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splitting in blue and green

Friday, February 15, 2008

Click and shift-click to split. Nice.

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call me old-fashioned

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Don’t get me wrong - I love the Web2.0 RIA always-connected lifeblogging world and digital audio recording and tweaking my linux window manager to maximum productivity.

But sometimes it’s nice to put down the iPod, sit down, put on a vinyl record, write an old-fashioned letter to a friend for their birthday, ride your bike in the freezing weather to the post office and send it off.  She’ll get it in a few days.  Why the hurry?

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Flock browser, blogging.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

started exploring lifeblogging tools again, getting more active on my virtual presence.

I left my moleskin on the subway today by accident and felt like I lost a little part of myself.  So…if I ask you to remind me about something that you told me in the last two weeks (it is a pretty new notebook) then please understand

blogged directly from Flock.

Tags: , ,

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the 2008 Presidential Election ate my blog

Tuesday, December 18, 2007


I finally updated my (mt) MediaTemple.net account from a [ss] shared-service to a [gs] grid-service lite account. What does this mean? It means that the server behind ihardlyknower.org is running on top of 2007 technology rather than 2003 technology. And I’ll be more likely to update ‘er more often.

After the upgrade I went through over 5000 comments that were posted on this blog, all of them spam. It’s definitely time to look into CAPTCHA or some other way to block the comment spam. Interesting thing I discovered while paging through the pages and pages of spam - supporters of Ron Paul for President in 2008 was responsible for a few hundred of them. The radio talks about McCain, Huckabee, Giuliani, Romney, Clinton, Obama, Biden and Kucinich. Looks like Ron Paul has the support of the comment spammers.

I’ve been busy with life - learning to play jazz, getting hitched, looking for Brooklyn apartments, helping Chi-ah fight lymphoma, writing code for Laszlo Webtop.

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greenpeace intervention on youtube

Friday, March 30, 2007

Some of the folks that share the Brooklyn coworking space with me (my cocoworkers, I guess!) recently produced a video about an advertising intervention at the filming of a Kleenex ad in Times Square.

Greenpeace activists performed the intervention on a Kleenex commercial shoot in Times Square, effectively hijacking their ad campaign, and shutting down the shoot for the rest of the day (March 24th 2007). Kleenex, responsible for vast old-growth forest destruction in Northern Canada’s Boreal Forest, opened the door for this one.

Primary video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZCym0DB7hA

Additional:
http://www.gothamist.com/2007/03/26/video_of_the_da_57.php

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Brooklyn coworking open house on Friday!

Thursday, March 29, 2007

BrooklynCoworking_Feb2007

Tired of arguing with your cat about a bad client?

Wondering what is the next wave of social networking technology?

Looking for an invigorating environment to call an “office?”

You are invited to Brooklyn Coworking’s monthly open house and happy hour!

Break free from hourly coffee purchases and grab a slice of Williamsburg’s alternative working community - Coworking @ The Change You Want to See - a cafe-like community and collaboration space for developers, writers and independents. These types of grassroots coworking spaces are popping up all over the world, from San Francisco, to Paris, to a few here in New York City…

Join us this Friday, 30 March, at The Change You Want to See gallery for COWORKING BROOKLYN. From 10 am to 5 pm, our doors will be open for anyone to come on by and give us a try. Bring a laptop, a snack or two, manuscript, screenplay, or killer app and leave the kats behind.

From 5 pm to 7 pm, we will host a happy hour(s)! Bring a treat or two and get ready to let your hair down.

Who are we? Writers, Programmers, Organizers, Artist, Philosophers, Activist, Bloggers, and Adventure Seekers…

When you join the Brooklyn Coworking space you get:

• a community of like minded folks

• a low monthly rate

• a flux of interesting people

• networking and expertise

• wifi

• printer and scanner

• coffee

• beer-o-clock

• quiet spaces to work in

If you have questions feel free to email us at brooklyn.coworking[a/t]gmail[d0t]com

Cost: Free!!!

When: Friday, 30 March, 10AM - 5PM (Happy Hour 5pm - 7pm)

Where: The Change You Want to See Gallery, 84 Havemeyer, Willamsburg, Brooklyn

Map: OnNYTurf Subway map

Want more info?

Join the new NYC Coworking Google Group -

http://groups.google.com/group/coworkingnyc

Check out The Change You Want to See Gallery:

http://www.notanalternative.net/wordpress/

See the Coworking Wiki: http://wiki.coworking.info/

See the Coworking Blog: http://blog.coworking.info/

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past present and future of the Web, AJAXWorld 2007

Monday, March 26, 2007

It’s funny - I’ve been working on making interfaces and UI-heavy applications over 10 years - first ASCII-based games and then PEEKing and POKEing my way into non-text games. Then it was X11 development in the mid-90’s - building widget-based application UIs and a frame-based animation engine and at the same time making HyperCard stacks. When time came to get a job I started working at Macromedia on Director, Flash and Flex. I dabbled in CSS and browser JavaScript but found it frustrating to keep up with the latest browser idiosyncrasies.

Now browsers are catching up with Plugin-based rich-content like Flash & Director. At AJAXWorld 2007, I worked the Laszlo booth for part of the 3-day conference & walked around to sample the tech of other companies. After doing the rounds I really feel like the stuff we’re doing at Laszlo – releasing and supporting the open-source OpenLaszlo compiler & server, working on Laszlo Webtop – is top-notch technology. I’m truly psyched to be working at Laszlo.

Why do my engineers need to learn another language? asked a few folks. When I demonstrated the simplicity of writing LZX and the complexity of apps like LzMail, LzPix and Webtop they were impressed. When I showed how you could tweak a query arg and generate AJAX they were floored.

I can’t wait until we get Webtop running in OpenLaszlo 4.0 and offer the ability for companies to iteratively port their existing web layer over to Webtop.

Last night Laszlo sponsored a cruise down to the Statue of Liberty and then back up the Hudson. The multicontinental crowd loved it. You’ve never really lived until you’ve seen a dancefloor full of European and American tech folks doing the electric slide wearing funny hats on a boat off the coast of Manhattan.

Laszlo seriously rocked that conference.

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go RoundArch!

Monday, March 26, 2007

RoundArch’s new site is a nice example of a RIA homepage built with Laszlo. They’re a top-shelf developer of online user experiences. They do great work.

“Adobe’s Flex is clearly a market leading Rich Internet Application platform.” …. but RoundArch uses Laszlo for their presentation anyway….

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digg question

Thursday, March 22, 2007

When you register at digg, it ask “Are you human? (Sorry, we have to ask)” at the bottom of the registration page. Looks like it assumes the answer is yes if you can parse alphanumeric pages in the image.

I gues the new Turing Test is the ability to parse an image and extract symbols. Got that vision scientists?

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(co)working in Brooklyn

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Since I moved to NYC almost a year ago I’ve worked in a few different environments -

  • on-site helping out an engineering group at an advertising agency
  • on-site consulting on optimizing code at job-search site like to dice.com, monster.com
  • remotely in LA at my dad’s office for 2 weeks
  • NY public libraries. I couldn’t do any conference calls when working at the library.
  • Cafes. When it was warm and I sat outside I was comfortable on conference calls in cafes. When it got colder I refused to be “that guy who talks really loud” on a cell-phone in a cafe.
  • at a buddy’s house in Brooklyn ostensibly “coworking” informally
  • at home in my tiny NYC apartment, cat on my lap
  • at Not An Alternative, a coworking space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
  • at Jelly at House 2.0, a cooperative living space in Manhattan

The largest chunk of time was the working at home. In the past month I became the lonely telecommuter and started checking out NY coworking digs. I found Jelly and liked the environment but we had some connectivity problems so ended up at a beautiful (but very quiet) public library in midtown. The tone was very informal. Initially, folks there (mostly guys) talked aloud about the tools & technology they used at various start-ups in the NY area. Obviously the talking toned down when we hit the library.

I’m working in a Brooklyn coworking space now and able to get more real development work done than I did while working at home for the last month. I’m still figuring out how many days a week I want to cowork and how many days I want to work solo at home and take care of things around the house. (like laundry, having time to cook a full dinner,etc.)

Joel Spolsky mentions office
space calculations that he’s making as he moves Fog Creek
Software into a larger space. Being in the middle of a search for
a new apartment to move into when we have to move out of our current
digs in July, I understand a lot of the calculations that he’s making
- size versus location, landlord/realtor versus tenant, office space
versus common space - with price always a factor.

Joel also talked about the requirements of making his office space a cool hang out. Since I started doing tech work in the late 90s in San Francisco, tech companies have been trying to make offices cool places to hang out. I always liked the folks that I worked with but always was too busy outside of work - playing and listening to music, baking bread, reading books, hanging out with the cat, visiting with friends - to spend extra time at the office. I understand where he’s coming from, though. Although I take pride in the work I do, I never thought of my place of employment as a one-stop-shop for work, play & life.

I rarely watch TV, play video games or pool, need to listen to music particularly loud at work. It sounds like Joel’s space is pretty cool, but I probably wouldn’t take advantage of most of the frills except for the ease of pair-programming. Plus I’ve never really liked the fit of those Aeron chairs. ;)

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