All posts of Ian

ShowMeDo.com – new beta on-line!

We have a new release of ShowMeDo on-line! We’re receiving some amazing feedback on our market-test with offers of new videos ranging from language tuition through knitting and on to car servicing. We’d love for these new videos to compliment our current 10 videos. Our 10 videos are free to access (and always will be), […]

Making Money with On-Line Services

I’m seeing an increase in on-line services that let users earn money from their efforts. Many people like the idea of supplementing their incomes by doing something that they enjoy. Some examples: eBay – become a retailer selling whatever you choose Professional blogging – e.g. ProBlogger, write about what you enjoy and earn money through […]

Two Entrepreneurial Pieces

Two good entrepreneurial articles, first Paul Graham’s How To Make Wealth, previously only available in Hackers and Painters is now on-line. If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That’s been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds […]

Blink.com’s Founder Looks Back

Here’s a cool post from the founder of Blink.com, a failed but well-funded social bookmarking site from 1999. He talks about their past offering given the recent success of the del.icio.us social bookmarking service and their acquisition by Yahoo!. He laments their mistakes, it’s rare to see someone be quite so open about their decisions: […]

John – Thank You!

I’d like to say a huge thank-you to John to helping ShowMeDo take a step forward, we’ve now got a daemonised TurboGears server that runs 24/7 (woot!). There’s nothing to see yet (really, there’s just a blank page) as I haven’t yet put up any content or the real server…but we’re getting there. Fingers crossed […]

Upgrading Ubuntu, problems and solutions

I’ve just upgraded my Ubuntu linux distribution from “Hoary Hedgehog” to “Breezy Badger”. I ran into some trouble, I’m pretty sure it was all caused by me running out of disk space during the upgrade. For the record I’ve added the process here to go from a broken upgrade to one that works. I also […]

Great customer service

Two of my toys blew up last week. My 18 month old 17″ Viewsonic LCD monitor just stopped working and about the same time my 6 month old 512MB Compact Flash camera card died. I was (pleasantly!) surprised to see that Viewsonic offer a 3 year warranty on all LCD monitors – they just came […]

An evolutionary approach to starting a company

Here’s a nice post by a VC taking a look at two ways of building a new business – either start well-funded by VCs or start as a one-man-band in a garage (or a two-man-band from sofas for Kyran and I). “We don’t have a preference for one way or the other, but I will […]

Grant for Investigating an Innovative Idea

In an earlier post I alluded to a government-awarded grant that Kyran and I had used to evaluate a business idea. I hadn’t applied for a government grant before and it was a bit daunting – perhaps explaining the experience will be of benefit to other UK entrepreneurs. Back in April I worked with the […]

Review: Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional

I highly recommend Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional to anyone looking to learn or improve their Python programming ability. I recommended this to a colleague who had a lot of programming knowledge (in old Microsoft QuickBasic, would you believe) but no experience of Java, C++, Python. Within a few days he was comfortably doing […]