sent2null space

In the previous post I detailed the roller coaster ride of implementing e commerce enablement to the consumer site that I'll be launching in a few weeks. The service plan options that I provide allow users to manage their own private conference room in the basic "free" configuration, additional plans that require payments allow a user to manage or create multiple rooms. The problem I ran into revolved around how to provide the users the ability to create new rooms in a limited fashion. Originally I thought that the uniqueness of the problem constrained the generality of the solution so that all I needed to do was upgrade the User class to add a new "create room token" which was simply an integer indicating the number of available requests to create a room that the associated user could invoke. This solution however broke the symmetry of the permissions system in that it granted a right that the permissions granted outside of the ken of the permissions system st...

Launching a start up is an amazing experience, in the last few months I've written code in many different areas to facilitate the successful and smooth launch to come. As mentioned in previous posts the last step of getting my commercial site up and running involved coding the consumer web site and providing users the ability to browse and select or upgrade to any of the service plan options that my site makes available. In this post , I discussed some of the ways that I was able to efficiently handle problems that consumer sites enabling e commerce run into. Basically, a trade off must be made does the site manage every aspect of the service plans that users purchase by keeping subscriptions? If so where is the subscription information managed? In a proprietary method on the consumer site or is that function off loaded (at cost) to a third party payment processor? In the ideal I would design and build my own payment processing API, get a merchant account for handling credit card...

In a recent article at Silicon Alley Insider , a wall street analyst came to the conclusion that Verizon building out a fiber network is a bad idea. I wrote a fast post listing several reasons why the analysis is at best way off the mark. I extract it here but link to the post below. The original article at SAI. The short term (what i call idiot analysis) of a stock always makes me chuckle. If a 15 year wait for return on investment is too long for you Moffet that is you but some investors actually b u y on those horizons. I had to blink at the screen when I read the ending of the article indicating that Moffet thinks the best thing to do now is nothing??? huh??? Like the horse cart manufacturers did as the car came on the scene eh? Where are they now? No, only someone on LSD would do nothing, by acting NOW Verizon does several things. a) They get first mover in marketing the converged service that will be cheaper for them and us, more powerful in terms of bandwidth provisioning, more ...

As a self trained illustrator and lover of art and art history, I still keep a tab on the works of animators, designers and artists immersed in the digital media that are available to us these days. Recently on a recent surfscapade of the net I discovered the following animation. DAD at work Needless to say the crude art work work perfectly with the animations frenetic style and makes a hilarious little clip. I was so impressed by the title character (which just happens to match an acronym of a very important program in my framework) that I created an illustration of DAD that I plan to put on a T-shirt. I also created versions of DAD with the suit case and hat. Of course only those that have seen this video will recognize the character , sort of an inside joke then to the people that enjoy this type of work. If you are interested in getting a copy of the graphic file (.psd format) to print your own shirt I can send it to you, just send me an email and I'll send it over. I am using ...

It has been a while since I posted anything, have had a few personal problems that are getting in the way of my normal output and I am very deep into implementing the payment solutions for the site launch (still) I switched to use Amazon payment services instead of Paypal which turned out to be a nightmare, as it stands Amazon integration was only a fraction as formidable and I am almost done with the testing. I'll have more to say about the differences between Paypal and Amazon in a subsequent post. Until then, enjoy the following: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/viewer.php?id=386773&key=BdVqZyXzBtOzdxbStiN2YyNzMxOGY4QjE4MTIrNV9xMGI5ODE7QjE0QlYxOzJWNTJiMDI0ZjArVnFfOTYxbTk5NjUyMDg4OQ%3D%3D A modern classic.

Something I've noticed in this latest internet 2.0 bubble is the confusing and sometimes unbelievable choices that are made by start up founders with regards to naming their businesses. Gone are the days when picking a name is done to hint or indicate the service or product that is sold by the business. Today we get absolutely Machiavellian contrivances that combine various words such as "plurk" or we get other astounding things like "phweet" , your guess is as good as mine as to how that is supposed to be pronounced and god help the person trying to recall the site name at a url field for entry. Here is a list of some of my favorites (sarcasm). gorb renku plurk phweet rifttrax twerq scribd shifd ipartee kwiqq blufr librivox just to name a few. It is as if the creators of these sites are more interested in releasing their pretty little thing than in actually making money from the products or services hawked at the site. I mean seriously , "phweet" ???...

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/facebook-tries-to-fight-off-international-clones-good-luck-with-that The ready reproducibility of not only Facebooks "look and feel" but also its functionality is a direct consequence of the light weight technology that the site is built on. Any technologist knows that Facebook is a really well organized web site, the "well organized" part coming from using the built in hierarchical management of xml to collate messages from to users, to add entries to feeds to transform those xml files into rendered display elements for the site, it is quite a basic xml based publishing platform and nothing more. As such building a similar platform for anyone that knows a bit of xml , xsl and html and jsp is trivial. The "apps" that Facebook loves touting are more managed scripts cleverly categorized but nothing about that is patentable and is easily replicated so Facebook must resort to lawsuits to attempt to maintain its distinct advan...