The only solution I could reliably make work was to open up Activity Monitor and kill the pow process manually.  It worked..until the next time and I would have to do it again and again.  It seemed like I was doing this many times a day.

It turned out this was a bug reported to the development team and is a confirmed issue.  The cause of the problem is determined to be the dns resolver, ndns.    A pre-release version, 0.4.0-pre is reported to resolve the issue.  Install it with the command:

curl get.pow.cx | VERSION=0.4.0-pre sh

I did this and have not had to manually restart pow once.  I’m not sure why the official release has not been updated to include the fix to this issue which seems to effect many users.

$ brew update

I then attempted to update my redis installation to the latest:

$ brew upgrade redis

I was greeted with this message:

Error: undefined local variable or method `brew_install' for main:Object

Trying several things on my own to no avail, led me to a Google search result pointing out a known issue and solution.  It appears there is an issue with a brew_upgrade.rb artifact being left behind after a brew update.  The following commands from the Homebrew wiki fix the problem:

$ cd $(brew --prefix)/Library/Contributions/examples
$ git clean -n # if this doesn't list anything that you want to keep, then
$ git clean -f # this will remove untracked files

I hope this helps someone with the same problem.

It amazes me (though it shouldn’t) how far a community of developers can take something vs. a software giant like Microsoft.  It looks like open source wins against corporate.  Sure, the results are not exactly scientific but interesting all the same.

Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn’t sustainible for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks.

I’m sure the decision must have been hard,  to leave the business he co-founded.  The posts hits home because I made a similar decision over 10 years ago.  I read this last week and I was surprised by the abruptness but his reasons are solid and understandable:

You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I’m downright religious about it. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

How many parents choose a career for personal gain and with the thought of given their children a better life?  At what cost?  Kids grow up not really knowing one or both of their parents.  Steve jobs had a book written about his life so his kids would know why he did what he did.

As David points out:

This myth neatly identifies those fit for mission: Young, without obligations, and few if any extra-curricular interests.

I was young one and I can attest to this, 100%.  It’s really easy to think that if you pour your waking hours into your startup, you will be insured of success.  More is not better…after working 80 hours per week for a long time I became burnt out and it took an eternity to recover.  I learned my lesson, work less.  Yes, I said it, work less.

It was really easy to getting into the mindset and the routine of working the crazy hours.  I knew about burnout but sometimes with stubborn people, it has to be their idea, their realization.  This is how it worked for me.  The days got harder and harder to start and the hours resulted in less actual work done.  I wasn’t putting in my best efforts but rather going through the motions and passing the time.   The products shipped but I can’t say I was particularly proud of the quality.

I sold the company I founded which forced me to reset and determine a better path.  I realized less is better and be more efficient with less hours.

Most people will look at that and say that’s not me. I don’t have 110% to give. I have a family, I have a mortgage, I have other interests. Where’s my place in the startup world if all I have to give is 60%? What can putting in part-time give?

Get out of the mindset you need to put in ungodly hours to be successful, you don’t.  I provide consulting work to clients but I put aside time for the projects I am passionate about, the products I want to see come to market.  I make more progress on these projects with small, focused efforts than I would have in that past life.

DHH works at 37Signals, the poster children for working less and enjoying your life:

The good news is much more than you think. The marginal value of the last hour put into a business idea is usually much less than the first. The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.

Steve Eichert, a fellow entrepreneur and someone who moved from the cubical to his own company has a great and timely post about doing things little by little.

No matter what I do, I’m still going to have things I need to do that will prevent me from creating. The good news for me, is I have the ability to put aside all of those things and go and create. I’m starting small, trying to pick a few features that I’ve wanted to add to one of our software products and getting them implemented this week. My goal is to continue that tradition every day by finding at least 1 small thing to add, improve, or tweak for the better.

It’s important to realize you can do the things you want to accomplish by doing them in small steps.  You will enjoy working less, leave the 80 hour weeks to those that don’t know better.

The Problem

One such issue surfaced when a client wanted to begin accepting credit cards.  As most Internet users assume, they land on a web page asking for credit card information and it’s secure, I wouldn’t enter my credit card information without seeing the friendly little lock.  Another telltale sign is seeing the https: in the browser address bar.

Many sites today make use of outside CSS and JavaScript files host on a content delivery network (CDN) somewhere on the interwebs.  This has tremendous benefit for web developers and users alike, giving applications better performance.  The problem arises when we have a secure page (https) which pulls in assets from non-secure CDNs, where requesting assets securely will fail to return successfully and ruins the user’s experience.

This application happens to be a Ruby on Rails application but that fact is irrelevant.  The scenario is likely common today; we have a secure checkout page but our site contains menus and links to pages which are not sure but just plain http.  When the users visit the site with their browser of choice they are presented with various messages or maybe none.

1. Firefox 6/7, no message..just no indication the page is using SSL.
2. Chrome, no message but a red line through the “https:” in the browser address bar.  This does not give confidence to the user, I would not put my credit card information in this page.
3. Safari, no messages and everything looks good with the exception of the missing tiny lock icon indicating a secure page.
4. Internet Explorer, well this is the least friendly of the browsers telling the user there is mixed content and prompted with how to proceed.

The problem was mainly centered-around the Yahoo YUI JavaScript and CSS assets and how they were included.  This application uses the Yahoo content delivery network (CDN) to serve the assets, which is a great way to serve the assets.

The Solution

I decided to do what every self-respected web developer does when facing a problem, Google for someone else who had the same problem and successfully solved it.  I ran into one very insightful post from Dan over at CollectiveIdea.  The post lays out a very similar problem with some good ideas for the solution.

Dan points out a URL like this:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Will cause Mixed Content warnings when included from a secure page.  Some of the suggested solutions include downloading all of the assets locally and the problem goes away.  Although this is true, we lose the benefits of using a CDN.

What works is both elegant and simple; two qualities that make my day.  Referencing your CDN-based assets this way is only a slight change:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Notice how we are referencing the GoogleAPI URL, we leave off the http: and the https:.  By using two forward slashes only the request will resolve itself and work brilliantly.

Maybe I am the last web developer to find out this tidbit of information but I wanted to document it so the next one faced with this could find the answer here.

Eric Schmidt spoke recently at Le Web where he said developers, like it or not, will target Android.  As someone who writes iOS applications, it seemed like an arrogant statement and Marco had his thoughts, which seem reasonable to me:

Android devices have been selling in large quantities for a long time. That’s not new. Yet today, compared to iOS, Android is much less profitable for developers (especially for paid apps), its users are less influential for expanding new services, and its app development is much more painful and expensive. And in the rapidly growing and increasingly influential tablet market, Android has an extremely low marketshare.

Shify Jelly creators of applications for both iOS and Android took offense to Marco statements and wrote some elegant dialog as to the contrary:

First some background. We’ve been in the iOS app store since August of 2008, which for those that are counting is only a month or so after it first launched. We’ve been on Android now for about a year. We make serious apps like Pocket Casts and Pocket Weather AU, things that take a lot of development effort and involve serious server back-ends. We’ve made enough money since then to support 2 full time staff, and 2 part time designers. Yes we’re the guys who had the run in with Amazon, the email from Steve Jobs, and we’re not millionaires.

Finally, since neither of these developers allow comments on their blog, Marco’s rebuttal to the challenge by Shifty Jelly:

If you make the first great Android Instapaper client that:

• uses the official API
• contains a significant portion of the iOS app’s features, the details of which we’d work out privately
• runs on a wide variety of Android devices and OS versions including modern smartphones, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, and whichever 10” tablet matters at the time of completion
• is priced at $2.99 or higher in the U.S. with approximately equivalent pricing elsewhere, and satisfies requirements to be sold in the Google Marketplace, Amazon Appstore, and whatever B&N uses for the Nook Tablet

I’ll call it the official Instapaper app for Android, I’ll promote it on the Instapaper site, I’ll drop the subscription requirement for its API access, you’ll answer all support email that comes from it, and we’ll split the net revenue 50/50.

As you may know, I write iOS applications but have not given Android much thought primarily for Marco’s reasons.  I like to keep an open mind and would target Android if there was money to be made in any of the apps stores.  I just don’t see it.  Certainly there are tons of Android phones flying out of the stores but are those people spending the money like the users in Apple’s App Store?  I fear not, at least not today.  If users aren’t spending their hard earned dollars on applications how can we be expected to spend our hours on developing for a platform with almost no return.

Who is making money selling their Android applications today?  Please leave a comment.

The dialog is worth the read and is food for thought.  It’s interesting how, since neither allows comments on their blogs, they are forced to trade shots in this way.