I can now say ‘i haz kitteh’. Pip and Pi are now home. Pip took a little while to settle down, but Pi pretty much ruled the roost from the word go. Thank you to MandaBurms for a lovely pair of cats.
Listening to: Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - The Police
Well bugger me… if it doesn’t rain it pours. After singing the praises of my little MacBook I got home and the thing was as dead as a door nail. It’s a $1600+ type problem to get fixed (a new machine is about $1700). So after some cursing and swearing yesterday I am back running my Mac world from an external hard-drive. Not a long-term thing, but surprisingly effective.
We’ve started to see something really exciting with Ponoko… regular traffic blips driven by products that capture people’s imaginations. Over the past 3 weeks the following products have gained a delightful level of traction:
I found reference to this article in Tim O’Reilly’s tweets. I’m a fan of George Soros… he’s rather successful and wonderfully thoughtful. His thinking about markets and how they behave is always insightful. He stepped it up when commenting on the current situation (my emphasis):
We are currently experiencing the bursting of a credit bubble that has involved the entire financial system and, at the same time, a rise and eventual fall in the price of oil and other commodities that have had some of the characteristics of a bubble. I believe the two phenomena are connected in what I call a super-bubble that has evolved over the last quarter of a century. The fundamental trend in the super-bubble has been the ever-increasing use of leverage—borrowing money to finance consumption and investment—and the misconception about that trend was what I call market fundamentalism, the belief that markets assure the best allocation of resources.
WOW! Read it slowly - that’s George Soros implying that the market is not always the best mechanism for allocating resources.
Dear John… yes, you’re a lot like Obama. If ‘awe-inspiring’ was a park bench - you’d be sitting there with Barack (’specially after today’s headline) just for very opposite reasons.
Dude - I was willing to pay attention to you until I read that story. You being “not institutionalised” and being like Obama is me being like Lewis Hamilton because sometimes I drive in a car by myself.
A question I have been asking myself over the weekend is whether or not you’d ever see products shared across the web in the same way as MP3s. If so, what sort of file format would you need? I have come to the conclusion (and it might because I have typed ‘make’, ‘make install’ once to many times) that a product file will probably look a lot like a software application - rather than being a single file it will be a directory structure that contains a package of things that you would need. A product needs a bunch of info. For example:
Design files
Bill of Materials (x N)
Assembly docs
Instruction manuals
So for any sensible product description you’re looking at a range of files - it doesn’t make too much sense to try and jam that into one file.
So as a first cut I think a product package might be a tar.gz file containing:
Product Name/bin An optional translation of the design files into CNC code such as G-Code or SBP code. Some CNC type code is more efficient than others - so there is value in being able to distribute ‘binary’ versions of the cutting or disposition instructions.
Product Name/bom A set of structures (like yaml or xml) that list the materials required for the product. This would include both the materials from which the product was cut or deposited and other items like electronics.
Product Name/src The design files for the product.
Product Name/tmp A temp directory that is used by parsing software - included to keep things tidy. The contents aren’t guaranteed to exist over time.
Product Name/usr/assembly Assembly instructions for the product.
Product Name/usr/make Other manufacturing instructions for the product.
Product Name/usr/use Usage instructions for the product.
The next few posts are me just getting ideas out in the open before I forget them. I promise they won’t be as crazy as my lawn mowing tales, but you’ll need to grin a bear things for a little while.
Design files really tire me. They consume a vast amount of my time. But like some sort high-maintenance relationship I stick with them because the reward is great. The big issues are around interrogation. Technically - the vast majority of my job is looking at a file and asking two seemingly simple questions:
How long are the lines?
What and where are the areas?
The amount of effort you need to go to to get that information is mind boggling - but pretty valuable once you have it. Once you’ve asked and answered those questions you are able to start asking and answering some interesting business questions.
Having spent two years doing this I have come to the conclusion that this situation suffers from a HIFI/LOFI problem. A good design file needs to be a HIgh FIdelity store of information and it needs to handle some pretty hard-core issues - like lines tangent to a circle:
Looks simple, but it ain’t and it’s important. That sort of stuff that guarantees the hand-gasms you get when using an iPod. So this is a necessary evil of the space - the file formats need to be hardcore (created by monkeys smarter than me)… but that hardcore nature really gets in the way of creating vital and valuable business systems. That’s why Sequoia and SAP are sinking cash into Right Hemisphere - there is gold in them thar’ files. But the thing is business systems really only need a LOw FIdelity version of the data. As I see it the fidelity requirements of a design file look like this:
The above process is a gross simplification of the product design-manufacturing lifecycle. A product gets designed, business stuff happens and the product gets made. Pragmatically the hifi requirements (in fetching blue) are at the ends of the process - when you’re creating the design and when the final product gets made. The other stuff you can get away with having a lofi version of the data.
“So what! Stop you’re whinging,” I hear you say. Fair cop. The ’so what’ lies in the potential of “what next”. Creating a solution to this LOFI/HIFI dichotomy has a real potential to unlock some really interesting innovation in the manufacturing and product spaces.
You can try and tackle the problem by saying ‘one file format only’ but culturally, that doesn’t fly too well and you then need to get onto the treadmill of file format support, which given the plethora of closed file formats is very very painful. It would be really powerful if there was a way of recognizing the separate requirements…
