I was asleep when I heard a knock at the door. I knew it was UPS. I jumped up and threw some clothes on but by the time I got to the door, they had gone. I ran down the hall to the elevator. I had just missed them. Caught the next elevator and caught them in the lobby of my apartment building just as they were leaving. Phew! I had my Kindle 2.
I didn't have the original Kindle and I've never used any kind of electronic reader so this was a new experience for me. I love books and own A LOT of them. But spending time on three continents, at conferences and on airplanes means I'm looking forward to more books at my fingertips and avoiding the agony of "which 0.1% of my books can I take with me on this flight".
Here are my first impressions:
I'm very happy so far and can imagine buying the majority of my books for the Kindle from now on. The real test will be whether I'll go back and re-buy any of my existing books (especially the ones back in storage in Australia)
UPDATE: just discovered the Web browser has an Advanced Mode that does CSS and Javascript. This site doesn't look too great with it, though :-)
by : Created on Feb. 25, 2009 : Last modified Feb. 25, 2009 : (permalink)
People who follow me on twitter or are friends on Facebook already know this, but last week I officially resigned from mValent.
It was over seven years ago that Duane Tharp and Clyde Logue approached me about joining them in a new venture post-Bowstreet. I had already made the decision to move back to Australia from the US and they were still willing to hire me despite being remote. Within a year we were venture funded, had hired a CEO and VP Engineering (who became my boss) and were starting to build the team.
mValent went through distinct phases and so I don't necessarily feel like I've worked in the same place for seven years but rather three or four different companies. I don't think I ever really did the job I thought I would be doing, but I learnt a tremendous amount on the business side of things and made a number of really good friends.
But it's time for me to move on. The technology I helped create and the people I helped hire now have an excellent home at Oracle. I'm ready for something new.
As to what's that is: I hope to have more to say very soon...
by : Created on Feb. 23, 2009 : Last modified Feb. 23, 2009 : (permalink)
I was feeling nostalgic for the days of Apple ][ DOS 3.3 and started re-familiarizing myself with the disk layout (VTOC, catalog entries, track/sector lists, etc)
Of course, I couldn't help but then implement them in Python.
Here is a python module that reads Apple ][ DOS 3.3 disk images and can both list the disk catalog and also dump the contents of a file.
http://jtauber.com/2009/02/15/a2disk.py
Enjoy!
by : Created on Feb. 15, 2009 : Last modified Feb. 15, 2009 : (permalink)
People who follow me on twitter already know this, but yesterday Oracle announced its intention to acquire mValent, the company I helped start in 2002. Congratulations to all involved! We built a great team, then a great product, then made our customers successful with that product. As with any startup, there was always a gap between what we wanted to do and what we could do given our resources. As part of Oracle, mValent is going to be able to close that gap in a huge way.
by : Created on Feb. 5, 2009 : Last modified Feb. 5, 2009 : (permalink)
Some countries have a single large urban agglomeration that is much bigger than other urban areas in the country. Others have three or more major agglomerations that are pretty close in size.
For a while I've wanted to visualize different countries depending on whether they were more like the former or more like the latter.
So I took some data from http://www.citypopulation.de/ and used HTML Canvas to create a bubble plot of all countries with three or more agglomerations over one million people. I used the ratio of the population of the largest agglomeration and the second largest as the y coordinate and the ratio of the population of the second largest and the third largest as the x coordinate.
Here is the result:
Population Ratios of Top Three Urban Agglomerations
Besides this criterion, I can't immediately think of other similarities Argentina, the Philippines, France or South Korea have; or India, China, Italy and the Netherlands; or Russia and Bangladesh.
by : Created on Feb. 2, 2009 : Last modified Feb. 2, 2009 : (permalink)