Cody Littlewood's Notepad

The Ubuntu site has excellent documentation, but I kept running into an error when it came time to mount the image onto the USB so that I could have a LiveUSB ready to go. This slimy error read, "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." It would happen everytime I tried to execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m.

I had quite the search trying to find a simple solution for this. I attempted to mount the image multiple times and nothing seemed to with the USB full partition set as MS-DOS. The fix was quite simple and a small program that does all of the steps for you once you've downloaded the OS from the Ubuntu site. Just go to http://penguintosh.com/ for the readme or download the program directly at http://www.mediafire.com/?rctco14mzjayaa9. The program comes with detailed instructions and handles the entire process for you. Let me know if this is of any help!

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There are quite a few options for one click pre-beta launch pages for the startup world right now. Launchrock is the first example that leaps to mind and they  really do an awesome job, but we ran into the problem that we have a two-sided market. Here at Backstagr, we needed a prelaunch page that represented that. Specifically, we needed multiple user types to be able to signup and indicate which user type they were for our records. First of all, we want to be able to deliver them a customised experience when they come back to sign in for that first time, and secondly we want to see the interest level of both sides of the market. Since we couldn't find a good solution out there that allowed for multiple user types, we did what every good development team (in our humble opinion) should do-- we built the tool and released it into the open-source world for anyone to tweak, fix, test, and use.

I've completed the back-end server/database (and VERY BASIC front-end) side of things, and over the next couple weeks the talented Mike Babb will be adding the much needed front-end styling and Vicky Jaime will be adding some design. Once we have those two items completed, you'll be able to see a working example at the Backstagr homepage.

When Mike adds the front-end styling, you'll probably want to keep the styling, but utilise design assets which match your own brand. Other than that, and a few tweaks to the setup_mailer.rb/database.yml files, you'll have a working multiple user type launch page for your startup with just an hour of setup. Please feel free to fork the repo on Github, make pull requests, or submit issues. We all have full-time day jobs, so we only get nights and weekends to work on these things, but I'll do my best to keep up on them. Without further ado, here is the link to the repo!

Follow us on Twitter: @codelitt @mikegbabb @vickyjaime and @backstagr

Whether you're working at a startup, attending university, or working for a massive corporation we all find ourselves being buried by stress and huge workloads. It is unfortunately part of being a professional, however, I've always thought it shouldn't drown out the more important things in life. I wrote last time on a similar note, but recently I stumbled across some incredibly insightful information which hasn't left my mind since I read it.

It is extremely easy for me, and many of the people I know, to get so wrapped up in what we are doing that we forget to give put life into perspective. Through a series of events, I found an article by a nurse named Bonnie Ware. Ms. Ware collected the regrets that her patients told her as they were on their death bed. Reading this profoundly put into perspective which items in life I should worry about, and which items probably don't matter. Here are the top 5 regrets before dying in summary (click here to read them in full):

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard. (Not one patient ever said, "Man, I wish I had spent more time at the office.")
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings (both positive and negative ones.)
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The most astounding thing to me, albeit simple, is that every single one of these can be influenced by choice. Paul Graham originally lead me to this article with his "The Top of My Todo List" where he sums these all up into actionable todo items:

Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too hard; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

None of these items are terribly hard to achieve, but we so easily forget to do them if we don't put our daily lives into perspective every day and remember what actually matters in the grand scheme of things. We'll all probably have a few regrets when we die, but we can make damn sure that they aren't the ones aggregated by Ms. Ware. If you look at life with this perspective, day to day struggles and stress seem rather minor. I've never met anyone who told me they wished they worried and stressed more.

Among my many eccentricities (and believe me, there are many), is the tendency to devote all that I can to any given effort and to hold onto my ideals with an iron grip. This happens in many different facets of my life; work, side-projects, education, sports, politics, friends, family, and more recently love. As with any quality, being so idealistic and giving everything you have has its upsides and downsides. The downsides are probably many and I couldn't count them all here if I tried. It makes me see the world very black and white sometimes. At other times I impose my values on others' actions. I also probably can become very fixated on details if I'm not careful. However, among all of these possible downsides I wanted to write about the upsides and my reasoning behind this way of approaching life so here it goes:

You can't always determine what opportunities present themselves to you in life. It's a sad fact that some of us aren't fortunate enough to have all of the opportunities that we wish we had in life, but you can determine what you do with these opportunities. If I look at my life, the pivotal moments have not been which opportunities I've had, but rather whether I decided to take the opportunity or not, and how much I was willing to devote myself to the opportunity. Opportunity and freedom are important in life. Never does the same opportunity come to us twice.

This of course leads us to regret. Never in my life have I regretted trying something new; never have I regretted sacrificing something small for something else much greater in my life; nor have I ever regretted giving an entire portion of myself to an effort. I've never regretted failing, and if I could go back and do my life all over, I'm pretty confident I would have done things mostly the same when it comes to taking an opportunity. Do you know what I have regretted though? I've regretted not trying something because I was afraid to fail. I've regretted and will regret till the day I die any instance where I was afraid of the consequences so I held myself back instead of attempting to achieve something more in life. I can live with failing. I've failed before. I'm going to fail again. I'll probably fail at something today, but at least I will know that I gave it everything I have and that I wasn't scared of life. I can't live with decisions where I tried to play it safe because of fear of the unknown.

If there were one quality that you could say seperates humans from animals, what would that be? Our capability of speach? Our capability to share ideas? Our capability to build relationships from one dataset to another? How about our IQ? I would say that the line is drawn in the sand between humans and animals at exploration. We are inherently explorers. We came out of the cave, we saw fire, we crossed continents, we took on the high seas, we developed industrial nations, we invented electricity, and we set foot on an extraterrestial satalite rock known as the moon. How many of these accomplishments could we have achieved without the willingness to devote ourselves to an effort and to accept an opportunity? Not one of them. We would have stayed huddled in our cave.

Why do we find the story of Romeo and Juliet so romantic? I guess if we look at it logically it's the story of two rich, spoiled 13 year olds who decide they're in love, send both of their families into a war against each other, and then kill each other when they can't be together...but we still find it romantic. The romance is not in the love story, but rather in the tragedy. Taking an opportunity and a risk on a love that was next to impossible and then devoting so much of themselves to the relationship that they could not bear to live without each other is the where we find the romance and the beauty of Shakespeare's most famous work. What great companies were founded by entrepreneurs who didn't give their opportunity a shot and then devote that entire portion of their time, blood, sweat, and soul into their effort? The list goes on and on. None of the greatest things in life would ever be accomplished if we aren't willing to sacrifice, take opportunities, and give everything we have to make it possible.

I don't think that your entire life should be devoted to ONE effort. You need balance. That balance for me is my projects, my life, my love, and my family. For someone else, they may split it into other sections. There is no right answer, but balance is definitely necessary. Once you figure out that balance though, you have to give everything you have in that section of your life to the efforts that fulfil your heart, mind, and soul.

So while devoting everything I have to the different efforts in my life may not be the norm or what a casual observer would decide, I will continue to do it till the day I day. One thing that I know for sure is that I can not stand for mediocrity. My work, my life, my family, and my love will never be mediocre. We have to fight mediocrity and "average" at every point. It is unacceptable in every form and fashion. Every project that I'm passionate about has my devotion. Sometimes they may fail, but at least at the end of the day I'll have no regrets. To me that is comfort. There is a massive amount of comfort in never wondering what I could have accomplished or experienced if I would have given all that I had to an effort or taken a chance on something that I believed in. It may have its pitfalls, but I'll sleep well at night and I'll be happy.

-C

Today while updating the en.yml file for my rails app, I hit a snag and continually kept getting told that the yaml could not be parsed by the new parsing engine Psych. I was already updated to Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9.3 so this problem was supposedly fixed when you look at the documentation. Still, I could not get past parsing errors for one simple line of code.

I looked for answers everywhere only to find people saying to "force Rails 3.2 back to the Syck parsing engine." I really hate relying on outdated and unsupported engines whenever I can avoid it. It took a couple ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING hours, but here's what worked for me:

• Open up config/boot.rb require yaml and define the parsing engine as Psych. It should contain something like this:

• The next thing that you need to watch for (if you've changed your en.yml file at all) is that you're using the correct amount of spaces for the yaml syntax. There should be two spaces in between lines. I was hacking together a solution so my error message says "Password" instead of "Password Digest." And yes, I understand that this is a hacked together solution. If you don't have the correct syntax for the yaml code then you will get an error similar to an "Undefined Method" error. Here's what my code looked like with the syntax:

Edit: I'm now having trouble reproducing the errors, so there may be another item to do. The only other item I did was installing and uninstalling the psych gem. I realised that the gem doesn't need to be included because the engine is already included in updated Ruby and Rails.

If you have any questions or think this is completely bogus, leave a comment. :)

-codelitt

Today marks the primary elections in Venezuela which will decide the opponent to run against Chavez over the next 8 months. These coming months the candidate chosen to represent the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática's (MUD) will campaign with hopes of victory in the October presidential elections. Now, for the first time in history since 1999, the people of Venezuela have an opportunity at toppling a politician, a tyrannic king, that has been slowly killing his country in favour of a popular status. Henrique Capriles Radonsky is the favourite and is closing the poll numbers against Chavez to single digits. He also has a clear lead of 10% against the other primary candidates. But I'm not writing to cover the elections. This is simply background. I'm writing because Venezuela deserves a leader with vision, a president who represents the future of Venezuela-- Venezuelans deserve better than a political appeaser which is all Chavez has become. Capriles is the president that Venezuela needs and the one who can pull them out of increasing violence, division of classes, and an increasingly weak economy.

Chavez touts around the banner of a revolutionary like his idol Simon Bolivar, but in reality he is a pitiful disgrace to the story and history that Bolivar represents. The Venezuelan president parades this masquerade of helping the poor and lower class garnering him votes, however, the devil is in the details. His continually short-sighted politicking is destroying Venezuela's future in favour of more votes. Great politicians are leaders that inspire change and lead their country to an equilibrium where the health of the country and the health of the people is first priority. This election isn't about changing a president, it's about changing a broken model that is continually perpetuated by an ignorant Chavez whose own ego is larger than his desire to give Venezuela a bright future. As murder rates rise, poverty increases, foreign investment leaves, company after company is federalised, and healthcare declines only a fool would vote for the same man and expect different results.

Unfortunately, Chavez has found the hot button issues among the Venezuelan lower-class and continually holds their support by folksy notions of fighting Western and European imperialism, building social programs for the poor, and pushing the blame of the state of the country to others. In this politically empty rhetoric he has failed to provide real solutions to the country which is in desperate need of. Chavez doesn't really care about change, he cares about doing enough that it appears his government is actually doing something which brings him the support he needs to further extend his powers. In 2009, Chavez used this popularity to do away with term limits; quintessentially giving Chavez the title "President for Life" as long as he has the votes. With his continuing efforts to federalise companies in the nation, well-educated professionals are scared to vote for fear of losing their jobs and careers in a terrible economy. Chavez's entire regime has been quietly eliminating the electoral process, opponents to his position, free-speech in the press, free-expression amongst the people, and extending the powers of the executive branch. Each move is a calculated decision and a crucial piece his strategy to create a tyrannical government. While Chavez will quote Simon Bolivar and idolises him, the disgusting truth is that Chavez is the exact opposite of the revolutionary who fought his entire life against tyranny. The hypocrisy of Chavez is disturbingly transparent as he continually extends the powers of his office and directly contradicts the teachings of his hero, Bolivar, who said, "Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves."

Since Chavez took office in 1999, the rate of homicides has continually increased to an appalling number that is unfathomable to a Canadian-American like myself. In 2011 there were over 19,336 murders in Venezuela. 20,000 people lost their lifes, 20,000 families wept, hundreds of thousands of humans in one country lost a brother, sister, mother, father, son, or friend forever. This rate is nearly 5 times the rate of homicide in Mexico, which has had heavy coverage in the American press while many more Venezuelans died and hardly any American media outlets took notice. The families who can, are sending their children overseas because the danger is very real. Nearly every Venezuelan has had an intimate member of their family kidnapped or killed. Chavez's increasingly idiotic economic-dissonance  contributes to the problem of poverty, which in turn adds to the crime rates. But I'm hesitant to call this crime rate a problem. Having high-rates of theft and burglary is a problem, 20,000 people dying annually from bullets and knife blades is a genocide. A true leader of a country that genuinely cares about his people spends his time protecting his country rather than spending his time finding ways to stay in power.

Chavez's foreign relations are also doing nothing to help the country. Continually he fights against "imperialism" when in reality no imperialistic countries are doing anything to attempt to exert control over him. I equally hate imperialism, but aligning himself with Cuba and Iran is only a detriment to the economy that could be growing power in the world due to its resource rich land and highly educated population. As Chavez continually spouts hate against European, North American and certain Asian nations, he is setting the country up for failure instead of following in Brazil's footsteps towards true economic power in the global economy. While, Venezuela should write its own distinct future, leveraging oil hungry countries like the US to fuel economic development in Venezuela is more important to the future of the country than a meaningless stance against the US's politics. This economic development could provide much wealth to social programs furthering the decrease in the poverty rate and genuinely providing support to Venezuelans. In 2003, Venezuela experienced an economic collapse that lost Venezuela 24% of its GDP. Taken from the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

The main challenges facing the economy are in the areas of the exchange rate and inflation. The Venezuelan currency is substantially overvalued. The government is reluctant to devalue because this would raise inflation, which is currently running at 22.5 percent and exceeds their target. Since there are exchange controls and the government is running a large current account surplus (7 percent of GDP), there is nothing that would force a devaluation in the near future. But this poses an intermediate- run problem, since even if inflation is stabilized and begins to be reduced, current rates of inflation will continue to appreciate Venezuela's real exchange rate. This makes imports artificially cheap and non-oil exports too expensive on world markets, hurting the tradable goods sector and eventually becoming unsustainable. It also makes it extremely difficult for the economy to diversify away from its dependence on oil.

So I finally broke down and installed OSX Lion on my late 2010 Macbook Pro after they released a couple bug fixes a few weeks ago. I know it was rather late in the game, but I kept hearing about people having a few problems with apps crashing and the GUI sucking too much computing power. One of the things I love about Mac OSX is that it is Unix based and has a relatively small kernel compared to it's Windows counterpart, but it is admittedly heavy on the GUI at times which sucks a portion of your CPU's time. Without fail, after the install I noticed significantly slower speeds and a Xcode in particular giving me some trouble. I tinkered for a few weeks, asked some friends, and pulled some hair. I now have Lion running just as fast, smooth, and beautifully as Snow Leopard was. Here's what the consensus is and what worked for us:

1. You don't actually need to do a clean install. I tried this and it simply didn't work. The Lion update was meant to build on Snow Leopard and update it in such a fashion, that I saw no differences in speed between a clean install and the Apple approved update.

2. Part of the problem is the launching speed caused by the log files and temporary files that continually build up on your computer's system. Open terminal and type the following command. **Disclaimer: Make sure you feel comfortable doing this and know what the command does. I take no blame for anybody deleting the wrong files.

atsutil databases -remove

It's the weekend after the largest activism I've ever seen from my generation in all of my 23 years, and one thing has been weighing on my mind for the past couple days... In short, yes tech companies had a huge hand in gaining opposition support against SOPA/PIPA, but isn't it about time we spoke about the democracy in action we've seen over the past month or more?

Continually, I keep seeing articles across the web about how Google, Wikipedia, Reddit and others stopped the legislation. Granted, this is particularly truer with more traditional news outlets than it is with tech outlets and the true Internets, but this is terribly concerning to me. This heavily tilted attitude in traditional media simplifies democracy into a fight between two lobbyist powers, the Internet world and the MPAA world. This shows how broken the system is. Instead of talking about the activism of millions upon millions of United States citizens that hate this legislation, traditional media is demonstrating a fight between enterprises. "But enterprises can't vote," you say. Well the sad truth is --and this is demonstrated by where the media attention is going-- they actually have more power in the republic of the United States than citizens...if the citizens are inactive that is.

You can not remain indifferent to the power of the "lobbying powers that be," when clearly these fights in congress have been shaved down into two corners; the tech startups with their supporters and the MPAA with their supporters. The core distinction that we keep witnessing in the press is that the story of SOPA/PIPA is framed just that way. But here is the real truth: the activism against these awful threats to the net was started by the people and for the benefit of the people. This was a grassroots effort started by two non-profit organizations, Demand Progress and Fight For the Future. This fight was started by the people and was fueled into the spotlight by the huge tech powers.

I'm not arguing that they didn't have massive influence in this democratic process, but in the end they only provided information and awareness about the bill. They didn't stuff congress's pockets with cash and they didn't rely on taking their best friends in congress out for drinks like the MPAA. No. They raised awareness about the bill and its dangers. Then they enabled the people to contact their representatives and voice their opinions. Final numbers vary, but 10 million people signed petitions against the bill, 3 million emailed their congressmen, and over 100,000 people called their representative. WE, the people, stopped this bill, not Google and not Wikipedia. I'm terribly grateful for their support and influence, but we were educated, we were organized, and we were ACTIVE. This effort should be applauded as one of the greatest demonstrations that democracy can still work when the people are active in the democratic process. Let's not forget that lesson here.

 

[edit]: A number of people have made a very good point: We have not completely stopped it, but rather we have brought it to a standstill. There is still much work to be done.

This year has been a crazy one. It's been filled with a new education about love, happiness and career. Figuring out how to balance these is not always easy in a society that worships income, doesn't understand love anymore, and puts superficial entertainment above happiness. Most of these things I learned from my friends and new culture which just seemed to resonate with me beyond anything I can explain. They all have the same sentiment and they aren't all simple to achieve, but they're lessons I won't soon forget:

1. Love and the best of friends come from the most unexpected places.
2. Don't compromise your happiness for anything. Make yourself happy and then figure out how to make everything else work within that.
3. Sometimes you make some pretty big mistakes, but if you are under 30 you still have time to change them into learning experiences. Stay Calm. 
4. Follow your heart and your passions. You'll be the best in the world at whatever career you choose if you're happy with what you're doing. Don't live to work, work enough to live.
5. Love+Happiness > Money. Period. Don't be afraid to be poor. Be afraid to be unhappy.

Lessons for both sides of the fence when combining worlds: employees, employers, Fortune 500s, and startups

The past 3 months have been weird. I left my position as Chief Communications Officer at a 50 person dev shop where we spent a large majority of our time working on a startup project (a language learning application) and shut down my side project, Gmashr, when Google released Google+. I left these projects to work with a 10,000+ person Fortune 500 with a traditional business model as the chief architect of digital strategy [1] and help drive this mammoth's business streams through the net.

There are many differences in these two worlds as well as many similarities. I want to highlight some of the differences that you will find as more of these large companies are jumping into the new age of the net in force, bring in external talent to do so, and others change companies [whether startup to corporation or corporation to startup]. Some of these differences are beneficial to one side of the fence and some of them are just different styles that work for the respective parties with no "right or wrong methodology."

Being the open net advocate I am, I have long been a huge supporter of open-source projects. The net and the world benefit from this open information methodology. I believe in non-negotiated transparency and that the right to information is an inalienable one. In its most idealistic sense, the open-source movement puts users and the future of the net in front of personal gains. This is probably one of the largest differences between a large corporation and the close-nit world of the net. One of the longest standing terms in Fortune 500s is IP; or intellectual property. IP to the net, of course, means something completely different. "IP" is probably one of the biggest concerns facing Fortune 500s. This is actually understandable, albeit incredibly frustrating for a transparent net guy.

Corporate espionage is very real and many of these large companies have technologies that not only face theft from competitors, but from foreign governments and are highly regulated by the government where the corporation lies. Whereas in the tech startup world, it has become frowned upon to hide what you are launching and people favour discussing ideas openly. Also, if someone steals your idea then its very likely you didn't develop fast enough or someone developed it better. It's a cold, hard truth and this tech world is not for people who aren't the most brilliant weirdos in their area.

Corporations have a difficult time being transparent, not because they are hiding something, but because every action has a large and wide-berthed effect. One wrong move and their stock price dips causing millions of dollars in loss. This loss doesn't just affect the company, but also affects thousands of employees who have a decent portion of retirement invested in company stock because of a buy-in program where the company usually matches a certain percent. There are many other implications as well. You won't only see this type of protection in old large corporations. Google is a great example of a fairly new company that is also extremely protective of their intellectual property when developing a new project.

This all being said and for lack of a better phrase: It fucking sucks. "IP protection" is on the tips of everyone's tongues. IT departments have locked down your [almost surely] Windows laptop to the point where you have to request special permission to install any program, including printer drivers, Firefox, or anything. At my past startup, I built my own computer, Hackintoshed it, and customised it to the point of bare recognition. I'm just a digital strategist. You should see what the hackers built.

Previously, I bitched openly about anything and everything that didn't meet my standard of approval. I wrote on the walls of my office. We would have hackathon days at the CTO's house in San Telmo. Hackers at the "office" had wired in a digital music server which blasted everything from tango to salsa to hip-hop at all hours of the day. It was incredibly irregular, but as I always say: Brilliant people are never well-behaved. Any single one of these actions would most definitely be frowned upon in a corporate environment.

To be fair, you have to respect a large corporation who hires an extremely irregular person to come in and challenge the giant. I've been extremely impressed by their efforts to accept my abnormalities and eccentric ways. I'm sure that just as often as I am ready to pull out my hair orbiting this mammoth, they are also ready to pull out their hair dealing with my rough edges. They've been incredible about providing me champions of the project and surrounding me with others who are pushing the bar in their own way. I've been extremely lucky, and for this I'm extremely grateful.

There is a careful line to walk when you are coming into a giant corporation. Likely, they hired you because of your expertise, ability to think differently, and because they want to challenge themselves in new way. You don't want to lose these attributes, but if these shine through too brightly then you will find people don't accept your ideas and expertise as viable alternatives. You'll become that nutball with ideas that will never "float." [2] The trick is to orbit the corporation, sucking in the amazing training and resources they provide, while not getting sucked in yourself. Networking, building relationships and learning how to demonstrate value of your ideas in a way that resonates with different business functions is probably one of the biggest keys to success. Just because you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, doesn't mean that they will be able to see it as well.

On the other side of the coin, be ready to be challenged in ways you never thought possible. You will learn how to build stronger arguments and more academic reasoning for your projects then you ever thought possible. You will meet coworkers that have a different insight into the company and can help you drive value more than if you try to go it alone. Be open to learn and not too resistant to hearing ideas while maintaining your individualism is key. Transparency takes time to get comfortable with. Large organisations will get comfortable with it over time.

The takeaways: [TL;DR]
1. Startups are, by nature, more open and free to do as they damn well please. The employees are often amongst the weirdest, but geniuses in their area of work.
2. Fortune 500s should be expected to be much more careful about their intellectual property, but it is not entirely without good reason. The consequences can have implications unimaginable to a startup.
3. If Fortune 500s are going to hire an outside resource to lead them into the net methodology of doing business, be prepared and accepting of the eccentricities that come with some of these people. It will take some adaptation from both parties. 
4. If you are a startup guy going to work for a corporation, be prepared to learn how to orbit the mess while soaking in as much information as possible and learning from your coworkers. Transparency takes time. Don't expect the change to happen overnight.

[1]: Not official title.
[2]: Often a horrible corporate word that is thrown around.

Disclaimer: These thoughts are my own and are not conclusive. These thoughts in no way represent opinions or beliefs of any corporation, organisation, cause or other person. These thoughts are opinions only and may very well be different on any given day.