Joel Ingulsrud

Author: joel

  • Facebook and the Hacker Ethic

     

    Facebook logo

    If the Letter from Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook’s SEC IPO registration is a true representation of how Facebook functions, and they are able to maintain the Hacker Ethic he espouses after going public, FB will be a worthwhile long-term financial investment.

    In the late 1980s I read about the original definition of hacking in Steven Levy’s fascinating telling of the computer industry foundation story, Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The 25th anniversary edition includes  a 2010 interview with Zuckerberg.

  • The Most Powerful Bicycle in the World

    The Most Powerful Bicycle in the World

    A triathlete turns down a $9,000 raffle prize in favor of a $134 steel bicycle.
    World Bicycle Relief Impact

    “The most powerful bike in the world is not one that weighs 16 pounds, made of carbon and is ridden by professional athletes; it’s a 55 pound steel bike in the hands of a Zambian student fighting for her education.”

  • Here’s to the Crazy One

    Steve Jobs 1955-2011

     

    The misfit. The rebel. The troublemaker. The round peg in the square hole.

    The one who saw things differently. He wasn’t fond of rules. And he had no respect for the status quo. You can quote him, disagree with him, glorify or vilify him.

    About the only thing you can’t do is ignore him. Because he changed things. He invented. He imagined. He healed. He explored. He created. He inspired. He pushed the human race forward.

    Maybe he had to be crazy.

    How else can you stare at a circuit board and see a work of art? Or say no to a thousand great ideas so you can say yes to the one? Or gaze at a box full of parts and imagine a bicycle for the mind?

    (apologies to Craig Tanimoto)

  • Bicycles Breed Good Bread

    Russell Shorter in the New York Times about the benefits of prioritizing bicycles:

    But while many Americans see their cars as an extension of their individual freedom, to some of us owning a car is a burden, and in a city a double burden. I find the recrafting of the city in order to lessen — or eliminate — the need for cars to be not just grudgingly acceptable, but, yes, an expansion of my individual freedom.

  • bubble graph stats

    Love them bubble graphs:

    My first custom app project was an executive information management console for pharmaceutical wholesaler SUN-S in Sendai, Japan, circa 1987, plotting their market position over time vs competitors using revenue for size of bubble, market share for x axis and growth rate for y axis.

  • Two wheels better than four in Tokyo

    Excellent introduction to cycling in Tokyo by CNN’s Christopher Johnson:

    Two wheels better than four in Tokyo | CNNGo.com.

    As many of the photos illustrating the article suggest, cycling downtown on the weekends is marvelous.

    If only the sento would start catering to cyclists who just need a quick shower.

  • Apple’s appetite for flash memory

    Thanks to the success of flash memory-based iPod, iPhone, iPad and now MacBook Air product lines, Apple has become the largest buyer of NAND flash semiconductors among computer manufacturers, and among the top three buyers across all industries. If the remaining MacBook models are redesigned as Steve Jobs hinted they would around flash storage and no optical drives, and further tuning improves already impressive performance, the next generation of MacBook Pros are going to sell very well.

    Less expensive, much lighter, considerably faster and with a cool new App Store built in, the 2011 MacBook lineup should significantly accelerate OS X market share gains.

  • Apple goes with USB instead of SD for MacBook Air Software Reinstall Drive

    image of MacBook Air USB Software Reinstall Drive

    Apple is including an 8GB “Software Reinstall Drive” USB flash memory device with the new MacBook Air laptops introduced today.  I wish they had gone with SD instead, but since they can’t seem to justify the cost of including SD card slots in the low-end MacBooks this is the best alternative, and you can’t put a keychain/lanyard hole in an SD card.

  • MacPaint and QuickDraw source code released

    Yay! Bill Atkinson’s source code for the original MacPaint (and QuickDraw) has finally been released to the public in the form of a donation to the Computer Museum in Mountain View.

    http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/

    In writing MacPaint, Bill was as concerned with whether human readers would understand the code as he was with what the computer would do with it. He later said about software in general, “It’s an art form, like any other art form… I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing… And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple… If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times.”

    Now mere mortals like myself can study the magic.

  • Steve Schaffran on pre-Adobe Photoshop

    Friend and colleague Steve Schaffran reminisces about Barneyscan XP and the pre-Adobe days of Photoshop (scroll down for the original English text):

    One of the transformations, however, made my hair stand on end: it could flip a color picture from the red, green, blue color space of the computer display to the cyan, magenta, yellow, black color space necessary for exposing printing plates for printing color. That meant that a $15,000 bundle of our scanner plus Photoshop 0.35 plus a Mac II was in principle a competitor for the $1,000,000 to $3,000,000  color scanning and retouching solutions then used in the printing industry.  If we could only strike a deal, we were sure to sell some scanners.