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Justin and Jason discuss Rob Walling’s upcoming MicroConf, what Justin has learned from his outsourcing experiment, an update on Pluggio and it’s revenue growth, why Justin uses Nozbe and how it’s made him more productive, the kickoff of the Appignite beta test and how Jason plans on conducting it, how Neville fell of the TZ bandwagon and some ideas on how to get back him back on, methods of implementing full text search in MySQL, Jason’s strategy for getting Jerry Pournelle and Elon Musk on the show, how Justin formatted his blog to work on mobile phones, Jason’s latest idea for a TV show and where Jason and Justin rank on Google.
@Justin, what are your thoughts on how Nozbe compares to something like:
http://www.smartsheet.com/
or Basecamp/Fogbugz?
Also, do you know of any of these that integrate well with tickets, bug trackers, and github?
William
@Jason have you looked at Solr and Lucene?
FILE STORAGE:
Storing the podcast audio files on amazon s3 or rackspace files is a complete no brainer. It will cost a tiny amount.
To store 100Gb and pull 30Gb in downloads a month would cost around $15 a month.
MYSQL INDEXING:
I run a small performance company that deals with Drupal/php/mysql e.t.c. and tend to always have to rescue people from MyISAM. I guess if you are going for MVP then the full text search will be fine but over time it will create problems. If I was you I would have a look at the way Drupal does this and not use the MySQL full text indexes as the first time you have people searching whilst you are updating the index on any decent data set you are screwed. That is assuming that you can’t take advantage of something like Apache Solr.
Also you talk about having a problem of searching across multiple tables. If you are using MySQL search why not create a meta table that contains the data from the other tables to be able to search across them.
I think selling a hosted search as an add on to appignite which uses something like Solr would be a money spinner!
Justin,
You can ask the Ukrainian/Russian programmer to set up Virtual Box and run your PHP thing on WinXP. He can still program on his Win7 host, but run the server (or whatever it is) in VBox. You can easily share folders between host and guest machines in VBox too (so that you don’t have to e-mail or FTP code changes to the server every time).
It should take him no more than an hour to get VBox, install it and install a guest OS, assuming he’s got a WinXP ISO or CD laying around. (And I’m pretty sure he has one or can get one – the same way he probably has his Win7.
) This is definitely more sensible than you spending 3 days tweaking that lib for Win7 64bit.
If neither of you have experience with Virtual Box, I’ll be happy to help.
Cheers and good luck with your project.
@William – As far as I can tell nozbe is a very personal productivity manager with some team share concepts bolted on (and quite clunky). I highly recommend it for personal productivity but I would suggest other tools for team task management. (However it’s cool that you can share todo list publicly in Nozbe)
@Stewart Robinson – Thanks for the insight into both those issues. Now myself and Jason need to toss a coin to see who gets to do that task… can you guess who will end up doing it
@Axure – Thanks very much for the info that’s great to know for future developers who have this issue.
@Jason great idea about trying to get Elon Musk. The BBC published a short video interview with him yesterday talking about SpaceX.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13341292
Exciting stuff!
.
Hey, Justin. Any chance you could upload the test that you gave to the oDesk workers?
@james – Here it is! http://techzinglive.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/pluggio-coding-test.zip
@Axure @Justin Yep virtual box is the answer for you on this one. Thats what I do for any development these days. Spin up a new VM with everything pre-configured and code away. Makes it easy to hand over things to clients at the end of a job too which is a bonus.
I wish I could go to MicroConf. I guess one of the big advantages of the US is being so close to the startup culture. There isnt as much were I am (Sydney Australia). That said my Lady friend is from Panama so perhaps I can time my next trip over to conincide with some form of meeting and attend that on my way.
@Jason How applicable is AppIgnite for building simple websites for people. I have a client asking for a simple website with 5 pages or so. The only additional requirement is a very simple admin page to add products. Would AppIgnite be like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant for this or something you would see as being useful?
@Jason As for the fulltext thing. Just go with duplicate tables. To have people search across mutiple models in one go just union each of the queries and sort by the score MySQL spits back. Problem solved in the easiest way possible which should speed up your release
@Stewart Robinson – I agree. I think that implementing the meta table for MySQL full text search is the best way to get started. In terms of scaling up to using something like Lucene / Solr, that’s a much bigger issue and would require too much configuration expertise for the market I’m initially targeting. But maybe later on down the line.
So, how does Drupal search work if it doesn’t use MySQL’s built-in full text search or Lucene / Solr?
@Ben Boyter – Appignite is meant for building database driven web applications and not static websites. For that you’d be much better off using something like Weebly or one of their competitors.
I agree, duplicate or meta tables is the way to go for implementing MySQL full text search.
I am in that section where you talk about SoundCloud and being blocked on one of the users’s company. So, I did too stop listening to the podcast for a while because of the move to SoundCloud. At first I thought it was my phone but now I see there are others may be having similar issues.
The way I used to listen to the podcast was by going to your site and streaming the MP3 file, about the 4 or 5 minute mark the connection is dropped and the streaming stops. So have to reload the page and look for where I left off. I tried the iPhone iTunes’ store and I got the same result. I was able to live with it for a while but on a 1.5 hour show you can imagine how many times you have to reset the podcast.
Eventually I decided to start downloading the podcasts and listen without interruption.
Jason, you can get Screenflow as part of the MacLegion bundle for the next couple days. It’s only $50 for the bundle and all licenses are standard.
http://maclegion.com/
I am not at all affiliated with the site.
@Helmut Granda – Wow, it sounds like the move to SoundCloud really hurt our listenership. I don’t think Justin or I even considered that this would be an issue of any kind. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
@Bill.D – Cool! Thanks so much for the heads-up.
@Jason
I am sure you didn’t mean any harm and I don’t think SoundCloud meant to compromise your podcast. I had the feeling they want to save bandwidth by not allowing streaming? Just a thought since it would be the same as downloading the whole thing but anyhow we just have to adjust to the service and I really appreciate all the work you do for the community for free. In the end I had to weight up my options.
Do I make room for the podcast or do I just don’t listen to it. I choose the first option.
@Helmut Granda – Well, I appreciate that and I’m glad you chose the first option.
Enjoy your podcasts. Like I said before, informative and entertaining.
Have you considered:
TechZing
Tech – UFO – Pinocchio
Who is the Puppet and who is the Puppet Master?
@Constant – Thanks, I’m glad you enjoy the show.
But I’m not sure I understand the second part of your comment. Could you clarify please?
A proposed tag line for your web site.
Your existing tag line: If you’re a hacker, you’ll probably like our show
does not describe me, but I like the show.
Aside from the interesting interviews, not all technical, your interaction with Justin is like how I would imagine at talk between Pinocchio (the puppet) and Geppetto (the puppet master). The roles change occasionally. The listener is always guessing who is who.
Plus, I remember Justin’s allusion to Pinocchio in a earlier episode.
I got called a teacher’s pet on a podcast! That’s a first for me.
@Justin and Nozbe: ” I highly recommend it for personal productivity” – I would say the same thing…
I’ve been using it last couple of months, and I switched completely to it these days.
@Soundcloud problems: Haven’t noticed any problems from my home broadband service. Maybe it is something peculiar to mobile phones ?
Jason, I love the tv show idea. I would definitely watch it!