Zoomii
It’s that time again where a new application catches my eyes (and mind). Zoomii: the [near] real online bookstore. I remembered Alexaholic/Statsaholic’s story and wondered how long will Amazon allow Zoomii to survive.
General
Selling V*
Apparently I was marketing some medications through this blog. After dwindling Google result ranking, I discovered that my old installation of wordpress (ancient 2.1) was vulnerable enough to allow unauthorized template modifications. All is fine now isA. Do you still have the adverts for the medications? I was looking to buy some but can’t find a reputable company.Just kidding...
Jobalytics – a Passenger on Dreamhost
After Ninh pointed out Dreamhost’s mod_rails news, I was tempted to get my hands dirty deploying a test application. I revivied one of my long lost pets (that hated the FCGI it was running on), made some modifications, and capified it to my Dreamhost’s account. And … It was a breeze. The deployment process (including capistrano script modifications, and...
Passenger (mod_rails) on Dreamhost
I got an update from Ninh Bui from Passenger fame about Dreamhost progress on mod_rails adoption. We’re working closely with Dallas Kashuba (CTO of Dreamhost) on getting Passenger ‘dreamhost’ ready (even though we’ve inferred it was already production ready, taking on a huge hosting company is a challenge on its own, i.e. it’s in its own league 🙂 ).We’re...
Man or SUV
The amount of corn needed to produce a full tank of gas for an SUV is enough to feed a person for a whole year. The 2008 World Development Report “Agriculture for Development†provides a compelling example of the food-for-fuel debate: over 240 kilograms (or 528 pounds) of corn – enough to feed one person for a whole year...
Rails deployment that suits Rails development
The guys from Phusion – The Computer Science Company – released mod_rails (Passenger) today. I’m just feeling unusually happy. They made a great job not only producing that longly-awaited piece of software (years in the waiting), but also creating a great hype, marketing, documenting, testing, and nailing down the details that made Rails deployment as easy and as enjoyable...
Sales Techniques
Steve Howard from MLE Systems has started talking to me about Sales techniques and, man, do I love it! Although, Sales is a modern “survival” skill, it’s hardly taught in schools for non-business majors (what a shame). Being a techie, you become more involved into tech details and, like it or not, social skills (including sales) quickly withdraw from...
Food or Fuel
This is serious. The United Nations’ World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel. Cereal grain import prices for the world’s poorest countries are...
Business-People Pairing
How would it be like if our sales-person shared a few hours of his time acting as an observer on implementing a user story with one of the developers? What if our HR manager set aside a part of her Monday to watch a developer troubleshooting an application or setting up a deployment script? If software development is at...
Code Quality Measure
via FocusShift Via reddit, and from there to the best quote I read in a while:”Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.” – Joel Spolskey. The quote is highly interpretive, but, to a great extent it bears the truth.