Wednesday evening, Patrick and me will leave for a meeting in Luxembourg. We will stay in a hotel and have our meeting on thursday morning. Then we will drive to Meribel, France and stay there until sunday evening to meet with one of our advisors. Then drive back on monday.
Meeting your advisors in one of the best ski regions in Europe is not a bad thing.
Unfortunately our appartment has no cable, phone or any other way to access the internet so we will depend on our Blackberry (Boris) and Treo (Patrick). Emailing won't be a problem but blogging, designing or coding will be difficult.
I guess there is nothing to do but ski then. Sigh...|W|P|114297383923891891|W|P|A small break?|W|P|bomega@gmail.com
|W|P|Have a nice time. |W|P|No internet access? ever heard of wifi? :P
There are love songs, dance songs, shout-a-long sonds and sad songs. But do YOU know of
any Start-up songs? Or even better: Web2.0 songs? We slected the top 5 Fleck Web2.0 songs:
#1
Title: The Sharing Song
By: Jack Johnson
Why: "...It's always more fun to share with everyone..."
#2
Title: Hate it or love it
By: The Game
Why: Hate it or love it! Vote, rank and rate. It's very Web2.0 to ask for user feedback!
#3
Title: Just a lil bit
By: 50 cent
Why: deliver today, not later! Develop fast and go live in beta. Ah yes, our beta program should start in a lil bit too...
#4
Title: It's All About The Benjamins
By: Puff Daddy
Why: It IS all about the benjamins isn't it? Cash is king.
#5
Title: one thing
By: Amerie
Why: She sure know how to focus on just one thing doesn't she! It's what we try to do too: less features!
Looking forward to your suggestions. It's illegal to send us your MP3 files so you better don't do that. If you send us your MP3 File we would have that music and we wouldn't have paid for it. So don't send your files. If you do decide to send us your files we will delete them. Yeah. uhh, we promise...|W|P|114285901109738680|W|P|top 5 Web2.0 Songs?|W|P|bomega@gmail.com |W|P|Russian national anthem is a web 2.0 song? |W|P|If You Don't Know Me By Now#6
Title: If You Don't Know Me By Now
By: Simply Red
Why: web 2.0 is all about knowing you...
New2mac send us this creation:
He also mentioned that it was the male version of the Fleck Signal. Who would have thought!
And another one by Sexy Ninja Monk... Right, did you just try to imagine what a Sexy Ninja Monk would look like too? I don't even wanna know. But here is his hand:
I look forward to more creative translations of our hand signal so start sending them in. I will add them to this post as they come in...|W|P|114285727546285546|W|P|User Fleck Hand Signals...|W|P|bomega@gmail.com |W|P|Hey Boris,Good to see my hand signal here ;)
This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn't finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a (code)writers block but after 3 days I still didn't feel like finishing my work.
I couldn't even explain why I didn't finish the design, after all, I had 90% of the screens finished and we only needed a few more pages. So yesterday Patrick and I were in the car and suddenly I blurted out 'The design isn't good enough. I want to start over'. Patrick looked shocked and confused and I explained to him that we were making things to complicated for users in the current design and we needed to go back to the basics of the service.
We went back to the office and decided to spend a few hours just trying to look at the whole thing with a fresh look. After 2 hours we were sweating, high on caffeine and extremely excited because of what we sketched on our whiteboard. We decided to throw away my 2 weeks work and implement a much simpler design. It reminded me of this great story which I'm going to ask you to read now:
From Folkore.org: MacPaint was good at drawing text, allowing the user to specify characters at any position, with any font, size or style. But once the text was instantiated, it just became pixels like everything else; you couldn't go back and edit it as text. In June 1983, Bill thought he could do something about that.
Bill decided to try to turn pixels back into characters when you selected them with the text tool. He wrote a lot of elaborate code, probably as much as for any other MacPaint feature. First, he wrote assembly language routines to isolate the bounding box of each character in the selected range. Then he computed a checksum of the pixels within each bounding box, and compared them to a pre-computed table that was made for each known font, only having to perform the full, detailed comparison if the checksum matched.
Bill got his character recognition routines working well, and it seemed like magic, if you were used to the earlier MacPaint, to be able to recover and edit previously placed text. It wasn't perfect, because it would fail to recognize a character if a single dot was out of place, but it was still very useful. Everyone loved the feature, and congratulated Bill for pulling off another miracle.
I was surprised a few days later when Bill told me that he decided to remove the character recognition feature from MacPaint. He was afraid that if he left it in, people would actually use it a lot, and MacPaint would be regarded as an inadequate word processor instead of a great drawing program. It was probably the right decision, although I didn't think so at the time. I was amazed that he was able to detach himself from all the effort that he put into creating the discarded feature; I know that I probably wouldn't have been able to do the same.
So why is this story so important to me? Because it shows a lot of courage to throw away your work when you realize that the final product will be better without it. And I was lucky that it was MY work that I thought we should throw away and not someone else's. How would I have felt If I would have been happy with my work and Patrick would have suggested we throw MY work away? I would have resented the suggestion and been offended. Which I shouldn't be. I should welcome the suggestion. That is why I think every developer should read the story about Bill Atkinson and MacWrite. Every day you should ask yourself
'am I doing the right thing? Should I start over? Is this feature really cool or do I just like it because I CAN build it?' and if the answer is no, you should be able to detach yourself from your work and throw it out of the window.
Like a rabbit chewing off its leg to get out of a trap...|W|P|114255129728736193|W|P|Kill your darlings...|W|P|bomega@gmail.com
christianhauck|W|P|attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (where is the original source, by the way?).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
BillyWarhol|W|P|nice story*Hey thx fer yer offer of a Beer yesterday!!*
i hope U & Patrick take a minute to enjoy a nice pint of Guiness today!!*
Happy St Paddy's Day guys!!
Cheers!! Billy ;))
Chris|W|P|Sounds familiar. ;)
...you make sure we (Boris & Patrick) have a comfortable place to sleep on march 22 in Luxembourg. We have a meeting there the next day (march 23) at 9:30 so we need a place to sleep. Yes we could just pay for a hotel but where is the adventure in that? So, here is our offer:
- You provide us with a place to sleep, for free
- We will tell you the secret behind Fleck!
- We will give you the full tour including a personal demo
- We bring something small to eat, from Amsterdam (eat, not smoke)
- You provide something to drink (beer/wine/cognac)
- You provide a simple meal (pizza, Big Mac, any kind of fastfood)
- You can ask a few friends to be present too
- You won't tell anyone else until we tell you you can!
You can even host a party if you want as long as we can go to sleep before 12. Cool deal isn't it? Email me (boris@fleck.com) if you think so too...|W|P|114200860405115647|W|P|Ok, we will tell you what Fleck is about if...|W|P|bomega@gmail.com Nymo|W|P|Why Is There A Wild 94.9 Poster On That Wall? Did I Say Too Much?Shame I'm No Where Near Your Area..
|W|P|This comment has been removed by a blog administrator. |W|P|This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
We just noticed that we missed one vital part that we need as a web2.0 company! The sentence 'Fleck is hiring' should be present somewhere on our site to qualify, so here it is.
This is what we are looking for:
PHP & Ruby on Rails developers
Fleck will change the way people use the internet. Being a start-up, everything is new and in constant flux. Working for Fleck means being part of an enthusiastic crew that demands a lot from you. You'll be working on server-side technology, our web site and browser extensions.
We're looking for people matching the following profile:
- Excellent technologist.
- Fluent in PHP or Ruby on Rails.
- Good knowledge of JavaScript.
- Good knowledge of Linux, MySQL, Apache.
- Good writing skills.
- Knows how to make a Fleck Handsignal
- Preferably some Perl or Python experience.
- Eye for detail, inspiring and energetic.
- Based in Amsterdam.
|W|P|Oooh so Fleck will be - at least partly - powered by Ruby on Rails ay? I am learning it at the moment ironically. Hope to see some good stuff soon!
|W|P|I'd apply if I knew what fleck does ;-)
So a few weeks ago I asked people to help us a bit with our Google Rank to make sure we would become the first result for 'fleck'. A lot of people added our button or badge to their blogs and homepages and this paid off!
In the picture you can see our whiteboard with a graph of how we have been growing the last few weeks. We started out way below the 200th search result and then came in on number 220, then to 20, 16, 10 then down one notch to 11, up again to 6 then down to 10 or 11 again and back up again to 8, 6, 5 and then down to 9.
And then...
suddenly...
today...
3!!!
Yes we are now result number three for Fleck in Google. Try it yourself while it lasts:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fleck&btnG=Google+Search
And if you want to help us a bit to get to that first spot please add our button or badge to your blog or homepage or just post something about Fleck.com. Here is the code for our badge:
<!-- Start Fleck.com Badge of honour -->
<a href="http://www.fleck.com/" target="_new"><img src="http://www.fleck.com/images/fleckbutton.gif" alt="Fleck.com" border="0" height="137" width="98" /></a>
<!-- End Fleck.com Badge of honour -->
Every link helps!|W|P|114182340597589323|W|P|How to get a better rank in Google!|W|P|bomega@gmail.com |W|P|Just added!Height 137, it's a prime number! It's impossible to resize the image an maintaining the proportions!
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten|W|P|Hello TLAB, happy to hear you like my numbers. |W|P|Hi,Just added your badge on my french blog.
Now, I'm waiting for the beta
ould ignore ALL warning they would disconnect me.
Now if I would be famous enough a lazy journalist would be able to write an article "Boris threatened with shutdown by power company". In reality we would all know that I would simply pay the bill. In RIMs case that meant winning, the case, losing the case and then pay a fine or settling before the trial ended. They chose on of many options to prevent a shutdown.
Still, happy to hear this is all over now and looking forward to hear about all the details.
UPDATE: $612.5 was the ammount we were waiting for. Stock should fly on monday. CNN has more details here: http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/03/technology/rimm_ntp/index.htm?cnn=yes|W|P|114142488328268182|W|P|Blackberry dispute settled!|W|P|bomega@gmail.com |W|P|Great website, go on friend!Cheers, Alprazolam.
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Patrick and I just had lunch (pasta!) in Elf, the restaurant on the top floor of our office building. As you can see in the photo we didn't waste valuable working time during our lunch. And the wine sure did help the creative proces. We should do this more often. Or maybe not...|W|P|114122768055153442|W|P|Fleck Lunch|W|P|bomega@gmail.com |W|P|You should do this in Italy...;-)
mkc
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten|W|P|I wish we could! |W|P|I've not understand, do you sell sushi? :-) |W|P|Haha I was second comment on the list. Go me.
Arjen just returned with a few bags filled with hardware. It's strange to handle actual goods in this virtual world but it also feels really good to see actual stuff getting build. So we didn't just order a server, we decided to build our own server, in true Google style.
These servers are test servers to test the different processes that make up the Fleck service. We are going to host them locally and they won't be accessible online. We are splitting those processes to make sure the whole service will be scalable. If one process is taking too much time or processing power we can just move it to a new server.
From the receipt: 5 x 256 DIMM (we are missing one!), 3 x 80 GB Harddisks, 1 x DVD rewritable player, 3 x Intel Celeron 2.67 GHz processors, 3 x black boxes to house the stuff, a lot of cable and one Sitecom xDSL/Cable router + 4 port Switch.
Cool huh?|W|P|114120715438778175|W|P|The Actual Fleck Hardware (with photo!)|W|P|bomega@gmail.com |W|P|It sprints slackware 10.2 in just under 9.7 seconds, with an average load of +0.07 :)