Google has launched a preview of their new Google App Engine. The first supported language is Python, which can be used to develop web applications that Google will host for you.

Google's plan is to handle all the mundane things that you need to do when getting an application running on the web... things like hardware setup, DB and web software configuration, notifications, authentication, log rolling, scaling and the like.

I wonder if offerings like this from Google (and other vendors like Amazon) could spawn a new breed of startups where entrepreneurs can concentrate on their ideas without worrying about hardware purchases and Apache config files?

I wasn't absolutely sure it would work, but for not too much cash I was able to upgrade the Rogers PVR that I'm renting to have about 5 times the space to store more shows. The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 (not the HD version, no high def for us yet) has a port on the back that allows adding a second hard drive.

I went the fairly cheap route and bought a new 500 Gig Western Digital hard drive at Canada Computers in Waterloo and a basic, cheap case/enclosure together for around $150.00.

The first time I hooked the drive to the system, I didn't read the PVR manual closely enough. You are not supposed to plug the hard drive power into the PVR switched outlet. The drive needs to be powered up before the PVR.

The second time around, I got a message to format the drive. I agreed and then the system worked, but still no extra space. The next morning I hard-powered-down the components again and let it boot. Then wham... the system goes from 80 Gig to 580 Gig. Yay. A rough calculation/guess and I figure I can store about 430 "shows", noting that we save shows that are a mix of 15 minutes, 1/2 hour, full hour and the regular 2 hour movies.

I was traveling on the 401 on Friday February 15th, 2008 and I stopped at the Mallorytown S. service centre. I happened to find a ring near the Tim Hortons lineup. I'm hoping to reunite the ring with it's owner.

If you lost a ring and can describe it in specific detail, I would be willing to send it back to you.

Am I crazy posting this? It's a bit of an experiment in conscience I guess. How many messages will I get? Send a note to "onecog2many @ gmail.com".

My web host is going to move this site to another physical location. They're not just picking up the box and putting it in another room. They're going to slurp all the files and data down a big pipe to another state and drop it on a new machine. Cross your fingers that by this time tomorrow I'll still be able to do anything.

Update: The Register picked up on the fiasco caused by the extended downtime...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/navisite_outage/

Those of us old enough to remember reading e-mail on UNIX systems from the command line (with the mail or elm programs) might recall a utility called "biff". Once turned on, biff would interrupt whatever you were working on to sound a bell and display the first few lines of an incoming message right in your terminal window.

Along with many X-Windows systems came a biff improvement in the xbiff utility. Besides keeping notifications out of your terminal windows, xbiff displayed a cute mailbox with the flag up or down depending on the status of your e-mail. New mail comes in and the flag went up. Read your mail and the flag went down.

I think it's time for the next generation in biff... the "Chumbybiff". Chumby is a small, friendly networked device with text, audio and video capabilities. It is designed to be "hackable" which means the makers of Chumby encourage you to "upgrade" the device. You can change the physical look of the device by embedding it into another product (like a stuffed animal, or an appliance). You can augment the electronics of the device (e.g. with sensors), and you can change (and share) the software inside.

That's where Chumbybiff comes in. You could program a Chumby to make a sound for any incoming messages. It could be updated to listen in on the phone line and/or voicemail as well as e-mail or IM messages from the Internet. A system could be setup to easily change the sounds for each type of message by recording a sound or choosing an MP3 file or something similar.

I can see this being useful for people at home with babies. Once you get a baby to sleep, the ring of the phone can just ruin your day. Chumby could soften the phone by playing a more soothing ring sound, and could also make quiet "ping" reminder sounds when an IM or e-mail comes in.

Just a thought. Since Chumby is wireless, it's easy to move from room to room (like parents often do with a baby monitor anyway). I don't have a Chumby (or the time) to try this out, but it seems like a good idea.

I just came across this on the WPLINFOSTUFF blog, and I wasn't (and am still not) sure if this is for real or not. The NOSO project encourages people to get together and NOT connect with each other. It's for those people that are so engrossed in online interaction (E-mail, Facebook, podcasts, IM) that they need a scheduled break to be with other people being by themselves.

http://www.nosoproject.com/

I happened to be walking with my kids earlier this summer when we bumped into one of my son's school mates. We stopped to chat for a bit in their back yard and I noticed that there were several lush spots of green lawn when most other yards in the neighbourhood were patchy and brown from a recent dry spell.

The neighbour noted that they had moved their trampoline around periodically when they noticed how well the grass fared underneath.

I wonder if you could build and market a device that worked like a large retractable awning with a material similar to the trampoline surface, covering your entire lawn during the hottest parts of the day (when you wouldn't normally want to be outside anyway) and have it hidden away when the yard is in use and during the night and cooler parts of the day.

It could even be automated, sensing the temperature, angle of the sun, amount of changing shade, etc. It might be viable for smaller rectangular-shaped lawns that you might find in the suburbs, but likely not on an estate. Perhaps an roving cover that moved from place to place would work for large areas?

A built-in low pressure mister would likely help keep the lawn lush at the same time.

What do you think?

I would like to announce the start of a new website called "One Key Press". I have set up this website to encourage people who live in the Region of Waterloo and surrounding areas to discover, inform and participate in their communities. It will feature news and views on local happenings from myself and other local authors.

If you're interested in helping out, let me know at michael@onekeypress.ca.

I will also chronicle my efforts on the Editor's Blog hosted on the One Key Press site, so check it out if you're interested in the trials and tribulations of setting up a site like this.

Is it just me, or does the introduction of Squidoo Module Development Kit coincide with the introduction of Squidoo group spam? I maintain a robotics group that used to be configured to allow anyone to join, that is until spam lenses started to be added. I've changed the configuration to force approval for being added to the group, but I'm still getting requests for adding lenses that have nothing to do with robotics.

Are these just ad-revenue-hungry lensmasters, or an automated barrage of Squidoo-spamming-bots on the loose?

Update 2007/03/31: It looks like Squidoo has been listening to complaints of spam. Follow the link below to read about their efforts:

Spam, It’s What’s Not For Dinner

WorkHappy.net is an entrepreneurial blog with a track record for good (if infrequent) posts and reviews. Carson McComas is known to post the occasional inspiring quote as well, and this one got me thinking...

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

That one speaks to me... instead of lining up tasks and barking orders, a good entrepreneur (or a any manager in general) should make a priority of inspiring their partners, investors, co-workers or even customers. Keep the goals clear and let people figure out their own best way to achieve them. It's very "Cluetrainesque" for someone who passed on in 1944.

For more details on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, see the Wikipedia and WikiQuote pages.

Captain Cam, a children's entertainer that my kids have seen at a few events, must have a lot of time on his hands. He answers kids' questions on his video blog and he's getting pretty good at it.

Here's a recent entry where he answers a question about math:

Watching Captain Cam in person is fantabulous! The kids really like his magic tricks, songs and general craziness.

Here are some more links to help you find out more about this crime fighting super hero:
Captain Cam on mySpace
Home page

This isn't much of a technological business idea, but if you had the mechanical skills it might be worth a shot.

I watched a small-town holiday parade just recently and one of the floats was a tractor pulling a hay wagon loaded with people. When the tractor pulled away from a complete stop, all the people on-board the trailer were jolted out of their place. For farm equipment this shock might not be such a big deal, but when you have kids in tow it's not really safe.

I wonder if you could build a hitch that would dampen the shock of fast starts and stops so passengers wouldn't be jolted. It would have to be as easy to attach to the tractor as a regular hitch, yet have the ability to even out sudden changes in velocity. Do you think it's possible? Such a device might even be good for delicate farm equipment... although I don't know if that's a problem or not.

Gah! Spammers are going to be the death of me.

For quite some time my blog here has been running spam free, but for one reason or another it has been a target for the last few weeks and I've been the victim of comment spam. I thought I could get away without doing it, but as a result I've turned off the ability to post comments without approval.

For my little site this won't be much of a problem, but I imagine that approving each and every comment on a site with a high volume of readers and commenters would be a nightmare. A site administrator enables comments on their site in order to promote conversations, but the spammers make it near impossible to leave the system unattended and open.

I know that sites like Slashdot have an incredible volume of comments on every post, but they also have a large user base and moderators that help push off-topic talk to one side. Since it's just me and my site here, I'll live with the fact that I'm being a little "controlling" and comment approval is now required.

Update 2006/11/30 - It seems that even the comment approval feature doesn't stop the automated comment spam robots. I've spent the better part of the month removing daily spam comments from the approval queue... the attempts still keep coming in even though they never make it to public view on the site. So to keep my sanity I've had to implement some other methods that should make it harder for the computers to add spam, and easier for real people to add valuable comments.

If you've ever had the urge to do some birdwatching, keep an eye on this one. From the creators of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music store comes Songbird, an open source project that I'm sure will be big.

It's a music player, organizer, mixer and what have you that looks a bit like iTunes from the screenshots. But where Winamp and iTunes support video playback, from what I it looks like so far there are no plans to do so in Songbird. It appears the coders are trying to it do one thing and do one thing well... making the best free and cross-platform music player possible.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet this project will go far and make a big impact.

Oh ya... I shouldn't forget to mention that I first read about Songbird on the MAKE: blog.

Mark Evans over at the Maple Leaf 2.0 blog points out that a web site offering a free service can indeed make money. PlentyofFish.com, and on-line dating service apparently makes $10,000 a day through Adsense. Incredible! The owner reports that he has the largest website run by one person.

Jason Fried over at the 37signals blog makes a comment that you've likely heard before, but applies to anyone who is interested in starting a technology business. Pondering whether AOL or Microsoft can compete with YouTube's success in the on-line video market, he states:

"Can AOL and Microsoft beat YouTube down the road? Anything is possible, but they’re making it awful hard on themselves if they think technology is what’s going to win this race. Technology rarely wins the race — experience and execution does. YouTube nailed that. Time will tell if they nailed a few coffins at the same time."

Experience and execution... many would say it's the execution that is a real entrepreneur's calling card. Entrepreneurs do. They "make something happen" as Seth Godin encourages. Even if you don't have the experience, getting out there and starting something will put you in a place where you will learn what you need to know.

"Technology rarely wins the race?" That's another one to remember. As someone who is knee-deep in the creation of software, it's all too easy to get caught up in new technologies for the sake of new technologies. Focusing on the end product and just making something with whatever tools are at hand is likely a better way to get things going.

Blogs and blogging software are becoming ubiquitous. They let you journal your every thought, and combined with web feeds make it easy for anyone to read your thoughts in the way that they prefer. But the basic blog is still lacking in functionality in my opinion. Guided by Internet search engines, people often return to blog postings long after they were posted and possibly after they are relevant. Stale posts can be irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.

Constructive bloggers often re-visit and update their posts from the past as they learn more about the topic. Take the PressThink blog for instance. Jay Rosen is quick to add to his posts with a summary of other people's comments, as he comes across them, in a follow-up area he calls the "After Matter". He include quotes from other sites and links to additional information, along with his own commentary on how his opinion changes as time passes. If all blog software had a feature that supported this, posts would rarely go stale. I can see this turning into a Wiki-like page for each blog post.

There's also the Work.com site. While I'm not sure it can be called a blog, each article has several sections recommending other sites, services and blogs that provide additional information on the topic.

Maybe it seems like a lot of work to revisit your posts days, weeks or years later? I guess you could say that. But if you are providing information to a community of readers, you might feel that you owe them to keep the information up to date. You could look at it this way, the more quality content that appears on your site, the more loyal readers you will find and keep. If they come to know you as an expert, they'll be more likely to return to your site and recommend it to others.

You might say that existing comment systems provide the type dynamic updates that I'm talking about, but on popular blogs I see a really poor signal to noise ratio in the comments. It's not really a conversation as much as it is a shouting match there. Having something like the after thought section allows the author to pull together reactions to the original post in a clear and concise manner.

They're doing amazing things with computer generated imagery (CGI) these days, creating fantastical and unreal characters, scenary and special effects for the movies. But what if you want to put an object from the past in your film? You could go out and find someone that has what you're looking for (like a classic car, or an old kitchen appliance) and pay them to rent their treasure for the duration of shooting. Or... you could pay someone to rent/generate you a computer model that you could animate and drop into your scene.

You could be that someone. A database of full, three-dimensional objects could be created by "scanning" real items now before they're gone. Then you could place them in the background of any movie, or use them to accurately create a CGI model if you need to have your object animated.

Now... how much would you have to charge for a model? How would you manage the rights to the use of the model? Does the technology for creating a high definition scan for objects of any size already exist, or would it have to developed?

BarCamp? What's that? No... you won't be learning how to make martinis. Check out the site. Participate. From the sidebar on the site:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

The first meeting is Friday Sept. 29th, 2006 at UW, but it's not an event specific to the University.

Stephen Walli has a fine post titled "Startup Mechanics: Security, Responsibility, and Equanimity"  on his blog Once More Unto the Breach. He talks about the myth of security in a big company, and of the responsibility an entrepreneur must take in his or her own venture. Here's a snippet:

In a startup you need to be very comfortable constantly making decisions with less than perfect data that will fundamentally effect the course of a small company. Some of those decisions will be wrong.  Everyone on the team will know it.  How you behave about such mistakes will define your personal success more than the bad decision ever could. How you behave when others on the team make their mistakes will fundamentally define the success of the team.

Some sound advice for anyone attending Entrepreneur Week this year :)