Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

There’s a lot of stuff in the news about how our current societal structure, especially in the US, is simply put, bad for us. The distances between where we work, eat, live and shop put undo strain on our relationships with our families and our bodies. Numerous studies have shown that there is a correlation between your weight and how far you have to commute. Clearly, spending 1-2 hours in a car, sitting in traffic is going to eat valuable time that could be better spent doing better things.

Christopher Alexander, the author of A Pattern Langauge, would probably agree that our way of building the states is completely messed up. In his book, Alexander suggests various city planning features that would lead to a better and more cohesive society. These patterns range from intertwining country and city to making buildings no more than 4 stories high to the distribution of offices and old people. The patterns in this book make sense logically, but obviously something’s wrong, because you never see it in practice.

In fact, our society is much more like the Sprawl in Neuromancer by William Gibson (but without the cool nano-tech, for now). The Sprawl is a large metropolis that spreads from Boston to Atlanta. In other words, it’s a complete mess, much like the cities of today. I find two things very interesting about this phenomena. The first is that we all know building the way we build sucks. However, people get caught on the idea of protecting their property values or inexpensive housing. In today’s world, both of those mean sub-divisions with set floor-plans. The solution is sub-optimal, but appears to be less risky, and therefore remains popular.

The second thing I find interesting is that despite our tendency to build disjoint physical communities, we yearn to build cohesive ones in the on-line world. In reality, this is all web 2.0 has been about. Mashups, aggregation, rss, and social networking are all about integrating all the sources of information that were always present on the web, but not combined in any sensible form.

One wonders if we’ll eventually see our physical communities start to mash up. Obviously, change does occur, just witness the trend of gentrification. However, the physical world is far less malleable than it’s virtual counterpart, therefore, any change tends to be slow and expensive. My guess is that we’ll continue to build the way we build because of momentum and it’s easy. Thankfully, we’ll have the crutch of technology to keep us from completely segregating ourselves.

I’ve actually started working on my little web based mp3 streamer project again. Some people will probably claim that iTunes does everything that I’m trying to do anyway, but I’d like the point out that iTunes doesn’t run on any hand-held internet devices or on the Wii. Of course, it’s possible that development will grind to a halt again, since it has to be squeezed in between all the other stuff that’s going on. However, hopefully now that I’ve picked a technology and got seriously started, I’ll stay motivated and actually get something useful.

At SoCon 07 it became pretty clear that Atlanta doesn’t have a very close knit startup community, free-spending VC’s, and enough crazy people. Unfortunately, by the time we got finished talking about what we didn’t have, we didn’t have time to talk about what we do have: basements.

One major advantage that Atlanta has over the current hotspots for startup activity is that the people here don’t have to spend a lot to get their company started. Space isn’t tight, labor is affordable, taxes aren’t that high, and food isn’t that expensive. Which means that one can bootstrap their company, go through a few lean years and still not have to worry too much about putting food on the table. If things go really lean, most likely the parents are going to have 800+ sqft of un-used space that you can move your family into.

The great benefit of doing software in Georgia is that you can do a lot with a little bit of money. Atlanta’s housing environment gives you the advantage of waiting before staking out on one’s own. Which means we can develop a more experienced and varied entreprenuer base. Once there’s some confidence that the community in the region can deliver, the community, free spending VC’s and crazy people will follow.

The good thing is that we’re already seeing the start this process. SoCon brought the community out to discuss these topics and in the process, made the community more self-aware. Two prominant local companies, Scientific Atlanta and JBoss got bought last year, which helps raise the technology profile of the region. As far as lunatics go, this is the home state of Cynthia McKinney and Neal Boortz. Only time will tell if we’re at the start of a wave or the bottom of a ripple. Either way, it should be an interesting ride.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in an abusive relationship. I’m with someone that keeps beating me up, keeps giving me headaches, but for some reason, I just can’t seem to leave it behind. That someone is Linux. After an update this weekend, the fonts in opera  a l l   s t a r t e d  t o  l o o k  l i k e   t h i s. Since Opera is 90% of what I do on my linux box, this was simply unacceptable. A lot of googling, some tweaking, much cursing, and a good bit of “this would never happen on a mac” later, it still looked the same. Somehow, I completely screwed up my fonts and I had no idea how to fix it.

However, there are no problems in life, only opportunities, so I decided that I’d use this as an opportunity to give other linux’s a whirl. I’m running Fedora Core at work and I’m really not that impressed with it. Open Suse 10.2 was what I was running when the font fiasco occurred, so I’d prefer not to run it again. That chosen field of contenders was Symphony OS, Ubuntu, caos, and Vector Linux.

Symphony OS was the one I was the most excited to try, since they have the experimental Mezzo desktop environment, which claims to offer an alternative to the dominant desktop paradigm. Symphony’s two active mirrors are in France and both are dog slow. I really like having a laptop and had little desire to wait the 28 hours it would have taken to download the entire iso. As much as I wanted to try it, this OS never even made it on the box.

Next on the list was Ubuntu. Ubuntu prides itself as being linux for humans and should be able to run that Mezzo environment I’m so fond of trying. Unfortunately, I’m a Jedi and Ubuntu finds my name, vi_Jedi, to be totally unacceptable and Mezzo environment is temporarily unavailable in .deb form. I kinda like the name vi_jedi and I’d much rather change my OS than my identity.

Vector Linux is a slackware derivative that claims to be the worlds fastest linux. I chose it over vanilla Slackware because it comes on 1 disk, as well as built in support for the ipw2200 chipset and XFCE. I really like the cleanliness, speed and efficiency of a good text based install system. What I like more is a graphical environment that works and the X server that shipped with Vector simply would not work with my hardware. Starting X would completely halt the system. It was like a kernel panic, but without the blinking LEDs.

My patience was wearing thin by the point I got to Caos. Now by this point I was pretty frustrated so I might have missed the part the the paragraph of text on the boot screen that said the caos install will re-write your partition table and nuke all your data. I just erroneously assumed that typing “install” would get me the installer, like every other linux distro since the 0.9 kernel days. But no, caos is lightweight and different, so there went all my data. Losing the data wasn’t a big deal, I have backups, but the X server did the same funky thing that Vector Linux did.

The field of four was suddenly the field of zero and reemerging from the ether was SuSE 10.2. All in all, it was a rather disappointing experience. What was meant to be a foray into the world of niche Linux distros ended up being a return to something that I was already using. Thankfully, it wasn’t a total loss. The Caos install wiping out my hard-drive gave me the perfect reason to finally start using LVM. Now I just need to remember not to update any fonts…….

41-2 Colts. The only Bear’s only score will be an odd interception with a fumbled return a shade before halftime. Things are going to go so bad that Lovie Smith’s halftime adjustments will include putting Kyle Orton in to provide a spark. Unfortunately, the game will be nothing compared to the post game aftermath, where we will learn in the press conference that the McCaskey’s have been at it again and not only did they give a 10-year contract extension to Rex Grossman, but they’ve decided to let Lovie become Dallas’s new head coach, thereby ensuring that the bears will have another two decades of mediocrity.

Remember folks, you heard it here first.

I was originally going to leave this as comment to Jeff’s What’s up Atlanta? post, but my thoughts aren’t really clear on the subject, and I felt I was a little impolite to ramble on somebody else’s blog.

I find it pretty cool that the leaders in the technology community in Atlanta are getting together and trying to make it a more vibrant place to do neat things that might pay the bills. However, I think focusing on people who have decided to make Atlanta their home is getting involved too late in the game. For Atlanta to really become a preeminent player in the national startup market, the community has to attract and keep young talent that is still evaluating where to live and what to do.

Part of the reason Silicon Valley and Boston gather a lot of interest from investors is because they’re both places that attract smart people. The cream of my high school’s crop (remember I’m from the Chicago area) that were looking to go out of the region were mostly thinking New England and California. Stanford, Harvard, and MIT were all popular destinations. Two out of a class of 600 ended up in Georgia. Effectively, you’ve now got a positive feedback loop. Talented kids go to these places, start companies while in school, make their home there, and get rich there. When it comes time to invest some of that money, it only makes sense that they’d put it back into the community that gave them their start, thereby creating opportunity for the next generation of talent.

One sense you get from the people that come from those regions is that the universities helped in getting their start. They provide avenues for people to get funds and they work on getting business people and technology people together, while they’re still the environment of the university. This is something you don’t hear from the people who’ve attended Georgia Tech or Emory. In order for Atlanta to really take off, we need to change this, and make these resources better. I’m not advocating that we reduce our institutions into trade schools, but rather help make them exciting places where things happen and opportunities present themselves. We need to help raise the national profile of these schools. Then we need to keep the talented folks here once they graduate.

These are my somewhat scattered thoughts on the subject and I don’t really have any solid data to support my hypothesis. Nor any idea of a plan to put in action. Who knows, maybe people are already doing this and I’m late to the party. End Ramble.

At some point late last night, the CISCO router that we use to handle our phones and data entered a really funky state and became unresponsive. This of course, led to vijedi.net and choicesquilts.com being down. Of course, the Choicesquilts IT staff, aka my wife, was out of the office all day and the problem didn’t get fixed until a few hours ago. IT catastrophies always seem to happen when there’s nobody around to fix them.

The only reason I’m blogging about this is because last night seemed to be a bad one for networking equipment. Along with my case, one of my collegues suffered a delayed bricking of his linksys and he reported that one more of his friends had a router die. Coincidence, or conspiracy? (Probably just the cold, dry air causing weird static issues).

My goal is pretty simple. I want to use my favorite database PostgreSQL, with my favorite environment (Ruby on Rails), on my favorite OS (Mac OSX). Unfortunately, this wasn’t as straight-forward as I could have hoped.

After shifting through various conflicting and inconclusive sources of information including the occasionally cryptic Ruby Wiki and the Postgresql docs, I decided that I’d try to condense this information down for those of us that just want to write some code.

I found the easiest and most trouble free way to do this is to install Mac Ports. Their instructions are good and make sense, so there is no need to elaborate here. Just make sure you have Xcode installed.

With that out of the way, to install Postgresql type:

sudo port install postgresql82 postgresql82-server

Along with installing postgres, it’ll put up a bunch of instructions about how to install postgres as a service, and create a new database. Unlike normal unix installs, the default postgres user is postgres82.

The next step is to update Ruby, since the Ruby that is shipped with Tiger is broken. The simplest way is to use ports again:

sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems

You might need to add /opt/local/bin to your PATH environment variable in order to use your updated Ruby instead of the system one. Next, install Rails with:

sudo gem install rails -y

Now for the final and most complicated step, installing a Postgres ruby driver. There are two available drivers, a native one and a pure ruby implementation. For performance reasons, the native driver is preferred, however it is a little unintuitive to install. You first need to set some environment variables (these examples assume the bash shell):

If you miss that step, you’ll receive numerous errors from gcc. The final step is (as root):

POSTGRES_INCLUDE=/opt/local/include/postgresql82 gem install postgres -- --with-pgsql-lib-dir=/opt/local/lib/postgresql82

At this point, you should be ready to start developing your Rails apps against Postgres.