Archive for the ‘GenTech’ Category
Last week I responded to a general media posted online request looking for people who “made it” via self study:
I am looking for professionals who developed their particular expertise by intense focus, discipline and self study. You didn’t necessarily learn what you know and what you’ve become good at (and known for) at college (although you could have learned the basics there.) You may not even have a degree. Whatever it is you’ve accomplished, you did it “your way”–and it has worked. If this fits you or someone you know, please send me a BRIEF description of:
- what you do
- how and why you fit my description here–please be specific
- your name, city, company and if I can use your full name, city & company
I’ll follow up with questions via e-mail later today.
I promptly wrote up a bio and sent it off:
I think that I’m a great fit for your column regarding professionals who developed their expertise by self-study as opposed to traditional learning. Here’s a brief summary of my story so far.
I was a brilliant student through high school, graduating third in my class (with only a .5 point spread between the top three graduates). I attempted college but fell short in terms of finances and maturity– I was 17 and really not emotionally ready. I ended up dropping out and pursuing my technology interests on my own time.
I had been programming computers since I was 7 years old, and continued working on technology projects that interested me into the early 90s. I got online in 1993 and immediately found the ideal new venue for my efforts. I built my first web site shortly thereafter, and by the time the rest of the world discovered the Internet– and particularly the web– I had quite a head start.
I did freelancing for a while before taking my first corporate job working in web development in 1995. Over the next 13 years I worked directly for companies like National Instruments, Houghton Mifflin, and Leo Burnett, while always keeping my skills honed by exploring new technologies and pursuing side projects. In my career I’ve had the chance to work with clients and partners like JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories), NASA, Starbucks, Wieden+Kennedy, Morgan Stanley, Apple, Adobe, Thomson Learning, and the US Army.
Although I’ve had trouble getting past HR screenings with a lack of a degree, once I am in place in a company I’ve always excelled– rapidly rising to positions of management and leadership, from director-level to C-level executive.
In December of last year I struck out on my own again and co-founded a web development business called Hapax Labs, and we’re now in the process of being acquired by Mir Internet Marketing. I’ll be joining the Mir team as a part-owner and Chief Solutions Architect.
I like to think that I’m following in the footsteps of other passionate technologists who made their name without a degree hanging on their wall– Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates, just to name a few.
You can find details of my career on my resume at http://www.idolhands.com/resume, or by checking out my LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyehmke
Although I never heard back from the journalist, my story must have been what she was looking for. Look what turned up yesterday: While degree still preferred, it’s certainly no requirement
I’m in the second paragraph under “Seizing Your Opportunity”. (I’m pretty sure that my comments about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were helpful in writing her article, as well.)
I was inspired this week by a post on the Rails Google Group by Melvin at 48hourlaunch.wordpress.com, who was asking for suggestions on a software problem to tackle with 48 hours of effort.
I’ve got what I call a “magic notebook”– several, to be precise– full of app ideas in various stages of ideation. So I decided to take on this challenge as well and see what I can do with one of them.
Like Mel, I’m taking on a project that meets one of my immediate needs and is well within my area of expertise. So I’ll be creating something that is useful to me and also has a broader market appeal.
One of my defining characteristics is the inability to do things halfway; unfortunately, this can sometimes manifest as “analysis paralysis”, overengineering, etc. Although Rails inherently short-circuits a lot of these tendencies (as does my business partner, for that matter!) the strict time limit I’m putting on myself makes this something of a competition between completion and perfection. At worst, I will move one of my unrealized applications one step closer to market, and hopefully learn something about my internal process along the way.
So what’s the big project going to be? Can’t talk about that yet, but if all goes according to plan there should be something public in within the next 30 days (48 hours / 2 hours per day = 24 days). I’ll also be posting notes about my progress as I go.
If you know me in the nondigital world, you also know that my family homeschools my daughter. I didn’t know much about homeschooling or the homeschooling community before we started this adventure a few years ago; my exposure had been limited to one cool-but-eccentric family where I grew up and an uber-religious boss in the 90’s. Homeschooling has been great for us, however, and my 11-year-old daughter is learning more history, geography, literature, and Latin than I ever did, even in high school.
One of the great things about my working from home (since leaving my corporate job back in December) is that not only do I get to spend more time with my family in general, but I’m also able to take on some responsibility for Lydia’s science education. For a few months now we’ve been learning the basics of electronics. Over at our homeschooling blog, www.WhatAboutSocialization.com, you can find the first of our video podcasts, entitled “Warning: Science in Progress!”
The first episode shows our first Arduino project. I’m working on the second and third installments now.
I’ve got Tip of the Day enabled in TextMate. Check out this gem from today…
-25 points if you don’t get the reference.
OK, so it appears that Google did, in fact, get the idea for Image Labeler from someone in game theory– Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University. They licensed his ESP Game, in which players try to guess the words that their partner is entering when shown an image.
I stand by my assertion that this is the wrong game framework for creating valuable image metadata, however, because the game is about predicting your partner’s guesses (thus “ESP game”), and not about collaborating or validating meaningful tags.
The purpose of von Ahn’s game is made pretty clear in the screenshot below:
I’m feeling extremely frustrated with Technorati right now. The fact that LiveJournal has problems interacting with Technorati is one of the main reasons that I moved to Blogspot in the first place, but even after moving blog hosts Technorati is atill not indexing Radio Bantik at all.
I’ve successfully followed Technorati’s procedure for claiming my blog, and I’m using their tag format, but nothing seems to be working for me.
For example, my blog is tagged (in my Technorati account) with the keyword WebObjects, but searching for blogs tagged with WebObjects does not reveal my blog at all. This runs contrary to their help documentation, which states: “Once you’ve tagged your blog with either of the methods above, your blog should be listed in the Blog Directory in a few minutes (up to an hour during periods of intense activity). Thank you for participating!” (A blog last updated 345 days ago, that no longer even exists, does appear in the results list, however.)
I’m using their ping tool when I update, but the site still says that my last update was 8 days ago. No searches against tags in my blog posts work.
I’ve sent e-mail to their support address, but the only reply that I’ve received so far was from an autoresponder. I’m going to try again in a few days, but in the mean time I feel like I’m beating my head against a wall, writing posts that no one will ever read.
Grr.
Update
I resent an e-mail to Technorati’s tech support, but I still haven’t received a reply. However, I think I know what the problem is, and I believe it’s architectural. Since Technorati already knew about a blog named Radio Bantik, as I had previously claimed it at the old address, it was not indexing the new (moved) Radio Bantik. Why didn’t I just update the URL of the original blog in Technorati’s configuration? Because they don’t let you change the name or URL of the blog that you have claimed! So, once again, grr.
However, I have since changed the @#!$ blog once more so that Blogger posts to my own server, so once again I reclaimed the blog through Technorati. And… it seems to be working now. Mostly. Searching is still a little iffy, but at least I show up in the blog directory now.
I didn’t completely waste my morning on Google Image Labeler or anything. (Found via Boing Boing… thanks for ruining my morning, guys.)
But after spending some time on it, I reflected on what they were trying to accomplish– motivating the masses to improve their image metadata– and what they were getting, and I realized that from a game theory perspective, there are serious flaws in Image Labeler.
How It Works
After clicking a button to start, you are paired up with a random partner for 90 seconds. You and your partner are shown an image, and you start entering labels for that image. You’ll also see a list of “off limits” labels that seem to represent labels that have already been applied to the image in previous rounds by other participants. You don’t see the labels that your partner has entered, but you are told the number of labels that they have put in.
Whenever you and your partner enter a matching label, or if you mutually decide to ‘pass’, you move on to the next image.
At the end of the round, you get to see the Google user name of your partner, and you are presented with a list of the images and labels as well as a link to the sites that the images came from:
The brilliant thing about this is that it’s set up as a game. You get 100 points for each label that you and your partner manage to agree on, and you also see your highest ranking partnership:
This brings a competitive spirit to bear on what is essentially a volunteer effort to improve Google’s image search metadata.
Problems with Image Labeler:
Aside from the fact that the images that are displayed are often too small to actually make out, and that they are displayed without any context, the more serious flaw in Image Labeler is the conflict between the mechanism for attracting participants and the objective of their participation.
The structure of the game rewards you for guessing what your opponent will enter as a keyword, not for entering the best keyword. The result is that as you play, you end learning that the winning strategy involves entering labels that represent the “lowest common denominator”, because these keywords have the higher probability of having been entered by your partner. This means that Google is going to end up with a large number of uselessly short keywords (e.g. “man”) rather than truly descriptive keywords (e.g. “Tony Blair”). The time pressure imposed by 90-second rounds only increases the odds of low-quality keywords being applied.
Unless this conflict is addressed prior to keywords from Image Labeler being applied to Google’s database, it could contribute to a serious “metadata poisoning” problem for Google, where they have large quantities of low-quality keywords rather than small quantities of high-quality keywords.
Suggestions for Improvement:
- Pair up high-scoring participants for better results.
- Have follow-up rounds where partners (or other participants) can see their unmatched labels and apply them.
- Provide some sort of context for the image that is presented. Some of the images were illegible scanned documents, that at the end of the game you would discover were pictures of handwritten notes by Freud.
- Hire someone with a background in game theory to redesign the process to produce higher quality results.
Google Image Labeler is a fun time sink, but I’m not sure that it’s actually going to provide the value that it’s intended to without some serious retooling.
I have to go, um, do something now. Something that has nothing to do with improving my ranking (currently #706 overall, #61 today). No, of course not.
I got tired of wrestling with LiveJournal, so I’ve officially moved Radio Bantik over to Blogger. I managed to recreate all posts with the correct dates, but unfortunately, comments are gone.
The only thing that I’ll miss is XJournal. Can anyone recommend a decent Blogger desktop client for OS X?
LazyWeb call to action: someone needs to invent a term for the creation of a blog entry as an act of goodwill and permanent record, following on an arduous and unfruitful Google crusade to find the answer to a tricky and obscure technical problem. (See why that needs a buzzword?)
The background:
My house radiates WiFi like nobody’s business, we’re all laptopish, and I’m fairly paranoid. I hated the idea of checking mail over an unsecured connection, even with the (questionable) protection that a secured WiFi network brings. My hosting provider offered a self-signed SSL certificate option, so I started using that about a year ago.
The problem:
Every time I launch Mail, I get a dialog box for each of half a dozen accounts stating “Unable to verify SSL server pop.idolhands.com”. That’s really, really annoying.
The sarcasm:
Thanks, Apple, for naming your mail client “Mail”. That makes a Google search really, really easy.
The solution:
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Click on “Show Certificate” in the “Unable to verify SSL server…” dialog box. A new pane will appear containing more information about the certificate.
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Option-click-drag the certificate icon in the certificate pane to the desktop. You’ll end up with a file named whatever.server.com.pem
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Double-click the .pem file. It will open in Keychain Manager, and a dialog box will open asking you if you want to add the certificate to a keychain.
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Important: select “X509Anchors”, not your account keychain, from the Keychain drop-down.
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Click OK. You will be prompted for an admin password.
Note to Apple: while accepting self-signed certificates without a warning would be a Stupid Thing, and arbitrarily allowing users to permanently trust these certificates would be a Bad Thing, reading a stern warning and providing an admin password authorization should be the Only Thing that one has to do in order to trust a self-signed certificate. This obscure, non-inuitive 5-step approach stinks of security through obscurity.
As I noted earlier, Lydia and I have been working with my LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit. We’re starting out simple, building some of the models that are recommended in the book that comes with the kit. But since I’ve augmented my collection of parts with some neat stuff from the online catalog for LEGO’s educational division, we have all the parts that we need for more complex robots as we move on.
In addition to being a lot of fun for both of us, I’m seeing a lot of learning opportunities for Lydia with these projects: the ability to read a diagram (e.g. instructions), visual-spacial skills (parsing a 3D drawing and understanding its relationship to the parts in her hand, fine motor skills, mechanics, electronics, logic, problem solving… Robotics is really a rich field for learning.
Our first robot was BumperBot, an obstacle-avoiding robot. The first version had a single bumper attached to a touch sensor, and it was programmed to back up and turn when it struck an obstacle. Since we have a Roomba that has pretty much the same behavior, I even made BumperBot play Roomba’s “uh-oh” sound when it hits something.
We then upgraded the bot to have two sensors, so that it could react differently based on whether it hit something with its left bumper, right bumper, or both bumpers.
Next we’re going to integrate a light sensor. We can use it for echo-location, line-following, light-chasing, and dark-seeking behaviors. I’ll post pictures and write about it when we’re done!
More pictures of our robotics projects are posted on Flickr.
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