May 16, 2008
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Line breaks added for readability. Emphasis added where necessary.
April 15, 2008
As per Dive Into Mark.
tarsi:~ zachhale$ uname -a
Darwin tarsi.lan 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
tarsi:~ zachhale$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
81 git
65 cd
46 nano
44 cap
34 ssh
31 ss
23 ls
20 scp
15 sudo
11 mate
sh-3.2# history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
77 svn
44 ls
30 cd
18 pwd
11 sudo
10 nano
10 mate
10 cp
10 apachectl
7 mysql
Don’t be afraid, join the meme!
April 12, 2008
April 10, 2008
This is not a recent occurrence but Twitter is turning into quite a nice platform for getting unsuspecting users to learn about you and/or your company with very little effort.
Three easy steps to making me angry and confused for spending time to learn about your spammy self.
It seems a little bit petty to be complaining about this but I’m honestly unsure as to how to combat these people who follow me on Twitter and are obviously only doing so as an advertising mechanism. Some are legitimate, reasonable people with interesting lives and are only out there to find other interesting people to follow. Most, though, have a following-to-follower ratio of over 100-to-1 - obviously they are not showing much discression.
Twitter gives me a few options for these people: block or do nothing. Should I block them or just ignore it? I don’t actually care if they follow me, but it sure inflates my own following-to-follower ratio. I don’t want to come off as an ass and block someone legitimately interested in following me (though I don’t know why that would be the case, either).
Petty, I know. Yay social media marketing. :/
March 29, 2008
Several times now I have revisited my current setup for personal information management and whether or not I am comfortable storing private personal hyperlinks on the web. My concern with using online services is that when I store hyperlinks on wikis, messages, emails, etc. and click, the other site will see me in their referrer logs.
This isn’t an issue for most webmail services like Gmail because it is normal for these services to obfuscate urls beyond recognition making it impossible to identify any referrers. You see urls full of hashes and hard to recognize identifiers that are meaningless to anything but the application itself. I doubt keeping urls unidentifiable like that was a primary concern in the design of webmail systems but it does provide this obvious advantage.
The concern I have is with services like Backpack, Basecamp, or any hosted blog or wiki where you have a unique and easily identifiable url associated with your data. On hosted sites like the aforementioned Backpack and Basecamp, your account is identified by a chosen subdomain which is very likely easily identifiable to you personally or to your company/organization. For example, Startup Weekend uses the domain “startupweekend.grouphub.com” — obviously identifiable. On a personal domain like say for example “zachhale.com” if I were to set up a private wiki at “wiki.zachhale.com” and do everything necessary to protect it with a robots.txt and require http authentication, if I put create a link and click on it referring to another site they will see where I came from. Even if your domain name isn’t identifiable by name to you, there is still whois information that can be dug up and tracked back to you.
I’d rather not let people know what I’m doing in those private spaces. Maybe I have a list of blogs I admire and visit frequently or maybe it’s a corporate information system with links to competitors sites. In many cases I would rather not send information to those people identifying my visits with me or my company.
There are a few solutions that I can easily see:
Obfuscating completely is difficult to do and often nearly impossible to do, so the only other reasonable solution now is to set up some proxy. In researching it looks like there are a number of client browser extensions/plugins for spoofing referrers, but any client side hack is tedious to enforce, especially across a large organization or with multiple platforms in the mix. The other option is to manually redirect traffic through another domain, preferably not owned by you. I found one service called referhide.com that provides this solution. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be too hard to set up a redirection script either with javascript or through passing parameters through the url. Either way, though, you now have to either manually or programatically change all your links to go through that intermediary service — sounds like a pain.
What I’d like to see is something similar to robots.txt but for referrer links. It would be impossible to enforce by strictly trusting web servers to do the ignoring since people could choose to ignore such a file without question. The only real solution I could see is standardizing this into web browsers so you could trust that anybody using a compatible web browser would know that their referrer traffic is being properly dealt with and anonymity is preserved.
Any ideas? Am I missing something major here?
March 26, 2008
My degree audit officially shows all green “OK”s and the message “All requirements have been satisfied” appears at the top. Woohoo! It’s been a long journey and I’m finally done.
And it feels weird.
Part of it is because I have not sought any form of employment other than working full time on my startup, but I think most of what’s weird is that I feel like I can do anything now. I’ve felt like that for the last few years, but now it’s unconstrained by long-term academic requirements. Nothing is holding me back from pursuing whatever ambitions I want to and that feels very, very good.
I still don’t have income as of now, though. I’ve had extensive conversations recently about this and about my lifeline being provided by my parents while I figure out how to get some income rolling in through my company and projects, and the pressure is really hitting hard. I’m a bit conflicted about how I will ground myself fully at this point. Do I diversify and hope something catches? Do I focus completely on the one most important future revenue generator? Do I stop for a short while, grab some projects for some income, then come back to everything? There’s no right answer to this so I’m sort of testing the waters if you will over the next couple of weeks.
We have been working on Mavenry for the longest time now and I have learned a ton about starting a business and how important it is to start with solid, accurate assumptions and to build from the needs of the customers. It’s been a tedious journey but I couldn’t imagine not having gone through everything we’ve gone through so far. I’ve even picked up the know how to build sales projections, financial models, business plans, neural brand identity maps, you name it. Anyways, this humongous learning process has swayed our direction back and forth and back and forth but we’ve been chugging on an incredibly solid direction for the last few months that should prove our efforts worthwhile in due time. I’m excited and passionate about the direction we’re heading — it’s all about staying focused and taking one step at a time.
Towards the end of the quarter I threw up a simple (and full of bugs that need fixing) application Glitchee for sharing mp3s with each other in sort of a “running mixtape” idea. Now there are a few solid competitors that have literally launched within the last week and attack sort of similar issues with different approaches, but I’m still sure that what I envision is not solved by either of the new guys out there so I’ll keep on chugging as a side project. I don’t expect this project in how it’s designed to be any sort of income bringer but who knows, maybe it’ll fill out to be something worthwhile that people would jump on and use.
And other than that, I’m building a website with mini CMS for my mom’s real estate presence as well as working on a store/gallery and mini order fulfillment system for my dad’s photography business.
It constantly astounds me how much my perspective on life, learning, relationships, projects, etc. changes so drastically and often these days. I’m at a point where my patience is extremely low for wasting time that could be spent producing something. While during school when I had a lot of forced projects and tasks to complete it seemed more reasonable to spend a great deal of time reading, learning, and running over and over plans for this and that, I’m at a point where all of that just seems like such a waste of time. I realize I only feel that way having already experienced that phase, but it’s weird to switch to an entirely different set of ambitions for what I spend my time on. I want to make things. I want to produce actual applications and products that can get out there. I’m tired of reading for hours on end about things that don’t produce results. I have a need for making things happen.
Now that I got all of that out of my system, I’m beginning to drink the cool aid and am moving my projects over to using Git and specifically the new cool kid on the block github.
March 7, 2008
10 days from now I will be completed with the last quarter of classes remaining in my undergraduate degree. It’s hard to really comprehend right now, but overall I’m stoked.
Today marked my last class slide presentation (my final capstone project presentation) which, while it was overly text heavy, went relatively well. It was the last time I will have had had to present in front of class for school. Whoa.
The college experience has been absolutely monumental so far and I’m really going to miss it. It is easy to take for granted the welcoming attitudes that come with being in school. My program, professors, advisors, and peers provide such a wonderfully comfortable safety net. Sometimes it gets overly stressful and sometimes it seems like assignments and exams are out to destroy me, but once they pass it’s is obvious that they really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I’m not forced to compete. The reason I’m here is to learn.
That said, I’m stoked to be done. Mavenry is chugging away beautifully and I’m more than ready to dedicate myself to a life of entrepreneurship. I can’t wait to focus less on completely academic requirements to learning about what I want to learn about when I want to learn about it. I can’t wait to be completely responsible for my financial well being. I can’t wait to have complete control over my schedule and what I choose to spend my time with. I can’t wait to spend a week straight on my own projects without having to procrastinate on acheiving relatively inflexible academic requirements.
I still have a business plan to co-write, a culminating capstone report to write, a large capstone poster to finalize, and two rather difficult exams to prepare for for my human sexuality class. It’ll be a busy week and I’m ready. Here I go.
February 9, 2008
For the 2004 election I turned “of age” less than a week before the presidential election so, as you might expect from an underage voter, I didn’t follow any of the preceding primaries/caucuses for either party. This year I’m paying attention, though, and if you’re curious, I’m completely behind Obama.
Today was my local democratic caucus here in the 43rd district of Washington State. How I understand it this is a rather unique year because normally Washington doesn’t matter much but at this point the two candidates (Obama and Hillary) are so close that we actually matter. It makes me feel quite special in an odd normally-ignored-but-finally-noticed-for-once kind of way.
I’m really confused about the whole electoral process after looking into how just the democratic delegate selection process goes. The primaries ballot sent out to all the democrats doesn’t actually elect ANY delegates. Really, none at all. It’s what is described as a 7 million dollar beauty contest paid for by the state” Lovely. (If you agree this is stupid, I’m told it’s likely Sam Reed’s fault.) Instead, all delegates are chosen through the in-person and on-paper caucus system regulated only based on the honor system. Everyone (or at least, encouraged to) meets locally and chooses a number of delegates for their precinct based on the percentages of supporters for each of the candidates.
The location I voted at had I believe 6 precincts represented, one including the majority of the dorms on campus. I’ll just say I’m relieved to not have been in that precinct. Instead, mine was was about 55 people from only 4 square blocks in this area.
The whole event started by announcing the general rules for conducting the caucus then the person managing this location started to list off the precinct numbers being represented. After he got through announcing two of the numbers each group started to clap and cheer as if we were teams competing in some way. Each successive precinct tried to clap louder and louder. I was quite amused. Oh, foolish college kids (I won’t be one for long).
Our leader was a bit unorganized, but oh well — I respect him volunteering either way. We all filled out our choice of candidate on paper sheets then three people tallied up all the votes to make sure all was accurate. We ended up with 44 votes for Obama, 11 for Clinton, and 3 Undecideds. Then, one of the undecideds decided to change his vote to Edwards despite everyone telling him that he had already dropped out of the race. Being the slightly out of touch with the system, we went straight into a selection of volunteers to be primary and alternative delegates to attend the next largest caucus happening in a couple months.
After we began to select volunteers, we went backwards and two people stated their arguments for each candidate and one arguing to send an undecided candidate to be “flexible” and allow the next level of caucus sway our votes one way or another instead of us saying who we wanted (no, I don’t think that makes any sense). We had a perfect number of volunteers for Obama and one too many for Clinton. The solution? “Who want’s to not volunteer for Clinton?” Each group of potential delegates and alternatives worked it out on their own from there. My involvement lasted about two hours.
I’m glad I had the opportunity to get involved this year and I hope that we can all get behind whoever wins (though I would prefer Obama). While I respect Clinton for everything she stands for I can’t help but feel like most of the people voting for her at this stage are doing so based on principle that she’s a woman which is a bit frustrating. I talked with with Adam on this issue which was more the case at his caucus and commented that at least we are quite a bit more in touch with who we’re voting for here. The majority of the country still votes based on instinct and for such superficial (in my opinion) reasons.
Go Obama!
February 3, 2008
Every once in a while a day goes by where things pile up and up and then the day comes to a close without having felt the slightest bit of productivity. I had one of those days today.
It started with a late start and lingering end to an outing I went on yesterday which finished with me getting home mid-afternoon with little energy from lack of sleep. I spent a short amount of time catching up on reading, watched a little of the Super Bowl, grabbed dinner, had my morning shower (late), decided to nap but failed, had an unsuccessful coffee run, then had a meeting where I was completely belligerent. I’ll stop my rant of daily activities here.
There is a distinct mental state that tends to fall into place following lack of sleep, broken eating schedules, malnutrition (including over-caffination), and the general feeling of being unaccomplished. When in this mental state any and every event that takes place, if not initiated personally, feels completely awkward no matter what it is. Not only does my brain move slow like molasses, but what comes out of each thinking spurt seems incomplete and off-topic. It’s quite a frustrating place to be.
The obvious solution is to do a “reset”. If I get back on a proper sleep schedule, eat normal again, and start to conquer small tasks it should be easy to get back into the groove. And that’s just what I’ll do. I can’t be the only person to experience these completely frustrating and seemingly unfixable situations, am I? People say this builds up from stress and over-working but I really don’t feel like I’ve over-worked myself the last couple days — but then again, maybe my standards for over-working are skewed.
I do have to mention, though, that since quitting diet soda a few months ago these occurrances have diminished dramatically. I’ve also made a conscious effort to get back onto a semi-regular schedule to avoid these situations. Oh, and I’ve also just purchased a sweet new thinking aide.
I am Zach Hale and this is my journal.
