Access your EC2 instance with AWS private key

July 9th, 2010 § 0

OK, someone set you up a EC2 instance and now you need to get access to it.

Requirements:
- the EC2 private key (here it will be called key.pem)
- a terminal (though you can use some SSH client, I am just talking about an UNIX terminal here)
- your machine IP (here it will be 79.123.321.1)

Do the following:
1. Download your key to ~/Downloads
2. Open the Terminal
3. Go to your ssh directory $cd ~/.ssh/
4. Copy your key $cp ~/Downloads/key.pem .
5. Tight up permissions $chmod 400 key.pem
6. Test it $ssh ubuntu@79.123.321.1 -i ~/.ssh/key.pem -vvv
6.1 -i will set the path, -vvv sets verbose mode
7. Edit your config file to avoid doing -i ~/.ssh/key.pem all the time
$vim ~/.ssh/config
paste and edit this text
Host 79.123.321.1
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/key.pem

8. Access your EC2 from anywhere in your machine with
$ssh ubuntu@79.123.321.1

Beautifully Inspiring

June 19th, 2010 § 0

There are few stuff on the internet of videos that are truly inspiring. This video is one of them.

Ruby ASCII-8BIT / UTF-8 encoding distresses

June 15th, 2010 § 0

#reminder

Ruby was written in Japanese and does not stick with a specific encoding standard. That can bring you some distresses if you need latin or other special characters running on your app.

If you are running Ruby version 1.9 (or up) don’t forget about this “if & thens” :

1. if:

puts "café" on any Ruby script
brings you
invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII) (SyntaxError)

then:
use the following magic comment (as it was named)
# encoding: UTF-8
on the first line of your script

if on you .erb template:
<%= "å".encoding%>
outputs ASCII-8BIT and
<%= "å".force_encoding('utf-8') %>

outputs å and you need to be passing this ASCII-8BIT typed strings around…

then:
you’ll need to convert this strings to UTF-8
p string.encoding.name
outputs ASCII-8BIT
string.force_encoding("UTF-8")
pstring.encoding.name
outputs UTF-8

PS: Careful on partials. They also break all the stuff if not encoded.
<%= partial("admin/menu").force_encoding("UTF-8") %>

Freemium models dissected

June 13th, 2010 § 0

Some nice quotes or thoughts of mine:

“2% average customer conversion from free to premium”

“resons for free: time to understand, distribution benefit, network benefit (add value to the ecosystem)”

“might be more important indirect revenue stream (ads) than direct (recurring billing)”

“company can get a double personally due to free/paid features”

“optmize to less surprise. People prefer to pay a higher tier that necessary”

“at the very beggining launch your beta product and also beta business model.”

“limited features or limited capacity?”

“be agile and iterate your business model”

“from my study on 25 freemium model companies the free/payed convertion rate was between 3 to 5%”

“20 to 25% conversion rates? You’re smoking something…”

“entrepreneur live in a reality distortion field”

“let people go deep into your product and start love. Then they pay something”

“customers do not pay for features. They don’t pay for analytics, for better support…”

“raising prices is easier than lowering”

“in the SaaS business 50-60% of staff are in tech support on normal business software 50-60% are in sales”

“many signups, no real usage: wrong. Start collecting analytics on user usage”

“don’t make people think [about paying you on one-time payments]”

“you make what you measure”

“recurly.com and chargify.com help you out”

After the crisis…

June 10th, 2010 § 0

… let’s put the tourists rolling to Reykjavík.

My country also has some nice videos showing off Portugal.

INEO Weekend - outcomes

April 27th, 2010 § 0

Este último fim de semana tive o prazer de participar no INEO Weekend, um evento em que se cozinha num espaço moderno e agradável, uma receita atípica. Têm-se como ingredientes “mentores” que adocicam e guiam a força e tempestuosidade dos “promotores”, com diagramas, passagens literárias, bons exemplos e bastante senso comum temperado pelo “been there, done that”. No final serve-se o cozinhado à prova dos “investidores”, à mercé de um projector cronometrando 10 minutos.

O resultado traduziu-se num fim de semana bem passado, repleto de discussões entre os todos os participantes, como ao redor das várias porções de salgadinho e Ice Tea de Manga.

De sublinhar o ambiente informal, em que todos dão o seu contributo e se esquecem um pouco as paneleirices muitas vezes subjacentes a eventos nesta área do empreendedorismo. Um estilo de evento a seguir.

Eu co-representei o nosso projecto Vendder que foi revisto e discutido sobre diversas luzes e ângulos por diversos mentores, como João Pereira da InovCapital, Ana Almeida da Tapestry ou Paulo Gomes da Reusable IT e aprendi ou re-lembrei que:

  • Nem sempre é simples calcular o custo de um projecto
  • Calcular break-even é um exercício para ser praticado
  • Deve-se ter presente a fatia de mercado que pretendemos atingir
  • Como sondar o mercado para definir o valor do serviço e assim preço a pagar.
  • “Planos de negócio” são para esquecer e antes de “planos” quer-se “negócio” e simples projecções
  • O capital existe, faltam as boas ideias, equipas e execução
  • Há capitais de risco com bolsas de diferente tamanho
  • Aposta-se em equipas coesas, eles são a alma do projecto
  • Há que apontar o canhão para o cliente alvo a abater, não há muitas bolas nem tempo para algortimos balisticos refinados.

Fez-me lembrar os meus tempos em Londres, em que falavamos callbacks em AJAX entre duas pints de Guiness e umas apresentações que pareciam sempre sido feitas num iPhone entre 5 estações do Tube.

cross-post from http://www.nship.org/2010/04/ineo-weekend/

Whenever your Windows search fails you

April 27th, 2010 § 0

#reminder
find . | xargs grep '.tec-event-entry'

“It’s like DNA. One cell carries the coding for all of them.”

April 18th, 2010 § 0

I had a surreal experience the other day. I was sitting in a coffee shop and watched someone (at the recommendation of a friend who didn’t realize I was within earshot) open up my blog and start reading it. Right there, out of the corner of my eye, someone was experiencing me (well, digital me) for the first time.

Here it was, my first impression writ large. No fair running over and saying, “no, skip those two, those two aren’t so good, go back a month or two and read the generous, thoughtful ones I wrote…”

It’s like DNA. One cell carries the coding for all of them.

via http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/when-a-stranger-reads-your-blog.html

CS still rocks!

April 17th, 2010 § 0

Randomly browsing the internet I bounced into CouchSurfing.com.. since February I do not check it (shame on me). Worse than that is the fact all incoming emails from CS were going directly to my trash folder. Result:

25 unread / unreplied CouchSurf request from people I know / don’t know (and other I still don’t).

ERASMUS / ESN / BEST Friends

April 17th, 2010 § 0

Every time an international friend of mine send me a message always starts or ends with “where are you now?”.

Where Am I?

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