A cheap, reliable fileserver with features similar to commercial offerings

We needed to build a network storage system to store a few hundred gigabytes of data. Our goals were pretty basic at first : reliability and serving the data to windows clients. So started a search for several fileserver systems – we looked basically at OpenFiler and FreeNAS. Both were good enough, and had a [...]

A clean install of Ruby 1.9.1 + Ruby-on-Rails 2.3.2 on Ubuntu 9.04

I think the best way to go about this is to build everything from source. There are a few caveats of course, but I hope to clear them up. Prerequisites: sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev mysql-client libssl-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev Download the sources for ruby, rubygems, mysql-ruby OPTIONAL: Add this patch to ruby for [...]

Kansas just went bye-bye

Its been more than a week, and I got the heart to post this now. I have moved away from Calypto… and EDA (in my daily work routine atleast). I have moved to a new hush-hush company working with grid computing and distributed systems. And what’s more…. I am working on the Windows platform. Mind [...]

Saturday Night Blues(pec)

There was an interesting article by one of the guys of BlueSpec, about how the threading model is deficient.  It is a topic often touched upon by George Harper in several of his articles (and my comments! ) 'Tis but a simple enough approach – Let thy not believe in thy own scheduling. Ask for [...]

Currency for advisors:stock options

Brad Feld, VC extraordinaire, has this excellent post about the compensation that early stage advisors should get. What is more interesting is that Brad actually talks numbers!!! For example, 1% vested over four years is in the top range of the compensation bracket. What Brad usually prefers is 0.25% <=x <=1%.   However, one of [...]

Venture Capital funding in semiconductors going up…

I was reading through the 2006 Venture Capital Industry Report and found a very interestin, and very heartening, news. (Pg. 10) The number of companies and amount of capital invested in semiconductors and electronics has grown significantly, reflecting increasing activity in storage, mobile, and consumer devices. The median amount invested in semiconductors is standing at [...]

Pitch and Presentation

Ashwin, over at Venturewoods, linked to a great presentation. This is a presentation given at OSCON 2005 by Dick Hardt, CEO, Sxip Identity. I think the most important thing is to have a flawless demo (if any) and an intensity that burns through – everything else is just language. I mean look at the Yoda [...]

When VC’s turn evil

Bill Burnham blogs about the VC investment process in Datapower and the happy ending. It was very interesting that sometimes VC’s can gang up together and force an entrepreneur to accept funding at their terms or valuations. Even the comments section of Bill’s post has one about someone who had to seek funding from out-of-area, [...]