Last week I read this article on ReadWriteWeb that advises a startup to “Give It to Them Straight: Avoid “Pitching” to Your Board.” The article explains how it can be bad to exaggerate your product and cover up problems that you are experiencing in development:

“VCs hear bad news all the time — it is [...]

What could possibly go wrong? Thousands of volunteer hackers break ground on dozens of projects at a bunch of hastily organized unconferences promising to Save Haiti?
In a word: everything.
Tonight there are a number of people organizing some pretty intensive projects involving one of the most sensitive places in the world.
Let me tell you — [...]

Updated Nov 16, 2009: @chrismessina created a wiki for the Twitter syntax http://microsyntax.pbworks.com/Slashtags
The NYT reported today on how the #fthood hashtag has failed:
Until lately, the main way to make sense of an urgent outpouring of tweets on a particular subject was to use text searches: look for the phrase “Fort Hood,” for example, or [...]

Some time ago, I joined Twitter as @unthinkingly, and I loved it. Then, something felt wrong, and I deleted a bunch of followers. First I went down to 200 people, then 100, then 50, and it still was somehow wrong, so I quietly slipped out the door. Nobody really complained. I think many people have [...]

During the collapse of the journalism industry, I have rarely been surprised — and only occasionally truly saddend — by a newspaper going out of business.
It’s not that I don’t have empathy. I have worked briefly as a journalist, have a degree in journalism, and many of my professional heroes are journalists. I actually [...]

In October I’ll be geeking out at the ICCM 09, the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping. The conference is “harnessing mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies, and visual analytics to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies.”
If you’re scratching your head wondering what the field of crisis mapping is [...]

So, I’ve spent almost a month now as a resident geek at the InSTEDD Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
InSTEDD is working on epidemiology-related technologies that are very relevant to my research interests:
InSTEDD’s mission is to harness the power of technology to improve collaboration for global health and humanitarian action. We are an [...]

I have been trying to quit programming for about six months.
I’m down to about 2 times a day, on average, sometimes more. It’s a problem.
Don’t get me wrong, programming is one of the best disciplines I ever stuck my nose into. Programming teaches you fundamentally how to constantly improve your craft. But it’s [...]

On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing: for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled [...]

Just found out about Political Streams.
I really do like this idea, but reinventing the pie chart with those desaturated squares is not a good start. I’ll be checking it out to see how they iterate on representing the concept, which is fascinating.
It mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all [...]

Most of the gang at Bolt | Peters went to BayCHI tonight, and I was really impressed by a presentation from Yahoo about BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).
Turns out that, once you get beat badly by Google, you start to get really open. Nice.

Basically BOSS (bad name, great tool) means that, with [...]

Today Adaptive Path, the godfather company of the interface and experience research industry, released the first of some amazingly high quality concept videos about the web browser of the future.
I’m really impressed, even though I spent most of the day grousing about some of the details of the interface they showed — my nitpicking [...]

Intel produced this fantastic map yesterday at the 2008 Research@Intel Day. Red countries have higher rates of technology adoption. This is really valuable data for thinking about how to influence the adoption of technology, and for thinking about the ICT4D political spectrum in more than two shades of grey (or red and orange I guess). [...]

It’s been a good book month for interface geeks and IXD/UX people. Congrats to AP on the new book and kudos especially to upstart publisher Rosenfeld for the innovative stuff they are doing, including user testing of their 500-page, large font digital versions. Rock on, you madcap publishers you. You’re gonna make it big working [...]

On the occasion of amazing new videos of the latest prototype, it’s worth remembering that Android (not the just-barely-open iPhone) is the future of mobile development for the masses. Especially when combined with the hardware support of the Open Handset Alliance and the general propensity for open source projects to kick ass.
PS: where the [...]

Hack zero: Switch to Gmail
This is not a joke: Gmail is a fantastic and nearly spam-free platform. Notably, you can hook it up with a custom domain name so no one knows you are part of the Goog machine like everyone else.
Hack one: Greylisting with Postfix on Ubuntu
A mail transfer agent using greylisting will “temporarily [...]

I was never super into Alan Cooper (of Inmates are Running the Asylum fame) until I read this hilarious argument with Kent Beck, the godfather of Agile programming. (pssst. don’t click on that flaky wayback machine link. I’ve republished the article here, probably completely illegally, for your convenience. But it’s pretty depressing that this doesn’t [...]

Several times this weekend I used the phrase “unixlike” or “unixy” to describe applications or devices.
This is what I meant:

Most importantly, it means that you play well with others, as in the Unix concept of standard out: Whatever your application does, it is able (intended, really) to be used as the input to [...]

Just a quick open invitation, if you are in San Francisco this weekend:
UPDATE: Changed the time to 4pm.
I’m meeting with designer-researchers Niti Bahn and Dave Tait on Saturday, April 19th, at 6pm 4pm at Atlas Cafe in San Francisco (in the Mission). Come have a beer with us! We’re talking generally about designing [...]

So I went to this Street Hacks talk 2 nights ago is here: http://www.janchipchase.com/ (it was awesome, you missed it. Clam Pizza.) And then it turns out Chipchase just got all famous this week, seriously: First a rad video in the Economist:

And then in the New York Times.
Here’s my Reader’s Digest version, [...]

Speaking of personal metrics …

simone:~ chris$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
80 cd
70 ruby
44 svn
33 rake
28 ll
24 ls
23 rm
17 ssh
17 df
12 mate

I’ve recently been reading quite a bit about “personal metrics” (aka “attention data”, aka your “information wake”). Pictured are some examples from Last.fm, Nike+ and RescueTime (which I used for a few days this week! My Saturday computing is visualized below.)
As an infoviz junkie, I have to say that I have always *adored* this stuff. [...]

Very much looking forward to this Adaptive Path event (San Francisco) tomorrow:
Street Hacks and Long Wows - An Evening with Chipchase, Burns, and Schauer
How long have you been using your current cell phone? And what happened to your previous model? If you live in a country like India, China or Ghana the answer is [...]

The Zimbabwe Election Watch is doing a pretty amazing job of aggregating media reports about the Zimbabwe elections and using Google Maps to present the results. I’m both impressed and depressed about it.

Next week I’m sure Rails will be completely passé in favor of Merb (managed by git, of course). But for now, here’s the stuff that makes me a happy programmer this weekend:

Rspec With Xpath.
Autotest/Zentest
Continuous Integration (a practice not an app.)
CruiseControl.rb (see this for Rails).
CSS Dryer. Here’s my last ramble about server parsed CSS.

Now this is what I am talking about: A mobile phone based API for doing things like managing quantitative research projects. Supports a bazillion types of phones. Developed by a South African company. You own your own data. Sounds like a brilliant new project and I look forward to hearing more about it.
The [...]

I’ve felt for a long time that education is the most important vehicle for social change. I mean, really how else does anything actually get done? You’ve got to have some kick ass teachers along the way, or you’re gonna be a vegetable. And vegetabledom happens to entire societies. Watch out.
So I’m a little [...]

If there is anything I hate more than cell phones, it’s money.
I mean, of course everybody *likes* money, but seriously, who wants to actually deal with it? Going to the bank, cutting checks to the landlord, saving receipts, budgeting, negotiating salaries, calculating the tip, trying to find stuff on sale, thinking about taxes … [...]

If you need a professional application server, particularly for rails, I’m recommending Rimuhost these days.
Their VPS plans are a reasonable deal, but, as always, the support is what is always most important when choosing a host unless it’s a super small static site, in which case the big guys like mediatemple, dreamhost, bluehost are [...]

Things are looking great so far with this hairbrained project of ours.
Fabulous, actually: Bolt | Peters is super interested in the project and wants me to work on it for some percent of my total time at work. Which is fan-freaking-tastic! Thanks BP!
If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out [...]

There’s this great movie called A Beautiful Mind that I saw once, and in the last few months I’ve been quoting it a few times when talking about my programming career. Overall it’s a great story, but the one scene that really gets me is when he (John Nash, famous mathematician) is standing in front [...]

The other day I referenced Jan Chipchase’s blog as “almost certainly my favorite.” This is patently false. I am a big fat liar when I get excited. (Chipchase is probably tied for second with a few other exceptionally cool writers.)
The blogger at the top of my feedreader is, really this time, absolutely, Ethan Zuckerman. I [...]

I am obsessed with cell phones right now. Mostly I bloody *hate* them. I haven’t had one for six months, but work made me get one last week. So since they made me get one I am lobbying to get into some cell-phone-type research, partly to figure out my personal issues with cellular voice communication, [...]

I’m just getting started on a new project nicknamed Kestrel.
The basic idea a simple and user-centered web app that helps facilitate ordering, billing and member management for CSA’s. Things are JUST getting started and I am soliciting help in doing some feasibility research as well as a basic evaluation of existing CSA management applications. [...]

I’ve been following the recent debate about the future of web standards and whatnot. It’s been making me think a bit about what I really want to see in the future of web standards. And I can’t get this great California zine Cometbus out of my head. (Well, ok, by “following the recent debate” [...]

• lede:

SCENE: Atlas coffeeshop on 20th and Alabama, right now
ME: *clickety clickety
GUY #0: (in hushed tones) … “So we’ve got these great new offices in San Mateo and a great team, I really think you’d be super interested in working with us. Kaleb says you’re just ACE and that’s all I need to know. This coffee [...]

Since this seems to be the advice that I’ve been giving to pretty much all of the geek + activisty folks that I know, I figured it bears repeating here: Move to San Francisco. Now.
There have been really great conferences like An Event Apart and CompostModern, green socialite stuff and Green Fest, a great cycling [...]

Recently I’ve been really worked up about all these computers in the closet. It’s a bunch of junk.

A bunch of dot-com-bubble bullshit that never needed to be purchased in the first place. I’ve been stressed out about that festering backwater of old computers since I got my job here 16 months ago.
For 16 [...]

I’ve never seen gadget hype reach the levels that have been achieved by the iPhone. And I’ve never been so caught up in it myself. After visiting eyesondarfur.org I’ve decided that I’m giving my iPhone budget to Amnesty International: $50 a month over the next year.
In the culture jamming spirit I spliced an iPhone ad [...]

There has been a lot of excitement recently around a couple of developments in touch screen interfaces: First there was the insane presentation at TED 2006. Secondly, of course, the iPhone made everyone all hot in the pants for it’s touchable goodness.
In Malawi, the NGO Baobab Health Partnership … adapted Linux to $100 [...]

Seems like Paypal is one of those “leapfrogging” technologies that could help entire regions skip the process of developing a banking infrastructure, which apparently takes about 200 years of war (judging from how the West has done it).
Good as it sounds, it is important to note that users in all the African countries covered [...]

[update: there's a great new post on worldchanging.com about this. -cb ]
I spent some time today searching for sailboats in satellite imagery, looking for signs of computer scientist Jim Gray. The story is covered here.
The significance of using this technology to do this work is obvious. Using satellite imagery to find a particular lost person [...]

moulin, the brainchild of Geekcorps volunteers Frederic Renet and Renaud Gaudin, started off as a side project of Geekcorps’ Last Mile Initiative. Frederic and Renaud quickly developed an initial prototype of the system to run on a Nokia 770. Excited by the potential of making Wikipedia more widely accessible, Renaud volunteered for a second [...]

IBM’s new Many Eyes rocks. I experimented with the nptech data last weekend and built this in about 10 minutes. It’s a very rough bubble map of the users of the nptech tag. Interesting how it shows the distribution of the tagging activity. Related: Swivel and Data360.
Number of times “nptech” was tagged, by del.icio.us username

My [...]

“When I go to a restaurant, and look at leftovers on my plate, I don’t see food, I see information. If the restaurant were Google, they wouldn’t just take that plate and scrape it off into the trash. There would be a camera in the kitchen, photographing every plate coming back, with analysis of what [...]

I’m getting into an excellent free pdf called “In the Shade of the Commons,” a publication from the Waag Society, which bills itself as a small group of enthusiastic idealists … with a mission “to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality [...]

I am still working on developing a tool for analyzing community tags in del.icio.us, but I have run into a problem that messes up the data pretty significantly. I would be interested to know if anyone has any ideas what is going on.
The problem is this: del.icio.us says that there are about 5160 items [...]

I’ll be operating from the assumption that everything that happens in cyperspace is part of the same reality that our physical bodies occupy (sounds obvious, doesn’t it?), and that a sustainable application of technology is one which increases our understanding of reality and moves us away from a passive consumption of virtuality to an active [...]

Linux and open source computing is going to have a great 2007. In spite of a few hiccups in some communities, and the astonishing lack of penetration into the mainstream brain, it is obvious that we are seeing more and more people getting it.
Just check out IBM’s Linux praise page if you want an [...]

I think that Tux Magazine started a couple of years ago.
For a number of reasons–not all financial–the model we had built for TUX was not sustainable. At this point, a group of us who were involved in TUX are tossing some ideas around. Where it will go we are not sure but let me assure [...]

I make websites, and I manage a few web servers. Making sure that pages load quickly is a pretty fundamental part of my job.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about how much more important this concern is for people who are in low-bandwidth environments (my house in rural NC), and especially in [...]

Many Debian developers denounced the Dunc-Tank proposal. Some even demanded that Towns be removed as leader because he supported Dunc-Tank. Their objection was that by financially supporting developers, Debian would become a two-class system and that, in turn, would be destructive to the Debian community.
Linux-watch.com just posted this article commenting on recent delays in the [...]

The Darfur Wall is a beautifully executed charity project that fills a very simple, traditional purpose (collecting money) using an innovative and stark interface. The black and white, no-images design reinforces the tragedy of the situation without being overwhelming. I think this is a great example of online design serving a progressive cause — which [...]

As a web developer, I am a sucker for great tools. Signal Vs. Noise makes some of the best web-based applications I have ever used, and they have a thread for all of their readers (36,000+ really smart RSS subscribers) to post the stuff that they are using.
Note the preponderance of mac stuff.
Softwarewise I [...]

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the recent newsines (trendiness?) about “conflict” diamonds, pointing to a parody site realdiamondfacts.org. It’s a sendup of DeBeers and Co. (It’s an exact parody of their PR-campaign website, diamondfacts.org.)

The bigger issue, Zuckerman points out, is that there are any number of products that the Rich Folks of [...]

I missed this writeup from a little while ago. It is a good description of what Geekcorps is doing in Mali. Some of their really interesting projects are the Water Bottle Antenna, which provides a powered wifi antenna for about $3 (compared to $100) and the Desert PC which is basically a fanless, [...]

Rajan Harinarain, a South African entrepreneur and inventor has come up with a temporary foldaway house for use in emergency situations complete with electrical wiring and fittings, doors and windows that can be erected by a small team in 5 minutes.
Afrigadget is a great site (though with irregular posts) about a bunch of interesting developing [...]

Ubuntu Linux has been translated into Kurdish!

Controversy followed the release of a Kurdish translation of Ubuntu in Turkey last week. The release was originally reported in Millyet, a Turkish national newspaper, on November 21. This first release of a Kurdish language operating system and software has caused a stir in Turkey, where, up until 1991, [...]

John Maeda writes thoughtfully about simplicity and design at his MIT-based blog. He just posted a great bit about Paul Polak’s design for a low-resouce flashlight. Design under difficult conditions can lead to the same creative insight as design on a limitless budget.
“… this prototype flashlight that is completely solar powered (recharged in sunlight), easily [...]

Ever since the introduction of Microsoft Office 2003 it has been possible to distribute documents that can only be used in the way that you want them to be used — such as limiting who can copy, print or forward the information. This type of control, however has been easy enough to defeat with a [...]

I’m looking forward to getting this in the mail. I am excited to see a publication that is addressing this type of issue from a nonpolitical stance (or rather, I think, it is implicitly political. If you subscribe now you can still get the first issue from the Need Magazine website.

NEED magazine is an [...]

Featuring super-lovely production and a cast of all stars, TEDTalks emerges from its walled garden with a serious web presence.
“Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider [...]

Just had a really great first experience at Qunu asking obscure questions about our email server. It was an obscure subject, but I needed generalized advice, so I didn’t have a listserv (such as a particular software group) to turn to immediately. I was able to connect to a geek in a few minutes and [...]

Great, reveling post about the remaining difficulty of running Ubuntu (the “sexiest” open source Windows-killer yet) in Ethopia by Andrew Heavens over at Meskel Square.

There is one thing that the bright-eyed fans of Ubuntu and its kind never tell you. That is that if you install it on to an old Windows machine in a [...]

Just found this nice, basic, summary of the various Linux distributions.

Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix [...]

If you are interested in keeping up with the best practices of mime types, content types, character encoding and doctypes ….
A very nice survey of document types from the best developers on the web:
http://www.elementary-group-standards.com/archives/site-standards/why-xhtml.html

Last I checked, only about 2 percent of developers were women.
Just now read this:
The GNOME Foundation received 181 applications for the Google Summer of Code (SoC) program, but not a single application was from a female developer. The lack of women participating in GNOME, and free software in general, has spurred the GNOME [...]

function stableMatching {
Initialize all m M and w W to free
while free man m who still has a woman w to propose to {
w = m’s highest ranked such woman
if w is free
engage (m, w)
else some pair (m’, w) already exists
if w prefers m to m’
(m, w) become married
m’ becomes free
else
(m’, w) [...]

I’m posting again after a couple months absence though mostly I think I’ll just be doing short excerpts from the stuff I’m reading. At any rate, comments are open again. Please indulge.

New Wi-Fi distance record: 279 km!:
Ermanno Pietrosemoli and Javier Trivio (of EsLaRed) and Carlo Fonda (from the ICTP) have successfully established a whopping 279 km wifi link in Venezuela. They did it using a pair of Linksys WRT54Gs running DD-WRT and some recycled satellite dish antennas (no amplifiers!)

I have a wonderful new job (wrangling Linux servers) and am too busy learning to post at present. After I get through the stack of O’Reilly books on my desk I’ll be back (and much better informed).

I recently posted about my need for a simpler RSS aggregator.
I worked through the massive list of existing RSS aggregators at wikipedia and couldn’t reallly find something that did exactly what I wanted and worked.
I needed something that was simple, cached hourly, displayed various encodings well and worked with RSS and Atom formats. [...]

It’s a very ‘06 catch phrase.
My favorite non-open-source software company published a book today, and I think it’s likely that it will do quite well. Considering the fact that they practically have their little Web-2.0 paws up the proverbial skirt of every well-intended, moleskine-toting geek in the blogosphere … I think the fact that [...]

I have a love for maps because they can be the most rich, yet easy-to-understand communication tools. ReliefWeb, a website devoted to distributing time-sensistive information about humanitarian crises, is an excellent resource for insightful maps and infographics. You can sign up to receive email updates of all their new maps. Suff like this map showing [...]

This is where it’s at folks: free programming and web design books. Make your computer do impossible feats of inhuman strength with this collection of languages and techniques, from old-school Fortran to Web 2.0 hipster-standards AJAX or Ruby.
I’m loving this collection and (hopefully by mid spring) I’m going to gather all of my favorite [...]

Last night I was trying to do something that I thought would be pretty simple: display a bunch of recent weblog posts on one page.
There is a great online community of folks in the biofuels blogosphere, and this page would give a quick summary of their myriad, nerdy, wonderful events and research.
So the [...]

37 Signals is a supersmart little company known for creating easy-to-use web-based project management tools (namely the Basecamp suite), and they have just announced the latest in their product family: Campfire.
According to their website, “Campfire brings simple group chat to the business setting. Instant messaging is great for quick 1-on-1 chats, but it’s [...]

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: LinuxChix Africa
“LinuxChix Africa manages to shatter two stereotypes at the same time: the idea that women aren’t interested in free/open source software development; and the idea that women in Africa are bound to traditional cultural roles. Founded in late 2004 by Anna Badimo, a computer science graduate student in [...]

David Warlick posts insightfully about the uses of technology in education. Right now he seems like a pretty stressed out guy.
I’m not an educator (though I do work in education via nonprofit evaluation). And I don’t get quite as excited as he does when discussing the latest crop of communication technologies.
But in one of [...]

The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit based in Amsterdam that has been doing great work distributing Free/Open Source technology to the global NGO sector.
This morning I was reminded (via Worldchanging) that they are working on creating several different “best of” software compliations for NGOs– kind of like that lovely old mixtape you have [...]

Mike Davidson has been working lately on an innovative (I said innovative, not trendy) online news company, Newsvine, that provides articles from mainstream media outlets. The Newsvine team is a well-respected web group, most of them formerly of Starwave, a studious anti-hype third-wave (i.e. late 1990s, post-bubble) internet company. (Here’s Starwave’s startup profile from [...]

Great advice on crafting a home page from A List Apart. In short: build it last, and work first on the details (the smallest, ubiquitous elements of your site). A great homepage with poor search results or product page will only lead to disappointment. So if your site is shallow and ugly on the [...]

Thomas Krag has a great-looking new book (with lead editor Rob Flickenger) about wireless networking in the developing world. And it’s always nice to see people taking advantage of the print-on-demand services of lulu.com.

The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying [...]

Rosetta is a web-based platform that does exactly what I thought needed to be done: it makes open source software translation really easy for lots of people, and it makes it easy to collaborate on a translation project.
Instead of having to edit .po files manually, this web interface allows you to easily just … [...]