The Atlantic just published an in dept look at the Tech team behind the Obama campaign. It’s a little personality heavy, because they are trying to make tech interesting to the average reader, but putting that aside, there is quite a bit of detail on the team and tech structure behind the campaign.
Contrast that with what happened in the other campaign, where this was clearly not a core part of what they were doing.
In late 1999 I claimed my last name as a domain, and have had various email and web solutions hanging off of it ever since. This past weekend I migrated off of self hosted email to Google Apps for Domains. My email address remains the same, but the infrastructure is Google’s. There were 3 main converging trends that drove me there: spam, client innovation, and protocol integration.
Because most people host email on one of the big three (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), spam fighting techniques for the little guy have largely stagnated. If you are big enough there are other algorithms you can apply to patterns affecting your millions of subscribers at once. For individual filtering, especially with an email address that’s been constant for over a decade, the best you can do is spamassassin, which last released in 2011, and realistically hasn’t done anything innovative in the last 3 years. So recently my false possitive and negative pool have been overlapping in a way that means a lot of manual work. Thunderbird’s bayesan filtering is quite good, and makes up for some of this. So when my laptop is running while I’m getting mobile email, my spam rate in mobile is low. When it’s not, about 80% of what gets to my mobile inbox is spam.
Spam by itself wouldn’t have pushed me over the edge, but Mozilla deprecating new development on Thunderbird was another blow here. Email is powerful because it is universal, can be accessed by any device at any size, multiple clients interacting with the same data, at the same time. Desktop email has gotten the short end of the stick in recent years, again because most people are hosting with the big 3, but Mozilla was still making a valiant attempt to keep email open. They’ve now decided it’s more interesting to chase Chrome than provide value here. That’s their call, but it’s sad to see desktop email take that hit.
Lastly, there are lots of quite interesting tools growing up to integrate with email in a new social world. Give you profiles of your contacts via social networks, make it easy to convert email into tasks. All great stuff. None of it works with IMAP or Desktop email. All the innovation around email right now is using the GMail API and Chrome extensions to modify GMail web interface.
So the migration is on, I’ve nearly got my email history dating back to 2000 into Google now. In the process I found I’d actually lost 2008 and 2009 archives, which I’ve mostly restored via backup. That would explain why some things weren’t showing up in search that I expected. Already, the spam filtering is a huge win, and eventually I’ll get used to the web UI for some things (still going to keep using Thunderbird in combo for a while).
The biggest challenge in this whole process is that because of how Google has wedged Plus into everything, having both a gmail and an apps email causes some real confusion on the Plus side, because there is no way to tell Google they are the same. That’s just going to be confusing for a while, and if anyone has best practices around that, let me know.
Twice in the last month I’ve been contacted by friends I’ve made in the local tech community with questions about tech volunteering they are doing, or planning to do for local non-profits. I, hopefully, was able to provide them with some pointers and info to help them out.
I find that awesome. Not the me helping them out part, but the fact that they’ve gotten engaged and are giving back some of their vital skills to local organizations in need.
Over the past couple of years, through my work with the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, and the IBM year of service, I’ve realized that tech volunteerism is quite a rare thing. While there are a lot of techies in our area, when most of them volunteer, they do so in a non tech role. They are board members, and program leaders, which is good and important, but the very real technology needs are often overlooked.
Those conversations, plus a few other in the last month, have made me really start thinking about more ways to encourage and nurture more of this in our area. I’d love to have a peer group where I could share these experiences, and learn from others. This is a whole other master plan.
So, if you are a techie of any sort (developer, designer, it guru), consider giving those skills back to your local community. It’s something very few can give, and very many need.
NY Times: Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble
The national parks’ history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures.
But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers — July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone — rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.
People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.
Though the article doesn’t really stress this point, this has always been a problem. People that are clueless about nature, possibly because they’ve been sheltered from it in the cities or suburbs, are clueless, whether or not they have a cellphone or gps.
The whole OLPC goes windows debacle has been going on for months now, creating incredible polarization on many fronts. A huge part of what actually excited many of the XO laptop volunteers was the chance for a Linux breakout market. I really think that senior leadership lost track of the fact that those blogging up the XO effort to its launch were largely in it for the Linux angle. By deciding to go the “natural route” and replace Linux with XP, lots of people have lost interest in the effort, including myself.
Putting more XP machines into the world isn’t something very interesting to me, and it seems to go against the whole notion of the computer being a learning tool at all levels. I guess now the children of developing nations will be learning power point instead of python programming. What a shame.
A vendor can often be their own worst competition if they create good technology, but put it out in a way that is too limiting, in platform support or licensing, than their prospective users would like it to be. I’ve often refered to this as the Anti-Market among colleagues. The rules of the Anti-Market are more or less as follows:
If you create a technology that is useful, but 90% of your prospective market can’t use it for various reasons, they’ve got a good chance of getting together and writing a replacement for your product.
Example 1: KDE vs. Gnome
Gnome created out the anti market that KDE created. KDE is built on QT. Back in the early days of KDE, QT was licenced in rather funny ways by Trolltech. The funny license meant that Red Hat (and other Linux distros) didn’t want to ship it. Mandrake was originally just Red Hat + KDE to fill such a need. But with the bulk of the KDE user market blocked because of bad licencing, a void existed to be filled. Gnome did that. A decade later Gnome is the primary desktop environment on nearly ever major distro, and while KDE 4 has gotten some recent press, it is definitely now a minority player.
KDE was brought down because it created an anti market. People wanted that kind of function, but the way it was delivered was not acceptable to its users.
Example 2: Java vs. Mono on the Linux Desktop
How many Linux desktop apps are you running right now, or ever, that are Java based? How many that are Mono based? The only Java apps I run on the desktop in any frequency are Azureus and Freemind. On the Mono side F-Spot and Tomboy have seen a lot more use. Until very recently Java remained under a license that made including it with the Linux platform quite an issue. Mono is under an MIT license, and has been since day one. While Mono has a number of short comings, the fact that it’s so young, and so much more used than Java in the Linux desktop space speaks a bit to the anti-market that Sun created by waiting forever to open source their baby.
Example 3: MySQL vs. everyone else
In 1995 Linux was already being used to run key parts of the internet. None of the traditional ISVs were paying attention to it (DB2 showed up in 1998 on Linux, and too my knowledge, was the first big database vendor there). You know what you need to run the internet, a reasonable database. MySQL popped out of the anti-market created by there being a platform people were using quite a bit, but lacking ISV support. People needed the function, but couldn’t get it even if they wanted to pay for it.
I continue to be amazed at how much of an anti-market MySQL took advantage of.
Closing thoughts
The Linux Desktop space is full of anti-market applications, some of which have even seeped back into the Windows world, like OpenOffice, Gimp, and Pidgin. Adobe just made a very astute move and got Air out for Linux before they forced a new anti-market there. While the Linux Desktop space isn’t the highest volume space for users, the developer to user ratio in the space is very high, which means ignoring it means there is a real chance of creating an anti-market.
I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts or examples here, comments are open, have at it.
John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set. Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit. There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing. One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it. It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse. The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.
Thanks to John for bringing that over. I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up). While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way. I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.