So from today on, ViJedi.net will be about software, technology, the software development process and other startup-y topics. All my personal posts, like pictures, random thoughts and the rest will be at a new blog tejus.tumblr.com. Thanks for reading.

That was the easy part, the not so easy part was moving the 4+ years of email sitting on the dead servers hard drive. Most of the process is general recovery hacking: pull out the hard drive, put it in a new machine, do a backup. Restoring onto a new server is where it got a complicated.

I used VirtualBox to host my Centos 4.8 vm with a Mac OSX guest. This Guide on the Zimbra wiki is the correct procedure to recover from this situation. Its very accurate, but it’s worth mentioning a few important highlights.

First, make sure you’re setups are identical. I had forgotten to install a few of the services on my restore machine which caused all sorts of problems and startup failures.

Also, for reasons that I have yet to determine, Zimbra is incredibly crash prone when running in a virtualized environment. You may have to restart often. When trying to test this process, I encountered multiple segmentation faults in Zimbra’s services.

Since this means that you’ll restart often, it’s best to shut off all extraneous services.

You only need these

Changing these setting will allow for quicker reboots, shutdowns, and reduce the number of things that can go wrong. I also disabled SSL on my zimbra instance, to future reduce the number of problems.

Now you’re ready to move your email. The best approach is to use imapsync. This utility, written in perl, is like rsync for your mail. It will only move mail that does not exist in the remote location. It can also be restarted after a crash to continue on after a crash (see a few paragraphs above). You’ll probably have to baby-sit the process for a bit, but within a few hours, you should be off your self-hosted email solution and into the manged services of Gmail.

With that out of the way, I want to answer a question that I’ve gotten a lot recently. Almost everyone has heard of LASIK (laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis). Most companies and doctors offering corrective surgery advertise this procedure. Not as many people have heard of PRK (Photorefractive keratectomy). PRK is the procedure that Sonali had done a few weeks ago. LASIK is what I will be having done tomorrow.

Both are corrective, out-patient eye surgeries, and eliminate the need for the patient to wear corrective equipment, such as glasses or contacts. The recommended procedure depends on many factors. This post seeks to explain some of these differences.

What they are

LASIK is the more common procedure. In this procedure, a surgeon cuts a flap in the cornea to expose the area on which the laser operates. Once the laser has finished, the surgeon replaces the flap, which stays in place naturally. The creation of this flap leaves a permanent scar that is visible in close examination (when the eye-doctor shines the bright light in your eye).

PRK involves the removal of the top layer of quickly regenerating cells in order to reach the layer that can be effected by the laser. There is no flap. Over time, new cells replace the ones removed and the eye returns to its natural strength.

Both surgeries take only a few minutes in the operating room.

One over the other

LASIK is the preferred procedure, because the patient is able to function normally within a few days. As long as the patient refrains from rubbing their eyes, the risk of flap displacement remains low.

However, the creation of this flap permanently reduces the strength of the cornea and increases the risk of flap displacement in the case of trauma. In situations where the patient’s career exposes them to abnormally high levels of risk for head trauma, such as mixed martial artists, astronauts, and professional deep-sea divers, PRK is the only viable option.

Even if you don’t have an exciting career and are a normal software professional, the doctor may require PRK if the corneal tissues lack the necessary thickness. This was the case with Sonali.

Also, if you’ve had LASIK, but your vision has degraded, the follow up procedure will be PRK. If PRK was not so inconvenient, almost nobody would get LASIK.

Benefits

The obvious benefits are you don’t have to wear glasses or contacts. If you’re someone like me, with absolutely horrible vision, glasses are not really a viable option. Even the most expensive and thinnest lenses have noticeable levels of diffraction for any object not in the center of my field of view. While tolerable during the day or at home, being outside at night is frustrating experience.

Contacts are far superior for vision, but they are inconvenient for traveling. There are other risks as well, including the increased risk of eye infection and eye-fatigue caused by the lack of oxygen to the eyeball.

Major Downsides

The risk with both these surgeries is that you may never regain the same corrected vision. There’s a chance of halo’s, glare and reduced night vision.

With Lasik, the most terrifying risk is that your eye might fall apart. It’s not very likely long-term, but highly likely if you rub your eyes within a month of the procedure.

PRK is a far safer procedure, but requires much more time to heal. The same level of vision correction that is enjoyed by a Lasik patient in 48 hours takes 6 weeks to achieve with PRK. It will take at least a week for a PRK patient to be able to carry out normal tasks. The first week after PRK also involves more discomfort and pain.

Dry eyes are also a problem. There are other downsides and risks. Again, please consult your doctor.

Why does PRK take longer?

Instead of resealing a cut, the eyes of PRK patient have to re-grow tissue that has been removed. This has two side-effects. One is that there are more exposed nerve-endings being stimulated, causing the pain and discomfort experienced by PRK patients.

The second is that the cells regrow, it takes time for them to regain uniform density, resulting in blurry vision. There is no way for your brain to focus the image because light is not being aligned correctly, but during this period the patient does not have a prescription. Corrective lenses will not help.

Is it worth it?

I dunno, too early to tell. Check back in a few months.

This is just an overview, since many people are unaware of the existence of a second procedure. There is much more information out on the web. Please post any questions in the comments.

I think that this situation is not as bad as many make it out to be. Home Depot, UPS, Delta, AFLAC and SunTrust conjure up very different images than Google, Yahoo!, Apple, eBay, and Oracle. Yet all are Fortune 500 companies and none of them count as startups. However, we do think that individuals working at the latter set of companies are more startup friendly.

While not as terrible as the perception, I do believe that this phenomena is real and it has little to do with the makeup or mentality of the workforce. It’s a result of simple economics. A standard for working for a startup is the assumption that the employee will give up some base salary in return for performance based compensation in the form of stock options.

An Atlanta company puts itself at a hiring disadvantage using the same compensation trade-off as its Valley counterparts. Lets put some numbers to this to see why.

I’m going to assume that the company has issued 1 million shares at $1/share, and will never dilute. Implicit in this assumption is that pre-money valuations and eventual dilution is similar between the average Atlanta and Valley companies. Differences here will skew the outcomes but the goal isn’t trying to figure out specifics, but the relative reward between regions.

Now the real numbers. According to Salary.com, the salary for a Senior Software Engineer is approximately $84,000 in Atlanta and $100,000 in Palo Alto.

For exit numbers, I used the charts in this post from Scott Burkett’s blog. The average exit in Atlanta is $259 million, the Bay Area is $356 million.

Generally, in my experience, the tacit assumption is that some dollar value of salary is forgone for equity. For this example, I’m going to use $2 of salary equates to one share. Percentage trade-offs make the final outcome look better, but there will still be a difference. The final large assumption is that everything goes to plan, and the company sells right at the end of the four-year vest for the average sale price in the region.

Here are the numbers after 4 years:

The Atlanta employee looking to be part of a startup is taking on the same risks, for a lower reward. This will reduce the pool of talent available to any startup looking to grow to a self selecting set that appreciates the lifestyle and is willing to burden the risk at that reward threshold.

I don’t know if this is a positive, negative, or even correct (those assumptions are pretty large). Please leave any feedback, corrections, or methodological faults in the comments.

In order to save another fellow developer the headaches I went through, I’ve published the source for my migration script on GitHub. It includes examples of how to use the Jira4r gem as well as installation instructions. Feel free to fork away and make it better!

I still wanted my own server with full access, so I got an account with Linode. Since I found it very difficult to upgrade between major versions of OpenSUSE, I installed Arch Linux based on the recommendation of the guys over at WeTheCitizens.

This blog, my private repositories and some other stuff sit on this server now, but the shared instance wasn’t going to work for photos.  I signed up for a Flickr pro account and started migrating my public code to GitHub.

When I started this site nearly 5 years ago, none of this would have been practical.  The hosting that you got for $20/mo was worthless.  Code and photosharing sites all sucked.  Now I’ve got a set of tools that work really well and I don’t have to maintain any of it.

Fort Mountain has a lot of trails, but most of them seem somewhat unused and infrequently traveled. We traveled on portions of the Guhati Trail, which is an 8.2 mile loop. The trail was well marked, but could have used a little more attention. There were lengthy sections that were nearly overgrown and more than a few trees blocking the path.

The trail also didn’t seem that popular, we didn’t see another soul while walking. We ended up taking the main road back instead of walking back down the trail to make up some time.

The de-facto standard for modal dialogs with JQuery is Thickbox. However, if anything above sounds familiar, I recommend giving Colobox a try.

Colorbox is missing a few features of Thickbox. The Colorbox does not resize automatically and doesn’t change position on screen when the user-resizes their page. However, that wasn’t a big issue for my needs, since users probably couldn’t use the app unless they had maximized their browser anyway.

Where the developer of colorbox focused his time is allowing the developer using Colorbox to customize it however they want. Take a look at the css. Every element that you need to change has an ID and represented in the file.

One missing feature that would be nice to have is the ability to add custom buttons. In the app I’m building, I had to manually add them into the JS file. Which wasn’t hard, but it breaks the ability to upgrade.

However, the most important thing is the ability to make the product fit the design and colorbox does deliver on that.

The fix for this is to run the follow two commands:

$ sudo ntpdate us.pool.ntp.org
$ sudo hwclock --systohc

This will sync your hardware clock to the time from the network time service.