Gregory Heller Get in touch

Archive

2006

156 posts

  1. Face recognition on your cameraphone?

    This is by way of World Changing , Jamais Cascio quotes from an article in New Scientist Technology: The concept… is based on a central server that registers details sent by the phone when the photo is taken. These include the nearest cellphone mast, the strength of the call signal and the time the photo was taken. […] …in tests Davis and his team found that by combining [facial recognition software] with context information the system could correctly identify people 60 per cent of the time. The context information can also be combined with image-recognition software to identify places within photos.

  2. I’m a Scrum Master!

    As of 5pm Friday, I received my certification as a Scrum Master. What’s that? Well Scrum is a form of project management that focuses on self managing groups and agile/iterative development. Read more about Scrum .

  3. Henri Poole and Mike Gifford Talk About Open Business Models

    While at the Web Of Change conference in September of 2005 I spent a fair amount of time talking to Mike Gifford of Open Concept Consulting about CivicActions and our business model and how it can be a model for new open source web development consultancies. Upon our returns to the real world, Mike wrote me with some questions, at that point I brought Henri Poole, one of the founders of CivicActions into the discussion.

  4. Ever read the MySpace Terms?

    A friend just pointed out the The MySpace Terms 6. Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com. 6.1 By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services.

  5. Trees for the future: carbon offset programs

    If you have been following my blog, you have seen that I am feeling guilty about air travel and the environmental impact. I wrote about this earlier and got some good feedback in the comments from Rolf which lead me to Trees for the Future where I just bought $100 worth of trees to offset my carbon footprint from air travel. TFTF will plant trees to the tune of one per dime. So I just bought 1000 trees which will each absorb 50 pounds of carbon a year for 40 years.

  6. An Inconvenient Truth

    Via WorldChanging : The movie An Inconvenient Truth will open at the end of May. Participant Productions is getting people to pledge to see the film when it opens in their market (at the film’s website ClimateCrisis.net) . The ClimateCrisis site also has a nifty carbon footprint calculator. The Calculator got me feeling really guilty about air travel. This past weekend I met a guy while in the desert south west of LA who is working on carbon pollution credit trading. I should admit that we talked about these issue while in a climate controlled house baking in the sun and 100 degree ambient air temp. We talked about TerraPass which allows you to buy carbon credits for your driving. I suggested that someone should start “AeroPass” to allow travelers to buy carbon credits to offset their air travel.

  7. Laptop theft and data security

    Yesterday, as I was preparing for another leg of my rock star tour, I heard this segment on marketplace about data security and laptop theft. It is worth a listen. Here is the summary: Imagine someone steals a laptop from your bank or your phone company. It happens more than you might think, and that has some major identity theft and security consequences. Employees of big companies not only fail to secure the data on their machines with encryption, apparently, they also just leave them in the back seats of their car! Rich mentioned to me that a man was stabbed during a laptop heist in San Francisco, and my googling for the story lead me to this story about thieves prowling conferences specifically to steal laptops not only for the hardware and software value, but also for the value of the data (client lists and personal data).

  8. Getting information to consumers about the products they buy

    WorldChanging ran a great post on the GreenScanner , a public database of consumer opinions about the environmental accountability of over 600,000 products. Basically the Green Scanner is a website that allows a user to enter the UPC from the bar code label on a product and get information about the product. Green scanner focuses on environmental issues around the product, however, there was a great discussion in the comments section of the post about other projects brewing to provide consumers with other information about the products they buy. One of them is GrassCommons . Another similar concept is the Reveal Label , and yet another is the Lowdown on Logos concept from Jim Hightower’s organization.

  9. We’re made out of corn!!!

    This is a great story from Science Friday about corn. The author of “Omnivores Dilemma”. Corn is in almost everything we eat, and our carbon is from corn. A bushel of corn is 56 pounds of 20% of oil consumption is for food growing, more than for transportation! Corn is over produced. And the government subsidizes corn production to the tune of 50 cents a bushel. There is a dead zone size of NJ in the Gulf of Mexico caused by nitrate fertilizer runoff from Iowa! Listen the audio. I might try to read the book .

  10. Drupal Camp New York

    Drupal Camp NYC will be an opportunity of people interested in Drupal and developers interested in learning to develop sites with drupal to get together and learn from each other.