Blast Off

My father‘s satellite launched on Wednesday!

GLAST Spacecraft Lauch

Taking Opportunities

I touched on this before, but Marc Andreesen’s essay about careers and creating and accepting opportunities rather than having a definite plan really resonated in me.

I believe a huge part of what people would like to refer to as “career planning” is being continuously alert to opportunities that present themselves to you spontaneously, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

And with that in mind, effective May 2nd, I will be Chief Technical Officer of JESS3.



I couldn’t be more excited. Jesse has already built an amazing team, a huge and exciting client roster, and has the passion and drive to realize our dreams.

Plus I get to play on the web all day. Who can beat that?

Jesse had posted about this the other day, but I wanted to give my current employer proper notice before I started talking about it.

People often trash working for large companies, especially anything government related. I loved it. But, in the end, I knew where I wanted to be, and a stepping stone formed around it.

Real World, Stage 2.

I Made a Fire Eagle Application

Late last year I mentioned that Yahoo was coming out with it’s own location management platform. They launched it last week in private beta. At this point – it really is just that, a platform. Very few applications exist. Seth Levine was kind enough to send me an invite.

I wrote a quick application using Fire Eagle. Birdwatcher shows recent location updates on a nice pretty map (using the Yahoo Maps API, of course…).

The bummer is that I can’t get a feed of recent updates platform-wide that twitter offers, even if I’m not displaying any identifying information. So if you want your updates to be added, click the “Add yourself” link in the top right corner and the application will start showing your locations as you add them.

I see location as an upcoming feature in online interaction. As our technology usage grows more transparent and better integrated in our lives, including while mobile, where we are will play a role.

My ideal application is something that will automatically update itself on my location, and notify me if my friends are near me. From the screenshots on Fire Eagle’s site, it looks like they are planning a Facebook application that will do that. If they don’t come up with something soon I may do it myself…

I’ll eventually post up the source code for BirdWatcher, so others can see how it works + improve.

Some Overall Thoughts

• The geocoder is pretty robust. Just like Google Maps, you can type in a lot of crap and it’ll figure it out.
• The platform isn’t that stable yet. Was down for a while today.
• Don’t launch a platform with a total of zero demo applications (other than a very basic walkthrough).
• Don’t launch a platform with incomplete libraries (the PHP api had about half of the functions, and didn’t fully work).
• Fire Eagle is touted as heavily privacy focused – in face it’s about the same as Facebook. Once you grant permission to an application, they can see and do whatever they like.

UPDATE: I encountered some issues with the API yesterday, but they are resolved now.

UPDATE 2: Yeah, they changed their API around. Thanks for telling me… NOT. What has two thumbs and is really annoyed right now? THIS GUY. The app is broken right now. Fire Eagle is taking a ride on the FailBoat.

Idea: Picket Fence Project

I’m thinking about starting an open source project, based on a need I see. I’m working on fleshing out the idea a little bit more, and recruiting some local PHP developers I know to help me. I don’t have time for this, but who does?

One of the great things about developing third-party applications on Facebook and other platforms is that everything related to user authentication is handled for you.

$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

All a developer has to do is toss in that one line of code, and all user authentication is handled for you.

When building web applications, I’ve spent way too much time dealing with user authentication, profile registration, logging in, logging out, etc. There are lots of tutorials for this, but in the end, you always have to figure it out yourself.

I want to start an open source project that will create a dead-simple user management system, so all a developer has to do is call one line of code, and everything else will be taken care of for them.  I’m calling it the Picket Fence Project.

I also want it to be easily configurable, and it to allow you to log in (optionally) with:

• OpenID - which is way too complicated to implement on your lonesome
• Facebook - If they can log in with their Facebook account, great
• Anything else – whatever other auth systems become available.

Of course, if this is already out there, great. Just tell me

And if you are a PHP rockstar with some extra cycles, let me know.

WidgetDevCamp Presentation

Sorry for the week delay… hard to post when you’re in the middle of a mountain (literally).

WidgetDevCamp was awesome, thanks to everyone, especially Peter Corbett and Justin Thorp.

Here are my slides:

| View | Upload your own

I gave a presentation about Facebook development, and afterwards they asked to actually see an application being developed, so I did just that. The WidgetDevCamp application. I learned the hard way that Ubuntu and projectors don’t mix, but Joe LeBlanc was kind enough to lend me his Mac for the presentation. I feel like I’m going to end up going the Mac way soon.

Joe wrote about it. So did Peter. And Justin.

Jess3 posted some nerd-tastic pictures of me.

Speaking at WidgetDevCamp

I’ll be at WidgetDevCamp this weekend.

I’ve planned to talk about developing Facebook applications and how they “work”, with a particular spin on developing widgets. I may also be collaborating with one or two other people on some other topics – we’ll see how that plays out.

I’ll post slides after.

If you are there, say hi.

Reaching My Google Goal

I’m now #2 on Google for “zvi”. I can make it.

Google Might Want To Recrawl This…

Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, everything you are viewing is merely reflects a moment in time. You can come back a day later and it’ll be different. While I was doing some searching for the previous blog post, I came across this little gem for the wikipedia entry on Intrapreneurship.

Click here to see it, kinda NSFW.

Looks like Google needs to re-index that page.

If you’re not laughing, it’s late. Leave me alone .

The Creativity Sinkhole

I’m a technical person, a hacker. I happen to also be a pretty good designer, at the same time. While they both are weaved together so often, they often form a bizarre dichotomy.

Spending a good chunk of my high school and college years learning to be a pretty programmer/scientist, I was taught from the ground up to be a problem solver. I know how to identify a problem, then design and implement a solution. While there may be many different ways of solving it, you know when something works. Same goes with entrepreneurship: identify a need, fill that need. You have a pretty good idea when something fills a need.

Design is totally different. There is no right answer. Something may look good, but so does another design.

I’ve redone the design half a dozen times. Each time, I love it. Then I see a design on another site, and get inspired to come up with something different. I spend hours tweaking fonts, spacing, colors (colors might be the worst to deal with, I wish the whole world were color blind).

You’re never done with design.

To sum it up, as soon as there is enough money around, I’m hiring a creative person to take all the creative stuff out of my hands!

Mozilla Lighting Updated

Fired up Mozilla Thunderbird this morning, to find an update for Mozilla Lightning, the calendar plug-in for their e-mail client. I had installed it before and absolutely hated it mainly because of the crappy/ugly interface. The new interface, however, is really slick. Thanks open source!