Thursday, April 17, 2008

And I'm Spent...



It is working. After a long battle all day yesterday (and giving up on Apache), Ruby on Rails is running. The rest of my configuration is yet to be done (no database yet), but all in good time. Take nothing for granted: this is a very powerful server. Here are the specs (and yes, it is 2008):

Fedora Core 8
450MHz Pentium II
512MB RAM
10GB HDD

Should serve very well for the amount of traffic I expect at 49times.com.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Should Have Been Mine

An article in the Washington Post today caught my eye. It's about a web-based startup called WEBook that lets authors collaborate on a novel and they all make money when it's published. Some of the books will be sold through Amazon's on-demand publishing and some sold directly at Barnes & Noble stores.

For some reason, this sounds really familiar. I don't know why, but it may be similar to an idea I had several months ago. They probably had the idea at that time, but they were smart and got a company going, with investors and everything.

Which leads me to believe that I in fact do have good ideas from time to time. No one batted an eye when I mentioned a community-written book, and now a few folks are living it up in Mountain View with their good idea. The model can last so long as there are serious players writing there. My brother could benefit from something like that.

Now, what to do with my next big product of random thought before someone makes a corporation out of it...

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Never be Late Again

With Gmail's Custom Time, just make up an event in the past and say it happened. It's that easy!

You may even figure out a way to win last week's lottery using the Custom Time API! I'm going to create an app for Android so you can even keep a little slice of your own time in your pocket (coming the second half of 2008). But when that happens, I'll have had it since 2005.

You guys are way behind!