Dot Product

As I think most who have known me would have predicted, I stepped up to an iPhone several months ago. This post is authored from that device while I wait to get into the Dr.’s office with Ian. Entering text is certainly possible, though this is going to be a short post because its far from pleasant. Still, its a remarkable device that has reshaped the accessibility of information for me on many occasions. If it has one weakness, its the coupling with AT&T, whose service seems positively Neolithic compared to verizon…

More on this topic later. (Told you this would be short)

Peter wrote in and queried me about the new Doctor Who Series. He asked if someone new to the shows should start with Christopher Eccleston’s incarnation, OR just jump in at the beginning of David Tennant’s tenth Doctor. I figured I’d share my opinion here and give another plug for the new series, because it really is outstanding and a great deal of fun.

Definitely start with Christopher Eccleston!

There are a couple of good reasons for this actually, aside from the fact that he’s brilliant in the role and really brings out a very fresh, and somewhat tortured version of the Doctor to the audience. Tortured? Yeah, well you see… there was a war between the Daleks and the Timelords… simply called the Time War. A war so devastating that both sides seem to have been wiped out. So he’s dealing with a ton of survivor guilt, and is now alone in the universe. Which is fertile ground for the character to pick up some serious emotional depth, which Christopher Eccleston portrays very well.

Alot of the history of what happens in that first season also plays out in the 2nd and 3rd season under David Tennant, who is also brilliant, so starting at the new beginning helps make sense of a number of things down the line.

The 4th season starts in April of 2008 I believe, and then there will be at least a 1 year hiatus punctuated by 2 telefilms, and then the 5th season in 2010. On the one hand, that sucks, but it beats having the production crew and writers of the show quit or grow stale.

Yes, since the beginning of the last hiatus I have been devoting myself to a new startup, Zomega Terahertz Corporation. It has consumed all of my free time and continues to do so. I’m the CEO of the Corporation, but I will tell you that as a small business, where there are only a handful of people involved, everyone wears alot of hats. I still laugh about it, but one experience I had back in early January of 2007 really brought this home for alot of the people that I interact with here at the Center for THz Research at Rensselaer.

We were racing to finish our latest prototype of the mini-Z 1000, a portable, compact turnkey THz spectrometer that we were going to be showing at Photonics West in San Jose, CA later in the month. When I say racing, I’m not exaggerating at all, there were plenty of long days and nights leading up to that show, and we didn’t have enough time or people to get everything done that we would have liked. Add into this mix a prototype that continued to develop knew quirks and problems just as quickly as we could fix the old ones! At one point we were trying to get the focused transmission mode working (thats where a lens focuses a collimated THz beam into a tight spot on a sample, and on the other side a second lens re-collimates the beam for processing), and I was sanding down the backside of a high density polyethylene lens so that it would fit in the holder… there was quite a bit of material to remove, and I had white powder all over the place, and my fingers rubbed raw from working the lens. At this point, one of the students from the Center walks in and sees me.

“Aren’t you the CEO?” he asked, sounding puzzled.

“Yes, it’s a glamorous job, isn’t it?” I smiled. Definitely not what he was expecting.

It’s not part of the job description, but it’s what has to happen in a small organization to perform. I’d argue that larger organizations would benefit from executives getting into the trenches now and then, and not just for photo opportunities. Herb Kelleher, founder and one-time CEO of Southwest Airlines, certainly would agree. Having an understanding and connection with the operational parts of a business form an organizational culture and competency that can become a competitive asset, as Southwest Airlines has proven.

We’re starting to grow, and I expect we’ll be adding quite a bit of talent to Zomega over then new year. I hope to share some of our growing experiences with you, even if our competitors might be reading (Hi guys!). More to come…

There are a few shows that I’d like to share, just in case you have not come across them in your travels. Aside from Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, which I’m assuming everyone has access to in one form or another via Sci-Fi or DVD, I would like to commend to your attention Hustle and MI:5, two british series that have exceptional writing and are top notch dramas. Hustle is about a group of grifters who work the “long con” together in London, and MI:5 is about the British domestic intelligence service (think “24″, but scrap the real-time angle and kick the writing up by a factor of 100x).

[dusts off the cobwebs of this spam-comment infested blog]
[taps the mic] is this thing on?

Yes, I abandoned my blog, as have so many others as time became pinched and finally snuffed from the list of resources I have at my disposal. Does this post signify that the air of free time has once again returned to breath life into this dark hollow?

No, it simply means I’ve learned to breathe under water.

I do not promise daily posts, but there will be something here to read, for better or worse, having to do with my life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the poor souls who must endure and toil beside me in this domain. Will it amuse? Edify? Uplift? Make your hair grow back? Do your taxes? Love your second aunt (once removed)? Surely not. Set not your expectations too high and you will always be pleasantly surprised.

Oh, and sadly I’ve turned off comments. I’m sorry, but the one thing I really DON’T have time for is fighting back the HORDES of spambots trying to use my blog to sell all manners of snake oil and quackery… and damned to anyone out there who buys their crap… THEY are the reason such spammers are still a problem, a decade after this problem really got bad. So if you have any comments, please send them to me in an e-mail. You’re a resourceful fellow, I’m sure you can find my address

No spoilers. Just wanted to say that having seen the movie, I think they’ve really reached the point where even a 2.5 hour movie is an inappropriate format for rendering the later books. Quite simply, the richness that makes the later books so good is gone. The movie is still a visual feast, but the characters often act in a way that would seem disjointed if you didn’t know the book.

In truth, a mini-series that lays it out over 7 - 14 hours is really the only way they could get it right. Too bad there just isn’t the money side to support that sort of move.

This is so freakin’ cool I don’t know where to start. Take an ordinary substance, change some basic environment variables and get some extraordinary material properties. Serious physics wood from this one.

There must be a better description for the practice, but at least the title is descriptive. My definition: “System or Network Administration that is offensive to end-users.”. The example I have in mind is something I was banging my head against last night. Talking with this user last night, and she was unable to tune to many internet radio stations. Connections simply didn’t work, and they did a day or so ago.

So I tried to help, narrowing down where the problem lay. Since she was using Windows, the natural place to start is corrupted software. Several tests later, we determined it was a problem with networking, not the software she had installed. Here is what we found: her WiFi provider was re-routing requests to port 8000 (typical for internet radio) to port 80 on the same host. Just port 8000.

WTF? The only answer I could come up with last night was that the provider was trying to manage bandwidth usage, since internet radio can be pretty intense for really high quality streams (128kbps or higher). Get 10 users sucking at those HQ streams and you’ve basically filled a T1.

Except for this user, internet radio is one of the reasons she has the service. Offensive Networking Administration.

Another example: broadband providers that re-route or block outgoing port 25 requests. This is a anti-virus or anti-spam measure, but for those of us using our own servers for relaying mail, this simply sucks the big one.

And I won’t get into the activities of big ISPs like AOL which make it very time consuming to keep deliveries to their servers working when YOUR users are recieving spam through aliases on YOUR servers being delivered to the ISP. The customer calls YOU to ask why they’re not getting their e-mail, but it’s the ISP’s action that is causing the problem.

All of this is very aggravating, and besides chewing the poor sot being paid to take my tech support call, I’m not sure how we (as intermediaries or end users) can fix this general practice.

Thoughts?

So a renewal notice from GoDaddy for our CodeFuries.com domain has brought up an interesting conundrum: when should you take a web site down? Chris, Brian, MattC, MattH and I set up the site to facilitate joint development and distribution of some software we had a common interest in. In the intervening years, our interests (and geophysical proximity) have migrated, and things are pretty dormant at CodeFuries now. The software is still useful, and still available, but development is basically halted because alternate solutions have become available that simply work better. Most of us are using Wiki code now for common/shared authoring environments, so is it time to pull the plug?

On the one hand, the hosting is free, the domain costs a whopping $9 to renew… it many ways that is the easiest thing to do (aside from just letting the domain expire). On the other hand, why leave clutter lying around. I’m interested in hearing your input!

This week I’m attending the SBIR/STTR National conference in Albany, NY. For those not familiar with the SBIR/STTR program, it’s a federal grant and contract program designed to help small businesses develop technology and transfer tech from research institutions into the commercial sector. Generally, both programs have two phases, where Phase I is a feasibility study, and Phase II involves producing a prototype. Phase III is for commercialization. The awards for Phase I are somewhere from $50k - $100k for 6 - 9 months, while Phase II is for up to $750k for up to 2 years.

So far, the conference has provided some important nuggets of information I had not gleaned through reading the solicitations or through other workshops. The frustration is that those nuggets are buried in HOURs of content that is not so revolutionary… and for those of us already crunched for time from competing concerns, it can be hard to sit still and sift for gold.

Still, it’s a good program, and hopefully my next startup will be able to take advantage of the program to fund some development work. Sure beats dilution through outside investors!