tabulas.com

still alive, in portland. finally wrappped up - so tired.

Will be flying up to Portland for OSCON next week - yay! (I love Portland)

. . .

This weekend, I finally switched out most of the substrate in my fish tank to a more plant-friendly substrate - took a few days, cause it had to be gradual (didn't want to overstress the fish out). I finally replanted the existing plants tonight, and the fish look healthy (none of them are crashed at the bottom).

. . .

Nothing much else is happening - I was gonna try to catch Dark Knight over the weekend, but got a bit busy running errands and cleaning the place up (as soon as I land Sunday from Portland, I have to drive up to LAX to pick up my mom, who is coming back from Korea).

. . .

Hope all is well with everybody!

I really wanted a Cinnabon today, but I had no cash. And seeing as to how Cinnabon seemed like one of those places that wouldn't take a credit card for a $2.50 purchase, I also bought one of those boxes of minnbaons ($12.99) to take home with me.

Holy crap, this was a bad idea (for my waistline).

. . .

Following up from yesterday's post, today was a much better day; July has/will be a very busy month for MindTouch. I find that working at a startup is mostly about throwing up as many balls in the air as possible, and hoping you don't drop too many (or maybe that's just MindTouch, hah!). A lot of stuff has been falling into place lately with all our projects, which is coming as a huge relief to me (why does someone who has such minimal impact on said projects care so much anyways? ). 

. . .

Thought of the day: I used to think technology companies should have their engineers build cool shit, and then just release it. But man, that's so not the case. Lately, I've been obsessing over the message that MindTouch sends out. And I can understand why product releases would be delayed, or projects scrapped, for the sake of the message. For example, we've finally figured out the right message for our product at work, and everything we do has to build around that message. If it doesn't, it's relatively pointless. I had written up a meandering blog post about the evolution of the product for the upcoming releases, but ended up scrapping it cause it just didn't fit the message.

I have a small worry that we're pushing out too many things at once right now ... thus not giving people a chance to properly digest all the little cool things we do. Unfortunately, given our current engineering trajectory and the huge deal around OSCON, we're currently in a ship that's nearly impossible to right ;) (And honestly, you could really have worse problems than having too much stuff to announce).

I used to be blind to everything besides the product, but now I'm starting to see how all the little pieces play together: how engineering ultimately dictates the product's direction; how PR pulls together external events like conferences and links them with internal milestones to drive awareness; and how sales (I've been granted an account to our internal sales wiki and I've been reading through how sales work) ultimately plays up the strengths of the former two and monetizes.

And I'm starting to understand how the open-source model fits in to this whole equation. Open-source software, technical merits aside (of which there are many) is a great marketing and lead generation tool - OSS generates more adoption, which in turn raises the number of people who are acquainted with your software. If these people supply contact information, you have a fantastic spigot of leads. And not only that, but if you build an open-source component like Deki which is a fantastic development platform, you really do build up a base of loyal users who understand the product.

And these community members, who know the product, serve as a huge talent pool for hiring. Ramp-up time for engineering is always a difficult task ... to have somebody who knows the product who can come in on day one and kick ass is always a huge boon (plus it means we don't need to pay for recruiters).

Anyways, this post ended up being way longer than I intended - I just really wanted to write about my Cinnabons.

I showed up to work today and realized I left my laptop at home, so I had to immediately walk back out to retrieve my laptop. Corey, who was standing outside in the hallway, thought I came in, couldn't deal with work, and went back home. Hah.

Anyways, the day didn't get much better after that. Here's to tomorrow!

(I could really use a boost - things have been so blech-y lately.)

A few weeks ago, the free bulletin board site, SpreeBB.com, went down ... taking down Tabulas' boards. Oops. The joys of the hosted models...

So anyways, being on a dev kick this weekend, I decided to install phpBB3 and do a tight account integration with Tabulas: signing up for Tabulas would give you a phpBB accounts; and updating your account information on Tabulas would also update phpBB. And guess what? A couple hours later: done.

One thing I've been loving in OS software are programmatic hooks. It's a very basic concept, but it's incredibly powerful when you're hooking up functionality across different pieces of software. I decided to add programmatic hooks for Tabulas to help facilitate the phpBB integration (Tabulas' codebase is rather large and unwieldy - moving more of my stuff to programmatic hooks can help keep the core light and simple.

The next step for Tabulas is to take these programmatic hooks and let them be URLs - there's no reason a programmatic hook has to be a local function - it could also POST to a URL - this is how "plugins" for hosted sites like Tabulas could work.

A big inspiration for my recent obsession with hooks comes from my recent WordPress plugin, as well as my initial inspection of the Drupal hooks (there's no reason you could layer Deki underneath all of Drupal). We desperately need hooks in Deki, both in the front-end as well as the API - we're awesome at pulling data in, but we suck at pushing data out.

Last week, stressing over my "work to do" on Sunday night kept me up for my first all-night since college (I think). Anyways, tonight I'll nip it pre-emptively in the bud by listing my work items this week at work:

• Driving the iPhone-specific user interface for interacting with content inside Deki, built on top of Deki's API
• Stabilizing the never-released Deuce skin (yay for UI work!)
• More dev work on our control panel for the Kilen Woods release
• Start the massive upgrade script to switch Deki's file schema and local storage (this is gonna be hairy)
  
• Releasing the WordPress plugin
• Pulling together a minor release for 8.05.2 which was the result of some idiotic checkins of mine (oops)
  
• Wik.is postmortem (we did a twelve-hour upgrade to the latest release of Deki, and it's becoming clear that our upgrade strategy needs to re-examined; but this will probably require more infrastructure changes)
• Cleaning up our internal technical wiki

My non-MindTouch project goals this week:

• Continue with the raeviews mockups and UI flow
• Change the crossposting to be hooks
• Add custom WordPress installs as a crossposting option
• Add Tabulas support for Deki federation :)
  

Hey everybody,

A long time ago, I signed up an account at a hosted service, spreebb.com, to host the Tabulas forums. A few weeks ago, they went down. Unfortunately, because they were a hosted site, I didn't have access to the data, making getting a backup impossible.

I finally had some free time to set up forums, right here on the Tabulas server. I also took this opportunity to synchronize user accounts - so you can use your existing Tabulas username/password to log into the new forums!

Over the next few weeks, I'll clean up the forums so the style matches Tabulas, and I'll get the discussion forums back into place.

I apologize for the forums going down, and it won't happen again!

http://forums.tabulas.com/

As I promise with my overly-technical posts, a picture of a beautiful woman to balance it out:

"Roy, I can't believe you stayed in on a Friday night to work on THIS!"

Long-time readers of Tabulas will have known that I've long been interested in pushing data across services - this is why crossposting was such a big deal for me. I believe that federating data is incredibly important (and one of the few good things that's come up from this Web 2.0 bubble).

Last week, I asked one of the MindTouch developers to look into the feasibility of MindTouch Deki / Wordpress integration after I got a little excited about the Universal Edit Button. He got back with a very rough prototype this week - it was enough of a proof of concept for me to waste my Friday night hacking out the proof-of-concept into a slightly better proof-of-concept. The stuff I hacked together tonight only accomplishes one task: A WordPress install can push content into MindTouch Deki and maintain the data association between the Deki page and the WordPress page. Obviously, the second part of this is MindTouch Deki pushing data back into Wordpress - unfortunately this type of functionality doesn't quite exist inside Deki yet, so that part will be harder to accomplish.

Why it's awesome

• It. Just. Works.
  
• No updates necessary for Deki - the APIs I used exist in very old versions of Deki ... which means it'll work on Wik.is!
  
• It adds wiki functionality to your blog - each blog edit gets stored in the wiki - you can always go there and revert changes and see what's happening! And all you need to do is install a friggin' WordPress plugin!
  
• Unless your wiki engine stores in XML (XHTML), you can't do this without writing a Wordpress XHTML -> Your-custom-markup-language ... Deki can. Sucks for you, MediaWiki! (Also, even if you managed to get it one way, once you add functionality to push from your wiki to your wiki, you're bound to end up with all sorts of formatting nightmares). Features like this which "just work" is exactly why creating your own markup language when XHTML exists is such a horrible, horrible idea. 
• It lets you point multiple WordPress installs into a single Deki install. Got 30 WordPress installs you want to oversee? Simple. Install the plugin, and point. Don't forget that once it's in Deki,  you can export it in all sorts of crazy formats using the API, and you can take advantage of our kick-ass search engine across all the sites at once (WordPress' search doesn't scale so well anyways).
  
• I wrote it.
  

How it works

• (Prerequisites: Install Wordpress plugin, create a MindTouch Deki account, enter information on plug-in to authenticate into MindTouch Deki account)
• Anytime a post is published (e.g. made public) in WordPress, it saves the page in a configurable location in your Deki ("Example: "Blog Posts/")
• It utilizes the Wordpress URL as the Deki page URL, and the WP title as the Deki display title (this lets the URL between Deki + WP remain consistent)
• All categories and tags that were set in the Wordpress entry are collapsed into a single tag list inside Deki
  1.  A few special tags are added to the Deki page: "wordpress-id:#", "wp-author: {name}", "from: {wordpress site url}"
     
• When a WordPress entry is updated, it will automatically update your Deki page by finding the "wordpress-id:#" tag, and then saving the update. If your WordPress entry URL changed, the page will also automatically move inside Deki (or if you decide to move it).
  
  1.  You can also take advantage of a special WordPress tag to target the entry's location inside your Deki; this lets you override the configurable path!
     
• When you delete your WordPress entry, it also deletes the Deki page.
  

This is pretty f'ing awesome, if I may say so myself.

It was really nice working on this, because I've been working on such shitty, boring projects lately (like integration with Sharepoint integration ... ugh). I've been leading a project lately for another demonstration of how awesome Deki's API is (a kick-ass mobile interface), but I've forced myself not to be too hands-on so others can learn the joys of creating a product that's their own ... it'll probably be one of the first projects where I have almost no direct code/UI contributions :)

P.S. Just to demonstrate this, I created a WordPress blog on my own domain (which I will eventually have my Tabulas account automatically crosspost to) to post this entry to the MindTouch Developer wiki. With luck my WordPress entry should show up on the MT developer wiki. (edit: yay it worked!)

gotta love alliteration.

so syntax-brillian filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. if you bought an Ölevia TV you're screwed (but hey, you got what you paid for).

anyways, here's what i don't understand. how does a company ever end up using "Ölevia" to brand anything, especially televisions?? every time i saw one of those televisions, i'd think of it as a supplement for a certain anal-leakage inducing fat substitute. ("Ölevia: relieve your anal leakage now") did nobody else at that company realize this? 

And just to be mean: I see a disproportionate number of companies that I track which are run by asians that end up sucking. I'm not going to include Yahoo on this list cause i think the perception that it's a sinking ship are largely overblown (people forget it's still a pretty kick-ass company) ... but stocks that I've tracked/owned which fall under this umbrella which have been under pressure over the past three years: Sigma Designs (SIGM), Cogent (COGT), and now Syntax-Brillian (BRLC). And really, I'm not sure if there's a single American-based company stock left that I track on a semi-occasional basis which has an Asian in an executive position.

 . . .

And the edits keep on coming... I've been feeling the pain that my coworker's has been feeling lately... thus the additional snark. I noticed my recent link collections page has some choice items (I've been keeping that page pretty active, but I doubt any of you care).

Some recent links I've read:

• Russia threatens military response to US missile defence deal - Times Online - "Russia threatened to retaliate by military means after a deal with the Czech Republic brought the US missile defence system in Europe a step closer. " I love how our foreign policy is dictated by the status quo - hey, Europe's never had problems with egotistical dictators or anything! (Ok, I got lazy with linking every word, but I guarantee there are at least four more examples if we go earlier on in the century) <sarcasm>Let's build these missile stations in countries which will almost assuredly always be our friends!</sarcasm>
  
• My Way News - Fed to curb shady home-lending practices - "Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke of the much-awaited rules in a broader speech Tuesday about the challenges confronting policymakers in trying to stabilize a shaky U.S. financial system." I propose the Fed just rebrand itself as the "Bank of America" (of course, they'd buy out the real company first). This would be a killer business model, because, hey, if your profits are a little low ... just print some more money! I can't believe somebody didn't think of this business model: printing money! Or maybe designing some trees to grow money. I'll propose these at the next MT meeting. (With as much gravitas as I can muster)
• Brit is banged up for boozed-up Dubai bunk up | The Sun |HomePage|News After a woman who lived in the UAE for three years was caught having sex with a man on a beach, she was given a warning. Then, when the policeman caught them a second time, she "is alleged to have called the cop a f****** Muslim **** and tried to hit him with her high-heeled shoe before being restrained." In a country she lived in for three years. One would assume that she figured out how to balance out the cultural differences of living in a conservative society. And somehow she's painted as the VICTIM?
  
• Congressional Approval Falls to Single Digits for First Time Ever - "This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job." And yet we keep re-electing them ... representative democracy at work, ladies and gentlemen! 
• The onion conundrum: no futures market, high volatility - Jun. 27, 2008 - "Onions have no futures market, yet their recent price volatility makes the swings in oil and corn look tame." I know there's a lot of people who (a) think speculators are the main reason behind the oil spikes and (b) we can do something about this ... but as someone with a strong free-market bias, articles like these reaffirm that the knee-jerk reactions usually never work.
  
• Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Any VMware experts reading this blog? - "Isn’t it the job of programmers to render worthless the accomplishments of hardware engineers?" Amen to that (with much apologies to hardware engineers for my liberal use of for loops)
  
• Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL - "Historically the project policy has been to avoid putting replication" Looks like Postgres finally woke up to the fact that mySQL kicked their ass even though Postgres had an (arguably) better product the whole way.
  
• Talking Business - On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble - NYTimes.com- "Having conquered the Internet, Google’s executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else — even day care." I don't know ... but seriously, if I ever get into a (perceived) position of success, please don't let this type of hubris consume me. 

Phew. Now you get an idea of what type of stuff I read on a daily basis.