Clay Loveless

Photo

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:31:43 -0800

My #lockscreen (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:13:04 -0800

My #lockscreen (Taken with instagram)

#Hustle (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:41:01 -0800

#Hustle (Taken with instagram)

"There’s no ‘i’ in queeet, ese."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:55:42 -0800

“There’s no ‘i’ in queeet, ese.”

- Señor Clay Loveless

Photo

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:34:42 -0800

Admiral Ackbar on #SOPA

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:42:00 -0800

Admiral Ackbar on #SOPA

I am now Kloutless. Why? It’s not as useful as I thought...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:33:00 -0800

I am now Kloutless.

Why?

It’s not as useful as I thought it would be. The inexplicable score changes for me and others make it an unreliable measure of anything. They’ve proven themselves to be so unpredictable another individual’s Klout score is not actionable.

Note that this opinion is my own: not my employer’s, former employer’s, etc. etc. I just don’t find it useful, and have no intent to proceed with my plan to use Klout scores in Jexy support dashboards.

Jexy launch weekend bug hunt.

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 20:12:08 -0800

Jexy launch weekend bug hunt.

#stevejobs

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:36:24 -0700

#stevejobs

Fundraising Lessons from The Gambler

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 14:19:00 -0700

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.

-“The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers

When raising money for a new business, there are times when you find people that you genuinely like. You’d hang out with them, drink beers with them, and certainly go into the trenches with them.

This is all good. It feels great. You’re raising money, and you genuinely like the person you’re pitching! She seems to like you too. Despite numerous articles out there pointing out that investors are not your friends, they’re not supposed to be people you can’t stand hanging out with either.

It feels like it’s all but in the bag. But for one reason or another, it doesn’t come together. It’s tempting to keep pushing, since you’ve got good rapport, to get to a real yes or no answer. Try not to do that.

Instead, take a hard look at the situation. The person on the other side of the table may really like you too. She may believe you’re a capable entrepreneur, she may think you’re smart, she may think you’re great in many ways. But if she doesn’t believe in your business, she won’t pull the trigger just because she likes you.

Don’t get hung up on the bullshit you read about “we invest in people, not ideas”, because that’s just one of the many white lies you’ll hear out on the fundraising trail. Ultimately, it’s bullshit: the investors have limited cash to invest, and they need to see returns. They won’t bet on people who have ideas they don’t believe in, because they’re not in the bank-account-filling business. They’re in the returns-on-investment business, and there are too many people out there who may have ideas they do believe in and are people they ALSO like. Guess where the cash is going?

That’s not a reason to burn the bridge. Remember that it’s a small community, and that in 3-5 years (or less, if she was right about your idea not having legs), you may be back with another idea that she likes better. She’ll probably still like you as a person, and if you didn’t push them into some awkward corner of saying “let’s just be friends”, then she’ll be happy to hear from you.

Read the signals. Identify wrong trees that need no further barking up. Know when to walk away.

Update: A few people have emailed to ask if the subtext in this post is that Jexy isn’t going to happen. That’s not the case: Jexy is happening!

SSL, php-fpm and nginx

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:50:00 -0700

Like many switching to the nginx/php-fpm combo, I ran into a situation with some PHP scripts that relied on $_SERVER[“HTTPS”] having a value of ‘on’. As of nginx 1.0.4, this isn’t provided out of the box. Of course, the rest of the $_SERVER[“SSL_*”] values that are present under Apache and mod_php (or php-fpm) aren’t available either.

The closest approximation I could come up with to Apache’s mod_ssl +StdEnvVars for nginx is this: create a file in your nginx config directory (commonly /usr/local/nginx/conf) called fastcgi_ssl.conf. Add the following to it:


# Provide as much of Apache's SSL +StdEnvVars data as possible.
fastcgi_param HTTPS                 on;
fastcgi_param SSL_PROTOCOL          $ssl_protocol;
fastcgi_param SSL_CIPHER            $ssl_cipher;
fastcgi_param SSL_SESSION_ID        $ssl_session_id;
fastcgi_param SSL_CLIENT_VERIFY     $ssl_client_verify;

# _SERVER entries for these will be empty unless you
# rely on client-side certs you've issued
#fastcgi_param SSL_CLIENT_CERT       $ssl_client_cert;
#fastcgi_param SSL_CLIENT_RAW_CERT   $ssl_client_raw_cert;
#fastcgi_param SSL_CLIENT_S_DN       $ssl_client_s_dn;
#fastcgi_param SSL_CLIENT_I_DN       $ssl_client_i_dn;
#fastcgi_param SSL_CLIENT_SERIAL     $ssl_client_serial;

Include this file only inside server {} blocks that are configured for SSL use in nginx, and you’ll find that a environment checks for HTTPS work a lot better from within PHP.

Getting PEAR2 Pyrus Running

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:39:00 -0700

I had a heck of a time getting PEAR2’s pyrus.phar 2.0.0a3 running. I downloaded pyrus.phar, ran ‘php pyrus.phar list-packages’ and got nothing.

Turns out the problem was having Suhosin installed as well. Once I added:

suhosin.executor.include.whitelist=”phar”

… to my php.ini directives, ‘php pyrus.phar list-packages’ gave me a list of packages.

I always forget this, but the trick is always remember: if it doesn’t work for some reason, check suhosin settings. Make sure you have suhosin logging turned on, and check the log!

Father’s Day adventure #2: Rescuing 4yo’s basketball...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:16:20 -0700

Father’s Day adventure #2: Rescuing 4yo’s basketball from drainpipe. (Taken with instagram)

"You should think of your investors as the Honey Badger. They just want a launch. When it comes to..."

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 23:02:00 -0700

“You should think of your investors as the Honey Badger. They just want a launch. When it comes to everything else, Honey Badger Don’t Care.”

- The Wise Spouse

Hat tip @bmcHalDe via O’Reilly Maker. See other great...

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 21:01:00 -0700

Hat tip @bmcHalDe via O’Reilly Maker. See other great O’Reilly spoof covers by O’Reilly.

RESTful Routing, LocationMatch, ForceType and SetHandler

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:29:28 -0700

For years I’ve been seeing articles about RESTful routing, and watching developers contort their code including route aware this and that. All these gyrations come with a performance penalty, not to mention a code maintenance cost. (More lines to maintain = more pain in the ass.)

There are a few brave souls who’ve bucked this trend and gone with the original tools designed for this job — mod_rewrite and the like.

What I haven’t seen much that makes perfect sense to me is extension-free files with a ForceType or SetHandler directive applied to them.

I know examples with Apache and PHP show that I’m a geezer, but humor me anyway.

In either case, you create a file called ‘foo’ (no extension) in your document root. In it, you put something like this:

How you’d do this with funky new stuff such as Lighty, Nginx, and node.js, I don’t know exactly. I’m sure it’s possible. But, it’s an exercise for those of you fascinated by the shiny and the new.

The point is this: save your CPU cycles for the stuff that actually matters. Leave the easy stuff like routing where it belongs: outside your app.

Atlassian gives a prize for installing all their tools...

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:55:00 -0700

Atlassian gives a prize for installing all their tools successfully. Here’s mine.

I especially like the bikini-briefs-with-bunny-tail kneeguards!

Nerd Merit Badges, on a nerd’s bag strap. Thx @kloveless!...

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:26:58 -0700

Nerd Merit Badges, on a nerd’s bag strap. Thx @kloveless! #gluecon #jexy (Taken with instagram)

Seems like the money #Target is donating to #education is too...

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:48:56 -0700

Seems like the money #Target is donating to #education is too late to help their #marketing department. (Taken with instagram)

The boys tuckered out after a multi-hour track-building session.

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 11:22:27 -0700

The boys tuckered out after a multi-hour track-building session.