Redwood City Startup

I’ve updated the theme to try out a new look for the blog.

I had originally placed a few types of ads on these pages, just so that I could try them out somewhere other than at the day job. But now that I’ve got ReadPath cranking there really isn’t any need to experiment here any longer.

I’m fairly happy with this new theme, but you might continue to see some changes as I customize things.

I’ve had a kindle since they first came out, I’ve loved it since day one and use it pretty much every night to read for hours on end. In the past I would leave the wireless off though. With the 1st Gen kindle you could get a lot longer battery life if you didn’t turn the wireless on. Once you were reading a book, you could read for several days without needing to connect to Amazon’s servers. Only once you had finished a book and needed to add more did you need to turn it on to sync.

A few months ago, I downloaded Amazon’s kindle app for the iPhone, more out of curiosity than anything else. Initially I just couldn’t see myself reading books on such a small screen, especially one that was backlit and would cause eye-strain. However, in the last couple weeks I’ve discovered how seamlessly Amazon has made syncing devices and reading locations. Since during the day, I pretty much always have the iPhone with me, I can just pull it out and start reading. The iPhone is perfect for the situation where you might only have a few minutes and might need to put it away very quickly. I was getting my van washed yesterday and was able to read for 5 min at the car wash. The magic happens though when you get back home, turn on your kindle and it knows to sync your reading location up to where you left off on the iPhone and vice-versa.

I’m now finding that I’m able to get even more reading done during the day. Filling in small breaks instead of waiting for a single block of reading before bed.

I downloaded Firefox 3.6rc1 last night and it’s noticeably faster than the current 3.5.7. I can’t wait till they release it officially. Seems like safari, firefox, chrome and webkit are just leaving IE in the dust. It’s great to have some healthy competition in the browser market.

Now that I’m spending a good percentage of my day chasing around a 1yr old, my brain has gone to mush. I’m finding that if there are things that I need to do and I don’t jot them down, then they don’t get done.

I was on the lookout for a really great notes/task management tool that would sync back and forth between my laptop and iPhone. I tried out several of the web based ones and Evernote(which has a desktop and iPhone app), but they never quite did exactly what I needed.

Then I found Things. It’s a bit expensive, but it got great reviews, so I thought I’d try it out. You have to purchase the desktop app and the iPhone app separately, but they work great together. Syncing whenever you have wifi turned on on the iPhone. You can quickly create notes, set them as scheduled, inbox, or whatever you want. Update them and move them around easily. The desktop app even integrates in with iCal’s todo list.

If you need a fast way to keep track of a mix of small and large things and the ability to sync back and forth from phone to laptop, I would highly recommend checking out Things.

I’ve been attempting to sync the videos that I take on my iPhone back to my desktop mac. It appears that the normal way that Apple envisioned you doing this was to sync with iPhoto which would then download the videos to your desktop.  My problem is that I’ve got a fair of amount of infrastructure and work-flow behind using Aperture and Final Cut and syncing with iPhoto caused a lot of duplication that had to be undone by hand.

What I really wanted was to be able to just push or pull the file from my iPhone to the desktop over my local wifi. A really big first step getting there was finding the app Air Sharing.  This allows you to expose a portion of your disk on the iPhone and share it over wifi through bonjour or http. Great app, it’s got all of the controls that you need for security. Also, you can log into other servers over ssh, ftp, ftps, … browse to the file you want, and then either copy it locally or mail it off(This is great since the default iPhone is really cranky about mailing large files). You can even select to mail off an entire directory and it will make a nice zip of the directory for you before emailing it.

Air Sharing got me most of the way to where I wanted to go, but I still couldn’t figure out how to get the items that I wanted out of my Camera Roll and into the shared directory. Then I realized that when you’re in the “My Documents” area of Air Sharing and you click “Edit” and then “+” that there is an option to add from Photos. This allows you to select whatever you want from your Camera Roll and add it to the shared dir in “My Documents”.

Now when you add the iPhone as a new server in your finder, you’ll see the videos that you selected in the folder just like it was any other shared file on a remote server.

I’ve been listening to Leo Laporte’s Podcast Network since it started and haven’t missed a TWIT in years. It’s made sense that as he’s added more specialized podcasts, that the flagship “This Week in Tech” has become more of a general tech and media show. Not exactly how I would prefer it, but I can still get the geekier stuff on FLOSS and TWIG.

My gripe though is that appears that in the last several months that John C. Dvorack has become an almost regular guest, appearing on the show pretty much every week. When Dvorack first started appearing on the show, he could tell some interesting stories about early happenings in tech and would keep things moving if the topic got too far afield. Lately though all he does is destroy any discussion that does get going. Not sure why the change happened, but he seems to only want to talk about himself and will not tolerate discussion of things that aren’t of personal interest.  His presence is completely ruining the show, to the point that if I hear him introduced I’ll move on the next podcast.

The latest TWIT is as good an example as any, every time the other guests would get into a substantial discussion on a topic, Dvorack would blunder in with some random unrelated thought that he had and derail the discussion. The beauty of podcasting is that there isn’t the time slot constraints that other mediums have, so if you find something worth discussing you can flesh it out.

I love the work that Leo does and listen to hours of his programming each week, but I’m afraid that he might have too much personal loyalty to Dvorack to see what’s happening.  I can’t imagine how Leo’s not completely burned out, but maybe as a New Year’s resolution he needs to take a fresh look at his programming and get back to basics a bit.  You just can’t lose with good guests and good discussions.

Amazon has really got to think about updating the software on the kindle to allow the reader to display the current time at the top of the device. I’ve spent way too many nights reading for way too long and then not gotten enough sleep. I really end up paying for it the next day.

I was up till 1:30am last night reading and am having serious trouble moving today. All of this could have been avoided if I had known that I had been reading for 4 hours straight.

Of course you could say that I should just put a clock in the family room and solve the problem, but then I’d have to go grab a new clock and that’s not nearly as easy as writing a blog post.

Is it bad if, while you’re feeding your daughter dinner, you silently wish that she doesn’t finish so that you can get a bite of her food. Because it just looks so good.

Jaimie has been making dinners for Caitlin ahead of time and they’re getting quite tasty.

Apple just revved the software version of AppleTV up to version 3.0. There are a fair number of UI changes with this release and the layout seems to make a lot more sense now. The thing I like the most though is the inclusion of streaming radio from the internet. I can now get streaming DigitallyImported during the day, WOOHOO. You used to be able to do this by using the AppleTV as a remote set of speakers instead of playing directly off of the AppleTV. This made it a complete pain to control with the remote though.

It’s going to take a little more testing to see how well the update went. It just so happened that at the same time that the update came out I was upgrading the home wifi network (big changes coming there that I’ll talk about shortly). With the network upgrade I had to disconnect and reconnect the AppleTV to iTunes. This required a re-sync of all of the files. As this was taking place video on the AppleTV was getting a bit of video stutter, but it could be that it was just overwhelmed from the file transfers. Once things calm down a bit I’ll take another look at the video.

I was listening to a very interesting KQED Forum program the other day on the new law in California that requires that anyone arrested has a DNA sample taken and stored in DNA database. As you would expect, the ACLU had quite a few issues with this new law and immediately filed suit to have it dismissed as unconstitutional. The ACLU lawyer made several points on how people can very easily be wrongly arrested and that there is no court involvement in deciding whether there is probable cause to take the sample. Also, they were quite concerned about the issue that once someone is in the database it’s incredibly difficult to get the sample expunged, even if the person is never charged with a crime.

As a counterpoint to the ACLU, Forum had a top California law enforcement official on to discuss how he felt about it as a policy. He took the position that innocent people had nothing to fear from being included in the database and that he would encourage his entire staff to submit samples. He also felt that the larger the database the better the chance the police had of being able to prosecute criminals in cold cases and who could possibly argue against catching criminals.

I believe that there is a major aspect that the guest representing law enforcement doesn’t see. In most cases currently, DNA is used to prove that a suspect was in a location.  Blood, semen, or hair samples are taken from a crime scene and then compared to a sample taken from the suspect. Scientists don’t actually look at the genome of the person, but compare a set of markers that if matched show a very high statistical likelihood that the samples came from the same person.  With the current setup there are a couple of issues that could arise, the scientists have to be very careful in following procedures so as to not contaminate the samples. Also with a batch of samples taken from a crime scene, samples that aren’t a match to suspects can be ignored as extraneous.

It’s with this last issue where having a massive database can cause havoc. Up until now, since extraneous samples were ignored there isn’t any incentive in planting false DNA. However, as a statistically relevant portion of the population enters the database this incentive changes. Now a criminal committing a murder can after wards pull out a DNA bomb and fire it at the crime scene. This could be a small device similar to a party popper, but instead of being loaded with confetti is loaded with random hair, blood, and semen samples. These could easily be obtained by offering criminals money to provide samples, since there’s little risk to them in this scenario. Now when the forensic scientists take samples at the crime scene and then run them through their PCR test equipment and compare them to the database, dozens if not hundreds of criminals will pop up as matches. The defense lawyers now have probable doubt, since how can law enforcement prove a negative in that non of these other criminals were the one to actually commit the crime.

DNA can work well and be trusted as a tool when the scope of the search is limited to the individual crime and when there aren’t large scale databases. If these databases are allowed to grow and more and more of the population is included we will start to see people being framed with DNA evidence. Unlike fingerprints, it’s much easier to plant DNA evidence and not that hard to obtain.

Just noticed that there’s a great feature with Google Voice. If for some reason you’re not happy with the phone number that you’ve been assigned you can select another one. Just go to the account settings on Google Voice and then select to change your phone number. There’s a one time $10 charge to do so, but it’s really simple to do and takes effect immediately.

When I first signed up, I went through things really quickly as I was just testing it out. But since this is something that I’d like to use as a primary number I wanted to make sure that I could get one that was easy to remember. So I’ve updated my number to (650) 450-9057.

Wow, following a very round about path I just spent way too much time building a family tree over at Ancestry.com. I started out looking for used book stores and libraries in the bay area. This then led me to Google Book Search where I was testing out searching for some terms from older books (Google’s Book Search is pretty amazing by itself). This then led me to searching for “McCormick Family” which brought up a lot of old family history books. I was curious if any of these people were related, which led me to try out Ancestry.com to see if it had a way of filling in some of my family tree that I didn’t know.

The site is pretty amazing with the amount of source material that you can search through. I was quickly able to build up a tree going back to my grandparents and was able to find documents for almost everyone. The problem was that I had trouble taking it to the next level beyond that. I needed a few clues to fill in the next level of branches, which I didn’t have, and hit a brick wall with the search. I know that there are privacy concerns with private family information, but I wish there was a way for their systems to notice if some other user has a missing branch of my tree and offer to fill it in.

Overall a fun use of an evening.

Got my first straight up spam phone call tonight. It was so over the top that I had to listen to it just to see how bad it was. A robo-dialed call from the 202 area code was offering secret weight loss berries from Siberia. All I had to do was leave my name and phone number on the voice mail of whoever’s system was hacked and doing the robo-dialing and they would call me back to get my credit card info. Couldn’t be anything wrong with leaving my credit card info, right?

I’m actually curious how this type of system could work. Email spam always worked because the incremental cost of sending spam was essentially $0. You could send out millions and if only 100 people ever responded you’d still make money. With those percentages it’s possible to come across someone that believes that secret berries will overcome your beer drinking habit or that mushroom extract will give you a “bigger manliness”.

Phone spam would have to overcome the issues with the cost of placing a phone call. Other than hacking the phone system and using a blue box like Woz and Jobs were famous for, there is always a cost to placing a phone call. So either the phone spammers have discovered a whole population of people willing to give their credit card info to random people on the phone or they’ve discovered a way to make free phone calls.

The number that called tonight (202-211-8774) is not a legitimate number. When I attempted to call back I got the “This call can not be completed” error with a male voice that kicked in afterwards saying error “090T”. Didn’t find anything relevant about this error on The Goog. I’m guessing someone is placing this phone call for free, just not sure how, caller id is probably spoofed but that doesn’t answer the cost aspect.

If this call is a sign of things to come, having a telephone in your house could become much more unpleasant.  Email became unusable until spam filters were put in place in pretty much every email application. There’s no infrastructure for doing phone call spam filtering other than something like Google Voice which has some basic filters .

Getting ready for denise’s wedding shower. Jaimie was bathing Caitlin in the shower of the hotel room. Everything was going great until Maggie jumped into the tub to get the rubber ducky. Then we had a wet baby and a wet dog.

Tapping out text on the iPhone isn’t As bad as it first seems.I will try and post some pics and video from the event later.

Lately I’ve been watching the TV show Breaking Bad at night after everyone else goes to bed. It’s got to be the most depressing show that I can remember. The episode I saw last night featured a family completely strung out on Meth with their poor abused child left to fend for himself. Makes me just want to go give Caitlin a hug after each show.

As depressing as the show is, I find I can’t stop watching it. It’s one of the better written shows out there right now, it’s almost as if it were intended for viewing as an R rated movie instead of cable TV. There are swears and violence which get bleeped. I had to look up where it had originally aired since we downloaded it off of ITunes and was surprised to see that it’s an AMC show.  I wonder if this is the start of a new trend where edgier shows can be done on smaller networks where the creators of the show will have more control. This counteracts the issues that shows like Firefly, Terminator, Jericho, and Dollhouse have had with the larger networks exerting control or killing shows that didn’t live up to their prime time standards.  As more and more people watch shows on streaming systems like ITunes or Hulu, the network is going to matter less and less. Recommendations, word of mouth, and simple quality will matter much more to how well a show does.