Category: Other

Articles that don’t fit in to any other categories.

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Using Git with Subversion(SVN) on a Non-Standard Repository Layout

For the longest time I was a loyal Subversion(SVN) user. I know, it’s crazy, but I was. When I found out about Git, I was hooked immediately and used it for all of my personal projects. The problem was that at work we use SVN, and getting everyone to migrate to Git just wasn’t in the cards. Much to my surprise, Git has the ability to interact with a SVN repository, so I could still use it anyways.

The issue with my work’s current SVN layout is that it is non-standard. By that I mean all projects exist in one big happy repository. Something like:

Repository -> Project -> Trunk/Branches/Tags

Unfortunately, Git+SVN isn’t really all that excited about working with non-standard repositories, so I had to do some experimentation and Googling to figure it all out. Eventually, I came up with the following steps:

Step 1: Clone the Repo
The first step in this process is actually cloning your SVN repository. By clone, we mean make a full copy of it and all of the revision history.

git svn clone svn://the.svn.server/allEncompassingRepo/project -trunk=trunk/ .

After the initial clone is complete, we move to fixing where git should look for things.

Step 2: Set up fetch, branches, and tags
The initial setup for fetch, branches, and tags gets screwed up at this point if you have a non-standard layout like my employer does, so we need to do some cleanup. Open .git/config and set the following:

url = svn://the.svn.server/allEncompassingRepo
fetch = project/trunk:refs/remotes/trunk
branches = project/branches/*:refs/remotes/*
tags = project/tags/*:refs/remotes/tags/*

Now that the config file is all set, go ahead and save.

Step 3: Pull down your files
The config file is all set, so you’re ready to do your first pull.
git svn fetch svn
That’s all there is to it. If you’d like to know how to use Git+SVN, I suggest reading the fine article over at Viget.

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Dual-Boot Pumpkin

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!

Dual-Boot Pumpkin Front (lights on)
Ubuntu (lights on)
Dual-Boot Pumpkin Rear (lights on)
Windows (lights on)

Dual-Boot Pumpkin Rear (lights off)
Windows (lights off)
Dual-Boot Pumpkin Front (lights off)
Ubuntu (lights off)
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Remove undefined from a Javascript object

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;

Easy and pie.

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Is it a bubble or something else?

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.

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Switching from Google to Duck Duck Go

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:

  • The search results are good: While Google has been taking time to improve their results lately, it’s refreshing to see original content get ranked higher than web scrapers. In fact, the web scrapers have a tendency to not show up at all on DDG.
  • Lots of documented goodies: I’m still getting my feet wet with DDG, but the ridiculous amount of goodies is going to make things a lot more enjoyable.
  • I like not having page previews by default: I’m not sure if DDH even supports this, but I absolutely HATE having preview panes pop up in Google by default. Can it be turned off? Yes. Am I too lazy to do it? Yes.
  • Directly search other sites: You can search other sites directly, which is a nice feature. Try “!amazon Founders at work”.
  • They don’t track you: You know that feeling you get when you think someone is following you down a dark alley at night? That’s the feeling you should get using Google. They track everything. I don’t like being tracked, so DDG is probably going to become my permanent search engine. Read
  • Instant Answers: Sometimes you don’t need to click-through to a page. For instance, search “jquery” and you get a handy little box that tells you what jQuery is, and where you can get more info about it. For someone new to jQuery, that little bit of information could help them make a more informed click to learn more.
  • I miss instant search: I would really like to see an option for instant searching on DDG. Being able to refine your search results letter by letter was really handy.
  • I miss other Google service integration: Searching for “coffee near 49503” would show a map with coffee houses on it in Google. In DDG, my results aren’t nearly as useful. I hope that some sort of map integration is in there future, because it would stop me from switching back to Google to use their map service.

What do you like about DDG? What features do you wish it had?

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Startup Weekend West Michigan: The Pitch

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.

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Learning How To Hack

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.

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My History of Failure

“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.

Encode4Free

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.

  • No motivation – I was still in college, didn’t need the money, and enjoyed my life just where it was.  There wasn’t really a huge motivation for me to do this.
  • No passion – I honestly didn’t care about video encoding.  Sure it’s cool, but only cool from a technical standpoint.  It wasn’t something I could really get behind.
  • Knowledge – I really had no idea how deep the programming rabbit hole went at this point.  Not knowing what good design was really put a cramp in how fast I could develop too.  In short, I was inexperienced and it showed.
  • Flawed business model – In retrospect, this should have been a freemium model.  10 minute video for free, anything over is charged.  That way people don’t get annoying advertisements added to their videos.

Should I Get The Book?

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.

  • Design – This is huge.  My site design sucked.  I basically ripped off a WordPress template that somebody made because it looked cool.  It had nothing to do with my idea, and it showed.  People coming to the page would say “So what is this about?”.
  • UI – The interface and experience was awful.  None of it made sense, and the changes that people did suggest I back-burnered until I “had more time”.
  • Seed Data – The idea that users leave reviews about whether they needed the book or not was great, except that nobody would do it.  Without having some reviews already in there, I found that people weren’t motivated to leave a review because they thought the site wasn’t being used.  I needed to have data seeded, but I couldn’t think of a good way to do this without paying any money (I had none at the time).
  • Focus – I tried to focus on too many schools at once with the first launch.  I should have started with one to see if the concept would stick.
  • Advertising – On a college campus, flyers and word of mouth is key.  I had zero flyers and nobody talking about me.
  • Karma – Users like getting a reward for doing something.  It doesn’t have to be money, karma works just as well.  Users get to scratch their competitive urge by posting reviews, getting karma, and checking to see if they have more then their friends. I should have done this, but didn’t.
  • Evergreen data – One of the big problems with this data is that the instructor can change books, change styles, or even stop teaching.  The data can become useless quickly.

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.

CampaignAlytics (Working Name)

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.

  • Pay for a design – The first thing I did for this web app was pay for a design.  I got a great deal, and now have a design that I can be proud of and shows off the product like nothing I could have ever come up with.
  • Co-Founder – Having someone to talk you out of bad ideas, and give you a sense of perspective is amazing.  Having someone to discuss ideas with and share the burden is pretty great too.
  • Funding – I’ve come to the conclusion that without a little bit of funding, this startup will take forever to complete.  We’re applying to the seed incubator Momentum and hopefully we’ll get funded.
  • Iterate – I’ve already gone through two different layouts and menu structures for the account/analytics page.  The second version is far better than the first because I asked for feedback from a few trusted people and implemented the changes right away.

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.