At SXSWi
I’m sitting in a panel “Social Design Strategies” at South by Southwest Interactive. What a privilege and a pleasure to be here. I can’t believe I’ve never attended this before.
So far the best panel by far was “Art of Speed”, with people talking about how to build successful, profitable companies very quickly. The strongest speaker on that panel was Michael Cassidy, who has built and sold 3 companies for $10-500 million. His most recent sale was a company that sold for $500 million in 500 days. Wow. That made me sit up and pay attention.
One of his great points was about culture and hiring. He does one-day funding rounds and one-day offers for new hires. Also, on the first day of a new hire’s employment, everything is in place. They have a computer, email, and a task list. None of the typical, “Ah, your computer is not quite ready, just sit here and read these manuals.”
Going to pay attention now. More later.
[tags]sxsw,sxswi[/tags]
Weewar – a fun online game
This morning, I started playing a great new online game, Weewar. which reminds me of old-school “empire” from my Amiga 800 days.
It is a turn based game with a bunch of interesting AJAX-y features, the best of which is live updates of the other players moves. I’m still in my first game, but I’m really enjoying myself so far.
If you’d like an invite, drop me a note from my contact page.
Django on Rimuhosting
This is just a quick post to confirm that Django does indeed work perfectly on Rimuhosting with very little effort required to set up. It is fast, it connected to my Mysql db without a peep of a complaint, and it is making me a happy developer.
Setup details
I’m using Rimu’s “MiroVPS3″ plan. It is $39 a month, less 10% for being an open-source developer. It provides 4G hard drive space, 60G bandwidth (in and out combined), and 160 MB ram.
I’m running the following “stack”:
- Debian: I know and love Debian much more than any other Linux distro. Almost everything is installable with a simple “aptitude install whatever” command.
- APF: firewall, set up according (mostly) to the instructions on Webhostgear. I had to tweak it for Debian, by setting “monokern=1″ and by symlinking /etc/rc.d/init.d to /etc/init.d
- Imap/Smtp set up according to the instructions on The Perfect Rails/Debian/LightHttpd Stack article.
- Mysql: Actually not my favorite db, but I didn’t want to convert to PostgreSQL at the moment, at least not until I’d proven my existing dev setup worked. Rimu set this up for me, since I’d requested a Django setup.
- PIL: I need the Python imaging library, so “aptitude install python-imaging” did the trick.
- python_mysqldb: Another simple “aptitude install python-mysqldb”
- Apache2 with Mod_Python: Apache2 is more flexible about vhosts, and I’m going to use the heck out of them. Mod_python is the preferred deployment environment. I am not using any other mod_plugins. Rimu set this up, and I made vhosts entries based on what I read in the django documentation. The only “tricky” bit was setting up a different vhost for the media URLs. I did that one without mod_python support, to make for lighter server threads.
It is a very responsive environment. I can hardly wait to deploy some real apps on it very soon.
[tags]django,rimuhosting,debian,vps setup,python webhosting[/tags]
Why Rimuhosting is my new VPS provider
I’m decided to use Rimuhosting as my new VPS provider. In my last post, I gave a comparison table for the VPS providers that made my short list.
I really spent a long while reading and researching my choices. Please keep in mind that my priorities are almost certainly not yours. For me, Rimuhosting was definitely the best choice. Let me explain my thinking:
First, I made a “gut-level” cut.
No-Go:Anything with less than 148 megs of ram, which had (in my very subjective opinion) a lesser rep, or which had a lame website. Out: Powervps level 0 (memory), VPSLand (spotty rep), XELHosting (clueless, uniformative website), Jaguar Discovery (memory), Liquidweb (Price), Solarweb (memory, rep)
Next: I assigned points based on features.
- Cost: 5 points for under $40-49, 10 for $30-39, 15 for $20-29.
- Reputation: 10 points for “great” reputation, as judged by me from reading reviews on other sites.
- OS: 5 points for Debian
- VPS: 7 points for Xen
- Memory: 5 points for 256 megs or better
- Space: 2 points for 10gigs, 5 points for more
- Panel: 5 points if included for free
- Bandwidth: 5 points for greater than 100Gigs
- Backups: 5 points
- Rimuhosting: 37
- JaguarPC: 34
- A2B2: 32
- PowerVPS: 32
- Hosteasier: 32
- DEHE: 28
- ServInt: 27
Scores:
[tags]VPS,Reviews,Rimuhosting,JaguarPC,A2B2,PowerVPS,HosteEasier,DEHE,ServInt[/tags]
Fresh design examples
Web Design From Scratch has a nice, well illustrated article on Current Style in Web Design.
Of course, I don’t want to advocate always running with the herd, but in this case I’d argue that it isn’t so much the herd, but more of a pack. OK, so that isn’t such a great metaphor. What I’m trying to say is that I think the sites they mention exemplify some of the best, freshest sites on the net, and that I personally take a lot of inspiration from them.
I think the first thing I’ll do from this list is to lighten up my various sites templates a bit, making the page less “weighty”:
The great sites above share the following design features:
- Simple layout
- 3D effects, used sparingly
- Soft, neutral background colours
- Strong colour, used sparingly
- Cute icons, used sparingly
- Plenty of whitespace
- Nice big text
[tags]design,layout,web design[/tags]
15 Segment ASCII Display Project
With the resurgence of interest in hobby electronics, I thought my readers might enjoy looking at the details of a simple project I did with cheap EBay-acquired parts. This was a fairly straightforward scrolling LED ascii display.
Goal
A simple-to-use Simstick display, capable of showing a reasonable subset of ASCII, utilizing cheap 15seg displays.
15 Seg Display
I chose to use LTP588G 15seg display, since it was cheaply available via EBay or surplus.
Segment Lettering
I could not find a “standard” segment-to-letter map for a 15 seg display, so I have extrapolated from the standard 7 seg layout:
GBuy predictions
I have a prediction for Google’s soon-to-be-released service GBuy that I haven’t read anywhere else. I think they may incidentally take out PayPal, but it will only be a pleasant (for them) side-effect of thier real goal. I just don’t think that goal is big enough for Google.
They want the holy grail.
They want to monetise the internet, and they surely want to remove their deadly over-reliance on ads. Solution? Micro-payments. That’s right, micropayments. I know, they have been tried several times and they’ve always died a miserable death. But, no one with the clout, public goodwill, and intelligence of Google has tried.
Imagine, if customers could manage their subscription settings via Google:
- Customers could put a maximum pay-per-page or pay-per-session for a site, and then when they hit those sites, there would be no barriers, logins, or subscription requests. Google would just hit their credit card or bank accounts for them, and forward the money to the site.
- Google could feature sites which have GBuy enabled by some icon on the search listings.
- Sites would be able to be “all content”, and no longer have to serve ads, or optionally no longer have to serve ads – for the paying visitors.
- Google could also enable pay-for-feed, which is something no one is really trying yet.
Steps to a goal
I don’t believe they will just roll out what I describe in phase one. What I think will happen is that they’ll undercut PayPal’s fees, getting a lot of instant webmaster users. People will sign up for GBuy, and Google will move that money around for them, taking a small cut, possibly even deliberately taking a small loss to fuel uptake. When a certain critical mass is reached, when enough people have accounts, they’ll release the micropay API/subscription model.
They’ve already said they aren’t really interested in the stored-payment model, I think they are aiming higher. Higher probably even than my modest prediction. I don’t have unthinking awe for Google, like so many do, but I sincerely respect and admire their audacity at going after new and bigger markets.
[tags]Google,GBuy,PayPal,predictions[/tags]
Recent Comments