The Frictionless Scam

When we were much younger, Dylan and I would dream up things we could do to make money with as little effort as possible. The goal is what I call the "Frictionless Scam." That is, you want no contact with the client nor with the police. So it has to be legal and something that doesn't require the client in the room with you. You want to cash the check, hand over the product and everyone walks away happy.

A good example would be computer-generated astrology or biorythm charts. Feed some random or nearly random numbers into a program, print out the chart, mail it to client and cash the check.

Another silly idea I had while stuck in a traffic years back was auditing vehicles for possession by a ghost or extraterestrial or something. Which would involve a box with blinkenlights and dials. Then you create a certificat that guarantees the vehicle is ghost-free. Now given that ghost don't exist, you would be pretty safe from a legal stand-point. But the fact that you have to do a show and dance for the customer means this isn't a frictionless scam.

Neal Stephenson came up with a great Frictionless Scam: plug an Eliza-like chatterbox into voice synth and voice recognition software to build a phone sex service. "Is it because of your massively erect penis that you came to see me?" "Enough about me, what are you wearing?" "Do my large melons excite you?" "What does this tell you?" (If you haven't played with an Eliza, you might not get the previous joke.) Of course, neither voice synth nor voice recog are up to the point where we can do this and you still need a large server somewhere with an expensive T1 to pull it off. What's more, in 2012 it would have to be a 3d generated web cam stream.

Now it seems that Print On Demand and Amazon have created another near fricionlessscam. Take some Wikipedia articles, edit them into a book, sell book on Amazon. And thanks to PoD, you only have to print the book if/when you actually sell it. And given that Wikipedia has good markup, you can pretty much automate the conversion from Wiki to PDF that gets sent to the On Demand printer.

How Google Jumped The Shark

I was going to call this "Year end round up" but I'm 2 months late. And there were far more important things going on last year.

Google jumped the shark.

It was the year they declared war on your private life. Here is a great quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." It is extremely startling that a man as smart as him doesn't realise everything that is wrong with that statement. Remember, this from a company who's mission statement used to be "Don't do evil." Of course, Schmidt is a rich straight male of european descent and has profited handsomely from that Invisible Knapsack he has.

And of course they chose the wrong side of the Nym Wars.

But for me, the real signal that Google No Longer Gets It was that they pulled the plug on Google Wave. This was the most exciting thing I've seen since... well since the web was won, I guess. Take email, IRC, Wikis and online forums. Remove all the elements of those that make them annoying. Then add in RSS feeds, images, spreadsheets, version control, real time simultaneous editing and more. Take AJAX, Comet and all that, then make something helluva useful out of it.

Observer bias

Another way of putting it:

At its basic level, the Law of Fives is a practical demonstration that perception is intent-sensitive; that is, the perceiver's intentions inform the perception. To whatever extent one considers that perception is identical with reality, then, it has the corollary that reality is intent-sensitive.

A startup

I realised a few months back that while I claim to be a programmer, I could also be called a serial-entrepreneur. I've founded 4 companies over the years (Educatic, ARTware, Awalé and Quaero). Me being an entrepreneur is kinda ironic, if you know me.

Anyway, the real goal of this post is to get a link to my latest companies brand new website. I'd like to brag about how awesome this website is, but it isn't awesome and prolly never will be. I didn't make it so don't blame me for the flash animation and canned newsroom sound.

But the thing is though, the product we sell really kicks ass. A fully configurable automagic document classification and document archiving intranet application. It can handle volumes of over 1 million documents a year. That's a lot of documents. One thing I realised a while back is that we didn't just write an archiving app, we wrote a tool to build an archiving app with. Which is both great and a pain because each install is so customised I have trouble keeping track.

It is noteworthy that this is the very first time one of my companies has even HAD a website. Which is another irony given that I developed websites for a living for over 10 years.

The URL again, for those that don't know how to the clicky-clicky: http://www.quaero.ca

(Full disclosure: I founded Quaero and yes this is a blatant attempt at seeding the search engines.)

Sharp!

Inspired by a YouTube video, I pulled apart a old hard drive and turned it into a small, low powered grinder/sander.


I was wondering how to glue the sand paper to the platter. Them things are polished smooth. I was figuring sanding the platter and using epoxy. But it turns out that the centrifugal force at 5200 RPM flattens things out just find. Who would have thought!

One of the first things I did was grind myself a shiv. Because life is tough in the En-Aitch.


I then promptly dulled it cutting up some paper. See? Even the paper is tough in En-Aitch.

Pretty lights

In a fit of weakness, I bought 2 silly USB mail lights. This are basically a PIC that talks USB on one side, and turns coloured leds on and off. They come with software that is supposed to check if you have mail and change colour depending on what's going on. Of course, the supplied software is Windows only and doesn't even work it seems.

Not that I care about a light that tells me if I have e-mail pending. But controling pretty lights from the computer? I'm all over that. Someone had already written a script in Python to control these things. I ported it to Perl because, well because I like Perl.

To use it, you must have Device::USB installed. And perl, of course.

http://pied.nu/Perl/setcolour

Doing setcolour will show you all devices installed

Doing setcolour 1294:1320 1 will set all mail devices to colour 1, which is blue on one of my devices, green on the other.

Doing setcolour 2-7 2 will set one mail device to colour 2, which is red on both my devices.

UPS and power conditioning

If you have a server or any computer that is important, it needs an UPS. Something large enough for 5-10 minutes of power outage. But it is not enough to just plug the power into the UPS. You must also plug into UPS data port. And set up the software that will allow the computer to detect the power outage and shutdown before the battery runs out.

This is non-negotiable.

Not doing this risks you showing up Monday morning and not getting any work down while an admin drives 100 km to fix a problem.

And if you have any piece of important electronic equipment, you'll want a filter. And no the fuse on your power bar doesn't count.