Monthly Archives: December 2007

Please sign this petition to stop Petland from opening in Austin

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sign this shit!

Say No to Petland in Austin!

Why is Petland Bad for Austin?
Over 12,000 animals are already dying at Town Lake Animal Center every year. If Petland moves into Austin, thousands of unaltered animals will be brought into the community contributing to the pet overpopulation crisis. This influx of unaltered animals will reverse all of the spay/neuter progress and efforts made over the last few years, and will create an even greater crisis and thousands of more unnecessary pet deaths in the years to come.

The arguement that Petland sells purebred animals and that people that are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy them, will take better care of them and keep them for their lifetime, simply isn’t true. The truth lies at shelters all over the country, including Town Lake Animal Center where thousands of purebreds are dumped every year. And right behind them are thousands of purebred rescue groups trying to save their lives, but there are just too many and many die at the shelter waiting to be saved. Just in the greater Austin area, we have many purebred rescue groups including;

All Texas Dachshund Rescue
Austin Aussie Rescue
Austin Boxer Rescue
Austin German Shepherd Dog Rescue
Border Collie Rescue Texas, Inc
Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club Rescue
Chako Rescue Association (Pit Bulls)
Chesapeake Bay Retriever Relief and Rescue
Cocker Spaniel Rescue of Austin
Central Texas Dachshund Rescue
DFW Pug Rescue
Fila Rescue
German Shepherd Rescue of Central Texas
German Shorthaired Pointer Rescue
Gold Ribbon Rescue (Golden Retrievers)
Great Dane Rescue of North Dallas
Greyhound Pets of America
Heart of Texas Lab Rescue
Helping Hands Basset Rescue
Hound Rescue (Beagles)
Katys Promise Rottweiler Rescue
Lil’ Paws Maltese Rescue
Lone Star Catahoula Rescue
Lone Star Shih Tzu and Lhasa Apso Rescue
Luck & Legends Saint Bernard Rescue
Nationwide Boston Terrier Rescue
Ponderosa Pomeranian Rescue Inc
Reunion Rescue (Pit Bulls)
Rottilove Rescue (Rottweilers)
Shiba Inu Rescue of Texas
Spindletop Rescue (Pit Bulls)
Texas Airedale Rescue Team
Texas Alaskan Malamute Rescue Association
Texas Great Pyrenees Rescue
Weimaraner Rescue of Texas
Westie Rescue
Grimalkin Rescue (cats)
Maine Coon Rescue (cats)
Maine Coon Rescue Alliance (cats)
Texas Siamese Rescue (cats)

Why Single out Petland?
Petland purchases their animals from Hunte Corp out of Goodman, Mo, who in turn purchase their animals from from puppy mills. The Hunte Corporation is the largest puppy dealer in the U.S., selling 90,000 puppies every year to retail pet stores. Say No to Petland and the exploitation of innocent pets!

What is a Puppy Mill?
Puppy mills are commercial breeding facilities where dogs live in horrible conditions. The entire goal of a puppy mill is to raise a cash crop, puppies. With profit as the only motivator, puppy millers keep the parents of these puppies known as the breeding stock, in horrible conditions. Most are kept in small, wire cages their entire lives, sweltering in the summer, freezing in the winter. They live in their own filth, with poor food and minimal vet care. They receive no exercise and no socialization with people or other dogs. The puppies the mills produce often have a host of health and behavior problems. Once the breeding dogs are no longer useful, they are killed.

The Hunte Corporation is a wholesaler of puppies. While the Hunte Corporation ads and website show a sparkling clean and modern facility for the puppies, what is not shown is where the puppies come from before they arrive at Hunte, the same filthy puppy mills described above. The parents of these puppies are prisoners of greed, spending their entire existences in these deplorable conditions.

We urge all Austin residents to Say No To Petland by signing this Petition and calling, faxing and emailing your City Council Members. Check out http://www.austinspetdirectory.com [sic] for more information about getting involved with stopping Petland set-up shop in Austin.

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Flickr stats!

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Stats for your account | flickr.com

I’ve used Flickr exclusively for my pics for years now even though I have my own server and can do it myself. One thing I really miss is web stats and logs to see referrers and where my images are linked from. Flickr just announced yesterday that they added stats! You have to activate it though, they don’t collect data for you by default. I just activated mine and should see some information tomorrow.

Activate your stats today!

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FBJS autocomplete/typeahead in Rails

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Facebook released FBJS a while back to allow some JavaScript in Facebook applications. It is basically a JavaScript parser that modifies the scripts to make them a little bit safer. Ray and I have been working on a new app for OnMyList and we want an text input box with autocomplete to suggest names. If you’re using Rails outside of Fb, or if you’re using IFRAME for your Fb app, then autocomplete is really easy, you basically only need to add 2 lines, one like this in the controller:

auto_complete_for :user, :name

where user is the model name and name is the field you want to autocomplete for inside the users table. And in the view, you add something like this:

< %= text_field_with_auto_complete :user, :name %>

This will generate everything you need to have an autocomplete textbox. However, this assumes that you can load the Prototype and Script.aculo.us js libraries, and if you want your app to use FBML, these libraries do not work as FBJS.

Autocomplete with FBML is a little bit more work. Facebook’s Developer Wiki has an FBJS typeahead with AJAX example, I don’t love hacking JavaScript so I just borrowed the code there to use in my view. That page shows you how to write a PHP AJAX endpoint, to make it work with Rails, I tried to make it so it would take the data returned by the auto_complete_for method, it turned out to be a bit too much JS changes for me, I’d like to leave the FBJS as close to original as possible. I also prefer writing Ruby more than JS so I ended up implementing the endpoint in the controller, it took a while to get it working, so to possibly save you some time, here’s how it looks like at the end:

def auto_complete_for_user_name
  names = User.find(:all,
    :conditions => [ 'LOWER(name) LIKE ?', params[:suggest_typed].downcase + '%'],
    :order => 'name ASC',
    :limit => 10).map { |n| n.name }
  render :text => "{fortext:#{params[:suggest_typed].to_json},results:#{names.to_json}}"
end

I tried render :json but it didn’t work, coz the typeahead JS is expecting a certain format, but render :text works just fine. Hope you find this post helpful. I will also edit that Wiki entry to include the Rails version of the handler.

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Self Edge now got Dry Bones denim

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Self Edge got a new line of stuff by Dry Bones, I photographed these products and got to try them on in person, they are really dope, my favorite was the Type III denim jacket, it is seriously next-level!

Introducing Dry Bones Japan:

There are certain Japanese Denim companies that fly under the radar and surpass all expectations for so long, we wonder why it’s taken so long for them to come into the spotlight. Dry Bones is that company, with almost 20 years of denim and garment production under their belts, they consider themselves to be from the second generation of denim companies worldwide; somewhere between the big three that started it all in America and the new group of companies in Japan producing denim.

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daily photo: Bear yawn

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Sorry I haven’t been shooting and posting daily photos, it’s mainly because it gets dark at around 4:30 now and I usually shot at around 7pm when I took a break from work, also have been busy writing another Facebook application.

I gave Bear a cashmere hoodie for Christmas, we think he looks super cute in it, so I setup proper lighting to take some pictures of him in it. 🙂 Toward the end of our 15-minute shoot (including setup time), he got bored and this was what happened:

he got tired after a while (by AndrewNg.com)

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getting D-SLR for Christmas?

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Here are some links so I can make some money, lol… I just ordered the 400D and the 50/1.8 for my folks so at least I’m putting my money where my mouth (or fingers) is… It’s a great time to pick up some Canon gears coz they lowered the prices by a little bit with instance rebates.

btw, I just found out if your rss reader does not support iframes (GReader doesn’t), you have to view this post in a browser to see these links.

The 50/1.4 is better, but IMO not over 200 bucks better. The bokeh from non-L lens look like shit to me (but I am really picky and spoiled), I was looking at some pictures from my 100/2.8 USM macro and the bokeh was really harsh. So if you’re serious about photography and you want to go with Canon, I’d go with the 40D with the 35/1.4L, and here are the links (the kit lens is semi-decent too):

If you must need a zoom, go with the 24-70/2.8L, this is the lens I use 95% of the time, because it is awesome but also because I don’t have the 35/1.4L.

But if you are going to stay with 1.6CF bodies, the new 17-55/2.8 EF-S is like the 24-70/2.8L for 1.6x CF cameras, it has IS so it’s even more useful. (Thanks Kevin for pointing this out!). After looking at its MTF graph and images on PBase (you have to click “more” a few times to find semi-decent images, but that’s true with most photo sharing sites), I’d recommend this over the more expensive 24-70/2.8L unless you absolutely want an L lens or you plan to get a 1.3CF or FF body in the future. Looks like the bokeh from the EF-S 18-55/2.8 IS is nice and soft too.

The new Nikon’s high ISO performance is very impressive from the many reviews and 1DsM3 vs D3 comparos I’ve read. If I were to get a top-of-the-line pro setup I’d probably seriously consider the D3 over the 1DsM3, esp for photojournalism-style event shoots. For studio though, the 1DsM3 is king, it almost gives you medium format type resolution. If you shoot Nikon you must get the 105VR.

and if you need a flash, go with the 580EXII coz the price difference between that and the 430EX isn’t much right now…

If you shoot Nikon you’re lucky coz IMO their flash system is better, and the SB800 is absolutely amazing (and relatively inexpensive!), not to mention the D200 and D300 got built-in slave triggering with the popup flash.

If you need remote triggering, you can’t go wrong with the PW+2, I have 2 of these for my Alien Bees and they’re great. 100% reliable, never missed a frame when used with the strobes. (I’m still having problems getting the connection right with the 580EXII sync socket though).

If you need other stuff from Amazon, please use the link at the top of my blog.

Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

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Bootstrapping ftw.

Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing:

Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, describes a startup as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful deal as figuring out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.

So it?s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don?t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed.

Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.

I should also say that for businesses that don?t have the benefit of venture capital backing, the reverse is probably true. Almost certainly non-venture backed businesses will not have the ability to get too big too fast. They will mostly fail because they have the wrong business plan and they don?t have the wherewithal to survive for the period of time it takes to figure out the correct one.

Regardless of whether you have taken venture capital or not, capital efficiency and bootstrapping are critical values. You must keep your burn rate low until you can show without a shadow of a doubt that you have a business model that works, can be operated profitably and is ready to be scaled. Then and only then should you step on the gas.