Posted by mark.
Oct
17
Posted by mark.
Economists love the concept of opportunity cost because it gives you a the real long-term value of an investment or purchase in relative terms – which is really the only way to calculate value. On Wednesday the DOW hit 10,000 again. The US financial press did their part to ring the bell while the banking community celebrated the boost in perceived value and the increased likelihood that the public would buy their wares.
Fox News, like clockwork, has given former asshole …
Oct
17
Posted by mark.
One of the most popular pages on this blog is a post I wrote two years ago titled “World wide cities database and other free geospatial data“. There are still few people out there who realize that not only can you get a free world-wide cities database from the national geospatial ingelligence agency in the US, but they have around 4 million other points around the world that even include things like undersea features, palm groves, vineyards and a lot …
Oct
17
Posted by mark.
I’ve spent the last 5 days agonizing over a very hard problem on my network. Using curl, LWP::UserAgent, openssl, wget or any other SSL client, I’d see connections either timeout or hang halfway through the transfer. Everything else works fine including secure protocols like SSH and TLS. In fact inbound SSL connections work great too. It’s just when I connect to an external SSL host that it hiccups.
If you remember your OSI model, SSL is well above layer 3 (IP …
Oct
16
Posted by mark.
It took me a while to find this – I needed it for testing purposes, nothing malicious. If you’d like your web server somewhere on the web to pretend to be any other web server, even a secure one, you can do the following. x.x.x.x is your own server and y.y.y.y is the ip of the server you’re trying to mirror. I’m also assuming you only have one network card in the machine and it’s called eth0. The following will …
Oct
15
Posted by mark.
While I upgrade to Karmic, here’s a quick setup to get a virtual ubuntu server running on a real ubuntu server:
As root:
ubuntu-vm-builder kvm jaunty –hostname dev2 –addpkg openssh-server vim -d /usr/local/vms/dev2 –mem 256 –libvirt qemu:///system
This will create a jaunty jackalope ubuntu virtual server using the KVM hypervisor. The hostname will be dev2. It will add the openssh-server package as well as vim. It will put it in the /usr/local/vms/dev2 directory. It’ll allocate 256 Megs of memory for the machine. The …
Oct
15
Posted by mark.
Under the guise of fostering innovation, guys like The Life Sciences and Healthcare Venture Summit, who spammed me today are happily taking money from entrepreneurs and offering a tax deductible day out of the office in return. Perhaps I’m inspired by Jason Calcanis’s recent jihad against investors that charge you to pitch, but these high cost ‘for-the-startup-community’ events are a waste of time and money and something that’s been grating me for some time now.
The event above charges you $595 …
Oct
14
Posted by mark.
What’s a Bleet? A blog entry that really should be a tweet.
Naval and Nivi (venturehacks) posted an interesting tweet today:
Chris Dixon on the problem with taking seed money from big VCs: http://j.mp/2BHIPe. Some solutions: http://j.mp/4hFSsL
I agree. I think there’s cachet value in having a large VC invest and based on Chris’s (IMO correct) views you need to decide if that value is worth the extra equity you’re giving up. The only scenario I can think of where cachet adds tangible …
Oct
12
Posted by mark.
Update: I wrote this blog entry and then predictably, I unposted it after my more diplomatic side took over. But it got out via my RSS feed anyway and a friend enjoyed it. So here it is in all it’s left wing liberal glory. I’m switching the published date to today. Enjoy.
I’m an immigrant.
“Oooh nasty! Are you here to send your dirty kids to our schools?”
No.
“Are you going to leech of our social security?”
No
“Are you going to steal jobs from …
Oct
11
Oct
11
Posted by mark.
There’s a spectacular interview on ft.com today with my favorite FT journalist John Authers with Bruce Greenwald who teaches Ben Graham’s value investing course at Columbia.
Bruce talks about behavioural finance and the irrationality of investors, the often ignored mathematical realities of the market, the brutality and danger of short selling (all short sales are treated as short term capital gains), the power and value of franchise and much more!
I love his constant reminder of what value actually means: First look …