Digital Notepad

Mac OS X - ideal development platform - VMware, Ruby on Rails & Ubuntu

tomschlenkhoff — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:36:01 +0000

Mac as the ideal development platform? Maybe for the iPhone I hear you mumble. Until I found this nice, clean and extremely flexible solution I wholeheartedly agreed. The basic scheme goes like this:

As foundation I am now running a clean, basically stock OS X. On top of this I am running a bunch of VMware Fusion Virtual machines, ranging from OS X, Ubuntu down to Windows XP ;-). Basically I am running all the development environment in Ubuntu and doing all the research and editing on OS X natively.

To achieve this I have a Ubuntu Server 8.10 with PostgreSQL, Apache 2 prefork, Ruby Enterprise Edition and Rails 2.2.2 installed. This Linux VM shares my Mac OS X Project folder via VMware HGFS mount directly in /var/www/projectname. This setup enables me to work with Textmate and save/copy/mess around locally on my Mac OS X host system (10.5.6) and immediately have the changes reflected in the Ubuntu machine. So the basic workflow is the same than before with having RoR etc. installed locally on my OS X. Hope I made myself clear!?

Here is how to get there (you may have to adjust the version numbers and replace cabchap&tom with the required domain/user):

Install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Server CD, using F4 - minimal system, then press “Install” and later select “Basic Ubuntu Server”, “SSH Server” and “PostgreSQL Server”.
sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::http::No-Cache=True
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libpq-dev apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev libreadline5-dev git-core
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/48623/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215.tar.gz
tar xvfz ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215.tar.gz
cd ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/
sudo ./installer
sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/ /opt/ruby-enterprise
sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem
sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/ruby /usr/bin/ruby
sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/rake /usr/bin/rake
sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/irb /usr/bin/irb
sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/rails /usr/bin/rails
sudo /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module
sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf [and enter the following:]
# General stuff
ServerSignature Off
LogLevel warn

# Set Rails mode
RailsEnv development

# Lock down GIT files

Order allow,deny
Deny from all

# Prepare for Rails
LoadModule passenger_module /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20081215/bin/ruby
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
cp default default.orig
sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/default [fill only with:]

  ServerName dev.cabchap.com
  ServerAdmin devmaster@cabchap.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/cabchap/public
  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
cd /var/www
sudo mkdir cabchap
sudo chown tom cabchap
rails -d postgresql cabchap
sudo -u postgres createuser cabchap [answer yes to superuser]
sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.3/main/pg_hba.conf
host all all 192.168.0.0/16 md5
Replace:
local all all ident sameuser
with this line:
local all all md5
sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.3/main/postgresql.conf
listen_addresses=’*’
sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Finally configure the VMware shared folder in VMware settings for the relevant machine:
Name: cabchap (this name is mounted in fstab)
Folder: dev (in Projects/Something/dev)
In etc/fstab enter
.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,user,ttl=5,uid=tom,gid=tom 0 0

Let me know if this interesting for someone out there. If it is, I will invest more time in clarifying these quick draft notes. May this be helpful.

[Start-up Braindump] - Branding on the Cheap - Part 1

tomschlenkhoff — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:36:01 +0000

Branding is so full of meaning that it’s quite hard to grasp the main concept. Basically branding is about matching all facets of your product (and surrounding services) to the needs of your customers. Start-up branding is closely related to positioning, in that it is about researching what makes your most relevant customers buy and recommend your product/service (for simplicity sake let’s talk about products here) and adjusting it appropriately.

It is a lot more than fancy graphics or the packaging of the product. It is everything from the relevant minimal feature set, to timing when to enter the market to colors, typography and logo.

Before I delve into the gory details, I will simply describe how I go on about it. By no means is this the relevant source for state-of-the-art brandding/development but it is, by now, a honed process to get to reasonable results quite cheap and fast. And this is what matters in a cash-strapped start-up!

I consider this a side-project; at least in terms of continous attention. It is quite important, probably as important as product development (at least for B2C-products) - but branding is nothing that I am able to rush. If I am writing software for 16 hours a day instead of 8, I will get significantly further during that day. While thinking about a claim, naming or a smart graphical representation (aka logo) it is impossible for me to ‘push’ my thoughts. Depending on work-load, I set aside one or two days per week on average, which means maybe spending one full day on creating meaningful naming patterns for a product, but over the rest of the week, revisiting and reconsidering for a few minutes daily.

Right a the beginning of a project, while doing initial feasibility research and talking to all the stakeholders, my branding process begins. In an iterative process, I am considering what problem the product may solve exactly. Then, by thinking about related problems in my domain I reconsider if it makes sense to broaden or narrow down the scope of my research. It’s absolutely vital to repeatedly narrow and widen the scope until all related areas haven been well thought through. A wrong focus here is very expensive (at least in terms of ressources) later on.

After having the best scope nailed down, you are able to answer the most encompassing branding question: “What is the character, the basic feeling, the overarching solution my product stands for?”.
BMW identified “Freude am Fahren”/”The Ultimate Driving Machine” as their core value proposition. This doesn’t sound like much but from this condensed statement flows everything else -> a sportive color-palette, aggressive car styling, matching typography and such.

With CabChap things evolved like this:

Finding and refining the scope of the product (online market for on-demand transport). So it’s not just the demand-side of human transport or the offer-side, it’s not scheduled traffic like busses or trains. This will be refined along the way.
Deciding/making-up on a customer base. CabChap will most probably have 40+ year old, non technical cab drivers and on the other hand techno-freaks that wear a suite and are well versed with their iPhone/Blackberry.
What kind of characteristics are ideally suited for this product and these customers? I don’t know, but my guess is, that these two groups prefer most likely a friendly and competent site. So the feeling I would like to communicate is friendliness/chap”iness” and competence/cleanliness.
The results can be found in the name (CabChap); Cab, besides being an alliteration and easy to remember, communicates ideally the concept of on-demand traffic for everybody. So, by just hearing the name you may guess it has to do something with human transport. And this is already quite an achievement if you don’t plan to spend millions on building a brand like Coca-Cola or the like.
Secondly the logo carries cleanliness and - hopefully - competence. At first I opted for a serif-font to communicate british/old-style but figured later that this is no ideal fit. And, actually as an afterthought, I happend to stumble on the ‘ab’ part in ‘Cab’, which lends itself nicely to a graphical mark for icons, logos etc.
From there finding fitting colors (black, white, orange), derived from BlackCab, the orange Cab-Sign and matching styles in webdesign (simply, typo-based, little and concise content with lots of white-space) is just a small step.
If the end-result will fit together isn’t so clear yet, but with another iterative honing process I will get there eventually.

Now, I am tired. More thoughts later next week.

[Startup-Braindump] - Priming / The Idea

tomschlenkhoff — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 09:30:31 +0000

Marcus, a real London black-cab driver, taught me quite a bit about the trade during hikes in the mountains surrounding Freiburg. One of the themes that connects all my startups was obvious again: on-demand transport, namely cabs in London, lacks transparency. Another problem are brokers in the market that are overpaid and imho underdeliver. With this hypothesis I started surfing around and reading through all the relevant cab-sites. The next few days I talked a lot to cab drivers in Freiburg and drove around with them to get a first-hand feel for the trade, at least in Germany.

This helped a lot in 1. really verifying there is a pain point and 2. understanding the big picture of the synthesized solution. For statistics and an overview, I checked out the main organizations on the net and by calling a few relevant people.

In discussing the problem and the proposed solution with Mathias, my business partner, and with friends and family I basically honed the story and filled in holes in my reasoning. Don’t rely to much on positive feedback here, though: A lack of enthusiasm with your friends may simply arise from not being into startups like you are. Or, conversely, enthusiastic reactions won’t help you in the future if you don’t have a clear view of all the potential problems. Basically I am only looking for real, factual show stoppers here, nothing more, nothing less.

So, iteratively refining the problem and continually thinking about how to solve it will continue to be an important thread in the next months! This will not be done any time soon; maybe its just me, but I keep discovering new aspects of the problem and the solution the more I talk or really hands-on experience the problem. E.g. while exploring the possible solutions it became obvious that the market for on-demand transport is lacking a decent payment method. So it may be naturally to offer this adjacent solution together with the core product. But this is another discussion (See Episode 65 - Upselling :-) )

[Start-up Braindump] - Prologue

tomschlenkhoff — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 09:26:51 +0000

My third try, a lot more more if you count the unsuccessful ones. This time I will not deviate from best practices I learned by trial and error in the last startups I started. At least this is what I thought a few weeks ago, unofficially inaugurating CabChap.

I will note a few thoughts and best practices on internet start-ups, that I’ll execute in the coming months.

Flashback: First real startup: millimeta, an out-of-home media control company, dead by now, successful in its days. Number two: telfish, worlds most powerful mobile phone plan analysis engine, with customers like o2, Saturn, Spiegel, Media-Markt and the connect-Magazine - alive and kicking (www.telfish.com). Finally CabChap, the best place to buy and sell on-demand transport, currently in it’s infancy. We’ll see how this one will work out.

Updating Automattic’s Akismet using SVN

tomschlenkhoff — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:44:58 +0000

It is soooo easy, but I still keep forgetting it:

Just cd down to wp-content/plugins/akismet and execute ‘svn up‘. Voilà, that’s it. Maybe you have to enter the plugin area of the WP-dashboard to make WP realize, but once there - it recognizes that you updated.