Sky’s Blog

I love Joi Ito’s advice about startups. Mostly he is talking about understanding risk. I particularly focused on one section just after 9 minutes into the video where he talks about how it’s folly to spend a lot of time building a business plan when it’s so inexpensive to go ahead and develop your product iteratively and develop the plan after you’ve seen how your customers are reacting to the product. Here’s the video:

(continue reading…)

Tweet This Post

The iPad immediately led me to think about how tablet computing is portrayed in science fiction. TV and movies  – because that’s the only place you actually saw little beasties like these 10 or 20 years ago.^[1] Today they’re (literally today) all around the world.^[2]

In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”). (continue reading…)

Tweet This Post

I was browsing the history of Esperanto and discovered Rose Island, a micronation in the Adriatic Sea that declared itself the Republic of Rose Island in 1968. (And whose official language was Esperanto.)

Apparently there have been any number of these escapades, including, of course, pirate radio broadcasters off northern Europe. The story of Sealand is especially entertaining.

Gotta read up on them.

The photo is from Wikimedia Commons and has been released into the public domain by its copyright holder. Click for a larger view.

Tweet This Post

I’ve never gotten seriously into heavy metal, but on occasion I pig out on grunge music for a few hours, and today I was listening to an NPR Music Fresh Air podcast where Dave Davies interviewed the musicians of a heavy metal group Acrassicauda who started playing heavy metal music in Baghdad and are now in the US.

This movie/video Heavy Metal in Baghdad (85 minutes—the entire film is available online) really gives you an understanding of what life has been like in Baghdad for a few years now. Machine guns being fired a block away while the crew is recording… mortal shells exploding during a concert in a hotel… getting stopped on the street… the feeling that they can only stay 5 minutes in one spot or something bad will happen. And it makes you think about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have left the country for other parts of the world. The band escaped Iraq and ended up in the US – via Syria.

By itself the movie wouldn’t have sparked a blog article, but I had a conversation last week with some consultants who are studying the sociology of hacking and are doing some thinking about whether the talent that’s going into the creation of malware might be refocused on more productive enterprises. What you’ll see in this movie is the frustration and anger that wells up in people living under conditions of war year after year. It somehow sparked in me a feeling of where many hackers must be coming from these days! These guys were “living with death and fear every day.” From that standpoint, let alone the images of heavy metal way out of its element in Iraq and Syria, it’s worth watching.

Tweet This Post