Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Found this video of Steve Jobs doing a commencement speech at Stanford... Another wonderful speech from a great visionary about how he lived his life and his advice to the next generation. Watch it...

Art of the Start Video

I read The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki a while back. It had wonderful down to earth advice about innovation and entrepreneurship which apply to both startup and corporate settings.

Guy recently posted a video he did that covers a lot of topics in the book. If you do not have time to read the book watch the video... He is a great speaker!

World Cup Prize Money

I was watching a game the other day and was a little surprised to hear one of the commentators talk about prize money. For all the years I have watched the world cup it was the first time I heard it. So I looked around and found out that a lot of money is set aside for this. In fact it is 332 million Swiss francs ($270 million) that is set aside for prizes. It was hard to find the data since it was distributed in many small articles.

The amount given to teams range from 7 million Swiss francs (currently $5.6 million) for teams beaten in the first round to 25.5 million Swiss francs ($20 million) for the champion.

So the next question is who gets the money? hmm..

World Cup in ASCII art!

Nice hack for geeky soccer fans.. Reminds me of the matrix.. Watch a live feed of the world cup in ASCII art at http://ascii-wm.net/

All you need to do is telnet ascii-wm.net 2006 and enjoy!

InquisitorX

Came across inquisitorx today which is a little search aggregator that provides suggestions as you type with one click search engine changes. Additionally, you can download a safari plugin for it. Seems useful and cool. Plan to use it for a couple of days.

BlogBridge

I have been on the search for a feed reader and really never found something that I liked. Mussie suggested that I try a reader called BlogBridge designed by one of his friends Pito. After a couple of days of using it I really like it. Nice UI, simple, fast, and open source.

Here are a couple of features that I liked:

• Subscribing to a feed defaults the url in the clipboard
• Unread marks work well for me
• Voting on feed is cool
• Tag integration
  
• Feed sync across computers
• SmartFeeds
• Works on both Mac and Windows
  

Safari Debugging Tip

Safari has a hidden menu that can be activated by opening up a Terminal and inputting this line:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Loading up the new MacBook Pro

Just received a new MacBook Pro and it is lovely. I spent the day installing software. Here is what I loaded the machine with on day 1:

• Skype - IM
  
• Adium - IM
  
• FireFox
  
• FireFox Extensions - FireBug, Web Developer Toolkit
• Xwindows Server
• Emacs - Editor
  
• MySQL 5.0
  
• MySQL Administrator
• Eclipse Web Tools Project (with the intel patch)
• Eclipse Plugin - Subclipse
• Eclipse Plugin - Azzurri Clay Database Modeling Plug-in
  
• Cyber Duck - FTP Client
• VNC Viewer
• Subversion Client - Source Control
• Tomcat - App Server
  
• BlogBridge - RSS Reader (I like this more now)
  
• StuffIt Expander
  
• Windows Media Player
• Windows Remote Desktop
  
• TextMate - Editor
• MenuMeters - Perf Monitoring
• SvnX - SVN GUI
• XcodeTools
• info.xhead - Keep track of my passwords
• GIMPShop - Photoshop
• NeoOffice - Open Source MS Office
• WebKit and Drosera - Safari Debugging
• iWork
• IPSecuritas - VPN
  

Play Beautiful

Joga bonito has some amazing soccer videos. Things I did not imagine were possible. My favorite video is Brazilian Ping Pong. Enjoy

My data format is mine!

Ned wrote a wonderful essay titled "Own your data: ad-hoc representations".

I have to totally agree with Ned. I have been involved in a number of projects that applied what we called at the time the Highlander Principle (there shall only be one) to prevent NIH and take advantage of reuse. The end result looked like the standard but not really. This ultimately required a developer using the system to always translate semantics back and forth to figure out what was going on.

The other myth with adopting a related standard is that you get free features. In reality you end up adding new work to address use cases specific to the standard that are not core or valuable to the application. That creates unnecessary complexity and work.

My view is that standards should be used for their purposes. If the semantics of an application are core, then expressing things in the simplest possible representation does more good for the application. If integration is needed with a standard that should be a feature that tests the extensibility of the architecture.

Go Santiago go!

Just finished reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I really enjoyed the book. It is a story about an Andalusian shepherd's journey to find a treasure in the Pyramids.

The story is full of little gems about life and how one should pursue their Personal Legend.

This book could not be more timely. As I start working on a new startup it reminded me of the journey I am about to embark on. Like Santiago, I'll be learning, making mistakes, and following a passion. A definite recommendation!

(via Mussie and Julio)

Javascript inheritance

I have been doing some deep javascript coding recently and doing inheritance with prototype requires that you put your head on sideways. A google search led me to Base.js. It really simplified things for me!

Dual monitor rig is a must have for developers

I heard and read (e.g. Bob's posting) that having 2 monitors for dev was great. I tried it last week and have to say it is SOOO worth it. I felt the productivity boost. Here is my setup:

20' widescreen (for coding) + 19' (for testing)

Total monitor costs <$500 from dell.

SSHD

I have been using sshd to securely connect to my computer in the office. I setup cygwin's sshd on my windows machine, poked a hole on port 22 in the firewall and was ready to rock and roll.. On the client side I used putty to setup the tunnel using the -L option.. Here what the final setup looks like

app1 <-port1-> putty <-ssh port 22-> sshd <-port2-> app2

sysinternals

For some folks this might be obvious but Sysinternals has some amazing tools. I liked the process viewer, blue screen screen saver, and the Filemon..

enjoy messing with your system

Hats off Tabblo!

I just posted my IBM farewell party pictures using Tabblo. The experience was A+. I had 108 pictures in iTunes and 2 in email. Through a few clicks plus some upload time I had a result that I loved. I then pointed tabblo to my blog and puff it was up there...

Congrats Antonio, Ned and team on an A+ job!

Farewell IBM

See my Tabblo>

MacBook Woes

Yesterday I picked up a MacBook Pro from the apple store! Store was beautiful, box was beautiful, sales associate was beautiful :). Got home, the packing was beautiful, power code was beautiful, power up was beautiful. I was in geek heaven.

Loaded up the machine and after installing the dev addons the beautiful mac kept freezing up. So off to the apple store to return it. argg....

Thanks, now the wild west!

Next week I start my adventure in the wild west of consumer tech startups. It is a new startup in the mobile consumer space that is still in stealth mode (more to come later). I do this after spending 8+ years at Iris/IBM. I was so touched by how friends, colleages, and customers bid me farewell.

I want to let you all know that the best part about working for IBM/Iris was all of you! I have found you all to be such an inspiration. Because of you I am a better person and engineer. I could have not asked for a better farewell. I hope we cross paths again and ask all of you to stay in touch.

Here are some highlights of my last week:

• Farewell party's tabblo (via Pete)
• Story from Rob Novak
• Joe Russo's top ten (via Pete)

Google Web Toolkit

Google just released a Web Toolkit. Interesting idea generating JavaScript from Java code. I have yet to play with the library to have some real feedback. It sounds similar to the ROR's RJS. It is great to see the big guys giving back!

I was not able to find any info about what Google apps are using this. I would have loved to see that list.