eriksmartt.com/blog

Happy New Year!

Hope you’re having a great holiday!

Links from December 11th through December 29th

Links from December 11th through December 29th:

• jQuery UI - ThemeRoller - Generate themes for jQuery UI components.
• GlimmerBlocker - Opensource ad-block proxy for OS X
• Stanza: a Revolution in Reading | Lexcycle - free iPhone eBook reader with desktop app for pushing your own docs into it.
• pymunk - Google Code - "A python wrapper for the 2d physics library Chipmunk"
• Integrating Facebook Connect with Django in 15 minutes -
• FireUnit: Firebug Unit Testing for Firefox -
• Regex Tester – RegexPal - A browser-based testing utility for JavaScript regex.
• XRegExp: JavaScript regex library -
• RomRaider - Open Source ECU Tools | RomRaider / Rom Raider - Another option for open source Subaru ECU hacking. Looks like it still supports the older Tatrix cable.
• stanlemon.net : jgrowl - A Growl-like notification tool for JQuery.

Links from December 1st through December 10th

Links from December 1st through December 10th:

• Icojoy - stock icons shop, article ‘Free web development icons #4 SE’ -
• DryIcons | Free Icons | Coquette Icon Set -
• Aviary - Phoenix - Browser-based image editor (uses Flash)
• Google now hawking fully unlocked G1s to developers - Google now selling fully unlocked G1s.
• approcket - Google Code - Backup and restore an AppEngine database to MySQL
• Advogato: GitTorrent, The Movie - Interesting ideas on adding P2P to distributed version control.
• compfight + a flickr™ search tool -
• calaboration - Google Code - Open source tool (by Google) for syncing iCal and Google Calendar
• Magic/Replace - Data Cleanup for Everyone from Dabble DB - Tool to automate formatting changes in spreadsheets/CSV's/etc.
• Glendix - Bringing the beauty of Plan 9 to Linux -

Book: “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”

What a great book — and difficult to review in a “cut to the chase” manner. “Innovation and Entrepreneurship“, by Peter F. Drucker, outlines a systematic approach for identifying innovation opportunities, and growing a culture of innovation within an organization. He provides a view of innovation as a style of working — a way of paying attention to, researching, and responding to key market changes.

The chapter on “Principles of Innovation” offers a nice list of Do’s and Dont’s, but this is just scratching the surface of the wisdom in this book:

Do’s:

1. “Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the opportunities.”
2. “Go out and look at the customers, the users, to see what their expectations, their values, their needs are.”
3. “An innovation has to be simple, and it has to be focused. It should do only one things, otherwise, it confuses.”
4. “Effective innovations start small.”
5. “Successful innovation aims at leadership.”

Dont’s:

1. “[Do] not try to be clever.”
2. “Don’t diversify… don’t try to do too many things at once.”
3. “Don’t try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present!”

Here are some of the quotes I highlighted while reading:

• “The test of an innovation… lies in its success in the marketplace.”
• “Most of Silicon Valley are still inventors rather than innovators, still speculators rather than entrepreneurs.”
• “Entrepreneurship… is a behavior rather than [a] personality trait.”
• “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
• “Entrepreneurship is ‘risky’ mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.”
• “Anything truly new that looks big is indeed to be distrusted. The odds are heavily against its succeeding.”
• “The organization must be… willing to perceive change as an opportunity rather than a threat.”
• “Only when people with proven performance capacity have been assigned to a project, supplied with the tools, the money, and the information they need to do the work, and given clear and unambiguous deadlines — only then do we have a plan.“
• “To render an existing business entrepreneurial, management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.”
• “The people responsible for an existing business will… always be tempted to postpone action on anything new, entrepreneurial, or innovative until it is too late.”
• “A business needs only a very small share of a small market to be successful.”
• “Failure to achieve objectives should be considered an indication that the objective is wrong, or at least defined wrongly.”
• “The probability of success… diminishes with each successive try.” (In reference to pursuing the same idea multiple times.)
• “One cannot do market research for something that is not yet on the market.”
• “The new venture needs to build in systematic practices to remind itself that a ‘product’ or a ’service’ is defined by the customer, not by the producer.”
• “Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.“
• “The founder has to learn to become the leader of a team rather then a ’star’ with ‘helpers.’”
• “A product is not ‘quality’ because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money… Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes ‘quality.’”
• “A ‘premium’ price is always an invitation to the competitor.”
• “Trying to satisfy everybody… always ends up satisfying nobody.”
• “Charge for what represents ‘value’ to the customer rather then what represents ‘cost’ to the supplier.”

If you’re interested in learning how to develop a professional practice of innovation and entrepreneurial management, this is a great book to read. Sure, it’s a little dated (as Drucker’s work is going to be), but it doesn’t get in the way or dilute the message — and offers insightful business history and lessons that are still relevant today.

Links from November 12th through December 1st

Links from November 12th through December 1st:

• Term Extraction Documentation for Yahoo! Search Web Services -
• pinvoke - Icons and pixel fonts - 1000 icons. Similar to the Silk icon set; Also CC licensed.
• austin [UXBookClub.org] - A UX book club in Austin.
• jQuery plugin for Twitter - blog - coda.coza - JQuery plugin to load tweets by username into a DIV.
• Cookstr - "We've got an amazing collection of recipes from great chefs and cookbook authors."
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet -
• SQL Injection Cheat Sheet - Nice reminder of the tricks to keep an eye on.
• reglib - Google Code - JavaScript event library (binding events with CSS selectors)
• TwitterFon – naan studio - Open source Twitter application for iPhone
• MIT OpenCourseWare - Videolectures.net - Video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare.
• Data Source Python Library - Google Visualization API - Google Code -

Links from October 17th through November 12th

Links from October 17th through November 12th:

• jQuery.timepickr.js - Clever UI for entering time (hours/minutes) into a HTML text field
• tangoGPS - Free user friendly map and gps for Linux || Screenshots || - Opensource GPS-based mapping app for Linux. Uses Openstreetmap maps and other geotagged data.
• IDEO Labs » How To: Connecting the Nokia 770 to Arduino -
• tarpipe - A "Yahoo Pipes" like service for mashing and moving data via Web APIs
• WireIt - a Javascript Wiring Library - UI library for "wiring" components (ex., Pipes)
• Arduino - ArduinoEthernetShield - Ethernet Shield (and library) for the Arduino
• CS193P - Cocoa Programming | Announcements - iPhone Application Programming course CS 193P at Stanford. Includes lecture slides as PDF.
• Online image / photo editor pixlr free - Web-based, basic photo editing tool.
• GameJS: A 2d game development framework in JavaScript - A Canvas-based game development framework for JavaScript.
• H+ Magazine - Transhumanist webzine

Defining Design Thinking

“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

(Via Design Thinking.)

Links from September 19th through October 10th

Links from September 19th through October 10th:

• robhudson’s django-debug-toolbar at master — GitHub - Another django debug toolbar
• django-recommender - Google Code - Django pluggable to extend django-voting with "collective intelligence" for recommendations.
• High Performance Web Sites :: Hammerhead: moving performance testing upstream - Firebug plugin for testing page load times
• App Store - A web interface to the iTunes App Store. Very useful for browsing from Linux (or any environment lacking iTunes.)
• html-whitelist - An appengine REST API for sanitizing HTML
• Box2DJS - Physics Engine for JavaScript -
• Particletree » Calculating Color Contrast for Legible Text -
• PhoneGap | Bridging the iPhone GAP - Open source native iPhone application wrapper for Webkit. Sounds like a nice way to develop native-looking applications that are really browser based.
• JBox2D Demos - 2D physics engine (port of Box2D) that can be used with Processing.
• Dev Channel: Early Access to Features and Fixes (Chromium Developer Documentation) - Move Chrome from 'beta' to 'dev' release updates.