Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, founder and publisher of Make: magazine, and co-founder of Maker Faire. Dale has been honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change." He's been instrumental in many of O'Reilly's most important efforts, including founding O'Reilly Media, Inc. with Tim O'Reilly. Prior to Make, he was the developer of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website, launched in 1993 and sold to America Online in 1995. He was also developer and publisher of Web Review, the online magazine for Web designers from 1995-1999. Dale was publisher of the O'Reilly Network and he developed the Hacks series of books. He is the author of sed & awk.
Deconstructing Databases
At EuroOSCON, Greg Stein of Google gave a talk about the open source software development tools offered for developers at Google Code and I came away with an unexpected insight into Web 2.0. In describing the new bug tracking system, he said, that while he liked many existing bug systems, he realized there was an opportunity to redesign a new,…
The Chemistry Set in SF
The American Chemical Society is meeting in San Francisco this week. A billboard on a bus alerted me to it. I wish I had known about it earlier. I wonder if they are talking about why kids don't have real chemistry sets anymore or why chemistry is taught so poorly in high school. One of my favorite articles in the…
Desperately Seeking Status
"It never hurts to remind yourself of the business you’re really in: providing your customers and clients with status." This rather bold statement comes from a summary of this Trendwatching Report on Status Skills, which at the end mentions Make. Let me first admit that the topic of status is one that makes me uncomfortable, enough so that I was…
Craig Cline
Craig Cline passed away last weekend. He is probably best known for his role organizing the program for the Seybold Publishing Conference. He worked for a company whose name and shape changed drastically over time in the binge-and-purge 90's. The Seybold Conference, which usually occurred around this time of year in San Francisco, was one of its acquistions and one…
Shop Class as Soulcraft
Matthew B. Crawford writes in praise of manual labor, lamenting the disappearance of the shop class (and shop teachers) as our culture focuses on developing knowledge workers who supposedly use their heads, not their hands. He writes: " At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering…