Silly Putty Physics Experiment

Ever wonder what would happen if you dropped 50 lbs of Silly Putty from the 7th floor of an office building? Wonder no more as our crack team of Sunbelt Scientists take the challenge.

Dont Copy That Floppy!

Some early 90's anti-piracy film.

Adam Curry

Behind the Mic

Adam Curry

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His first gig was on a Dutch in-hospital radio station, then as John Holden a motorcycle-riding African-American pirate-radio DJ. Most of us met Adam Curry as an early MTV host, but he actually got his start as a budding geek.

In this interview with IT Conversations' host Doug Kaye, you'll hear a very personal side of Adam's life: how he discovered the Internet and the web, registering the mtv.com domain, then being sued over it. He founded OnRamp, an early web-development company that grew through M&A to a $230 million public company. Adam has started many other ventures, not all successful. He's been to Iraq and even produced a reality-TV show about his own family.

Doug and Adam also discuss audio on the 'net. Here's your chance to hear the Behind the Mic side of the creator of iPodder and one of podcasting's leading evangelists.

Dave Winer

Behind the Mic

Dave Winer

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"Watch out for something that the users get better than the geeks," could be Dave Winer's mantra. Throughout his career, Dave has focused on making computers easier and more powerful for users.

Many of his creations are direct descendants of his early work with outliners that began a the University of Wisconsin. Dave took outliners to Personal Software, created a dual-view BBS in 1982, founded Living Videotext in 1983, released the MORE outliner for the Mac in 1986, merged with Symantec in 1987, then left a half year later to found Userland Software.

He has lent his hand to technologies and standards that have touched the lives of almost everyone online. They include OPML, XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and podcasting in addition to his widely read blog, ScriptingNews.

Get to know one of the most influential personalities on the Internet from this interview with IT Conversations host/producer Doug Kaye.

Ourmedia.org

Marc Canter and JD Lasica, founders

Behind the Mic with Doug Kaye

Marc Canter and JD Lasica

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IT Conversations host Doug Kaye interviews Marc Canter and JD Lasica who have just launched Ourmedia.org. As JD wrote on his blog:

"Exactly nine months ago, Marc Canter and I met up at Supernova. I mentioned to him the idea I'd been kicking around with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive to create a grassroots media organization, site, and registry called Open Media.

"Turned out that Open Media was, ironically, a trademarked name. But Marc jumped at the chance to dive in as co-founder of this new entity -- he's been a multimedia pioneer for 15 years, and this is the culimination of what he's been striving toward all these years.

"Today, Ourmedia.org officially launched."

Philip Greenspun

Software Engineering

Philip Greenspun

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Philip Greenspun has had the same MIT email address since the age of 13, and he's had a profound yet subtle impact on many software developers. His 1999 book, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, was an inspiration to many programmers writing server-side code on Unix/Linux platforms. It was one of the first to be published both as a free download and as a traditional book. (Filled with color photos, printed on high-quality coated stock, and weighing in at 3.5 pounds it was also the first computer coffee-table book.)

In this interview with IT Conversations' host Doug Kaye, Philip describes the evolution of his attitudes towards software engineering as manifested in Philip and Alex's Guide and his latest book, Software Engineering for Internet Applications, for a course at MIT where "the goal of the course is that the student finishes knowing how to build Amazon.com by him or herself." (That must be one heck of a semester!)

Oh, and by the way, Philip also built photo.net, which receives 10 million hits/day from 400,000 unique visitors each month, and co-founded and ran ArsDigita, a now-defunct website development shop using many of the tools Philip and his associates developed previously. You won't want to miss the story of how the venture capitalists to whom Philip relinquished control of this $20 million profitable company ran it into the ground. There are lessons there for any budding (or experienced) entrepreneur.

Bruce Schneier

founder & CTO, Counterpane

Beyond Fear

Bruce Schneier

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Host Doug Kaye says, "This is the one interview I hope everyone will hear."

In his lated book, Beyond Fear, security guru Bruce Schneier goes beyond cryptography and network security to challenge our post-9/11 national security practices. Here are some teasers:

• "We're seeing so much nonsense after 9/11, and so many people are saying things about security, about terrorism that just makes no sense."
• "Homeland security measures are an enormous waste of money."
• "If the goal of security is to protect against yesterday's attacks, we're really good at it."
• "The system didn't fail in the way the designers expected."
• "Attackers exploit the rarity of failures."
• "More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk."
• "Did you ever wonder why tweezers were confiscated at security checkpoints, but matches and cigarette lighters--actual combustible materials--were not?...If the tweezers lobby had more power, I'm sure they would have been allowed on board as well."
• "When the U.S. Government says that security against terrorism is worth curtailing individual civil liberties, it's because the cost of that decision is not borne by those making it."
• "...people make bad security trade-offs when they're scared."

Read or listen to this terrific interview in which Bruce also says what he thinks of the 9/11 hearings and answers questions from listeners regarding spam and biometrics. This is one of our best.

Doc Searls

senior editor, Linux Journal

DIY-IT

Doc Searls

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Okay, so he's not really a doctor and doesn't even play one on TV, but Doc Searls has become one of the most-read blogger/journalists on the 'Net. He co-founded a successful ad agency during the dot-com boom only to discover that he hated advertising and marketing. He then teamed up with David Weinberger, Chris Locke and Rick Levine to co-author the classic, The Cluetrain Manifesto and then played the speakers' circuit until 9/11 shut that down.

In this conversation with host/producer Doug Kaye, Doc explains the vision he's been speaking and writing about since early 2003: do-it-yourself IT (DIY-IT). He suggests that we view the construction industry and its vendors as a model for commodity component-based application development. He says this is a "corner of the market you're not going to see when you look at vendor sports, the supply side...Really powerful things happen when the demand side starts to supply itself."

Doug and Doc explore the DIY-IT opportunity and the shift in the supply/demand ratio. Is it just due to the changes in our economy -- it's easier than it used to be to hire good people -- or has there been a permanent shift in power from vendors to customers? Open-source software is an enabler of DIY-IT, but they're not one and the same. (Unix/Linux is just a body of practices and methodologies, Doc says.) And DIY-IT isn't an open-source-only world. Doc sees roles for Microsoft and others if they get onto the bandwagon and deliver the building materials DIY'ers need.

His presentations are everywhere online, but this is a great opportunity to hear a full-length interview with Doc Searls.

Doc's many roles include:

• Senior editor for Linux Journal, the original (and still the leading) Linux publication.
• Proprietor of Doc Searls' IT Garage, a new group journal launched by Linux Journal's publisher, SSC.
• One of the four authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the iconoclastic web site that became the best-selling book.
• A talking source on The Linux Show, CNET Radio, ZDTV, CNBC, KOMO-TV, KING-TV, and ZDTV and whoever else wants to risk dispersing his opinions.
• A marketing, PR and advertising veteran. Most notably he co-founded Hodskins Simone and Searls, one of Silicon Valley's top advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S was absorbed by Publicis Technology in early 1998.
• A lifelong writer whose byline has appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail and lots of other places, including (of course) Linux Journal. Many of the older pieces are collected at Reality 2.0, which is at his personal portal, Searls.com, which is also home to his consultancy, The Searls Group.
• A frequent speaker on any and all the above subjects.
• On the advisory boards of Jabber, Inc., Ping Identity Corp. and Technorati. He holds stock in the first two of those three.

Paul Graham

Hackers and Painters

Paul Graham

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Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you.

Speaking with IT Conversations host Doug Kaye, Paul explains some of issues explored in his new book including Why Nerds Are Unpopular--Paul gets email from all over the world about this essay--and Good Bad Attitude--Is there such a thing as a hacker ethic?

In 1995, working with Robert Morris, Paul built what was arguably the first major web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 and became Yahoo Stores. Regarding the stressfullness of those days, Paul wrote, "I remember sitting back in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like I was on vacation."

And you won't want to miss Paul's comments on Java, which he says, like Cobol ("a Neanderthal language"), is an evolutionary dead end.

Paul Graham is currently working on a new programming language called Arc. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple but effective Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters.

Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Joel Spolsky

founder, Fog Creek Software

Joel on Software

Joel Spolsky

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IT Conversations' producer Doug Kaye interviews the author of Joel on Software, an online column initially inspired by Philip Greenspun and Dave Winer and now read by thousands of programmers and managers. To call him a former paratrooper would be accurate but misleading. He served in the Israeli army and co-founded a kibbutz, but he didn't jump out of airplanes, he was pushed.

Joel and his family bought the first IBM PC in Israel, and when he moved back to the U.S. and completed college, he went to work on Microsoft's Excel development team, still a strong influence on his opinions on software development.

Doug and Joel discuss extreme programming of which Joel has often been a critic. He makes his case for the importance of formal testing, particularly on large projects, and explains why, "customers don't know what they want." The Joel Test was one of his most-read essays. It's what job applicants should ask at the end of the interview to evaluate prospective employers.

And Joel has plenty to say about Microsoft: the impact of the cast-in-stone file formats for Word and Excel, the split between the so-called Raymond Chen and MSDN Magazine camps, why some developers may not move to Avalon/XAML/WinFX, and what will happen to Win32.

An entertaining oportunity to get to know one of today's most influential developer/authors.