Thanks Mike for tweeting about the website of Douglas Trumbull. Nice to see this being done so well. Great content with great presentation. Can happen on the Internet. There are not many examples of a site like this though.
Category: confessions of a pixel pusher
Douglas the movie No idea what it was. Looks like allot of work is gone. That can happen.
Digital is binary:
Your data either can be 100% safe. Safer than anything before. Ever.
Or it goes away. Completely. Nothing left.
The real world operates only in matters like life and death on such a binary pattern. Otherwise there is often stuff left. Something to be saved, recovered. Not so in digital.
That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.
I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.
But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.
On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.
? Saas ? Never had heard of it. Till Today. And then it showed up everywhere. SaaS seems to be a fancy acronym for Software as a Service. Turns out that’s what I am doing with Interdubs. Maybe if I would hang out in the Silicon Valley more or spend more time with VC types I would know this kind of language. But actually, I rather not. I just like to go ahead and write software. No need to call it fancy names. I rather check if people can use it for what they would like to do. Chances are they don’t know -or care- about SaaS either. They just have work to do.
When getting an error like ‘Unexpected signal: 10’ when launching vmware on OS X it could be that you ran a 3rd Memory Manager like iFreeMem. Quitting it did not fix the issue. I had to reboot, and then vmware was happy again. It might even be that running iFreeMem first and then VMware would work. My solution is just not to use ‘iFreeMem’ any longer. It feels snake-oilish anyway: why should a 15 dollar application do a better job in managing my memory than the OS itself? It’s one of these things that the OS should be really good at. It’s not about having ‘green’ in your pie chart.
Since a while I have a very early MacBook Pro. Overall I got used to it, love it as much as I did the PowerBook. Funny how you get used to everything. I am sure it still gets how etc etc. Back then I got it with the biggest drive that was possible: 120GB. Of course that one has been above 95% full for the last year or so. Finally I got around to put a 250GB drive in the machine and, surprisingly, it even worked. I did probably not to these things in the smartest way, but in the end it worked:
I got a 250 GB drive from Amazon that let’s you end up with 232 GB formatted capacity in real bytes. The Western Digital WD2500BEVS Scorpio 250 GB 2.5-inch SATA Hard Drive is 129$ right now.
I got a Macally B-S250U USB 2.0 2.5-Inch SATA Hard Drive Enclosure for 25$. Putting the drive into the enclosure was easier than I thought. Funny enough the enclosure needs a 2 USB connections to work. One for data the other one for power. Even more strange is that with just one cable the LED will light up and the drive will click repeatedly. I was convinced that the drive was DOA at that point.
So then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my internal drive to the newer bigger one. It took more than a minute to copy all the Adobe Acrobat crap. I really need to delete that. Adobe Acrobat is ‘near-malware’. Anyway. I let the copy finish over night.
There are lots of screws to get into the MacBook Pro. The internet seems to agree ont he fact that the MacBook Pro is much easier to get into than the PowerBook. I found the instructions at iFixit to be very helpful. The Torx T6 screw driver you need for 2 screws in the case and 4 on the drive I found at Sears. 2.49. They sell a set of 3 little screwdrivers for 10 dollars. Or you pay 7 buying them individually.
Gettting the upper part keyboard part off was a bit tricky. A little bit of careful jiggling around did the trick.
I also went ahead and disconnected the power light. It sit’s on top of the harddrive. I don’t need to see a room illuminated by my sleeping laptop while I am trying to sleep as well.
Still amazed that it did work.
Roughly drafted writes about Apple and it’s ProApps. And the future of them. It feels that the author uses just a few to many arguments. I think that not all is well in the Pro Apps world of Apple. Nobody knows. Neither do I. That’s the Apple way, and that is part of the problem: You can not manage the communication around Pro Apps like you do for the next iPod.
Apple announced Aperture 2. I neither used Aperture-1 nor Lighroom. But I talked to people who did. Aperture was (an / another) example for Apples inability to come up with Pro Applications on it’s own. You just can’t in that vacuum that the super tight Apple communication rules dictate. Apple has money and brilliant engineers and the best intentions. But that’s not enough. You have to have an open dialog with your Pro clients. Pushing updates that claim “enhancements and bug fixes” and do not give any more detail is simply unacceptible for Pro Applications.
It is interesting to see how different the current workflows can be. Like
this or that.
Judging by the end this is already from 2003, but still worth looking at:
Robert Rodriguez talking about HD. It was never a fanboy of his,
but I think he expresses a couple of very interesting concepts rather well in this piece.
Running and developing a system in the same time is allot of fun. An idea can be quickly added and / or tried. Some are more
involved though. At this moment there are 42,658 files in Interdubs. So uploading happens allot. There was a ftp interface, but people
need passwords and needed to remember the folder name.
It could be easier. And now it is. It’s as simple as clicking on a link:
A transmit droplet with the proper parameters get created and downloaded automatically. Those droplets can be kept in the dock or on the desktop, and uploading is even easier than it was.
As with so many nice and easy things the underlying technology is actually not that simple. It was great to be able to draw from the resources and experience of the amazing people at Oneiric to get the backbone for this service addition installed. David Green was super helpful, without him this feature would have taken weeks longer to implement. Working with David is allot of fun, since everything he says he will do he does. And it works, since he has tested and checked it from the get go.
It is truly interesting how a small company with people that care can have so much more impact that larger ones that take weeks to move.