I’ll try to prevent this from becoming another Seth
Godin lovefest, but Seth’s article on the
best time to start a business was too good not to write about.
From the article:
- The best time to start is when you’re out of debt.
- The best time to start is when no one is already working on
your idea.
- The best time to start is after you’ve got all your VC funding
…the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start
is right now.
Full article
here.
Go read it now.
Photo by Tom Stone
I often find that it’s difficult to be content with what I have in life.
It’s too easy to focus on what you don’t have - a new car, a bigger
house, that shiny new MacBook Pro -
and forget about how much you do have. Modern society doesn’t make
this any easier, particularly in the geek culture where something you
must have comes along every few seconds it seems.
The reality is, I’m fabulously wealthy. I mean, I’m no Warren Buffet,
but compared to the rest of the planet, I have more than enough.
I drive a 10 year old car, but there are millions of people who have no
car at all. Millions who would be happy to have a car, any car.
I have a laptop computer that’s 4 years old, and has seen better days.
But there are millions who don’t have any computer at all, and would be
excited at the thought of having mine.
I’d love to have a bigger house - who wouldn’t? With two young boys, you
can never really have too much room. But there are millions who live in
houses a fraction of our size, many that aren’t what most of use would
even consider houses. There are millions more who are homeless, and
would consider any kind of shelter to be a gift from God.
I struggle with this a lot - trying to be content with what I have.
Perhaps it’s just human nature to always want more. Perhaps it’s a
reality of modern life - we’re being conditioned to not be satisfied
with what we have.
I thought of this again today, as I came across (via
kottke) a collection of photos on
Flickr by photographer Tom
Stone. Tom is known for photographing
the homeless and others “living along the edges of society”. Looking at
his photos of people living on the streets of San Francisco, and reading
the stories that go along with them isn’t easy. They’re pretty stark and
depressing, but it reminds me once again of just how much I have, and
how blessed I am.
It’s a poorly kept secret that I couldn’t design my way out of a box
(take note of the generic template used on this site). Therefore, when I
need to put together a web page I often turn to free html/css templates
as a starting point (or if nothing else, a starting point). Here’s a few
of the sites I’ve discovered with decent html/css templates:
I’ve also got a couple of sites I use for help picking color schemes:
I would be interested in knowing where other people who don’t have the
benefit of working with a designer turn for help and inspiration. Leave
your favorite sites in the comments.
The latest in a long series of things distracting me from other things
that are likely far more important:
Sun: Learn about JRuby -
I look forward to playing with this someday soon.
Yahoo: Ruby Developer Network -
Yeah, I’m a little late on this one. Included just in case you have
spent the recent months in a cave.
Free CSS Templates
The Shire of Bend, Oregon - Middle
Earth-ish homes. Very unique, and very cool. Almost makes me want to
leave the midwest for Oregon. Almost.
Weird Al: White and Nerdy
- This song was written about me, and I starred in the video. Ok, not
really. But I could have…
Jack Slocum: Real-world examples of the Yahoo UI Library - This stuff continues to
impress me.
Javascript tabifier - Best
HTML/Javascript tabs I’ve seen yet. Ridiculously easy to use as well.
See them in action here
In response to the previously mentioned buyback of
Odeo, David
Galbraith has written an insightful article on the topic of building
companies with sustainable business models. His position (a smart one)
is that venture capital shouldn’t be the default, it should be for the
edge cases - companies with big infrastructure needs that are growing
more rapidly than they can manage.
From the article:
Every venture funded tech company is predicated on the idea of ’exit’, the point where the company is sold to a bigger one or has an IPO, so that the investors see a return and move on.
…
When I was an architect, you didn’t set up a practice on your own to ’exit’, you setup to build a company that made a profit and made products that made the environment a better place along the way - a sustainable enterprise. The whole idea of ’exit’ in the context of building an architecture firm, or a legal or medical practice is preposterous.
Amen brother.
Read the full
article.
I typically avoid joining each new social networking thingy that comes
along, but I’ve joined two lately.
The first was LinkedIn. You can view my
public profile here, feel free
to add me if you’re so inclined. My email address associated with me
there is larrywright at gmail dot com.
The second one was Twitter, which is a new-ish
site from the folks at Odeo (which, as an aside,
was recently bought back from the
investors - way
to go Ev), that lets you keep up with what
your friends are doing at any given moment. You can send and receive
updates via text messages, the web site, and now by instant message.
Pretty cool. View me here, and feel free to add me as a friend if you’re so inclined. Or come to to my home page and look at the left hand side of my page
to see what I’m doing at the moment. As if you care.
On an unrelated note, things have been a little quiet lately, due to
other commitments. Things are quieting down a little now, though. I’ll
have some more technical posts up soon(ish).
A random sampling of the things that I’ve found interesting lately:
Airplane Seat
Etiquette
- If you ask me, reclining your seat on an airplane is a declaration of
war. There are few things in the world that are ruder.
Mark Fletcher leaves
Bloglines
- He’s technically leaving Blogline’s owner Ask,
but that’s a minor detail. I was a happy Bloglines user for a long time,
but it started to lag behind the other readers. I’m a happy
Feedlounge user now.
Interactive Capistrano
Shell
- This has some potential for a lot of uses outside of Rails (system
administration in particular).
Video - Woman Calls 911 Over Wrong Burger King
Order
You really have to hear this to believe it.
Cheat - Cheat is a command line tool
similar to ‘ri’, but it prints out a cheat sheet for the command you’ve
specified. Awesome.
One of my favorite organizational tools is
Instiki. I use it for note-taking, maintaining
reference information, and keeping lists. I have several lists that I
keep in tables, and the other day I had need to make them sortable.
Here’s how I did it.
The first thing you need is Stuart Langridge’s
sorttable Javascript
library. This is a library that allows you to make any table sortable,
just by giving it a class of “sortable”, and a unique ID. It’s smart
enough to figure out how to sort most kinds of data, so it will sort a
date column as a date, and a number column as a number. Very cool piece
of code. Anyway, take this Javascript file and put it in the the
public/javascripts directory for your Instiki installation.
Next, start editing the page with the table that you want to make
sortable. At the top add the following declaration:
Next we’ll modify the table. Usually tables in Textile look something
like this:
|ID|Name| |1|Joe Smith| |2|Susie Jones| |3|Bob Barker|
We need to add a table declaration and associated modifier in order to
give it a CSS class of sortable, and a unique ID:
table(sortable#mytable) |ID|Name| |1|Joe Smith| |2|Susie Jones| |3|Bob Barker|
The class name has to be “sortable”, but the ID (the part after the #)
can be anything you want as long as it’s unique.
Save your changes, and you should now be able to sort by any column in
your table.
I recently came across a presentation given on migrating a very
large database (as in, tables with 1.8 billion rows) from Oracle to
PostgreSQL. It describes some of the issues they had along the way,
including having to move from Linux to OpenSolaris due to stability
issues.
One of the more interesting challenges they had to solve was the lack of
support for partitioning in PostgreSQL. Oracle allows you to partition
tables, so for example if you had a large table, you can cluster the
data into various segments - dates in their case. The reason for doing
this is to allow you to put less frequently accessed data on cheaper
storage (say, SATA instead of SCSI).
The solution in this case was to use PostgreSQL’s support for table
inheritance (implementation details in the presentation). This allowed
them to easily add and delete new partitions. Database archiving is
always a hassle, and it also seems like this might make that easier as
well.
I’ve never used inheritence in PostgreSQL, so I don’t know what kind of
overhead it adds, but no performance issues were noted in the
presentation. Regardless, this seems like a very interesting solution to
a pretty common problem.
[preso]http://www.lethargy.org/~jesus/archive%20s/66-Big-Bad-PostgreSQL.html
Free Programming and Computer Science
Books - No explanation needed
Getting Started With Getting Things
Done
16 Year Old Guitarist Plays Pachelbel’s
Canon
Guy Kawasaki - Ten Things To Learn this School
Year -
Includes “How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run”, and “How to
explain something in thirty seconds” among other great advice.
Geek to Live: Top 10 free and cheap productivity
tools
- My favorite: Pen and Paper (second favorite: plain text).