I just got the most blatant phishing attack that I've seen since the dotcom bubble. Just had to share this one. Just wow.

A DGTFX virus has been detected in your folders
Your email account has to be upgraded to our new
Secured DGTFX anti-virus 2012 version to prevent
damages to our webmail log and your important
files.

Click your reply tab, Fill the columns below and
send back or your email account will be terminated
immediately to avoid spread of the virus.

USER ID:
PASSWORD:
PHONE NUMBER:
DATE OF BIRTH:

Email Technical Team
Note that your password will be encrypted with
1024-bit RSA keys for your password safety to
avoid any unauthorized user.

I just read about Tony Hsieh's plan to rebuild downtown Las Vegas in the image of Zappos.

When I was on a recent trip to the California Academy of Sciences, I was eating lunch in the cavernous building that houses a planetarium and a rainforest dome when I had the thought that maybe future cities are going to be more like macro structures that facilitate lightweight human interactions. Right now the delicate balance of "inside at the office" and "out at the coffee shop next door" is very hard to achieve.

In the future maybe we'll have an easier time of figuring out how to arrange our living and working spaces so that the levels of interactions can be more granular, and we can take these things to a higher level.

The art of running into people is a lost one. I'm getting back into the swing of things here in Mountain View, but it is still kind of tough to work things out. At least I run into interesting people out here.

Just to chime in on how momentus this shift is, I'm going to comment on Matt Mullenweg's post commenting on the new YC partners Garry Tan and Aaron Iba.

The traditional route of partners at a VC firm is the classic MBA/IBanking thing. Your track record of portfolio managmenet, how much money you've dealt with, etc.

YC, for all its denigrators, is shifting the playing field out from under the current VC industry.

For those of you following at home, this has been playing out slowly, and almost imperceptibly apart from snide jokes from the established VC community, for the last 5 years.

Behold the power of slow change. The problem is, the change is slow until everythng changes "overnight". There is a threshold effect. That's the power.

The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. If you don't have a web presence, in the tech world you might as well not exist.

I've been in the position where I just point a potential employer at my resume on my blog, and they still want me to submit it as a MS Word document. WTF?

Union Square Ventures is looking for people who have a strong presence on the Web. Maybe if some more high profile gigs forgo the traditional resume, we'll start to see a shift.

I take a lot of pictures. Not in quite the same sense that a lot of people do, but I take a lot just the same. Most people have tons of pictures that they took of other people or themselves on holiday. I have those too, just not as many as I have of things I'm buliding/repairing/destroying.

I end up taking a lot of detail shots of electronic gadgets and circuit boards. I use the macro function of my camera a lot. The flash is my best friend and worst enemy. Lighting is hard.

All of these things add up to a frustrating experience sometimes. In some cases, any picture is better than no picture to get the idea across. Other times I'm trying to document something in great detail where I  need to show the colors of the wires or the markings on the chips that I'm photographing.

Lighting is key. And hard. It's hard to light a PCB without the glare of the light causing the piture to get vignetting due to the camera adjusting the exposure or white balance. The flash usually causes total annhialation of the image at close range. Point light sources add shadows that make it hard to see the region of interest. Autofocus always seems to focus on that thing hanging in the way in the nearfield or that think that is off in the background but is brighter than the foreground that you are trying to capture.

It seems crazy to have to buy a state-of-the-art digital SLR to get decent snaps of a project, but at many points I felt like maybe that was the only option.

However, I tried a newer camera and I have a different opinion. All of this can be fixed with good signal processing and better control systems on the camera.  I moved from a 5MP Canon SD450 that is now something like 7 years old to a newer Nikon 12MP S8100. I didn't think that the resolution was going to make a difference. I was right. What makes the difference is that when I take a flash picture at close range, it doesn't trigger the flash at full strength and it adjusts the image exposure to suit the situation. If I decide to turn the flash off, it figures out that the exposure needs to be increased. Autofocus is still a problem, but it gets things right more often than the old Canon did.

I've been reading about the Lytro lightfield cameras recently. I'm wondering if this is going to revolutionize digital photography for instructional and documentation purposes. What about 3d imaging? I wrote about this in the past too. Anything that makes the process faster and less fiddly is going to make a huge impact. For every blog post that has ten pictures in it, I have to take at least 25 exposures to get a decent set in the end. To get great results I'd probalby have to take twice that number.

When you do a build or teardown, you need to "caputure the moment", since you may not get any more chances to see the project in a given state of completion/disassembly. It's tedious and difficult to analyze the quality of the shots at the same time as doing the actual work, so I end up taking a ton of shots and spending time culling them when it comes time to write the article or blog post. I wish that I could have a better feeling about each pic that I snap during the process rather than be surprised when I don't have enough good shots at the end of a build.

TL;DR - get a newer camera, it helps.

I'm working on a project called Pedal Fighter, which is a MIDI foot controller inspired by the MIDI Fighter project. I'm in the very early stages of work on this, and since I don't know much about how I want the final button layout to look I'm planning on iterating a bit on the physical properties of the device.

Normally, when I'm doing software I plan on doing some prototypes or at least many iterations on the idea before the final form starts to take place. But, how to do this in the physical world? We are getting close to having cheap 3d printing, but I'm thinking even more low tech.

I had some notions in the past about doing cardboard forms and using epoxy-over cardboard as a prototyping material. Now I'm thinking even cheaper and easier than that. There are 3 components to this method - MDF (medium density fiberboard), pine furring strips, and #6 wood screws.

The idea is to make enough of the surface panel available using MDF and the structural members will be spars formed from the furring strips. The MDF is mounted to the furring strips using #6 wood screws, which are really cheap. Even from Home Depot, a box of 100 us under 4USD.

I haven't gotten too fancy with this method yet, but I'm already thinking of ways that I can expand on this technique.

For example joining two furring strips together to form a wider member can be done by cutting a bit of MDF and using it to join the two (or more) strips together into a structural member. If more strength is needed, we can use MDF panels on both sides.

If the panel needs to take more load, we can add more furring strips underneath to bolster the surface. If we can't spare the room needed for additional spars, we could use 1/4" MDF rather than 1/8". The thicker MDF is much stiffer but costs 50% more.

I'm thinking of some other ways of doing cheap prototyping of enclosures and boxes for projects. Somehow I don't like the idea of buying a generic black plastic or polished aluminum box for each project. I like feeling like I can drill holes all over the prototype and move things around without destroying a 15USD project box. At the end, when it is time to finalize the design, we can just cut a new panel from MDF and replace the one that looks like swiss cheese.

The only problem is that MDF looks ugly. I'm going to have to see how it paints up before I pass a verdict on looks. I'm not sure if a prototype made from MDF will be taken seriously if you need to present something in a design meeting.

I'm going to explore a few other build methods, including using foam board and aluminum/steel extrusions for things that have to be really light or rigid, or both.

I was looking at the readme for jsdom, and they have an example where they grab all stories from the Hacker News page. I recently wrote a userjs script that dealt with the stories list, so when I saw how they selected the list of stories I was blown away. Here it is:

td.title:not(:last)

They are using the :not pseudo-selector to grab all elements that are not the last one. I knew about the :last selector, but it never occurred to me that there was a negation selector. So why do we avoid the last td.title? It turns out that the "More" link at the bottom of the page has a class of title. Ghetto.

Check out the MDN page on :not.

A friend of mine was clearing out his old books when I went over to his place today and he offered to give me any books I wanted. I resisted since the last thing I need is more stuff, especially books, lying around.

Nevertheless I dug through the pile a little and found the O'Reilly Erlang book. Well this is a language that I'd been meaning to get to eventually, so why not have the book at the ready.

I think my next few languages to get further into maybe Haskell and Clojure. I've already learned the basics of these languages, but I kind of want to get them a little more nailed before I look at any new languages. However, Erlang looks pretty sweet.

I'm also looking at F# periodically. I keep reading the source code for IronJS to brush up a little bit.

I have been running in my new Five Finger shoes lately, but the last few days I have been resting. I think I might have overdone it a bit. My heels are hurting a little bit. I can't quite put my finger on it - they aren't really bruised, and it isn't the bottoms of my heels. It is the sides. Kind of a spot directly behind the ankle.

I'm not sure what the deal is but I'm going to rest for a few days before I go back out with the Vibrams.

I have been in Silicon Valley for a year now, and in that time I've considered several different opportunities to be a founding team member of a startup.

In many cases these seem like decent opportunities, but now that I've done a startup and hit most of the high and low points over the long haul, I tend to think longer term now. I want to vet your business idea even though I'm going to be on the technical side of the house. I've been in the position of developing features that no one wants or uses. I've been through the long trough of self-doubt about whether the idea is viable and people telling you it will never work.

I get that. Which is why I want to be just as passionate about the business as the business guy. I have to really buy into the idea. Otherwise I might as well go get a job and get paid a whole lot more and just focus on technology. I'm in this startup game because I love the feeling of putting everything behind an idea that you think is awesome and you fully buy into. If I don't feel that about the opportunity I will pass.

There have been several that were in my line of passion, music. I'm extra skeptical about these opportunities. I tend to put their feet to the fire with extra vengeance, because I can get blinders since I love audio and music so much. I want the startup to make business sense. I can do music on the side if I want to. However if I find a startup that feels great from a business sense, and also involves the music business, I'm going to be very happy and excited.

However, I haven't felt quite that way about any of the recent opportunities that have come my way.

I had a talk with a friend of mine over at the co-working space I belong to. He is on the hunt for another founder, even though he is highly technical. He told me that it becomes harder to convince top people the further along the project is. Part of the appeal to tech founders is that you get a chance to do a greenfield project, made in your own egomaniacal image. This is a strong motivator.

I felt like one guy I was talking to recently was just too far down a path for his idea to interest me enough. I tried to get a sense of whether or not he was willing to pivot early, but he had already been talking to investors and had his pitch kind of worked out. This is good, but I thought that the idea was a little too derivative. It didn't quite pass my sniff test.

I'll keep on trucking on my own ideas in the meantime. At the rate new opportunities are coming my way though, I might actually find something that is so compelling that I can't refuse.