I’ve never owned an Apple, and have never had the urge to, so I can’t comment but Dave Winer’s story sounds insane to me. Apple’s clearly making some mistakes in my limited opinion.

$160 for a possibly used 80GB drive and then you ‘trick’ the owner into signing away their old drive? That’s just ballsy….

I’m on the hunt for designers. I’m actually really interested in finding some people with traditional design experience who are looking to make the jump to software design. Check out the description here and if it interests you in the least please contact me!

We’ll likely host some sort of group evening early Jan to meet all the people interested but we’re still working out those details.

Yes, I’m rereading a lot of Paul Graham today. Paul makes a great point about interesting projects.

“Before ITA (who wrote the software inside Orbitz), the people working on airline fare searches probably thought it was one of the most boring applications imaginable. But ITA made it interesting by redefining the problem in a more ambitious way.”

Some may think that our BrainPark project is boring old knowledge management for the workplace. Well technically it is, however, we’re spending these early days exploring the problem space to find the right problem to solve. I think we’ve managed to find it and part of the requirements was that it’s one we’re all excited about.

Is it just me or is Paul describing coworking?

“If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do at home. At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And when they work at home, hackers don’t work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors. They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work. There’s no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime hacking hours. There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate retreats or team-building exercises. And when you look at what they’re doing on that computer, you’ll find it reinforces what I said earlier about tools. They may have to use Java and Windows at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you’re more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.”

Success is all about the measuring stick. Let’s peek at the success rates YCombinator has experienced with a few different measuring sticks.

1. Success as a business, got stupid rich: 50% although Paul indicates 25% is likely more reasonable over the long term
2. Everyone got paid, no one lost their shirts: 100%. Even the initial projects that didn’t continue as a business were able to somehow make enough money to pay back investors and then some.
3. Enjoyment and growth: 100%, “Whatever our long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of people who wish they’d gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.”

It’s easy to peek in from the outside and read about a business failing and think ‘wow, they screwed that up, poor losers’. As always there’s more to it then you read in the papers.

Quote from Why to Not Not Start a Startup.

Just an interesting quote…full Paul Graham post here..

“When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you’re not just making a technical decision. You’re also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two…when you choose a language, you’re also choosing a community. The programmers you’ll be able to hire to work on a Java project won’t be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.”

I have a sad history of hobby based research into company compensation and rewards plans. One concept I’ve always been attracted to is that of gainsharing. The basic concept being to tie any form of compensation to actual productivity. When actual productivity increases above a baseline then the people making it happen see some benefit instead of only the so called powers that be.

The only formal plan I’ve researched in any depth is one called The Scanlon Plan. Years ago I found a used copy of an out of print book on the plan. I believe this is it, since reprinted.

“The Scanlon Plan was developed from the innovative work of Joseph Scanlon during the 1940s and 1950s. Joe’s experience as a steelworker and union leader during the Depression prompted him to conclude that a company’s health, indeed its very survival, required a climate of cooperation rather than competition between labor and management.”

Joe Scanlon worked very closely with Dr. Douglas McGregor in the development of the plan. If you haven’t read McGregor’s 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, I highly recommend it.

What’s my point here? Sorry, don’t have one, just some links and references to old reading.

Some Links…

• Is Gainsharing for You?
• A 1955 TIME article about Joe Scanlon

This is an intriquing design as posted at core77.

Be forewarned, I’m having an “I’m so happy I work in linux” day. A quick example why. My wife’s a photographer and while she’s relatively technical, she’s no nerd. I have to give her respect though as she now works fully in linux and is slowly mastering the gimp. [Insert bad jokes here…]

In any case she has to resize a large volume of images very often. Basically, fill a dvd full of low resolution images that are passed onto her client to review for the purposes of eventually ordering prints. Clearly you can use photoshop, gimp, etc for this purpose. Open up the images, scale them, save as, etc. As well, photoshop and others have batch tools for repeating actions like these often.

Another option for people working in linux is the appropriately named ImageMagick. ImageMagick allows you to do almost everything from the command line. Personally I’ve hardly scratched the surface on this but some quick examples I’ve played with…

Convert from a jpg to a png

Lower the resolution 50%

Add a border

Add a watermark

Of course you can now mix, match, and combine all the commands. In my case I need to write a simple script that took a directory full of jpg’s and tif’s, lowered the resolution to 30% and dropped them all into a destination directory in jpg format.

It took me about 15 minutes to write this script which does just that. My wife can now drop a whack of images into the source directory, click an icon I put on her desktop, and then burn the dvd directly from the destination directory. Come on. I know I’m a nerd but that’s cool isn’t it?

I’m test driving google analytics on this site using this plugin. I’m not sure I’ll keep it around but I’m interested in how it works as we’re using it on some of our client applications.