A WebHook named ‘Jeff’
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 25th, 2009
Jeff as a webhook
PROBLEM: Help people understand how cool webhooks are.
PROBLEM: Find out when there’s new content on a site.
SOLUTION: Put a webhook into the site’s search indexing tool – SOLR.
SOLUTION: Custom SOLR Token Filter.
The code, while JAVA and therefore evil, is trivial.
WHY?
Every cool web app (sooner or later) has some cool content in it. So you add a search engine. When your users want to build mashups with that content, you add webhooks to that engine. And you’re done.
Starting point: http://e-mats.org/2008/06/writing-a-solr-analysis-filter-plugin/
GOTCHAS:
JAVA – Evil and Stupid
Java classpath (on Mac) – also Evil and Stupid
Java permissions (to connect to remote servers) – http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5309619
WHERE IS THIS GOING TO LIVE?
Webhooks coming to NASA soon...
FINAL TAKEAWAY: Fitz was right – everything should be HTTP.
“Rabbits FTW” – The Mark Cuban Stimulus Package Needs Meat
Posted by admin in carbon, entrepreneurs on February 23rd, 2009
Most of my (non-work-related) thinking these days circles around how we, as a species, a culture, or a geographical collection of human flesh, can make a smooth recovery from our petroleum addiction. I read a fair bit on the subject, from the “Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook”
As is often the case with the large, complex issues facing humanity, most of our effort is (dare I say it?) wasted on trying to fix the wrong things. Like changing our lightbulbs. Even changing our cars is, most of the time, the wrong thing. Why? Read the rest of this entry »
Cool things I’ve discovered recently
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 19th, 2009
I’ve never done a round-up post before, so now must be a good time. Here are a few cool things I’ve found recently:
How to use VPN to solve VoIP problems
As some of you may be aware, when I’m not busy with my day job at NASA, I run a small VoIP company. The why and when of this company is a story for another day, with intrigue, betrayal, ex-CIA agents, con artists, lawsuits and utter, utter sleep deprivation. But, as I said, that will have to wait.
It’s a simple enough business – multi-line phone service for homes and offices, complete with distinctive ring, cool automated phone trees, time-of-day dialing, etc. And it has always had one nasty technology problem in it – NAT.
Anyone who has ever dealt with VoIP has run into all the various ways that NAT can go wrong. And I thought I had worked out ways to deal with most of them – at least, until I started working with some new hardware.
Let’s skip the gory details, and summarize by saying that I’ve been forced to deal with this problem in a decisive, and final, fashion. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Make $1 on The Internet
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 17th, 2009
Growing up in the Gen-X / Gen-Y, post-TV world of my youth has obvious advantages. But it lacks some of the nuance of yesteryear – like a framed copy of your first dollar.
Making money on the internet, at least at a small scale, is exactly the opposite of making money in the real world. Trying something is so cheap, you should just keep trying things until something works. Unfortunately, just because it works a little bit – doesn’t mean it’ll work much more than that.
I started writing software when I was seven years old. Most of the years I clung to the idea that, someday, I would write a piece of software that people would pay money to OWN. When I began working, first as a coder and then later as a software architect, I still held out dreams of building the next Google – a gigantic, brilliant piece of engineering that would make me the richest man in the world.
And then I discovered Toyota.
This was also just about the time I was going broke, chasing one of these big, complicated visions. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Microsoft is Evil (and Google is Not)
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 13th, 2009
Last time I checked, Google had annual revenues of about $20B.
Microsoft has annual revenues of about $60B.
Google knows everything about me – and they’ve shown a few times that they’re not afraid to use it. (Ask Chris Campbell about the time Google emailed us when we were working on Netscape 8.)
Microsoft knows very little about me.
As a developer of software, I respect and emulate their business model – they write software, and then they sell it to people. It’s old-fashioned, but it works. And it’s straightforward.
And Google? Google, who makes a living by pimping out a spot in my attention span; Google, who has the moral backbone of a Tadpole – is considered to be the good guy.
When to Pause, When to Push
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 12th, 2009
It’s now 11pm on Wednesday night. Tomorrow morning, at 10am, I will be presenting my Project Plan to execute $6M worth of custom software development over the next 36 months.
That Project Plan doesn’t really exist yet.
It’s been a busy week. LAST night, at 11pm (roughly), I filed a Notice Of Intent, to bid on a DIFFERENT multi-million dollar, multi-year contract. Oh, yesterday was also my oldest daughter’s 6-year-old birthday.
There’s a point, in here, somewhere. We’ll wind our way towards it.
Technically, these days I’m an “Information Worker”. What I think that means, is that I get paid for thinking about things. At least, that’s how I choose to interpret it. My clients probably prefer to think I get paid for the OUTPUT of my thinking – but I’m all too keenly aware of how directly the quality of my output, is related to the quality of my thinking. Read the rest of this entry »
<N> Reasons Why Open Standards, more than Open Source, Really Matter
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on February 10th, 2009
There have been some great articles on the dangers of, either no standards, or closed standards. However, no one has really talked about how almost EVERYTHING we have accomplished as a race of people, has been to the credit of open standards of information exchange and interface. So let’s take a walk back through the ages, and look at the wonderful things that open standards have brought us.
1. Numbers
Regardless of the language they use, or even the character set they use for writing it, most countries on the planet now use the “decimal positional notation” for all numbers and mathematics. This public, open standard for notation has allowed the development of relatively friction-free international commerce, and was the successful basis for… Read the rest of this entry »
Ruby on Rails causes Global Warming
Posted by admin in carbon, entrepreneurs on October 31st, 2008
I use a laptop. Which means, as I peck away at my keyboard in the waning hours of the evening, I can smell the slow charring of my wool pants (mixed with the redolent odor of singed leg hair) as the tiny fan embedded in my computer tries desperately to keep this multi-thousand-dollar device, from melting into a pile of slag.
As a self-taught engineer, I tend to notice the glaringly-obvious – perhaps more than many of my well-educated peers. And there’s one obvious lesson in this – if solid state electronics are getting HOT, they’re wasting using a fair amount of power.
In a nuclear reactor somewhere out there, an atom died for the pixels on my screen. Another few drops of precious oil, or a few tons more gasified coal, were spilt for those extra minutes of Microsoft Word (or perhaps “Grand Theft Auto 4″).
Moore’s Law has shown us how the steady change of computing SPEED (doubling), and COST (halving), has reliably powered our advancing Information Age. Yet nothing in Moore’s Law has halted the seemingly inexorable increase in ENERGY requirements, of these most devious of machines.
This is not a problem that we’ve address head on – in our subsidized energy economy, there has been no real motivation to do so. In fact, as our dependency on computing infrastructure has deepened, we’ve made it WORSE. Here’s how it works: Read the rest of this entry »
Social History – Now a Handy WordPress Plugin
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on September 22nd, 2008
Last week I stumbled across this blog post by Aza announcing his “SocialHistory.js” script, and it really inspired me to do better with the Social Bookmarks on this blog. So imagine my surprise when I realized that there was no WordPress plugin available yet!
I hadn’t written my first WordPress plugin, so I decided this would be a perfect opportunity. You can see it working below this post (and every other post on the site) – where you will find social bookmarking links for only those sites that we’ve seen in your browser history.
I’m still waiting for my submission to be accepted at WordPress.org, but if you simply cannot wait to get a copy for yourself, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the tarball.
Oh, and a big thank-you to the makers of Sociable – I borrowed liberally from their plugin for this one.
If any of you are interested in collaborating to make this a little less ugly, let me know!
