This will be a collection of things I’ve stumbled on during my time as a business owner (or just in the business world in general). First off, all of my experience is with small business and the service industry, and the only way I see that changing is if my business really takes off. So far, owning a business has been one of the most unstable, stressful, and aggravating occupations I’ve had…but it has by far been the most fun. There really is nothing better than working for yourself. It takes a lot of drive and you really have to love what you’re doing. If you don’t love it, you aren’t going to be able to do it day after day, week after week, year after year. I guess that’s the first tip:

• Love what you do. If you don’t love what you do, what’s the point? You aren’t really getting anything out of working for yourself, and I can tell you now that for all the stress and work it takes to get a business going and keep it going, it’s just not worth it if you don’t get to do what you love for at least a small portion of the day. Find something you’re knowledgeable and passionate about, and the money and success will follow.
• Consider working with a partner. Owning a business is hard work. Sometimes more than one person can handle. In my experience, it’s been a lot easier having a partner than if I had to deal with everything on my own…someone who you trust and who shares your passion for what you do and for success. You can take a sick day and he/she will work in your stead, you can swap meetings with clients/customers, take vacations while the other one works, etc. You have to split the profits, but can make it up by doing almost twice the work anyway, and you get a lot more freedom.
• Be smart about your time. Since you’re just starting out and don’t have much (if any) capital, it makes sense to try and do everything (bookkeeping, equipment repairs, etc) yourself, right? Absolutely wrong…it almost always makes more sense to hire a professional. You make money by doing what you’re good at. You don’t make money doing time-consuming tasks that you aren’t trained for. Hiring a professional to help you out may seem like a waste of money, but you save money in the long run. They’re great at what they do, you’re great at what you do…so use the time you would have spent floundering with what they’re good at to do what you’re good at, and you can pay them and have leftovers. Need a contract? Hire a lawyer. Doing taxes? Hire an accountant. Being smart about your time is really important, especially when considering your personal sanity.
• “No” can be a great answer. Speaking of personal sanity, let’s talk about the most important word you can possibly have in your vocabulary. “No.” This word will save you. Trust me. You can’t really use this word when you work for someone else, so enjoy it. Try it now…say “no” out loud. Didn’t that feel great? What the hell am I talking about? You don’t have to do everything everyone needs (read: wants) all the time, and you certainly don’t have to do it when they need it. I’m not talking about when you and a client set a deadline and you decide you just don’t want to do it…that’s called laziness or poor planning. But if you find yourself inundated with work and a client out of the blue decides they need that huge project they’ve been mulling over in their head done THIS WEEK, “no” is a very appropriate response. “No” can also be used in other contexts.

  For instance, someone comes to you with a project that doesn’t make sense or it just sucks. Or the project is the best idea ever, but you get a strange vibe from the person pitching it. You don’t necessarily have to use the word “no” in this case, but the general concept is there: money != happiness. Just because a project seems great at first doesn’t mean it won’t drag you into a fiery pit of everlasting hell later on. Listen to your intuition, and know when to turn something or someone down.

  On a side note, the more you exclusively work on better projects with better clients, the better projects and clients you’ll attract. This isn’t a business technique as much as it is the way of the universe.

• Communication is essential. Want to know a great way to piss someone off? Go way over budget on their project, then send them a bill at the end of the month. That’s a recipe for the swift end of a business relationship. Are you going to be 2 weeks late on a deadline? Tell your client ahead of time. Are you way over budget? Let your client know what happened and why! The sooner you tell them, the more appreciative they’ll be. Honesty, transparency, and proactive communication are the foundation of any relationship, but also translate well to business relationships.

  Also, be honest and verbose with your estimates. Sure, a prospective client may go with someone else with lower numbers on paper, but when they find out the other company more or less lied just to dupe them into getting their business, they won’t be happy. Also think of it this way: your numbers are the way they are for a good reason. If the client doesn’t want to pay your fair rate for a project, do you really need that penny-pinching tightwad arguing about every invoice with you anyway? Remember: the better the projects and clients you work with, the better the projects and clients you’ll get.

Ok, that’s about all I have in me for now. Maybe I’ll do a followup later, but hopefully these tips can help anyone new to business, or maybe give someone who’s been doing it for a long time a little perspective. A lot of this stuff I apply not only to my business life, but life in general, with great success on both ends. Keep in mind this is mainly geared towards the service industry, and being only 23 I’m not the most knowledgeable person in the world, but hopefully the things I’ve found so far are universal.

There are probably a billion guides for this already, but whatever. If you DON’T have a ~/.bash_profile (a file that gets executed every time you start cyg):

touch ~/.bash_profile
chmod a+x ~/.bash_profile

Now that you have the file, add this to it:

SSHAGENT=/usr/bin/ssh-agent
SSHAGENTARGS="-s"
if [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" -a -x "$SSHAGENT" ]; then
	eval `$SSHAGENT $SSHAGENTARGS`
	trap "kill $SSH_AGENT_PID" 0
fi

This will start up ssh-agent for each Cygwin shell you have open. Close your Cygwin shell (if one is open) and open a new one. Now type:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
[enter your password]

Voila! No more typing your stupid password every time you need to ssh somewhere. Note that if you close the Cygwin window, you’ll have to ssh-add your key again! This is good security…you can close the window when you’re done and someone who happens on your computer sitting there won’t have password-less access to any of your secure logins.

After all my research on what it means for a service to be RESTful, I think I’ve finally got a very good understanding. Once you understand a critical mass of information on the subject, something clicks and the first thing that comes in to your head is “Oh yeah! That makes sense!”

It’s important to think of a REST web service as a web site. How does a website work?

• A website works using HTTP. If you need to fetch something on a website, you use the HTTP verb “GET.” If you need to change something, you use “POST.” A RESTful web service uses other HTTP verbs as well, namely PUT and DELETE, and can also implement OPTIONS to show which methods are appropriate for a resource.
• A website has resources. A resource can be information, images, flash, etc. These resources can have different representations: HTML, a jpeg, an embedded video. REST is the same way. It is resource-centric. Want a list of users? GET /users. Want an event? GET /events/5. Want to edit that event? PUT /events/5. Every resource has a unique URL to identify it!
• Resources are not dealt with directly. Instead, representations of resources are used. This can be a bit hard to grasp. What is a user? It’s a nebulous object somewhere that I cannot interact with. It is an idea, an entity. A representation is a form of the user resource I can interact with. A representation can be a comma delimited list, JSON, XML…anything the client and server both understand. How do we know what we’re interacting with? Media types:
• As a website will tell you what kind of image you’re requesting, a REST service tells you what kind of resource representation you are receiving. This is done using media types. For instance, if I do a GET /events/7, the Content-Type may be “application/vnd.beeets.event+json” which tells us this is a vendor specific media (the “vnd”) and it’s an event in JSON format. You can pass these media types in your Accept headers to specify what type of representation you would like. These media types are documented somewhere so that client will know exactly what to expect when consuming them.
• If you request a page that doesn’t exist or you aren’t authorized to view, a website will tell you. This is done using headers. A good REST service will utilize HTTP status headers to do the same. 200 Ok, 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error, etc. These have already been defined and refined over many, many years by people who have been doing this a lot longer than you (probably)…use them.
• A website will have links from one page to another. This is one of the main points of a REST service, and is also widely forgotten or misunderstood (it took me a while to figure it out even doing intense research). Resources in a REST service link to eachother, letting a client know what resources can be found where, and how they relate to eachother. An HTML page has links to it. So does a REST resource. Links can be structured however you like, but some good things to include are the URI of the linked resource, the relationship it has with the current resource, and the media type. This creates what’s known as a “loose coupling” between client and server. A client can crawl the server and figure out, only knowing a pre-defined set of media types, what resources are where and how to find them. This principal is known as HATEOAS (or “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State”).
• REST is stateless. This means that the server does not track any sort of client state. There are no session tokens the client uses to identify itself. There are no cookies set. Every request to the REST service must contain all information needed to make that request. Need to access a restricted resource? Send your authentication info for each request. It’s that simple. Isn’t it easier to track session? Not really. Maybe it’s easier on a small level, but once you start needing to scale, you will wish you’d gone stateless. Using a combination of HTTP basic authentication and API/Secret request signing, you don’t have to send over plain text passwords at all. Hell, even throw in a timestamp with each request to minimize replay attacks. You can get as crazy as you’d like with security. Or for those who prefer security over performance, use SSL.

Now for some examples. Because I’m currently working on an event application, we’ll use that for most of the examples.

Let’s get a list of events from our server:

GET /events
Host: api.beeets.com
Accept: application/vnd.beeets.events+json

{"page":1,"per_page":10}
-----------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:12:48 GMT
Content-Length: 1430
Content-Type: application/vnd.beeets.events+json

{
	"total":81,
	"events":
	[
		{
			"links":
			[
				{
					"uri":"/events/6",
					"rel":"/rel/event self edit",
					"type":"application/vnd.beeets.event"
				},
				{
					"uri":"/locations/121",
					"rel":"/rel/location",
					"type":"application/vnd.beeets.location"
				}
			],
			"id":6,
			"title":"Paris Hilton naked onstage",
			...
		},
		...
	]
}

What do we have? A list of events, with links to the resource representations of those events. Notice we also have links to another resource: the location. We can leave that for now, but let’s pull up an event:

GET /events/6
Host: api.beeets.com
Accept: application/vnd.beeets.event+json

-----------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:12:48 GMT
Content-Length: 666
Content-Type: application/vnd.beeets.event+json

{
	"links":
	[
		{
			"uri":"/events/6",
			"rel":"/rel/event self edit",
			"type":"application/vnd.beeets.event"
		},
		{
			"uri":"/locations/121",
			"rel":"/rel/location",
			"type":"application/vnd.beeets.location"
		}
	],
	"id":6,
	"title":"Paris Hilton naked onstage",
	"date":"2009-12-05T04:00:00Z"
}

Using the link provided in the event listing, we managed to pull up an individual event, which we know how to parse because we know the media type…but wait, what’s this? OMG, someone is trying to smear Paris!! She’s on at 8:30!!! NOT 8!!! Let’s edit…if we do a PUT with new information, we’ll be able to save Paris’ good name:

PUT /events/6
Host: api.beeets.com
Accept: application/vnd.beeets.event+json
Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==

{"title":"Paris Hilton naked onstage (yuck)","date":"2009-12-05T04:30:00Z"}
-----------------------------------------
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:12:48 GMT
Content-Length: 666
Content-Type: application/vnd.beeets.event+json

{
	"links":
	[
		{
			"uri":"/events/6",
			"rel":"/rel/event self edit",
			"type":"application/vnd.beeets.event"
		},
		{
			"uri":"/locations/121",
			"rel":"/rel/location",
			"type":"application/vnd.beeets.location"
		}
	],
	"id":6,
	"title":"Paris Hilton naked onstage (yuck)",
	"date":"2009-12-05T04:30:00Z"
}

Holy shit, that was close. Notice we had to pass in authorization info, but now Paris won’t sue us for spreading misinformation. Phew.

What have we learned? Given one URL (/events), we have discovered two more (/locations/[id] and /events/[id]). We’ve also seen the media types in the responses that allow the client to know what kind of resource it’s dealing with and how to consume it.

Hopefully this pounds two really important points in: media types and HATEOAS. Without them, it’s not REST. You can’t just pass application/xml or application/json for every response. Sure, maybe the client can decode it, but they don’t know what it is, and without linking to other resources, they don’t know how to find anything…unless you want to document everything and never change your service.

Some other tips/points:

• Give yourself a few initial entry points to your REST service. You should be able to discover all of the resources in it just by crawling. If you can’t, you haven’t done HATEOAS correctly. This is a lot harder than it sounds, but it’s more than useful later on. Think of your REST service like a website with good navigation.
• Remember to implement the OPTIONS verb for your resources. It will tell the client what verbs can be used on what resources. With some decent routing built into your application, this should be a cakewalk.
• As mentioned, you can use HTTP basic authentication for your requests. If the client is anything but a web browser, you won’t have to serve up an ugly popup login box, you can just do all that shit transparently. If you don’t want to send a cleartext password (please don’t!) you can salt the password on the client side and send it over. Hash the password again with the client’s secret for added security. Crackers will be amazed at your 1337 computer hacking skillz. You can then verify the hashed salted value on the server side. Add client-secret request signing with a timestamp for uber security.
• Read a lot more info on REST. It seems that SO many “RESTful” services out there are half-baked and made by people who researched the topic for half a day. Some good ones to take points from are the Sun Cloud API and the Netflix API. Notice the documentation of media types and LACK of documentation on every single URL you can request. This is that loose-coupling stuff I was talking about.

That’s it for now! I wrote this as a culmination of knowledge for the last week or so of research I’ve done…please let me know if any information is missing or incorrect and I can make updates. Hope it was helpful!

I recently (read: today) had an obnoxious problem: I’m writing some code for creating an ATOM feed, and kept getting errors about entity-escaped values. Namely, things like ’, •, etc. Even written as entities, Opera and IE7 did not recognize them. I read somewhere that it was necessary to convert the named entities to numbered entities. Great.

Well, PHP doesn’t have a native function for this. Why, I do not know…there seems to be functions for many other things, and adding an argument to htmlentities that returns numbered entities would seem easy enough. Either way, I wrote a quick function that takes the htmlentities translation table, adds any missing values that are not in the translation table, and runs the conversion to numbered entities. Check it:

function htmlentities_numbered($string)
{
	$table	=	get_html_translation_table(HTML_ENTITIES);
	$trans	=	array();
	foreach($table as $char => $ent)
	{
		$trans[$ent]	=	'&#'. ord($char) .';';
	}

	$trans['€']	=	'€';
	$trans['‚']	=	'‚';
	$trans['ƒ']	=	'ƒ';
	$trans['„']	=	'„';
	$trans['…']	=	'…';
	$trans['†']	=	'†';
	$trans['‡']	=	'‡';
	$trans['ˆ']	=	'ˆ';
	$trans['‰']	=	'‰';
	$trans['Š']	=	'Š';
	$trans['‹']	=	'‹';
	$trans['Œ']	=	'Œ';
	$trans['‘']	=	'‘';
	$trans['’']	=	'’';
	$trans['“']	=	'“';
	$trans['”']	=	'”';
	$trans['•']	=	'•';
	$trans['–']	=	'–';
	$trans['—']	=	'—';
	$trans['˜']	=	'˜';
	$trans['™']	=	'™';
	$trans['š']	=	'š';
	$trans['›']	=	'›';
	$trans['œ']	=	'œ';
	$trans['Ÿ']	=	'Ÿ';

	$string	=	strtr($string, $trans);
	return $string;
}

Hope it’s helpful.

UPDATE – apparently, even the numbered entities are not valid XML. Fair enough, I’ve converted them all to unicode (0×80 – 0x9F). All my ATOM feeds validate now (through feedvalidator.org).

Notice the “clone” in quotes. Why? You can’t actually clone a VM technically. We can work around that, though. Keep in mind, this guide is for VirtualBox <= 3.0.8 (later versions may have a clone button or something).

One thing you CAN do is export to OVF and re-import, but I’ve found that OVF loses many settings (like video ram, network settings, whether you use SATA or not, etc). I prefer not to even bother with this method.

The next thing you can do is just clone your VM’s hard disk(s):

1. Go into the ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/ folder. Copy and paste (windows) or cp (linux/unix) from db_master1.vdi to db_master2.vdi. If you try to import this into the Virtual Media Manager, it will piss and moan about the UUID being duplicate or some shit.
2. VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid db_master2.vdi – this is the magic command that allows you to import that new HD.
3. Create a new VM, and set db_master2.vdi as the primary drive.
4. Configure your new VM to have the same settings. (this is a pain, but there really aren’t that many settings).

There are a few things you’ll have to dick with once you have your VM cloned. If you’re into networking/cluster/HA crap like me, you’ll probably have a static IP. This obviously needs to be changed. It’s different for every distro, but it’s in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf for Slackware, and /etc/networking/interfaces for Debian (any other distro can go to hell).

Your old network interfaces, eth[0...n] will now be eth[(n+1)...(n*2)]: eg, if you had eth0 and eth1 before, they will now be eth2 and eth3. To reset this, (in Slackware):

1. Open/etc/udev/rules.d/75-network-devices.rules in your favorite editor
2. Remove all the entries.
3. Restart. (note – someone please correct me if you don’t need a restart… perhaps /sbin/udevtrigger will fix this?)
4. You will now have eth0 and eth1 again. Hoo-fucking-ray.

The process is the same for Debian, but the 75-network-devices.rules will most likely have a different name.

Good luck.

Here I will outline some wonderful techniques I’ve developed for saving the planet. A lot of these may come off as common sense but, as we all know, most people don’t have it so I’ll go over them anyway.

1. Driving. This is the obvious and hard one. Although I realize you can’t stop driving altogether, there are ways to drive the same distance without using as much gas.
   • Accellerate slowly. You are driving a 2 ton object. Although it feels slow, generating the amount of power to get that object from 0 to 30 is enormous, and a lot of fuel is used to get started. I can’t stress how important this is going uphill…take it slow.
   • Don’t stop for anything. Once you stop, you have to accelerate again. If you are coming up on a red light, decrease your speed a few hundred feet before you reach it. Then, you’ll be traveling a constant slow(er) speed and by the time you get there, the light will be green. If you get good at timing, you’ll be able to keep up a good speed and never have to stop for a red. Don’t mind the asshole tailgating you, they’d have to wait at the light anyway. With stop signs, obey the “no cop, no stop” philosophy.
   • Keep your tires filled and your car in tune.
   • Get a better car. If you actually go offroad a lot, you constantly haul stuff around, or have to deal with 3 feet of snow, you can skip this step. If you live in California like me, you can ditch your stupid SUV and get a real car. Remember, the size of your dick is inversely proportional to the size of your car. The bigger your car, the tinier your penis.
   • Get off your fat McDonalds ass and walk or ride your bike once in a while.
2. Lights. Get compact fluorescents. The initial cost is worth the eventual energy savings. They last forever and are much brighter than incandescents. Also, with any type of light, it’s better to leave it on for a few minutes than to incessantly turn it on and off. Note – with compact fluorescents, they are not disposable…they need to be properly recycled!
3. Heating/cooling. Heating a house or apartment is a big deal, so do it only when you need to. Wear a coat or put on some shorts and open the windows. Yes, you may be uncomfortable, but don’t be such a fuckin’ wuss. Some people are cold all the time and have no food. Bein uncomfortable builds character. Get over yourself, asswipe.
4. Food. I’m not going to shove the organic thing down your throat. It is better, however, to buy foods from your area. If you live in Siberia, skip this step. If not, supporting foods that haven’t been trucked across the globe saves energy because they haven’t been trucked across the globe.
5. If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brow… You get it. Flushing doesn’t waste water. Water just goes back into the water cycle. Flashing wastes electricity. Huh? Toilets don’t use electricity, stupid! Oh yes they do. In order for the water to come out your sink or toilet, it has to be pressurized. This takes a lot of energy. Imagine, if you will, trying to pressurize an entire city with a hand pump. A lot of work, right? Right. Well, pumps use electricity, and a lot of it. The less water you use, the less electricity used to pressurize the water system.
6. Don’t die. As your body decomposes, it releases harmful carbon into the atmosphere.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my energy-saving tips. Be sure to stay tuned for more in the future.