Nick Gall's Weblog

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Using the web to organize collective fundraising. Via slashdot, an interesting new twist on the decentralization, mass innovation, social software them -- Fundable: Fundable is a new service that lets groups of people pool money for various purposes in what are called "group actions." Similar to an online auction, a group action has its own page, describing how much money will be collected and what the money will do. No participant takes a risk: if the collection for a group action falls short of its target on deadline, all money is refunded. Fundable's all-or-nothing approach to collecting money lets you participate in a group purchase or fundraiser without worrying about what other people will do. You will either get what you paid for or get your money back. According to the slashdot article, Fundable has already succeeded in raising funds for OSS development. Hmmm... I might use this to organize the next Gall Family Reunion. <grin> 5:31:36 AM

Friday, July 08, 2005

A true ironist. Via Strange Doctrines, a Washington Post article about a man who really lives the concept of "contingency": "What are the chances of you doing this again?" the judge asked. Timmers -- dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit, his long, white hair flowing down his back -- paused a moment before speaking up. "There's always a chance of anything, Your Honor," he said. The judge's jaw dropped. He pressed Timmers to be clear. "The odds of that happening are 800 million billion to one," Timmers said, "but I can't ever rule anything out completely, Sir." The irony is that his honesty has already gotten him more jail time (i.e., the delay in sentencing). What I also like about this piece is the chain of linked commentary about it. I especially like the commentary at Thoughts Arguments and Rants: Don't be a Sceptic Luka Yovetich sent me a link to this article in the Washington Post about the costs of scepticism. The defendent was asked whether he would commit more crimes if he was released, and (to paraphrase) he said that he didn't know because he didn't have an answer to global scepticism. As they say on the interwebs, read the whole thing. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll recognise behaviour that previously you'd only seen in philosophical colleagues, etc. 11:51:23 AM

Great WS-* Case Study. Tim Bray has done a great case study write up about WS-*. Here's the intro: Last week at Java One, Ashesh Badani, a Sun SOA marketing person, wanted to have lunch with me to talk about WS-*. He brought along T.N. Subramaniam, Director of Technology for RouteOne, a car-loan aggregator. (Sun loves RouteOne, they're a reference customer not only for us but for SeeBeyond, which we're in the process of acquiring). Anyhow, neither Ashesh nor Ashok Mollin, a Sun guy who's been engaged at RouteOne, got a chance to say much, because T.N. and I hit it off and had a good time talking about Web Services. Which RouteOne are doing, big time and for big bucks and successfully. They are exactly the kind of people that those of us struggling in the WS-* morass ought to be looking to for lessons. This, I think, will be the first ever ongoing piece structured as an interview; with T.N.'s help, I've tried to reconstruct our conversation at lunch. I think some conclusions are obvious, but I'll leave them for you to draw. I'd bottom line the advice from TN as "So far so good, but as you fill out WS-* KISS (instead of addressing marginal cases)." 11:29:20 AM