Visiting Dijon – April vacation

Well, I did plan well enough in advance my week of vacation so my family was not able to visit me in Paris. Alas, I’m taking the train to Dijon now so as to make something of this week off. Sorry family!

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9 Criteria for Investing in a business – from Fabrice Grinda

Just saw a great presentation from Fabrice Grinda on his entrepreneurial experience. Here are his personal 9 criteria for investing:

  1. billion in revenues someday
  2. 90% of bs. model revenues, margins
  3. Seed round should require less than $0.5 M
  4. Scalable business
  5. Growing biz; rising tide raises all boats; market
  6. Can be one of top 3 players, could be niche, better to be #1 of course
  7. No risk of margin squeeze
  8. You know how execute in that space
  9. Only ideas that the investor likes personally

Quite interesting…

billion in revenues someday
90% of bs. model revenues, margins
Seed should be less than $0.5 M
Scalable business
Growing biz; rising tide etc; market
Can be one of top 3 players, could be niche, better to be #1 of course
No risk of margin squeeze
You know how execute in that space
Ideas that the investor likes
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Google Chrome Browser on Apple OS X – Follow this for pre-release version

Google should be nearing their first beta version of their web browser named Chrome. If you’re impatient and just want to try it out now, you can download the latest “Early Access Release” here.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-Mac

As of now, this version of the browser does not prompt you to download a new version when it is available.

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Photo mosaic of HEC MBA Class of 2010

I’m helping out with the HEC Visions of Leadership awards for next Wed., Dec. 2nd. After putting together a promo video,

I built this mosaic of the class of 2010 which is being honored.

Built a photo mosaic of the HEC Paris class of 2010 for the Visions of Leadership awards ceremony.

Built a photo mosaic of the HEC Paris class of 2010 for the Visions of Leadership awards ceremony.

You can check out a larger version on Flickr.

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Back to blogging

In the spirit of Matt Cutts’ 30 day challenges, I’m going to post to this blog once a week for the next 4-5 weeks (well, I’ll aim for 30 days worth of weeks).

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Web Standards and Collaboration

I recently wrote about web standards and how it facilitates collaboration within teams over at my R2i blog page. Attached to the post is the brown-bag presentation I gave a few weeks ago.

You can download the presentation on web standards here as well.  I plan to follow up on this topic in more depth in the coming weeks.

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Optimize WordPress to Score an A with YSlow

I finally took the time to setup WordPress for myself this week. After I completed the installation (wow, that was fast!), I had the idea to see if I could optimize the delivery of the content. Yahoo! has created a Firefox plugin, YSlow, which reports on several different aspects of a web site’s delivery and structure, and rates each category on an A to F scale.I thought it might be a fun exercise to try to optimize Apache based on the feedback that YSlow provides to see how high a score I could get for this blog. So far, I’m at 93 (an A).

YSlow score for this page

Here are the steps I took in my Apache configuration file.

  1. Enabled g-zip compression for text-html.
  2. Enabled Expires Headers for images in the /images folder.
  3. Turned off etags because I wasn’t using them.

Here are the configuration settings that I added to the .conf file:

<Location />
        # Insert filter
        SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
        # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
        # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
        # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
        # BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
        # NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
        # the above regex won't work. You can use the following
        # workaround to get the desired effect:
        BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
        # Don't compress images
        SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
        \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
        # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
        Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

<location /blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/>
        ExpiresActive On
        ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
        # Disable etags
        FileETag none
</location>

Let me know if you have any other ideas on improving your YSlow score. Next step: optimize a DotNetNuke site using YSlow.

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