Alston Grove

Seth Godin has a free eBook called Really Bad Powerpoint that explains what we should really be communicating in a presentation. This quote from the book impacted me:

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough. If all it took was logic, no one would smoke cigarettes. No one would be afraid to fly on airplanes. And every smart proposal would be adopted. No, you don’t win with logic. Logic is essential, but without emotion, you’re not playing with a full deck.

Instead of writing bullet points, he wants you to sell your idea and organize the presentation emotionally. He has some good examples, so check it out. I’ve tried to use logic in my arguments to sway others on decisions unsuccessfully, so maybe appealing to the right-side of the brain is what I’m missing.

The desktop of the future will be running Linux. Each successive wave of development improves and pushes open source software further. The increasing momentum from developers around the world makes widespread adoption of Linux inevitable. I remember telling people this in 1995 and they laughed me out of the room. I suppose those people are running MacOS X now, or they are looking forward to Windows Vista… So, can your desktop do this?

Click through the screenshot to watch a video of a Linux box running Xgl and Compiz. You might not want to watch the whole thing if you get motion sickness easily.

You can patent just about anything these days, and the Federal Court of Appeals just made it harder for anyone to challenge your obvious patent. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking for a different opinion from the US Supreme Court. In the meantime, Really Magazine keeps a running list of the most ridiculous patents achieving registration. Here are some of my favorites this year:

• Headband
• Game of Etiquette
• Pillow
• Bottlecap Necktie
• Tea Bag
• Cucumber Sandwich
• Beach Blanket

Just remember to record your innovative 3-legged chair design in your Moleskine notebook and you should have no problem in court. Don’t forget to save some money for the lawyer fees.

Here’s a fun little puzzle called the Leap Frog IQ Test. Supposedly, this test is given to second grade children in China, and should be solvable in 3 minutes by someone with an IQ above 50. I’m not sure about that, but I did have fun solving it.

It’s an interactive Flash-based puzzle, but I’ll explain how it works just for edification. You start with green frogs on the left and brown frogs on the right. The goal is to perform a switcheroo of green and brown frogs. The rules are:

• Green frogs can only move to the right and brown frogs to the left.
• Only one frog is allowed on a rock at a time.
• A frog can move to the open rock or jump over one other frog to reach it.

It reminds me a little bit of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. I’m not sure if the Frog puzzle is also recursive, but my solution is algorithmic with two steps.

We knew this was coming. Music industry sues P2P firm LimeWire. Limewire is an open-source P2P client for the Gnutella network. The basic version is free, and the professional version is under $20.

This case is different from the Grokster one. To download Limewire, you must click-thru a “Non-Infringing Intent of Use” and answer “I will not use Limewire for copyright infringment.” So even if people are using it to copy RIAA-backed music, Limewire can say that it does not actively “induce” copyright infringement. Unfortunately, the RIAA will do their best to prolong and make this case as expensive as possible.

Will the music industry ever get the message? Stop overcharging for your music, especially online!

Which reminds me, I’ll be watching AllOfMp3.com closely in the next few weeks. On September 1, 2006, a Russian amendment to law will take effect, explicitly referring to the online distribution of creative works. AllOfMp3 acknowledges the copyright legislation and vows to have agreements with the rightholders in place to continue doing business.

Could you imagine what it would be like if all online music stores were as cheap as AllOfMp3? There would be very little copying of music, and everyone would find it more convenient to buy. There would be no more need for middlemen like the RIAA. I guess that’s why they’re fighting so hard.

As you may have read, I am always looking out for a better Slim Keyboard that has the minimalist programmer in mind. So, now I’ve gone and bought an A4Tech KL-5 Mini Keyboard.

It’s not too bad, much like a laptop keyboard, really. Things I like:

• Nice typing sound, easy tactile pressure
• Slight ridges on “home” keys for index fingers
• Normal size keys
• Has cursor keys, home, end, page up/down
• Acceptable number of annoying keys (e-mail, browser) that are small and less noticeable
• Space bar is centered
• Function keys are smaller, out of the way
• Backspace and Enter keys are acceptable sizes
• Nice form factor and attractive look

Things I don’t like:

• Control key makes my fingers play twister
• Where’s the little feet to angle it up?
• Cursor keys are in-line, which slows down finding them
• The Escape key is too small and too far away

I mapped the Caps Lock key to the Control key, and I think I’m getting used to it otherwise. The Happy Hacker keyboard was nice, but the key clacking was beginning to drive me mad.

Little bits of privacy lost here and there seem harmless, but are they adding up to something? Lately, I feel like companies know me better than my friends.

On my birthday, I got happy birthday cards from insurance companies. On my wedding anniversary, I got advertisements from jewelry companies. After my son was born, I got ads for baby products. When rates dropped below our mortgage rate, I got offers that showed exactly how much money I could save. When my house was listed for sale, I got ads for moving services. After we moved, local businesses sent me welcome letters.

I feel like I’m being tracked and targeted by guerrilla marketers. It’s all public information, so what’s the big deal, right?

I think someone needs to build a website that collects information from various public sources and publishes profiles on people. It could contain:

• birth announcements
• phone and address directories
• real estate transactions, mortgages
• GIS property map, satellite imagery
• municipal court cases, state prisoner incarceration
• deadbeat parents, child support non-payments
• voter registration

Cross-referenced and processed, you might see that Bob is 32, married to Jane with 2 children who are ages 1 and 3, and they just paid $300,000 for a house at 500 Main Street. Click here for a picture of the house. Here are phone numbers and e-mail addresses. They registered as democrat last election. Bob got a speeding ticket last week.

Maybe it could be a social network, only instead of updating your own profile, you update someone else’s. Give the scoop on who the person is, link them to other people they associate with, and enter revealing information about them. It could be like wikipedia for people.

For a nominal fee, you could subscribe with the site and have your information kept private. It could be called… Privacy4Sale.com. Hey, you gave up your privacy, so now you have to pay!

I was at CompUSA to pick up some cables and I ended up making an impulse buy: a Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter for Vonage. I’d been researching Vonage, AT&T CallVantage, and Packet8, but my wife says I spend too much time on decisions, so I’m trying to change.

The PAP2 is very small, like two decks of cards, and it has an ethernet jack and two RJ11 phone jacks (for two separate phone numbers). I plugged it into my Linksys switch and patched the “phone 1″ into my house panel. Since I put the phone adapter behind my firewall, I had to add a few rules to let VoIP packets through, which the manual kindly provided.

I went to the Vonage website and activated my adapter. One nice thing about VoIP is you can pick the area code your phone number will orginate from. If your parents live in South Carolina, you can get a number that is local to them. I kept it simple and chose a Columbus number, but I might add another number later. Right after I activated, the phone LED lit up, and I had a dial tone. I didn’t have to take a day off from work to wait for some telco guy!

I’ve been using it for a couple days, and I must say I am impressed. My wife hasn’t complained, so I know it’s decent. The voice quality is good and the service has been flawless. It comes with standard features like caller ID, 3-way calling, call waiting, and even voice mail. You can use their website to track calls, check voice mail, add features, and configure settings. The price for all of this is pretty unbelievable. We were paying $35/month for a line, and $75/month for long distance. Now we pay $15/month. It makes me feel like the big telcos have been cheating me all along.

Vonage doesn’t require a contract, so I could eventually switch providers. CallVantage has some interesting features, like Do Not Disturb. Packet8 most interests me for their Virtual Office. Really, I need to run Asterick and connect it to my VoIP provider, and I’d have all the PBX features I could imagine.

How would you find the tasks not shown on the bar?

Because I certainly can’t get it right. I click the wrong arrow every time. You might say that “up” goes to the top of the pile, with recent tasks on top. You might also say that “up” goes to the top of the page, with the first tasks started at the beginning. To confuse one further, clicking an arrow will cause the tasks to shift either left or the right. Is it natural to associate up and down with left and right?

Rickard Öberg, a co-founder of JBoss, has recently started a blog called The JBoss Issue, where he lists 4 issues with how JBoss, Inc is managing the codebase of the JBoss application server:

1. Missing copyright notices
2. Invalid license
3. Illegal distribution
4. Abuse of trade/service mark

[Update appended on 10/17/2005]
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