I'll be in Portland attending O'Reilly's OSCON next week.

I've never been before, so I'm quite looking forward to it! In addition, I'm driving there, so it'll be the first real long drive I've done in the car. I can't believe I've had it for over 6 years and never traveled any real distance...

I was just browsing Hacker News and was intrigued by the link to Grey Goo.

Nanotechnology has been a fascination of mine since 1986 when I first read K. Eric Drexler's wonderful book Engines of Creation. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend that you do. It's a wild ride through our probable future.

Anyhow, I was particularly struck by one of the paragraphs in the wikipedia article that alludes to the class of bugs that all of us as programmers strive to avoid:

In a History Channel broadcast, grey goo is referred to in a futuristic doomsday scenario: "In a common practice, billions of nanobots are released to clean up an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. However, due to a programming error, the nanobots devour all carbon based objects, instead of just the hydrocarbons of the oil. The nanobots destroy everything, all the while, replicating themselves. Within days, the planet is turned to dust."

Indeed.

Let's not do that.

What an astoundingly great review of The Empire Strikes Back:

Their dialogue fairly crackles, from the first exchange in the corridor of Hoth ("Afraid I was going to leave without giving you a goodbye kiss?" "I'd sooner kiss a Wookie!") to the famous last lines before Han is put into carbonite: "I love you." "I know." Incidentally, never ever say that to a girl when she utters those words unless you are actually about to be frozen in carbonite.

Recommended for nostalgia reasons alone.

Tip'O'Hat to John Gruber for the link.

I'm currently cruising at 35,000 feet on a Virgin America flight from San Francisco to Seattle. I'm surfing on my iPad whilst being served a Rum and Coke by a very nice flight attendant.

Being upgraded to first class didn't hurt either.

Seriously, Virgin America is the best airline I have ever flown. Friendly; a little bit irreverent; spotlessly clean. Recommended.

Did I mention the WiFi?

As usual, Dadcentric sums it up.

I have slammed doors and stood behind them as you cried yourself to sleep.

I have slept in your bed, curled around you like a blanket and felt my legs grow slowly numb.

I heal your wounds and you fix me when I am broken. We meet in the middle and find much happiness there.

Seriously, Dadcentric has some of the best writing out there.

A nice comparison chart, though I'm pretty sure that this applies to any startup, not just tech ones.

[Via Fred Wilson]

Here's a little gem I just found on the interwebs: an interview with Michael Bywater. Michael is an astounding wordsmith; writer of my favourite columns in Punch and allegedly slept with my boss. Not my current boss, mind you.

Some gems:

My main memories are of course of Anita. And her bull terrier, Murdoch. And of the chaotic offices in the ancient and haunted part of London called The Borough, a warren of streets and alleys on the south side of London Bridge...

and...

Even things like Myst - which, hell, was just a droopy post-hippie HyperCard stack with a rather good music loop -- were way below the level of Magnetic Scrolls or Infocom in narrative terms. So the era came to an end.

My time at Magnetic Scrolls was a wonderful time of my life and I enjoyed every moment of it. Hopefully this article will give you some sense of what it was like for the non-engineering folks who passed our way.

Read it over here.

Paul Carr's wonderful tell-all book Bringing Nothing To The Party is now available as a free ebook.

You can read about the process about bringing it out as a free ebook at techcrunch, download it directly here, or read it online via Google Docs...

It's a great story about startup culture in the UK and the jounalist's involvement in it.

Taken directly from the Amazon editorial review:

Bringing Nothing To The Party, is the bizarre, hilarious and nauseatingly true story of a unique group of hard-partying high-achieving young entrepreneurs and one man's attempts to join them, whatever the cost.

As a journalist covering the first dot.com boom, Paul Carr spent his life meeting the world's most successful young Internet entrepreneurs. And in doing so he came to count many of them amongst his closest friends.

These friendships meant he was not only able to attend their press conferences and speak at their events, but also get invited to their ultra-exclusive networking events in London and New York, get drunk at their New Year parties in their luxury penthouse apartments and tag along when they threw impromptu parties at strip clubs after raising tens of millions of pounds in funding.

In 'Bringing Nothing to the Party', Paul uses his unparalleled (and totally uncensored) access to tell the real story of a unique group of hard-partying, high-achieving young entrepreneurs - and his attempts to join them, whatever the cost.

Recommended.

Not only is Didi one of the smartest people it's been my fortune to know (we went to college together), he now heads the "Greek Ministry of Finance General Secretariat of Information Systems".

And he's posting government tech issues out in the open.

Professor to Greece's CIO. Wow, what a job change :-)

Why had I not heard of this before!

The Prisoner, one of the best TV series of all time has been remade and starts a week from Sunday on AMC.

Sadly, I just noted that Patrick McGoohan, the original Number Six, died earlier this year.

As a kid, I visited Portmerion a number of times. I loved the series - I have various books and photo books, I've have had posters on the walls of my office (when I had an office...), etc...

I can't wait!

Be seeing you...

Right now I'm at Benaroya Hall for StackOverflow's DevDays. So far it's pretty good. Joel started off the day with a great talk, followed by Scott Hanselman.

Scott (a great speaker btw), was demoing ASP.Net MVC - very impressive. He also noted that beta 2 of Visual Studio 10 just went live for download.

After Scott finished his talk it was announced that Microsoft would upgrade everyone's laptop memory to the maximum out in the lobby. They have boxes of RAM and a load of screwdrivers.

And not only for Windows laptops. They have memory for Macs too - a very nice gesture.

However, it did strike me as amusing that not minutes after announcing Visual Studio 10 beta 2, Microsoft was offering to upgrade the memory in everyones laptops...

Anyhow, up next is Rory Blyth on iPhone development...

I just posted a little lisp implementation, written in javascript. This has been hanging around for a long time (I wrote it almost two years ago), so it was finally time to get it out there.

This was an interesting exercise and is almost guaranteed not to be bug-free...

You can find it over on github.

Note that this uses the wonderful parser generator by Jan Max Meyer to generate the actual parser.

In an attempt to start posting on this blog again rather than everywhere else (friendfeed, twitter, facebook, etc...), I present you with the following:

Enjoy.

It's amazing how quickly we go from here...

To here...

Sometimes life just needs to slow down.

Now that it's shipped you can see a little bit of what I've been working on.

All that operator stuff? Ahem, me :-) Enjoy.

Actually though, most of what I've been working on is behind the scenes and hard to actually point to, but the operator stuff? Yup, me.

Google really is cool. I've been working on backend infrastructure stuff, but had the idea to take advantage of some of it and add the operator stuff to the docs UI - the team that owned the docs UI loved the idea, so I built it and out it goes. This is just a little part of what they're up to. As the docs blog post says, expect more soon.

Well, we've always been hiring, but we're kicking it into high gear right now. We're looking for dev and test, so if you're interested send me some email (or give me a call).

Google Seattle/Kirkland. (Btw, I took most of the photos on that site...)

However, if you're a "sourcer" or "representing a high quality candidate", please don't call me :-)

When my daughter (my little three year old baby) got home, she informed me that she had a learnt, in her words, Taekwondo, at daycare today.

So not only does she totally own me already (she's a girl, she's my daughter, aka a dangerous combination), she's also going to be able to totally kick my ass.

Sigh. Daughters. They rock :-)

Pretty interesting. Students at Georgia Tech created a game that maps a 3D view onto whatever the camera in the phone-like device is seeing.

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

They produced a nice video too...

Sweet idea.

A few weeks ago, Hugh MacLeod, whose blog Gaping Void is a never-ending source of inspiration announced that his book Ignore Everybody was available for pre-order on Amazon.

Naturally I went ahead and ordered it.

A few days later he announced on his Crazy, Deranged Fools email list that he'd send a signed copy to the first thousand people who'd pre-ordered the book.

Genius.

Today my signed copy arrived and my other copy will find it's way into the hands of someone else who needs some inspiration. Or a kick in the arse. One of the two.

Anyhow, the book rocks! I started reading it this evening and was very happy to see that chapter seven starts with my favourite piece of Hugh's writing...

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the "creative bug" is just a wee voice telling you, "I'd like my crayons back, please."

It inspired me.

So I went ahead and mashed me up some Hugh to create my own cube grenade. You can find Hugh's original here.

It'll be going up in the office tomorrow.

Thanks Hugh (and I hope you don't mind ;-)

Having thought about my last post for a bit I thought I'd ask you, dear reader, what would you like me to write about?

And at the same time I get to try out the nifty Google Docs Forms thingy. All responses end up in my spreadsheet and won't be shared with anyone (until I write about it, that is).

Let me know!