in the course of my job, I feel spoiled. And I try to share as much with you as I can - like tomorrow, I’ll be filming demos at the Research@Intel event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. From the previews I’ve seen, some of this stuff is just freaky sci-fi cool. I can’t wait to see it, shoot it, and get it out to you. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts, even if all you have to say is how wrong you think I am. Leave it in a comment! :-)
Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog


Liveblogging the WWDC 2008 Steve Jobs Keynote

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 9, 2008
. 8 Comments

I’m pretty much counting on Twitter being down (or rather, turning into a smoking crater where their servers used to be) during this morning’s Steve Job’s keynote at WWDC. So I’ll be liveblogging it here. I’m not at WWDC, but will be following via various online tools, and geeking out with fellow Macheads at Intel while it’s going on. This post is mostly going to be my observations and opinions on the news, rather than actually breaking the news, so if you want to follow along as “live” as you can, check out ArsTechnica’s live coverage, MacRumorsLive’s autoupdating page, and Engadget’s live coverage. Twitter and Summize also have a page set up to track the news, but like I said, my money’s on Twitter getting obliterated (it’s already flaky this morning).

The world is about to change. New iPhone. The iPhone App Store. And then what? New devices? OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” (here’s my prediction on what that one really means). I can’t wait! This is better than Christmas! :-)

I’m in the new JF1 “living room” area at Intel, where they have a few tables set up under a 65″ plasma TV. I’m hooked up to it, using it as my external monitor, getting ready to scour the interwebs for each new tidbit as it makes its way from the mouth of Steve. I’ve got my Mountain Dew and some Pop Tarts. I’m ready. Let’s do this thing! :-)

Josh Liveblogging WWDC 2008 Keynote

Steve’s on stage now. We’re getting the best updates from the Ars IRC channel (#wwdc on irc.arstechnica.com). Steve’s talking about the enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0 software - calendar and contact sync, remote wipe, etc. Stuff we already knew. Now he’s bringing suits out on stage, from other companies. Stuff we hadn’t heard already - capability of viewing office documents, SharePoint access, VPN and two factor authentication (as in SecurID/SoftID). Cool…

Now talking about the iPhone SDK and how many similarities it has with the “real” OS X kernel and code. APIs are the same, line for line. Location-based services, 3D positional audio, how easy it is to develop for it and debug it, etc. Showing a new demo app, “Nearby Friends”, which sounds really cool. I’ll have to go back and watch the video of this, showing how easy it is to build an application, live. Talking about how much developers love coding for this platform. Yay, look how awesome we are!

Now comes the game demos. First up, Sega, talking about Super Monkey Ball. I have a love/hate relationship with that game on other platforms. The “party” parts of the games are really fun, but the “roll the monkey in a marble across this platform surrounded by a bottomless abyss on all sides” are freaking FRUSTRATING. In the keynote, they’re saying the demo looks awesome. Full “tilt” control using the accelerometer. Will be available “at the launch of the app store” for $9.99. Not a bad price - people were speculating that iPhone apps would be a lot more expensive - $20 to $40.

Now demoing an eBay app, which sounds technically cool, but honestly isn’t very interesting to me because I don’t use eBay. Now they’re talking about an app called “Loopt” (”connecting people on the go”), which Ars is excited about, but I’ve never heard of. Sounds like “friends on a map, showing you what they’re doing”. I’m not to keen on the idea of these kinds of apps, but I guess I’d have to see a GOOD one in action to really decide.

BTW, thanks to Brent, Matt, Tod, and Jerry, who are sitting around the table, correcting my mistakes and typos as I write this. :-) Matt’s trying to listen to a live audio stream, which is sort of working, but it’s more delayed than the Ars IRC feed (which is AWESOME! FAR better than any other way I’ve done this before. Thanks Ars! :-) )

Matt listening to a WWDC keynote audio stream. Sort of.

Showing a Typepad blog authoring app, that’s going to be free at the app store launch. Yawn. Show me a generic XML-RPC compatible editor (I can has MarsEdit for iPhone please?) or something that’ll work with WordPress and I’ll be interested. I’m sure that will come soon enough. And an AP “see local news and photos based on your location” app. Sounds kind of dumb - how much news do you know of that has specific location information, more than just “Dateline: this city”? Meh.

Next up a game developer showed off a couple of games that look cool (kind of hard to get a sense of them when I’m reading text descriptions in an IRC channel - I’m sure we’ll see lots about the games soon enough). And an indie dev who works in the insurance industry made a really cool virtual musical instrument app called “Band” that he developed in 8 months in his spare time. And now talking about Major League Baseball. Woo! Not.

Now showing off a bunch of medical reference/learning applications. Talking about med students and K-12 education. I love the idea, but how many K-12 students do you know that have iPhones (or would be allowed to have iPhones by their school’s policies)? Still, very cool ideas, and it’s great that these applications are coming, and relatively easy to develop.

Enough with the 3rd party app demos. I want to know what Apple has to show us today!

OK, now Forstall’s talking about the lack of a good chat platform, and how to receive notifications from your apps while they’re not running. He says the WRONG solution is background processes, because they sap battery life and performance. (And now he’s showing how Windows Mobile does this, and making fun of it! :-) ) “We have come up with a far better solution.” A push notification service to all developers. When your app is running, you’re connected to a server. When you quit, the connection dies. Apple maintains a persistent IP connection to the iPhone, and 3rd parties can push notifications through that server to the phone (badges, sounds, alerts, etc.). Alerts can include buttons to automatically launch your app (so it doesn’t have to stay running the background), and the phone only has to maintain one server connection (presumably to Apple) to make this works. Works over wifi and cellular. Coming in September. I have to admit, this seems like a really clever solution to a really tough problem. We’ll see how it works out in real life!

Steve’s back on stage, and talking about new iPhone 2.0 software features. Contact search, iWork (create and edit iWork docs - cool!), bulk delete and move in email, save images from emails, new calculator, explicit content filters, and new language support for Japanese and Chinese character input - draw them with your finger. That’s a welcome feature for a lot of people, I’m sure. The 2.0 software update will come in early July, will be free for iPhones, and $9.95 for iPod Touch owners (gouged again!).

Now on to talking about the app store. Wireless download and install, automatic updates, devs set prices and keep 70% of revenues. “We FairPlay apps” - FairPlay is iTunes’ DRM for music, so that means that apps will be locked (and presumably, cracked shortly thereafter - FairPlay has a reputation of being pretty breakable). If your app is larger than 10MB, you can only install over wifi. Enterprise apps can be deployed on the intranet, downloaded to your computer, then synced and installed via iTunes. Sounds like a good solution for corporate apps.

Now for something completely different: Mobile Me, new mobile service. Worst kept secret in the industry - this is basically .Mac done right - “Exchange for the rest of us”. Works on Mac, PC (woo!), and iPhone (double woo!). Push your contacts, email, calendar, and files into the cloud, and keep them in sync across all devices. But I do this already with Google - Gmail, Reader, Docs, Calendar. Will be interesting to see how this compares. Or maybe MobileMe will just be powered by Google. The site is me.com. Going into a demo now - I’ll check this out myself later, see if it’s worth it. It’s a cool idea, regardless. $99/year, 20GB of storage, and there’s a 60 day free trial. Expensive for what you get. I’ll probably pass. “Available with iPhone 2.0 in early July”. So, does that mean no iPhone until early July?

OK, now he’s talking about the new iPhone. “Next challenges.” 3G, enterprise, 3rd party apps, more countries, more affordable. iPhone 3G introduced today (big surprise!). Even thinner. The back looks plastic, black. Solid metal buttons. Same display and camera. Flush headphone jack (yay - no more adapters!). Improved audio. Feels “even better” in your hand.

3G = faster data downloads. Email attachments and downloads. Doing a video demo speed comparison between EDGE and 3G. 3G is faster. Duh. Comparing to other 3G phones. It’s faster. Of course it is. Tell us something new! Show us pictures! Their claiming “great battery life”, which was one of the big concerns with previous 3G chipsets (which were also too big).

Talking about location services now, and “GPS”. The question is, does it have REAL GPS (satellite-based, not tower based)? From the demos (tracking a drive down Lombard street), it looks to be the real thing. Or at least, good enough to pass for it (smooth tracking, etc.).

More countries - they’re aiming for 12 countries for the 3G launch, with a stretch goal of 25 70 (!) countries over the next several months. Hear that sound? It’s the bottom dropping out of the international iPhone resale grey market. ;-)

More affordable. It started at $599, sells now for $399. 3G 8GB iPhone is $199. Yow! Nice! 16GB is $299. And “something special” - a white one, 16GB. Same price. Saying launch in 22 countries on July 11. I wonder if the U.S. is one of those countries? Showing a new iPhone commercial. Twice.

Jobs has left the stage. No “one more thing”. Nothing on Snot Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 (though they said there will be a session after lunch to talk about it, that’s under NDA). Bummer! I still held out hope for a new hardware class of device, Atom powered. Oh well - there’s always MacWorld 2009 in Januuary!

This was fun. Ultimately, there’s no real new hardware. We all knew about the new iPhone and its features ahead of time. Kind of bummed that it won’t go on sale for a month, but that gives me more time to save up my pennies. ;-)