Been There Developer Selected

I have selected a winning bidder for the location aware application I'm calling Been There. It was a tough decision as there were lots of good bids and developers. It was also interesting to be the customer for once!

About "Us"

Who's "Us", Precious?

I have been in the technology business for a long time and I have seen a lot of "businesses" come and go. The unique and wonderful thing about the early days of the Web, and to some extent it still applies, is that you could just "hang out a shingle" (that is, a Web site), and be as competitive as the next guy. In theory at least.

The idea that the Web "leveled the playing field" was sort of a valid one, though a guy selling computers from his garage was decidedly not on the same playing field as Dell, HP, or Gateway at the time. I say sort of because the playing field was not actually leveled, it's just that everyone had the perception of business equality on the Web. And what was this perception based upon?

Ignorance.

Someone could create a Web site with the appearance of a full-blown clothing store. Of course, a brick and mortar store is assumed to exist, but this is not necessarily so. To this day, Web site visitors have no way of knowing at a glance if a random site belongs to an establish company or is just one guy in a basement.

This ignorance has engendered a verbal fiction, especially with one-man development shops that I find really annoying. About "Us".

To "compete" and "level the playing field", small development shops (and other business types) try to look big, and in doing so, have created some sort of business schizophrenia.

I Yam what I Yam

I am a firm believer in being who you are. It is disingenuous to represent yourself as something that you're not, whether it's in business or in personal life. I recently updated my Web site and though my wife is a big part of "our" business, and I do work with a number of sub-contractors, I decided to continue with the "I" instead of the "web".

Additionally, there advantages to "being small". I have worked in companies much larger than mine and the ability to determine direction and in some cases make simple decisions is greatly hindered by the size of the company.

Anyone interested in more on the topic should great Chapter 3 of Getting Real, starting with "Less Mass". (Getting Real has been required reading for my staff for a couple of years now.)

Have a Blank PHP Page?

So you're coding a PHP page, you switch to your browser and hit refresh, and you get -- nothin'. No error message, blank page, and depending upon your error settings, you may not see anything in the logs. You have display_errors turned on, so what's going on?

If you're using PHP 5.x, it may be a combination of two  things:

1. You have white space somewhere.
2. Output buffering is set to 4096 by default.

What's happening is that some sort of error has occurred in your code (or you have whitespace in an include before a header call) but the error output is being buffered by the output_buffering setting new to php.ini in 5.x and the error is being hidden.

If you have logging turned on, you would still see there error there, but this can otherwise be misleading.

Vim and Spell Check

I often need to check my spelling when marking up websites or coding for website output. Thankfully, my text editor of choice has a nifty spell check feature. The key is

:set spell

You can add this to your vimrc or just type it in command mode. And I guess if you wanted to be really fancy, you could enable spell-check per file type, but I went the vimrc route. Also, when using gvim, you can enable or disable spell check from the Tools > Spelling Menu. This menu also gives some hints for using the spell checker.

After enabling spell check, you'll notice blue and red underlines under certain words; blue is apparently for grammar syntax (such as failing to capitalize a word) and red is for spelling errors.

• ]s and [s goes to next or previous error respectively.
• When the cursor is over a word, use z= for suggestions.
• :spellrepall repeats a correction.

As usual, there are lots more features to explore. Check out vim help or go to the vimdoc site:

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/spell.html

Been There

After much deliberation, my wife and I have decided to pursue the creation of a location aware iPhone application called "Been There". It will be something like a geographic discussion board where users can take photos, add notes and share locations with contacts from the address book.

As I am extremely busy with other projects and not yet well-versed in Objective-C, we will be outsourcing the job. Although I have been on guru.com as a freelancer for some time, I have also decided to try out elance.com to solicit the bids.

iPhone Here We Come

We have been looking at the various possibilities for shrink-wrapped software development and have decided that iPhone development is where it's at. We've come up with a list of more than 50 app ideas. Where to start?

Paradigm Shift

After some deliberation, I've decided to take the business in a different direction. Custom development work has been good to me and for the time being that's what I will be doing. But I'm going to start spending more time on shrink-wrapped software.There are lots of reasons for this:

• I started programming in 1993 with QuickBasic and some desktop software for testing audio devices. This represents a return, of sorts, to my roots. Or whatever.
• The custom development business has become very competitive, especially with cheap, foreign labor. So much so that I've stopped bidding using sites like guru.com and elance.com.
• Shrink-wrapped software is no less competitive but offers advantages that custom development can't touch. For example, build once and sell many times represents more work up front but potentially more revenue for less work in the long term.

I am totally pumped about this change and am looking forward to building my first applications.