Hi all, I’ve always wanted to integrate my various blogs into a single site and now that’s finally done. The new site for this blog is here. Please check there for new posts. Thanks.

Confession: I’m an addict of James Cramer.  I’m a fan because I believe he is a man of integrity even when he’s spent a great deal of time on Wall Street where crooks are everywhere.  I’m a fan also because I  believe he tries his best to educate the public(the retail investors) about stocks and that he exposes the dark side in Wall Street professional traders.

James Cramer from TheStreet.com is a serial entrepreneur.  He started a hedge fund back in the 80’s and averaged 24% annual return after fees until he gave his fund to his partner in 2000.  In the 90’s when the term blogging didn’t even exist, he started TheStreet.com which is one of the first(if not the first) real-time blogging financial websites.  He also has a real estate business, and a health-conscious company called “Less Or Evil”.

Jim has just made a couple videos on being an entrepreneur.  The first video is about what it takes to be an entrepreneur.  In the second video, Jim talks about how he started his hedge fund business.  You can find the videos here and here.  I hope you’ll find the videos useful.

I’ve just read Starbucks Howard Schultz’s memo and my view on Starbucks’ leadership is once again reinforced. You have to be amazed by Howard’s and the company’s awareness even 20 years after founding the company(or taking over the original little Starbucks store at the Seattle Pike Place Market). Can Starbucks re-accelerate its growth? I’ll have to say yes as long as Howard is still at the helm.

I just wrote Adobe Flash is full of surprises about a week ago and today I came across OpenLaszlo. It’s a platform that’s supposed to enable “write once, run everywhere” applications. From what I understand after reading their website, OpenLaszlo is a programming environment or an SDK for writing applications. The code eventually gets compiled into Flash code so that it can run in Flash or Java. My guess is that the main target platform is Flash since Flash is ubiquitous and that OpenLaszlo seems to be targeting the desktop(ok, Java runs on the desktop too but seriously, it’s not desirable to run a Java application on the desktop when there are choices)

If history is a good indication of the future when it comes to software development battles, it’ll be an incredibly tough battle for OpenLaszlo to win over the users of Adobe’s Flash tools. No matter how great OpenLaszlo is, it’ll always be one step behind Adobe’s tools. Remember back in 1990’s when Borland tried to get people to use their Windows SDK instead of Microsoft’s Windows SDK? We know how that battle turned out. The only way for OpenLaszlo to win is probably if it makes it much easier to create Flash apps. On top of that, OpenLaszlo has to provide some value-add, something that Adobe can’t do.

It’ll be interesting to see how this battle turns out. Choices, if not too many, are good.

Finally, Steve Jobs just annouced that he wants to scrap DRM! Most consumers never believed in DRM anyway but media companies jammed it down consumers’ throats. Soon, we’ll see DRM in the graveyard!

Update: Steve Jobs’ letter is here.

Netflix customer service cofirmed with me that its movie search doesn’t allow users to find movies by release dates. It wasn’t explained to me why and I really don’t see any reasons for not making it easier for customers to find what they want to see. I can’t imagine it’s related to technical difficulties. Is it possible that it’s a business decision to deliberately prevent customers from renting a certain subset of their movies only? I’d like to know what you think of this.

btw, Netflix also doesn’t offer a search by MPAA rating (i.e. R, PG, etc) either.

Since my last post, I’ve implemented PayPal on my site. I thought I’d write about my PayPal implementation experience.

First of all, the fact that I didn’t go with Google Checkout is not because Google Checkout is worse then PayPal in terms of features, performance, fees, etc. I went with PayPal only because I had already spent a lot of time looking into PayPal and that I had a good understanding of how it works. The fact that a lot of websites already use it and it just works(cross my fingers), and that there’s existing support in Ruby on Rails made it almost a no-brainer to go with PayPal. In order for me to get a better time estimate for implementing Google Checkout, I’d have had to spend more time than the couple hours that I had already spent. That said, Google Checkout seems to have all the features that I need. Having SOAP is also nice. Google Checkout also works with AdWords and that’s another plus. It has a lot of potential and my plan is to implement Checkout sometime in 2007.

Now let’s get back to PayPal. It probably only took me a couple days to implement PayPal for my site. PayPal communicates with merchants mainly through HTTP POST’s. HTTP POST’s are used instead of SOAP calls probably because PayPal was developed back when SOAP wasn’t very popular yet. Nonetheless, the HTTP style API didn’t not cause any problems in my implementation. A merchant receives notifications of a payment by getting Instant Payment Notifications(IPN’s) and Payment Data Transfers(PDT’s). With that combo, I was able to determine payment status with no problem in my tests. Speaking of tests, PayPal provides a sandbox test environment that completely mimicks the production environment. You can create test PayPal buyer and merchant accounts and simulate all kinds of scenarios. The sandbox test environment alone probably saved me a lot of time. Additionally, PayPal has good documentation and a lively forum and you’re likely to get any questions answered quickly.

If there were one negative thing, then it would be that some bloggers have had bad experience in getting support for the production environment. I hope that is not the case when my site goes live(keep my fingers crossed)!

I did run into a small problem when I was debugging my payment code and I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Update: the result of this work is now live at UberSquare.com.

I’m currently building a website with Ruby on Rails that requires SSL to secure a few web pages such as the login page while leaving the rest of the site SSL free. It took me a few hours to figure it out and the information on this subject is somewhat sparse. I thought I’d write down the information in case someone needs it.

I’m using WEBrick for my development work because it’s quick and easy. Normally, WEBrick isn’t in ssl mode and it wasn’t obvious to me as to how to run an ssl version of it. After looking around, I found the script mentioned in this mailing list.  Simply save the script as server_ssl in the script directory of your RoR project and then:

chmod +x script/server_ssl

Be sure to change the ‘ip’ in the script.

SSL requires the use of a server certificate. The logical question is then how does one create and install a server certificate? Normally, you would purchase a certificate from a Certificate Authority or create one by using a tool like openssl(see HTTPS Configuration in the Ubuntu Server Guide). However, it seems the server_ssl script tells WEBrick to create a server certificate on-the-fly and so there is no need to create and install a certificate. One side effect is that Firefox will warn you the certificate is not authentic. Another side effect is that if you stop and restart WEBrick without restarting Firefox, Firefox will tell you the certificate has the same serial number as another certificate and will simply refuse to use the certificate. If that happens, just restart Firefox. These are inconveniences but are ok while you’re still in the development phase.

The trick to have both ssl and non-ssl webpages running on your site is to have two copies of WEBrick running, one running SSL and one running regular HTTP. Each needs to run on its respective standard port(ssl – port 443, non-ssl – port 80). So edit your server_ssl to change the port to 443. You also need to make sure there isn’t another webserver running on port 80 and so stop Apache or IIS on the box if you need to.

Now, run the WEBrick’s:

sudo ruby script/server --port=80

In another terminal, run an ssl’ed WEBrick:

sudo ruby script/server_ssl

That’s pretty much it! To make it easier to ensure certain web pages on your site use SSL, you might want to check out the excellent ssl_requirement plugin from 37Signals.

Update: the result of this work is now live at UberSquare.com.

My family just came back from a 3-week visit to Hong Kong. We spent time with friends and family and it was a lot of fun. As usual, the good times and bad times(mostly good ) in Hong Kong got me to think a lot. Before each trip, I would be bombarded with many issues from work and life in general(mostly from work). It was always very important to resolve design issues at work, bug fixes, team management and whatnot. But once I got to Hong Kong and have spent some time with friends and family in this dynamic environment, I would pretty much throw every issue I had from the states out of the window. I would also realize how inconsequential some of the issues are. Traveling to my home town, especially since it’s out of the country always gives me a bigger picture.

Coming back to the United States always takes some getting used to not only because of the jet lag, but also of the dramatic changes in the environments – going from an extremely developed and busy city to a city or a state that is less connected in so many ways(fewer human interactions, lower population density, etc). Late December and early January in the pacific northwest is always dreaded – it’s overcast and the sun goes down at 4pm and doesn’t go up unitl 8am. Aditionally, I can usually leave behind the issues and matters from the states when I’m in Hong Kong. Why this isn’t true vice versa? Is my feelings trying to tell me something? I had little options in terms of where I lived when I was employed by my previous employer. But it just dawned on me now that I’m self-employed, I have a lot more options. Should I give some serious thoughts as to where my family lives?

Have you had similar experiences? Feel free to drop me a note. Wish you all have an interesting 2007!

The announcement of Microsoft Expression Studio product and WPF /E generated a lot of buzz yesterday. The products will give designers an alternative to Adobe’s products for creating rich user interfaces for web applications easily. Designers will also be able to use the products for desktop applications but my guess is that Microsoft’s emphasis for these products will be on the web.

WPF /E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere) is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe/Macromedia’s Flash Player. I downloaded it from the release site and played with it a bit with the demos which are also available on that site. The installation was fast and smooth on IE7. However, Firefox wasn’t able to locate the plugin. All demos ran pretty smoothly and the UI was very slick and responsive, just like what you’d see in a Flash application.

I’m pretty excited by just playing with the demos. Hopefully, the plug-ins for Firefox and Safari will be available soon. I do wonder how many professional designers will switch to the Microsoft platform when they’re already very comfortable with the Adobe tools. Do you see capabilities that Expression offers that Adobe’s products don’t? If you’re a designer, I’d love to hear your opinions.