VC Magnet

I own a small business that enables people to create and publish their own cookbook. Getting ready for the holiday season, I have been working hard on getting everybody to eliminate operational bottlenecks and introduce some new products. Some of those efforts have been stalled by various fulfillment companies who are unable to get credit to purchase the equipment needed. These are successful companies, not startups, with solid growth and a long history of cashflow who normally would have no problems getting a loan for this sort of thing.

However, major banks have practically frozen lending to small businesses. In some cases, they are even advising these companies put their capital expenses on credit cards.

As a VC I might see this as a golden opportunity. Solid risks are unable to get credit because of halt in interbank lending. Even if you are a successful business owner that has cringed at the idea of taking VC money in the past, you might just be willing to give up some equity rather than deal with some insane interest rates and panicked loan officer.

Bad news for those of us in the startup world. This could flood the market with very attractive deals from solid risks and keep the VCs yawning whenever they see the caller-id from that early stage entrepreneur.

But, I'm not a VC. What do you think.

Blackberry Curve

 

I recently purchased a BlackBerry curve, and I have to say I am impressed. As a skeptic migratingn from a Treo 700p, my assumptions about the lack of expandiblity and capabilities of the BlackBerry family of products have been blown away.

I finally have a push email service with gmail (though unfortunatly not with the blackberry gmail client).

The best part - the one day Verizon sale put the Curve in my pocket for $49.95 and dropped my data plan from $44.95 to $29.95 a month.

RAM, RMagick, and You

Two days before the release, I am looking at top and trying to figure out why my mongrel instances are growing wildly in RAM. Playing with GC.start makes things a little better, but I just have some itch in me that tells me that might not be the best thing in the world to do.

After isolating the problem to something having to do with ImageMagick I discover what appears to be the problem. RMagick is not releasing the memory allocated with RMagick::ImageList.new.

Apparently what happens is RMagick holds a little tiny reference to some great big chunk of ImageMagick's memory. Well the GC only recognizes a the reference (which is very small).

Then I saw this very valuable post on RMagick

Turns out they have 'fixed' this by providing you the method .destroy!. That did the trick and life is back to mostly normal. Just thought I'd write this up quickly as memory leaks are not fun to find, especially in ruby.

HTTPS with Mongrel and Apache

Recently I was trying to configure my Railsmachine server for conditional http access. I was using something similar to ssl_requirement.

In this plugin there is the following call


request.ssl?


Of course behind apache this is returning false, even when the browser is using https. This happens because of mod_proxy.

The solution is to set the X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https' env=HTTPS

HTTPS is an environment variable set in Apache (which versions I don't know)

X_FORWARDED_PROTO makes rails understand the original protocol and request.ssl? returns true where appropriate.

In short, add the following to your httpd.conf




RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https' env=HTTPS


Negative Political Bumper Sticker Contest

Candidates are about to start dropping like flies. Let's help them on their way. Create and share bumper stickers that slam US presidential candidates. Ceehive will get them made for you.

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