DrawMatic

One Down at OSCON!

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:47:00 PDT

Just finishing my talk with Andrew Hyde on Startup Weekends. Links to the slides and some resources here: oscon2008.html

AppEngine Shell Project

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:24:00 PDT

I’ve created a minimal Google AppEngine example project for an upcoming workshop. Here it is:

http://code.google.com/p/aeshell/

The Original Picasa Easter Egg

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 05:54:00 PDT

Today, Picasa posted about its “Teddy Bear” Easter Egg.

The Picasa 1.0 Easter Egg was a pink pig, this one, in fact, as an homage to Invader Zim, which we watched riotously during late-night debugging sessions.

The Most Important Javascript Post This Year

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 10:28:00 PST

Eugene and I worked together on the original dojo.gfx project, and he's gone and written a significant post on functional programming which Javascript developers must read and understand thoroughly if they want to move ahead in their technical abilities.

I Love Information without Understanding

Sun, 6 Jan 2008 11:16:00 PST

So, I was just double-checking for my own Googlegänger, and found that I had a game credit on Uru, but my fave is my Hollywood Credits at the New York Times.

I especially like that I’ve “worked with” Bruce Willis, et. al.

The information is all “true” but doesn’t promote a lot of understanding about who I am. (I did update my profile on MobyGames, though.)

I Never Meta Meta I Didn't Like

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 18:06:00 PST

In The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen talks about how disruption in a market can come from a low-quality, low cost provider nibbling away at the lowest margin business of an established company. That company is almost happy to lose some of this business, as it can focus on its more profitable higher-end offerings. Goodness knows it’s not going to squander its potential profits in a race to the bottom. Often a company won’t consider the techniques and technologies of its downmarket competitor until time is running out, and its competitors are gobbling up ever higher-end bits of what it considers its prime domain.

Today’s meta-market question: What’s at the low end of this, the value-creation market?

Let’s take a look at some data points along the curve…

Netscape, founded with 1994 with money from well-known VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, blazingly fast to market with a beta product release in 7 months and an IPO less than a year and a half after being founded.
Idealab!, which began incubating Bill Gross’s brainchild startups in 1996. The idea was to create economies of (infrastructure) scale so that starting companies, particularly web and software companies, could be launched in a few months for a couple hundred grand.
YCombinator, Paul Graham’s 2005 angel group, which mini-funds mini-teams of just a few people to build earliest stage companies in a summer.
and, this year: startupweekend.com, which turns a weekend and a roomful of people into a launched web company (sometimes). It’s like the web startup version of National Novel Writing Month, but can the single-person, spare-time, 1-month startup be far behind? Sometimes, one person with an an idea and some time can create a lot of value.

So here’s the ultimate disruption, aided by the open web, open source, open exchange of ideas: you’re the link at the start of the value chain, innovating with leverage in a loose affiliation with other folks doing the same thing, enabled by technology that nobody owns enough to take away from you.

What are you going to do now?

On a Personal Note

Thu, 17 May 2007 16:41:00 PDT

Jill and I were married this morning in the quaint little hamlet of Beverly Hills. I’m dancing on the ceiling.

(non) Flash of Genius

Sat, 2 Dec 2006 09:32:00 PST

Video Streaming without Flash

Doesn’t work in IE, no sound… but… Cool!

Awake

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:55:00 PDT

Today was my last day at DreamWorks Animation.

One of the first technical things I ever learned to do was film animation. I became so enamored that I wanted to be the next Ray Harryhausen, and through high school worked part time running an Oxberry Film Master animation stand at WBS post production in Houston.

Animation led me to Houston’s performing arts high school (HSPVA for old friends and web spiders), and live action filmmaking and USC.

The last three and a half years at DreamWorks Animation have been a delicious victory lap around the field I owe so much of my own personal development to. Just the other day, at work, I stumbled into the office of Jim Keefer, whom I worked with at WBS Houston in the (mumble, a long time ago, mumble)’s, then went on to ILM along with Margot Pipkin and Judy Elkins, where they all worked on Return of the Jedi.

I start my new job on Monday. It has nothing to do with where I came from, and everything to do with where I’ve gone since.

But right now, on the last day of a wonderful stint with wonderful folks, I just wanted to leave a little spiderable, RSS-compatible thank-you note. It’s been a blast, and I hope to see each and every one of you again as art and technology continue to intertwine.

Social Productivity

Wed, 4 Oct 2006 20:19:00 PDT

From Ron Garret

"Ironically, C programmers understand this much better than Lisp programmers. One of the ironies of the programming world is that using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effectively as a member of a team. A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team. So although programming in C hobbles you in some ways, it forces you to form groups whose net effectiveness is greater than the sum of their parts, and who collectively can stomp on all the individual Lisp programmers out there, even though one-on-one a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer."

I noticed the same thing at Enfish, where all the Smalltalk programmers (save me) were replaced with C/C++ programmers. I learned C++.

I think one of the reasons dynamic languages are finally gaining some traction is that the problem spaces have gotten so large that you need a team of people even with a powerful language.