Archive: October 11, 2014

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Davenet turns 20

Saturday,  10/11/14  09:50 PM

Congratulations to Dave Winer on 20 years of blogging!

I was an early and avid reader of Davenet... even when it was a column in Wired Magazine, and remain subscribed to Scripting News via Dave's own RSS technology.

Dave is one of the pioneers of the web, still diggin' (as he likes to say) - a key innovator in blogging, RSS, podcasting, and a bunch of other cool stuff, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

One of his most important and long-lasting contributions was inspiring me to start Critical Section back in 2003 :)

Onward!

I took this picture of Dave at Internet World in 1996; he was live blogging in the Apple booth.  Same as it ever was...

 

coding

Saturday,  10/11/14  10:23 PM

Greetings blog public; checking in after another busy week of coding.  I started in Word, and then moved to Excel, and next week hope to get back to Visual Studio.  But in the meantime, it's all happening...

Paul Graham: Before the Startup.  On the importance of history and chemistry between founders.  I agree entirely; one of the things that makes eyesFinder so cool is that we're all longtime friends.  Echos a key thought from Peter Thiel's Zero to One

Google turned a camel into a street view car to map the Liwa Desert.  Hehe, excellent!  (although perhaps "street view" is not exactly the way to describe the result... :) 

Following in eBay/PayPal's footsteps, HP plan to break themselves in two.  Interesting ... seems as if the goal is to unlock value, but where will it come from?  The PC / printer business is stagnant, with no innovation, and the enterprise division is mostly services, too big to grow fast.  A sad epilog for the once-great tech company. 

Interesting that many "tech" companies really don't invent much new technology, they're just users of existing technology.  eBay and HP's enterprise business fall into this category, while PayPal and HP's PC business do not.

Speaking of PayPal: Square Cash now lets you send money to nearby friends via Bluetooth.  So be it.  (PayPal's original product enabled Palm Pilot owners to "beam" money to each other via their Pilots' IR ports.  Not much demand for that.  But there was demand for PayPal's next product, which let eBay users settle auctions online...) 

According to TechCrunch, There's something going on in LA.  Excellent.  Perhaps eyesFinder will be the next big success story to come out of Caltech :) 

The greatest keyboard ever made.  The IBM Model M.  I agree entirely and have in fact just ordered one ... yay.  I first used one on an IBM 3151 terminal, back in the dawn of time. 

ESR: Time, Clock, and Calendar programming in C.  A great guide to a pretty archaic collection of APIs.  The handling of timezones is especially tricky and well-explained. 

From the Magazine: Nine hard lessons from a top iPad publisher who is calling it quits.  Interesting to read that IOS 7 (and 8) were a step backward. 

Awesome: The Thirty-Meter Telescope's construction is finally under way.  Looks like something out of a science fiction movie, doesn't it? 

How interesting: one-third of Google product searches happen in the wee hours.  Come to think of it, many of those might have come from me :) 

Okay, back to coding...

 

 
 

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