Calling all Delhi geeks! I’ll be in Delhi for a couple of weeks, starting Sunday. Lets hang out.
If you’re looking for a job with a really cool startup, here’s our top 10 reasons to work for us. I have an VERY cool project in the works that is being built using Ruby On Rails, is very Web 2.0, and is for a huge, unexploited market: if this kind of a project interests you, then ping me and lets talk.
Author: jonathanboutelle
New mullet theme for wordpress
Gopalarathnam Venkatesan has just released an implementation of the mullet blog layout. It also supports the long tail archive! It’s plain looking (based on the default Kubrick theme) so you can customize it pretty easily to get the look you want, and most of the html will look pretty familiar. Gopalarathnam has a ton of screenshots up on flickr, so if you’re setting up a new wordpress blog, you can now have two options (the other one is Kapil Mohan’s mullet layout)!
DCamp is gonna rock!
DCamp (a barcamp-like event for DEE signers and DEE velopers) starts tonight in Palo Alto (at the socialtext offices, home of the original barcamp). Lots of awesome smart people are going to be presenting and sharing their ideas, including (but not limited to!) Sarah Allen from Laszlo, Rick Boardman from google, LukeW and Bill Scott from Yahoo!, Nate Bolt from Bolt/Peters, Micah Alpern from ebay, and Luke Hohmann from Ethniosys.
Sounds like my kind of party.
BarCamp Bangalore rocked the house
BarCamp Bangalore looks to have been an awesome event. Amit has a nice writeup. Writeups from stateside visitors emphasize the world is flat meme. Kamla had a nice speaker-by-speaker review. But my favorite posting is the mugshots taken of every participant.
When Amit, Gaurav, Manik, and I organized barcampdelhi, we were worried that nobody would show up. But it seems the barcamp meme has found a vibrant home in the indian tech community. Awesome!
Java Package Structures Considered Harmful
As I get more experienced with ergonomic languages like Ruby, the sharper, stupider parts of Java are coming into sharper relief for me. Fortunately, at least some of these problems are cultural rather than technical, and and can be corrected by simple changes in practices. A great example of this is java package structures.
Silicon Valley Ruby Conference
I’ll be spending the weekend at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference being organized by SDForum. I got interested in Ruby because the AJAX libraries uzanto uses (prototype and scriptaculous) come from the ruby on rails world, and are awesome).
But in the last few weeks I’ve been hacking with Ruby on Rails itself for a new project I’m working on. The experience has left me very impressed with Ruby (an elegent little object oriented language) and especially with Ruby on Rails (a wicked cool web app framework). Anyway, this conference should be good, and it’s local and reasonably priced. So if you’re in the bay area and looking to get your Ruby on, see ya Saturday!
Bill Scott from Y! to speak tonight at Google campus
Bill Scott (AJAX evangelist for Yahoo!) will be giving a talk at the Silicon Valley WebGuild tonight (April 12). The talk is hosted at the GooglePlex in Mountain View.
It’s not free (5$-20$, depending on whether you register online, and whether you’re a member of the web guild), but it’s bound to be good stuff.
Accounting-friendly Investing
I just wrapped up my taxes for the year. It was a hassle, but it was a lot easier than last year, and MUCH easier than four years ago. Over the years I’ve realized that a lot of the accounting pain associated with stock investing is actually avoidable. Below are some tips and tricks to minimize your tax-time blues:
1)Dollar-cost averaging sucks! Sure it works great as a strategy(you buy more when things are less expensive), but all those small transactions are difficult to account for. They make calculating your cost basis a lot harder. This insight leads to three sub-rules.
a)Never buy the same stock or mutual fund twice
b)Never select the “reinvest dividends” option when buying a mutual fund.
c)If you want to buy the same thing, just settle for a “similar” thing instead. For example, instead of buying an S&P 500 mutual fund, buy a DOW mutual fund. Then buy a DIFFERENT S&P fund. Then buy a DIFFERENT DOW fund.
Mullet sighting at justaddwater.dk
JustAddWater has implemented the mullet blog layout, and written an article about it. Here’s his description of the mullet:
1. At the top of our front page we list the latest 5 articles showing the headline, the excerpt and other relevant links and information:
2. Below the teasers of first 5 articles we show headlines along with publishing dates of the previous 35 articles.
Now if he would just implement a long tail archive…
SQL Scripts for Scoop to Drupal conversion
A few years back I wrote some sql scripts to convert a Scoop-based community website (dialognow.org) to Drupal. I get occasional requests for these scripts, so here they are. No guarantees, and they are certainly out of date. But they worked for me!
copy_comments_table.sql
copy_stories_table.sql
copy_user_table.sql
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