Kevin Kelly at TEDxAmsterdam

Continuing the lunch-time video habit, I ended up watching a speech by Kevin Kelly about "technology's story."  As a one-time Whole Earth Catalog editor, you might expect him to think outside the proverbial box -- he doesn't disappoint, dismissing how engineers see these tools, and talking about how we might consider our technology (without which we'd be toast) a seventh kingdom of life, with an evolution and urges of its own.

The talk is a very nice redux of his book, What Technology Wants, which I read a couple of months ago.  I found most of his written arguments compelling, peppered with a couple pies in the sky.  If Amazon auto-generated per-book hash-tags, I'd aim you at the comments my Kindle tweeted about the book.

In another intersection, I've been following the Quantified Self movement, another of his brain children.  I find the most interesting thing about "self quantifiers" is how easily we humans graft technology right onto our bodies.  (Nike+, GPS, bluetools, eyeglasses)  I guess we'll know what technology wants, once we're all cyborgs.

Mark Masterson (CSC) at OSCON

I'm continuing the trend on my lunch-time videos, watching more O'Reilly stuff, and today was Mark Masterson's presentation at OSCON.  He does a really interesting job of breaking down how enterprises balance the adoption of new technologies with risk avoidance.  The upshot, to me, was that risk calculations are based on the probability of failure, times the cost of failure -- so if you can't reduce the probability of failure, virtualization can certainly reduce the cost of failure.  I hadn't seen it put so simply, before.  Very interesting!  (BTW, here is Shanley Kane's post, that he references which I enjoyed.)

Simon Rogers (Guardian) at Strata

I'm still watching Strata speeches at lunch, and I just finished this interesting talk by Simon Rogers at The Guardian.  He's talking about how The Guardian makes sense of big data sets, how they open the raw data to readers, and how they present data in a visualized form to readers.  He mentions the changing role of journalists a few times.  My redux is that in the past, journalists took data sets and asked "the right questions" of the data and presented that -- but now they're able to present views into the raw data that allow readers to ask their own questions.

It would be interesting if this is a sea change in more than just news.  Thinking about operations, we tend to aggregate vast collections of metrics and stats and then present "the upshot" to the customer.  They take our word for it, that the data bear us out, or they ask to see particular subsets of the data.  Are there places where we could give them the full data set, with tools that help them understand it?  Already we directly show them disk space used/free on their NAS volumes ... do we take the next step?

Getting yourself started with Arduino

On of my cow orkers was interested in Arduino, and I'm a fanboy.   So when I got home, I put together a quick "dip your toes in" kit to lend him.  Roughly, it consisted of:

• Arduino Uno
• A-to-B usb cable
• two feet of jumper wire
• a mini breadboard
• a bunch of 10k resistors
• a half dozen LEDs
• sensors for flex, light, pressure and one I forgot
• two instant-on buttons, a potentiometer dial
• one miniature servo

So now he wants to know about good books to get started.  I think when I started, I was just fiddling with parts and relying on sample code on the Arduino site.  But since then I've read a couple of kewl books.  Try these:

• Getting Started with Arduino is very simple
• Programming for Interactivity is pretty hard-core

And of course, he wants a good starter kit.  I've tried two, and they're both great:

• Adafruit "budget" starter kit
• Sparkfun "flex" starter kit

Have fun!