via McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Ben Greenman’s Graphs About Charts and Charts About Graphs: Graph #1..

via gapingvoid

Something about Carl Sagan is always inspirational. Perhaps because he shows that we can be both rational and optimistic about the future.

Every time I hear his voice, on videos like this one and on his audiobook, I’m reminded that we can always go further and the ultimate success is to inspire others to pursue their own happiness and success. We need more people like Carl Sagan.

To get your two-finger swipe navigation back, just go into the Mouse preferences and over to the More Gestures section. Change the first option (Swipe between pages) to use two fingers.

This will disable the full-screen swiping and get you back up and running. Doing the same thing on your laptop should work as well, except you’ll pick three-finger swiping instead of two.

Enjoy.

For instance, I’ve been working at very small startups since around 2007 (after I decided pro photography wasn’t the career for me). And at one point in 2008 I explored working for a more established, profitable and growing technology company. I interviewed with them for the position of Software Architect which would have been a leadership position in the company, reporting directly to the CTO and taking over direction of two product development teams. It would have been an opportunity for me to shape the future of the company and how they used technology to achieve their goals.

The email I just noticed was the offer letter.

I had completely forgotten about this company and the offer they made me, so when I opened the email to take a peek, it really gave me a weird feeling. The kind of feeling that isn’t quite regret for turning it down, but certainly wasn’t the “I’m glad I didn’t accept that” feeling. It was a very good offer, for a position which I would have enjoyed. But when I talked to my boss at the time about it, he didn’t particularly try to dissuade me from accepting, but rather posed an interesting question:

“Is this one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities? If so, you should take it. If not, then why change jobs when another similar or better offer could come along in the future?”

I pondered on it for a day, and then turned down the offer.

About 3 months later, the startup I was working for at the time went out of business. I went to work for another startup, and that one too went into hibernation mode late last year. Whereas the company who made me that offer is still going strong. If I had taken the offer, I would probably still be working there. I would have significantly more money in the bank. I would probably be working fewer hours every week. And I would probably own a swank loft in downtown LA.

But I wouldn’t have met many of my current good friends. I wouldn’t have probably been able to spend two months working from Berlin, a trip which introduced me to my girlfriend. I wouldn’t have created a few cool products which are getting used around the world. And I wouldn’t be working with a group of crazy guys right now, trying to disrupt the entire music industry. No way to say whether my life would have been “better”, but it surely would have been much different. It’s interesting looking back.

There are probably a ton more forgotten moments and life events hidden away within my 12,390 sent and 102,189 received messages. I can’t wait for the rest of this email export to finish so I can do some analytics on them.

In the course of building the frontend application for Earbits, I’ve been constantly annoyed with the responsiveness of my local development server. As a pretty complex AJAX application, there are lots of little (and some bigger) calls to the Rails backend APIs to do lots of potentially slow things. This means that there are lots of calls that are originating in the browser and being served by one mongrel, so the server ends up handling requests too slowly. Which leads to me being frustrated. Which leads to me finding a nice solution to the problem.

Warning: This May Not Apply To You

If you have slow running requests that have to run in series, or if you’re not doing AJAX-y things, this isn’t going to help you much. This setup is only useful if your app sends a bunch of parallel requests to the backend. For instance, if after your main page loads, you need to do AJAX requests to a) load the user’s friends, b) get their comment history, c) calculate some suggestions, and d) check to see if you should show a popup promo to the user, then this might help you out. But if you need the results of request (a) to get (b) and the results of (b) to get (c), then you’re out of luck and this will be a waste of your time.

Ok, ready to do this?

Step 1 – Install Nginx

This is much simpler if you have macports installed. So go do that first if you haven’t already. If the first step below doesn’t do anything, you don’t have macports. Once you have macports, it’s a simple two-command process to install nginx.

$ sudo port -d selfupdate
$ sudo port install nginx +ssl +debug

Now, while nginx is installing you can open a new terminal window and keep going. The install will take a few minutes.

Step 2 – Configure Foreman

Foreman is a great tool released by David Dollar to make running web processes and workers crazy easy. It uses a Procfile to define the different things it controls and you should refer to his blog or a Google search to learn about the finer points of Foreman. We use a pretty simplistic file here as an example.

To get started just run:
$ gem install foreman

Then create a file called Procfile in the root of your project using the text editor of your choice. My Procfile has just one line that define a web process using the standard Rails server:

web:    bundle exec rails server -p $PORT

Step 3 – Configure Nginx

Now that nginx is probably finished installing, we can get it configured to act as a local Load Balancer for our Rails server. I’m going to set it up using port 80 locally. If you are running an HTTP server locally already on port 80, then you should adjust your configuration accordingly. But if you’re not using port 80, Rails redirects might cause you some headaches. So I suggest you stick with the standard port.

First, you’ll need to find your nginx.conf configuration file. If you used macports to install it, it’s probably in /opt/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf but if you can’t find it, run nginx -V to see where it’s hiding.

If you’re not familiar with nginx at all, there are two main directives that you’ll be using, server and upstream. The server directive defines the front-end part of nginx (i.e. where it listens for incoming requests). The upstream directive defines the back-end (i.e. where to send requests so that Rails can handle them). Both of these snippets should exist within the http section of your config file. I’ll provide a complete nginx.conf at the end of this section so that you can just replace the default file and then tweak it if necessary.

Upstream section

This is the configuration that I’m using, I will explain it in a second:

upstream foreman4000 {
  server localhost:4000;
  server localhost:4001;
  server localhost:4002;
  server localhost:4003;
  server localhost:4004;
}

Here on line 1 we’re defining the upstream which we will reference later. Note that “foreman4000″ is just an arbitrary name used to reference it within the config. Then since we plan on running 5 web processes starting at port 4000, we list out each of the ports where our Foreman will be listening for requests.

Server section

This will define a server so that nginx will listen to requests on port 80 and direct them to the upstream we created above (line 6). We also pass the real IP of the request and the hostname along to the server (lines 7-9, in case you need either of these bits of data.

 server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;
    access_log  /opt/local/var/log/nginx/foreman4000.access.log  main;
    location / {
      proxy_pass http://foreman4000;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
    }
 }

Test the config

After you’re done making the changes above (or if you download my nginx.conf example file), you should run $ sudo nginx -t to test the config and make sure it’s all good. If it fails, double check everything. If it’s good, you’re ready to start it up.

Step 4 – Start your Engines

Now all we have to do is start everything up. In your Rails project directory:
$ sudo nginx
$ foreman start -p 4000 -c web=5

Note: I use the non-standard port 4000 as the starting point so that other random servers can run on 3000 (rails default) and 5000 (foreman default) without conflicting with this setup.

If it’s working you should be able to open up http://localhost in your browser and your Rails site should load. In the terminal running Foreman, you should see it handing requests to each of the 5 web processes (web.1 – web.5) like this:

Now, enjoy your new, super-responsive AJAX server! I know I do.

Notes and Extras

There are a few reasons my local development environment is slow. Firstly, I’m using a hosted mongodb that is shared among a few of our developers so that we can more easily collaborate on work. It makes it possible for me to add a new feature and seed the database with some good example data, then hand it off to our UI guy to style it up with zero configuration on his end other than a git pull. Secondly, we make heavy use of the Facebook Graph APIs which can at times be sluggish over my mere-mortal internet connection. Getting someone’s friends might take a full second, posting something to a wall might take a couple seconds. You can imagine how with just one process running, it would get a bit slow.

The third reason our site is slow in development is the simple fact that it’s designed to be chatty. Instead of large monolithic views getting rendered for the user, we do a lot of client-side template rendering using underscore.js based on json data requested by the client app (which leverages backbone.js for much of the interaction logic). In production, this works great because we can fire up a bunch of web processes and everything scales on out. But in development, between the slow database access and the numerous calls, things can take seemingly forever to fully load. But not anymore!

BTW – if you haven’t tried Earbits out for your online radio needs, you absolutely should. Great way to discover new music, share with your friends and really just have a great time. And you should stop listening to so much Genesis anyway. It’s time for something fresher.

The biggest change in this new version is our improved Portfolio Manager which makes it super-easy to manage all your images and galleries in one place quickly. Uploaded images instantly appear in the gallery and you can easily drag images to change the order or to move them between galleries on your portfolio. If you’ve ever seen an easier portfolio manager, we want to hear about it!

We’ve also made some improvements to the themes and our theme builder tool to make it easier than ever to choose a theme, color scheme and title font for your portfolio to give it that custom look. Hooking up custom domains and email forwarding is similarly simplified and can be set up in just minutes.

Finally, for all the people out there who have a bunch more images to showcase, we added the huge Pro account that allows you to upload 2,000 images to your portfolio. I wish I had more than 100 awesome examples of my work to put in my own portfolio, but I’m sure that many of you do. So now you have that option and still at a price that is hard to beat at any of our competitors.

Of course, you can still create a free portfolio to get started and show off up to 36 photos. And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Version 2.5 is already in the works with a great list of new tools and improvements!

I hope you’ll join me in helping out the restaurants in your town by opting for the phone call. It’s really not that hard… (and you can always use OpenTable to find places and check for table availability!)

The [OpenTable] access fees can be substantial, particularly for restaurants operating on thin margins. One independent study estimates that OpenTable’s fees comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each “incremental” 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back and hopefully book by telephone the next time.

via Is OpenTable Worth it?.

From the moment I wake up and groggily grasp for my phone to check email and news I am hyper-connected. Generally, the only times that I’m not within 3 feet of some internet access device are when I’m sleeping, showering, driving (in motion), or having dinner with friends. And that last one is the only one where it’s actually my choice to leave the phone in my pocket, all the other situations have physical or legal limitations on usage.

The need to be connected is, in fact, very basic in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the psychological theory that explains the largest and most fundamental human desires. Our need for a sense of belonging comes right after physical safety. We thrive on friendship, family, and the constant affirmation of our existence and relevance. Our self-esteem is largely a product of our interactions with others.

It is now possible to always feel loved and cared for, thanks to the efficiency of our “comment walls” on Facebook and seamless connection with everyone we’ve ever known. Your confidence and self-esteem can quickly be reassured by checking your number of “followers” on Twitter or the number of “likes” garnered by your photographs and blog posts. The traction you are getting in your projects, or with your business, can now be measured and reported in real time.

Our insatiable need to tune into information – at the expense of savoring our downtime – is a form of “work” (something I call “insecurity work”) that we do to reassure ourselves.

via What Happened to Downtime? :: The 99 Percent.

I believe that the only option to reclaim our collective sanity is to go out of our way to unplug as often as possible. With few exceptions, nobody is going to die if you don’t check email for a few hours. Or if you ignore phone calls and text messages for an afternoon. And I highly recommend the occasional extreme disconnect of taking a multi-day trip somewhere without internet access or cell coverage.

Embrace downtime, liberate your creativity.

And there really is no room for running off half-cocked and spending your life savings starting an “ice cream for dogs” business because you love ice cream and you love dogs and someone told you that you could accomplish anything you put your mind to.

I always enjoy reading fiction–also known as 90 percent of all start-up how-to guides and articles. The dreamscapes they paint always seem to I’ve a knack for happy endings.

Follow your dreams.

Turn your passion into profits.

Do what makes you happy.

This is lovey-dovey utopian nonsense. This sort of advice would have you believe that if you simply put your all into something you will be successful. Bottom line: if the start-up idea your passionate about isn’t capable of generating revenue, your passion will bankrupt you

via Why ‘Be Passionate’ Is Awful Advice.

Worth a read, would love to hear what other people think about this.  Seems like it’s the “trophies for everyone!” mentality transferring into expectations of business as the young adults become entrepreneurs.  Everyone thinks they’re going to be the next Facebook or Google…