Redwood City Startup

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.

Just called AT&T to switch my iPhone for my blackberry as my primary phone. It was an easy process where I switched the sim cards and the rep switched the data plans. Now if you call my cell number it’ll go to the iPhone. Overall a painless experience.

I just finished reading the article “The Story Behind the Story” in this month’s Atlantic Magazine where Mark Bowden goes through the backstory and context of the videos of now Justice Sotomayor. The article takes on the fall of real journalism and its replacement with political hit jobs. As someone raising an infant at home and often having the news channels on during the day, I can definitely attest to the fall in quality at the 24 hours news networks. All of them can best be described as News Entertainment rather than any type of real journalism.

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’m really happy to see all the work that has gone into getting conservation into people’s minds when they go through their day. Everyone is now talking about electric cars and plugin hybrids. In the long run though, I’m not nearly as interested in energy conservation as I am in new renewable energy sources.

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.

I just finished reading an excellent book on finance, The Myth Of The Rational Market by Justin Fox. This book will blow away a lot of what you learned in Econ 101 or have heard on the news. It turns out that many of the core ideas and theories of finance and economics have been under fire for decades.  The issue is that several of these core ideas were easy to conceptualize and remember, like the efficient marketplace, but have been shown to be oversimplifications and poor models of reality.

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.

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 .

Was just watching the movie “the game” with Michael Douglas on TiVo. AMC played it a couple days ago.

What I found interesting is that douglas’s character, who is supposed to be a wealthy businessman from San francisco is living in the filoli house which is a historic house/park. We’ve often taken family there when they’ve visited to see the amazing gardens.

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.

I was a bit concerned after the announcement that Microsoft would be taking over search development for Yahoo that Hadoop would suffer. But according to this, development will continue if not be enhanced.

I’ve been using Hadoop and HBase with ReadPath and have been thoroughly impressed with the results. Prior to testing it out, I had read many comments about HBase being usable for batch processing but not really up to the task of replacing a database for live requests.

As an initial test I’ve replaced ReadPath’s dictionary system, which had been running on Mysql, with HBase. This system is responding to hundreds of requests a second and returning in ~10mS which is on par with what Mysql was doing. The big wins are with scalability though. I’ve currently got a five server cluster with which I’m seeing a 100x increase in inserts/updates over Mysql with a much larger data set. As I convert other databases to use HBase and add these servers into the Hadoop cluster, performance should only increase.

I just got the signup email for Google Voice.

It was really easy to complete the registration and I’ve now got a phone number that can be redirected to any other phone. So if I’m home, I can have it call the home phone. But if I go out, I can have it forward to the cell phone.

The system also does automatic transcription of voice mails and then emails these to you.

I’m interested to see how it works. My new number, in case you want to say hi is (650) 395-7120.

Just trying this out to see if it works. It’s somewhat amazing how my blackberry is becoming my primary computer all day as I’m running about with caitlin.

The only real way to actually test out search engines. Compare the results with all of the formatting removed and location radomnized. Here’s a great site to test it out for yourself. You do a search and then vote for the site that you think has the best results.

In the early voting it looks like Bing is actually edging out Google by a slight margin. At the time of writing Bing is up 42% to Google’s 41% with Yahoo trailing behind at 17%. It’s often apparent that two of the results are quite good while the third is not nearly as good with the third place result being Yahoo.

I picked up a couple HP desktop machines to beef up my garage datacenter recently and came across some very different experiences while installing Centos 5.3.

On the HP a6700f, which goes for about $500 with a quad core AMD phenom at 1.8Ghz, 4Gb memory, and a 500Gb disk, the Centos install went beautifully. I had a running linux server in a matter of minutes with everything picked up and running as expected.

Later, I had needed one more machine and was at Frys where they only had the HP a6720f. It’s a bit more expensive, but comes with a 2.2Ghz AMD Phenom and 6Gb of memory. However the install on this box was a completely different story, almost nothing worked. The motherboard is slightly different and the ahci driver couldn’t pick up the sata harddrive. The install would hang for awhile and if you checked the alt-f3 screen you could see that the driver was failing while trying to communicate with the harddrive. Using Google, I was able to determine that at the install prompt you needed to add the param “pci=nomsi”. With this the harddrive was picked up properly, but uses the device-mapper driver instead of the normal /dev/sda. I haven’t noticed any performance difference though.

After I got the machine installed on the now functioning disk I realized that the on board Gig eth card hadn’t been picked up. A trip back to Google and I found that on this chipset that the on board ethernet is not supported yet with linux. So a quick jump to amazon to pick up a Intel PRO/1000 PT dual Gig eth adapter and I had a fully functioning server.

I would definitely say that the while overall the HP “a” desktop line is great for an ultra cheap linux server, the a6720f is just not worth the headaches. Pick up the a6700f instead.

I saw today that Microsoft released their new search engine Bing and have spent some time playing with it.  It’s definitely been a pleasant surprise, which is much better than I ever thought Msoft could pull off.

Of course one of the best ways to test something is to do a head to head comparison. Here’s a little site, that allows you to search on both sites at once. For the handful of test queries that I threw at the two search engines I would say it was a toss-up as to who had the best results. The test would be even better if it stripped the formatting and randomized the display so you didn’t know which was which by the appearance or location. I think in such a test Bing could hold its own.

This is actually exciting to see a real competitor appear again.