siminoff:

jasoncalacanis:

Oh heck yes! Fraiche yogurt rocks (Taken with Instagram at Fraiche Yogurt)

Best yogurt anywhere. If you are ever in Palo Alto you have to grab some Fraiche

david-noel:

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If someone is determined to be a match, that person would have to be willing to undergo an outpatient procedure in which marrow is extracted from bones in the back by a special needle. It’s not a fun procedure, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

That’s why, starting now, we are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent between the ages of 18 to 60 to take a test to see if you’re a match. 

You can register online for your test, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th, for a special party we are throwing to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Read this, forward this to relevant people and help this guy out. Amit’s one of the nicest fellows I’ve ever had the chance to meet. 

I’ve been using the excellent pow zero-config rack server for running my rails and sinatra apps on my development machine.

There are a number of ways to get pow installed and managed. You can use the options described at the bottom of the pow website, or you could homebrew: brew install pow.

For some reason, both of these approaches have been problematic for me in the past, so I’ve been looking for a better alternative.

My favorite approach is now to use the powder gem.

I like to keep utilities like this in my rvm global gemset so that they are available regardless of what application’s gemset I’m using. Before installing the gem, run:

rvm use 1.9.2@global

Next, install powder with:

gem install powder

Now, install pow with the powder binary:

powder install

Pow should now be installed and running. You can check status with:

powder status

Now let’s get our app set up with powder

cd /path/to/awesome/app
powder link
powder open

Great, our application is now being served up by pow.

Powder has a number of other useful features. You can see all of the options with powder help:

powder help
Tasks:
powder applog       # Tails in current app
powder config       # Shows current pow configuration
powder down         # Disable pow
powder help [TASK]  # Describe available tasks or one specific task
powder install      # Installs pow
powder link         # Link a pow
powder list         # List current pows
powder log          # Tails the Pow log
powder open         # Open a pow in the browser
powder remove       # Remove a pow
powder restart      # Restart current pow
powder status       # Shows current pow status
powder uninstall    # Uninstalls pow
powder up           # Enable pow
powder version      # Shows the version

startupquote:

Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.

- Dave McClure

So true…

I’ve been planning on getting this blog moving for ages.  As a developer, I feel an innate need to design the look and feel of my own blog.  I know this can be done with Tumblr templates, but I have to version control it outside of Tumblr and copy/paste it in, so it’s always felt fairly hackish to me.

All of my code is currently managed on Github.  They have a great feature called Github Pages.  It uses a ruby gem called Jekyll to take dynamic content and generate a static site.

I’ll be documenting the process on this blog as I go, and in the spirit of open source, the source code will be available here.

You can take a look at this feature yourself at Github Pages.

Great article about Wordnik’s experience with MongoDB over the last month.  We’ve been using MongoDB at PhoneTag for over a year now as well and our experiences have been similarly awesome.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that my Macbook Air has been heating up much hotter than normal, and the battery has been draining more quickly.  Today I set out to find the cause.

I launched activity monitor and noticed that Chrome was always at the top of the list, consuming at least 10% of my CPU even with just a single tab idling on google.com.

My first thought was that I was running on the latest beta, so I downgraded to the official version.  No change there.

Next I decided to check my extensions.  I disabled all extensions and, sure enough, CPU usage dropped to a measly 0.4% when idle.

I started enabling them one by one and found that the Google Mail Checker Plus extension was the culprit.  The official Google Mail Checker extension is a much better option, albeit somewhat limited in features.

So, if you find that Chrome is using more resources than it should, try disabling all extensions and enabling them one at a time to identify the bad apples.

Google recently announced that it was opening it’s Wave product up to everyone. One point that went largely unnoticed is that it is now also available in Google Apps for Domains.

This is fantastic news for us. Until now my team and I have been using separate gmail addresses (eg. mdillon.mycompany@gmail.com) instead of our work addresses (mdillon@mycompany.com) to keep our work Wave accounts separate from our personal Wave accounts. This also means that I need to use a separate browser to be logged into my work Wave account at the same time as my personal Wave and GMail accounts.

Waveboard solves that second problem for me.  It is a standalone Mac application that allows me to be logged in to my work wave account, and keeps it separate from my browser.

Now that Wave has been been released for Google Apps, my first problem is solved as well.  

Now, what if I want to use my Google Apps Wave account in Waveboard?  When Waveboard is launched, it defaults to the personal GMail login screen.  Unfortunately you cannot log in to your Google Apps Wave account from this screen.

The fix is simple, yet somewhat annoying.  For now, simply follow these steps:

1)  Click the ‘File’ menu, and then choose ‘Open Location’ (or alternately use the cmd+L keyboard shortcut)

2)  In the textbox, enter ‘http://wave.google.com/a/mycompany.com’ and click ‘open’

You will be taken to the Wave login screen for your Google Apps account.

I would guess that Waveboard will add this as an option sooner rather than later, but for now this gets me by.  Enjoy! 

Setting up at MongoSF

dillons:

Taco Friday!! mmmmmm