The World Needs More Ninjas

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The Unbearable Joy of Taxes

Ah, the opportunity to reflect on how craptacular our tax system is. Because of my stipend in grad school, there was no withholding, so we had to send in quarterly estimated taxes. Our Illinois state tax was always pretty close (last year it was only a $37 refund…that’s about as good as you [...]

The ACM Conference Talks

The student chapter of the ACM hosts a rather impressive student led conference here at UIUC every year. This year, Leigh Ann and I went to four of the talks they had.

Joel Spolsky: He writes a well-known blog in the tech community and is the CEO of Fog Creek Software. He was a [...]

The Darndest Thing

Sometimes you just learn something that shakes your entire concept of reality. Last night, someone was telling us about a kid she went to college with who was black but had two white parents. After the obligatory “milkman’s baby jokes”, we decided to look it up. According to genetics experts, this isn’t [...]

The Virtues of Openess

Here’s an interesting post advocating open salary knowledge within a company.

There are three major reasons why salaries secret are silly:

It frustrates employees because any unfairness (real or perceived) can’t be addressed directly.
They’re not secret anyway. People talk, you know.
It perpetuates unfair salaries which is bad for people and for the organization

…
Making salaries public (inside the [...]

The Joys of Video Editing (Or Lack Thereof)

Goal: Take an hour of camcorder footage, digitize it, splice out the best clips, and burn it to a DVD.
Why does this process have to be so freakin’ hard? This details my adventure. First, there’s the matter of getting the film from my friend’s camcorder, which only has composite outputs, to a digital [...]

The Corruptibles

The EFF has a new commercial detailing some of the anti-consumer legislation that the MPAA/RIAA is trying to get passed in Congress right now.

Go Ahead and Be Evil, Google

Here’s a funny article that imagines what products could Google bring to the market if they decided to abandon their “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

Google Murder
Why pay top dollar for a professional hit man when an amateur will do it for a few bucks and a good alibi? Google could leverage the technology behind Google Answers [...]

Sony’s Downward Spiral

Fresh off their rootkit debacle from last fall, Sony seems to be missing on all cylinders with the upcoming Playstation 3. The PS3 has such low expectations that if it doesn’t blow up when you plug it in, it will be hailed as a major success. Here’s a good article about Sony’s love [...]

A Bad Week for the MPAA/RIAA

First, allofmp3.com, the popular Russian site that sells non-DRM’d songs for about a tenth of iTunes’ price, gets an article in both CNN and the NY Times. That’s some pretty good advertising for the site.

I guess the MPAA/RIAA lobby is trying to keep Russia out of the WTO as long as the [...]

Coding 2.0

Replacement office chair suppliers in the Redmond area must be smiling today. Today, Google announced the release of the Google Web Toolkit which allows you to write code in Java and convert it into AJAX that can run in any browser as a web application. To me, this is a potentially huge development [...]

Google and Small Business

Here’s some interesting insights about the business models of Google and Microsoft by Robert X. Cringley.

Here’s the most important key to Google’s success: Most Google advertisers don’t advertise ANYWHERE else. Its mainly small and medium sized companies whose advertisements the average person would NEVER have seen before the Internet. Google is making a ton of [...]

From the “Cool Things I Didn’t Know Existed” Department

A friend from Korea told me that Korean airlines offer WiFi in-flight on their flights to/from America. He said the cost is about $30/flight and the bitrate is about 1-2 Mbps. Evidently, the connectivity is good too. Plus, they have plug-ins for each seat so you can work on your laptop the [...]

Random Tidbits from the Web

Amidst the MySpace hysteria, Congress proposes banning access to the site from libraries and schools. Isn’t telling teenagers “No” the most effective way of ensuring that they will do the activity? In other news, I think I’ll change my career track to be a “MySpace Pedophile Bounty Hunter”. Seems like that’s [...]

The CEO Work Day

I found this article absolutely fascinating.
It has people like Bill Gates and other CEOs essentially walk you through their work day. Of particular interest to me was the way people use email. Basically for the two tech people (Gates and the Google VP) and two law people (the law firm partner and Posner [...]

Apple Pwns Little Girl

Before Steve Jobs starts running Disney, he might want to figure out how corporations should deal with those little rug rats that we call kids.

When 9-year-old Shea O’Gorman and her third-grade class began learning about writing business and formal letters, she thought who better to write to than the chief executive of the company that [...]

MySpace…More Like Waste of Space

With MySpace cracking the Top 10 most visited sites last month, it seems like a good time to offer my thoughts on this waste of Internet space. If this is supposed to be Web 2.0, it definitely uses Web Design 0.1. Some may be worried about sexual predators lurking in MySpace. I’m [...]

The Beginning of Crash 2.0

According to BusinessWeek, Facebook turned down $750 million because they want $2 billion.

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much [...]

The BBC on DRM

The BBC has an article about DRM. Money quote:

Yet, there seems to be a belief that rigorous enforcement of technological restrictions, backed up by the ruthless application of draconian laws that allow the replacement of copyright with contract law and criminalise activities which used to be considered legal - or acceptable even when not [...]

MPAA/RIAA: Let People Die, Just Don’t Let Them Circumvent DRM

Pop quiz: What’s more important:
A. Protecting people’s lives
B. Protecting critical infrastructure
C. Thwarting terrorists
D. A, B, and C
E. Making sure users don’t circumvent the copy protection on the latest Britney Spears song that they bought
If you answered E, you probably have a bright career ahead of you working for the MPAA or RIAA. A request [...]

Cory Doctorow Interview

Here’s a nice, short interview with Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame about copyright and the Internet.

I mean, the plan that the industry has is basically to come up with a world where all digital devices have to be approved, all analogue devices have to recognise watermarks, and the internet as we know it is torn [...]