mehack

Synthesis’s network went down last Friday. Not down in the sense of our network connection. Not down in the sense of WiFi. I mean really down. Our main server decided that it was time to call it quit, and left the building. Really out. Like bye bye. Time to rebuild.

Some advice for people who find themselves in a similar predicament:

• Ditch Windows Server if you can. Synthesis used to rely on it for Exchange (to support the Outlook and Windows Mobile junkies in the office), but when the processor melts down on that computer, you can’t just take the hard drives and plug it into another machine;
• minimize the number of your machines in your closet and run Ubuntu JeOS — if you do need to run Windows, at least you get a lot more flexibility;
• Zimbra, zimbra, zimbra! We’re still testing it, but so far we absolutely love it. The web client rocks, it has Windows Mobile push support, and I’m now finally using iCal and Mail.app instead of Outlook under Parallels; and
• for backups, Jungledisk is the way to go. We mount S3 from inside our Linux instances and do daily rsyncs of critical data for backup. And, once week, we automatically suspend each instance, hot copy it, and rsync that for backup.

Better, stronger, faster.

If you get a chance, Wagamama is definitely worth a quick lunch or dinner visit — not necessarily for the food (although the Zagat ratings aren’t too shabby), but just to experience a shift in restaurant efficiency. Something that I usually wonder about while sitting in a restaurant is the restaurant’s scheduling technique.  How do they get the kitchen to get appetizers to come out first (and together), and have main entrees appear simultaneously (and warm!).  To further “mix it up”, all this has to happen while factoring in the time it takes for the waiter to get from a table to the kitchen with an order (while not getting sidetracked), from my table to the register, back with the credit card at the end of the meal, etc.  The whole dance makes my head hurt.

Wagamama, instead, throws that all out the window.  Their focus is on two things, and two things alone: food and time.  There is no need to worry about ambience (its all really simple), and there aren’t any tables that can fit certain sized parties to avoid the problem of having to have large groups wait.  All waiters, armed with 802.11 devices, take your order at the table, and beam those directly to the kitchen.  The notion of “appetizers” are gone and are replaced by “sides”, to remove the need to get those to the table first.  When the food is done, it is brought to your table immediately.  And finally, when your check is to be paid, you swipe your credit card right there at the table and you can keep your eyes on it at all times.

I guess what Wagamama exhibits is a focus on what’s actually important — food and time.  I love the notion that they’ve removed everything else from the equation and can make sure they really deliver on those.

21 proves to be an entertaining and forgettable two hours of my life that doesn’t manage live up to my expectations set by Bringing Down the House. Peter Steinfield and Allan Loeb ignore all the nuances and the realities of what the MIT team did; what the movie fails to emphasize, and what is the most brilliant part of the story, is that the Ben Mezrich’s tale is true — its not fiction. Instead, this movie adaptation attempts to be the Ocean’s 11 for young and smart kids — just one that isn’t well-acted nor even has a plausible story to back it up. Unless you’re illiterate, save that $10 and put it towards the bookstore or a trip to the library to pick up Bringing Down the House instead.

* Kids: the writers really manage to get the MIT undergraduate experience wrong. While getting those details right is not at the forefront of their minds, its the small details that irritate me. Probably one worth seeing at LSC instead.

At ETech this year, Kati London (of ITP and now of area/code), put together a great panel discussion entitled Artistic Experiments in Revealing Invisible Networks. Somehow I missed it, but at the finale of the talk was a reference to one of my favorite final projects from Every Bit You Make, Generative Social Networking by Andrew Schneider and Christian Croft.

Every Bit You Make, as a class and as the topic of my next book, explores the intersection of our ever increasing digital lifestyles, the infrastructures needed to put that in all place, and the architectural decisions and choices to help create that infrastructure. For example, we analyze the market need to create a wireless protocol to inter-connect devices, study the introduction of Bluetooth to consumers and the first few devices that showed up with support, and then begin to exploit their vulnerabilities. The duo looked at cellular phones and gave birth to Generative Social Networking:

How does it work? Unbeknownst to the phone owner, her device will betray its list of saved phone numbers to a nearby laptop … [who] will generate a “conversation” with each number in the list. The first number on the list is called and receiver’s response recorded. The next number on the list is called, the first number’s initial response is played back to the new number … This continues for however many phone numbers are in the contact list.

(listen to the project in action).

Their final project absolutely it speaks to the title of this essay — everything about our digital lifestyle exposes some form of API, whether it be intentional or not. In fact, people found and sell startups on the notion that they are exposing an API to items that were previously un-API-able. Andrew and Christian expose this information/vulnerability, and then extrapolate it to larger concerns of the meanings of social interconnection (e.g. courts have ruled that privacy, in so far as the telephone is concerned, only extends to the content of the conversation, and not the number that was dialed) to make it immediately disgestable to anybody.

For more information on GSN, read their final project writeup and view the presentation they delivered at Eyebeam.

One of the items that we’re constantly looking at perfecting at Synthesis is our project process — since we work on such a wide variety of projects, its sometimes hard to converge on a single process that all of us can know, embody, learn, and execute on; its really a question of, “write once, run anywhere”. The one thing that I’ve gravitated towards is (and thanks to Glyph for putting it so succinctly): run it like an open source project.

Our client interaction lifecycle has people coming in and out of it at every stage — we have practitioners interacting heavily with clients during “project inception”, engineers are going rampant during “development and build out”, and our clients have internal teams that we’re working with during “the transition”. People need to get up to speed really quickly because their expertise may be needed for a brief moment, or because we’re handing off ownership of a project. And knowledge transfer is just a plain, hard, problem.

Just like any good open source project, we’ve structured all our projects to have top level and sub-level README files — with this, I, a developer, can go from SVN checkout to compiling code in a short amount of time. That, armed with the URL of a well-maintained and up to date Trac instance means that I, again as a developer, know “what needs to be done”. Jabber chat rooms (we were never IRC fans) and e-mail lists for each project means that a “community” can be found relatively quickly. And code reviews mean that the changes committed to the tree are correct, with the great side effect of forcing us to get other junior developers up to speed.

Having projects run like this makes our life that much easier. We just pretend that we’re running a good open source project hosted on Sourceforge and then we’re forced to contend with ebbs and flows. Our process, we like to think, supports developers popping in and out of a projects, and allows us to answer to those who just demand a snapshot view of “where things stand”. And, when we don’t have to worry about “how” things are getting done, then they can really just get done.

E and I are pretty regular supporters of the iTunes store — a song here, a music video there, and an episode of The West Wing in the evening. After inspecting our credit card statements, we’ve decided that spending cash on iTunes needs to be treated as our version of The Latte Factor.

The Latte Factor® is based on the simple idea that all you need to do to finish rich is to look at the small things you spend your money on every day and see whether you could redirect that spending to yourself. Putting aside as little as a few dollars a day for your future rather than spending it on little purchases such as lattes, fancy coffees, bottled water, fast food, cigarettes, magazines and so on, can really make a difference between accumulating wealth and living paycheck to paycheck.

This has all gotten us thinking about how to cut out, or at least reduce, iTunes from our lifestyle. The answer? YouTube:

• Music video on iTunes - $1.49.
• Music video on YouTube - $0.00.

All that is left is the ability for me to load it onto our iPods to take the music out into the world — I’m giving TubeSock a try. Hopefully it will pay for itself in 10-15 downloads.