Posts Tagged tech
When to Pause, When to Push
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 12Feb09
It’s now 11pm on Wednesday night. Tomorrow morning, at 10am, I will be presenting my Project Plan to execute $6M worth of custom software development over the next 36 months.
That Project Plan doesn’t really exist yet.
It’s been a busy week. LAST night, at 11pm (roughly), I filed a Notice Of Intent, to bid on a DIFFERENT multi-million dollar, multi-year contract. Oh, yesterday was also my oldest daughter’s 6-year-old birthday.
There’s a point, in here, somewhere. We’ll wind our way towards it.
Technically, these days I’m an “Information Worker”. What I think that means, is that I get paid for thinking about things. At least, that’s how I choose to interpret it. My clients probably prefer to think I get paid for the OUTPUT of my thinking – but I’m all too keenly aware of how directly the quality of my output, is related to the quality of my thinking. Read the rest of this entry »
Ruby on Rails causes Global Warming
Posted by admin in carbon, entrepreneurs on 31Oct08
I use a laptop. Which means, as I peck away at my keyboard in the waning hours of the evening, I can smell the slow charring of my wool pants (mixed with the redolent odor of singed leg hair) as the tiny fan embedded in my computer tries desperately to keep this multi-thousand-dollar device, from melting into a pile of slag.
As a self-taught engineer, I tend to notice the glaringly-obvious – perhaps more than many of my well-educated peers. And there’s one obvious lesson in this – if solid state electronics are getting HOT, they’re wasting using a fair amount of power.
In a nuclear reactor somewhere out there, an atom died for the pixels on my screen. Another few drops of precious oil, or a few tons more gasified coal, were spilt for those extra minutes of Microsoft Word (or perhaps “Grand Theft Auto 4″).
Moore’s Law has shown us how the steady change of computing SPEED (doubling), and COST (halving), has reliably powered our advancing Information Age. Yet nothing in Moore’s Law has halted the seemingly inexorable increase in ENERGY requirements, of these most devious of machines.
This is not a problem that we’ve address head on – in our subsidized energy economy, there has been no real motivation to do so. In fact, as our dependency on computing infrastructure has deepened, we’ve made it WORSE. Here’s how it works: Read the rest of this entry »
Social History – Now a Handy WordPress Plugin
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 22Sep08
Last week I stumbled across this blog post by Aza announcing his “SocialHistory.js” script, and it really inspired me to do better with the Social Bookmarks on this blog. So imagine my surprise when I realized that there was no WordPress plugin available yet!
I hadn’t written my first WordPress plugin, so I decided this would be a perfect opportunity. You can see it working below this post (and every other post on the site) – where you will find social bookmarking links for only those sites that we’ve seen in your browser history.
I’m still waiting for my submission to be accepted at WordPress.org, but if you simply cannot wait to get a copy for yourself, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the tarball.
Oh, and a big thank-you to the makers of Sociable – I borrowed liberally from their plugin for this one.
If any of you are interested in collaborating to make this a little less ugly, let me know!
Email address as OpenID
Just a strange thought I had this afternoon, based mostly off of a report I’ve been drafting (on the market opportunities of demographically-specific technology addictions), which highlights some interesting points:
Everyone on the internet uses email.
I’ve played around with http://identitu.de, which takes your Facebook account, and turns it into an OpenID. Which is wickedly cool – if you have a Facebook account.
But what if all you have, is email? Could we take email accounts, and verify them (using IMAP or POP3), and present THAT as your digital identity?
I think we can. Watch this space for my attempt.
Moving to the Cloud – Making EC2 Usable for the Rest of Us
I’ve been messing around with hosting for what seems like a LONG time – my first domain name was registered in February of 1997, more than ten years ago.
It never gets simpler.
I started out with a shared hosting account with ProWebSites.com (long defunct), for almost $30 per month. Traffic and storage were measured in megabytes, those days, and no one even talked much about “up-time”.
When I started working at Ramsbottoms Computers in Nelson, I took over their “web hosting” department – which involved a bunch of local businesses, hosted off of an overbuilt desktop machine sitting on the desk in the back room. The best thing I did for them was get that server rebuilt into a rack-mounted box, and tucked into colocation in the only data-center in town.
Sometime early in 2000 I put my own server together, in the basement of an office building in Iowa. (It’s still there, actually.) Since then it’s been a succession of colo boxes, self-managed hosting… I’ve even run a couple of data centers.
Last week, the hard-drive started failing in one of my ServerBeach servers.
This, really, was the last straw.
I’ve had billing issues. I’ve had trouble-ticket issues. They won’t return phone calls (although they do reply to email – excessively. Usually I get a blank copy of any email I send to them – 10 minutes before I get an actual reply.) Now I’m getting hardware failures – I’m done. I’m leaving.
I decided it was time for EC2 – until I realized that the hosting services built on it where $500 a month minimum, and the alternative seemed to be a weird set of windows command line tools.
I went whining to Jesse Andrews:
4:52:13 PM JustJosh: do you know the gandi people?
4:52:18 PM JustJosh: can I get an invite?
4:52:57 PM jesse: ahh, that is new
4:53:00 PM jesse: have no invites
4:53:03 PM JustJosh: fucl
4:53:15 PM jesse: ec2 might be better for you
4:53:20 PM jesse: since you need more than a $8 slice
4:53:31 PM JustJosh: yeah
4:54:01 PM JustJosh: but I don’t really have time to figure out ec2 instances
4:54:24 PM jesse: install elasticfox
4:54:31 PM jesse: you can have a new slice in minutes
4:54:41 PM JustJosh: looking into it now
5:16:18 PM JustJosh: help
5:16:24 PM JustJosh: what AMI should I start with?
5:16:27 PM JustJosh: there are a PILE of them
Etc, etc.
Let me start out by saying that ElasticFox ROCKS – James Greenfield took an entirely broken experience, and managed to make it only MOSTLY broken.
But there was one absolutely critical function that elasticfox DIDN’T do – save an AMI image of your running instance, back to S3.
So I added it.
There are a lot of caveats, of course – I’m still hacking wildly. No guarantees on anything but Mac. But seriously, it’s a lot better than the alternative.
Go download it, and try it out.
![Magic \"Build Image\" Button](http://www.cognition.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/picture-63.png "SpandexFox - The \\"Build Image\\" Button")
PS – SpandexFox.com is running on EC2.
PPS – EC2 got elastic storage today – SpandexFox will have support SOON, I promise.
Get a Tweet with the latest DVD releases using MovieScout
Posted by toddicus in entrepreneurs on 16Apr08
(Guest Post by Todd Khozein:)
I am proud to say that I have written my first, yes my first, web app ever in the form of a tool to proliferate the growing and widespread impulsive want-it-NOW shopper’s need to be the first to know in the form of a Twitter Bot that will, indeed, tell you what the latest DVD releases are with a link to buy it NOW! Thanks to Joshua for holding my tender little virgin hacker’s hand through the intricacies of building something that actually works in a world where run-on sentences are acceptable, nay encouraged.
I think I have officially taken a significant step towards geekdom and feel that I should commemorate this occasion of the alpha release by inviting you, the reader, to make this app wildly successful and dedicating the remainder of your waking hours tonight and possibly tomorrow in telling all of your people how sexy this app really is.
How I Built a Free Grid Computer, In Less Than a Week
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 11Apr08
By now you’ve all heard about BuyLater, my happy little firefox extension that (thanks to an unexpected LifeHacker.com article) is rapidly climbing towards 1000 users and world domination. Without getting TOO technical, I thought I would share with you how I saved BuyLater from becoming an infrastructure nightmare – one that would have either killed the value of the application (real-time updates), or sucked tons of money and hardware into a technology backwash.
This will be a little controversial, I think – simply because the technique I used, (grid computing), is most often used for less… legitimate… purposes. So much so, that it is almost synonymous with “Bot Nets”.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
BuyLater 0.7 Released, Support for Canada and UK Users
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 03Apr08
After the deluge of new users from last week’s Lifehacker.com article, followed by a full day on the front page of delicious, I ended up with an inbox full of bug reports. While there were a few pernicious actual “bugs” in there (sorry to everyone who ended up with the ‘can’t delete items’ bug, that’s fixed too), most of them fell into two buckets:
Life after LifeHacker.com – What to do when your Alpha leaks
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on 29Mar08
Wow. It’s not every day that, suddenly and without warning, thousands upon thousands of strangers descend upon your happy little world, and start playing with it. But such is the power of LifeHacker.com.
They decided to run a story on my happy little bot this morning. I didn’t know about it, came back from lunch – and I had 100 users. (For the last week, that number has been stubbornly stuck at 8).
I poked a little further, and realized that only 20 of those 100 users had twitter accounts. Hmm – I guess I better get email notifications working, eh?
