Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
Today I read this really insightful article about how giving away software can kill the market for it.
While I largely agree with the Andy, I think that he has missed one important point.
Giving away a really good product in a certain space can depress sales and stifle innovation, but there will always be that small percentage of users whose needs are not met by the free alternative. Because of this, niche users will be willing to pay top dollar for a product that goes beyond the free alternative.
What about the free alternative?
Won’t its developers be adding features too?
Sure. They might.
But its free, so its not a priority.
Your customers, on the other hand, will pay you good money to make adding features they want a priority … see the difference?
Case in point, Google Calendar added to-do lists, almost a year ago now … but despite cries for an api for it, nothing has happened.
2524 users (people requesting that feature) is not a large number to google, but if you’re a small development shop … and each of those users were paying you … say $4.99 a month … you’d be doing okay.
Lots of motivation to bang out an api … yeah?
So, instead of looking at it as “Free” killing the market for your product.
Look at it as …. “Free” doing you the favor of hand delivering the most passionate, keyed-in, highly motivated group of users in the market for your product, to your doorstep … for free 
You’re welcome.
February 9th, 2010
Finally!
January 30th, 2010
Yesterday, Joel Spolsky posted an article about why growing steadily but slowly might not be such a good idea.
When I read it, I had my reservations about it, but I couldn’t express them … the whole idea just sounded wrong?
Well, the guys over at 37Signals issued a rebuttal of Mr Spolsky’s argument, and I have to say … I agree.
The main thing that drives the use of software like Fogz bugz (a bug tracking web application), is how good it is, and how much buzz it generates. The size of your company doesn’t matter if people that matter (developers in this case) are talking about the other guy’s software on twitter, facebook, digg or reddit, and recommending it to every other developer they can find.
Just my 2 cents.
November 5th, 2009
The un-reference: immediate values
Some objects in Ruby are stored in variables as immediate values. These include integers, symbols (which look like :this), and the special objects true, false and nil. When you assign one of these values to a variable (x = 1), the variable holds the value itself, rather than a reference to it
– From page 54 of The Well Grounded Rubyist by Robert Black
Filed under Things I did not know about Ruby
September 28th, 2009
Yes I know this is supposed to be a professional blog.
But today, a man I considered the greatest ever musician in modern history … died.
Thank you for the awesome memories Mike.
You inspired me more than you’ll ever know.
You were amazing.
I’ll miss you.
June 26th, 2009
If you’re using the excellent jquery json plugin you might run into problems trying to parse json returned from the php function json_encode.
Specifically, when you try to parse the returned json using $.evalJSON you get the javascript error
missing ] after element list
I also had this same problem with the cakephp json component (which I decided to use instead since it would be more portable across php versions than the php5.2+ only json_encode).
The simple fix is this.
Add slashes to your output and surround it with double quotes like this …
$status = json_encode($status);
echo '"'.addslashes($status).'"';
I figured this one out, by examining rails json output that worked just fine with the jquery json plugin.
February 8th, 2009
Its admirable what they’re trying to do, but I installed the software and couldn’t get it to run. (Strange “could not connect” errors)
After screwing around with their rather unhelpful help thread and losing 2 hours of my life I gave up and uninstalled it. Don’t waste your time like I did, until they at least figure out how to make the darned thing work right out the box.
Thats probably why I hadn’t heard about them until a few days ago, and then, entirely by accident.
August 22nd, 2008
From Paul m. Jones
“I don’t recall where I first heard the term BREAD; it stands for “browse, read, edit, add, delete”. That covers more of what common web apps do, including the record listings. It even sounds nicer: “crud” is something icky, but “bread” is warm and fulfilling. That’s why I tend to use the term BREAD instead of CRUD …”
I like BREAD.
August 20th, 2008
Had to write a blog post on this …
Drobo allows you hotswap SATA hard drives in and out of it.
Just pop it open (yes … while its plugged in) and switch out hard drives as you wish.
It has 4 bays and can hold up to 16TB of Data. It magically writes and rewrites your data across all the drives it is using at the time … scary good eh?
Runs USB 2.0 or Firewire 800 (oooooh) … definitely up my ‘most coveted items’ list, right next to the Macbook Air (still searching for a sugar mommy to help out with that one).
Watch the video intro on Drobo
enter the code ” krose31 ” to get $100 off your drobo
August 20th, 2008
There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing nothing as long as it is done in moderation.
— From Freelance Switch
‘Become More Efficient By Simplifying Your Life‘
August 15th, 2008
David Otton (who I’ve never met) has an interesting take on the old Framework vs. libraries debate, that I identify with.
I went through the same struggle (in my head) months ago. However, after having that internal struggle that David went through, I came out on the side of frameworks.
Why?
- Because frameworks allow me to get web applications up very quickly
- I don’t have to spend time figuring out or refining database access, templating or any of the other ‘plumbing’ that you have to do on most code projects. In fact there is a hobby site, that I wrote with my own custom code … and I haven’t made updates to it in months, because I have to entirely refactor the codebase to do the new things I want. If I had written it in cake (which I plan to port it over to). I’d have no such problems.
- I don’t have to completely relearn my code base after weeks away from it (part of the problem above too)
- Most frameworks include libraries of their own that you can use. In a recent project that I’m working on, there is a twitter gem for Rails that probably saved me (and the client) about 20 – 30 hours of coding, testing and bug fixing
What the article did tell me, though, is that developers the world over (especially PHP) developers are used to writing code from scratch. Designing, creating and implementing new ‘plumbing’ is a big part of what we do.
In any given framework, you’re going to like about 70% – 85% of what it does and (probably)absolutely hate the rest of it. Giving yourself over completely to convention-over-configuration framework like Cakephp when you don’t agree 100% with it is a big step for most developers. One that quite a few developer shy away from.
I think though, that if you find a reason to stick with it, like I did. You will find that the benefits of doing things with a framework will eventually overcome objections you might have to not having the framework do things … your way.
August 12th, 2008
New in this release is support for PHP
There is a new feature list here
A couple of interesting Rails enhancements
About to check it out.
August 4th, 2008
Insane!
May 3rd, 2008
I have been unable to play around with mod_rails (the apache module that allows you run Rails apps in apache) and write a “mod_rails 101″ type blog post.
However, I came across this excellent mod_rails tutorial on how to get up and running.
Just thought I should share.
April 16th, 2008
I started work on a web app that makes extensive use of zip codes recently.
The trouble was, I couldn’t get my hands on a good listing of all the zip codes in the United States without paying $20 or more at some fly-by-night website.
See for yourself here
Eventually … after much google-batics … I found a tiny link at the bottom of this wikipedia entry on zip-codes.
It went to this geocoding website and right there, was the link I had been looking for!
A FREE CSV file of all US ZIP codes including zip, city, state, latitude, longitude, and county.The date says it was last updated on September 20, 2007, which gives me hope that the file is frequently updated.
Many Thanks to ibegin! Enjoy!
update: The list was updated January 18th 2008
December 14th, 2007
