I don't envy conference organizers these days - most of what's being said can be read the next day, for free, on line, at your own pace, from the comfort of your own home, and without spending a bundle of time and money to sleep in a far away hotel. Competing with that is not easy, but the guys at MicroConf managed to. I would sum up the weekend by saying that it was a "very high bandwidth experience". Every day, from breakfast until I turned in, I was chatting with people or listening to speakers during the conference itself. That's aproximately 16 hours of being "on", and by the time I got home to Padova, I was exhausted! But at the end of the day, I felt like it was worth it being there in person, because of all the interaction with other people. The speakers' talks all ended up on line, more or less, but all the chatting and discussion and getting to know everyone is the human element that is tough to replicate on line, and one of the most important reasons to attend a conference in person. Prague is also a beautiful city - I wish I had had more time there to check it out. Here are some highlights and notes, in no particular order:

• Rob Walling talked about actual, concrete numbers when discussing his current project's revenues. There's a ton of handwavy stuff out there on the internet, but real numbers are tough to beat. What makes it especially nice is that they also felt "real": they're good numbers, no doubt about it, but not stratospheric, science fiction numbers that leave you feeling like "ok, whatever, but that's not the planet I live on". They're numbers that make you think "maybe, if things go well, I could do that too".
• The number of "I'm from X, but live in Y" people at the conference was high. Irish but live in Spain, American but live in Japan. Or maybe just noticeable because I'm in that category myself. There were people attending from the US, Europe, Japan, South Africa, and even Australia. Impressive!
• Almost all of the speakers had very specific, concrete advice that I can and will apply to LiberWriter, time permitting. I read, and have read, a lot of business books. Most of them are kind of fluffy, truth be told, in that they've got one decent idea, and a lot of filler to turn what could have been a tight, ten-page article into a book. This was quite different in that there were a whole lot of tips and tricks being thrown out.
• Rob's wife Sherry gave a talk about life with an entrepreneur. Having two kids and a wonderful wife myself, it's a point of view that I was very interested in hearing about. Judging from the people I chatted with, this was not your typical "startup" conference with a bunch of 20-somethings with no family and no ties - a lot of the other people attending had kids to think about as they launch their ventures. A question I asked of Rob was how much of a leap he took from consulting to working on his own products, with the answer being that he's actually pretty risk adverse. No Silicon Valley story about betting the house and everything else on the company - apparently, revenues from the web sites and products were good enough that there wasn't even really a leap to make when he quit consulting.
• The size of the conference was just right: enough people that I didn't quite manage to meet everyone, but not so many that it was overwhelming. In downtime between talks, and during dinners, breakfasts, lunch and so on, the speakers were very available to chat with.
• Patrick McKenzie seems to have stumbled into his life's calling as someone working at the border of software and marketing. The amount of advice, anecdotes, and data that he was continually spinning off was incredible. He comes across as being a down-to-earth, approachable, friendly person.
• Part of the balancing act the organizers have to work with is where people are at: some people had an idea but no concrete business. Some of us (me) make some money but not too much. Others have viable businesses that they make enough to live off of, and then there are those who seem pretty much 'set'. It's difficult to find people to speak to each audience without losing some of the others.
• The thing I liked the most about a lot of what was discussed was that it seems realistic. Few people at the conference were from Silicon Valley, and yet... they're successful! I like hearing about success stories that work out really well for the people involved, but still feel like something attainable. People should be looking to emulate the successful guys here, not looking at extreme outliers like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
• I'm used to tech conferences, where it's all about the technology. There was very little actual tech talk at MicroConf - it seems like everyone knows their stuff and was interested in learning about marketing, sales, and so on.

However, since it was a business conference, I also have to put on my cold, hard accountant hat. Will the conference pay for itself? Only time will tell. I learned a variety of interesting and useful things, many of which I think I can put into practice. The problem is finding the time between consulting work and family, but that was a bottleneck before, too - I had, and have, more things to do than time. Also, to be very direct about it, how much of what I learned could not have been learned by carefully reading accounts of the conference, slides, and other material published on the internet? A lot of it. I'm not sure I would have paid attention to all of it though, so the conference was definitely nice in that it exposed me to some talks and ideas that otherwise I might have brushed off before giving them a chance. In terms of dollars and cents, I won't be able to say for a while whether it was a sensible investment or not. Would I go again? I'd like to - it was a lot of fun and the people were great. Like I said, it's tough doing conferences because your competition is the internet!

I've been reading "The Millionaire Next Door" and have so far found it to be a pleasant book with a good message: don't waste your money on silly things and appearance (fancy suits, fancy cars, expensive boats, etc...), save what you do earn consistently and constantly, invest wisely, and so on. Wikipedia has a good summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door One of the things I like about it is that it focuses on "ordinary" wealthy people, those with a million or more in the bank, but not the Warren Buffets or Bill Gates types that are extreme statistical outliers. There are plenty of people in the US who have done well by themselves by slowly but surely putting together enough money to be financially independent, without, however, being in the spotlight. As the book says, these are the kind of people who maybe own a local chain of businesses doing something fairly ordinary, but doing it well enough to succeed. They may very well not live in a fancy house, nor drive an expensive car, or otherwise outwardly draw much attention to themselves. The world of software does not revolve around "dressing for success" (you noticed?), but we do tend to focus on the "big winners". Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Larry & Sergey, Larry Ellison, and so on are the stars of the show. Of course, the economics of software being what they are, instances of winner-take-all markets with one big fish and a lot of also-rans are not uncommon. However, that is not the only story, and I think it'd be interesting to know more about those in our industry who have accumulated significant wealth, yet are not the guys with more money than they could possibly ever spend on things that aren't, say, country-sized chunks of real-estate. I'm guessing they'd fall into these categories:

• Highly paid workers who have consistently saved over the years. There are examples in the aforementioned book about people with relatively low salaries who happened to be very frugal and invest well (and have had some luck in their investments too). These people would probably tend to be older, as it takes a while to save up that kind of money, and since this industry is so young with so much turnover, I would not think there would be a lot of people out there like this, but who knows, maybe there are a bunch of IBMers with this kind of story.
• Those who got in on the right IPO, like Google or Facebook or something like that. These events not only generate billions for those at the top of the heap, but for the right person at the right place at the right time, can mean significant wealth even without being in the upper echelons of the company. My suspicion is that this kind of IPO, where everyone cashes out, is not common enough to have a lot of people in this category, but who knows, maybe it adds up over the years.
• Those who own or started software firms that do something that's not very visible, but nonetheless dominates some particular niche. This is where I'd guess most of them would be, but I certainly have no data or even anecdotes to back this up.

It'd be very interesting to gather some actual data on this, although I'm not in a position to do so myself - I wouldn't even really know where to start. As I age, I think the third category has begun to seem appealing in many ways - I'm simply not cut out for the Big Company life, and I'm not interested in living in Silicon Valley and going "all in" on the latest startup - I already did that, and while it was fun and I don't regret it, it's not the kind of thing I'd want to do now that I'm married and have kids. Incidentally, this more relaxed, under the radar approach is exactly what is expoused in one of my favorite books of the past few years, Start Small, Stay Small. Edit : I finished reading the book and reviewed it here: http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/

It's one of those things that you read about, but are never really sure about: you think "maybe he was doing something fishy, and isn't tellling it straight in the public account of the incident". So I'll try to stick to "just the facts". A few weeks ago, I dug up some old book reviews I'd done, and posted to Facebook, and opened a site here: http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/ as a way of collecting them. Naturally, I also added Amazon referral links, because, hey, it helps feed my reading habit! Last month I got enough to buy two whole Kindle books, so we're not exactly talking about "get rich quick" territory here. We're not even talking about anything remotely close to my day job, for that matter. But hey, if I can get a little bit extra to spend on books, it's nice. The reviews were basically quick notes on books I read. Nothing that I or the rest of humanity can't get along without, but I felt like writing up a little something for myself and people I know on the internet - maybe it'll help someone else find an interesting book to read. Several days later, I believe on October 8th, I woke up to find my phone was 'not signed in to Google', and, after repeated attempts, wouldn't sign in. Same thing with my Nexus 7. Logging in to my computer, in something of a cold sweat at this point, I find I can't get into Gmail or anything else, either. Luckily, on the computer, Google's system did redirect me to a page where they mentioned suspicious activity, and gave me the chance to reactivate things by sending an SMS to my phone. This did work quickly, and did a little bit to alleviate some of my stress. I understand that locking things down quickly is probably to my benefit as well as theirs in the event of an actual security breach of someone's account: it keeps the attacker from doing any more damage. However, it was sure a bad way to start a Monday morning. However, the actual 'blog' (sorry, I hate the word!) was still blocked. It too has a form to fill out to prove that you're human. Although: as a computer guy, you'd think that with all the clever people at Google, they would be able to tell from my access patterns to the site, browser footprint, IP addresses and so forth, that...well, I am me. In any event though, they promised to review the blog within two days. So, I waited patiently. A week later, still nothing. Then, the next day, I went back to check on the status, and they had reset the review request: it no longer said anything about October 8th, when I had originally made the reinstatement request. So I filled in their form again, asking to have my blog back. That was yesterday, we'll see what happens next. As far as I can tell, I did not violate their actual terms of conditions, which say nothing about referral links: http://www.blogger.com/content.g Since the people at Google are loth to speak with their users directly, it seems as if one of the best ways of getting support is to complain loudly and publicly about this kind of shennanigan. And to forestall the somewhat inevitable comments on anything related to Google: 1) Yes, I know I signed an agreement where they say they can do whatever the hell they want and I can f**k off if I don't like it. Try and do anything on line with a major company and not get a contract like that, or for even more entertainment value, try and negotiate the contract with t he company. Good luck. If you don't say yes, you're pretty much on your own; there doesn't seem to be much of a market for "more humane terms and conditions" out there. 2) I know, I know, relying on the Google beast is a great way to set yourself up for a big fall if anything ever goes wrong, because it's impossible to appeal, or pretty much even to talk with a human. But with a limited amount of time in my life, to date, Google has been a pretty good deal. I suppose it's something of a "black swan" situation: everything seems fine until one day WHACK, and Google pulls the carpet from under your legs. Conclusions? Well, I hope someone out there can help me recover my content. I wrote it myself, and I would like to save my book reviews somewhere. What alternatives are there to the Google colossus? Not too many that I can see that are anywhere at all as convenient. Edit: 2012-10-17: I don't know what did it, but they have reinstated the site. Strange and disconcerting, but I guess things are ok for the time being. Thanks to whoever it was at Google that finally had a look.

I am a big fan of Ruby on Rails: it does a lot of things, and it does most of them pretty well. When starting a new web project, it's the first thing I would reach for: most of the time, your problem is going to be figuring out a good product/market fit, or whipping up some internal tool without wasting a lot of programmer time. Once you've got a firm grasp of the problem, then maybe you can consider optimizing. Who cares if you do something that no one wants really really fast? However, Ruby on Rails is not beautiful in terms of being particularly fast or lightweight. No complaints from me: most of the time, I'm happy to have something that does so much for me, leaving me to work on the actual problem at hand. Once in a while, though, you do need fast and relatively lightweight, and that space has been getting more interesting over the past few years, at least in terms of the web. First of all, technologies like "Comet", utilizing web sockets or some other always-on connection are becoming more common, where a socket with the server remains open in order to quickly exchange data from the server to the client - and back. That seems to be a poor fit for something like Rails, where it can tie up a lot of resources if one isn't careful. And while computing costs continue to decline, no one minds getting more for less in terms of what their server can do. Furthermore, with frameworks like Backbone.js, pushing more and more code to the client, the server can afford to be a bit simpler and do less, so it may as well be snappy to boot. Java has long been fairly popular for "heavy lifting" types of applications, partially because it does end up being reasonably fast. But it's not something I've ever had much fun using and is usually kind of wordy, and makes you feel like you need a crew of people in Palo Alto, one in Bangalore, and one in Stockholm just to churn out all the code. And it certainly is no lightweight in terms of memory either. So... while it can certainly do pretty much anything you need, I don't see it as being the strongest player when someone needs "real time web" code, and needs it to be reasonably light weight. Ruby, outside of standard Rails stuff like Passenger, seems to offer some interesting possibilities for this kind of work, like Reel but they don't seem to have the traction other solutions do. Python is in a similar situation: the Twisted framework has been around for a while, and while it has some success stories, never seems to have really 'caught fire'. Neither of these languages was built for "concurrency" from the ground up, and that seems to have, to date, inhibited people from using them extensively for this kind of job. My gut feeling is that the need for speed and "concurrency" (or at least handling a lot of concurrent users) will drive adoption of languages heretofore not so popular on the server. Let's have a look at them. Erlang: This is by no means a new language, having been developed in Ericsson in the late 1980ies; and it implements several interesting concepts. First and foremost, concurrency is handled in the form of many small "processes", which are not actually Unix processes at all, but processes internal to the Erlang VM. The Erlang system contains a scheduler that allocates resources to all of these processes, so even if one of them dies or behaves badly, it's not a problem: the system as a whole can continue to function well. The way Erlang is built, the scheduler is preemptive: the internal "processes" don't need to yield to let other processes run. Beyond the scheduler and simple processes, Erlang gives you the tools to create elaborate trees of supervisors and workers that are quite robust to failures in any one portion of the system, as well as giving you the tools to set up a system to run on multiple, distributed computers. This kind of thinking is necessary when you write applications, such as phone switches, where downtime is really, really not ok. Erlang processes comunicate almost exclusively via message passing, meaning that state is not shared. Altogether, this makes for a fast, rock solid system that can easily handle thousands of concurrent connections without breaking a sweat. The computing world being what it is though, Erlang is likely to be more of a Lisp or Smalltalk: it's a trailblazer that did many things years before their time in other languages, but I don't see it as ever quite catching on amongst 'the masses'. It has a wonky syntax, it's a functional programming language, and because it is used in environments where too much experimentation is not good, it does not have a lot of room to break with its own past and innovate in terms of the language itself: it's slow to change and improve, even where the need to is clearly perceived. Node.js: is the opposite, in some ways: being based on Javascript, it draws on a huge number of potential programmers - orders of magnitude more than Erlang. And thanks to design decisions enforcing the use of asynchronous code and callbacks for anything that could block, it deals quite well with concurrent connections, even if the language and libraries don't really give you much in terms of "true" concurrency. This is a simple model that works pretty well, even if, theoretically, all it would take is one "while (1)" loop in a callback to block the entire system. In practice, this doesn't seem to be a big problem, though. More of a problem is writing maintainable code, when everything is a callback. Keeping the network of callbacks straight can be a bit of a chore, and is probably not an optimal model in terms of programmer productivity. That said, people seem to do make due with it, although Node is young enough that we haven't seem projects that are 5 or 6 years old and maintained by people who didn't write them. One of the advantages of being such a popular language is that lots of people have a strong interest in seeing Javascript being very, very performant. That need begat the V8 Javascript engine, from Google, which they were kind enough to release as free software. So one of the advantages that Node has is that the underlying implementation is extremely fast for a dynamic language. For many people who know Javascript, picking up Node.js is also an easy choice, even though people used to browser side programming with Javascript will have to adjust their way of thinking to succesfully tackle server projects. Go language: this is an interesting one, written by some luminaries who work at Google. It can best be described as something akin to C with some updated features, such as garbage collection, that make it more suitable for working on large projects, where things like memory leaks are going to make life very frustrating. It has the feel of a "real language, for real programmers" in that it doesn't stray far too far from what people are used to - it's not going to cause the "what the hell is this?!" reactions that Erlang might in more close-minded circles. Between the big company backing it, and the approachable syntax and concepts, Go looks like it has a good shot at the mainstream. Where it gets interesting is their concurrency model, which is apparently based on something called "communicating sequential processes" which, superficially at least, looks like it has some things in common with Erlang's "actor model" of concurrency. Under the hood, Go apparently hives off its "goroutines" to different OS level threads, but does not have a preemptive scheduler like Erlang: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=543 - although according to this, they may change that in the future. I'm not enough of a computer science guy to comment much on the details of CSP vs Actors, but both seem like valid models with strengths compared to trying to keep threads straight, which always seems to be a source of problems for programmers. Conclusions So, what's actually going to happen? I see Node.js as the clear front runner. It takes a worse-is-better approach that seems to work well enough as people get started. If they encounter difficulties later, they can always rewrite in something else, if needs be, but by "luring people in", Node.js has gathered a large group of users who continue, in turn, to churn out more code for use with the system, making it more attractive to new users. Programming languages are not winner-take-all markets though, so perhaps there is room for a few more languages to have decent followings in this space. Hopefully the competition will lead to ever better tools for those of us utilizing them! What do you think?

There are so many sites trying to vie for Google results for any and every town in existance in the United States that they are crowding out useful information. They get their list of towns from census data or similar sources, and generate pages for every single entry they find, no matter how small. During the weekend, I was poking around, looking for information on a not-quite-ghost town called Lonerock, in Oregon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonerock,_Oregon
I love to visit out of the way places like that when I'm back in Oregon, which we hope to do next summer. So I was curious about it - it appears quite isolated, but seems like it might be worth a look. According to the Wikipedia article it is a very small town, with a population of 24 people. And yet, if you look at the Google results for it, you find a few good links at first, and then:

• Any number of results with "city information", which is just census data with a bit of fiddling.
• Current local time. Gee, that's great to know.
• Various 'homes for sale' sites: none listed.
• Horses for sale "in Lonerock", but it turns out they're all in Heppner (30 miles away) or farther.
• Climate statistics.
• Bicycles for sale in Lonerock. Surprisingly, none of those, either.
• Attorneys at law in Lonerock. I think they ran them all out of town: there are none.
• Truck scales and weigh stations in Lonerock. You have to drive at least 50 miles to get to the nearest one.
• Hotels in Lonerock: nope, none of those either.
• Various Cable and Internet offerings (I think in reality they use this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers )
• Doctors in Lonerock: Neurologists, Gastroenterologists and even Nephrologists. Turns out there aren't any in town.
• Car Rentals in Lonerock. Just in case you fly in to any of the Airports in Lonerock, and want to leave rather than staying in the Hotels in Lonerock.
• Apartments for rent in Lonerock. A town of 24 people in the middle of the wide open west is not the kind of place you're likely to live in an apartment...
• Relocation guides for Lonerock.

And so on and so forth. Scattered in the middle, you can even find a few articles and photo pages by people who actually had something to say or show about the place, but finding them amidst all the crud is not an easy task. To me this seems surprising - it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to make sites that just happen to have entries for every town in the entire nation rank a bit lower than things written by human beings. Google - have a look at Lonerock, and see if you can use it as a way to seperate the wheat from the chaff!

I have some long running server processes that I am going to launch soonish, and I want to be alerted when they're done. Using Gmail and Android, it's pretty easy:

1. In Gmail, set up a new label, "Alerts" or something like that.
2. Set up a filter in Gmail that matches messages along the lines of codered@example.com, and adds the Alerts label, does not skip the inbox and are always marked as important.
3. Now, on your Android phone, in Gmail -> Settings -> Account settings (select the account) -> Sync inboxes and labels, and select your Alerts label.
4. Then, go back and select Labels to Notify in settings, select "Alerts", and add it to "Notify in Status bar", select an appropriate ringtone, set vibrate to 'always', and deselect 'Notify once' - because we want to be notified any time an alert comes in.

That should do it - on your server, set up an alias in something like /etc/aliases that redirects email from the alert alias - codered in this case - to your own email address. Now, you can script alerts that will get their own ringtone on your phone like so: echo "Dave, I can't let you do that" mail -s "Warning, computer malfunction" codered@example.com Pretty simple and effective if you need a simple way for your computer to let you know that it needs attention right now.

A number of years back, I read yet another complaint about someone having trouble finding a computer with Linux preinstalled. So I did something about it: I created LinuxSi.com, where it is possible to register computer stores in Italy (this was an Italian Linux mailing list) that are helpful towards people wishing to buy a Linux machine. Fast forward past getting married, having kids and buying a house, and LinuxSi.com is not something I have much time to run any more. I still think it's a useful service, even if the site itself is a bit creaky. In any event, I've put it up for auction with Flippa.com, and there's one week left on the auction. Right now, it's going for just $10, which even with the low amounts of adsense income it brings in, you'd make back pretty quickly. I hope that it goes to someone who cares about promoting Linux in Italy - if nothing else, the domain name is a good one that could be employed for many things.

Steve Blank is known for his teachings on the Silicon Valley type of entrepreneurship, with his ideas forming the basis for the "lean startup movement" amongst other things. He writes frequently on entrepreneurship, and with a great deal of credibility, having been involved in various startups in a number of roles. He has, without a doubt, walked the walk in terms of startups, and now seems to be spending his time helping other people learn how to walk the same path. That's a noble thing to be doing when, with the money he's made, he could probably be off doing pretty much whatever he wants. If you've heard of Steve Blank, you've probably also heard his famous phrase: "get out of the building", an admonition to startup founders to get out and talk with their customers to validate their ideas, rather than huddling in their offices building something that may or may not have a market. With that in mind, when I saw he had a new book out, The Startup Owner's Manual, I thought "great, that's one I'll get without hesitating!". Unfortunately, though, an eBook wont' be out until "2nd half of 2012"! Ouch. To me, his ignoring eBooks is indicative of a need to get a bit further outside the building, though. "I want an eBook" was probably the biggest request on his blog post announcing the new book, along side messages of thanks for writing the book. After reading, on Blank's blog about the availability of the book from BookDepository Ltd, who offer free worldwide shipping, I went ahead and ordered it even if I would have prefered the eBook. Since they're in the UK, and I'm in Italy, I figure it can't take that long, right? Wrong. I ordered on March 15th, and as of April 13th, it still isn't here. Compare and contrast with the other books I'm currently reading which I was able to order and start looking at in just a few minutes on my Kindle. Granted, Steve Blank surely isn't doing this for the money, and from that point of view has little real need to listen to his customers - it's not wrong to say he's doing the world a favor by writing the book in the first place. If he thinks a paper version is far superior, that's his perogative. However, I think he's doing a lot of his readers a disservice by not making the eBook available sooner. I know I would have liked to start reading what he had to say last month, rather than waiting for a paper book to make its way (by mule train?) down here to Italy. The crux of the matter is that while he may well be right in thinking a paper book is "better", for some people, an eBook is the only option, and for them, an "inferior" eBook is a heck of a lot better than no book at all. Also, on a more constructive note, with eBooks, you can get pretty creative. For instance, if you have a tabular worksheet, you can simply hyperlink to it in, say, Google Docs, so that those with more advanced devices like iPads can open up the link and start working with a real, live spreadsheet immediately, rather than a chart in a printed book. Granted, that means 'giving away' the worksheet, but presumably it's not that valuable on its own, and makes for great advertising if it gets a lot of attention. Finally, since I actually run a business that does eBook conversions , on the blog post announcing the book, I offered to donate our services, so he'd get his book done for free, so you can't accuse me of just complaining! Mr. Blank, get out of that building and make an eBook available, please!

Actually, that's not true - I've produced plenty of open source software over the years. However, in a sense, it is true: only the very best actually get paid to work on open source software full time, and I'm not one of them. People like Linus Torvalds. People like Guido van Rossum, although even he supposedly divides his time, and does not work on Python full-time. Think about that. Python is a hugely popular programming language used by many companies and individuals who get a lot of value out of it. But the creator doesn't even work on it full-time. Now, that's just one example - perhaps Guido enjoys the things that Google sends his way to work on outside of Python in any event - but I think it's representative of open source in general. Back to me: I've produced some small bits of open source code that other people find useful. Several people have even built products on Hecl that make money. But I'm not good enough to work on open source full time - I'm not one of those famous, brilliant coders who is so good that someone will find a way to pay them to work on stuff that gets given away for free. I am, however, a good enough programmer to work on people's proprietary code, and have never had too much trouble finding someone with a project they're happy to pay me for. Why is that? Because it's so much easier to funnel money back into a proprietary project. If people like the product and buy it, the company gets money, which can be used to pay the developers. With open source, millions of people might use it and get a lot of value from it, but the developer has no right to receive any of that back as cash, which he or she can use to pay for things like food and rent. So, I can code tolerably well, and I could conceivably contribute more open source code, but instead I spend my time working on proprietary code because it pays the bills. Clearly, when I can, I use open source software in these endeavors, and contribute back whenever I can, but the "secret sauce" remains closed. That's a pair of hands lost to the creation of more open source. I know I'm not alone in this, either - tons of people work on mostly proprietary projects the world over, but relatively few people get paid to work on open source code full time. So when I read about people debating the utility of copyright bring up the existence of open source as some sort of counterexample, it irritates me a bit. The right level of protection and enforcement of copyright is a complex debate that I'm not going to get into here. What I want to point out is "that which is not seen". Sure, open source exists. But how much more of it would exist it there were more money to fund work on it? How much open source software remains an idea in the developers head that does not get realized for lack of time? People often criticize the "Linux desktop" despite its extraordinary strides in recent years. Well, how much farther along would it be if there were more people paid to work on the 'boring stuff', like usability testing? Ubuntu and Redhat pay a few people to do that kind of stuff, but how many more people do Microsoft and Apple have for that kind of work? That's not to say that open source "doesn't work" or some such nonsense. It obviously works quite well, but it really shines where the currency is code, not money. Developers can and do give back lots, in terms of code, bug reports, suggestions, documentation, and so on to open source projects, which make them better for all involved. Where open source doesn't seem to work quite as well are in small, fast-moving, consumer-oriented products. My guess is that 99% of iPhone users could care less about the source code for their apps, but on the other hand, a large portion of the Emacs user base more than likely has written at least a few lines of Elisp. In any event, the point isn't to beat up on open source software, but to counter this idea that "intellectual property" is in no way shape or form necessary because the existence of open source software somehow "proves" that "things will get made just the same". Yes, maybe they will, but in lower quantities than consumers might find desirable. After all, most of us aren't good enough to work on open source software.

What with two kids, a new house, and LiberWriter getting some good traction, I've been looking around for things to give to a good home so as to have less stuff to deal with. So, on the auction block goes BikeChatter.com : https://flippa.com/2696023-professional-cyclists-on-twitter-plus-2-years-of-history

BikeChatter.com is the place to go on the web to follow professional cyclists on twitter. With 500+ racers, and nearly half a million status updates from racers like Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Mark Cavendish, and many, many more, this site is the best place to find out what's going on in the world of professional cycling, directly from the participants. Since I like following the site myself, I really want to see it go to people who will take it and make it even better.

Something I've picked up from reading about economics is the concept of "the margin". It's a way of thinking about problems that more people ought to take into consideration. What is "the margin"? It's that space on a line, in the middle, between two extremes, where the transition from "yes" to "no" occurs. If I offered you a million dollars for the computer you're reading this on (for broad definitions of 'computing device'), you'd probably take me up on the offer. For 0 dollars, you would not. Somewhere, in the middle, is a number where you'd change your mind from "nope, won't sell" to "well... sure, what the heck". That is, loosly defined, a margin. As an example, when people debate about "intellectual property", they often use terrible examples: companies like Microsoft, or performers such as Lady Gaga. Those are bad examples because they are complete outliers, way off on one end of the curve. It's hard to disagree with "so what if Lady Gaga earns a bit less revenue from her music, she's got plenty to live on" when you talk about copyright being a means for artists to support themselves with. Thinking "at the margin" is about those bands that currently barely sell enough music to work professionally as musicians. In scenario A, they are able to work creating music, thus creating more, and likely better music than if they merely pursued it as a hobby. In scenario B, they fall on the other side of the margin and therefore have to get 'real jobs'. This means that their music takes a back seat, and they produce less of it. Now, copyright and company are a complex conundrum with many facets; my point is simply that when thinking about big changes, we should think what will happen at the margin, not what will happen to the outliers.

Since I got my Kindle a bit more than a year ago, I have finally been able to slake my thirst for reading materials, something that was prohibitively expensive when ordering English language books via Amazon.co.uk, and took lots of time to boot. Here are some of the interesting books I've happened on in the past year: The big one was "Start Small, Stay Small": which has tons of ideas on how to do small, niche startups, "for the rest of us". Those of us who aren't in Silicon Valley, who aren't seeking millions in VC funding, those who don't want to aim for "astronomically rich", but just a comfortable lifestyle with more control over our own destiny. This book gets special mention for being a big inspiration for LiberWriter. Here is a list of the others.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow: http://amzn.to/sXQGSR - probably makes my list because I just finished it, and as he writes, "what you see is all there is" - we're biased towards things that come to mind easily. Actually, it is a pretty good book even looking through all the others I've read.
• 1491: http://amzn.to/uaR0yf - about the Americas prior to the arrival of "Cristoforo Colombo". I have the sequel, 1493 in my reading list, but haven't gotten to it just yet.
• Built to Sell: http://amzn.to/ukmyNP - how to create a business that is something that you can sell because it can exist without you. Not quite so relevant to startups working on a product, but some good concepts nonetheless. A good summary is probably just as good as reading the book, as the core concepts are fairly simple.
• A History of the World in 6 Glasses: http://amzn.to/vF9FgN and An Edible History of the World: http://amzn.to/w1kTg3 - two interesting looks at the history of the world based on what we drink and eat.
• Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World: http://amzn.to/tVvltK the history of the world as seen through languages. It's interesting to read about why some languages lasted so long even though their speakers were conquered, why others swept all before them and disappeared, and so on.
• The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East: http://amzn.to/spQCF7 - a look at how the legal systems of 'the west' and the middle east differed and the results those systems led to. Limited liability companies are an important innovation. The book can be a bit dry and repetitive at times, but the material is very interesting.
• Warlord: http://amzn.to/spjf73 - Winston Churchill's "war years".
• Positioning: http://amzn.to/sSJRnw - a classic about branding.
• The Intelligent Investor: http://amzn.to/tffzgJ and A Random Walk Down Wall Street: http://amzn.to/vXIsTT two classics on investing. I'm more inclined towards the 'random' view of things myself.
• The Great Stagnation: http://amzn.to/vccI3c about "what ails us" as a country. One of the recommendations is that we need to "raise the social status of scientists."
  
• The Party: http://amzn.to/tWX1hA an interesting, and balanced (well, it seemed that way to me, but knowing essentially nothing about the place I could be completely wrong) book on how China is run.

And for fun, a variety of Sci fi and Western books, but nothing particularly noteworthy. Neal Stephenson's REAMDE was fun, but I'm not sure I'd read it more than once, like some of his other books. Here are my Amazon wishlists of things I'm considering reading at some point in the future. Comments welcome on the value of the books listed. "Regular" books: http://amzn.com/w/20I0Y1YGD1FUB and random fun books and movies. Business books: http://amzn.com/w/5B2JQOP8VZEW - although some of them are not strictly business books. Yes, if you're curious, the book links do have referral codes in them, to help sustain my reading habit.

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: <iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=dedasys-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;asins=B003YH9MMI" style="width: 120px; height: 240px;"></iframe> 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".

I saw this link on Hacker News:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/speaking-of-dropbox-heres-my-no-1-phone-prank/
And couldn't help but thinking it was singularly unfunny. He changed the guy's password - ha ha! I'm sure most people can do better. Here's one off the top of my head: I was due to leave a company in a few days, prior to our move to Austria. One of my colleagues in the programming department was tasked, in that period, with doing a bunch of work with Drupal, which he found singularly unpleasant and a pain in the neck to work with, which was compounded by the boss asking often about the status of the project. My colleague tended to be an early riser and would get into the office to get some work done early, before it got noisy and people started hassling him about this, that or the other thing. So on my soon-to-be-abandoned workstation, I set up a cron job that would, during those hours, randomly play a sound file I recorded while he was out, with my impression of a ghostly voice saying "druuuuuuuppaaaaaaallll". He said it scared the pants off him the first couple of times it went off.

Videos are becoming more and more common on the internet, and for some things, like mentos and diet pepsi, they're hard to beat. For things I'm seriously interested in, though, I prefer text. Here's why:

• Text goes at my speed. I read quickly, and certainly faster than people can talk. If I want to slow down and reread something, I can do that too.
• Video, outside of actual video chats, is not interactive, so I don't get the benefits of being there, being able to interrupt, ask questions, and so on, that can make the 'in person' experience superior to just reading about something.
• Text is searchable and indexable. I can search within a page, and it's also more likely to be visible to search engines.
• Text is easy to scan and glance at.
• Given the ease of scanning text, it's also easier to filter: "is this something I want to invest more time in reading?". In the time many videos use for people to simply introduce themselves, I could have already got an idea of a document is worth further perusal.
• Text is easy to manipulate; cutting, pasting, quoting, etc... are all easy.
• I don't have to put on headphones to read text if my wife is sleeping and I'm working late.
• Text has good, and highly visible conventions (various headings and subheadings) for indicating subsections of a large document and what they may be about.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote an article comparing Linode and Slicehost having been first a Slicehost customer and then switched to Linode. I would have been happy to stay with Slicehost, because they seemed like good people, but the 64bit vs 32bit issue, especially, tilted things very far in Linode's favor. I thought the results were damning, and many people agreed with me, judging by the number of people clicking through the affiliate link I added later. Based on some comments I read from this guy, who did a similar comparison, at http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/ I think that between the two of us we drove a lot of customers towards Linode.
Those articles have been out there for years, and are very easy to find with Google. Curious to monitor the situation, a while ago, I set up a Twitter search feed for "Slicehost vs Linode" to see if people were talking about my article, and what other people were suggesting. Overwhelmingly, those suggestions have been for Linode too. Recently, Rackspace, who acquired Slicehost several years ago, announced they would be shutting down Slicehost and transitioning their customers to Rackspace: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/05/rackspace-shutting-down-sliceh.php And yet - people are still asking about Slicehost vs Linode on Twitter! This is a useful reminder to me of how much, in our profession (and likely others, but I'm going with what I know) there is a core of the very clued in, who follow all the latest trends (and, negatively, fads too, at times), and are highly informed about everything that's going on. Outside that, though, there is a pretty long tail of people who are much less informed. That's not a criticism of those people, either; perhaps they follow the latest developments in gold mining technology or something else that's much more relevant to their lives than "computer stuff". It's something to keep in mind when marketing things - you think that everyone must have got the message, that no one could possibly not know what's going on, but it's actually quite difficult to really, reliably communicate something to a broad range of people.

While I'm keenly interested in where mobile phone technology is going, I've never been much for living on the cutting edge of new and expensive phones. I originally wrote Hecl for the humble Nokia 3100, and got a Nokia 6210 classic a few years ago. For the first time in... probably something like 10 years, I got something that wasn't a Nokia: a new Samsung phone with Android. I find it interesting because my own, small purchase appears to very closely mirror a broader trend in the market. Since more or less the day it came out, Android jumped out at me as the place to be for an open source guy like me, and indeed, I'm quite happy with the phone, even though it's towards the low end of the Android range. It does everything I need though - music, GPS, photos, email, Kindle, etc... etc.... To tell the truth, even though it's a cheaper phone (around 140 euros) than the Nokia, it does far more. To some degree, that's of course to be expected, because the Nokia is at this point something like 3 years old, but going from the traditional rocker switch to a touch screen is really a night-and-day difference. Many of you are probably saying "duh" at me and wondering what sort of luddite I am, but like I said, I started hacking on Android when it came out, but it took me a while to finally get one. For a few things like making calls, the Nokia experience is in some ways still superior. It's got 'call' buttons that you can hit and be talking to people in short order, but for most of the rest of the applications and software are just night and day better on the Android phone. Gmail and Maps both strike me as something I could use more readily, rather than the hacky, slow Gmail that ships for Symbian. And of course, with a slightly bigger screen, the web is also a bit better. More than anything, it feels a lot more like a 'system' rather than a very, very solid core phone/sms system with some other junk bolted on.

<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=dedasys-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;asins=B004IYISQW" style="width: 120px; height: 240px; float: left; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 8px;"></iframe> Many small business owners start a business with the idea of greater freedom in mind, yet end up chaining themselves to something that takes even more dedication than a regular job. This book discusses the dos and don'ts that business owners need to be conscious of in order to create a business that is independent of its owner(s) in order to be able to sell it. It does so in an easy to read format that's a bit of a gimmick - a fictional story illustrating the authors points. Like most business books, the core idea isn't that hard to explain. the book even includes a handy summary of the main points, which I'll paraphrase here:

1. Focus on one thing you can do really well; even a service business can be 'productized' by creating a standard service that is the focus of the business.
2. If your business revolves around one or two key clients, the risk inherent in that approach will lower the value or scare of potential buyers completely.
3. Put a process in place, from sales through production.
4. Don't "be" your company. If the company is all about you, what's a potential buyer really getting if you sell it and leave?
5. By focusing on products, you can charge up front rather than having poor cash flow. If you pay people to work on a project for 3 months, and don't get paid for another month, you are, by the end, out 4 months salary while waiting for the payment.
6. Say no to projects outside the scope of your business. Only by focusing narrowly can you really excel at what you do.
7. Spend time doing some research and calculations to estimate your potential market size; buyers will want to know this.
8. If you have a business that has sales people, hire at least two so that they'll compete with one another.
9. You want people who are good at selling products, not services; the latter will want to tweak your offering for each and every client, rather than selling it as-is and trying to find how it can meet the customer's needs that way, which is the best strategy for a product.
10. If you were previously running a more 'generic' services company, and you switch to a more productized approach, be prepared to take a hit the year when you switch.
11. Potential acquirers will want to see at least a couple of years of steady growth with the new model after making the switch.
12. If you grow, you'll need a management team that can work without you. Put an incentive system into place to reward their loyalty and results.
13. When looking for an adviser to sell your company, aim for one where you will not be the largest or smallest client.
14. If your adviser really only has one company in mind to sell yours to, they may be trying to sell you off cheap as a favor.
15. Consider how much you could grow with the resources of a buyer. Think big, and show them what kind of growth could happen with the right backing.
16. Think and speak like a product business with 'customers' rather than 'clients'.
17. Stock options are more complex than simpler options like bonuses that are paid out over a period of time, in terms of ways to give people an incentive to stay.

All in all, it was an enjoyable read, with solid points. Even if you have no intention of selling your business, thinking of the business itself as a sort of "product" that is not dependent on you to work correctly is a sensible way to go about creating and growing a business. He's certainly not, nor claims to be the first one to discuss this idea, and indeed references the well known E-Myth Revisited which focuses less on selling a business, and more on how to go about extricating you and your skills from the business.

For each and every bit of trite business advice, there is an equal and opposite bit of trite business advice "Fail fast" vs "be persistent" "The first person to mention a number in a negotiation loses" vs "by saying a number, you frame the negotiations" "Ideas don't matter" vs "the Number One startup killer ... making a product for which there is no interesting market" "Do something you're passionate about" vs "where there's muck, there's brass" "Business plans are a waste of time" vs "failure to plan is planning to fail" There's some valuable lesson behind all of these; I'm not saying these are bad advice. What I'm saying is that if it were so easy, more people would be doing it successfully. In reality, it's very difficult. What are some of your favorite equal and opposite bits of business advice?

I've been running at capacity for a while now, and something went "snap" recently, so I decided to take a few days off to clear my head a bit. One of the things that came to mind is that I have too many 'side project' things. I have had lots of fun (and a few flame wars) over the years with LangPop.com but I decided that it's another thing that should probably go, in order to simplify my life some. It's a fairly popular site amongst programmers, as I think it's the best of the bunch in terms of guaging an admittedly tricky subject like language popularity, but there's lots of room to add to it. I've got various ideas for whoever ends up buying it! About money: it doesn't earn a lot. Programmers, I think, are fairly blind to advertisements. In the right hands I think it could do better, but most likely, it would work best as a bit of branding/advertising for your own business, much as TIOBE's index has spread their name far and wide. For the time being, I'll accept private bids, and depending on how well that does or doesn't go, may consider using something like Flippa.com later. Write me at davidw@dedasys.com if you're interested. I'd be happy to share some numbers and information with you. Perhaps I'll update this posting with them too. What you get: everything! Historicaly data, code, scripts to manage it, the domain. It could use some cleaning up and love, but it does get the job done. Running it just takes a few minutes a month, so I could hold on to it with no trouble, but I've decided that I want one less thing to think about. Update: Some Numbers In the last year, according to Google Analytics, the site had: 174,645 visits. In the last month, it had 17,047 visits. Revenue? Think of it as zero and you won't be too far off. You would have to rework things significantly to make money from ads on it, I think. Hosting costs? Not sure, particularly, it's on my Linode. It utilizes Ruby on Rails, but creates static HTML pages, so it's fairly cheap.