Here’s some food for thought. Ahmed Hassan very recently wrote a comment in response to an article of mine, Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle, and it’s worth promoting to its own article, so here it is.

Being from Toronto and having worked in both Toronto, Ottawa, and the US, I think Toronto has severe challenges.

1. We build workers…not leaders.

We have loads of talent…but all we create is good worker bees.

2. Yes, lack of big companies is a big deal.

There are some ‘entrepreneurs’ who will just go at it on their own. yet, the vast majority of people like a decent job. So they meet up at large companies…work for a while…then maybe decide to start their own thing. All we have in Toronto proper is IBM and AMD. Anyone care to explain how RIM was founded in Waterloo. I ask that as a serious question. How does a small town create the only great Canadian tech company in operation right now? Why was it not founded in Toronto? Ask that question a few times…over and over.

3. Politicians do not understand business.

When you have someone like Miller who says he doesn’t care about companies who move to Mississauga for lower tax rates as he only wants companies who are willing to pay more to take advantage of Toronto’s urban character… you know something is wrong. They will try to push venture capital and ‘incubators…’.

As I say…mentality before process.

4. Sometimes you run out of talent.

How many high tech centers do we need? Everywhere you go, there is a lack of talent. If Toronto tech can just pickup and move to Seattle, Silicon valley, New york, boston, dallas, austin… in an already established tech base, why would they bother doing it here? Better weather, lower taxes, more like-minded entrepreneurs.

It’s not impossible. But Toronto has its work cut out for it. The biggest threat to Toronto…is actually Waterloo. Very close to Toronto and with a large tech base. It’s largely a mentality gap. Toronto embraces bureaucracy and structure. Startups are about freedom and independence. If you will…that’s why RIM was founded in Waterloo as opposed to Toronto. No Toronto bureaucracy would have ever approved of RIM. I mean they would be competing against Motorola, Nokia, MS… impossible…that’s a bad investment.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

If you’re a reader of the usual sites with links that nerds like, you’ve probably seen the video or read the writeup of Clay Shirky’s presentation at Web 2.0 on “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”.

In his presentation, he describes a conversation with a TV producer, in which he talked about the effort that people put into the “Pluto” entry in Wikipedia. The producer, hearing this story, rolled her eyes and asked “Where do they find the time?”

Clay suggests that the producer believed that “free time”, which he refers to as “cognitive surplus” or “social surplus”, was TV’s by divine right. He posits that the mental energy once devoted to television watching and other equally passive ways of filling one’s spare time is being better spent — on the internet.

(I’ve always found that saying someone has “too much time on their hands” is an intellectually dishonest way of dismissing someone: see my entry Too Much Spare Time? and Cory Doctorow’s essay, Too Much Time on His Hands.)

If you haven’t seen the video of Clay’s presentation, here it is — it’s 16 minutes of your free time well spent:

The TV producer reminded me of a record executive whom I encountered at my first job out of school. It’s an interesting story about programming work and technology in the mid-90’s, the music industry and how predictions about technology can be way, way off.

My First Job Out of School

A screenshot from the 1991 version of the Mackerel Stack, a HyperCard stack the promoted Mackerel’s design work.

My first job fresh from getting my computer science degree at Crazy Go Nuts University was developing multimedia applications in Director at a little company called Mackerel Interactive Multimedia.

The year was 1995, when Myst still defined the cutting edge of multimedia, CD-ROMs and sound cards were still fairly novel peripherals and the only other opportunities for a wet-behind-the ears developer seemed to be at a bank or insurance company, neither of which seemed to be appealing. While the pay wasn’t great — I used to call us the “hos of technology” and did a Full Metal Jacket-esque routine that ended with me shouting “Me so geeky! Clicky-clicky! Me hack for long time!” — the place wasn’t soul-killing like a bank or insurance company might have been. I could wear whatever I wanted, I could dress up my office space however I pleased, the hours were flexible and the co-workers were great: a hip and cool set of young people, with a near 50:50 gender balance. It seemed like Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, which had just been published at that time, right down to the ill-advised office romances (one of which was mine).

While the dream at the company was to write the next Myst, we paid the bills by writing multimedia apps for clients — typically interactive advertising or educational pieces that would eventually be distributed on CDs or even multiple floppies.

The company went under after a disastrous merger in 1997. Its story was covered by Cory Doctorow wrote an article for Wired about the Mackerel’s demise; unfortunately, it never got published in the magazine. The Mackerel story is told from a different angle by co-founders Dave Groff and Kevin Steele at the Smackerel site, which is subtitled A Biased History of Interactive Media.

Enter the Record Exec

One of the bands represented by the record exec’s company. You can try to guess who they are, and you should be able to figure out the record company as well.

One day during the summer of 1996, one of the founders came into the area where the developers hung out and told us that we’d landed a contract with an independent record label belonging to a major record company.

“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” I asked.

Apparently it wasn’t. The indy label turned out to be merely a new branch of the major record company. It would sign up-and-coming underground and alternative acts and use the major label for distribution. If the major label was pin-striped and buttoned-down, the indy label was its edgier nephew, clad in faux Hot Topic-esque cred. In spite of their trying-too-hard-to-be-cool aspects, we thought they’d make an interesting client.

The record company exec was a woman who was about five years past their twenty-something demographic. She gave off more of a business school vibe than a rock vibe. She peppered her speech with business-school-isms like “target audience” and “units sold”. She used the word “product” several times and didn’t use the word “music” or even “album” once. Everything she knew about music didn’t come from being a fan; it came from what she’d read in her market research reports.

“That’s why they don’t call it show art,” one of us quipped.

The Brainstorming Session

The CD player application from System 7, the version of Mac OS from 1996.

One of the goals of this initial meeting was to brainstorm some ideas for interactive apps that we could build for them. I had been working on an idea that I was rather proud of: CD player apps customized for specific albums. For any CD other than the one for which it was customized, it would show a mostly plain interface, plus some promos for the album. However, if you used the player to play the album for which it was customized, it would “come alive” with lyrics, liner notes, album art and so on. It was an attempt to bring back what was lost in the move from LPs to CDs.

“Nice try, kid,” said the exec with great disdain. “We did some market research and we’ve determined that no one will ever listen to music on their computer. People see them as machines for getting work done. We’re aiming for the rec room, the den, the living room and the bedroom, not the home office. You computer guys are aiming for home office.”

“You sure about that?” our production manager asked. “We all use the CD players on our machines. For some of us, our computers are in our bedrooms and living rooms, and they’re also our primary stereos now.”

“That may be true for you,” she replied, “but you guys are the exception. Computers are great, but they’re office equipment. You don’t keep a typewriter or photocopier in your living room, so why would you have a computer there? And that’s where people listen to their music. Office equipment and entertainment: apples and oranges. Trust me - I’ve been in the music industry for a while - no one’s going to listen to music on their computer.”

I listened as a few other people had their ideas shot down in similar fashion. It was a matter of her knowing the music industry better than we did.

The Hail Mary MP3 Play

At some point during the increasingly futile brainstorming session, I remembered something that I’d brought back from the Macromedia User Conference. I reached into my laptop bag and fished out a floppy disc.

“Here, check this out,” I said, slotting the diskette into my laptop. “It’s something called Shockwave, which lets you embed multimedia applications inside web pages.”

“We don’t think there will be much interest in the world wide web outside of technical people. The pictures are tiny, you’re stuck with default fonts, and your customers have to go buy a modem. Too much tech hassle, too little payoff.”

“You should give this a look,” I insisted. “The company that makes the tool we use to write multimedia software is using MPEG layer 3 [the term “MP3″ hadn’t made common parlance yet] compression to squeeze music files into less space. There’s a small multimedia program on this floppy, and a whole three-minute song. It would normally take about 8 floppies to hold this song.”

I put the disk in my laptop and launched the Shockwave application, which started a tune playing.

“Sounds like crap,” she said. “And who’s the band? The Spin Doctors? They’re so over.”

“Ignore the band,” I said, trying to remain patient. “Just think of the possibilities. This three-minute single is only a megabyte in size. It fits on a floppy, which you can hand out, or you’d be able to download it in a reasonable amount of time. The download will be even faster on the new 56K modems.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” she said, making that opening-and-closing hand gesture signifying pointless chatter. “It only means something to you because you’re a techie. I’ve seen the market research, and I will tell you now: people are not going to be getting their entertainment from computers or the internet. It’s going to come from set-top boxes and MiniDisc recharging stations at their record stores.”

At this point, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. “Well, you seem to have all the market research, so maybe the best thing would be for you to come up with ideas for an interactive application, and then we can hammer out the details with you in a later meeting.”

“I think that would be a good idea,” she said. She rose from her seat to leave the room, shaking her head.

“I don’t know about you,” I said to the others after confirming that she was out of earshot, “but I think the music industry needs to be destroyed.”

The video’s four-step program for becoming a new media douchebag is pretty simple:

1. Don’t do any real work.
2. Talk, type, tag, text and Twitter a lot of stuff. The greater the volume, the better!
3. Be sure to hate a lot of stuff. And tell folks!
4. Celebrate the other new media douchebags out there.

According to Valleywag — for whom the four-step program above could count as a mission statement — New Media Douchebags in Plain English is a parody of Google’s Google Docs in Plain English .

[Thanks to jwz for the link!]

Over at Signal vs. Noise, 37signals’ blog, David Heinemeier Hansson asks Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco? Here`s an excerpt:

If your idea for a web business is more along the lines of the mundane “product * price = profit” (3P) variety, I think the culture of San Francisco and that famous 20-mile radius around Stanford is anything but helpful. I might even go as far as say it’s downright harmful.

The flush availability of other people’s money is simply too tempting. When you’re not spending your own money, it’s easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.

I can vouch from personal experience that the line about what happens when you’re not spending your own money is so true. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about it.

Naturally, the question comes up: “If San Francisco, the Bay area, and Sillicon Valley aren’t good places to start a web business of the 3P variety, where is?”

David provides a quick list of cities where some interesting applications are being developed, which includes:

• Chicago (and originally, Copenhagen), home of BaseCamp
• New York, home of FogBugz
• Sydney, home of Campaign Monitor
• Ottawa, home of Shopify
• Austin, home of Blinksale
• Toronto, home of Freshbooks

I’m highlighting Toronto not only because it’s the city I call home, but also because there’s a strong small development shop community that’s been building up here over the past few years: we hosted one of the first BarCamps to follow the original, and created DemoCamp, CaseCamp and TransitCamp as well as the upcoming RubyFringe conference, which promises to be quite unlike any other developer conference out there. Toronto also offers some serious quality-of-life bonuses to techies, a very livable city with lots to do at night, Asian food aplenty (including three or four Chinatowns, depending on how you count ‘em), a smart workforce and proximity to major cities in the United States (we’re about an hour away by plane from New York, Boston and Chicago).

More on my experiences in a later post.

[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]

The Audigy series of Creative Labs’ Sound Blasters lost some functionality with the release of Windows Vista:

• EAX: “Environmental Audio Extensions”, a set of digital signal processing presets that are meant to make sound in games seem more realistic.
• 3D Audio
• Sampling rate conversion
• Audio mixing

Creative’s story is that Microsoft removed “the ‘Vendor Extension mechanism from Vista’s DirectSound implementation,’ which is what Sound Blaster Audigy relied on to generate EAX effects and other audio processing.” Without this bit of code, Sound Blaster Audigy cards produce regular 2-channel stereo sound and not the supposedly more realistic-sounding, spatially-localized sounds for which people bought Audigy cards in the first place.

If this development wasn’t enough to upset Audigy owners, Creative stirred the pot last July by charging $10 for software called Creative ALchemy (that’s not a typo — the first two letters in “ALchemy”, when referring to the software, are supposed to be capitalized). Here’s the description from its page on Creative’s site:

Creative ALchemy (Audigy Edition) restores your Sound Blaster Audigy’s ability to process EAX effects, 3D audio, sampling rate conversion and audio mixing for certain DirectSound3D games in Windows Vista.

Quite predictably, some users were quite annoyed at being asked to pay for this software. In the words of this Gizmodo article, Creative was effectively “charging 10 bucks to fix something that should work in the first place.” A commenter in this CrunchGear article on the issue made a point that the charge could reflect the extra development effort required in making Audigy cards work under Vista, but also suggested that Creative could’ve eaten that cost “for PR purposes”.

For more commentary on Creative Labs’ charging $10 for what some saw as functionality that they had already paid for, see this ZDNet article titled Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?.

The Good Deed and the Punishment

In the comments for the Gizmodo article I cited earlier, there’s a reference to a free software workaround that enabled the features lost with a Vista upgrade. The workaround was posted to Creative’s forums and the commenter felt it necessary to note that the post “surprisingly, hasn’t been removed yet”.

It’s quite likely that the workaround in question was a solution posted by one “Daniel_K”. Here’s what a Gizmodo article posted yesterday has to say about it:

Developer, good-guy and all around hero, Daniel_K stepped up to the challenge, putting together his own drivers and asking for non-obligatory donations in recognition of his effort. Daniel_K’s drivers restored functionality, and added some extra features to boot.

You might think that Creative would be pleased: here’s a user with the will and the skill to develop a software fix that restores functionality to their hardware under Vista — essentially crowdsourcing at its best.

However, they were not pleased. Here’s a message posted to their forums by Creative’s VP Corporate Communication, Phil O’Shaughnessy. I’ve emphasized the part of the message that really grind my gears:

Daniel_K:

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don’t have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O’Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Simply put, Creative is saying that by fixing stuff that they’ve broken on purpose in order to gouge more money out of their customers, you’re stealing from them. It’s just another case of a vendor seeing its customers as “batteries for their Matrix”, or a Jay Michalski puts it, gullets that live under the end of the distribution system’s conveyor belt, where they gulp down products and crap out cash.

Oddly enough, there are a couple of commenters to the Gizmodo articles who come to Creative’s defense, one of whom brings up the fact that if Daniel_K did any reverse engineering of Creative’s drivers for Audigy cards, he broke the EULA. These people are the sort that Dante was thinking of when he wrote about that part of the 8th Circle of Hell reserved for evil counselors.

Links

• Creative Labs’ Forums: Message to Daniel_K
• Gizmodo: Creative Presents Cease-and-Desist Note to Developer Hero
• Wired: Creative: Fixing Our Crippled Sound Card Drivers Is “Stealing our Goods”
• Articles from July 2007 on ALChemy:
  • Gizmodo: Creative Charging $10 to Restore EAX Effects in Vista
  • ZDNet: Creative charging $9.99 for Vista EAX update?
  • CrunchGear: Creative Charges $9.99 For Enhanced Vista Drivers
• Want to email Creative Lab’s VP Corporate Communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy? He’s at poshaughnessy@creativelabs.com
• You can still get your hands on Daniel_K’s fixes — here’s a page featuring a torrent containing them.

Chris Ragobeer: An Open Letter to Toronto’s Technology Community

Over at The Toronto Marketing and Technology Blog, Chris Ragobeer wrote an article titled An Open Letter to Toronto’s Technology Community. In the article, Chris lists these things:

• Things that Toronto already has that will help in turning the city into a high-tech hub.
• Things Toronto needs to establish or acquire in order to turn the city into a high-tech hub.
• Some suggested actions that the local high-tech community can take.

David Crow: Harnessing Hogtown’s Hominids for High-Tech Hijinks and Hubs

David Crow (who recently was voted Toronto’s best tech evangelist at BlogTO, running against some pretty stiff competition including Yours Truly) also responded to my article in a piece with an extremely alliterative title: Harnessing Hogtown’s Hominids for High-Tech Hijinks and Hubs. In the article, he makes these points:

• Where is our “Fairchild” that creates our own “Fairchildren”? “Can you name big successful software companies that have started in Toronto? More importantly, can you name successful companies that have started because the founders were members of another “parent” company? Why has RIM or Nortel not created a strong spinoff culture?”
• One possible source of “Fairchildren” might be people who’ve spent time in Silicon Valley and other hubs, who’ve either returned or migrated to Toronto to start companies here. They bring with them experience and connections and “might be a better hope for new wealth creation in Toronto in the high-tech sector.”
• ICT Toronto is a joke. David’s feeling about City Hall’s attempt to bolster Toronto’s standing as a high-tech hub is similar to mine: “We have a fascination with self-congratulatory bullshit efforts!” Last year’s TechWeek was a non-event that registered on almost nobody’s radar, and I have my doubts about this year’s. Their goals are misguided, and they have no idea of what it means to be local technology company. They seem to be focused on on turning Toronto into a place to do “nearsourcing”, in which case they might as well come up with a marketing campaign like “Toronto: The Bangalore Next Door” and resign us to the fate of being a call center hub.

I fell in love with Montreal in my late teens. It’s quite unlike most cities in North America — you can practically feel the place’s history, and everything from its architecture to the “feel” of its streets just seems different. It’s like having a little bit of Europe, but closer by and cheaper to get to. If you’re from North America and looking for a different vacation destination and on a budget, I recommend Montreal.

Today’s Montreal Gazette features an article titled Silicon Island?, which takes a look at their high-tech community’s grassroots movement:

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the Internet, local geeks with bright ideas started meeting at informal, community-organized events called BarCamps. The global movement that began in the Silicon Valley was the grassroots retort to stuffy, invitation-only tech conferences. In a BarCamp, computer whizzes show the first drafts of their garage projects to anyone who will listen.

This type of networking results in lasting connections that can pay off. Now when [George Favvas of Montreal-based SmartHippo.com] needs someone with a particular skill, he puts the word out on his blog, his Facebook profile or on his LinkedIn page, a social network for business contacts. Other bloggers write about it. Someone who knows just the guy gets wind of it, and Favvas has a candidate in a few hours.

This way of doing things has been so fruitful that it’s being seen as a model for other sectors of the technology industry, like telecommunications and life sciences.

“The young entrepreneurs today are different from the IT entrepreneurs of the ’80s and ’90s,” said René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology, which has become the preferred venue for local tech gatherings.

“They are very good at organizing themselves. … It’s sad to see more established companies not seeing this as a core of business,” he said.

There’s also a gathering called YULbiz, a monthly get-together for local business bloggers (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Pierre Trudeau airport). Montreal StartUp encourages successful entrepreneurs to become angel investors. Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Technology Ventures has a branch office in Montreal.

Map of Montreal’s subway.

As with Toronto, the chicken-and-egg problem also plagued Montreal. As the article puts it: “Do risk-takers attract smart money, or does the availability of money encourage risk-takers? Ideally, both factors are at work, in a mutually reaffirming symbiosis.” The seed money is now coming in, and things are looking up:

With its pool of tech talent, the emergence of seed money, and a budding network of mentors, “Montreal has the right mix of elements and we’ll see it really flourish next year,” [Austin Hill] said.

The next step is to get people from different tech and business sectors talking to each other. René Barsalo, the director of strategy and liaison for the Society for Arts and Technology (”the preferred venue for local tech gatherings”) says that in his ideal world, a presentation by a 3D animator would have engineers, musicians, medical technicians and furniture designers in the audience.

The article closes with a line that people in the Toronto tech community will find familiar: “The grassroots is moving up quite nicely, but a top-down movement isn’t happening at all.”

Zed Shaw’s title for his writeup of the CUSEC 2008 conference sums up his opinions: CUSEC 2008 Rocked Hard!. It’s a telling sign when the master of over-the-top condemnation has nothing but praise for your endeavour.

Here’s a quick summary of his points:

• “The first thing I’d say about this conference, and many of the other small regional conferences is just how well organized they are compared to the professional and larger conferences. The CUSEC organizers are all volunteers from universities, yet they were better planned, had their act together, and really knew how to put on a show.”
• Montreal however reminded me of what Canada is supposed to be: friendly, cool, relaxed, and open. The sexy French accents helped push this perception, but also the food, the fact that strip clubs were everywhere, the streets were clean, people smiled at me (nobody in Vancouver smiled) and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
• Tim Bray’s presentation: “It was a decent talk, and I think the audience got some valuable information out of it…I liked Tim’s talk since it was perfect for students starting out, and it dovetailed well with a talk by Dr. Peter Grogono on the same subject.”
• Kate Hollenbach’s presentation: “What she demonstrated is a way to do simple visualizations using a Python simplification wrapper to most OpenGL primitives. What impressed me the most is she did live demos of large scale 3D visualizations based on information from internet services like Facebook. She did this live right off the internet and it didn’t tank on her. If the project already can survive the demo effect then it’s doing pretty damn good.”
• Zed’s keynote: “I did my keynote in Factor using a neat presentation DSL that Slava wrote up for another presentation he did. You can grab the source to it here. Then go grab the 0.91 release, put the file in extra/cusec2008/ in the Factor directory, and then just start factor and type: “cusec2008” run to start it. Yes, I make it hard to read through on purpose you bastards. Learn something for a change.” (That crazy Zed, always working that “Magnificent Bastard” persona…)
• The points from Zed’s keynote:
  • I work at a stupid bank on a cool project.
  • They’re bureaucracy almost crushed the project.
  • They tried to push through a product we couldn’t use due to a major theoretical limitation in how ACLs work: they aren’t turing complete.
  • Steak And Strippers! The sales guy’s dirty bomb.
  • After months of wasted effort on the project and fighting stupid politics we finally implemented something better.
  • This kind of thing makes being a corporate programmer suck, suck, suck!
  • Don’t be a corporate programmer. They demand all of your creativity and trust none of your judgment.
  • But, you’ve gotta eat so if you do become one, here’s how you survive.
  • Then tons of advice on how to survive and be happy until the moron MBAs who know nothing of technology die off and are replaced with people who get it.
• “Another thing that impressed the hell out of me about the audience is that many of them actually came up and told me they didn’t agree with all that I said. Other conferences I’ve been to people either don’t speak up when a speaker is being an asshat, or if you do challenge the speaker he gets all pissy.”
• “What blew me away first off is that the audience asked actual fucking questions. I’ve been to so many conferences where half of the shit the audience spews out of their mouth hole after the talk isn’t a question. They state what they think, talk about their own work (which usually sucks), and just don’t ask a fucking question. The CUSEC attendees rocked because they got up, and not only asked great questions, but asked challenging ones that caught a few speakers off guard, myself included.”
• “CUSEC was full of great independent thinkers and I hope they never lose that. Always question the people telling you how it should be and demand evidence. If some shit head Haskell moron tells you that software should be stateless, then ask him why there’s monads. If someone says that you should be doing more usability, then ask him why his website sucks shit.”
• At CUSEC the corporate talks were actually useful and given by non-sales people. They did include pitches to hire folks, but not but based on how cool their product was and how interesting the work is. Additionally, I had managed to inoculate most of the students against stupid sales pitches so most of the people trying to recruit had to throw in, “We don’t suck like Zed says other corporations suck.” I was actually also proud since throughout the rest of the conference students would yell out “Steak and Strippers!” whenever it was funny.
• Jeffrey Ullman’s keynote: “Pretty neat stuff, and since he’s basically the grandfather of google having been their thesis adviser, it was worth seeing.”
• Idee’s presentation: “The demos were impressive.”
• Idee’s as a start-up: “Then they mentioned that the two partners actually had 2.1 million of their own money for the “start-up”. That pretty much killed the talk for me. Technically it was excellent, but if you come to me and say you got your business off the ground by a heavy investment of 2.1 million bones then I don’t call you a start-up. A start-up is Woz and Steve Jobs making circuit boards in their garage on nothing. With that much money you’re just a business.”
• On Slava Pestov’s no-show: “…he whimped out at the last minute and decided to defend his MSc. in Mathematics instead. Loser. No worries though, because I got Slava’s CUSEC speaker’s plaque and plan to take it on a disgusting traveling gnome style tour of NYC before mailing it to him.”
• Jeremy Cooperstock’s presentation: “It was a kick ass talk about how the current internet can’t handle the required latency for musicians in different locations to perform together.”
• On Jon Udell’s talk: “One thing I found annoying about Jon Udell’s talk is that, just like all the other RESTafarians, didn’t have a clue about HTTP. He mentioned that you could use ’;’ in a URL to give people hierarchy, but that’s just dead wrong. It’s the exact same problem that Rails ran into, since ’;’ is a path parameter and isn’t part of a file name at all. It’s right there in the HTTP spec that you can’t do it, and part of the grammar even, but REST people don’t have a clue. They think if they can put the char in a file on their modern file system then it can go in a URL. Not true at all since HTTP was built before most modern file systems…I later had the chance to sit next to Jon and chat with him. He’s a smart guy for sure and very nice. Just wish he wasn’t telling kids how to do REST.”
• Jeff Atwood’s talk: “Finally I watched Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame talk about what a lot of other people have said and why you should blog. I completely agreed with everything Jeff said, except for a tiny bit of hypocrisy he didn’t fess up to until asked…Jeff is a great public speaker too. Even though I disagreed with a few of his points I really liked his talk and would see him speak again any time.”
• Don’t just fucking blog, but write some software and give it away. While the average person can only read a human language, the people you really need to hit with your message as a programmer are other coders. I’d say that’s the best thing I’ve done for myself, not really the blogging.
• I have a policy of not naming people on my blog since it’s normally a pretty fucked up place to get named. I’ll just keep it short however and say all of the organizers kicked major ass. They were all nice, awesome people that I’d hang out with any day. I’m glad they invited me to the conference and I’d come to the next one any time.

Continuing the recent run of lists of career tips — see What to Do if You’re Laid Off in the 2008 Recession and How to Work the Room — here’s 10 Secrets to Success.

It’s a list on PickTheBrain.com that originally appeared in Investors Business Daily. This list is based on answers to questions they asked “industry leaders, investors and entrepreneurs to understand the traits they all had in common”.

Here’s a simplified version of the list — to see the whole thing, read the article:

1. How you think is everything. “Think Success, not Failure. Beware of a negative environment. This trait has to be one of the most important in the entire list. Your belief that you can accomplish your goals has to be unwavering.”
2. Decide upon your true dreams and goals. “Write down your specific goals and develop a plan to reach them…Goals are those concrete, measurable stepping stones of achievement that track your progress towards your dreams.”
3. Take action. “Goals are nothing without action.”
4. Never stop learning. “Becoming a life long learner would benefit us all and is something we should instill in our kids. It’s funny that once you’re out of school you realize how enjoyable learning can be.”
5. Be persistent and work hard. “Success is a marathon, not a sprint.”
6. Learn to analyze details. Get all the facts, all the input. Learn from your mistakes. I think you have to strike a balance between getting all the facts and making a decision with incomplete data – both are traits of successful people. Spend time gathering details, but don’t catch ‘analysis paralysis’.
7. Focus your time and money. “Don’t let other people or things distract you.”
8. Don’t be afraid to innovate. Be different. Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity.” (It sounds like a variant of my own maxim, “Do the stupidest thing that could possibly work.”)
9. Deal and communicate with people effectively. “No person is an island. Learn to understand and motivate others.”"
10. Be honest and dependable. “Take responsibility, otherwise numbers 1 – 9 won’t matter.”

Original image taken from the Wikipedia entry for Hype Cycle and modified by Yours Truly.

(Got work to do. More later.)

Inspired by news of the impending layoffs at Yahoo!, Robert Scoble — quite possibly the internet’s best-known tech evangelist has compiled a list in his article What to Do if You’re Laid Off in the 2008 Recession. I’ve got a condensed version of his list items below; I suggest you read the article to see the list in full. It’s good advice whether you’ve just been laid off, looking for a job or even if you’re currently employed and looking for your next job.

(Note: while a few of these points are tech industry-specific, they should be easily adaptable to whatever field you’re in — or would like to be in.)

1. Don’t get lazy. It might seem dire, but if you work it you WILL find a job.
2. Make sure you spend at least 30% of every day trying to find a job.
3. Start a blog on the field you want to work in.
4. Do things that will get you to be recognized as a world leader in the field you want to be in. Are you a programmer? Build something and put it up!
5. Network! Learn from Loic Le Meur. How did he get thousands of videos uploaded on Seesmic everyday? He networked.
6. Do a video everyday on YouTube that demonstrates something you know. Loic does a video everyday. If you’re laid off you have absolutely no excuses.
7. Show your friends your resume and cover letter. Don’t have any friends? Now is the time to make some. Call up some interesting people and ask for an informational interview.
8. Do the basics. Yes, my blog helped me AFTER I got the interview, but I got the interview just by having a great cover letter and an interesting resume.
9. Don’t feel bad about taking government assistance. You’ll need it to pay your bills.
10. Go to any job networking session you learn about.
11. Go where the money is. If you are laid off and you haven’t sent your resume to Matt Mullenweg this morning, why not? People with new funding (Matt just got almost $30 million) are the ones who are hiring.
12. Take a little bit of time to work on family and health.
13. Volunteer. Let’s say you are going to be out of work for six months. What could you do with six months of your time? Make sure you come away with it with a great project under your belt. Why not volunteer your time with a charity that could use your skills? Building an IT system for the Red Cross looks damn impressive — saying you were “on the beach” for six months does not,
14. Make sure you take advantage of any help your former employer is offering. Sometimes they have retraining or other programs that might help you land an even better job.
15. See if you can keep coming into the office. This isn’t open to everyone, but at Userland I kept coming into work everyday after the paychecks stopped. That made me feel better, plus it gave me the ability to use phones, stay away from negative situations (do you really want to be around family all day, everyday, who might remind you that you need to find a job?) as well as give you a place to work hard on finding your new job.
16. Go to every business event you can attend. Can’t afford to get in? Me neither and I have a job! Hang out in the hallways. You never know who you might meet.
17. Always have your suit ready. Some interviews happen quickly. You want to be able to answer “yes” to “Can you be here this afternoon?”

You may also want to check out the Deep Jive Interests article that asks Are You Applying SEO Strategies To Your Resume?

If you’re looking to both laugh and cry at the same time, looking no farther than an article written by Robert Graham in the Errata Security blog titled Why the OLPC Promotes Terrorism, which should be a contender for the most insane tech article of the year. It’s so filled with the type of over-the-top pronouncements that one normally sees on extreme right-wing blogs that I had to reread to make sure that it wasn’t parody, and even now I’m not 100% sure. (Next to this article, Zed’s rant sounds rather restrained.)

The article’s two main points is that the OLPC is evil because:

• The design of the OLPC reflects the needs of its creators rather than its users, which to rob third-world children of their dignity.
• It’s a tool to indoctrinate third-world children into the preferred ideology of its designers, which is rabidly communist.

The article has:

• Bizarro statements: “The processor is more than fast enough to run software written in capitalistic programming languages like C++, but the majority of the user interface is written in slow left-wing languages like Python.”
• Reasoning that would make Bill O’Reilly proud: Graham states that features like mesh networking feature are meant to reinforce the notion that individualism is bad and socialism is good.
• A pointless conclusion: “Yet, at its core, it’s still a computer than people can use to hack the United States. It is a weapon that can attack our nation’s infrastructure much more effectively than a gun would. Here is a picture of us installing Metasploit on it” — as if Metasploit only ran on the OLPC.

Graham’s preferred machine for the third world? Intel’s Classmate PC: “[It] runs the same Windows or Linux desktops that everyone else in the world uses. Intel’s computer has no enforced educational agenda. It doesn’t have communist software on it, yet the children collaborate with each other anyway without software forcing them to.”

Graham’s article has a couple of things I agree with:

• The OLPC is not without its problems and is not above criticism
• I don’t see anything wrong with Intel releasing a competing machine, in spite of Negroponte’s huffing and puffing to the contrary

…but for the most part, it’s FOX News-style insanity. If you’re a techie looking for a laugh, Graham’s article is the place to go today.

I’m of the opinion that shutting off display models on the showroom floor might be an acceptable prank, but interfering with a live presentation by shutting off the TV being used for slides crosses the lines of etiquette and ethics. A number of people agree, and the flak that Gizmodo has received led editor Brian Lam to write an article defending their reporter’s actions. Here are a couple of excerpts:

But bloggers and trade journalists, so desperate for a seat at the table with big mainstream publications have it completely backwards: You don’t get more access by selling out for press credentials first chance you get, kowtowing to corporations and tradeshows and playing nice; you earn your respect by fact finding, reporting, having untouchable integrity, provocative coverage and gaining readers through your reputation for those things. Our prank pays homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. And no matter how much access the companies give us, we won’t ever stop being irreverent. That’s what this prank was about and what the press should understand.

…

Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I’m talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple’s mistakes when they didn’t make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset. Stock prices torn downward by publishing incorrect leaked info. Writing about companies that also pay you for advertorial podcast work. All of these examples are offenses from the last year. And I consider those offenses far worse than our prank, because it ultimately it puts the perpetrators on the wrong team. As one reporter put it while chiding me, “Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.” Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers. In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience. Every tech journalist has to decide whether or not he’s writing for companies or for readers. When they start writing for the companies, covering all their press releases and regurgitating marketing jargon, you do no one any favors (not even the companies, which already hire press release machines).

To borrow a quote from Tom Waits: Get off the cross; we could use the wood. There’s a difference between “civil disobedience” and “asshole”.

The “I’m keepin’ it real” defense is the resort of idiot rappers and performance artists who’ve come under fire for going too far; it’s the mark of a mind that lacks the will or the wherewithal to get past those unresolved “rebelling against Mommy and Daddy” issues. As far Lam’s implication that if you’re not rude to “the companies”, you’re kowtowing to them, that’s a lame high school debating tactic called a false dichotomy.

In his weak defense of their use of the TV-B-Gone device, Lam seems to have forgotten Gizmodo’s earlier stance on the device. Here’s their October 2004 review of TV-B-Gone: (thanks to Webware and Zoli Erdos for pointing this out!)

Mitch Altman is an asshole. And not just any asshole, but one of those snotty holier-than-thou types who has nothing better to do with the money he made as a founder of 3ware than to develop a device with the sole purpose of imposing his viewpoint on others. See, Altman hates the television and its encroachment into public space. Rather than just doing what most everybody else has done—which is either not really caring or, failing that, getting the fuck over it — Altman has invented a device called the ‘TV-B-Gone’ (obviously having expended every last vapor of his creative ability developing the product, he was left to co-opt the most obvious name schtick ever). Essentially a universal remote that cycles through every possible code, the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.

Read the Wired News profile, where Altman wanders through a city, turning off other peoples’ televisions, peppering his behavior with such gems as, “We just saved him several minutes of his life.” Maybe after making his tens of dozens of dollars on the TV-B-Gone, Altman can invent a gadget that transports self-important cocks who think they’re waging a subversive culture war to a log cabin coffee shop where they can reassure each other how awesome they are for hating television. Free berets for the first 100 pricks to use the word “Sheeple!”

“Power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick”? “Self-important cocks who think they’re waging a subversive culture war”? How eerily prescient, yet unaware!

I’ll leave the last word to Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb:

Toward the end of today’s post, Lam mentions his blog’s interview with Bill Gates. “We got the guy to open up and talk about Windows and its shortcomings like he never has before, not even on 60 minutes,” Lam says. “If that’s not journalism, I don’t know what is. If we had been in the pocket of this industry, we never would have asked such a risky question.”

That is the sort of thing that makes you a journalist. And what’s wrong with letting the questions you ask prove your independent spirit? No amount of silly pranks will ever do so much to prove your integrity as will the actual reporting you do. That’s something that any blogger who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist must learn. Actions might speak louder than words, but not if your actions are juvenile stunts that obscure your reporting.

By now, most Rails developers — and even a number of people who couldn’t care less about Rails — have read Zed Shaw’s infamous rant titled Rails is a Ghetto. It’s given me a lot to think about, and as a result, I’m changing my presentation topic at Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night to Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for my Rails (or: Lessons and Challenges from Zed Shaw’s Rant). I promise that it’ll be both informing and entertaining.

• Want to know more about Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night, which takes place this Tuesday, January 8th? See this entry.
• Want to sign up? Email me!

Aside: A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane

How can I reference Right Said Fred without showing you the video for their one hit?

Back in late 2006, I wrote an article about how they’ve been predicting that for the fourth year in a row, someone has declared that “this is the year RSS will be big!”.

I also wrote:

Perhaps I should start a betting pool on when the pundits will stop predicting that RSS will go mainstream next year. I’ll put money down on 2009. Any takers?

I’m glad I didn’t put money down on 2008, as someone has declared 2008 as the “Year of RSS”. Yes, it was a blog called Enterprise RSS, but still…

I think that “The Year of RSS” is turning into “The Rapture” — always imminent, but never actually coming to pass.

A quick reminder to my readership: If you’re going to be a jackass in the comments (like “Brian” was in this one), your comment will either not get approved, or — as in Brian’s case — “disemvowelled”. You’re in my virtual living room, and I expect you to behave accordingly.

I just got an announcement from the folks at O’Reilly about their new book, Windows Vista Annoyances. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s good for 500 pages of material”. Then I checked the page count: 664. Heh.

A number of people have approached me — both online and in person — and attempted to guess what it was that made me consider leaving my Technical Evangelist job at Tucows, a job that I enjoyed and to which I was well-suited.

The person who came closest, a “long-time reader, first-time caller”, emailed me, asking if the the photo below, which recently made the rounds on a number of tech sites, was the reason:

Photo by Martin Davidsson. Click the photo to see the original.

It’s an ad placed in Stanford University’s independent newspaper, the Stanford Daily by Y Combinator, a Boston-based venture group who specialize in investing in small tech starttups. One of their better-known beneficiaries is Reddit, which ended up being acquired by Conde Nast Publications last year. One of its principals, Paul Graham, made his fortune with a web application that eventually got bought out by Yahoo!, which turned it into Yahoo! Store. The “Larry and Sergey” referred to in the ad are Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Although seeing this photo helped crystallize my thoughts, it wasn’t what made me consider switching jobs. The credit has to go to the video below.

Why I Changed Jobs: The Video

Please be advised that it’s not safe for work because it features a guy lying on the ground with his pants dropped to expose his derriere, into which he inserts a bottle rocket.

Jason Kottke calls this “the funniest video of all time”, and he’s right.
Can’t see the video? Click here.

The Video, Described

For those of you who’d rather not play the video, here’s what happens: A bunch of guys, who look to be about high school age, are hanging around in a driveway. The central guy in the video is lying on the ground with his legs in the air and the pants pulled down. He inserts the bottle rocket’s stick into the expected orifice and one of the other guys lights the bottle rocket’s fuse.

What makes this film wonderfully comic in that Three Stooges way that we boys love so much is that this bottle rocket is too tightly attached to the stick. It ignites and shoots flames out its rear, but stays in place. The result is that the guy in the video ends up effectively blowtorching his own ass. It appears painful, but in the end (heh), it’s mostly harmless.

The poor guy wriggles in pain for the duration of the bottle rocket’s “burn”, after which he leaps to his feet. At that point, the rocket’s last bit of gunpowder goes off with a comically satisfying bang, with equally comically satisfying effects. I have watched this video at least a few dozen times and it always makes me laugh out loud.

As you, the astute reader, have probably guessed, the rest of this essay is devoted to explaining why this video convinced me that I should take a chance on a new job.

Brilliant Idea, My Ass

First, I need to take you back to the year 1993. I was in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, the location of Crazy Go Nuts University. In addition to being a computer science student, I was also, among other things, the keyboardist in a band called Volume, whose other members were George on bass, Drew on drums, Chris on guitar and Mike as lead vocalist.

One day, while relaxing after a rehearsal, Mike decided that it was time to share his brilliant idea with the rest of the band. “Guys,” he said, “I have a brilliant idea.”

George put his head in his hands. It was a generally accepted fact in our band that brilliant idea in the Mike’s own parallel universe usually translated into harebrained scheme in our own reality.

“Oh, this oughta be good,” said Drew, leaning forward. “What is it?”

We had a high nerd factor in the band: Chris and I were in computer science (him as a masters student, I was an undergrad in my sixth year), Drew was working on his masters in biology and George had finished his liberal arts bachelor degree and was working in the marketing department of a company that made a graphical database query tool.

Out of all of us, only Mike would’ve been a character in a Richard Linklater film. He was a scruffy philosophy major with a scant number of hours of classes a week who often woke up close to noon. His house was straight out of a college “stoner” movie: from the “smoking lounge” complete with dark wall, model train and jury-rigged disco ball (a hemispherical lump of clay covered in tiny pieces of mirror glopped onto an old turntable) to the fireman’s pole that let you descend from the upstairs bathroom to the kitchen in a flash, it seemed primarily set up for partying and only coincidentally set up for living in.

“I was thinking that we should close with a bang,” said Mike. “At the end of the show, I want to drop my pants, bend over, stick a Roman candle up my ass and shoot it out towards the audience.”

“You’re right,” I said, “that is brilliant.”

“Seriously, dude! I’ll drop my pants, stick the Roman cable up my ass, one of you will light it…”

“You see,” said George, “there’s already a flaw in your plan.”

The discussion went on for a little while longer, but even though some of us might have been convinced to let Mike try out his idea — even just to see if he’d actually go through with it — we never closed a show with Mike’s “Roman candle up the ass” finale.

Mike went on to bigger and better things: these days, he’s doing quite well as a lawyer on Bay Street (Toronto’s answer to Wall Street), with an office schedule that sometimes starts at 7 a.m.. If I could go back in time to show a picture of present-day Mike to the band back in 1993, none of us would have believed it.

I am beginning to suspect that Mike’s success comes from rather than in spite of his willingness to stuff an explosive device in his nether regions.

A Little Perspective

You must recall that this was almost fifteen years ago — a more innocent time, before the mainstreaming of the world wide web, before CollegeHumor.com, before Jackass and before a surprising number of people started posting videos on YouTube featuring Roman candles up their asses. [All these links are videos featuring people with Roman candles up their bums. Consider yourself warned.]

Stories about idiotic things that university students did were spread by word of mouth; only the fatal ones were covered by the media. Simply put, in those days, ideas like Mike’s weren’t copycat inspirations; more often than not, they came from your own stoned head.

Gordon Ramsay Wants to Put a Rocket Up Your Ass

On celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (the original British version, not the new American one), whenever the chef of the restaurant he’s trying to save appears to have lost the passion for cooking, he almost always says “I need to put a rocket up his ass”.

While the rocket insertion of which Chef Ramsay speaks is merely figurative, I have come to the conclusion that the metaphor is even more apt than Ramsay himself realizes.

“Why White People Run This Age”

Okay, I’ll fess up. What really got me thinking about making changes to my career path wasn’t the bottle rocket video, but some commentary on the video made in a blog called The War on Folly, written by Charles T. Duggleson and Charles H. Follymacher. The article is titled why White people run this age, and here’s the relevant excerpt:

…I’m once again reminded why White people rule the globe. It’s not a new idea, just feeling compelled to state it once more, this time without feeling: they run the world because they have a much (much) higher percentage of folk who will do absolutely *anything.* any bloody, assinine [sic] thing at all. if you can name it, guaranteed it will be tried, if it hasn’t been already.

it is out of these absolutely stark, raving, barking mad experiments that new discoveries are made, which in turn lead to a fresh new batch of shit to fuck with. new answers urge new questions and all that, right?

…

us colored peoples of the world tend to leave well enough alone a lot more, not much for forcing Mother Nature’s hand. our ancient sciences are lost. that’s our bad. who knew? we didn’t ask. and now it may be too late to churn up that kind of insatiable hunger for knowledge.

a lot of White folk die off in these quests to discover and experience the unknowns, large or wtf. but some small percentage do manage to live to tell the tale and, wherever possible, wreak [sic] the profits.

A quick aside: I don’t want my story to get derailed into a discussion of race, culture and achievement — it’s not relevant to this article — but it is notable that if you do a search on YouTube using the keywords roman candle ass or bottle rocket ass, you will discover two things:

• A surprising number of people have decided that it might be a good idea to launch fireworks from their behinds. Remember that the YouTube search results comprise only those people who had video recording equipment handy and decided to post it on YouTube.
• Most — if not all — of the asses into which the fireworks were inserted are white.

Salada’s Advice

“What we see,” goes the advice that used to be printed on the tags of bags of Salada tea, “depends mainly on what we are looking for.”

Messrs. Duggleson and Follymacher, often write about issues of race, so when they saw the bottle rocket video, they made the leap from “white kid rectal pyrotechnics” to “whitey takes chances and sometimes comes up big”.

I saw the bottle rocket video by way of their essay, so I had both the original incident and Duggleson and Follymacher’s commentary in mind when I made my logical leap: If I want to move forward in my career, it’s time to take a few chances.

Or more simply: I needed to put a rocket up my ass.

Around the time I saw the video, I attended Albert Lai’s breakfast seminar, which was held in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. In his presentation, Albert suggested that Canadian investors need to be less timid and more willing to take a chance on start-ups, which were more likely to produce innovation than larger, more established organizations. This was a point made again in a roundtable discussion that followed, where several people also asserted that you learn more at a start-up, especially if you follow an iterative process and “fail fast”.

The other factor was the restlessness I’d started to feel at my Technical Evangelist position. As I’ve written before, it was a job well-suited to me, as it allowed me to do a mix of the things I loved: technology, writing, communicating with people and even a little graphic design and accordion playing. The only problem with the job was that failure wasn’t an option, and for the wrong reason: there simply wasn’t that much opportunity to fail.

My coding work was largely limited to example code in articles and small one-afternoon projects such as the Duke of URL. The rest of the job was looking at better ways of explaining how to use Tucows’ services and getting out in front of developers and people interested in technology and acting as the company’s ambassador. It’s all stuff that I find fairly easy to do.

There’s a certain comfort in not having to program a large project that would serve thousands of paying customers a day. It’s far easier beat a deadline when writing technical articles than it is to beat a deadline to produce a working, useful program. The development team did all the heavy lifting, after which I’d simply write and talk about it.

When I started the job, I found this arrangement relaxing, having come from a dot-com where we often ended up writing code that never saw the light of day, since it had been scrapped after the investors and other powers that be changed the company’s direction (which at one point, happened every three weeks).

But after a while, I found myself looking for challenges. Luckily, I wa