johnbarrytech.com

Long/short:
I have a Very Good Idea that nobody’s doing yet.
I ran it by someone in the problem domain, and he agrees not only is it a Very Good Idea, but yes, he hasn’t heard of anyone doing it.

We begin fleshing out an application to fill said need.

We’re at the point where we’ve only invested time and energy into the design phase, but that’s about to change. Brainstorm lists have transformed into user stories, and user stories are starting to have documents that look an awful lot like functional specifications.
I’m not really into extensive requirements gathering if I don’t know the problem domain very well – I’d rather develop via tracer bullets and a few prototypes of basic functionality to make sure we’re going about it right.

The frustrating part of this idea:
I don’t know how to make any money off of it.
It’s a chicken/egg issue – if there’s a ton of users then there’s a resource for people to pay for. If there’s no users, there’s nothing worth paying for.
But in order to attract users, you have to give it away.

So, what is the right business model?

• Premium Membership, a la Monster/Dice/Ladders?
• Advertisements that pay via clicks?
• Give product away but sell support? (same chicken/egg trap applies here)
• Something brilliant I haven’t thought of?

This thought’s occurred to me – maybe the problem isn’t solved because there’s no money in solving it.

Probably not giving out enough information to get help, so here’s the nutshell:
We want to be a document harvester for certain classes of documents that relate to specific standards.
The information is already captured for other purposes; we’re trying to archive it in a format that allows querying/modification/usage of said documents.
Sort of like a data library. There’s more to it that’s specific to the problem-domain that differentiates the product, but that is the nutshell.

Like any library, if it’s three people’s book collections it doesn’t give us a lot of utility.
When it’s 5000 (and we’ve got a dewey decimal system of some sort) we start to see some power.
Hive-mind, infinite retention of knowledge. . . that sort of thing.

It almost feels crass to ask, “how do I get mine if I invent this?”
But a guy’s gotta eat.
So how do I get mine if I invent this?

(just an aside – I think this blog gets 20 visitors a month. It’s funny to query the audience when aware of its size; it makes it an act akin to prayer. “Help me, oh illustrious few who could mentor me in this strange journey!”)

I’ve installed Apache, installed ruby on rails.
Ruby on Rails works fine on the weBRICK server, but it’s not working on the apache server, just giving me a 500 Internal Server Error.
Better check the logs.
ls -ltr ~/www/myApp/log/

Lo and behold, production server’s the most recently modified!
Check its log, see stuff like:

Status: 500 Internal Server Error
Could not find table ’sessions’

This has gotten me three times using the Ubuntu Community Documentation. It’s in there, but it’s not formatted as an instruction.
Relevant text:

murb: I had to add RailsEnv development as well to get around the ‘no route found to match “/rails/info/properties” with {:method=>:get}’ warning… (can someone elaborate on why?) apparently this is because /info/properties is buggy and no longer supported: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/161924

(emphasis mine)

I added RailsEnv development to my httpd.conf, bounced apache, and everything started firing away smooth as silk.

Automatic saving functionality – make a change, it’s saved.
It’s not so bad with revision control; if the changes don’t work out the way you want them, revert and you’re done.
But what if your workflow is:

1. Open image you plan on editing
2. Make changes you want
3. Either Save As… or Save the current picture. Either way, until the edits are done you’re committed to neither choice

With the “automatic save” functionality, once (2) is done, your original is toast. To preserve originals, I’m forced to change my workflow, creating a copy before any work is done.

Save a recovery copy automatically, but let me choose Save or Save As… – I’m smarter than you because I’m actually editing the photo myself. I probably know what I want to do with it better than the computer.

I want an application for the iPhone that works like this:

Press app button, menu has two items:

1. Departure
2. Arrival

Clicking the button sends the current time/date to my server, which then adds the data into a MySQL database.

The database bit will then store/track the data, allowing me to track and graph my commute times.

Potentially useless information, but also the foundation for a winning “I should telecommute” argument that doesn’t involve me quitting the current job.

I’ll be working on the database display/graphing stuff in the coming weeks. The iPhone bits. . .  no clue. Don’t have the SDK (I think it’s a grand?) Maybe there’s something I can “repurpose”.

Probably some sort of twitter thing.