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.

read more | digg story

A Stupid Response to Peak Oil

Interesting article supporting your earlier claim.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

I have not read the article in its entirety, but I must say that as I read it I got both scared and, at the same time, incredibly motivated by an expanding opportunity that may be heading our way.

Can you imagine the amount of resources that would become available for alternative energy sources if people could no longer run their automobiles or data centers due to an energy crisis. I believe a crisis of this sort may very well bring economic hardship, but at the same time, a massive re-allocation of capital. Capital investment can fuel huge economic growth.

You mentioned Black Tuesday in our conversation the other day in a comparison of what would happen with an oil peak. This historical crisis was the product of mass speculation and irresponsible lending to individuals investing in the stock market (most of which is now illegal). At least in the tech sector, I would say, that the market is far less speculative than it was during the .com's. Prices are based more on earnings than in most times of economic prosperity in the field. In a comparison with the Great Depression, an energy crisis might very well become a World War II.

The area where I see some of the most speculative pricing is in the oil industry itself. Prices are high in anticipation of a shortage to come; not one that is already here.

The one area I am more fearful than any other is real estate. The irresponsible lending of banks does echo something of a 1929 crash. Mortgage brokers have been preying on the irresponsible lending tendencies of those wanting to keep up with the Jones, and the banks have been playing along. That has already started to fall apart, as is evident with the write down's of huge amounts of loans. These incidents have lead to the recent firings of several CEOs (Citigroup for one, who's CEO lost 8 billion dollars within a year.)



I'm going to post this on my blog at the risk of looking like an idiot so I get some other perspectives. Kanda is my economic advisor and can tear me apart - which I encourage him to do. You hear that kanda. Move this conversation to http://briancochran.blogspot.com

Contests: Pop Culture Contests vs. Creative

As of yesterday, Ceehive is now in the top 5 search results returned for creative competitions. Right behind worth. It appears that we are starting to get a little traffic from this source as well. Incidently, tapatap.com and votigo.com unique visitors are down but attention is getting better. Worth1000.com and ourstage.com appear to be growing wildly. You have to ask yourself, is it better to be a creative competition site today, or a pop culture hot or not. I think you know how I would answer that question :)

Creative Competitions

Pop Culture Contests