When I was an early teen, the issue of security was of paramount concern to me.  Not computer, social, national, or even homeland security.  No, it was Room Security.  My room.  The one in the basement.  The mostly unfinished basement that smelled like concrete and pine 2×4’s.  I wanted to build an early detection system for parents.  I called it S.H.A.R.K..  It began simply enough with some parts from Radio Shack:  Some infrared diodes, a relay or two, and a piezo electric speaker.  I had a lot of time for this project, and naturally the system requirements exploded.  I didn’t really see it that way at the time (thankfully), but I ended up drawing master plans for a general purpose computer.  While not yet introduced to Alan’s machines, I knew S.H.A.R.K. needed memory and some sort of execution system.  I envisioned a tape with rows, each where a hole could be cut.  Through a hole light would cause a relay to trip, closing some circuit that was paramount to Room Security and the prevention of unannounced parental intrusion (UPI).  See the tape allowed me to have a modular, dynamic approach to security.  Swap in a fresh roll and have a brand new security strategy.  Brilliant.  Kind of like programming, or modular hardware, or..well BUG.  Sadly my imaginations never actually worked in practice, but I had a bunch of wires in a shoebox and it did something.

This week I have the honor of speaking on Bug’s behalf at Maker Faire.  I’m a huge fan of the publication and when reading it get the same stimulating, awesome feeling of creating that I did when S.H.A.R.K. was fresh in my mind.  I’m really looking forward to seeing all the freaky cool things people are doing, and hope BUG makes a few people smile.

My personal road to the Maker Faire has actually taken me three years,
as last year at this time my son was born, and the year prior I had a
48 hour long trip to Sweden.  But this year nothing shall stop me
(despite being in New York instead of San Francisco as I write this).
It’s an event I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time, and not
only am I attending, I’ll be participating the whole time.

My impressions of Makers Faire were formed from reading various
blog posts and hearing personal tales over the years.  In my head I
picture a huge field covered with bits of silicon, oddly shaped
plastics, insanely huge gears and blowtorches.  Not sure why the
blowtorches, but I picture many of them strewn about.  It’s the place
the teenager in me would’ve hitchhiked just to get to.  Then again,
back then my computer had no case and instead  sat on a piece of foam
until the one fateful morning when I wiped it out by accidentally
touching the edge of my CGA card (yes, you read that right) and
shocking the heck out of it.

Part of why I’m excited about Makers is that it gives those of us
who look beyond the Web/computer as "the platform for innovation" a
chance to share.  Living in San Francisco I feel heavily immersed in
online culture, and while there’s phenomenal creativity occurring in
that culture, I still believe there’s so much more to technology and
imagination.  Last week I tried playing with Yahoo Pipes for the first
time and felt it was pretty impressive that I could so easily "mash up"
various feeds and services.  Experimenting with their tools was
definitely dabbling in creation. 

I look forward to this weekend where
I can have the chance to meet others who are taking their visions well
beyond the screen+keyboard+mouse.

The following is a guest post from Dave Mathews, as part of our series on The Road to Maker Faire.

On July 26, 2003 after Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex 3.0 a hungry group including Tim O’Reilly, Rob Malda of Slashdot, and a handful of other software guys sat around a dinner table and talked about a movement in the world of creating new hardware and remixing gadgets.

Prototyping stuff (like my CueCat consumer barcode scanner in 1997) involved digging for parts in bins of old gear, surplus electronics shops and occasionally big-box electronics stores.  Needless to say this was time consuming, required soldering irons and things were frequently "good enough" but not exactly what was in mind for a solution.  Dare I mention all of the warranties I have voided in my lifetime?

This hacker spirit however, is what lead Dale Dougherty, Andrew "Bunny" Huang, Joe Grand, Phil Torrone and I to get together at O’Reilly’s ETech a few months later to continue the discussion and put some framework around MAKE Magazine, which debuted in February 2005.  I am proud to say that the MAKE Magazine movement, including the blog and associated Faire events have become a phenomenon and have spurred offspring like Craft, which I hope grows to be as strong.

The founder and CEO of Bug Labs, Peter Semmelhack captures this spirit with BUG and his model of open source hardware.  Hell, he even has "hack" in his last name – and is leading the next evolution of home remixing; by giving their customers the ability to quickly and easily build their own "whatever."  Third party accessory makers can get involved too as BUG connectors and wiring diagrams are open and easily sourced. Have you seen Apple’s iPod connector licensing agreement?  Trust me, you do not want to.

What I like best about BUG is that you can dip your toes in the water today, now, for free.  Let me back up a bit – when the Apple Newton was announced at Macworld Boston in August of 1993, handheld computing was an interesting oddity. I remember playing with the hardware in my local CompUSA, but stayed away from it due to the price of $699.  When Palm launched their PDA in March of 1996 however, the price was much better at $299, but I still was apprehensive on its value proposition.  I first stuck my "digital toe" in the water by downloading the Palm Desktop client to my PC, then used this software for weeks – first importing my contacts, getting my calendar setup and filling up my "personal digital assistant world" with data before buying the associated hardware device.  I loved the interface and after I trusted the software, bought the Palm Pilot (the original name before a Pilot pen lawsuit), sync’d it up and had an "instantly-full" assistant.

So I challenge you – download the SDK, for free. You’ll find a debugger and virtual BUG hardware emulator.  See what you can come up with on your desktop and let us know what your creation does, via comments or the forum!  If you like the software, then you will love the hardware and the ability to mobilize your build.  If you are a company that has manufacturing experience, take a look at the open source connectors and communication capabilities of BUG.  I predict that we will see hardware options for this platform that an iPod could only dream about…

Dave Mathews is an entrepreneur and lifetime inventor with more than two-dozen patents, writer for several technology outlets and frequent TV host.  His stories can be found at www.davemathews.com online.

Now in its third year, Bay Area Maker Faire 2008 takes place next weekend, Saturday May 3 and Sunday May 4, and Bug Labs is raring to go as we gear up for the event. For those who are new to Maker Faire, it is best described as a weekend of unbridled creation and exploration of all things hackable – whether mechanical, electrical, or other. From making music with tesla coils to aptly titled danger machines, next weekend will be about celebrating the unabashed spirit of DIY and, for lack of a better word, "making" things.

For our first go at Maker Faire, we’re inviting the community of hackers, hobbyists, tinkerers, designers, and free thinkers at large to come by our station at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, and join the Bug Labs team in creating the next batch of BUG applications and modules.  The Bug Labs team will be arriving in force, with our biggest showing at an event to date. We’ll have two tables and several BUGs to play with,  and we encourage you to bring your soldering irons, your laptops, and your breadboards, and come along with us as we venture into making new gadgets and apps.

And over the next week, we’ll be publishing a series of posts on this blog chronicling the "Road to Maker Faire," featuring pieces from Bug Labs employees and guest columnists. We’ll also be giving away several passes to the event for those interested in attending. Stay tuned for more details!

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time out of the office giving talks and meeting with people – customers, suppliers, potential partners, investors – both listening and talking about BUG and our mission.  Somewhere along the line someone compared what we’re doing to Starbucks…

They said that when they were growing up they had "plain ol’ coffee" and maybe an espresso once a year or so at a restaurant.  Nothing more and everything was fine.  There was no "problem" or perceived pain with that state of affairs.  Then along came Starbucks and, bam!, they had all these choices to make.  And make them they/we did.  Some basic research turned up this, and a brief, informal survey of the baristas around here confirmed that each one needs to understand 100+ different combinations of coffee, tea, milk, soy, flavorings, quanitities, etc. (this is further suggested here).  Starbucks has catered to something we innately desire – choice and control.

Choice and control.  We all like it.  In fact, more and more we’re spending our $$ with vendors who give it to us.  Witness the success of Toyota’s Scion.  It was a huge draw at the latest Auto Show in NYC (just ask my son who I could not drag away).  Given the building blocks of beverage or automobile making we will take more over less every time (with some guidance for getting it right the first time).  And I think this applies to everything.  Literally.  I think ten years from now we will live in a world where today’s one-size-fits-all restrictions will be unrecognizable.  Just like a Google-less world is hard to imagine now.

BUG is fundamentally about choice and control.  In our case we’re focusing on electronics because we think there is a huge untapped market waiting to be explored.  Others are focusing on different areas – check out the open source footwear!

The Starbucks analogy was spot on. 

I have been a huge fan of Gentoo Linux for several years. Why? Is it the elitist appeal of compiling your operating system from scratch? Could it be performance gains achieved by compiler and package optimizations for a particular piece of hardware? The excellent forums? Nope, none of the above. The Gentoo community instills a culture of looking under the hood, of customizing and tweaking, of not being afraid of greasy hands. I get laughed at in the office sometimes because of this and I have to spend more time installing, but I think it’s worth it. Deep customization seems to be the wave of the future, and here is why I think so.

Enterprise Application Servers: great idea! Provide a uniform platform optimized for a specific type of application. Abstract the hardware layer with some operating system and a JVM. Serve up Ebay! But why stop there? Why can’t the app server run on bare metal? What is the use of all that OS overhead/complexity/variance underneath? In software design, we constantly make compromises between optimization and generality. What if we didn’t have to? What if we could develop and deploy an entire operating system for a specific application or job position or organization? Well of course you could but it would be incredibly expensive and take forever. And who’s gonna write all those device drivers?

At SCALE in LA a few months back I had the opportunity to see a presentation by and briefly talk with Bruno Gonçalves de Albuquerque of the Haiku project. The concepts behind the operating system are fantastic. The level of optimization at the user experience level when you control the entire OS (read: filesystem) is really amazing, and clearly blows the doors off any desktop OS I’ve ever used. Why am I not using Haiku right now? Well apart from it not being quite done yet, hardware support. Developing device drivers is a constant and thankless battle, typically undertaken by Microsofts and OEMs. Where is the incentive for a Taiwanese OEM to provide a device driver for Haiku? While listening to Bruno Gonçalves de Albuquerque it occurred to me that this problem may just go away if Haiku had binary compatibility with the Linux driver model. All of a sudden my graphics card works, and my wifi (gasp) too! Linux, besides being an operating system, provides support for a very large number of devices and systems. Fresh off the presss, 2.6.25 supports a new hardware platform. The fact that all of this work is open source presents an opportunity for other OS producers to leverage this work. It lowers the cost and increases the potential user base by supporting a greater variety of hardware. But who cares? We have OS X and Ubuntu and XP. Do we really need another operating system?

On the hardware front things are changing radically. Eight cores today, 64 tomorrow. Specialized (audio, physics, credit card validators) cores on the same chip. There is talk of doing away with the graphics card altogether and putting that in the CPU too. The list goes on… But where is the software? Where are the operating systems and languages and runtime environments to fully take advantage of this latest round of hardware innovation? And who decides where virtualization occurs? Is it KVM…or perhaps some JVMs? Do I have to run one master OS that virtualizes all the others? Can I partition, version, and manage OSs per core? Dynamically? Can I have a custom OS for Crysis III that gives me a few more frames per second because my machine isn’t looking for security patches? Do I really have one machine or many?

There is a shift happening in software caused by new hardware platforms. Component based design, concurrency, functional programming, and virtualization are all, in part, results of trying to utilize new hardware designs. This change is similar, but hopefully more fundamental to the shift from single-task operating systems to multitasking ones. From TSRs to Windows. It took so much time for that earlier change to manifest*. What’s the difference between then and now? How long do we have to wait for MS Windows 95 part II?

Well I think the difference is Linux and open source. The difference is an open driver model that allows OS developers to focus on new ideas rather than supporting 3000 network cards. The ability to see solutions in the open, and the ability to collaborate. No more silos, no more ivory towers. The demand for radical OS customization will increase as divergence grows between hardware potential and what our existing operating systems, languages, and runtimes are capable of. And as this demand increases I hope to see new, radical, highly-custom new operating systems and runtimes emerge. Exciting times!

* And yes, I had an Amiga too back in 1989. And yes, it was sweet.

Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures (an investor in Bug Labs) mentioned a NY Times article to me yesterday that is flabbergasting.  It’s entitled "Another Heck of a Job" and details the $600M debacle (that’s not a typo) surrounding the effort to design and build a reliable, hand held device for the 2010 census takers.  I won’t go into too much detail here because Brad has posted a great piece on their blog.  The point is, it highlights the serious challenges organizations face when trying to innovate with hardware.

For me, while I shake my head at reading this stuff, I also know that this is just one that got reported.  These things are like cockroaches.  You see one, you know there are hundreds more hiding in the walls and cabinets.  That to me is the bigger disaster.  The waste is staggering.

UPDATE – I emailed Secretary Gutierrez (U.S. Secretary of Commerce) this morning offering to help with the design and construction of the necessary census device.  I’ll let you know if he responds.

I’m currently reading William Gibson’s latest release, Spook Country. I’ve been a fan of him since first stumbling through Neuromancer as an early teen. It was a very important book for me at the time because of the concepts that technology is not just in the domain of math nerds, NOCs, and ROI, but interacts with almost every aspect of the human universe. Gibson’s stories usually involve some kind of hacker immersed in a crime or scandal and, for me, the biggest thrill is in how Gibson’s characters modify and subvert top-down megacorp driven consumer products into things of real human interest. How the world, as designed by focus groups and industrial designers, is never really how it turns out in the end. The essence of this of course is Gibson’s statement: “the street finds its own uses for things” (”Burning Chrome“, 1981).

Back to Spook Country. There are a couple of characters that are involved in an emergent underground art-scene known as “locative art”. A viewer goes to a specific physical location and visual art accessed through some network-enabled hardware. Typically pieces have some direct connection to the physical space and there is a direct connection between the digital art and the physical world. One problem Gibson’s characters have though, in this near-future tale, is the hardware. There is some vague reference to a cell phone ducted taped to a GPS receiver. More specifically, the problem is that Gibson essentially sees technology as always being generated by massive, top-down systems, and hackers, artists, and criminals subvert these systems for their own needs, but only in highly localized ways.

Is Gibson right? Are we forever doomed to Maas-Neotek decks, Sense/net media, and Sony camcorders? Or will bottom-up, user-directed technologies become popular and skew us all from Gibson’s near-term future worlds?

I was really searching for a good title for this post.  It ranged from "inauguration" to "freshmen orientation" but none fit that well.  Then I remembered that it was the end of Spring Break and voila!  But now for the important news – we’ve released all the details of BUG+EDU on the website.  Please take a look and give us your thoughts.  We’d love to hear your comments on ways you think the program can expand and grow in the future.

First time hearing about BUG+EDU?  No problem, I’ll take a moment to explain…

In our opinion, children of all ages represent more creative, original thinking that can possibly be harnessed.  When I was young I envisioned a future with all moving sidewalks, and remember sketching out how they’d work (intersections are tricky!) and thinking it through to the nth detail.  Now, that’s not completely true, since the one topic that never really crossed my mind were the economics of the situation. 
Which is an unfortunate reality of technology innovation – it tends to be a bit pricey relative to allowances and after-school jobs.

The amazing thing for "kids these days" is the power of computers and the Internet.  They both provide vast opportunities to create new software, applications and web sites.  But all those opportunities are isolated to the digital realm.  Hardware invention/innovation remains frustratingly out of reach for all but the most intrepid youth.  We aim to change that.

BUG+EDU (again, details are all here) is a series of programs to not only get discounted BUGs to interested students, but also provide free units to educational institutions, help participate in creating new class curricula, and sponsor on-campus events and demonstrations of the platform in action.  We’ve tried to offer a wide enough range of programs to help virtually any type of school, teacher, or student, but if there’s something that somehow has slipped through the cracks, please let us know!  In the meantime, good luck on finals!