Shanti’s Dispatches

Rails 1.1 has arrived!

RJS is a templating language that allows you to write JavaScript in a native Ruby style.

Some Good RJS Links

Cody Fauser's Intro to Rails' RJS
More on RJS and some of its advanced features
Rails JavaScript Generator Methods

Now, here's an absolute Must-Have RJS Debugging Snippet to drop into your rhtml page when you're playing around with this stuff:

(via techno-weenie)

I guess this post was making the rounds this week while I was busy coding up a storm. Ironically, I was implementing a billing system so that we can charge cards at Sprout.

Hello. It's never a good time to start a company without the intent of making money.

You don't have to make a lot to begin with... Overture started by making pennies (literally) and went on to be acquired by Yahoo for $1.63 billion.

Evaluating Business Ideas

Whenever someone tells me about a new business idea, the first thing I ask about is the business model.

Here are some simple business models

- Buy widgets at $2, sell them for $4. (Wal-Mart)
- Offer a free, limited service to attract clients. Also offer a premium service and charge for it. (Sprout, 37 Signals)
- Blog about interesting things, sell advertising. (Weblogs Inc.)

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how much dough you can potentially make with your business model.

If the model gets much more complicated than any of the above... I'm usually a little skeptical about its potential viability.

When to realize you're in a Web 2.0 circle ... you know what

99% of the population has never even heard of Web 2.0. Even in the tech industry in non SF Bay Area cities. (you'd be surprised)

These people:
- don't have a gmail account, nor do they even know it exists (they are still using some crappy hotmail 2mb limit acct they opened 4 years ago)
- don't read blogs
- especially don't read TechCrunch (let alone know what it is)
- have never heard of Ruby on Rails
- Ajax? are you kidding? they think it's a cleaning detergent

I'm not a part of the whole SF Bay Area thing (yet), but we do need to keep some perspective here... Pets.com isn't going public again like it's 1998. A few lucky (+ highly-skilled & passionate) guys in their garage got bought out for $15-30 mil. The rest of us have to actually bring in the Benjamins, with uhh, you know, paying customers n stuff.

Me-too companies... What's the bfd?

Commenters on the Caterina post belittle all the 'me-too' companies coming out of the gates. I don't really know what 'me-too' means exactly... Yes, there are some 'me-too' companies, but that's really just a sign of competition and innovation.

The weaker ones will be weeded out, though, when hosting only costs $10 a month, what's the bfd? Throw some AdSense on there and you're all set.

Of course, if you've taken $5M in VC and your business model is "throw some AdSense on there," well, you better have a lot of targetted content + traffic. They only make so many Yahoo/Google acquisition lottery tickets.

This via the January 2006 issue of Entrepreneur magazine. Article by Mark Henricks.

It's also important to tell the truth, because customers' brains are better at detecting untruths than even they know. Renvoise's book reports on one neuroscientist who had people play games with decks of cards rigged to produce unfair results. Players were occasionally asked whether the games seemed fair. After a number of rounds, players started reporting the decks were stacked.
But skin-conductance tests revealed that they became nervous when reaching for rigged decks well before the knowledge reached their conscious minds.

Here's another golden nugget:

Another study Renvoise quotes asked people to accept money for placing a large billboard in their front yards. The success rate was more than seven times higher if the homeowners had first agreed to display a much smaller postcard in a window. The moral: Don't underestimate the power of starting small.

This post is the first part in a series titled Biz Magazine Recap wherein the best / most interesting nuggets of articles from Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. are posted here for your viewing pleasure.

I've been meaning to start doing this for a while now... BigCite is a new site that just appeared on the radar. It even has tags for all the web 2.0 groupies. (it is a nice touch)

Man, the snarkiness flows freely in this

My old pal from InfoSearch David Gagne has some awesome writeups (blow by blow, minute by minute) from some of the panels this year.

Let's say you have three very similar methods in your Rails app:

class Clown
 def do_something_one(foo, baz)
 end

 def do_something_two(foo, baz)
 end

 def do_something_three(foo, baz)
 end
end

You also have a slew of helper methods, that call each method, and do something else with the foo & baz objects (like serialize and log them to a DB, for example).

I had googled around a while for a way to instead just have one helper method:

 def do_something_generic(which_thing = 'one', foo, baz)
    # Dynimcally call one of the three methods,
    #    based on the 'which_thing' parameter.

    # Are any Ruby mavens in da house?  Is this right? :
    c = Clown.new
    c.send 'do_something_#{which_thing}', foo, baz

 end

How to Call Methods Dynamically in Ruby

Michael Crichton violates some patent laws in an op-ed in the NY Times:

- The Earth revolves around the Sun.

- The speed of light is a constant.

- Apples fall to earth because of gravity.

- Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.

- Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.

- Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.

- Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.

Most people know that Thomas Edison was a voracious inventor, eventually obtaining patents on 1,093 of his inventions.

Of course, you'd have to read his biography to know that by the end of his career, he thought patents were basically useless.

People would steal his ideas (some of them very ingenious, of course), and often there was very little he could do about it.

The choice seems to be:

A) become really good at implementing and executing a plan behind your invention / application of an idea you have

-- OR --

B) become really good at cranking out massive quantities of overly-broad patents, then hiring lawyers to beat people over the head with 'em!

Option B just doesn't sound too appealing to me, despite its lucrative potential.

David feeds some trolls in his response to this thought-leader's post on why Ruby isn't Enterprise-ready.

DHH - haven't you learned not to pick fights with anyone who refers to himself as an "industry thought leader" on their blog?

There's a whole system of accreditation that vets people, who umm, type the words "industry thought leader" into the description field on their blogspot.com blog.