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Now that's a prediction

Amusing: IBM’s Jeopardy-winning knowledge bot was named Watson, after IBM’s first president, Dr. Thomas J. Watson.

In Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of the main characters is named Mike, nicknamed so after Mycroft Holmes in a short story written by the same Dr. Watson, before founding IBM:

Mike was not official name; I had nicknamed him for Mycroft Holmes, in a story written by Dr. Watson before he founded IBM. This story character would just sit and think—and that’s what Mike did. Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet.

Inception (the ARM implementation)

As a way of getting better acquainted with the ARM-based devices cluttering up my desk, I picked up this gem of a textbook at Amazon:

Reading through the interrupts section reveals an implementation of Inception on the ARM platform:

SSH escape sequences (or "don't kill -9 that process")

Back when I first started SSH (around the RedHat 4.x days), I’d occasionally be connected to another host via SSH when the host or the network connection would suddenly lock up. I’d end up trying to figure out which SSH process was the one that was frozen and kill -9ing it. That is, until someone showed me how to use SSH escape sequences. Occasionally I see people talking about killing frozen SSH sessions and it reminds me to pass on this tip.

A week with a ChromeOS netbook

A box showed up earlier this week in the mail with an interesting set of markings. It wasn’t a big surprise - I’d been eagerly anticipating the arrival of a Cr-48 since it was shipped late last week.

Inside the box was the netbook, a set of instructions and the new set of Cr-48 decals. The decals are pretty flashy and look good, but I figured I’d wait a bit before putting them on (hey, this thing looks pretty good as-is).

The heartbreak of the pivot

(This was originally a response to a question asked of me on Quora, but I’ve copied it here to my blog so I can expand on it)

“Pivot” is a big catchphrase in the startup world these days. It has a glamorous feel to it: you picture the Twitter team dropping Odeo on the ground and moving on to the brand new idea without a moment’s thought. There’s more to it than that.

In May of 2010 we stopped spending all of our resources on DotSpots and started working on our new idea, Gri.pe. By our September launch at TechCrunch Disrupt, we were focusing all of our efforts on it and decided that we’d start the process of shutting down DotSpots.