Kevin’s Blog

From the Zen of Python:

There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

From Python itself:

Python 2.6 (trunk:66714:66715M, Oct  1 2008, 18:36:04) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5370)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

In the console, evaluating arrays:

29> [83,117,114,112,114,105,115,001].
[83,117,114,112,114,105,115,1]

30> [83,117,114,112,114,105,115,101].
"Surprise"

When I tried to install Erlang through Macports,

sudo port install erlang

I got this error:

Error: The following dependencies failed to build: tk tcl Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

To fix it, I needed to move aside the iPhone SDK include files during the installation.

sudo mv /usr/local/include /usr/local/include.bak; sudo port install erlang; sudo mv /usr/local/include.bak /usr/local/include

Jack Po, an experienced entrepreneur and local friend of mine, just posted some tools startups might find useful. While I agree with most of what he has to say, some healthy horizon-broadening is in order.

I’m new to the startup scene, but I’ve always been a tech guy. Here are my tools:

Website Registration: 1and1 has free private registration that you can toggle on or off. $7 is the base fee for a .com.

Website Hosting: Engine Yard (for rails), SliceHost (for custom stuff), Media Temple (for shared hosting), Google App Engine (easily scalable, but has had hiccups…)

DNS Hosting: I stick with whoever hosts my site. I’ve never had any problems.

Email, Calendar, Wiki, Internal Messaging: Google Apps

Actual Website: Ruby, Java, or Plain old HTML/CSS/jQuery

Phone: Skype, Grand Central (but GC keeps deleting my old messages… boo!), iPhone

Conference Calls: Skype - easy and free.

Surveys, Spreadsheets and Documents: Google Docs - The coolest part of this suite is the real-time collaboration. Plus, there’s a form-filler mode for the spreadsheet app that you can use to conduct surveys.

Newsletters: Google Groups (for continuous conversations) or Gmail email aliases with BCC (for periodicals).

Project Management: Lighthouse, Github, Google Code, Sourceforge, or just plain old face-time. I’m actually itching to build a way more intuitive project management system. But for now, I can live with these. (I used to use Basecamp, but it can be abused too easily…)

Website statistics: Google Analytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Google Sitemaps

Code Tools: Linux Shell, TextMate, Eclipse

Computers: Apple Macs.

Presentations: Apple Keynote

Graphics: Adobe Photoshop CS3, Omnigraffle

Dear Pivitol, Rewrite Twitter in Erlang. That would be awesome.