The last few months I’ve been working on various projects, but I haven’t been blogging about them, mostly because I usually only post about either something amusing I found on the Interwebs or because whatever programming problems I’ve just solved merit some attention and I couldn’t readily find a solution for.

This blog has grown from being just a personal blog to one where lately quite a lot of the posts concern programming issues, interspersed with only some personal posts.

Currently I’m following quite a few entrepreneurs out there, and some of these blogs by entrepreneurs talk about start-ups and in the next blog post about a technical issue they had to deal with or solve. I quite like that combination. I think it interesting enough that I will start to blog about my quest to launch a start-up, and how I arrived at that idea.

So why I am looking to set up a start-up ?

Currently I’m working full-time as an Online Sales Manager, but more and more the technical side of things is being done by other people in other departments, less and less by me. Being somebody who loves IT and all the things around it, that leaves me with a serious technical itch to scratch. As pressure at work is sometimes heavy, I’ve started programming again during the evenings as a stress-release.  I figure I might ‘do’ something with this programming. Also, this answers my need to do ‘useful’ stuff.

In a large organization a lot of what you do are meetings, meetings, meetings to decide what to do. Then you make decisions which are challenged by committees. Finally after days or weeks or months of wrangling a compromise is reached. And then finally you or someone else can ‘do’ the necessary work. It’s not exactly instant coffee, if you know what I mean. A start-up of one means that I can focus on what I want and do something just about immediately (ahem. We’ll see).

So I’m thinking about setting up a start-up where I can scratch that programming itch and (perhaps) make some pocket money doing that.

I’ve done some soul-searching…

The questions I’ve been asking myself these last 6 months have been various :

• What do I want to achieve ?
• What do I really want to do ?
• Just how far do I want to go with this ?
• Do I really want or need a startup ?
• What sort of startup ?
• And what are my business ideas ?
• Do I want to sell something ?
• What exactly ?
• How much time am I willing to spend on this in time and money ?
• And so on…

In the end, I’ve made a few decisions and come to a conclusion.

Decision: I want do this as an independent.

I’m going to set myself up as an independent “on the side”. Even if I fail, if I don’t sell anything or things don’t work out, I want to know what it is to be your own boss, even in a limited way. At least I will have tried, and who knows, I might make make something worthwhile out of it, learn from the experience. I hope to set up something small that can grow over the years.

Decision: Work with the technical strengths I have or can readily acquire.

I have to be realistic. I’ve made a few websites over the past few years, for me or for friends of mine, but I’ve realised that I’m not a real websitedesigner and probably never will be one. I’m no big Photoshop designer that can create a beautiful design from scratch and cut up the psd in elements and then code them in html. I love the user experience of a well-designed site, but have no huge creativity when it comes to designing one myself beyond making it functional and error-free.

I’m more interested in the back-end of the web systems, how things work. Sure, it gives me satisfaction to spruce up a website with JavaScript (JQuery-ui rulez because it’s so easy to make a nice site with it), putting up the layout and such, but I get an even bigger kick out of setting up a back-end database and writing the functions that allow you to search it. Making it work, puzzling out the different ways you can access content. Interfacing it with other content.

A combination of HTML, JQuery, Flex and Python, all of which I know to varying degrees allows me to do both the front-end and the back-end of a website in such a way that the result looks reasonably competent.

• HTML and JQuery for the front-end
• Flex for the display of tables, graphs and complex user interface parts
• Python for database connectivity and back-end functions that the front-end parts call.

Web hosting providers that provide Python are currently not that much in evidence, but there are more and more out there. I myself use WebFaction, which I can heartily recommend for their quick answers, nice admin interface and reasonable prices.

That is the base functionality, how to get things done. But that is only a means to an end.

Decision: How much time do I want to invest  in it ?

I’m working a full-time job. Do I want to go all-out, quit my job, or do I want to do this part time ? And am I sure that I can control how much time I invest in it ?

After weighing pro’s and contras I’ve decided to do this low-key but long-term. I still want to see my family, not be off to meet some client every evening. I want to build this up over the years.

My main goal, after all, is to scratch my programming itch and make what I create ‘useful’ to other people. So no website design, no consultancy (at least not at first), no excel sheet programming. No individual programming stuff for one particular client (exceptions may happen). I am gonna make things more than one person / company can use. Probably sell them as a service or downloadable program.

And as an entrepreneur I respect told me recently: to keep your costs low, make it yourself. Own it. Don’t sell stuff someone else made if you can create it yourself.

He also told me another golden rule: if you want to do this you  full-time you must sell something people want to buy. This seems to be evident, but it’s not. In fact, I’m not sure that I’m going to be doing that. One more reason to start up on the side, testing the waters so to speak.

Decision: What am I going to sell ?

After deciding on limiting my time used for it, I have narrowed the choices down. So I’m selling software or services via a little webshop. What sort of software service ? I’ve decided I’m going to sell tools, tools that I myself think I need. After all, if I can think of uses for those tools, perhaps other can use them as well ? The first one is a social media tool, to keep track of stuff on Twitter. There are already several tools out, but I am not out to corner the market, I out to learn stuff and see if what I make is useful to other people.

Conclusion: I’m doing this. This year.

I’m somebody who needs time to adjust to new stuff. I take my time researching, sometimes too much so. It’s time to start doing.

I’ll update on this in the coming months with how it goes…

Just a pointer to a great blog post about

• things you know
• things you know you don’t know
• things you don’t know you know.

Trust me, go and read the blog post, it’s worth it.

Stephen Fry on (and against) the institution that calls itself the Catholich Church.

The Intelligence² Debate – Stephen Fry (Unedited)

I just noticed that this is my 400th blog post – I started blogging using Wordpress on Januari 17, 2005 – more than 5 years ago ! Somewhere on the site there’s a link to an earlier blog of mine using Bloxsom, but I quickly switched over to Wordpress.

Wordpress has been – for me – the ideal Content Publishing Management (CMS) system.

400 posts means about 6 blog posts per month on average, something which surprised me – I actually thought it was less.

My first post was about the birthday of Tom, it’s fitting to put a picture of the family as it is now.

A picture of the Boschmans Family end of 2009.

Onwards to another 400 blog posts or another 5 years, whichever comes first !

Wow. I just saw the advert for a new type of remote controlled helicopter called the Parrot AR.Drone, and I experienced instant want-it syndrome. It’s controlled via your iPhone, it’s not out yet, somewhere in 2010 but from what you see in the demo it is amazing !

It is helicopter on steriods, typically geek stuff, and it looks damn cool.

I’ve just discovered a really bothersome bug using Excel 2008 for Mac (I’m using the current latest version 12.2.3 of Excel 2008 for Mac). My date columns keep on insisting on using the US format of month-days-year, even when the mac time setting is set to Brussels, Belgium. There does not seem to be a way to fix the setting in Excel, and similar date format problems appear on forums already since Excel 2004.

The workaround I found was to select the date format 01-Mar-2009, in other words show the month as a word instead of as a number. This way I’m sure that the date I’m typing in is correct. But really this is annoying me immensely.

Another workaround (haven’t tried it yet) so that Excel uses the underlying Mac date format is to NOT preselect CELLs and format them as DATES – just type the date in a normal cell using slashes and Excel will then convert the values to the correct international date as set by the mac… I’ll try that next time.

WHY hasn’t this been resolved yet !? What’s so hard about doing this the right way ? I know the answer ofcourse – it’s a big company and everyone there has to jump through 15 hoops simultaneously while hopping on one leg and signing delivery forms with a pen that only works 1 in 3 times

For those few regular readers out there, they have probably noticed that I no longer post regularly about Adobe Flex.

Please be assured that this is not out of the picture ! Rather, I wanted to learn Flex enough to get by in it. It’s been *very* interesting, but also very hard sometimes to wrap my head around Actionscript and MXML. Now that I know a bit about what I can do with Flex, I’ve started again with Python and more specifically with CherryPy.

CherryPy is a very easy-to-use web framework that you can use to set up your own webserver in a flash. It provides a basic syntax for setting up the webservice, then scurries out of the way, letting you ‘get on with it’, whatever that may be.

Currently I’m setting up a local Webserver (using CherryPy) and this is where most of my time has gone to.

Once the python application on there has been created (and most of it has) I then will head back to Flex and it’s usages as a reporting tool – I’ll be trying to use PyAMF as the glue between python functions and Flex datagrids.

Anyways, more on that later…

This is soooo cool.

Creating an AIR badge for an Adobe AIR application is a bit of a hassle, but the following 2 Wordpress plugins really do take all the work out of it. Any post where you want to add an Air badge, you’re done in 3 minutes.

You’ll need either one of the following plugins:

- The Original plugin, made by Peter Elst, which is easy to use
- The Updated plugin with built-in click tracking (requires a bit more work)

I decided to use the original plugin, and you need to do just 3 things to use it.

1. install the plugin (in your admin menu, just go to the plugin section and use the “search plugins” button to search for “air badge”
2. upload your .air file to the server (if you want to use the wordpress “Add Media” uploader, you might also need to install an additional plugin called “PJW mime-config” and add .air to the list.
3. create your badge by writing the following magic words between the words ‘airbadge’ : application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg

You’re done ! Admire your work (and that of the guy who made it possible, Peter Elst)!

I’ve changed webhosting providers recently, moving to WebFaction because I have plans to develop some applications. The fact that on my original webhosting provider (which is very reliable) I only had 50 MEGABYTES where I now have 10 GIGABYTES for about 10 euros more (plus access to the Python scripting language, plus unlimited domains, plus emails, plus databases, etc) sorta clinched the deal for me.

The WebFaction control panel takes a little bit of time to get used to, but once you take your time to work with it a bit, you realize how flexible you can be in your setup. Domains are your basic dns domains. Each domain can have multiple websites (sub-websites). Each website can have multiple applications. Each application can be used in one or more websites.

Reminder to self : when installing wordpress on Webfaction, in order for it to send mail you need to install the “Configure SMTP” plugin, otherwise your notifications will not work.