Dru Nelson

Like A Boss

Originally uploaded by drudru

I don’t know what it means, but it was what was ‘tagged’ on the freight elevator I have to take in the morning (I ride a bike in to work).

Like A Boss

I sense a very powerful meme in the making here.

BART Perrier Ad

Originally uploaded by drudru

Another interesting artvert

I’m very into Keyboard shortcuts.

A while back I wanted to write a global system hook that would allow me to use EMACS/TENEX style navigation bindings (CTRL-E,A,N,P) on normal windows programs. It turns out that somebody already figured out how to do this. Check out this article at LifeHacker on AutoHotKey. Overall, it works perfect and it feels really empowering. You can really put your keyboard to work.

Also, if you want a really comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts for windows and some of the more popular apps, check this forum post out.

The other day, I got snagged by the headline Flektor Case Study: Counter to prevailing Web 2.0 wisdom. Hey, I’m a sucker for contrarian articles. I also like and understand the Web 2 dot oh. Yet… I think the whole industry needs to, as they say in Hollywood, “pull it back a little”. I’m not hot on the whole widgets thing, but I do have some friends here in the valley that are in that industry (RockYou!, slide, and Meebo).

So I gave it a read. After a few paragraphs it got even more interesting. These guys were game developers and they used that development style/methodology to produce their product. They focused on several things. First, they focused on quality and had a large QA staff for a company that size. Second, they made their app creation tools super simple to use. The product managers and the designers could turn around new products very quickly. The analogy used in the article is that of level editing on top of a game engine. Neat.

As I read on, it was mentioned that the founders were Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin. Aha! Of course! These were the guys that made Crash Bandicoot. They were Naughty Dog software, which was purchased by Sony. These guys are Lisp hackers. They were a poster child for the Franz Lisp company. I always thought it was cool that these ex-MIT hackers used Lisp to build great console games. Dynamic languages and garbage collection aren’t supposed to work in the console world.

I searched my blog for the old post I had on GOOL. I thought I posted about their technology before, but I can’t find the post. Essentially, they had a great Lisp derivative and runtime that ran on the console. The system would allow for hot code replacement right from Franz Lisp/emacs/whatever. Essentially, you could imagine having a character on the screen doing their death sequence. Then you change some code/state and bring them back to life. Real RAD development for gaming. Something that would be really really hard to do in MSVC. Not only that, but the system was fast. For example, their language also allowed you to tie cpu or gpu registers to variables. Very good tech and very good games. Who knows if they used Lisp at Flektor, but I definitely need to check out their product now to see what the quality level is like.

Anyways, there it is again. That pattern. Certain people who do extraordninary things tend to continue to do extraordinary things. If I were an investor, I would place a lot of value on this team. These guys really know how to execute.

Update: Got a few comments about GOOL. When I read the papers back then, their language was called GOOL. I think it was 1998 or earlier. It was the Oopsla conference in San Jose when Anomorphic Systems got bought by Sun. The newer language GOAL was created for the PS2 when they did Jax and Daxter in 2001.

Today I went into my gmail spam folder just to check if there were emails being marked as spam that weren’t spam. I found a few, but I was totally disgusted by some of the email subjects in there. I was so disgusted it prompted me to make this post. How many resources are being wasted by spam.

Where are all those predictions from a few years back that company XYZ was going to solve this issue. Wasn’t Microsoft supposed to solve this? This is probably one of the reasons Facebook is doing so well. The good social networks act as good gatekeepers.

I wonder if the wacky alternative solutions are starting to appeal more to people now. Surely everybody has felt the cost of the problem by now. If there was a product that solved this issue 100% correctly, people would pay.

I saw this graph a while back.

It is still relevant.

Click on the picture for the big version

Read Between All Those For-Sale Signs By DAVID LEONHARDT and VIKAS BAJAJ Published: August 27, 2006 New York Times

Haven’t heard that one before:

> In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to increase the share of homeowners in America from the post-war average of around 63% to 70%. Lending standards were relaxed and deposits were no longer required. The extreme was reached with so-called NINJA loans (borrowers needed no income, job or assets).

> Debt markets -Another pounding Jul 12th 2007 From The Economist print edition

First I saw the post on Reddit about Iran asking to be paid in Yen

Then I see even a Black Hat SEO guy is looking to diversify.

Then Steve, posts about inflation

Then I remember some old posts about some other Middle Eastern countries dropping the dollar as their primary currency peg (Kuwait and Syria).

Interesting stuff.

As far as commodities blowing out the US stock market, this is old news though. Check out those graphs.

When will the US public notice?

When they notice and start diversifying, it will probably be time to get back into the dollar.