Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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RoboChick – Emily’s first post
Emily has started blogging on RoboChick, she’s talking about the Herbie the Mousebot birthday prezzie I bought her (pcb + parts + motors == hours of fun), one of the two wheeled robots that I thought would make for cool projects. I hope she gets the pictures up soon…Robot pictures in flickr.
Experimenting with eLance
I’ve posted a job into eLance for the first time – I figure it is time to experiment with remote web design and CSS implementation. Now this might seem odd given that I live in web-designer-rich Brighton…
I’m a believer in building on-line marketplaces where we can remotely trade our skills rather than only doing business in person. I’m also well-aware that I’ve never really used the marketplaces that exist.
Since I’m rather likely to build more businesses like ShowMeDo which revolve around the idea of remote marketplaces, I need to get more involved with the dynamics of these sites.
Of course the easy thing to do now would be to turn to friends in Brighton and ask for a pointer to ‘the right person’ to solve my design needs…instead I’ll take the slightly scarier route to dealing with someone I’ll never meet in person.
What’s the site? A few days back I finished a draft for my new professional-screencasting site. I’ll use the site when I make contact with companies that I think could benefit from using screencasts to explain their software. Given that I’ve produced over 100 screencasts in the last 3 years (and received some incredibly positive responses from viewers) I intend to scale up the activity.
I’m heartened by Patrick McKenzie’s experiences with eLance (and from there have opened a dialog with Gursimran) and the final design of bingocardcreator, whilst a bit too busy to my eye, is a serious improvement on his older site. I shall report as I progress…
Addition – when I listed the project I provided a 4 paragraph text summary (which is shown in eLance) and a 3 page pdf proposal. So far I’ve received 14 bids, many are cut/paste proposals, only a few have resulted in useful conversations.
I realise in retrospect that I’d probably receive more targetted bids back if I’d included pictures in my proposal pdf. As it is I link to external sites but that puts more work onto the bidder which results in the cut/paste less-useful bids. Since many proposals are (I believe) ignored, the bidder wants to do the minimum work to win a percentage of their bids.
So far I’m happy with the amount of effort required (about 5 hours including writing the proposal document) given the better bids that I’ve had back, I’m narrowing my search down to two providers now.
Addition – I’ve decided to go with Gursimran outside of eLance. We’ve spokenly extensively over email via Patrick’s blog entry (above). If it wasn’t for Gursimran then I’d have gone with Danet.Solutions through eLance. User danetsol understood my requirements and quoted very competitively, I’d be happy to suggest that others invite his company to bid, his examples really were very good.
£5 App Write-up (6 demos at our Demo Camp)
What a fab night! I counted 46 people which makes this possibly the largest event we’ve thrown – thanks to all for attending. Sponsored beer, live Qik video, 6 great talks and lively post-event pub conversation – who could ask for a better evening? Josh made this rather excellent panoramic view of us all:
Each of the 6 talks lasted 15 minutes and covered a wide range of geek and tech-business topics:
- ‘Google Maps + GPS + Python + Series 60 + giant pencil == live biking location demo’, Tristan Roddis (CogApp)
- LiquidFold using Google’s App Engine, Simon Willison & Natalie Downe
- “An airport that you can turn-off” – evolvable flight-paths for crash-resistant landing vectors at a major airport, Matt Sarjent
- ‘Pistach.io: a cracking idea! [blog-based advertising platform, new start-up]’, Aral Balkan and Dave Stone
- AllSizes+ – hacking flickr with GreaseMonkey, Premasagar Rose (of Dharmafly)
- ‘Inuda’s first public app [howsociable.com – brand metrics company side-project]… after two years of ‘Innovating’ alongside client work’, Jon Markwell and Kev The Dev
Ribot both sponsored the event (great beer – thanks!) and made live Qik video streams for the evening. I believe these segments are correct:
- Video 1 – quick intro from John and myself
- Video 2 – Tristan’s Python Series 60 demo starts
- Video 3 – Tristan concludes, full talk for Simon and Matt (followed by break)
- Video 4 – Second half – Premasagar, Dave, Jon+Kev
The Ribots also sponsored the beer, they skinned the bottles to show three stages of the design process:
More images can be found tagged in flickr and via the fivepoundapp homepage. If you’ve a question about the night then come join the FivePoundApp google group. Finally – thanks to Danny for hosting and to John for yet more great cake.
Possible talks for the next event could include something about ClearLeft’s SilverBack, a Chumby demo and Seb’s postponed Arduino hardware hacking. I’d love to see some more internal-company demos/start-ups/proto-projects, please ping if you’d be interested in talking.
Addition – great write-up at Ribot HQ, including discussion of how and why they branded their sponsored beer..
New PC + Ubuntu
I’ll jot these down as helpful notes for others. I’ve just bought a new Mesh PC, it includes an nForce 610i chipset (with video and audio) and a separate GeForce 8500 GT graphics card.
Ubuntu Hardy installed without hitch, it found my nVidia and suggested the restricted driver, it was happy with the SATA 500Gb hd and ‘just worked’. Installation took 30 minutes and was a breeze. Prior to this I configured the partitions manually (in the Ubuntu installer) to keep my Windows XP partition for dual-booting (a bootloader is added automatically to let you boot into XP on startup).
Sound was a bit more tricky (isn’t it always?) – it turns out that the on-board card was doing just fine, the problem was that it has a choice of 2, 4 or 6 channel sound which are controlled by drivers. This is fine if you have the Windows driver, for Ubuntu it looks like config-file hackery. I was plugging in speakers for 6 channels rather than just 2.
Under System->Preferences->Sound if I chose ALSA (rather than ‘autodetect’) then everything worked with 2 channels, I had to configure mplayer and VLC to see ALSA.
To avoid the config hell I put my old SoundBlaster Audigy into the machine. This was detected under ‘Sound’ as ‘p16v’, but wouldn’t act as the default device. It turns out that now the machine sees two ALSA devices and uses the nVidia one as default.
Installing asoundconf-gtk solved this (I chose the SoundBlaster to be the default) and it wrote .asoundconf and .asoundconf.asoundrc to my home directory. asoundconf-gtk appears in System->Preferences->Default Sound Card.
Now VLC and mplayer (also Flash in Firefox) all play sound just fine.
I also made a point of upgrading my nVidia drivers using EnvyNG to the latest (173.14.05). With the default Ubuntu nVidia driver I had some tearing on full-screen (1680×1050) movies, with the new EnvyNG driver I get a clear, great picture.
Once again I have a snappy, stable Ubuntu box and I can mostly ignore Windows. Yay!
Oddly I didn’t have to refer to my old notes to get ALSA with the SoundBlaster working on this new PC – the External channel was enabled by default (it wasn’t on my last PC).
Addition – I noticed that in Firefox 3 my backspace key doesn’t take me back a page. Thankfully this fix (backspace key for ubuntu firefox) solves the problem in just a few seconds.
From Demon Internet to BeThere
I figured a quick report on my fab move from Demon Internet to BeThere was in order. I was ‘pretty happy’ with my Demon adsl but I’m pretty wowed by BeThere.
I decided to switch as a friend did a speedtest and had a much faster connection than I was getting with Demon under my 8mb plan. My Demon customer support chap told me that ‘I’d be unlikely to get a faster connection if I moved so I shouldn’t bother’ – since he was wrong I figured some numbers were in order.
I’ve moved from a £20/month plan to Be’s Pro £22/month. My adsl has jumped from 3.5mb down/400k up to 11.1mb down/1.1mb up. In fairness the new line is ADSL2+ whilst the Demon connection was ADSL but, heck, the customer support chap thought nothing of this.
I’m also impressed at Be’s attentiveness – I had a number of txts and emails telling me the status of everything and ‘it all just worked’ when I plugged it into my Ubuntu box. I’m a happy customer.
Several weeks on – I’m still a happy customer. Video come down really quickly, the connection only appeared to die once (but the router might have overheated – it all ‘just worked’ again when I tried an hour later with no reboots). DNS resolution takes up to a few seconds sometimes but I’m willing to put up with that given the super-fast download speeds.
Recommend a friend – they have a recommendation plan, you get the installation fee waived and I get a month’s free subscription if I invite you in. Ping me a mail if you’d like the invite (you don’t have to take it up, there appears to be no downside for me either).
Read my book
Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
Mor Consulting Ltd. is an A.I. focused consultancy offering strategic research and development owned by Ian Ozsvald, based in London (UK).
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