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Software

I always found it a bit ironic that I had less time to blog here as I started working full-time on a blogging startup. Well, my time spent on Skribit is starting to pay off. Today, Skribit finally goes out of what we’ve internally been considering our public beta — so it’s our official launch day. We have been laying low on the marketing and press front, except for my ramblings here, and now we are ready to tell more people about it. That being said, TechCrunch just wrote about Skribit (thanks Daniel!). This is the first step on our so-called “Customer Acquisition Plan”, as MBA as that sounds.

Skribit - Cure Writer's Block

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Last week I had the pleasure of attending NoSQL East 2009, a new conference based around the non-relational data stores that I briefly covered in this post. In short, it was a rather intimate and highly technical conference on the grand scheme of things. There were roughly 120 people in attendance for the two-day event that gathered 16 speakers who discussed, more or less, which NoSQL technology they employed at their company and how they used it. [click to continue…]

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There’s a new tech conference coming to Atlanta at the end of the month. Unlike other events I have covered and attended, this one is for those who not only develop websites but also deal with large data sets at high load and have learned the struggles of dealing with relational databases like MySQL at such scale. The underlying concept (movement rather) is called NoSQL — a (much debated) term describing the next generation of data storage technologies. [click to continue…]

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When it comes to music, I am a complete maniac. I must have some new, non-overplayed songs to get any work done. That’s why I invested in a solid studio monitor setup and that’s why one of my screens usually looks like this:

Paul Stamatiou's Music App Screen
Left to Right: Hype Machine, SweetFM, thesixtyone, iTunes, Last.fm

Add to that my propensity to store stuff in the proverbial cloud, and it’s no wonder why I’m relying more and more on music websites than actively seeking downloads to put in my iTunes (and it doesn’t help that I always have just a few MB left of space on my early-adopter SSD). I used to labor over [click to continue…]

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You have probably heard of a company called GrandCentral a few years ago. They made big news with their September 2006 beta launch of their service allowing people to use a single phone number for all of their phones. David Ulevitch of OpenDNS was the first person I knew that began using GrandCentral full-time. He had a single number that rang his office phone and mobile phone at the same time — a real convenience [click to continue…]

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I take a lot of pictures for reviews on this blog, most with a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. A good chunk of my time on larger reviews is actually spent reviewing hundreds of images, then fine-tuning the best ones in Photoshop (case in point, my upcoming car review is taking forever). I’ve been using some version of Photoshop since the Mac OS 8 days. However, I mainly used it for the same basic image manipulation techniques — cutting people out of backgrounds while I was on my high school’s yearbook staff, and lots of cropping, levels tweaks [click to continue…]

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The title of this post might be a little cryptic to those not familiar with the Apache webserver, but this post is a sort of followup to Paul Buchheit’s recent post “Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step” as well as a response to a recent Skribit suggestion. The step he’s referring to is getting your web server to utilize gzip encoding. [click to continue…]

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The world’s largest and most popular BitTorrent tracker used for finding everything from music to movies and computer applications has always had its share of high-profile legal issues. Despite snags like their 2006 server raid to incessant cease and desists from media companies, The Pirate Bay has always come out fighting, recently hitting a 25 million unique peers milestone. This time, however, the four Pirate Bay founders are headed to jail in what is being called a landmark case. [click to continue…]

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First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin

April 9, 2009

BackType is aiming to solve a long-standing problem that reared its face when blogs met new forms social media and news sites. The problem I’m referring to is comment separation anxiety. Comments have feelings too. They don’t like being separated. BackType’s Connect WordPress plugin uses their Connect API to suck in all comments related to [...]

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Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 12 (Scaling)

April 1, 2009

My last startup update discussed Skribit’s recent redesign and entrance into the GRA/TAG Business Launch competition. Since then a few things have been keeping us busy. For one, we have had more and more server issues. While Skribit doesn’t use much in the way of CPU

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Review: Boxee Media Center (or Going HD: Part 4)

March 9, 2009

When I wrote that I couldn’t live without my Vudu box, I already had a Linux HTPC hooked up to my TV and still thought Vudu rocked. Why was that? There was no easy interface for me to work with all of the media files I had on the HTPC. Using a keyboard and mouse [...]

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Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 8 (Redesign)

March 2, 2009

The last few weeks of working on Skribit have been proved to be rewarding. It’s finally gotten to a point where it’s noticeable that we are making some progress with product development. This past Friday I pushed live the new redesign of Skribit.com. A few weeks ago we hired graphic designer Justin Ruckman to pump [...]

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First Impressions: Safari 4 Beta

February 25, 2009

Those of you that have been following this blog for a while know that I have been in a cycle of switching between Firefox and Safari as my primary browser almost regularly. I’ve even gone way of Flock back in the day. However, I have always ended up coming back to Firefox. Firefox is like [...]

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Review: Iconfactory xScope

February 15, 2009

I may be rather late to the party but I recently discovered Iconfactory’s xScope last week while graphic designer Justin Ruckman was in town working on the next version of Skribit. I saw him using xScope’s Dimensions tool to painlessly measure distances between on-screen elements. I was hooked from then and started using the xScope [...]

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100 Applications and Services I Use Daily

January 29, 2009

Almost a year ago I wrote a now somewhat outdated article titled Startup 101: Tools for the Job. A suggestion on my Skribit account asked me to delve into the software I use on a regular basis, so I decided to put the two together and briefly discuss some of the tools that keep [...]

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