andrewmccall.com

2nd Hebden Bridge Geek Up

Andrew — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:51:34 +0000

When: Wednesday January 27th @ 7:00pm
Where: Hole in’t Wall, Hebden Bridge (map)

Tomorrow night we’re hosting the second Hebden Bridge Geekup, we skipped December because it fell on the 30th.

The first was a success we had a good turn out. As with the last one, we’re still finding our feet so there is no formal agenda or presentations planned. Of course if anyone has anything they want to present or a project they want to talk about drop me a line if you do and we’ll sort something out.

Read more about Geek Ups in general at Geek Up. Questions, comments etc direct them at me here, on twitter @andrewmccall or email.

EC2 Spot instances

Andrew — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:45:43 +0000

The thing I really like about Amazon’s cloud stuff is they’re constantly undermining themselves with new innovations – spot instances are another great example. Taking the utility metaphor a step further you can now rent their services when nobody else is for cheaper, like buying electricity at night.

A lot of the tasks I’m envisioning for Sproozi aren’t really time dependent. While it’s important to show you a page in a timely manner, crawl and index a brand new website you add quickly and basically be interactive there is also a lot I have to do in the background. The huge and growing list of URLs people add all need to be re-crawled and re-indexed regularly is just one of many examples of processing vast amounts of data. These tasks are always running, always in the background.

Spot instances are a perfect fit – I can bid the price I want on extra capacity spin up some extra instances to join the cluster when they’re cheap. Over the next few weeks I’ll probably try to add some spot instances to my Hadoop dev cluster and see what happens.

Signups via twitter API

Andrew — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:04:08 +0000

This is possibly big news, something I’ve hoped they would do for a long time and something Fred Wilson voiced his support for a few weeks ago: Creating user accounts via the twitter API.

Both the projects I’m working on full time could benefit from this. Sproozi of course because we could create user accounts for them and help users find interesting local people to follow. My oft promised side project which at it’s most basic level [the one I'll launch first] aims to make making announcements easier could benefit by making the signup process seamless – users wouldn’t have to already have to have a twitter account, they could create it all in one step with us.

That I think is what makes this such big news, sites that rely on users already having a twitter account to do something useful will be able to create that account as a seamless on site process. That will help drive users to the sites and drive users to twitter. Let’s hope they start rolling it out to other developers!

Twitter Extends Sign-Ups Off-Site As It Seeks New Users (mashable.com)

There’s no money in it

Andrew — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:00:09 +0000

I followed up with a few potential investors who’ve had my pitch for Sproozi today. It’s been a week or two since I heard from them and I honestly wasn’t surprised when they came back with a no. Not hearing anything doesn’t exactly show a great deal of excitement.

I’m an optimist though and on the bright side I haven’t had a conversation or a meeting that I haven’t benefited from.

With first VC I met I had a pretty friendly audience, I knew him already, and I got some really good advice about how aspects of the pitch, the business in general and some introductions. With another, less friendly, it was clear I hadn’t done my homework. In yet another I learned a bit more and took on board the suggestion that I get a core set of users together to beta test the project – that basically just launching it blind was probably not going to go anywhere.

The rest of my meetings and conversations have been just as good. In each one I’ve refined my pitch further had clearer and better prepared answers for questions but I think I may be making one mistake that is keeping me from getting funded- trying to0 soon.

I’m starting to think that, because I have to explain the idea. I really s to be able to just give someone a link they can click and play with. With a link and 10 minutes, countless objections can be overcome and services that sound similar dismissed – it also gives a pretty clear idea of exactly what the thing does. I can’t possibly manage that level of understanding in any pitch, no matter how long or how refined.

So what’s next? I’ve got a side project I keep hinting about that’s painfully close to ready to launch very soon and then I’m going to keep working on Sproozi, get it to the point where I can send that link, develop some feedback from users and get some interesting data – get it to the point where I’m talking about what we are doing, not what we want to do. I’m not put off, if anything I’m more focused on distilling Sproozi down to the minimum set of features I can launch with.

If you haven’t already, signup for the super-secret-pre-alpha on the Sproozi site and as soon as I get there, I’ll let you know.

GeekUp Hebden Bridge

Andrew — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:12:02 +0000

It’s cold, wet and pretty nasty outside, but tonight is our first GeekUp in Hole in’t Wall in Hedben Bridge @7:00. If you’re local and a geek about anything, come down.

Useful commit messages

Andrew — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:17:08 +0000

I realised that I’m not very good at this when I looked at my last commit for this theme. The message was “added a few things” a message I find myself using when I have nothing else to say, or if I’ve done too much work and either can’t remember all of what I did or be bothered writing it all out.

It’s bad form though, and I’m trying to learn my way into using git properly to make it happen less. Basically I’m still trying to find the right place between a commit for a unit of work and my previous more traditional view that all commits must compile and pass tests. At the same time I’m trying to reconcile that with a Kanban board way of organising what to do.

How does everyone else commit? When, how often and what ‘rules’ do you apply?

Sproozi blog and pre-beta signup

Andrew — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:33:03 +0000

Sproozi is getting closer to actually doing something that’s worth showing off. I’ve setup a blog for it at blog.sproozi.com where I’ll post development updates. I’ve also added beta pre-registration to the Sproozi site. We’re going to need testers as soon as it launches, so if you’d like to help out let me know over there.

There’s no money in it

A meetup for Geeks in Hebden Bridge

Andrew — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:23:30 +0000

When: Wednesday November 25th @ 7:00pm
Where: Hole in’t Wall, Hebden Bridge (map)

What:

We’re holding a GeekUp style meet in Hebden Bridge, open to anyone who is a geeky about anything.

There is no formal agenda or presentations planned, we’ll see how it goes, hope it works and if it does we can to turn it into a regular event.

Most established Geek Ups are primarily aimed at techie geeks – We’d like to see ours better represent the area and to be something unique. So we’re throwing the door open to all geeks, if you’re obsessive about something (tech, beer, music, films, books, knitting…), come along.

Read more about Geek Ups in general at Geek Up. Questions, comments etc direct them at me here, on twitter @andrewmccall or email.

Downloading maven dependency source jars

Andrew — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:44:16 +0000

I’ve been working on a new project that I’m planning to open source real soon – stay tuned.

When I’m implementing interfaces in a dependent package using Idea/Maven I want to tick the “copy javadoc” button to at least have the documentation from the intereface. The issue of course is that I don’t have the sources.

Run the following command:

mvn dependency:sources

Maven will download any sources it can find for in remote repositories for your dependencies and Idea finds them like magic. So now not only can you copy javadoc, you can also click the line number in the stack trace and get something meaningful – not “compiled code”.

Geo tagging dongle

Andrew — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:33:26 +0000

Saw a truly awesome piece of kit on the engadget website, the PhotoTrackr mini from GiSTEQ. It’s a little USB dongle that you carry around with you and it logs your route as you go. When you’re done you plug it in and use the software to add geo data about where you were when you took the picture.

It’s less than £50 and what’s best, it exports the logs as NEMA and GPX.

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