Tiago Matos’ Nest

Sócrates puts some pressure on them…

http://osbastardos.blogspot.com/2010/02/afinal-o-gajo-e-simpatico.html

Upong Magento 1.4 they introduced something very usefull for Develoment/Production management, enabling/disabling Development Mode trhough htaccess.
This way you can have a .htaccess in your development root dir tailored for development and another (or none) in the production environment.

In /index.php change your code to:

if (isset($_SERVER['MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE'])) {
print_r(”Dev Mode”);
Mage::setIsDeveloperMode(true);
ini_set(’display_errors’, 1);
}

and in your /.htaccess add this line to the end of the file

#Magento Developer Mode
SetEnv MAGE_IS_DEVELOPER_MODE "true"

Change from “true” to “false” according your needs.

Procrastination from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

I have done some research and the amount spent kissing per person is 20,160 minutes making 14 days in a lifetime and, according Nielsen, average user (like you) spends 4.5 hours per month on facebook wich makes 135 days in a 75 year life span. Holly f*ck, Facebook wins Kissing by a 1000% margin.

The world of “entrepreneurship” is just bloated. From the “entrepreneur” itself, this small world lavishes with “business angels”, “business plans”, “seed capital”, “ramen profitability”, “break-even point”, “market forecasts” and other endless jargon concepts.

I have been thinking on writing this post for a long time and, truthfully, there’s more to say than I am willing to write today. I will try to focus on a part of it. Let’s limit it to 10 bullets. While can’t (still) write on how to sucessfully IPO a company or digg into startup personnel management advices, I will approach the first step or the 1% of inspiration because, and paraphrasing Lau Tzu, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” and some other random folk “Success is 1% of inspiration, 99% of transpiration”.

1. Idea vs. Implementation

Vendder, our main company product isn’t properly born out of a new idea, similar projects have already been sucessfully accomplished. Of course, there are a lot of space for innovation and we are leveraging Vendder with new concepts, like social/distributed commerce and by building our services over an already tested open-source framework, enhancing our development cycle.

Nevertheless, the perfect idea badly implemented is always worse than a simple, well executed idea.

2. Carefully choosing your partners

A startup is like a marriage, except you’ll spend more time awake with your partner. I have been working, traveling and being friends with Filipe for a long, long time. Remember, this is important, don’t choose your business partner mainly on technical skills, most co-founders will trade social/soft skills for pure technical.

3. It’s a marathon, not a sprint

Don’t blow yourself up in the first months, or even years. Startup world moves fast but remember sucess is, in this case, made of trial & error. Be prepared to let go blood, toil, tears and sweat.

4. Use your connections

Your best startup friends are also your friends and contacts. They, and most importantly their own contact network, will provide you importan feedback, get you valuable business leads and ultimately be your first clients. Don’t be afraid to ask for favors, some server space, a new monitor, a logo or helping you on acccountacy, or other tasks you’re clueless about. Most, if not all, good stuff that happened with our company has been induced by our contact network.

5. Demand critics

Your friends will provide your support but you’ll also need critic feedback, mentorship and conselling. I am not expert by any means on all e-commerce details, from shipping to cross-country taxes, customer relations… there are so many specific areas and someone will always excel in at least one of them. Ask for sincere opinions about your ideas, the more humble you are the better responces you’ll have.

6. Startups are not sexy

Social acceptance sticks mostly with standards. Standard is a nine to five job. Standard is working for the boss. Standard is being in a bad mood on week days and drunk on weekends. Standard is the missionary position. Creating your own, self sustaining business takes no missionary position, no one will be openly waiting for you.

Paul Graham states, and I confirm, go and find a nice, big and reputable company to work for if you want to impress chicks. Working 10+ / day, without fix income and predictable outcome is not sexy at all.

7. Be strong spirited

It’s a up and down. Expect happy, happy days and dull, dull moments. Every thing you’ll achieve, from a nice word from a happy customer, a 1.000 Eur contract or finished on time milestone takes you to the moon. But the downside is awfull, you can be dragged into endless emotive discussions with your best friend/co-founder, shout ‘what tha fuck do you know?’ when your consultant/angel investor turns you down you break your lapto when you cannot merge your code into the code repository and destroy all team work. Think well if you are suited for string emotions. Waking up without a reason at 9.00 everyday is not so bad.

8. Prepare yourself

“Fuck business plans” is a common thing I read around the startup world.

I would add, “Fuck business plans, if you already have no plans”. Before you fully commit to your idea you should prepare yourself. Spending time writing down the concept of your idea, how to achieve it, exploring the market, guessing how to fund and a why to sell it to the market is valuable information for your decision on leaving you Herman Miller chair and got back to your mom’s garage. It will question your motivation and make you reflect and, ultimately, save you from a big investment on a poor idea.

9. Are you a Jack of all trades?

Nothing better than Robert Heinlein to explain why you cannot be a “specialist” in a small group of people while wanting to change the world upside down…

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

10. Love.

I will leave this one to you.

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of marketing on my mobile, from music concerts to new car launches. I had not subscribed to any of this services and I kept receiving messages I am not interested on reading about.

So I contacted my mobile phone operator, Rede4 (www.rede4.pt) I asked them to remove me for the their senders list and block any non-target mobile message.

They replied today:

Em sequência do e-mail recebido, informamos que procedemos à activação da restrição de envio de mensagens publicitárias por parte da operadora para o número 9365515XX. Esta activação toma efeito num prazo máximo de 15 dias.

OK, you have set up your first Amazon EC2 instance and everything is running just fine. Now it is time to make a backup of the entire thing in case you need to boot all the image at once in case of failure.

Requirements:

• Get yourself a Certificate and Key (X.509 Certificates > New > Download both)
• https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html?ie=UTF8&action=access-key
• Get Firefox Amazon S3 Extension called S3 Fox

Upload your key and certificate to your EC2 server (I have put them on /widetail/keys)

ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k /widetail/pk-6JBXXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem --cert /widetail/cert-6JB7XXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem -u 550000004 -a -e /widetail,/var/lib/mysql/,/var/www/

-a => all directories
-e => exclude directories
-d => volume where to save your image bundle
-u => your AWS id. Check your AWS account.

PS. Be careful with the exclude paths, no spaces are allowed.

Open up S3 Fox and create a new bucket (be carefull about the region you select!). Like widetail-bucket-ami

ec2-upload-bundle -b widetail-bucket-ami -m /mnt/image.manifest.xml -a AKXXXXXXXJYA -s GQPxxxx/xxxxqk5

-m => location of your bundle (same as -d on the last command)
-a => AWS Access Key Id (same you use in S3 Fox)
-s => AWS Secret Access Key (same you use in S3 Fox)
-b => name of the bucket you created in S3 Fox

The image.manifest.xml is automatically created when you perform ec2-bundle-vol no need to worry about it.

Now go to Amazon EC2 Management Console > AMIS > Register new AMI.
Insert the path to your image manifest, on this case widetail-bucket-ami/image.manifest.xml (bucket name / manifest name)

If everything goes well you can now launch another instance of the same EC2 image, if not leave a comment.

==Update==

Now, you need to migrate this Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to a different region. On my case, I need to migrate from EU region to US region (the default us-east-1).

First, go back to S3 Fox and create a bucket in US ( default is us-east-1) like us-widetail-ami.

Execute the following command:

sudo ec2-migrate-image -K /widetail/pk-6JBXXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem -C /widetail/cert-6JB7XXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem --manifest image.manifest.xml --bucket widetail-bucket-ami --destination-bucket us-widetail-ami -o AKXXXXXXXJYA -w GQPxxxx/xxxxqk5

-K => your key (same as above)
-C => your certificate (same as above)
–manifest => your manifest image name (same as above)
–bucket => name of the bucket you created in S3 Fox and uploaded your image (same as above)
–destination => name of the new bucket you created in the new region in S3 Fox
-o => AWS Access Key Id (same you use in S3 Fox, used with parameter “-a” above)
-w => AWS Secret Access Key (same you use in S3 Fox, used with parameter “-s” above)

Go to your AWS GUI interface > Select Region (my case US East) > Images > AMIs > Register New AMI and add:

us-widetail-ami/image.manifest.xml

If everything is fine, great, everything is fine and you can use the same Amazon AMI in a different region but if you bounce into:

Invalid or unaccessible kernel id in ami manifest: aki- xxx

it means your image kernel ID is not recognized in the new region and you need to get an equivalent kernel and ramdisk ID. Install ElasticFox, another Firefox extension and browse around to find a similar AMI to the one you used in first place. tip: search for you own AMI id, check the owner ID, change region to your target region, search for that owner ID, find a similar AMI to your original and write down its kernel and ramdisk ID.

Now add them to your command:

sudo ec2-migrate-image -K /widetail/pk-6JBXXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem -C /widetail/cert-6JB7XXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem --manifest image.manifest.xml --bucket widetail-bucket-ami --destination-bucket us-widetail-ami -o AKXXXXXXXJYA -w GQPxxxx/xxxxqk5 --kernel aki-540dxxx --ramdisk ari-d5709xxx

=or=

in case you are still doing the bundling (means at your EC2 instance after doing ec2-bundle-vol and still able to access image.manifest.xml) you can migrate only the image manifest. This way you are not migrated a complete bucket from S3 but your bundle image at your current instance.

It’s time for:
sudo ec2-migrate-manifest -m /mnt/image.manifest.xml -c /widetail/cert-6JB7XXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem -k widetail/pk-6JBXXXXXXXXXXXXXX4J2.pem -a AKXXXXXXXJYA -s GQPxxxx/xxxxqk5 --region us-east-1

this will migrate your manifest image and adjust your ramdisk and kernel IDs to suit your target new region. When done just push it to the new region’s bucket with ec2-upload-bundle.

After hours of searching for ways of accomplished this stuff, this is probably a great help for the guys starting to mess around with EC2 backups.

If you need help setting up your EC2 leave a comment or drop me an email.