Although some say it's too little too late to save GM, the Chevy Volt does seem like an interesting car. Unlike the Toyota Prius which has a hybrid drive train that uses both gas engines and electric motors for propulsion, the Volt only uses electric motors to turn those wheels. The E Flex Platform which the Volt is built around, seems to have a nice simple, modular design. You have electric motors to turn the wheels, batteries to power the motors, and a generator to charge the batteries. It even has the word "platform" in its name, and almost seems worthy of that label. But they're not shipping for 2 more years? Having worked on a hail mary platform myself, I have this suspicion that GM is putting so much pressure on the Volt that they're killing it with scope creep. They're trying to do too much, trying to get it too perfect, and wasting too much time. They need to get it out now.

Instead, GM should take the IBM PC route (or perhaps, the more profitable iPod accessory route). They should just define the specifications and baseline requirements for the motors, batteries and generators, and ship the Volt half baked (as far as the drive train goes... obviously safety features will need to be fully baked). Who cares if it gets less than 100MPG and has a short range? Other companies can then compete to build compatible batteries, motors and generators, which could spawn a thriving industry to absorb at least some of those workers the automobile industry will shed (or has). GM can charge license fees and charge for "Volt Compatible(TM)" labels, which should be more profitable than having to do R&D + production themselves. We'll get the Volt sooner, better, and probably cheaper. I'd even support a nice big government bailout if GM would commit to something like that.

I can't say for sure that such an Open Automobile Platform would be good for the Big 3. But then, I'm not even certain it's good that we have a Big 3 in the first place, instead of Small And Medium 100¹. At the very least, I think the industry should be comprised of Big 3 And A Bunch of Little Uns, more or less like our beloved internet industry. You get more innovation, more competition, more jobs and when the shit hits the fan, you don't have to worry about an entire industry going poof (just most of it). An Open E Flex Platform might just be what we need for such a change.

I've written a lot of web apps in my life. I've written my own webmail, blogging engine, feed reader, and even my own search plugin. To add to my suite of Ryo Brand web apps, I am proud to announce Ryo's Stock Portfolio App.

This is another one of those "personal itch" projects. I recently decided to take advantage of the current economic crisis and buy up some stock, mostly for the fun of it. Naturally, that means whenever I'm in the bathroom taking a dump, I'd want to use my iPhone to see how much money I've made/lost that day. I'm sure there's a nifty app that'll do just that, but I'm still running the 1.x firmware, so no 3rd party apps for me. The next obvious choice is to use a web app of some sort, but after evaluating a statistically insignificant sample of two such sites, I've concluded that all such sites are either too slow or too complex to be used on an iPhone while taking a dump.

So, as my name implies, I went and rolled my own. It's dead simple, and almost certainly faster than all the existing offerings. My portfolio page weighs in at a hefty 1503 bytes, and usually generates in under 50ms (including a curl call to a undocumented Y! Finance API). Hell, it's so fast I could probably even use it while taking a pee.

Check out this sample portfolio.

I've been working on some significant changes to my personal homepage for the first time since, oh, 2003(?). You can see the new version of the top page at this secret URL.

The new page reflects the realities of the Web 2.0 era, where (unlike when I last worked on my homepage) most of my content is hosted elsewhere, and my homepage now simply aggregates it all in one place. Think of it as a portal in reverse: instead of me going out to the world, it's where the world looks into me.

Now, this isn't radical or new by any stretch of the imagination, but ironically enough, it's something I spent 3 years at Yahoo! trying to do for everybody while my own site stagnated in neglect. I first did a hack back in the fall of 2005 to make it easier to pull in external content into a Yahoo! 360 profile. Unfortunate, the PMs didn't see the value in that then. I got another chance at it last year while working on Mash, and came pretty close to realizing the idea, but Mash was put on hold a few weeks after the beta launch. The underlying module architecture did live on, however, and was used to power SearchMonkey, and was also subsumed into (and subsequently largely removed from) the Yahoo! Application Platform (which has yet to launch).

So, I finally decided it was time to give up trying to do the world a favor, and just do it for myself. Except, like they say, the third time is the charm; I managed to do it better than my previous attempts. With my homepage,I found an approach that provides both vitality and efficiency: the page aggregates content from 5 sources (for now) and updates should show up within 15 minutes, but the page also generates in 300ms (on 4 year old low-end hardware, PHP 4.3 without APC, and file-based object caching instead of memcache).

Some early "reviews" of handsets based on Google's Android have been popping up. For example, this one concludes:

Android, while extremely powerful, has a less-elegant, less-user-friendly interface than the iPhone.

You know, the IBM PC and Windows 3.0 combo wasn't nearly as elegant or user friendly as Apple Macintosh computers of the day. But who won that war? I'm as big an Apple fan boy as the next, but I've been around long enough to know that the sleekist, most elegant, shiny and user-loving devices don't always win, especially when going up against commoditized, open platforms and systems.

As if to spite me (or prove my last blog entry incorrect), there's an article in the NYTimes titled Habits May be Good For You, about someone who's trying to use advertising techniques to bestow sanitary habits upon people in Africa. While that sounds all noble, here's a passage that caught my attention:

"For most of our history, we’ve sold newer and better products for habits that already existed," said Dr. Berning, the P.& G. psychologist. "But about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before."

The article lists products that we didn't used to have, but have now thanks to advertising. They include wonderful life-saving (and life-enhancing, of course!) products such as sprays to make your couches smell all froofy, things to make your laundry smell like unicorns, chemicals to make your teeth glow in the dark... Clearly, advertising has done wonders for these multi-billion dollar companies. Advertising allows them to create demand. It's kind of like printing money.

This is an aspect of advertising I hadn't considered in my last post. For existing demand, I still believe advertising is unnecessary. If consumers know that they want something, they have access to tools to discover exactly which brand of that item best meets their criteria. Advertising is not necessary there.

But what about this other role advertising plays? How else would companies create new markets? In other words, how would companies make you buy crap you didn't know you needed? Well, my answer is, they shouldn't. Now, this is where you ask: "But wouldn't that stifle innovation? We wouldn't have dish washers, PCs or the internet if companies hadn't created demand for those technologies!" I'm not saying innovation should stop. Companies should continue to innovate and create new products. But instead of depending on advertising to create demand, they should let the market decide. And the market will decide based on the merits of the product, and worthy products will spread virally through social channels. We're not there yet, but I think we'll get there, sooner than advertisers think.

Nonetheless, I do want to get back to the point about companies selling shit people don't need. I think that's a problem. I think that problem exists because public corporations are funded by share holders who expect exponential growth. If demand doesn't grow exponentially (or generally fast enough), the only way to achieve exponential growth is by entering new markets. One way to enter new markets is to create them.

Now, I don't know anything about economics, so I probably have that all wrong. But let's say I'm right. The problem with a system which requires exponential growth, is that infinite exponential growth is impossible, if any dependent factor is finite. That is, you can't create infinite things out of finite things. Our economy depends on things that are finite, or grow less rapidly, such as energy and certain natural resources. I recently heard that we consume more energy per time unit than the amount of solar energy that falls on this planet. That's akin to spending more money than you make, in a world where nobody's there to lend you money. (That's not entirely true, since renewable energy sources do exist... but it won't matter if we don't tap into those sources, and unless those sources can keep up with demand.)

Anyway, I'm sure I got this all wrong. I'm sure our economy will keep growing. I'm sure smart people have figured it all out. I guess I should just be a good boy and go whiten my teeth now.

The internet is great at eliminating the middlemen. One only needs to look at the music industry to see one of the fiercest battles for survival being waged by fat lazy middlemen anywhere. The middlemen in that industry, of course, are the record companies. In an age where musicians (and their fans) can effectively market, distribute and monetize their goods (music) using online tools (many of them free), there really is no need to have record companies. Record companies used to play a role. They are now obsolete.

Advertising used to play a role. Before the internet, the only effective way to reach your potential customers was through advertising. If you launched a new product, how else would anyone find out about it? Word of mouth existed, but was ineffective, with very very low viral coefficients.

But the internet changes that. Search engines are very effective at matching demand with supply. I recently needed to buy pectin. All I had to do was type in "pectin" in Google, and one of the top results directed me straight to a manufacturer's website, where I found that the local Whole Foods stocked the item. No advertising needed. When a hot new product launches, I hear about it in blogs, and my friends talk about it, share items, post tweets, IM links, email articles. Again, no advertising needed.

Of course, there's the inconvenient truth. Advertising can't die, because advertising still makes money. The odd thing is, advertising doesn't make money because consumers demand it. I don't know of anyone who likes ads. No, advertising lives because of inertia. These companies have paid billions of dollars in advertising for decades. Why would they stop? Most of them don't know, for example, that improving your search ranking and paying top dollars for AdWords yield the same results, except the latter costs money. Surely, if it costs money it must be better (you know, the same way free Open Source software couldn't possibly be as good as multi-million dollar enterprise software). Sooner or later, the beast will die. Question is, what comes next? *shrug* I just wanted to rant against ads.

In Jakob Nielsen's comments about the Internet userbase exceeding one billion, he says:

The Mac, for example, already matters less than you think. Although it has a prominent role in the U.S., it's hard to refer to a company with single-digit market share as "dominant." In Asia, the Mac is practically nonexistent.

I disagree with his assessment. Apple has a noticeable presence and market share in Japan, and at one point, something like 55% of Apple's international sales were from Japan. The only reason why Apple has practically no marketshare in the rest of Asia is because most of Asia (population-wise, that means China and India) can't afford Macs. But with economies modernizing in those countries and as disposable incomes increase, I think there's a very good chance Apple will see significant growth in those markets. [Tagged: macs asia jakob+nielsen ]

A week or so after I bloged about my dream search box, Yahoo! internally released a new search feature called Open Shortcuts that was functionally equivalent to my hack (the timing, AFAIK, was completely coincidental). Well, as of yesterday, this feature has apparently become publicly available. Read more over at the Yahoo! Search blog.

Despite working at Yahoo! (though not in the search division), I admittedly still use Google as my default search engine. For me, the main reasons that I haven't been able to switch (I've tried, I swear!) are:

• Google's result are marginally better (more relevant, less spam) than Yahoo
  
• I like the weather forecast display better on G
  
• I like the stock ticker display better on G
  
• Google's calculator is better (try: "0xef to binary","e^4", "14!" --none of these work on Yahoo!)
  

Open Shortcuts is kind of cool because it does lower the barrier for conversion. I can set my default search engine to Yahoo! and selectively send queries to Google with 3 extra key strokes. Or I can send my stock symbol lookups to Yahoo! Finance (which, at the end, is usually what comes up as the #1 result on Google anyway). But then, 3 extra key strokes to lookup a 4 letter ticker symbol adds 60% more work... and that's a lot.

The other cool thing about Open Shortcuts is that it adds stickiness to search. Since the shortcuts are completely customizable, once you've set things up the way you like them and get used to it, you're likely to keep using the product. Whereas with generic non-customized search, the cost of switching is practically zero (assuming equivalent functionality and quality). [Tagged: yahoo search open+shortcuts ]

Lots of talk about the death of IE5 for Mac (well, more like 2nd death, the 1st death was when MS halted development), and the general tone seems celebratory. Now I'm anti-MS, anti-IE, yadda yadda yadda as the next, but I think people are losing context here.

*dreamy transition sequence*

It's a long time ago. Year 2000 or there abouts. MacOS X PR1 comes out to revolutionize the platform, to bring the Mac OS out of the stone ages. Guess what browser it comes with? Yup, MSIE 5. And guess what? It worked. Safari wasn't out yet, neither was Firefox. Lots of people were still using Netscape 4.7, and Netscape 6 was one slow buggy hunk of software. Frankly, for a while, MSIE 5 was the best browser on OS X.

*dreamy transition sequence*

Sure, by today's standard, IE5 is a crappy browser no matter how you look at it. But at it's moment of death, let's at least acknowledge it for what it was. At the very least, the developers who fought an uphill battle to get it out deserve it.

I'm at BarCamp right now, kinda kicking myself for not having come out here earlier (I got here a little after 4pm today). So far I got part of a session about SVG, and a service called Pandora which is basically a music streaming service that makes recommendations based on music you like (and finds matches from less well known artists --the so called "long tail"). One interesting little tidbit I got out of the Pandora session was about naming; apparently nonsensical names are memorable than the sensical ones. Right now I'm catching the tail end of the Women in Tech session where, it sounds like they're talking about creating an Open Source mobile-based geolocation-yummy service thinggy. [Tagged: barcamp ]

Just saw some details about PS 3, and felt rather sick:

At the heart of the PlayStation 3 lie two very powerful processors. One, the main processor, is a new chip called Cell that was developed for use in the console by SCEI, its parent company Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp. and IBM Corp. The chip is based on IBM's PowerPC architecture and will have seven cores, each running at 3.2GHz, to give the chip a total performance of 218GFlops.

Running alongside the Cell will be a graphics processor developed by Nvidia Corp. that is capable of handling full high-definition images and boasts performance of 1.8TFlops. Together, the two chips will give the PlayStation 3 a total system performance of 2TFlops

Maybe it's because of the way I was raised (no comics, no TV, certainly no game consoles) but unlike most people my age, I'm distinctly anti-gaming. At the very least, I tend to clump computer games in with sitting on your ass watching TV and other such mindless (mind damaging) activities. There's nothing wrong with it if that's what you want to do to yourself, but I find it an aweful waste.

So Sony is going to ship millions(?) of these high-performance computing units, which will spend an aggregate several hundred million hours of computing power, for uses that average out to (IMHO) negative human development. Imagine what it would be like if all these gamers went outside and played or otherwise did something useful/not-unhealthy, and used all that computing power on something useful. Imagine all the good that could do to mankind...

But, I think I'm just going to have to hope that I'm wrong on this one, and hope that there's some good in computer games. I mean, we wouldn't really spend so much time, energy, money, and brain power on something that's self destructive... would we?
[Tagged: ps3 ]

For as long as I can remember (i.e. at least a decade), I've been the go-to guy for Mac related issues for friends, family and people of that ilk. Recently, I've been telling people to just go to the Genius Bar in the Apple Store downtown. Skip the campus computer store (they're useless), don't call Apple (half the time they make you run in loops); just take it to the Apple Store.

The amazing thing is, most of the time, they come back and tell me good things about their experiences.

[Tagged: apple ]

I was talking to my friend Yitz the other day (whose assbook has taken on a post-Scav life of its own¹) about the possibilities of Open Source social networking software.

In some sense, Open Source social networking software is meaningless, because social networks derive value from their members more than from the underlying software. Slashdot and Livejournal are both built on open source software, but the sites and their respective communities (I would argue), have made greater impact than the software themselves.

However, as people begin to realize that just about any software created these days, particularly for the web, has to be social networking software of one form or another, an Open Source social networking library that provides core functionality could become valuable. Yitz created a site that does most of what The Facebook does (and some things that it doesn't do) in about a week, but most people don't have the time, energy or brains to do that. Even if they did, it's a royal waste of time to recreate 90% of the{face|ass}book just to do something a little different for the remaining 10%.

One application we discussed was the marriage between OpenHive, and a social networking core. At this point, the assbook has more extensive social networking capabilities than OpenHive, and it makes sense to take those core SN capabilities and simply add library sharing features on top of it.

Another interesting possibility would be if the OSSN library had externally accessible APIs, that allowed different social networks built using the same core to communicate with each other; effectively building a grid of social networks (or a network of networks). So, for example, if you have an account on The Assbook, you wouldn't have to re-register for OpenHive or rebuild your friends list, and vice versa. (side note: FOAF/RDF might be useful here)

Of course, if various services opened up a little more, there wouldn't be much of a need for an open source interoperable social network-network. For example, OpenHive accesses data from two external sites: The Facebook, and Amazon. We did nasty screen scraping from The Facebook. We used well documented APIs for Amazon. I'm sure you can guess which we preferred.

I didn't really plan it this way, but I think I'm saying what I said in my last post: OpenSource is great, but open APIs are better.

¹Some numbers on his blog, also see articles in our school paper and Stanford's. [Tagged: social+networking open+source open+APIs theassbook ]

I think Lawrence Lessig talked about something similar in Code, but we're having an interesting discussion in the MacLab.

The problem is this. Our machines rev nightly, and as part of the revving process, we've been wiping all user data. Our explicit policy is that we make absolutely no guarantees about user data, particularly over night. However, the reality of it is, most users are not entirely aware of our policy, and have a tendency to ignore posters, warnings, etc we put up. One of our tutors modified the revving process to not delete files that have been modified within 3 (or any fixnum) days.

I think this is a horrible idea, but others seem to disagree.

The reason I think this is a horrible idea is simple: we are creating conflicting policies. One policy is our explicit one, where we say we don't save user data over night. The other policy is the implicit one, where we in practice will be saving user data for some number of days. Where this becomes an issue is that users are more likely to follow our implicit policy than our explicit policy, because even though they do not read signs, they definitely notice when they see (or don't see) their files from previous days.

So we will then, through our own practice, be implicitly telling our users that user data is stored for some indeterminate number of days, while not being able to provide the level of service/security users will naturally expect/assume (that is, user files can suddenly disappear, and we will simply point at our unnoticed signs).

What really baffles me is that, none of our users are asking us to store data. If they ask and we tell them we wipe the hard drives every night, they understand. Yet by introducing an implicit, unofficial, and un-demanded service, we're jeapordizing users data. It makes no sense to me.

What am I missing?

This year I've been working mostly with "manly con"¹ so I've been outside most of the time, and away from computers, email, internet, etc. I took on the trebuchet item, and lead the design and construction of a kick-ass trebuchet with a 10lb counter-weight (the item specifically states that the counter-weight must be <=10lb; otherwise we would've made it bigger). We think we're supposed to fling calculators at a model building with it, so we're going for accuracy over range... I think we'll do well on this one.

Anyway, I've always wanted to make a trebuchet, and now I have.

¹:Stands for manly construction, which does big construction projects with power tools, as opposed to "girly con" which is in charge of artsy craftsy things and making things we make look nice --membership to either cons, however, isn't gener-specific in any way). [Tagged: scavhunt university+of+chicago trebuchet ]