After OSCON, I’ll head down to San Francisco for a week or two with the hope to secure legal representation for our startup, JadeTower. Indie-Arcade will soon be far enough along for us to start demoing it to investors and we want to have all the paperwork and mechanisms in place to ensure that process is as smooth as possible. While we’re on track for a invite-only alpha release at the end of the year, the path to beta and beyond will likely require more resources than just William and I (despite our superhuman powers). We’re not yet ready for VCs, but we are ready to move from self-funding to angel-funding.

Though I have a few appointments lined up (some thanks to our friends at Socialutions - another Hong Kong web startup), I’d be more than happy to meet with anyone else that you could recommend. Even if it’s just to chat about startups or open source or Hong Kong. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or send me an email. Oh, and if you know of anything interesting going on in San Francisco or Silicon Valley at the end of the month, I’d love to hear about that too.

What is Indie-Arcade?

Simply put, we’re going to help you create classic video games (you know, NES-era, those games that were actually fun to play) and share them on the web. You can mod, mix and mash games parts and you don’t need to be an expert programmer (or even much of a programmer at all). Everything’s in-browser and cross-platform.

I’ll be speaking at OSCON 2008 next week on open source in China. I did an earlier version of this talk last year at ApacheCon US in Atlanta. As a sort of sneak-peak of next week’s talk, I’ve uploaded last year’s slides to Slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

I’ll arrive in Portland late Tuesday night and be there until Sunday. If you’d like to meet-up and chat with me, leave a comment or send me a message.

Update

Something appears to be wrong with Slideshare at the moment, but you should be able to directly download the presentation from their website.

It was only after I had determined the new css design for Cubicle Muses and Peregrinari that I came across a string of recent articles on minimalism in sight design. In no particular order:

• Mark Pilgram on ‘Minimalism’
• Ryan Tomayko’s site
• James Bennett on Minimal site design
• Jonas Arnfred’s ifany article on Minimalism

Ever wish some Java CLI or other command line interpreter had readline support? I know I do, all the time. Well, search no further. With rlwrap (OS X port), every CLI now can have the readline power you know and love.

Ok, finally fixed a few things on the newly deployed Cubicle Muses site. I mentioned in the last article that I was having some difficulty setting up redirects the way I wanted to. Turns out there were two reasons for my troubles.

First, I was using Joyent’s Virtualmin web-based console. I eventually came across an article on using mod_rewrite in .htaccess on Joyent and that solved my problems. The Virtualmin console is rather awkward to work with and doesn’t allow direct access to the config file, making some apache directives impossible to use.

The other part that puzzled me is that changes I made to the apache configuration via Virtualmin didn’t seem to take effect. Well, turns out for at least some configuration changes, they don’t. At least, Virtualmin doesn’t have apache re-read its configuration. However, adjusting the proxy setting does restart the webserver, and I was able to use that trick to get my config directives fixed and read.

So the site should be a bit more responsive and I should see less 404s now. If you came by for a look and Cubicle Muses was either down or looking rather odd, I apologize. Take another look and let me know what you think.

After a few weekends of work, the old cubicle muses and peregrinari websites have been relaunched with a new style and new backend. The previous site ran on pyblosxom, which I still really like but was difficult for Jenny to use. So I switched everything to Radiant CMS.

Some other changes include using Feedburner for feeds and new designs based using the blueprint css framework. The blogs also now aggregate data from our accounts on Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader, Flickr and similar websites. I’ve been considering using disqus for managing site comments, but until they support import of old comments I’m using the Radiant comment extension. However, judging by the traffic in only the last hour, I may need to beef up comment-spam detection.

There’s also going to be a few more 404s (missing pages) than usual until I can figure out Joyent’s httpd configuration tools. All the previous articles and comments should still be at the same urls, but some images and files have moved. (For example, a file at /cm/images/jaaron.jpg will now be at just /images/jaaron.jpg.) This is simple enough to solve if I can only get the right Apache directives to configured on Joyent’s shared accelerators. They limit some of what you can do (no mod_rewrite, for example), so for the next day or so I’ll have plenty of error messages.

I’m also curious to see how well the site performs. One of the reasons I switched away from pyblosxom was due to performance. Pyblosxom is basically just a cgi script that reads and transforms flat files into weblog pages. All that file access starts to add up when you have lots of previous articles. I was hoping that Radiant would be much speedier due to using a database and caching. However, so far the site is still a bit sluggish. Hopefully once more of the pages are cached (and we’re generating less 404s), the site will be more responsive. Otherwise, I may wish I had jumped on the wordpress bandwagon.