Rastin Mehr

A while ago on Reuters and Slash dot I read that Chinese President Hu Jintao has launched a campaign to rid the country’s sprawling Internet of “unhealthy” content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine.

That isn’t really anything new. The truth is, the distributed and democratic nature of the Internet has always been a threat to those who are trying to super impose conformity or a unified set of ideas over the diverse humanity. I personally think attempts to censor and lock down content would fail in the long run, yet they could do quite a bit of damage in short run.

Photography by Abbey Wuthrich © All rights reserved

Many social networking and online communities such as YouTube and Flickr aren’t exempt. For example, we all know that there is an ongoing race among companies such as Google or Yahoo to grow market-share in China. They have already filtered their search engine content to comply with the censorship regulations imposed by the communist party. The same applies to YouTube and Flickr which are owned by Google and Yahoo. In general the fact that a lot of user generated images and videos are centralized in these two online communities, would leave them at the mercy of corporate greed and dictator governments.

Continue reading To better protect the Democratic Internet

My mother is walking 60K to raise funds for Breast Cancer research. The money she raises will benefit the BC Cancer Foundation, a leader in this critical cause.

Most of us know someone close to us who has been affected with some sort of Cancer, I lost a girlfriend to cancer myself few years ago. My mother has also lost a close friend to cancer just recently.

We can join forces and make a difference and as they say “Let’s make Cancer history”.

Your can make your donations directly to the CIBC bank when you visit my mother’s personal page on the BC cancer foundation website. Thank you kindly for making a difference.

[tags]mehrzad mehr, peach interior design, end breast cancer, find a cure, make donations[/tags]

This is a very interesting keynote delivered by Eben Moglen (Professor of Law and chairman of the Software Free Law Center). The same person who once said: “Anything that is worth copying is worth sharing.” and “The more we give away, the richer we become. His keynote is definitely worth listening to, it is very educational.

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[tags]free software, foss, eben moglen, sharing, proprietary software, open source software, wealth[/tags]

I have an inexpensive wired notebook that I use for putting down brain stormed ideas, doodles, diagrams, client meeting notes, and daily journals. I number every page as I go, and I make sure to have it in my gear bag all the time. When I feel creative once in a while, I don’t want to leave my thoughts on loose sheets of paper, printer throw outs, napkins and such. Problem with scrap paper is that they get taken by people, or end up in a recycling bin. That would be such a waste of what money can’t buy so easily: IDEAS!

Getting into the creative mindset takes inspiration and practice. Once you are there, it lingers for a while and then fades away, during which you’d really want to document what is received by your mind, or else they get forgotten somewhere in the time-warp.

Continue reading Respecting your thoughts

If you are looking for the right developer to bring that brilliant business idea of yours to reality, you may find the following seven tips useful:

Always Shop Around

Let’s say you’ve got a price quote from a developer, and it sounds higher than what you expected, or they are not even willing to deliver the results within the time frame that you are expecting.

Please consider that novel business ideas are often done for the first time, that means there are no history or track records of such a project available to give some kind of clue to the developer about how much resources (Time + Money + Brain) are required to finish the job. In other words, they have to make lots of assumptions and there is a high level of risk involved in that.

Developer’s cannot afford to look bad as a result of a failed project, therefore they demand all the time and fees they can to minimizing risks for delivering the final product.

Seems like a sensible thing to do right?

On the other hand, chances are that some developer has already done a project somewhat similar to yours in the past. Maybe he’s got some magic library of code sitting somewhere on his hard drive that could be used for your project. In that case he would require less time and money to make your idea happen.

Therefore always check with at least 3 different developers, ask for price quotes, and find out how they are planning to take on your project.

Hire a hacker to help you find other hackers

When I say a “hacker” I don’t mean a cyber criminal, but a developer who can solve problems using novel short solutions, basically a smart talented developer.

Continue reading Tips on Finding the Right Application Developer