Thursday, June 18th, 2015
It’s not often — actually, it hasn’t happened before — that I enjoy a book so much that I finish reading it and then immediately read it again. But there’s a first time for everything and the book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, was well worth reading twice. I daresay I’ll read it again this summer.
The book is heavily focused on the career and experiences of Ben Horowitz in the startup world and as a CEO of a fast growing company with many twists and turns before an eventual successful exit. It’s packed full of anecdotes and tips derived from personal experience, which suits my style of learning. I’d much rather hear from someone’s personal experiences in business than to read a book by someone who has “studied” startups and businesses.
There’s also a different level of transparency that can be reached if the author is no longer working on the businesses that they are writing about. Approximately ten years has passed since Ben Horowitz exited his startup and he’s now a VC, which gives him the freedom to write in more depth about the struggles (and eventual success) that he experienced.
Why did I like it so much? Starting and running a business is hard-work. It’s one urgent thing after another. There are no easy answers and there is no roadmap to success… and I find that strangely motivating.
From 37signals Signal vs. Noise blog:
“Oh, that’s not my job,” is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making shit work.
The sentiment expressed in the blog post rings true to me, but obviously not to many of the commentators on the blog who are way off base. This is more about attitude rather than an expectation that the accountant will pitch in and write code if development is behind schedule. Accountants, as a general rule, don’t know how to code. But they can probably do testing or assist the actual coders in some other way that helps speed things up. It’s about a willingness to contribute your efforts, outside of your domain, if necessary, for the greater good of the company — rather than building a little fort around yourself and doing your utmost to ignore anything that you don’t think is your job.
Recently we switched to hosting a site using WordPress and shortly thereafter we started seeing some strange URLs showing up in Google Analytics, with index.html appended to the end of them. The only place the index.html addition could be seen was in Google Analytics traffic reports.
Default Page setting in Google Analytics
After a little digging we discovered that a few years ago when all URLs on our site used the .html extension we had elected to use the ‘Default page’ option in Google Analytics (your domain > Profile Settings > Default page). Here we had specified index.html as that was the default page at the time. Since then we’ve moved on to using WordPress as a CMS for our site and so the default page is now index.php.
This setting is entirely optional. It’s purpose is to remove duplicate entries in Google Analytics for pages that can be shown from URLs that do and don’t include the trailing index.html or index.php. For example, http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.php point to the same content, but when linked to, will show up as different links in Google Analytics unless you have specified that index.php is the default page.
More information from Google here:
‘/’ and ‘/index.html’ Tracked Separately
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
According to the All About Microsoft blog, a Microsoft group might soon start preventing employees from buying Apple products on the companies dime.
Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group (SMSG) may be putting in place a policy to prevent employees from using corporate funds to buy Macs and iPads.
Based on an alleged internal e-mail passed on to me by one of my contacts, this edict just came down last week. SMSG encompasses 46,000 Microsoft employees worldwide, according to a Microsoft Careers page about the group, and includes Microsoft’s front-line consumer and business sales, service and support people.
Policies like this aren’t great for several reasons.
- Your own employees aren’t voluntarily using your products, why not? Banning them from using non-company products for company work just masks the issue and doesn’t give you an answer to the why question and thus doesn’t give you a chance to improve your offerings.
- If employees don’t like company products enough to use them over a competitors similar products, maybe they aren’t the best people to have working in your sales and marketing departments. Can you imagine an Apple employee using a ThinkPad with Windows 7 installed over a Macbook Pro with OS X Lion because they thought it was better? No, me neither. They’d be chased out of the building with pitch forks before they had time to enter in their login details.
- It is bad for internal morale and makes you look like a loser to the outside world. Companies that effectively have to ban employees from using a competitors products are doing something wrong.
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
This recent thread on The Business of Software forum caught my attention. It’s an interesting discussion but it was more interesting say 5+ years ago before SaaS products had really taken off (and proven themselves…).
I get the shakes when I think about going back to using an email client like Outlook instead of Google Apps. Connecting to the mail server wasn’t fun even when the mail server was located in the same room, but when you were travelling overseas and connecting to the mail server via a VPN it was simply an awful experience and frequently unusable.
Now with Google Apps I can connect to my email from whichever device I’m using with an Internet or 3G/4G connection. It’s seamless and I have 15 GB of emails within a few seconds reach. It’s hard to beat that.
SaaS products aren’t for everyone and they don’t work for every product, but in 2011 you really shouldn’t need the *benefits* of SaaS products explained to you. You can decide that they aren’t for you because of the lack of control and privacy concerns, but the actual benefits of these products to people who are more relaxed about the loss of control and privacy should be pretty clear.
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
Just encountered this issue with SVN when trying to update the repository:
URL ‘https://example.com/development’ of existing directory ‘c:\example\development’ does not match expected URL ‘https://example.com/development’
This error was the result of some playing around I did with setting up SVN on a different machine and using uppercase letters instead of all lowercase when I was importing the repository onto my new machine.
Windows does not let you have two folders in the same directory with the same name even if they do not use the same case letter case, but Linux does and because SVN is cross-platform compatible it needs to keep this in mind.
So if you somehow get into a situation where you have two URLs, one which includes uppercase characters and one that does not, then you could run into the above issue.
The way to fix this is to right-click on your repository and select “TortoiseSVN > Repo-browser” navigate to the problem folder and ensure that there is not two duplicate folders there. If there is a duplicate folder then you will need to remove once of them from your repository.
Monday, January 3rd, 2011
Updated on the 2nd of August, ’11: Recent versions of VirtualBox have changed the way the cloning works, so the instructions below no longer work. Never fear, some smart chap has built a GUI application to handle the cloning and as an added bonus it also lets you decided if you want to generate a new UUID or keep the old UUID. It also lets you increase the virtual drive size, amongst other things. No official website for this tool, but the guy who built it has a forum thread at virtualbox.org and it can be downloaded from here as well.
I’m using VirtualBox to create multiple virtual machines that I can use on my computer. All of these VM’s will be quite similar, but used for different purposes. One might be for web development, the other might be for games and the other might be for smart phone apps development. It’s one way of ensuring that my primary machine does not get cluttered and slowed down by a gazillion different applications and services running in the background.
One minor issue that I can into was cloning a VDI in VirtualBox. Simply copying and pasting the relevant files in Windows Explorer does not work, as each hard disk must have a unique UUID — copy/paste duplicates the unique UUID and so you can’t add the duplicated HD into the VirtualBox Manager as it conflicts with the original HD.
So you need to power up the Command Prompt and use the VBoxManage command with the clonevdi command option.
- Open the Command Prompt
- Move to the directory which contains the VBoxManage.exe file, possibly at this location: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
- Type in this command and press Enter: VBoxManage clonevdi “<path>\original.vdi” “<path>\cloned.vdi”
That’s it. The cloning process should begin. Now go get yourself a coffee, if the VDI is large it’ll take a little while to clone.
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
I can’t remember the last time I read a comment on a blog, new site or YouTube that was anything but blather. The vast majority of comments are a total waste of space and time.
I was about to build my own comment blocker extension for Chrome, but luckily I cam across an existing extension, CommentBlocker, which does everything I need it to.
There is a version for Firefox too.
Ahhhh, that feels better.
Working remotely is certainly a challenge. It’s the ultimate “grass is greener” thought inducing situation. If done right though, it’s hard to beat. Jeff Atwood has some thoughts how to successfully work remotely for computer programmers:
If this seems like a lot of jibba-jabba, well, that’s because remote development is hard. It takes discipline to make it all work, certainly more discipline than piling a bunch of programmers into the same cubicle farm. But when you imagine what this kind of intellectual work — not just programming, but anything where you’re working in mostly thought-stuff — will be like in ten, twenty, even thirty years … don’t you think it will look a lot like what happens every day right now on Stack Overflow? That is, a programmer in Brazil helping a programmer in New Jersey solve a problem?
A little worker’s cottage in Coppin Street, Richmond, just sold for $1 million. It’s a pretty good indication that there is a massive bubble in the Australian residential market at the moment. Ponder this:
The house sold for $1 million at auction on Saturday, almost double the $533,000 its owners paid just five years ago and more than four times the $218,000 it sold for in 1996.
The housing market in Australia escaped the worst of the Global Financial Crisis, but it is hard to imagine that we’ll be that lucky forever — with such inflated housing prices, how can mere mortals possibly expect to be able to pay back such huge loans within 30 odd years?
