Ensight - Jeremy Wright
A Personal Blog
LAN Parties Business Idea
Jun 8th
All credit for the base idea here goes to David DiBiase, a genius of a young man who will certainly one day be great. David’s base idea came from something he’d heard about in Europe (name of groups entirely forgotten). Basically these groups hold massive LAN parties with up to 500 machines, and make a decent amount of money (admission, food, merchandise, petting zoo…. yeah, don’t ask).
After David told me about this idea, I was wondering if perhaps it wouldn’t be more economical to turn it from a monthly thing into a constant thing, a la Lazer Quest. (more…)
Tech Rollover Leasing
Jun 7th
I’ve recently been on a cost-cutting adventure at work. Anything I can do to bring our IT costs down and create IT income gets my full attention. As such, a recent offering from Telus caught my attention. The premise is simple, instead of treating new PC’s, servers, etc as a cost you need to immediately bear (it’s a royal pain getting approval for 20K for 4 new servers); you treat it as a utility.
Think about it for a second, when you have regional or long-distance phone service and you want to add features, you just call up, add them and they charge you appropriately.
Wouldn’t it be great if each PC on your network had a fixed monthly cost which, just like any other utility, included a total warranty on the hardware, included all hardware and OS maintenance and had decent support response times?
This could be big! (more…)
To Sterling Hughes
Jun 6th
Sterling Hughes is, I’ve heard, quite the persona in the PHP world. I’d like to congratulate him on an incredibly well written post to his blog.
While I am not one of those who hopes PHP dies, it is certainly refreshing to see someone who knows and loves PHP appreciating where it can evolve, and some great things that can be modelled. (more…)
Embracing Team
Jun 6th
I just came out of a meeting with the CEO here at work and had a sudden jolt of reality: I don’t have to do everything. Even deeper, I don’t need to know everything, it’s okay if all my ideas aren’t right and it’s even okay if someone else’s idea is wrong (and mine’s better) and theirs gets done anyways. (more…)
Inspiration or Homage
Jun 6th
Back in the day (certainly a long time ago) when I was a designer, arguments about what “inspiration” versus “copying” were abounded. I’m sure they still do to this day, though they are typically called “rips” as opposed to copies, which is why I wasn’t surprised when a PHP friend of mine, Harry Fuecks, stated equivocally (as Harry often does) that .NET and Java were now paying “homage” (ripping, copying, whatever… at least he was civil about it ;)) to PHP with the recent release of “Nuke” toolkits for both.
Both JBoss (read more about it here, and all credit to Harry for the links) and .NET both released similar toolkits, at least in name, to the various PHP Nuke projects (phpnuke, postnuke, etc).
But, to what degree is this copying? Is it just marketing hype? Did they truly borrow ideas from “Nuke”? Is it all just common sense? (more…)
