Paulitex ][

I’ve been referencing this video for a month and finally...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:09:00 -0700

I’ve been referencing this video for a month and finally found it.

There’s something incredibly uplifting in the idea that tenacity trumps all. See also Paul Graham’s What Startups Are Really Like point 5, “Persistence Is the Key”

Photo

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:24:00 -0800

From http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Startups+pitch+their+vi...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:45:46 -0800

From http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Startups+pitch+their+visions+Demo/5889120/story.html

Interview on Lining Things Up

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:14:58 -0800

Interview on Lining Things Up:

Chad, who was a student in one of our courses, asked me to be on his show recently and talk about startups, GrowLab, and Vancouver. I thought I bombed it right away after, but it actually turned out pretty good. :)

This was so much fun, thanks so much to everyone who came and...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:25:11 -0800

This was so much fun, thanks so much to everyone who came and listened.

Neat Scala null -> option idiom

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:53:00 -0800

Working with Java APIs in Scala? Things potentially being null when you wish they were None?

I had this problem working with servlets… request.getQueryString returns null if there is no query string in the url (as opposed to an empty string) and without explicating checking for nulls (a good 3-4 lines of clutter), the code throws an unhelpful null pointer exception. Turns out Option(value) does exactly the type of conversion I want: a Some[return type] or None if it’s null.

so checking for null conditional (4-5 lines) becomes a single line:

val queryString = Option(request.getQueryString).getOrElse(throw new NotLoggedInException)

nice.

Capitalizing on a General Education

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:08:02 -0700

Capitalizing on a General Education:

Great article on the divide between generalist / non-technical degrees being studied by most University students and the economic/job prospects of their graduates.

But no fear, you army of BAs who wax eloquent (I am one of you). Keep your eye on Matygo. We are here to help. Get the concrete skills you need to get on the track to positions where you can actually exercise the abstract and holistic thing your big brains have been trained to do.

Jobs on organization core values and what marketing is really...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:01:03 -0700

Jobs on organization core values and what marketing is really about. I actually saw this video a long time ago and have been wanting to find it many times since. It surfaced in the wake of the news so i’m logging it here.

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones” narrated by Steve...

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:30:54 -0700

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones” narrated by Steve Jobs himself. Never aired. By far the most touching of all Steve tributes I’ve seen tonight - fair warning.

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet..."

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:45:02 -0700

“

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

”

- RIP Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

Photo

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:56:13 -0700

The Matygo Blog: Network Effects (or, how to make it big on the internet)

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:02:00 -0700

The Matygo Blog: Network Effects (or, how to make it big on the internet):

Wrote this for the matygo blog, though it’s really a personal position.

matygo:

A network effect: when the value derived from a system increases with the number of people that use it.

I’ve been slightly obsessed with the idea of network effects lately, but for good reason: Every major internet success has been created by leveraging network effects: from email to Airbnb. A…

2 shell tricks

Fri, 27 May 2011 11:47:00 -0700

1) Empty file of any size (useful for testing things, e.g. uploads of various sizes):

Did some googling a came up with using ‘dd’… it’s long, hard to remember, and a bit hard to read. For example, if you want a junk ~50mb file:

$ dd if=/dev/random of=./fifty.junk bs=1024 count=50000

that says ‘in blocks of 1024 bytes (1kb, the Block Size) read 50,000 blocks from /dev/random (the In File) and write them to ./fifty.junk’ (the Out File). It works, but a bit unruly. I just wanted to say ‘make a 50mb file.’ So as I was about to write a script to wrap dd named ‘mkfile’ and discovered this:

$ mkfile 50m fifty.junk

Perfect. Size suffixes make sense (b,k,m,g) and very easy to remember. It isn’t installed by default on my Linux (Ubuntu) but it’s on my Mac, so I’d guess it’s in BSD as well.

2) Bash Math

bc is a simple calculator (Bash Calculator I assume). You can pipe stuff into it.

e.g. $ echo ‘(20 * 45) / 7’ | bc

will print 128

you could do it with ruby too (or a myriad of other scripting languages), e.g.

$ ruby -e ‘puts (20 * 45) / 7’

will also print 128.

That’s all too much typing. So I wrapped bc in a script called ‘calc’. Now I can just go

$ calc 20*45/7

and also have 128 printed. Handy. (If anyone knows of an existing just-as-simple solution like mkfile was, please share).

Here it is, copy it to a file called ‘calc’ (no file extension) somewhere in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and make it executable (chmod +x calc)

#!/bin/sh

join=""

for arg in $@; do join=”$join $arg”;done

echo `echo $join | bc`

Enjoy!

Year 292M is the next Y2K

Wed, 04 May 2011 23:51:00 -0700

In pursuit of what we can safely use as the infinite future on date comparisons:

scala> val t3 = new Timestamp(Long.MaxValue)


t3: java.sql.Timestamp = 292278994-08-16 23:12:55.807

Yup - that’s year two hundred ninety two million and a lot.

by comparison here’s today.

scala> val t1 = new Timestamp(System.currentTimeMillis)


t1: java.sql.Timestamp = 2011-05-04 22:58:11.658

So sometime during August 16th, year 292,278,994, longs will no longer fit the current date and everyone still stuck on JVM 1.6 will be facing yet another Y2K style crisis. Good to know?

(I feel like there must be a joke in here somewhere… I’m open to suggestions :) )

OO fail - isn't that what param types are for?

Wed, 04 May 2011 22:54:54 -0700

Potential runtime error of exactly the type the compiler is supposed to catch.

(I know *why* in Java it has to take a Date and can’t specify a Timestamp object, but that’s a language (and potentially library) design error. I wonder how/if I could solve this in Scala….)

from: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/sql/Timestamp.html

intcompareTo(Date o)
Compares this Timestamp object to the given Date, which must be a Timestamp object.

The Matygo Blog: Office v 2.0 (now with tracked lighting)

Mon, 02 May 2011 18:51:34 -0700

The Matygo Blog: Office v 2.0 (now with tracked lighting):

farhanpatel:

matygo:

Well it’s been exactly a year since we moved in to the dominion building. It was a wild ride, we built a lot of cool stuff in that office, played a bit of starcraft, all in all had a great time.

You know what they say, all good things…

To make room for our interns who will be joining us…

I’ll be working here for the next 4 months. It should be a very interesting 4 months thats for sure. Working with Scala promises to be interesting.

Can’t wait to get started with our team this summer :)

Keeping it real in the dtes

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 13:42:17 -0800

Keeping it real in the dtes

history meme

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:49:00 -0700

Haha great idea alex. This is like a programmer’s version of those stupid ‘what are your favourite <blahs>” forwards. Here’s mine, post yours!


Pauls-IcinTosh:Darkhorse paulrl$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnk1,1 | head -n 20
143 hg
141 cd
79 ls
26 rake
14 ack
13 touch
11 pwd
10 java
 7 ssh
 5 sudo
 5 sc-server
 4 which
 4 script/console
 4 mate
 4 bin/cassandra
 3 sc-build
 3 clear
 2 mv
 2 mkdir
 2 irb

mrtoto:

things I use:

quicksilver:~ $ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnk1,1 | head -n 20 
    244 hg
     48 cd
     35 nmap
     34 ls
     15 sudo
     14 vim
     13 pwd
      9 man
      9 clear
      8 rm
      7 find
      6 cp
      5 ssh
      5 ps
      4 python
      4 less
      4 history
      3 whois
      3 kill
      2 wget

Rent a White Guy (in Beijing)

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:56:41 -0700

Rent a White Guy (in Beijing):

If all else fails….

This really brings me back. Never did this myself but knew a couple people who did.

God I love China.

Just finished my last exam of my degree. (and I think I killed it). Just wanted to let it be known...

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:41:05 -0700

Just finished my last exam of my degree. (and I think I killed it). Just wanted to let it be known :-D