December 21, 2011
Suppose you are an oppressive regime with pesky dissident bloggers. The Great Firewall is expensive and leaky. There is, it turns out, a cheaper legal toolkit hiding in plain sight, one that lets you silence critics worldwide for a tidy profit per infringement. Scientology figured this out years ago. So, less famously, did the state of Bavaria.
October 30, 2011
Goa in November sounds lovely until you meet the Indian visa office in Berlin: photos only taken on premises, Berlin residency not recognised, employer letter required, processing somewhere between one day and two weeks. Also, why exactly do they care which army your grandfather served in? Then you check what an Indian needs to visit Europe and a darker comedy emerges.
August 30, 2011
Google Labs is shutting down. The official mythology, one engineer, 20% time, magic appears on Labs, was already mostly fiction by the time I joined in 2004. What it actually became, and what Larrys new top-down Google says about innovation, is a longer story. Meanwhile, Triposo Labs is now a thing, starting with every geocoded Wikipedia article plotted in order of appearance.
August 07, 2011
Founded Triposo, hired a team, shipped product, raised an angel round, all without a physical office and, awkwardly, without a place to live. The romantic version of the digital nomad life involves cafes and double espressos. The actual version, played out across Sydney, San Francisco and Berlin, involves outlet doublers, mailing luggage ahead and a lot of charging.
June 23, 2011
Two weeks to spare between Silicon Valley meetings and New York, so we took Amtrak: 3300 miles through Denver and Chicago, coding in the lounge car as the Rockies slid past. Each stop turned into a live test of the Triposo guide we were building, stepping off a train into a city you have never seen, armed with only a phone. It mostly works. Chicago, it turns out, has a problem.
May 14, 2011
Marx is out of fashion, but dialectical materialism applied to tech giants is hard to resist. IBM begat Microsoft. Microsoft begat Google. Google begat Facebook. Each one a deliberate negation of the last, right down to which programming language counts as serious. Where does that leave Triposo, with two ex-Googlers trying to do to Lonely Planet what Google did to Yahoo?
May 09, 2011
Part three of leaving Google: what comes after. The itch goes back to the first dot-com boom, when my brother and I started world66, convinced printed travel guides were finished and mobile would take over. We were a decade early. With iPhones and iPads finally up to it, the plan involves seven open datasets, some crafty Python, and a guide that knows it is going to rain tomorrow.
May 08, 2011
Part two of three: the reasons to leave Google anyway. Pitch anything to Larry and Sergey and you get the same note, solve it more generically, which is partly how Wave grew into a 90-minute demo that left everyone unsure what they had just seen. Add strategies, product roadmaps, and the slow realisation that being inside the walled garden eventually makes the outside world stop making sense.
May 02, 2011
After seven years at Google, I'm leaving. Cue the inevitable 'what's wrong with you?' Before I get to the gripes, though, there are a few popular narratives I want to push back on: that Google has gone evil, that the good engineers are all defecting to Facebook, that 20% time was always a myth. Part one of three. The bashing comes later.
September 07, 2010
There's a small genre of web toys that turn your text into ransom-note style images, built around hand-picked Twitter avatars shaped like letters. Hand-picked? In 2010? Surely Google Image Search has opinions about what the letter X looks like. Add the Ajax Search API, a bit of CSS rotation for that authentic kidnapper feel, and see what happens.
July 29, 2010
Demotivational posters are forum currency, but making one is still a tedious little dance: PowerPoint template, image search, color picker, snarky tagline, screenshot, upload. The whole thing ought to collapse into a single URL. Type a search term, a word, a tagline; let the machine fetch the image, sample its colors, and arrange the rest. Conformity not included.
July 17, 2010
A long-ago server crash forced me off Zope and onto Django, which meant rewriting every old project. I never really finished. Today, two get dragged back from the dead: WordColor (once a fragile Windows binary that screen-scraped image search) and LandGeist. It's interesting how much has changed - things that used to require a desktop install now happen entirely in the browser.
June 22, 2010
The internet is gloriously borderless, right up until iTunes, Kindle, Netflix and Hulu politely ask where you live and decline your business. After years of collecting workarounds from outside the US - VPNs, gift cards from helpful eBay strangers, addresses that don't quite need to match anything - here's the field guide. Including the trick Netflix never noticed about Australian zip codes.
May 03, 2010
Switching from iPhone to Android meant losing Trip View, the one app I actually relied on for my Manly ferry commute. No Android equivalent existed, so I built one - simpler than the original, mostly because I am lazy. Most commuters reaching for that app have exactly one question. But there's a small trick that means you never have to tell it which direction you're heading.
November 17, 2009
Buying Super Freakonomics at an airport, as a present, should be easy. Boxes of unpacked books rule out hardcover, so it has to land on the Kindle. Two seconds on Amazon. Then a half-hour spiral through hotel WiFi, iPass, a corporate VPN, and a nervously brief flick of data roaming, just to get the phone online. Amazon nailed the buying part. The rest of the internet, not so much.
October 09, 2009
A long-weekend trip to Kakadu becomes my first real conversation with Aboriginal Australians, over beers at a roadhouse three hours from where they live. One painted Paul McCartney's jacket. Another has been a mechanic for 62 years and looks anywhere between 50 and 90. The conversation drifts into harder territory - life expectancy, alcohol restrictions, petrol sniffing - and ends with a slightly mischievous modest proposal.
August 02, 2009
Bought my wife a Kindle 2 for her birthday and ran straight into Amazon's geographic restrictions. They will happily sell you the hardware, just not the books - not even the ones out of copyright. Meanwhile any torrent site hands you the complete works of Bill Bryson in minutes, and 1984 is public domain in Australia but not the US. Something here does not add up.
April 18, 2009
Vegetarianism is hard to argue against on the merits. Meat drinks 70 percent of agricultural water, drives 18 percent of greenhouse gases (six times what flying does), and the bio industry treats animals like furniture. And yet. Steak tastes really good. Augustine's prayer on chastity comes to mind. So here is a compromise with a deliberately ugly name, designed to do roughly half the good for roughly a seventh of the sacrifice.
January 06, 2009
Most 2009 predictions are dreary: bad economy, Obama president, internet still up. Boring. Time for five less obvious bets, including a Microsoft rebound that makes Mac heads stop and wonder, a country in trouble that isn't the one everyone's watching, and a European love affair that may not survive the year. Check back in twelve months.
December 15, 2008
Sydney pubs advertise steaks for 12, 10, even 7 Australian dollars, and old-timers still grumble that back in the day it was a fiver. Turns out one pub still does the fiver: 300 grams plus fries, twenty-five minutes away on foot. Compared to Zurich, where a packet of nuts costs the same, it feels like a steal. Until a Swiss friend opens his mouth.