Venture capitalists pump new fund money into the "flavor of the moment" industries at a staggering rate. The goal is to quickly empty out an existing fund to make way for raising a new fund and to start earning the management fees. Firms only earn fees on invested capital, creating an incentive to invest quickly in "hot" industries without much thought. This roulette table investment strategy, where everyone bets on an industry in a short period of time, barely worked with telecom and the internet, but it looks like an abysmal failure with Web 2.0 and cleanteach. It seems like "0" and "00" have come up back-to-back. There are many analogies to justify the roulette strategy, like the "rising tide floats all boats" or "safety in numbers." You could also use the analogy: "lambs to the slaughter."

TheFunded.com: Hey, Fred, the VC Model is Broken!

Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio - Audible debug messages for Catalyst.

Added espeak support for linux and put they on CPAN.

Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio - Audible debug messages for Catalyst. - search.cpan.org

I just created a simple trait for the Catalyst::Log that uses OS X's 'say' utility to log error messages to audio, such that the computer will say them to you. My eyes tire of reading through 100s of lines of debug output, so now sometimes I will have the computer simply talk to me.

Its not in CPAN yet, but its simple enough:

-------

package Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio;

use Moose::Role;

sub speak
{
my ($self, $txt) = @_;

return unless $txt;

system("say $txt &") if $ENV{'SPEAK'};
}

1;

-----

In MyApp.pm, after setup():

Moose::Util::apply_all_roles(MyApp->log, 'Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio');

----

In a controller: $foo='bar'; $c->log->speak('Hello world, the value of foo is $foo');

---

If ENV 'SPEAK' is set, it will talk to you. Works like a charm. mst/t0m told me how to do it. Will get around to CPAN'ing it this week. Anyone aware of a cross platform library that will do this kind of speech stuff? There is no reason to stop here if this is useful to people - could play tones depending on state, warnings, etc.

Audio Debug Logs for Catalyst: Catalyst::TraitFor::Log::Audio

Konstantin Othmer, CEO of Core Mobility, is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. Our interview ended only because the camera was full, and Kon had a company to run. We could have listened to him talk for 12 hours. In the person of Konstantin, I found the prototypical Valley entrepreneur, a person whose unbridaled brilliance led him from professional poker to Apple Computer to General Motors to venture investing in Japan to the helm of Core Mobility. Konstantin spoke about the Valley spirit, hard work and the culture of a good startup.nullnullnull

Konstantin Othmer on the Valley Advantage — TechDrawl

There is just one problem: In Atlanta, The ‘California State of Mind’ is a Cancer. It is a disease. It has no applicability here and it destroys lives. The commonly stated idea that the differences between Silicon Valley and Atlanta is one purely of scale is false, and the implication of these differences cannot be understated. There are emergent properties of a startup economy that large, that do not exist at our scale whatsoever.

I can’t say that strongly enough. In Georgia, the California State of Mind will try to kill you and will ruin your life. Its not like us. It wants to kill your family. It belongs on the terrorist watch list. Without the supportive environment of the Valley, the valley game-plan has disastrous effects on human lives.

I wrote an article for Techdrawl as part of the series I'm doing on Startup Geography. It is also up on Hacker News (presently the #1 item).

The previous piece is here.

A California State of Mind (As a Cancer on Atlanta)

iPhone 3.0 is live! so we are going to repost our tethering tutorial with some big improvements. You now don't have to do any downgrading or torrenting. Seems you can just run a little command in terminal (Make sure you are on OS 3.0 on a 3G iPhone and iTunes 8.2):

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

After that, the steps become a lot more simple.

1. Download this file (for AT&T) and mount the disk image (thanks Gizmodo) for other carriers, try here.

2. Option-click on "restore" in your iTunes with your iPhone attached. Browse to the opened disk image file and hit OK. It will update phone settings for a few seconds.

3. You have tethering. Now go into your iPhone/settings/general/network/Internet Tethering and turn it on.

Boom - 3 steps to tethering...

Oh, and how to you like cut and paste and spotlight search?

Enable tethering shortcut found - iPhone 3.0 is Live! | 9 to 5 Mac

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FlexViz is a graph based visualization tool written in Adobe Flex. It has support for browsing a single ontology where the concepts are represented by nodes and the relationships between concepts (e.g. "is_a", "part-of") are represented as arcs.

FlexViz | The CHISEL Group, University of Victoria

SoftLayer provides global, on-demand data center and hosting services from facilities across the U.S. We leverage best-in-class connectivity and technology to innovate industry leading, fully automated solutions that empower enterprises with complete access, control, security, and scalability.

Welcome to SoftLayer

An Introduction from 35K Feet

by Russell Jurney on June 9, 2009

My name is Russell Jurney, and I am a degenerate serial technology entrepreneur. I was a bad student. I’m a terrible employee. Yet despite an entrepreneurial career that might so far best be described as a negative feedback loop, I can’t stop founding companies. Being an employee without a stake is like playing poker for monopoly money. After a while, there is no thrill. I’m just going through the zombie motions, counting the days and the dollars in my account until I can drop out, start a company and feel alive again...

An Introduction from 35K Feet — TechDrawl

What you really need are tabs, tooltips, accordions, overlays, high usability, striking visual effects and all those "web 2.0" goodies that you have seen on your favourite websites.

This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today's website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.

jQuery TOOLS - The missing UI library for the Web