Chris Klaus founded Intenet Security Systems in 1994, while he was a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Chris’s product, the Internet Scanner, offered well being to companies connecting to the internet as the world wide web emerged, and it did so under a freemium model.  Beginning as a side project in his dorm room where $1,000 checks started showing up, Chris asked a professor where he could find a good lawyer for his business, and that lawyer introduced him to Tom Noonan.  Chris dropped out of Tech to pursue the business full time, John Imlay and Sig Mosely invested, and Internet Security Systems grew rapidly in an emerging market.  ISS’s rapid growth culminated in its initial public offering on NASDAQ in march of 1998 and in an acquisition by IBM for $1.3 billion in October, 2006.

Very interesting!

Atlanta's Security Cluster: Spotlight on ISS

Jello:

Been playing around with Drew Conway's scripts he demo'd at the bay area R meetup at linkedin last week - saw it here.

Files to do this yourself are here.

Information on the libraries: Igraph twitteR ggplot2

Installation (for OS X):

- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10
- Install latest tcltk
- In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");

Have at :) Beware the API limit.

Oh, the MS zoomable thing.

Very interesting...

Social Map of #ASW3 Hashtag on Twitter (Atlanta Startup Weekend 3)

There is just one problem: In Atlanta, The ‘California State of Mind’ is a Cancer. It is a disease. It has no applicability here and it destroys lives. The commonly stated idea that the differences between Silicon Valley and Atlanta is one purely of scale is false, and the implication of these differences cannot be understated. There are emergent properties of a startup economy that large, that do not exist at our scale whatsoever.

I can’t say that strongly enough. In Georgia, the California State of Mind will try to kill you and will ruin your life. Its not like us. It wants to kill your family. It belongs on the terrorist watch list. Without the supportive environment of the Valley, the valley game-plan has disastrous effects on human lives.

Jello wrote an article for Techdrawl as part of the series he is doing on Startup Geography. It is also up on Hacker News (presently the #1 item).

The previous piece is here.

A California State of Mind (As a Cancer on Atlanta)

Today, we’re taking Twitpay out of beta and putting it out there for everyone to use. (If you don’t like to read long blog posts: we’re turning on “real money” powered by Amazon Payments. We’re excited. Twitpay is awesome.)

Congrats to twitpay for going live with real money!

Twitpay

On February 10 at approximately 1656 GMT, the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 communications satellites collided over northern Siberia. The impact between the Iridium Satellite LLC-owned satellite and the 16-year-old satellite launched by the Russian government occurred at a closing speed of well over 15,000 mph at approximately 490 miles above the face of the Earth. The low-earth orbit (LEO) location of the collision contains many other active satellites that could be at risk from the resulting orbital debris.

The following videos, interactive 3D Viewer files, 3D models, and high-resolution images are available to better understand this event.

See also:

... POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 Satellite Collision

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told ... how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.

Herbert might as well have been talking about technology. Don't get me wrong. Ideas are important. Research is critical to advancing our society. But when it comes to commercialization, it is only a small part of the puzzle.

GT VentureLab: It's the Execution, not the Idea that Matters

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

I couldn't help but think of copyright extensions when I read this passage.

After Credentials

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.

Amazing, extraordinarily creative game that looks like so much fun.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Is this the right way to get persistent storage in EC2?

FuseOverAmazon

FUSE filesystem backed by Amazon S3
Overview

s3fs is a fuse filesystem that allows you to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a local filesystem. It stores files "natively" in S3 (i.e., you can use other programs to access the same files). Maximum file size=5G.

Its quite useful and stable, e.g., can be used to easily copy daily backup tarballs to s3.

To use it:

1. get an amazon s3 account!
2. download the source, compile it (I've used fc5/ppc and f7/i386) and slap the binary in, say, /usr/bin/s3fs
3. do this:

/usr/bin/s3fs mybucket -o accessKeyId=aaa -o secretAccessKey=bbb /mnt

That's it! the contents of your amazon bucket "mybucket" should now be accessible read/write in /mnt

FuseOverAmazon - s3fs - Google Code

PhreakNIC 0x0b

PhreakNIC is an annual gathering in Nashville, TN, for hackers, makers, security professionals, and general technology enthusiasts. Hours upon hours of both informative and entertaining presentations are given by volunteers and many areas are set up with the intent of encouraging socialization. In our 11th year, we are now the longest running non-commercial hacker convention in the United States.* PhreakNIC is organized by the Nashville 2600 Organization, which is a 501(c)(3) tax deductible charity. However, it takes many resources to organize, and help is given to PhreakNIC by other 2600 groups in the South East United States, as well as the Nashville Linux Users Group. Our thanks go out to all who contribute.

This is next weekend BTW. I'm speaking twice.

PhreakNIC Technology and Hacker Culture Convention