fluxcapacity

Well, it's certainly been a busy two months!  So much so that we got distracted from writing a second monthly update earlier in September.

Recently, we've had some pretty interesting developments:

First, we're incredibly happy to share that our little startup has grown by 50% in size.  Or, in other words, a third person has recently decided to join Jeff and me on our adventure!  I'd better skimp on the details for now and let him post his own introduction and story as soon as he's had the opportunity to wrap things up at his current gig and settle down here.  But suffice it to say, we're all incredibly excited.

Second, we're moving!  The initial plan was to work out of space in my parents' home in Los Angeles for the first six months, but Jeff and I felt that having three of us living and working full-time would be a bit overkill (despite their awesome level of support in offering to make it work).  Luckily, Jeff's family graciously offered us an empty apartment to live and work out of on their property on Beaver Island, Michigan.

So, in a move that has left some of our friends and family scratching their heads, we're taking the show on the road for roughly another three months while we burrow away and continue to develop technology together from the island.

Here are some pictures of Beaver Island in the winter (courtesy of the Beaver Beacon):

If you would like to come visit us, there are daily and charter flights available through Fresh Air Aviation and Island Airways (Jeff developed the flight reservation system), or ferry rides through Beaver Island Boat Co (until the lake freezes over).

Is this startup suicide?  Paul Graham and The New York Times both might have you believe so!  But the argument that all startups must begin in Silicon Valley seems to hinge on "all other things being equal", which they rarely if ever are.  We're hoping that our divergent path will enable us to invest more time early in developing differentiating technology, bootstrapping all-the-while for as long as possible.  And then, eventually, we'll return to a metropolis, rejoin the tech world, and start going to trendy "Lunch 2.0" style events again (if they still exist).

So, with that, we'll be departing LA over the last weekend in October.  Jeff will be driving his car another 2,000 miles back to Michigan.  I'll be sticking around for my Dad's birthday on the 28th, and rendezvousing with Jeff and secret agent #3 at the airport in Flint, Michigan.

Before we go, we'll be hitting up this month's October g33k d1nner, and we're planning a quick visit to the bay area.  If you're up there and know us or wanna meet us, drop us a line!

Have you ever opened a huge JPEG in your browser, only to watch it slowly download, filling up line-by-line? More than likely, this means the file is a so-called "baseline" mode JPEG. It's great for digital cameras, because it is relatively simple to encode a baseline JPEG, which means you can take pictures faster, but it's somewhat non-ideal for web display because of the sequential loading behavior.

There's a different JPEG mode called "progressive" which improves the situation a bit. Conceptually, it is useful (and quite accurate) to think of progressive JPEGs as first containing a "blurry" version of the image, followed by a series of refinements which sharpen the image, until you arrive at the final, crisp, version. There's a lot of added flexibility in the progressive mode. For example, you could first sharpen an important part of the image (say, the sea turtle's face) and get around to the rest of the image later. In some cases, it is also possible to maintain the same level of quality while shrinking file size, but doing so requires a sophisticated JPEG encoder. Progressive JPEGs are also more difficult to decode, because the information in each pixel is scattered across the file.

I have been spending most of my spare time (and some of my non-spare time) adding progressive JPEG support to Fluxify. I just applied the update to our server, and while there is nothing visibly noticeable, Fluxify should "just work" with progressive mode JPEGs. It also turns out that there was a bug that prevented us from sending grayscale JPEGs, which is fixed now, too.

So, now you can go learn all about JPEG on Wikipedia. The Progressive JPEG article isn't written yet. Any takers?