Here's how I have created the beginnings of a profitable Kindle formatting and conversion service,
LiberWriter, from scratch.
Last Winter, I read one of the best business books I have read in a long time,
Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small:
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Rather than being a "big idea" book that includes one big idea and lots of stories to support it, it's a very practical book on how to go about creating a small online business. I've always been someone who loves to build things, from various open source projects, to diverse web sites that people have found valuable. However, I am not a "business guy". I'm not that good at making money, so the simple approach in the book is really better for people like me: make something and sell it. Advertising can certainly work, but it's so much harder to figure out the numbers compared with a product, where you can compare the cost of providing the product to the price people will pay for it. And that's just one thing; the book has tons of ideas about practical ways of going about putting together a profitable small online business. It's not a "get rich quick" book - part of the idea is that if you are looking at a niche that is fairly small, it will simply not be of interest to larger companies, so you aren't going to get outspent and outcompeted by them.
In any event, though, at about the same time I read the book, I was poking around looking at Amazon's KDP, which allows you to self publish for the Kindle, and noticing how difficult the process is. The native format of Amazon's books is HTML with several XML files thrown in for good measure. Now, for someone technical, that's certainly not an insurmountable obstacle, but for many authors, it's a very unpleasant prospect. Granted, you can also manipulate a Word file to make it suitable for the KDP, but even that is something that many people dont' find to be a productive use of their time. They're authors, and they want to write.
Having spotted a niche that looked interesting - I love to read, and I like the idea of helping out authors - I discarded the book idea I was looking at myself and did some writing of my own: source code for a project that would automate the process of converting and formatting Kindle books.
The core of the system was a fun evenings/weekends project, and soon it was able to produce pretty good books. After "inflicting" the beta version of the system on several people, such as Rich Bowen (thanks again, Rich!), I got it beat into shape and started accepting the first paying customers. It's very exciting to have those first few people pay for something you made - it's a great feeling!
Initially, my thought was to sell it as a way to write books directly for the Kindle, however, it soon became evident that 99% of people have already written their books with Microsoft Word, so what they were really interested in was a conversion and formatting system that would take a Word document, poke and prod, stitch and stretch it some, and output a nice looking book for the Kindle.
One of the lessons from Rob's book was that stuff doesn't have to be perfect if it works. Initially, I had people putting their word documents into LiberWriter not with the smooth(ish) upload process we have now, but by cutting and pasting in their documents! As a computer guy, doing things in a hacky way is sometimes very unpleasant, but you know what? It worked, and it was easy for people to handle, so I ran with it until a better system was in place.
Writing code was the easy part, and definitely within my "comfort zone". Some of the other things I've had to do have been much more difficult, and as a consequence, more of a learning experience.
For instance, I realized early on that the process would never be 100% automatic, so I'd have to get some people to work on the books, with the idea being to provide them tools to make the process as simple, quick, and easy as possible. I'm always on the lookout for new things to script within the system.
However, need people it does, and finding them and engaging them has been a difficult process. As per the book's suggestion, I've primarily used oDesk to find contractors, and have grardually begun to find some people who work really well. It has taken time, and has not been easy, though. I'm not an introvert, but in some ways I'm happiest when doing my own thing. Being the 'boss' is new. One of the tricky aspects of oDesk is that pretty much any job posting gets tons of responses, some of them from people who appear to have barely read the posting. One trick I learned is to request that the potential contractor creates an account with LiberWriter. Very simple and not a waste of time, and yet a majority of applicants ignored the request.
Through most of the spring and summer, LiberWriter remained something strictly for the evenings and weekends, as I was busy with client work during the days, and with my daughter during the afternoons, but as August rolled around, I found some more time on my hands, and really started investing more energy in LiberWriter. It has been very rewarding to see a corresponding increase in the number of customers. We (at this point, between myself and the contractors, LiberWriter is a group, and no longer "I") also raised prices - another valuable piece of advice from the book, and... pretty much anyone who writes for people jumping into online businesses. As tech people, we often tend to aim low in terms of prices. Indeed, soonish, prices will likely go up again.
Another challenge has been turning it as much as possible into a "productized service". Since Kindle books are fairly simple in what you can do with them, as long as you don't get too fancy, it's possible to automate *most* things, but not everything, so it's not just a product that people buy and it works and that's that; there's a human element involved, which means more communication, and more potential for things to go off the rails. I've been investing time in automating the workflow of the system, but have a lot more to do on that front. Also, one of the things our customers love about the service is being able to deal with "real people", something that is more difficult at Amazon. That's good for us in one way, but in the future, it will be critical to document things and make them as simple as possible to avoid generating unneccessary support requests, as it can easily take up a lot of time.
Indeed, because LiberWriter does attract customers who are often not all that technical, making the user experience as easy and straightforward for them as possible (and then some) is extremely important. It can be exasperating once in a while, but I do my best to channel any frustrated energy on my part into making the site ever easier and ever more straightforward. In other words, instead of "how the heck do they not get that?!" it's "what can I do to make sure the tools and information they need are even easier for them to get?". There's lots to do on that front, but on the whole it's actually part of the project that I've grown to like a lot. Rather than dealing with other techies like myself, our customers are people who really benefit from what we offer because we can save them so much time and frustration.
Marketing the system is fun, but another area where I have a lot to learn: I'm not a natural when it comes to marketing or selling. One thing that has worked well so far is finding forums where your target users hang out, and then.... spam them as often as possible? No way! Be yourself, and provide genuine help and value to people in the forums. By being on the level, and not trying to sell! sell! sell! people are friendlier and more receptive to your message. It can be time consuming, but I suppose it's the sort of thing where taking the wrong short cut could be very detrimental over the long haul.
Without disclosing too much, I don't think I'll ever get rich from LiberWriter, but it is incredibly satisfying to have created and marketed a product of my own that goes beyond just selling my own time. LiberWriter doesn't bring in as much as consulting, yet, but it feels like much more of an investment, something that will have some momentum of its own, and of course it has been an incredible learning experience. I like programming, but being outside of my "comfort zone", doing stuff that's new and challenging is also a very positive part of the project. If things continue to grow the way they have been, I could envision depending on LiberWriter as my primary source of income in the very near future. That's a bit of a jump into the unknown in some ways, but I'd love it. I have worked very hard on it lately, and one of the things I am enjoying is always having new ideas about how to improve every aspect of the system, from customer service to the mechanics of the conversion process, to tracking the finances. In some ways it's tiring because I'm thinking about it *all* the time, but it's that "good kind of tired".
It's been a tumultous summer, and in the past few weeks we (well, my wife much more than me!) had a new baby boy, and bought a house here in Padova. To keep things interesting for the future, I applied to the
Startup Chile program with LiberWriter. I suspect they're more interested in startups with high growth potential, but I feel strongly that the approach outlined in Rob's book is one that people outside of Silicon Valley, without easy access to venture capital and the huge talent pool that area has, should consider, rather than trying to copy what makes Silicon Valley work like it does.
Whether I get accepted or not, LiberWriter will continue to grow, and, I sincerely hope, thrive. A big thanks to all our customers, and to my wife Ilenia, and children, Helen and Daniel for tollerating all the time I spend with the computer.
I wrestled a bit with writing this post, as I don't want to "jinx things", and I've only just got a small taste of "success", but I've always enjoyed reading about how "ordinary people" have managed to create their own small businesses, people like those behind
Balsamiq, "
Bingo Card Creator", and the like, and I figure that writing up my own experiences is a way of "paying it forward".
That s a copy of The Lorax. My friend Jonathan had brought a copy along during our road trip in Mexico, and Jacob was really excited about it. And didn t really want to give it up, because You can only get The Lorax in Mexico. He (and Oliver) really enjoyed all his presents he also got a train book from us (which he said, Oh, yay, it s the book they have at preschool! ), and a game and some other presents from the distant relatives.
But the highlight was something of an impulse buy. I was at the RadioShack in Derby a place I ve written about before, It is what a RadioShack should (and used to) be. It has a large amateur radio section, sells all sorts of coax by the foot, and provides astonishingly good post-sale service. Well, I was there with a radio question, and Mark (the owner) who is an excellent salesman in a positive way pointed me to a display of snap kits. I noticed their Electronics 101 Snap-Kit (a rebranded Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100). A ham in Pennsylvania had suggested them to me once, and as Jacob s birthday was coming up, I gave it some thought. The kit said ages 8 and up. I asked Mark what he thought about a boy just turning 5. He said, Well, probably not normally. But knowing you, if you re there to work on them with him, I think he d enjoy it. But I wouldn t have him work on it by himself. I agreed and we bought it.
I pondered how to explain the concept of this thing to Jacob. Eventually I decided I would call it a toy-building kit. He understood that.
Jacob and I spent hours together working with it. He would flip through the book, either picking circuits that looked interesting or telling me what kind of circuit he wanted to build. Then I would tell him what to put where, and he d snap them together and play with them. He only played with each finished product a few minutes before he was ready to try another. Once I got him very excited with my offer to show him how to hook up two switches in parallel for the fan he built (and later introduced the parallel vs. series concept by hooking them up in series instead.) Here we are working on it together.
Jacob repeatedly called Terah over to look at the things he built. He was very excited that he assembled it himself. Eventually, Oliver (age 2) came over wanting to help. So he sat on my lap, and handed parts to Jacob, then Jacob put them on the grid. Oliver really enjoyed being involved in this way, even though I had to keep him from doing things like ripping the capacitor off its mount.
We tend to be modest in terms of the number of things we give the boys and their cost, reasoning that we, like many, already have too many toys in our house, and that greater cost doesn t necessarily equate with a better experience for the boys. I particularly look for things with lasting value and unique experiences for them, and I think we succeeded this year.
But I realized quickly that the greatest value of this kit wasn t electronics. It was having a great way for me to spend a lot of time doing things with the boys which all of us enjoyed. Those hours building things together were as much a present for me as for Jacob, I m quite sure.
Jacob s real party was a few weeks ago at the Great Plains Transportation Museum in Wichita. They let people rent a historic caboose to use for a birthday party for children. So we did that for Jacob this year.
That was a huge hit for the boys. Jacob got to help his grandpa make some pie (instead of cake) for the party. He enjoyed eating it, of course.
He enjoyed opening his presents high up on the observation chair in the caboose. And the boys got to play on all the other equipment in the museum. Jacob enjoyed playing tour guide for family since most of them hadn t been there. He also enjoyed watching freight trains pass on the other side of the fence from the museum preferably while sitting in one of the museum s engines.
Oliver certainly didn t get left out. Train-watching is serious business, after all.
Jacob has long talked about going to the train museum and the airplane museum (Kansas Aviation Museum) on the same day, so one of his birthday surprises was that we went to the airplane museum after his party. His favorite item there is a retired FedEx 727. Here he is walking down the rear of the plane.
And, of course, they played captain and co-pilot in several different planes.
An obvious question is why Linux doesn't support UEFI secure booting. Let's ignore the issues of key distribution and the GPL and all of those things, and instead just focus on what would be required. There's two components - the signed binary and the authenticated variables.
Yet another progress report about D-I l10n. 
There are certian things haskell is very good at, and I had the pleasure
of using it for one such thing yesterday. I wanted to support
expressions like 
Fixing the Sandbrige MacBook Air display initialization
We left our hero with Debian installed on the MacBook Air, but with
the display getting scrambled as soon as the i915 driver loaded.
As was reported to Matthew, the problem is as simple as a lack of
the right mode for the eDP panel in the machine. This mode is supposed
to come from the panel EDID data, but for some reason the driver
wasn t able to query the EDID data, and so it decided to try some
random panel timings it dug out of the VBT tables, which are generally
supposed to be used by LVDS panels. Apple helpfully stuck valid data
there, but for some other panel one that is 1280x800 pixels instead
of the 1366x768 pixel panel in the MacBook Air.
I heard rumors that some machines would get a black screen when the
i915 driver loaded. I was fortunate my machine simply displayed a
1366x768 subset of the programmed 1280x800 mode. A bit of garbage on
the right side, and a few scanlines missing at the bottom. Quite
workable, especially after I ran fbset -yres 768 to keep the console
in the visible portion of the screen.
DDC failure
Looking through the kernel logs, the Intel driver tries to access the
EDID data and times out, as if DDC is just completely broken. This is
rather unexpected; the eDP spec says that the panel is required to
support DDC and provide EDID. Now, we ve seen a lot of panels which
don t quite live up to the rigorous eDP specifications, but it s a bit
surprising from Apple, who generally do VESA stuff pretty well.
We ve heard reports about panels reporting invalid EDID data, or EDID
data which didn t actually match the panel (causing us to prefer the
VBT data on LVDS machines). But I ve not heard of an eDP panel which
didn t have anything hanging off of the DDC channel.
But X works fine?
During early debugging, I happened to start X up. Much to my surprise,
X came up at the native 1366x768 mode. Digging through the kernel logs
after that, I discovered that EDID was successfully fetched from the
eDP panel while X started up.
At this point, I knew it was all downhill the EDID data was
present, it just wasn t getting picked up during the early part of the
driver initialization when the console mode is initialized.
eDP power management
The CPU is given complete control over the power management of the eDP
panel; sequencing through various power states and waiting appropriate
amounts of time when things change. Given the goal of keeping power
usage as low as possible, this makes a huge amount of sense.
The eDP spec is quite clear though, without power, the panel will not
respond to anything over the aux channel, and that includes EDID
data. The eDP panel power hardware in the Sandybridge chip has a special
mode for dealing with this requirement. If the panel is not displaying
data, you can supply power for the aux channel stuff by setting a
magic bit in the panel power registers.
When initializing the frame buffer, the kernel driver turns off the
panel completely so that it has all of the hardware in a known state
(yeah, this is not optimal, but that s another bug). When X started,
the panel was already running with the console mode.
Given the difference between these two states EDID querying with
the panel off failed, while EDID querying with the panel on worked, it
seemed pretty clear that the panel power wasn t getting managed
correctly. So, it seemed pretty clear that the magic power the panel
bit wasn t getting turned on at the right times.
Getting the power turned on.
I stuck a check inside all of the aux channel communication functions
to see where things were broken. This pointed out several places
missing the panel power calls. This wasn t quite sufficient to get
EDID data flowing. The remaining problem was that the code wasn t
waiting long enough after turning the panel power on before starting
the aux channel communication. A few msleep calls and huzzah! EDID at
boot time and the console had the right mode.
Making it faster
However, it turns out that the driver does this a lot, and the msleeps
required were fairly long the eDP panel wants a 500ms delay from
turning the panel power off before you can turn it back on.
I fix this by simply delaying the panel power off until things were
idle for a long time. Now mode setting goes zipping through, and a
few seconds later, the bit to force panel power on gets turned off.
Getting these bits for yourself
I ve pushed out the code to my (temporary) kernel repository
git://people.freedesktop.org/~keithp/linux
in the fix-edp-vdd-power branch. I d love to hear if you ve tried this
on either a MacBook Air or any other eDP machine from Ironlake onwards.
This year, 
For the longest time, I went by the nick "Yoe" when I went on IRC.
When I chose this nick for myself, I was sixteen, and the Internet
computer at the local public library had an IRC client installed that I
tried out. Obviously, my first choice of nick -- "wouter", a fairly
common first name in Dutch-speaking regions -- was already chosen, so I
had to come up with something else. If I'd realized that I'd still be
using this nick today, seventeen years later, I might have
chosen that nick with a bit more care...
Over the years, some people have asked me what the nickname meant,
where it came from. I've never really told anyone the entire story,
mainly because it was somewhat embarrasing. But hey, we've all been 16,
right?
In the early nineties, there was a show on TV called "Het huis van
wantrouwen". On this show, they had a running joke involving a short
clip of Belgian members of parliament informally voting on a subject by
raising hands (literally); the joke was that this clip was dubbed with a
bunch of people saying "Yoe, de manne" -- which is dutch for something
along the lines of "Yo, guys".
As a young geeky teenager, I found this joke way more funny than it
actually was; and as such, a few years later, during one of the more
weird episodes of my life, I started pranking people by sneaking up to
them from behind and shouting "Yoe, de manne" right next to their ears.
I even managed to do this to one of our teachers who was walking on the
playground.
This was just around the time when I first tried out this "IRC"
thing. It didn't take me too long to realize I was the only
person who thought this "joke" was funny; but somehow the nick stuck,
and here we are, 17 years later, I'm still using it.
Or, well, I was. As of today, if you want to catch me on
IRC, you'll find me going by "wouter" instead of "Yoe". Of course
someone had registered that nick several years ago, but then he hadn't
been using it in years, and so after a quick request to the
OFTC admins they made it available for me.
Whee.
Even though Enrico is not smiling on this picture, he s one of the friendliest Debian person that I know. I always enjoy his presentations because he can t refrain from inserting jokes or other funny tricks. 
That said he s serious too, there s lots of good stuff that he has developed over the years (starting with Debtags) and he has put a lot of effort in reforming the New Maintainer process. Read on to learn more about his various projects.
Raphael: Who are you?
Enrico: Hi, I m Enrico Zini, a DD from Italy. I m 35 and I work as a freelance Free Software developer. One of my historical roles in Debian is taking care of Debtags, but that is not all I do: my paid work led me to write and maintain some weather forecast related software in Debian, and recently I gained a Front Desk hat, and then a DAM hat.
Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?
Enrico: It was 2001, I was at uni, I was using Debian. At some point I wanted to
learn packaging so I read through the whole Policy from top to bottom.
Then I thought: why package only for myself? . There were many DDs at
my uni, and it only seemed natural to me to join Debian as well.
Evidently this was also natural for Zack [Note from editor: Stefano Zacchiroli], who had become DD 6 months
earlier and didn t hesitate to advocate me.
I found the Policy and the Developer s Reference to be very interesting
things to read, and I welcomed my AM s questions as an excuse to learn
more. I completely understand those people who have fun trying to answer
all the questions in the NM templates while they wait for an AM.
With my super DAM powers I can see that my AM report was submitted on
October 16, 2001 by my AM Martin Michlmayr, and that James Troup created
my account 9 days later, on October 25.
Raphael: You have a special interest in the New Maintainer (NM) Process
since you are a Debian Account Manager (DAM) and a member of the NM Frontdesk.
Thanks to your work the process is much less academic/bureaucratic than it
used to be. Can you remember us the main changes?
Enrico: One of the first things I noticed when I become a Front Desk member is
that there was a tendency to advocate people too early, thinking by
the time they ll get an AM, they ll know enough .
Unfortunately, this didn t always work, and once the real NM process
started it would turn into a very long and demotivating experience both
for the applicant and for the AM. So we tried 
There was another question recently on StackOverflow that I had meant to
discuss in a follow-up post here. User deltanovember asked