Game g = new Game();

As a more positive and proactive followup on my previous post about the Top 10 of retail mentality, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the “Lean Startup” philosophy and concepts, started by Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

If you have not already done so, please have a quick look at the slides:

Or you can watch a webcast of a live talk by Eric on the same subject, “How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step”:

Earlier this year, a Google Group was started.

I try to force myself to use Things on a daily basis. I had put the library files on a local server, but with “Back To My Mac” enabled, I had troubles accessing it over the net sometimes.

When I read about Dropbox, I reminded myself that I’m spending quite some money every year on Apple’s .mac (now Mobile Me) service, but 99% of the time I am just using the email part of it.

So, I wanted to see if I could put the Things library on the iDisk, despite the fact that their FAQ says it’s not possible.

It is possible.

1. Quit Things.
2. Enable “iDisk Sync” in the Mobile Me preferences pane.
3. Move your Things library (if you have not changed anything, it sits in ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code) to your iDisk.
4. Create a symlink from ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code to /Volumes/iDisk/Documents/Cultured Code.
5. Launch Things – if a request comes up, browse to ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things and select it

Voila. Life can be easy sometimes.

Atlassian has a new promotion for the upcoming release of Jira 4:

If you send in a screenshot of your current issue tracker, you can either choose a free 10 user license (complete with 12 months support and upgrades, renewable for $10/year), or a 20% discount on your order.

Cool, huh? As a very satisfied Atlassian customer, I highly recommend to check it out!

After pondering for a while, I finished installing Piwik as our secondary web reporting / analytics tool.

I’m quite happy with Google Analytics so far, but the fact that you don’t own the data coming from your users on your website (along with some remarks from our lawyer about exporting usage data into the US being not the preferred solution, especially in Germany) was enough to start looking around for other solutions.

Read more…

After the 5 user starter editions of Jira and Confluence that was sold for 5$ a couple of weeks ago, I just stumbled across the Jira personal license, that covers 3 users for 0$.

That’s right, a free license, no strings attached – for all 3 Jira editions.

I have not looked at the fine print, but it seems you only get official Atlassian support (which is excellent, btw) for the starter license.

Still, the personal license should be enough to get you hooked…