Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Yesterday afternoon, I returned to my desk to find my Mac frozen. When I rebooted, the hard drive started making horrible noises, so there was no question that my 200GB Hitachi drive had crapped out. Fortunately, Time Machine had my back, and the good news is that I dusted off the 250GB HM250JI Samsung drive I had written off a while back. I had installed it in my MacBook, but it was slow to the point of being unusable. And as it turns out, this was a bug. I wouldn’t have known this if my hard drive hadn’t crashed, because I’d been using the 250GB drive in an external enclosure, where it behaved fine, if a little slow. Well, one firmware update later, and this drive is zipping along. It’s not a blazing speed demon, but it’s in the sweet spot for performance/capacity that I had hoped for when I bought it!

I was planning to make a MiniPOV Cylon Jack-O-Lantern, but I remembered I didn’t have a MiniPOV at home. I placed an order for one to remedy this, but I figured the order wouldn’t get here in time for Halloween, so I whipped something else up instead. It’s a Jack-O-Lantern that’s designed to look like it’s got a flickering candle in it… until you get up close. It has a proximity sensor and brings the LEDs up to maximum brightness as soon as you get near it. The source code is based on an example from Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, which I now keep on my bench within reach of all my Arduino boards. I wrote up an Instructable that shows how to do it. Now I need to figure out what to put the electronics in for the next holiday. I think stuffing it in a turkey could be a remarkably bad idea.

I got home late afternoon Tuesday, and I’ve had a few days to reflect on the fun I had at Maker Faire. This was my third Maker Faire, but only the second one that I really worked at (at the first one, I had an exhibit, but I didn’t participate in the setup/teardown). At the 2007 San Mateo Maker Faire, I spent nearly all my time in the Maker Store, where we sell books, issues of Make, t-shirts, and my favorite, electronics kits. Make is nothing without its community, so we have a voracious appetite for kits from independent makers, and we sell these kits online and at events. These include kits like Adafruit’s MintyBoost, MiniPOV, electronic game kits from Grand Design and XGameStation.com, and a whole lot more. (The above photo shows Mark Frauenfelder trying out the Critter and Guitari cellular automata kit.)

At the Austin show, I worked in the store again. But this time, we had added a lot of new kits, and among the breakout sellers were the Arduino and Arduino-compatible boards. Arduino is generally described as a platform for physical computing (you can sense and control the physical world with them). It’s open source (both the hardware and software can be studied, modified, and passed on to others), and it’s very easy to program because it was designed by and for artists and designers. The board is based on the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, and the programming language is similar to Java.

One of the reasons that the Arduino did so well (we sold out of the pre-assembled boards fairly early the second day of the show) is that we also had a new book for sale: Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, which is a full-color book with projects showing how to create amazing things with Arduino. It was a no-brainer for someone who wanted to play with Arduino to buy one or two Arduino boards along with the book. All they need to get to the Arduino equivalent of “Hello, World” is a USB cable, a computer (Mac, Windows, or Linux) to program the board, and a red LED to blink.

If it sounds like I’m shilling for product, well, I probably am, but my enthusiasm for it exceeds my desire to sell things to you. When I edited Tom’s book, I got the Arduino fever, and now my office is filled with sensors, displays, solar panels, passive components, LEDs, and Arduino boards. When I was a kid, I played with electronics and home computers whose capabilities were similar to Arduino’s. One of my big thrills at Maker Faire was setting up a ZigBee-based demo using a couple of Arduino boards that I put out and let people play with.

One of the cool things about working in the store was that we had a section reserved for the independent makers who build the kits we sell. Limor Fried of Adafruit spent a lot of time there talking about the MintyBoost and MiniPOV. Dave and Cheryl Hrynkiw of Solarbotics had a permanent crowd of kids, which led to us selling out of Mousebot kits really fast. Karl Papadantonakis of LEDKit.biz was showing off his amazing no-solder LED digital clock. Andre LaMothe of XGameStation.com demoed the 8-core Hydra game console and the XGameStation Pico. Jed Berk, maker of the Blubberbot autonomous/semi-domesticated blimp robot was also there. Raphael Abrams set up a great demo for the Daisy MP3 player and answered questions about it from attendees. And from my own neck of the woods, Paul Badger of ModernDevice was joined by David Fowler from uC Hobby to show off Paul’s Bare Bones Board, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board that you build yourself! What’s more, all these folks gave talks and did workshops on their kits (more on that later).

So even though I was deep in the belly of a commercial enterprise for most of the faire, my responsibility was to connect these small independent kit makers with a community of people who are enthusiastic about their creations. What really blew me away was that there’s a growing market around people who take a cool idea, find a way to produce it in modest quantities, and maybe make a living selling them to enthusiastic fans who are going to learn a LOT from building and playing with their kits!

P.S. if anyone knows of a good, small Newtonian reflector telescope kit (or wants to design and manufacture one), let me know in the comments!

BIF-3 is over, I can’t wait for BIF-4. The day ended with a conversation between Walt Mossberg and Mark Cuban. I wrote it up in more detail over at the BIF Speak blog.

Originally posted on the BIF Speak blog.

Walt Mossberg continued his conversations on day 2 of BIF-3, bringing storyteller Clayton Christensen up on stage. It was refreshing to see Christensen say that the cell phone is poised to disrupt the personal computer because I’m a firm believer in that, too. What was really fun for me was the conversation about Nokia vs. Apple. If you’ve gotten a coffee or a beer in me, you’ve probably heard me rant on and on about this, but never as articulate as Christensen and Mossberg. Now you’re all in trouble, because I think I can speak more lucidly and loudly about this.

Christensen said his money is on Nokia to build a platform that disrupts the personal computer. Mossberg replied that Nokia has made several tries to do this, and they all sucked. I completely agree with Christensen, and even with Mossberg (who, for the record, made it clear he wasn’t placing bets). I have two phones in my pocket at all times: a Nokia 6290 and an Apple iPhone. When geeks ask me which cell phone they should buy, I give them a rundown on the issues and a little demo. The first thing I tell them is that if they are a geek and love tinkering with things and hacking them to do stuff that they won’t do out of the box, get a Nokia phone (but don’t get the 6290; I got it because it was the cheapest phone I could find running the latest version of the webkit browser). Then I tell them that both platforms use the same wonderful web browser, WebKit, which is the engine that powers both Safari and the S60 Browser.

There’s no question that the iPhone is a powerful product, and it’s going to get better. But my money’s on Nokia, too, for pretty much the same reasons Christensen has. Christensen said that the iPhone is a sustaining innovation: it keeps the iTunes Music Store platform alive in the face of more and more cellular companies competing with Apple on music downloads. But if you pick up a high end Nokia phone today and spend time tinkering with it… I mean really spend the time: download some of the 3rd-party software for it, mess around with Nokia’s Python interpreter, tweak every setting, and maybe even look at the free SDK and write a Hello, World. What I think you’ll see is a simmering cauldron of disruptive innovation, with a not-so-pretty user interface.

If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, let me jog your memory. What is Mac OS X? It’s a simmering cauldron of not-so-pretty disruptive innovation: FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, the GNU Compiler Collection, the Apache web server, and much more. What Apple did was take a beautiful user interface (NEXTSTEP), make it even better, and put it on top of that mess. What happens when Nokia takes that crucial step?

update: I spoke with Walt Mossberg during the break, and he made an important point. It’s wrong to look at Mac OS X as just a pretty face on top of a mess of random bits, and what I wrote above frames it that way. The NEXTSTEP-derived bits that make Mac OS X so wonderful are a really thick part of the whole stack. And likewise, it would be wrong to look at Nokia’s Series 60 as just a mess of disjoint components; it has many usable bits, particular the S60 web browser, high on up the stack. Nokia still has a lot of work ahead of it. If I were them, I’d stop with the feature set they have now, and spend all my resources on making a user interface as good or better than the iPhone. This doesn’t mean changing their icons or rearranging the layout of controls. They need to refactor things in such a way that usability permeates the Series 60 operating system.

I’m in Providence today (Wednesday, October 10) and tomorrow at the BIF-3 conference. You can follow my postings over at the BIF Speak blog; I’ll be posting throughout both days.

Robert Blackwell of the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers sent me an announcement about this weekend’s Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. Sounds pretty cool:

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP, a two-day, low-cost conference on Saturday and Sunday, October 13-14, 2007.

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is an annual conference dedicated to the Perl programming language. In 2006, the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers hosted the first Perl Workshop based in the United States. This year, the Workshop has been expanded to two days. The 2007 Workshop is structured as a series of short lectures, but the atmosphere is low key and engaging: the perfect combination to open your mind and then cram it full of good stuff.

You can get more details here. Man, it’s been a long time since we had a Rhode Island Perl Mongers meetup. A lot of former RI PM folks have been coming to the Providence Geek Dinners, which is a great place to talk about Perl and many other technical topics!

This should be interesting.

The Providence Geek Dinner returns this month on Wednesday September 19 at the usual time and location. Check out the Providence Geeks blog for complete details and RSVP!

No matter where you live, there’s a built-in bias against homegrown events, a widespread assumption that they can’t be world-class. If you’ve never been to any of the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF events (BIF-1, BIF-2, and now BIF-3), you might be tempted to give into this bias, but that would be a big mistake. Last year, I attended BIF-2 under a BIF N-GEN scholarship, so it didn’t cost me to attend. My blog coverage of the event last year earned me a spot as a member of this year’s blog-jam. But it would have been well worth the cost to me. This is an innovative event with top-notch speakers, and co-hosted by a Rhode Islander (Walt Mossberg) who has become a giant in technology through his Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal and the D: All Things Digital conference.

BIF-3 has an amazing lineup of speakers; here’s a list of a few:

BIF -3 will be hosted by Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg and Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor. The duo will guide participants through a program that includes Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, UnderSecretary of Homeland Security Jay Cohen, Ghost Map author and co-creator of outside.in Steven Johnson, 37signals founder and CEO Jason Fried, Providence Police Chief Colonel Dean Esserman, architect Chris Benedict, Studiocom chief creative officer Juan Fernando Santos, information architect Richard Saul Wurman, BzzAgent founder and CEO Dave Balter, IBM VP of Innovation Irving Wladawsky-Berger, author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Made to Stick author Dan Heath, president of Stanley Bostitch Denise Nemchev, author and founder of The Hybrid Vigor Institute Denise Caruso, founder of the gethuman project Paul English, Linear Air president and CEO William Herp, author and associate professor UC-Davis Graduate School of Management Andrew Hargadon, Icosystem CEO and Chief Scientific Officer Eric Bonabeau, TopCoder founder and chairman Jack Hughes, founder of Zipcar and GoLoco Robin Chase, Director of the MIT Agelab Joe Coughlin, and former head of Knowledge Management for the BBC Euan Semple.

At the admission price of $1,000 this is a very good deal, especially compared to other events around the world. And if you’re local, it’s even cheaper because you’re not paying for air fare to the San Francisco Bay Area or a hotel room (and I’ve heard a lot of folks in the northeast complain there are no good conferences here!). But it can get even cheaper. Here are two ways:

• When you register, mention that I sent you, and you can get in for $800.
• If you’re a Providence Geek, check out the even better offer (half price, but limited to five takers) over at the Providence Geeks weblog.