Author: Dan

19 Nov

Digital living and the DNA of companies

One of the lessons I learned through all the years of working on products at PhatNoise was what I call the DNA of companies.  Companies, I feel, are living entities — complete with personalities and ailments.  I also think that companies are wired a certain way, making them excel at certain things but be shockingly [...]

25 Sep

Function Unit Specialization through Code Analysis

This post is another entry in my life-archive series, and also from my academic career. This paper was actually accidental: I was enrolled in a graduate class and had to come up with a project for the quarter. I had a very out-there idea of taking what we had learned about VLIW [...]

02 Sep

PhatNoise: From concept to launch

I have been meaning to write several posts about my first company, PhatNoise, but haven’t had the chance to finish one off.  Well, after seeing an update on the Techcrunch tablet project over the weekend — especially the sentiment expressed in the comments – I decided to put something together.
There is a lot I want [...]

28 Jul

Optimizing FPGA-based vector product designs

This post will be my first archival experiment, so I decided to start off with one of my favorite academic projects.  This work was largely done while I was a visiting researcher at the wonderful Imperial College of London.
I remember literally staring at the math behind my lab’s latest research work.  I was a student [...]

28 Jul

Life Archiving

One of the reasons why I have started this blog is to make a portfolio of my work.
I have long admired how folks working in artistic or design fields have been able to neatly wrap up their work in largely a visual format — whether it be old school vellum and paper, or the latest [...]

15 Jul

And then there were three…

I’d like to interrupt regularly scheduled programming to bring you Alex Paul Benyamin! Born July 9th, he’s just one of my projects coming out of stealth mode

He’s already made me a very proud dad…here’s to you kid!

12 Jun

Open source, Twitter, and You

As I write more about my own projects (past and present), you’ll see that I generally root for the startup that can fight its way into a market and build value. There are times when, however, a startup should realize the larger role it plays in an ecosystem and set some of itself free. Twitter [...]

21 May

Why isn’t there an open source Twitter?

I am not a twitter user, as my stimulation / activity ratio is already waaay too high the way things stand, but I sure do get a lot of secondhand twitter smoke. Just wading through techmeme and techcrunch to find stories not about twitter being down is getting tiresome…
So why hasn’t someone developed [...]

14 May

Modeling the natural world

I came across an interesting article about Yahoo researcher Duncan Watts and his empirical findings on how trends spread through a modern, networked society.  The article tended to pit Duncan against Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point, as well as other leading marketers.  In essence Duncan debunks the theory that influential members of our [...]

01 May

Calling Air + Flex developers

I have embarked (last week actually) on a pet project of mine and decided on using Adobe’s new AIR platform, with Flex as the coding environment.  I am total newbie at most web programming (at PhatNoise and Harman everything I did was embedded C or Lua), but I really quite like Flex as a framework [...]