When your servers only reboot at most once every few months (data center maintenance), you don’t have to think about this thorny problem all that often.
But it’s a nice touch to get your Rails deployments almost 100% hands-free.
Checkout How to Start Mongrels on Boot over at shanti.railsblog.com for the 411.
Practical Javascript, DOM Scripting, and Ajax Projects picks up where Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax left off.
Frank Zammetti’s practical guide to real-world JavaScript and Ajax will have you developing actual client-side apps in no time. As more of a hacker than a theoretician, this kind of guide appeals to me. Usually when I start developing my own apps, some of the code used previously (in building sample apps) will be adapted and tweaked for my own purposes.
Some of the projects you’ll learn how to build in Practical Javascript:
* JSDigester - a library that simplifies (takes away the pain) of parsing XML on the client side
* Mashing up a list of hotels + a Yahoo Map for a user-entered zipcode
* Client-side persistence techniques
* A JavaScript validation framework
* Building widgets and working with UI widget frameworks
* Building a JavaScript mini-game (cool!)
* An Ajax-based client-server chat pplication
You can pick up a copy of Practical Javascript, DOM Scripting, and Ajax Projects at Amazon.com (avg. review score is 4.5 stars).
Beginning Ruby (by Peter Cooper) is a massive tome (600+ pages!) on the ruby language.
If you want to know just about everything there is to know about ruby, it’s here in Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional. Now just reading this book won’t make you a ruby pro, but actually applying each of the things you learn will no doubt put you in a better spot than most “rails jockeys” who are just learning RoR.
For me, coming to Ruby via Rails made things a bit harder than they should’ve been. Had I been sane at the time, I would’ve read a good chunk of a book like Beginning Ruby first, before attempting to jump into Rails. But alas, many of us learned the fundamentals (and beauty) of Ruby only after being bit by the rails bug.
Just a few of the things that are covered in Beginning Ruby:
* ruby language basics (types, classes, inheritance, modules, etc)
* creating and releasing ruby gems
* parsing / working with xml
* working with URIs and files
* compressing files
* basic encryption/hashing
* … and of course some of the basics of Rails.
If you still don’t have an introductory book on Ruby, you can grab Beginning Ruby at Amazon.com and also directly from the publisher’s website (Apress).
Ever purchased the same song off iTunes multiple times, simply because you happened to have downloaded it on another computer?
Does this drive you freaking nuts? Enter hymn project.
While hymn has been around a while, it seems that it has gotten stable over the past several years.
In early versions, Apple and hymn were playing a game of cat and mouse; each successive version of iTunes would break hymn’s decryption mechanism.
A week or two later, hymn would come out with a new version that defeated Apple’s new scheme. It seems hymn has won the arms race, for now. I just decrypted my entire purchased library from iTunes (you know, songs I already owned but were laced with crippleware).
M4A/M4P Encryption Guide
When you download songs off iTunes, they come in the encrypted flavor of the AAC Format. (AAC is like the successor to MP3)
Hymn will convert your .m4p files (maintaining 100% audio quality) into .m4a files. You can then play these .m4a files into any program that supports AAC. (hymn also offers an option to convert to mp3)
M4A - UNencrypted (*.m4a)
M4P - ENcrypted (*.m4p)
To play unencrypted m4a songs in Winamp, for example, just download this plugin and place it in your Winamp plugins folder.
I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t be this excited, but AGLOCO, the AllAdvantage resurrection / get paid to surf pyramid scheme appears to be joining the deadpool.
You knew it would happen one day, just not before they … Ever. Made. A. Single. Payment.
The sad part of the saga is not so much that agloco founders were silly enough to believe their business model had long-term viability, but that so many sheeple actually fell for it. (note: i hate that word but it truly is applicable here… 
)
Now I won’t have to clean out so much agloco SPAM that one of my sites receives daily.
I almost never click on ads in GMail. This one caught my eye:
Clicked through on the link (what self-respecting geek can pass up servers + Nintendo Wii) — and … and … no mention of the Wii on the page!
Genius marketing — they got me to click through, then blog about them too!
By now I’m fairly used to seeing articles about how much Finland kicks ass.
#1 in Education: Finland takes number one spot in OECD’s latest PISA survey
The American Dream is Alive and Well … in Finland!
One of the Happiest Countrries in the World
I’d be interested to hear a Finnish person’s perspective on this, especially someone who’s spent a good deal of time in America.
Could the policies and regulations in Finland be replicated elsewhere and still work?
Because most of the time, the rhetoric coming out of the articles is not so much “Good for Finland” but rather “if only we’d do what Finland does, all our problems would be over.”
Let’s look at how small Finland really is…
Via this page and Wikipeda:
* Finland has a population of just 5,300,362 people
* Each year, between 2,000 and 3,000 people receive Finnish citizenship.
* Finland’s GDP is $176.4 billion (via world fact book)
Compare this to the United States:
* US population: 301 million
* In 2006, a total of 1,266,264 immigrants became legal permanent residents of the United States
* An estimated 700,000 to 850,000 illegal immigrants enter the US each year
* United State’s GDP is $13.13 trillion
Would a small company who builds 10,000 Ferrari’s each year be able to suddenly scale and build 5,000,000 ? Or do you just end up with 5,000,000 Pintos, not Ferraris?
I’m all for change in this country. Our generation though, and the ones coming up now, are probably the most cynical when it comes to politics. We don’t believe anything we can do will actually make a difference.
Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are two of the candidates who offer the most change for this election cycle. They’re both a little crazy, and both huge longshots.
But even if you had someone radical at the helm, could they really do anything with an unsupportive Congress?
Think of this kind of brilliant tactic they must contend with (courtesy of our military-industrial complex):
You would think if you run a bomb-making company, for example, or you run the company that makes the B2 bomber, it would be really smart to build the whole thing under one roof, right? Not so. That’s not how the defense business looks at it.
In fact, a part of the B2 bomber is made in every single state in the United States. Why? Because what they wanna make sure is not just that they get the program going, but that they keep it going. And that whenever that B2 comes up for review, everybody on the commission is getting a piece of the action.
Quotation via this page and the film why we fight.
Americans are increasingly feeling disconnected with the government that we pay so much in taxes to each year; it’s all viewed as a corrupt, machinistic system, not a protector of our security and liberties anymore.
Michael Arrington has an interesting post up at TechCrunch about old guard vs. new guard entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
This reminded me of a realization a while back while chatting with a younger entrepreneur who had just raised some VC and received a lot of coverage. I mentioned something about the first Internet bubble and then I quickly realized he was 14-15 when that was going on.
I have to agree with Michael that from a Venture Capitalist’s perspective, someone who is not “gun shy” as it were is the kind of founder you want to hand $10 million to in the hopes of it turning into $500 million or billions.
On the other hand…
For every Facebook and Google, there are countless Pets.com, Boos and Edgeios who blow through tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars with naught to show for it.
As an entrepreneur who’s never raised a dime, if someone handed me $5 million, it would be very hard to blow through that money without seeing a discernable ROI. Much of it would probably sit untouched until a system was in place that could easily prove that for each $1 spent, at least $1.10 (hopefully much more) would be coming in as revenue.
Is that what the typical VC is looking for? No, probably not. They’re looking for the next Facebook, and if it becomes obvious you’re not going to be that, well, I don’t know… you just might not get your calls returned as promptly.
Even if you raised $10 million yet only managed to cash out for $20-30 milion, as a founder, you’ll probably end up with little more than some good war stories and the shirt on your back if that’s the outcome. VCs often get preferable terms such that they get their money back first, etc in the event of a cashout.
An Alternative Approach: Be the Tortoise
Companies that seem most likely to be alive in 3-5 years seem to take the Tortoise approach to business: slow and steady, as we’ve all heard countless times, wins the race.
Sien Tierney uses a snowboarding analogy. (paraphrasing him) As you’re going down the mountain, you can always choose a path that keeps you fairly horizontal. This let’s you stay on the slope a lot longer and get a feel for the range. At any time, once you feel comfortable, you can always choose a path that takes you racing down the slopes.
This approach seems much more sensible.
I’d much rather own a business doing $10 million a year, that was built over the course of 10-15 years, than blow through $5 million in a fit of exigency with nothing left whatsoever to show for it.
An anecdote from The 4-Hour Workweek…
The typical investment banker spends 80 hours a week for thirteen years, so that he can have the option to retire at 35 with tens of millions sitting in the bank. When asked, what will he do then, he responds “go sit on the beach in Thailand.”
As Tim Ferris reminds us — you can do that for $250 and a few non-traditional life/business operational strategies.
This is rough transcript of me making a few calls to tire shops just now here in SF…
Call to Store #1 (which is much closer to me)
Me: “Hi, I need to get a new set of tires on my Mitsubishi Galant, and was wondering if you could give me an estimate.”
Tire shop: “What size tires do you have?
Me: “I don’t know.”
Awkward pause for like 10 seconds.
Tire shop: “Well you need to know what size of tire you need before we can price it out.”
Call to Store #2 (Larkin Bros Tire Co)
Me: “Hi, I need to get a new set of tires on my Mitsubishi Galant.”
Larkin bros: “What size tires do you have?”
Me: “I don’t know.”
Larkin bros: “What’s the year and model (LX, DX, ES, etc) of the car?”
Me: “2002, and I think it’s an LX.”
(guy looks something up on his computer…)
Larkin bros: “Well then that can run you anywhere from $80 installed up to $120 installed per tire.”
Such a simple way to win my business.
It took all of this Google Image search for the phrase “John, Anne, and Panama” to reveal a photograph of John Darwin, alive and well with his wife in Panama.
John showed up at a police station in London recently, after believed to have been dead for over five years.
Via: Valleywag.
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