Anarchogeek

Global Dressup – Awesome kids clothes from around the world

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:49:41 +0000

My mom’s a serious traveler. She’s dragged me around the world many times. So when i had kids she started collecting the coolest dress-up clothes for them. From Guatemala to India, Thailand to Bolivia, everywhere she went she found awesome stuff. Not just buying it in the markets, but she tracked down the makers and found cooperatives. I remember finding a knitting coop of women hours outside of Cochabamba. I was translator, with my then more limited spanish, we spent hours talking about their lives, work, and struggle for justice and equality.

Eventually my mom collected way to much stuff for her own two grandkids. Friends kept commenting about how awesome their outfits were. So she decided to create an online store, offering all the cool dressup clothes she’d found in her travels. What we have is Global Dressup – Kids clothes from around the planet. Check it out.

Lean Startups for the Ruby Hacker – Brazil Edition

admin — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:26:47 +0000

I gave a talk on lean startups for hackers at the wonderful Ruby Conf Brazil about Lean Startups, explaining the concept, to ruby hackers. The startup world has focused on lean startups, but many developers don’t get the concepts yet. The conference was live streamed by eventials, in a nice format that includes both the slides and video of the speaker. Amazingly, it was both streamed live, and immediately available for playback. Check it out, Lean Startups for Ruby Hackers

The train to nowhere – The train of the free peoples

admin — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:57:56 +0000

Uruguay and Argentina recently re-established passenger train service between the two countries, for the first time in over 30 years. I’m a huge fan of trains and would love to see their revival in Uruguay.

I was super excited to read about new train service. Everybody really takes the ferry between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, it’s fast, there’s wifi, it’s reliable. But train service sounds cool.

Only once i read about the new service did i realize that it’s really a wonderful example about everything which is wrong about rio de la plata (nice way of saying uruguay and argentina).

There is now train service! The thing is, the train doesn’t go from Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina to Montevideo the capital of Uruguay. The two places where the majority of the populations of each country lives. Instead it went from Pilar, Argentina, a town 250,000 about 56km outside of Buenos Aries, to Paso de los Toros, a tiny town of 13,000 people in the middle of nowhere Uruguay.

Really, the train goes from a medium size town in Argentina to a very small town in Uruguay. There is NOTHING in Paso de los Toros except cows, a small damn, and sleepy gauchos.

A train route, going from Buenos Aires to Montevideo would make sense, if it took a reasonable place to cross the river. But they didn’t. What’s worse is they picked two small towns nobody wants to go to.

They first train left Pilar, Argentina on the 22rd of September with lots of pomp and circumstance. The media covering the great new initiative.

The thing is, the train arrived at the Uruguayan border and in classic uruguayan fashion, somebody decided they didn’t have the proper paperwork in order. They refused entry to the TRAIN! The few passengers who were on the train were transferred to a bus for the rest of the trip. They arrived at 3am!

The thing is, they intended it to arrive at 3am! It wasn’t late, that’s the schedule. The train takes 19 hours and arrives at 3am, to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. The only positive part about the whole thing is that the train trip is cheap, $31 USD!

How to block sites from Hacker News?

admin — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:42:38 +0000

Can you block sites from hacker news? Who would want to do it and how?

I know it sounds funny, everybody’s wanting to get on hacker news, and sometimes i get my blog posts or posts about projects i’m working on posted to the site. I’ve never tried to engage in black hat hacker news manipulation, but i have stumbled across various ways it would be possible.

Here’s how it works. First off, once a url has been posted, it’s done, the original user who posted it gets a lock on it and the karma associated with it getting popular or not. I noticed that sometimes the www and non www versions of websites, two links to the same thing with different urls, are treated separately. When other people try and post it, they just upvote instead.

I first discovered this when i posted a link to asciiflow.com not using the www. It was cool, and i was surprised it wasn’t already on hacker news. Turns out it was posted about a month earlier. Nobody seemed to mind my reposting although there was some discussion about it.

The yesterday i posted a link to drawastickman.com, the cool animation of a stickman you create. I wanted to know, with a really cool link, and myself with decent karma, 890, would it get on the front page without me asking anybody to vote for it. It ended up with 14 points, but didn’t make it on the home page. Maybe i gave it a bad title, “Draw A Stickman – Interactive Canvas Story Telling”.

A few hours later it got posted again as “Bring a stick man to life.” by kgthegreat who had little karma a the time, but now has about the same as me. Perhaps he/she gave it a much better link title, i’m not sure. What’s more likely is that s/he got a few friends to upvote in the first few minutes after posting.

I think it’s fine that kgthegreat got the karma and the link posted, and i don’t really care who gets credit. It’s a cool link and i’m glad it got shared with the community.

My real question is this, what if somebody else had done like me, posted the link and ignored it? What if both the www and non www versions of the url had been posted and lost in the flow. Then those links would be on hacker news, but never float up and sit on the top like they deserve.

Now imagine instead of two hackers posting links they think are interesting, and instead think, what if somebody wanted to keep things from hacker news. The best way to do it would be to post links you wanted buried at high traffic times with two low karma accounts. Simply make it so nobody notices or upvotes the pages. Give them terrible titles.

I wonder if anybody’s done this to their competitors websites?

The new way to censor stuff is not to delete it, but rather to let it get lost in the noise. With crowd sourced content discovery platforms, like hacker news, it’s possible for participants to play the role of censor. It’s fascinating stuff.

Update: According to PG, the karma of the poster is not used in calculating whether or not the posts get moved to the front page.

Cubox The Video

admin — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:14:47 +0000

I’ve always had this running thought in my head, what would a documentary about me be like? Do you ever think that? There’s documentaries about musicians for example, recovered footage, their story, how they became great. Maybe i’m hugely egotistical, but it’d be interesting, for me at least.

During the Geeks on a Plane trip to South America i got to know Ben from Micro-Documentaries who shot a bunch of great short videos of the trip. We thought about having Ben come down to Uruguay, but we did get in touch with some great local Uruguayan video producers to work with us, Nui. They’d worked on the ‘tribute to the ball‘ video about football. We had them in and spend a long day shooting around the office. They created an awesome little documentary about Cubox.

The Cubox Consultants

admin — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:52:59 +0000

In March we shot some video about Cubox, my company, trying to explain to people who we are, where, and how we work. Here’s the one about the Cubox Consultants.

Video: La Historia Secreta de Twitter & El Modelo de los Lean Startups

admin — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:03:15 +0000

Hice una charla sobre la historia de twitter y modelos de startups en Medellín, Colombia el 9 de agosto. Los slides esta acá y el video acá.

Building a Hacker Culture in Uruguay

admin — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:00:18 +0000

Uruguay’s a pretty nifty place, a country most people don’t know exists in South America. At OSCON 2011 I gave a talk about some of the cool projects the country’s started, like giving out laptops to all the school children and making every landline in the country a free internet connection. Here are the slides:

Building a Hacker Culture in Uruguay – OSCON 2011

View more presentations from Rabble .

La Historia Secreta de Twitter y El Modelo de los Lean Startups

admin — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 06:04:38 +0000

On Tuesday i gave a talk about the creation of twitter and lean startups. It got some coverage in the local media, and people wanted to see the slides. I was told that it was streamed and perhaps even there is a copy floating around online. If i find the video, i’ll post that here too. The talk and slides were in spanish.

La Historia Secreta de Twitter & El Modelo de los Lean Startups

View more presentations from Rabble ..

The Blackberry Shift: From the executives to the urban poor

admin — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:05 +0000

It happened without us even noticing. Blackberry’s user base has shifted — from business executives to the urban poor. It happened so fast that it’s hardly been noticed in the media. RIM may not even know it themselves.

This past weekend the riots in the UK were not organized via sms, nor twitter, or facebook, but by BBM (BlackBerry Messenger). If you were to say, “a riot organized via blackberry,” you might assume it was a riot of the bankers, it happened in Argentina in 2001, but that’s not what was happening. It was the poor, the underclass, who was using blackberry.

It’s not just the UK. While the riots were happening I was in Medellín, Colombia, to give a talk on lean startups. There as well, the blackberry is the phone of choice for the urban masses. With BBM you avoid sms charges, get a nice smart messenger phone, and it’s cheap. Turns out in Colombia you have some money you get an Android, and if you’re well to do, you get an iPhone.

What happened is a while ago RIM decided to move in to the pre-paid segment. You can now get a blackberry for cheap with a flat rate data plan. Because people don’t use blackberries for streaming video or music they don’t tax the network as much.

The blackberry is becoming the new sidekick. A tight, messaging focused phone on a budget. The funny thing is, everybody’s been thinking, because RIM’s getting crushed on the high end, they’re going to go out of business. But perhaps what will happen is that they’ll replace the feature phone. Fighting with Nokia for bottom three billion.

It reminds me of a Mad Men pitch to Admiral Television about them focusing on the African American market. Their ad buys and concert sponsorship clearly shows the RIM execs intended to reach out to these markets. I updated this paragraph to make it clear i don’t think the RIM exec’s are racists.

After a decade of being the tool of choice for the upwardly mobile and a symbol of globalization, it’ll be a tough transition to tool of the masses. That said, perhaps there is a good long term market for RIM to replace feature phones with messaging phones.

Updates: Apparently in Nigeria this new segment of blackberry users are called ‘low brow’ users. They also say a lot of the phones are bought used.

Slate ran an article on Bono and the world Dorkiest Phone, and RIM has run commercials trying to reach out to youth.