Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Towards Seed Tuition, Not Seed Investment for Startups
Back in college, I asked a friend why – even though they didn’t like the professor – they didn’t drop their painting class. Their reply – it gave them a space and a time to focus on painting, and their disagreements with the professor helped them better articulate the goals of the work. Excelerate Labs …
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4 Startup Principles from Dave Winer
First off: “Just do it — develop the products, and sell them and evolve them, and compete.” – Dave Winer People come back to places that send them away. Choose the best people to compete with. Make products for geniuses. Only steal from the best, and consider theft of your ideas the most sincere form …
My Proposal for an Open-Source Community News Platform
I wrote this up earlier this year and thought – maybe you know of a similar project that could get this idea off the drawing board…. This community news platform is designed to collect and disseminate information in the public interest for communities too small to be effectively served by a traditional daily news source …
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Rails’ Page Caching with Multiple Formats in respond_to
One of the apps I’m working on was using Rails’ caches_page to speed up performance and reduce server load. It worked great until we added new formats via within the respond_to block. If there wasn’t a format specified in the request – the caches would get all messed up. Well sometimes. Making it a difficult …
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iPhone App Development Step 1: Hit a Brick Wall
This morning, I had an idea for a iPhone app. After drawing up a couple of sketches on paper – I dove into the internets to look for existing code, sample projects, or at least some tutorials that might get me started. While I did find an extremely simple sample project that did something similar …
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Garrick’s Web Technology History
Earlier this week – a message came through the web font mailing list referencing VRML. A painfully slow, barely usable, 3d modeling-for-the-web technology that I experimented with VRML during my time with Jeremy and da5d. And I hadn’t heard of since. Shortly after my adventures in VRML, CSS 2.0 supported custom web fonts as we …
IgniteMPLS: QWERTY in 2010? WTF.
If you’re not able to attend tonight’s IgniteMpls event, or just want a preview of my 5 minute talk…. QWERTY History Why QWERTY was Invented QWERTY @ Wikipedia Christopher Lanthan Scholes: Wikipedia, Find a Grave Antique Typewriters’ Flickr Stream Alternative Keyboards Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Colemak Fitaly Opti GKOS Two Stick Frogpad Maltron
How to Make Safari Render Pre-GZipped Web Fonts
After too many sleepless nights, I’ve finally got Safari to render pre-gzipped fonts. All the fonts in Kernest are pre-compressed on the server (in addition to saving a little bandwidth, it also saves a little disk space and a couple hairs of server performance). I started with this post by Darren Rush on how to …
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IgniteMpls: Setting QWERTY Ablaze
On Thursday March 4th – I’ll be transforming my The iPhone, iPad, and the End of QWERTY post into a 5-minute presentation at the 2nd IgniteMpls event. Should be great fun. See you there. Now, which keyboard layout to create the presentation in.