Aaron White

This came in pretty handy today. (via Wikipedia)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:07:00 -0500

This came in pretty handy today. (via Wikipedia)

An Open Letter to Google & Oracle

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:36:00 -0500

DoInk.com, like many other startups, uses Java, and in-spite of the trend towards dynamic cotton-candy languages, I still love the overly verbose jTongue, if for nothing else than it’s static typing system and amazing catalogue of libraries.

Larry #1: I know Google invests heavily in Java technologies, and with good reason: it’s the best way to make maintainable large-scale suites of websites. I love your open source Java library contributions, and use them actively.

Larry #2: I can’t imagine you give a flying-duck about Java. I suspect it wasn’t relevant to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, and I’d understand (though be disappointed) if Oracle let Java languish.

Larry #1: Larry #2 isn’t incentivized to grow Java (see above). PLEASE, is there anyway you could be persuaded to take Java “off their hands”? It would mean a lot to our jCommunity in the long run.

Thanks in advance,

- Aaron

The Adventures of Lil Cthulu. This wasn’t the mental image...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:07:00 -0500

The Adventures of Lil Cthulu.

This wasn’t the mental image I had when reading Lovecraft, but hey, this is a fine interpretation on its own! (via Dave)

tedr - weliveinthefuture - ideasareawesome via New...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:20:11 -0500

tedr - weliveinthefuture - ideasareawesome via New Scientist

Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device

Great… now I’ll have to get over my aversion to things touching my eyes…

Ah. Finally; a domain name.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:40:13 -0500

My blog has sat ‘naked’ at aaronwhite.tumblr.com too long, today I gifted it with its own domain name: you are now reading Restriction Is Expression.com. It’s not the shortest URL I own, but the phrase is a tenet of mine.

Adversity & limitation is the context for meaning-creation in the world. (Or, if you prefer, its not about what’s waiting on the other side, it’s the climb). I hope this serves as a reminder for creators, developers & artists: this struggle is what makes your story so great.

I'm being held hostage by Facebook!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:15:00 -0500

By now, many of you have seen Facebook’s new ‘featured loser’ section. You know, that little area up-and-to-the-right, politely suggesting you re-connect with a friend who is no longer actively using The Facebook…

As a social website builder, I understand how powerfully this simple message can affect engagement, on the other hand, now I know Facebook’s holding my social reputation hostage.

It’s becoming hard to sleep at night knowing that if I don’t feed the wall, Facebook is going to slap a scarlet letter alongside my picture and ensure all my friends see.

Well played, Facebook, well played.

(Unrelatedly, I just integrated Tumblr to post to my newsfeed…)

Facebook Fan Page Etiquette

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:19:00 -0500

I’ll fan your page when:

I use your service
I love your service
I support your entrepreneurial endeavor on an emotional or intellectual level

I won’t fan your page if:

I don’t use your service
I don’t already know what your service is
Its not your ‘baby’, just a distant cousin

This post is going to allow me the emotional wiggle-room to click ‘ignore’ and not worry about having broken unwritten decorum.

Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:35:44 -0500

marco:

I’m sure you split stories like this into two pages for a good reason: to save my bandwidth. After all, the remaining 3,126 characters of the story’s body (1,530 bytes as transferred with gzip compression) would have increased the page’s total size by 0.0032%.
No, I’m just yanking your chain. I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right? Why should you leave money on the table? You’re a business.
But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!
Keep up the great work, publishers.

Dear Steve Blank, this is incredibly irresponsible

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:11:38 -0500

Dear Steve Blank, this is incredibly irresponsible:

rafer:

caterpillarcowboy:

rafer:

Steve Blank Quote:
It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors.

Rafer sez:
I’m all for being non-judgmental, but this is ridiculous. When you are in a position of authority, it’s incumbent upon you to say when something is a terrible idea. Do not publish instructions on precisely how a founder would poison the next couple years of their lives.

I’ve shared my thoughts on it, but I’m curious (since you have more experience than me) what you find so objectionable.

Rafer sez:
@cowboy You aren’t the only one who asked, so I must have been unclear. Blank is laying out a path to raise a round of capital before there’s a business. Raising such a round has such a tiny, tiny probability of providing economic benefit to first time founders that it’s the startup equivalent of Russian Roulette instructions — using five bullets instead of one.

He ought to have written “Don’t do this” across the top in big red letters. And since that’s the case, why write it at all?

Scott: I think we have two totally different take-aways from this article. First, Blank outlines “what companies ‘used’ to do (read: still)” - business plan -> funding -> execute.

In the second section, he goes on to suggest if you follow Customer Development and iterate to product-market-fit (or at least close enough to it), *that* is the time to raise money, when you need it to fuel a viable business, and can demonstrate to VCs that you have a viable business (or are close to it)

How does this poison a founders next couple of years? Still unclear on your objections.

OMFG. “You rarely know what’s going to turn up on...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:21:00 -0500

OMFG.

“You rarely know what’s going to turn up on one of those wacky Spanish talk shows, but in no way were we expecting this. This man has trained his dog to dance, and we mean really dance. As the caption on Live Leak’s website puts it, “this dog dances better than you.” (via Huffington Post)

Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline, because my...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:51:22 -0500

Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline, because my girlfriend & I had a killer costume this halloween ;-)

Apparently, my dream conference room became a reality in...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:44:00 -0500

Apparently, my dream conference room became a reality in Facebook’s new office space.

via giantrobotlasers Click through the image, this info-graphic...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:32:07 -0400

via giantrobotlasers

Click through the image, this info-graphic rocks!

Nice! Amazon RDS: http://ping.fm/fB3F1 (cloud MySQL w/ elastic resources)

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:58:41 -0400

Nice! Amazon RDS: http://ping.fm/fB3F1 (cloud MySQL w/ elastic resources)

Interesting listing on MVP tools/tactics: http://ping.fm/hK4pK

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:54:54 -0400

Interesting listing on MVP tools/tactics: http://ping.fm/hK4pK

"It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:13:20 -0400

“It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you.”

- http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html (via shellen) (via hiten)

thegongshow: Caterina Fake’s recipe for a focused, productive...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:30:11 -0400

thegongshow:

Caterina Fake’s recipe for a focused, productive day. Very cool (and very nicely designed). I wish I had the self-discipline to implement this, but both the nature of my job and the way my mind spins hold me back.

——————
singletasking (via caterina)

Good lord, what has science done?! (via hiten: iomegadrive...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:13:14 -0400

Good lord, what has science done?!

(via hiten: iomegadrive agentmlovestacos)

Finally Deactivated my Vark.com Account

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:23:00 -0400

As a startup, Vark.com is doing a lot of interesting things. I really dig their IM interface, the breadth of ways they store, share, & answer questions, the interesting statistics regarding “median time to answer” and other fun facts about how well the service is humming.

Ultimately, though, it has a single fatal flaw: it fails to provide personal value to the nucleus of expert users that provide value to the wider user-base.

Josh Porter (aka Bokardo) explains this problem succinctly in a post title “The Delicious Lesson”:

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

Vark.com fails to provide experts any lasting and meaningful value… “Why should I spend my time and energy answering these questions?”

This isn’t unrecoverable. Vark could provide experts value in the form of notoriety by ‘scoring’ their contributions and providing a category leader-board, appealing to their ego or compulsion to beat the ‘game’.

Perhaps there is some other clever offering, but the lesson is: there has to be something.

Just your typical Roger-Rabit-esque morning here in...

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:47:24 -0400

by , made at

Just your typical Roger-Rabit-esque morning here in Brookline.

We launched a neat new site called “my.doink.com” last week. Let’s you make animations with imported sounds and imagery. It doesn’t require registration to play with the tool, so check it out! We’re gluttons for feedback.