Synthesis

I submitted a proposal for Open Source Bridge, an ambitious, community-driven conference happening in Portland, Oregon from June 17th to the 19th. The deadline for submissions is today!

PJ Hyett asked for it on Twitter, so I created it. Announcing:

The Github Theme for TextMate!

Hosted on, GitHub! (what else?) The basics are defined, but I’m sure it could be improved. In which case, you know what to do.

David Berlind’s video Is it time to throw away your servers? is a nice high level explanation of Amazon EC2, and he begins to make the case in business terms for moving to virtual servers. Unfortunately his cost comparison is not apples to apples – he fails to atleast touch on the extra costs involved. Particularly EC2 bandwidth, which was completely left out on the EC2 side, and was no doubt included in the $350/month per physical box number.

Not to mention the time/money for atleast one linux guru to setup your EC2 servers, secure them, back them up, SLAs, etc. I’d like to see a more in depth whiteboard video that goes into these issues. I think EC2 is great, but the cost differences aren’t quite as dramatic as Berlind’s video would have you believe, unless no one ever visits your site. Lets see a more honest comparison. I think EC2 would still come out ahead.

JDiskReport is a cool disk usage analyzer that helps you see where all the space is going on your hard drive. Find big un-used files, and delete them! It’s got a cool interface, it’s cross platform, and it’s free!

Great Article: Self Control is the Key to Success

Thinking back, this makes lot of sense. When I was disciplined at enforcing self-control, I acheived great things. (Graduating college, completing recordings of albums, quiting smoking early on, buying a house, getting my current project done) and well, everything else. When it comes to finishing something, it all comes down to self-control.

Podcasts are great. I only listen to them when I’m stuck in a car driving and can’t do anything else, but when you ARE doing that, it’s a great way to keep your brain active. It also allows you to fulfill your dreams of thinking about whatever you’re interested in literally ALL the time. Forget day dreaming and thinking about other aspects of life. I now think about web design and development 20% more of the day, not to mention balancing my two careers where I do just that! Oh well, this is an experiment in total immersion.

My favorite podcasts:

Venture Voice: This is the model by which interview-style podcasts should emulate – Greg Galant has a professional, polished interview style which makes you forget this is a Podcast and not NPR. He’s also got one of the more unique accents our there (atleast to my Florida ears), and seems to be able to get interviews with anybody who’s anybody in the tech and venture capital worlds. Listen here for inspiring stories from people in the trenches building new companies right now.

Ruby on Rails Podcast: The web development framework which continues to kick ass has its own Podcast, hosted by Geoffrey Grosenbach of TopFunky.net, author of the nuby on rails blog, the Sparklines, Gruff, and pure-CSS graphing libraries for Ruby, and lots of other helpful stuff. This Podcast interviews the who’s who in the RoR world, where the creators and big users of RoR get together and feel good about Rails.

Boagworld.com – A couple of funny brits hang out and talk web design. Each show focuses on a specific aspect of the biz. They go off on tangents here and there, but I’ve already learned some interesting tidbits from the couple shows I’ve listened to so far. And I’m getting better at imitating british accents at the same time!

Web 2.0 – A couple of funny americans hang out and talk web 2.0. They also conduct interviews. In show 7, Jason Calcanis of Weblogs, Inc. basically turns the interview around and asks the interviewers a lot of the questions. It’s funny. This is another show to hear interviews from the who’s who of the web.

I also plan to check out the Audible Ajax podcast, since they just interviewed Thomas Fuchs of Script.aculo.us, and the newly discovered Duct Tape Marketing podcast, since they conducted yet another interview of Jason Fried. Although, I don’t know how much more Jason Fried interviews I can take. I like the guy and his company, but I’ve already heard the gospel many times, plus I regularly read Signal vs Noise and peruse the 37signals website. How much new information could their POSSIBLY be?!

Never the less, I can’t resist, and I will probably download these new interviews at Duct Tape and Web 2.0 just in case there is anything new or inspiring in them.