To give a little background on how I understand the state of the School of Informatics, IU Bloomington, and the State of Indiana, there is a significant brain drain. The State of Indiana can’t keep the talent it produces from their state universities that found first-of-their-kind schools. Hello from California by way of Illinois.

Funding Ideas

A competition that funds business plans is ultimately funding ideas. The timeline of the competition is purely academic and verges on the pace of corporate. Submit in November, select by February, and present in April.

It’s open to seniors and graduate students meaning if you didn’t already secure a job offer by mid-November, which you should in such a hot tech market, feel free to throw an idea out there that appeals to Indiana based investors (hint: faster assembly line). If you still don’t have a real job offer or couldn’t build a prototype to get funding, you could still make a presentation by February. After six weeks of deliberating over PowerPoint slides, you, you and your partner, or you and your team will win at least $100,000.

“As an Indiana University graduate and local software entrepreneur, I am thrilled to have been involved in the formation of BEST. I am optimistic that pairing talented student entrepreneurs with seed capital and business mentorship will lead to entrepreneurial success”

- ExactTarget CEO and BEST investor, Scott Dorsey

You’ve proven you’re a talented student entrepreneur after a few rounds of presentations spread over six months. Now, CEOs from all over Indiana will drop what they are doing to mentor you to bring your idea to life. Your seed capital should give you at least a year (maybe two if you’re lean) to build it.

Build It

Now imagine it’s the beginning of your second semester of your junior year, and you’re scheduling classes for next Fall. (That’s how it felt for me.) An upperclassman didn’t tip you off that your internship from the summer before junior year could be used as your capstone (thanks Tyler) so you’re blocking out half of your schedule for one course where YOU BUILD SOMETHING.

For the next 6–8 months between homework, Little 500, and a summer internship, you can formulate and iterate over half a dozen serious ideas before showing up for your first capstone session where you form a team to build something. You and your team then have two semesters of student loans (plus endless credit card offers) to build a business. Student loans (and credit card interest) are way cheaper than venture capital funding, especially if you’re a “talented student entrepreneur.”

Better Yet

In all seriousness if you think you’ve got a good to great chance at this BEST competition, drop out and come to Silicon Valley. There’s a valuation bubble. Port your PowerPoint slides to HTML/CSS/JS and talk loudly at University Ave. coffee shops, and odds are you’ll have $100k before everyone else has finished submitting their business plans on Nov. 15.

Shamelessly, the company I build products for needs more help. If you just need someone to talk with about building ideas, I’m open to that, too.

Weaknesses

What concerns me most about this business plan competition is the lack of involvement by two key players in the Indiana technology scene as I see it. Gazelle TechVentures and Scott Jones used to play a substantial role in driving technology innovation and hi-tech job growth in Indiana with the support of Mitch Daniels. Jones and President McRobbie have a long history. I was present for their first press release over four years ago. If this was a sound plan for job growth and technology innovation, Scott Jones would be involved.

SproutBox has been investing in solid, vetted business plans for years in Bloomington. Why aren’t they involved? They even host a technology conference that boasts the benefits of starting a technology company in Indiana!

It frustrates and saddens me that this is what is announced the day before the SOIC Career Fair. I’m still proud to tell people I have a degree in Informatics from Indiana University even though it matters less every day. Throwing money at problems like this rarely works, especially in technology.

Students, don’t plan it– build it.

For those that don’t know, public key auto allows you to connect without entering a password. The server has my public key and when I try to connect, my private key on my laptop grants me authentication. To generate your public and private keys run:

max@macbookpro:~$ ssh-keygen

If you create a passphrase (and you should), you’ll have to enter that when your private key is being requested by the server you are SSHing to.

Next, you’ll need to install your public key on the server. Mac OS X does not have ssh-copy-id so you can use scp:

max@macbookpro:~$scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@godaddy:.ssh/authorized_keys

Now, you should be able to SSH to your GoDaddy account without having to enter your password. You can infinitely more users by appending their public key to the authorized_keys file on the server. In my situation, I just wanted to add my friend Andy so I had him copy his id_rsa.pub to a shared Dropbox folder. Then, I used cat to append his to the authorized_keys:

max@macbookpro:~$ cat ~/Dropbox/Shared/Andy/id_rsa_andy.pub | ssh user@godaddy “cat » ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”

Doing a quick more .ssh/authorized_keys showed both of our info (look for our email addresses). I should note that using scp again would overwrite the authorized_keys file so my info would be overwritten with Andy’s instead of the intended appending which cat does. Now we can both SSH to my GoDaddy account without me having to give him my password.

Appended Public Keys

1. Install Pre-Requisites

You’ll need Ruby 1.8.7, RubyGems, typhoeus gem, and json gem before we start. I have Xcode installed so Ruby was already there for me. To check if you already have Ruby, open Terminal in /Applications/Utilities and run:

ruby –v

If that returns ‘ruby 1.8.7′ or higher, you’re in business. If not, you’re probably best off following these directions to get Ruby and RubyGems ready to go. To download RubyGems, run this in Terminal:

curl –O http://files.rubyforge.vm.bytemark.co.uk/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz

I ran that in ~/Development where I also have some other dev stuff like Android SDK and Eclipse. Extract (tar xzvf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz) and then run:

cd rubygems-1.3.5

sudo ruby setup.rb

sudo gem update –system

You don’t have to update, but I did just to be current. So now you have Ruby and RubyGems. Next you’ll need the rest of the gems which is easy:

sudo gem install typhoeus

sudo gem install json

2. Preparing for GitHub Clone

What you’ll be cloning from GitHub is a mini site that houses all of your Brightkite data, so I made sure I knew where I wanted to keep it permanently to avoid moving it around. I keep other sites in ~/Sites that’s where I headed to clone the git repository. If you need help getting Git installed and ready, follow the excellent directions provided by GitHub. When you’ve arrived at your preferred directory run:

git clone https:/github.com/HiroProt/brightkite-archiver.git

This will create a directory called ‘brightkite-archiver’ and download the files you’ll need.

3. Archiving

This step comes right out of the README under ‘Usage’. Edit bk_backup.rb in your favorite text editor. I chose nano since I was already in Terminal. Fill in your username and password about 20 lines down. Save (ctrl+o then ctrl+x in nano) and then run:

ruby bk_backup.rb

“Wait, wait, wait ”

4. Look what you did!

Now open ‘archive_browser.html’ in Safari or Firefox to see what you’ve accomplished! All of your check-ins, photos, locations, comments, and even avatars should be there ready to browse. Congratulations!

Thank you Martin for putting this together! This is actually the first time I can remember pulling from GitHub and making something out of it. On top of that, it was my first experience with Ruby. I’m in love! Hopefully this little guide will help others take a tweet that says something is on GitHub to having something useful on their machine.

Preparation

Before starting, I backed up all my data to another PC on our network. Then, I removed the drive that held the OS from the H340 (it was conveniently labeled) and put it in an extra SATA to USB external enclosure I had. I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Server and burned it to a CD.

Installing Ubuntu

I connected the external enclosure with my H340 drive to my MacBook Pro and quickly formatted it with DiskUtility to Mac OS Journaled. Looking back, that probably wasn’t necessary. Then, I restarted my MBP and booted from the Ubuntu Server CD by holding ‘c’. I chose to install it to my external drive (and not my MBP). The configuration is easy but takes a little longer than normal since it’s reading from the CD and writing through the USB port.

When it came time to install the GRUB bootloader, I wasn’t sure what address to type in so I chose ‘Go Back’ which brought me to the Install menu screen that allowed me to open a shell. In the limited shell, I was able to to run ‘fdisk –l’ which listed all the hard drives available and gave the path. My external enclosure’s path was /dev/sdb (and my MBP’s hard drive was /dev/sda which made sense).

Make sure to install OpenSSH Server or you won’t be able to SSH into your server at the end!

Tricky Part

After the install finished successfully, my MBP rebooted as normal, and I saw in Disk Utility that my external had a Linux hard drive partitioning that wasn’t mountable by OS X. Success! I slapped it into my Acer case and thought I was off and running. But then I couldn’t ping the box… or SSH into it…

Luckily, I came across this forum posting stating that I needed to delete a line in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:00:00:00:00:00", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

I restarted my MBP and booted from the Ubuntu Server CD again, this time choosing to restore a system. I chose my Ubuntu install on my external (something like /dev/ubuntu because I kept it generic) and a root shell was launched. I used my standby command line editor nano to open the 70-persistent-net.rules file and removed both lines that started with SUBSYSTEM==“net”. Write to output, exit, and reboot.

Result

I put my external drive back in my Acer again and noticed the network LED was blinking this time around. Sure enough I was able to ping the box and SSH in! Now I’m running Ubuntu Server instead of Windows Home Server. I’ll have a lot more flexibility on what I can run and will be able to manage it all via Terminal instead of some taskbar program in a Vista VM or on our other Windows 7 box. Once I get RAID setup, I’ll feel a lot more confident about my data. Relying on WHS homemade duplication was a ticking time bomb. I’ll also get to brush up on my sysadmin skills which is what I’m most excited about!

Google Maps has a great Street View feature that shows you what you would see if you were standing in the middle of a street. IMDB lists filming locations for movies and TV shows. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could match up the filming location to a street view of that location? You could expand the idea further by matching a frame in the movie to a Street View. (I’m not sure if using one frame of a movie or TV show is fair use or would violate their copyright)

Screenshot from The Dark Knight courtesy Warner Brothers (please don’t sue me)

Google Street View from Van Buren and Canal in Chicago

Kind of neat, right?

If it is legal to use the frame, you could create Flickr groups for each movie and keep the captured frames there. Flickr also has a great API that you could use to fetch these photos to display in your mashup app.

Expanding this further you could create trips on Gowalla for people to complete in real life. The City of Chicago is already doing this with Foursquare to promote tourism. I picked Gowalla because they actually have a trips feature unlike Foursquare.

I think people would get a kick out of seeing how these real life places are transformed for the silver screen. The audience for the site would be very focused so it would be easy to run ads for anything movie or TV related (think of how much Netflix advertises online).

So there’s a quick mashup idea. Take it or leave it. Love it and develop it. I think it would be a lot of fun. Good luck!

First, I guess you can’t know what “a more serious development environment” is until a less serious one is defined. I think anyone first starting out in web development gets a text editor (maybe the system default like Notepad or TextEdit), a simple FTP client (maybe one built into your browser like FileZilla), and that’s about all you need to really get off the ground. For some, that simple setup is all they need. For others, they need something more serious that mimics how an actual development team would work.

I’ll start by pointing out I’m using a Macbook Pro with OS X 10.6 so a lot of command line and traditionally *nix tools are already built in. Any tools I considered had to be able to run on a Mac.

I decided on the timeless classic of Apache (web server), MySQL (database server), and PHP (scripting language) for the backbone of my setup. There’s a great free tool called MAMP (Mac — Apache — MySQL — PHP) that allows you to install those services with just a few mouse clicks. It also includes some great tools like phpMyAdmin, DynDNS, and Postfix. In the future I might consider playing with nginx and PostGreSQL just for the experience.

I’ve gotten into the habit of paying for software lately especially if it’s really useful and well designed. MAMP Pro is one of the many tools I actually paid for because of its advanced features. It has been well worth it the investment.

I settled on PHP because of its default inclusion in the MAMP stack. I’d like to learn Ruby or Python or something just as cool in the future. Developing with PHP will allow me to use an MVC framework. I chose Zend Framework simply because it’s what I’ve had the most exposure to in the past. Again, I know there are others out there like CakePHP and CodeIgniter that I might explore in the future.

With MAMP and Zend picked out, I was ready to develop but wanted a way to also collaborate. In the past, instant messaging and email passed as version control. Not any more! I’m not sure if SVN (subversion) is included by default with Mac or if it got added when I installed some development tools in the past, but either way when I went to terminal and typed ‘svn help’ — it was there. Subversion is only useful if you have a server and luckily DreamHost offers one with their basic hosting package and has a great wiki setup with instructions. We were up and running in a matter of minutes.

(Note: I use GoDaddy hosting for my site but the new project site is using DreamHost. Debates could go on for days on picking the right hosting provider. One of my new requirements is offering some sort of version control system out of the box.)

Once we were setup, I tried using Versions which is a Mac Subversion Client. It’s beautiful! But it’s also an app you have to pay for after the 21 day trial. I don’t think I’ll be purchasing it, even though it’s super well designed, because the last piece of software I want to mention already has version control built into it.

Coda is “one window web development for Mac OS X” and by far the best piece of software I’ve ever bought. It includes a fantastic text editor, file transfer, svn, css, terminal, books, and more I haven’t even discovered (plugins!?). I would highly recommend buying this if you are serious about development. In the past I’ve used TextWrangler, which is a great free product, and I know some people swear by TextMate, but for me Coda is god. Like I said, it includes a great svn feature that makes Versions rather useless to me (and not worth the price tag). It also includes a great file transfer feature that makes Panic’s other great tool Transmit, even with all of its amazing features, again rather useless to me.

The only other ‘tool’ to list is Terminal but even that’s built into Coda!

What Prompted The Upgrades

I’ve actually had most of these tools for the past year. Most of my exposure and experience with them was from my time at SproutBox. I still feel like I owe them a debt of gratitude.  Work has been the inspiration for my renewed passion in development. For the past 8 weeks I’ve been reteaching myself object oriented programming (not that I knew much to begin with). I’ve also been getting more projects off the ground starting with GeoLorean. There’s lots more in the pipeline so watch out!

What tools and software do you use for development? Is there something I overlooked? Maybe something you’d like more detail on? Let me know in the comments.

Before I start, I’m sorry to any experienced designers and developers who have read these dozens and dozens of times before. Sadly, the laymen still continually make these mistakes so every couple months beginner bloggers like me have to reinforce these issues.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been hunting for freelance jobs in the Chicago area on Craigslist. I’ve slowly learned that this is the worst place to look for work. There’s a bonus freebie. After going through a couple hundred listings, I’ve noticed the same reoccurring trends that have started to make me cringe and not even bother replying. If you have or are thinking about making a job posting on Craigslist or any other service, please avoid listing any of the following.

“I need someone who can do EVERYTHING!!!”

As much as I hate to admit it, no one can design you a logo, design and code you a website, incorporate some e-commerce, make it #1 in every search engine, and also be a systems administrator who is an expert in Flash and Final Cut Pro and is a Social Media Ninja with strong graphic design skills. They did start design firms and ad agencies for a reason. I find it perfectly acceptable to seek someone who can do frontend work as well as backend work, but there are limitations.

“I want it fast and cheap.”

Fine, but you’ve already picked your two. This kind of thinking is so old and common there’s even a Wikipedia entry on the classic “Project Triangle”. In other words you have three options:

• Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
• Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
• Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time.

If you need to think about this outside of web design, think about what happens when you build a house in a day with just cardboard. Cheap, right?

“I’d like a sample of your work to compare against someone else before I hire you.”

TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE! I’m happy to show you my portfolio and even projects that are nearing their completion that haven’t made it to my portfolio. Wait, you want me to “enhance a photo” or give you all of my ideas before I start? Well if that’s the case why did I spend all that time revising my resume and putting together my portfolio in the first place? Ah, you want it cheap, fast, and good. Doesn’t work like that (see above).

You don’t hire someone for a job, see how they do, and then decide whether or not to pay them. In reality your hiring thought process should be more along the lines of, “hey this person has done quality work in the past and I can see that. I expect them to do the same, if not better, work for me,”

Time Expectations

It’s a fact of life that deadlines need to be met. But! If you think you’re going to post something on Craigslist and get it done in a day or a week, then it’ll probably take a week or month, respectively. (Unless you don’t require high quality, see above)

What’s even worse than putting a designer or developer under the gun, is “knowing” how long it will take them to complete a project. The posts usually read, “I’m a programmer so I know how long it takes to design” or vice versa. Newsflash: your math savvy applicant is going to adjust their hourly rate to accommodate the amount of hours you think it’ll take to “get the job done”.

Job vs. Internship vs. Volunteer Position

The economy sucks. Fine. I can’t afford someone who is experienced. Fine. I want someone to work for me for free. Not fine. Seriously, it’s illegal and insulting. I could go on and on with phrases people use to say, “I don’t have any money to pay you now, but there will be TONS of future work”, but I think my favorite from today is:

Please don’t respond if you aren’t willing to start on internship basis, we’d be offering $ now if we could.(link)

First, there are such things as paid internships. (I’ve had a few) Second, if you’re starting a business why would depend on complete strangers to help you succeed? Friends, family, and fools. Ok, there are a lot of fools on Craigslist.

Bottom line, don’t call something a “job” or say that you’re “hiring” if there isn’t any compensation. Let people come to you if they want to work for free, don’t go out phishing for them. Internships are meant to be valuable experiences so individuals can go on and perform at a higher level at their next positions, not for young college and high school kids to be taken advantage of. If you aren’t offering a cup of coffee or a couple bucks an hour, then you’re just offering a volunteer position.

Every designer and developer understands that not everyone understands how much time and effort goes into their work so for every layman out there — please don’t underestimate us! Our work is valuable, specialized, and, for some, a livelihood. Thank you for not making yourselves sound like oblivious morons in your job postings!