Jared Stenquist - Personal Blog

My man Boris with the Celtics trophy. NICE!!!

Jared — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:35:59 +0000

Check out Boris Revsin with this champ trophy at the celts game! NICE!!!!

HTML5 shows some balls

Jared — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 04:40:15 +0000

Damn, can you believe that HTML5 is already showing such promise? If Googlers can put this together on their 20%, there is an incredible potential here.

http://tcrn.ch/9n2hHP

The oftentimes prohibitive cost of data

Jared — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:41:19 +0000

When costs for a particular product or server get prohibitively high, typically in a monopoly situation, it’s a great time for a startup to come in and level the playing field. Competition is the golden key to creating a price point that matches supply and demand.

Yesterday i reached out to a company i found online that offered movie time data and a cool affiliate program that could let my site visitors buy tickets, creating a nice affiliate revenue stream. In the ideal world, the data stream would be free, which would then increase the amount of tickets sold through a now increasing amount of affiliates. In this theoretical world, the movie producers would think logically and offer this data to anyone, knowing that more access to tickets = more sales = greater profit.

The pricing i received back from the company was somewhere between mind-blowing and ludicrous. $3,500 PER MONTH to access the data. That’s $42,000 a year. Absolutely ridiculous. Of course they also have a similarly crazy pricing plan where you pay $0.25 per screen per week. So for a typical 12 screen theatre, you pay $12/month just to see what times movies are playing. Now of course if you try to build any sort of national app that integrates a users geo-location, you’re looking at much more than $3,500 a month if paying on a per screen basement.

I’m sure somewhere in this company a sales guy is doing the math for us entrepreneurs – Why spend $15,000 a month by paying per screen when I can get you EVERY screen for just 12 easy payments per year of $3,500.

If anyone hears of a better alternative, somewhere in between scraping the data and paying through the roof for it, i’d love to hear from you.

Mass Mailing and the need to reduce waste

Jared — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:26:10 +0000

Today my mailbox was full of mass mailings, all from Dell, all the same offer. Each envelope had the same address, business name and suite. The only difference: The person it was addressed to. If Dell could simply find a way for their database to know we are all from the same company, they could save 75% on their costs to market to me. Multiply that by the millions they send to and you begin to see the savings that are possible. There must be a smart young company out there ready to pitch Dell on their magical savings solution.

For now, I’ll just keep on shredding.

Hiking in Runyon Canyon – Hollywood Hills

Jared — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:17:46 +0000

Besides the incredible panoramic views of L.A., we found this house – Abandoned. Wild.

[View with PicLens]

Skymall Classic

Jared — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:04:23 +0000

Snapped a photo of this Skymall gem on my flight to LA. Question is….

How many people end up with worse/more migraines after using this device?

CampusLIVE Featured in Boston Globe

Jared — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:03:15 +0000

This article was run yesterday, announcing our first investment, complete with the following goofy photo of us. Think we need to hire a couple ladies?

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2010/02/amherst-based_campuslive_gets.html

Telecommuting high above LA

Jared — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:30:46 +0000

Alex was nice enough to find me a desk at her new office in LA. Not a bad view!

What to do when eSata doesn’t work on a Dell Latitude E6500 – Win7 or Vista

Jared — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:54:32 +0000

I ran into an interested problem with my month-old Dell Latitude E6500. It comes with an eSata connection which i was eager to take advantage of for high speed backups and disk cloning. I discovered that there is a lot more to getting this port working with an external drive (in my case a 1.5TB Western Digital MyBook).

There are a few things you’ll need to conquer to get eSata functionality out of the E6500. Although quite annoying, the 50+megabytes per seconds you’ll be able to transfer at are worth the wait.

1) Intel Matrix driver and software must be updated.
The SiL5744 chipset requires updated software from the dell support site. Download the software here.

2) You must make a registry change (YIKES)
Microsoft has directions to make a registry change necessary to run eSata.

3) You must enable the correct SATA support in the BIOS
The E6500′s BIOS is initially set to use IRRT. The likely reason for this is that IRRT supports RAID1 setups, which in my opinion aren’t going to be widely used even in corporate environments. Tt must be changed to AHCI for an external drive to successfully connect. Some registry changes are needed to keep the system able to boot. (if you make a mistake you can switch back to IRRT to boot again.

4) CHECK TO MAKE SURE YOUR CABLE FITS THE CONNECTIONS – MODIFICATIONS MAY BE NEEDED.
I bought a standard Belkin eSata cable at Staples for around 20 bucks. Turns out the plastic molded around each of the male ends goes too far down the plug, causing it to not actually make a connection. I cut about 5mm off with a razor blade and it made all the difference. This problem is well known (toms hardware article) and not too obvious to the average consumer.

I put a lot of the blame on Western Digital for making the case on their MyBook so damn thick over the ports. They’re no way most cables will fit into this drives without some modification. I would also recommend looking into other eSata drives, as I was less impressed that a $175 external drive came with demo/trial software. Disappointing considering how much great open source software they could have bundled with it.

Some Additional Resources

For CPanel Servers, ConfigServer firewall a must

Jared — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:38:40 +0000

The crew at ConfigServer have created an awesome (Free) firewall plugin for CPanel that makes security a breeze. I’ve loaded it on all our servers and am really impressed. You can hop over to more information about ConfigServer, or follow the simple instructions I’m archiving here:

############################################################################### # Copyright 2006-2009, Way to the Web Limited # URL: http://www.waytotheweb.com # Email: sales@waytotheweb.com ###############################################################################


Installation

============

Installation is quite straightforward:
rm -fv csf.tgz

wget http://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz

tar -xzf csf.tgz

cd csf

sh install.sh
Next, test whether you have the required iptables modules:
perl /etc/csf/csftest.pl
Don't worry if you cannot run all the features, so long as the script doesn't

report any FATAL errors
You should not run any other iptables firewall configuration script. For

example, if you previously used APF+BFD you can remove the combination (which

you will need to do if you have them installed otherwise they will conflict

horribly):
sh /etc/csf/remove_apf_bfd.sh
That's it. You can then configure csf and lfd by edit the files

directly in /etc/csf/*, or on cPanel servers use the WHM UI
csf installation for cPanel is preconfigured to work on a cPanel server with all

the standard cPanel ports open.
csf installation for DirectAdmin is preconfigured to work on a DirectAdmin

server with all the standard DirectAdmin ports open.
csf auto-configures your SSH port on installation where it's running on a non-

standard port.
csf auto-whitelists your connected IP address where possible on installation.
You should ensure that kernel logging daemon (klogd) is enabled. Typically, VPS

servers have this disabled and you should check /etc/init.d/syslog and make

sure that any klogd lines are not commented out. If you change the file,

remember to restart syslog.
See the readme.txt file for more information.
Webmin Module Installation/Upgrade

==================================
To install or upgrade the csf webmin module:
Install csf as above

Install the csf webmin module in:

  Webmin > Webmin Configuration > Webmin Modules >

  From local file > /etc/csf/csfwebmin.tgz > Install Module
Uninstallation

==============

Removing csf and lfd is even more simple:
On cPanel servers:
cd /etc/csf

sh uninstall.sh
On DirectAdmin servers:
cd /etc/csf

sh uninstall.directadmin.sh
On generic linux servers:

cd /etc/csf sh uninstall.generic.sh