Oliver Roup’s Blog

• On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life – This is so Meta

January 13, 2010 – Google Wave being put to use in real life. Very cool.

• Official Google Docs Blog: Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs

January 13, 2010 – Wow! That is some cheap storage!

• This Will Be The Year Adobe’s 2 Million Flash Developers Come To The iPhone

January 11, 2010 – Interesting. I always wonder where they get these numbers. Two million (active? de-duped?) flash developers seems like a lot. But the broader point is well put – the number of iPhone apps in the world may be about to mushroom. Now of course if Adobe can add support for Android and Windows Mobile…

• xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe

January 11, 2010 – A little late night coding humor…

• Startup Advice In Exactly Three Words – #StartupTriplets

“Improve employees resumes”

January 10, 2010 – Unfortunately pithy advice sort of loses it’s power when you try to cram 50 of them into a single article but this one struck me as particularly powerful. (Came to my attention via a tweet from @Nivi.)

• Kickingbear» Blog Archive » Software Sea Change

January 9, 2010 – Interesting thoughts on iPhone app development. Hillariously recalls the hideous stuff we had to see in the 80s from desktop publishing and in the 90s from web publishing before we all collectively got our act together and recognized that the old principles of typography and whitespace indeed still applied.

• The case of the 500-mile email

January 5, 2010 – Totally amazing geeky story of tracking down an impossible bug.

• Rands In Repose: Wanted

January 4, 2010 – A great post on hiring. Just like the author, I’ve let a few great ones slip away. His thoughts on “hiring for your career” are spot on. Your professional relationship with those you hire (or who hire you) is never over.

• Daring Fireball: The Tablet

The way these meetings work, from what I’ve gathered, is as follows. Apple brings no hardware. They bring no software. They show no mockups. They do not even completely acknowledge that they’re making a new device. The people from Apple simply say something along the lines of, “If we were to create a new platform for book/magazine/newspaper content, would you be interested in offering your content for it?”

January 2, 2010 – It must be nice to be in this position…
• Charges dismissed against Blackwater guards in Iraq deaths – washingtonpost.com

January 1, 2010 – This seems like kind of a big deal. I’ve never bought into the conservative complaint that people “walk on technicalities” but I can’t say this feels like the right outcome. How does the sixth guy who pled guilty feel? Ouch.

• Gene Expression: Intercourse and Intelligence

December 30, 2009 – Fascinating study on sex and intelligence. Among other fascinating results: Those with unusually low or high IQ are almost half as likely to have lost their virginity by 18 as their “normal” peers. Also sexual activity varies widely by chosen major with 85% of Math grad-students at MIT self-reporting as virgins. Wow! All the usual caveats about correlation and causation of course.

• << stephen j. dubner >>

December 30, 2009 – Fascinating real-life story of a compulsive silver burglar.

• Security: Generic cross-browser cross-domain theft

December 30, 2009 – Real and interesting security hack from CSS parsing. I can’t imagine we’ll ever run out of these things to fix…

• Groom Tweets, Changes Facebook Relationship Status from the Altar – overshares – Gawker

December 2, 2009 – This is classic

• Google Chrome OS: 5 Ways It’s Completely Different

November 19, 2009 – Well at least we’re past the part of the argument where we say that the web browser and the OS are two fundamentally different products.

• IEBlog : An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

November 19, 2009 – The comments on this post are pretty classic. The gist, “Please just drop your renderer and use WebKit.” Harder and harder to justify why not right?

• Microsoft Excel : Sparklines in Excel

November 19, 2009 – This is very cool. Despite Microsoft’s overall problems, the office team continues to do great stuff. I recently converted to a mac and generally I’m very happy but I do miss the PV version of Word and Excel. Running in vmware doesn’t work as well as it should and the Mac versions are just not as good.

• Women ‘should bare 40 per cent of their bodies to attract men’ – Telegraph

November 18, 2009 – Glad we got that sorted out.

• Official Google Blog: New site hierarchies display in search results

November 18, 2009 – This kind of thing is what makes Google so good. The visible part of this seems marginally useful – but it shows the classification work that Google must be doing underneath. No doubt they’ve built a classifier that can put many pages in their catalog in some kind of global topic hierarchy. That is impressively far-sighted and when combined with other similar low-level “not immediately valuable” work will pay huge dividends.

• Finding the laws that govern us

November 17, 2009 – Wow wow wow. This is a huge deal. I bet Westlaw is quaking in their boots. And if they’re not, they should be.

• Paul Allen diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

November 17, 2009 – This is sad news.

• S&P 500 INDEX – Google Finance

November 13, 2009 – The S&P 500 since the day I graduated from college more than 10 years ago. It’s flat; actually down slightly. Lost decade? I think we just had one.

• How to pick a co-founder

November 12, 2009 – Awesome post by Naval Ravikant. He’s dead on.

• Barrick shuts hedge book as world gold supply runs out – Telegraph

November 12, 2009 – This is interesting and an alternative explanation for the spiking price of gold.

• JSNES: A Javascript NES emulator

November 9, 2009 – An NES coded in Javascript. Wow.

• Twitter Blog: Retweet Limited Rollout

November 6, 2009 – Despite a rough start, the twitter guys have some pretty impressive engineering underneath. The fact that they can contemplate having a single message echo to effectively their whole network is hardcore. The scale implications of this are pretty substantial.

• DocVerse Turns Microsoft Office Into Google Docs With Collaboration Plug-In

November 3, 2009 – Alex DeNeui in the news. Good stuff!

• First 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud – Open Blog – NYTimes.com

October 30, 2009 – Wow

From “Life after VC“:

“Prison is America’s most overlooked talent pool,” she says. “Many gang members are proven entrepreneurs who built highly successful drug operations. The thing they were bad at was risk management.”

…

“We’re looking for leaders,” says Rohr. “If you weren’t good at selling crack on the street corner, you’re probably not right for PEP. We want the guys who know how to run an organization and get stuff done.”

People never stopped asking me why I went to business school. I was too old, too senior and in the wrong career track. “What jobs do you think it will help you get?” they would ask. When framed that way, there was no good answer.

There are a number of reasons:

• Even though I was succeeding at Microsoft, I knew I had to leave. I looked ten years down the road and didn’t like what I saw: VP of something not so interesting; products I was no longer proud of; master political infighter. There were and are signs of life (Bing!) but it seemed like a long grey road ahead. But leaving for “nothing” seemed unpalatable. Leaving for Harvard was somehow easier to talk myself into.
• I had spent 4 years heads-down on a media battle that I could now see Microsoft was going to lose and lose badly. The XBOX Live Video Marketplace is a big success in four years otherwise spent trying to make water run up hill. I’d spent too much time on politics – begging the Windows Media Player team to support some feature or another (and them lobbying me).  I’d given up a lot of personal stuff to work so hard for those four years (and there’d been payoffs career-wise) but I wanted to surface, to have fun, to interact with the world, to live.
• My father had been dying for 5 years. I applied and was accepted before he died but it was obvious where things were going.  I felt like I needed some air – some time and space to get away and come to grips with things. Business school felt arguably more additive than surfing in Thailand for a year.
• I felt like I knew a lot about a very narrow slice of the world. I could specify software for media really well and I was a good manager. But I just had a sense that there’s so much more out there – and on this Harvard does a great job of exposing you. I spent 2 years learning and talking about airlines and food processing companies, about factories, about sports management, about consulting companies, about politics and about finance. I also made friends from crazy places, out of the way amazing places: Brazil, Belarus, Zaire, rural China, Sweden. I feel like I know a thing or two about macroeconomics and finance and accounting and about a million other things. On this front, Harvard delivered brilliantly.
• I wanted to be inspired by the people around me again. There was a time when Microsoft hired the brilliant and fiery college kids, the savant programmers, the ambitious drivers. Occasionally they still do (and I’d like to think I hired a few of them) but for the most part, those days are gone. There are still some of those people around but for the most part they are rich, they reflect on past glory and they leave early enough to catch their daughter’s softball game. (Which is a perfectly rational thing if that’s where you are – it’s just that I am not.) Every time someone talked about how comprehensive the healthcare plan was as a reason for staying, I felt like an idiot.
• If I’m being honest with myself, I thought school might offer opportunities romantically. Whether it did or not, I did not capitalize on them. For the answers to that one, look within.

All things considered, I wouldn’t change a thing (except maybe the huge bill.)

Onwards.