spack++

I also entered the Amazon Startup Challenge for HolaServers and good old LogHelper, which it turns out, I haven’t blogged about.  Well, won’t that be an awesome entry.  I figure I have a decent shot at making the finals, which would mean at least $5000 in amazon aws credits.  That would turn out the be real money, since I will be paying out of pocket for S3 as I am getting started.  Also, I would quite like to have my mysql hosted on say EC2, which it looks like is getting more doable daily.  Not sure how they ensure that your mysql daemon stays up.  To do such a thing directly with amazon is like $72 / month (ten cents / hour * 24 hours / day * 30 days / month).  Not too bad once I am getting upgrades, but to start, I think it rather prohibitive.  My co-lo is only like $100 per month and that’s for 2U of servers.  Winning the contest and getting 50k in cash and 50k in credits would also be cool.

So lately I have been trying to get the styles to line up a bit better and though I am not all done, I would feel pretty hopeless without good old firebug.  With firebug you can mouse through the dom and the browser highlights what you’re over.  Also, coming from a guy who used to make a living reading some not so good perl, css is a bit hard to read / follow.  Guess I would get better at such things, but I am not there yet.

Are the next generations of designers going to be great at design, html / css, javascript, templates and the like?  Can someone point me in the direction of some such person?  I would really like to be able to set someone up with eclipse, python and getting holaservers working on their laptop, have the mythical designer edit the templates and commit them when they’re done.  Is that so wrong?

Enjoy,

Earl