Dear Blogging Community as a Whole,

I wanted to say I’m sorry.  I’ve violated one of Scoble’s core blogging rules i.e. “Don’t change your blog / feed url” often (if ever).  Well I’ve done that all too often but I now have a new url:

http://fuzzyblog.com/

]]> http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/12/16/a-mea-culpa-or-heres-my-new-blog-url/feed/ 19 fuzzyblog http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/12/13/serverbeach-versus-xlhost/ http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/12/13/serverbeach-versus-xlhost/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:12:32 +0000 fuzzyblog http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/12/13/serverbeach-versus-xlhost/ ]]>

So I’m just plain jonesing to do the podcast. That means bandwidth and that means storage. And the desire to play with stuff that TextDrive* just won’t support means that I’m going down the dedicated server route. Given that I’m an ex-Rackspace customer this really isn’t surprising at all to me. I just like having a box which is dedicated to my whacky adventures. Example: The ability to install MySQL 5 and start using it in Python. My TextDrive won’t give me that since its shared hosting. And given that I’m a true MySQL believer and my other buddy Mike says its ready then I want to be all over it. Stored procedures here I come!
So Kevin thinks I should go ServerBeach and Nick thinks I should go XLHost. XLHost is cheaper and offers remote reboot via the web which is, imho, important. XLHost also does a better job on the “Sucks” test:

• Sucks Test on ServerBeach
• Sucks Test on XLHost

So anyone out there have any direct experience with either of these guys ? Thanks in advance.
*TextDrive which both Mike and Niall recommended is actually excellent.

Recommended.

So I’m on like Day 3 or so of Google desktop.   Overall I’m still happy.  Some things have changed:

• I really want Google desktop to index my Gaim logs.  Sadly it won’t and the plug in for it has gone missing (site offline). If the owner of Wickdev.com could put their web page back I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants it and if anyone has the whole source for this (it seems like it was open source at one point), I’d be interested in stepping up and maintaining it (yes I really want IM indexing that bad)
• I’ve reduced the sidebar applets to mostly just the Scratch Pad and the Todo list.
• The Photos widget can be embarassing if you have any photos on your machine that aren’t work safe (or you have kids around).  Oops.
• I discovered that double clicking the size of a sidebar panel increases its size (basically the equivalent of maximizing the window but in a vertical context).  Its very, very nice actually.

Overall I’m hugely pleased with Google Desktop.  Its small, light, fast and “feels right”.  Bravo guys.

I recently had a bit of an epiphany as to just why Podcasting will be huge. I’m sure its obvious and must have occurred to others but just in case I thought I’d blog it.

Its all entropy you see, all entropy. Entropy or the natural tendency of the universe to move from order to disorder. Wikipedia on Entropy and for the physics geeks out there I know all too well that I’m simplifying; its my blog after all. An iPod, when you get it, has no songs on it (for reasons described by Mark Cuban), and then you start putting songs on it. Each song increases the entropy by a little bit. Fill the iPod completely and you’ve maximized its entropy.  Now here’s the important part — you can’t easily pay for enough music to fill a 30 gig iPod much less a 60 gig iPod.  So something’s gotta go there — and it’ll likely be Podcasts.

Now, put another way, and disregarding the whole entropy babble, look at it this way: Most iPods or other portable MP3 players, are basically little hard drives and when has a hard drive in your life ever stayed empty for long? People will fill up the hard drives on their players because, well, they always do. And given that music is too damn expensive to fill the player with it will be either pirated music or Podcasts. And while I’d never bet against piracy*, I’d wager that great Podcasts like Dawn and Drew will drag people into the Podcast world and that will lead to other podcasts and so on.

So podcasting is gonna be huge.

*That’s a fools bet at best.

I find that, once again, I’m unhappy with my cable modem / wifi gateway.  Ideally I’d like:

• Something with at least 4 ports since I have 3 desktops in active use and I prefer cables on my laptops honestly (i’m so damn sick of ssh windows dying when connectivity goes south; and don’t vent to me about Screen – it doesn’t work with VI well so that’s a non starter for me)
• Ability to branch it into a switch since I need more ports (3 desktops + 3 laptops).
• Something with a USB 2.0 port which isn’t Netgear.  I have a brand new netgear wifi gateway w/ usb hub and its as useless as tits on a bull due to firmware bugs and Netgear’s firmware fixes just plain don’t work.
• Something with actual *gasp* working security.  I don’t care if its wep, wpa or what — I just don’t want to have my neighbors leeching my bandwidth and whatever security model it is I need it to work on both Windows and Mac.
• Web UI w/ port forwarding.  Given that I’m working on a local dev server on my new (old) Ubuntu box the ability to forward ports to my local server is highly useful.
• Bittorrent compatible.  I mean come on.  Like I’m not going to open 6881 ?

Any thoughts?  I’ve had mixed success with LinkSys in the past.  I actually have a perfectly good LinkSys but I can’t find the power brick so its effectively a paperweight.

Thanks in advance.

Just go here.  And change ‘foo’ to whatever your account name is (there’s a form field; you don’t have to do it manually at the link level).

When I was speaking at search engine strategies a few days ago, I had this wonderful discussion about podcasting with Randall (Hi Randall; hope all is well; sorry I can’t link to you but I lost your business card).  Randall is in the real estate business and they want to do a podcast.  Like a lot of real internet businesses, they own their own hardware and want to do podcasts but are concerned about the bandwidth.  Yeah I could argue about how bandwidth is cheap, etc but the simple fact is that he was right and I was wrong.

Regardless of how bandwidth is priced, the fact is that he feels its expensive so the question became to me:

How do I make him realize that there is cheap bandwidth out there?

And then, in a flash of clarity like a bolt from above, it struck me: The answer is in DNS.  DNS or “domain name system” is what matches up Internet IP addresses to Internet hostnames.  And, like many geeks, I often thing that the answer is in DNS.  And what he really needs is to do this:

1. Start podcasting
2. Create podcasts.FOO.com where FOO.com is the company’s real DNS name.
3. Set up an alias for podcast.FOO.com  because people will get the singular versus plural wrong anyway.
4. Store all of your podcast media files whether video or audio on a cheap server like TextDrive or ServerBeach or whatever.    You don’t need expensive bandwidth and 5 9s of reliablity for media files.  As different companies come out and are cheap then rotate your DNS entries onto some new hosting place.

See?  Wasn’t that simple?  Seriously tho if you’ve got a real data center and you want to experiment with something like podcasting, don’t store the data files on your SAN or use up bandwidth at in your real NOC.  Just get some cheap hosting and get on it.  DNS can isolate you from all but very temporary breakages.

ls /var/www/apache2-default/

tail -f  /var/log/apache2/error.log

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

/etc/apache2

or in my VI centric little world:

vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

So I’ve decided to go with Django as my 1st python web framework.  The documentation is basically spot on but I hit a typically bizarre setup error about not being able to find make files under the python directory so I loaded up Synaptic Package manager and selected Autoconf and then did a search for python and basically selected close to everything and clicked update and it just plain worked.  Outstanding!

A buddy of mine just IM’d me about cheap hosting in the US.  His requirements are:

• non shared hosting i.e. dedicated server
• a linux distro which doesn’t have package management issues i.e. gentoo / debian / *bsd
• a non astronomical monthly fee ( he needs at least 2 servers from day 1 to build a clustered architecture)
• ssh access w/ some kind of decent web based admin tool like webmin
• ability to do some kind of disc mirroring / heartbeat with drbd or something similar.  This is a high reliability application but he can’t afford to buy his own hardware*

I’ve heard good things about ServerBeach but I don’t know.  Anyone have any thoughts?  Niall?  Where’s your box?  Kevin what do you use ? (and yes I could traceroute but I think its a good conversation to start)

*I know that’s inconsistent on the face of it.  Don’t bug me about it.  Bug him (oh crap; he requested anon)

technorati tags: hosting, startupstart

I think the most common questions any entrepreneur has are always about money — how to get it, where to get it, how much to get, etc. And, sadly, I see everyone always make the same mistake.  They focus on what they can raise but NOT on what they actually need.  Oy.  And I’ve done it myself too.

So here’s my little bit of web 2.0 startup advice for the day:

1. Understand your own business.
2. There is an inflection point for any startup where a linear increase in growth or capacity requires a non linear increase in capital needed.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately.  And I mean a lot and I think the best analogy I can make is from architecture.  Reading Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painter’s* book 2 years ago at Foo Camp made me think a lot about architecture.  And I think the lessons from building buildings are very applicable to software.

Lets say you live in the Bayou and you want to build a dog house.  That can be done with a few scraps of plywood, a 2×4 for 2 and Rover’s is just as happy as a clam.  So now you get a 2nd dog and you want to make it bigger.  Well more plywood and another 2×4 or some additional lathe and you can easily double the capacity of the dog house.  No worries.  Now your neighbor asks you to dog sit for them.  Ok no problem.  You make it bigger still and you can hold 3 dogs.  Then all your neighbors bring over their dogs.  And guess what?  Your dog house sinks into the mud.  Why?  Well you never made a foundation.

That’s what I mean about a linear increase in growth or capacity leading to a nonleaner increase in capital.  You could easily double or triple the size of the dog house and rover et al were fine. But when you needed to quintuple it you really had to rip it down and pour a cement foundation or it would just sink into the mud.
Having had lunch with Kevin Burton from Rojo / TailRank a few weeks ago, I worry that he’s making this type of mistake.  Now don’t get me wrong TailRank rocks. But as the quantity of data he’s trying to process expands, he’s going to face this issue.  Heck FeedLounge seems to be in the middle of it. Controversy.  My guess is that WordPress.com / Matt either have hit this point already or will soon.
So I think this is a basic either VC or engineering principle and I’m going to be cocky enough to name it after myself:

Scott’s Law of Funding: Linear increases in growth / capacity will at some point require nonlinear amounts of capital.
I look back at the founders of Google and that giant pile o’ money they took back in the early days ($25 meg from Kleiner if my memory serves me right) and, damn, were they ever right.  Yeah they might a lot richer now and less diluted if they had taken smaller drips as they went but what they didn’t do was ignore this.  Whether by luck or planning they had enough money to deal with this up front.

An Internet Example:

When I built out the first data center for Feedster, I bought cheap switches (D-Link gigabit switches to be specific) for our internal LAN backbone**.  Why?  Well switches are complex and I didn’t know enough to buy the right ones.  Now we’re using *censored* but its an enterprise level switch.  Our traffic may have gone up by *censored* fold but our switch costs went up by *censored* fold but its a nonlinear price increase.

Conclusion

So keep this in mind.  For whatever you do, whatever your startup, there will be a point where your growth rates are going to be such that you need a non linear increase in capital.  Yes I know you’re a hot web 2.0 startup and you’re going to be acquired before then.  Well that’s the plan and that’s always the plan but it rarely actually happens that way.  Sometimes you have to actually operate the thing you’re building and, if so, are you going to be able to.

Footnotes

*If you haven’t ready this yet then you need to.  If you haven’t re-read it lately then you should.  Heck I just did.

**I did however use Cisco for our external facing side.

So here’s the report on the 1st day of the 30 days. Here’s what it looks like on my system:

And here are some details:

• I moved it from the far right hand edge of the screen to the far left. That feels more right for what its worth.
• I’ve seen a few window redraw issues and my windows programming experience says that that’s tied to applications grabbing the wrong screen contexts / sizes and making assumptions that they had the whole display area. Given that I didn’t see any of that before I moved it, there must be some bad fu associated with left hand side of the screen (and that’s likly why Google put it on the right). Still I read from left to right so having it on the left feels right.
• The internal notepad, “Scratch Pad”, is brilliant. All of my machines since 1995 have had a single file, todo.txt, launched at startup into notepad.exe or another editor. Why? Well its my equivalent of a sticky pad / writing on the screen. This is better since its moderately visual and I can always see it.
• So that’s great BUT their own search engine can’t find text you type into it. I started by entering “where doth these notes go” into the Scratch Pad but now 12 hours after I typed it in, its still not indexed. Consistency thy name is engineer!
• Not knowing where the data is stored for Scratch Pad bothers me a lot but that’s just me.
• The little todo list widget is nice. Very nice. I’m the classically disorganized guy who focuses hugely on what’s in front of him so having this is cool.
• The email widget is really, really nice but I don’t understand the filters UI at all. Here’s what it looks like:

  

• I know that’s hard to see but the idea is that you put in terms of what you don’t want to see in your list of emails.  I like that because I don’t want a list of 10,000 messages in here.  But what I don’t understand is how to use this dialog.  Subject is a text field as is From and To.  So do I put the words in the subject field or the Has the Words field.  I suspect that what they wanted was a checkbox or radio button here.  Recommendation: See Thunderbird’s filters dialog box.  While I have many, many issues with Thunderbird, they really did get filters right.
• It seems hard to do filename searches or perhaps it was still indexing my disc.  I wanted to hack the iPodder / Juice code a wee bit to help my snaky goodness (Python) and was looking for xrced and all it found was a mail message containing a reference to xrced but not the xrced script.
• I’m hugely biased towards currency in search results.  Hey I founded Feedster right?  For me currency is often all that matters.  If I’m searching for *.doc what I want are the latest *.doc files NOT everything on my blasted hard disc.  I’d strongly recommend to whoever writes this absolute gem of a piece of software that they read Gelertner’s papers on the Timestream / Lifestream approach to organizing data.  Gelertner rocks.

But overall I still love this little beast.  Its actually gotten me to respond to emails which any long time reader knows I generally don’t do.

My oh my. I’m just plain astonished at the rich, frothy goodness that is Google Sidebar / Google Desktop 2.0 / whatever the heck they call it. This thing is bloody well rocking my world. Yes I know that I’m the last person on the planet to try this new thing from Google which came out more than 6 months ago. And I agree, like Inluminent says so well, that there need to be Mac versions of Google stuff. That said, given that I’m a professional search guy, I’ve seen this type of thing before. Verity did it. Fulcrum did it. DTSearch did it. Others have done it. None of them seem to have done the overall issues of local search as well (note — I haven’t looked at Yahoo’s stuff or MSN’s stuff yet; when I have time). Google really nailed this one well.

So here’s my committment. I’m notorious for NOT using new technology. I still copy files with a DOS shell. I use notepad even tho I’ve gotten 25 other tools, etc. I’m going to give Google Desktop 30 days and not turn it off, not minimize it and see how it shakes out. If I have to give it screen real estate for 30 days then I’ll definitely use it.
The clock starts … now!

technorati tags: search

So I’m seeing Niall and Om and “I wanna be like them”.  Seriously though.  I’m definitely fascinated by podcasting, I’ve got the iPod 60 gig, and I feel that I’m ready to actually *gasp* create a podcast.  What occurs to me that might be interesting to the 13 people who read this blog is this : Tech War Stories.  I’ve been in technology for so damn long now and worked with so many characters that perhaps tossing out some of those stories like:

• Every startup needs a green football
• The day paul got a gun or “How to become a consultant in 1 easy step”
• Real engineers can explain their code
• Everyone needs a Geek Kit

If this sounds interesting to you then leave a comment and I’ll start working on it.  Most of my best stories are actually pre-Internet so that gives them an aura of “Aged Bits”.

Oh and my 4.5 year old, Alex, has agreed to help.  He wants to be the Internet’s youngest podcaster:

Ever hear a podcast that just called to you?  So much so that you actually called up the Podcaster and said “Thanks Dude”?  Well if not then I recommend you do so. What creative person doesn’t enjoy getting thanked for their work?  Well, for me last night (post SES sleep woes have made this now “last night”) it was the Om and Niall show from OnPodSessions.  Part of it what was good for me was that the two of them just plain riffed on each other in a flavor akin to a Jazz improv session.  Part of what was good for me is that it had an inherently high trust factor — I know both Niall and Om fairly well (Niall more so; Om less so).  Just as I inherently trust a Steve Gillmor podcast, I trust Niall and Om.

Nice work guys.  Thanks.

Having read much of Defensive Design, the new 37 Signals book, today during SES travel, I found my experiences downloading a new Linksys driver for my old WPC11 v3 card interesting.  Here’s the download page.  The 1st download link is, unhelpfully, for the Windows CE version of the driver.  The second is for the Linux driver.  Now I’m all for multiplatform and all but put the most common platform at the top.  Sigh.

So I just got my 1st ever USB keychain drive. $20 at Walmart for 256 mb of storage. I plug it in and it just works. I copy* my PowerPoint for SES over to it and it just works. *StillAstonishedAmI*. I mean how often does a hardware doo hickey just plain work? No drivers, no nothing. That’s just plain awesome.

So here’s the question of the day:

Why don’t any Digital Cameras have a USB port on them to accept a keychain drive? Wouldn’t that just be an awesome answer to the problem of running out of storage and not being able to synch (bad weather; no laptop, etc). Am I nuts to want this or is it now a standard camera feature and I’m just clue free and proud of it.

*Yes Virginia, I started a DOS Window and copied feedster-ses*.ppt onto it. Old habits die hard and old geek dogs all too rarely learn new tricks.

I actually asked my wife for 12 Weeks with Geeks for  Christmas.

Oh my.  Russell is flexing his blog mojo and realizing the power of the dark side.   The worst thing ?  It would actually work.

Wow.  I was just looking for this today when I was thinking about Jeremy:

Roughly 60 days ago, I began My 30 Day Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Challenge. Obviously it lasted longer than 30 days, but the experience has been very, very useful. I’ve learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of both services.

Part of me wonders how many Gmail engineers have forced themselves to live off of Yahoo! Mail for a month. And I wonder how many Yahoo! Mail hackers spent a month exclusively on Gmail.

Anyway, here’s the lowdown.

More….

Heh.  I was leafing through my copy of the Pragmatic Programmer while taking my shower (what’s that you say; you don’t shower at 3 am?  Then you don’t have an absolutely wonderful Australian web consultant like Mike that you’re time synched with) and I found this little gem:

find . -name ‘*.php’ -mtime +7 -print | xargs grep ‘v2db.php’

Yeah I know I should know it off the top of my head but I generally look these up until I memorize it.  And, if you think I’m blogging this because I **know** I’ll need it again then please pass Go, collect $200 and get a Krispy Kreme.  Oh wait.  Here you go:

i.e. How to Bring Web 2.0 Company Engineering Under Control

Yes Virginia this is another article in my Engineering Management 101 series of posts which can all be found under my Software Engineering tag.

Process is often to many engineers a dirty word. Sometimes its a very dirty or #*$&#(*$ word. However this is not necessarily the way process has to be. When implemented correctly process actually aids engineering increasing the ability of the organization to deliver quality product. Alas, that one word “correctly”, in the previous sentence makes all the difference. All too often process is handed down as an edit from above as if the hand of god had graced it upon the organization. Whenever this happens, process is almost always a failure — particularly in small, highly technical groups that are used to full control of their activities.

[ And, yes, given that web 2.0 companies are often started by a single "hackerish" individual that's the type of "hackerdom" I'm referring to. ]

These types of groups, if not directly involved in the authoring of the processes, will tend to fight them tooth and nail. As in any type of successful organizational change, HOW you go about implementing things makes a world of difference.
So here are my Ten Tips towards Implementing Successful Engineering Processes:

1. Make Sure that the Precipitating Indicent for the Process would actually be Solved If There Was Process in Place. Generally the move towards process comes as a result of some sort of incident that makes senior management throw their hands up and say things like “Those (#$*#($ hackers; we need to bring order to our chaos”. The problem is that all too often the precipitating indicent wasn’t one that process might have solved.For example a network event happens like a partner’s ad server goes down intermittently causing unreliable site performance. Now any software engineer knows that when something happens to software that’s outside of your control to which a network connection is being established is devilishly tricky to debug. Unless you’ve specifically instrumented your code around that sort of thing, you’re just going to be scratching your head when the error occurs. And you’re going to be rapidly debugging just to diagnose the problem. When you run large production web sites these types of things do happen. And, when the partner has large server farms with some kind of dynamic server rotation based on DNS, it gets worse. When a large online portal first debuted their Add Feed to MyCustomPage buttons, we tried desperately to support it and it would work one time. Then we’d refresh the site and try and subscribe again and it would fail. What was happening, as best as we could diagnose from the outside, is that in the pool of servers that handled end user feed subscription there was one or two that were using an older version of code that couldn’t handle feed urls longer than (if I remember correctly) 128 characters. Given that we make long urls, this was clearly an issue to us. Now you could have all the process in the world and all the units tests and it still stands a very good chance of NOT catching that.And, engineers, particularly the really good ones, the ones you have to have to succeed in today’s Internet business are logical. When you try and justify a process change based on a precipating incident that simply isn’t valid and no amount of process would have solved, they immediately and dramatically discount the process model on its face. No matter whether or not the process model actually has valid elements, they discount it and dismiss it. This is sometimes referred to, or at least similar to, “Flipping the Bozo Bit“. Yes engineers do this both too easily and too frequently. Never the less if you want to work with engineers its important to understand.
2. Pick the Right Time to Implement Process.Here’s a secret about process that I probably shouldn’t say. If you want to make sure that you get process implemented, its almost as important to pick WHEN you implement the process as WHAT the process has in it. Let’s say that your engineering department has a new release under way. If you try and change processes before the release is finished, no matter how valid the process is, they will kick, scream and howl. They will fight the process model with every fiber of their being.Why? Well engineers purely hate the rules being changed on them. When an engineering group agrees to ship a product, they do so knowing that there are one or more constraints on them. An example of a constraint is the feature set. Engineers go into a release process knowing the feature set. Add more features to the release and, well, the rules have been changed. The engineers know all too well, whether explicitly or implicitly that new features have costs and that they may well cause the release date to be missed.But, if you wait until after the release is done, then the engineering group is often so damn tired that they’ll simply agree to anything just to have management stop annoying them. Once upon a time I was in a large, publicly traded software company. We had a release team of probably 35 people across our Cambridge, Boulder and Albany departments. We met our delivery date and the Chairman of the board walked through Engineering with a Shopping cart passing out bottles of champagne because we had actually shipped in Q4 thereby fulfilling his promise to Wall Street. And, promptly thereafter, new engineering processes were implemented. None of us were happy but we basically shut up and accepted it. It was the peace of exhaustion.
3. Avoid Holy Wars. There are exactly 2 holy wars in all of programming. One is the Editor war (VI versus Emacs versus an IDE) and the other is the Platform war (Windows versus Mac versus Unix). Any process document which mandates one of these has a high chance of failing. Any process document which mandates both of these has an even higher chance of failing.
4. Make sure that any process you want to implement is economically viable. Engineers tend to be logical (they can also be irrational of course; they’re human). If an engineering process that’s requested isn’t economically viable, well, they know its going to fail. And they simply won’t take it seriously. Lets say for example that someone gets the “Pair Programming” bug and they want to implement it. Well that’s great but if you have engineers that work from remote locations regularly, its not economically viable. Why? Well unless you’re willing to fly people to someone’s home office it ain’t going to work. Now lets say that your organization works with code in 3 different languages (C, Perl, PHP) and you want to implement a process by which all checked in code is reviewed by another person. Well unless your organization has substantial excess engineering capacity that process requirement is not valid. Multiple languages in the same organization generally means your staff are broken into specialists by language. So you might not even have the capacity which means you’re going to have to go out and hire another say Perl programmer just to review your existing Perl programmer’s code. And that’s not going to happen; its just management speak.
5. Don’t leave gaping logical inconsistencies in your process model. The classic mistake the virtually all web process models make lies at the database layer. Engineering process simply isn’t a matter of code checkins anymore. Often there’s significant process issues tied to how you implement changes at the data level. As an example I have regular jobs I kick off on our core data warehouse that can affect the categorization of 100K feeds or more at a time. Recently I changed the categorization of more than a million feeds in a single day. Any process model has to take into account row level versioning across multiple tables. And that dramatically impacts the process model. Where the heck do you check that into Subversion?
6. Identify the influencers and seek buy in. A long time ago I spent 3.5 years building, selling and installing high end ($250,000 + ) corporate knowledge management software. One of the key lessons from experience i learned is if you want new organizational processes to succeed then you find out who the influencers are and you go to them BEFORE you define a new process and you get their buy in as part of the definition step of the process. If you go around the key influencers then they’ll torpedo you every time. The way to succeed is to get the influencers to be part of writing the process spec. This is basic politics 101 / management 101.
7. Make sure its uniformly applied. Process models work when they’re rules in general not rules in specific. If you’re going to have a process model then it applies across the board; every programmer; every project from big to small.
8. Be Specific. Don’t leave a term in their like “Senior Software Engineering Staff”. If you’ve got someone in mind for, say, code reviews then use a name. Let people know who’s actually going to do what.
9. Make things such that process is required. Engineers always fight against new. things. Believe it or not we’re actually the most conservative people in the world. We know that most technology doesn’t work; heck we wrote the bugs that keep it from working. So if you want to get engineers to do something then make it so its actually required. Now let us say you have a sole engineer on a project and he’s not checking into subversion regularly. He owns all the code and he’s solely responsible for every single change. Well if you ask him why, he might reply “Look — I can use Subversion but its slower. I know every change I’m making and when I need to I make backups.” But, however, assign another engineer to that project permanently and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Subversion use won’t be a problem anymore. Why? Simple. At that point the use of Subversion is required.
10. Don’t ignore ongoing work in process. Directives like “Cease all coding until the requirements of this process model are met” in any business aren’t realistic. In an Internet business really aren’t realistic. Often times there are significant projects that have to be completed before a process model can be started. Its rare that engineering management knows everything that’s going on. We’ve seen this in case study after case study of factory floor workers and software engineers are new age factory workers.
11. Make sure it matches business constraints. When I was at Dataware, the company was recovering from an engineering manager who required an SEI (Software Engineering Institute) process model. Dataware had traditionally been a hacker driven culture which some of the most talented people I’ve ever been privileged to work with (Hi Jim Kearney; Hi Andrew Willemsen; Hi Pete Jenney; Hi Brian Giedt; Hi Ed Fischer). Anyway the company had newly gone public and management wanted to concurrently deliver innovative new products and have a dramatically more rigid process model. The problem is that the business constraint (innovation) didn’t match the process model (rigid).  This dichotomy basically crippled Dataware’s ability to innovate for a long time.  However it made lots and lots of pretty Gantt charts.
12. Beware blogged lists of steps. The advice you find on the web may only be worth what you pay for it.

Someone recently IM’d me about my “100 Things About Me” post which was, good lord, 3 plus years old and I thought this was an interesting meme: 10 things which have changed about you or are just plain geeky as all heck since you either started a web 2.0 company or joined one:

1. New favorite caffeinated beverage: Vietnamese iced coffee
2. Number of post mortem documents you have written with at least one #$&#*($# word in them: ALL.
3. Number of times you’ve installed linux on company servers: At least 40.
4. Number of tattoos you had when you started company / joined company: 0.
   Number you have now: 1.
   Number visible with clothes on: 0.
5. Number of times you’ve slept in the office: Don’t know but its likely within the size of a MySQL tinyint field.
6. Number of people you’ve dated since your web 2.0 experience started: 1.
7. Geekiest thing you’ve done since you joined a web 2.0 company: Convert an Intel 486sx chip to a keychain while watching my son take a bath.
8. Number of times you’ve changed blogging tools: 5.
9. Number of times you’ve sworn at a blogging tool when you lost a post with it: Well it certainly exceeds the maximum value of #5.
10. Number of venture capitalists who’ve turned you down: Next question please.

And, for the special bonus round:

1. Number of pounds you’ve put on since you started: 12.

Note: You’re 10 things would be likely different than mine. That’s good. I’m just curious if my experiences are the norm. Niall? Want to continue this?

Interesting. I just finished a long IM chat with my buddy Greg and he pointed me towards EZT as a templating library. He wrote and, well, $geek_fu is no stronger than Greg’s. He and I tossed it around for a while and, without having coded with it, it feels very, very similar to my beloved SmartTemplate from SmartPhp. Every web page I’ve written for 3 years now has relied on SmartTemplate so finding an analog on Python increases my happy quotient dramatically.

We also shot the breeze on OR mappers and object dbs and that was interesting. Good to know that I’m not the only one who thinks the way I do. Its what I call me “Codd and Date” manifesto:

Data shall be stored in tables. Period. As Codd and Date handed it down from the heavens so shall it be.

Wikipedia on Codd and Date (well Codd at least)

I could also describe this in a way familiar to any Highlander freak:

There shall be only Tables.

Good stuff. Thanks Greg!

Ok I have my 1st gui Python app up thanks to this. Its nothing more than a cross platform text box but just that is cool. Quite cool actually.

Now conceptually I really do like the idea that Python is brace i.e. { and } free. Having managed literally departments of programmers through different programming standards and the “indentation wars” I can see the desire to call “A Pox Upon their Houses; there shall be no braces”. Guido was absolutely brilliant when he made this decision and $guido_geek_fu++; as we would say in PHP syntax.

That said one of the more infuriating things I find about learning Python is that when you paste code in from the web, the indentation gets munged and then things don’t compile. Given that indentation is basically invisible and that any newbie will paste code in from things like O’Reilly’s Safari (i.e. an online version of the Python Cookbook), you can see the problem.

Am I the only person who’s ever noted this? I can’t be but I’ve never seen it discussed.  Niall I know you do Python as do you Simon (and, yes, I’m looking intently at Django).  Am I on crack here ?  Did I fall off the turnip truck somewhere in the basics of the learning curve?  Now bear in mind that I’ve spent the last several years steeped in brace centric languages and, at least for me, I find that the getting past the initial hump of a new language is the hard part.  After that its all the same stuff but that initial hump, the adaptation to a very new way, is the hard part.

This is an article in a series that I’ll be writing. The next one may be “Why Engineers Don’t Always Do What They’re Told”.

Understanding BitRot

Among software engineers there’s a term BitRot. We don’t talk about it all that much and its not well understood but its this: Bits really do rot. You write some code. It pulls in some libraries. 3 months later you use it again and despite never having touched that code, it magically doesn’t work. Either one of the libraries changed or a Unix permission somewhere went from Foo to Bar or whatever. Even though bits are digitally perfect, they actually decay. Its an entropy thing. So I’m working on the new version of Feedster that will come out *censored* and I keep finding that what I’m doing is familiar. So I grep through the code base and, sure enough, I’ve done this before. And you what happened? The damn bits rotted on me. So when you manage engineers keep in mind that just because your people wrote code once upon a time, if that code isn’t in active use, it may well have rotted away.

Why Engineers Hate Building Tools

Now a very, very common case of BitRot is in the area of internally developed tools. You know what I mean — you have a site that does Bar so you need a little web form or executable that makes Foo easy. So you, generally some non geek, asks a developer to do it for you. Heck James did this to me last night. It happens all the time. Now the problem with tools and BitRot is that those tools are never industrial strength. They’re always, always last minute efforts that never get thought out well. They tend to break at the drop of a hat or with the slightest breeze. And what happens is the developers themselves never use them so we don’t see it when they break. We go and modify some core library which is called by it, change the library calls in the production version of the code and not in the tools.

So BitRot is one common problem with tools. Another one is that building great tools is actually really, really ***hard***. Now traditionally at Feedster I’ve done site level administration right at the raw SQL level. I mean its easy right to write this: “UPDATE foo SET BAR=1 WHERE qoo=BAH”;. Actually its not easy. But its trivial and I’m used to it. I spend 99% of my every day in Putty logged into up to 35 to 50 different sessions. Yes it is “King of Tabs” meets ssh for “Window Hell”. Since I always have access to the server canonically known as “dbwrite” it really hasn’t bothered me. But Feedster’s not just me anymore (technically it hasn’t been for a long time but as our traffic volume rises the # of support incidents rise correspondingly). And since I end up with a bunch of issues forwarded to me, my work load has been rising. So lately I’ve been on a “Tools Tear” to enable people like James (who is a sales guy and has no relationship to either support or QA but is just helpful as all get out) and Sheldon.

So you start implementing tools… And the complexity just ***grows***. An example is making minor edits to your site’s home page like adding the Feed of the Year contest button to the home page. So you figure:

• sole text field w/a unique key
• db save and load routines

That of course then leads to the need for custom styling or presentation attributes that you simply can’t predict so you to:

• text field of unlimited size
• contains html

Then you find out that you need to support edits to pages other than the home page so you write an html UI page which lets someone other than the programmer choose what page to edit. And you load it with the names of the unique keys that represent the pages to edit.

Then you find out that you have to support a staged environment. This requires a preview ui. It also requires a presentation attribute for “Hot Diggity Damn! This is Ready to Be Served”.

Then don’t even get me started on versioning… And yes I do know that changing text on the home page is both mission critical and non trivial but even the smallest tools have real world requirements. I’ve seen it recently.

And that’s not even taking account issues of login, permissions (not everyone should be able to edit the home page), security holes, etc.

Tools are complex. Engineers hate to write them, at least in a non resourced way, because we know whether by having thought through them in full or simply knowing intuitively “oh crap here I go again”.

Recommendation: Its not all lost. You can do tools right and here’s how:

1. If you’re going to build tools then recognize up front that there are real costs to them. BitRot is real.
2. Assign resources to tools and make building and maintenance of tools the way that new engineering hires are trained. If you’re a new hire then you gotta put your time in like anyone else.
3. Make the engineers use their own tools! I’ve now stopped doing “UPDATE foo SET BAR=1 WHERE qoo=BAH” and been using my own tools and its made a huge difference.
4. Have one landing page for your tools. If you’re a web company — and who isn’t — then integrate even crappy little tools into your Intranet’s main home page or they’ll never get used anyway.
5. Metrics. And for the special GeekFu bonus round what you want to do is tie metrics into your tools. Why? Well its a lot easier to REFUSE requests for tools if you can say to people “Why Svringar you never used the tools I made last time”.

About Me

Although these days I’m known mostly as an engineer and I do operate as a CTO / Senior Engineer / Sole Contributor, in a previous existence called Dataware (Chief Technology Strategist; whatever that is) or Mascot Network (VP Eng), I ran large scale project teams.

My buddy “Mike Down Under” has an interesting post on Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 – $9.95 per month

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for some time now and today I saw a post from Michael Arrington that touched on what I’ve been thinking for a while.

So it’s Web 2.0. we’re all pretty much decided on that. We’re seeing lots of very cool things popping up,  mashups of services and access to technologies that are really quite awe inspiring. We are fast reaching the point where we feel we *must* have these sorts of tools to conduct our daily internet use.

Still, what I find glaring me in the eyes is that there is still a very strong mentality that we shouldn’t have to pay for things on the internet.

…

More…

Well clearly people don’t like to pay for things.  That’s obvious but I don’t think its all of it.  I think a big part of of it is:

• Simplicity of transaction
• Trust

Simplicity.  One of the main reasons why I use Amazon is that I **generally** don’t have to re-enter shipping info, credit card, etc.  And it keeps your shopping cart across sessions.  That makes commerce so simple.  At least it used to.  I used Amazon yesterday to buy the new 37 Signals book and I lost my shopping cart twice, had to re-enter my address and my credit card info.  It was so **jarring** that it didn’t even feel like Amazon.  One of the main reasons why I no longer like to buy from PC Connection is that they idiotically persist in using a session based shopping cart.  And that’s saying something since in 2000 I spent well over $1,000,000 with them at the height of the dot com boom.  80 proliants, EMC storage, cisco gear, etc.

Trust.  Now I founded a web 2.0 company and let me ask you this — who among the Web 2.0 crowd would you think will be here in a year? Now for me trust breaks down to:

• If I use it can I get my data back?
• If I give them $$$ will I get my value out of it?

I could go on and on about this one but trust is one of those fundamental things that is:

• Hard to get
• Easy to lose
• Damn near impossible to recover from

Let me give you an example of a web service that I would gladly pay $20 per month for: Photo Backup. Yes there lots of online backup services but I wouldn’t pay any of them for the privilege.  But if Google or Yahoo offered it?  **Damn**.  Yeah I know intellectually that these guys can screw me over just as well as anyone else.  And I also know that I’m likely to get better customer service from a web 2.0 company (test this — IM one of the Feedster founders, me, at Feedster2003 with a Feedster problem and see if you get a response).  But that’s largely irrelevant unfortunately.  There’s simply a trust factor that both Yahoo and Google will be around a long time.

So if you can’t solve the trust issue maybe you can make the transaction process easier.  And I know that Dave McClure would say “Paypal”.  I’m starting to be a bit dubious on this actually.  The constant phishing attacks and paypal spam I get EVERY day bit by bit make me scared of paypal.  And I strongly doubt I’m the only one.  Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a Web 2.0 version of PayPal.

My darling wife Shelley contributed this audio clip in tribute to Marcia Brady and in complaint of my current work focus.

Thanks to Nick setting up blogs, we’ve now got 3 delighted WordPress users at Feedster:

• Nick (crawler engineering)
• James (sales)
• Rachel (sales and marketing)

*Smile*.  Now this makes the founder of a blogging company proud.  Thanks guys.

Oh my. A comment from Dewayne who has, if my memory is correct, been reading me since my days of Radio Blogging. Here it is:

Scott -

Would you mind letting us in on your thought process for learning Python as opposed to something else? Is this a new part of feedster or just a personal goal? I am asking because I too am seeking the next step in my personal education and right now I am leaning towards learning Ruby on Rails.
Thanks,

Dewayne Mikkelson

Heh.  That’s like the best question anyone’s asked me in weeks.  There are several answers:

1. Personal. Yes it can be used for Feedster but I can’t blog about how so I can’t talk about *censored* where we might use *snakelanguage*.  So if I’m going to blog the learning process, which I’ve found is the best way to force myself to actually do something, then I’ve got to have a personal project.
2. Support System.  Whenever you learn a new language, the support system you have around you makes a huge difference.  I know one person doing Ruby and he’s busy as all heck so his ability to answer dumb ass questions is limited.  I know 3 Python programmers, one superb / world class, one damn good if not superb and one learning.  So I view my chance of “dumb question” help as 3x greater than with Ruby.
3. I need some local tools.  PHP is a wonderful server side tool and its outstanding at what it does.  When you develop in PHP the way I do at Feedster many of the traditional scalibility issues go away.  But, what PHP isn’t good at, is local apps.  Yes there’s php-gtk but that feels like a hack to me.  Python is damn good even at Gui apps.  I’m astonished beyond measure that iPodder / Juice was developed in Python.  Given that my pre-web background was in traditional software development, I know just how hard cross platform GUI apps are and here’s this little Open Source effort doing absolutely rocking work.  I want to understand better how the heck they do it.
4. Its a More Advanced Language.  In Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, he argues fiercely for the language’s inherent “advancedness” (for lack of a better word) as being a more efficient problem solving tool.  I.e. you’re more efficient (at least for some tasks) in VB over straight C and Perl over Fortran and so on.  Its a damn interesting argument and having read over the 1st part of a Python reference book, I’d have to agree that syntactically Python is more advanced than PHP. I’m curious to see if my immersion in PHP for 3 plus years either helps me learn Python or prevents me entirely.  I did a line count on the number of lines of code I’ve written to date in Feedster and its shockingly high.  If you assume that LOC measures are inaccurate even by 50% its shockingly high.
5. It May Be Better Suited to Certain Types of Computing.  As I read through the Python stuff so far, I’m easily seeing that its a powerful language and I can see that its good for GUI programming and server side programming.  At least to me it appears to be less well suited to PHP’s forte — web apps.  Now this is interesting to me since most of 2005 I spent using PHP to do things it really wasn’t meant to do — back end data processing and job crunching.  Yes it worked and I was fine with it but I wonder if a better language might have done the job a little better.  This is a good opportunity to investigate it.
   Note: Simon will no doubt disagree with me.  I’m still learning and I could very well be wrong here..
6. The Rails Question.  Ah yes.  Ruby.  I find Ruby very, very interesting and the advent of 37signals is clear that Ruby has powerful Geek Fu.  That said I feel a little bit like “Well I know how to develop web apps and Feedster has lots and lots of powerful libraries and constructs for it.  Do I really want to start from scratch?”.  Not to mention the concerns you have with a large scale site regarding security, coexistence with other apps, etc.  I actually asked our lead admin to install Ruby on Rails on our dev box a few weeks ago and he’s still making sure that he’s comfortable with it being on there.  And I wonder if the lesson for all of us from 37 Signals isn’t “use ruby” but “do what we do”?  We can develop crappy web apps in Ruby just like we can in PHP.  That said I did just order the new 37 Signals book.

So that’s my thinking Dewayne.  If I was purely doing Web Apps then it would be different but I’m not just thinking that way.

Scott

Sigh. But on OSX the WordPress rich editor doesn’t seem to work in it. Big sigh.

I normally don’t blog things like this but since BoingBoing is a very trusted source (at least to me; your mileage may vary).  Shocking:

PriceRitePhoto rip-off artists exposed

Boing Boing stalwart Thomas Hawk tried to order a camera from PriceRitePhoto, and discovered that they company was fraudulently offering the camera at a low price, responding to orders by calling up customers and hard-selling them for overpriced accessories, and if they declined, refusing to fill the order because the camera was “out of stock.”When Thomas called to complain and threatened to blog about the incident, the manager of the store, Steve Phillips, was threatening and abusive. He claimed that he would have Thomas visited by the police, that he’d harass Thomas’s boss, that he’d charge Thomas’s credit card for the full amount and then not ship the camera, and so on. He did, in fact, call Thomas’s boss and scream at him, too.

…
Link

I hope people blog this all over the place and establish a definitive Google pagerank for this posting for PriceRitePhoto so the BoingBoing article floats to the top.

I thought a lot about 1st projects to learn Python and, well, my first idea was overly ambitious.  So I thought more about computing problems I have every single day and one came to me: Gaim IM Logs, well, suck.  I mean the log format is fine but the search is deadly slow I often need access to them when I’m not at the machine where the log was created.  So why not write a Python app that:

1. Runs as a service in the background.
2. Monitors the Gaim log directory structure
3. When it finds a new log file upload it to gmail adding whatever metadata it can find to make it better searchable
4. Extract all embedded urls from the IM logs (hey I’m processing them anyway) to a local “IM Catalog”, time sorted newest at the top — how often do you need a url someone sent you and you can’t remember exactly who or which account you had but you’d know it if you saw it.  This is a feature I had in my late, lamented only by me, Inbox Buddy product and it rocked.

If you think about it, this project covers:

1. Overall application structure
2. Application configuration since you need to know where to look to find the user’s specific IM logs, their gmail account name, mail server, etc
3. Data parsing
4. Network IO in the form of mail sending
5. HTML generation

That’s a lot of the basic primitives I use every single day in PHP.  It’ll be interesting to see how Python compares.

Step 1 – a basic recursive directory scanner looking for log files.

Its that whole Zen Koan thing:

If a tree fell in the forest and no one was there to see, did it fall at all ?

The Web 2.0 developer version of this would be:

If a feature fell in the forest and you were the only one awake in the company to know you just did something wicked cool, was it really cool ?  Or were you just a stressed out geek ?

Sigh.  Anyway.  Ajax is **interesting**.  Hopefully coolness to come soon.  And I figured out my first Python project to boot.

Note: Typo corrected.  Thanks to Mark for this one.  Oy.

Evan of Blogger and Odeo fame just wrote a damn good essay about being “10 Rules for Web Startups” and I thought “Damn but I need to understand that better”. So I figured I make an annotated version and relate it in context of my own startup lessons. This is, after all, how I tend to learn — I take something and dissect it. Anyway. Thanks Evan! Great essay.

#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there’s less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there’s a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

Me: Yup. In my first company we made a product called HyperWriter which was a pre-Internet GUI based hypertext editor and browser. Think FrontPage but starting in 1987. Yes, Virginia there was a Hypertext industry before the web. No Virginia it did not survive the advent of the Internet with one exception — Eastgate Systems, makers of the ever wonderful Tinderbox run by the equally wonderful Mark Bernstein. Anyway this was a very horizontal product with users in literally every industry like BASF (intranets), Firestone (online training), Higher Education (online courses about nematodes). Those were just a few of the uses that our thousands of customers had for the product. And, while it was a great product, we suffered from lack of focus. Applications for the product broke into two main categories:

• Text based such as online documentation
• Interactive such as education and training

We ended up adopting the positioning statement “HyperWriter – Your one solution for online documentation and interactive training”. This, honestly, served no one well and our rationale at the time was that one of those was too small and we’d be better off not “limiting ourselves”. Clearly both were huge industries and focus would have served us well. Go Ev Go!!!

#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist’s ass. Third, consider doing something that’s not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have “blog” in their name, RSS companies “feed,” or podcasting companies “pod” or “cast”? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

Me: Yep. Google clearly thrived by being the best in the world at something that everyone else disregarded (search and then advertising). Look at Oddpost, the best damn web mail client ever. Look at all the new startups around doing AJAX versions of “traditional” web apps like calendaring. New platforms always give an opportunity for retakes of prior apps.
Now — about the name. Yes Evan is right about making your identity stand out but you need to be really careful about it particularly when you mess with things that sound cool.
My good friend Shimon is doing it with a wicked cool AJAX based Todo List manager (Voodoo Todo) after he did excellent work on Frassle a very, very cool blog publishing platform. And I’d love to give you a link but I just googled his name and several variants on it and damn if I can find it. I gave you the Frassle mention in the hope that he had a link from Frassle to Voodoo. Sigh. He doesn’t.

Update: Its voo2do.com.

#3: Be Casual
We’re moving into what I call the era of the “Casual Web” (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people’s everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they’re just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

Me: Interesting. I hadn’t ever thought about it but Evan’s right — there is a huge opportunity by looking at the web from this perspective. My gut says there’s a huge opportunity still in photos. Flickr nailed the single user photo sharing solution but, having spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my inlaws, I firmly believe that the problem is really easy sharing amongst the family unit. But that’s the point of another blog entry… Got it. Be casual.

#4: Be Picky
Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn’t feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google’s biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

Me: *chuckle*. Very true. Everyone always wants something and often its not good for you. One tweak here and one tweak there and soon you have a whole big mess.

#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it’s sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don’t get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

Me: Man oh man is that true. I can point to things in my own site that aren’t user centered where I didn’t fight hard enough for the user’s perspective and Evan’s dead on here. User. User. User. (Said to the tone of “Marcia Marcia Marcia”). Note to self: Buy the new book from 37 Signals.

#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don’t trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you’re small and they’re big, it’s hard to say no, but see #4.

Me: Well that’s why Feedster exists. I’m a search guy and I saw an idea on a blog for “RSS Search Engine” and I said “I Can Do That and, damn it, I want that” and 3 days later I not only had one but it was featured on Slashdot. And, initially at least, we did hire people who used it. And we did add features based on my desires (although we’ve moved away from that). I’ve called this “Scratch Your Own Niche” before.

#7: Be Greedy
It’s always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it’s true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company’s ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

Me: Yep. We used to actually have a self service advertising system using Paypal to allow people to place their own ads on the Feedster.com site. Before our first CEO wanted it taken down we had made some $6,000 cash in ad revenue. Teeny numbers I’ll admit but I wonder what it would be if we hadn’t taken it down. Perhaps I should have fought harder for that one. Alas. Seriously though its ok to charge money. I just counseled a startup recently to give special pricing to Web 2.0 companies but charge less if they blog. Charge even less if they blog regularly.

#8: Be Tiny
It’s standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you’re successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they’re small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn’t cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.

Me: Yep. Acquisions are, without question, the end game for most firms these days. Being tiny is definitely a way to go. I’d question Elance though. I’m not an outsourcing guy. I believe in creating and owning your own intellectual property.

#9: Be Agile
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr’s company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That’s why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

Me: Well said. Startups should be able to turn on a dime and react to new things. We were slow to react to podcasting but we’re starting to do the right things in that area now.

#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can’t be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I’ve found than David Allen’s GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you’ll have a secret weapon.

Me: Given that I’m blogging this at 2:08 am after a hard core day I hear you Evan. Clearly I need to look at GTD and I will. Note to self. That said, you will have crunch times and you best know how to do it and survive it (I’ve got a blog piece on this coming out).

#11 (bonus!): Be Wary
Overgeneralized lists of business “rules” are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

Me: Roflol.

]]> http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/11/30/the-annotated-evhead/feed/ 16 fuzzyblog http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/11/30/becoming-p3/ http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/11/30/becoming-p3/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2005 03:09:51 +0000 fuzzyblog http://fuzzyblog.wordpress.com/2005/11/30/becoming-p3/ ]]>

Its time to become a P^3 person. I mean I know Perl, I know PHP. Why not *drum roll* Python?

1. Download Python 2.4. Done.
2. Ask knowledgeable Python Person “What Gui Framework?”. “WxWindows”. Download. Done.
3. Open obligatory 2 year old Python book that my wonderful wife gave me as a present back in 2003. Read first chapter. Done.
4. Type “Hello World” into Idle. Done.
5. Plan first project. Make it something I need. Ah yes. Got it. Need to research if its viable in Python. Requires a tree control, launching external apps under Windows, getting a process ID and an edit control. Should be viable.
6. Write first blog entry about Learning Python to force myself to follow through on it. Done.

Heh. Feels good to be geeky again. P^3 is the goal I say, P^3. Hm… Given that in another age I did prolog can that make me already P^3 or does code you last wrote in 1987 not count anymore ?

I’ve got a good friend, someone I know via IM, that wants to start a company.  He’s always asking me for advice, which is good of course, but I thought it would be better to just start blogging it since I know he’s a reader.  Anyway.  Here’s today’s “Advice Bit”:

Metrics

Now I’ve been through the startup mill a few times now and there’s one thing that’s starting to **finally** sink in: Metrics Matter to VCs.  I’ve spent a few bits of odd time lately revamping the Feedster internal stats system so I can better gauge how to manage what features on Feedster need improvement and its been illuminating.  One of the things that I’ve learned also is that, in a web environment, you can get metrics on ***anything***.  A product manager asks you for a tool?  That’s fine.  But start capturing usage metrics. Then, when you’re having trouble debugging the tool, see if Feature foo is actually being used.  If its not then just delete feature foo.

Now the true lessen here for new startups is that if you’re starting out and you have NO codebase then you can build metrics in from the ground floor.  Every engineer knows that if you know a constraint on a problem early its a lot easier to solve the problem.  Accept that you need metrics on every facet of the organization and build that in early.

Hm… I’m a self admitted IM freak. I use IM religiously and devoutly, normally logging 12+ hours daily on IM. So I tried the new Gtalk client recently and it had some problems that affect me, being an IM freak, that I’d love to see addressed. I doubt they will be since I’m utterly not the target demographic (non advanced end user) but giving them some ideas is my daily positive karma contribution:

• Standard Windows Interface. I’m not sure what is it about writing an IM client which makes you want to change the core OS interface but Gtalk, like Trillian, does this. Example — why isn’t there a maximize button? See my previous Trillian essay about this. Trillian is a brilliant product but I don’t want to learn how to use a very different set of GUI primitives.
• Logging. Yes Virginia I know that IM logs are loved by some and hated by others but, if you need them, not having them is killer. I just had one of the best IM sessions in a long time over Gtalk and at the end of it I needed to capture the urls, thoughts, etc and I knew that if I closed the window w/o saving it to a file I was hosed. Files are so 1980s anyway. Particularly when you need to copy the text, launch notepad, save it and so on. Which brings us to …
• Redefine Logging. IM logs are very, very useful but rarely implemented in a useful fashion. Logs w/o search are like peanut butter w/o chocolate — they go great together! There’s an interesting IM product on the Mac, Chatalog, I think the name is which forwards your chats to your .mac email account. Why not a default folder named “IM Conversations” with sub folders for “Bob”, “Bill”, etc and each im convo saved there. IM and email are really two halves of the same whole — online interaction either synchronous or asynchronous.
• Tabs. Conversations need to live in tabs. Tabs need to be available vertically or horizontally. Vertically gives a lot more concurrent convos which is key.
• Windows are Cognitive Burdens. I’ve never understood the separation between buddy list and conversation windows once im clients have a tabbed interface. Having more windows to manage is a distinct cognitive burden. I know it doesn’t seem like much but it is. That is, after all, why you see even Microsoft lessening the reliance on MDI.  Why isnt the address book just a tree control in a split pane ?
• Pictures in the Address Book.  I don’t know about you, but for at least certain people, I’d far rather have a picture of them than their name.  I’d much rather send my wife an IM by clicking on her pretty face than “waytoolongrandomimhandle”.
• Multiple Identity.  Like a lot of IM junkies I have *ahem* multiple accounts.  There’s fuzzygroup my erstwhile personal IM handle.  And then there’s feedster2003 for handling Feedster support and then there’s *censored* which I use solely for when I need someone to be able to contact me and I need to focus and can’t stay online in a general context.  And there’s more.  For me IM accounts are a bit like bunnies; they keep popping up.  Now this is an edge case that’s far over the line but I suspect most people who do even a little bit of serious IM at least make the work versus home distinction — or they would if the client supported it.  I personally live and die by Gaim because of three things:

• logging
• tabs
• multiple identity

iwas dmumb

Not only was I dumb but I couldn’t spell or type!

Here are some tips when caffeine starts to either not work or, well, make you want to vomit rats:

• Bright Light.  I’ve got a 300 watt halogen going in a 12 x 10 room and its having a noticable effect on my consciousness
• Loud Music.  Hopefully my neighbors appreciate a Beastie Boys / Quiet Riot / Def Leopard / Dead Milkmen combination.
• Cold.  I’ve got the window open and its chilly in here!  It works though.

If you find that VIM’s auto indenting makes pasting in text, well, suck then enter this:

:set paste

and

:set nopaste

to reverse it.

Source: VIM.ORG

And, yes, I rated it as life changing.  This one tip will make a huge difference in my use of VIM.  I used to sometimes exit VIM, edit the file with nano -w and then re-enter VIM.  This completely eliminates that so its huge.

I’ve been getting the serious urge to upgrade my digital camera lately.  Right now I’m using a 5 year old 3 megapixel Kodak which, while working wonderfully, makes me feel kinda lame truth to tell.  And I had an absolute blast taking lots and lots of pictures over the Thanksgiving Holiday at Shelley’s parent’s house.  Now I’ve always owned Kodak digital cameras and I, honestly, have no real desire to change.  I’m thinking about the Kodak P880:

I’ve also been thinking about the Canon S2:

They’re both 5+ megapixel which is more than enough for anyone who’s not a pro (imho).  They both seem to have good lenses.  My preference for the Kodak is that it will likely have a substantially better user interface and be much more usable.  My wife’s Canon A80 PowerShot is just plain painful.  They’re both SD media sadly relegating the Compact Flash slot on my Thinkpad into instant uselessness.  Sigh.

Update: A quick of DPReview makes me think that I should also look at the Kodak Z740:

So anyone have any thoughts about any of these?  I know that the first is much higher end but since I keep my gear for 5+ years in general, the price difference doesn’t feel that much.  And I have a little one who’s fast as the dickens so a fast acting camera is important (I missed several great images this past week).

Matt has his usual wonderful thoughts, this time on options in software. Having once sold a piece of software with roughly this many options (shown on left). Matt’s right — most people won’t use the options and you can always expose a plugin api for it if you have to.

Good job Matt! This was a gutsy post to write — what Geek doesn’t want features? Having big options dialogs makes you look like you have tons of features. And you do, just not usable ones. Its all about the 80 / 20 rule and clearly you understand that. And, while Joel would argue that the 20 is always different, I don’t buy that. While there always are differences, there are also commonalities that, if you take the time to understand your users, can be leveraged to everyone’s advantage.

I’m in the middle of, yafh*, working on improving the look and feel of Feedster’s site. I needed to know how to wrap images around text. And, while I could have looked up on some HTML reference site, I did what I have done every single time I needed to know this since I started blogging. I checked Scripting. Why? Well I always seem to remember “Dave Does this” and its always easy for me to find since I regularly read him. So thanks Dave!
*Yet Another Feedster Hackathon; this time I arrived back from Thanksgiving by 7:30 pm, was eating Pizza by 8, bought a big screen flat panel by 9, crashed and rose again at 1:00 am to coordinate with Mike and grind on the new UI.

Any developer has, at one point in his or her career, had this type of conversation between themselves and one or more other developers:

(04:31:39) mikeair888: and we’ve still got a full day US time
(04:32:01) fuzzygroup: more than that actually
(04:32:13) fuzzygroup: the board meeting is at 9 am pst which is 12 pm est
(04:32:26) mikeair888: oh cool
(04:32:29) fuzzygroup: and its 5 am here (ok 4:30 but lets make the math easy)
(04:32:33) mikeair888: yep
(04:32:35) fuzzygroup: so that’s 24 + 7 hours
(04:32:39) fuzzygroup: or 31 hours total

Jeremy, an engineer on Yahoo Search, in discussing why people find Google’s results to be the best, even in the face of a blind “taste test” which proves they aren’t shows tremendous courage with this post which quotes Seth Godin’s post on the same topic:

Jeremy: I won’t go into the flaws with this method, since that’s really not the point. He goes on to say:

Seth: Which reinforces my point that Google isn’t “better” for most people if “better” means more relevant or deeper. Google is better because it feels better and quicker and leaner and easier to use. The story we tell ourselves about Google is very different, and we use it differently as a result. Think about that the next time you insist you need a “better” formula or a faster server or a stronger first baseman.

Seth: Music sounds better through an iPod because we think it does. Design matters. Stories matter most of all.

Permalink to Seth’s Post that Jeremy Quotes

Jeremy: Bingo!

Permalink to Jeremy’s Post

Given that I just finished Seth’s book “All Marketers are Liars” and, honestly, loved it, this resonates tremendously with me. Now given that we’re thinking lots and lots about Feedster’s design issues right now, I need to point out this information to our people.

Thanks!

Seeing all the astonishing prices on home electronics over this Thanksgiving holiday has given my wife and I the incentive to “make our contribution to the global economy” with the purchase of a big screen TV.  We’re debating between a 32″ LCD to a 42″ plasma tv in the $1,500 to $2,000 price range.  We’re thinking about the Sharp Aquos but wondered if anyone had any input.  Thanks in advance.

Robert Scoble just chimed in on the XBox 360 shortage:

Lots of people are saying we did this on purpose. That we limited supplies to make hype bigger.

Yes, Microsoft has gotten its evil back! For a minute there, I thought Google had taken over our evil.

But, come on people. We’re making them as fast as we can. Our suppliers simply can’t make anymore. Have you ever worked on a manufacturing line? I have. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be made. There are physical limitations to how many boxes can be shipped (ever study the world’s airline cargo capacity? We have.

More…

This basically matches up with what Greg Stein said and just plain makes sense.  My apologies for being aggressive on the posting earlier.

Surprisingly enough, Greg Stein, showed up in my blog comments with some very cogent thoughts on the XBox 360 shortage. Greg’s a serious gamer and the person who turned me onto the astounding zen experience that is Katamari (thx man I did actually buy it and we all love it). Anyway read what Greg has to say here.

Dave just had an awful iTunes experience:

Arrrgh, I plugged my new iPod into my old Mac and lost everything on it. Never got a confirmation dialog asking if it was okay if it wiped out the music and audiobooks that I painstakingly took hours of my time to set up. Never mind that the originals are on the other side of the United States. Honestly, how dare they design software that’s so brutal?

More…

Now I too just bought the 60 gig iPod Video.  And its a lovely device.  The odd thing though is that on Windows there is the confirmation dialog that there doesn’t seem to be on the Mac.  Interesting.  My main problem with the iPod on Windows is that it doesn’t seem to download and synch podcasts correctly.  For that I turned to iPodder / Juice.  And, while I find the UI a wee bit confusing, it definitely rocks.  Last Saturday it downloaded hundreds of megabytes of Dave, Adam, Steve, Dawn and Drew and others.

So I’m sitting in the den and my little boy wanders out and wants to sit in my lap as I fix bugs.  Naturally I pick him up and ask him if he wants to post his picture on the web and he sleepily but happily agrees so here you go:

So I’m off in Texas in some suburb of Dallas, spending Turkey day with Shelley’s family.  And, naturally, I have to login and deal with issues of Top 500 tag spam, a new bug that cropped up, etc.  So I go over to Shelley’s Dad’s PC and type into the Run command “Putty”.  And it works.   Clearly I’ve been on this PC before.

(Putty is a SSH client that I use religiously for logging into Feedster servers).

Wow.  I just spoke with my wife who’s in the Dallas, Texas* area for Thanskgiving (I’m meeting her there) and her sister wanted to get Steve, her husband, an XBox 360 from the local Target.  And, after arriving on line at 5 am, she discovered that there the store only had 12.
The local Walmart only had 48.  And the biggest lot that anyone in the whole city had is reportedly 220 at the local Best Buy.

Looks like the reports of Microsoft limiting supply to maximize demand (and pricing) are completely true.

*That’s where her family is.

Heh.  We’re now closing in on the final steps of the Top 500.  1 ajax bug, a few output options and it’ll be ready to go.  I’m very, very pleased.  Everyone — me, Mike, Nick, James, Alan, Rachel and others all did a great job.  Kudos to each and every one.

As you may or may not know, I travel for Feedster to our San Francisco offices quite regularly.  And the hotel I’ve been staying at, the Hotel Milano, has, ahem, connectivity woes:

Ping statistics for 64.95.116.11:
    Packets: Sent = 102, Received = 67, Lost = 35 (34% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 10ms, Maximum =  90ms, Average =  9ms

Now, just to be fair, this is with my 1 laptop on which WIFI actually works.  So here’s the criteria for a hotel recommendation:

• Close (walkable) to the Feedster Offices at 116 New Montgomery
• Connectivity either wired or wireless (preferable) that just plain works
• Nothing monstrously expensive; one of the reasons that the Milano is attractive is that its not all that expensive ($140 / night)

Any recommendations out there?

Disclaimer: The author, Adam Kalsey, is a friend but this is still really, really cool: http://tagyu.com/

Distinct.  Thank the heavens for Distinct. 

Q: Why did the hacker cross the road?

A: To get back to the wifi on the other side.

–Scott

If you have to ask on this post, you likely don’t want to know …

I’ve been grinding since like 3:30 am, if you consider the post wedding drive from Fresno back to San Francisco; which I do since I came up with YMF500F* during the ride, so when one of the Feedster 500 Team Members, Mike our web contractor asked how I was felling, I got poetic:

(03:37:53) mikeair888: how you feeling?
(03:38:46) fuzzygroup: i feel like hammered death on amphetamines after a 5 day crack binge

*Yet More Feedster 500 Features.

Given that I’ve been holded up in Fresno for 2 nights now for Demitrious’ wedding whilst concurrently hacking out the Feedster 500, and that all Feedster mail is down for me, this post is solely to let any fellow Feedsterites / Feedster contractors (over in Australia, this means Mike …) that I’ll be offline for 4 hours or so whilst I drive back back to San Francisco but I will have my cell phone if anyone needs me.

Podcasts that will be heard on said drive will include the Gilmor Gang and Adam Curry.

*Chuckle*. I’ve been in massive crunch mode over the past week getting ready to launch quite a few new things and, as always happens, when you’re about to do a release, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Here’s a few of the things:

1. Last Minute Features. When I gave our lead VC a preview of one of the features, his comment was “Wow; but can you do *foo*�. Sigh. Of course we can do foo but I had already started to leak the news of this so, given that he was right and we needed to do that, foo was added to the project plan. But, of course, foo requires bar and bar requires cat and dog and lion and giraffe and etc. You’ll see how we did on that come Monday.
2. A Wedding. Of course this wouldn’t all be complete without a major life event, a wedding, to attend. And, of course, said wedding would involve 8 + hours of round trip travel in a car. Not a lot of coding productivity in a car although you can get some very amusing pictures of how you use an iPod. I’ll blog those tomorrow or Monday and you can all get a good laugh. But, and mark my words, I’d have gone to this wedding no matter what. Its for a Feedsterite, our lead Systems Administrator, and he’s worth it beyond by ability to describe it.
3. Torn Ligaments. I had originally planned this release to concur with my travel schedule so I’d be in our San Francisco offices for a full week; able to collaborate with out Feedsterites. Unfortunately my wife tore ligaments in her ankle last Monday so she wasn’t able to walk which completely delayed my trip and forced me into the combination Daddy / Mommy / Nurse roles. No gripes on my part — that’s what you do when the people you love are in trouble — but its an amusing wrinkle in a release crunch.
4. Loss of People. And no release crunch would be complete without losing a staff member or 2 along with the productivity hit that entails. Nothing like having to lock down every single server you have, rotate passwords, etc.
5. Network Connectivity Heck. I had a bad feeling about network connectivity for this trip so I brought not one but two Thinkpads and an extra WiFi card. My X31, true to form, executed its “I Hate All Wifi Except for My Home Networkâ€? behavior and persistently refused to stay connected to the Wayport Wifi in the Wedding Hotel. So I figured “Well I’ll change the wifi card and all will be good.â€? That gave me about 20 minutes of connectivity post reboot. So I’m back to working on my Thinkpad X20 – five + years old and with only a 5 gig hard drive. But, you know what? It works flawlessly. Oh but the battery has decided to not hold a charge so if I unplug, it dies completely.
6. Lack of Caffeine. When I called for room service this morning, I was told, astonishingly enough “I’m sorry we don’t serve soda with breakfast�. **OY**. How can you serve coffee as the ONLY caffeinated breakfast beverage? I mean Great GooglyMoogly.
7. A Singular Bizarro Connectivity Issue. Our beta site is Feedster.net and while it works fine, on my older laptop I am unable to connect to that box in any way. It must be a DNS issue since I can connect to its ip address 64.95.116.31 but I can’t get to our Intranet, our webmail, etc. since those are Apache vhosts on that same box (and, no, modifying my hosts file makes not the slightest difference).
8. No Left Mouse Button. The left mouse button on my older laptop has decided to, ahem, go missing. Its physically there but it never works anymore. So I’ve remapped the left and right but remapping my brain is a bit harder. Thankfully I’m a fast touch typist anyway.
9. Etc.

There’s more I could go into — but — I’ve got working hardware, working connectivity, a fabulous co-founder*, a really good web contractor who’s helping out and been essential in not letting the good work I’m doing look like *Scott’s Usual Less than Good Design*, a very good project plan to execute against, Flock to make blogging easier, great co workers like Nick and James who are going to come in on a Sunday and help out. But you know either the worst of this (or the best) not one of these things has surprised me. Not a single one. I’ve done at least one crunch mode a year since ‘87 and they’re always like this. *Insane Chuckle Here*

*Who, amusingly enough to me, asked for foo prime, a different last minute feature. When he did so, I was chuckled and said “Yes Sir� and proceeded to implement it since he was also right.

I have to send a great big Thank you to Andrew and the rest of the folks behind Juice the once and former iPodder.  I’m attending the 2nd Feedster Wedding* and I’ve downloaded ratloads of Podcasts using them to energize my development process.  iPodder just makes it damn near trivial to use podcasts so that’s great!  Thanks guys.

*Ok mine was the 1st ever Feedster wedding.

Just a test.  I’m gearing up to blog quite a few things so having a decent blog writing engine integrated into a browser is ***intriguing***.  *Clicks To Send the Test Post*  *Fingers Crossed*

Even though Feedster has an RSS Advertising server of our own, I just plain have too much damn respect for Adam Kalsey to NOT blog his review of Yahoo’s new program.

*chuckle*.  Today is increasingly surreal.  Earlier today things were fine, I was grinding on code, made a presentation to our Japanese partners, writing tools to make sure that Feedster search results don’t run amok, etc.  Now there’s a fierce thunderstorm, lightning, high wind, horizontal rain and the sirens just went off (which in Indiana means “Stop Blogging and Get to the storm shelter if you can hear this”).   *going*.

Dear Chris,

I just decided to follow your advice and install Maxthon. And, while I applaud you for your enthusiasm for this product, after about 5 minutes of trying it, all I have to say is this:

Huh???

I’m really, really glad that Maxthon works for you but it just doesn’t work at all for me. Here’s why:

1. CTRL+T. No support for CTRL+T to create a new tab. Given that I’m hugely used to FireFox, when I tried Maxathon and found that CTRL+T did not create a new tab, I was just spooked from the beginning.  Yes I know that Maxthon predates Firefox but I’m kind of surprised that since it knows I had Firefox and offered to import my thousands of bookmarks that it didn’t automatically set CTRL+T for me.  (Ok this is a stretch but when you’re an alternative product struggling for market share wouldn’t this be a great approach?)

2. Feed Support. I know that I’ve seen you rave about its RSS support but when I went to Jeremy’s blog and clicked on one of his RSS icons, I get this. I’m sorry but having a feed displayed when you click on an RSS icon isn’t a good user experience. Shouldn’t Maxathon have recognized the feed and displayed it in its aggie ?
3. Refresh Button. I was testing some new Feedster Ajax features in Maxathon to see if they were compatible with IE’s XML model so I needed to regularly refresh the page. Where’s the Refresh icon or button? Here’s what Maxathon looks like on my System.
4. OPML Support. I couldn’t find it. Is it here?

Any thoughts? I do trust your opinion on stuff so I’m curious. It might be just that I’m so used to FireFox / Mozilla that I’m just not able to properly grok the Zen of Maxathon. So did I miss something when you raved about Maxathon ? Thanks man. Hope all is well with you and Ponzi.

– Scott

I believe that Robert had a link to Kayak, a travel meta search site, recently and I gave it a shot. Not only has it already saved me literally several hundred dollars in just a few trips but its also made the difference between my family and I having a rental car for our Thanksgiving excursion to Dallas.

Thank you Robert. This ends my use of Yahoo Travel I guess. Wonder if they’ll notice. Wonder if they’ll care ?

I was wondering if anyone out there in BlogLand knows if Microsoft Project has had any decent improvements since Project 2000 ? I find myself using Project more and more to manage my own engineering, particularly the coding I have for our joint project with Mitsui and I’m > 5 years out of date.

The things I find most bad about Project 2000 are:

• Its persistent and dasdardly tendency to eat its own data files. I’ve been nailed by this so many times in the past that it scares me. Still its the only project management tool I’ve got so I keep using it. In particular cutting and pasting things seems to cause corruption.
• Saving to HTML. I find myself always having to select a Map when I save to HTML. Is there a new Feature like “Automatically Save to HTML using Template Foo?”
• Do I have to update to a whole new version of Office to get a new version of Project? Right now I’m happily using my personal copy of Office 2000 I bought back in 1999. Feedster the company doesn’t even own a copy of Office on Windows (our machines other than myself and 2 admins are, I believe, all OSX or all Linux).  I’m dramatically more likely to upgrade to Project if it doesn’t require a new version of Office since I run projected exclusively on my old Thinkpad X20 laptop (only 384 megs of RAM; Windows 2000).

Robert ? Is there a blog by a Microsoft Project Product Manager that could address these questions?

Man I wish I could take credit for this but our Crawler guy, Nick, was feeling inspired late Saturday night. So the world now his Dashboard widgets for Feedster:

More on this and how to download it. Damn but I’m glad he didn’t have a date Saturday night!

Well worth it if you’re on Windows: XAMPP.

Hilarious: http://www.seuss.org/seuss/seuss.sttng.html Via Boing Boing via Bonnie

Heh.  Wonder if this is the first wordpress.com post to be on Memeorandum?

 This is for this post.

 

Lunch, for me, has long been nothing but a time offset. Think about it — if you wake at 7 and eat lunch at noon that’s a 5 hour offset.  Right ?  So if you think of lunch as a time delta from the period you wake then its completely appropriate to have Spicy Hot Shrimp Gumbo at 6:17 am.  Of course you have start working at roughly 1:43 am to pull this off.

And, if you think that this is nothing but a way for me to rationalize to my wife that I should get away with eating shrimp gumbo at 6:17 am then you get the bonus prize.  Thank you for playing.  Please come again.

I’m sorry for the delay but I’ve got a sick wife right now (sprained ankle) and I’m doing the combination Mom / Dad / Nurse / Software Engineer concurrency thing right now and its a bit draining.  Hopefully I can respond to them later tonight.

Dear Robert,

I thought heavily about calling you on the phone and having this as voice conversation because I didn’t want to go on the record publicly about it (most of my real friends are in Open Source) and I don’t really need the flames that will, inevitably, be directed at me regarding this but … oh well. And that felt cowardly. I’d send it to Bill or Steve but, honestly, to me you are Microsoft. So here goes.

1. Fork the Issues On Competition Between Client Side Software versus Server Side Software

Open Source software is, honestly, wildly different between client side software and server side software. I bloody well love server side open source software. I built my company on it and I rely on it *by the minute*. But — and this is what’s going to get me flamed to a toasty crisp — when it comes to open source GUI software, the Emperor’s clothes are, sadly, missing. We all boldly claim that Open Source is better engineered, runs faster, etc. And, in the area of the desktop, I’m just finding that not to be true. My experience using Open Source software on the client side i.e. GUI apps basically, well, sucks camel balls (not all of the time but a large part of it). By and large my open source GUI apps:

• Crash; Example: Gaim. If I leave Gaim on “Automatically Reconnect” then if it encounters and problems, well, it tends to just plain die.
• Use way too much memory: FireFox. Yes I’m a tabaholic. I’ve admitted that and I’m in a 12 step program for it. Right now I’ve got maybe 20 tabs open spread across 8 browser windows and FireFox is using 125,104K of RAM. I have a hard time understanding why 20 tabs opening relatively small web pages uses 125 megs of RAM.  And it doesn’t reclaim the memory when you close a tab (this is a long standing bug). I’ve seen similar memory characteristics in other Mozilla apps (and other Open Source apps).
• Fail oddly. Thunderbird is an interesting mail client. For me it consistently refuses to send messages if its been running too long so I constantly have to exit mail just to send a message. This happens regardless of whether or not I’m using my Feedster mail server or my (cursedly required) Yahoo DSL mail server.  Yes I have a large mailstore but I find it hard to believe that the size of my mailbox affects whether or not I can connect to a mail server.  I do believe that the regular problems that Thunderbird has saving drafts is related to that and I’ll take the heat for it (or at least not blame them; it could be the OS responding too slowly as it seeks for the right spot to write the mail).

So if I was Microsoft I’d promote the client side of the business with a FACT (not FUD) based compaign around something like this:

Microsoft Desktop: It Just Works Better 

And do the classical studies on how the stuff actually does work better. 

2.  Attack Open Source Server Software By Hiring Away the Developers

Given that Microsoft is one of the leading employers of software engineers world wide, and is a company with $$$ that always needs engineers, if I worked for Microsoft, I’d say this:

• Let’s analyze the leading open source server tools that take $$$ away from us (heck our commit logs are public; its easy to figure out who’s actually making a difference)
• Task our recruiters to locate, romance and recruit them

Open source developers are, generally, poor as church mice.  Yes there’s someone like Greg Stein from the Apache project (also ex-Microsoft) who’s done quite well for himself and is now at Google but then you have someone like John Coggeshall, a buddy and really good member of the PHP community.  I’d describe John as a “soldier” in the Open Source wars.  He’s not Rasmus; He’s not Linus but he’s still important.  If you hire John (and John is now a real adult with real cash needs) then you just (minorly) attacked the PHP project at its core.  Now someone else will rise up and not everyone will join but, when you come right down to it, car payments are car payments, people get married, have kids, etc.  And you’re hiring good software engineers anyway — why not hire the people who would otherwise compete with you?

All my best.

Scott 

 

Ever typed in the wrong thing into the wrong IM window?  I’d love a Gaim plugin which said “restrict any of these words to only these contacts”.  Basically I’d love to be able to say to Gaim “I only want to curse at these people”.  Chuckle.  Oh Lazy Web please save me.

I just took a shot and installed FireFox 1.5 on my secondary laptop.  Its actually working quite nicely and seems to function correctly with WordPress.  Nice job guys.  Thanks Asa!

Note to self: Test the Asa search with the new relevance code coming from Feedster! 

As I’ve commented on my Feedster Blog, which is alas, down right now, Feedster just added Podcast Search. Here are some thoughts on that:

1. Tap into the public OPML directories.
2. Expect the public OML directories to all be in slightly different flavors of OPML.
3. Regularly revise and test your regex’s if you use a regex based OPML parser. We’ve never been comfortable with any of the public OPML parsing libraries so we rolled a regex parser and use it regularly while often griping about it.
4. Don’t expect sites like Odeo to support a public, parseable directory. Understanding their URL syntax tho will go a long way.
5. Expect that lots of things won’t appear in any directory. I just finished writing a “Deep Discovery” tool that utilizes our database of 17 million plus feed urls and scans it for podcasts. Right now its added another 500 podcasts (which doesn’t sound like a lot but when your base is 38,000 or so, its actually statistically significant) (oh and its still running). (Up to 640 more feeds since I started this post)
6. Realize that there are lots of non-US podcasting sites. We’ve even found podcasting in russian.
7. Realize that people may consider themselves podcasters but never have encountered an enclosure tag in their lives. I don’t want to name names but this was very, very surprising to me.
8. Subscription and Metadata standards are confused. Things like the iTunes metadata extensions (example feed using them) versus the iTunes pcast files and the pcast:// psuedo urls.

Right now implementing podcast search is a lot like implementing blog search was when we started Feedster — confused and emergent. You’ll have to do a rat load of work you don’t want to and don’t feel should be necessary. But, in the end*, it’ll be worth it.

 

*there can be only one. *Insert Geek Pop Culture Referential Chuckle Here*

Sigh.  Anyone who ever founded a company knows this scenario:

1. You go to sleep.
2. You wake up *knowing* something is wrong.
3. You get on email and IM and, indeed, something is wrong.
4. You squash actions of less than perfect planning and thought that are doomed to cause you endless hours of future work and recovery.
5. You fume.
6. You rant.
7. You drop the issue and see refuge in a hot shower.

But to make it all better, I prescribe International House of Pancakes and Vietnamese Iced Coffee (make iced coffee, add sweetened condensed milk).  $happiness++;

My buddy Mike has a good review of BlinkSale.  Its a typical example of how company’s screw up customer service — which happens — and is, statistically, a damn near certainty if your company is of any size and volume.  Just do the math — if you do enough transactions, you’re going to screw things up.  The sad thing is that even being, ostensibly, a web company, they’re apparently not monitoring the blogosphere — or will they?  He only posted this a little while ago.  It’ll be interesting to see if they ever comment on his blog.

New version of RSS Owl.

This weekend I found myself in Pittsburg airport and I had the odd inclination to fire up my browser and research Ajax libraries (astonishing what open, free Wifi enables isn’t it). And these are what I found:

The Obligatory Google Search

PHP Libraries for Ajax Work

• Sajax (also supports other languages)
• Blog Post about Najax (which is now Xoad)
• More Sajax Examples
• Round up Blog Post of Different PHP Libraries
• The Ever Wonderful, Always Quotable Terry Chay on this Stuff (note to self; hire him for Feedster someday; Terry we have a slot open for you anytime you’re ready!)
• PHP Magazine on Ajax
• Joe Stump on eNotes
• Xoad
• Round up Article on PHP and Ajax
• Henri Bergius Set of Links on PHP and Ajax
• Drupal Implements Ajax Based License Chooser
• And, the obligatory WordPress Ajax Based Same thing

JavaScript Libraries for Ajax Work

• Prototype (via my buddy Mike)
• OpenRico
• Script.tac.ulous (which I likely spelled wrong and is really Ruby but is still cool)

Consulting Companies

• Web Break Stuff (absolutely beautiful work)

Noel, one of the sys admins here at Feedster, just let me know this:

If you minimize Firefox, it will (automagically) reclaim memory that it’s no longer using.

Apparently this is a workaround for the Firefox bug where it doesn’t reclaim memory for tabs that you’ve closed (a long time FireFox / Mozilla bug I’ve blogged about in the past). Now when Noel told me this, I immediately tried it and saw my memory usage go from 153 megs* to 52 megs. Awesome. Thanks Noel. (Oh and this works in Thunderbird also so I strongly recommend minimizing your Firefox and Thunderbird windows every few hours).

* Yes I’m a Tabaholic. I’m currently searching for a support group on this. Please contact me if you have suggestions.

Picture of a Tabaholic

(That’s like 25 tabs in one browser window and 5 browser windows open total; I do have issues)

Scoble has, once again, an insightful piece:

As I’ve been going around the world I’ve been meeting with many people who’ve built their companies on non-Microsoft stuff. Some of whom have companies worth billions of dollars now. Some of whom you’ve never heard about unless you read TechCrunch. Here’s 12 reasons Web 2.0 entrepreneurs like Ross tell me that they aren’t using Microsoft’s stuff:

More…  (link on Ross added by me)

Robert pretty much nailed it.  And they’re quite similar to several of the points I made when I was interviewed by Information Week back in October.  Good stuff. 

One thing that’s particularly true with respect to Web 2.0 companies is that Web 2.0 stuff often starts just as “science experiments” and, since you need to deploy things out on the Internet for people to play with (and give your experiment feedback), Web 2.0 stuff tends to be built on open source tools.  That’s what happened with Feedster — I had a cheap box in a hosting center with Apache, PHP and MySQL and I built a search engine since someone posted on a blog “Wouldn’t be cool to have a search engine for RSS content”.  Now if I had to worry about software licensing and such, I almost certainly wouldn’t have.  Now it wasn’t just that open source was free — it was also the whole ecology of cheap hosting, downloadable source code, great online docs, etc.  And its really, really hard to see how Microsoft competes with that.

Its been a while since I took a look at Pito Salas’ BlogBridge news aggregator and, I have to say, its just plain beautiful.  Wonderfully designed, easy to setup, cross platform and just plain nice.  There’s lots more good stuff inside but since I’m dashing for a plane, this is all I had time to post.  Thanks Pito.  Great stuff.

Screenshot showing the 50 odd feeds I setup in BlogBridge:

 

http://www.laridian.com/ That’s right. Let me say it again — http://www.laridian.com/ Now when the title of the post is “A Steaming Pile of Camel Dung” and the 1st thing is a url, what do you think I think (got that?) of that url ? That’s right — I’m trying to make you realize that the products from Laridian are, imho, a steaming pile of camel dung. Well I should clarify — I don’t really know that much about the products — what I know about is the installation process. And that, dear reader, is a steaming pile of camel dung.

My wife is, of recent, an avid Palm user and with the Tungsten T5 I got her for her recent birthday, she also wanted a bible for her palm. Well we started with the Zonderman NIV Study Bible and that was, not the installation process, but the product itself, well beyond camel dung. It was actually, again imho, a giant mountain of dragon feces. This was a product so bad that it repeatedly crashed her entire Palm and required a hard reset. You know the one I mean — where you have to unscrew your Palm stencil, get the little end and push the hole for the hard reset. She then did online research, sadly not using Feedster (alas), and picked Laridian. Given our previous experience I had her try and install the test version. And she really liked it. It didn’t have her perferred bible version but she used it enough to know it installed and didn’t crash her Palm. Awesome so, today, on a day with not a lot of time and too much to do, she asks me to install the full version. “Sure Babe; whatever you need”. Famous last words…

Well this required, not 1, not 2, but the download and installation of over 15 different .SIT compressed files. So everything had to be downloaded, decompressed and then dragged into the Palm installer. That then led to a massive orgy of synching, checking to see if its there, realizing it isn’t, silently cursing*, trying again and so on. After literally over 2 hours, I managed to get the online bible application installed but still didn’t have all of it installed — parts of it seem to simply not install. So in closing, I give you this:

Laridian Installation Process = A Steaming Pile of Camel Dung

Note to software product marketers: Its supposed to be a better user experience when people give you money than when they don’t. That’s how the game is played. You know…

*My little boy was in the room.

Thanks Mike!