Business of Software 2011 Scholarship

This year will be my third year attending the Business of Software Conference. I love this conference, but the software developer side of me always feels confused. "Software" is in the name of the conference, but not a single line of code ever appears on any slide in any presentation. How can this be?

Well, the Business of Software Conference targets people who make and sell software for a living. It's a niche market. If you look at the other software conferences out there, they already cover how to make software, programming languages, how to make software better, how to sell a software idea to investors, and a million other technical details. The non-technical details, the stuff not covered by the tech conferences you see in the news, that is what you get at BOS.

The Business of Software conference is about the culture and philosophy of software and software businesses. We get together and talk about the side of business which is rarely discussed publicly. We discuss how to make software people want and find useful. We cover how to hire great developers and make them happy. We learn how to find and grow a customer base. We even talk about how we can be happier.

If you want to know how to be a successful software entrepreneur, make the world a better place, and run sustainable business, this is the place for you. It might not seem exciting in the Hollywood sense, but the content does inspire you. That's why I think young entrepreneurs would really benefit. I know I would have benefitted had I attended right out of college.

That is why I'm sponsoring a few scholarships to the Business of Software Conference through my mobile app development business, Moving Average Inc.

The scholarship gets you admission to the conference, which takes place in Boston October 23-26, 2011. You can find the details of the Startup Scholarship to attend the Business of Software Conference here. Please apply if you fit the bill.

I look forward to talking to you in Boston!

The Faces of WWDC

People make conferences worthwhile. Lots of value comes from the technical content, the parties, the swag. But years after the event, you remember the wonderful conversations and adventures with people.

At Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, there are more than 5000 people. Sadly, I wasn't able to meet them all. Instead, I took some photos of the more interesting characters around Moscone center during WWDC 2011. Some of them are developers, but some of them are marketers, and even a few are Apple protesters who were working hard to keep things interesting.

See all of the Faces of WWDC Photos.

First Impressions of the X-rite Colormunki Display

I had a small disappointment when I purchased a Dell u2711 27 inch display to use with my second generation MacBook Air. The colors looked awful. Dock icons look saturated and cartoony. Grays looked dark green. Blacks looked gray.

Allegedly, this display was calibrated before leaving the factory. The factory calibration report didn't have "just kidding" written at the bottom, so I can't explain why the colors looked terrible. Maybe the calibration only worked for Windows computers?

I felt pretty irritated with how ugly my photos looked on the new display. I edit lots of photos. Too bad I just spent a pile of dough on a monitor that made my best photos look like snapshots from a disposable camera.

Clearly I needed to recalibrate the monitor if I wanted to keep my sanity while editing photos. My first attempt to fix the issue was using the Colorsync calibration utility. The calibration utility uses the human eye as a calibration device. The results were an improvement, but still definitely fell on the ugly side of the fence. I suspect that only certain types of calibration issues can be fixed by using the human eye.

Next, I looked at a few different inexpensive options for hardware calibration. The X-Rite i1Display 2 appeared to be discontinued. The Datacolor Spyder had occasional reports of a poorly-calibrated unit slipping through to consumers. Buying a potentially mis-calibrated, or obsoleted calibration device didn't sound very satisfying to me.

The Colormunki Display seemed to be the replacement for the i1Display 2. There weren't many reviews for this device, but I decided to take a chance and be an early adopter. I found a good deal on Adorama.com, and ordered a munki.

The Munki Arrives

When the Munki arrived in the mail, my first move was running it's "easy" calibration routine on the u2711. The results were disappointing to say the least. Sure, it was a large improvement over what I had before. The green tint was gone, which was nice. But it still seemed oversaturated, and there were still cases where colors just seemed wrong.

I next ran the advanced calibration. This produced great results. The colors looked correct, the brightness looked awesome. The only problem was that certain shades of gray appeared greenish or pinkish.

I process lots of images into black and white using Silver Efex Pro, so I can't tolerate nasty grays. I looked for hints on how to configure the Dell u2711 for a Mac.

The first thing I realized was that setting the gamma on the u2711 to "Mac" might have been a mistake. I haven't found a lot of documentation on it, but I suspect that the "Mac" gamma setting meant 1.8, and the PC gamma setting meant 2.2. Historically, Mac had a gamma of 1.8, but since the release of Snow Leopard, the default gamma has been set to 2.2, just like a PC.

I changed the Gamma setting on the u2711 to "PC" and ran the advanced Colormunki Display calibration again. Success: everything just looked better, including black and white images, which now looked consistently black, white, or gray, but never green and pink. I can't explain exactly why the wrong gamma made black and white look green, but I was relieved. My problem was solved.

Hints

• If you have a new Mac OS X (10.6 or later), the display gamma is the same as a PC. The "Mac" gamma setting on the u2711 seems to be for older Mac operating systems.
• The Colormunki Display advanced calibration seems to produce better results than the easy calibration. I suggest starting there.

Notes on the Colormunki Display

• The Colormunki can be set to monitor the ambient light levels and automatically adjust the calibration to match.
• The Colormunki knows if the ambient light diffuser is in place or not. Nice touch!
• The Colormunki has a white LED on either side of it which periodically ramps on and off when it is plugged in. This might be distracting for some folks.
• The USB cable has a counterweight which can be slid up and down it's length to help hold the Munki on the display.
• The Colormunki has at least five feed of USB cable on it.
• The Colormunki has a threaded tripod socket on the bottom.
• You can calibrate multiple displays on the same computer using Colormunki.
• The colormunki advanced calibration has you adjust monitor brightness (presumably to go with ambient light levels). This presumably saves power on the monitor, but I suspect this puts an upper limit on how much the Colormunki can automatically adjust to ambient light levels. I wonder if there are tradeoffs to calibrating with the room brighter than usual and then letting the automatic ambient adjustment adjust down to normal room levels.
• I believe that changing monitor brightness probably invalidates the monitor calibration. If you change the monitor settings, you should recalibrate.
• I feel like the colormunki calibrates display brightness (when asked to match ambient levels rather than a fixed brightness) a bit lower than I normally would set it. It might feel a little weird after being used to the very bright default brightness levels of most displays.

If you decide to buy the Xrite Colormunki Display using the Amazon links on this page, it will help support my efforts. 

*Moving Average Inc. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
*Updated 22 March 2012 to add links to Amazon.

Developers Perspective: Google I/O Day 1 Video

A Cheap Standing Desk for Programming

This would be an artist's interpretation
if an artist did it.

I keep hearing more and more about how we're all killing ourselves slowly by sitting eight hours a day. You can read one anti-sitting article here.

I'd prefer my tombstone not to say "Died from an overdose of sitting," so some time ago I purchased a BJÖRKUDDEN table from Ikea. At 40 and 1/8 inches, it is probably their tallest table. It isn't the perfect height for me, but it works.

I put my MacBook Air on a shoebox to get the display a tad higher, but I'd ideally like to get an adjustable arm to raise my laptop even closer to eye height.

Does anyone else have a suggestion for an economical standing desk hack? What other improvements can I add to the system?

TSA Opt-Out Day Update: Suspicious Bagel

The Daring Fireball reported on a passenger arrested after passengers reported his package to authorities. It contained a bagel, among other suspicious items.

I think the professor was arrested for being uncooperative, not for having a bagel. Just to play it safe, you can now screen for suspicious bagels in the TSA Opt-Out Day game.

None of the news stories reporting on the bagel incident have included an actual photo of the suspicious bagel, so I have created an "artist's" interpretation of the device. You can see it in the screenshot of the game to the left. If that isn't a suspicious looking bagel, I don't know what is.

Let me know in the comments if you know more about bagels and airplane safety.

Links:

Android-only link to the free TSA Opt-Out Day Game

Previous updates to the game and TSA news

The original TSA Opt-Out Day Android Game announcement

Followup: Testing my Backup Solution the Hard Way

If you have been following my adventures, you know that my white MacBook died in October 2010. You can read the sad tale of the crash, what I lost, and what data my old backup system saved.

The incident made me finally realize that I need an automatic cloud-based backup system. After a little research (you can read about my backup solution research in the same article), I installed CrashPlan and let it start backing up using a 30 day free trial of CrashPlan+.

The nomenclature is a little confusing, but CrashPlan is the backup software you install on your computer. CrashPlan+ is the cloud-based backup service which CrashPlan can utilize. Alternatively, CrashPlan could be used to backup to a friends computer or an external hard drive.

It took about 15 days over cable modem, but my entire 26 GB user folder finished backing up to the CrashPlan+ cloud. Now I've let it start digesting the 882 GB of data on my Drobo. That will take longer -- several months.

The CrashPlan feature I've been using most is the ability to throttle network bandwidth. While I'm asleep, I let CrashPlan use up to 1 Mbps of bandwidth. During the day, I limit it to 200 kbps so that the internet still feels responsive. I only wish you could schedule the bandwidth throttling rather than having to manually change it.

Overall the program works great. The restore interface looks good, and makes it clear when each file was backed up. I feel a lot more comfortable that I'll be ready if disaster strikes again.