So I took the part to work, put it under the microscope, lined up the iPhone camera with the eye piece, and voila!

I put my left index finger in the frame for size reference.

Note: in the second photo, the chip has been removed. :)

The top 4 reasons you should consider Linode for your hosting needs (I’m sure there are 6 more reasons, but I’m time limited today):

Reason 1. Automatic Upgrades

Every year or so, I wake up to an email from Linode telling me I can have more disk space or RAM on my server. Adding it is super easy: just login to their web site and click a few buttons. Today I’ve got 490 MB of RAM and 16 GB of disk, and I’m still only using their least expnsive option.

Reason 2. Huge Internet Speeds

Linode servers have great Internet connection speeds. I regularly get over 50 Mbits/second.

Reason 3. Customer Service

The Linode support team is very sharp. They know what they’re talking about, and they are very helpful. This is more than can be said for many other support organizations. I’ve only needed to open a support ticket a cople times, and on both occasions, the Linode support staff responded within an hour and gave me all the information I needed, not only to solve my problem but to prevent my problem from happening again in the future

Reason 4. Cost

At $20/month, Linode is very affordable for what you get: Full root access, nearly any Linux distribution you want, lots of RAM and disk, and good CPU speed (my Linode has 4 CPUs).

After 7 years, I very highly recommend Linode as a Virtual Private Server hosting service.

Mom, I hope you’re proud. This is all I’ve got to show for myself.

This was not a killer demo. I’ve sat through a lot of these, and I’m sure you have too. Fortunately, you can do a few simple things to make sure your demo goes better than this. I have most experience with intimate demos involving an audience of fewer than 30 people. These suggestions work best with that kind of audience.

1. Explain the Setup

Any product worth its salt is complicated, at least under the hood. You’ve just spent a lot of time building a new product with a team of engineers. If it were simple, you wouldn’t need to do a demo to show it off. So you’ve got to explain the background. Here’s a checklist of things that you ought to explain before diving into the demo:

• Physical configuration
  • Are there cables involved?
  • Explain how everything’s connected
  • Explain the computers involved and where they are
  • Explain all the software involved, with diagrams if it helps
• List improvements since last time, if applicable
  • “Do you remember how the product used to do X?, and that sucked?”
  • “In the past when I clicked this button, it took 30 seconds to process. Now it’s done in 3 seconds”.
  • “Users told us that this used to be confusing. We’ve tried to make the feature more approachable and user friendly.”

2. Tell the Future

Don’t expect your audience to know whether the demo worked or not. Tell them what’s going to happen when you click that magical button, before you click it, so they can participate in the demo success when it works. Get them to feel the excitement of anticipation, and when it works, they ought to instantly think, “Yes, it worked!”, just like you do. To make this emotional connection, you have to tell the future. Here’s an example of telling the future:

“When I click this button, you will see that light blink (point at it), an on-screen spinner will begin to turn, and about 10 seconds after that, a message will appear with the number forty-two. Any questions on what’s going to happen?”

Take time to listen for questions. Make sure the audience is completely clear on what’s about to happen before you click that button. Don’t rush this.

Then, click the button.

After the process finishes, don’t jump in and say, “See? It worked.” Instead, let the audience come to that conclusion themslves. You gave them enough information to evaluate whether it worked, and if you “told the future” correctly, they will see for themselves. This way, they will believe more seriously that your product works (they verified the results themselves, after all).

3. Face Checks

Take time during your demo to make eye contact with each member of the audience, if possible. If you have more than about 20 people in your audience, you’ll have to limit this exercise. Check for the following expressions in the audience:

• Confusion: A furrowed brow, looking downward, or a pained grimace
• Boredom: Eyes glazed over, looking at nothing in particular, or head bobbing
• Excitement: Eyebrows raised, lots of motion, smiling, or the “ah hah” look

If you catch someone bored or confused, it’s time to engage them. Start asking questions. If you can’t think of a question to ask, try this one:

Any questions?

Followed by a 10-second pause. 10 seconds is a long time in a demo. Count it down in your head, “10 Mississippi, 9 Mississippi, 8 Mississippi, …”

Another list of engaging questions:

• Does this seem like a good approach to you?
• Do you think your organization will be able to make use of this?
• In your opinion, are we on the right track?
• Are there any concerns with what I’ve presented so far?
• Do you feel like there’s something we could have improved?

By the way, don’t be afraid to take the conversation in a new direction based on the responses to these questions.

You should do a round of face checks after making important points in your demo. Take a look at each face and spend about 1 second looking for the expressions listed above. Just looking at their faces can cause them to better engage in the demo. The audience needs to feel like they are participating in an interactive experience, and not just “along for the ride” like some kind of academic lecture.

4. Slow the Tempo

Presenters almost always go too fast, especially during demos. I think there are two reasons for this:

1. They are nervous
2. The technology is more familiar to the presenter than the audience

As a presenter, you should go slower than you think. You almost can’t go too slow. Here are a few tips:

• Allow silent moments
  • Just look at the screen and look at the audience.
  • This will let the audience absorb.
  • Don’t fear the silence. Embrace it.
• Ask what the audience thinks
  • If you get no answer, you are going too fast
• Draw on a whiteboard
  • This will naturally slow things down
• For long demos, plan regular breaks

5. Easy on the Superlatives

Avoid words like “fantastic” and “spectacular.” Let the demo speak for itself, and let the audience come to their own “fantastic” conclusions. Instead use phrases like “isn’t that neat?” and “we thought you’d like this.” If the demo is pitched properly, the audience will see how “fantastic” it is without you cramming it down their throat. If you start tossing around superlatives, and the audience doesn’t agree, it will solidify a strong opposition to your product in their mind, and they might think of you as a slimy marketing weasel.

This is one place where Steve Jobs excels. He uses phrases like, “we think you’ll like this,” and “this is really neat,” and “wasn’t that cool?” It’s startling when people get up after Steve and start tossing words around like “phenomenal” and “amazing”. When I hear words like that, I think, “hey, you just show me the product, and I’ll decide whether it’s phenomenal.”

You can use accurate superlatives like “totally new” and “unprecedented”, but be careful to stick to accurate words and don’t venture into the realm of hyperbole.

6. Repeatedly Repeat Yourself

It’s okay to repeat yourself. Don’t worry about insulting the audience’s intelligence. Most people go too fast and shower the audience with so much new information that they get hopelessly lost. Err on the side of too much repetition rather than too little. If your face checks reveal that the audience is bored, you might be repeating yourself too much, but this is unlikely.

7. Trade Vocal Cords

Don’t talk too much. It’s human nature to support ideas when you feel like you invented them. You can use this principle when giving a demo by letting the audience talk through ideas. By letting them talk, you are letting them take ownership of the product, which is a good thing if you want them to be your supporter.

Be a good listener, but be careful not to lose control of the demo.

Pay attention to industry terminology they use, and try to use the same terminology in your presentation.

I think a good ratio is about 1/3 to 2/3. You should talk about 1/3 of the time, and let them talk about 2/3 of the time. This guarantees that they are engaged, and it really helps them solidify all the concepts in their mind. As an added bonus, you just might gain an insight into how they operate, which can help you make your software better for them.

8. Spend Your Time Wisely

A good demo has lots of audience discussion. Getting the ratio right is key. Here’s roughly how I divide my time during demos:

• 1/4: Setup and background
• 1/4: The actual demo
• 1/2: Discussion and Q&A

Notice that it usually takes about as much time to explain the background as it does to give the actual demo. Sometimes, the background actually takes longer, and that’s perfectly fine.

Also notice that about half the time should be spent discussing and answering questions.

Happy Demoing

These tips have helped me demo successfully, and I hope they help you. If you have anything to add, please let me know. I’d love to work new suggestions into this article.

M&Ms are yummy. At work we have ginormous bags of M&Ms to snack on. One day I reached into the bag and pulled out a handful (about 8 M&Ms). I happily munched until there were 4 left. Lo and behold! The remaining 4 were all blue. “What are the odds,” I asked myself. So I set out to find the answer.

I started by figuring out how many different M&M colors there were. My bag had 6:

• red
• green
• blue
• brown
• yellow
• orange

Then I assumed that there were an equal number of each color in the bag (that may not actually be true, but it makes the problem a tad easier to solve).

Armed with this information, I started up the wayback machine to go back to Computer Science 235, when, back in my college days, I studied probability. This is when I realized that I had forgotten pretty much everything I knew about probability, except dice rolling odds (which I use in Risk to conquer the world). So it turned out that memory lane wasn’t that helpful after all.

At this point I decided that I should compute the odds of choosing a handful of 8 M&Ms at random with at least 4 blue ones, this being a prerequisite of having 4 blue ones left in my hand after eating the other 4. To do this, I first drew 8 boxes on my white board, to represent the 8 M&Ms I could draw at random. This helped me reason about the problem. For any given box, I have a 1 in 6 chance of drawing a blue M&M. If I draw a blue one for a given box, that leaves 3 more I would need to also randomly draw. So I started enumerating a few permutations that could make this happen:

And so on. I realized pretty quick that there were too many permutations to enumerate so it was time to get analytical. I started to reason this way:

In position 1, I have a 1 in 6 chance of choosing blue, but I don’t really care which position the blue M&M lands in. I also know that, if I get lucky and chose blue in position 1, that does not impact my odds of choosing blue in position 2. So each position is independent. What that means is I have a 1 in 6 chance of choosing blue the first time, and again the second time, and the third time, and the fourth time. But, and this is the kicker, I don’t have to choose blue for the first 4. It just has to be any 4.

So if I were to compute the odds of choosing all 8 blue, it would look something like this:

1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6.

That’s a good starting point. Since we don’t have to choose all 8, but only 4, blue M&Ms, we can just throw out 4 of the terms, so we end up with this:

1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6

This is when I started getting confused. I started to wonder if maybe the 8 don’t have anything to do with the problem at all. Maybe the odds of choosing 8 at random, eating 4, and being left with only blue are the same odds as just randomly choosing 4 blue M&Ms.

This is when I ditched the analytical in favor of the empirical. As much as I wanted to eat 10,000 M&Ms to prove my hypothesis, I decided to write a small computer program to randomly choose 8 M&Ms from a virtual bag, randomly eat 4 of the virtual M&Ms, and then see if the remaining M&Ms were all blue. This I did, and ran it 5,000,000 times. The result: 0.077% of the time, I had 4 blue M&Ms left. That’s right, 0.077% is the same as 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6. So I conclude that the odds are the same, and the problems are, in fact, equivalent.

So I beat the odds that day when I had 4 blue M&Ms left. Without even trying, I did something whose odds were 1,296 to 1, against. I should have gone to Vegas that afternoon.

P.S. The odds of having 4 M&Ms left that are all the same color (any color) are 6 times easier: 1 in 216.

P.P.S. If you want to see the source code (warning: it’s C++), just ask.

1. Hulu in the Living Room

In 2010, Hulu will partner with a company like Western Digital or Popcorn Hour to release a tiny box that connects to your HDTV to watch TV shows and movies, streamed from Hulu’s servers. The box will cost less than $100, and have no monthly subscription, because its development will be subsidized by Hulu’s ad revenues. If it’s not released in 2010, it will at least be announced.

2. Cable Networks Become Record Labels

Just like iTunes changed the music industry, online media and broadband Internet access will start to change the TV industry. It remains to be seen who will be the big player (my money’s on Hulu), but one thing is for sure: Americans will have a choice when it comes to buying subscription TV services. The trend will begin in 2010, allowing consumers to get on-demand TV content for free, and will finish some time in the future with cable companies either totally transforming into something like modern record labels, or going out of business.

3. HDTV Sales Will Boom

HDTV’s have gotten so inexpensive that nearly every American household will have one by the end of 2010. This will be driven by the fact that online media will be so easily accessible that most people won’t need to buy cable, so they can easily justify the cost of a new $500 TV.

4. Qt’s Best Year

Companies who develop desktop application software that needs to run on Mac and Windows will simply have no other choice for their developers than Qt. That trend will strengthen in 2010 to the point that it’s a no-brainer decision over platform-specific choices like .NET, Cocoa, and others. Qt has matured so much over the last 5 years that its toe-hold in this market will grow to a full Nelson in 2010.

5. Model Aviation Takes Off

Model airplanes have gotten very popular and accessible. Manufacturers have pushed prices down so low that anyone can afford to get into the hobby. Batteries, R/C electronics, and planes have gotten cheaper, and planes have gotten easier to fly for the novice pilot. The entry-level model airplane market will take off in 2010.

Your Turn

Do you agree with my predictions, or am I totally off?

Have any predictions of your own?

You’re still here?

Okay, buckle up. In the late 1800′s, a paranoid undertaker from Kansas worried that human operators were routing phone calls to his competitors. You see, back in the day an operator (usually female) would manually connect your phone calls for you. No dialing. If you’ve ever watched an episode of “Lassie” where Timmy falls in the well, you’ve seen this in action. So you would pick up the phone and ask the operator lady to connect you to a certain person or business. If you asked for an undertaker, for example, she was free to route your call to whichever undertaker she liked the best. This really torqued off our heroic undertaker, Almon Brown Strowger, who, rather than just blogging about it, set out to solve the problem.

Strowger invented a new kind of relay (which is EE speak for a fancy switch) that could be operated remotely by sending it electrical pulses. The relay could connect phone calls automatically based on what you dialed on your rotary phone. By hooking a bunch of Strowger relays together, you could route calls to any other phone, without the need for a human in the loop.

You’ve probably seen these old phones with rotary dials. That’s why we have ‘em. All because a disgruntled undertaker saw a problem and decided to fix it.

What torques you off? Why don’t you go out and invent something to fix it?

The added thrust helped control the plane. Without it, I would have been toast out of the gates (like last time). The take off was uneventful other than the 90 degree right roll on launch and the first turn which almost crash landed the plane right into the adjacent road. Yikes! Here’s the video:

Everything was going okay, but it was extremely twitchy and stall happy. I think it’s too heavy, cause I was fighting to keep it aloft the whole time. I held my own for a few minutes, and then the low-voltage cut off kicked in. The motor must have been pulling more juice than I realized. I was up wind, which was a problem because the wind was blowing at about 10-15mph. Nevertheless, I managed to bring it in for a nice soft landing. Well, “soft” is relative. The plane touched down at the same spot where the only obstacle in the whole park was sitting: a sideways metal pole. Oops. Here’s the video and crash site photo:

You can’t tell very well from the pic but both the wing and horizontal stabilizer are bent, because they went under the poll while the rest of the plane went over it. Not pretty.

Oh well. Live and learn. My battery was badly puffed (due to the low voltage and high amp draw I’m sure), but it subsided back to normal. Not sure if I trust it for another flight yet, but I will definitely be keeping it in an ammo box and carefully monitoring its voltage before I use it again.

Thanks Cliff for filming!