Scrollin' On Dubs

Aug 14

Resolution to an obscure Quickbooks online access prob

Nerd 2 Comments »

On the off chance this helps someone who faces the same weird Quickbooks error we did, here’s the resolution to this strange problem we recently encountered. I’m using Quickbooks Premier 2006 and have it setup to automatically connect to our Bank Of America account and pull all transactions from the various sub acounts. This simplifies the data entry in Quickbooks considerably.

It stopped working last week however with an error that had a ton of junk and the error code OL-323. Turns out while we were at OSCON a few weeks ago, someone sniffed Kimbro’s credit card and tried to buy $2700 worth of flowers. BofA immediately recognized the transaction as fraud and suspended the account. They have since closed it entirely so it no longer appears in our online dashboard but Quickbooks was still trying to pull transactions from that account. The fix: deactivate the online access for that account in Quickbooks (chart of accts > right-click edit acct > online tab > uncheck online access).

You’d certainly think Inuit could throw a more descriptive error message or at least allow the connection to pull data from the working accounts since it wasn’t an issue of authetication… Anyways, a week later having dealt with both BofA and Intuit, this turned out to be the resolution to this issue. Lesson learned: don’t send sensitive data over untrusted wifi at a conference of 2700 techies all using the same connection. Even when using SSL and presumably connecting to a legit wifi hotspot, people can emulate an access point by broadcasting their own wifi signal under an SSID like “OSCON wifi,” intercept your connection and perform a man-in-the-middle attack to steal your info.

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Aug 11

Why isn’t Federal proposed legislation nameless like State Propositions?

Activism 2 Comments »

There is an inconsistency in the way in which proposed legislative changes are named at the Federal and State levels and I’m curious if anyone can provide insight about the possible rationale behind this discrepancy. Propositions up for vote at the State level are always named like “Prop 101” – you have to read it to know what the heck it does. Federal Acts, however, have vanilla names like the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, and the most recent travesty The Protect America Act of 2007 .

Presumably the reason for naming a piece of proposed legislation is so that voters can talk about it, assign meaning and remember which proposal does what rather than trying to track a collection of numbered items. The only problem with this method though is that it introduces a naming bias into the equation- who is going to argue against something well-intentioned-sounding as the “Protect our Citizens Act” or the “Prevent Car Accidents Act?” And you would think the situation that is supposedly remedied by assigning descriptive names is less problematic at the Federal level since these things are voted on by Senators and Congress people- it’s their job to be knowledgeable of what each does (ie. they shouldn’t need the mnemonic benefit of descriptive titles). I would expect a Senator elected to his/her role to be able to keep track of these where I wouldn’t expect the same of the average citizen. I’ll refrain from a rant about how so many liberty restrictions have been recently submarined into effect under red-white-and-blue-colored titles. But I’m curious: if they’re going to use descriptive names for proposed legislative changes at the Federal level, why not at the State level? I’m admittedly not up on my US history so I may be off with the nomenclature of Acts, Proposals, Bills, Laws, etc but I would think intuitively this practice should be the reverse of what it is now given the voting constituency in each situation. Anyone? Bueller?

Aug 10

How we do our podcast

JumpBox, Nerd, Tutorials No Comments »

A couple people have asked me recently how we do our Grid7 podcast. We have a humble talk show we do with entrepreneurs and innovators bi-weekly over on Grid7.com and we just did our 24th episode. There may be more streamlined ways of doing things but these are the steps involved from my perspective:

Capture

“Garbage in, garbage out,” as they say. The idea is to capture the highest quality raw audio to start with. If the guest is local I try to conduct the interview in person because I think the face-to-face interaction is a better dynamic. I use the internal mic on my MacBook and record directly to a track in Garageband.

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If the guest is remote and I have a good internet connection, I’ll use my skype account with skypeout and capture using a great piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro. It’s nice because you can isolate the inbound and outbound audio to separate tracks and equalize the volume levels later. It generates an mp3 on your desktop and is straight forward. If I have a crappy connection I can record calls on my Treo using an app I have called CallRec. This captures the conversation as a wav file stored on the SD card. With a 2GB SD card, storage is a non-issue.

Produce

I use Garageband to refine the raw audio, add an intro/outro to the track and do the final mixdown. Provided the call quality was good, there should be no need to apply a noise filter. I have heard that Audacity is a good open source audio editor that’s available though I have not used it personally. Once I have things sounding right, I export the track to iTunes, right-click on the track -> “get info” and adjust the details in the ID3 tag. I then right-click and convert it to MP3. Once it creates the MP3, right-click-> “show in finder,” grab that file and ftp it to our server.

Publish

Last step is to publish the audio track to our site. We use WordPress as a CMS for our website and it has an open source plugin called Podpress that makes it easy to serve a podcast. Provided you have the Podpress plugin installed and activated, you author a post as you would normally do for a text entry only you click the “Add Media” button under the textarea and tell Podpress the URL of your MP3. I like to add a paragraph or two on our guest explaining his/her background and the gist of the episode and also include a headshot. If you’re writing any type of extended entry, you want to author it in a text editor and then copy/paste it into the browser (I’ve had Firefox crash after authoring a long entry in the browser and it sucks). Podpress generates the proper RSS feed and even gives you a flash-based audio player that allows the visitor to listen directly from the browser. It handles stats and can syndicate your podcast via the iTunes Store.

Promote

You’ll probably want to list your podcast in the iTunes Store (and “store” may be a misnomer – it’s just a directory so you don’t have to charge $$ to be listed). There’s plenty of other podcast directories out there- google around. I added ours to Everyzing so that the audio itself is indexed and made searchable. Running your RSS through Feedburner allows you to get stats on the listeners that subscribe via RSS. Depending on the subject matter of each episode you can then submit them to various news sites as you go. We held the #1 slot all yesterday on news.ycombinator.com from an interview I just did with the Zenter founders.

Monetize

We have not actually tried to monetize our podcast yet. It currently serves more as a vessel of exposure for us and an in-roads to make connections and meet new people. There are various options for services that provide a simple way to splice in ads dynamically. I went though and researched a bunch at one point and found Kiptronic to be the most promising (plus it sounds like they now support video blogs as well if you’re into that). AdSense is always an option for the site itself. Feedburner lets you display ads in the RSS feed itself once you cross the 500 listener threshold. I experimented with Comission Junction but saw zero dollars ever come out of it. Amazon affiliate program was equally as dismal in terms of what it generated. We’re now in the Google PPA beta so that will be interesting to see how well it works. Short of having a program so popular that you can command a dedicated monthly sponsorship, a dynamically-inserted ad via a service like Kiptronic seems like the way to go.

Anyways, of the million ways of hosting a podcast, that’s how we do things with Grid7. If you have a podcast of your own, what tools do you use?

Aug 05

Phoenix Dev House

Arizona, Events, Nerd, Speaking 3 Comments »

Big ups to Derek Neighbors for pulling together the first ever Phoenix Dev House last night and hosting it at his place. It was a 12-hr hack session modeled after the first one conducted in SF. The idea is to get a bunch of coders together in a room and kick around ideas and then act on them, cranking out some code and getting something tangible finished by the end of the evening. At the first Super Happy Dev House they ended up writing the wiki system that was used to collaborate on future events (apparently Derek used this as well for the Phx site).

There were some great demos- Brian Shaler showed off a couple projects he’s been working on including an offline tool for digg users which he plans to unveil shortly and his crappy graphs site. This is the guy who figured out the secret of getting massive diggs for his stuff – write flash-based visualization tools for digg users. Josh Knowles showed off an app he made for the iPhone that allows him to control a keynote presentation on his mac from his iPhone – very cool. He’s also working on an app for the iPhone that’s similar to the Feelrz idea I submitted to Cambrian House. If he pulls that one off it has the potential to become absolute craze like Twitter. David Koontz showed off something he’s doing with JRuby but honestly he lost me at “J” :-( Lorin Thwaits demo’d a pet project of his that makes it easy to find very large prime numbers. I still don’t fully understand the utility of this but apparently the problem is important enough that the EFF is giving away $100,000 to the person that finds the next big one. You’ll probably see Lorin on the Discovery channel next month… James Britt was able to get some insight that helped him solve a Google Gears problem. I showed off the Sentinel application I had written a few years ago to solve the issue for people who transact business internationally of maintaining compliance with the OFAC’s SDN list. There were other demos but I had to leave early. But not before demo’ing a bomb-ass guacamole recipe (see picture).

If you’re a nerd in Phoenix you’ll want to do a couple things if you haven’t already:

Sign up for the next happening on September 15th at UAT. Ideally, sign up to give a talk and not just attend.

Join the Elev8AZ google group and help boost visibility of tech in AZ by keeping up with announcements and promo opportunities that can get local AZ people and companies noticed

This week begins the voting on SXSW panels. We’ve got handful of AZ people that have submitted talk proposals so be sure to vote for your local favorites.

If you haven’t yet been to a Refresh Phoenix event come out this Tuesday and meet other nerds doing cool stuff in AZ.

And look for another Barcamp in the early December time range. You can monitor the RSS on that page to stay updated.

These events generate real ideas, relationships and even businesses. Thanks again to Derek for putting it together. If you’re in Phoenix and complaining that there’s nothing happening in the tech scene, there’s no excuse not to be at one of these upcoming events.

Aug 02

Kernel Dump Summer 2007

Events 3 Comments »

Between attending OSCON in Portland last week, doing the TechCrunch demo pod at the party on Friday in SF and doing our production release and launching sales for JumpBox, it’s been a whirlwind the past few weeks. Here’s a recap some of the highlights:

1.0 Launch Madness

It was a crazy scramble right up until we left for Portland. Not only were we changing our corporate identity, building the online store and payment gateway, porting our site over from WordPress to Drupal, revving the applications to their latest versions, and putting the finishing polish on the JumpBox platform itself but we were also prepping for our presence at the conference and TechCrunch party getting new shirts/biz cards/DVD’s made. It was a stressful week leading up to OSCON but we launched sales officially last Tuesday and saw a record day for downloads. Sales velocity has been improving slowly and we’re putting better and better metrics in place as we go to confirm/refute hypotheses about what is working well and where the bottlenecks are. One of the sessions at OSCON was titled “How to change your tires at 100mph” and I feel to some extent that’s us right now- we’re now finally on the racetrack and we’re converting our yugo into a formula one as we drive. True to 37 signals form of “it’s not a problem until it’s a problem“, we deferred the aspects of the system that didn’t need to work immediately. All in all, we’re happy with the progress of things and as we anticipated, the pace of learning has accelerated greatly now that we have customers and a better idea of our conversions.

Portland and mass transit

We were in Portland for OSCON last week and that was my first time in that city. The weather was a treat after our 117deg days here in Phoenix. The feature that stood out most about their city is that they have mass transit absolutely nailed. Trains and buses are everywhere and come frequently and a good number of people seemed to ride them. Phoenix has been torn up the past year as they build our light rail. I hate to be pessimistic but frankly, I don’t see it working in Phx. Waiting in the heat would be enough to deter most travelers from using it, but they also traverse the first and last mile to the train stops somehow. Rail is a transportation medium that is hugely subject to network effects (ie. the first train is marginally valuable, the second makes it significantly more valuable and a grid of trains running makes it extremely valuable)- one rail stretched across the city is only mildly useful unless it integrates well with the bus system. If it’s going to see adoption at all in Phoenix, they’ll need to solve the cooling issue at the stop and last mile issue. The fact they chose to route it around Sky Harbor airport so they could continue to bill $20/day for parking makes the program pretty irritating. Provided they can fix the cooling issue at the stops and make it work, we’ll see an industry of smart car rentals (or an equivalent short-hop transportation option) spring up around the light rall stations and that should be an interesting opportunity for someone.

OSCON

The open source conference was well-attended. I heard the figure of 2500 attendees and that seemed about right. I didn’t know what to expect about what the audience make up would be like- it was heavily slanted towards developers. We did informal counts of Mac v. PC laptops at the couches and meeting areas and noticed that Mac has clearly overtaken PC in the developer community. I attended sessions on foundations of OSS, law as it relates to OSS, jabber, subversion, Trac, how Youtube scaled to meet their insane growth, the Art of Community, promoting an open source project, myths of innovation and lessons in usability. The innovation seminar was probably the most interesting- the guy was author of this book and was a great speaker. I realize the developer-level stuff is now officially way over my head and I’m relegated to the ranks of normal end user. We met with some cool people at the conference and saw an awesome duo guitar performance at the Intel booth on the last day. I’m actually happy we didn’t end up doing a booth there, however. It’s just the wrong venue to promote JumpBox.

The intel booth was impressive.

TechCrunch

We did a product level sponsorship at the now-famous TechCrunch annual party hosted by August Capital. There was apparently all kinds of drama surrounding this girl and she was certainly quick to hop in our photo (check the Sandra Bullock resemblance):

It was good seeing our friend Shanti Braford (red checkered shirt) who recently left Phoenix to be in the tech mix up in SF. And big thanks to Josh Strebel (left) for saving our ass and running errands for us while we were stuck in Portland after Alaskan Airlines canceled our flight. The other guy in the picture above is our AZ friend Josh Knowles (blue shirt) who also came to party with us.

Books

I’ve had a chance to finally read a bit now that we’ve launched. I’ll try and writeup individual posts with the takeaways for each book but here’s the gist:

Anatomy of Buzz – nothing earth-shattering here if you’ve read Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell stuff but it’s decent as an overview of the mechanics of how buzz travels. There’s a 20pg assessment at the end that makes a nice summary and gives you a checklist to assess your company’s marketing efforts.

Freakonomics – I’m way behind the times with this one but it was a carpet ride through the underbelly of different industries exploring why strange anomalies occur. Understanding corruption in sumo wrestling, learning why so many teachers in the Chicago public school system were cheating to enhance their students’ test scores, and a windfall study on the accounting books from the largest documented drug ring. This author took a subject as dry as Econ and made it intensely interesting by distilling it down to one thing: incentives.

Startup – Great read for anyone doing a startup of their own. This makes me feel like ours is peanuts in the face of the high stakes with GO corporation and Penpoint. Lots of lessons with regards to raising money and deal negotiations- I’ll write this one up soon.

Movies

Last King of Scotland – Forest Whittaker gave a killer performance in this movie and looks eerily like Idi Amin. Go rent this one.

The Guardian – I know, I know. Ashton Kutcher… dude where’s my car? This movie was great though- it was Top Gun for the Coast Guard. I haven’t teared up from a movie in a long time but this one did it (btw my brother sent me this and cast Top Gun in a whole new light- we had been reciting Top Gun dialogue at a pool party the other week and this clip makes it considerably less-badass).

10 mph – shortly after I quit my corporate grind job 2yrs ago, my roommates at the time who worked in the same company quit and rode a segway scooter across the US and filmed a documentary. This is worth it for the photography alone and Hunter and Josh are hilarious. It’s cool to see that they’ve won a few awards with it. They’re now working on the next one that has something to do with fantasy football.

Bella – we’re going to a screening of this indie film on Aug 13th and the trailer looks awesome. If you’re in Phx and would like to attend, lemmeknow and I can probably get you in.

Bands

Between catching some random shows, Last.FM and friend recommendations, there’s a ton of great music I’ve discovered recently.

Spoon – good european sound with tinges of Jet and Wolfmother.

Ben Lee – incredible young songwriter. Reminds me of the singer from Small 23.

Brand New– we saw these guys perform in Phoenix a few months ago and I’ve never seen so many fans singing along at a show. Their sound was infectious had huge crowd energy. We ended up covering “The Quiet Things” at our last show.

Joe Purdy – solid acoustic songwriter.

Bright Eyes – singer sounds like a lamb sometimes but their lyrics and songs get stuck in your head for days. Their Poison Oak track is powerful.

Kevin Devine – Find of the month. Happened to see these guys open up for Brand New and they blew me away. Get either one of their albums.

Donovan Frankenreiter – Jack Johnson-esque chill sound.

JVA – unfortunately their CD is way over-produced and doesn’t do them justice. We saw them perform live at the Intel booth at OSCON and they were terrific musicians.

Menomena – caught them randomly at the Mozilla party at OSCON. They have a strange and beautiful sound as if TV on the Radio crashed into Pinback while learning music theory from Phish and taking singing lessons from Bare Naked Ladies. Actually, I change my mind- these guys are the find of the month. If you buy one album this month, get their Friend and Foe release.

Podcasts

Jehane Noujaim – an amazing proposed idea for bridging cultural gaps through a day of shared cinema around the globe.

TalkCrunch – I’ve listened to a bunch of TalkCrunch interviews and they’re good. Arrington presses guests for information to the point of it being uncomfortable but he does get a lot of answers. The Zimbra one was very interesting.

Venture Voice – the interview with the DoubleClick and Shopwiki CEO was solid.

Grid7 – not to toot our own horn here but we’ve had some good guests on the Grid7 podcast lately. I really enjoyed talking with Adam of Inkling Markets. We should have two very interesting guests coming on soon… stay tuned for that.

So Close

Lastly, I placed 2nd in the last Ideawarz tournament on Cambrian House. I should be happy with that standing given that there were 50 entrants but I’m bummed about the idea that won. It was essentially a rehash of the CH concept itself and though it’s a noble cause that I support, it’s not nearly as interesting (or feasible) as the AdSqueeze concept. I’m realizing more and more that the ideas that consistently do well on there are something like “Solve world hunger via crowdsourcing.” They propose vague, honorable goals but no realistic means to achieve them; tacking on the crowdsourcing adjective almost invariably secures you a slot in the top three. I’m concerned about the future of CH and that they’re encountering the same fatal flaw that killed Grid7 labs: people who are paid solely in equity who are not truly on the hook to deliver in the end will fail to do so. I feel like they’re getting spun out on their engine/processes instead of ensuring they produce a few successes. I do have a recommendation for them on what they need to change at this point and I’ll write that up soon. I know they’ve had some cuts lately and are down to around 25 people – I genuinely like this company though and I really want to see the co-op concept made to work. They basically need to incorporate the concept of microfinance into their model to infuse real cash into the system (however small) and get the accountability hook of real money changing hands to work for each project. Make it a place where anyone with disposable income can go to back risky ideas that can be tested quickly with minute amounts of cash.

Anyways, that’s the haps on the craps and bring you up to speed on what’s been happening here this summer. We’re hiring for a QA position, a contract graphic designer position and a Ruby on Rails rockstar for JumpBox. Contact me if you fit the bill or know anyone who does.

Jul 24

JumpBox 1.0 is now shipping!

Entrepreneur, JumpBox 4 Comments »

Almost one year to the day since we founded our company I’m proud to announce the availability of the JumpBox 1.0 platform and our library of open source server applications. We conducted an extensive beta program over the last eight months during which we iterated and refined the product based on real customer feedback. Thirty thousand downloads later we’ve delivered a promising first step towards our grand vision of simplifying the delivery and management of server software.

If you haven’t already downloaded one and tried it out, you can get any of nine open source server applications and have it running in less than a minute. And you can use it indefinitely at no charge if you don’t mind having our navigation at the top. This library is growing each week so if there’s something you’d like to see in there, let us know.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the beta, the hundreds of OSS developers that contributed to the projects in the library and to all our our friends, family and investors who have provided the capital and encouragement that has enabled us to manifest the JumpBox vision into reality. We’re up in Portland, Oregon right now at the O’reilly Open Source Conference. Given our goal of making Open Source accessible to the masses, there’s no other place in the world we’d rather be right now to make this long-awaited announcement.

-sean