Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
Bill Gates and his TED talk from 2015. States that the next outbreak is going to look very much like the one we are in now with the Coronavirus COVID-19.
It is very interesting to see Bill and what he is doing with his Foundation. It’s doing some amazing work!
NASA have bought back the worm logo! Its the future.
NASA, with some much-needed good news:
Enter a cleaner, sleeker design born of the Federal Design Improvement Program and officially introduced in 1975. It featured a simple, red unique type style of the word NASA. The world knew it as “the worm.” Created by the firm of Danne & Blackburn, the logo was honored in 1984 by President Reagan for its simplistic, yet innovative design.
NASA was able to thrive with multiple graphic designs. There was a place for both the meatball and the worm. However, in 1992, the 1970s brand was retired – except on clothing and other souvenir items – in favor of the original late 1950s graphic.
Until today.
Tesla is a very interesting beast! It looks and feels like a car company, but really it’s not!
Here is a link to an interesting article about Tesla not being a hypergrowth company.
Whenever I create a new WordPress blog on Google Cloud and then try to edit the permalinks it gives an INTERNAL SERVER ERROR.
This happens in every Google Cloud deployment of WordPress.
The reason is because you need to Enable mod-rewrite in Apache because the .htaccess files need to do what it needs to do. Here is now to fix it.
Step 1) Make sure you have enabled mod_rewrite in apache. This can be done by going through Compute Engine>VM Instances > identify the correct instance and to the far right on the line will be SSH. Click it and it will take you securely inside a command line interface. Run this command:
$: a2enmod rewrite2) Check your virtualhost configuration in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and make sure that it is configured with AllowOverride All instead of the default AllowOverride None for your web root directory. This tells apache it is ok for settings in .htaccess files to override settings. Use this command to modify the file.
sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.confOnce you're in there, find the right spot and change it.
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride ALL <----(edit from none)
Require all granted
</Directory>After you’ve made that change, make sure to restart the server:
sudo service apache2 restartNow, your .htaccessshould work. You can also make this change inside a virtual host, which would normally be preferable, but that depends on the way Apache is set up.
It seems like in the business chat application world there are really only 2 big players – Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Here is a little list of other alternatives if you are looking for something different.
Wimbledon announced yesterday that they have had to cancel the 2020 All England Championships because of the coronavirus outbreak. This comes off the back of the French Open announcing that they were going to try to reschedule their Grand Slam from May to September, because it was expected to lose £230 million if they had to cancel.
Wimbledon took the strong position of cancellation, because they knew that they had insurance of £100 million if they had to cancel the Championships.
It turns out that the All England Club had the foresight to take out infectious disease insurance during the SARS outbreak, which has then help them in a good stead for the current coronavirus outbreak.
Still a huge shame though that there will be no Wimbledon 2020!
(I used to play tennis for a living, so it’s just unimaginable to not have Wimbledon this year!)
For the past month or so I have been thinking a lot about internal communications at our company and trying to work out how we can create a central source of truth and information for all the products we create. This lead me to Confluence.
Confluence is a tool that allows anyone to create a wiki (that actually looks good) in a matter of minutes.
Confluence looked like a great solution and I even had a play around with the product as its free to signup and use for 10 people. However, I was simply shocked at the price of such a tool. I understand internal communication is very important, but should it really be valued at $10 per user per month?
I know Confluence hosts the platform and there are a lot of great features, but $10 per user per month just seems a little bit over the top for a tool that I could create using WordPress in a matter of hours (which will have a hosting cost, but at a fraction of the cost).
Why are so many technology companies especially paying for such a service? Is it because of the ease of use? Is it because of the templates?
You can’t even brand Confluence effectively for your company on the $10 per user per month.
I have been watching This Week in Startups – with Jason Calacanis – pretty much since the beginning. The video series / podcast provides a great insight in to some of the leading minds in the technology world.
Jeff Housenbold (Softbank Vision Fund) recently sat down with Jason to talk about the Softbank Vision Fund and some of its portfolio companies.
The comments about Growth vs Profit were very interesting and provided great insight.
Crenk is live again.
Here at Crenk we are looking to explore the world of business, finance and technology. All stories and comments will be straight from the wandering mind of a CEO within the technology industry.
Expect short articles that are straight to the point and written in a very short period of time with limited storylines.
I’m doing this to gain more of an understand on the overall business landscape as it helps my mind to learn by writing.
Hope you all enjoy this site and the content as much as I do from writing it.
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is installed on a web server, which either is part of an Internet hosting service or is a network host itself; the first case may be on a service like WordPress.com, for example, and the second case is a computer running the software package WordPress.org. An example of the second case is a local computer configured to act as its own web server hosting WordPress for single-user testing or learning purposes.
Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress was used by more than 26.4% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2016. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites. It was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog. The license under which WordPress software is released is the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation.
WordPress users may install and switch between themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. Every WordPress website requires at least one theme to be present and every theme should be designed using WordPress standards with structured PHP, valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Themes may be directly installed using the WordPress “Appearance” administration tool in the dashboard or theme folders may be uploaded via FTP. The PHP, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS code found in themes can be added to or edited for providing advanced features.
WordPress themes are in general classified into two categories, free themes and premium themes. All the free themes are listed in the WordPress theme directory and premium themes should be purchased from marketplaces and individual WordPress developers. WordPress users may also create and develop their own custom themes if they have the knowledge and skill to do so. If WordPress users do not have themes development knowledge then they may download and use free WordPress themes from wordpress.org.
WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. WordPress has over 40,501 plugins available, each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. These customizations range from search engine optimization, to client portals used to display private information to logged in users, to content management systems, to content displaying features, such as the addition of widgets and navigation bars. But not all available plugins are always abreast with the upgrades and as a result they may not function properly or may not function at all.
A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system.
The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems which were the first knowledge-based systems.The original use of the term knowledge-base was to describe one of the two sub-systems of a knowledge-based system. A knowledge-based system consists of a knowledge-base that represents facts about the world and an inference engine that can reason about those facts and use rules and other forms of logic to deduce new facts or highlight inconsistencies. The term “knowledge-base” was coined to distinguish this form of knowledge store from the more common and widely-used term database. At the time (the 1970s) virtually all large Management Information Systems stored their data in some type of hierarchical or relational database. At this point in the history of Information Technology the distinction between a database and a knowledge base was clear and unambiguous.
Bora Bora Sunset Through a Wave – Amazing. There are so many amazing colours in this picture.
Some hot news for those of us that have with held buying an iPhone (all 2 of you). Word on the street is that Apple has had an excellent 4th Quarter, and with sales of iPhones surpassing previous estimations, there is some wiggle room when it comes to price.
The iPhone which currently resides in an exclusive contract with AT&T, sells for $199 with contract. Millions and millions of people jumped on board with the first iPhone came out, and the second generation was just as popular. With over 15 million iPhone sold worldwide, it has dominated the mobile market. Outstanding sales have given Apple a cushion in case the current economic downtown starts to effect sales, they can afford to drop the price of the iPhone to $99.
What would a $99 iPhone do to the market? For starters, with such a low barrier to entry, the iPhone will clearly bleed further into the consumer market, even those on the fence would be tempted to purchase, and the market dominance would only leave true niche mobile companies like Blackberry able to withstand the onslaught.
Conjecture? Possibly, but only time will tell. Get those Christmas wish lists ready and stay tuned for more info!
I adore WordPress, so much so that I use it to design websites that don’t even require a blog, just solely based on the CMS, ease of installation and abundant supply of options and plugins available for it. With all that being said, now and again I run into an issue with some stupid coding somewhere along the lines that won’t let me do exactly what I want. Today I ran into a problem implementing a plugin that would allow me to place a Google Maps map onto a client’s website. Google is nice enough to give the code out to hard code their maps into any site, but it requires the iframe tag which does not play nicely in WordPress.
After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag. This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin. According to their site, EmbedIt is a,
simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.
The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme. EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.
My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on. I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it. I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.