Alex Tabone

Programmer and avid business student.

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Wilson Miner - When We Build

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Twitter API to the rescue

Sometimes I half-remember a tweet, something that a person I follow on Twitter had shared. Visiting the Twitter profile of this person and browsing through it, manually searching for THE tweet, can take quite some time. I encounter this difficulty in cases where I vaguely remember the tweet, perhaps just a phrase of it, but forget the link that was shared to a particular blog post or video that caught my attention. Fortunately, Twitter provides an API. By browsing through the documentation, I found this URL to be very useful in such cases: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=TWITTER_USERNAME_HERE&include_entities=true&count=200&include_rts=true (This displays the last 200 tweets published by the user with screen_name TWITTER_USERNAME_HERE.) A Ctrl+F in the browser helps to find the complete tweet (and its metadata) by searching for the phrase or words that I had remembered.

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Joel Spolsky describes why software for a vertical market (vertical software) is a good option for startups. Two advantages of developing vertical software are: "1. It’s easier to find customers. If you make dentist software, you know which conventions to go to and which magazines to advertise in. All you have to do is find dentists. 2. The margins are better. Your users are professionals at work and it makes sense for them to give you money if you can solve their problems."V

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Available options when creating a new Ruby on Rails application

Running rails new -h in the terminal returns a list of switches that may be used when creating a new Ruby on Rails application. Usage: rails new APP_PATH [options] Options: -r, [--ruby=PATH] # Path to the Ruby binary of your choice # Default: /Users/alextabone/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p0/bin/ruby -b, [--builder=BUILDER] # Path to a application builder (can be a filesystem path or URL) -m, [--template=TEMPLATE] # Path to an application template (can be a filesystem path or URL) [--skip-gemfile] # Don't create a Gemfile [--skip-bundle] # Don't run bundle install -G, [--skip-git] # Skip Git ignores and keeps -O, [--skip-active-record] # Skip Active Record files -S, [--skip-sprockets] # Skip Sprockets files -d, [--database=DATABASE] # Preconfigure for selected database (options: mysql/oracle/postgresql/sqlite3/frontbase/ibm_db/sqlserver/jdbcmysql/jdbcsqlite3/jdbcpostgresql/jdbc) # Default: sqlite3 -j, [--javascript=JAVASCRIPT] # Preconfigure for selected JavaScript library # Default: jquery -J, [--skip-javascript] # Skip JavaScript files [--dev] # Setup the application with Gemfile pointing to your Rails checkout [--edge] # Setup the application with Gemfile pointing to Rails repository -T, [--skip-test-unit] # Skip Test::Unit files [--old-style-hash] # Force using old style hash (:foo => 'bar') on Ruby >= 1.9 Runtime options: -f, [--force] # Overwrite files that already exist -p, [--pretend] # Run but do not make any changes -q, [--quiet] # Supress status output -s, [--skip] # Skip files that already exist Rails options: -h, [--help] # Show this help message and quit -v, [--version] # Show Rails version number and quit Description: The 'rails new' command creates a new Rails application with a default directory structure and configuration at the path you specify. Example: rails new &;/Code/Ruby/weblog This generates a skeletal Rails installation in &;/Code/Ruby/weblog. See the README in the newly created application to get going. A good-to-know thing, since many times we take the defaults for granted.

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If you are looking where everyone else is for the next big thing, you are looking in the wrong place.

- Mark Cuban

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Books I read in 2011

*Steve Jobs* by Walter Isaacson *Anything You Want* by Derek Sivers *The Magic of Thinking Big* by David J. Schwartz *The E-Myth Revisited* by Michael E. Gerber *Business Stripped Bare* by Sir Richard Branson *Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion* by Robert B. Cialdini *The Personal MBA* by Josh Kauffman *How to Win Friends and Influence People* by Dale Carnegie *Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination* by Hugh MacLeod *Switch* by Chip and Dan Heath

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Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else. How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat? The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government. The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

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Facebook Timeline launched today

Facebook launched Timeline today. Wired published an interview with Serkan Piantino of Facebook.

Interesting points:

the importance of MySQL

the dark launch approach

Link to interview on Wired at  http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/facebook-timeline-anatomy

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Focus - how Steve Jobs helped Google

From Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 

Steve Jobs recounts the advice he shared with Larry Page, Google's co-founder and CEO:

We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. 

Only some months later, in September 2011, Google stated that they will let go of some of their producs: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html

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Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.

Scott Adams - from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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The iPhone

The iPhone was immediately dubbed "the Jesus Phone" by bloggers. But Apple's competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. "It's the most expensive phone in the world," Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview. "And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard." Once again Microsoft had underestimated Jobs' product. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cellphone market.  

from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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"The co-op business model: share whatever you've got" by Derek Sivers

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Everything’s relative, of course, but I’ve found that those who genuinely know their stuff are considerably modest, when compared to those who have a fraction of their experience and knowledge. Perhaps this is simple human nature. Blissful ignorance and dreams are many times preferable to actual work. It’s easier to brag about your next million dollar web application, than to actually create it. It’s more impressive to use the terms “gig” and “contract,” when you really mean, “freebie website for my sister.”

Do You Suffer From the Dunning-Kruger Effect? by Jeffrey Way

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Here is an example of design thinking. All the countries involved in setting up the state of Israel should jointly give a yearly grant of $3 billion to the Palestinians but every time a rocket is fired at Israel $50 million is deducted for that year. Politicians have no experience as designers. Politics is too much based on argument.

Edward de Bono http://www.edwdebono.com/msg24w.htm

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Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what's not working.

Anything You Want - Derek Sivers

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A great technique: reading and signing the Automattic Creed - a weapon of influence, as described in “Influence – The psychology of persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini (in the chapter titled “Commitment and Consistency”).