ibrow

Steve was a huge fan apparently. Did a quick search to confirm, found this excerpt from his bio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj4b8oaV0MI

This is really very interesting stuff, and what a great site.

Are there any other resources out there that offer code reviews like this? Reviewing others code really is a great way to improve your own.

You may find the Reddit discussion about GEB of interest. http://www.reddit.com/r/geb

This is great, and probably the way to go. We do have a number of venues who update their listings on a weekly basis, so we must be doing something right by them.

So it's sort of a three link chain:

1. help the fans to find bands they like (and help the band to promote themselves to a wider audience) 2. help venues find bands with the most fans 3. connect these bands with the venues so the bands play in front of large audience and the venue sells more beer.

Point 3 is where we get the revenue stream.

This is good stuff, and helping me see things a bit differently. Thanks

Thanks for the compliments.

Along with @anigbrowl in the comment above there are really three main types of audience: bands, fans and venues/promoters.

One of the possibilities is to charge for stats, how many visits, where are they coming from etc. But I think this is only possible with a larger visitor base (i.e. more unique visitors/hits).

I really like your idea for resources for touring, this could be a good thing to go for, especially as it is all about helping the artists (which is primarily what the blog focuses on). The yelp idea is great as well, and fits in nicely.

But again it's how to make a return on these resource, is advertising the only way?

Edit: after going through anigbrowl's comment above and thinking some more, these resources will be a great way to help promote a band and build up a fan base. Then hopefully we have some value here to the venues by helping them find bands that will bring in the public. This is good stuff. Thanks

Thanks for your reply.

It costs us roughly £400 per month, including blog posts, server costs and we have an odesk hire who does about 10-15 hours per week researching and entering in shows.

I see what you mean about the £2 as lacking in value, it's all about perception.

Sadly outside the US so I don't think we can do kickstarter (don't know if there are any EU equivalents).

If we had money to burn we'd most likely revamp the site, focusing on mobile (more and more people are accessing us with Android/iPhone ad we both feel this is the way to go). We'd also like to do events for unsigned bands.

If money was truly no object, then yes, full page ads would be pretty cool, but I have no idea how we'd get roi on this.

One thing we've thought about (in conjunction with the localisation of a mobile site) would be very localised targeted advertising. But we're not marketing/ad people and have no idea even where to begin with this.

Is it even possible to get a sales person for commission only to do something like this?

I rather like this, especially the quote:

[Jim Buckmaster] added, "It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it."

And what is to say that Dropbox doesn't get the fear and disable sharing too? After all, if a user is sharing a file, they could be pirating a movie and for that Dropbox could be shutdown.

Link to the crowdfunding page: http://www.indiegogo.com/firstorbit

What if he was raising both his middle finger and his index finger, as in the "Longbowman Salute"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_sign#V_sign_as_an_insult

Would it still be censored as it is not offensive (I don't think?) to a US audience, but could be considered offensive to a UK audience. Would there be selective censoring?

This reminds me very much of a previous story posted here a couple of months ago:

"Give this company a child's drawing and they'll make it into a stuffed toy" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148574

Both fantastic ideas and well implemented.

I don't understand how meaningless waffle life this gets published. As billpatrianakos said where does this 500% figure come from? But apart from the article itself, the thing I really don't get are all the obsequious platitudes within the comments (within TC).

IMHO the best way to increase productivity is to stop pissing about reading pointless nonsense on how to increase productivity, and actually start doing the work.

How does one become an "Advanced Emacs User"?

I say this as I've been using Emacs pretty much every day for about 2-3 years, yet I can't help but feel I've only ventured a couple of miles into the journey.

I use Emacs not just for coding, but organising and note taking, file management, shell, git (just beginning to), irc, sometimes for browsing and occasionally twittering. I know (and love) registers, macros, jumping around with "the mark". However I feel as thought I have reached the so called "Plateau Effect" where I'm not advancing any further.

There are a bunch of good blogs out there about Emacs which I read occasionally as well as flicking through the wiki

* http://emacsblog.org/

* http://www.masteringemacs.org/

* http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/

* http://www.emacswiki.org/

But, I still feel as though I am no where near what can be called an "advanced user". I feel as though there is still so much more Emacs has to offer, but I just can't find it.

I guess my question is: where do I go from here? How does one become truly advanced?

Sorry for hijacking this thread, and thanks in advance for any pointers.

P.S. FWIW my emacs.d is on github: https://github.com/ibrow/.emacs.d

Edit: formatting

Thanks for that. Quite a thought. Hopefully this will never happen - am assuming that the Earth has more chance of being hit than the moon (the moon being smaller and faster)?

But would the nights be totally dark? I've experienced a lot of nights out on a boat on a moonless night and the stars provide a (relatively) large amount of light on their own.

There's a thought. What would happen, hypothetically speaking, if an asteroid large enough were to hit the moon and spin it out of its orbit? What would happen to life here on Earth? Obviously tides would be affected, and I am assuming that this in itself would probably affect a lot of animals, fish, birds etc?

Interesting to compare the prediction of sales made in the article with the actual sales: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg

Just a couple of quick points from a point of view of someone who has hired/worked with a lot different employees and freelancers.

Firstly, joining open source projects is all well and good, but this is only a part of what people are looking for. The main thing is that you can finish something. For want of a better expression: that you can "ship".

If you are someone that can consistently complete assignments and projects, then it really doesn't matter if you're introverted or not. If you are the type of person I can give a project to and I know that it will be done when you say it will be done to the quality I expect, then you can really do what you want - work from home, in the office, on a beach.

However, from your post, this is probably something that needs to be worked on. As others have said, consider joining a freelance site or similar to get a few completed projects under your belt.

Secondly: communication. Saying no is absolutely fine. It is how you say no that matters. I've had a couple of people not want to do a specific projects for me, due to cultural/ethical reasons. And this was fine. They explained their reasons why, I accepted and everyone was ok, and we still work on other projects. If they were an arse about it then most probably I would never work with them again on anything. The only advice I can offer you here is to think about it from the other person's perspective (and this works both ways).

Once you have can prove that you can get the job done, and you can communicate effectively, then you don't need to be "teamplayer" to be of value to a company.

Good luck with it

> not all of us an Apple one

Which is probably why they are looking for an Android developer: http://twitter.com/path/status/26431179050

I have a (2 year old) Vaio VGN-Z11WN and it was a bit of a nightmare to get Linux to install correctly on it. The main problem was the Stamina/Speed graphics switch, which is a software switch in this model, where as previously it used to be a hardware switch.

I joined the Launchpad group for the Z-series: https://launchpad.net/~sony-vaio-z-series which helped a lot, but there were still things like the microphone not working etc.

I have tried Ubuntus Jaunty, Karmic and Lucid on there with mixed results - karmic for some reason was the best. Fedora 13 installed perfectly (excluding the speed/stamina switch) but then I ended up in dependency hell!

Because of the trouble I have had with getting Linux onto this machine, I don't think I am going to get another Vaio.

My main desktop runs Arch, but I didn't even dare go there on the Vaio!

I would be very interested to hear how you get on. Good luck.

Looks like a great book - adding it to my wish list. Thanks

(link to book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Constructio... )

Not productivity related, but the most important thing IMO that an office should have is a view of the outside. It is more than just something nice to look at. If you spend as much time as I do in front of your monitor(s) you need to regularly focus on something in the middle to far distance to reduce eye-strain. I've done a quick search on the internets to find this: http://www.pasadenaeye.com/faq/faq08/faq08_text.html

I've no idea if this is scientifically proven or anything, but looking away from the monitor every once in a while can't be bad for you.

> It's hard to find good/great developers period and when you find them language is rarely a concern

Totally correct, however, with Ruby I think it's easier to find them primarily as there are less Ruby devs about, and using your example above, more or them are intermediate/senior (40% for Ruby, 10% for PHP). Then again intermediate/senior != good/great.

(Disclaimer: we're a PHP shop, but know a lot of really talented Rubyists)

Whilst you may have an easier time finding PHP developers I actually think it is harder to find good/great PHP developers in comparison with Ruby devs. The reason for this is that Ruby/Rails development seems to focus more on TDD, CI, logic/display separation and other good practices, where as PHP, being older, hasn't traditionally had this approach. Having these practices at the core of what you do (IMO) makes you a better developer (not necessarily programmer).

First impressions are that it is really clean and simple to use. I agree with others that you should have a facebook login as well as twitter. One minor thing I noticed is that if you do a search the conference results aren't in date order. For example, if you search for "Berlin" the date order goes 2010, 2007, 2010 which, IMO, is a bit counter intuitive. Apart from that, all good so far.