Category: Four pillars

Last week I used an image that had been shorn of attribution by the time I found it, and wanted to find a way to credit the right person. Lars Plougmann, a long-standing reader of this blog, found the source using a tool called Tineye.

Tineye calls itself a reverse image search engine, and is a pretty good service at the beta stage. There have been so many occasions where I had found the image I wanted, but not at the right resolution. Tineye appears to solve this; at worst, it tells you that the resolution you have is the best you’re going to get, so you don’t waste time looking.

I thought it was worth sharing. Not surprisingly, I went off on a tangent while using it, thinking about how similar techniques could be made to exist for audio and video files, and the kind of uses they could be put to.

Views? Thoughts?

I love mangoes. So much so that I eat them in every possible form: the normal fruit, the dried fruit, the pickle, the juice, ice cream, sorbet, whatever. Even in joke form. Mangoes in to a bar.

Talking about mangoes and bars, take a look at this:

What a wonderful idea. A fork with an extra-long central tine, so that you can “spear” the mango all the way to the seed, so that you can peel off the skin and eat the mango lollipop style. Mango forks have been around for quite some time, as you can see below:

If you want to know more about mango forks, you need to read Maura Graber’s forthcoming book, Let Them Eat Cake.

While I was wandering around her site, I was reminded of another piece of wonderful Victorian utensil invention, the moustache spoon. So here’s one:

Don’t you just love it when people design useful things?

I use Akismet, and as a result most of the spam directed towards my blog gets trapped. Some stuff does get through, and there’s something about the stuff that gets through that intrigues me. So I thought I’d share it and find out if anyone can shed light on the phenomenon.

A large percentage of the spam that does get through seems to be directed at a particular post, as shown below:

It’s an old post, nearly three years old. And it doesn’t read too well, the quotation marks have been replaced by hieroglyphics ever since I recovered the post from backup. But I can’t see anything unusual or different about the post, something strange that would attract spam. Yet maybe 70 per cent of the spam that makes it past Akismet is directed towards this post. Anyone know why? Anyone experience anything similar?

I was going through a bunch of old papers and magazines, doing the therapeutic, cathartic clear-out thing. And I came across the September 27, 1999 issue of BusinessWeek where the first-ever E-BIZ 25 was announced. Heady days.

Anyway, here they are, unranked, grouped in 6 classes shown in brackets:

[empire builders]

• Jeff Bezos, Amazon
• Steve Case, AOL
• Tim Koogle, Yahoo

[the innovators]

• Louis Borders, Webvan
• Jay Walker, Priceline
• Meg Whitman, eBay
• Glen Meakem, Freemarkets
• James Clark, Mycfo
• Christos Costakis, E*Trade

[bankrollers]

• Masayoshi Son, Softbank
• Robert Kagle, Benchmark
• Lawton Fitt, Goldman Sachs
• John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins
• Bernard Arnault, LVMH Moet Hennessy

[the visionaries]

• Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley
• John Hagel, Mckinsey
• Bill Joy, Sun

[the architects]

• Lou Gerstner, IBM
• Pehong Chen, Broadvision
• David Peterschmidt, Inktomi
• Kevin O’Connor, DoubleClick
• Ellen Hancock, Exodus

[the pacesetters]

• David Pottruck, Charles Schwab
• John Chambers, Cisco
• Michael Dell, Dell

Seems like such a long time ago. Yet less than ten years have passed. No Google on the list. No Apple. So who would make your list today?

Some years ago I confessed that my interest in opensource was driven more by Jerry Garcia than by a Stallman or a Raymond.

There’s something about music, and about food, that teaches me a lot. Which helps me understand that opensource is about culture and values; the economic benefits accrue as a consequence rather than as an objective.

Which is why I found this article about what Trent Reznor’s doing encouraging. Now I’m not a big fan of Nine Inch Nails; I have this sense that they’re loud and dark and negative and foreboding ….. see, I’m probably showing my age and biases. Actually I haven’t heard enough of Nine Inch Nails to have an opinion about them; when it comes to rock, I spend my time mainly listening to music made in the period 1964-1974, usually on the softer more melodious side. [And I have liked some of their stuff, thanks to Russ Goring.]

But I don’t have to like Nine Inch Nails in order to like what Trent Reznor is doing. Take a look. See what you think.