For instance, the Common Lisp Cookbook has a very thorough page on Setting Up an IDE with Emacs on Windows or Max OSX, but as far as I can tell, it’s from 2004 or earlier because it doesn’t mention SBCL or SLIME, two of the most popular pieces of CL development software today. Or when you run into a specific problem, it’s usually not too hard to find an answer, but it might not match the setup you’re using. That’s why I had to quit using Lispbox, because no one had any clue how it was configured, especially not on Windows. n00bs didn’t know the answers and the wizards had a traditional setup.

Here are some of the variables that contribute to the combinatorial explosion of configuration, in order or pain caused:

• Operating system: Linux (many flavors), Mac, Windows, Cygwin
• CL implementation: most common are SBCL, CMUCL, Allegro, LispWorks, CLISP
• CL implementation version (I ran into a problem here)
• SLIME version (stable 2.0 release or CVS snapshot)
• Emacs version (I didn’t run across any problems with this)
• I almost forgot, now there’s Cusp/Eclipse if you don’t want to use Emacs/SLIME, but right now Cusp is only tested on SBCL.

Maybe someday someone will try out all of those combinations and report, but for today, I did exactly one: Windows XP, CLISP 2.44, SLIME CVS, and Emacs 22.2 Why CLISP? After reading lots of internet, I came to the conclusion that (aside from the commercial CLs), CLISP is the best implementation for Windows users. The knocks against it are that it’s slow because it’s byte-code compiled, it doesn’t have threads, and on some points, it’s ideologically different from CL and other implementations.

Well, the performance isn’t a big concern for me (plus as I went to press, 2.45 was released with experimental JIT compilation), the threads also aren’t a big deal right now, and I think the differences will help me be aware of the considerations for writing portable code. Also regarding the SBCL windows port, it’s still considered experimental (currently v1.013 for Windows) but people are saying it’s stable and everything works except the threads. There’s even an msi installer for the Windows version. One of my next projects will be to dive into the SBCL documentation and mailing lists to get a better feel for it.

As far as the philosophy behind this (and future) setup guides, I want them to be a) thorough and b) instructive. Instructive? If you just want to take my word for everything, that’s fine, but I want you to know where I got my info from, so I’ve tried to include links to references for each step. On to the setup guide!

0. Files to Download

If you want to get started on downloading the setup files, here are the links:

• 7-zip (download v4.57 - 840K) - for unpacking .tar and .tar.gz files commonly used in *nix.
• Emacs (download v22.2 - 37MB)
• CLISP (download v2.44 - 4MB)
• SLIME (download CVS snapshot - 700K) - CLISP recently removed a function used in the 2.0 version of SLIME, but the SLIME CVS snapshot has that fixed

1. Setup Directories

Windows XP loves extremely long pathnames like C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data. This is okay if for GUI-driven apps, but in Emacs, you’re not clicking, you’re typing, and you want short path names. Also, much (most?) of the open source Common Lisp tools are developed on *nix, so there’s less impedance mismatch when using stuff off the net if you have a *nix-ish folder structure.

Start with a root folder. In the pathnames in the rest of this guide, I’ll refer to it as [HOME]. I used C:\home\ to match the *nix convention of having user files be in /home/username/. You also need a username directory - I called mine peter and I’ll refer to it as [USR]. So in my case, [HOME]/[USR] would be C:\home\peter\.

Emacs NOTE #1: One important point about filenames in Emacs is that they CAN be entered with ‘/’, but if you prefer to use ‘\’, you have to escape it with another back slash, so in Emacs buffers and files, you would enter “C:/home/” or “C:\\home\\” but never “C:\home\”. The trailing slash is also important because it indicates that it’s a directory. Now that you have chosen your [ROOT] and {USR] values, these are the folders you should setup:

• [HOME]\[USR]\
• [HOME]\[USR]\site\
• [HOME]\[USR]\docs\
• [HOME]\[USR]\lisp\
• [HOME]\[USR]\info\
• [HOME]\bin\

2. Setup Emacs

Emacs does not need to be “installed” like most Windows apps - it just runs from its directory. Extract it to [HOME]\bin\. I changed the folder name from emacs-22.2 to just emacs, so my path was c:\home\bin\emacs\. You run emacs by running the file [HOME]\bin\emacs\bin\runemacs.exe.

Emacs settings are stored in a configuration file called “.emacs”. On Windows, the default working folder and .emacs location is C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data, but that’s too painful to type and it’s a hidden folder so it’s not even easy to get through with the GUI. To have Emacs work in a different folder, create a file called site-start.el in the emacs\site-lisp folder. In that folder, put the following line (but change the path to match yours):

(setenv “HOME” “[HOME]/[USR]/”)

(Thanks Nathaniel! This was probably the biggest annoyance of mine that made me put off finishing setup for so long.)

Emacs NOTE #2: Emacs has lots (and lots and lots) of keyboard shortcuts, many more than there are letters in the alphabet. Many of them require multiple keys or a sequence of keys called a “chord”. The two modifier keys used are Control and Alt (also called Meta). The common way to write chords is to use C- and M- for Control and Meta, so to run the command to close Emacs, you hold down Control and X, then let go, then hold down Control and C. This is written as C-x C-c. Sometimes a chord is followed by another letter or the name of a command. For instance, to undo, you hold Control and x, then let go and hit u. This is written as C-x u. Dashes mean press at the same time, space means let go. Easy! I made a cheat sheet for common commands in Emacs and SLIME.

Now it’s time to create your .emacs file. Run emacs and hit C-x C-f. This is the find command, which is used to create or open a file. At the prompt “Find file: “, type “~/.emacs” (without quotes). Right now just put a ; (that’s the comment marker in Emacs Lisp files) and save it by hitting C-x C-s. There’s a world of stuff you can put in a .emacs file, but that’s too much to bite off now.

3. Install CLISP

This is easy if you download the install package (that’s the one I linked to). Run the installer and choose [HOME]\bin\clisp\ as the install directory. That’s it!

4. Setup SLIME

CLISP changed recently (around version 2.44 - not sure exactly) and broke compatibility with the SLIME 2.0 release. This was fixed in development and the CVS snapshot works. If you try to use the 2.0 release, you’ll get an error that looks like this:

INTERN(”FRAME-UP-1″): #<PACKAGE SYSTEM> is locked

So use the CVS snapshot (which I linked to) and you should be fine.

Extract the SLIME folder to [HOME]\bin\emacs\site-lisp. (Here’s a tip about putting emacs code in site-lisp).

Now in Emacs, open your .emacs file (C-x C-f, ~/.emacs) and enter the following (general SLIME instructions, CLISP specific parameters), changing your pathnames as usual:

(setq inferior-lisp-program “[HOME]/bin/clisp/full/lisp.exe
-B c:/[HOME]/bin/clisp/full
-M c:/[HOME]/bin/clisp/full/lispinit.mem
-ansi -q”)
(add-to-list ‘load-path “[HOME]/emacs/site-lisp/slime/”)
(require ’slime)
(slime-setup)

Save the .emacs file (C-x C-s), then run the eval-buffer command (M-x eval-buffer). This will run the code that you just entered and tell Emacs how to run SLIME.

Now, you start slime with M-x slime and you’re ready to go!

————————————–

I hope this works for you - I ran through it on another computer and it worked the first time, so if you use exactly these parts you should be OK. Please let me know if you run into problems so I can incorporate the fix into my doc. Many thanks to everyone who I linked to, since they did the coding, testing, and writeups that I used to get here. More resources to come - tell me what you’d like to see. If it’s something I was planning on doing anyway, I’ll move it up my queue.

The next guide will probably be setting up your built-in documentation (Hyperspec, etc).

The book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is widely praised as being an important, mind-bending, eye-opening book, but the reviews I’ve seen generally fall have fallen into two categories:

• people who have tried to read it but quit about 1/3 of the way through, but still proudly display it on their shelves as a badge of honor
• b) people who have read it and understand it, but don’t feel like trying to explain it to the uninitiated.

Since the MIT OCW course was a summer lecture series for high school students, I figured I could keep up. And by watching the lectures first, I’m hoping the book will be easier when I get around to reading it. It doesn’t seem like a book where I should worry about spoiling the ending.

There was one problem that took me a while to overcome: the lectures were in streaming .rm (Real Media) format. That means RealPlayer. I am not friends with RealPlayer - I cut my ties with Real in 2002 and vowed never to have their software on any of my computers again. If you don’t understand my revulsion, just Google “real player sucks” (477,000 hits).

So after a few days of tinkering, I came up with this solution for ripping rm streams and encoding them in a different format (I chose .mp4 so I can watch them on computer or video iPod). It takes about 20-25 mintues per hour of media but can be setup up in batches to run overnight. In my opinion, that’s a small price to avoid dealing with RealPlayer.

[NOTE: This is for Windows XP. YMMV on other platforms]

First, install these 3 programs:

• MPlayer - DON’T download the GUI version - you need the command line options to rip the stream.
• Real Alternative Lite - RealPlayer codecs without the player
• Free iPod Video Converter - there are zillions of programs that convert media files if you have the right codecs (it took me a while to figure that out) - this was the simplest, most straightforward one I came across

Second, rip the stream from the web. Open a Command window, go to the MPlayer directory, and type:

• mplayer -playlist [file URL] -dumpstream -dumpfile [destination file name]

This takes a while - streams download at 1-5x real time, so the 60 minute GEB lectures each took about 15-20 minutes each for me. Also, it doesn’t appear to be doing anything when it runs - it says something like “Cache set to 320KB”. It’s working, just walk away. You might be able to get multiple streams with one command by tweaking the command line args - let me know if you find something like it in the MPlayer documentation.

[EDIT: Apparently for MIT OCW streams, you can download them directly by changing the URL. Just change “ http://mfile.akamai.com/7870/rm/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870″ at the beginning of the streaming URL with “http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870″. This way you can download them at full speed instead of streaming speed. Thanks Sharma!]

Third, once you have the ripped files, open Free iPod Video Converter, add the .rm files you ripped, and hit “Convert”. The defaults are fine - it sets video and audio quality based on the values in the source. This took about 5 minutes per hour on the MIT OCW files I used.

That’s it! Now instead of being tied to a computer with internet connection, you can take your learning on the go! Now go back to the Hidden Video Courses in Math, Science, and Engineering page and prepare for some seriously nerdly workouts!

————–

UPDATE: My original streamdumps on a DSL line (~200K/sec) did not work right - the had correct file sizes but blacked out 50-70% of the way through.  The mp4 conversions from those files just clipped off when the files blacked out.  I tried downloading them using the direct downloads but the files got clipped and were only 30-40% of the expected file size.  I tried the direct downloads when I had access to a T1 line and they all downloaded completely and played to the end.  I’m not sure what the difference was, but check your .rm files to make sure they are the right size and play all the way to the end.

Good Sleep, Good Learning, Good Life

“…Myth: Since we feel rested after sleep, sleep must be for resting. Ask anyone, even a student of medicine: What is the role of sleep? Nearly everyone will tell you: Sleep is for rest. Fact: Sleep is for optimizing the structure of memories. If it was for rest or energy saving, we would cover the saving by consuming just one apple per night. To effectively encode memories, mammals, birds and even reptiles need to turn off the thinking and do some housekeeping in their brains. This is vital for survival. This is why the evolution produced a defense mechanisms against skipping sleep. If we do not get sleep, we feel miserable. We are not actually as wasted as we feel, the damage can be quickly repaired by getting a good night sleep. It is our brain dishing punishment for not sticking to the rules of intelligent life-form: let the memory do restructuring in its programmed time.”

Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths

“It appears that polyphasic sleep encounters the precisely same problems as seen in jet lag or shift-work. Human body clock is not adapted to sleeping in patterns other than monophasic or biphasic sleep. In other words, the only known healthy alternatives are: (1) a single 6-8 hours sleep block in the night, or (2) a night sleep of 5-7 hours combined with a 15-90 min. siesta nap. Those numbers differ substantially across the population and there is no single recommended dose of sleep for everyone.”

The site these articles came from, www.supermemo.com, is called “Super Memory: Forget About Forgetting”. I’ll be looking more into it soon.

Explanation after the jump:

Top Row (all rows are from left to right):

• Hard Rock Cafe Stockholm - souvenir from when I lived there (’00-’01)
• Epcot Living Seas - home for the summer in ‘02
• Seattle - got on Microsoft Intern interview trip (spring ‘03 - no hire)
• Islands of Adventure - more Florida trips
• Epcot World Flags - ditto

Second row:

• “Jag talar svenska” - interpreter pins sold in Utah for the 2002 Winter Olympics
• Snowboarder - also 2002 Winter Olympics (I was going to school at BYU at the time
• Swedish/American flags - from my time in Sweden, ‘99-’01
• American flag - don’t even need a reason for this
• Shamrock - tired of getting pinched on St. Patty’s
• Raccoon - got while volunteering at Odyssey of the Mind in Tampa

Third row:

• Stockholm city hall - lived in Stockholm 10/00-10/01
• HIF (Helsingborgs Idrotts Forening) - the shield for the championship football (that’s soccer to you Yanks) team in Helsingborg, Sweden, where I lived from 11/99-5/00
• Shield w/keys - shield for the town of Lulea, Sweden, where I lived from 5/00-7/00
• Sverige (Sweden)
• Stockholm
• Question mark - ? not sure
• Moroni - one symbol in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Seagull - state bird of Utah
• Dolphin - another Odyssey of the Mind

Fourth row:

• Mermaid from Copenhagen (blurry) - I visited Copenhagen before I left Sweden in 10/01
• Moose in Finland - I lived in Jakobstad/Pietarsaari, Finland from 7/00-10/00
• Helsinki Cathedral - I got to visit Helsinki (for a couple hours) when I was in Finland
• IB - I was in the International Baccalaureate program in high school
• Stitch playing ukulele - Disney trips, plus I went through a serious Hawai’ian/Polynesian phase
• Guy with sword - Renaissance fair
• Dragon - ibid
• Flamingo referee - another Odyssey of the Mind

Bottom row:

• Cubs jersey - got when visiting Chicago in 10/03 to scout graduate schools
• Red Sox - got visiting my cousins in Boston in 8/99
• UF Gators - got when visiting a friend at UF in summer ‘99
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers - got while riding the bandwagon during the Alstott/Sapp/Dunn years
• “Lighting the Way” - gift for donating to BYU’s annual fundraiser
• Moab, Utah - took a trip there with my wife and mom in summer ‘04
• Dead Horse Point - ibid
• Cougar Y - I’m a BYU alumnus

So there you have it - an abridged history of my life from the mid 90’s through 2004.  Clearly I stopped with the pins since there is nothing (except the Cubs) from Chicago, and I’ve lived here for almost four years.

Do you have any quirky collections that tell your life history?

I’ve always enjoyed music - from playing the trumpet in elementary school, owning a $230 portable CD player in 1993, to being an iPod man today. Practically every spare dollar I earned between the ages of 13 and 17 was spent on CDs. I love and appreciate all kinds of music - classical, rap, rock, alternative, opera, techno, Hawai’ian (especially Hawai’ian), even country (Claire from 9th grade, if you’re reading this (which I’m pretty darn sure you’re not), it took over 15 years and I’m still not a fan, but I can say now that I appreciate country music). But now I don’t listen to music very often. In fact hardly at all. I have my iPod running most of the day, but I listen to podcasts, sweet delicious podcasts of all stripes that keep me informed and help me learn new things. What’s the difference between me now and when I was in high school (besides the notably reduced mental redardation and 70 extra pounds)?

Music and the Brain

My answer has come from my interest in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence (God bless him for writing it) stresses the temporal nature of the brain - how learning, memory, even sensory perceptions like vision and hearing only work on data that changes through time. Our brain works by processing related events connected by the sequence they occur in - kind of like musical notes! Music speaks our brain’s native language! No compiling, no byte code, etc - it operates directly on our abstract syntax tree (that’s my analogy, don’t hold it against Jeff). That is why it’s easier to remember song lyrics than the words of a speech - the lyrics are attached to a musical sequence that burns into your mind.

[Someday I’m going to give On Intelligence a proper writeup, but I don’t have it in me right now. It is definitely the most exciting book I’ve read in the last couple years. Whoops, gotta stop talking about it - my pulse is starting to race.]

Dan Weinreb recently wrote a review of a book called “This is Your Brain on Music” that I haven’t read but am dying to based on his review. Please read his entire review (and the book too!) but check out these nuggets on how entwined music is in your brain:

-When you hear a musical tone, there are neurons in your brain that send electrical pulses at exactly the same frequency as the note

-most people can recreate the exact tempo of a song they know, to within a few percent, even if they’re not musically trained

-your brain can distinguish between musical consonance and dissonance before your neocortex (higher, human level thinking) gets involved

I find all of that ridiculously fantastic, and if you’re at all interested in thought and music enough to keep listening (er, reading) to me, then you should check out those two books.

Example time! Look at the following sentence:

Janet owned a baby sheep.

Just a normal sentence that’s super easy to forget. Now look at this slightly different wording, set to music:

The words form a sequence (same as in the first sentence), the musical notes form a sequence, and each note links to its word, so even if you couldn’t say the sentence exactly by itself, you can fill in missing words if you sing it. It’s a heavily connected graph.

Emotional Amplifier

That’s the mechanics of why music works on our brains, but most people listening to music aren’t trying to accurately remember sentences. What’s more important is that since music talks directly to our brains, it can cause our brains to affect our emotions, hormones, and all of the other chemical goodness that our brain does without us asking it to. So music can affect your mood, and usually, no matter what mood you’re in, you want more of it. When I’m discouraged or wistful, Fade to Black by Metallica captures my mood perfectly. When I’m exceptionally grateful and loving, Con Te Partiro by Andrea Bocelli amplifies it (I almost cried with joy and love for my family when I heard him sing a lullaby version of it to Elmo on Sesame Street). When I’m frustrated and stubborn and need to unlock the power of my brain to triumph over a knotty problem, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture is the key - rarely can I get through the whole 9 minutes without figuring out how to triumph over what was impeding me, or at least get in the frame of mind to solve the problem shortly thereafter. Regardless of what you’re feeling, if you find a song that matches that feeling, it’s like having your best friend there to pour your heart out to. It listens to your heart, understands you, encourages you, and celebrates with you. Because it is directly in your brain, it is also directly in your heart in a way that few people on earth can be.

That’s the difference between the high school me and the modern me. My teenage hormones gave my mood and feelings much more control over me than my rational, hard working life as an employee, father, and husband currently allows. I also feel that I have much more control over my life at this point so I don’t succumb to the powerlessness that is such a big part of being a teenager. I know my purpose now, so music isn’t as necessary as an outlet for unchecked emotions.

Music is a emotional amplifier and an emotional determinant. Since the human experience is largely an effort to either make ourselves feel a certain way or wallow in the fact that circumstance has made us feel a certain way, then it’s no wonder that music is so powerful that poor people will pay for it and honest people will steal it.

[Hold on kids, Uncle Pete is reminiscing]

Urban history is just economic history viewed from a different angle. Farming and agriculture was the dominant form of life for thousands of years because it was the best economic option - access to soil and water was more important than access to other people. Even if you couldn’t sell the food you grew, at least you could eat it and not starve.

With the economies of scale gained during the Industrial Revolution, congregating in cities became a better economic option for many (and eventually most) people. [Warning: US-centric view of history ahead] Despite the horror stories of Victorian London of the Chicago stockyards, life in cities was a better choice, especially for people who didn’t own their own land. The technological developments of the era (steel mills, railroads, electricity, heavy manufacturing, etc) made those who developed and invested in them rich, and the cities that accommodated them prospered. Cleveland in 1900 had all the optimism and glitter that cities like Seattle do now. Starting around the 1970s, the US economy shifted from primarily manufacturing to services like finance, insurance, accounting, advertising, marketing, law, high tech, research, software, etc. This if referred to the “white collar” or “service economy” and is what we have now.

Some people claim there is another economic shift underway, from providing services to providing experiences. This idea was first developed in the book “The Experience Economy” by B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore. Examples of this are how a regular amusement park may offer fun rides, but Disney provides a complete immersion in their (surreal, creepily clean) world. Dunkin Donuts sells you coffee, but Starbucks provides a cozy place with hip music. Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells athleticism. You get the point.

[Reader interrupts]

Reader: Peter, why are you giving me a history lesson? That’s not why I read your stuff!

[Peter shakes the glimmer out of his eyes and gets back on track]

I don’t buy the argument that there’s a fundamental shift in the economy towards experiences, but rather, like functional or OO programming, it’s a tool that you can use in situations where it’s appropriate. For instance, I’d much rather my lawyer be a service provider than an experience provider. I’d hate to have his office be mocked up as a courtroom with actors pretending to litigate me while he protects my assets. But for those occasions where you can turn your product or service into an experience, you have a chance to
differentiate yourself from your competitors and create a lot of value for your customers.

This was the biggest insight I got from writing about what kinds of software people would buy - that there are a shortage of great experiences available through software, and that people will pay for outstanding experiences. The best experiences I can think of that you can get through a computer are games, music/movies, and social networks. Heavy social network users engage as much and as passionately as people get about games and movies. Plus, creating (not populating) social networks is a fairly straightforward technological problem when compared to all the negotiation and cost and (ick) people skills required to make a major media property like a game or movie. No wonder everyone wants to start a social network right now!

So if social networks are such a great experience, why aren’t people paying for them? Well, the networks let people sign up for free, because they want to have everyone on their network. But then they’ve immediately set the market value of the network at $0! Also, social networks are only a good experience because interacting with people is a good experience! If social networks vanished, people would still have friends, but if your friends vanished, you’d have no use for the social network. Whereas if computers and TV went away, people would still play games (board games? sports?), act, sing and dance.

That leads me to the big current idea in urban planning that I do buy into - The Rise of the Creative Class. This idea, based on research by Richard Florida, is that creativity is the new constrained resource that’s fueling economic growth. Throughout history, the constrained resources have been, depending on time and place, natural resources, arable land, labor, labor, capital, manufacturing capacity, distribution, etc. Now we have all of those things in abundance (sorry for the continued US-centricity) but creativity in all forms is the new economic engine.

From an economic perspective, there are two kinds of creativity: creativity that’s economically productive like software development, marketing, developing new business models, etc, and indirectly valuable forms of creativity like music, visual and performing arts, writing, etc. The second kind create value by increasing the creative capacity of those who experience it. For instance, I’ve never paid anyone for anything I’ve read on the internet, but what I have read has changed my entire perspective on computers, programming, entrepreneurship, economics, and business - basically every aspect of my professional life. The delta of my economic production as a perspective software entrepreneur vs as a company man is directly attributable to the effect that internet authors have had on me.

So if people will pay for great experiences, and creativity is economically valuable, what does that mean for software entrepreneurs looking for opportunities? Find some way people express their creativity (expensive hobbies are a great place to start but definitely not the only source) and help them do it! Just like companies seek financial profits, then creative people seek fulfillment profits, and they’ll happily buy something that helps them achieve a higher level of creative fulfillment. If you want to do this through software, you’re limited by the computer’s interface (you’d have a hard time replicating the thrill of hang gliding or the satisfaction of scaling a mountain). But every one of your competitors is bound by the same limitations, so anything unique, difficult, or expensive you can do to differentiate yourself puts distance between you and them and makes you that hard to follow. To continue the example I gave in my last article, 3D rendering might be a common non-differentiating technology now, but accurate underwater 3D topographic data or accurate AI fish behavior would turn your scuba simulator into a remarkable experience. Lots of hackers have the technical chops to code something like that but who would go to the trouble of researching marine biology, interviewing ichthyologists and divers, and charting tide and temperature conditions?

[Reader interjects]

Reader: “What?!?! You just gave me more work to do! Now it’s not enough to be an outstanding hacker? Now I have to go become an expert in a whole new field too? Peter, if you keep piling on me like this, I’m never going to read your writing again!”

[Peter, arms folded, nodding]

My work here is done for the day.

The “Free” Firestorm

Hank Williams, my recent blogging buddy, lit the internet on fire recently with a series of posts where he accuses venture capitalists of collapsing the market for software entrepreneurship by funding so many companies that give products away for free. He says:

In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when your competition is free.

…Venture capital has totally distorted the market. VCs are investing billions of dollars in companies with instructions to get big fast and to worry about advertising revenue later. As a result the competition is for users and not paying customers.

Then at Startup School 2008, DHH took Hank’s fire and poured a 500,000 DWT oil tanker on it with his talk “The Secret to Making Money Online“. And what was the secret? Charge people for your product! Breathtaking, isn’t it? We’re living a world where feathers get seriously ruffled when you insinuate that people should have to pay money for stuff.

This recent “free” debate needed to happen, and some good points were raised. Anything that can be digitized can be copied and distributed for (essentially) free on the Internet, so anyone whose business is digital or digitizable needs to understand free. It can either be an advantage (if you’re starting from nothing and building up) or a disadvantage (if you used to rely on high copying costs to protect your profits - I’m looking at you, music and movie industries).

Breaking Free From Free

What does this mean for software entrepreneurs? Right now the market for people wanting to make money off the Internet (supply of entrepreneurs) is growing, the demand for free software is growing, but what about the demand for non-free software?. Reg Braithwaite aka Raganwald asked a great question:

What does this mean for startups and business models? Is this effect stronger in some niches (programmer tools, for example) but weaker in others (enterprise integration applications)? Does SAAS change the game? Does pricing a product so that it is credit-card-ware change things?

Rather than answer those specific questions (which I don’t have any particular insight or experience into), let’s look at some guidelines for anyone trying to grow a profitable, Ben and Jerry-style software company. Hank gave his advice on the subject in “Seven Dos and Three Dont’s for Creating New Web Products” post (definitely go read the whole post for details and examples). Here’s my list of 5 principles to evaluate an idea to see if people will pay for a product that:

1. Supports serious, expensive hobbies
2. Is so outstanding it redefines its category
3. Helps businesses spend less money
4. Helps businesses make more money
5. Can be bought easily and instinctively

1) Consumers with serious, expensive hobbies will pay for high quality tools and services. Look at what people DO spend money on, and figure out what benefit they get out of it. Then provide a similar or better benefit. For example, photo buffs like SmugMug because it’s better, more attractive, and has better tools to make showcasing pictures easier. Millions of people pay for XBox live because it’s the best console-based Internet gaming platform. Audio and video buffs buy expensive software to give them the effects, speed, and ease of use that they need. People throw money around all the time - if we’re afraid to charge money, have we really created something that people value?

Heck, I paid over $150 just for my scuba fins and that’s not even the part that keeps me alive! Not only that, I was ogling the $250 pair that made me swim faster for less effort. And I pay $50-70 every single time I get on a boat. Looking around my house at my hobbies, I have about $1,200 of scuba gear, about $1,000 of camera gear, a $600 camcorder, over 100 DVDs, a gajillion dollars worth of kids’ toys and books, etc. I even have about $500 worth of lawn tools and I hate working on my lawn! Now try to tell me it’s hard to get people to pay for stuff.

Just take go through every expensive hobby that people have and find some aspect of it that could be digitized and delivered through software. Again, back to scuba diving - if you mapped and created 3D models of the world’s most popular dive sites, I guarantee people would pay to preview them (the trick would be to do it cost effectively, but that’s the sort of technological problem that we’re supposed to be good at, right?). If you’re paying $5K for a one week diving trip to Hawai’i, what’s another $99 to scope out the territory before you get there? Piggyback off where people are already spending tons of money.

People throw money around for experiences all the time - if we’re afraid to charge money, have we really created an experience that people value? If you can’t get people to pay you what they pay for a cup of coffee, a magazine, or one adult beverage, then how much are you really enriching their life?

2) Don’t be second best. People that are paying for hobbies pay for excellence. Excellence is your opportunity to build a moat around yourself. Two things happen if you build something that’s the best in class: you become easier to choose and you become harder to leave.

When you’re the best and you exceed expectations, people talk about you, the press covers you, and your sales and marketing job just got a whole lot easier. The hype before the release of the iPhone was estimated to be valued at $400 million in marketing value. If a satisfied customer raves to his friends about your product, your cost to sell to his friends is lower. They know about you and someone they trust has already recommended you. They’re now much more likely to choose you than Joe Schmo who hasn’t heard of you.

Not only that, once they’re in your fold, you get to raise the bar for their expectations as high as you want. While it might be hard for you to clear that bar, it will be sooooo much harder for your competitors. No one likes to backslide when they feel they’ve made progress - I get claustrophobic just thinking of some of the apartments I lived in when I was in college. Do I ever whip out my old cassette Walkman because I get so sick of having thousands of songs on my iPod? No. Have I ever copied the address from a company’s MapQuest page and entered it into Google Maps? Yes. Once I started using MSN Maps, I never used MapQuest again. Once I started using Google Maps, I never used MSN Maps again. I think iTunes/iPod music syncing falls into this category - people who would never dream of dragging and dropping music files to a mapped drive have no problem plugging in an iPod and waiting a couple minutes. Most people never looked back on tenements, horses, or farming once houses, cars, and grocery stores were available.

Back to the 3D scuba site model example (hint, hint to anyone that wants to collect some money from me): if your models are slow, wireframe models with little detail and no fish, then adios. If you’re offering full screen, full color, interactive environments with lots of detail, realistic fish, day/night cycles, tides, etc, then I have no choice but to take you. How good could you make it? Could you compare with Finding Nemo? Could you make it into a video game? Could scuba simulators be as popular as flight simulators? Don’t think small.

Make the product that is so good it forces your customers to raise their expectations.

3) Businesses buy things that help them spend less money. After all, if you shrink the top line, the bottom line grows. After all, businesses are just organizations whose expensive hobby is making money?. One way to do this is to build something comparable to an existing product and sell it for a lower price. This is very tempting because it’s easy to measure, but competing on price in a world with no distribution costs leads you to…free. Nuff said.

This isn’t a good idea for any industry and it’s especially bad for software. The price of physical goods is partly based on reproduction and distribution costs, while software is almost entirely priced according to willingness to pay (maybe that’s why there is more free software than free products). So if you have a worse physical product with better distribution or lower cost, you have more ways to swing the balance in your favor (think McDonalds vs Five Guys). With software, the only two variables are design (how well you solve the problem) and marketing (how aware are customers of your product).

A better approach is to shrink a market or disrupt your competitors. You build a worse solution to a known problem that happens to be a better solution to an unknown problem. This opens up new markets that you conveniently become a dominant player in - look at 37signals in simple web-based project management software. Basecamp is terrible compared to MS Project, unless you’re part of the (much larger) group of businesses that doesn’t find the power of Project to be worth the effort of dealing with it. This lets you nail the most important subset of features and since you have a different business model, you can charge a premium for your product while still undercutting competitors on price.

4) A close corollary of #3 is to help businesses make more money. The other way for businesses to make more money is to earn more money. They would love to buy a product that helps them make more money, but why should they trust you when you’re telling them exactly what they want to hear? They only want to buy things that works, not just what the vendor says will work. The Pragmatics and the Conservatives need to see other successful examples in order to trust you and to take the uncertainty out of your promised ROI numbers. The uncertainty of a new product is fine for the entrepreneur that created it, but not for most customers.

That’s why you need bold initial customers who will take the risk and are willing to share their experiences. Having predictable results is often more important for a client than good results (”No one ever got fired for choosing IBM’s $400/hr consultants”). This is fine, because once you have this baseline level of market confidence, your name and reputation sells itself and you get exponential growth through client case studies and testimonials.

Why else is this hard? You have to know a business or industry well enough to know how to improve it. You don’t have to be the guru of that industry; you can often make a huge difference by bringing a computational perspective to the domain. I bet everyone of you reading this has cringed at a horribly inefficient business practice that could be done cheaper, faster, and more reliably with a little bit of computing added to the mix. If you or someone you know has access to a non-computer business, dive in and look for ways it could be improved. Find out what they have to do but hate doing and find a way to simplify or automate it. A dentist would rather clean teeth than fight with insurance companies, a band would rather write songs than try to book gigs, an architect would rather design buildings than wrestle with permitting, etc. If they can invest some money in software that would help them do more of what they love and are good at, they’ll buy it. And what if they don’t? Their aggressive competitor will :).

Those previous examples were ways to save time, which was then used on the primary business to earn more money. Another way would be to augment the primary business to make it run better. For instance, video editing software makes video production faster and easier while improving the quality. Digital cameras let you spend more time taking pictures and less time developing, while also letting you take more pictures and get instant feedback. A CRM lets you keep better track of your customers so you have more information to help your interaction with them. Project management software helps you write better software with fewer bugs. A Mercedes helps a real estate agent impress his clients while chauffeuring them from showing to showing. Know the business, make it better.

5) Make buying your product easy and instinctive. I can grocery shop very fast because I buy the exact same things every time - bananas, apples, milk, yogurt, Marshmallow Mateys, Tennessee Pride sausage biscuits, 5lb bag of rice, frozen veggies, ground beef, chicken breasts, etc. I don’t comparison shop anymore because I’ve already done that and now I know what I should buy. The companies I buy from literally don’t have to do any more work to sell to me! This is the appeal of subscription based software - continue to meet expectations and you continue to receive payments. Make something that becomes part of everyday life, and you’ve got a recurring revenue stream. Just ask Amazon how nice that tastes.

And please, please, PLEASE, make it easy for people to give you money! If you only accept Google Checkout, expect to miss out on PayPal users. If you don’t take checks, you’ll probably lose business. Do you customers really need to register to buy your product? If not, don’t make them! The exact amount of lost business because of payment restrictions is unknowable, but you can be pretty confident it’s not $0.

Conclusion

If you’re now thinking “So what happened? I thought this was supposed to be the easy answer to all of my entrepreneurial woes! All this guy did was increase the amount of work I have to do before I can cash out and go kiteboarding all day!”, then my work here is done. The simple lesson of economics (that I could have saved myself 2,500 words if I wasn’t busy trying to blow your cache) is that people pay for things that they value and that are scarce. Fix your eye on that principle, and while you’re walking down the road towards it, you’ll find what they value (expensive hobbies, making money) and what’s scarce (original, non-commoditized products, experiences, services that create value).

Now quit reading blogs and get to work!

———————–

UPDATE: Here’s a good article with a similar idea: 13 Tips for creating a successful new online product

Follow the discussion on reddit and Hacker News

Not DropBox.

DropBox solves a pain I’ve had for years, a pain that never relented or could be relinquished - keeping data consistent across multiple computers. I usually have 2 computers at work (a desktop and a laptop), plus my laptop at home and 2 more desktops. I tried to keep a folder that would sync across all of those machines but I never found a process or product that could do it for me, so I just decided to live without access the files I wanted. I’m not even talking about a 100 gigabyte media library, just things like notes, drafts, some pictures, etc.

I’ve been using DropBox since it came out in beta, and it solved my problem so completely that I had to consciously think to remember what life was like without it (kind of like trying to remember what it was like to install a device driver on Win 3.1). There’s a client app you install that watches your DropBox directory. It then syncs all the files in that directory tree with a copy on their server, and pushes the changes out to other machines where you’ve installed the client app. So far, It’s fast and flawless.

But wait, there’s more! Since it syncs by sending changes to your file instead of the entire file, it also keeps a backup and revision history so you can restore older versions (again, across all machines), like source control for dummies. They also encrypt the files, both in transit and on their servers, so your stuff is safe.

Still not sold? Since copies of all your files are on their servers, you can access them (including revisions) over the web! So if you’re on a computer that doesn’t have the client installed and you just want a couple files, you can just grab them off the web.

It’s sort of funny, but despite absolutely loving the product, I hadn’t written about it yet because I didn’t know what to write. It worked so well that I didn’t even notice it 99% of the time. Have you heard of the book Don’t Make Me Think, one of the great books on designing for usability? (If not, GO READ IT!) If you need to see an example of those principles in practice, try DropBox. I didn’t have anything to write because I hadn’t really used the program - it just quietly served me like a good butler.

They’re still in beta. Once beta is over, there will be small free accounts and paid accounts with more storage. Beta testers will retain a free account that’s bigger than the standard free. I have some beta invites left, so if you’d like to try DropBox (and if you don’t, why the heck are you still reading?), email me and I’ll send you one.

Here are our attendees:

Peter Christensen
John Quigley
Craig Luddington
Matt Bone
Brendan Baldwin
Andrew Wolven
Bruce Burdick
Chad Slaughter
Kurt Stephens
Steve Githens
Alex Hemard

ITEMS OF BUSINESS:

Name - None of the name ideas got much support, so we’re sticking with Chicago Lisp until someone comes up with something awesomer.

Project - No one had any ideas for or time to work on a project as a group so that’s also waiting for an awesomer idea.

Server - John and Craig both have servers where they can host things but not allow remote access to. John has a basic homepage at http://www.chicaglisp.org and has a mailing list setup. There might be a wiki in the future. Meeting announcements and recaps will continue to be on Peter’s Chicago Lisp page and then cross posted to the two mailing lists and the chicagolisp.org site.

Next Meeting

WHEN: Friday, May 16th at 7pm.

WHERE: CashNetUSA offices. 200 W. Jackson Blvd, 14th floor, Chicago. Map.

WHAT: Lightning talks. The following people have signed up, more welcome (email Peter if interested or add a comment at Coordinatr)

• Grant Rattke - A simple object system using macros
• Steve Githens - Scripting a Java SOA system using Kawa and Clojure
• Dry runs from the people presenting at the Intro to Lisp Workshop

Intro to Lisp Workshop: We did some pre-planning and delegation. See details here.

Presentation on Combined Object-Lambda Architectures (COLAs):

The inagural presentation of our group was about the work done by the Viewpoints Research Institure (VPRI). The most recognizable name associated with this is Alan Kay, Mr. Invent the Future himself. John Quigley made an excellent slide deck (pdf) where he reviewed the paper “Making COLAs with Pepsi and Coke” (pdf) by Ian Piumarta and put into slightly more comprensible language.

This paper is for the Fundamental New Computer Technologies project at VPRI. The aim of the project is to create a complete computing system in 20,000 lines of code. This system would be everything from the hardware to the UI and include both design and implementation. Having such a compact system would be a useful exploration and learning tool, so every part of it can be inspected and manipulated. They’re currently 18 months into a 5 year project but they already have made intriguing progress.

John’s presentation was about the architecture of the self bootstrapping system. I can’t claim that I understood it all, or even most of it. I was able to keep up mostly because I had come across VPRI’s work on Jeff Moser’s blog earlier in the week so I was familiar with the overview. What I did sort of grasp boggled my mind and definintely but VPRI on my technical radar, if for no other reason than as a technical challenge to aspire to.

If you can understand everything in Piumarta’s paper (or even in John’s summary deck), you’re a whiz. If not, don’t feel bad. I would recommend reading the NSF proposal (pdf) and the first year progress report (pdf). They’re in more accessible, less technically deep language and they have pretty pictures.

Thanks John for setting the bar high right out of the gate!

INTRO TO LISP WORKSHOP

WHO: Programmers interested in learning more about Lisp.

HOW MUCH: The low, low price of 3ish hours of attention span.

WHEN: Saturday, May 31st from 3pm-6pm.

WHERE: Institute of Design, 350 N. LaSalle St, 4th floor, Chicago. Map.

WHAT: A hands-on introduction the the Common Lisp programming language.

Tentative Schedule (presentations will be 30-60 min)

• Setting up a Lisp Environment (John Quigley): A hands-on walkthrough of how to setup a Lisp environment, Emacs, and SLIME. There will be documentation beforehand about steps to take and which packages to get.
• Lisp Basics and Idioms (Peter Christensen): Lisp syntax, contructs, basic code, idioms and practices.
• Common Lisp condition system (need a volunteer)
• Macros (Craig Luddington): How Lisp lets you write code that writes code that writes code … and why you’d want to do that.
• Demos of cool things in Lisp (need volunteers): showing off both neat and practical things that Lisp can do.

We’re looking for volunteers to do the following:

• Present on the CL condition system
• Suggest and present on other aspects of CL not listed here that would be suitable for an introductory session
• Walk around and help troubleshoot during the first session about setting up your environment.

If you’re interested in attending or helping, please email me and include “Intro to Lisp Workshop” at the start of the message.