Jim Panttaja

Periodically I notice how many catalogs I receive in the mail. Recently I have had a weeks worth of mail forwarded to me at a time - and the stack of catalogs that I promptly throw in the recycling bin was staggering.

I found Catalog Choice. This web site let\’s you register your address(es), and names of recepients of catalogs. Then you can choose catalogs, choose the appropriate addresses and names, with the customer id. Catalog Choice will contact the sender and cancel the catalogs. They say it may take as much as 10 weeks - but if this works, it will be a huge savings in trees. So far, in three weeks of going though my mail and registering catalogs, I have requested that I be removed from 30 (count them) catalog lists. I had no idea the number would be that high. I wish I had done this ten weeks ago.

This is a project that we have had an eye on for awhile: One Laptop Per Child. Their original goal was to create a computer that would cost under $100. But the real goal is summed up in this part of their mission statement:

OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

So the computer is just a tool in this effort.

There is a special promotion starting on November 12th - their Give One, Get One program. For $400, you get one XO laptop, and donate one to a child in the developing world. You also receive a $200 tax deduction. And - yet - there’s more (from the letter we received from them):

Additionally, T-Mobile is offering donors one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot locations throughout the United States, which can be used from any Wi-Fi-capable device, including the XO laptop.

It is worth getting one (perhaps to give to your child or grandchild) just to open your mind up to what it makes possible:

Mesh networks

Incredible power consumtion

Cool power generation devices

Python, Logo

An Rss reader

A Wiki

The capabilities are incredible - spend some time on the site - and then imagine what you can do with yours - and imagine what a child in the developing world can do with theirs. Maybe you need to buy two and give two…

[Update 12 November 2007]

Bob Zurek has also commented on this program.

I am currently trying to fill two positions. A friend sent me an invitation to Doostang. Doostang represents themselves as an online career community. It is invitation only at the moment, and so I used my invitation to sign up. I looked around and found that they have job listings - and that I could list my jobs.

So - I listed my two jobs, and saw a cool feature that let me add them to Facebook as well. Really cool. Then I received the following email:

Hi Jim,

All of us here at Doostang are excited at the opportunity of helping you find great talent. Due to us catering to the current membership base at Doostang, and the small team we have to develop a better product, we’d appreciate if you can please refrain from posting your software/designer/engineering positions for now. When we have better categorization over the next few months, we will be able to handle these positions. In the meantime, if we can help you with any product management/marketing/business/sales/finance/interns etc. positions, please feel free to post all of these on Doostang.

Please let me know whether you have any questions. I would be delighted to answer them.

Thank you for the opportunity to work with you and for bearing with us!

Nat

—–

Nat Chambers
Community Relations Manager
Doostang

This is my second web-based bait-and-switch in two days. They want my participation. They want me to add my friends to bolster their network. They want me to add jobs, unless it is the jobs I want to fill at the moment. What was particularly puzzling is that their are engineering jobs listed on the site. And one of their categories is a little weird - but says ‘Product Management and Engineering’. So it seems like they want my participation.

But as I told them in my email - its their football - they can bait-and-switch or make whatever rules they want. But I can be offended - and share that with other potential participants.

I recently purchased some casters for a couple of office chairs from a company called Home Office Solutions. The product worked as advertised, though they did send the wrong product the first time. But that isn’t the point.

After receiving my order (the first time - with the wrong stuff), I received an email asking me to fillout a survey:

We continually strive to provide outstanding service to our customers and would appreciate any feedback you can provide about your shopping experience with us. In return for your valuable time, we would like to offer you a $50 coupon toward your next purchase!

Since I hadn’t received the right product, I decided to wait until the order was properly fulfilled. Today, I filled out the very brief survey. I then was sent to a web page that said:

Thank you for filling out our Customer Comment Form.
As our way of expressing “thank you”, please accept a special coupon code for your next purchase:
“XXXXX“*

*totaling $699 or more. Not valid with any other offer, including sale items. One time use per customer (at the same shipping address).

I have XXed out the code they offered me - but have reflected the font sizes as presented.

Of course the original offer never mentioned a $699 minimum order size. I can only assume that this represents their standard business ethics. As I told them via email, what a stupid way for them to lose a customer.

Yahoo has a web site on Exceptional Performance and Steve Souder, Chief Performance Yahoo! has recently authored a book (O’Reilly) called High Performance Web Sites.

Yahoo also makes available a tool, YSlow, that helps you to assess how you measure up against the Yahoo guidelines.

The advice is clearly focused on sites like Yahoo - and as a number of blogs have suggested, you need to take the advice with a grain of salt. But it is a good starting list - especially if you look at some of the follow on blog entries (many of which are referenced from the Yahoo site).

Phil Haack’s blog describes his experience using Coral Distribution Network (it slowed down his site).

Jeff Atwood’s blog entry in Coding Horror is called YSlow: Yahoo’s Problems Are Not Your Problems.

Look especially at the follow on discussions on Jeff Atwood’s blog.

I now live in two places - one with a 40 megabit connection, the other is much slower (and I am now in my car - and seeing about 800 kbps). It is worth making sure that your engineers are not always running on the the high speed connection - with the servers next door. Sometimes performance problems are masked by really high speed links, or small development databases. You need to simulate the real world when you are evaluating your system. And it may be worth simulating something even worse than the real world. Several years ago, I was running an application that was developed with a development environment. I was trying it on a dial-up line (remember those), and noticed that the application always repainted the screen twice. It was a serious bug in the tool that no one had ever noticed - because on high speed networks, you couldn’t see the repaint.

Use other people’s advice (with a grain of salt), and do your own ‘real world’ evaluations.

Update:

A couple of my colleagues pointed me at some tools to facilitate load testing:

• JMeter
• Grinder
• Netem

Update:

The comments keep coming in. There is a post today on O’Reilly Radar  pointing to A Great Performance and Operations Blog called High Scalability by Todd Hoff. Lot’s of posts about Amazon, Twitter, Hadoop, etc.

And my friend and former colleague Jeff Dao comments:

Some of the suggestions I know of, and some I don’t – like get servers closer to the users, and order you load scripts matter, respectively. Bottom line is, distance and data size matter.

When thinking about this, I always think of water delivery system – pipe size, water volume and water pressure (bandwidth, data size and latency).

I was recently searching on Google Books (I wrote about Google Books earlier this week), and found that they now have information on the books that Mary and I have written and contributed to. But I was surprised that I couldn’t find a reference to The Microsoft SQL Server Survival Guide. At least I couldn’t looking it up by author name (Panttaja). I did find that there was a book by that title authored by Jim and Mary Panttajja. But that’s my book.

So, Google has meta data that is incorrect. No problem, I contacted Google to help them correct this information (they can actually read the information off the cover image if they would like).

It appears that they are ‘unable’ to correct data that is known by them to be in error. I received the following response from Greg:

Hello,

Thank you for your recent message. I have noted your book issue regarding
“The Microsoft SQL Server Survival Guide.” It appears that this title is
one of many books that we recently added to the Google Book Search index
in a metadata-only view. This means that users will only be searching
title, author, subject and copyright information, and in some cases,
tables of contents and/or a book summary. In effect, this is like seeing a
library card catalog online.

At this time we are unable to edit the information for books in
metadata-only view, as we receive this information from third-party
providers. We apologize for this inconvenience. However, I encourage you
to check back with us periodically, as we continue to develop new features
and functionalities.

Sincerely,
Greg
The Google Book Search Team

As Greg points out, it is like viewing a library card catalog online. The difference is that in this case the information is wrong. And Google is unable, and unwilling to provide correct information. Oh yes, and to be clear, it isn’t their fault because it comes from a third party.

This naively appears to me to be at odds with the Google mission statement: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it univerally accessible and useful.” Apparently inaccurate is ok - and too troublesome to correct.

I would expect Google to be at the forefront of maintaining accurate information. I would expect them to provide mechanisms to correct mistakes. Even though it comes from a third party - it is now their data. I am disappointed that they seem content to offer data that they know to be erroneous.

Yesterday felt like the first day of school. It was our first day in an “office” with our new company, RebelVox (www.RebelVox.com). We are still not in a real office, but the four of us are all in the same room (and not sitting at the same bench in South Park with our laptops out, or sitting at different tables at the Crossroads Cafe, interviewing people).

So we arrived with our laptops like other kids arrived with their lunch boxes or backpacks. We each claimed our desk (in this case, which couch or which stool). The good news is we already knew where we belonged for lunch - at the nerds table - and we know who the nerds are.

Yesterday the web site went up (at least a beginning one), the initial logo saw the light of day, we each received our phone number. You can check out the website and logo at www.RebelVox.com.

Today the highspeed network arrived - and perhaps later today, some

Now we have to get down to our lessons and our homework.

I came across this pointer in Guy Kawasaki’s blog to a great summary/taxonomy of data visualization tools and sites by Laura Fitton in Smashing Magazine. It includes references to Swivel and IBM’s ManyEyes which I wrote about in June.

Lot’s of pictures (examples).

I have been looking at database products, and found a couple of links (and a couple found me):

• EnterpriseDB offers an Oracle compatible product at a fraction of the Oracle cost. A colleague of ours, Bob Zurek is now their CTO.
• Not unrelated, EnterpriseDB is providing a Postgres Resource Center. Bob wrote about this in his blog.
• Encirq provides a very small footprint database for embedded environments. A former boss of mine at both Tandem and IBM, Steve Weick, is the VP and CTO. Steve has a great history with a variety of database products, including DB2, NonStop SQL, Informix and Cloudscape.

All are things I need to spend more time looking at.

Guy Kawasaki published a book called “The Art of the Start” (which I highly recommend to anyone starting anything – but especially starting a company). We are in the process of starting a new company – and over the last five days have built the heart of that company.

Mary and I spent the last five days with two other people ‘starting’ a new company. The other two had been formulating the core ideas for perhaps the last five month – and Mary and I first discussed it with them about two months ago. We began in earnest over the last five days in Jackson, Wyoming.

We have worked with both of the principals before. That was helpful in the process – but I don’t think it was essential.

What was essential was four people coming in to the process ready to discuss – ready to figure things out – ready to let the others figure things out. The fifth day found the process accelerating – as we took an initial architecture and found ways to simplify it.

The result is going to be amazing (of course there is a lot of work from here). But the process was brilliant. Any of us could have tried to impose a structure – but we didn’t. Each day (perhaps twice a day) someone would outline the next things we should discuss – but we were all comfortable as that list of things would be ignored – and another topic took control of the proceedings. Sometimes two or more of us weren’t up to speed on the topic at hand (occasionally none of the four of us) – but those who didn’t understand participated, those who did were patient, and the convergence of perspectives was brilliant.

We have all been through this early stage before. We knew that we were establishing the culture of the company. But you can’t sit down and create the culture on flip-chart paper. You create it in these kind of work sessions – and the coffee breaks, mojitos, meals, hikes and bicycle rides (Mary and I aren’t quite up to single track riding – but we climbed some good hills, and managed off-road riding at 6700 feet). In fact the bicycle rides are a great metaphor for how we worked together. The four of us approach bicycle riding from different skill sets, experience (an understatement), and degrees of being in shape (not to mention age). But we could ride together – pick different paths – but still feel that it was a group encounter.

We can’t tell you what we are doing yet – but I think the first project will be named Snowking – after the ski area down the street from where we met (and the site of a hike and a bike ride).

After I wrote this post, I came across a post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It is a response to a blog entry that Guy wrote about how some people create web sites with little effort - and lot’s of results: No Plan, No Capital, No Model…No Problem. This is a guest posting by Glenn Kelman of Redfin: On the Other Hand: The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship by Glenn Kelman. He provides a view of how hard it is to start - and run - a startup. And how that is part of the point. He provides a top-ten list that shows “the ways a startup can feel deeply screwed up without really being that screwed up at all”.