Allan & Steve are the chubby founders of LessEverything. This is their blog, hear them rant, praise, give advice and talk about Just Stuff, Less Accounting, Lovd by Less, More Honey, Less Memories, Code, Business, Design, Marketing
Here's a great quote. 
People are always asking us to sign NDAs. We sign most of them. Signing them has become a necessary step to open the discussion of someone’s idea. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve signed an NDA and the idea winds up being, “I want to build a website that is just like this other one, except with better navigation.” We have a bunch of NDAs in our filing cabinet just like this. And they are worthless. This is because an NDA only covers things that are not already publicly known. If an idea is 97% stuff that is already out there, even if its out there by others, that NDA is only going to cover the 3% that is new.
The 3% coverage NDA is also unnecessary because ideas are worthless. An idea might not be worthless because it’s a bad one, although it might be bad (we’ve seen a lot of bad ones). It’s worthless because ideas in general are worthless. Anyone can have a good idea, and they do. What has value is execution. The ability to take an idea and transform it into something real, something people love, something someone will pay for. I’m not talking about having insert your most hated consulting company here take your idea and create the latest, greatest PHP based ASP.NET WS-* compatible collection of HTML and bad CSS that is only a website because some color-blind “designer” figured out how to point a DNS entry at it. I mean something that people LOVE. (People has to be more than your obviously overly kind mother.)
To illustrate the point of how worthless ideas are. Here is a list of five good ideas (how good they are obviously depends on your own perspective).
Note: I said I’d give five, but I gave six because they are so easy to come up with.
I think it’s human nature to think that ideas are valuable. I certainly get excited thinking I’ve created something precious when I have a new idea. I feel like I should guard the idea and not tell anyone until I have developed it. What I should do is tell my circle. I should have a circle of people who are smart and we all talk ideas through. Cultivate an idea until we either give it away or execute.
Tomorrows post will talk about how you can choose a consulting company without using an NDA.
In the past few years I have successfully surrounded myself with nerds and geeks. These people are awesome and most of them I probably would have stuffed into their own lockers in high school. (Although, to be fair many of them would not have fit in their lockers.) For those of you just entering the realm of the geek you are probably more than a little shy. You might be wondering how to start a conversation with these interesting highly intelligent tech folks. Here's a few things all nerds have in common.
You probably have heard by now that there are some security issues with all the versions of Ruby and that you should upgrade your Ruby to get the fixes. The holes mainly involve buffer overruns and a particularly nasty vulnerability that only affects non-Unix based operating system. These effect Ruby versions 1.8.5, 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9.0. (Since I only use 1.8.6, that’s all I’ll talk about here.) The solution is to update 1.8.6 to version 1.8.6-230. Unfortunately p230 breaks rails and almost everything else running ruby. So what is a boy to do? Well Hong Li has come to the rescue. He has back ported the changes to p111 so the rest of us can apply his patch and secure our 1.8.6 machines at p111. The fix involves downloading Ruby 1.8.6-111, patching the source, compiling ruby and restarting your apps.
> wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
> tar zxvf ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz
> cd ruby-1.8.6-p111
> wget http://blog.phusion.nl/assets/r8ee-security-patch-20080623.txt
> patch -i r8ee-security-patch-20080623.txt
> ./configure
> make
> sudo make install
index 410cc6f..c8278b7 100644
|--- a/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
|+++ b/lib/webrick/httpservlet/filehandler.rb
--------------------------
File to patch:
/bin/sh: ./miniruby: No such file or directory
Thanks to Wilson Bilkovich for pointing me in the direction of Hong Li’s patch.
Okay so I don't hate them but they are getting on my nerves. They report the news and the reporting sucks. It's gotten boring. So boring they make me want to shut my computer off and go play with my son. What a waste of time. What happened to opinions, real opinions? I am tired of reading about the latest Facebook feature or how LinkedIn is worth a billion dollars. If you're going to write a review on an app, give me something besides a "nice" summary. Rip the app apart, why does it suck, where are the cool parts? I am sick of hearing who got VC funded and who is in the dead pool. VC money means crap to me, I don't care how much they swindled you into taking. Bloggers, I want to be inspired by your thoughts, I want to be energized by your opinions. I want to be angered if I disagree with you, I want to feel something other than that you wasted my time.
The latest episode of Rubyology is up and ready to be downloaded. This week, Chris and I interviewed Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Engine Yard.
Here's my issue: How can a web consulting company NOT have their own products.
We, LessEverything, just launched LessFriends.com. It's yet another useless Twitter tool that people will forget about in about a week. We launched the site on a whim, I am sure we'll see great riches from it. :) Its a great tool for those people who are trying to be prom queen of twitter.
In the past two months I have been out of the “office” for at least four weeks, touring the world, attending and speaking at conferences, and I took a holiday. I am still behind. This week I was desperate for a break and an increase of productivity. So I did something that I didn’t even do while on holiday with my family….I took a vacation from Twitter and Instant Messaging. When I woke up Tuesday morning I closed Twitterific and iChat and any IRC channels that are not part of the communication chain of my company and declared bankruptcy on my email inbox.
The result is I feel great! I have no idea what I missed. Did anyone get married? Any kids born? Any cool new almost Web 2.5 site released? I have no idea. And I am fine with that. I hope I did not slight anyone who might have sent me any directs or @stevenbristol’s. If so I am sorry. In an effort to retain my increased level of productivity, I am going to be making some deep cuts regarding who I follow. I am going to try to keep my follow list to 10 folks plus a few more who only tweet rarely.
I feel almost as free as I felt when I quit smoking ten years ago. I am hoping to keep this feeling going.
I recommend trying a little Twitter break to anyone feeling a bit squeezed.