Category Archives: Atomic Avenue

Haiku of the Day

Blisters on my feet
So tired. Too much blinky.
Best Comic-con yet!

Comic-Con!

OMG, it’s Comic-Con!

After months of preparation, several sleepless or near-sleepless nights, and a ten hour drive, we made it to San Diego to once again take part in that mightiest of comic events on Planet Earth.

We’d barely managed to get set up when the doors were flung open and what seemed like a mile-long line of comic fans burst into the San Diego convention center whooping it up in their search for goodies and comic-con exclusives. Within minutes the convention hall was a sea of people and the left half of it could only be moved through with a fair amount of determination. Pictures (and maybe even video) to follow, but it was unreal. And that was preview night!

So Obvious It’s Brilliant (Plus the Secret Origin of Atomic Avenue)

I love this story–not just because it points toward a possible way of fighting a devastating disease, but because of the sheer simplicity of the approach.

Now, I have no idea whether this sort of approach is the Next Big Thing in oncology, but I’m attracted to the story because it seems to be a great example of someone looking around, seeing how something (in this case, advances in cloning technology) has changed the game, and revisiting an old problem with a fresh set of eyes. Suddenly, an amazing insight like, “Hey, if this guy’s immune defenses are being overwhelmed by cancer cells, why don’t we just send in an army of cloned reinforcements from his own cells?” becomes almost blindingly obvious.

Of course, once the first person thinks of something like this (and it works), everyone in the audience can just sort of shake their head and look sadly at the other researchers who’ve spent decades trying to perfect other approaches and wonder why they were wasting their time on something that now looks like a hopelessly pointless and old-fashioned way to address the problem.

To wit: Obviously the way to stop dealing with scratches and crackles on record albums is to encode and play back record albums digitally! Obviously it makes no sense to haul around a huge, battery-sucking boom box on your shoulder to listen to music when a tiny set of headphones attached to a Walkman (or later CD or MP3 player) lets you listen to your tunes wherever you want without annoying everyone else around you.

Sure, we say “obviously” now, but until someone thought to use the decades-old technology of Analog-Digital converters and lasers to record and play back music digitally, all the “smart” audiophiles were spending countless hours trying to de-static and dust their record albums, and researchers were focused on devising avant-garde tone arms and improved, diamond-tipped record styluses. Similarly, before Sony introduced the Walkman, music lovers were more concerned with how big (and heavy!) the boom box needed to be in order to hear good bass, and whether Duracell or Energizer made the best batteries. Had the Walkman not disrupted everything, the next great area of research would no doubt have concentrated on making and perfecting rechargeable D-cells.

In the crazy world of computer software, the technology shifts come even faster. There are any number of fashions and fad involving feature sets, languages, and technology platforms. Often, the wise path is to hold your fire until the picture clarifies a little, or you really sense that a trend is catching on (otherwise, we’d have likely done a ComicBase for the Apple Newton or Pippin—anyone remember those?). At the same time, ComicBase has been among the first programs anywhere to embrace internet-driven software patches, CD-ROM data distribution, DVD (and dual-layer DVD). ComicBase is even down in tech history as the first software program ever distributed on Blu-ray Disc. Not too shabby for a program whose whole purpose in life is to keep track of comic collections!*

Still, all those technologies were years in development, and the uses were pretty much built into the technology itself. What’s really exciting is when someone takes an older technology (like Analog/Digital converters and lasers) and applies them in a game-changing new way (storing and playing back digitally recorded music on a CD). These are the shifts that take the world by storm and make being in technology so interesting. (Right now, my #1 hope is that there’s something in the works—somewhere—which is going to let me get where I’m going without paying $4.49 or more per gallon.)

One of the big new changes in our life here is the much faster internet pipe that was part of our new office location. Computer folks like ourselves are always after more speed, but what started as an imperative to keep up with the growth of Atomic Avenue has already turned as well into a way for us bring in on-demand cover picture downloading (part of the Archive Edition of Atlas), new online services like renewals and product downloads, and more.

But as cool as all this is, what I really wonder is: What’s the next “blindingly obvious in retrospect” innovation whose components are already here…and we just don’t know it yet?

*Probably the biggest “Blindingly Obvious In Retrospect” moment for us was Atomic Avenue itself. After a decade or so of doing ComicBase, we were bemoaning the largely theoretical nature of guide values for comics, along with the paradox of a comic market that seemed almost entirely dysfunctional in that most store inventory would never actually sell, while comic fans would drive themselves crazy looking for rather ordinary comics they needed but which nobody was bothering to bring to conventions or post at auctions.

Suddenly, we thought to ourselves, “You know, there are tens of millions of comics that have been entered into ComicBase—all with prices. What if we just gave everyone a big button marked “Sell” which would let them post their comics to a central site. Then, anyone looking for a regular comic like Hellblazer #85 could not only find it, but probably find a dozen copies in various conditions. And whoever sells their comics on the system would be able to put their books before the entire world and just wait for orders to roll off their printer!”

The Real First Day of Summer

…is obviously today. School let out late last week, the weather’s great, and–following a dip of a few days (graduation parties? Father’s day?)–Atomic Avenue traffic just set a new morning record.

Sadly, since our whole year tends to focus on the San Diego Comic-Con, summer is actually my busiest time of all. I don’t normally catch a break until a month or so after Comic-Con when all the action has died down a little. Hopefully, this year we’ll be able to get free and take that big cross-country trip we’d been dreaming of for the past few years. Even with record high gas prices, you don’t get too many chances to road trip it across America seeing as many of the lower 48 states in one go as humanly possible…

Well, that’s the motivation, at least… now back to coding…

700,000 Comics for Sale!

Woohoo! Atomic Avenue passed the 700,000 comics for sale mark today! We’re now at more than nine times the number of books available as all of eBay’s comic auctions–combined!

We Love Robots…But Not on Our Forums (Sorry!)

Even though I was in the middle of More Important Things (which, by definition is sort of…well, everything), it was that fourth forum spam message in six hours which sent me over the edge. Suddenly, the idea of retro-fitting our third-party (and incredibly hard to decipher) forum software with a CAPTCHA to help deter spam robots went from the “sometime where I get a few hours after Atlas’s release” timeframe to Right Bloody Now.

“CAPTCHA’s (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) are those squiggly, hard-to-read sets of letters which are popping up more and more frequently in order to make it difficult to overwhelm forums and other systems with automated attacks. The theory goes that by requiring a human being to actually pause and decipher such letter codes, the spammers out there will find their productivity cut from being able to attack millions of systems per day to at best hundreds. More commonly, the automated scripts they employ will simply fail in their efforts and move on to the next system on their list.

I’m not in love with filling out CAPTCHAs myself, but I was really getting tired of deleting spam. On the bright side, it seems to have (temporarily) stopped cold the flood of new, patently bogus accounts which we’d see piling up in the forums as “pending approval”. (We’d always required new account owners to activate their accounts by clicking an email link–a simple measure which by itself would stop hundreds of bogus spam accounts per month). Adding a simple CAPTCHA at registration seems to have at least temporarily helped stop even more.

So, although anyone who knows us at all knows that we love robots here at Human Computing and Atomic Avenue, Spambots (and their dirtbag owners) are not at all welcome. There’s no stopping determined spammers who want to spend a lot of time posting messages, but when being a professional spam-creep depends on posting millions of bogus messages per day, it doesn’t make any sense to do it where it’ll take you longer to post the message than it will for the board owners to delete both the spam and your account.

Erlangen: The Photos

(trying this out as a PDF slide show. You’ll need Adobe Reader (a.k.a. Acrobat) to view it)

erlangen

Goodbye, Bunker Hill…Hello, Market Street

It’s official: we’re now moved out of the old offices at Bunker Hill Lane and have now taken up quarters right downtown at 95 S. Market Street #500, San Jose, CA 95113. (Note the way I slipped in the address update: subtle, huh?).

Anyway, the move went as well as can be expected when some two dozen computers, 50,000 comics, and countless boxes containing everything from network switches to voodoo dolls are involved. Big thanks go to everyone who helped out—as well as all our customers for bearing with us through the relocation.

As it stands now, we’re largely operational again, although (as usual) we’re having some drama with the phones. For now, the best way to reach us is by email or, if you have a technical question that isn’t too pressing, post to the forums. It’ll likely be a few days before everyone has their desks unpacked and start getting caught up on everything. That said, we’re still anticipating pushing out an update this week for ComicBase.

Initial impressions on the new place: I like it–a lot! Let me count a few of the ways…

1) Location. It’s about five miles from my house, which means I get an hour of my life back each day just in commuting time. Or, if I want, there’s actually a way to bike back and forth. Doing so involves going through a pretty crazy bike path that runs alongside highway 87, but at least it saves gas and gives me a chance to get some exercise.

2) Location. Downtown San Jose is getting cooler all the time, and we’re right in the heart of it. At our old place (on the outskirts of Santa Clara, in an office park), the best you could do for lunch without driving was a Togos up the road. From where I am now, I’m within walking distance of dozens of great restaurants, hot dog stands, take out places, and a nice park to have lunch in. There’s also a concert series in summertime in the park across the street, as well as the famous Christmas in the Park displays come wintertime. Oh! And we’re two blocks from both The Tech Museum and from Adobe’s headquarters.

3) Private Offices. I made a terrific mistake last time I chose offices when I went for “open plan” and didn’t ask the landlord to build in at least one private office. As programming guru Joel Spolsky warned so long ago: programmers need offices. It’s not for status—it’s simply that when you’re programming, it takes way too much time to mentally “load up” the program and get down to work—and all that can be shattered in an instant by the sort of interruptions that go on constantly in a cubicle environment. I’d actually gotten to the point at the last office that I was intentionally coming in late and saving my important work until everyone had gone home just so I could have uninterrupted time. Now, I have the option of just closing my door. I admit, I’ll probably miss out on a lot of good office banter this way, but I’ll also be a lot less stressed out about getting my work done.

4) Friendly Neighbors. Carolyn has a great blog entry on this one that made me laugh out loud. I’ve also probably had more friendly chats with neighbors in the building in the past four days than I did with all our neighbors in the old building in two years. I still don’t know what two of the companies on my old floor actually did… So far at this location, I’ve discovered a music magazine publisher, a nightlife magazine publisher, an internet firm, and met the folks at the law firm next door who (gasp!) are not only incredibly nice, but actually like comics. (They also were kind enough to receive a couple of our desks for us while we were out schlepping stuff from the old offices. Thanks, guys!).

5) Faster Internet. For years, we’ve been champing at the bit for a faster internet pipe, but there was simply no way to get one at the old location without laying out ruinous amounts of money (and we were being quoted low to mid four-digits per month for colocation as well). Thanks to the better connectivity downtown, we’ve already got more than twice the bandwidth as we used to for just a little more than we’d paid previously, and there’s the possibility to scale it higher as business demands. All this means that not only is our site faster, but we can do more with it as well (as the folks checking out the development builds of Atlas found out in the d3 release last week).

Moving Update: Bright Paint, Higher Bandwidth

I’ve been mum on the whole moving thing for a couple of weeks while we waited for the owner of the building to come back from a foreign trip and… well, actually sign the lease. That accomplished, we had just 11 days to organize an office move, including our office machines, telecom, servers, and a small army of toy robots.

This past weekend was spent stripping an ungodly amount of wallpaper off the new offices, scrubbing gallons and gallons of wallpaper paste off walls (delightful!), and priming, prepping, and painting all the offices in a variety of colors. It was a long, long weekend for all involved, but we got it done. Big props to editor extraordinaire Shiaw-Ling (who turned out to be a pretty darn good painter!) as well as my own folks, who actually spent their entire vacation—on purpose!—helping out.

The end result? The sedate former law office now looks like the home of a hip Swedish design firm—or maybe a new exhibit wing for the Tech Museum. Either way, it’s going to be a lot of fun to come into work there.

Another really good thing about the new location: we’re mere blocks from the origination point of Covad’s wireless T1 service in San Jose, allowing us to double the bandwidth of the Atomic Avenue and ComicBase sites without breaking the bank (as would have been the case with bonded T1s). I’ve just run some initial speed tests at the location, and it looks encouraging indeed. To tell the truth, I’m getting as excited as a kid before Christmas just thinking about what we could do with that extra speed.

Moving day is Monday the 28th, and both ComicBase and Atomic Avenue will be down for some period while we move gear to the new location. Wish us luck!

Moving Day Approaches…

We’ve signed a lease at a new office, but just as we were shopping for desks and furniture, I got a call from my realtor to let me know that the owner of the property had just left for an overseas trip and will be unreachable for two weeks. As such, we can’t really start the preparations to move in yet.

Argh. More on this later assuming we manage to actually conclude the lease signing (on both sides!) without any further drama…