Tag: me

the coffee house, office of the future

over lunch, i had a conversation on the demise of good coffee houses in cambridge. it increasingly seems that if you don’t like your coffee polluted with “flavors” or burnt and served in a plastic cup, and like to have a nice couch to sit on, your options are dwindling. herewith my concept for a renaissance of the coffee house, ca. 2006.

coffee houses have traditionally been an important center for thought and the arts, as well as commerce. For instance, the Cafe Odeon in my hometown Zurich saw Mata Hari dancing, Lenin and Trotsky plotting and the DaDa art movement was born there. Lloyd’s coffee house in London spawned Lloyd’s of London, the first insurance company in the world.

these days, you see people camped out with their laptops, using the free wifi, and consuming far too little to make them welcome and profitable customers. coffee houses need to stop fighting this trend, and embrace it. why not rent out space on their premise, and encourage people to make the coffee house their office? like many who telecommute, i’d be happy to move my virtual office to a nice cafe with comfy chairs, a guaranteed spot, and an ‘all you can eat/drink’ policy. i (or my company) would be willing to pay $300-$400 a month for the privilege.

recurring, predictable revenue stream

subscription-based business models are attractive for their recurring, predictable revenue streams. you’ll notice half-assed efforts at your local cafe to sell gift cards and loyalty programs, or more sophisticated ones like this breakfast club noticed by seth godin. renting out space to telecommuters would be an extension of these ideas.

it’s just like at google hq

most articles about google include the obligatory reference to it’s famous cafeteria. wouldn’t it be great if all the great food you’d want in a typical work day was only a wave to the waiter away? sure beats the food court or the vending machine at your officeplex. should be quite feasible too, as demonstrated by the obscene profit margin on coffee and your local indian place.

it rides on some of the biggest economic trends

wasting 2h a day in traffic to finally arrive at a crappy office plex is on the way out. rising oil prices, the desire of companies to put their capital to better use than sinking it into cubicles and the increasing virtualization of work all lead to an ever growing % of workers who can work from anywhere, anytime. if this cuts down on meetings, the bane of productivity, even better. i for one would not mind to hang out with my friends while we all work for our respective entities (or collaborate on the fly, just like those old geezers at lloyd’s did)

so where is the entrepreneur who can make this happen? would you, dear reader, make use of such a facility if it were offered?

Working on a biochemistry problem

Rosetta@Home screen saver

It’s good to know my computer is actually just doing that, with near 100% efficiency, instead of being mostly idle. Plus, looking at the protein folds and wishing to be able to nudge the search algorithm closer to the lowest-energy state is quite mesmerizing. You also gotta admit that they do have a cool line for their advertising.
2023-08-09: A coda for BOINC

BOINC had some success. It enabled lots of science, and it got lots of people all over the world interested in science. Thanks to NSF, it paid my bills for 15 years, and it gave me freedom to do what I wanted, to travel, and to work with lots of great people. As a piece of software, BOINC is (mostly) beautiful, and I enjoyed designing and writing it.

But BOINC never fully achieved any aspect the vision I outlined earlier. There were moments when it seemed like it might: for example, the HTC and Suzuki projects, the Open Science Grid collaboration, the Anbince thing, and a dozen others. Each of these seemed, initially, like it might put BOINC “over the top”. But all the initiatives petered out, for reasons outside my control. The cycle of hope followed by disappointment, over and over, has worn me down.

content wire interview

i recently did a new interview with paolo di maio of content wire.

Gregor J Rothfuss has been observing and working with content management tools for many years. We catch up with him over the internet to talk about open source, a subject increasingly recurring

How do you see the business model for OS developing?
In services, more and more. there are some excellent open source venture blogs that track this question in great detail: Open Source Strategies and Asay

Os tools are not very usable. Why is that? Is it just still too early in their evolution?
This held true, traditionally, but has recently been true less and less. One reason is that software per se is no longer interesting, and increasingly, developers are aware of usability issues, and a nice UI can now be considered quite sexy. This is mostly due to some well-publicized web applications that utilize AJAX technologies. At first, OSS was often in catch-up mode and had to quickly fill in holes in functionality. now that functional parity to commercial products is being reached, the focus has often shifted to these more subtle qualities.

Plus, more and more hackers understand the value of design, as exemplified by Apple who are taking geek toys and slapping nice UI on top, or Firefox, which is essentially a slimmed down Mozilla.

Only in its Firefox incarnation has full success come.

Reproducible Setups

this is the second time in less than 6 months that i have to migrate my work environment from one laptop to another. i bought a new T42, probably one of the best deals out there. the 7200 RPM and the 1400 x 1000 screen make all the difference. just for comparison, this packs the same screen real estate you get with the 17 inch powerbook into 15 inch, you get 7200 RPM instead of 5400 RPM, and it sets you back $1800 instead of $2700. no wonder apple is changing their hardware platform 😉

as always, moving is a huge pain. this time, i have to deal with my 3GB, 250K file eclipse workspace, with countless settings across applications, logins etc. fortunately, there is freesshd for windows, which makes scp an option and allows me to sidestep all the SMB nonsense.

sekrit message

this morning, when returning to my laptop, it had the following in a fullscreen editor window:

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ui failure

yesterday, we came back from DC, and when we wanted to get on the T at airport station, there was a huge queue. apparently, MBTA had decided to replace the one, 2 second process of “hand over $1.25, get token, insert token, pass barrier” with a 2 minute ordering process with their new ticket machines. the new machines had such a lousy UI that each machine had an MBTA employee assisting with the ordering. instead of a big button to get your damn ticket, you have to wade through a forest of choices (hablas espanol? single ticket, monthly pass, lifelong membership? pay with card, check, sale of daughter? receipt? fries with that? sign up for T frequent commuter miles?) with that familiar touch screen experience (ie, 50% of the time the screen doesn’t recognize your choice). given that just about everyone just wants to get a single ticket and has $1.25 ready, not making that a default accessible with one push is mindless. at least you can recharge your charlie card..