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 …

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 …

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? …

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 …

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 …

One of the most enjoyable eTech presentations was the return of last year’s Life Hacks talk. Like last year it covered a wide range of topics related to techniques that geeks and hackers worldwide use to increase their personal effectiveness.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a seat (the talk was SRO), and so didn’t take any …

Google announced a new web site at eTech, Google Code.

It’s appears to be an open-source portal, with a focus on google technologies such as their API, info on their open source involvement, and so on.

Chris DiBona, google’s open source program manager introduced the site and then ran through a brief list of current projects.