• it’s distributed
• there’s GitHub
• it’s the latest cool thing
• all the cool kids are doing it

The last reason (cool kids) is probably the main reason for my resistance. I don’t like to follow the heard. I don’t like to do it just because everyone else is doing it. I especially don’t like to do things just for lame reasons or poorly supported reasons, or reasons without a compelling WHY?

Eventually I heard one compelling reason: It saves you time because you don’t need to switch context or have multiple workspaces copies in order to work on a branch or experiment with some code.

In all the talk about Git I’ve realized something very troubling in the software community, they are very bad at explaining WHY and have a tendency to always just explain WHAT.

You see the Mexican Restaurant that Seth talks about does a buch of tiny things that are NOT readily apparent 80/20 efficient. For example the 14 different kinds of salsa, scream 80-20 optimization. I bet that most people only get 3-4 salsas, yet as soon as you take-away 10 varieties, you lessen the experience.

So if you’re out there and are looking for a recipe for a successful business I’m thinking that there’s not so much a perfect equation but rather there’s a million little details you’ll need to work on that you’ll need to rigorously refine until you get to the vital few that make you a success.

window.ondeviceorientation = function(e) {
    var heading = e.webkitCompassHeading;
    var accuracy = e.webkitCompassAccuracy;
    var alpha = e.alpha;
    var beta = e.beta;
    var gamma = e.gamma;
}

My thought was that if I upgraded to FreeNAS I would be able to add iSCSI support and other things in such an easy to use manner it would really make my life a little easier. Short Answer: No.

Ubuntu server was much easier to install iSCSI and get working the first time. With the addition of WebMin management of this server over FreeNAS was much easier.

Then I thought about RAID. For FreeNAS I was thinking Raid5 over ZFS. In theory this was good, it actually worked as advertised, until I started rsync. Then over a 1GBP connection I was averaging 15MB/s, whereas before over Ubuntu I was getting 50+ MB/s.

So then I thought, well, at least I’m getting RAID, but then practically I thought, if I get a card, it’s expensive (more than 2-3TB disk) and it’s still a single point of failure. So rather than go this route, I’d rather just have a great back-up plan and mother board to support more SATA connections.

As to ESXi, the first problem was the network card. It required I purchase a $40 Intel 1GPs network card. Servers installed great, though cloning was a pain. Then when I went to install an XP virtual, guess what? No drivers for my sound card, not in Windows but there was nothing found in ESXi to pass on. Then I needed a windows Machine to mange this server through vSphere which meant that I needed to keep a separate machine on just to support a machine with multiple VMs.

Conclusion

NAS – Stuck with Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, I could use WebMin and Samba to do what I needed for a file storage and I could use iSCSI, NFS, and SCP/RSYNC with high transfer rates.

VM Server – Stuck with Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS using VirtualBox. The nice thing is here I can just clone drives and with a simple shell script I can start/stop the machines at boot or halt.

I think that if I had another day and more time I would have been OK, but not leaving today and maybe arriving.

I was really looking forward to this conference. In fact I’ve been looking forward to it since I applied in March, I’ve built a robot just for the conference (Feynman-Mini). I’ll have to demo the robot in a few days and give a you tube talk about Robotics Programming 101 for those missing my talk.

I’m so sorry to everyone I will not be able to attend.

(Updated) In hind sight the call was correct, the flight was delayed and although I might have made the PDX flight my baggage would not have… Travel Note: Ship Robots ahead of time via UPS. Pick a larger carrier i.e. Delta.

This is an extra for the book, Robotics Programming 101. This extra highlights all of the Ubuntu specific robotics configuration details in Robotics Programming 101.

The Kindle Edition is now available on Amazon.com for $0.99.

• Raleigh, NC – 2010 Rank #10
• Raleigh, NC – 2011 Rank #57
• Columbus, OH – 2010 Rank #61
• Columbus, OH – 2010 Rank #22

So what’s changed in a year? Well, in Columbus, OH, not a whole lot. My guess in Raleigh, NC? Not much either.

I’ve seen rankings like this fluctuate for EVERY place that I looked at rankings.

Advice: If you’re planning to move to a place IGNORE THE CITY RANKINGS. Rather take a visit, find someplace that feels right and you can afford.

There’s almost a hundred different PHP frameworks out there. Some are big some, are small. All of them do about 80% of what you need the way you want it, but the 20% that’s not usually takes you the most time/effort/money.

This book shows you how to build your own PHP Framework using a PHP Framework template called GinPHP.

Visit the website to learn more http://www.phpframeworkbook.com.

The Kindle Edition is now available on Amazon.com.

You can purchase it directly from Amazon HERE, for just $0.99.

I think that it’s a really keen observation when looking at most products that succeed in the end. Word was not the first word processor; Google was not the first search engine; Facebook was not the first social network.

As a pioneer most of my business life I relate to this A LOT. I created new products, new products that had never been created and business problems that have not been solved.

I think the lesson here is unless you have a Trust Fund, develop something slightly different to be new, but learn from the mistakes of others and become a settler right after the pioneer spends his time and money paving the way solving the stuff requiring lots of time and money… Something which you might not have…