When someone asks what I do, I explain this. Inevitably the response is a long, blank stare, followed by one of:
- Are you out of your f’ing mind?
- Why are you doing this to yourself?
- How do you handle working on three entirely different startups?

Assume for the moment that I have good reasons for doing this, and that I may or may not be insane. Let’s talk about “how you do it”.

First of all, I try to choose very carefully what to work on. I want to work only on things I am passionate about. I like to build things I can honestly be proud of. And I aim to surround myself with people I really like and respect. After all, life is short… all else held equal, why would you work on a project you don’t really like, or produce something that customers/consumers don’t really like, or work with bozos? You’d have to pay me an immense amount of money to do that.

I’ve been fortunate to find coworkers who are willing to work with me in this way. More on that later.

I’ve been fortunate also to find projects with synergy. These are all software-based projects. My role is similar on each one: I own definition and delivery of the product, meaning the product plan and everything it takes to get it designed, built, and operating. I’m using many of the same technologies on each project, so that switching from one project to the next costs me very little time. I use many of the same processes and tools (git, Pivotal Tracker, et. al.) And most of the things I learn on one project apply well to the others.

I structure my time carefully. My weekdays generally look like this: up by 7:00; breakfast; chase 3-year old around until she is dressed; commute; daycare dropoff, some days; daytime work hours; read news during lunch; daycare pickup, some days; dinner / family time / playtime; bathtime; bedtime stories; and usually some 9pm to midnight work. Notably missing from this routine: exercise; sufficient family time; sufficient free time to think; margin for error. (Hint: you should not do what I am doing.)

Mondays through Thursdays are CampusPerks days. Fridays through Sundays I reserve for my other two projects. Urgent stuff like service outages interrupt my routine, but this is rare… all of these web sites rarely go down because I write bug-free code. (Little programmer joke there.) Firewalling projects from each other in this way is vital; without this approach I would be too mentally fragmented, and unable to reach a state of flow on any one project.

I also try to be draconian with my time, by which I mean things like being frugal with commitments, saying “no” to most new opportunities and requests (thus avoiding death by a thousand cuts), and avoiding distractions that fritter away time (cable TV, I do not miss you, not even one little bit). That said, I wish I had more time. I miss saying, “yes”. When you have a child, especially, you desperately crave more time to say “yes”.

I try to chunk work into small batches: my tasks take a few hours or at most one day, instead of days or weeks. There are so many reasons to do this, but three biggies are that you get more flexibility in choosing what to do next, you learn quickly whether you’re doing something well, and you get frequent satisfaction from finishing something. “Small batches” is something I’ve only recently learnt about, and now I’m trying hard to double down on it. I’d like to write more about it a different day.

I separate my workspaces too. Two different office spaces, three different web browsers, three different gmail accounts (one for each project), and so on. One computer, though. Many backups.

There’s lots to improve in all this, of course, but… it’s working. I’m making forward progress, a little each day. And managing to have fun while doing it.

What’s hard:
- Saying no
- Remembering passwords
- Remembering which services/accounts to use for each project
- Staying focused on doing the right thing next
- Keeping energy levels up and consistent
- Being entirely present on the task at hand (see: energy)
- Having the patience to be a good parent, coworker, etc. (see: energy)
- Exercising
- Carving out time for play (I try to remember: having the time and means to play is one of the reasons I do all these other things!)

Busy. Fun. Busy. Fun. Busyfun.

I’ve been a terribly inconsistent writer on MyOwnPirateRadio over the years. I’ve written sporadically. I’ve written snotty rants, mind-numbing trivia, and esoteric technology crib notes. I’ve written about completely random and unrelated topics. In short, I’ve written so poorly that only my most patient, masochistic, and excitement-starved readers are still around. (Hi, mom! Oh, wait, she doesn’t have an internet connection.) So, dear reader(s), I’m sorry. I apologize. I’ve been a shit.

But I do want to write — it makes me happy — and so I’m going to start again.

I will write about one topic:

Life trying to get startups off the ground.

This will not be “How I succeeded at getting my startup off the ground”, or “My genius recipe for gobsmacking success in startup life”, or, ”How I built and sold my company for $10M in just 3 months with only 8 toothpicks, a pair of tweezers, and a tenth of my staggeringly massive brainpower, bitch”. This is not one of those blogs. Gloating will be kept to an absolute minimum. I intend to write more in the vein of “How I’ve worked like crazy on too many projects at once for 5+ years with little to show for it except a much smaller bank account, a bunch of hard-earned lessons, and a smug sense of satisfaction. Please send help.”.

I will write as openly and honestly as I can.

I will try really hard to write regularly, at least once a week.

I will spend no more than 30 minutes writing a post.

I will avoid the temptation to portray this lifestyle as glamorous. ‘Cuz it ain’t. Read me?

And I want to feel good about doing this. I have a lot of “priority guilt”… why write blog posts when I should be writing code, helping out at home, doing some exercise, or becoming a better husband and dad? I also fear the embarassment of screwing up in public. But I’ve come to grips with a few realities: I need to write; my privacy is largely an illusion anyway; and I’m much less interesting to everyone else than I like to think.

I’ve put off starting this for a very long time now, so I’d better post this before I manage to stop myself again.

So here goes: Startup Fever. Wish me luck.

P.S. How Canadian of me, to start off with an apology. Represent!

Unlike Bamboo, Cedar does not offer Varnish as a reverse proxy cache, nor does it automatically gzip content. You need to do it yourself. Heroku recommends:

1. Use memcached, with Dalli as the memcached client. Make sure to follow the Rails 3 section.
2. Use Rack::Cache as a substitute for Varnish. Heroku links to this article which explains how to integrate Heroku with Rack::Cache. I couldn’t get it to work, so I hunted around and pieced together the folllowing riff.

require 'rack-cache'
My::Application.configure do
...
  # Enable Rack::Cache
  config.middleware.use Rack::Cache,
   :metastore => "memcached://#{ENV['MEMCACHE_SERVERS']}/meta",
   :entitystore => "memcached://#{ENV['MEMCACHE_SERVERS']}/body"

You can also set HTTP headers in production.rb as follows. (3600 is an example value, make this whatever you want.)

# Add HTTP headers to cache static assets for an hour
config.static_cache_control = "public, max-age=3600"

And you may want to add this to your config.ru to get gzip working:

use Rack::Deflater

References:

I just finished watching the videos of you launching Pressly at TechCrunch Disrupt. Well done. You and your team should be really proud of what you’ve achieved.

I wish you’d been given more opportunity to elaborate on your strategy to win. Instead you had to spend most of the Q&A time defending Pressly’s raison d’etre to Dustin Moskovitz et. al. That was unfortunate; deck stacked against you. But you did a nice job staying the high road and giving solid answers to the skeptical questions.

Jeff, I loved your comment about publishers being great at telling stories, and not so great at building technology innovations to deliver those stories (in compelling new ways, with compelling profitability). It’s true. And it’s good, I think, that Pressly is joining a cadre of other players in this same space. Existence of multiple players is proof that the market is ready. And publishers need lots of options right now, especially ones that let them do fast, cheap experiments. Pressly can help them do that.

I suppose controversy-seekers could frame this as “walled garden versus open web, round 2″. That was my very first thought after watching the video. But that isn’t really the case, is it? Neither the iPad/App Store ecosystem nor HTML is going away anytime soon. There will be multiple winners in this market, with multiple technology bets. Consumers will buy many different kinds of devices, and consume content in many different places and ways. It’s probably more accurate to compare Pressly’s space to the blogging services market back when it was just getting going: Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, and so on. Lots of experimentation and diversity, with consolidation down the road.

My biggest takeaway on all this is that Pressly makes a lot of sense from a publisher’s point of view. Publishers are losing sleep over how to follow their audiences to digital devices without abandoning all the assets they hold dear: their brand, destination websites, exclusive content, and UX. And with limited capital and time/runway remaining for technology investment (or investment of any kind) they have to be brutally frugal and thoughtful about what bets they make. Pressly has good answers on the economics (very little cash up front), the technology (more open), the user experience (niiice), and control issues. Clearly The Economist and Toronto Star think so, and I bet many others will reach the same conclusion.

I hope Pressly does really well.

Let me know when I can buy some shares.

osh

I couldn’t find a way to do it with Facebook’s Graph API, but there’s good support for it in the FQL API. You can craft up queries by hand, as shown below, and issue them right from your web browser. The response is an XML document with the statistics for the URLs you want to know about. There are also FQL wrapper libraries in several languages… for Ruby I had some success with the fb_graph gem.

Multiple URLs example:

https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select  url,like_count, total_count, share_count, click_count from link_stat where url in(“http://bing.com”, “http://google.com”, “http://facebook.com”, “http://twitter.com”)

Single URL example:

https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select  url,like_count, total_count, share_count, click_count from link_stat where url = “http://bing.com”

Within the XML results, the “total_count” attribute is the number shown within the Facebook Like widget.

Docs:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/link_stat/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/

Context: MongoHQ, which I’m using with one of my work projects right now, is a service that hosts MongoDB databases. It integrates with Heroku, allowing you to get started on a Heroku app using MongoDB very quickly. MongoHQ supports hourly and daily backup of their databases to Amazon S3 buckets, but alas, not yet for databases provisioned automatically via Heroku. So if you want to step up to a backed-up database you’ll have to set up your own. Here are the steps I followed to do it.

Secret decoder ring:
S3 = Amazon Web Services Management Console, S3 tab.
IAM = Amazon Web Services Management Console, IAM tab.
MHQ = Mongo HQ console.
HKU = Heroku.

Recipe:

1. S3 : Create a bucket for your app’s backups, e.g. “my-app-backups”.
2. IAM: Create an IAM User account for MongoHQ to use, e.g. “mongohq”. Download the credentials and store them safely.
3. IAM: Create an IAM Group to contain all users with backup permission, e.g. “myapp-backup-writers”.
4. IAM: Add the mongohq User account to the newly created Group.
5. IAM: Using the Permissions tab of the Group’s properties attach a new security policy, granting permission to write to the myapp-backups bucket. See below for a sample policy.
6. MHQ: Sign up for your own MongoHQ account.
7. MHQ: Create the database you wish to use with Heroku.
8. MHQ: Select the “Backups” tab and enter the IAM User credentials from step 2.
9. MHQ: Click “Save Settings”. If all is well you’ll see a message, “Setting Updated”.*
10. MHQ: Create a new user on the Database Users tab.
11. MHQ: Copy down the Mongo URI string from the Database Info tab, substituting your user name and password from step 10.
12. HKU: In the root directory of your Heroku app do “heroku config:add MONGOHQ_URL=’URI’”. URI is the Mongo URI from step 11. (Normally Heroku sets this variable for you when it provisions a MongoHQ database. You’re overriding it with a link to your own database.)

* Step 9 is where I got stuck. It worked fine with my own personal security credentials, but not with the IAM account I created specifically for MongoHQ to use. (I wanted more security… giving your main account credentials to a 3rd party site isn’t smart.) I fiddled around with the security policy for quite a while, and eventually discovered I needed the “ListAllMyBuckets” permission. Here’s the security policy that worked for me:

    {
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [ "s3:ListAllMyBuckets" ],
          "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
        },
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
            "s3:PutObject",
            "s3:PutObjectAcl"
          ],
          "Resource": [
            "arn:aws:s3:::MY-APP-BACKUPS/*"
          ]
        }
      ]
    }

Treat the world as flat, and find a defensible niche to start in. E.g. think of the world as the Risk game board, and pick an initial territory where your chances of getting established are high. If you start in Europe, you have lots of borders and the battle is much harder than, say, starting in Australia. (Or Kamchatka. Remember Kamchatka? I think I learned more geography in Risk than in school.)

Follow your own rules. In response to an audience question about mistakes he has made in his career, Howard explained that many of them stemmed from breaking his own rules when investing, e.g. (1) investing in the market when all signs still clearly pointed to down, (2) investing in companies whose CEOs did not have deep domain experience. (Howard likes such companies best, as a rule, for his investments.)

Have a sense of humor, especially about yourself. Howard’s self-deprecating humor made him a real pleasure to listen to, and he explained that his habit of poking fun at himself is part of why people like to follow him in social media. “I make fun of my own mistakes first, before anyone else has a chance to.”  He talked openly about passing on a few investments that would have been incredibly profitable, e.g. a chance to invest $25K in Twitter when it was valued at only $20M.

Spot and leverage the big waves. He spoke to only one slide during the 30-or-so minutes, and it showed two graphs depicting the meteoric rise in Twitter and Facebook usage. His main point was that when you can get in front of a huge market-changing trend (like social media) you are maximizing your business opportunities to do well. “You don’t need to catch every wave. Just one amazingly great wave in your lifetime is all you really need”. Also, fighting a paradigm-changing trend is futile. So, in this specific example, which Howard calls “the social leverage trend”, figure out which of Facebook and Twitter it makes best sense to align your business with first, then integrate and try to ride the wave.

Use your dashboards. He talked about dashboards and his view that they’re essential to business success. From memory, “What’s your dashboard? It’s never too early to start building your dashboard. … Figure out the one or two pages you need to look at every day to understand both the macro market picture and the micro [i.e. the key signals/metrics from your own business]. For me it’s http://techmeme.com, http://angellist.com, and market all time highs.” These dashboards give him “the very early market signals [from AngelList] and the loudest public market signals [from all-time highs]“.

Thanks Howard for a fun and frank talk.

Ruby on Rails normally provides pretty good debugging information for dealing with errors, but I ran into an odd error today that had no debug info other than the exception itself. Here’s what I did to find and fix the problem.

Symptoms: “So, tell me, how long have you been feeling this way?” I had just added a new controller, model, views, and helpers to my app. Requesting a route to any of the new controller’s actions caused Rails to die with the exception “ActionController::RoutingError (undefined method `sub’ for nil:NilClass)”. No stack trace. No filename / line numbers. I knew one of the 20-odd new files I had just created must be causing the problem, but I didn’t know which one.

Diagnosis: “Breathe in. Breathe again. Again. OK, now cough. Ah, yes, now I see the problem.”: The only way I know of to diagnose these kind of problems is brute force. I added a debugger statement to the top of application_controller.rb and restarted the app. Then I requested a URL that was causing crashes, and from the breakpoint, stepped forward in the debugger (next, next, next…) until the app died. Studying the code that executed just before the app died didn’t yield an obvious result, but about 10 frames up the stack I could see a call to ActiveSupport::Inflector#constantize. I edited that method to print (puts) the parameters it was being called with, then restarted the server and tried again. Voila: the last parameter spit out by #constantize before the server died was the culprit.

#constantize PlaceLinksHelper for name PlaceLinksHelper

The Cure: “Take three of these and call me in the morning.” : It turns out I had created a helper module with the file name “places_helper.rb”, but within that file I mistakenly defined “module PlaceLinksHelper”. For some reason that shall remain a mystery to me, this caused things to fall-down-go-boom. The fix was simply to give the module the name Rails expected to find: “PlacesHelper”.

Upon Reflection… “I sure hope that doesn’t happen to me again. But it probably will.” I don’t know how you do this sort of diagnosis efficiently in a closed-source or compiled environment.  This is about the 5th time I’ve edited Rails source code to find and fix an oddball problem. I guess you could try attaching a debugger to binaries and then study the gobbledy-gook, but… no thanks. The only other thing I  could have done in a compiled/closed source setup is study each of my own files line by line. That would have worked, but it would have taken far more time.

Source code good.

First, an account of the nefarious deeds

Case #1: Sally got phished. Sally received a phishing email claiming to be from “Google Account Management”, asking to reconfirm her password.* She gave them the password, only to discover a few hours later, that (a) her password had been changed, locking her out of her gmail account; (b) the phishers had sent email to all of her contacts with a “Help, I need cash fast, send me money via Western Union” scam; (c) she couldn’t get back into her gmail account because she hadn’t set the password recovery information. It took her days to get everything back to normal.

Case #2: Jane dated a creep. Jane dated a guy who turned out not to be a good fit for her. Unfortunately they moved in together before she figured it out. She had to force a breakup, eventually kicking him out. A few days later she realized he was logging on to her email account and reading her email, and in some cases deleting emails. She changed her password, but to no avail: it seems he had installed spyware on her home computer that monitored what she was typing and informed him of password changes. Yikes.

Second, some advice

For starters, both the Canadian and US government offer comprehensive web sites that tell you what to do to protect yourself against identity theft. Here’s the Canadian site, and here’s the US site. Check them out. They say roughly the same thing. I find the Canadian one a little easier to read.

I gave Sally and Jane some advice specific to their scenarios, as follows:

1.  Never reply to an email request for a password. No legitimate business will ever ask you for a password via email. If you’re wondering whether an email is “real” or not, you might try searching on Snopes to see if someone else has reported the same thing.

2. Call Transunion, Experian, and Equifax (the credit reporting agencies) and (a) ask for a copy of your credit reports, and (b) have them flag your file with a “fraud alert” so that nobody can open an account under your name without confirmation. See the US identity theft web page for phone numbers for the credit reporting agencies and a  description of how fraud alerts work.

3. From a secure network, log in to your email provider (gmail, hotmail, whatever) and do two things:

(a) Change the password you use to login to email. Here’s good advice on how to create a strong password that’s also easy to remember.

(b) Fill in the “Password Recovery” information in your account settings. This is they info they use to confirm your identity when you click “I forgot my password”… typically, a secondary email address and/or phone number. This step is really vital because if you get hacked without filling in the recovery information you may not be able to get your account back at all.

Notice I suggest doing this from a secure network. In Jane’s case, she couldn’t safely change her password from home because her ex-boyfriend put spyware on her machine. She went to a friend’s house to do this step.

4. Protect your computer and home network.

(a) If you suspect your computer has spyware or a virus on it then install and run a virus scanner. For this I recommend Avast. I’ve had several experiences with Norton products crippling computers that were otherwise fine.

(b) If you think your home network has been compromised (like Jane’s), change the password on your home network router and cable modem / DSL modem.

It’s best to do 4a and 4b in unison. Get a computer-savvy person to help you if you haven’t done this before.

5. Report what’s happening to the police. Tell them you are concerned you’ve been or may become a victim of identity theft. Collect any evidence you can and give it to them.

Since identity theft is still relatively new, you may find it difficult to get police to pay attention to you. In Sally’s case, the local authorities refused to help. The US identity theft site has suggestions on what to do if local police won’t handle your report, and it’s applicable to Canada (and probably other places) as well.

That’s it. There’s heaps more you can do, but these basic steps will help you protect yourself and recover if you run into similar problems. Here’s hoping you manage to stay problem-free.

* I’ve changed names to protect my peeps. They don’t need any more hassles.

We use Macs almost exclusively as our work machines these days, and we don’t have a lot of spare hardware lying around. Going without a machine for even a few hours is a big productivity hit. So the awful grinding noise that began emanating from Katrin’s Macbook last week was not a welcome sound. Luckily it was clearly coming from the fan, not the hard drive.

We were having an extremely busy week, and having waited days in the past for support at the local Apple store my first instinct was to find a local repair shop that could do it quickly. After all, it’s just a fan, so it should be fast and cheap, right?

Silly me.

After calling several repair shops I realized that the fix was going to run between $150 and $200. Pretty steep for a simple part swap — I can get parts in my car fixed for less than that — so I decided to do it myself.

Here’s what I discovered:

1. I couldn’t find any stores in Toronto who were willing to sell me the part. They all want to do full repairs.
2. More generally, it seems Apple doesn’t allow local service providers to resell parts. They are full-service only.
3. Laptop fans are commodity even in Macs, according to one of the folks at laptopexpert.ca, so you’re better off shopping for the fan by its physical dimensions rather than an Apple part number. (I.e. you pay more for an “Apple fan” than a “laptop fan”, but they’re the same thing.) This may help in the future, but in my case I didn’t know the fan size and couldn’t find it online.
4. Darryl at iRepair.ca was most helpful on the phone and pointed me at several web sites for finding the part. He also had the most reasonable repair prices, about $50 less than everyone else I called.
5. I couldn’t find any Canadian wholesalers who had the part. Perhaps I didn’t search hard enough, but I was surprised, nevertheless.
6. IFixIt.com and PowerBookMedic.com are two US-based businesses that sell parts online. Their shipping options are slightly different, and the part prices in this case were about the same. It’s worth checking both and deciding how important delivery speed is to you.
7. There are fans for sale on eBay, but when I searched I only found used parts. A used fan is a pretty silly thing to buy, in my opinion, so… no joy there.

End result: I bought a fan from IFixIt for $40, they shipped it overnight (FedEx: $40), and I paid another $5 and change in HST. I used the excellent IFixIt repair guide and had the repair complete in under an hour. If I wasn’t in such a rush I could have chosen a $4.00 delivery option instead, and waited for US Post.

Thank you, IFixIt, and Darryl at iRepair.ca. Darryl, you’re first on my list the next time I need repair help.

P.S. I did also try an app called smcFanControl, to no avail. Worth a try.