For the past few months I’ve been consulting with This Week in Tech (TWiT) helping build a new TWiT.tv website. Last week Colleen Kelly—who’s done an amazing job building out TWiT’s studio, live & mobile streaming infrastructure, and IT systems—decided she’s moving on from TWiT and accepting a position with Google. One thing led to another, and Leo Laporte and TWiT CEO Lisa Kentzell made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: I’m joining TWiT as their VP of Engineering. Stay tuned for more on what we have on the drawing board, but meanwhile I want to thank Leo and the TWiT crew for the opportunity. I know I’m certainly not the only TWiT fan who considers this a “dream job” of sorts.
May 5, 2010
I’m Joining TWiT
April 12, 2010
Why Cisco Will Buy Palm
Bloomberg reported today that Palm is up for sale, resulting in a flurry of articles citing HTC and Lenova as two of the most likely bidders. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me to see HTC pick them up just to bolster their intellectual property portfolio and help solidify HTC’s bid to be the leading anti-Apple. However, in the spirit of US Robotics acquisition of Palm back in 1995 and attempts by 3Com to integrate Palm after they merged with USR in 1997, I think there’s another bidder out there who can and should grab Palm while they can: Cisco.
[UPDATE: Later in the day yesterday outlets began reporting that Cisco is on the list of companies that have, in fact, made a bid for Palm. Others include HTC, Lenova, and Dell. Since then, there’s word that Lenova has walked away.]
Here in no particular order are the reasons I think Cisco will make a bid for Palm, and why I think they just might be the highest bidder:
Cisco’s Consumer Aspirations – With their acquisitions of Scientific Atlanta (set top boxes), Linksys (consumer grade networking hardware and VoIP solutions), and Flip (flash memory video recorders) Cisco has made it clear they’re moving into the consumer content production and delivery device business. Acquiring Palm would give them yet another delivery device line, the underlying operating system, and hand-held hardware expertise.
Carrier Relationships – Just as the Scientific Atlanta acquisition gave Cisco a seat at the table with cable companies and Linksys solidified their position with traditional ISPs when it comes to the residential “last mile”, acquiring Palm gives them similar connections with Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, etc. This will be important not only with respect to handsets, but as Cisco tries to compete with network access devices like the Novatel MiFi, Sierra Wireless Overdrive, and similar devices from Motorola.
WebOS – Beyond the basic intellectual property portfolio that would give Cisco a stack of chips in the mobile device patent game, Palm webOS could serve as the basis for a wide variety of touch screen devices from Cisco in a number of form factors: VoIP phones, coffee table media devices, or future Flip devices, for example.
Talent – It’s five miles from Palm’s campus in Sunnyvale over to Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose. Picking up Palm is a great way to get a local pool of handheld system design and engineering talent—including a large pool of ex-Apple talent—for use on any number of Cisco projects, but particularly portable consumer devices.
Deeper Pockets – HTC’s market cap is $8 billion. Lenova’s is $55 billion. Cisco’s is $152 billion. If it comes down to a bidding war, Cisco takes it.
Vindication – Ken Wirt, Cisco VP of Consumer Marketing was SVP or Worldwide Marketing for Palm from 2001 to 2006. As one of the many Palm executives left by the wayside as Palm has struggled to find a winning game plan, you’d have to think Wirt would appreciate the opportunity to show what Palm could be with the resources of a parent company like Cisco behind it.
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January 11, 2009
Signs of Palm Mojo
Update – It turns out Blast Radius–an interactive agency that worked on the Palm web site–also has an in-house toolkit called Mojo. The toolkit described below is the Blast Radius tookit and doesn’t seem to be related to webOS.
The new Palm Pre will be the first phone to use Palm’s new webOS operating system and the Palm Mojo framework. Apparently the SDK is in private beta at the moment, and there’s not a whole lot of information on Palm’s developer site. However, it looks like Palm has rolled out parts of Mojo on their site. If you visit the Palm Pre CES launch video page at Palm.com, and check out the source, you’ll notice they’re already including mojo.js:
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January 4, 2009
Cleaning House
The year end break finally gave me the time and motivation to take care of something that’s been nagging me for some time. For the past five or ten years, I’ve been hosting a dozen or so random little sites for friends and family. If you’re reading this, you might just be in the same situation: the friend whose theater production needed a site, your family member’s band, another friend’s pre-Flickr site for publishing kid pictures.
Each one of these sites was a quick little side project, and a great excuse to try out [insert neat new technology]. In my case I’ve accumlated a standalone Perl CGI site, a Gallery photo site, a Mason site for a band, not to mention my own WordPress blog. Of course web hosting has evolved quite a bit in the past decade, so each of these sites was originally built on a different host. MSEN back in Michigan, Aimnet here in the Bay Area, then stints on Lunarpages, Bluehost, and most recently MediaTemple’s GridService. Different sites on different servers, MX records pointing all over the place, a mix of registrars…it was ugly.
So to start off the new year, it’s time to start fresh. All the sites have been consolidated, refreshed, archived, backed-up, validated, and otherwise cleaned up. In the process, I replaced a number of services and tools that just weren’t working for me the way they used to. Here’s what’s in my toolbox at this point:
- GoDaddy – I can’t stand GoDaddy. Their DNS management UI was probably down literally 50% of the time I tried to access it. They’re relegated to registrar duties only at this point, but only because they’re cheap enough it’s not worth the time to transfer to someone marginally cheaper.
- linode – MediaTemple’s GridService was pretty slick, however for low traffic sites there always seems to be an initial lag that feels like they’re spinning the site up or something. I took a look at both linode and slicehost, both of which offer ~$20/mo packages with root access, your choice of Linux distributions, and nice management tools. Slicehost almost had my business, but their full-instance backup feature lost out in the end to linode’s DNS management and monitoring tool. Slicehosts’s DNS UI was particularly painful, requiring you to enter each record manually in an old-style web form vs. linode’s much more robust UI.
- jekyll – As I’ve described, I’m using git (with repositories hosted at github) and jekyll for revision control and site generation respectively. None of these small projects really requires a database back end or dynamically generated content, so a simple site generation tool like jekyll and the use of markdown/textile makes things easy.
- lighttpd – I’m a long time Apache user, lighttpd really does just feel lighter and cleaner, particularly for these small static sites.
- postfix – I suffered with sendmail long enough, editing one config file then converting it over into a format the app actually read. Sendmail is out, postfix is in. One config file, logical config options, and logs that seem slightly easier to monitor/mine.
- Ruby & Python – Perl and PHP are out. Ruby and Python are in. Life is better now.
OK, I’m old school. I was sold on straight LAMP, sendmail, RedHat derivatives (CentOS/Fedora), vi, etc. almost ten years ago, they’ve worked for me, and I had better things to do than reconsider those choices. But I was really just stuck in a rut. Times change, tools evolve, the web isn’t what it was 10 years ago, and now is as good a time as any to re-examine what’s in your tool box.
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December 24, 2008
Trying out Jekyll
As Tom Preston-Werner (author of Jekyll) describes it:
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. Visit http://tom.preston-werner.com to see an example of a Jekyll generated blog.
Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which is where I first heard about it.
The thought of maintaining a site via a text editor (vi, in my case) and pushing changes out from the command line gave me some major ‘90s deja vu, but WordPress has always seemed a bit to “heavy” for me, so I thought I’d give Jekyll a shot. Plus Jack Moffit and Dustin Sallings were both talking about Jekyll, and in fact Jack had already moved his site over from Movable Type to Jekyll. Plus I just want to be one of the cool kids, so here we are.
With the git/jekyll combo, a little CGI script that does a git pull and calls Jekyll, and the web hook feature of github, I can edit pages locally, commit them to a git repo, and when I’m ready to make changes on the live site I can just do a “git push”. My changes are uploaded to github, they hit the CGI script on kensheppardson.com, and the site is rebuilt.
I have a feeling this system will encourage me to post a bit more often. We’ll see.
Update 3/1/2009 – I’m back on WordPress, primarily to test out some add-ins, but I also miss WYSIWYG a bit.
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