Startup Weekend 2012

Wow!  What an amazing and at the same time exhausting weekend.   Fifty four hours spent with some really great people, listening to great ideas and eating fabulous ( yet horribly unhealthy food )!  

My team, consisting of 1 designer, 1 non-technical person, and 3 developers, got off to a late start on Saturday, after second guessing our first idea and pivoting.  We ended up creating a service called Limo Nanny.   The idea of Limo Nanny was to provide a service for busy parents with hectic lifestyles to find responsible drivers to help them in pick up and drop off their children for school and other events.  I was amazed at all we were able to accomplish as team by presentation time, Sunday at 6pm.   We had a presentation, partially functioning, professional looking website ( powered by Django on the back-end ), and an iPhone App ( which unfortunately we had no time to show off in the demo ).

In the end, I think our idea was somewhat invalidated, or at least we found that it requires some more thought.  The trust barrier between parents and drivers is perhaps too large to allow a perfect stranger however well vetted by our screening process, drive your children.  So, for that and geographic reasons (one of out teammates came from Kentucky)  our team chose to disband, not continuing Limo Nanny.

What?  I spent 54 hours to build a product this weekend and came up empty handed!?!?  Why in the world would I want to go again next year, even be excited about it?

I can't say it enough.  The people and ideas were awesome, and I learned a lot.  I learned that when you have the right team and a good idea that you should go with it and get your idea moving quickly.  Momentum is key.  Get validation of the idea quickly and if it's not going to succeed, then fail fast and learn from your failure. I also saw first hand that ideas are nothing without great people behind them to execute.

I'll close this post with something that Mark Suster said in his Skype call on Saturday that really stuck with me.  He said something to the effect that it's unlikely that an idea/company formed over the course of 54 hours, with people who just met, and who went with the best idea they could come up with in that time frame are going to start a business (in that weekend) that turns into the next Facebook.  But, that's not the point of Start-Up weekend.  The point is to meet people, build something, make connections and maybe find that person or people that you mesh with that will want to help you build that next awesome idea!

Can't wait until next year!   Time for much needed rest :-)

- Eric

Improving Mobile Viewing

Inspired by my recent reading on the latest HTML5/CSS3 standards, I wanted to make this site look nicer for mobile viewers.

It turns out I didn't need to do much of anything as Blogger already does this for you. http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/06/announcing-blogger-mobile-templates.html.

That was easy, thanks Google!

Cocoaconf Columbus Wrap-up

Cocoaconf was great.  If you haven't heard of it, you should check it out.  The first ever Cocoaconf was kicked off here in Columbus last weekend.  There was a good turn out and the speakers, many of them local, were great!  The conference was two days and consisted of a a range of topics from beginner to advanced.

The first day, I spent in Chris Judd's iOS Tutorial Lab as an assistant, helping others, answering questions, etc. It went pretty well. The class received positive feedback and I thought Chris did a great job condensing so much material into a 1 day tutorial.

The second day, was much more relaxing.  I attended

• Keeping Secrets For iOS Developers - Randy Beiter
  Download iOS Explorer, plug your phone in and be scared.  Wow, there is a lot of plaintext data that you wouldn't think would be available to someone with physical access to your iOS device. They don't even need to unlock it to see these files. Randy demonstrated this to the audience, using the iPhone ( of a brave volunteer. :-) ).
  
  As a developer, if you don't take any special steps to secure a plist file, or for example, data in the NSUserDefaults, or a database such as the default SQLite data store. You can actually view and change any data that is stored there. The speaker went on to explain how to secure these resources by encrypting passwords, using the iPhone Keychain to secure access, etc., but I was surprised at the end of class to hear one of the guys sitting behind me that he just found a few passwords in plain text in a of the few apps he uses.
  



• Mac OS X For iOS Developers - Daniel Steinberg
  Daniel is a very entertaining speaker and I learned how to write a Hello World app for Lion and a little bit about Cocoa Data Binding with NSObjectControllers, Auto Layout within your xibs and he touched briefly on how to easily utilize auto save and full screen facilities built into Lion.
  



• Drawing With Core Graphics On iOS - Bill Dudney
  I'll admit, I had not heard of Bill Dudney before this conference, but he has a lot of respect in the Apple community. He's a co-author of Pragmatic Programmer’s books iPhone SDK Development and Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone.
  
  His presentation style, made it very easy to follow his examples. He walked us through recreating a stock chart graph, similar to that of the iPhone "Stocks" app, using Quartz(== CoreGraphics). I was happy to note that much of this was review, thanks to the Stanford CS193P Course ( see lecture 5 ). One thing I didn't know, however.. Colorspaces are a good thing! If you ever meet Bill Dudney, ask him about his opinion on the matter. :-) He is very adamant on the matter ( and has sound arguments to back it up. )
  

Looking forward to next year!

MS Command Line Help

MS Shell Scripting Reference, this is a reference for all built in windows commands, control stuctures, etc., with examples.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ntcmds.mspx?mfr=true

A great resource.

Teach your Grandma how to search Google with http://lmgtfy.com/

A friend of mine turned me on to this cool site that animates a google search for you.

1. Just go to http://lmgtfy.com/. 
2. Enter your search term. 
3. It'll generate a search link that you can send out.

Alternatively, you can build your own link with http://lmgtfy.com/?q=<enter+your+query+string+here>

For example : http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Fallen+cannot+get+up

Now you can show even your oldest, most technically challenged relative, how to do a Google search for what they need in a way they can follow! 

Okay, so its probably not really practical for Grandma, but it is cool!

SQL Server Translations for Oracle

I keep Googling to find out how to do the same stuff in SQL Server that I can in oracle. 

For example in oracle select nvl(foo, 'Empty Column') from fooTable; 
But in SQL server select isnull( foo, 'Empty Column' ) from fooTable; 

There're a ton of differences to be found once you try to do anything outside the vanilla select * from bar;.  I found this page that has a lot of useful translations from the Oracle side.  So if you know how to do it in Oracle, you might find the SQL Server equivelant you're looking for here.

http://www.sql-server-helper.com/faq/oracle-functions-p01.aspx

Best HEX Translator Ever!

A great online utility to translate between:

• Character 
• Hex code point 
• Decimal code point 
• Hex UTF-8 bytes 
• Octal UTF-8 bytes 
• UTF-8 bytes as Latin-1 characters 
• Hex surrogates

http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richard/utf-8.cgi