Category: Tech

The 10 Types Of Trade Show Visitors

So Frogfoot has a stand at Futurex and we quickly realised that there are 10 different types of attendees.

1. The “I know more than you” or the “My product is better than your product” visitor

These guys are fun. They stand a few meters away from your stand and then, once they’ve formulated their attack, they step forward and launch into a tirade about why what you’re doing is wrong or how what they’re doing in their garage is better. Some of them are the “Leading xyz gizmo provider and we’re launching next week” kind of winners.

2. The “You have breasts” visitor

I don’t have breasts… (shut it!) but we do have a girl who works for us. She does have breasts and there are many lonely men walking around at these kinds of things who obviously don’t get too see too many girls in the wild. They generally will talk to the girl until someone else makes it very obvious that they are no longer welcome.

3. The “I know nothing about techmologee, please teach me” visitor

People. If you don’t know how a computer works it is obviously not the best time for me to be explaining the intricacies of 802.11g. Also, you, lady who couldn’t operate a track pad, need to stop blaming our internet connection for yor inability to remember your yahoo mail password. I *promise* it has nothing to do with the hotspot.

4. The “Defend your product!” visitor

Similar to visitor #1 these guys chose to be as evasive as possible while constantly telling you how crap your idea is and how it won’t work. You usually get the idea that these are the guys who tried something similar a few years back that failed dismally but they remain evasive about who they are and what they do because they believe it adds an aura of mystique… mystique of course is something we all love… not.

5. The raving lunatic visitor

These guys are cool… well they were cool until the nutcase that lives downstairs from me appeared on the horizon. I quickly darted away and hid until he had moved on from our stand. Upon returning I learnt that he had mentioned how lame this trade show was. “Fishing Shows… that’s where the action is at…. They give out free caps and everything”. Thanks buddy. We care. Now go back to spreading your conspiracy theories and accusing me of “that clunking sound” at 4am.

6. The serial hoarder visitor

This is the visitor who goes from stand to stand not saying a thing, but collects every single brochure, pen, balloon and knick-knack available, quietly stuffing them into his trade show bag and moving on to molest the next stand.

7. The “I can’t grasp basic business concepts” visitor

These are people who can’t seem to understand why they would want to “do this hotspot thing”… even after you explain that they will make money.

8. The “Synergy” visitor

If you follow Dilbert you should equate the word “Synergy” with loathing and fear. Synergy is what marketing types refer to “symbiotic” relationships. The Synergists will try and explain why your company and their company should “work together”. They will find synergy even if they sell paint stripper and you sell internet.

9. The “I represent foreign money” visitor.

These are the types of people who try to convince you that you should contact them because they represent some people who have money. This could be complete rubbish or it could be our next meal ticket…

10. The Perfect Visitor

This is the great visitor. The guy or girl who realise how great our product is and see the value of it without too much explanation. They ask all the right questions and some even sign up right then and there.

ath

j.

The next geekdinner… Dangerous Drumstick

The next in the series of awesome get-together-and-talk-all-things-geek geekdinners is on Thursday the 27th of September at Summerville in Camps Bay.

Amongst other great talks, my friend Derek will hopefully get to share a bit about his experiences running an online business… A subject that usually wouldn’t be all that interesting except for the fact that Derek is/was a big time old-school marketing director type person for airlines, hotels and large travel consortiums spending multi-million budgets on traditional media marketing… Only to get better results out of his kitchen and some well thought out online advertising.

The wiki is still where it’s always been. Sign up there.

ath.

j.

You lose Computicket, YOU LOSE!

Never before have I been so floored by the absolute uselessness of an online process as I was 2 weeks ago when I tried to use Nu Metro’s online booking process powered by Computicket.

compu0.pngThe Computicket site requires Java to run. I run Linux, so even though I’m able to install Java I chose not to for security reasons. So, I load up my virtual machine and browse the site using Internet Explorer 7 under windows. Off to a bad start.

Lets have a look at the site. First of all, the color scheme is terrible. It looks like something put together by a color blind person in 1994. I love the way they have taken advantage of the Internet Explorer’s customizable scroll bars, because, like, red and yellow are classy.

Next up we have the interface. At first it looks ok. Then you start using your brain. The blue box is the cinema. Check. The white dot is the cursor. You wonder, where are the seats? Are they all available? Am I losing my mind.

You assume simply that maybe the entire cinema is empty. On the right you click the up arrow twice to select that you want 2 tickets. Then you click somewhere. hoping to find an open seat.

(If you’re seeing this in an aggregated form, the rest of this story is on my site)

Continue reading “You lose Computicket, YOU LOSE!” →

GeekDinner – Carnivorous Cantaloupe

Another successful GeekDinner is in the bag…

Last night around 70 of Cape Town’s coolest geeks converged on Krugmann’s in the V&A Waterfront and ate, drank and discussed geeky things like wireless meshes and selling wine on the interwebs. I’ll leave it up to more neutral people to say whether or not it was a success but I certainly enjoyed myself.

David Carman spoke about building a wireless mesh in Scarborough… his talk was excellent… I’m very interested in the technical elements of wireless communications but the thing that “got” me the most was the fact that they are providing internet access to kids in the township. I don’t care what authority you’re from and what laws you want to twist to “get your way”, but if you want to take Wikipedia away from underprivileged kids you’re going to have to do so after ripping the CAT5 cable out of my cold, dead hands.

Next up was Ian Gilfillan who essentially told us that, even though he is now an International MySQL superstar, he didn’t get rich doing so.

Alan Levin talked about peering… Alan is a great speaker who did his best to ignore Wizzy’s heckling. It’s comforting to know that we should soon have cheaper international bandwidth in this country, and morally reprehensible (what’s new?) that the government and Telkom have set it up in a way that it’ll still cost an arm and a leg because some irrelevant middle man has the “rights” to sell it at some archaic price as previously defined by Telkom. BMW X5 much? (Alan, did I get the corruption chain right?)

Johann Wegner of GetWine.co.za (our fabulous wine sponsor) was up next and talked about the challenges of selling wine online. His sidekick (what was his name), Sam Paddock, gave a more in depth technical discussion about how they actually do it. Very interesting…

Finally we had Aslam Khan telling us how wonderful PHP and Pretoria are. Actually, he talked about Behaviour Driven Development… a talk which for some reason the two non-technical people I brought along seemed to enjoy the most… perhaps because he used the dog.getBody().getTail().wag() vs dog.expressHappiness() analogy. Aparently non-techies like dog analogies.

I’d like to personally thank:

  • You guys for rocking up!
  • Antoine for hooking us up with sound and a projector.
  • SimplyAV, an excellent AV company that I would seriously recommend you contact if you need AV – (021) 782-5100.
  • GetWine for providing the Wine.
  • Krugmann’s for hosting us.
  • The other GeekDinner organisers.

Finally, just a little punt. These things don’t organise themselves and we’ve got it to the point that it’s actually quite easy to put together. PLEASE, if you have any inclination for helping us organise a future GeekDinner, sign up to the GeekDinner Planning list. We don’t mind if you lurk.

There’s also the announce list which everyone should join so that you know when these things happen. The list traffic is extremely low, about 1 email a month. Finally, for those of you who have succumbed, there is a Facebook group.

Cheers, see you at the next GeekDinner.

ATH,

J.

ps. The photos and the very bad recording (something went wrong) will be available some time over the weekend.

GeekDinner on the way…

The 3rd of the new series of GeekDinners is being held at a really great restaurant called Krugmann’s Grill in the waterfront. We still have some space available so sign up on the wiki to book your place.

There have been a number of people who’ve asked me various questions about the geekdinners, so here is my FAQ:

  • No, it doesn’t cost anything… you only pay for the food you eat. (there is often free wine).
  • No, you don’t have to know linux to come.
  • Yes, you can bring your boyfriend/girlfriend.
  • No, It’s not a boys club.
  • No, you don’t *have* to speak.
  • No, it is not boring.

http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/Cape_Town_July_2007

Also, if you want to keep up to date with the GeekDinner happenings, why not sign up to the GeekDinner Announce mailing list

J.

Nerds Rule!

Nerd, Geek, Hacker; The lines are definitely blurred and there are definitely people out there whose mind’s think differently.The older I get the more in-touch with my inner-nerd I become, and the more happiness that part of my self brings me.

What did you do last night. It was a typical saturday night, The revellers were revelling, the rabblers were rabbling.

And the geeks? Well, we were hacking. Firstly an attempt to fix a broken ICD (In circuit debugger) and then a lengthy conversation over dinner about the complexities of tracking supersonic aircraft with combination radars (one of the geeks works for an unnamed company that develops military radars.

Then the conversation moved to using solar flares to map a 3d model of the earth’s density, and then later still, a conversation about how to hack a pic into a remote controlled car and make it drive a set path. Next logical progression? A discussion about building control better control circuits and the maximum possible data transfer rate over FM, farm wide wireless sensor system for use on farms and why you don’t want to stand in front of one of the biggest radars in the world. The answer? Obviously because, as it spins quite fast, it is likely to know up side the head and leave you unconscious. Oh, and high powered lasers and an unfortunate incident inside a dam wall.

The point I’m trying to make is this is where I feel most at home. In the presence of other hackers. Kindred spirits. I love to learn constantly, I crave the knowledge and the outside-the-box, anything-is-possible philosophy that comes with it. Perhaps this is why I am so happy being a frog… you never know what’s going to be your next challenge and you know that there are bright people around to help you come up with a solution.

Anyways, back to last night. While somewhere else in cape town another group of 20-somethings were likely drinking themselves into oblivion and using their best pick up lines on other, just as alcoholicly-oblivious, females, we were plotting our next hack.

Someone said “Let’s distil the pineapple juice stuff”, or something to that effect. The pineapple juice stuff was something that my best friend’s house mate had “concocted” a while back. I think it is just pineapple mash, some yeast and some water. It definitely tasted like there was some alcohol in there.

Now, first I must be clear on something. We all drink. Occasionally we even drink to much. I have nothing against those who choose to drink themselves into oblivion. I’m sure they think our geek-hacker-nerd evening was just as much a waste of time as we think theirs was. To each his own.

Ok, so checklist: Digital probe thermometer, check. Boiling container, check. Tubing, check. Ice, container for ice, check. You get the idea.

So we set rig it all up in the most liebig condenser looking fashion possible (this is at about midnight) and do some test runs to make sure we can keep the temperature of a liquid at a stable 80ish.

I must point out that, at this point in time, the chemical engineer in the group is lying on a mattress in the lounge shouting the occasional instruction at us. She is not too concerned about the process, but rather that we don’t kill ourselves. In true geek form, her book is far more entertaining than a group of electronic engineers and programmer trying to make alcohol.

The kitchen at this point looks like a meth lab.

Moving on. Get the temperature up to 80ish, notice the tiny bubbles, see the viscous looking liquid condensing in the tube and running down all the way into the clean black cat peanut butter jar. Yup, the pinky finger test confirms, it kicks like meths (apparently someone knows what meths tastes like).

Now, in true geek form, after about an hour of distilling, and probably a little over 30ml of alcohol we all take the tiniest of sips and decide that the only logical next step is to pour the rest of what we have into a saucer, turn off the lights, and set fire to it. Awwww, pretty.

GEEK PRIDE!

ath.

Benford's Law

The other day I was part of a discussion regarding how to detect fraud in large datasets and I was reminded of Benford’s Law… it really is quite amazing.

Essentially the law states that in a large enough collection of naturally occurring statistics the frequency of the first digit will tend towards “1”. This holds true for things as diverse as house numbers and stock prices.

If a large set of numbers is generated by a psudo number generator to say, fake atmospheric pollution data, the resulting set of numbers will not adhere to Benford’s Law and therefore can be assumed to be fake. It is obviously a trivial exercise to analyse a large set of data and modify it to adhere to Benford’s Law.

The table from the wikipedia article shows the logarithmic nature of these numbers.

Leading digit Probability
1 30.1%
2 17.6%
3 12.5%
4 9.7%
5 7.9%
6 6.7%
7 5.8%
8 5.1%
9 4.6%

What does facinate me even further is the question: Would a large set of randomly generated numbers generated by atmospheric noise random number generators adhere to Benford’s Law, and if not, Why?. Surely if pollution data does adhere to the law then atmospheric noise, which is much like pollution, should too.

I think I might generate a large set of random numbers generated by atmospheric noise and have a look at it while I’m disconnected at the river this weekend.

I hope this puzzles you as much as it does me…

j.

3D desktops work!

Hi,

Beryl working….This is just a quick note to say that if you’re running feisty you should think about getting Beryl to work… I spent a few minutes getting mine to work last night and it really is quite slick… and believe it or not, can be quite useful. There is lots and lots to tweak, and yes, I had the burning windows working for about 30 seconds before my brain kicked in.

ath,

j.