- Neal Stephenson, Reamde

In 2011, the best tools on the planet cost $25/month, billed to your credit card. In just a few minutes you can have better infrastructure than most fortune 500 companies. It’s incredible.

So part of my first three weeks as CEO of Xamarin has felt like a trip to a toy store. Everyone loves window shopping, so here is a list of some of the tools we’re using to run our startup:

Google Apps. Mail, calendar, internal wiki, and shared document editing. Cost: $5/user/month.

Github Bronze. All of our code is stored in github’s private repositories. We love github. $25/month.

Asana. This is our task management tool and it’s fantastic. It’s the only distributed task system I’ve ever used that’s as fast as typing into a text editor. Asana is a new startup from Dustin Moskovitz, the founder of Facebook, and their product is in Beta. Our team loves using it and we predict great things for Asana as it rolls into launch.

Stripe. Stripe is a payment system designed for programmers. They have a beautiful API that’s so simple you can integrate it into your site in less than ten minutes. If you’ve ever had to use Paypal Payments Pro, you will have a deep appreciation for stripe. They don’t require a merchant account and their JavaScript API allows you to transmit credit card information directly from the customer’s browser to stripe’s servers without redirecting the user to a stripe.com page. This reduces your PCI compliance burden without hobbling your payment workflow. Stripe will power our online store and future transaction systems. These guys are in beta too. They’re going to take over the world.

Themeforest. When I first discovered themeforest I thought it would be a wasteland of machine-generated CSS and generic templates. But the site is full of hand-coded, cross-browser gems for $15-30 a pop. There’s no substitute for high-end design, but if you need to get a decent-looking site up quickly, it’s your best bet, and far cheaper than it should be.

IRC + bip. We’re a distributed team, and having a place we can all hang out together online is very important to us. We wanted to find a for-pay, hosted group chat system that we loved, but campfire was too laggy, HipChat didn’t allow you to signin multiple places, and we didn’t feel we could trust a free solution like Convore. In the end we setup ngircd on a low-end, dedicated linode, configured to force SSL. A lot of us use bip as a proxy to maintain a persistent connection and show a backlog when you reconnect.

UnlimitedConferencing. For phone conferencing, we setup a $49/month account with unlimitedconferencing.com. We don’t pay a per-minute fee and international people can dial-in over skype to save money on long distance. It works fine.

Assistly. To handle incoming support requests from our future customers, we’ve looked at TenderApp, ZenDesk, and Assistly. We settled on Assistly after a support tech who’s worked with all three told us she prefers Assistly because it’s faster and easier to use. $69/support agent/month.

Linode and Rackspace. We use linode to setup quick Linux servers, and Rackspace for Windows servers. They’re cheap, reliable, and fast. If you need more power, a dedicated server from somewhere like 1and1 will do the trick. It’s surprising how far you can go on a $30/month linode. I’ve been using Linode for years and love them.

EFax, Scanner Pro for iPhone, and PDFPen. It’s a dwindling fact of life that you need to send and receive faxes to do business. These three items have eliminated fax machines for us. We use EFax to forward incoming faxes to an email address. You can also use it to send faxes online. PDFPen is a mac app that blew me away when I took a JPEG and converted it to an OCR’d PDF in just a few seconds. You can also use it to mark up and to edit PDFs. And you can use Scanner Pro to convert a phonecam photo into a PDF that looks like it came off a scanner. You can even fax it directly from the phone (for a fee). It’s been a lifesaver.

BizSpark. BizSpark is Microsoft’s program to give startups free licenses to basically any piece of Microsoft software, including access to MSDN. If you plan to use any piece of Microsoft software, it’s a great program.

Ravix Group. One of the things we learned from Ximian is the value of signing on a part-time CFO from day one. At the very least you want a controller to keep your books in order and setup payroll and insurance, or you’ll have a big cleanup process later on. A higher-level finance person can also be very useful in helping you think through cap tables and convertibles notes and online billing and taxes and so on. We interviewed a bunch of individuals doing part-time CFO consulting for various startups. Their fees varied from a $6,000 monthly retainer plus 0.25% of post-series A equity, to $125/hour flat. In the end, we got some great references from Ravix Group, a firm that do outsourcing of financial and HR tasks for startups. They have a deep team and can assign various individuals to your tasks as appropriate. We’ve only just started working with them but it looks great so far.

Ropes and Gray. There’s no substitute for a great lawyer, and we have one of the best firms in the country with Ropes and Gray. Our team there is incredibly responsive, works weekends and late nights, and knows their stuff. Like working with a CFO, having a great lawyer has some benefits you might not expect: in addition to their legal expertise, they see a lot of deals, and can tell you what’s “market” and what isn’t. We never would have raised our Series B financing at Ximian without Ropes and Gray, and we’re happy to be working with them again.

I’m sure there are some other great products out there, but this is our list. Hopefully it’s helpful to someone who’s just starting to do the research. It really is a wonderful time to start a company.

A brand new adventure.

I’m excited to report that I’m joining Xamarin as co-founder and CEO this week. I’m honored to be joining Miguel, Joseph and an all-star engineering team. And I am very passionate about our mission: to make mobile software development incredibly fast and easy.

In the last year, one thing that I’ve learned is that mobile phones are, for many people, their first direct contact with software. We met people in the most remote areas of the world, living in straw huts without electricity or running water, who have mobile phones. And so anything we do that improves mobile software improves the lives of billions of people. I’m passionate about this, and I’m very excited about the chance we have at Xamarin.

We believe that mobile development is in its first stages and that we can deliver an incredible mobile development experience — far better than what exists today. Our objective is to build great products that people love. We want to pamper our customers.

I’m about to board a plane to Boston this morning where we’ll get things kicked off, before moving to San Francisco later in the year. There’s a lot to be done. I’ll try to keep you posted!

1. The four minarets on the side are the genius of the Taj Mahal. Without them the building would look much smaller. They create a sense of proportion and perspective. Interestingly, the minarets are angled three degrees away from the center of the building, in case of earthquake.

2. Everyone knows that the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum for a Mughal emperor’s dead wife. The story goes that she saw the building in a dream, described it to her husband, and he built it for her after her death.

   What I didn’t know is that the Taj Mahal is situated next to a river, and the emperor’s original plan was to build his own tomb on the other side of the river, in black marble, with a bridge spanning the river, linking the two tombs together. That would have been spectacular.

   But his building spree came to an end when he was deposed by his son, who put his father’s coffin inside the Taj Mahal, to the side of his wife’s, destroying the symmetry of the building.

3. The designers intended you to approach the Taj head on, walking slowly along the center line toward the entrance gate, seeing the building open up through the door in front of you. The effect of this is amazing. First you see the central building, perfectly inscribed within the doorway. Then two of the minarets appear in perfect symmetry, then all four, and then the entire building is in front of you. At points, the building seems to be magnified by the entrance door, and then to recede, and then to grow again in front of you. It is an incredible revelation.

   For some awful reason the Indian government has placed the tourist entrance to the SIDE of the building, completely ruining the effect. Everyone catches a glimpse of the building partly obscured by the outer wall, gasps, and then rushes through the door from the side, completely missing the geometry of the central approach. Don’t miss it.

I was also surprised that the Taj Mahal is only 350 years old. I thought it was older. The year construction started, Galileo was beginning his house arrest in Italy.

As a friend said, the Taj Mahal is one of the few legendary world sights that lives up to its reputation.

We spent a morning cycling around the deserted dirt trails that wind from temple to temple. We saw almost no one. Once we rounded a bend and found an old English couple seated on canvas chairs, sketching one of the temples with charcoal and art-supply paper. We stopped and said hello. Made of brick and regularly stepped, the temples beg to be climbed. “Do you think I can climb this?” I asked. “Of course,” said the English lady, “but mind the snakes.”

Whenever we stop we are surrounded by children. They sell hand-colored postcards and I can’t resist.

We climbed into a balloon at dawn and floated through the heart of the Bagan temple zone. I was surprised at how low we flew. The pilot explained that the winds higher up were too strong. Tree tops brushed the bottom of the basket and we had spoken-voice conversations with people on the ground. At one point we dipped even lower so that we could see through the doorway of a temple. I made out the shape of a seated Buddha, glinting gold in the morning light.

By chance we found a guide who offered to show us a local village that is not government-supported for tourist visits. He told us that they were very poor and in need of food and medicine. I smelled a scam but we went along anyway. Ten minutes from our four-star hotel we found ourselves in a cluster of thatch houses with no electricity and no running water. The well was a fifteen minute walk. We had brought rice, toothbrushes, and some medication from a nearby grocery store and gave them to the village headman. He assembled the 20 poorest families in the village and divided everything up evenly among them right in front of us. It cost less than one night at our hotel and these people were so eager, each receiving an equal portion of rice and 800mg of paracetamol. There was no scam, this was obviously just poverty. I felt like an idiot. Why didn’t we buy more? And what do I care about getting scammed out of rice and tylenol, anyway?

After Bagan we went to Mandalay to check out the Burmese stomach flu, which we found both sudden and full-bodied, a potent bouquet of retching and myalgia. For two days we subsisted on Chinese crackers which were disgusting despite the lusty description on the packaging. We were glad for the generally high standard of plumbing in our guesthouse, and also for the rehydration salts our doctor had insisted we take along (his own brand called Drip Drop – tasty and effective).

In Mandalay I was healthy long enough to take an afternoon Burmese class from the woman who ran our guesthouse. A sophisticated and intelligent older lady, fluent in English and an ex-university lecturer, she told me I was the first guest to ever ask for a lesson and was excited to teach me. She knew all about the evolution of Burmese, its relation to the Sri Lankan Pali, and the origins of its odd, circular script. It was a great afternoon.

I do not have the natural language talents of Stephanie, who speaks five languages fluently, but I am always surprised by how easy it is to learn 20 words in a given language, and how much it changes your experience visiting a country. In the small amount of time I spent learning it, Burmese seemed simple, with no conjugations and few difficult sounds. After a couple of hours I could form simple sentences, and Stephanie and I spent the rest of our trip astonishing the local people with monologues like, “This is my wife. She comes from Germany. I am 33. We are hungry. We go restaurant?” It’s not poetry but I think anyone can get to that point in a couple of hours and it opens so many doors. We did the same thing in Cambodia and it changed everything about our trip, not only there but also in the Mekong delta in Vietnam, where we discovered that nearly everyone we met was of Cambodian descent and spoke Khmer as a first language.

From Mandalay we went to Kalaw for a day of hiking among the hills and relatively opulent local villas. This is yet another colonial hill town founded by white people to escape the heat of the colony. The hills were dry and it felt Mediterranean. Besides a strange situation in which our guesthouse presented laminated documents with government seals to prove that the guide we had independently hired was a bad man, “steals your money, builds huge house for himself, nothing for villagers,” we had a good hike (and found the guide to be 100% non-thieving).

Our last destination in Myanmar was Inle Lake, which is a giant shallow lake supporting several fishing villages built on stilts over the water. We thought it would be loaded with tourists and almost skipped it but as it turns out, nothing in Myanmar is overly touristy.

The real attraction in Inle, for me, was the unique one-legged rowing technique of the local fishermen, which I tried to learn. It is unbelievably hard. Simply balancing one-footed on the skinny edge of a narrow plank on the side of a tiny canoe-boat is difficult enough. Actually paddling the boat around with the paddle hooked into the back of your knee without losing your balance was impossible for me. Never mind using your free hand to manipulate fishing nets while rowing, like the Inle fishermen do.

The actual technique, when practiced by a master one-legged Inle rower, does not look graceful, and in that regard I did very well, paddling in an improvised, jerky style without a hint of grace, and falling into the boat every two or three strokes.

So, not in this lifetime.

Meanwhile, we are in India. I’m writing this in a tented desert camp near the Pakistani border. It is quiet except for the screechings of Rajasthani birds and the roar of old MiG jets in service of the Indian air force that fly overhead occasionally, patrolling the border or maybe just flexing the might of the Indian military machine in full view of Pakistani radar.

India is loaded with culture and it’s a huge change from South East Asia. I have many things to say about this country, but first I have to get something off my chest.

What’s the worst part of traveling in India? It is the slimy men who proposition my wife while I am standing next to her. I don’t mean to generalize a country of over a billion people, but in our brief experience here it is the most slovenly, smelly, overweight and greasy men who seem to think they have the best chance with my wife. They make graphic overtures to her in the street. Perhaps it is because they are wearing sunglasses and have slicked their hair back that they have such a high self-opinion. In self defense I have upgraded my sunglasses, but it hasn’t done any good.

I am a gentle person and my wife is a sensitive traveler who dresses modestly in accordance with local customs. Nevertheless, several times in the last week I have had to refrain from triggering a cascade of events that ends with me talking to an American consul, and some pear-shaped Rajasthani slob visiting the prosthodontist. In light of these men, the custom of arranged marriage takes on a rather more sinister light.

Ok, that’s that. We have been miraculously healthy in India and have mostly shuffled from one desert fort to another. Tomorrow we mount Marwari horses with funny ears and ride three days to Udaipur for the Indian Holi festival. Pictures and so forth to follow.

It was our first evening in Burma and we were rattling through the streets of Yangon in a $2 taxi on our way to the famous Shwedagon pagoda. We’d finally ventured to ask a local what he thought of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Burma, kept for decades under house arrest by the military junta.

“I keep a picture of her on my phone. Here.”

We were shocked.

“Aren’t you afraid of what might happen to you because you have this?” we asked. In Burma, “defaming the government” or supporting the pro-democracy movement are crimes punishable by imprisonment or forced labor in a work camp. (For that same reason, I’ve altered the identifiable characteristics of everyone mentioned in these posts.)

“It is for truth. I talk political and I have her on my phone because I love truth. I am afraid but I love truth more,” he said.

These kinds of conversations became a theme of our visit to Burma, but this was our first day and we were surprised to meet someone who would talk with us so openly. “You are very brave,” I said.

“Compared to some people I am a coward. Some people are really brave.”

Yangon’s streets are leafy and pleasant. The broad sidewalks are a market for vegetables, meat, used books, anything you can imagine. Every component of urban civilization is on display. Barbers cut hair in the street next to key makers, next to a shoe repairman, across the street from a girl folding betel nut and lime into a leaf and selling it for ten cents. A group of boys play a fast-paced dice game with bottle tops, and a few houses down some girls are betting on dominos, perched on tiny plastic chairs.

How is it that colonial architecture looks so good when it’s falling down? All the buildings are in a state of artistic decay. There are holes in the sidewalk that could break your leg. And there are the anachronisms of a closed society: balance scales, tiny blue Mazda taxis with two-stroke engines from the 1940s, mechanical typewriters.

Buses stop frequently, and it’s a hell of a thing to see. An attendant jumps out of the open door as the bus slows and shouts out what I can only assume are the names of the onward destinations, while pushing people on and off with a violence that makes me flinch. Old ladies are shoved into the street and the bus is moving again in a few seconds.

Some people are camera shy, but most are happy to have their picture taken. A few stop you and pose, expectant.

The Burmese have been living under some form of occupation for hundreds of years. After the British left they never really attained self government. The father of the country, Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, was killed before he could take power and a military junta has ruled the country ever since, for forty years. Where else in the world has the military run a country for so long?

So I expected to find in Yangon an oppressed, suspicious people. And there is a suspicion here we didn’t find in the rest of the country, but there is also a hint of cultural energy that surprised me, that we didn’t find in Cambodia, for example. Open-front tea shops and bars are on every block. Guys with long hair and tattoos sit together at a cafe and talk, gesturing excitedly. A library we pass is full of people and a sign that says “free wifi,” though we are told by an apologetic girl that there is no wifi.

The city is diverse, with Indian, Chinese, Burmese and minority people passing each other in the street, dropping a few bills into a passing monk’s bowl. A camera shop TV shows Al Jazeera English.

We walk at random into the open doorway of a decrepit building and find a second-story art gallery where we meet a Buddhist artist whose paintings have strange themes. We are warned not to go to the 3rd floor; “it is collapsing.”

For an entire day we don’t see a uniformed police officer, but the Lonely Planet warns that secret police follow every tourist at some point during their trip. Once on a side street we are told to turn around, that foreigners are not allowed here.

But the streets are beautiful in their activity and colors, and we feel welcome here.

“Sorry, we are sanctioned country,” the concierge explained when we got to our hotel, “No credit card. US dollars only.” He looked embarrassed to admit it.

In Burma, there are no ATM machines, and except for three hotels, credit cards are mostly useless. The three exceptions proxy charges through a shady company in Las Vegas.

Exchange rates between the dollar and the Kyat, pronounced “charts,” vary widely. So like most travelers, Stephanie and I flew into Burma with a money belt stuffed with crisp US dollars. And crispness matters — an older note, a visible fold, a discoloration, a tiny tear or pen marks on the bill mean that the government money changers with whom hotels and other services must exchange their dollars will refuse to accept it, or change it at a lower rate.

Despite our best efforts to get brand-new bills before leaving Munich, about 20% of our money did not measure up to the standards of the Burmese guesthouse operators. One $50 bill was rejected because its serial number began with “CB” — a sure sign that it’s counterfeit, we were told.

So in Burma I have seen the cleanest, starchiest US dollars of my life, to all appearances fresh from the mint.

By contrast the local money is ratty in the extreme: taped, stapled or sewn together, smelling of pond water and disintegrating in your hand in a manner reminiscent of the shroud of Turin, Kyat are accepted in any condition without a second glance. Stephanie once received as change a 200 Kyat note in such a state of disrepair that it was given to her in a little plastic baggy, lest its various components blow away.

After our short ride with the politically courageus taxi driver, we arrived at the Shwedagon Pagoda to find a staggering Buddhist edifice, one of the largest Buddhist constructions in the world, a giant conical stupa covered in 85 tons of gold, topped with a 76-karat diamond and surrounded by other religious buildings of similar magnificence. It is opulence in a very poor country, and I wonder what the Buddha would think of it, but it is unutterably beautiful.

It happened to be a full moon, and there were a lot of people at the pagoda. I am used to the frowning solemnity, the hushed shuffling of a Christian cathedral. Both are built to awe, but there is a coldness and distance to a cathedral, whereas Shwedagon on the full moon pulsed with life: young professionals stop by after work to pour water over a statue of the Buddha or to apply a tiny sliver of gold leaf. A husband and wife meditate together on the marble while their children run and play around them. There was a lively vibe, more like a public square after work, or a shopping mall on the weekend, than a church.

We picked up a wonderful guide who explained that each corner of the eight-pointed pagoda represented a different day of the week (Wednesday is divided into morning and evening for some reason). People gather at the corner of the day they are born to pour water over the Buddha, and over the statue of their “birth animal.”

As we circled the pagoda we noticed a group of people clustered around Tuesday — the lion. “That is her corner,” our guide whispered. “Many people come to honor her. That is why they close the pagoda on Tuesday, so she cannot come on her day of birth.”

“She” is Aung San Suu Kyi, and many times in Burma we will hear her referred to in this furtive way, a pronoun with no antecedent. It is appropriate to the mythical status she has among the Burmese people.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, is the “number one hero” of the Burmese nationalist movement, the man who signed the Aung-Attlee treaty granting Burma independence from Britain. He was the clear choice for Burma’s first leader, but he was assassinated before he could take office. Because of the tremendous respect his memory commands among the Burmese military, his daughter has a kind of protection. She cannot be killed or exiled, so instead they’ve put her under house arrest and limited her movements.

If this story sounds familiar, it is nearly identical to the first half of The Lion King, with Aung San Suu Kyi as Simba. Some people in Burma believe — I am not making this up — that the Disney movie predicts her eventual triumph over the greedy military jackals who pillage the country’s wealth and stash it in secret accounts in Singapore.

Burma is not simple. In a couple of weeks you don’t have time to gather more than a few distorted impressions. For some more pieces of the puzzle, and far better photos, be sure to check Stephanie’s blog.

From Yangon we flew to Bagan, a completely different part of the country, filled with ruins. Bagan is one of the best places I’ve ever been. And the subject of my next post.

The Myanmar embassy in Bangkok is surrounded by a tall grey wall topped with iron fencing, and the visa processing entrance is down a little side street. It opens at 9am. It has different hours from the consular office used by Myanmar citizens. Do not be fooled.

We were told that the embassy only processes a limited number of same-day visas every day, and people showing up after 10am are turned away. So we showed up at 7:45 expecting a queue of travel agent runners in front of us, but we were the first ones there.

If you walk down the side street away from the main street, after two blocks you find a little shop that is effectively an adjunct of the Myanmar embassy. They will take your visa photos, give you the application forms and a pen, glue your photo to the form, etc. This place is a must. They know what to do and what not to do. It is also very easy to find: look for a little yellow sign on the right side of the street that says “photos, copies, visa” (or words to that effect).

Apparently getting the visa is no problem if you do not list a profession like “journalist” on your work history (reverse side of the form). It has been rumored that the embassy in Bangkok will google your name and refuse a visa to anyone with obvious journalistic connections, so if you are a journalist trying to sneak into the country you might want to get your Burmese visa elsewhere. Of course in this day and age, it’s a strange distinction to draw, when everyone’s blogging or otherwise communicating their experiences.

We got back to the visa entrance at 8:30 and found a cluster of Western travelers waiting for the door to open. None of them knew about the shop. We strutted around with our completed, stapled, and glued forms and sent the whole lot scampering to the shop, leaving us first in line.

The cost for a same-day visa is 1200 baht. We paid our fee, handed over our forms and passports, and were told to come back at 3:30 to get our visas. We had printed the itinerary for our flights to and from Yangon, but they didn’t seem to care. The whole process inside the embassy took about 15 minutes.

And at 3:30 we had our visas (which had our pictures on them). That’s it.

This time in Bangkok was marginally more pleasant than previous experiences. We discovered the elevated train which is far nicer than the subway in Boston, and we availed ourselves of the excellent shopping to pick up a few supplies we’d neglected to pack (probiotics for my prima donna of a stomach, a new lens for Stephanie’s camera, DEET-based bug spray). Prices are similar to the US.

Yesterday we flew on AirAsia to Yangon, and I’m writing this from our hotel lobby. Yangon is mindblowing. Walking the streets is a huge adventure, like time travel. But more on that later. It deserves its own space.

He is is hunched over the last few crumbs of a bagel (not poppy seed — more on that in a sec) and though excited about the adventures to come in the next six months of travel, he already looks a bit worn-out. His eyes droop and his shoulders sag.

Why, you might ask, with this rich bounty of travel ahead of him, and his amazing and sparkling wife by his side, why does he look like such crap?

Part of it is Bangkok. In the opinion of our hero (still me), Bangkok is a sleazy migraine headache of a city. Bangkok is way too stimulating and a little bit disgusting, like accidentally putting on someone else’s underpants in the locker room.

But Bangkok is just a means to an end. It happens to be the only city in the world where our hero, ok, where, I and my wife can get a visa for Burma in less than one day. Which is essential, because we have booked an AirAsia flight to Burma on Friday for two weeks of unplanned exploration. We have a hotel room for the first two nights in Yangon, and after that we’ll just go wherever the wind takes us. A favorite way to travel.

But the main reason for the baggy eyes and dark circles is that amidst all the planning and packing, I stayed up way too late the last three nights hacking.

For some reason, my best ideas come at the most inopportune times, and three times in the last week I was so completely taken by an idea that I hacked deep into the night. The German winter sun is a shy bastard and stays hidden until late morning, giving you long, uninterrupted periods of darkness in which to work. I am convinced this is a major reason for the unstoppable power of the German economy.

Of course, each time I went to bed at 10am, it was after working on a completely different idea, so now I have three brilliant, unfinished hacks on my hard disk. I’m trying to delude myself into thinking that I’ll work on them while traveling, but experience says otherwise. We’re going to be moving every two or three days and there’s so much to do and see. Between that and, hopefully, keeping you apprised of our movements, there just won’t be enough time.

Which brings me to the itinerary. In the next three months we plan to visit Thailand, Burma, Rajasthan, Nagaland, Nepal, Bhutan, Assam, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, and Komodo. It is strange even to be able to tell you that. Normally when traveling, we tend to just wing it, but this time around we wanted to go to several places that require advanced planning, and so we had to get ourselves organized. Google Docs was involved and spreadsheets were produced. Print-outs were even made. It’s unheard of.

After Komodo we have a brief stop in Tennessee for my sister’s graduation from college, and then we go to South America for 6 weeks, and then Africa, and then finally we move to San Francisco to live happily ever after by the end of the summer.

But first we have to get through Dubai. Which brings me to the issue of the poppy-seed bagel. As it turns out eating a poppy seed bagel before transiting Dubai is a good way to end up in Arab prison. If you don’t believe me, google “poppy seed swiss dubai” and check out the story of the poor Swiss schmuck who was imprisoned for three poppy seeds found on his clothing as he passed through Dubai. He didn’t even eat the bagel in Dubai! Other similar stories can be found – google for “dubai melatonin,” for example.

So the bagel I ate was covered not in poppy seeds but pumpkin seeds, in true German-bakery fashion. I’ve searched extensively but haven’t yet found any sign of punishment for fragments of pumpkin seeds, but I’m worried nevertheless. I’ve gone into the bathroom and shaken off my shirt a few times already.

And now they’re calling us to board. Wish me luck.

At the same time, I was taking flying lessons.

So it was impossible not to notice birds exploiting the same aerodynamic effects I learned from flying.

Here are a few, for your reading pleasure.

Ground Effect

Wings fly because they are supported by the air. The wing pushes down and the air pushes back up.

When a wing is very close to the ground, the air that’s pushed down is trapped between the wing and the ground and forms a higher-pressure cushion of air, giving the wing more lift, so that it can fly at a lower speed. This is called ground effect.

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when you’re learning to land is that in ground effect, the airplane just wants to keep floating and floating. And so if you have a limited amount of runway to work with, you want to approach the landing without carrying too much extra speed.

In Florida I noticed a lot of birds skimming the water and it was amazing how far they could glide just above the surface without having to flap their wings once.

Dihedral

Stand in front of an airplane and look at its wings and you’ll notice that they are not completely parallel to the ground – they are angled up. This angle is called the dihedral.

The purpose of the dihedral angle is to make an airplane self-stabilizing. If a gust of wind causes one wing to drop, the airplane will slip sideways toward the lower wing. This causes the lower wing to generate more lift, to rise, and to restore the airplane to wings-level, without the pilot having to do anything.

And that’s why in a little Cessna, even in slightly rough air, you can often let go of the yoke and let the plane fly itself (unless the guy sitting next to you is a big fatty and unbalances the airplane).

Swarms of turkey vultures dot the sky over Southern Florida, making the location of every road kill.

In this picture you can see that when turkey vultures are soaring, their wings are angled up, like a Cessna (or an Airbus).

I’m not sure why some birds have dihedral and others don’t, but I suspect turkey vultures benefit from it because they do so much gliding. Some airplanes actually have negative dihedral – fighter jets, for example – to make them less stable and more maneuverable.

Landing Flare

When you’re landing an airplane, at the very end, you pull back on the yoke as the airplane sinks, to stay in the air as long as possible so that you touch down with the slowest possible airspeed.

The landing flare also angles the lift vector backwards and helps to slow the airplane down.

Unfortunately I don’t have a cool picture of this but I noticed a lot of birds would flare at the last minute before perching on a tree branch or landing on the ground. They would also flap their wings as they flared, sort of like a thrust reverser on a jet.

Gyroscopes

Of course, birds are ornithopters and fly differently from airplanes. They don’t have propellers or jets creating a longitudinal thrust.

They also don’t have spinning gyroscopes and an artificial horizon to tell them which way is up when they’re flying inside clouds, like instrument-equipped airplanes do. Which is why it has long been believed that birds cannot fly through clouds.

Or can they? Pilots have reported bird strikes in instrument conditions. And in 1972, an ornithologist in New York bought a military surplus radar and tracked birds flying through clouds for several miles – and they were going straight.

It shouldn’t be possible for birds to fly through clouds, but it is. How do they do it? Do birds have some kind of gyroscopic organ, or a magnetic sense that tells them which way is the ground?

I’ve done some googling but haven’t found a definitive answer. The best article is this 1993 classic, The Turn in The Atlantic.

Happy reading.

We try to focus on mobility, and count on being able to buy what we need while we’re traveling. I have a 55+10 backpack and Stephanie has a 65 liter bag, and neither bag is full. If your bag is full, it takes ages to pack. We want to be able to pack & go, so we leave a lot of empty space in our bags. I’d say mine is 60 or 70% full.

Here’s my full packing list:

1. A pair of linen pants I had custom-made in Hoi An with very deep pockets. Super useful as nothing can fall out.  These roll very compactly.
2. Two quick-dry cargo pants and two bathing suits. One pair are the dorky kind with detachable lower-legs, which I’ve used once or twice.
3. Two t-shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, one very light linen sweater.
4. Two pair ex officio underwear (which I rarely wear, to be honest), and one pair of smartwool socks.
5. A pair of Keen sandals I’ve been wearing for nearly five years that are in great shape. These shoes are indisputably ugly but very practical, and seemingly indestructible.
6. Trail running shoes for hiking and working out.
7. A big bag of medicine like cipro, amoxicillin, azithromycin, sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim, pepto bismol tablets, dramamine, ibuprofen, etc. Our doctor gave us a handful of prescriptions before we left. These have, unfortunately, proved to be very useful as we’ve both gotten various infections.
8. Kindle 3 (Amazon delivered it to me in Thailand)
9. An incredible Petzl Zipka Plus head lamp. This is a very bright, pocketable and head-mountable light that makes it easy to see and be seen in areas with no street lighting (pretty common in e.g. Cambodia). I keep it next to the bed at night, just in case. A lot of people we’ve met have coveted this.
10. 13” Macbook running Mac OS and Linux
11. Panasonic GF-1 digital camera
12. Underwater camera for diving
13. Suunto Zoop dive computer
14. iPhone 3GS with AT&T unlimited international data (works in Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea; didn’t work in Cambodia and Vietnam). We use an app called Expenditure to track our spending and (try to) stay within our budget.
15. Unlocked Nexus One. You can get local SIMs with a month of data for about $20 everywhere we’ve been. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have signed up for AT&T’s international unlimited data plan, which costs $70/month and has been useless half the time.
16. A pretty small toiletry kit: toothbrush (replaced twice so far), toothpaste, razor.
17. An MSR quick-drying camping towel. We’ve occasionally been somewhere with non-existant or disgusting towels, and this was a lifesaver.
18. Deck of cards; useful when it’s raining and we’re stuck somewhere, or waiting for a bus, etc etc. We like to show people magic tricks, too.
19. Fake poop, of course.

My whole kit weighs 9.5 kilos. You can definitely travel on a lot less than that, and my bag has been growing in the last few months, which I think is normal. I started out with a bag that was so empty, it made my mom nervous. I subscribe to the “buy it there” philosophy, which makes packing light easy, but I’ve also added a few things I’ve needed (mostly t-shirts) as we’ve been going along.

In the last week we’ve accumulated some sailing-specific items (gloves, books, rain jackets) that we’ll probably ship back to Germany before we leave Thailand.

In the country we’re mostly getting around by bus, but we hired a car and driver to get to some of the more remote sites. It costs about $40/day. We had to take a pickup to get to Prasat Preah Vihear because the road was extremely steep.

In the cities we get around by either moto or tuk-tuk. A moto is a motorcycle taxi, and the cheapest way to get around usually. You pay the driver a dollar or fifty cents to take you across town, and hop on the back.

If we have luggage, or are traveling in the middle of the day, a tuk-tuk is a lot better because it’s bigger and provides some sun protection. A tuk-tuk is basically a carriage drawn by a motoscooter. Here’s a picture of our driver from Siem Reap:

(He was great. If you are going to Siem Reap and need a Tuk Tuk driver, He has a web site here.)

Tuk tuks are a lovely way to get around because they’re slow and open air, and you get to see and even interact with people around you. Showing up some places in a car feels a bit like landing a helicopter in the middle of the street in downtown Boston and stepping out to buy some Starbucks.

We flew to Cambodia from Malaysia on Air Asia, which is a game-changingly cheap low-cost airline flying Airbuses all around Asia. I think our tickets were $80, and we bought them the day before the flight.

Mostly we’re trying to avoid flying now, because it’s more fun to go overland. In fact, a friend of ours suggested we try to go overland all the way to India… and we might give it a try.

Since we’re planning to spend the next ~year traveling, this week I’m continuing to divest myself of things that won’t fit in a 55 liter backpack.

And that includes more than 20 hard drives I’ve used over the years: laptop, desktop, usb. With great effort, I’ve consolidated all their data onto one disk, which will be spending the next year somewhere safe and sound (it’s backed up, of course).

But what to do with all the drives? Well, some would say – smash them with a hammer and be done with them. But it would be nice if someone could make use of all these platters, would it not?  So I’m in the process of securely deleting them all so that I can give them away.

Unfortunately, securely deleting 20 drives is no easy matter. It’s not secure to just repartition and reformat – the data is still there, and may include passwords or facebook cookies or other things that could be used against me and my friends.

But, ah, you say, I’ll just zero out the drive, with a command like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=100M count=5000.

This, sadly, is quite slow, especially given that I’m erasing most of these drives with a USB/SATA adapter.

To make matters worse, writing zeroes is not good enough, according to a famous 1996 paper by Peter Gutmann. He wrote:

The problem lies in the fact that when data is written to the medium, the write head sets the polarity of most, but not all, of the magnetic domains. This is partially due to the inability of the writing device to write in exactly the same location each time, and partially due to the variations in media sensitivity and field strength over time and among devices.

In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous “layers” contained.

So even after you’ve zero’d a drive, or even written random data to it, the old, overwritten value can be obtained through various techniques including magnetic force microscopy and scanning probe microscopy.

Gutmann developed a 35-pass erasure algorithm, known as the Gutmann method, to thwart these techniques and eradicate every trace of the old data from a drive.

And there’s even a handy Linux command, shred, which implements the Gutmann algorithm and can be run against a file or a device node directly.

Now, Gutmann’s paper and the 35-pass erasure method are often cited, but are also at this point quite old. Hard drives have changed a lot since 1996. They’re much denser, of course. And the method by which they encode data on the disk has changed as well (PRML/EPRML vs MFM).

Plus the interesting data is now drowning in a sea of uninteresting data. My password database is a few lonely kilobytes amid gigabytes of binaries and libraries and web caches and so on. And, as several people pointed out to me just after I wrote this, recent research seems to indicate that on modern drives, one pass is enough.

So it’s overkill to pull a “full Gutmann” on these drives before donating them to the local orphanage. And I don’t have the time for that anyway.

But nevertheless, I’d feel better doing at least one pass, right? Unfortunately /dev/urandom is pretty slow for this – far slower than /dev/zero or shred, which are already un-fast. And when you’re erasing 20 drives over USB and trying to stay ahead of the moving truck, speed matters.

Well, it turns out that the ATA command set has included a built-in “secure erase” command (ATA-SE) since 2001. This command performs the entire erasure on the drive itself. Since the computer doesn’t have to shuffle bits over the (in my case) USB bus to the disk, it’s quite a lot faster (though still by no means fast – I’m currently waiting 97 minutes for a 250GB USB drive to secure-erase). Also, it erases blocks that the hard disk had marked as “bad blocks” – so those aren’t recoverable either.

Check out these instructions for using the secure erase command from Linux with hdparm.

But unfortunately there is a sad ending to this story. The ATA spec also includes a command called “freeze lock.” This command tells the drive to disable the secure-erase command. And most BIOSes issue the command to all connected ATA drives on boot.

I think my friend Phil summed this up pretty well:

phik: that's the kind of thing that makes you feel really professionally rewarded
phik: you tirelessly fight your boss to work on something, make a prototype
phik: push it through some god-awful standards body
phik: get everyone to adopt it
phik: and the bios vendors block it

(Luckily, on my thinkpad, ATA-SE is still an option. And it works on about half these USB drives. Hooray!)

Just to, you know, make sure.

No results.

Phew.

It’s a great zoo, but it’s still a zoo. The apes live indoors in a big room the size of a gymnasium. They’re locked in there for the amusement of the throngs of children who smack their palms on the inch-thick glass and squeal. And I’m not an expert on apes, but they don’t look psyched about it.

And so I was thinking: now that we have cheap HD video and the internet, we don’t need to do this anymore. Let’s just close all the zoos and use the money to establish a fabulous online library of animal videos, and massive wildlife preserves that you can visit on foot or via jeep safari. In the process, we’ll free up acres of prime urban real estate that can be sold as parkland and residential neighborhoods.

Ok, visiting youtube isn’t the same as going to the zoo, but we’ve moved our freaks from the fairground to the internet, so the idea is not without precedent.

As a vegetarian, I’m used to being in the minority on this kind of thing, but I thought I’d put it out there anyway.

1. For packing the trick is BIT: buy it there. Pack the minimum you think you’ll need and if you forget something, buy it there. Often I don’t end up buying anything, but making this a part of my trip planning helps me relax and pack light.
2. Passport, wallet, housekey, phone & charger. That’s my checklist when I leave the house on the way to a flight. Anything else is a non vital item I figure I can take care of when I get there. You could buy a new phone charger there but this is such an oft-forgotten item that you want it on your checklist lest you find yourself drowning in $30 wall warts. If you take heart medication you might want to add that to your checklist.
3. They’re popular among frequent flyers, but I avoid the Bose noise-canceling headphones because they’re too big (and the travel case makes them even bigger). You can get a pair of in-ear noise-isolating headphones that are just as good, half the price, and 1/50th the volume (that’s volume in cm**3, not db). Slip them in your pocket and travel light. I use a pair from Shure and they’re fine.
4. Luggage with a lifetime guarantee is worth the slight premium in price. Briggs and Riley make a very sturdy bag that’s strong enough you can sit on it during a long pre-boarding wait, and with zippers that rarely break. And when they do – in 5 or 10 years – replacement is free.
5. If you’re tall or otherwise picky about airplane seats, use seatguru.com to understand the seat layout of your flight. Seatguru will warn you about equipment boxes under the seat in front of you, cold seats, or seats with a lot of bathroom traffic.
6. From my wife, I learned to *always* ask for a better price or a free upgrade on hotel checkin. We stayed 10 nights in a $2400/night hotel room with an in-room infinity-edged swimming pool at Jade Mountain in St. Lucia (it’s amazing, check the website) for less than $300 a night because the lady who checked us in shrugged and said “sure” when we asked for a free upgrade. If they say no, no harm done. And you’ll be surprised how often things are negotiable (I was).
7. For overnight flights, don’t take the sleeping pill until the airplane is actually off the ground. I once had an 11pm redeye with a post-boarding, pre-takeoff equipment problem that was announced moments after I swallowed a pill.  Deboard, wait 3 hours, and finally reboard while fighting off the somnolence. Obviously doesn’t apply if you don’t take sleeping pills to fly (good for you).
8. Never drink on a redeye; you’ll be dessicated enough when you land without any help from alcohol or any other diuretic. I avoid caffeine for the same reason.
9. If you travel a lot internationally, it might be worth it to pay the $65/month for AT&T’s international unlimited data plan. It really is unlimited, and as far as I know it’s unique in the world. People from other countries are incredibly jealous that this plan is available to Americans (or people with a US credit history and address).
10. Hotels make bank on the extras: room service, internet, parking, minibar, laundry. Make every effort to avoid these. If you’re traveling light and need laundry done, find a wash-dry-fold nearby; you can often pay them a rush fee for next-day service (sometimes it’s not advertised) and save a bundle. Take an airport express to share the internet cost with your spouse (or tether through your phone with unlimited international data). Grab a few snacks at a grocery store on the way from the airport to eliminate the risk of sating late-night hunger with $12 cashews.

And here’s a selection of tips from others in the same thread:

• Firebug can make that C20 boarding pass be an A1 boarding pass. They’ll never know. (From Ben Maurer) (Nota Bene: not TSA approved)
• If you’re traveling with someone, and you’re on a flight with 3 seats across, book the aisle and window, leaving the middle seat empty.  That seat is much more likely to remain empty than if you leave the aisle or window empty, and if someone does happen to get placed there, chances are they’ll be ecstatic to switch seats with one of you. (from Stefanie Wauk)

There’s nothing worse than being the remote participant on a conference call and struggling to make out the murmured conversations taking place in the conference room thousands of miles away — where the “main” participants are all sitting together, suddenly laughing about something you didn’t hear or understand.  How is this a good use of your time?  You had to get up early for this because you’re in the “wrong” time zone, and now you’re listening to the teacher in Charlie Brown.

On the SUSE Studio team, we had a “level playing field” rule for our weekly meetings.  Even though a lot of us were clustered in Nürnberg, Germany, everyone dialed in to the meeting, putting every single person on an even footing.  There’s no “local” and “remote.”  Everyone has to speak clearly into the telephone.

When we instituted this rule, we noticed the “remote” participants joining in the conversation a lot more often, and the calls went a lot smoother.

This worked well for us. It might help you too. Let me know how it goes.

Pictures of ordinary street life from long ago are fascinating. Look at this picture. It’s New York in the 1880s. Everyone is wearing hats. It probably smells god-awful. And part of you wants to enter that picture and walk the streets for a few hours. Not long enough to contract typhoid, but just for a little while, to see how people walk and talk and what they wear. Right?

This is the same impulse that creates period films and practices creative anachronism. I loved the Sherlock Holmes stories and read all 4 novels and 56 short stories. Same thing.

So sometimes when I’m walking down the street in 2010, I like to remember that I’m walking through a future past. My great grandson (not yet born) would love to switch places with me for a few hours and see what life was like back in 2010.

His interest is attenuated by the huge number of archived youtube videos from this period, but today’s video capture technology will look pathetic compared to what they’re recording in 100 years, and certainly won’t compare to being there. He’ll feel like he’s missing the full picture.

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in the future, so it’s nice to remember that we’re also walking through the past.

Comics are a low-friction way to learn about stuff with which you are totally unfamiliar. A one-page weekly webcomic that teaches you something and is funny is the kind of thing I would subscribe to.

It could be done in the style of  The Cartoon Guide to Statistics and similar books. And it would cover current events in a way that also teaches you about a general principle. For example, you could explain a rifle-shot provision in one particular bill, and readers would learn what rifle-shot provisions are in general.

(Rifle-shot provisions are clauses designed to apply to a single individual/organization without naming names. So they say, for example, this law applies to all hospitals incorporated on February 3rd, 1983.)

Any interested cartoonists want to open a kickstarter project?

An API means you don’t have to write grubby code to screen-scrape their web site, and you can get all the data you need.

For example, recently I was messing around with book information and found that the New York Times has a best sellers API you can use to access their bestseller lists going back several years. Cool, right?

Of course like many online APIs they rate-limit you to 5,000 queries per day. So if you want, say, all the bestseller data from the last ten years, you’d need about two days to grab all of that (assuming there are ~4 updates to the list per month, and you want to grab all 15 of their bestseller lists).

So here’s my proposal. Instead of making us run slow crawlers on your APIs to access historical data, just provide a sqlite database we can download.  It’s easier for everyone.

The API is still useful, of course, for up-to-the-moment data.

Now, commercial websites like the New York Times might want to use the inconvenience of an online API as a way to limit access to their data or to enforce some terms and conditions. But I think in practice it just means that people have to run their crawlers a little longer. And maybe they implemented an API because they thought it’s what people wanted.

In the case of government APIs, this is especially important. All government “open data” web sites should be providing downloadable data sets. If they’re too big, chunk them.

So, keep calling for online APIs. But ask for downloadable datasets too.