Associative Disarray

The Candy Black Studio

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:00:26 -0700

A dream of an office! (via @jkleske)

Google Streetview: Die Stunde der Hypokriten

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:01:12 -0700

Wenn ich als Bürger schon nicht verhindern kann…

dass in meinem neuen Reisepass Fingerabdrücke und per Funk lesbare RFID-Chips installiert werden

dass meine Kontobewegungen überwacht werden

dass mein Kommunikationsverhalten registriert werden soll

dass ich in vielen Städten auf Schritt und Tritt von unzähligen Überwachungskameras gefilmt werde

dass ich auf Flughäfen in Zukunft durch einen Nacktscanner spazieren muss

dass Mautbrücken automatisch alle Autokennzeichen erfassen

…. dann will ich wenigstens einen riesen Aufriss machen, wenn jemand es wagt, meine Hausfassade zu fotografieren.

Erfrischend klare Worte von dennis-knake.de

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Illuminate your thoughts!

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:20:49 -0700

via funktionalley.com

"Snakkes", a speech bubble lamp that can be written on with whiteboard markers.

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A clever idea to keep customers up to date

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:02:41 -0700

Wufoo greets customers who haven't logged in for some time with a list of interesting new developments.

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Weeknote #18

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:42:00 -0700

Organizing

Man, I wish I could buy time. While the company bank account is quite well equipped, I just can't find the time for everything that gets put on my plate by me or by others. Time Management my ass, it's Getting Shit Done™ what it's all about and that means: Differentiate the urgent stuff from the important stuff. And then do the latter.

I have to admit that I struggle to keep that in mind all the time. There are always many unplanned things that threaten to become serious distractions, be it a call from a customer in need of some hand-holding, a disrupted IT service or a sudden stroke of genius that of course should be worked out immediately. I try to be a good GTD disciple, but instead of a "mind like water", my mind every so often resembles more a flushing toilet.

Learning

Starting a business means starting a new way of learning. I'm amazed what amount of things I've learned since I started planning my business in late 2009. After relearning things I had forgotten already and acquiring new knowledge about topics I had only heard about from my directs at my previous job as an IT manager, my sysadmin knowledge today is at a new height. At the moment, I'm doing heavy in-depth reading about MySQL performance and MySQL high availability concepts.

Working with clients is another great learning arena. There's the client that first consumes a lot of support effort ("How do I create an SSH key?", "Please help me install git on Windows!", "Can you explain to me what the Features module is and how I use it?") and then cancels during the test month nevertheless. There's the customer that enjoys explaining to me how we should do our job. And there's the client that is pure pleasure to cooperate with and pays their bills a year in advance.

Marketing

I'm happy to have closed the deal of sponsoring the Drupal-Initiative, the german equivalent of the Drupal Association. All their websites are going to be ported to a DrupalCONCEPT Drupal cluster and we in return will be mentioned as their hosting sponsor.

My next action will be an email newsletter to all my Drupal contacts. I'm unsure how successful this will be, but I'm afraid there are a lot of people that haven't yet heard of DrupalCONCEPT and I'm definitely going to change that.

And with that, I'll return to doing important things!

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Tips for the S-Office

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:58:28 -0700

Matt Shapiro suggests that Starbucks should change its name to “Startbucks”, because so many startup founders not only get their caffeine kick there but also stay for quite a while during the day to do work and have business meetings. Certainly, I’m a member of that group. Over the course of a week, I spend at least 15 hours in my favourite Starbucks outlet in Freiburg working through my todo lists and answering customer requests.

With power outlets at many tables and free WiFi, Starbucks actively attracts road warriors with their laptops or iPads. But since they still call themselves a “Coffee House” instead of “Coworking Space”, I’d like to emphasise GigaOm’s recommendations for making oneself comfortable working at Starbucks without making others uncomfortable:

Almost always favor a single location. It makes it easier for your contacts to drop in for meetings.
Learn the names of most of the baristas and also take time to have a conversation with them. It helps build a human connection.
Make the baristas involved in your venture – share your news and make them feel part of your struggle.
Make sure you buy coffee or something at least three times a day.
Tip generously – up to $10 a day will ensure that folks at the store don’t view you as a freeloader and a pest.
Don’t spread out your stuff and take up too much space at the store.
Invest in great noise-cancelling headphones (to counter the loud background music).
Keep your mobile phones on vibrate and leave the store for conversations.
Make sure that the number of people attending a meeting is fewer than four so that you can all circle around a single table.

As much as I’ll second the headphone item, I’ll also add a quasi-opposite experience: You’ll soon find out that you’re not the only regular. Drop your introverted geek defences a bit and introduce yourself to your fellow S-Office workers. More often than not, a new acquaintance becomes a business opportunity.

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Two of mankind's greatest inventions: iPad + Velcro

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:00:12 -0700

via apple.com

Magical meets versatile.

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JavaZone Trailer: Java 4-ever

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 06:15:28 -0700

via youtube.com

But... what about Perl?!

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Vuvuzela in DOOM

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 02:03:59 -0700

via bildschirmarbeiter.com

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Weeknote #11

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:19:36 -0700

Last week, things had to go slower because Amalia got Pink Eye and we had to take care of her at home. Although being able to spontaneously carve out time for my family has been one of the core reasons to start my own business, accepting that I won't get as much work done as I had planned still is hard. So, from time to time, I have to remind myself of Gary Vaynerchuk's foremost rule of Crushing It: Family goes first.

The IT infrastructure of our Drupal hosting service is getting better every day, but we're still missing a user interface where customers can change settings for their websites. We can't use any of the existing open source hosting panels because they're built for single multi-purpose servers while our redundancy concept distributes services over separate server clusters. So, I met with a Drupal developer to do some brainstorming for the DrupalCONCEPT Dashboard. We worked out some great ideas how the dashboard can be integrated with our system integration software. Since I want to use an agile development approach, my next task will be writing user stories for the most important functions.

After receiving an RSVP for the June meeting of the Hamburg Drupal User Group, I decided to actually take the 5½ hour train ride across Germany and do a presentation about our hosting products. Being an active member of the community and directly connecting with Drupal users has already proven to be a great way of marketing our services. An since one of our first customers is based in Hamburg and totally enthusiastic about what we do, I'd be stupid to let that chance slip. Of course, I'll write how it went in my next weeknote.

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Weeknote #10

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:12:55 -0700

Customers is what happens while you're making plans. I've been doing a lot of planning over the past months but having our first customers proved that you can't foresee everything. Hopefully, you'll have set aside some time to revise your plans and do what suddenly became necessary. I didn't, so other tasks had to be put on the back burner -- more plans to change.

Although I've learned to do project management and organize my tasks, it's hard to fulfill my many roles. I'm company owner, manager, accountant, system administrator, business developer, marketing director and support representative, each of them trying to keep a healthy schedule and family life. That's a huge challenge.

On the positive side, working from home saves me time otherwise used for commuting that I can use to balance work and family.

Over the past few weeks, I've been working a lot, but I've also started to put in a free day every so often. That proved a particular good idea because it lets me free my mind from the urgent to focus again on the important.

One of those important things is friends. Taking a break from work to meet a friend over coffee or spending an evening together around a barbecue grill is a great way of winding down. It also gives me a chance at reflecting what and how I'm doing right now.

And, as it stands right now, I'm doing okay.

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Anatomy of a Stick Figure

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:55:53 -0700

via slideshare.net

Nice tutorial for drawing stick figures.

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Weeknote #5+6

Fri, 14 May 2010 17:54:46 -0700

What a ride those two recent weeks were! I feel like the rollercoaster of my business had finally climbed the first peak and now is thundering downwards, gaining more and more speed.

Drupal hosting

Last weekend, the Drupal Dev Days took place in Munich. So far, it was the biggest German Drupal conference ever. Since work on the website took much longer than expected, I decided to delay its publication a bit more and use the Drupal Dev Days as the venue to launch our Drupal hosting products labeled DrupalCONCEPT.

So, on Friday evening, I sat in my Munich hotel room, getting more and more nervous. Not because I had gotten the first time slot on the schedule for my talk "Drupal in the Cloud", but because I was becoming anxious how people would react to our business offerings. Well, in retrospect, the feedback I got there was nothing less than awesome! People came to me to ask me about details. Many were excited that we closed that gap in the Drupal services spectrum. The website design got praise, and I also got suggestions how we could make it yet more clear and informational.

And besides all the talking, I could do my first business deals, too. Already during the weekend, KontextWork announced they were partnering with us to host their DrupalWiki SaaS products. During the week, other new customers started populating their Drupal webspace on our servers.

The basic server infrastructure is running, but there are many construction sites we'll still have to deal with. No boredom in sight. :-)

Podcasting

This week really was as productive as it was busy. Additional to all the business stuff, I recorded the first episode of my new podcast Drupal Talkshow with my co-host Markus Heurung. We talked about the Drupal Dev Days, of course, and about the international DrupalCons in San Francisco and Kopenhagen. We also took a look at the Devel contrib module. It was a lot of fun and we plan on continuing the podcast on a bi-weekly basis.

Family

It's not easy to keep a healthy family life when both parents are busy working on huge projects with deadlines to meet. I'm glad that working from the home office enables me to do my fair share of household chores and spend time with our sweet little daughter. Also, Carolin and I are lucky to have great relatives and friends that support us. We very much appreciate it that we're not alone in taking care of Amalia while the creche is closed like this Thursday and Friday.

Overall satisfaction rating

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) (on a 5-smiley scale)

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Weeknote #4

Tue, 04 May 2010 12:37:56 -0700

Website work

I really crushed it last week to finally get the web hosting website done. And apart from minor touches, it's done and online. I decided to keep the site under wraps, though, to ceremonially reveal it at the Drupal Developer Days that take place in Munich next weekend.

IT infrastructure

Let me tell you: It takes a lot of effort to make IT management effortless. While I still stand by my decision to automate everything from the start, it's not always easy to accept the price of a lot more preparation work. Just whipping up some servers wouldn't have taken me that long, but if you want to build automated processes, you have to think them through before you spend even more time implementing them. I had planned to go live with our Drupal hosting products in April, but there was just too much tech to handle.

(Warning: Sysadmin talk ahead) Last week, I decided to upgrade Chef to 0.8 because 0.7 has seemed really outdated for some time now and I experienced some confusing behaviour with our installation, too. The upgrade took almost a whole work day because one new component called RabbitMQ didn't want to start but neither didn't give useful error messages. I had to do some test installations on fresh servers and eventually found the cause in a discrepancy between DNS and the /etc/hosts file. Additionally, a software packaging bug in the chef-server package (a wrong symlink, as I later found out) broke the Javascript that's essential for the Chef web interface. That wasn't a big deal, though, because Chef 0.8 introduces a new utility called Knife that lets you manipulate configuration data from the command line. And no GUI is as good as no GUI.

Working with tools like Chef is an investment that'll pay off eventually: With those automated processes, we'll have to invest minimal effort into maintaining and growing our infrastructure later.

Business Development

Getting the Drupal hosting website ready was my main goal for last week, and I'm happy to have reached it. Now I'm preparing my talks for the Drupal Dev Days which will draw some traffic to the website -- hopefully by many new Drupal hosting customers.

After the conference, I'll concentrate on creating website content in the form of blog posts, knowledge base articles and podcasts.

Family life

I have to admit, starting a business while my girlfriend is writing her thesis isn't the best timing. When both parents are busy-busy-busy with deadlines looming, even the question who does the grocery shopping can become a conflict -- let alone the one who'll spend the next hours out on the playground with our 2-year-old.

That's where I'm grateful for Gary Vaynerchuck's calming first rule in "Crush It!": Family first. Always.

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Why I moved from LaTeX to HTML

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:23:29 -0700

As I wrote in my last weeknote, I decided to switch from LaTeX to HTML for the training manuals and papers my company Freistil Consulting will publish in the future. In this post, I'm going to explain why.

As a computer scientist, system administrator and IT trainer, I've written a lot of documents ranging from single-page articles and a diploma thesis to my book "Perl-Meisterkurs" with nearly 200 pages. And all the time, I've been looking for the format that best supported publishing those documents.

In the early nineties, I learned to like LaTeX. The process of writing documents in LaTeX (write, process, verify, repeat) is so similar to writing software in a compiler language that I found it very easy to learn. And its output quality was just stunning compared to all the text processing software like Word. Also, like for example with Perl, there is a huge choice of useful extensions, called "styles", freely available on the Internet. With those, you can use LaTeX for writing articles and books as well as letters and even presentation slides (or cooking recipes for that matter).

But while you can generate PDF files easily with LaTeX, converting a document into HTML for the Web is tedious, even with the converter software available. And because I needed printouts as well as web pages to display on a projector, I chose DocBook XML as my source format. It's been used for publishing technical documents for a long time and can be converted into PDF as easily as into HTML. Unfortunately, at least using open source tools, the PDF output is not nearly as neat as the one from LaTeX.

So, when I started writing my Perl book, I reverted back to LaTeX and I've been happy for some years. That is, until I decided to focus on online training. Now great print quality didn't matter that much any more and I needed HTML files to publish on our online training platform.

The format had to be based on plain text so I could still use Textmate, my favourite text editor, and Perl scripts to process my source files. There weren't much alternatives left to choose from. One of the most interesting candidates was Markdown. I already use Markdown on most of my blogs because it's easy to write and also easy on the eyes. Furthermore, Scrivener, the writing tool I like most, also supports working with Markdown.

And then there was HTML, simple, plain HTML. I got the idea from Mark Pilgrim's interview on the setup where he mentioned that he's writing his new book in HTML. I liked this idea because doing semantic markup in HTML is easy and by using CSS, you can style a great looking online presentation.

Writing HTML is almost as easy as writing Markdown, especially when you have support from your editor software. Additionally, there was the strategic aspect that if I wanted to involve other writers, I would be much easier to find some who knew HTML than ones with LaTeX, DocBook or Markdown knowledge.

Because I still wanted to be able to generate PDF files, I looked for decent HTML-to-PDF converters. XSL:FO was the main reason I abandoned DocBook, so I researched the alternatives and found PrinceXML. Prince uses the normal CSS styling information and extends its syntax a bit to cover printing aspects like page sizes and footnotes. I found out that CSS3 actually even can do page or figure numbering and cross references. It has to be mentioned that PrinceXML is a bit on the pricy side, so I had to do some tests first.

I quickly converted one of the book's chapters from LaTeX to HTML, created a CSS style sheet for screen and one for print media, and checked the results in HTML and PDF. As was to be expected, the web presentation was fine, and also the PDF output from PrinceXML was quite acceptable. These results finally convinced me to go Full Monty on converting the book from LaTeX to HTML.

I haven't finished the conversion yet, but thanks to a Perl script with a growing list of regular expressions, I can minimize my manual work. I'll also need to write some scripts for generating the table of contents and the keyword index, because PrinceXML doesn't do that.

I expect to have a complete new version of the Perl Meisterkurs book in May and will let you know of my experiences in another post.

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Secret play room

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:06:28 -0700

via boingboing.net

Some parents really are awesome. Until this, I didn't see the use of owning a family home.

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Weeknote #3

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:54:28 -0700

Last week showed that defining priorities is essential when you're starting a new business.

Traveling

When I voiced my hope to get our hosting website online this week in my previous weeknote, I didn't think of the Perl seminar that would have me out of office for four of five days this week. So I only had Monday and the travel time on Tuesday and Friday to get the most important tasks done. By the way, I still enjoy taking the train to work, especially if getting there takes me a few hours. I kept the Bahncard 100 which lets me travel by train as much as I need for a flat monthly fee. So, for last week's seminar, I just had to reserve a seat in a train that goes all the way from Freiburg to Wolfsburg to secure myself 5 hours of solid work time in each direction.

Offline Training

The seminar went fine. I had twelve participants eager to learn Perl and three days to teach them the most important basics. Which is not a comfortable time frame, because actually only explaining all the topics takes more than two days, and then the trainees haven't written a single line of code themselves. But they got to a basic understanding of the language which was my expressed goal for the seminar. Together, we hope that there'll be a second seminar where we'll be able to look at practical problems and more advanced aspects of Perl.

Spending all day in a classroom and the evening in a hotel room still isn't my preferred way of teaching, so I'll put more effort into promoting our online trainings.

Training Material

In advance of the seminar, I had to spend some time on my training material. Despite it having matured over more than 8 years now, it's still not perfect in its explanations and examples and it still contains a few typos and glitches. Additionally, for a few weeks, I've been thinking about the format I could best maintain it in the future. The LaTeX format in which I had written the book started to show real limitations, especially because I had chosen it for its printing quality but now needed a format for online presentation.

After I spent some hours on looking -- and deciding -- for a future format, I got back to my original goal of working on the training manual itself. (BTW, I chose HTML and will explain the reasons in a separate blog post.) But departing time came quickly and the seminar took up the rest of the week.

Website

In the end, I didn't have the time to do the finishing touches on the webhosting website, so I'll have to postpone the site launch for another week. There maybe would have been enough time, though, if I hadn't embarked on my journey to a better book and paper writing format.

Those tool and format discussions are dangerous because they can quickly derail a project and bring productivity to a low. Instead of working on your content, you start researching and testing different "solutions" that could replace your working one. Sometimes, "research" is just an euphemism for procrastination. If you have people that pay for your living without asking for a quick ROI, you may be able to go on Holy Grail expeditions. But in a business, you need to focus on what directly benefits your customers. With a training manual, that's its content, not the format it's written in.

The second priority is business development, for example with a website. That's why I'll measure the success of the new week by how much new business I'll have generated in its end.

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Weeknote #2

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 14:59:51 -0700

Revisionism

Starting with the week after Easter, I'm now working as a full-time self-employed. And to comply with weeknote custom, I renumbered my weeknotes so the one from last week now is #1. All previous weeknotes, written during the business launch preparation phase, got negative numbers. The advantage of this change is that if (rather when) I have to compute the current weeknote number, I can use the Weeknote Calculator.

Secure Living

My application for state founding subsidies has been accepted! Yay! I'll be granted nine months of unemployment pay with 300 € on top, no strings attached. That means I can develop my business in a sane pace without worrying about my family starving.

Online Training

The new Freistil Campus website is working great. I'm very happy to have moved from Moodle to Drupal because I can do so much more with the site now. As I've told before, we're already using it for the new Perl Meisterkurs that started this month, and it's so much fun to experience motivated participants that fill the seminar group with postings and literally beg for new course material so they can continue learning.

I'll start working on a bunch of new training projects this week, including some free webinars about development topics like version control. My main focus will be two big online workshops I'll call "Water" and "Ice" for now.

High Performance Webhosting

Work on our hosting system is going fine, all the base infrastructure is in place. Especially the monitoring and security systems have already proven to work great. The former by waking me up in the early morning to tell me I had forgotten to configure the resource allocation of one web server which then gradually ate up all memory and went down in flames. The latter by alerting me of of a mysterious change of a system program that, as I found out an hour of anxiety later, had been caused by a software update I had done the previous day.

I'm not happy to report that I still haven't finished work on the hosting product website. But since everything else is running in its tracks I'm optimistic that next week will be launch week. (He said, in his child-like naïveté...)

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PIXELS

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:55:42 -0700

via youtube.com

8-bit creatures taking over the world! (Watch it while it's still online.)

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Weeknote #1 (week 14, 2010)

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:49:05 -0700

Whoa, only a few weeks in and already falling off the wagon? Those things are called "weeknotes" for a purpose, my dear friend!

Well okay, I've been pretty busy lately and the holidays with their parent-visiting didn't help. So, what's going in at the Freistil front?

Passion for starting a new business is one thing, being able to support your family is another. Since I don't expect our revenue to be huge from the start, I had to look for some type of funding that lets me keep paying for rent and food. Fortunately, the German state offers subsidies for people who leave or lose their job and want to build their own business. The downside: it's the state. Think beaurocracy. So, the week before Easter, I went to the Work Agency to submit my papers. Because I try to live the dream of a paperless office, I had all forms scanned in and later printed them out for my CPA or myself to fill them in. Now, at the Agency, the clerk politely explained to me that applications have to be submitted on the original form. And sent me back home. cricket So, instead of closing the deal, I had achieved nothing and that setback destroyed my motivation for the rest of the day. Productivity ground zero. Fortunately, I got another appointment two days later and delivered the papers right before the official went on her Easter holiday. Now it's waiting with my fingers crossed.

After building some clusters on Amazon Webservices, I tried Rackspace for comparison. Rackspace doesn't offer a service landscape as a big as AWS does, they're more of a VPS-by-the-hour shop. But at that, they seem to be quite good. Since our infrastructure is highly automated, we'll be able to use inexpensive Rackspace servers without much hassle where they fit in.

Getting all the necessary infrastructure in place takes a lot of my time. Frist, there are many parts in this puzzle of high performance and availability. And second, I often have to catch up with many software solutions I may have heard about during my management days but hadn't had the opportunity to put my own hands on. Because of that, I spend many days on the command line. Which is actually fun, but keeps me from doing other important tasks like website building.

So, I'm getting used to working long hours, or, like Gary Vaynerchuck puts it, to "crushing it".

And in the same Crushing Mode, I finished the Freistil Campus website on Friday night at 3am. Campus replaces the Moodle installation I've been using for online trainings. Based on Drupal, Campus will give us more flexibility to build the features we need for a great online training platform.

For the coming week, I hope to get the new hosting website ready to launch and for a positive verdict on my subsidies.

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