VS Consulting Group has been running an online startups carnival over the past two-weeks, profiling 28 up and coming Australian startups.
It is well worth checking out some of the other entrants, including fellow West Australian Scouta.
A big thanks to Vishal for putting on such an “event” — it really goes to show that the SaaS-o-sphere is alive and well over here in Australia!
Oh how I love alliteration. Especially on a leap year. This Friday, the 29th is the next installment of everyone’s favourite open house co-working day, Freelancer Friday. At this point I would make some smart-alec remark about how Freelance Fridays would only fall on a leap every x-number of years, however, I can’t be bothered working it out (I’m sure someone out there who will) so instead I’ll point you at the wiki, where you can put your name down. Hurry, time is limited.
Now that the OAuth standard has been finalised and the Rails plugin (as well as libraries for a number of other languages) has stablised, I thought it time to become an early adopter and add it to 88 Miles.
OAuth works like this:
Obviously, if a given instance of an application has a valid Access Token, it can skip steps 1-5, and just continue using the Access Token.
Although the Rails plugin is aimed at people using acts_as_authenticated, a little bit of hacking and code diving meant it was relatively easy to shoe-horn it into my custom login system. Because I wanted 88 Miles to drop-back to basic authentication if OAuth wasn’t available, I needed to work out what authentication system each request required. This can be done by:
request_proxy = OAuth::RequestProxy.proxy(request)
if(request_proxy.signature_method != nil)
# It's an OAuth request
if oauthenticate
# They get access
else
# Denied!
end
end
Nice and easy. I did go through and spruce up some of the authentications screens, but if you aren’t that anal, the boilerplate code from the plugin would suffice.
I’m writing this blog post using my brand-spanking Eee PC – the 7″ mini-laptop brought out by Asus. This thing is small, I’ve taken a picture of it sitting on my regular 15″ widescreen laptop, and you can see the difference:
They have managed to squeeze a pretty decent machine in there – it is a 900Mhz Celeron (under clocked to 630Mhz) with 512Mb of RAM and 4Gb of SDD drive space, not bad considering the size and the fact it weighs less than a kilo! Even with the specs, it is suprisingly zippy – I suppose because there isn’t really anything running on it. Boot up time is less than a minute, and shutdown is even quicker.
There is an 8Gb one as well (exactly the same, just with a bigger drive), but I threw in a $25 2GB SD card and that suits me plenty.
It comes loaded with Xandros Linux, a Debian derivative, and with a little hacking, you can unlock the less than useful “simple” mode to reveal KDE. So me further hacking still, and you can pretty much load up any software that will run on Linux. I have a LAMP stack, and I nearly have Rails working (getting Rails to work on Debian is a pain at the best of times).
One of the other great things about this machine is the hackability – many people have managed to install internal USB hubs and bluetooth adapters, touch screens and even digital tv tuners behind the screen (I’m very tempted by this…).
Alas, there are a few downsides. The battery life is pretty average (mind you I’ve been spoilt by my extended 5 hour battery on my main laptop) and hibernation takes longer than shutting down, so the default action when shutting the lid is sleep, which surprisingly chews through the battery. I had it fully charged the night I got it, closed the lid and it was almost dead by morning.
The keyboard takes a little getting used to (but what do you expect). For example, I keep hitting PgUp instead of shift.
The only other annoyance (and this is probably a Linux thing more than anything else) is the WiFi doesn’t auto-connect and it doesn’t seem to like JoikuSpot, so I’m still stuck with my iPod Touch on the train.
All in all though, for a $AU500 miniature laptop, it is freaking awesome!
I’m in a bit of a predicament at the moment. As many of you know, I’m back doing the web consultancy thing full time again after a 18 month hiatus. I made a couple of rules that I’m trying hard not to break:
Which (maybe un-)suprisingly I get asked for a lot. As a result, I’m looking for some PHP developers that haven’t become totally jaded by years of PHP4 abuse that I can sub-contract out to. I’d say I’m looking for mid-level developers, I’ll be there to help out find out WHAT needs to be done, and HOW it should be done – I just need someone to actually do the work.
I’m pretty anal about coding standards and software practice, so things like SVN are a must. I have a development server if you need an environment to work in.
If you think you might fit the bill, and want to work with someone who’s been around the development block a few times, email me on myles@madpilot.com.au with a short CV and your rates.
… and it rocked.
Just to test our sanity, AWIA decided to pull together Ideas4 in two weeks, (minus a couple of days because of public holidays) and not only did we do it, we managed to hit our attendance target and managed to have the show run smoothly!
We had 84 attendees (one all the way from America!), and two lovely presenters who did a terrific job.
A big, huge thanks to Rachel Cook, who despite being 8 months pregnant, told us about her time in Silicon Valley as an Angel Investor, and to Lisa Herrod who flew all the way from Sydney (on her birthday no less) to remind us that standards-based code and semantic markup aren’t enough to make a site accessible.
Jordan recorded both talks, and has uploaded them to Vimeo, and there is an Ideas 4 Flickr set. If you took photos, remember to tag them as ideas4.
Ideas 4 – Rachel Cook at Ideas4 on Vimeo.
Ideas 4 – Lisa Herrod at Ideas4 on Vimeo.
I was an awesome night – can’t wait for the next one!
For the past couple of months, I’ve been slaving away prepping the next version of 88 Miles, my simple time tracking application and now, I can happily announce it is alive! There are heaps of new features, and bug fixes, including a migration to Rails 2, a migration to a new server as well some dabbling in the wonderful world of Rails plugins. Some of the features are below:
Many people have been asking for invoicing from 88 Miles, but since it is really outside of where I’d like to see 88 Miles go (The strap line is Simple time tracking for a reason) so Saasu | The web finance engine to the rescue! I wrote the the Rails plugin that talks to Saasu.com, and I’ll be releasing it shortly after making a few cleanups (There are some parts of the API I’m not using in 88 Miles that are still a little rough around the edges). The plugin will allow users to sync companies and contacts as will as create invoices straight from their timesheets. I’m pretty excited by this feature.
88 Miles is now OpenID aware, so you can use your third-party OpenID to login to 88 Miles. Just between you and me, OAuth will be coming soon (as soon as the rails plugin and ruby library settle).
There has been quite a bit of work on the REST API — it should now be much more consistent (i.e the data that the server sends and the data that the server expects is the same). I’ve also removed the /api in the endpoint URL, as it was becoming a nightmare to maintain.
Finally, the biggest change is our new server! We have moved over to a Joyent accelerator, which are specifically tuned to the Ruby on Rails platform. This means everything will be quicker. The old Media Temple server, whilst great didn’t really allow for much customisation, and with the Christmas special of two years for the price of one, it was kind of hard to pass up.
It’s been a fun ride – this project is always a great learning experience for me – and it helps that there are others out there that like it. Go and try it out if you haven’t before (or even if you have) :)
For those of you who don’t remember, AWIA (and back in the day: Port80) has been running a series of talks, deemed “the Ideas series”, and I’m proud to announce the next one in the franchise: Ideas4!
We are lucky enough to have Lisa Herrod, a User Experience expert (and all-round nice gal) flying over from Sydney and local girl, Rachel Cook talking on startups. We might even have a special international guest, if everything falls into place ;)
Ideas 1,2 and 3 were awesome, and I’m expecting nothing less from Ideas 4, so make sure you mark 30 January 2008 in your diary. Tickets are $25 for AWIA members and $35 for non-members.
Head over to http://www.webindustry.asn.au/ideas4 for the rest of the details and to get your tickets.
Hurry though, they’ll sell out. They always do…
I can’t believe we are almost 0.083333% of the way through the year. By now everyone should be back at work – those of us at the Silicon Beach House are. Well as a result, Freelancer Fridays are back! Keeping with the “Last friday of the month” timeline, the next Freelancer Friday is on 25 January at the Silicon Beach House – Level 2, 90 King St, Perth WA. Turn up anytime between 9am and 5pm.
If you are interested in turning up (as always) add your name to the Work@Jelly wiki.
Today, I was discussing with one of the housemates, Angela about the problems in finding other freelancers when you need to do something outside of your skill set. We discussed what I called Company-as-a-Service and came to the conclusion that Freelancer co-ops were definitely plausible. Well, to facilitate some better communication between us freelancers, I’ve created a Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/australian-freelancers. If your are a freelancer, please sign up, that way we can all support each other, and find experts when we need them!
You see this is what happens you take up challenges from Twitter. It was suggested by Laural and Gary that it would be handy to have a map of all the Australian Meraki nodes – of course being a stickler for a challenge, I duly accepted. Unbeknownst to me, the challenge was also being accepted on the other side of the Nullabor, but Ajay. Although an interstate game of “Who can build a Google Map mash-up in the fastest time” sounded like fun, we decided to combine our powers for good and not evil.
And so http://icanhazmerki.net was born.
Using the Public API that the Merkai website has we have been able to know up a quick mashup. So some instructions:
Ingredients
Method
Enjoy! A big thanks to Ajay for his front-end wizardy and hosting donation – was much fun working with him – the man needs to sleep :)