Moving innovations

Finally our first service is in public beta. Even though we only exist officially since January 1st, we have been working behind the scenes for a few months already. All that work has now resulted in our first service: Wat vinden wij over (sorry, the service is in Dutch only). It’s a social bookmarking meets light-weight blogging service that allows people in the Netherlands to do what they do best: quickly give an opinion about something.

The current service is a public version where notes can be seen by anyone, but we think that the service makes a lot of sense also in a situation where you want to share information specifically with some others, e.g others in your own company or project. A forthcoming release of the service will address these issues, providing one example of how we how we want to help business capitalize on web2.0 issues (in dutch).

If you speak Dutch then please feel free to browse around on Wat vinden wij over and sign up. Feedback is always appreciated!

I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks. Part of that has to do with personal circumstances, and additionally we’ve been busy to get our company started. Since January 1st the three of us are sitting in the same office and the initial rush of getting things organized and settled now seems to be over. Today we even had time again for a strategic evaluation of our product roadmap and the next big things to work on. Good stuff!

Part of blogging less is also that our new product is sucking away blogging attention. As the product is progressing through the beta stages it is getting more and more useful, and I’m finding that it is much easier to jot down some of my quick thoughts there rather than writing it up as a blog entry. Hopefully other people will find it that useful as well. Tomorrow we expect to invite an additional set of beta users, and I expect that soon afterwards we will go public with the service. Let me know if you would like to be included in this batch of beta users, we still have room for some people.

Last Saturday I finally had time again to go hiking, and the weather certainly made it a treat. A nice sunny day with long shadows made for good hiking circumstances, which was evidenced by the many people that crossed my path, probably more than on any other hike so far. With a temperature of around freezing and a slight wind it was not too cold. Continuing the hike along the coast I walked from Haarlem to De Zilk through the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen. Not too many spectacular pictures as the dunes are a bit bland-looking in winter with everything a faded yellow-brownish color.

Our new company is finally taking shape. We have settled on the name winkwaves, with a preliminary web site up and running to explain who we are and what we intend to do. It’s in Dutch only for now as we have not been able to spend much time on it. Expect a completely new site to emerge somewhere in January, featuring more interactivity as well. One fun fact about the name winkwaves is that currently it gets 0 hits in Google. Writing this entry will change that, I know, but it is nice to have such a clear recognition measurement at the start of the company.

Since this week I’m also back to working just one job which is a bit of a relief as it allows me to focus fully on winkwaves instead of juggling two allegiances. For now that means working at home, but starting in the new year we’ll be moving in to some temporary office space until our new office is ready in March.

Thanks to the Captain’s universe howto it was not so difficult to create my own toolbar for Firefox. This is good news for the site I’m developing right now. Part of the design revolves around the ability to open a popup window related to the page you are viewing, and doing this with a javascript bookmarklet is more portable but also very difficult to get to work, due to all the overzealous popup blockers doing their business. With the toolbar these problems go away, and things work much more smoothly. Too bad it only works on Firefox, so there is still Safari and IE to explore.

Sorry, no links yet to the site or the toolbar, as all of this is still very much under development.

Flow is such a wonderful state to be in.

Yesterday I finally found some time to go hiking again, once more along the coast. Last time I ended my hike at Katwijk, so I continued from there this time, up to De Zilk. The weather was predicted to be nice, with mostly clear skies and some clouds. So, it rained part of the way. Nothing catastrophic though and I was prepared anyway, having taken a rain coat.

I was most impressed with the dunes between Katwijk and Noordwijk, even though this seemed to be the dullest part of the hike on paper. It’s just a stretch of dunes 500m wide and 5km long, but the nice part is that for the most part, unless you opt for the normal path on the side, there are no footpaths. You just wander into the dunes wherever you like to go. I did startle a small deer this way, which ran off right away after I passed by it. I did manage to take a picture of it as it was running away.

I finally managed to stop my fitness subscription. Certainly a good decision money-wise, as I have not been going for many months and consequently the monthly subscription was just a waste. On the up side I really helped to increase their margin. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, but this is typically one of those things that I tend to procrastinate on, no matter if I put it in my action list or not. At least the monthly payment was a regular reminder.

One of the reasons for not ending the subscription earlier is that it is clear that fitness is good for you, and stopping the subscription seems to be a bad signal to yourself. Simply not using the subscription doesn’t have that effect. You’ve got to love the complexity of the brain. Anyway, I’ve been wondering on and off during the last months about why I haven’t been going. It’s not that I don’t like to work out, as I was playing squash once or twice a week before I got into real trouble with my ACL. It’s just that a fitness workout is just so mind-numbing and dull that it could not appeal to me. Friends seem to solve that problem by going at particular times and watch TV while working out, but that doesn’t work for me either. I can’t concentrate on something that is really interesting, and all the other stuff is just some side entertainment for something that is still dull. There must be a good business plan in there somewhere if working out could be made less dull. Or perhaps I’m just a workout niche market.

Yesterday I got a nice thick envelope from NIMA in the mail, containing my official certificate for their NIMA B course. NIMA is the dutch association for marketing, and the NIMA B course is their strategic marketing course. A whole new career perspective could now open up for me, except that I already decided to start a new company where I’ll be the technical guy. Still, I enjoyed taking the course because it is always interesting to look at running a business from a different point of view, and it certainly has helped in the way I approach my current job, where I get to spend a lot of time working with marketing people as we work on innovations and strategy. If anything my SWOT making has improved quite a bit. :-)

In case you wonder, there was no wild party that you missed last night to celebrate, as I already knew that I passed some time ago as the result of the final exam came in. Hmm, in hindsight I forgot to party then as well.

Finally, a shout out to SRM for offering a very good course for this exam, one which, although at times pretty demanding, was a lot of fun to work through, applicable to my day job, and a good preparation on the exams to boot.

Just spending the last 30 or so minutes on getting a simple script to dump a mysql database, I am reminded again that consistency for the trivial things is really nice to have. Consider what the mysql man page writes about using the password option:

-p|--password[=pwd]
       Employ the specified password when connecting  to  the  database
       server.   If  a  password  is not supplied, it will be requested
       interactively.

Ok, so there is an option that can be used as -p or —password and it can take an optional password to be given on the command line. That’s what I wanted, because it’s no problem to include the password in this particular script and including it makes it possible to use the script in a batch operation. So I did something like this:

mysql -u someone -p=something database

That resulted in an access denied message. Having had more trouble with access management, in particular in combination with the mysql-administrator application, I figured this would be related and I spent a lot of time there. Eventually I did find out what the problem was, the -p option actually takes its argument differently from the --password argument. So you can either do:

mysql -u someone -psomething database

or

mysql -u someone --password=something database

Why?