Berkeley Go Club

I went to my first meeting of the Berkeley Go Club. It was a bit of a search, and spooky going down that dark hallway, to find the meeting room. I played a game with Herb and got whooped very well. I think it would be good for me to play with these folks more. Hopefully I can attend again before I head home.

"java is dead"

Do a google search for “java is dead” and see how many results you get. I just got “about 9,210″. Of course this number will rise. The question is: how quickly?

Bob Graham’s story

Can you say “hidden agenda”?

Java Technology

A funny thing happened this weekend that shed some light on some “advantages” of Java. What happened was that a JSP file got pushed to production that was missing a right parenthesis. It happened to be the JSP for the front page of the site. For a bit there it looked like the DNS would need to be switched back to the old site because the new site was basically totally broken by this broken JSP.

Somehow this belies some of the “advantages” of compiled Java. The theory is that with a compiled language you at least know that you’ve got all the syntax right, and all you’re variables types check out ok, etc. etc.

The truth is that people get annoyed with the edit-compile-test cycle and find shortcuts. JSP is completely sanctioned, but built in a way to short circuit the compile step. I don’t recall anybody every mentioning this bit when they talk about the advantages of having a compiler in Java.

Ruby

I just picked up Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas,Chad Fowler,Andy Hunt. I started looking at Ruby on Rails (again) and was watching this movie and decided I should give this thing some serious attention. I guess the thing that sent me to that movie was checking out Beyond Java by Bruce Tate. It didn’t really have much good to say about Lisp (my candidate for the next big thing), but it did seem to be pretty favorable for Ruby. The biggest thing is that the lead in to the book is the write up on the author’s “wake up call” by doing 4 months of java work in 4 weeks with Ruby on Rails.

The Autodesk File

This seems to be the stuff that Dan Drake and R. Cringely were talking about.

another way to make money

I spoke briefly with Tim about how there is no shortage of good ideas. In particular there is never a shortage of ideas about how to make money. What matters is execution. I said “every time I watch another edition of NerdTV I have another brilliant idea on how to change the world.”

So, this interview with Brewster Kahle, in particular gave me a great idea. The problem to solve is that authors on the web are not properly rewarded by royalties. In fact, the majority of internet authors have to pay in order to publish.

The solution, if I may be so humble as to offer it, is to create an online royalty system. It must be voluntary, affordable, easy to use, and protect readers privacy. Google is probably the top candidate right now to build such a thing, but paypal would be more likely, since they’re interested in being a clearinghouse for financial transactions. To get back to the solution: The solution is to create a plugin for browsers that will collect information on which pages have been visited that request money. The flag “please pay me” would either be in the HTTP headers (reasonably easy to extend HTTP servers to do that) and/or in META tags in the HTML content (very easy to add to blogs/whatever HTML content). The HTTP header bit is necessary for non-HTML content like video/pictures/etc. Then periodically, the user would say “show me my pending royalty payments.” Then they could review their “bill” and easily alter payment amounts (including deleting items they thought were not worthy), or boost items that they think deserve more payment. The amounts of the payments would have to be small of course. There would be an amount to cover “bandwidth”, and amount “for the author”. As in the real world, an author would have to have a large volume of readers to actually make any money.

The business model is to take a small slice of the transactions in order to cover the cost of being an intermediary.

Fundamental to this whole thing is trust. In this model, the customers establish a single trust relationship with the intermediary. They trust that their private data will not be shared, and that the money goes where they say. It’s essentially another paypal setup, except for a particular kind of payment. The google angle of course is that actual money paid is a pretty good clue as to the quality of content. That could be fed into a search/ranking system.

(Later that day…)

Oh yeah, and another thing. This should be open source. Well, at least the protocol must be open source, and the client side must be open source. That’s a component of trust. Letting everybody see what information is being transfered, etc. The protocol for making the payments must allow for multiple intermediaries. The trouble here is that this leaves the door wide open for direct competition. The advantage is that this increases the chances of being in a viable market. If there is an open standard with competing providers, that’s much more viable than a attempting to get everybody to voluntarily sign-up for your monopoly.

wanna make some money?

Heard a story on NPR yesterday about an online poker service going public. I suspect it was on marketplace but I can’t find it.

Anyway, it occurs to me that online poker is a pretty stupid idea. If you were gonna play poker, would you sit down at a table where every other player has a computer in their lap and you can’t see what they’re doing with it? Very likely they would be tracking all the cards and calculating odds of winning with their hand.

This is exactly the scenario in online poker.

I at least 3 ways to exploit this to make money.

1. Write software that you can use to track and calculate odds for yourself to use so that you can play and win consistently. Use it while playing online to take other players money.

2. Write that software and sell it to other people.

3. Turn your software into an online poker-playing agent, and let it just play for you online.

As with so many ideas, this one has a distinct window of opportunity. Wait too long and you’ll miss it. Either the online poker world will collapse because everybody realizes there is no sport in it, or the online poker companies will be be chasing all the exploiters of the system. Win too much/too often and you’ll get targeted for expulsion.

Another option is that the online poker suppliers will change the game so that it’s more randomized, e.g. always deal from fresh deck. In this case it changes the whole thing to mere gambling.

Books for MacOS X

This seems to be the app I’ve been wanting for quite a while. I was trying to find something like this (again) as a webapp, and came across this. Basically, I want to maintain a list of books I have, or have read and share that list on the web. The interface for amazon lists is too icky to use, so I gave that up. I think this (Books for OS X) may be the one.

pix?

Testing to see how the image upload thing works in blogger.