We're coming up on the second Tuesday of May and it will be time for the next Tech Tuesday in Waltham, Massachusetts. Take a look at the last several posts on my blog for details of what it's like.

Microsoft is going to provide free food and drinks, as they did last month. Thank you! They're adding something new: This month they'll be giving away an XBox 360.

The event is open to all. It's free for employees of member companies and students, only $20 for others. You can sign up in advance at the Mass Tech Leadership Council web site or just show up. Bring your friends! It's from 6pm to 8pm at The Skellig Irish Pub, 240 Moody Street in Waltham, MA. There's free parking behind and public transportation nearby.

I'd appreciate it if Boston-area bloggers who read this would post a reminder about attending on their blog, too. Engineering and business students are especially invited.

Last night's Mass Tech Leadership Council Tech Tuesday meeting in Waltham, Massachusetts, was quite successful. Not only did we have local people like Bob Frankston and John Landry (Lead Dog Ventures, Lotus, etc.), but we also had engineering students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and CXOs from companies around the world, including Scotland, Nigeria, New Zealand, and Spain. (The CXOs were attending Harvard Business School's Owner/President Management Program.)

Gilad Tiefenbrun, Director of Engineering of Linn Products in Scotland (known since the 1970s for their high-end audio equipment), showed their new Sneaky Music DS device for playing high quality music stored on a home LAN -- with Open Source software components you can modify to your heart's content. There was a lot of excitement about it. This was the first time, he said, that it was being shown publicly in the US, and is shipping Monday. From Gilad in a follow up email:

"Sneaky Music DS is our first player to add power amps inside i.e. a one-box solution that is ideal as either your first step in a do-it-yourself home networked audio system, or as an affordable way to add extra rooms, or to upgrade from budget networked audio players. It costs $2,000.

Our by-word on our technology platform is "Open" i.e. we want to embrace the most open standards for control interfaces (UPnP seems best), networking (TCP/IP Ethernet) and formats (FLAC seems best). We built on top of the open source RTEMS kernel, added multi-threading and TCP/IP, and put that back into the open source. The guys at NASA were quite pleased! We are going to open source the GUI, including our own world-class UPnP stack. We'll have an open source site up-and-running soon, along with forums and on-line support."

Laura Fitton (known as Pistachio on Twitter) showed up near the end. She brought her Nokia N95 and streamed video live using Qik. You can see those clips archived, listed as "Tech Tuesday", on her page Qik.com/pistachio. There were others streaming live video with other systems, too.

Here's one of Laura's videos where she interviews Gilad of Linn about the Sneaky, among other things, and gives you a good idea of what things were like at the event (it's also on this page):

[Embedded player pointing to: http://qik.com/video/51986]

Microsoft picked up the tab for drinks and food, which was much appreciated by all.

Here are some of my photos:

[Photos in original post on Dan Bricklin's Log with the following sub-titiles:

Some of the people talking, watching YouTube videos (you see Theo Jansen's TED presentation on the screen here), eating and drinking

Gilad Tiefenbrun of Linn Products and their new Sneaky Music DS digital stream player

Philip DesAutels of Microsoft watches as Laura Fitton holds a Nokia N95 which is streaming video through Qik.com. The live feed is visible in a browser window in the background on the projection screen.]

As Don Dodge points out, Boston has lots of events like this that are good for start ups, innovation, and for meeting others. Last night, there was also another talk in the Vilna Shul Speaker Series (I've covered some of them in the past).

Just a reminder that tomorrow, April 8th, is the next Tech Tuesday meeting in Waltham. I've heard from young (well, compared to me) engineering students, very experienced Internet engineers (closer to my age), Web 2.0 developers, marketing gurus, and others who are coming. There should be a lot of interesting people to talk to. Bob Frankston tells me he'll be in town this time and be able to make it, too, and bring his Amazon Kindle, Chumby, and more. Others should be coming to show off other devices and services, including Qik and Seesmic.

This month, Microsoft has kindly offered to sponsor some free food and drinks! Thank you, Microsoft.

On the technical side, I spent some time this weekend over at the pub making sure that we'll have good WiFi. I think I've worked out the problems we've run into in the past when only one laptop seemed to be able to connect (it was a DHCP problem on the router). Yesterday I was able to successfully have, as a test, two PC laptops, one Apple Powerbook, and one OLPC XO browsing all at once, so I think I got it fixed. We'll also have two projectors working, each with amplified speakers.

So, if you're anywhere near Waltham, Massachusetts, tomorrow (Tuesday) between 6pm and 8pm, drop by. It's at the Skellig Irish Pub at 240 Moody Street. Students, press, and employees of Mass Tech Leadership Council member companies can get in for free; it's $20 for others. There's free parking (after 6pm) in the lot behind the pub (off Pine Street) and public transportation with the Waltham MBTA commuter rail station a block away (3 stops from Porter Square, I think).

If you're not able to attend (for example, are stuck in San Francisco or Paris...) you can follow some of the people who might be there on Twitter: @danb (me), @pistachio (Laura Fitton, who posts when she does Qik or Seesmic), @mikepk (Michael Kowalchik), and @antrod (Antonio).

Next Tuesday, April 8th, is the second Tuesday of the month and it's time for another Mass TLC Tech Tuesday get together in Waltham, Massachusetts. The last two have been lots of fun and this should be, too.

Last month, among other things, Scott Jamison of Microsoft demoed some of Microsoft's cool image display technologies, including Seadragon, PhotoSynth, and HD View. It seems that Microsoft is working hard on dealing with very large photos (multi-GIGApixels) or collages of photos that make the zoom range of the beloved "pinch" gesture of an iPhone seem very limited. (You can see Apple and Microsoft staking out parts of a spectrum of uses.) Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe had just returned from SXSW and told stories. Tracy Licklider, whom many may remember from the Boston Computer Society, was there, as were many others. Like the first meeting, we shared Youtube videos that we liked, drank, ate, and schmoozed.

[Photos in original post on Dan Bricklin's Log]

This time, in addition to previous attendees who told me they are going to attend again, we have more people telling us they are going to come for the first time, including engineering students, entrepreneurs, and techies of all sorts. We'll have more tech toys to see, too. The Mass Tech Leadership Council is also kicking off its 2008 Awards program at this Tech Tuesday.

If you are in the Boston area on Tuesday, April 8th, drop by the Skellig Irish Pub at 240 Moody Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, from 6pm - 8pm. There's free parking (after 6pm in the lot behind the theater) and public transportation (commuter train) nearby. It's free to Council members and students, $20 otherwise. You can sign up in advance on the Council website, or just show up. There are lots of interesting restaurants within walking distance, so you might want to make plans with friends to meet at the Pub for Tech Tuesday and then go out to eat afterward.

On February 29th I stopped by CNet in San Francisco to be interviewed by Dan Farber for their "Super Techies" series. He asked questions on topics ranging from my earliest days programming through VisiCalc, Slate, and wikiCalc/SocialCalc. Afterwards, at their request, I sent them some photos and over the last few weeks they've edited it all down into a little over 10 minutes.

You can watch it on their web site on the "Super Techies: Dan Bricklin" page, or watch it embedded on the post on my blog.

Here are some photos taken just after we did the interview showing Dan Farber and the studio:

[Photos on original post on danbricklin.com/log]

This coming Tuesday, March 11, 2008, we are having another "Tech Tuesday" meeting. It's sponsored by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and its Open Source cluster. I did a write-up about the idea behind this ongoing series of meetings last month -- see my post on February 7, 2008.

As before, the meeting will be at the Skellig Irish Pub at 240 Moody Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, from 6pm - 8pm -- with free parking (after 6pm) and public transportation nearby.

We had a really good turnout at the last meeting, filling the room nicely, even though there was a major snow storm starting at the same time. Google was kind enough to pick up the tab from the bar for an hour or so. iRobot sent along a green Looj gutter-cleaning robot. The One Laptop Per Child people had a representative with some XO laptops (also with green plastic -- do I see a trend?). People did demos using the video projector and sound system I brought connected to Skellig's free wifi. People met others and made new connections. I think the feedback was pretty positive.

If we want this to be a regular thing, and I hope it becomes that, we need people to show up whenever they can. Whether you made it to the last one or missed it, please try to come this coming week. I know it's hard for some who are in Austin at SXSW, or at other meetings, but anybody else should try to attend. An ongoing techie gathering is important to the financial health of our region. I'll be bringing my stuff, including an OLPC XO and I hope Bob Frankston's Amazon Kindle. If you have something cool, please bring it to show and tell. Some well-known members of the press are trying to make it. In any case, please try to attend! The Mass TLC web site has more information and a sign-up page if you want to let us know in advance that you're coming (but show up even if you don't sign up).

Here are some photos from the last Tech Tuesday:

[The original post on Dan Bricklin's Log has four photos]

This week I attended one of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants' Diamond Exchange meetings. Senior IT and other executives from major companies, senior members of the US military, and others listen to talks about, and discuss, some relevant topics.

This meeting revolved around the behavioral economics research of MIT professor Dan Ariely. Dan, like Gordon Bell, Alan Kay, myself, and a few others, is a "Diamond Fellow" and usually attends these meetings as one of the interesting parts of the community that develops (a reasonable subset of the attendees are the same from year to year). This time, Dan had his new book, titled "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" [link to Amazon] that just came out a few days before. It is (as of this writing) number 21 on Amazon and number 5 on the NY Times bestseller list.

Dan is interested in the decisions people make everyday, such as when shopping, but, unlike a normal economist, as a behavioral economist he doesn't assume that people make decisions rationally. He looks at different facets of life and looks at people's expectations, and their passions (or lack thereof) for work.

The book addresses a variety of areas in which Dan performed a lot of experiments. He uses things as mundane as beer, wine, pencils, and chocolate in his research. For example, to see how people treat money differently than non-money, he put 6-packs of Coke in college dorm refrigerators and figured out the "half-life of Coke" (i.e., how long it took for people to steal it). Quite quickly. He then left plates of money. No one took any.

His experiments are all quite simple and clever. They cover areas such as how we assign values to things, how we treat financial relationships differently than social ones, how sexual arousal affects decision making, and more.

Dan gave me a prepublication copy of the book a while back, so I've already read it. It's a wonderful book. Not only is the research fascinating and important, but Dan's entertaining and very personal voice comes through in his writing. I highly recommend it to all sorts of readers. It is not a technology book, nor a dry economics one -- it is a book about people.

Dan has already been interviewed by NPR and some major publications and will certainly be interviewed much more as he goes about his book tour, but I thought it would be interesting to cover something you wouldn't find in the popular press: How do his findings apply to Open Source software? Dan and I sat down to talk in one of the lounges for almost an hour during the conference after one of the activities for non-golfers (sandcastle building after a short demonstration by a professional on a beach in Monterey, California). I recorded the whole thing as a podcast.

[The original post on Dan Bricklin's Log has a photo of Dan Ariely, right after our interview]

Here are some of the things we covered, which you should be able to see are usually related to Open Source software and its development:

For most people, when it comes to purchasing something, there is a big difference between free (as in "free beer") and even one cent.

Also, according to his experiments, there is a big difference between how hard people will work for free (without pay) vs. different amounts of payment. People will work hard (such as moving furniture) for free, and just as hard for lots of money (e.g., $60 per hour). They won't work anywhere near as hard for a small amount (e.g., $2 per hour).

He distinguishes between the "social realm" and the "financial realm". When things move from the social realm to the financial realm they are viewed differently. People don't think "This is the same as free, plus I'm getting a little bit of money." They think "I'm being paid very little."

When comparing things, it is easier to compare things that are in the same "bucket". For example, it is easy to figure out what you would pay for a shirt similar to another you've bought previously. But if something is "free" or is in the social realm, then it is considered in a different bucket from the "money" realm and comparisons are done differently, as if you were comparing different types of items. They are different mindsets. When you switch from the money realm to another, things change and not just in ways related to price. So, Open Source software is often not compared head to head with proprietary software and other factors come into play when deciding its value.

Feeling that your work is useful, even if you know it's an illusion, has motivational power with respect to that work.

People have an over tendency to keep doors open: We love options and over value them. We love keeping our options open even when it is clearly not in our interest. The fact that a piece of software is Open Source, and thereby gives you options, is an attraction (such as being able to make changes yourself, even if you never actually take advantage of that option).

Normal, financially-based contracts are usually pretty fully specified. In contrast, socially-based contracts are less fully specified but are more flexible and you know that when things go really bad the other party won't abandon you. (For example, see the difference between a marriage contract and one with your gardener.) Proprietary software has explicit contracts while Open Source software usually has incomplete social ones that are more flexible.

Once you move from a social contract to a financial one, it's very hard to go back, so you have to be careful if you want to stay in the social realm.

Gifts are viewed more like in the social realm than being paid in cash, though being told how much the gift costs brings it back into the financial realm.

Open Source can be about the pride we take in our work and in the pride of knowing other people are taking what we've done and building upon it. Paying for the work, even paying some people but not others, can change that view and amount of pride for everybody.

Money has side-effects. There are different norms of what is and isn't appropriate when money is involved, including moral aspects.

Just knowing a piece of software you are working on is covered by a socially helpful license (especially if it says it at the top of every file) may possibly affect your attitude while working on it. (This is my idea that stems from his research that says that just being asked to list some of the Ten Commandments cuts down cheating on subsequent tasks when compared to listing some book titles.)

We talked about the intoxicating "high" of doing programming.

He is interested in the meaning of labor. The old philosophy that you do a job just to be paid is wrong. However, we don't understand labor enough as an academic discipline -- about passion, affiliation, and motivation. The area of Open Source software is interesting, he feels, because in many places it removes the issue of money and just leaves the "payment" of joy.

We overvalue what we have or what we create. Ownership or authorship moves things from financial-based to pride-based. The inefficiencies from the author's perspective of continuing to develop and support a project even after there are "better" alternatives could be very efficient for users worried about switching costs. These effects should be much stronger in Open Source than proprietary software because of the financial nature of deciding to keep proprietary software projects alive.

Dan sees a real importance in doing experiments, and in taking social forces into account, in corporations -- but most companies ignore it. Open Source software removes money from the equation and opens the opportunity to take other forces into account.

We talked a bit more about gifts vs. money, including donations to Open Source projects. He looks to Burning Man, which is a gift economy and not a monetary one.

Finally, because of the way in which people do things by relative valuation and not absolute, he sees that the initial emerging social norms, such as in an Open Source community, are very strong and of long lasting influence, since they become the baseline that future behavior is measured against.

That's my overview of what we talked about. I really recommend that you listen to the podcast. Dan has a very special way of expressing things. Also, if you end up reading the book (which you should), you'll hear his voice in your head because of his writing style. People who have heard him give a speech and then read the book comment upon how much they can hear him clearly in his writing and how much that adds to reading the book.

The podcast is available on my Podcast page as "Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, about Open Source".

I'm writing this on a plane coming back from a variety of things on the West Coast. After sprinting to get SocialCalc up to the level of the last release, I then had some other long-awaited projects to do, which took up most of last week. Then I flew off to some conferences and meetings. I finally have some time to catch up with blogging. I'll write what I can on the plane, and finish it up and publish sometime in the next 24 hours back home.

On February 13th, Scott Kirsner held one of his Entrepreneurs on the Edge get-togethers. He invites various entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and others, has a panel discussion, and has lots of social networking. In this case there were also some demonstrations around the room.

The topic was display technology, and he titled it "Seeing in new ways: Next-gen display technology". The panelists were Adam Bogue of Circle Twelve/MERL/DiamondTouch, Peter Kazlas of QD Vision, David Rose of Vitality and Ambient, Mark Spitzer of Myvu, and Bob Zehner of E Ink. They are involved in (respectively): A multi-person-touch display system (it is multi-touch like Microsoft Surface and the iPhone, but can distinguish between different people working together and has very fine accuracy); some special materials for producing bright, colorful, displays; interesting consumer devices including a pill-bottle with a cap display that tries to remind you to take your medicine; a wearable display for the iPod and other portable video devices; and the display technology behind the Amazon Kindle.

As a few times before, I provided some of the sound equipment and recorded a podcast. I posted it on my podcast page, where you can find the 50-minute recording listed as "Scott Kirsner: Next-Gen Display Technology 2008-02-13".

I took a few photos:

[The original post on Dan Bricklin's Log includes photos of the panelists, the audience, and the eInk display next to an Amazon Kindle as well as two photos comparing it to a normal LCD display (35 grams and 1.2mm thick vs. 252 grams and 11.5mm thick)]

I just released a new version of SocialCalc for the OLPC XO. (See my previous post about this. We've decided to just call it "SocialCalc" and not "Sweet SocialCalc".) Even though the project still has a long way to go, to me this release is a major milestone. It finally shows that this is going to be a "real" spreadsheet. While we are still awaiting the companion project to connect this (and JavaScript applications in general) to the XO's data storage system (for save and load) and to the rest of the Sugar application framework, as a spreadsheet it's getting quite complete and benchmarkable.

The spreadsheet engine, starting in the release last week, supports insert/delete row/column, copy/cut/paste, conversion between SocialCalc format, CSV, and tab-delimited formats, and data sorting. Sorting works with any range, and can include up to 3 columns as indexes. All of this is supported by undo/redo.

Last night I finished porting the main 109 formula functions from Perl SocialCalc/wikiCalc to the new JavaScript engine. It now has, in addition to SUM, SIN, COS, IF, etc., database functions (DSUM, DCOUNT, etc.), text functions (MID, TRIM, etc.), financial functions (IRR, PV, etc.), and more. These are the functions that the June 2007 Open Document Format "Open Formula" specification calls the "small group". The specification says: "This group includes approximately 100 functions, and includes the basic functions that are very widely implemented in spreadsheet applications, even in resource-constrained environments." I figure that should be enough for a 1.0 version of a spreadsheet. It's more, I believe, than in my 2003 copy of Microsoft Works. So I'm finished (modulo testing, of course) one major part of the implementation.

You can find the latest version on the "Software Garden OLPC Home Page".

Performance has always been a concern of mine with this project. Not only is it written in a scripting language (JavaScript), it is running on a quite slow (by today's standards, not by yesterday's) machine, the XO. Therefore, I was pleased to see the results of some simple benchmarks I ran. I took the sample list of television stations that I bundle with this test version of SocialCalc (an old example from wikiCalc days), copy/pasted it a few times to get over 500 rows, and then sorted the four columns (using three columns as keys). It took about 7 seconds on the XO. Not bad. The "500 formulas" sample recalculates and redisplays in about 5 seconds. This is certainly useful enough for a school of 500 kids to do some reports, or for crunching data in a school project.

As a comparison, I tried something similar with a spreadsheet that seems to be viewed as a reasonable attempt at something for "real" use -- Google Docs' spreadsheet on my regular, modern laptop. I exported the TV station list to CSV, imported that into Google Docs, and copy/pasted to make about 500 rows. Sorting (only one key) took much longer than on the XO. Recreating the 500 formulas test also ended up in much longer recalc times. The XO with SocialCalc (running locally) is faster for these "big" jobs.

What does this show? The OLPC can't be viewed as a "toy", at least not when it comes to spreadsheets, since it holds its own in many ways with Google Docs. Google Docs' success shows that it (Google Docs) isn't a "toy", and its performance has been fine for many people. You don't have to have Excel's blinding speed on huge datasets to be a useful product. The Google spreadsheet, while in JavaScript, seems to be using server-side calculations, and is optimized for much smaller sheets. I'm sure they'll find ways to speed things up if need be. (After all, they have many people working on theirs and mine is written by one person part-time -- and my source is available to learn from if they care. They were clearly optimizing for other things than my tests.)

When searching for "olpc spreadsheet" on Google I came across a variety of articles complaining that the XO didn't have a spreadsheet. With this release of SocialCalc we can now see what the XO will have. (At a minimum -- as an open platform there will certainly be other products available, too.) It will have a "real spreadsheet".

The people running the OLPC project are making SocialCalc a "real" project, providing the help and guidance of Manu Gupta, Eben Eliason, Walter Bender, and others. It meets a lot of their goals: In addition to being useful, it will run on an XO not connected to a server, it is Open Source (Artistic 2.0 and CPAL) in a common scripting language (JavaScript) to aid in education and customization, and it has an architecture that should lend itself to fitting in with other applications on the XO (sharing data and hopefully eventually doing multi-person editing).

For me, this is a wonderful and welcome opportunity. I hope it pays off well for everybody else, too.

Thanks to the support of this project by Socialtext and OLPC I am able to create a useful application for use by school children (and their teachers and parents) around the world. Others can build on what I write. Already some teachers have started learning and evaluating SocialCalc for use in the classroom. Manu is trying to explore how children can participate in accounting using SocialCalc, including microfinance applications in rural villages in India. (Manu is in New Delhi right now.) As one person put it, it's like joining a techie Peace Corps. I thank SJ Klein (of OLPC) for repeatedly encouraging me to look to the XO as a platform, starting back much earlier in the development of wikiCalc a year and a half ago.

(Ross Mayfield of Socialtext pointed to this essay by Tom Coates: "On the OLPC Movement..."

At the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Open Source Cluster organizing committee meeting several weeks ago we were discussing what type of event to have next. We've had big meetings with presentations by IBM, Oracle, JBoss, Fidelity, OLPC, etc. This time we talked about starting a frequent get-together where people can come and schmooze, demo their latest to each other, look at new "toys", etc. This would be much more informal but with lots going on.

The criteria we came up with for a place to hold it included: Convenient to Route 128 where a lot of tech people work, accessible by public transportation so students can easily attend, a reasonably sized room, nearby places to go eat afterwards, WiFi connectivity, and some video projectors. Rather than just be for Open Source people, we're making it open to all sorts of tech interests, including robotics, social networking, etc.

We've found a venue that meets all those criteria. It's the Skellig Irish Pub at 240 Moody Street in Waltham, Massachusetts. They are being kind enough to let us use their place. It's next to the Watch City Brewing Company and the Embassy Cinema. They have a big back room which we'll take over. There are places to sit in small groups, a ceiling-mounted projector, open WiFi, a stage where I can put up another video projector, power-outlets, a bar if you get thirsty, good food if you get hungry, a front-room for more private conversation, lots of restaurants nearby to retire to or for overflow, free parking (after 6pm, I think) in the lot behind it (near the movie theater) and elsewhere nearby, and commuter-rail access.

Here are some pictures of the room, looking west to the bar and then east to the stage (the tables and chairs are pushed back out of this photo):

[Photos in the original post on Dan Bricklin's Log.]

We're starting with the second Tuesday of the month (the first meeting being February 12th) from 6pm to 8pm or so. If it's popular we may make this event more frequent. I'd love to have a place you know you can always go to (and take visitors from out of town to) every week where you'll find interesting people to talk with and things to see, but once a month will have to do to start.

We're lining up lots of interesting folks to be there. We have people from Microsoft R&D (they have some cool projects), Black Duck, probably Google (a lot of Open Source work on Android is happening in Cambridge I understand), the One Laptop Per Child foundation (we'll have a few XO machines and I'll show off my Open Source spreadsheet running on it), someone with an Amazon Kindle, and hopefully someone from iRobot. We'll be showing our favorite tech-videos on Youtube. Anybody can show off products they're working on. We'll be recording some Seesmic video and posting on Twitter. We're inviting members of the press and the venture capital community.

If you're in the Boston area next Tuesday, February 12th, please join us! Bring your new toys, stories from Comdex, MacWorld, and Demo, your own demos, and techie Youtube video URLs. It should be a lot of fun.

For more information and to sign up (it's free to people from MassTLC-member companies and students, $20 otherwise), go to the MassTLC's web page about it, "Tech Tuesday: Gadgets & Gathering".