Author: mark

  • The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

    One of the bloggers using FEEDJIT is The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

    If you don’t know what it’s about, read this.

    I just became a huge fan.

  • How to create and launch a startup in 10.5 hours

    I just launched FEEDJIT. It took me about 10.5 hours (4pm until 2:30am) from the first time my hand touched the keyboard until I fixed the last bug and went live. I got a question on the Seattle Tech Startup list about how I spent my 10.5 hours. So here’s a brief summary:

    • I drew a mockup in Fireworks. It started getting complicated with user registration and so on. So I basically binned it and just wrote the software, but the mockup gave me an idea of the most basic value prop. So I made a decision to go out the door with the very very basics and see if it’s something users actually want. (1 hour)
    • I designed the database schema in SQL commands using a text editor. I mentioned this CompSci quote to a friend yesterday: “Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write itself.”. Doing the data structures in the form of a schema forced me into making all the hard decisions of what features I’m keeping and what I’m not going to have time to implement. (1 hour)
    • I wrote the functional app. I find that if I do graphical or UI work early on it can become very time consuming as I try to get just the right dropshadow on some element. So I just dove in and wrote the Javascript and server components. The app doesn’t require any registration so I could just write the widget and the server code to store and deliver the stats that are displayed. (roughly 6 hours)
    • Then the last thing I did was create the home page (the only page on the site). After cranking out code for 6 hours I was too tired to faff with dropshadows and so on. So it became purely functional. (roughly 2 hours)

    I already have a server set up at serverbeach where I host this. It’s on a 10 megabit backbone connection but doesn’t cost me much. So I basically added a virtualhosts section to the httpd.conf file and copied the source code into the proper directories. I then compressed the javascript and used my SQL text files and the mysql client to dump the schema into the database. I brought it online and couldn’t figure out why everything was appearing to be in Denver, Colorado. Then I realized I’d hard-coded my own IP address into the Geo location routines. Shows you how you can screw up when you’re rushed. I fixed that and it worked perfectly.

    I hope there’s some value in that. I think the smartest thing I did was to drop everything except the features that would test whether this is a product my target market would actually find useful. That remains to be seen of course, but I’m hopeful. We’re adding quite a few new blogs per hour now.

  • Live arrival/departure info for your blog

    I started work on this at 4pm and it’s now 2am. It’s called FEEDJIT and it’s a little experiment. If you like it go ahead and install it. A few minutes after I post this it should be in the sidebar of this blog.
    Mark.

  • WTF is wrong with hosted gmail?

    I can’t log in to either of my hosted gmail accounts. Anyone else?

    UPDATE: I contacted gmail support and apparently they occasionally lock accounts due to suspicious activity. I think I had two different hosted gmail accounts open in tabs in the same browser. Very suspicious.

    Their suggestion: contact them. The response: occasionally we lock accounts – see our help page for detail. The help page suggests you contact them.

    So I’m stuck in a loop and it’s pissing me off because I haven’t had access to mark at linebuzz.com for going on 16 hours now.

    If you’re thinking of moving your corporate email to hosted GMail, think twice. You may be up the creek for 16 hours waiting for a locked account to timeout.

    .

  • Perseids meteor shower photo

    It took me about an hour to catch one of these. I shot this with probably the worst choice in camera. A Canon Powershot S50 which is awesome for everything but time lapse photography. It has a 15 second maximum exposure and you have to wait 15 seconds after each exposure while the camera processes. But after about an hour of trying I got one!

    This was shot at about 2am on August 13 2007 in Elizabeth, Colorado – about 50 miles South of Denver at 6000ft altitude on a perfectly clear Colorado evening.

  • Fly fishing the Dream Stream

    I just posted my first entry on Geojoey in a while. I’m in Colorado this week and spent yesterday fishing an amazing little river in the Rockies about 50 miles west of Colorado Springs called the Dream Stream by the locals. Full entry on Geojoey.com.

  • Drive

    I just drove from Seattle to Denver where I’m spending a week. We took the northern route through Montana and I stopped and did a tiny bit of fishing in the Clarke Fork and Yellowstone rivers. I just caught one small rainbow on a dry fly in the clarke fork which wasn’t bad considering it was the middle of the day on both rivers and not far from the road.

    We stopped in Bozeman for the night and I discovered an awesome fly fishing shop called the Bozeman Angler. There are some awesome restaurants on the same side of the street.

    Next week I’m in BC for three days king salmon fishing. I can’t wait.

  • X-Games Video: Jake Brown's unbelievable 40 foot fall

    Jake Brown fell 40 feet and landed so hard in the transition at the X-Games last night that his shoes flew off. Forward to the end of the vid and watch the slowmo version.

    Brown spent Thursday night in a local hospital, where he was treated for a bleeding liver, two sprained wrists, a bruised lung, and whiplash to his back and neck. He didn’t break a single bone. Unbelievable.

  • A good book

    If you’re a bit of a sci-fi fan, a bit of a maritime adventure fan, like all things engineering, then I have just the book for you. The Ice Limit is one of the best paperbacks I’ve read for a very very long time.

  • How hedge funds die

    Marc Andreessen has a great post on the collapse of the Sowood hedge fund recently. Reading this I have a weird sense of deja-vu. LTCM collapsed while I was working at Credit Suisse First Boston in Canary Wharf, London. CSFB lost about $700 million. Around the same time the Russian economy took a dip and they blew another $600 million. There were no layoffs and no pay cuts.

    If I ever decide I need the security of a day job I’ll go back to London and work in Canary Wharf. The London banking sector is the most bomb proof industry on the planet. Canary Wharf is also a pretty darn cool place to work.