Archive for March, 2007

Customer Service Surprises

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

There is so much good stuff about how to run a business on the net, that it’s impractical to point out each and every resource here. But sometimes, you find something really inspiring, you feel obliged to do so. Here’s a blog post about “customer service surprises” in the Motto magazine (looks like I’m gonna like this mag, and I hope we get it in  India soon) that caught my eye. Great work, Motto - keep up the good work! :)

Site upgraded, expect some new things!

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Hi all, after a rather long pause, I basically upgraded the entire vps that runs viamentis.com, right from the kernel up. The Bytemark folks are incredibly helpful as usual, and if you need some hands-on Linux hosting, they’re the guys to go to.

As a result, the site feels considerably faster, and am pleased that it went without a hitch, unlike my previous upgrade attempts (which is why I was putting it off for a while, as I didn’t have the time to spend on it). Finally, I had to install SBCL for staging the Lisp webapp that I am working on, so I had to basically upgrade the whole shebang. Am I glad I did :)

Yes, expect some action in the future, as I will be staging the Alpha release on this machine and will be asking some of you to take a look at the app. This is still a few weeks away, and it’s a very basic app, but I think it does the job, and I will finally be able to see how good Lisp is for webapps, for myself. Stay tuned!

R.I.P, John Backus

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

John W. Backus, inventor of the Fortran language, dies. He is party responsible for the Backus-Naur Form, or what we normally call BNF. He also pushed the state of the art in functional programming, which I partly work on these days.  Thanks Mr. Backus, we owe you.

If you are going to write tests, start early.

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

I am writing some tests retro-actively for a project that I am working on. Trust me, it’s no fun. I kept postponing writing them as I thought “I’m just prototyping this, it’s too early to write tests”. Trust me, that’s a mistake. Even if you’re noodling around with some code for a future project, start writing tests. It will take a lot of motivation to do it later.