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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

Apparently DirecTv and Tivo have made up after some earlier issues and are planning on releasing a new receiver in 2010, but who knows when that will be. Might have to start scrambling for an alternate content source fast since you can’t watch the first two episodes of Big Love and then just stop. Withdrawal like that can have serious health issues.

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.

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Next, it’s milk time.

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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.

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’m attempting to post from the iPhone while I watch caitlin, we’ll see how it turns out.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In all of the discussions I’ve read about the death of news, journalism, and newspapers the argument seems to be that if these businesses die, then no one will pay for journalism. That without a newspaper, there is no way we could get the real story. I don’t think that this is necessarily what needs to happen though. As the big media companies race to the bottom and look more each day like an episode of Jerry Springer, there are real journalists out there that want to search for and print the truth. These people have the highest standards and will continue to do their craft long after the newspaper has shut down or moved entirely to tabloid coverage. The good news is that these determined men and women are finding ways to get paid to do the work that they love.

What I see as the issue today is that in the past we could pick up the New York Times and know that we could trust the reporting within, the people that wrote there were held to the highest standards, we didn’t even have to really think about it. However as the unit of journalism moves from the newspaper to the actual journalist we need a way to quickly transfer that same level of trust of what we are reading. What I’m proposing is that to manage the need for a transfer of trust that a body of respected journalists, either through a journalism school or a group of professional journalists, creates a set of standards for professional journalists. This group would then accredit individual writers that met the standard of professional journalism.  Accredited journalists could be local bloggers reporting on the local government meetings or large columnists that have found it more to their liking to strike out on their own.

As the internet has given everyone a printing press, what we need is a way to quickly determine who is worth reading. Writers could begin to publish and as they reached a level of published content they could ask for accreditation and if received post this on their site. Each individual writer could determine how they wanted to get paid for their work, whatever made sense for them, it could even be working at a newspaper. This would not inhibit others from publishing whatever they wanted, but if you wanted to get accreditation and keep it, you must hold yourself to the standards.

Of course the running of the  journalism board would cost money and have its own issues, but I’m sure that there are some people out there that would be willing to pay for such a service if it meant that high quality journalism could continue.

I don’t really want to use compact fluorescent light bulbs everywhere, although the new LED lights look great. I’d rather be able to have a great home lighting setup with more light bulbs than you can count and leave it on all day. I want to be able to have my garage datacenter with 5 full racks of servers humming along all day and not have to worry what the power bill will be or the impact on the environment.

I’d really like to have the core of my home electrical system be a pluggable switching system where many different types of energy generation and storage systems could be plugged into. Something that would allow for remote monitoring and charting of energy generation and usage and handle balancing swings between energy sources. The local Frys outlet is now selling solar panels and wind turbines which I’d love to be able to try out and play with. Or to be able to experiment with different types of energy storage solutions.

Everyone has come to the realization that there isn’t going to be a silver bullet when it comes to getting off of oil and coal. Energy independence is going to be built off of hundreds of technologies and we’ve got to lower the cost of trying out new ones.

Definitely worth a read if you have any interest in the history of financial theory.

I had started studying finance because I was curious about why different stocks had different values. It appeared to me that certain stock’s values were solely based on the “Bigger Fool Principle”, that the only way you could make money was if you could find a bigger fool than yourself to take if off your hands. With billions at risk in different markets I felt that there had to be more to it than this. How could growth stocks with no plans of ever returning profits to investors be worth the multiple that people paid for them.

This led me to the capital structure irrelevance principle as what appeared to be at the root of my confusion. This theory was initially proposed by Modigliani and Miller in 1958. The first part asserts that the value of a corporation is unaffected by the source of the corporations finance. So if a corporation needed money it didn’t matter to the value of the stock as to whether the company sold more stock or borrowed the needed money. This part seems to make sense, I can understand why if a corporation all of a sudden needed new financing that that could affect the price of the stock, but not which source of money it decides to use to fill that need.

But a second part that came out of the theory had to do with dividends and that the value of a stock was independent of the dividend plan. So according to Modigliani and Miller, a stock’s value was not connected to whether it paid out profits as dividends. This just didn’t seem correct to me at all and I kept searching and searching for something that would refute this. However, it appears that this aspect of the theory is still standing.

As a very simple model I can see how you could say that it wouldn’t make a difference if you distribute profits to investors as dividends or you use those profits to fund further growth. In fact I think Warren Buffet’s life makes an incredibly compelling case that in the right hands keeping free cash flow within a corporation and using it to fund future growth is advantageous. However as an investor this assumes that my goals and the company’s goals are aligned.  But if the goal of an investment is to use profits to fund some other aspect of my life such as buying a house or paying for college for kids then the simple return of a dividend is more advantageous and valuable. But more to the aspect of the theory it makes the assumption that managers of a company, given profits will be able to turn them into more profits or that the company will even continue to exist. I believe that there is risk in putting off returns for greater future returns that doesn’t seem to be calculated correctly into current stock prices.