Tag: JustMigrated

In case anyone asks, my new telco is PowerClean and linksys

When I was out in the center of town today and made 2 international phone calls through wifi access points named PowerClean and linksys. I would have perhaps paid ePlus €10 for the 2 calls, but instead I paid 0¢ when calling via my own Asterisk server and out to the PSTN via Voip Discount. Eplus needn’t worry, I’ll keep paying my rip off subscription to them a little longer. All this is possible using the Nokia E61 which I can highly recommend as a phone.

DD-WRT Rocks

I upgraded one of my Linksys WRT54G Routers with the DD-WRT software. It’s been running a couple of days now and is really great. It replaces a mediocre interface with a clean functional and usable interface. So far the router has also been reliable and extensively used for voip calls and general wireless connectivity.

The DD-WRT puts a slimmed down linux onto the Linksys access point. It even comes with a netflow export feature which is very cool.

Here’s a picture of the interface in action:

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What I’m listening to

If I should die, let it be known that I read the following blogs:

…and listened to the following podcasts:

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Just in case.

Milton Friedman dies.

Being involved with $SECRET_PROJECT I have had little time to track regular news and managed to miss Milton Friedman’s death.

I’ve read a couple of his books, my favorite being Money Mischief.

Friedman’s view, government had the opposite obligation: to keep its
hands off the economy, to let the free market do its work. He was a
spiritual heir to Adam Smith, the 18th-century founder of the science
of economics and proponent of laissez-faire: that government governs
best which governs least.

[[posterous-content:eCIheojiBwactAopumyy]]

Jamie Cullum

Julie managed to get some last minute tickets to the Jamie Cullum concert last night.  It was a fantastic concert.  The supporting band Nizlopi, was aslo very good.

To be honest I hadn’t heard either of Jamie’s 2 newer albums and was very impressed.  At first he came across as somewhat arrogant on stage but slowly managed to build up a good repoirtoire with the audience.  The highlight of the evening was when he brought his band off stage and played his penultimate song out in the audience, right in front of Julie and myself.

Pictures will be forthcoming.

S.

The Valley that Woz

Interesting video of Woz (one of the Apple Computer Founders) talking about growning up in Silicon Valley. It brings home the benefits of living in an area with a rich conventration of electonics and technology companies.

“Parts weren’t easy to find but you could get a distributer in Mountain View… but at least it was possible here. At least we had a few places here.”

Guess it’s still true today.

YouTube nearly didn’t succeed

YouTube Lecture by founder – Karim

Once they had the site up and running, Karim and partners Steve Chen and Chad Hurley set about pitching the site to every Wired writer they could find. Nobody bit. Urging would-be entrepreneurs in the audience to trust themselves as experts, Karim notes, “Of course now it’s hard to pick up any copy of Wired that doesn’t mention YouTube.”

Problem was, nobody used YouTube. Karim shows another video of the YouTube boys sitting around pondering their existence. Nobody’s going to watch this, they complain; “This is lame.” To try to attract viewers, the three figured the best thing would do would be to get hot chicks involved. So, Karim recounts, they posted an ad on Craigslist in Los Angeles promising attractive females $100 if they’d post 10 videos on YouTube. They got not a single reply.

In June 2005, YouTube revamped, adding the four essential features that jump-started viral growth.

1) related video recommendations,
2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video,
3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments, and
4) an external video player.

That sharp uptick of growth (which, included in today’s YouTube traffic chart of the last two years, shows up as part of the flatline days) made it possible for YouTube to raise $3.5 million in November 2005. Sequoia, the sole venture firm that took a stake in the company, was apparently the only VC that really got involved with the product. Right after the first meeting, Karim recalls, the YouTube guys watched the entire Sequoia office, including the secretaries, register and start using the service.

And that’s where Karim’s talk ends. We don’t get to hear about his decision to leave the company and return to grad school at Stanford, but of course that’s a more personal story. What we do get is not so bad, though, and you can bet it’s a lot more than we’re going to get out of Google/YouTube PR in the foreseeable future.