I’m a crazy fuck. For years, one of the lame little items that I’ve bothered to bring home with me from visits to the US has been Listerine, the mouthwash. Sure, you can get mouthwash in Denmark, but none that’s as refreshing as Listerine.
It’s not that I have bad breath, it’s just that I like the quick freshening of mouth and teeth without the manual labor of brushing your teeth.
And just last week I spotted Listerine at a pharmacy downtown. Pharmacies here are not like their US counterparts, mind you, they’re much more highly regulated, so normally you’d get things like mouthwash in a regular supermarket, which is why I hadn’t thought to look at the pharmacy.
It’s good news. From now on I can focus on bringing something more interesting across the border.
The designers of this stovetop has managed to turn something as simple as turning the burners on and off or up and down into an exercise in endless clicking and limitless frustration.
First you click the on/off button to turn it on. Then you click the big button with the four dots until the number for the burner you want to adjust blinks. Then you press and hold the plus or minus signs to turn it up or down.
Why oh why would anyone ever want to make it harder to use a stove? It’s not hard as it is, and it’s not broken! Why bother with this?
I can forgive people for buying this the first time, because you would be forgiven for having enough faith in mandkind that a product as broken as this would never hit the market. After all, the only person I know who owns one of these hates it bitterly.
But the designers that made this, and the management that allowed such a product to be concocted and imposed upon the world are beyond salvage. What’s wrong with these people?
On a side note, there was also a dishwasher by gorenje, which was almost as puzzling and complicated to use. Avoid buying any product from them. Ever.
Xtorrent is yet another smash hit by David Watanabe. It’s the first bittorrent client I’ve seen that gets it just right.
The download itself isn’t what’s magic, it’s the search for torrents that’s brilliant. Normally, you have to go on multiple trackers, which can often be slow, download the right torrent file, open it up with your torrent client, and then delete the torrent file. I’ve been trying to walk some friends through this process, and it’s confusing to say the least.
Xtorrent solves this problem the right way. You enter a search term, and it searches whatever trackers it already knows about, and presents the results beautifully in a table in the app that you can sort and mess with, including seeing the files that are inside a torrent. Check file sizes, sort by the number of available copies out there (called Swarm), pick a file, and just click Download, and it starts right away.
If you don’t find the file in that list, however, it also opens up two tabs with Google and Yahoo searches for your torrent file. Or you can open yet another tab and use your favorite tracker. And this is where the magic happens: When you download the torrent file, Xtorrent automatically discovers that it’s a torrent file and starts downloading it. No more torrent files filling up your dashboard.
I love how this app takes the complexity out of torrents. Beautiful work.
My good mate Pollas and I got kicked out of MJ Cafe, formerly Cafe Mojo, in Gothersgade, Copenhagen. I weren’t there when it happened, got back as it was almost over, but from what Pollas related, it wasn’t that we didn’t buy enough, it was out of principle. Or something. It’s not really clear to us.
Anyway, there goes our favorite place to work. We’re now at Kassen, which is horribly smoky, has uncomfortable chairs, no tables in working height, no food, and too loud music, on repeat. Other places are cold, have flaky or only for-pay wifi, and so on.
Ever since reading about Delicious Monster working out of the Zoka coffee shop in Seattle, has this seemed to be to be an ideal situation. You got someone taking care of the surroundings, the drinks, and the food, and you take care of your business. No wasting time finding an office, negotiating a lease, worries about needing more or less space, cleaning, flowers, and other decor, conference room, and so on. What’s not to like about that?
It’s a perfect way to bootstrap a business, yet it’s another infrastructure piece missing in Copenhagen. I thought we’d found it, the staff seemed friendly, there was lots of laptop users, but apparently we crossed some line this week. We weren’t event there for a whole week straight while I was off in Silicon Valley.
Speaking of which, in Palo Alto we spent quite a bit of time at Coupa Cafe. Sure, they yanked the wifi on evenings and weekends, but during workdays we got to work there just fine, and when on a Sunday we kindly asked, they event turned on the wifi just for us.
It’s a delicate balance to strike, because laptop people tend to stay for many hours and be so consumed in their own flow that they forget to buy drinks and don’t contribute much to the ambience of the place. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Here we are, a group of tech workers representing the future of the fluid marketplace for labor, wallet in hand, but no-one to hand the money to.
We’ve obviously discussed opening up our own place, but we completely lack experince in running a place like that. If any of you have some insight, or friends with insight, we’d love to pick some brains.
For now, though, we’re nomads.
Two top journalists from the Washington Post are leaving the post for a web-only news startup.
Mr. Ryan said the future was in a multiplatform approach to news, “without the baggage of a long-term print institution.”
It’s classic Innovator’s Dilemma: You can’t start a low-cost, agile operation from inside a high-cost business in decline.
It’s pretty clear that audiences are online now, and that shedding the cost of print and focusing on digital is going to be the way to go. Printing has gotten cheaper as well, so as long as there’s still money to be made in print, you can use that for more backgroundy things that can be consumed when you’re not near a computer. But online should clearly be the focus now. G24 is an interesting combo play. (Via David Shen.)
I love this photo that my friend Anders Hviid took of his old, now defunct car. Amazing how the tilt-shift lens makes it look like a toy. Love it.
I love using TextMate for blogging, but at some point since the first version it stopped defaulting to Textile format, instead defaulting to plain HTML, so what I end up doing is posting, then changing the Format header that it inserts on posting, then post again. Annoying.
Whether it was upgrading my server software or Textmate that caused it to change, I don’t know.
Any clues?
UDATE: Mike Greiner sent me a hint: Open up File > New From Template > Edit Templates in the menu in TextMate, and edit the Blog Post (Textile) template to include the Format: textile header. Actually, that’s not 100% what he suggested, but that’s what I did, and it works. Thanks!
I’ll be in New York from Tuesday December 5 through Sunday December 10. You can find my US cell # on my Contact Info page. See you there, ping me if you have time to meet.
Or a house, I guess, where the UPS guy can just dump stuff in front of the house. Though a 30” monitor would still cause me some anxiety to have sitting there the whole day.
In this day and age—you know, UPS and TNT and all the rest of them are great, but the fact that you have to be home between 9 and 5 is simply untenable. I don’t have an office. I go places, meet people, hop around. What is a guy to do?
A doorman building seems like the best option, if price wasn’t an issue. Oh, and the fact that they don’t exist in Copenhagen. But a doorman is like having a receptionist. Handy dandy.
But the price? Think about it—if you want 24-hour coverage, that’s going to be at least 4 full-time people to account for vacation and sick leave. That’s a lot of salary to pay. Bummer.
As I was driving us to the airport today, I almost got run over by another car. The road was turning 30 degrees to the right, I was in the right lane, and the other car in the left lane. As the road turned, the other car decided to take a shortcut by using my lane. Of course, I was in that lane, until I had to get out of their way.
Turned out it was a pretty old asian couple, which made Christina teach me the term:
DWA – Driving While Asian.
Apparently, there’s a large population of first-generation chinese immigrants who have never really learned to drive, and they’re a danger for their surroundings. Hilarious, if a bit offensive.
Back in 1999 I got totally psyched reading Cooper’s manifest-like book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. I immediately went out and bought copies for my closest friends in the business.
One thing he wrote about was the desing of an in-flight entertainment system. Putting a monitor on the back of the seat seems like an obvious idea. Making it a touch-screen is pretty obvious, too. But, as Cooper discusses in the book, this is problematic, because you end up pecking the guy in front of you in the back, and he’s going to be able to feel that, and it’s going to be really annoying.
Well, zoom forward 7 years, and I’m now sitting in an airplane, with a guy behind be hammering on the screen in my back.
Haven’t these people read Cooper?
In case you missed it, we’re running a special offer, ending tomorrow: Job postings at Boxes and Arrows for only $100.
Why? Because we lowered the price of events listings to only $100, but we made a typo in the newsletter and wrote jobs instead.
So hurry on over and post your job if you have one. After tomorrow, we’ll be back to the regular price of $250.
Events are going to stay at $100 for now.
Here’s another thing I learned last week. When you form a new corporation in the US, initially nobody owns it. There’s an incorporator who incorporates it, and that person is omnipotent, meaning he or she can do anything. In our case, this was our law firm.
Then the incorporator appoints a set of directors, and the directors can decide on the issuance or sale of stock in the company. I forget if the directors or the incorporator institutes the organizational resolutions. I’ll find that out shortly.
The company decides how many shares there are, in our case 10 million, but there’s no inherent valuation. The company can sell them to the founders at one tenth of a cent a piece, say.
It’s quite typical to have a vesting schedule. The stock is allocated to the person, possibly even purchased by that person, from the get-go. But it’s not actually his or hers until it vests. The vesting can be anyway you want it. You can start half-vested or at zero. You can vest over 2, 3, or 4 years. You can link the vesting to milestones, or calendar time, or you can skip it altogether.
Vesting can be useful if you’re more than one founder. It can be used to make sure that if one person decides to take a two-year vacation after the first year, that person won’t get to own as large a share as the other person who’s still working full-time. This can be good for both partners, because the one on vacation can do that without feeling like he’s screwing the other person. In general, it’s used by companies to give people incentives to stick around longer.
The minimum salary you can pay yourselves as executives in the company, if you want it to count as having payroll, is twice the minimum wage, which comes out to about $28K/year. I’m sure there’s ways to pay nothing, but we didn’t discuss that.
For angel investment, you can do a bridge loan, also known as a convertible note. It’s basically a loan, with an interest, and which can be paid back, and with no ownership of the company, but with a twist, which is the “convertible” part. This is the part where, if there is a financing round later, the amount of the loan can be converted into shares at the valuation of that round. I’m not sure what would typically happen in the case of an acquisition, but I’m sure it’s all negotiable.
There’s one drawback of this, which is, that the higher the valuation of the company at the first round financing, the smaller the stake the convertible note converts to. That means the angel has an incentive to attempt to keep the valuation low, or make the financing happen sooner. Not sure how that would be accomplished specifically, but the incentive is clearly there.
Finally, I was reading the November issue of Inc. on board the plane, and they recommend a couple things for co-founded companies, specifially. First, a buy-sell agreement, which means that if one partner wants to sell his or her shares, the other partner has the option of buying them instead by matching the price. Second, a shotgun clause, which lets one partner offer to buy out the other partner, with the twist that the other partner is then entitled to instead by the first partner’s shares at that price. And finally, that the company takes out life insurance on both partners, so the company can by that person’s shares back in case that person dies, so that you don’t risk ending up with that person’s 3-year old daughter as your business partner.
That’s something we haven’t discussed either internally or with our lawyer yet, so it’ll be interesting to see what learning awaits me there. I’ll let you know.
Christina arranged for us to meet with John, a great Valley entrepreneur that co-owns SV Colo, and several other ventures, such as Tellme. He knows hosting. I was fortunate enough to get to pick his brain for an hour. Here’s what I learned:
The challenge in a data center is cooling. Google and others have started building datacenters in Oregon by the ocean where real estate is cheaper, and you can use the cool water from the Pacific Ocean to cool servers. The capacity to cool is measured in Watts per square foot, and the watts are simply measured by how much power the boxes consumer. Sure, some of that power ends up moving the fan and producing some noises, and machines may not run on full power all the time, but it’s a pretty solid measure.
What that means, specifically, is that you can’t pack your data center very densely. Specifically, 1U units are not worth it, because you can’t fill up a cabinet with 1U’s, anyway, because they make too much heat. A typical number is in the 100-140 Watts per square foot range. You do the math. Specifically, beware of hosting companies that do put too many units into their space. They might end up letting your machine overheat. Bad.
How you get the air moving through the racks is another challenge. Increasingly, people are using racks that pour air in from the bottom and suck it out from the top, which keeps the air moving nicely. The next step up might be some form of liquid, either water being led directly to the CPU, or something else that boils at a low temperature. But that’s not quite relevant right now.
I also learned to watch out for who the ISP is that provides the bandwidth, and make sure that they’re reliable and deal promptly with spammers so you don’t risk getting black-listed because of some other idiot on the same IP block as yours. And we should avoid Cogent like the plague. They’re the low-cost leader but unreliable. And I learned a term, “well-lit,” meaning there’s a lot of glass fiber in the ground. Silicon Valley is quite well-lit :)
If you want to get really good uptime, forget about one data center, go for two completely separate datacenters, with DNS that you can control outside of this, so you can switch from one to the other by changing the DNS. Trying to get five nines in one data center isn’t cost-effective.
On firewalls, John’s recommendation was that we forget the single firewall in front, because it’s a single point of failure, and instead firewall each machine aggressively. Specifically, that means running ipfilter (Redhat, Debian, Fedora, etc.) or rc.firewall (FreeBSD).
For load balancing, you can go with a decicated box (a Foundry one will run you $5K, but try getting a used one on Ebay). For redundancy, what you can do is, if each individual app server is available on the public internet with its own IP and DNS name, then if the load balancer should blow out, you can, as a backup, go in and change the DNS of the main host, and point that to one of the app servers (it would be a CNAME), and have that configured to do load balancing instead, while you rush out and buy a now load balancer. That’s the advantage of firewalling the hosts and having them available. Neat, huh?
Another thing that allows for is what’s called “direct server return”, which basically means that the request comes through the load balancer, but the hosts send the response directly to the client, rather than go through the load balancer. I’m going ta have to look more into the implications and configuration of that, but it seems like it would lessen the burden on the load balancer a bit.
Databases are quite a bit more tricky, but one thing you can do, is that you set up master/slave setups, and then if the master gets lost, the application can be switched to run in read-only mode. That way people can still get to their data, but you can’t add or update anything. Not sure if it’s worth adding the extra overhead and complexity to the app for this, but it’s an option.
One more thing: Don’t run NFS. Why? Because if one server gets hacked or goes down, it can hose the whole cluster. A better model is to have a server that’s the primary file server, and then use rsync to keep things in sync. Really simple and it works. Anecdotally, John related that in his experience, NFS and LDAP were the two things that were most often responsible for taking a whole cluster down. Also, you can’t run NFS between two data centers easily, and it requires rpcbind, which makes it harder to secure the server. Without NFS, you can pretty much close down all UDP traffic and only allow TCP.
That’s about it. I also got to chat with Tom from EngineYard at the STIRR mixer in Palo Alto on Wednesday. These guys definitely have their s**t together. They were using Global File System for shared files, which is also very cool, but requires special hardware. And Tom described how they had already thought about the two-data center solution, and had some ideas for how to manage the MySQL installation, so you could do active failover to another master. Or they’d rely on Oracle for that. It seems to me like a problem where the cost of solving it outweighs the cost of downtime should it happen weighted by the risk that it does happen. But I haven’t done the math on that one.
I hope you can use all of this for something. I’ve definitely learned a bundle from talking to these smart people. I have to say I find hosting interesting and fun. Developing apps and interfaces is really nice, but when you get it out there in the world, you have to take all of these things into consideration. And seeing some of the racks of some of the companies that they host at SV Colo was enlightening. You can tell that some have grown really quicly without much planning, and then next to it, you can see their new rack, all nice and clean with cables running neatly between the boxes. Tells you something about the companies.
I have a hard time figuring out what the deal is with the Prima Donna cheese. What I know is that it’s wildly popular in Denmark right now, in the red and blue varieties, and that in addition to the supermarkets, it’s frequent sold in Italian specialty stores.
Yet, the fact is that it’s Dutch. Most people think it’s Italian, but it’s not. It’s a brilliant marketing move, though. The name and the texture clearly signals Italy.
Not that the dutch can’t make cheeses, they make some great Goudas if you happen to get then in Holland. But abroad, Holland isn’t exactly associated with great cheese.
I was just talking to my business partner, Christina’s mother-in-law, who is Dutch, and she has never heard of the Prima Donna cheese, which makes it even more plausible that it’s a cheese designed for export to people who can’t tell the difference. Smart people!
November 16, 2006 · 1 comment
These graphical moving maps that show you where you are and how fast you’re going and at what altitude, they’re nice and all. But the only thing I really care about it how long time there is till we’re on the ground again. And that information only flashes once every 5 minutes or so, if you’re lucky. So if you’re trying to catch some sleep, it’s really hard to get at that information. Especially since I use my cell phone as my watch normally, and airlines tend to be less than fond of cell phones.
What I really want is a large LED alarm clock style display, separate from the in-flight entertainment system that just shows the number of hours and minutes estimated until touch-down. Please?
When was the last time you felt that pang of “Damn! I wish I hadn’t followed my intuition!”
It just doesn’t happen, does it?
Does that mean you should always follow your intuition?
November 09, 2006 · 1 comment
I’v always found my cousin Henrik tremendously fascinating. He’s done so many different things. Back in the 80’s he recorded an album with a band in Aarhus. But besides playing the keyboard, he’s also been a model, he’s really good at drawing, and he’s done marketing. But now, finally, he’s back to music again. And thank heavens for that.
On November 21st, he will release his first album in over a decade. And it’s shaping up to be a really fine album. Quiet, peaceful, harmonic, yet with an edge, with a freshness. You can tell that he’s been collecting inspiration during his years away from composing, that he’s got something to share.
Check out the beautiful web site, including previews of the songs, at haikumusic.dk.
Way to go, cousin, you make me proud.
I liked CSSEdit 1 back in 2004 when I’d just switched to the Mac, but some erratic, hard-to-reproduce problems, the nature of which I can’t recall now, prevented me from using it.
Now two years later, CSS Edit 2 is out, and I decided to spend the $15 on an upgrade. You can’t really test it if you can’t use it on a real project and save your changes.
Turns out, it still doesn’t beat TextMate. Here’s why:
When you’re doing dynamic web development locally, you can’t preview on the source files, only on the final HTML. So you’ll use Save As in your browser. But then you have to jump through hoops to get CSS Edit to show you the saved HTML file with the CSS file that you have open in the editor. Here’s all the steps you need to go through:
- Save as in browser
- Switch to CSS Edit editor window
- File > Apply to HTML
- Click +
- Locate file
- Check the “Remove existing stylesheets”
- Click Apply to files
- Switch to the preview window
And you need to do this each time you’ve made a change to the HTML. That pretty much does it in right there for anything but CSS for static pages.
I also have two minor gripes. First, X-ray really cool, but why can’t it then open up the relevant style(s) in the CSS file? I click on something, realize it has too much margin, and then I need to go hunt-and-peck in the CSS file to find the style. It would be cool if it could take me directly there. It would probably have to be a menu of all the things being inherited by this element, but even so.
Finally, I really miss auto-save when losing focus that TextMate has. Once you get used to it, it’s indispensable. I already have version control, so there’s never a situation where I don’t want it to save my file. With auto-save when the app loses focus, I can just quickly switch back and forth between editor and browser without having to worry about saving.
All in all, though I had my hopes up high, I can’t really use this version, either, mainly because of the first issue above. Now I have to go see if there’s a money-back guarantee.
UPDATE: Jan, the author of CSSEdit, responds, and explains why I was mistaken. I’m now a happy convert. Thanks, Jan!
