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".
A new effort for removing spam from a set of Debian mailing list has
started: on September 3rd, Fernando Estrada announced
the launch of the "Eliminar correo
no deseado de las listas en espa ol" effort.
Muchas gracias, Fernando, for this initiative. So, if you happen to be
a Spanish native speaker and want to help this effort (no need to be a
Debian developer or maintainer for that, just motivation and some
time)....feel free to join the effort.
As a first result of this, I had, today, a few dozens of proposed spam
messages to review, coming from debian-user-spanish. Yay!
The blog is back. We ve moved it to our new blog hosting (please 
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 
PostgreSQL 9.1 has had its first release candidate out for some two weeks without major problem reports, so it s time to promote this more heavily. If you use PostgreSQL, now is the time to try it out and report problems.
We always strive to minimize the number of major versions which we have to support. They not only mean more maintenance for developers, but also more upgrade cycles for the users.
9.0 has not been in any stable Debian or Ubuntu release, and 9.1 final will be released soon. So we recently updated the current Ubuntu development release for 11.10 ( oneiric ) 
The CA model of SSL has always bothered me. The idea of a trusted
third party feels eerily close to maffia security: you believe this
person, whom you don't know, is who he claims he is on nothing more than
the word of this other person, whom you also don't know.
The DigiNotar story proves how problematic this model is, but you
don't really need that to understand its problems.
For the longest time, however, there simply was no better way to
properly do these things. But now that we have 
I have been a long-time user of
.png)
After many years of successfully dodging doing any serious programming in PHP, I had to get my feet wet with PHP for my RL job: I was requested to develop a simple but non-trivial module for our Institute's Drupal-based webpage.
It basically meant two and a half weeks devoted to head-scratching: I had read the very good John van Dyk's 
This is just a quick post to remind myself in the morning, as soon as I've made it I intend to turn my computer off and leave it off until I can re-organize my office.
I've been using mutt for my email for the past few years. Nothing compares to the flexibility of procmail/sieve for organizing server-side mail, and then mutt is ideal for reading them.
With the addition of the mutt-patched sidebar mode you can even go for a few days before realizing you're not in a graphical environment. But one thing I do long for is the ability to execute scripts at various times.
Thus far I've not actually planned what I'd like to do, but as a starting point imagine being able to execute a hook when new mail arrives? Or when you send a message matching a pattern in some fashion?
There are some things out there, such as the various hacks which are designed to abort sending a message if you mention "See attachment" in a message body but fail to add one before sendign the message. These hacks generally abuse the sendmail configuration such that they're extremely ad-hoc and hard to chain/nest.
I've mellowed out over the years and I have no interest in attempting to write a mail-client (though at the same time how hard can it be? Just restrict yourself to using inotify on ~/Maildir and offload delivery to exim and you're almost done? I guess the hard part is the UI, though I do like the mutt + sidebar layout. Write the whole thing in some scripty language?)
I'll re-examine notmuch and gnus over the next week or two, but I suspect both will continue to disappoint in various ways.
Anyway, for the moment I'm just pondering. But threading is an obvious concern. Most current mutt hooks relate to the local folder, or the local message. If I were viewing a message in one directory and a new mail notification fired for a delivery to both ~/Maildir and ~/Maildir/.people.foo I'd need to either serialise them or thread them.
Ponder ponder.
In other news I've been doing more photography recently. Nothing cohesive except for my recent experiment with shooting a "street-girl" outdoors in falling light, but that was an interesting challenge and the results were sufficient to make me want to try shooting outdoors in an organized fashion again. (Some random images have been linked to from my wee 
I'm in the middle of setting up new build machines for the armhf
port (see 
All of these machines are Freescale i.MX53 Quickstart (aka "loco")
development boards. They include a 1GHz i.MX53 CPU (based around the
ARM Cortex A8, one of the ARMv7-A family). They have 1GB of RAM and
native SATA. They're lovely little machines, measuring just 3 inches
square. To mount them usefully in a machine room, I've mounted each
board with a 320GB notebook hard drive and the necessary cabling onto
a small perspex card as you can see here. Then we can fit 6 such
machines and a normal PC-style ATX PSU into a 3U mini-rack. Well,
it almost fits - the power supply pokes out a little so we'll
need 4U of space when we come to mount it.
The Quickstart boards have been sponsored
by 
Both Bash and Zsh use several startup scripts: profile, bashrc, zlogin, zshrc, etc.
The existence of several startup scripts exists to allow you to apply
specific actions for interactive or login shells. For instance, you may want to
set up a fancy colour prompt or to enable a powerful completion system for
interactive shells only, as it would be pointless to apply it to non-interactive
shells (that is, for shell scripts). Or you may want to display a joke and the
weather forecast at login, but not each time you spawn a shell by other
means.Common
Both Bash and Zsh first execute a system-wide file, then the corresponding
user-specific one. For instance, /etc/profile then
~/.profile. For simplicity I shall only mention the
files' base names.
Bash
At startup, depending on the case:
While