Dard-and-Disco

Disclaimer: This post may contain an inordinate amount of cheesiness, but bear with the author as it is an outpouring of relief before the next wave of madness begins.

I think it would be a fair assessment to say that the last couple of months has been a pretty demanding time at work. The fruits of our labour are now available for public viewing here, and as much as I would have liked that extra hour of sleep occasionally, I have to say that it’s been absolutely worth it.

Of course, none of this would have been worth it, had it not been for the giants upon whose shoulders I’ve been able to stand on and help to build a kickass product. [Clarification: There are more giants, but they don't have a web-presence]

Some of the lessons that I’ve learnt or would like to learn from my experiences so far [Note: Some or all of this might seem very obvious, but it's good to reminisce]:

• What they say about startups being one long roller coaster ride is dead-on. One moment you’re celebrating a significant technical achievement, the next moment you’re despairing at dead servers. I guess what I’d like to do is maintain a zen-like equanimity about it all and is something I have to work on.
• They say pre-mature optimization is the root of all evil, but pre-mature benchmarking is not. Don’t be afraid to test the edge case and look at performance - for us, it helped to unmask some deficiencies in our solution, which made the common case blazing fast.
• Don’t take criticism personally. It’s easy to get sucked into trash-talk with customers, managers, partners - you name it, but I think it ties in with maintaining composure and having the belief that every cloud has a silver lining.
• Taking a break is absolutely crucial. Sometimes the extra hours spent on staring at code, is better spent watching a movie and you end up being refreshed.
• Management of time is really important and is something I really need to work on. Bring on GTD and RescueTime
• By nature I am a pretty optimistic person and I think that helps to some degree to overcome troughs in a project (especially when they come along at an alarmingly fast rate)

Of course, there’s only so much you can do personally to get a kick-ass product out in the wild. Like I’ve said before, I’ve had the privilege to work with some amazingly talented people and so here’s my cliched thank you to all of ‘em; who I’ve had worked with; played Rock Band/Winning Eleven with; got litres of Red Bull with; discussed architectures and pitfalls with, and overall had an absolute blast.

And also to a few people will remain unnamed, who have tolerated my increasing periods of absentia. Thank you very very much!

Postscript: As soon as I clicked ‘Publish’ I noticed Chu Yeow’s more informative, more contextual post. Check it out!

ActiveCouch - A Ruby wrapper for CouchDB

Over the last month or so (interrupted by holidays and other work commitments), my colleague Chu Yeow and I have been developing an open-source Ruby wrapper (called ActiveCouch) for CouchDB.

CouchDB has been on our radars for quite a while now, with its promise of storing vast amounts of information over a cluster of unreliable commodity hardware, and this is our attempt to make it play nice with Ruby. We believe in eating our own dogfood, and ActiveCouch is currently in the process of being used internally at Bezurk for our various products. More information on ActiveCouch can be found at the project page, as well as at the Bezurk Blog.

Version 0.1.0 is out and it ships…today!

We’re looking forward to actively developing ActiveCouch as we believe CouchDB has a lot of potential, so here’s hoping for exciting times ahead!

Update: The gem is now available on Rubyforge. Simply run the command gem install activecouch from your favourite terminal, and you should be on your way!

Didn’t know that…

…Seth Rogen was a writer for Da Ali G Show, and an Emmy-nominated one, at that.

Nice!

In my next life, I want to be a movie writer like Seth Rogen.

Designed in Cupertino, Sleepy in Singapore

Update: The MacBook has gone into a coma and is in intensive care as of writing. Technicians are standing by. They fear that it might require logic board transplant. It’s times like these I wish I had opted-in for the logic board donor program. 

Lately, I’ve been having some Kumbakarna/Rip-van-Winkle woes with my (work-) Macbook. In case you’re wondering - yes it is the same beautiful Macbook which I defaced about two months ago, and it’s come mac from the dead. But after the unfortunate spillage, it started showing signs of increased lethargy. To be more specific, it would go to sleep and never wake up (for at least a couple of hours). I let it go the first time, thinking that it probably is the after-effect of a caffeine stained logic board. But as luck would have it, it is not.

From various blogs, I gathered that MacBooks have a safe sleep feature (analogous to hibernate on Windows) which doesn’t quite work well. I’m not sure if it is on by default on Mac OS X 10.4 (it was, on mine) but to disable it, use this command in your favourite terminal (that’s a zero at the end):

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Reboot and this disables the safe-sleep feature. Some other forums/blogs might instruct you to meddle with the nvram settings but this caused sleep to be completely non-functional for me. So just to be safe, use this command:

sudo nvram “use-nvramrc?”=true  

To be sure, use this command:

nvram -p | grep use-nvramrc  

and you should see the value true.I’ve lullabied the MB to sleep many times after making this change and so far it seems to have worked ok. Hopefully, the MacBook’s sleep disorder is behind it and it’s back to its energetic self.Postscript: I also realized after this entire episode that I am more forgiving of OS X’s shortcomings than I am of Windows’ shortcomings. Wonder why that is. Maybe it’s because when they get so many things right and very few wrong, I can cut them some slack.

Karma?

It’s been a bad week for me electronics-wise. I lost my relatively new phone in a cab last week, midway through last week my iPod died on me (just as when I was beginning to enjoy Vortex) and today I spilt coffee on my beautiful work MacBook and it died on me too.

I’m beginning to wonder if in my last life, I was an abusive manufacturing-line worker for Intel who didn’t care less about electronics.

E-Karma Gods, please forgive me.

And now..for something completely different

It’s taken us a while, but we are finally done with Episode 3 of The Inglorious Slackers. This episode is different from the previous two, mainly because we have managed to stay 80% on-topic, but more so because this is our first edited show (and it is edited for a reason). And with that, came its own problems…which we were not successful in anticipating.

Though we are pleased with the outcome of the editing, this episode actually felt like work - and that probably added to the delay and procrastination. Maybe we should stick to the aimless rambling - if that means putting out shows on time.

Episode Three Trivia:

• This episode pays homage to Monty Python’s The Life Of Brian, Mahatma Gandhi and a cult movie from the early part of the 21st century. (Mentioning the movie would be a spoiler)
• This episode was the first edited episode of The Inglorious Slackers.

Squirt Me

The new Zunes are out - they look OK. The faces of the smaller, flash based ones seem to be inspired by Mickey Mouse, and I still don’t understand Microsoft’s weird obsession with the colour brown† and undecipherable punchlines: You make it you*.

Personally though, I hope the second-gen Zunes do well because that will only mean that the iPods will get much better. The Starbucks-music-buying-and-browsing feature on the iPod Touch seems to be a better executed version of the infamous squirt technology on the original Zune.

Here’s to great Zune sales.

*The first-gen had the great punchline: Welcome to the social.

†It’s actually a rather dirty green. My bad.

Two is the new One

Episode 2 of The Inglorious Slackers is out. The theme this week is films, but we manage to drift in and out of the main topic. Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to listen to us and offer their feedback

We really appreciate it.

Touching Your Dream

You know when you have a dream, and you get up wishing that you were actually in it. Well, from 1930 to 2030 yesterday, I got some one-on-one time with the one and only iPhone and.I.am.floored. It is truly a work of art. The multi-touch interface works as advertised, with no asterisks in tiny font spoiling the fun. Google Maps is in my opinion the best application on it, or wait is it the iPod, no wait - maybe Safari, or is it Photos?

There are still a few rough edges - GPRS completely ruins the Internet experience, the keyboard is pretty hard to use for proper nouns (but for everything else go with Yoda Jobs and use the force), and it did seem a little sluggish sometimes (this could be due to the fact that it had third party applications installed). But all this just means that it’s a bad time to be a Motorola/Nokia/Samsung CEO when version 2 comes out.

I could keep going on and on, but that would just spoil the dream.

Postscript: In my excitement, I even managed to drop the iPhone. I know it is as unforgivable as going to the Louvre and drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa, but my sincere apologies to Choon Keat for my klutzy behaviour

The Heat Is On

Competition is always a good thing. It brings out the best in the lazy incumbent, and it always means best for the consumer - because it means more choice, and less tie down.

That is why I feel the Amazon MP3 service is a God-Send. The iTunes Music Store has in recent times (justifiably or unjustifiably) received quite some stick for its closed-doors policy, its perceived greed and its lock-down. The Amazon MP3 service, though still lacking the finesse of the iTunes Music Store, has aimed to answer some questions which Apple have been a little less forthcoming in answering:

• DRM-free music is priced at lesser (or equal to) than the equivalent DRM-shackled music you can buy at iTunes, and
• variable pricing makes an introduction - something which Apple have been very reluctant to offer.

Though Amazon MP3 says the service is restricted to US-only customers, I believe they do not perform any credit-card verification; so long as you to* enter a valid US address, you are free to purchase.

As for me, I’m enjoying John Coltrane’s ‘A Few of My Favourite Things’, without having to worry about whether I’m going to hell.

* - Thanks Amma!