Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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Brighton Bloggers
I’ve made it onto the Brighton Bloggers site, and I’ve no idea how. Anyone want to own up to submitting me? The tag-lines for the two entries around me read “Diary of a booze hound” and “Therapy is expensive. Blogging is cheap. You do the math.”. Am I the only entrepreneurial geek in the village?
Update: I was added by Richard Dallaway, he remembered me from a past conversation. Mystery solved!
Etsy Time-machine
Etsy have come up with a cool toy – more fun to play with than useful though. The timemachine plays an interactive Flash animation of the most recent additions of hand-made goods on the site by its independent sellers.
The items fly past from most to least recently added, like you’re flying through a cloud of product. Moving the mouse changes where you fly and if you click on a product then a tag (like an airline luggage tag) appears with details. All very swish and it catches your eye. I’m not sure that it adds a lot of value to the site, though I guess they’ll get mentioned by other blogs – and since they’re not marketing themselves they’ll need this kind of coverage to get their word out.
Whilst it loads (it takes a few seconds) it reports that it is ‘charging the flux capacitor’. The geeks shall inherit the Earth!
Review: The Island
Hmmm,
After about an hour when our good-boy clone Lincoln Six Echo has escaped into the real world and has a new identity, they could have finished the film with a nicely ambiguous and slightly dark finish (a la Gataca). But ohhhh no, we have to have a Hollywood happy ending which takes another (long) hour.
Why couldn’t the crack-team of ex-Navy Seal assassins shoot straight? Why did Lincoln Six Echo grow new memories of the real world when he was always kept in a confined environment with no outside contact? Why did we have the way-too-obvious product placement? We’ll never know.
Wikipedia has a good entry including notes on controversy (noting the way too prominent product placements) and symbolism. They also link to the fictitious Merrick Biotech website which has been ‘hacked’ by anti-cloning activists (this is all fiction, of course) – including videos. This is a nice bit of marketing I think.
It gets 6.8 over at IMDB and I’ll give it a Thumbs Sideways. I await the day we get a good Sci-Fi flick where the trailers don’t give the entire plot away in 30 seconds and the marketing droids don’t get to sell every scene to the advertisers. Maybe I’ll go watch Kubrick’s 2001 again (but heck, didn’t Bell get some product placement in there as well?).
Site was broken, now fixed
Apologies for the site going a bit wonky over the last few days – all is good again. I bought a bigger hosting package from GoDaddy and in the process they disabled the ‘mod_rewrite’ rule for some reason. This stopped comments, permalinks, categories and posts from working. All is now fixed, sorry for the interruption (Dunc!).
Review: Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)
Paul Graham has been writing online since before 2000, today he has 45 articles published for free online. New articles now make Slashdot‘s frontpage, quite a big event in geek circles. He published this book last year and it contains 15 chapters, 10 of which are online and 5 of which are new (and probably won’t go online I guess). The 5 new chapters are:
Update Jan 2005: How to Make Wealth is now online.
Good Bad Attitudes discusses the nerds instinct to step outside of the rules. Hurrah for us thinking outside of the box. How to Make Wealth explains that start-ups are a great way to make new wealth, and as a part of that start-up you can share in that wealth (so get on with it!). Mind the Gap discusses unequal income distributions, Graham think it is less of a problem than is popularly perceived and I tend to agree with his arguments. The last two new essays discuss aspects of programming language design.
Having read all of the online essays over the years, it felt sensible just to buy this book and give Graham a little cash back. I’d definitely rate this book to new readers who are interested in what makes a geek a geek and the world of high-tech entrepreneurship.
If you’ve read the online essays, you’ll still get 5 new chapters and How to Make Wealth alone is probably worth the entire price of the book, I quote:
“At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was ‘run upstairs’. Suppose you are a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.”
The online essays appear to be word-for-word reproduced in the book, but illustrations have been added. If you’ve never read Paul Graham, I’d suggest starting with his online essay Hackers and Painters (which is also one of the chapters in the book, and obviously the book’s title too). Overall: thumbs up.
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Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
Mor Consulting Ltd. is an A.I. focused consultancy offering strategic research and development owned by Ian Ozsvald, based in London (UK).
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