April 2013
1 post
May 2012
1 post
When I'm told AWS is down, I'm like
runningastartup:
April 2012
1 post
6 tags
If you get eval(base64 hacked on...
I have a shared host on Dreamhost that just got hacked to shit. A fairly standard hack, and nothing particularly inspired, but nevertheless some clients from years ago weren’t too happy. If this happens to anyone else, here’s the fix (for now):
UPDATE: This is not Wordpress/Dreamhost specific. I’ve seen reports of other installs/hosts affected. There’s no reason the below...
February 2012
2 posts
Minimal Mac: Microsoft's Biggest Miss →
minimalmac:
One of the benefits of a long car trip with my wife is the opportunity to have really great and insightful conversations with the smartest person I know. Yesterday, on the first leg of our trip, we spent some time discussing Microsoft’s many missed opportunities. The failure to take the iPhone…
Startup Lessons. Learning the hard way.: My... →
klinger-io:
There is all this talk going on about Path uploading address books and privacy here privacy there. I understand the fact that Startups push too far from time to time and Silicon Valley believes to have the right to shoot first ask later. But to be honest… there might be something wrong in my head……
January 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Lean Startups: a Game of Chess
From a few conversations recently with fellow startups and with people thinking of becoming founders and starting their own company, I occasionally get the feeling people see the whole lean (Lean) movement in different ways. They get that the ways of yore - months planning, months building, big budgets, no real data - lead to products no-one wants, huge amounts of waste and all-round frustration.
...
5 tags
WatchAt Crashpadder, we’ve been working on a marketplace for accommodation for a few years now, and I recently shared some of the little nuances at #foundersexchange that I’d come across during that time. Some seem obvious with hindsight but took a while for me to really understand, and some took us by surprise. Hopefully they’ll be useful thoughts for anyone thinking of, or already...
4 tags
November 2011
3 posts
6 tags
Startups: Hacking a Cohort Analysis with Google...
At a recent Seedcamp day I was talking with a few teams about how to do a cohort analysis quickly and easily. We all know the value of actionable metrics above vanity metrics (thanks in part to Eric Ries’s new book), but getting them out is often a surprisingly difficult task, especially for a small team. At Crashpadder we do two kinds of cohort analysis - one is a custom built tool that...
October 2011
2 posts
7 tags
Installing REE, Rails, XCode on Lion 10.7
A quick guide to installing Ruby Enterprise Edition, Rails, etc. on Mac OS X Lion. The main problem is that the latest XCode (4.2) ships with a messed up version of gcc. So:
1. Install XCode 4.2 from the App Store.
2. That actually places an App in Applications called ‘Install XCode’. Run that.
3. Install OSX GCC from here: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer This is a...
3 tags
WatchA very good analogy of what a startup often feels like…
September 2011
2 posts
Nate Berkopec: NASA Problems and LEGO problems →
nateberkopec:
NASA problems require many years and massive teams to solve. It took us over 10 years and 109 manned missions to gain enough knowledge and experience to send a man to the moon. That’s a lot of work.
Making a rocket of out LEGOs, comparatively, is trivial. Even if it’s a really big one - like 5…
August 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
Elezea // B-sides: The tyranny of the mundane, or... →
elezea:
There’s a good article on Design Mind in response to a recent Seth Godin post about technology and magic. Here’s the part that stood out for me:
To me that’s all we’re really talking about, and core to Godin’s point (whether it was intended or not) is that stuff doesn’t wow us anymore,…
April 2011
9 posts
3 tags
“We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now...”
– Starting to sound really quite serious… Not sure how fast one can add capacity, either physically or re-mapping from elsewhere. Time will tell.
3 tags
CTOs - When things go wrong, a checklist. →
An excellent list of things to do when it all goes wrong. This morning Amazon EC2/RDS in the US-EAST area went to crap. Crashpadder is down (bummer), and so is Quora, Reddit and Foursquare. I’d add a few to the list:
Your users don’t know what any of it means. Get your comms team with a simple clear message of what’s going on, and how it affects the most important things for...
Brian Cardarella's Blog: Exploring Rails 3.1 -... →
bcardarella:
Rails 3.1 will have password encryption baked in via ActiveModel::SecurePassword. Any ActiveModel based model will get this functionality. (ActiveRecord, Mongoid)
Your model will need a field called password_digest and then you’ll need to activate secure password:
class User <...
5 tags
Dinner at The Gilbert Scott
Had an exceptional dinner last night at Marcus Wareing’s new restaurant, The Gilbert Scott. It doesn’t open till the 5th May, but the Crashpadder team managed to get a sneak preview (and all food for £10 - absolute steal). The menu was excellent, with a good number of more unusual and interesting choices (pigeon, earl-grey ice cream, etc), and a great looking wine list.
Oh, and I also...
4 tags
Quick question with Alex from SoundCloud.... →
