Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Review: Intel NUC

Last fall I bought a new development desktop machine.

Since 2009, I had been developing on a Mac Mini, with Bootcamp so that it ran both Mac OS X and Windows.  But with time that machine was getting old and it is slower than new machines.  And with the release of Windows 10, I was looking to update to a new development computer.

I like the small form factor of the Mac Mini, so I went looking for a new machine that is about the size of a Mac mini.  I considered a new Mac Mini, but the latest model of the Mini has a number of problems, plus it hasn't been updated in a long time, so it is outdated.  So I went looking to see if I could find something faster, better, and maybe even cheaper.

I found all of that in the Intel NUC.

The Intel NUC is a very small desktop machine from Intel.  It is not sold by Intel as a complete system, it lacks memory and a hard drive (and like a Mac Mini, does not come with a monitor, keyboard, or mouse).  But it forms the core of an excellent system.  You can also get them from resellers who install the memory and hard drive for you.

I found a NUC, added memory, a solid state drive, and a large spinning hard drive, and Windows 10, all for less than the cost of a high end Mac Mini.  It is faster, better, and cheaper than a Mac Mini.

After about 6 months of using the NUC, it is still a very nice machine.  It is very fast, small, and quiet.  I developed Pretty Good Solitaire version 16 on it.  Since I bought mine, Intel has come out with 6th generation Skylake chip versions, so the new ones would be even faster.

For anyone who is not intimidated by installing your own memory and hard drive(s), I highly recommend the Intel NUC.  It is a cheap way to get a powerful desktop, plus it is absurdly small.  This desktop should last me at least as long as the 6 years the Mac Mini did, and with Windows 10 on it, it should stay current with software for a long time.

 

 

How I Got 100,000 Twitter Followers

Last April, I read a book called How to Gain 100,000 Twitter Followers by M. Lemont.  I wrote a review about it: Book Review: How to Gain 100,000 Twitter Followers.

After reading the book and writing the review, I started using the techniques in the book to gain Twitter followers.  Every day.

When I read the book, I had 500 followers.  In the first week after reading it, I gained 200 followers.  Then I did a 1 to 1 consultation with the author (who was offering them at the time free to people who bought the book, I don't think that offer still stands now).  The consultation was done using direct messages on Twitter.  When the consultation started, I had 704 followers.  Later that same day it went over 1000 and later in the week it was over 2000 followers.

I just kept going, doing several of the techniques described in the book every day, over the spring, summer, and fall.  Each month I gained 10,000-15,000 followers and in December, I hit 100,000 followers.

It is not an easy thing to do. Out of all the people who have read the book, only 3 are known to have actually put it into practice and made it to 100,000.  But the procedure is really pretty simple, all you really need is time and the dedication to work your twitter account every single day.  Also, you have to figure out what works for you on Twitter.  For me, I tweet about my games and also about mostly tech related news, such as news about Apple and Microsoft.

If you want to reach a larger audience on Twitter, there is probably no better book to read.

 

Small Giants

Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham is a book about small companies that want to be small, but also great.  It details 14 small companies and goes in depth into the companies' histories, founders, and why and how these companies have decided to remain small companies rather than growing bigger.

The usual pattern for books of this type is to look at each company individually, generally with separate chapters.  Small Giants takes a different approach.  The book jumps around from one of the 14 companies to another to illustrate its points.  This takes a little getting used to in the beginning when you aren't familiar with the companies yet, but after you get used to it, it works well.

The companies featured in the book are small companies, but with one exception they are bigger than a typical MicroISV.  The smallest company has only two employees but the largest has more than a thousand.

The author chose only companies that had faced a decision where they could have decided to become a bigger company, either by going public, being acquired, or some other means.  Each company made a choice to remain a small, private company.

The book details the decision to remain small and how each company works and succeeds.   All of the companies are leaders in their industries, despite being small.  It shows how passionate, focused companies can compete successfully against much larger competition.  The culture of each company is described (and each company is different).  It deals with the issue of succession when the founders leave the company (some companies have faced this already, others are planning for it, and some others haven't yet planned for it).

While the companies featured are generally larger than MicroISVs and are in completely different industries than independent game developers, there is a lot here that applies that will be of interest to indies or MicroISVs.  A few of the companies, such as Righteous Babe Records, or Hammerhead Productions, a movie special effects company, are in intellectual property/development/publisher type industries and therefore face many of the same issues as indie game companies.

If you like reading about how small companies operate and are managed and how the people who run great small companies do it, then this is a must read book.

MicroISV

Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality is a new book by Bob Walsh about small software companies.  It is intended for people who want to start their own company.  It is a guide to starting the company and all the things you need to do to get started.  It details all the things you need to do to do, from the legalities of what type of corporation to form to advice on marketing and technical support.

Let me start out this review simply: if you are looking to start your own small software company (or have just started doing so), buy this book.  There is nothing else available like it that covers so much territory about the basics of starting and running a small software company.  Just buy it and read it.

Now, for the rest of the review, remember that I'm not really the target market for this book - I'm not starting out, I've already done it.

The term "micro-ISV" was invented by Eric Sink in article in 2004 for MSDN.  I'm not a great fan of the term, primarily because of the ISV part.  An ISV sounds like something that should have a four wheel drive.  It is a term coined by Microsoft and stands for "independent software vendor".   A micro-ISV is Eric's term for a very small software vendor.  In fact, he pretty much meant the term to stand for a company of one software developer.

In the year plus since Eric's article was written, the term has really caught on.  There was a need for a term to describe small software companies, since there are so many of them.  Shareware is not really the right term anymore, and in any case many small software companies are not using the shareware marketing method, so a more general term was needed.  A microisv.com web site was created and it has become the basic topic of a web discussion forum.

As the term was used more and more, it seems to have stretched to refer to any small software company, including Eric's company SourceGear and Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software, both of which have a couple of dozen employees or more. 

In the book, Bob Walsh lists these companies as very successful Micro-ISVs near the end of the book.  To me, the best part of the book was near the end where he has short interviews with the founders of 25 MicroISVs. 

He says "please excuse the length of this chapter", but in fact the main problem with the book is that this chapter is too short.  The interviews are only 2 or 3 pages with each company and I would have liked to have seen much longer interviews with even more companies.

I wish that there had been more in the interviews about each companies business processes - how they handle the various workloads.  That is, how does a one, two, or handful of people do all the things that a company needs to do.  And I would be interested in more about the long term goals of a microISV, questions about whether the company wants to grow and become a full ISV, get bought out, or whether the goal is to remain a small company.

The book touches on these issues in many places, but since the book has to cover so many basic topics it never goes into these more advanced topics in much detail.

In short, after reading the book I guess I want to read the sequel.  This book is the manual for how to start up a MicroISV, now I want to read the book about how you run a MicroISV over the long term.

The author, Bob Walsh, has a blog at ToDoOrElse.com.  He has also started up a new blog specifically for the book at MyMicroISV.com.  Some interviews are available on that site (similar to the interviews in the book).   There is an interview with Bob Walsh at microisv.com.

The forward of the book by Joel Spolsky is available online at JoelonSoftware.com.  In it, he says

Don’t start a business if you can’t explain what pain it solves, for whom, and why your product will eliminate this pain, and how the customer will pay to solve this pain.

This only applies to business software, of course.  For entertainment software, you need to explain what pleasure it gives - that is, it better be fun.

DVD Review - Veronica Mars

I watch very little television these days - that is, television in the old sense of sitting down and watching a television program at the time that it is broadcast and with commercials.    I suspect that I am not alone in this.   I do watch a lot of movies and TV shows on DVD.  It is ever so much more confortable that way - I watch with my laptop on my lap and usually Pumpkin on or by my legs.  No commercials and none of the annoying clutter that fills the screen of regular television these days.  And you can watch at any convienient time.

Recently I watched the Season One DVD of the new television show Veronica Mars.  Let's just put this bluntly - Veronica Mars is the best television show since Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The reason the show works is that it is so well written.  It is both funny and action packed, like Buffy was.  The formula is essentially this:

Veronica Mars = Buffy - vampires + Nancy Drew

Except that Veronica is much more interesting than Nancy Drew.

Basically, there is a mystery contained in each episode, plus there is a season long mystery that plays out over the 22 episodes.  This formula works great - each episode is self-contained, but yet there is a thread that goes through the entire season.  And the best part is that the writers don't play games with you.  They don't just come up with something out of the blue, as in some other shows like the excretable Lost.  It's like Buffy was in seasons 2-5 and also like the early Alias (and unlike the current Alias which has become Lostisized).

I highly recommend the Season One DVD of Veronica Mars - it's just 22 hours of fun.