Down at Highgroove Studios, we’ve finally lifted the wraps off Scout, our simple solution to server monitoring and reporting.

It’s true, we’ve been using Scout internally now for months, and it has proven its usefulness time and time again. We’ve also been collecting meticulous feedback from our pre-launch users. We hope it saves our customers as much time as it has saved us.

See the Scout Blog announcement here: Scout Opens to the Public
See our blog announcement here: Scout’s Grand Opening

It’s a great time to be a techy. Here’s my top 5 run down of why:

1. The Apple iPhone. I don’t want to sound like a Apple Fan Boy, but of all the techno-gadgets out right now, it’s got to be the coolest. When I was young, I was enthralled with a show called “Beyond 2000” and in some of the interviews with the designers of the Flying Car, “they” said that by 2008, there would be many families owning these flying cars. Well, we don’t have flying cars, but we do have a tiny hand-held device that can hold GBs of music, movies, TV shows, and pictures, can take and share pictures, provide maps of the world on command, satellite imagery, directions, and is a full-fledged Internet device that switches from on demand edge to wifi seamlessly. Oh, and is the best phone (dialing, answering calls, syncing contacts, visual voicemail) out there. Truly futuristic.
2. Rapid Web Development Frameworks. It is truly easy to build rapid, effective, database-backed, web applications and deploy them on the Internet, securely or publicly for anyone and everyone to just plain “get things done.” Technologies like Ruby on Rails, the Django Framework for Python, Java (maybe) and PHP (possibly), simple open APIs, easy cross-platform Javascript libraries, the Open Source stack of Apache on Linux, and the excited-ness and open-ness of the “Web 2.0″ community makes building these kinds of things fun.
3. DVRs. Tivos and Tivo-like technologies are fundamentally changing how we view television. My MythTV server (I keep rebuilding it) can record HD over the air, and content from my DirecTV box, very easily. When I miss something I want to watch, I order it off iTunes, or simply watch it on one of the network sites like nbc.com or abc.com or maybe a torrent network (or friend). Oh, and I don’t watch commercials. MythTV automatically detects them (using black screen fades, logo detection, and other algorithms), and I hit one key to skip all of ‘em. Watch for social networking type functionality, like interacting with other TV viewers (my friends) to really bump this technology to the next level.
4. VOIP. Skype, Asterisk, Vonage, and others make it easy for someone (me) to have a phone number in almost any area code (or toll free) that rings to multiple phones, soft(-ware based), or real, and then rings elsewhere, turns voicemail into text/e-mail, and receives faxes turned into pdfs and delivered to my e-mail inbox. Hosted VOIP services will be very disruptive technologies in short time.
5. Social Networks. Yes, it’s true: MySpace enabled all teenagers (and tweens and twenty-somethings) with a computer to make the ugliest web pages in the world — the equivalent of rainbow HRs, dancing baby animated gifs, and MIDIs playing in the background (you remember?) — technology-one-upped as photo slideshows between text, youtube videos everywhere, and embedded mp3s in the background. But, despite my cynicism, networks like Linked In, and now Facebook are mingling business and pleasure, and connecting people presently (friends, classmates, work-mates), historically (old class-mates, old pals), and forward-in-time (in groups and ways they didn’t know exist) in totally new ways. I think they also show some ads too, though I’m not sure. Even if they have no intrinsic value to many people right now, the fact that a majority (or is it closer to 99%) of all college students are using sites like Facebook on a day-to-day basis mean they aren’t going away when they get into the workforce. This kind of connectivity and open-ness will be demanded and expected in the workplace, soon.

Hey alright, I made it to 5. It really is a great time to be into technology. Highgroove Studios and all our ventures are doing fantastically, and we are simply having a terrific time working on all kinds of fun stuff, like web development using Ruby on Rails, apps on the iPhone, Facebook integration, and maybe some top-secret stuff, soon to be revealed….

If you’re into techno-babble as much as me, there are some events (in Atlanta) coming up that you might want to check out, including the Georgia Tech College of Computing Alumni Association’s Net Neutrality Panel, the Ruby User’s Group and Python User’s Group meetings (meetup), Startup Weekend Atlanta, and BarCamp Atlanta. Techno-babblers, rejoice!

For the 9th year in a row, Georgia Tech has been ranked in the top 10 public universities.  We’ve moved up to 7th in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings.  We’re also now 35th among all universities!

Check out the Press Release from Georgia Tech’s Alumni Association, and the U.S. News and World Report Rankings.

There’s an upcoming College of Computing Alumni event, soon.  Let’s see if we can’t keep going up.

I’m consulting here in Winnipeg, Canada for a very cool dot.com. Teaching these developers Ruby on Rails is just too fun. They are Web Developers, mainly having used PHP, and like every great development shop, they’ve rolled their own tools for doing database access, managing the database (migrations), templating, deployment, etc. After teaching them the basics of Ruby on Rails and all these things that are built right in, they’re in love. I can’t wait to show them the built-in AJAX, testing, RESTful web-services, deployment, and all the other ruby-love and rails-goodness that I’ve come to love myself.

I certainly remember the day I fell in love with Ruby on Rails. Sigh.

If you’re a web developer doing web-stuff and you haven’t taken a look at Ruby on Rails, you’re missing out. Even learning a new framework (and language like Ruby) will expand your repertoire in your current language/framework of choice.

Did I mention I’m available for hire for consulting/training/project-kick-offs/development?

Just a quick note — I get requests from people who are actively seeking and promoting jobs for both PHP, Ruby, and Rails development (and other jobs like Engineers and IE Operations).  If you are in the market, shoot me an e-mail or just check out the Ruby and PHP meetups on meetup.com.

Last night I attended the Georgia Tech Computing Alumni Mixer at the new Klaus Advanced Computing Building.  It was a great event, and I’ll definitely be attending more.  I’ll also be dragging along all you GT folk who are reading this.

The new Klaus building is fantastic.  I gotta admit that the landscaping outside is still, quite horrific, but I didn’t actually notice until Jodi, who is the student liaison on the GT Planning and Design Committee, and architect extraodinaire pointed it out to me.  Nevertheless, the inside is just plain rad.  There are several nooks in between classrooms and offices with big plasma TVs with hookups freely available — making it perfect for impromptu Wii gaming presentations and generally just being able to say, “check this out” and fire up your laptop’s display on the screen.

I spoke with several people about possibly hosting the Atlanta Ruby User Group meetings at Georgia Tech, though it appears we have some space planned out at the ATDC, which should be great.

I’ll definitely be promoting and attending more of these events.  I am feeling very successful these days in life and in business, and much of it I owe to a great, challenging, and rewarding experience at good ole Georgia Tech.

Jodi’s company, Kung Quinn Inc., has been working on an amazing new project in downtown Athens, GA.  Baxter Street Lofts is a mixed-use, residential and retail loft building on Baxter Street.

The spot used to be our family’s restaurant, Hunan’s — an Athens main-stay for good chinese food.  If you lived on campus from, oh say, any where in between 1974 until about 2005, chances are, you had chinese take-out, delivery, or dine-in from Hunan’s.

The project is going fantastic.  The lofts are really shaping up, and Jodi’s attention to detail in everything about them really shows.  We’ve put up the brand new web-site and started a really great marketing campaign.  We’ve already sold a few and have some neat shops and offices coming in soon!

If you’re interested in the project, let Jodi know, or visit the site and fill out the contact form!

+1 points for the Post Office, it was Efficiency Central for all the late filers, like me. I have never been in and out of the post office quicker.

-1 points to the Georgia Department of Revenue. What’s up with a 500-ES Estimated Tax payment form that just plain doesn’t work (see the download here — 2005_forms?). That’s right, it doesn’t even have the ability to select 2007-Q1 on the form. Isn’t that just, ummm, retarded? It really makes me start to wonder how many people actually don’t even bother to pay, or just don’t don’t even care. Judging by those late-night TV Ads: “do you owe the government lots of money….?” — probably a lot.

+10 points for my accountant who rules by the way. I’d totally refer you, but I’m keeping him all to myself and will hire him soon to expand globally (and set up a really sweet severance package for me quite a few years down the line).

Happy Tax Day everybody!

I’ve been quoted about my car computer in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (the Atlanta Newspaper) for a story about a company here in town that’s launching a large in-car telematics business:

Dunwoody firm hooks up Chrysler’s computers

registration required, you can use the username: spam@seebq.com password: spam

I mentioned to Mike Pearson (the writer at AJC) to definitely ping a few of the locals (Matt Turner of TunerTricks, Jack Shakes, and some others at mp3car.com) in town who are more into this hobby than I am, but it was nice to see my quote as the very first line!

As an aside: When I first got out of school, I tried to start a little company doing custom in-car computer systems. A prototype built, a demo-presentation to Ludacris’ business manager in Luda’s driveway, and 6 months later — it was a miserable flop, but terribly fun. I later came to understand it was more like an expensive hobby, and it helped me realize that there’s more to starting a business than just saying you’re “President and CEO” and then doing all the incorporating and froo-froo stuff. This probably goes to show why I’ve been so successful in my newer ventures — I’m doing the opposite. I’m not doing any “company related stuff” like printing business cards or “incorporating” until I absolutely need to — two things I have already done, only now at the appropriate times. I’m just spending time focusing on the business itself (to be honest: on making money), and it’s working out great.

Reading the article made me realize that back then my marketing (among other things) was just too big for my britches — the automobile industry is a crazy one, full of a few big players and very large deals. The aftermarket industry is even crazier, and should have been the sole market for my failed company.

Come to think of it, I still think there’s a product and a market and a whole lot of money fun to be had. If you’re listening, Hughes Telematics, fund me as a spin-off company and let me build a team and an after-market product — software, hardware, the whole-nine yards for in-car-computing and we’ll see how that meshes with your new big deal.

In the mean time, I’ll be focusing on my wonderful day jobs.

As many of you know, I’ve been deploying quite a few Ruby on Rails apps lately — to shamelessly plug a few, there’s Meople (a db/app server and web server setup), some personal sites (my own server) and quite a few Highgroove Studios client’s sites.

When I first started “helping” Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios a long time ago to deploy Rails applications, we were learning along with the big providers. We survived the pre-1.0 Rails days (0.13, 0.14 !) and some crazy Apache and lighttpd setups. We’ve come a long way, from the days of shared hosting and the wonderful resources at TextDrive, DreamHost, and other hosting providers. We’ve since moved on to deploying on our own servers, dedicated and co-located for complete control. Along the way we’ve contributed to many guides, pages, and the community — most importantly, many of the pages on the Official Ruby on Rails wiki. Most notably, we’ve learned a few tricks or two about hosting business-class apps that demand serious attention to detail.

We’re ready to give back to the community, and provide a much needed service. We’d like to introduce Slingshot Hosting - specialized Ruby on Rails Business Hosting for Serious Applications. (more…)