Op de Spoorzone Overvecht website heb ik zojuist een artikel geschreven waarin ik probeer uit te zoeken wat nou eigenlijk het kostenplaatje van sloop en nieuwbouw is en hoe dat zich verhoudt tot niks doen.
Wat me vooral opvalt is dat buitengewoon triviale en cruciale informatie niet (of in ieder geval niet makkelijk) te vinden is. Hopelijk komen er hulpzame reacties op.
Let me explain in a non technical way why Google Wave is a breakthrough. I argue that it doesn’t just revolutionarize the concept of email (only a few decades old), it changes the very concept of mail (thousands of years old).
Let’s go back in time and imagine the Romans had Wave. First of all, I argue that they would have called it Arbor, because it makes more sense and because they didn’t like oceans.
But what would it look like?
Nu ik opzoek ben naar een baan, is het begrip scheefwonen – in een huis wonen dat te goedkoop is voor je inkomen – ineens weer relevant geworden.Als ik straks een baan heb, ben ik dan een scheefwoner? En is dat erg? Sommige van mijn beste vrienden zijn tenslotte scheefwoners.
Vandaag werd er weer klakkeloos negatief over scheefwoners gesproken in de Zaterdag NRC (23 mei, pagina 4, opiniestuk van Maarten Huygen over krakers). Ook vermoed ik dat mijn ouders sceptisch staan tegenover scheefwonen.
Tijd voor een tegenoffensief dus, want scheefwonen is goed!
Back in February I watched Travis Metcalfe’s talk about the Pale Blue Dot project, where you can adopt a star for $10 and sponsor scientific research. And not just any star; the recently launched Kepler satellite is looking for planets around these stars. Now that’s a cheap price to pay for so much fame and glory 
Of course, I wanted to adopt the brightest star available, but this was difficult using the interface available at that time. So I decided to download the list of stars and build my own Ruby on Rails application around it to make this search easier.
It’s located at pale-blue-dot.sprovoost.nl and here’s a preview:
My adopted star
You can search for stars in order of increasing or decreasing brightness and you can choose not to list stars that are already adopted. Each of the stars can viewed in Google Sky Maps, so you can see if you like the looks. You can also search by adopter name.
I just realized that every star now has a URL. Not sure why that is significant, but it’s kind of cool.
One of the features that I’d like to build soon is the possibility of finding available stars near a particular star, so you can adopt a star close to your friends star. To make the sky even more social, I’d like to build a Facebook App around it.
Of course, I don’t have an infinite amount of time to work on this, so any help is greatly appreciated.
You can find the source code here and the issue tracker here.
Also, is there anyone with enough math and programming skills and patience to build a mobile app? Such an app would use the phone’s clock, GPS, accelometer and (optionally) compas to assist in locating the adopted star in the sky.
I guess the reason Jobtorrent is just sitting there not being used -
even though it works – is that it needs a bit more explaining. It’s
very different from Job Feedr, even different from Odesk or even
Mechanical Turk (although that gets pretty close).
The thing that frustrated me about Odesk is that even if you apply for
a 5 hour job, there’s 20 other applications and you need to wait ages
to get a response from the ‘employer’ and potentially even going
through an interview where you need to show off your previous work,
etc, etc.
The idea of Jobtorrent is that in stead of applying for a
job, you just execute the job and collect a reward afterwards. If you
are the first to build a particular piece of software, or fix a bug,
or finish some date entry, you get paid.
From the other side of the fence, if you are developing or dependent
on open source software, and you need to get a bug out of the way that
is too small to properly outsource but too annoying / expensive to fix
internally, you simply post the link on Jobtorrent, wait for the first
person to fix it and give them their money in one click.
I was actually writing this as an email to Mick Liubinskas from Pollenizer when I thought “Mmm, maybe I should turn this email into a blog post…”
Steve Sammartino – author of Start Up Blog – just listed ten reasons for outsourcing digital work and why it’s ethical. My personal ethics were easily satisfied with reason 9:
The outsourced work is not dangerous – we are not sending kids down a mine or employing child labour.
So I don’t see any ethical problem, but I do believe that outsourcing is going to be a massive problem for Australian software developers.
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All good things come to an end and worse still: you sometimes need to plan that end. I figured I might as well make that end as interesting as possible, so here we go!
I would love to share my Internet connection with my neighbors as a way to reduce cost and increase speed and I’m pretty sure a lot of companies would love to do the same thing. Nowadays everyone with a wireless router and an ADSL modem can share and even sell their bandwidth. Except for a little pesky inconvenience: a hopelessly outdated Australian telecommunication law.
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I will distribute free copies of Getting Things Done
We all want to save the world, but we are remarkably ineffective at it. We leave the car at home once a week, replace a few light bulbs and complain to our friends that the government should do something about AIDS. Perhaps we even donate a bit to charities.
The problem is that it just doesn’t add up. It feels good, but it often turns out there are far more effective things you could do. But how do you decide what the best way is to spend your precious time and money?
Last year, Richard Branson offered $25 million to the person who comes up with the best way of removing one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere.
I say, let’s be a bit more ambitious and offer $10 billion to the person who actually removes about 300 billion tons before 2013. In other words, whoever restores CO2 to preindustrial levels before Kyoto ends, wins.
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