Derek Bobo's Blog

I generally try not to think about the nastiness that goes on in the world. I have not watched the news in years because I don’t like surrounding myself with the negativity. I get caught up on the highlights via a few websites and casual conversation, but otherwise I try to isolate myself from it.

Lately I’m having a more difficult time ignoring the reality. It’s bad out there. Gas prices look like they are back on the rise. The country is continuing to spend itself into oblivion… and aren’t you oh so happy with the way the bailout is going? Chrysler has announced they are closing 800 dealerships and GM another 1100. There is talk of looking at a national sales tax to raise funds. Unemployment numbers are the worst since the great depression. North Korea is doing nuclear testing. Banks are failing. I’m afraid that as bad as things are, the issues are magnified by greed and corruption.

It’s just really a dark time for the world and specifically our country right now. I suspect we will eventually pull ourselves out of these tough times but fear the worst may still be ahead of us.

At this point I think it’s important for us to get back to the basics of life. How are we able to protect ourselves, our families, and continue to survive with the worst ahead of us? What ways can we continue to provide for our families and ourselves if the worst were to happen? Could you drive on if you lost your job? How about when past due bills start building up? What if you went to cash in your savings and it wasn’t there?

I pray we won’t get to this point but I think it’s time to start looking at ways to help ourselves with the basic necessities of life, finances, and even our sanity to some extent. Trying times can leave a mark that never heals.

I recently ran across this article:

http://ecoble.com/2007/11/18/250000-bottles-amazing-recycled-mexican-island-paradise/

It’s old news but very cool stuff. It makes me wonder what other interesting ideas are out there. Have you seen any similar concepts that put junk to good use? I’ve got to think that economies down people have got to be looking for ways to innovate and make the best with what they have.

Any ideas?

I have an interest in survival. I enjoy watching shows such as Man vs Wild and Survivorman. I also try to do a minimalist camping trip once a year. I basically pack a small handful of items and then go rough it in the wilderness for a day or two without shelter or normal camping supplies.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the fancy survival knifes that have the hollow handle. Inside the handle are a few random items. Usually some fishing line, hooks, needle, thread, and matches. If you’re lucky you also get a compass on the end of your knife. Very cool stuff.

So I had a random thought today that instead of buying a survival knife, how about a survival thermos? It’s a bit bigger than a knife, but you get some considerable advantages. With only a little bit more bulk you now have a container for which you can transport food and water or use them for cooking. Additionally when not in use you have a pretty nice storage device for more items. In a survival thermos you might have fishing line, hooks, needle, thread, matches, compass, rope, mirror, emergency blanket, poncho, magnifying glass, straw, potable water tablets, knife, and maybe even enough room for a freeze dried meal.

So if you’re looking for an affordable, practical, and diverse survival kit, give the survival thermos a thought. If you do, please let me know how it turns out and what goes in your kit.

I started learning to play the guitar about a month ago. I’ve been taking a lesson a week at a local guitar shop and playing some every night. I have a long way to go but wanted to offer some words of encouragement to anyone else who is on the brink. While it does seem overwhelming it’s not nearly as difficult as I would have expected. Pick you up a guitar, some picks, and a tuner and get after it.

TIP: While I already had a guitar I noticed that the local pawn shop had a ton of guitars, both acoustic and electric. If you’re on a budget don’t let this keep you from giving it a try.

Here are the resources I’ve found most helpful online:

Ultimate Guitar – Here you will find the tabs and chords for a lot of your favorite songs. I suggest learning your chords and going off of the chord version of songs. If you know your chords and can figure out the rhythm you can learn to play any song!

FreeAndEasyGuitar – Aaron is an amazing self taught guitarist. His site boasts video lessons, song requests, and tablature. Aaron has probably been the biggest help to me so far. Definitely check him out!

Chorder – This site shows the guitar and fingerings for all your chords. If you’re learning a song that has a chord you’re not familiar with this is a great place to start.

The only other advice I would offer for the beginning guitarist is to keep your rhythm (pick) hand moving. All songs are going to have some open chords so if you hit a few extra strings while transitioning between chords no one is going to notice and it will sound much better than having dead spots between chords.

I hope this helps someone who is interested get after their goal. Picking up the guitar was one of the greatest feelings in recent memory. Good luck!

Starting a business is a lot of hard work. You want to look professional. You want to work efficiently. You want to scale. You want to offer superior service to your customers. The list is endless. Technology can be a huge strategic advantage in these efforts if leveraged correctly or it can cause you a lot of frustrations. It is my goal to help you make it a strategic part of your business.

Are you looking for a lower cost alternative to Microsoft office?

Want to get email addresses @yourbusinessname.com but aren’t sure how?

Need a way to manage your contact lists? Your projects?

Do you need to do advanced graphics editing but can’t justify buying Photoshop?

These are just a few of the types of questions I can help you answer. If you have a question for how you can leverage technology that is more scalable, maintainable, and affordable. Please do not hesitate to ask. I’ll bump you in the right direction for your needs and if you need further assistance I can help with that too!

When I talk about product development I’m generally talking about some piece of technology I’m about to build. That being said I think the approach is useful in other realms as well.

The first thing you have to do is come up with an idea. I like to keep it simple and go with the old approach of, “find a need and fill it.” One way these thoughts typically come to me is when I think, “boy wouldn’t it be nice if…” So I try to jot down any idea that comes to mind and might have some potential. They won’t all be good ideas, others may not be practical, but don’t throw them out just yet. If you think it’s a good idea but aren’t sure how it will all come together, that’s okay too.

With several ideas in front of me I start to go down through them asking a series of questions. Is this something I want to do? Is this something that people would want to use? Is it something I can make money off of? Are the market conditions right? As you go through these questions you will start to see which ideas appear to make the most sense and you’ll ulimately arrive at the idea you’re going to persue.

At this point you may have some work to do. Since your thoughts are based largely off a hunch you want to validate that it’s correct. If this product is mainly intended for personal use at first then you can skip this step, otherwise you want to do some research. Ask some friends and family, maybe make some blog posts, check with businesses, etc and find out if it really is something that makes sense. Listen to all the feedback you get, some may be useless and that’s okay too. With the facts at hand revisit the questions you asked yourself earlier.

Now that you finally have the idea and are ready to get after it just start going crazy. Start thinking of all the features you’d like your product to have. Don’t think of it in terms of boundaries or limitations at this point. Don’t worry about the how, just let your imagination go. Jot these down on a piece of paper as you go.

With your wishlish complete it’s time to start prioritizing. Which features absolutely make or break the product? Which features help enhance or differentiate the product? Which features are less important and are more marketing hype? You may notice some features are not quite as critical but if you try to retrofit them into a later phase it may create more pain than if you implement them from day one.

As the vision comes together you will want to start throwing together some rough designs. Hand sketches are fine, figure out how you will want to arrange your features, think about work flow, user experience, automation, customization, security, etc. Work through several iterations until you get something you’re happy with. When you think you have a winner that’s the design you want to spend more time with. Work through building the appropriate graphics, colors, widgets and controls. One completed you will have conceptual prototypes for which to initiate the sales cycle and a blueprint to begin the actual development phase.

I put off this task for quite sometime because I was a bit overwhelmed by it. I thought “this is something I don’t want to screw up, it’s worth paying an attorney who knows what they are doing.” It turns out it’s quite an easy task. First off you’ll want to make sure the name you want to register is available. You can do that online here.

Once you have the name figured out you can download the necessary forms here.

You’ll basically just need to fill out your contact information and appoint someone who can sign official documents for the business.

Next you need to write a $125 check to the Secretary of State and mail it in. The process takes about a week or so to complete.

While you’re waiting to get your reciept from the Secretary of State you can setup a business bank account because you’ll want to keep all business transactions separate from personal transactions.

DISCLAIMER: This in no way constitutes as legal advice and I would still encourage you to consult legal and financial advice whereever you have questions. If you goof something up it’s not on me

As promised this is the rough design of my solar power backup system. I think it’s really going to be pretty simple to get my test system going. To implement a system that would power my whole house would be much more involved, but I’m not there yet.

Basically the solar panels generate energy from the sun. These pass the current through the charge controller to the battery bank. The charge controller essentially protects your batteries from over charging. The 12V battery bank will then pass the electricity through the inverter. The inverter does a couple of things but the most important is it converts DC power to AC household power. At this point you have usable electricity.

What gets tricky (and what I’m currently wrestling with) is exactly what, and “how much” to buy. With solar panels you need to basically compute your electric consumption and then buy enough panels to generate enough power to accommodate that. This isn’t too painful.

Since I’m not an electrician I’m a little more confused with how big of a charge controller to get. I’ll need to investigate this before I make my purchase… but I imagine something small should be fine for my initial testing.

When it comes to batteries I keep hearing that golf cart batteries are the best. These are built to be charged and run down over and over again. The only caveat is that they are only 6V and the system counts on 12V. If  you had 2 6V golf cart batteries you can wire them together in a series to take it to 12V… but without any additional storage capacity. If you wired them in parallel it would basically double the storage capacity (think battery life).

The inverter needs to be big enough to handle your usage. As I noted in my other post, I only got a 750W inverter. This is pretty small and would not handle any major appliances, but should be fine for my initial tests.

So that’s where I stand right now. Right now I’m trying to figure out somewhere local that I can get a couple batteries to test with. I’d really like to get the golf cart batteries. After that it’s the charge controller and a couple solar panels!

Today I took the first step on starting my solar powered system. I bought a 750W Black & Decker inverter from Walmart. In it’s simplest form it takes DC power from a car battery and turns it into AC household power. A small 750W inverter like this won’t power any major appliances but would allow you to run a handful of small gadgets (a light, a tv, a laptop, small power tools, etc) which would certainly make things more enjoyable than sitting in the dark without power for a week.

Next I need to purchase a handful of golf cart batteries. I hear they are better than your typical deep cell battery. This certainly won’t get me off the grid, but right now I’m just trying to get a proof of concept system running that might hold up in an extended power outage. I’ll try to upload my hand drawn sketch within the next few days.

For those of you who are not aware of PHP’s autoload function, you can read about it here. Basically it allows you to do some lazy loading of classes. Instead of having to manually include files, you can just instantiate classes on the fly. If the object name is not in scope it will call the autoload function to attempt to load it.

For example:

include_once “common/classes/myclass.php”;
$objMyClass = new MyClass();

With an autoload function defined this can now be coded by simply doing this:

$objMyClass = new MyClass();

This is particularly helpful with large projects as it helps keep your code lean. You can read the basic examples from the manual, but I wanted to share a way to recursively autoload files. Here is my Autoload.php file which simply needs to be included by any page you wish to leverage autoloading on. In my framework I only need to include it once, basically in my index.php file.

• The constants are first defined in a Config.php file.
• All files in the HELPER_DIR are included as these are general functions that are leveraged in classes or inline.
• After including helper files this would essentially start at the next defined root directory and then look through all files and folders while attempting to include the appropriate class. (LIBRARY_DIR then ADDON_DIR then CONTROLLER_DIR then MODEL_DIR then VIEW_DIR then EXTENSION DIR).
• File names should be the same as the object name, minus the .php extension. For example if your class name was MyClass it should live in a file called MyClass.php.

I’m not suggesting that this is an optimal solution. In fact, the way I’m determing if the include file was found is a bit of a hack, but it does work and demonstrates a handy function of PHP. If there are any questions on this implementation don’t hesitate to ask.

<?php

doFindAndInclude(HELPER_DIR, "", true);

function __autoload($strClass)
{
   $blnDone = false;
   if( !$blnDone )
   {
      $blnDone = doFindAndInclude(LIBRARY_DIR, $strClass, false);
   }

   if( !$blnDone )
   {
      $blnDone = doFindAndInclude(ADDON_DIR, $strClass, false);
   }

   if( !$blnDone )
   {
      $blnDone = doFindAndInclude(CONTROLLER_DIR, $strClass, false);
   }

   if( !$blnDone )
   {
      $blnDone = doFindAndInclude(MODEL_DIR, $strClass, false);
   }

   if( !$blnDone )
   {
      $blnDone = doFindAndInclude(VIEW_DIR, $strClass, false);
   }

   if( !$blnDone )
   {
      $blnDone = doFindAndInclude(EXTENSION_DIR, $strClass, false);
   }
}

function doFindAndInclude($strDirectory, $strFilename, $blnIncludeAll)
{
   ob_start();
   doRecursiveFindAndInclude($strDirectory, $strFilename, $blnIncludeAll);
   $included = ob_get_contents();
   ob_end_clean();
   return $included != "";
}

function doRecursiveFindAndInclude($strDirectory, $strFilename, $blnIncludeAll)
{
   if( $handle = opendir($strDirectory) )
   {
      while( false !== ($file = readdir($handle)) )
      {
         if( $file != "." && $file != ".." )
         {
            if(is_dir($strDirectory . "/" . $file))
            {
               doRecursiveFindAndInclude($strDirectory . $file . "/", $strFilename, $blnIncludeAll);
			}
			else
			{
			   $strCurrent = $strDirectory . $file;
			   $strTestFilename = $strDirectory . $strFilename . ".php";

			   $pathinfo = pathinfo($strCurrent);
			   $extension = $pathinfo['extension'];

			   if( $strCurrent == $strTestFilename && !$blnIncludeAll )
			   {
			   	  include_once $strCurrent;
			      echo "FOUND: " . $strCurrent;
			   }
			   else if( $blnIncludeAll && $extension == "php" ) //Don't include directories
			   {
			      include_once $strCurrent;
			      echo "INCLUDE: " . $strCurrent;
			   }
			}
		 }
	  }
      closedir($handle);
   }
}

?>