Bug Blogger

Dip then Dive into BUG Development, by Dave Mathews

The following is a guest post from Dave Mathews, as part of our series on The Road to Maker Faire.

On July 26, 2003 after Chris Pirillo's Gnomedex 3.0 a hungry group including Tim O'Reilly, Rob Malda of Slashdot, and a handful of other software guys sat around a dinner table and talked about a movement in the world of creating new hardware and remixing gadgets.

Prototyping stuff (like my CueCat consumer barcode scanner in 1997) involved digging for parts in bins of old gear, surplus electronics shops and occasionally big-box electronics stores.  Needless to say this was time consuming, required soldering irons and things were frequently "good enough" but not exactly what was in mind for a solution.  Dare I mention all of the warranties I have voided in my lifetime?

This hacker spirit however, is what lead Dale Dougherty, Andrew "Bunny" Huang, Joe Grand, Phil Torrone and I to get together at O'Reilly's ETech a few months later to continue the discussion and put some framework around MAKE Magazine, which debuted in February 2005.  I am proud to say that the MAKE Magazine movement, including the blog and associated Faire events have become a phenomenon and have spurred offspring like Craft, which I hope grows to be as strong.

The founder and CEO of Bug Labs, Peter Semmelhack captures this spirit with BUG and his model of open source hardware.  Hell, he even has "hack" in his last name – and is leading the next evolution of home remixing; by giving their customers the ability to quickly and easily build their own "whatever."  Third party accessory makers can get involved too as BUG connectors and wiring diagrams are open and easily sourced. Have you seen Apple's iPod connector licensing agreement?  Trust me, you do not want to.

What I like best about BUG is that you can dip your toes in the water today, now, for free.  Let me back up a bit - when the Apple Newton was announced at Macworld Boston in August of 1993, handheld computing was an interesting oddity. I remember playing with the hardware in my local CompUSA, but stayed away from it due to the price of $699.  When Palm launched their PDA in March of 1996 however, the price was much better at $299, but I still was apprehensive on its value proposition.  I first stuck my "digital toe" in the water by downloading the Palm Desktop client to my PC, then used this software for weeks – first importing my contacts, getting my calendar setup and filling up my "personal digital assistant world" with data before buying the associated hardware device.  I loved the interface and after I trusted the software, bought the Palm Pilot (the original name before a Pilot pen lawsuit), sync'd it up and had an "instantly-full" assistant.

So I challenge you – download the SDK, for free. You'll find a debugger and virtual BUG hardware emulator.  See what you can come up with on your desktop and let us know what your creation does, via comments or the forum!  If you like the software, then you will love the hardware and the ability to mobilize your build.  If you are a company that has manufacturing experience, take a look at the open source connectors and communication capabilities of BUG.  I predict that we will see hardware options for this platform that an iPod could only dream about…

Dave Mathews is an entrepreneur and lifetime inventor with more than two-dozen patents, writer for several technology outlets and frequent TV host.  His stories can be found at www.davemathews.com online.

Alberto and Bobby need BUGs!

I'm currently reading William Gibson's latest release, Spook Country. I've been a fan of him since first stumbling through Neuromancer as an early teen. It was a very important book for me at the time because of the concepts that technology is not just in the domain of math nerds, NOCs, and ROI, but interacts with almost every aspect of the human universe. Gibson's stories usually involve some kind of hacker immersed in a crime or scandal and, for me, the biggest thrill is in how Gibson's characters modify and subvert top-down megacorp driven consumer products into things of real human interest. How the world, as designed by focus groups and industrial designers, is never really how it turns out in the end. The essence of this of course is Gibson's statement: "the street finds its own uses for things" ("Burning Chrome", 1981).

Back to Spook Country. There are a couple of characters that are involved in an emergent underground art-scene known as "locative art". A viewer goes to a specific physical location and visual art accessed through some network-enabled hardware. Typically pieces have some direct connection to the physical space and there is a direct connection between the digital art and the physical world. One problem Gibson's characters have though, in this near-future tale, is the hardware. There is some vague reference to a cell phone ducted taped to a GPS receiver. More specifically, the problem is that Gibson essentially sees technology as always being generated by massive, top-down systems, and hackers, artists, and criminals subvert these systems for their own needs, but only in highly localized ways.

Is Gibson right? Are we forever doomed to Maas-Neotek decks, Sense/net media, and Sony camcorders? Or will bottom-up, user-directed technologies become popular and skew us all from Gibson's near-term future worlds?

When do you stop teaching that old lolcat new tricks?

Here is a scenario that may be familiar to some Eclipse developers:

1. Write lolcats manager plugin using Eclipse x.y.
1.2 Build scripts for lolcats is written.  Takes 2x time of writing lolcats.
2. Release lolcats for Ecilpse x.y.
3. Eclipse releases x.z to general public.
4. Lolcats is tested on x.z and it is compatible. (yay!)
4.2 Lolcats build scripts are modified to build against x.z. 
5. You are now supporting Lolcats on x.y.* -> x.z.*
6. Users start sweating for bug fixes and new features only in x.z.
7. Brain starts hurting.

When do you stop supporting older Eclipse releases?  There are some great things in 3.3 that simply are not available in 3.2, and the overhead in forking product that goes through building, testing, and documentation can be very expensive.  Any advice on when to say when?

Marketers Hate You

It's ok, they hate me too.  I can tell that marketers hate us because they are constantly attempting to distill whatever demographic we belong to into simple slogans, product lines, and ad campaigns.  To them we are merely consumers: giant wallets with tiny brains and no free will; sheep, to be herded into groups and manipulated en masse.

Case in point is Calvin Klein's new fragrance for hip twenty-year-olds called CK in2u, which I read about in the New York Times last week.  CK in2u is the successor to the wildly successful CK-1 which was popular in the mid 90's.  Calvin Klein is courting a demographic they call the technosexual.  It's a self-serving label. Sex is easy to wrap up and sell.  Calvin Klein has access to beautiful models and can capitalize on the implicit promise that if you use CK in2u, you'll get some. According to the New York Times, "A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: 'She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.'"  This is fantasy and the DIY generation, the "technosexuals", won't buy it.

Technically savvy twenty-somethings are just too well informed for such an obvious and insulting ad campaign.  They can learn about Neil Postman with a quick search of Wikipedia and corporate viral ad campaigns are old news.  They will not have their consent manufactured by ads featuring gaunt teenage models.  They want to think, not to be thought for.

Mostly, though, they want control--control over the product, the style, and the message.  This is something that we will talk a lot about in this blog.  The technically savvy are all about control.  It's not about group or demographic ownership, but personal ownership.  They blog because they want to get their voice out there. They think they are unique.  Their community participation is bottom-up whereas ad campaigns like that of CK in2u are top-down.

How you open up a fragrance line, I don't know.  I write software and in software it's easy (open source and public API's for example). However, one way to get started in both product categories is to be less hostile towards the purchaser.  Treat them more like producers than consumers.  Don't distill their motivations into sex and only sex.  Let them create their own real groups instead of joining some make-believe idealized club.  Finally, don't hate the people who you want buying your products.  They know all the tricks and they can smell the hatred a mile away.