Posts
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ACLU Bust Card for Photographers
Inforgargoyle has a post about an ACLU Bust Card for Photographers. The compact sheet of info contains information about what your rights are when taking photos, and what your rights are and how to respond if someone confronts you about it. I think it’s an excellent thing to have available, because I believe people’s right are infringed upon too often here in the US as of late. On the other hand I would like to point out that sometimes the best way to deal with the situation is simply being considerate. I go to lots of events where people are either taking pictures for a group website or photoblogging for their own site, and normally they end up asking if I mind if they take my picture. Simple common courtesy. Of course there are times when the other party does’t want you to take their picture, and asking them beforehand would ruin the benefit of the right to photograph has bestowed upon you. So, of course, if your mission is to make a statement about the ubiquity of surveillance and the non-uniform distribution of access to that ability, I won’t argue with that. I’m very happy that people are out there paying attention to that issue and doing what they can to draw attention to it and help out. But if you’re not in that extreme group, simply being polite is a great way to ensure that too much negative opinion isn’t directed at the wrong targets.
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Skype for Linux
Apparently I missed this when it went through the news, but Skype now has a Linux client. In general I have a policy against running anything that I don’t have the source code for, but I might have to make an exception to try this out. I have a few friends who really enthusiastically recommended the service. Skype allows voice chat, which a bunch of other products do, but the geeks have been really into Skype because it’s built on some pretty hefty peer-to-peer technology. Apparently not only are the calls direct from one client to another, with the option of full encryption. But the user info is stored in a distributed index as well. Sexy stuff.
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Yahoo Login Problems Using Gaim
It appears that Yahoo has again changed something that causes third party apps to fail. Now, it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the trials and tribulations of trying to deploy a large scale application like this, I just don’t agree with their policies. Needing to change the underlying protocol is not a good way to control your application, it’s just evidence of poor planning and engineering. Of course, it also highlights some of the dangers of proprietary protocols. I have friends who normally I interact with using Yahoo. Bad me, cause now that Yahoo has decided to break from the API which my client was reverse engineered to work with, I can’t contact them. I’m not really happy about that, but unfortunately there’s not much that one can do. I use Jabber, but not all of the contacts I have are willing to switch. For them the official release always works, so why should they care if Yahoo wants to change the protocol? Well, just remember that there’s nothing that says Yahoo needs to keep doing that. Say they decide that they have lots of “value in their network”. Meaning they think if they decide to make Yahoo a pay-only service that people will cough up some money. Say they decide to do this to everyone, and not just the Gaim users. Take a little while to think about that. Me, I’m off to see how many other people are reevaluating Jabber and trying to see who else I can get to switch.
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Ongoing Trouble at Nokia
A post over at Textually.org pointing to a summary from the Nokia Connection press conference. Some interesting insights in there. I’m not a Nokia user, but I’ve heard so many good opinions of their phones that I’ve been planning to try one out. In particular, developers seem to like the platform for all the right reasons. In particular, the news about either Perl or Python being available really caught my attention. Here’s a company that seemed to be serving the community best by providing relatively open platforms upon which developers could innovate. Unfortunately they seem to have lost the advantage that once put them at the front of the market.
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Art of the Start Redux Part 2 (Afternoon Sessions)
Panel on Funding Your Dream
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Art of the Start Redux
I’ve cleaned up my notes from the other day, both to ensure that I’ve reread all of them to refresh my memory, and to clarify some vague points and correct some mistakes. Two big posts this time, hope that works out for the rest of you.
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SENT Show Now Live
I’ve been really looking forward to the SENT phonecam art show. I’ve been keeping an eye out for it since my first post about it in November of last year. Now it’s up and live, including a page that displays random images from those submitted by the public. Images are supposed to be submitted by mailing to submit at sentonline dot com. None of them have shown up on the random images page as far as I can tell. And it’s been three days since I sent the first one in. Either I’m doing something wrong (although I’ve verified the address a few times, and sent images to my own mail accounts to make sure everything is working), there’s something wrong with the mail processing on their side, or the images take a really long time to appear. I might email someone to find out what’s up, but probably not.
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Beginners Mind vs. Godzilla
The Art of the Start was fantastic. I uploaded my raw notes, and I’ll go through that stuff and clean them up a bit. There really was a ton of information presented in every session. For me, it was a great value. The audience seemed to be spread out all over the scale of experience. Some of them were engineers just starting to consider trying out one of their own ideas, others were MBAs looking for startup specific pointers, lawyers, and experienced entrepreneurs. Yet everyone I asked was happy about the information presented. Most were impressed by both the quality and quantity.
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Art of the Start 11
Guy made a funny comment between sessions. Guys law: to calculate valuation of a prefunding company, for each full time engineer add one million, for each MBA you subtract 250 thousand. :-)
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Art of the Start 10
Been There, Done That
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