22 Feb
SoCal Tech Group – Start with your backyard

I haven’t said much about SoCal Tech Group on my personal blog, but in light of its recent success I am compelled to give it a proper shout out. The SoCal Tech Group was put together roughly two years ago by me and a few of my buddies from PhatNoise. Its mission is to help [...]
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 machines and applying [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 an [...]
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 [...]
25 Apr
Old Media and Echo Chambers

I found an interesting intersection between the old, dead tree media and the echo chambers that so many “knowledge workers” live in.  The lead article in a recent New York Times magazine (April 20th, the “Green” Issue) is from author Michael Pollan.  He’s published several books on growing what you eat. Something about the article [...]
21 Apr
The Future of Digital Entertainment

This presentation was given to the students of Scott Douglas’ Entertainment Management class at the University of Montana.  I was given a hundred or so questions from the class ahead of time on the future of  entertainment online, and this presentation attempts to answer some of the best ones.  Enjoy directly below or view/download from [...]
16 Apr
Here we go

Learn through doing, I always say.  That said, I am embarking on digitizing/archiving a good amount of my past and present work through this site, but as I am a newbie to WordPress, things may break. After lots of searching found a theme I dig, though I have hacked it a bit so there are [...]