Justin Martenstein's Notebook

What? You're still reading this?

2008-02-21T18:44:02Z

Can anyone give me a good reason why I should continue posting to Livejournal.com (not that I really have been anyway)? My primary creative energy is going into MeetAtThePig.com and Six Hour Startup right now. If you want to try and track me on a day-to-day level, you can follow me on Twitter.

Facebooked

2007-09-22T17:42:58Z

Has anyone heard about this Facebook site? I signed up for an account last night. I think this is going to be really popular.

Launching the Pig

2007-08-21T06:41:18Z

Up until now, there has been no comprehensive resource for all the cool tech events going on around Seattle. Stuart Maxwell and I have decided to rectify this by creating MeetAtThePig.com. We're chasing down and posting the most interesting events we find. Hopefully in the near future, we'll also be writing about regular events - meetups, user groups, etc. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Oh, and if you want more background info on the site and the name, go read Stuart's blog post.

Weather SMS

2007-06-07T05:27:48Z

Does anyone know of a service that would send a text message of the day's weather to my phone every morning? This seems like a terribly obvious thing, and I can't believe it doesn't exist. The closest thing I got from a brief Google search was AccuWeather Alert, but there's not much flexibility there.

The idea reminds me a bit of an old post by Marc Hedlund on O'Reilly Radar. If you're looking for a new business model, find an old unix command and implement it on the web. Google is grep, S3 is mount, etc. As far as I know, there's no cron service...

New Job

2006-12-31T06:48:44Z

For those of you that don't know, I've been working on a contract-to-hire basis at Zillow.com for the last six weeks. On Tuesday (technically Monday) after New Year's, I start as a full-time employee. My official title is Build and Deployment Engineer.

If you're working in downtown Seattle, and interested in getting together for lunch, then leave me a comment or send me an email.

Geek Night!

2006-12-06T07:17:56Z

I'm going to be at Ignite Seattle! on Thursday night, a local geek-night sort of event being put on by O'Reilly's and Make Magazine. I'll actually be giving a lightning talk on an idea that came up during the last Mind Camp - Community Works for Geeks. That's assuming that I actually finish the presentation first, of course. Should be a very interesting evening, and make sure you come early for the bridge building competetion.

If anyone's interested in meeting up for dinner beforehand (possibly at the Honeyhole), leave a note in the comments or send an email. Hope to see you there!

Lucy

2006-10-05T01:49:40Z

Lucy Elizabeth Martenstein was born on Sunday, October 1st at 10:26 p.m., weighing in at 7 pounds, 7 ounces. The whole family is recovering well, though Sarah and I are both a bit tired.

Retail Inventory

2006-07-21T17:04:35Z

There don't seem to be any low-cost, easy-maintenance inventory systems for a small business owner / retailer. There must be a ton of folks out there (like my brother) who are opening shops where they are the sole employee, and they are having to track all of their retail stock by pen-and-paper. They have neither the time nor the energy to set up an in-house inventory management system.

Seems like this is a market ripe for some sort of Backpack-style, thin web app for people who just want to track their stock. You might run into some problems running a Point-of-Sale application that has to connect to the Internet every time you ring someone up, but that's more of a scalability issue.

Myhrvold v. Macx

2006-06-25T23:35:20Z

Nathan Myhrvold (former CTO of Microsoft) appears to be stealing a page from Charlie Stross's Manfred Macx stories. Myhrvold's new company, Intellectual Ventures, is brainstorming and patenting ideas, as well as possibly buying up existing patents, to corner the market on the next generation of technology. John Robb has some interesting commentary over at his blog.

In the Macx stories (i.e. Lobsters), the main character files patents and then gives away the technology for free, living purely off the altruism of others. Which is in direct conflict with Myhrvold's strategy. So the question is, how do we shift things more toward Macx and away from Myhrvold? Could this be an open source distributed effort? Creative Commons patents, where you ask a large group of scientists to start filing patents, if they agree not to actually enforce the patents.

How do we hack the U.S. Patent Office? Somebody call the EFF...

BarCamp San Francisco

2006-06-25T06:24:15Z

I didn't realize that BarCamp San Francisco is happening this weekend. I know of at least one geek attending, and blogging the event. Looks interesting - I'll try to keep an eye on the proceedings and see if there are some ideas worth stealing for Mind Camp 3.0.

Visualize

2006-06-18T06:45:14Z

Now that I've upgraded to a better laptop, I'm starting to get interested in complex network visualization again. I have a vision for something similiar to Ben Bederson's zoomable user interface work (see also: informational physics), though I really just want to hack something together for experimentation. I'm surprised no one has taken the "tag cloud" concept and made it interactive. You should be able to move the individual tags around, drag-and-drop, and their movements should give you some indication for how the tags are all related to each other.

The concept in my head is sort of similar to Touchgraph, but I want it to be able to handle large numbers of nodes in a cleaner fashion (this is where the details get fuzzy). But it should be an interesting project, and it gives me an excuse to learn Python.

Books to Read

2006-06-15T07:55:05Z

Does anyone know of a good Web 2.0-ish way of keep track of reading lists? My "to read" pile is threatening to get out of hand. I tried AllConsuming.net, but their "should consume" seems to lump books, movies, etc. together. And there's no way to prioritize or sort by tags, and all of the other things we expect from our web apps these days.

I've cobbled something together in my del.icio.us feed that will get the job done for now, but there has to be something more specific to the task.

For those that are interested, here's the current reading list:

jPod, by Douglas Coupland
The Expectant Father, by Armin A. Brott

And then somewhere in this list is my next book:

Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Corram
Illicit : How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, by Moises Naim
Judas Unchained, by Peter F. Hamilton
Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

Network Recovery Cluster

2006-05-08T18:24:07Z

I caused a minor plumbing emergency in my house on Saturday. As I was scrambling around, I grabbed a cheat sheet that I had sketched out of how to sweat copper pipes. On the back of the sheet, I had written the phrase "network recovery cluster". It's my own handwriting, but I have absolutely no memory of writing it down, or any possible context for the words (it was actually two lines: "network recovery" on top, and then "cluster" below, but I don't think that really changes anything).

A search on Google turns up no results (as of now), so I really have no idea what it means. It sounds cool, though, and I think I want one. Anyone have any suggestions for what a network recovery cluster might do?

Search and Replace

2006-04-26T05:26:06Z

I spent most of Sunday morning trying to figure out how to do a global search and replace in Unix. This led to a lot of reading and experimenting with grep and sed. I don't use these tools enough to feel really comfortable with them - something I need to get in the habit of doing.

I didn't find a viable solution until yesterday, when I googled a fairly simple one-line script in Perl.

ETech 2006: playsh

2006-03-08T02:48:16Z

Something intriguing came out of ETech today, via Matt Webb of Mind Hacks fame: playsh. Here's the relevant bit from the session desciption.

Hacking is a playful act. In a primal sense, play is the investigation and experimentation with borders and combinations. It is how children establish a model of their surroundings and how animals explore relationships and social dynamics.

Despite early, highly structured approaches to the sociability of computing in mainframe laboratories, computing has evolved a culture of iterative experimental hacking that is essentially playful.

playsh cooks up the best of Web 2.0, and throws the web browser away. It is a narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys.

I'm not entirely sure what it is, but "playful", "narrative", and "social prototyping library" hit all the right buttons for me. The only thing I can figure out is that it is some kind of (Python-programmable) command-line interface to Web 2.0 services based around the old interactive MUD model. I'm going to see if I can get the thing running tonight and find out what it's all about.

del.icio.us -> LiveJournal

2006-02-23T07:03:58Z

This is an automatically generated post to address Ario's RSS to Livejournal dilemma. I grabbed the last five links from my del.icio.us account through the RSS feed and then posted using the Livejournal API. You can check out the source for the script over here.

Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It
positive ecoomic overview of the lack of central government in Somalia; the possible downside is that Somalia may be a haven of Robb's Global Guerrillas
link

City of Seattle - Department of Planning and Development
link

The Unplugged - A Speculative Fiction
from WorldChanging
link

PressThink: Dick Cheney Did Not Make a Mistake By Not Telling the Press He Shot a Guy
Jay Rosen has the best analysis yet on the reasons behind how Cheney acted after he accidentally shot Whittington
link

The Futures Of Money
essay by Bruce Sterling from Forbes.com
link

Lending Library

2006-02-01T05:35:24Z

Note to future Justin-self: don't forget that you loaned your copy of Wireless Hacks to RevFry.

Upcoming

2006-01-31T07:00:30Z

RecentChangesCamp (Feb. 3rd - 5th)

There's a "Wiki / Open Space Unconference" thing happening down in Portland this weekend. I signed up, hoping to pick up some ideas on expanding the Mind Camp wiki. But it's looking more and more like we can't spare a weekend of working on the house. So I don't think I'll be making the trek down, though it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

SciFi Short Films (Feb. 4th)

And the added bonus of staying in Seattle for this weekend is that the SciFi Museum is hosting a short film festival at the Cinerama. Two showings (4-6 and 7-9), about 20 films - should be very interesting. I'm thinking about going to the later showing; email me or post something in the comments if you might be interested.

Super Bowl (Feb. 5th)

It was hard watching the Seahawks beat the Redskins a few weeks back. But seeing them in the Super Bowl for the first time should be a blast. And six years living in Cleveland instills one with a strong passion to see the Steelers lose. Sarah and I will probably be watching this at home, but Super Bowl Sunday is a valid excuse for we Americans to gorge ourselves and spend an entire day in front of the TV. Go 'Hawks!

Matisyahu / Blue Scholars (Feb. 6th)

My brother-in-law was trying to sell me on a couple of Matisyahu's songs a few weeks ago. He was considering selling off his ticket to the show next Monday, because apparently it's a hot item. I was a bit confused, though, since I had heard that the Blue Scholars were playing that night. It didn't even occur to me that they would be opening. I've been getting into them more and more over the last few months - everything I hear on KEXP has been great. The brief clips that I heard from Matisyahu were a little underwhelming (seemed like standard reggae / dancehall), but by all accounts he puts on a kickin' live show. So now I REALLY want to go, but it's been sold out for a while. Sigh...

69 Love Songs (Feb. 9th)

Sarah is working a 24-hour shift on February 14th, so we will have to plan some kind of "unValentine". I nominated this show being put on by KEXP, Three Imaginary Girls and Barsuk Records. Apparently a whole bunch of Barsuk's artists are getting together at the Crocodile in various configurations to cover the Magnetic Fields' fantastic love-themed album (albums?). Should be a really great time, but it will take some convincing.

The Wedding Singer (Feb. 12th)

It is much more likely that we'll be going to this show at the Fifth Avenue for the pre-Valentine's instead. We've had a subscription for this season and the last, and it's always a good excuse to get dressed up and go out for a fancy date. The bonus about this show in particular is that it's headed straight for Broadway once it's done previewing here (same as Hairspray). It'll be interesting to see if they match the spirit of the movie.

Demolition

2006-01-13T07:37:42Z

Sarah and I are deep into demolition of the first floor of the house. You can check out the pictures on Flickr. We're making a final push to fill up the dumpster this weekend - if anyone in the area wants to join us for some plaster-smashing fun, feel free to email me.

Predicting the Year

2006-01-06T16:45:21Z

Dave Pollard has a great post up about applying the Wisdom of Crowds to predictions for the new year. John Robb expands on the idea a bit by adding a betting angle.

Renovation Community

2005-12-24T06:23:28Z

Ever since before Thanksgiving I've been toying around with this idea for a house renovation community site. It would be something like a bunch of blogs combined with a wiki, where everyone gets their own area to write the story of their renovations, their projects, etc. (inspired somewhat by a brief conversation with Nancy White about Share Your Story). The wiki aspect of it would allow people to then edit and remix the stories to build more general articles about how to redo a kitchen, how to re-plumb your bathroom, etc.

It's an interesting idea, but it would take a lot of effort to build up a community - this is a community that Sarah doesn't even really think exists: the blogging / diy / house repair folks (or, they do exist, but only in small numbers). There is already a group of home renovation blogs, which do a good job of telling everyone's story. So I wonder if there would be a way to just crawl / mine the information there, tag it or remix it and extract the general knowledge (with the writers' permission of course)? This moves the idea more towards just being a technological issue, rather than just building narratives or community.

There's something almost fractal in telling the story of renovating a house. There is the larger story of the house and the family that dwells in it. Then there's the story of how you built the bathroom or how you replaced the drywall (the major projects). But then you drill down deeper into the one-day projects - putting up a new pony wall in the basement for example. You build up all these little stories, and you're back to the big story.

And if I take the story of my kitchen remodel, and compare it to the story of my neighbors' remodel - there are commonalities in there. There is knowledge that comes from our individual experiences that can be combined and shared with the wider world. So how do we gather the stories, extract the most relevant, general information and then make it available to everyone?

XBox 360 Thoughts

2005-12-06T06:52:19Z

I got my first up close and personal look at an XBox 360 last week - color me underwhelmed. I only got to watch "Geometry Wars" and "Call of Duty 2", though, so this may have been an unrepresentative sample. But even in the other demos, I have yet to see any game that uses the processing power of the machine to offer some kind of new gameplay experience. There's probably enough juice to do some interesting real-time weather effects - fog or rain. Just that feature alone would create some intriguing twists.

Tangentially related - Wired just put up an article that talks about the rising prevalence of the Uncanny Valley phenomenon in newer games.

Chaz's Bull City Records

2005-12-03T05:15:51Z

If you happen to find yourself in Durham, NC any time soon, make sure to stop by Chaz's Bull City Records at 1916 Perry St (next to The Cosmic Cantina and around the corner from Francesca's). My brother opened the store just a few weeks ago, and he's already got an excellent stock going - mostly college / indie rock, garage, hardcore and punk (I picked up Z from My Morning Jacket, Castaways and Cutouts from The Decemberists, and The Mouse and the Mask by Danger Doom). You can see some photos I took of the shop, or go to his site for announcements / upcoming events.

Seattle Wireless Fundraiser

2005-12-01T16:50:23Z

Seattle Wireless is having a fundraiser to put a node on top of one of the towers on Capitol Hill. This would give most of Seattle (and some of the east side) line-of-sight access to their network.

Building Community

2005-11-15T05:02:43Z

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to build online communities. This mostly rises out of my experiences coordinating the Mind Camp wiki and some of the feedback I've gotten from it. Does anyone know of any good resources - online or otherwise - that discuss how one develops viable communities over the Internet? I'm particularly interested in the use of wikis or CMS (Drupal?), and then I'm also thinking a bit about how to bridge the gap between online and face-to-face interactions.