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- If you like this blog, you'll love...Yesterday
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...Startup Lessons Learned. Eric Ries only started blogging a few months ago, but he's already written some cracking posts, like SEM for $5 a day, using the 5 whys to focus your development investment, and when not to listen to your users. These are all obviously tales from the trenches. He's able to dig into the subtleties of tricky topics like agile programming and give advice based on experience.
His focus on building a lean startup is especially useful these days, and I love his focus on the engineering nitty-gritty, I can relate to The Engineering Manager's Lament especially. G
- Oblong now means 'blog on', not 'no blog'November 17
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I'm extremely happy that my friends over at Oblong have finally decloaked and publicly revealed what they're up to. I was introduced to Kwin and John several years ago, and was instantly blown away by the potential of their technology, their infectious enthusiasm, and their scarily large brains. It's wonderful to see them reach this milestone.
Check out their videos to see for yourself, but they're offering a seductively easy but powerful new way of interacting with computers. They're building a system capable of precisely capturing mid-air hand gestures, with no data-gloves needed. Use it once and you'll be hooked.
On a personal level, they've been incredibly supportive of my own startup dreams, even though that's left me less time than I'd like to help them technically. At every step of the way, they've been cheering me on, they are utter mensches, and I'll be cheering them right back as g-speak conquers the world!
- Has Microsoft really opened up?November 16
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I've been closely following Microsoft's Open Specification initiative. A lot of people were sceptical, based on MS's long history of using its closed platform to block competitors and the fact that the move was driven by EU legal action. I had hope, mostly because the company has superb third-party developer support in its DNA. Since July I've been actively using the Exchange and Outlook documentation, and it has lived up to its promise. There's been errors and oddities, but no big gaps or censorship that I could detect.
I've only been scratching at the surface though, in comparison the folks on Samba have been battling the Beast of Redmond for secret API information for over a decade. That makes Andrew Bartlett's description of their team's week-long visit to the Microsoft campus all the more astonishing:
We w
- Why VCs don't trust youNovember 16
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I'm a trusting person at heart. That's meant I've had to work hard on the second part of 'trust but verify' to make sure I don't get ripped off. It's also made me (possibly too) sensitive to anything that seems like sharp practice. I ripped into Rick Segal when he joked about a trick question he'd throw at entrepreneurs. I'd overreacted, apologized, and noted that VCs have a tough job dealing with hundreds of people a year wanting money and figuring out who's genuine.
It didn't sink in quite how tough until I saw Rick's last post. He received an unsolicited email with a deck attached. The email was an obvious spammed form letter, but what was really mind-blowing was the extra slides at the end of the powerpoint presentation. Clearly intended to be used only for live talks, they were entirely different versions of the business plan for different audiences, with completely different facts about the team,
- How to connect to Exchange from LinuxNovember 13
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The OpenChange project has produced libmapi, a framework to allow Linux developers to connect to Exchange using the same MAPI/RPC protocol that Outlook uses. This potentially gives you access to the full range of data held on an Exchange server, so I've been experimenting with it for Mailana.
It's very much still in development, so you'll likely have to build it yourself from source, along with Samba which it heavily relies on. That Samba dependence also means any code you link libmapi against also has to be released under the full GPL. In practice, you'll probably want to build a simple command-line tool or some other thin interface to hide the MAPI nastiness anyway, so the rest of your system doesn't have to go GNU.
Initially I downloaded the April 08 'phaser' stable release of the code, but subsequently moved to the top-of-tree to get some of the calls that h