At the Bloggy Mountain High thing in Colorado, I met Byron, the inventor of the wonderful Clip-n-Seal product. So inspired by his bloggish inventors spirit, I now share with you my greatest invention, Bookmark 2.0! :)
I read a lot of nonfiction books and I like to mark certain passages for later reference. I've used the dogear technique often in the past, but I've come up with a new technique. I take a normal bookmark and stick a bunch of Post-It page marker slips on the back of it. Whenever I want to mark a spot in the book I just peel off a strip and stick it on the page.
It's been working out great, but I would add one more thing to make it the perfect bookmark: a pencil or pen built into the bookmark itself. Anyone know if such a thing exists?
1. Invent the worlds best bookmark.
2. ....
3. Profit!
Technorati Tags: invention
About a year ago, Mie and I watched an excellent PBS documentary series called The New Americans. It followed the lives of immigrants who came to America to try to build a better life for themselves and their families. We were touched by their struggles and strength and it made us want to find a way to financially help people like this, because it is often a relatively small lack of money that holds these families down. Mie found a way to do this in a way within her own social network which has resulted in some nice Pay it Forward action, but it wasn't really the sort of situation we had envisioned.
I had previously ran across the website of Kiva.org, an organization that accepts loans over the Internet on behalf of small businesses in developing countries. This is similar in concept to the microfinancing of the Grameen Foundation which made headlines with their Cellphone program in Bangladesh. The foundation delivered loans of a few hundred dollars to women in Bangladesh who used it to purchase cellphones and service plans. These entrepeneurs then created a sustainable business based on charging their neighbors per phone call. The payback rate on these loans was outstanding. "Grameen borrowers have [repaid] their loans at a rate of 99 percent, which is higher than credit cards, student loans, or home mortgages."
Kiva allows Joe Internet to participate in microfinancing by vetting loan applications and then collecting the loan principal via paypal. Unfortunately, when I first stumbled across Kiva they had already collected all of the money they needed to meet their approved loan applications, so I couldn't participate. Recently they approved a new batch from small businessmen in Honduras, Nicaragua and Palestine so today I donated $100 towards the Kiva loan for Ziyad Grocery in Gaza, Palestine.
Kiva will provide me with email updates throughout the term of the loan and I can also check an online journal for this loan account. When Ziyad al Kafarneh pays off his loan in 12-16 months, I will get my $100 back. I can then loan it out again or withdraw it. I'm excited about this system! As of this morning, Ziyad Grocery is still a few hundred short from the total $800 loan amount. Perhaps you'd like to join me in this venture? I believe the funding level can be as low as $25.
Today is day three of CodeCon #5, one of my favorite hacker conferences. I think the first year was one day for $40 and Bram's little project BitTorrent was introduced to a crowd of about 50 geeks; this year it is a three day event for $85, Bram is the founder of world famous and VC funded BitTorrent Incorporated and there are over 100 geeks in attendance.
My favorite presentation Friday was on the Daylight Fraud Prevention, a clever system for defeating the folks who launch phishing attacks. Unfortunately it was the first presentation and the con started late so the speaker was told to rush his presentation. He spoke so fast it was complete buffer overflow for me at first, but I was impressed once I figured out what he describing and how comprehensively considered his system was. I also learned a lot about phishing techniques, which can be much more advanced than I had thought.
On Saturday I was looking forward to the Djinni presentation, subtitled "Approximating Solutions to Nigh-Unsolvable Problems--Fast" which was all about approximating answers to NP-Complete problems. In my last company I was responsible for tackling the NP Complete problem of subgraph isomorphisms in the realm of molecular seach. Unfortunately I got distracted at the beginning of his talk so I think I had problems following exactly how the Djinni method worked. I'll take a look at it again later to see how it could be applied to the molecular search stuff I used to work on.
Having telecommuted for about 3/4 of my 12 year career, I found the iGlance presentation impressive. It is a well thought out system for replicating the feel of being just over the cubicle wall from your in-fact remote collaborators. For awhile in my last job I approximated this by leaving an otherwise unused machine in the North Carolina office running an iSight link all day long connected to my California laptop. When folks in NC wanted to talk to me they could just stop by my 'desk' or just wave on their way out to lunch. iGlance is much much more sophisticated, but it's only available on Windows so I won't be trying it out until it's ported to an operating system I use.
In the end, I think my favorite presentation of the day was the Query By Example extension for Postgres. This allows you to specify conditional and ranking parameters when querying an N-featured information space. What that translates to is being able to specify the WHERE and ORDER BY sections of a SQL SELECT statement using a few examples of what rows in the table you like and don't like. This was an entirely new concept to me and I'm not even sure how I could make use of it, but I'm going to enjoy churning it around in my head in the coming months. It also introduced me to some new things to study like Support Vector Machines.
My low point of the day was certainly when I discovered that my ettercap network scan was causing some sort of havoc on the wifi network. This really surprised me as I always do these sorts of scans at conferences just to see how many people aren't using secure communications and post the status to the conference irc channel (for example, here's Friday's scan results that I posted Saturday morning, ettercap log, which were strangely numerous for such a security-conscious audience). I was never aware of it causing problems before, and in fact I'd done it at the last couple of CodeCons as well without incident. I still don't quite understand how it was affecting network quality, but I guess in a way that just underscores my point of publically doing these network scans anyhow; you gotta be careful, because any idiot can run an off the shelf app and scan your unprotected traffic. Still, quite embarassing :)
Today, although it means missing one of my favorite San Francisco activities, Urban Golf, I'm heading back in a bit for day three. The projects I'm looking forward to most today are Monotone, a "low stress, high functionality version control" system, and Rhizome, a s semantic web application stack. I seem to recall that I first ran across the Subversion version control system at a CodeCon, so who knows perhaps in a year I'll be tracking all my projects in Monotone.