Month: July 2002

Little does young Aaron Swartz realise that I’ve used my accordion mojo to implant my name into his dreams. If he could be turned to the .NET side, he could be a most powerful ally.

In case you’d forgotten, there’s another blog on this site, “The Happiest Geek on Earth”, covering more techie-related stuff. I’ve just added two entries, so if it’s a slow day at work, go check it out!

Dear Gene,

You don’t know me very well. We met only once, at that debutante cotillion of peer-to-peer developers that they called the O’Reilly Peer-To-Peer Conference in San Fran back in February 2001. I was the guy from OpenCola with the accordion. You know, the annoying one.

I don’t know you very well either — I just know of your involvement with Gnutella, then gonesilent, and then Sun, where you got brought onto the JXTA project. Part of my job at OpenCola, being the Developer Relations guy, was to schmooze other developers. It was my job to keep in touch with guys like you and find areas in which our companies could collaborate. To that end, I kept records of not only what projects you were working on, but also those little niggly personal touches — your likes, dislikes, and so on. The kind of thing that Malcolm Gladwell said that “connectors” do. For instance, for this gentleman, I have “Likes heavier, darker, gothier music. Martial arts. Allergic to chicken.”

(All that shows up in my notes for you is “Likes cars. Dresses up for conferences. Sardonic.” I don’t know if you’d like that summary or not, but I can imagine you going “ha!” in response.)

Yes, we were professional rivals — you were the technical spokesperson for Gnutella, I was roughly the same for OpenCola. In the end, you had us beat; there are lots of Gnutella clients out there trading files right now, while OpenCola’s software remains in perpetual not-quite-finished limbo in a crappy office park north of Toronto. But like the restaurant business, rivalries in the P2P world were largely for show; it was competition at the front door and camaraderie at the back. We exchanged ideas, jokes, “war stories”, and even autographs. Well, I got your autograph — I didn’t write anything for the P2P book, but you did:

There you are, among the brightest lights of the P2P world, in a book by one of the most repected computer book publishers. No small feat, that.

(Note to Adam Langley: Yes, I did get your autograph, but you signed it for chapter 9, which unfortunately was on the following page.)

You did a lot by the age of 23 (which you were in 2000, when peer-to-peer technolgies were coming onto the general public’s radar). My big accomplishment at 23 was getting kicked out of school. I tip my hat to you for your hard work, your tenacity, and your drive to keep putting more software out there. I could learn a thing or two from you.

Come to think of it, I did. I owe you a debt of gratitude for your work on Gnutella, on which I based my first open source project. When OpenCola’s CEO, Grad Conn, was shown Gnutella by our CTO, John Henson, he was blown away. “This,” he declared, “is what I want our software to be like.” I found myself coordinating a project called Gnutelevision (which later became COLAvision), a Gnutella client married to a streaming server. It essentially trawled the ad-hoc network made up of Gnutella clients, hoovered up MP3s and video files and then broadcast them as a live stream — kind of like having a preview channel for the Internet. Based on the source of your Gnutella client and notes, I distilled a spec (shown here and here) from which we were able to build up that first version of COLAvision, which was well received at Def Con that year. My first foray into the world of open source was a success, and you’re one of the people whom I must thank.

You might find this hard to believe, but you and I might’ve gotten along pretty well, maybe even worked well together. I don’t know why, but I tend to seek out curmudgeons in my partnerships. Like this guy and this guy, with whom I’ve shared some nice little successes and colossal failures and this guy, with whom I’ve worked at three companies that imploded and our own little software consulting firm, which did rather nicely for itself. Perhaps it’s a yin-yang thing. Or maybe I just want to live in a “buddy” film. Or maybe driving people with opposite temperaments crazy is my idea of fun. Anyhow, I’d have been the zen goofball countering your insatiable drive, zigging where you zagged, the Flava Flav to your Chuck D. It’s a shame we didn’t get much of a chance to hang out.

Another reason I think we would’ve gotten along well is that I’ve read what you’ve written. You love analogies and you love being a smartass. Me too! In the P2P book, you compared the client-server model of computing to a cocktail party, and in this biting funny entry in your blog, you likened air travel to a brutal prison. I like the way you think.

The best evidence that we would’ve gotten along comes from your friend Yaro, who wrote these heartfelt words:

I knew Gene not through articles or interviews. I knew him as the guy I could call when I was having trouble changing a flat tire – and as someone who would say “stay right there, I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He was the guy I could ask if my tie was correctly knotted or what his thoughts on the Israeli Prime Minister were. He was someone that would check his character judgements with me and someone who would start whispering to me a hilarious idea in the middle of a boring meeting. In this land of minute friendships started at “events” and held up by lunch meetings, I’ve experienced two emotions that are equally impossible to describe: happiness to have called him my friend and the overwhelming, all-devouring sense of loss.

Of all your accomplishments, out of everything you’ve done, being a friend of this calibre trumps them all. It is your greatest achievement and your greatest example.

This weekend, may I suggest that you look Earthward for just a moment? If you look carefully, you’ll see a goofy guy with an accordion slung on his back, raising a glass of Guinness skyward in your honour.

So long, and thanks for all the packets,

Joey

Recommended Reading

The news reports:

• Associated Press
• Infoworld (Reuters)
• News.com
• Sacramento Bee
• Wired

The personal entries:

• Aaron Swartz
• Adam Langley
• Andrew Baio
• Andy Oram
• Cory Doctorow
• Damien Stolarz
• Kevin Burton
• Li Gong
• Martin Peck
• Yaroslav Faybishenko

Some interviews:

• Gene’s entry in Time magazine’s feature, The Digital Dozen
• Gene’s interview in The Atlantic
• O’Reilly’s story on Sun’s purchase of Gene’s company
• Gene’s interview with file-sharing portal site Zeropaid

Gene’s blog, This Place Sucks

Memorial Fund

A memorial fund is being set up in Kan’s name at UC Berkeley. Donations can be sent to the following address: In memory of Gene Kan; Manager, Gift Stewardship; College of Engineering; University of California, Berkeley; 201 McLaughlin Hall; Berkeley, Calif., 94720-1722. Checks should be made out to “UC Regents” but clearly marked for the Gene Kan fund.

I’ll let the flyer do the talking first:

The last Slut School night (which I covered here) was funkier than nineteen yards of chitlins with onions and sardines on the side! Da-yam!

Thankfully, Eva and the rest of the Slut School crew have seen fit to hold another Slut School night this Friday at the I-V lounge. It’s going by the name Big Booty Hoes and Sluts Too, which is unsurprisingly named after the DJ Assault number Big Booty Hoes (and Sluts Too). What Slut School lack in naming events, they more than make up for with the actual events themselves. DJs Fathom and Dig Doug (hah!) will be spinning an eclectic mix of funk, hip hop, new wave, heavy metal, electro, booty and soul.

The I-V Lounge is in a converted house across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario (326 Dundas Street West, only a couple of blocks west of University Avenue and St. Patrick Station). It’s a cozy place and they make a pretty nice martini. The party starts at 10:00 p.m. and stretches into the night — it’ll become an after-hours event at 2:30 in the a.m..

(You might also want to note that the fully air conditioned Casa Di AccordionGuy is crawling distance from the I-V lounge. Hint, hint.)

Thanks to an opportune run-in I had during a date back in April, I’m now working as a programmer at a little start-up called Silvercloud Entertainment. Silvercloud makes one thing and one thing only: online trivia games. The first one is called “Are You Smart Enough”, and we’re currently beta-testing it.

Two games are scheduled each day: one at 12:00 noon and one at 8:00 pm (Eastern Standard Time). You play against other people, answering multiple choice trivia questions. If you answer wrong, you’re out of the game. The last person remaining (or the last people remaining at the ned of 25 questions) wins the prize!

The questions are written by Ken Fisher, who’s written a boatload of trivia books, has a syndicated trivia quiz in newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, and wrote questions for TV’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The game’s database of questions is pretty sizeable, and once we use a question, we never use it again.

You have twenty seconds to choose an answer, and you can change your mind as long as some of those twenty seconds remains. In order to give people a better shot at lasting longer in the game, you have two “save me’s” at your disposal. If you don’t know the answer, you can use a “save me”; it’ll be as if you answered the question correctly. Since this is an online game, you can use any online resources to help you find the answer…if you can do it in the twenty allotted seconds, that is. You can also use your favourite instant messaging client to trash-talk your friends if they’re playing against you.

The beta test game is free, and the last person standing wins 2 free Cineplex Odeon movie passes. The real game, expected to go online later this summer, will cost $5 and the last person standing will win $1,000.

What you’ll need

You’ll need the following to play the game:

• A Windows machine (I know, I know). It should run WIndows 98 or later.
• DirectX 8.1. If you’ve installed some recent games or are running Windows XP, you might already have it.
• The client. You can download it by going here.
• A modicum of trivia knowledge.

If you’re in the Toronto area and are near a computer around noon or 8 pm, give the game a whirl and help keep your ‘umble accordion playing buddy employed.

The blogroll (the list of blogs or sites who’ve linked to me, even if only to pull down my pants and taunt me) in the right-hand column has been updated. Did I miss yours? Let me know!

Queen Street report

Queen Street West, a bustling street of bars, bookstores, boutiques, clothing shops, clubs, music stores (both for CDs and musical instruments), restaurants and street vendors, is my home turf. Casa di AccordionGuy — and yes, it’s a real house, not a condo — is tucked into a quiet residential neighbourhood a couple blocks north. I’m pleased to report that the worst effects of the garbage strike is that there are only three or four piles of garbage . Aside from an increased amount of discarded wrappings and cans in the street gutters, it’s surprsingly clean, and remember, this is after a heavy influz of tourists thanks to Canada Day, Gay Pride Weekend and the Molson Indy. Most American cities with Toronto’s size and population would be wallowing in their own filth by now.

I took some photos of Queen Street today at about 2:00 p.m. and will post them later.

Entrepreneurs or con artists?

A trio of guys — two in their early twenties, one in his early teens, have been doing the rounds of my neighbourhood, going toor-to-door and offering to haul people’s trash away for the measly sum of $2.00 a bag. They said they’d take the garbage to the proper depot (the depots are still open, it’s just the collectors who aren’t working). I opted to go with a pragmatic approach: we gave them only our food garbage and while they were canvassing houses down the block, I took pictures of their pickup truck, with the license plate in plain view. If they’re legit, there’s no problem, but if they’re just dumping the bags elsewhere (some people have been dumping garbage in parks), we’ve got a way for the cops to trace them.

Recommended Reading

Here’s what some of the local media have to say about the strike:

A discussion from the BoingBoing site on Toronto, my smart-ass comment about San Francisco (which I made here) and civics.

Strike talks collapse, city says (Toronto Star)

Trash talkin’ in court (Toronto Sun )

Talks stalled in municipal strike: unions accuse city of rigging bust (CBC Toronto)

A whole page on Canada.com devoted to the Toronto strike.

Trash talking: Mel’s deputy sticks it to unions while making like Mr. Clean (Now magazine)

Composting for smell and sanity (eye magazine)