Tiago Matos’ Nest

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

#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") %>

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”

… let’s put the tourists rolling to Reykjavík.

My country also has some nice videos showing off Portugal.

Not so recently time ago, and from times to times, I have noticed there are some people reading and sometimes making this words worth something. I have also noticed I am more keen to burst several posts on this blog , depends mainly on the current mindset.

Control, was some DivX movie I holded on this hard-drive for a long time, never had any urge to check it out. Yesterday, I did.

First thing I thought at Sam Riley first shot was “I have seen this face somewhere”. Sam Riley, portrays the lead vocalist on the infamous Joy Division, since the very early days before joining the band through all the roller-coaster of emotions and final mental drain, eventually leading him to be found hanging at his own kitchen room. Her wife found him dead. He was only 23.

The turning point on the story happens when Ian tries to build some sanity back to his life and does that inspirational look, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, to his old room, at his parents house. This is when it flashed: I had seen this Sam Riley image somewhere else.

Ian, worst dichotomy is a fucking cross-road of love. On the one-hand his young wife, whispering a life of plenitude and dreadfulness, begging for support and care; on the other, the charm of an independent and open-minded woman, working at the Belgian embassy and spreading optimistic vibes and ferhormones around. Ian played limbo for a while, going from side to side but eventually succumbed to his own polanskian fate.

There are very few things in life I like more to do than movies. More that drugs, beer and even ice-cream. If I recall correctly, for more than one summer at the tender age of 12 to 14, I have spent most of my days devouring movies. I perfectly remember to visit my local video-club and have to visit some other because there was nothing else worth for me rent there. No guys, there was no torrents back then.

So because of this, that and more, I recommend you to buy salty popcorns and delight yourself with this black-and-white photographic masterpiece.

Writing about this kind of stuff on my blog is quite selfish, I suppose the only person visiting this posts it’s me, when trying to remember how I have managed to fight away some computer quirk.

Anyway, today I’ve successfully managed to bring a medium-size Magento installation from 1.3 version to to 1.4 to life.

As usual I bumped into some problems along the way. This was the first:

QLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can’t create table ‘db_xxx.catalog_product_index_tier_price’ (errno: 150)

it’s conflicting with an existing table. So go to:

/public_html/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/sql/catalog_setup/mysql4-upgrade-1.4.0.0.19-1.4.0.0.20.php

and remove the following from being executed:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `{$installer->getTable('catalog/product_index_website')}` ( ...
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `{$installer->getTable('catalog/product_index_tier_price')}` ( ....

Next, Zend cache was bringing the whole show down:
(sometimes it displays: “There was an error processing your order. Please contact us or try again later.” on order completion)

Invalid mode for clean() method

a simple $rm -rf app/code/core/Zend/Cache/ does the trick.

Now don’t forget to change the base_urls, clean cache and index db.