Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓
October 10th, 2007 — Uncategorized
My ideas roll out as a blog, and are more contemporary than topical. Here is a summary of topics to date:
Shameless Plug
Write-ups of Technical Videos and Events
Free New Software Ideas
Free New Product Ideas
Free New Ideas about Society and Politics
TrueGift Donations and Education Ideas
Other Blog Posts
August 30th, 2007 — Uncategorized
Hello Everyone,
I am looking for work. I’m looking for a technical or technical sales position in a company with exciting technology, preferably one working near sensors, vision, or robotics.
This is a reentry into the regular workforce for me. I left JavaSoft in 1999 on good terms as a successful strategic systems engineer with many patentable ideas and large sales involvements. JavaSoft had accomplished its original goals of popularizing and standardizing the Java language and its employees were being folded back into the larger entity of Sun Microsystems. I took some time off from the frantic pace of JavaSoft, explored angel funding and business consulting for startups. I founded TrueGift Donations, a charity providing free school supplies to teachers. I took graduate engineering classes in image processing, robotics, and silicon processing. I kept up with changes in technology and programming languages. Also, Judith and I had two children and finally found a nanny we trust to stay home with both of them. Now I can go back to work.
The perfect position is a company or business unit of between 20 and 200 employees, based in Silicon Valley, with a truly cool technology. I am flexible about the level, compensation, and type of position. I am willing to travel extensively. My greatest skill is creating practical scenarios to build relationships with clients.
Please let me know when you see a possibility.
Have a wonderful, great, super day!
Charles Merriam
(Charles.Merriam at Gmail)
August 30th, 2007 — Uncategorized
Assuming you have been in the loop, you have noticed or attended a number of “unconferences”. An unconference is a new trick that people of learned, or at least that people have learned again, to meet, greet and share information. An unconference strips away the preparation and glitz of a conference back to a chaotic meeting place, and bypasses the hospitality industry’s high service/high cost offerings ($15 per guest for coffee service). Unconferences are growing in diversity and longevity.
The journey of unconferences unfolds with repeated occasions of each unconference. The first occasion of an unconference begins with the pure chaos of a few organizers and infectious altruism. The next time that unconference is held, it usually has a few organizing guidelines and a following. Best practices evolve the conference with each successive event, and new ideas start facing some resistance to adoption. If the resistance becomes to high, someone else starts a competing unconference.
A general consensus has arisen concerning the need for a central conference board, the need for snacks and drinks, the transition into a party or bar chat, a basic infrastructure of a wiki and wifi, and a dozen other small concerns. I propose some additional ideas for the journey.
Badges
Badges challenge participants to mingle and talk to each other.
SuperHappyDevHouse had the best badges that I’ve seen. Each badge had a discrete number of ambiguous color coded interests. For example, a red sticker meant either that you liked the Perl language or that you liked Zombies. Having some information was great for building common ground and providing an excuse for less extroverted people to chat. Having too detailed information tends to limit conversations. All unconferences could learn from this ambiguous structure.
A second item, a structure, is to number badges. Episodes of The Prisoner aside, it would be convenient to have a large number on each badge tied to contact information in a wiki and a mailing list manager. It makes it trivial for session attendees or hallway conversations to continue their conversations; just record the badge numbers. There permission system is still there: only those who choose to update the wiki can be contacted by the badge number.
Printing Station
A printing station improves the signage at an unconference. Hand written notices abound about session topics, meeting places, new guidelines or rules, sign-up sheets, and more. A single computer and printer that allowed people to print would eliminate a lot of the useless confusion and foster useful confusion.
Note Taking Template
Most sessions have one or more bloggers. Providing a template for note taking would improve the quality and usability of the resulting notes. A good template would include both the conference tag words as well as tag word for the particular session. Having all blog posts start with the name of the session and link back to the wiki is good, as well as writing down the badge numbers of attendees to catch up on missed connections. Single page blogs, like lists of links or short write-ups, can be printed out and posted opposite the program grid.
Session Classifications
While not usually one to impinge on the informality of sessions, I believe sessions should provide a smidge more information to conference participants. I would like each session to have an icon or keyword to differentiate between the type of session the poster expects. Unconference sessions break into Prepared Presentations, Prepared Tutorials, Thinking About Hard Problems, and others. This lets people vote with their heads before voting with their feet.
So here are some improvements for organizers of unconferences. I hope the journey of unconferences leads to a full spectrum of conferences for more efficient merry making, information transfer, networking, and business.
August 17th, 2007 — Uncategorized
Problem: People lie when asked, “what are you wearing?”
Solution: Smart clothing with cryptographically secure signing.
OK, a joke about wearing bikinis came up on a mailing list. This may be the worst idea I’ve ever published. It may be so bad that it goes into your head instead of mine.
Great for that visualization when you query and find that ‘trusted investement advisor’ is really wearing kid’s size 8. Or for when you wonder if this person is at least the same size as that girl you met at the party last night. Or truth in dating. Or, er, for gratituious overuse of technology. It is fairly trivial in the technical details.
Now, version two would have stress guages on the waist and bust line to meaure the tightness of the clothing….
June 30th, 2007 — Coding, Uncategorized
Linux should by a dynamic operating system with the best documentation, continually improving interfaces, and a generally world class reputation. Instead, Linux gets the progressive blindness of too many people resisting even minor changes. These continuous annoyances lead to the death of a million cuts.
MAN pages
These are the original documentation of Linux, back when online documentation was rarely heard from. The documentation continues to have a Spartan flavor, as in “We Spartans Send Our Young Alone into the Cold”. There are seldom examples, rarely useful information, no hyperlinks, and only cursory explanations. For example, I looked up the program “uname” when I was reading a script.
“uname” prints out system information. There are odd conventions as to what is printed, which are undocumented. For example, “uname -m” prints the machine name. On PCs, this machine name might be “i386, i486, i586, i686 (for Intel processors)” or “x86_64″ for AMD 64 bit processors. This information is not printed in the man pages; it’s just errata that people are supposed to know. The option “-p” to print the processor type just prints “unknown”, according to some other obscure convention. Except for SunOS 5.x where it prints the processor type. This errata is not on-line, but found in various shell scripts and dead tree books.
The manual has no particular formatting, examples, or hyperlinks. It does helpfully suggest using the newer program “info”. That program shows the man page again with no formatting, examples, or hyperlinks.
Now Linux faithful will quickly point out that this information doesn’t belong in the manual, that some manual pages have more information. For example, “man bash” gives a book of about 3200 lines covering shell programming, details about piping commands, a half dozen built-in commands, and no examples. Meanwhile, everyone else uses some sort of mark-up language, wiki, or such. In practice, most users use Internet sources for information.
Wait a minute! This simple command, “uname” is used on every system everywhere! Thousands of new people use it every day. Why could there this horrible lack of documentation on such a simple command? Why could I have picked any of a hundred commands to criticize?
Just one cut in the death of a million cuts. I am not of the Linux Spartan priesthood; I want everything to work the first time, every time, and be understandable by a five year old. If a five year old cannot understand, the five year old needs to know what is needed to understand.
April 3rd, 2007 — Uncategorized
Problem: People take speling way too seriously
Solution: A plug-in to put in a predetermed number of mistaken spellings and homonyms.
There is a pernicious cycle in communications that shows an unstable balance of form versus function. The written letter is formal, with attention paid to titles, calligraphy, careful phrasing. It takes time, and should say something of import.
Still, life needs to go one, so someone invented the ‘note’. A scrap of parchment could hold the informal information without effort. Grab a scrap, write “Whiterest art thy going this Saturday?’ and get it delivered. Ettiquitte emerged, and titles and closings were added. The scrap should be squared off. Over time, it evolved into needing to be squared off, signed, and stuck in an envelope. Too much effort for a short thought.
Several generations later, email came along. You could just send “Where are you going Saturday?”. The opening and signature were technical artifacts, and no one cared if the spelling were off. Then came etiquette. Then came IRC. Then came etiquetee. Then came IM.
Last seen, we were texting. Some companies are considering archiving your text messages forever. Someone will auto-expand LOL, UR, etc. Soon we will need spell checkers.
Now we have it within our technical measn to add as many typos and misspellings as are in this article. And by forcing people to hit an accuracy bar exactly, rather than just exceed a minimum, we may be able to use a commmunications medium for more than a few years.
What are you doing Saturday?
*-*-*-*-*-*-* Update 8/14/2007
John Maeda made one! It’s available here. Way to go, John!
March 29th, 2007 — Uncategorized
The American Red Cross could finance itself for decades by selling your DNA information.
This evil idea comes as a cautionary, evil notion. The plan is sound. The plan breaks no laws, but breaks the social conventions.
Consider that the American Red Cross (ARC) now requires positive identification before donating blood. There isn’t really any explanation outside “keeping the blood supply safe”. Consider the reasons why the ARC might want to permanently keep a sample from every blood donation tagged with the positive identification. For example, a “Really Nasty Syndrome” could cause a national health epidemic severe enough to go through the records of all blood donors to track the spread of this disease and identify the carriers. The American Red Cross could defend the practice of keeping the blood samples, and keeping the practice secret until such an epidemic.
Now as time goes on, more information about hereditary diseases can be gleaned from a DNA sample. It will become profitable for an insurance company to use a DNA sample to gauge risks before insuring individuals. If an insurance company found out about this freely given repository of DNA., it would happily make large donations to the Red Cross to access it. Nothing illegal would take place.
Hopefully, this evil idea will never come to pass.
March 28th, 2007 — Uncategorized
Problem: Health care quality varies widely, especially in psychology.
Solution: Secret Shopppers on a regular basis.
The world of psychological care is an odd one. Years ago, the Rosenhan Experiment showed that voluntary psychological evaluations for someone who was fine outside of hearing the word ‘thud’ in their ears were committed. Later, this was repeated and the experimenter was prescribed psychoactive drugs. I personally went to several care people, all of which pushed drugs.
Imagine you are an HMO, charged with keeping health care costs managed for a set of the population. It would be in your best interest to hire a couple of people to go for initial evaluations. They could even keep the classic symptom, “thud” once per day. If drugs are offered and prescribed, this tells you that the psychologist is taking the incorrect path, and one that is more expensive to boot. By removing these incompetent professionals from your pool, you lower your average health costs.
It could be harder to do in other cases. Sending a person with a real problem to a dozen different doctors may yield information, but it is work to standardize the process.
March 23rd, 2007 — Uncategorized
Problem: People tailgate me.
Solution: I can file complaints with rear mounted tail cameras.
I live in a congested area with a constant inflow of new drivers. Many have not figured out this concept of following distance, and I often have large cars following me by less than ten feet. If I brake, they have about a quarter second to brake with me or hit me.
How about making rear mounted tail cameras. I press a button, the current speed, the license plate, the driver, and enough general road in the back to handle excuses. Playing the wave form and printouts of GPS would confirm the speed, make the timestamp and location stick. They tailgated. I have a camera. I can file a complaint.
This works. The right people are caught. If our law system were good enough, it would be an excellent idea.
March 21st, 2007 — Uncategorized
So my son has cool shoes. For the elite among us, meaning those under six years of age, the option exists of purchasing shoes that *flash*. Walking in twilight, these shoes thrust moving red lights into the eyes of distracted drivers. They enliven play with light.
Today’s idea is simple. Let me be four year old. Or at least buy the shoes.
On the easy side, use the simple piezo generator, capacitor, and LED arrangement common in the shoes today. Flash the word “SEXY” or “PLAYA” or whatever on the shoes. On the more complex side, how about giving me a better LED array? Let me spell out words with my shoes.
The first way would invovle cute tricks with motion detectors and persistence of vision. I could wear a jacket that spelled out messages when I waved my arm quickly. An alternative to yelling across a crowded theatre. I could have gesture specific messages. For example, my shoes could light up “TIGER” when I bounce, “SEXY” when I do my pretty girl dance, or maybe something not standard.
Ah, for products to buy.