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From Tech Crunch: Don’t Post The Evidence Unless It Supports Your Case.

The emails provided by WL are truly amazing. Take 3 minutes to read through them. I’ve never seen such unprofessional behavior from a company. Just the email name alone (”Evil Genius”) gives most of the story away.

I don’t know Gina Bianchi, the CEO of Ning, (I spoke with her once by phone when she was doing reference checks on a friend), but I already was a big fan given how well she’s done with Ning. But after reading her emails, I’m even more impressed with her incredible level of patience. If I were in her shoes, I would have terminated my relationship with WL a lot sooner.

Truly amazing.

I’ve been playing around with Mule lately, mostly just trying to learn and see if it’d be a fit for a little side project I’m working on (it looks like it won’t, but that’s OK). But one thing that was a bit confusing about Mule integration is that the 2.0 version is very heavily dependent on Spring. That would be nice if I used Spring, but this project uses Guice.

First I tried Google, but only came up with this. Then I tried to see how other containers (Pico, Hivemind, etc) integrated in to Mule, but it turns out those integrations were for 1.x and nothing has been built for 2.x. I’m sure there is a better solution that what I came up with, but for a quick and dirty integration this worked really well:

    <spring:bean name="foo" class="com.bar.GuiceUtil" 
                       factory-method="getGuiceInstance">
        <spring:constructor-arg>
            <spring:value>com.bar.Foo</spring:value>
        </spring:constructor-arg>
    </spring:bean>

    <model name="...">
          <service name="...">
               <inbound>
                    <inbound-endpoint address="..." />
               </inbound>
               <component>
                   <spring-object bean="foo"/>
               </component>
          </service>
     </model>

Basically, you just make a simple utility class (GuiceUtil) that holds your Guice Injector and offers a static method named getGuiceInstace:

    public static <T> T getGuiceInstance(Class<T> t) {
        return injector.getInstance(t);
    }

Now Spring is configured to created a Spring bean named “foo” that actually came from Guice. Then you simply tell Mule to use that Spring bean. I’m sure there are a lot better ways to do this (I am a complete Mule newbie and know very little of the configuration options), but this got the job done for me.

An coworker from my old company, Spoke, just launched an iPhone version of their app and you’d be silly not to get it right now.

I predict this will become one of the killer apps for the iPhone. The app is really quite simple: it lets you play your home iTunes library (all of it) and your friends libraries on your phone. It works by utilizing a desktop app that integrates with iTunes. It’s simple, effective, and super cool.

And why should you get it right now? Because it’s free for the first 100K downloads, after which it’ll cost $3.99. Get on it!

In a few minutes I’m off to the airport. I’ll be in the San Francisco bay area (my original home) for five days, spending time with friends and family. But I’m also going to be meeting up with a lot of people and companies, trying to figure out what the best place for me to go next is.

If you’re around and want to meet up, drop me an email!

Bam! Third Wheel!

For anyone that ever reads (or read) Maddox (aka: thebestpageintheuniverse.net), you might appreciate what I found yesterday while in Seattle:

Yup, apparently someone actually took Maddox’s idea for rendering the Segway Human Transport obsolete seriously and sold it to the Seattle police department.

Now that I’m leaving my job and looking at my next steps, I’ve been spending some time researching various volunteer organizations that would take me out to third-world/impoverished nations to do volunteer work. So far the two most promising are Doctors Without Borders and Peace Corps.

• Doctors Without Borders provides the 6-12 month window I’d really like to do, but it forbids married couples from going on a mission together. This is a deal breaker for my wife and me.
• Peace Corps supports sending married couples on missions together, but the 27 month commitment is a bit longer than I’d like to do.

I’m leaving Gomez, my current employer, as of next Friday, July 25th. It’s been a great ride. Over the last ~2 years, with Gomez, and an additional year as the founder of Autoriginate/HostedQA, I’ve had a tremendous opportunity to work on really amazing products in the QA/testing/SaaS space.

But it’s also been tough, especially the frequent flights between Portland, OR and Boston, MA, and I’m looking to either pursue an MBA graduate program and/or move back to the San Francisco bay area, where I’m originally from. I’m on the waitlist at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business full-time MBA program, and if that doesn’t pane out I’ll be re-applying to several bay area schools next year while also looking for new opportunities in the bay.

I don’t have anything specific lined up. My plan right now is to spend the rest of the year carefully weighing my next steps. I’m looking at a lot of different options: grad school, another startup, joining a bay area company (ideally a startup focussing on consumer/social media), or possibly even doing something “out there” like joining the PeaceCorps or some other field work in an impoverished country. In the more immediate term, I’d likely be working on mioNews in between planning my next steps.

With that in mind, I’m open to hearing from my friends and readers about what I should do next. Find a job in Portland, OR or the bay area? Perhaps someone has participated in the PeaceCorps and has advise? Or perhaps someone is out there looking for help in software development and/or product management leadership at their startup? Let me know - the idea of so many options excites me!

• Indicate which stories you like, and which you don’t
• Get new stories recommended to you automatically
• Group your friends in folders, such as Family & Coworkers
• Publish stories to your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed - all at once!
• Follow topics of interest & see what the global community thinks

mioNews, on the other hand, is a much more complex UI - similar to an RSS reader. It introduces concepts similar to other RSS readers. But instead of rating people and topics that you like/hate, mioNews asks you to like/hate individual articles. Then, using some autotagging secret sauce, the topics and people are tuned behind the scenes.

While NoiseRiver and mioNews are both young projects and have a lot of room to improve, they are also both strong proofs that social software today does need to better help us cope with the “noise” on the web. I’m sure both products will need their algorithms to be tweaks and improved over time, but the most important thing is that people are open to the idea of allowing computers determine what we should read when we’re overwhelmed with noise.

Today (actually yesterday, but adcom was lagging) was another “deadline”. I was notified, again, that the waitlist for the Berkeley Haas School of Business MBA has decided to keep me on the waitlist. They did say they booted “many” people off the waitlist and rejected them last week, which I guess means my chances have improved. Of course, they only improve if there are actual spots available! Anyway - staying on the waitlist is better than a stick in the eye, so here’s to continuing to hope…