Rust Valley

I awoke this morning to find that Renesys, the company I work for, is featured in a business brief on the front page of the Business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. They probably have no idea that anyone from Renesys lives and works in Pittsburgh.
The coverage is due to the what I [...]

[Read more →]

Hurricane Ike did more than knock out power to 130,000 people in and around Pittsburgh. It is shaping up to be the biggest power outage in 5 years, when power blackouts affected Internet-connectivity (and electricity, obviously) from Ohio and Ontario to the Eastern seaboard. This is all according to an excellent writeup on [...]

[Read more →]

Technical people complain about tech reporters.  They gloss over details.  They ask dumb questions.  They don’t understand why we are the most important people they’ve ever talked to.
Some of those criticisms are baseless.  Technical reporters have a really hard job. They write about complicated subjects for a really broad audience, so they have to try [...]

[Read more →]

Mike Shanley has what I regard to be a practical and really interesting idea of the problem of giving early access to music to reviewers over at his blog, shanleyonmusic:
“Tell ya what they ought to do. Buy some old shellacs and an old record cutter and press up promo copies and mail that out to [...]

[Read more →]

Those of you who aren’t network geeks might not care but the core of the Internet has been crumbling for a while now.  The basic problem is that the ratio of network speed at the edge compared to network speed at the core has been growing far too fast, until now it’s basically the same:  [...]

[Read more →]

Six local companies recently received funding, housing and mentoring at the AlphaLab facility on Pittsburgh’s South Side.  Cynthia Closkey previously wrote about Alpha Lab back in March when the project of InnovationWorks was previously announced.  As Cynthia pointed out back then, what is useful about AlphaLabs is that it focuses on web- and software-related ventures
My [...]

[Read more →]

Google is at it again.  They are taking the bread and butter of someone else’s business and giving it away for free in order to further their massively profitable ad-selling business.  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will offer a free tool to measure web traffic targeted at helping advertisers select the right [...]

[Read more →]