Articles that don’t fit in to any other categories.
I’m a nerd. I regularly use Ubuntu, and just bought a Windows Phone 7 instead of an iPhone. With Halloween right around the corner, I thought it was time to bump up my nerd credentials.
I now present to you… the Dual-Boot Pumpkin!
I’ve been doing a fair amount of javascript programming lately, and I found myself needing to remove a nested object from an object. Doing this is easy enough with the “delete” command, but it leaves you with annoying “undefined”s all over. To get around that, I scoured the internet for a way to remove them easily. Turns out that if efficiency isn’t a problem, it’s easier to drop the right objects into an array and then re-assign it.
var tmpArray = new Array(); for(el in self.orderData.data.items) { if(self.orderData.data.items[el]) { tmpArray.push(self.orderData.data.items[el]); } } self.orderData.data.items = tmpArray; |
var tmpArray = new Array(); for(el in self.orderData.data.items) { if(self.orderData.data.items[el]) { tmpArray.push(self.orderData.data.items[el]); } } self.orderData.data.items = tmpArray;
Easy and pie.
It has all happened before, and will happen again…
Back in the late 90’s, we experienced an economic bubble of immense proportions. The internet (read: The World Wide Web) was just starting to gain mainstream acceptance, which is when the gold rush began. Companies with no real business plan, and no way of making profits were securing millions of dollars in funding. Beyond funding, some of these companies were getting bought for BILLIONS of dollars. For instance, The Learning Company was purchased by Mattel for over $3 billion in 1999, but was sold for only $27 million in 2000. While the company clearly had some value, it was overvalued beyond any reasonable price. This is the epitome of the of “Dot-Com” bubble.
Over the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion on Hacker News about the possibility of another “Dot-Com” bubble happening right now. A lot of people think that we are winding up to another bubble, but there is also a fairly large amount of people who think that this time is different. I fall in the the latter group, and here’s why.
Starting with YCombinator, a new philosophy on web startups emerged: lean startups. In a nutshell, your startup is given a small amount of money (enough to live frugally on for a few months) and mentorship. The most important part of programs like YCombinator is the mentorship. You get access to seasoned investors, business people, and founders that help you realize your idea’s potential. The upside to bringing a company to fruition this way is that your startup costs are low, and you will know very quickly if you can become profitable. During the 1st bubble, anybody with an idea and a web page could get millions in funding. No market validation required, just an idea. This time around, you actually need to have a plan. You need to have traction. You need to be profitable. Sure, some companies are getting over valued (*cough* Facebook *cough*), but that happens whether we’re in a bubble or not.
The important thing to take away from this is to look at what companies are getting serious funding (>$500k) and what companies are making nice (fat) exits. Are they good companies? Would you use their product? Would someone you know use their product? Are they profitable? Do they have a user base? If you can answer “yes” to most of these questions, we probably aren’t in a bubble. We’re in something else. A new economy? An information economy? Well, we already have an information economy, so what now? We’re transforming the way we do business and interact with each other. Instead of doing things yourself, why not let somebody else do it for you? (hosting: Heroku). Keeping in contact with people is hard, why not let Facebook do it for you?
I’m not sure where all this is leading, but I’m fairly positive it’s not a bubble. It’s something different. It’s a transformation of our economy. To what, I don’t know. But it is changing, and it’s going to touch every single one of our lives sooner or later.
For the longest time I’ve been hearing the praises of a little search engine called Duck Duck Go amongst the Hacker News crowd. Yesterday, I finally decided to take the plunge and set it as Chrome’s default search engine. After a day of solid use, here are some of my observations:
What do you like about DDG? What features do you wish it had?
This weekend I’ll be attending Startup Weekend West Michigan from 6pm Friday through 4pm Sunday. It promises to be an awesome event, but up until yesterday I had no idea to pitch. So I got to thinking, and came up with this idea. What is said below isn’t my pitch, but it’s what I’ll be pitching about. It’s kind of a far-reaching idea to put in to 2 minutes, but I think I can manage.
Your online social life and your local community are disconnected. Maybe some people want it to stay that way, but a lot of people want that connection made for them. I’m calling this idea, “Social Gone Local”.
It’s not that simple though. Local businesses already have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Check-in points on FourSquare. The REAL question is, “How do I find new businesses to associate with?”. Addressing that issue is the fundamental problem this startup will solve.
How do we solve it? By aggregating all of the data from your social networks and building a profile of your interests, likes, and dis-likes. With this information, we can recommend local activities, restaurants, shops, and events with a fairly good probability that you’ll like it. Think “Netflix recommendation engine, for life”.
But what if you’re visiting a different city? Change your location and we’ll give you recommendations for there too.
I’m putting this here as a resource to myself, as well as to others. If you’ve ever been interested in learning to become a better programmer, this resources is for you.
http://krainboltgreene.github.com/l/2/
Beginning to advanced Python, Ruby, and software development practices are covered here with links to free PDF books to help you learn. I highly suggest taking a look.
“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”
This is my third attempt. I’ve tried twice before and failed, but this time could be different. It could end up in failure just like the others, but I don’t think it will. I’m smarter this time around. I’ve learned from my mistakes, am better at what I do, and I have more to lose.
The first time around was in 2007. I had just learned PHP and thought I had what it took to make a video encoding startup. This was before the term “cloud” was popular, and my idea was that users would upload videos to my service, encode them into whatever format they liked, and then re-download them. For revenue, I thought that a free service could be done by adding advertising to the beginning of the encoded video. Or, a user could pay small fee to get moved to the front of the queue and have no advertisements.
The idea seemed good, but I wasn’t dedicated to it. I got a design going and had the back-end encoding stuff working, but I just couldn’t act on it. Some other things went wrong too.
In 2008 and early 2009 I worked on “Should I Get The Book?”(SIGTB). As a grad student reflecting on my undergraduate years, I realized that I spent a ridiculous amount of money on books that I never needed. After talking to friends and classmates, it seemed this was a universal problem, and my startup idea was born. This time, I did things right (sort of). I took a few hours every week over the the summer and started hacking away at it. By the end of the summer, I had a functioning product. I did a launch, and the waited. But nobody came.
So what happened? Was it competition? Was it a poor idea? Well, it was a lot of things.
Once I realized most of these things I vowed to start a re-design with all of these issues addressed. I was about 25% of the way through the mock-up when I was informed that RateMyProfessor.com had a similar feature. It was easy to use, and they already had a huge user base. My idea was basically sunk.
While SIGTB flopped, it was important step for me. I had pushed a project through to completion, learned a lot about marketing, and learned that I really need a co-founder to talk me out of bad ideas. Most importantly though, I proved to myself that I could accomplish something. I might have given up too quickly, but I think that the idea wouldn’t have worked well anyways.
I started this idea out in late October of this year. The idea is that email campaign analytics can be done better. Currently analytics is rolled in as a feature for big mailers (Mail Chimp, etc), but it doesn’t provide the in-depth analytics that a lot of marketing folks are looking for. We’re looking to change that. I’ve been working for an hour a day since November 1st, and have a lot to show for it. I pitched the idea to a local pitch night, and the reception was great. We have a lot of great features, and do it all in a non-obtrusive way that is compatible with mailing services, or can be rolled into your custom solution using our API.
I’m taking a different path with this startup, based on the things I’ve learned on the last two.
The thing I hope you can take away from this is that you are going to fail many times before you succeed. Being persistent (and maybe a bit stubborn) will take you 70% of the way there, and the rest is on how good your idea is.
I’m often in the situation where I need to merge changes from the trunk development into a branch. I can never, EVER, remember the command, so I’m putting in here in hopes that I can reference it again and that other people might find it useful.
svn merge -r x:y svn://repositoryURL/repo/trunk/ .
So, how does it work? X is the revision that you branched at. This can also be the revision that you last merged changes from. Y is the version that you want to merge up to. In most instances, HEAD is probably what you’re looking for.
Note: Using –dry-run if you want to see the changes that will be made before actually doing it. It takes some of the “this is scary” out of merging.