Entrepreneurial Geekiness

Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
More about Ian
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CustomKnoppix write-up

Business Idea June 29, 2005

CustomKnoppix.com (archive), the market test by Duncan and I for a customised Knoppix distribution is finished, I ended the hosting a few nights back. Duncan and I ran the site for three months to test Google Adwords and of course to see if anyone wanted such a service.

The test was successful in two ways:

  • We learned a lot about marketing
  • We learned that people probably aren’t interested in customised Knoppix distros just yet ;->

I’ve written up some detailed notes about cost, referring search terms, click-throughs and browsers versions. What’s cool is that in the space of a few hours and a few hundred pounds we could validate an approach to a new idea – that’s just peanuts in money and time. I love the ‘net.

I owe a nod of thanks to Seth Godin‘s Big Red Fez for inspiring the php-based contact form (dead in the archived version I’m afraid) as a way of making it trivially easy for a visitor to ping us a contact request.

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New Theme

Life June 29, 2005

Hopefully I’ll settle on this theme and just stop faffing about. Thanks to Becca for providing the very refreshing Ocadia theme.

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Open-Source principles applied to films?

Films June 27, 2005

Joss Whedon, producer of the foolishly cancelled Firefly series (which was absolutely amazing, and so stupidly cut short by Fox) is taking a novel route to the release of Serenity, the film that (hopefully) ties up the loose ends of the series.

Rather than keep the movie under tight wraps before the September 30th release, instead he’s presenting a set of mini-previews around the States. What’s novel is that anyone can see these early production runs – so early that some scenes just contain placeholder special effects and temporary music, and the fans can give feedback and help make the final release a success.

This feels like an application of the open source movement’s mantra: release often, release early which helps refine great software like the Firefox browser in the face of MS’s bloated Internet Explorer. The early reviews of Serenity are good, hopefully this’ll beat the usual pap that comes out of Hollywood.

Very cool, I for one can’t wait to see Serenity.

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Permalinks at GoDaddy

Life June 23, 2005

I’ve just switched Permalinks (definition) on for this Blog. It wasn’t clear whether my host GoDaddy supported the necessary mod_rewrite module…so I gave it a crack anyhow. It worked fine and all links were converted by WordPress automatically, so now the Permalinks are human readable (should you be so inclined). If you’ve linked to something I’ve said already then you’ll have to edit your previous Permalink – sorry about that, won’t happen again.

Oh, and I’ve changed the theme to, though this’ll be ongoing. So much to do, so little time.

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