Building an information culture Lean startups thrive on information in the same way that lean manufacturing plants do. The only difference is that startups thrive on customer data rather than process data. Getting the best return on invested time and resources means leveraging ready made solutions by fitting them into the framework created by customer knowledge. I just read the…

Casio DG-20 guitar teardown I bought a Casio DG-20 digital Midi guitar a few years ago thinking that it would be a cheap way to input Midi data into my sequencer using guitar fingering. I was partially right, but the feel of the instrument is not quite the same as a real guitar. The pressure-sensitive fingerboard is certainly unique, as…

Make: Electronics – The new Engineers’ Notebook Probably my first electronics book when I was a kid was Forrest M. Mims ‘ Getting Started in Electronics . The book was wonderfully accessible to just about anyone, including 10 year old kids like myself. I read that book nearly every day, and I would always have a wish list of parts…

Music gear and open source Image via Wikipedia I was checking around on Ebay recently for music gear that is on my ‘nice to have’ wish list, and when I searched for the Nord Modular synth, I realized that there is an open source version of the software required to create sounds for the instrument. From my experience so far…

Fun with fractals using HTML5 I was writing some fractal code and thought that it would be interesting to see if it could be done in Javascript with graphical output provided by the HTML5 element. As you can see, it worked just fine, albeit a little bit slow. <html> <head> <script src="fractal.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script> </head> <body onload="drawFractal();"> <canvas style="border: 1px…

Updated thoughts on the smartphone market Earlier, I wrote about why I thought Palm was a winnner . Following that post, there have been some developments in the market. Namely, the announcement of the Motorola Droid mobile device. Since then, Palm’s stock has dropped precipitously and suddenly they are really looking like a distant third player in the market. It…

Simple Fourier transform in Javascript I’m gearing up to do some signal processing stuff, and I thought it would be good to brush up a little on some of the mathematical concepts. I’m very familiar with the uses of the various transforms including the Fourier. However, although I’ve used others’ implementations of the FFT algorithm, I’ve never attempted to write…

The Hyperlink: the power of simplicity I recently came across the Ubiquity plugin from Mozilla labs. This project is championed by Aza Raskin , son of the late Jef Raskin of Mac UI fame. The Raskin legacy is a powerful one, and I’ve found personal inspiration on the pages of his site (Update: the articles on Jef’s personal site seem…

Moving the needle in email I ran across an article from Gabor Cselle , CEO of reMail and former VP of Engineering at Xobni that touched on some thoughts on email that I have blogged about previously . Here is the relevant text from the article: The lack of innovation in email is because the underlying protocols suck. If you…

Hacking the system These days everyone has their own take on what hacking’ is all about. Paul Graham’s seminal essay Hackers and Painters ‘ tries to pin it down, as does Eric Raymond’s ` How to Become a Hacker ‘. I have even taken a crack at figuring out what it means to me. More recently, Paul Buchheit of Gmail…