Jeff Barr’s Blog

• The Idea Shower: What Will the Web See When You Die? - “If people were to write about you today and used to the web to research you, what would they find? And more importantly, would you want others to read it?“
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Peggy Version 2.0 - “Peggy is designed to takes some of the sting, complexity, and mess out of playing with LEDs. It’s a versatile and powerful light-emitting pegboard that lets you efficiently drive hundreds of LEDs in whatever configuration you like, without so much as calculating a single load resistor. You can install anywhere from one to 625 LEDs, and Peggy will light them up for you.“

• Steve Rubel: Three Ways to Mitigate the Attention Crash, Yet Still Feel Informed - “The key is in wrangling your information flow. Here are three of my best tips.“

• UK Guardian: Timeline of the Universe - “Using observatories on the earth and in space, astronomers have been able to study the nature of the cosmos in unprecedented detail. By analysing the motion of distant galaxies, they have discovered that the whole cosmos is expanding under the influence of forces unleashed at its birth in the big bang.“

• Inform IT: Interview With Don Knuth - “I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! “

• John Dvorak: Vista’s 11 Pillars of Failure - “You get the sense that Microsoft just piles code on top of code and somewhere in the middle of it all is MS-DOS 1.0.“
• NPR: Home Prices Drop Most in Areas with Long Commute - “Recent studies suggest that buyers underestimated the costs of their long commutes. Those expenses can add up to more than the buyers saved on the home.“
• Steven Pearlstein: The Bottom Is Up Ahead - “What if, for the better part of a decade, the United States had been living way beyond its means, consuming more than it produced and investing more than it saved? What if China and Taiwan and Saudi Arabia and even Japan were willing to finance that trade deficit on easy terms because it allowed them to peg their currencies to the dollar in a way that generated higher job creation and economic growth in their home markets?“

I’ve been suffering under the weight of an overfilled work inbox for far too long. Although I would do my best to stay on top of things, it has been a challenge to simply keep up, let alone make any headway. Far too often, I run into someone at a conference and they will say “I sent you an email.” I then have to switch in to apology mode and tell them that I’ve been drowning in email (which is the truth).

I decided against email bankruptcy. The situation isn’t that hopeless, and these are all business contacts. It would be rude, unprofessional, and counterproductive to simply throw them out and start over.

Instead, I decided to devote more of my time to working through the backlog and (just as important) to start tracking my progress on a daily basis. Like losing weight (another project for this year) getting caught up with your email is a long process, not something that can be taken care of overnight.

So, on March 31st I recorded the number of messages in my inbox at the start of the day, did my best to get the ending point, below the starting point, and iterated day by day. I had 1,941 things in my inbox at the beginning of the day and 1,873 in the day. This is the net progress, which includes the dozens of emails which show up and are processed during the day. I’ve been making good headway day by day and am now down to 1,334 messages. In about 2 weeks I have chewed through about 31% of my inbox. Here’s my record:

It turns out that tracking my progress (or lack thereof) on a daily basis is key. I used a Google Docs Spreadsheet so that I could get to the same data from the office, my home, or on the road (cloud computing, what a great concept ;-).

Note that processed means that I have done as much as I possibly can to move the message forward. It doesn’t mean that I turned the message into a TODO item or that I moved it into a different folder for some later time which will never come. The message has been handled or it doesn’t count.

After I get my work inbox under control, I will start on my personal inbox. There are 3500 messages and the oldest one is from November of 2005. I may try the Mail Trends tool that I found in Life Hacker.

PS - Don’t email me to congratulate me; that would wreck my statistics!

• Joy of Tech: Warning Labels for Bloggers - “Caution: Excessive Twittering can seriously harm you and your followers. - Hilarious.”
• GEGL: Generic Graphics Library - “GEGL’s original design was made to scratch GIMP’s itches for a new compositing and processing core. This core is being designed to have minimal dependencies. and a simple well defined API.“

• Alex Iskold: The American Dream: 17 Years of Engineering Software - “The final project was to write an editor in Assembly 8086; and for over three weeks I was trying all possible combinations of letters and digits that could make the program run. I got it, but it was really like monkeys typing Shakespeare.“
• Me: Storage Space, The Final Frontier - “I am excited to be able to tell you about an entire new feature, a feature so new that it doesn’t even have a proper name, and that you can’t use just yet. But you can read about it and you can start thinking about the best way to incorporate it into your system architecture.“

• Journal of Virtual Worlds Research - “The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world“
• Firefox Add-Ins: Thumbstrips - “ThumbStrips is a Firefox extension that creates a filmstrip of thumbnails so you can see your history, and stop guessing at page names in the history sidebar.“
• Mitch Wagner: Qwaq Brings Virtual Worlds To Business Collaboration - “The power of virtual worlds is that they trick your brain into thinking you’re actually sharing a physical space with other people, participating in a shared activity. As a result, conversations and collaboration are richer. People who’d remain silent in a conference call, Webex, or chatroom will speak up in a meeting in a virtual world.“

• Piet Huk: Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds - “Rarely in my life have I so completely misjudged a situation. Getting an existing group to make the transition to a totally new mode of communication turned out to be effectively impossible. Trying to change given ways of doing things provoked far more resistance than I had expected, in both my astrophysics and my interdisciplinary collaborations. Simply put, that just didn’t work, period.“
• Garrett Mace: Project ShiftBrite - “ShiftBrite is a simple device I am designing and producing. It allows easy control of a bright RGB LED. The interface is a straightforward clocked serial data line and a latch input.” - Via Make.
• Reuters: IBM to Host Private Second Life Regions - “Under the new project, currently in beta testing and set to go live within several weeks, IBM employees will be able to move freely between the public areas of Second Life and private areas which are hosted behind IBM’s corporate firewall. This will enable the company to have sensitive discussions and disclose proprietary information without having the data pass through Linden Lab’s servers.“
  

• Music From Outer Space: Welcome to Music From Outer Space - “This website assumes a basic level of electronics proficiency and knowledge. To build the projects found here you must be able to read and understand schematics, relate schematics to physical components, solder, do panel wiring, case building, and troubleshooting. None of these projects has step by step instructions to follow. “
• Wikipedia: Pando - “Pando is a clonal colony of a single male Quaking Aspen tree located in the U.S. state of Utah, all determined to be part of a single living organism by identical genetic markers and one massive underground root system.“

• Cool Pictures: F15 Eagle Circles Space Shuttle - “An F15 Eagle circles the space shuttle Endeavor on its launch pad.“
• Marcelo Calbucci: The Secret to a Happy Marriage… - “There you have it, my wife doesn’t even know I run one of the most popular blogs for tech startups in Seattle!“
• M. David Peterson: [MTS08] Flight w/ Piers Hollot; Dinner w/ Jeff Barr and Tara Hunt; Lunch w/ Brady Forrest, David Recordon, and Brad Fitzpatrick - “Earlier in the week I had been fortunate enough to receive an invitation from Jeff Barr for an evening of dinner and fun with he and his family as well as Tara Hunt. Last night was that night, an absolutely fantastic evening, one I wish each and everyone of you could have been a part of. Incredible meal, incredible family, incredible conversation, all rolled into one. :)“

• Wall Street Journal: Ten Days That Changed Capitalism - “Like firefighters rushing to a five-alarm fire, policy makers are making mistakes that will be apparent only in retrospect.“

• Robert Scoble: The Secret to Twitter - “At some point I thought it was important to get lots of followers. But lately I’ve been telling people that the secret to Twitter isn’t how many followers you have, but how many people you are following.“
• Alexei Kapterev: Death by PowerPoint - “People read faster than you speak. That means you are useless.“

My friend Kevin Burton was lamenting the fact that NASA has been forced to cut funding for Spirit and Opportunity, the two Mars rovers which have long outlived their design lifetime, sending back tons of data and pictures in the process.

The budget shortfall? 4 million dollars. A mere pittance in the big scheme of things, when you think about it. I’m not going to go into the politics behind this. Obvioiusly, I’m for science and space exploration. I was following the Mercury missions by the time I was 5 years old. We need more low-budget, high-return programs like this.

Fellow space geeks, are we going to let this happen? I think not. Let’s save those rovers!

I’m traveling and have to be at my first meeting in less than two hours, so I need your help. I see a couple of ways to go about this. As always, we can tell our elected representives that we believe science and space exploration are important to our country and to our future, and that we need them to pitch in and help.

The second plan is a bit different. What if we just raise the freaking 4 million bucks ourselves and simply give it to the team? What would happen if we showed up at NASA HQ with a big plywood check (backed up by real money of course)? Could they take it, and would this make a difference? Does anyone know?

I just registered savetherovers.com and would be happy to use it as part of an organized effort to do something remarkable. I would also be willing to pitch in $100 as my part of the $4 million. That means we need just $3,999,900 more.

Anyone want to help here? Leave a comment and let’s see what we can figure out…

• UK Telegraph: Fed’s Rescue Halted a Derivatives Chernobyl - “Bear Stearns had total positions of $13.4 trillion. This is greater than the US national income, or equal to a quarter of world GDP.“
• Secure File Upload in PHP Applications - “Unfortunately this is not enough. A file can be a proper GIF or JPEG image and at the same time a valid PHP script.“

• Tamara Adlin: Bad, Bad Ads Manifesto, Chapter 1 - “Online ads have been driving me nutso-bonkers long enough. It’s time that I started griping about them in my blog, which, of course, will cause the entire industry to change overnight. So here goes.“
• A380 Blade Off Test - “Well that was an expensive 5 minutes.“
• Greg Linden: Designing for Internet Scale - “The paper does read like a laundry list, so let me point at what I consider the most important recommendations.“
• Bad Astronomy Blog: Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Milky Way Galaxy - “So you’ve lived here all your life — in fact, everyone has — but what do you really know about the Milky Way galaxy? Sure, you know it’s a spiral, and it’s 100,000 light years across.“

I’ve been on the road since the 10th of March when I flew from Seattle to London by way of Chicago. I brought my wife and my oldest daughter along for the first 8 days of my trip.

I’ve been too busy to do much in the way of personal blogging. I have been contributing to the AWS Blog and the AWS Buzz, and have also tried to keep my Twitter stream current.

Since then I’ve stayed in 5 different hotels in London and the surrounding areas. I presented at QCon and had a traditional English Tea in St. James Park. I made day trips to Slough, Rotterdam, and Oxford (where I got to be a judge) and spent 2 days each in Manchester (for the Northwest StartUp 2.0 Demo) and Brighton (for the Bar Camp).

My day trip to Rotterdam was quite productive. A one hour flight across the North Atlantic and there I was. Our return flight landed early but we had to sit on the tarmac for a while because the first Airbus A380 takeoff from London Heathrow was imminent. I was sitting on the wrong side of the plane (a tiny Fokker 50) and didn’t get to see the A380.

Yesterday I started with a “Full English Breakfast” and had Bangers and Mash (sausage and mashed potatoes) later in the day. The Full English breakfast is truly a work of art. It consists of eggs (scrambled, poached, or sunny-side up), baked beans, a grilled mushroom, a grilled tomato slice, some sausage, some bacon, toast, and some black sausage.

My wiki-powered itinerary has worked out really well. I have had an amazing number of meetings. I reconnected with old friends and made some new ones too. I do have two huge envelopes full of receipts and I am not looking forward to spending a day inside of Oracle Expense (previously reviewed here).

I am meeting some Amazon colleagues for lunch today and I’ll continue on to Washington DC tomorrow. After that I head up to Philly and I will be back at home later in the week.

On the down side I wasn’t planning to be away from home this long. When I was planning my spring trips last year I thought of my London trip as being in mid-March and my DC trip as late March. Without realizing what I had agreed to do, I had created a 17-day monster trip. I won’t do that again. I also failed to notice that tomorrow is Easter Sunday. I’m really missing my family, and I owe them a lot of quality time when I get back on Thursday.

• Econ Steve: So, the Fed is in the Mortage Business? - “I had joked with my econ professor that perhaps the day would come that if I couldn’t pay for my car, I could sell it to the Fed. I suppose anything is possible.“

My wife is the president of our neighborhood homeowner’s association. A few months ago she convinced me to take control of the web site. I dithered around for a while, not sure of what I wanted or how I wanted to do it. I looked into several specialized “neighborhood site” applications but didn’t really find anything that really appealed to me. I didn’t want the HOA to be saddled with a monthly fee and I was also concerned about the longevity and viability of these applications.

Last night I finally decided on a course of action and within two hours I had my new site up and running with all of the content from the old site moved over and in its place! How did I do it?

I created a Wetpaint wiki and copied the old content over, page by page. I uploaded a number of PDF documents (the neighborhood CC&Rs, directory, and so forth) as attachments and linked them in. I also created a section called “Family Pages” with a link to some information about me, my wife, and my kids — links to our blogs and information about the fact that my son can teach piano and that my daughters are always looking for babysitting jobs.

The finished result looks really good. Access to the wiki is by invitation only and will be limited to homeowners in my neighborhood. I’m going to keep it locked down in order to encourage my neighbors to feel comfortable contributing and sharing. That’s the real challenge. Given that we live in a high-tech neighborhood in the shadow of Microsoft, I’m expecting some good results. Like I told my wife, the real issue here is a social one. We need everyone to understand that they are empowered to add their own content. They need to take an active role in creating and maintaining what could prove to be a very valuable information resource.

My hope is that some extremely useful and wholly unexpected uses are found for this wiki. I have lots of ideas for more types of content, but I am going to resist the urge to add more features (that’s what the Microsoft folks are here for :-) and will sit back to see what develops.

If you happen to live in my neighborhood and you are ready to participate, send me an email and I will reply with an invitation. We’re going to start out quietly and then roll this out at the annual meeting in April.