Video of Shai Agassi Talking at MIT

MIT World: From IT to Cleantech: New Sources of Innovation
Shai Agassi presents an ambitious and dramatic plan to create a battery run car, a system of battery switching stations, and a subscription plan for drivers to buy miles the same way we buy cell phone minutes.
Agassi begins at 8 minutes in, talks ~1/2 hour and [...]

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Vertical Farming

“There are huge advantages to feeding people who live in the city, from the city.”

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Ray Anderson

“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them” —Paul Hawken The Ecology of Commerce
In the program guide for TED 2009, the above quotation accompanies the bio of Ray Anderson founder and CEO of Interface and a sustainable [...]

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It’s about voice. Have one. (A good one helps)

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Processing WordPress’ Post Content

If you find yourself directly manipulating a WordPress post (say outside of “The Loop” by using query_posts, e.g. query_posts(array(‘category__and’ => array(1,3)));) you may need to do some extra work to get the pretty formatting that WP does for you in things like the_content() and the_excerpt().
Say you have a single post in a local variable $my_post, [...]

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A Font of Humor

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Small Can Be Big

Why Small Can Be Big
SmallCanBeBig.org is a new way to help based on a simple premise: give everyone a more direct, more personal, more local and more shared way to help those in need, and big things can happen.
In a single year, it costs the Commonwealth of Massachusetts $47,000 to provide shelter for one homeless [...]

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“Democratizing Data” W. David Stephenson’s talk at IgniteBoston 5

David’s keynote presentation at Ignite Boston last night shows examples of the power data transparency, portability and ubiquity can transform government, workplaces and lives.
(This video is very shaky at times. I forgot the tripod, its hand-held above a crowd, 20 minutes.)

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Teaching kids the value of re-crafting

Craft Curriculum Empowers Parents, Engages Kids
“The pair hosted several series of Future Craft Collective classes for small groups of kids, and feedback from parents and children was highly positive. More than just a sewing class, the series got parents and kids thinking about issues around reducing, reusing and recrafting. Soon, the demand for their curriculum [...]

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More With Less

A week ago, during the TED 2009 conference, Ray Anderson’s talk generated a fair amount of discussion.
During the talk, Tim O’Reilly offered a summary: “The new civilization = more happiness with less stuff.”
This is a theme I’d like to explore. Can we recognize non-traditional examples of doing more with less?
In America at least, more with [...]

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50’s night: meat + potatoes & Mad Men season one

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WordPress Custom Login with Basic Authentication

If you want to take complete control over the validating a user’s login credentials against a WordPress database (or an external database that uses WordPress’ password hashing, as was the case for me), the following code should provide a good starting point.
In this particular example we’re using HTTP Basic Authentication to present the ‘login form’, [...]

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Why is there a box cutter on my desk?

I love books, I respect what goes into a quality print publication. I didn’t want to do it. but I had to.
Yesterday I took a box cutter to page 175 of Art Kleiner’s terrific book, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (amzn). The figure, Fluctuations in a [...]

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It’s dangerous for you to be here

Some thread-pulling on my part to weave together the thoughts whirling around in my head.
In the movie “My Blue Heaven,” Steve Martin’s character (Vinnie) says to Shaldeen (Carol Kane):
“You know, it’s dangerous for you to be here in the frozen food section.”
Shaldeen: Why is that?
Vinnie: Because you could melt all this stuff.

Today at TED, there’s [...]

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BTW, This is not Long Beach, CA

We got a few inches of snow again today. Boston’s hasn’t melted away all of the snow since around 12/26/2008 which, in a way reminds me more of what the weather was like growing up in New York. What’s a bit different is that this is Boston, and I’m pretty sure those are not cat [...]

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TED 2009 & MIT Sloan Management Review

Jimmy Guterman, Executive Editor of MIT Sloan Management Review is covering TED 2009 for our magazine and on his blog, “Jewels and Binoculars.”
Eluding the snows of New England, Jimmy posted this first dispatch from TED, saying: “the best new ideas helps make good managers better.”
Keep an eye out this week on [...]

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WordPress Generate Password / Hash Password

A while back I had to migrate a legacy application’s user information into a WordPress MU application, transferring user accounts from the old platform to the new.
I needed to figure out a way to create 10,000+ WP users based on the old information. The old application stored the user passwords in clear/plain text, WP one-way [...]

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