USB will charge all european phones

I whined. A few months ago, when I first heard that Europe was trying to force cellphone makers to standardize on one charger.  Maybe bitched more than whined, but that’s just splitting hairs.  I thought it was a bad idea.   I, too, have the box-o-chargers, some of which dating back to the mesozoic era of charges.  Rather, I bitched because I saw it as a superb opportunity for the bureaucrats to screw it up:  USB was quickly becoming the de-facto standard, and we didn’t need some committee in Stockholm or Brussels designing some heptagonal “standard”.  So here it is:  Mea Culpa.

Europe, with their continental sensibilities, has reached an agreement with big names (including Apple, for those of us tired of the proprietary iPod connector), to standardize chargers to, you guessed it, USB.  Assuming other countries jumps on the bandwagon, or at least don’t change their connector just for Europe, this can have a bit of an effect at the landfill:  every year, 130 million of us get new phones. That’s 65,000 tons of junk.

Hopefully now we won’t have to throw away the chargers.

wordpress

I got an email about WordPress today.  The summary: Wordpress, at least the public version, does not scale well.  So, here I go…

I’m not sure it’s the ‘public’ version that doesn’t scale well.  Some gripes with wordpress are really a LAMP stack gripe: Few complain about the L (Linux) and M (MySQL) parts of LAMP.  But Apache can be a hog, and PHP has the same issues as any other interpreted language.  Plus, no native db connection pooling (a downside of Apache MPM).

In benchmarks, WP out-of-the-box on an untuned server can serve an  over 600,000 requests a day.  I’d say that’s not bad for something that takes all of an hour to install.

If you want to scale beyond that, I don’t know of anything that can do so without effort.  If you want over a million requests a day, you gotta pay someone who knows what they’re doing. (more on that later).

Read the rest of this entry »

We are giving our IT Essentials for Startups workshop this next Tuesday, February 24th at SCORE Counselors to America’s Small Business Washington DC’s Chapter.    We cover the spectrum of IT basics for new or established small business owners.

We talk about marketing online (on shoe string budget) from websites, to blogs, to social networking.  We talk about back-office productivity tools, from collaborative work environments, CRMs, project management tools, to office networking systems, Voice-over-IP systems, and even down to your basic wireless routers and printers.   We even cover outsourcing and the latest trends in Open Source and Green industry as to how it could they can help your business.

Yes, it’s a lot!

We give you enough information about the current state of technology for to you to understand how these technologies can help your business and where to get started.   It is a half day workshop starting at 9:30 am to 12:30pm.

The workshop fee is $40 at the door.  All fees go to support SCORE which is an awesome organization.   They are a national non-profit partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration and they are dedicated to entrepreneur education and the growth and success of all small businesses.

Register early with Paypal and receive $10 discount.

American Bar Association Building
740 15th Street, NW
3rd Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Located behind Lafayette Park, McPherson Metro is within two blocks. viagra free sites computer edinburgh find cymbalta ocd bare calcium foot dr coral city augmentation lake salt breast

IT for small businesses

It’s that time again!  We are giving another workshop at the DC chapter of SBA/Score.  If you plan on attending, save some dough and sign up now; it’s $10 more at the door.  We will cover the full gamut of IT essentials for small businesses and startups.  I mean all of it: from website design to green business practices.

Speaking of green, we’ve uploaded our slides this time, rather than print them out (SBA only has single-sided printers).  So check them out and send us questions in advance.  Or comment here.

Here are some thoughts from the last one we did, back cold, cold February.

x men origins movie

deep purple-purpendicular download There’s a bit of a tech craziness is going around Washington DC lately with lots of twitter chatter about Government 2.0.  It’s no secret that this new administration is looking for answers in these challenging times but I have some concern that signal-to-noise ratio is going to cause some trouble.

In the last two years, Washington DC has taken center stage regarding technology adoption across institutions at both local and national levels.   Seems barely a few years ago that tech hackers never really saw much value in hanging out with PR and marketing people.  We had to be forced to go network like it was a chore and play nice with everyone we met.  Now-a-days, it seems like we’re all tripping over each other to exchange business cards, write on each others blogs and trying to score tickets the latest tech conferences.  Why is that?

Lots of reasons.  GenXers are now in positions of influence and arguably more willing to adopt new technologies.  We have a new and more open administration in the White House that is mandating more transparency.  And we have a bad economy that once again is attracting big business to Washington DC area.

..oh and one more… we also have… Twitter. Read the rest of this entry »