Posted by Michael Thu, 31 May 2007 20:56:00 GMT
I’m giving a talk at Gartner next week. Details are here.
I’m not exactly the average Gartner attendee or presenter, let alone customer, so we’ll see if my radical ideas get me booed out of there :-)
Posted by Michael Thu, 31 May 2007 11:46:03 GMT
I just tried to log into a service I haven’t used in a while. My password doesn’t work and it’s not obvious how to request a reset. It was easier to search on Google for their competitor and sign up than to reset my password on the other service.
In your business, are the easy things easy? You’re loosing customers if they aren’t.
Posted by Michael Mon, 21 May 2007 16:46:21 GMT
Typical headline— “::Insert big name vendor here:: just released an ISA-based, hardened Windows appliance…”
I get chills when I think of what a disaster this could be.
I’m a fan of lightweight and flexible appliances that do something really well.
ISA on “hardened Windows” is an obese system trying to look good in a sun dress. Most good sysadmins have been trying to harden their Windows systems for years.
If you’re one of these people, raise your hand if you’re sure this “hardening” worked.
Anyone? Bueller?
Okay, you in the back with the Microsoft employee badge on, put your hand down.
I think they should tell the truth:
“Hi. We developed a cool solution but used a really inflexible technology to build it. Instead of doing the right thing and moving it to a good platform, we’re going to shoehorn it into this half thought out plan and call it ‘a rapidly deployable system’”
Posted by Michael Wed, 16 May 2007 11:28:01 GMT
Most days, penguins here work from home offices. Very cold offices.
We had Verizon FIOS installed today. Our cable modem is down more than it’s up and the performance is spotty at best.
2 hour install (FREE) and we have 30Mbits for the same price as our (supposedly) 5Mbit cable modem.
I used the speakeasy (competitor to Verizon) speed test.
29773
That’s pretty darn close to 30 Mbits.
It might be hard to get me for the rest of the day. I’m off to download the entire internet.
Posted by Michael Wed, 16 May 2007 07:54:00 GMT
I’ve really been into mind mapping for the last 6 months or so and dropped some cash on the product I found to be the best for me: NovaMind.
I’ve been using it every day for 6 months on my old trusty PowerBook and yesterday it crashed on open. This has never happened before. The crash reporter popped up, I hit send and it restarted. It’s been working fine since.
This morning I get an email from their tech support. Yes, someone actually reads their crash reports, suggested a fix in a quicktime that was trying to load, and told me I should let them know if it happens again.
I love these guys.
Posted by Michael Thu, 10 May 2007 16:29:00 GMT
Erlang is a really great language for problem areas where a distributed system is involved, but it lacks the huge number of libraries that Ruby has. Wanna have your cake and eat it too? Yep, so do we. Enter Erlectricity, a Ruby to Erlang bridge.
It’s already on rubyforge, install it with:sudo gem install erlectricity
We’re actively prototyping a software solution that would be better in Erlang as it needs to be massively concurrent (think deep packet inspection at 750Mbits). Two libraries we need for aggregation exist in Ruby but not Erlang. Now we can bridge the two and let Erlang do it’s thing and Ruby do what it does best, just not so fast.
Posted by Michael Tue, 01 May 2007 14:43:29 GMT
Okay okay. About 100 emails on this. It couldn’t be much easier:
sudo sed -e 's/\edgy/ feisty/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
No really, that’s it.
Posted by Michael Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:28:56 GMT
We’re looking for 3 interns for summer work.
Just think you could get paid to get coffee and be a slave at some boring corporate cubicle garden
You could actually create something interesting, fun and (gasp) useful. Sure, there’s no pay, but you’d get to work on Ruby on Rails (like a real project), Open Source appliances, mobile technologies
you can do it in your pajamas.
Okay, so work from home, library, whatever. You’re responsible for whatever attire you have on that may or may not offend anyone.
Send an email to jobs@imapenguin.com with the subject “Internship”.
Note that the more creative you are in your email the better your chances of being one of the three. Also, since we’re not paying you, your country does not matter! Reasonable English is a good idea though.
Posted by Michael Fri, 27 Apr 2007 08:49:46 GMT
Every once in a while, something comes along that alters the course of things for me. I joined the Navy in 1993, that was one thing. I found Linux while recovering from back surgery in 1997. That was another.
Last month, 37Signals released an application called Highrise. We penguins are longtime 37signals users of products like Basecamp and Campfire. This new application raises the bar for us as a company, and for me personally.
Highrise on the surface looked like an oversimplified contact manager. Using the other products by 37Signals has greatly increased our productivity in the past so we decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
In 2 days, we were completely convinced that they were on to something. PEOPLE are the PRIMARY piece of data in the application.
Well that’s great because PEOPLE are what matters in any business. Not Opportunites, Deal size, the number of things we may be able to get them to buy, etc.
We put people in the center before Highrise, but our old CRM solution didn’t work like that, so we kept people in the center in our minds and the struggled with the application to work with us on it.
Today, our CRM application helps us remember all the details about conversations, follow ups, promises, funny family happenings (if you care about people, you should remember what they care about most) and things that really matter.
Posted by Michael Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:49:00 GMT
Yes, we know the Rails appliance is still on rails 1.1.6 :-)
We’re developing an automated build system for incremental rails updates on the appliance and including MySQL support in May.
If you need it quicker, this is a 100% open source project. We don’t charge for it and wont, so let us know if you’re interested in joining the development team.
