Big Dave’s Blog

Anyone see the NY Times article In One Flaw, Questions on Validity of 46 Judges? Basically, a law professor discovered a constitutional flaw in the appointment process for judges who decide patent appeals and disputes.  This goes back to 2000.  That means thousands of patent cases and billions of dollars in licenses.  The really interesting part is that no one, including the patent office, is saying he is wrong.

Imagine all those startups thinking they are secure with a patent to cover their IP. This is one crazy cloud over so that thought. Granted, a bunch of recent patents are completely bogus, but now the patent trolls could have a field day.   Definitely need to keep an eye on this one.

I wonder if that means the patent I just received last month is not valid anymore…

A Crushing Issue: How to Destroy Brand-New Cars

Last month, I pointed out an article about salvaging a ship in trouble.  The salvage crew successfully saved the ship and its cargo of 4,703 Mazda vehicles (loosing one life in the process), but now what do you do with the cars?  Turns out, it’s not easy to destroy 4,703 cars and not get in trouble, damage your brand, or get sued in the process.  It took Mazda a year to plan and about another year to actually do it.  Who knew?

Those of you in Boston may remember Tech Cocktail last fall. If you were one of the lucky 300+ people in attendance, you know how successful it was. I know I enjoyed it, and I met some great new contacts there. Well, Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle are at it again, but now it is POPSignal.

POPSignal parties are aimed at bringing together the local tech community in a fun and informal environment. There is no format, presentations, or speeches. However, there is always a free open bar, free food, music, fun activities from sponsors, and great conversation.

The date is May 15th, 6:30-9:30pm, at Tequila Rain near Fenway Park. To RSVP and get more details check out http://popsignal.eventbrite.com/.

Come on by and say hello.

It took a while, but I finally got to the top.  Those of you with a name like a celebrity or a common name know what I mean.  Use Google to search for yourself.  What page are you on?  I happen to have the same name as a former Mr. Olympia and actor from from the movie “Pumping Iron.”  For the longest time, his name dominated searches for me.  Now, between this blog, LinkedIn, and a couple of other web voices, I am at the top of the list.  It’s actually pretty impressive considering none of the web sites that mention me get huge amounts of hints, but Google still is able to rank based on relevance and recentness.

Lesson learned.  If you want to get yourself found on the web, start a blog and get people to link to it. Note, reciprocal links don’t count as much (if at all).

The funny thing is that by me linking to the other Dave’s site above, I may have just moved my rank down since a big part of page rank is inbound links.  Now I just need more people to link to this blog…

Body Heat Could Charge Your Cellphone

Saw this article the other day, and I couldn’t get over the possibilities.  As interesting as charging your cellphone from body heat is, think of all the other possibilities.  If you live in the North East like I do, you could generate electricity from the lost heat of your furnace or boiler.  It is unclear how much power you can generate from heat, but making power generation orders of magnitude more efficient is a pretty huge jump.  Power stations being 100x more efficient would sure save a lot of fuel costs.

Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster | High Scalability

There is some great information in here about scaling a RoR site - or any site for that matter. Earlier this year, I was in a position as the CTO to make a decision whether to migrate my site from Java to Ruby on Rails. I struggled a bit because I had heard of so many scaling problems. In the end (after a lot of testing), I convinced myself that there would be scaling problems, but most of the scaling problems would be due to decisions my team and I made. The problems would not all be with Ruby. Sure, Ruby runs a whole lot slower than Java, but that doesn’t mean there are no Java apps out there that don’t scale. If you architect your site correctly, more CPU cycles should not be a problem. More servers is always cheaper than a few extra weeks of developer time.

Bottom line is to spend your time designing your site to scale and don’t sweat a few extra CPU cycles.

Home Entertainment: Death Star Home Theater - Gizmodo

Ok, this is a little wrong on a few counts, but no one mentions that the business of Star Wars must be very good. The Meridian speakers alone in this room run about $100,000. Not bad…

MAKE: Blog: Salt water as fuel?

My gut tells me this may be like the cold fusion tests, but can you imagine if salt water could be used as fuel? The possibilities are endless. Cheap, clean energy…

This is my first post of many. Why Big Dave?  First of all, when you are 6′5″ tall, people tend to classify you as big.  Pretty soon I was always being referred to as “Big Dave”.  It’s interesting that even before “Big Dave” stuck, I always stuck by the phrase “Go big, or stay home!”  Between the two, it works for me.

Generally, I will be posting random thoughts about life and technology.