I recently read an article titled ‘How much is a startup?’. The question arose about there not being a forumla to price ‘talent’, yet the data clearly shows a trend. Head on over to see the data.

Possible market for a startup?

With the all the break-ins and phishing going on , I’ve been investigating if there is a possible market for teaching #security #basics. Starting out by trying to #validate using the classic lean #startup methodology, but no such luck thus far. Personally I’m not sure how far I want to go with this. Why?

Passion

Paul Graham talks a lot about start-up ‘passion’, which makes sense. Like any new business you have to be committed to the ins and outs, and I have to admit I don’t exactly have a passion for teaching security. I also believe passion brews innovation. So you see, this experiment may have already failed before it even got started!

Lessons Learned (already!?)

Stop chasing markets, and go with something your passionate about.

If you read my posts you may find that I’m a Sublime Text 2 fan. Well today, I just found out about Package Control and Soda. Where have I been!??!?!? These two packages are simply awesome. Working on a big monitor the tabs are somewhat outside my LCD display’s optimal angle, thus the black tabs seem to blend in with the frame. Installing Soda cured this issue, and I did it with Package Control!

Bootstrap

A few days ago Twitter released a new utility called Bootstrap. Its a collection of LESS scripts that creates a very useful CSS file that helps you do flash messages, tables, buttons, and even hover overs. The only issue I had with Bootstrap was I had started using LessFramework4 (a css grid) and Bootstrap comes with a form of 960grid.

Fork

This led me to fork Bootstrap and create a more easy drop-in ‘addition’ to my project (and probably yours as well). It allows you to use 80% of the cool stuff Bootstrap does well. I call it Bootstrap-thin (or thin bootstrap, depending how you see it).

Node.JS & ExpressJS

At the moment I’m working with Node.JS and Express. Having my newly compiled thin bootstrap scripts ready to go posed a problem as I was also using express-messages by TJ. The flash messages this produces doesn’t exactly make using Bootstrap worth while. Indeed the other half of the solution involved making sure my flash messages were formatted in a way which the Bootstrap CSS could properly style. The result was another git repo, express-messages-bootstrap. I also went ahead and published to NPM so you could quite easily do `npm install express-messages-bootstrap` and you’ll be good to go wherever you use express-messages.

Hopefully you’ll find these repositories useful, now go have some fun!

I just commited a #CoffeeScript version of the #Backbone.JS Todos example. Complete with annotated source of both plain and CoffeeScript versions.

See it here and at the #GitHub repo.

Just forked and commited some Cake tests and benchmarks for NodeJS’s V8 typed arrays module written by Tom Robinson. Originally there was a bug preventing the use of Float32Array but he’s since fixed it.

With the free time on my hands I’ve been translating Artur Adib’s Backbone hello world examples to  CoffeeScript and have been trying to help Maurice Machado with getting the CoffeeKup Issues and Pull requests out of the way.

With the Backbone hello world stuff, I’ve seen a few translations but they only go so far as doing one or two code examples. Some of them are also not taking advantage of some unique CoffeeScript features which make working with Backbone even easier.

Oh yeah, and a bunch of other stuff but I’ll save that for another post!