San Diego: March 2005

Better late than never, here’s the latest installment of our March, west coast business trip, travelogue. After 10 days of working in Palo Alto, we headed south; it was during this drive we saw the egrets mentioned in the last update. In due time we arrived in San Diego for the eTech05 conference.

Below is a small sample of the images taken around San Diego. First, there’s a photo of the coastline a bit north of San Diego, near La Jolla, followed by a view of the lovely Silver Strand beach, and ending with a nice sunset image.

You may click on any of the photos above to see a larger version; alternatively, a slide show of these and other San Diego photos is available.

Here’s some eye candy I came across at the recent Etech conference. (Visit my eTech archive for more about the conference.) Using the flickr API, jbum has created some interesting mosaic images. Shown below is a Fibonacci spiral and a detail from the spiral; these were created using images from the squared circle group photo pool.

Click the image for more information and to view at different sizes.

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Click this image for a special version (of a slightly different image), where each of the squaredcircles is “clickable”.

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And if that’s not enough, jbum has created a new mosaic, based on the concept of a day in the life.

Wow! I’ve never done anything quite like this before. 27 eTech posts over a 4 day period. Written pretty much in real time, with only a quick scan for outright stupidness before posting. I created a new category, eTech, so all of the postings can be found in one spot.

Was it worth it? Time will tell, but I think so. For one thing, I was keenly focused on every talk I blogged. On the other hand, I missed the meta-conference from last year, aka as the conference IRC backchannel.

The postings will help serve as a trip report, for sharing with colleagues. Beyond that, they will hopefully serve to alert others that interesting things were said about this topic and that. I tried to include some links of interest to give each article more value. I’d like to think I’ll go back through the posts and add a few more links, but that is unlikely.

Taking a quick look back over the postings and the sessions I attended, a couple of interesting themes stand out for me. First, I’m not sure I realized how interested I am in the whole categorizing/folksonomy discussion. I do face the related deep vs. wide issue both at work and in my personal archiving efforts; it’s great to see all these excellent minds worrying about my problems.

2nd, there was a lot of focus on web services, and how opening up an API can help make a service grow and thrive. Many examples of this were seen at various talks.

Favorite non-technical talks, in no particular order:

* Lessig on remix
* Lifehacks
* von Neumann’s universe

For the second year in a row, I had a very thought-provoking and energizing time at eTech, and consider it one of my best conference experiences to date.

Mark Fletcher, CEO and founder of bloglines, shared with the eTech audience his experiences with starting a couple of different web services companies.

Garage philosophy:

* passion for the idea
* cheap technologies
* keep it simple
* release early/release often
* involve your users

More on philosophy:

* moonlighting limits risk
* friends/family funding
* free services = less pressure
* web services APIs are a good thing
* hire a lawyer
* find good help (especially a sys admin)
* outsource to eLance, an online index of free-lancers

Simple web services architecture:

frontend: web servers, email servers
backend: db servers

Tools:

* http://cr.yp.to/
* http://www.clearsilver.net/
* http://www.sleepycat.com/

Of course, they are LAMP based. For hardware, they bought their own and then used a colo service. It’s cheaper to get started by using a hosting service, but it doesn’t scale. He also covered some of the architectural choices made by bloglines as they setup this service.

Overall, I think Mark’s approach is sound; I certainly get good value from using bloglines while traveling (netnewswire otherwise), and it’s been very reliable.

Ben Trott, co-founder of SixApart, the creators of MovableType, presented this afternoon at eTech. Talking on the subject of building personal web services, he talked about building tools for personal use.

Remixing of code, not content, though not with an eye towards replacing existing web services, but rather with an eye towards personal use and development.

There are lots of APIs out there, along with tons of RSS feeds, plus geo-location data, and this is all waiting for folks to utilize as the basis for new and interesting services.

There are many libraries, in most programming languages, to facilitate such development, and Ben goes on to give a couple of examples.

The first one is a personal friends aggregator, which is a page that lists all posts from your friends. Details in the slides if you wish to build a similar tool.

Another example is a feed splicer. It’s a simple tool, and joins together all feeds from one person who posts on multiple sites.

In summary, this presentation did provide a few ideas for folks who are looking to implement simple web services for either personal use or as an educational project.