Mark's Blog | Entries

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

How to find a good freelance developer

A bunch of people have asked me recently how to find good contract developers. I’ve done this quite a few times now and feel like I now have a pretty good system for selecting quality freelancers at good fixed prices.I can tell that this system works because on my last two contract projects I received an average of 100 bids per posting (spread across 3 different sites) and both hires ended up blowing me away with the quality, speed, and ...

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Why are you doing this?

One of the mentors at The Iron Yard this summer asked the question "Why are you doing this?". I love this question because without a really good reason for doing this, building a company becomes infinitely harder. Recently I had one of my most grueling days since I started Leaguevine when I spent the entire day on the phone making sales to people who mostly didn't give a crap. I don't like sales. But I could force myself to work ...

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Fixing tech startup incorporation documents

A year ago I incorporated Leaguevine myself without using any lawyers. I wrote about it here and heavily relied upon the Orrick company document templates. I realized back then that there was a good chance I would screw some stuff up and decided it would be better for Leaguevine to first get some funding or free access to lawyers and at that point revise anything I messed up.Turns out this approach worked great.I am currently attending The Iron Yard accelerator ...

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Python syntax highlighting in Django templates using Pygments

Highlighting code to be placed on your site is a pretty common need that has been addressed nicely by a number of open source projects. Pygments is great, but on it's own would take you a while to get set up. This guide is meant to get you set up with using pygments in your django templates in under 5 minutes. Choose your syntax highlighting styleFirst, decide which pygments style you want to use by trying them out on the ...

Friday, November 25, 2011

Almost 4 months in

I've been working full time on Leaguevine for almost 4 months now, and things are finally beginning to click for me. It's a completely different lifestyle, and I'm finally accepting the fact that it takes a while to adapt to it. Things like self-motivation, prioritization, setting deadlines, and staying organized are all things that I never had to deal with before since school basically took care of all that for me. These tasks are becoming easier every day, and I ...

Friday, November 4, 2011

Reducing CrashPlan's Disk Space Usage on OSX

I have CrashPlan backing up almost every file on my Hackintosh, and when CrashPlan runs, it caches a ton of data so it can run faster. However, they don't let you configure where that data is stored. In my case, I'm backing up around 1TB of data, and thus the cache is a whopping 8GB. 8GB might not seem like that much these days, but when it's sitting on your small SSD, it's quite annoying. Fixing this problem was pretty easy, and since ...

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Django-Celery on Webfaction using RabbitMQ

This tutorial is meant to get you up and running from scratch with django-celery on Webfaction. Each of the steps is a bit of a hassle since you typically need to find different install steps for each individual part, so I just lumped up the whole experience in this guide. Install Erlang Erlang is needed for installing RabbitMQ which is the preferred message broker for Celery. Webfaction doesn't come with this installed, so you'll need to do it manually: Go ...

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Self-Incorporating a Tech Startup

This is in response to my friend Ben's recent post, What about money for a lawyer?I spent a bit of time last month self-incorporating my tech startup and since this topic is very fresh on my mind, I thought I'd reflect on it for a moment. The first thing I'd like to reflect on is the actual decision about whether or not to do this myself or hire a lawyer. The decision here comes down to deciding whether or not ...

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

One month down

It's been one month since I started working on Leaguevine full time, and it's been a very interesting experience. After being in school for 20 straight years, being on my own has been quite a shock. I now set my own schedule and am accountable only to myself. As grand as all the blogs out there make that seem, it's kind of weird actually being in the middle of it.While I was in school, I would always have my side ...

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Migrating a Django Postgres DB from Concrete Inheritance to Abstract Inheritance

Django comes with several ways of implementing model inheritance, and specifying which one you would like to use takes only a line or two of code. Setting up your database for the very first time is extremely easy, but migrating between types after you have existing data in infinitely harder. I have a live site whose needs have changed since I built the database and the concrete inheritance I set up is no longer needed. In my case, the site ...

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Installing libjpeg and PIL on OSX Snow Leopard with Python 2.7

If you found this article through a google search, you've probably already read through tons of articles and forums where people gave advice on how to do this. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about: http://www.brantsteen.com/blog/python-27-libjpeg-pil-on-osx/http://proteus-tech.com/blog/cwt/install-pil-in-snow-leopard/ http://www.thetoryparty.com/wp/2010/08/31/pil-on-snow-leopard-_jpeg_resync_to_restart-error/http://www.brambraakman.com/blog/comments/installing_pil_in_snow_leopard_jpeg_resync_to_restart_error/ http://appelfreelance.com/2010/06/libjpeg-pil-snow-leopard-python2-6-_jpeg_resync_to_restart/http://djangodays.com/2008/09/03/django-imagefield-validation-error-caused-by-incorrect-pil-installation-on-mac/ http://colbypalmer.com/index.php?/colbyworld/blogEntry/install_libjpeg_and_pil_on_os_x_leopard/ It's clearly an annoying problem, and I'm guessing none of those worked for you. While this is clearly an annoying problem and I spent at least a couple hours of head banging myself, I believe most of peoples' issues can ...

Friday, August 19, 2011

Setting up my Hackintosh on my Toshiba Satellite M55-S329

I'll go through the process of turning my 6 year old Toshiba Satellite into a brand new Hackintosh. So far it's working great! Wifi and all! And best of all, it didn't take much time at all to set up.First, I have to give credits to the two best sources for this that I found:http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=167283 http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2/Portables#Satellite_m55-s3293Not everything went totally smooth for me, though, so I'll walk through each step in a bit more detail than in those links above. First, ...

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Scheduling Regular Backups on Webfaction

For Leaguevine, we take backing up our information seriously and have deployed a custom backup system for our database. I figured I would share how we back up our databases here. Note that this sort of backup technique is certainly not a replacement for source control or backing up user uploads, but that's a topic for another day.First, we have to decide on a schedule for what copies of the database we want to keep, and how long we want ...

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Sanya Beaches and Relaxation

After Yangshuo, we took a bus to Guilin where we again stayed at Liu Tao’s youth hostel for a night in preparation for our flight to Sanya. This time we paid for our room at the hostel because we would feel bad abusing his generosity towards Couchsurfers. We walked around the town that night, and enjoyed a beautiful atmosphere. Our guide book said Guilin would be overly crowded with tourists, but the city is big enough to hold a lot ...

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Looking back on our time in Yangshuo

This final set of blog posts is coming extremely late, but I figure better late than never!We spent most of our second week (6 nights) in Yangshuo and this may have been our favorite location on our trip. Yangshuo has been different from every other city/town we’ve visited in that it is small, not too busy, and a surprising number of people speak English. There are only about 200,000 residents in the town and thus you can get absolutely anywhere ...

Monday, July 11, 2011

First week of China - Beijing, Luoyang, Hua Shan, Xi'an, And Guilin

Blogging has been a bit sporadic over our first three weeks of this trip so I'm going to go back through the fun events of our first week here. I'll get to the stuff from the past 2 weeks soon! We didn't spend much time in Beijing since we will be doing a lot more of that when my family arrives. Our first impression was really nice, though. We stayed in a gorgeous Marriott room thanks to my dad's connections. ...

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

First day in Hainan

Today's my birthday and to celebrate, Rachael and I are going to go to a white sand beach and do nothing all day! We're staying at a cheap little place that is off the beaten path that sits right on the beach. I'm posting a photo from bed since I still am laying in it. Although the view is nice, it has AC and WiFi, the beach is not a goof beach for swimming so we'll probably change locations tomorrow. ...

Monday, July 4, 2011

Mud cave!

Sorry I still haven't given any updates on last week's adventures and I probably won't for another few days at least, but I wanted to post this photo after a fun afternoon. We took a tour to a mud cave right outside Yangshuo today and it was exactly how it sounded. It was a huge cave that we took a boat into to start. After that, we walked much farther into the cave and wore some cheap helmets because the ...

Friday, July 1, 2011

The Yangshuo Countryside

It's been many days since I last posted, and have since trekked 6000 feet up Hua Shan mountain, stopped in Xi'an to see the terra-cotta warriors, flew to Guilin where we relaxed a bit, and have spent the last 2.5 days here in Yangshuo. I'll talk about those other places soon, but just wanted to give a brief update on today's awesome journey! I apologize for being brief, but I am typing this from my iPhone (this cheap hostel has ...

Saturday, June 25, 2011

We're in China!

Rachael and I arrived in China about 3 days ago and the time has flown so far. We've both been really jet lagged, and have probably been trying to pack too many things into too little time to start this trip. However, we've already done some very fun things and have a lot more to look forward to! We started in Beijing for just a day where my dad's friend Ying and her daughter Yuan met us and treated us ...

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Backing up my Hackintosh

I am moving soon and every time I have to physically transport a desktop computer I worry the jolting will mess up a hard drive. Because this Hackintosh took me the better part of a day to set up, I decided it would be wise to make a bootable clone of my OSX partition. I didn't want to just back up my files, but instead want a copy of the operating system so if my current boot drive dies, I ...

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

To do: Combine my blogs

I have a new blog that I've been using at http://markliu.me and I intend to keep using that. However, I just miss how easy it is to post to my Posterous blog! Posterous has a sweet API now, so in the near future, I'll be writing some code to automatically take entries from this Posterous blog and import them onto my other one. I don't have the time to do this right now, and since I'm leaving for China in ...

Monday, May 23, 2011

Connecting to a Mac from an iPhone over 3G

A couple hours ago I realized I may need to connect to my Hackintosh this weekend while I'm out of town. Turns out, there are some really cool tools to do this securely for only $2! It took me a bit more than an hour to set up, so I thought I'd write an entry for future reference. In this tutorial, I'll be setting up both VNC and SSH on OSX 10.6 and connecting to it over 3G using an ...

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Webfaction Rocks!

About a year ago I began using Webfaction shared hosting for this blog and a handful of webapps I'm running (2 Django apps, 1 Rails app, and a wiki). I have been blown away by the service they offer for the amazingly low price. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. How they deal with bad neighbors The first thing they do that's great is they don't overload their servers so you are not likely to see a ...

Friday, January 14, 2011

My Recent Hackintosh/Windows/Linux Install

I recently built my first Hackintosh and I am extremely pleased with it so I thought I would write about my experience. I needed a new computer and really like OSX, but I was not willing to pay the price for a new Macbook or iMac. Since a desktop is perfectly fine for my purposes and I already had the monitors for it, I figure I'd save some money and build an awesome machine running OSX. Thus, I bought everything ...

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Where are all the Naysayers?

I must be surrounded by the best group of people alive, because I can't seem to find any negative feedback on Leaguevine from anyone. I'm not so much talking about whether or not my users are happy (which they certainly appear to be), but I'm talking about friends, family, colleagues, professors, and strangers I have talked about my ideas with. I can't tell you how many times over the past 2 months of business classes that I've been told "Don't ...

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Just Launched Leaguevine!

I've been working really hard over the past few months on getting my ultimate site online. Over the past 2 weeks I've been fine tuning things and getting feedback from about 20-30 people. The site was actually live, but I just didn't tell anyone about it :) Over the last few days, I slowly introduced it to a few more by posting on the Madison Ultimate Frisbee Association forum, and something like 100 people went and looked at it and ...

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Pictures and Recap of the Kenya Trip

Just now I finally wrote up a recap of our recent trip to Kenya. Here is the blog post. I didn't even finish it because I'm so long winded and it was getting too long. I decided to just end it because I was running out of steam. Here are some publicly viewable facebook pictures of the trip! First album of facebook pictures Second album of facebook pictures Enjoy!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

What is Your Proudest Achievement?

This is the first week of another semester of classes, and I was recently filling out a standard student questionnaire. I was flying through it without thinking, since the questions were the basic "why are you interested in this course" and "what are your hobbies outside of school" types of questions. However, one question came out of nowhere, and made me pause for a moment. It read: "What is your proudest achievement?" Within about 10 seconds I had written down "the ...

Monday, August 2, 2010

My 4th and possibly last trip to Kenya with Engineers Without Borders

In just a couple days I'll be heading out to Kenya again with EWB. I'm currently in a rush to take care of lots of little things before I go, but I'd like to step back and put my current thoughts down on paper so I have some documentation of this exciting time before I forget it the details. Why this trip will be our best one yet It took our group about 2 years to adapt to the Kenyan ...

Thursday, July 22, 2010

So long for my Stall 9 name

Looks like sometime in the last few weeks, a new company sprang up and called themselves Stall 9 Ultimate. This was definitely a shocker to me. And because I'm not really the creative type, the prospect of having to come up with another suitable name ruined my night. I've done a lot of reading into what goes into a good name, and after spending several hours studying this practice and brainstorming words, I think I've come up with a new ...

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Reflections on Creating Stall9

Okay, so Stall9 is not actually finished yet, but I thought I would still reflect on the journey so far. In case you haven't heard, I am building a website called Stall9 that will allow users to collaboratively update the ultimate frisbee community on what is currently going on. The premise of the site is that any person, regardless if he/she is a player, fan, or administrator, can update the information on stall9 to provide online followers with the most ...

Monday, July 12, 2010

Code For This Site

I've decided to make the source code for this site publicly available. You are welcome to download it, use it, modify it or do anything else you want with it. It is available here. I have also uploaded a rather detailed README that should get the site up and running for you if you do decide to play around with it. Getting this site up and running took a bit of time and during the process I was always wishing ...

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

MySQL and Python on 32 bit Snow Leopard

I am running Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on my home machine and had previously been chugging along just fine with my Python 2.5 and MySQL 5 setup. However, this morning I decided to try and get MySQL to play nicely with my Python 2.6 installation and I ran into all sorts of problems. I searched online for solutions and found that a ton of other people had problems as well, but none of their solutions worked for me. I ...

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Single settings file for Django deployment on Webfaction

After only a few days of this blog being up, I already became annoyed with having to maintain separate settings files for development and production. Thankfully, fixing this problem was incredibly quick and easy and should save me some headaches in the future. All I did was determine what host the settings file resides on and then set the parts of the settings file that change between development and production. Here is what the relevant part of my Django settings ...

Thursday, May 27, 2010

I'm moving blogs again

Hi everyone. Yesterday I finished building my own site which I will use for updates such as the ones I had provided here. I'm excited about this new site because its the first blog I've had where I actually programmed it myself! Feel free to check it out here: http://markliu.me I hope you like it!

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Kicking Off This Site

I'm really excited to be putting this new website up today! I had been using this posterous blog for travel updates while I was in India and hiking the John Muir Trail last summer. And I was using a different blog for my recent trip to Kenya. However, I am infinitely more excited about this one. I have recently been working with Python and the Django web development framework for an ultimate frisbee site I'm creating (I'm being a bit ...

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Trip to Kenya from 12/29/09 - 1/20/10

I will be traveling to Kenya for the third time in a few days, but instead of posting all about it here, I have instead set up a group blog so everyone on this trip can post. There are 7 of us so hopefully between us all we can give plenty of updates! This blog is located at: http://ewb-orongo.posterous.com

Monday, September 28, 2009

Life has really calmed down

I'm now back into the regular groove of things at Madison after a lot of fun traveling this summer. The John Muir Trail was absolutely amazing and would take a very long time to tell about all of those experiences. I wish I had gotten cell phone reception more often during the trail, but as expected, I was out of service for the last 10 or so days so I couldn't send updates. I do want to write about this ...

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

At Muir Trail Ranch

Hey everyone. I'm still fine and well and am at Muir Trail Ranch right now, about 110 miles in. George and John are great companions and we're all healthy. I just wanted to make sure we could get the meet up point right! For our resupply/meetup near independence, we will meet you guys at the junction of the bullfrog lake trail and the JMT (the place alyssa showed me on the map at elevation 10560) on Tuesday at 1pm. From ...

Thursday, August 6, 2009

In California, Preparing for the John Muir Trail

Rachael and I have made it safely back to the states and yesterday flew out here to San Luis Obispo, CA and are staying at Alyssa's house. Its gorgeous out here and hope it stays this nice on the trail! We have been buying a ton of food and are dehydrating a lot of things. We're almost ready to go. We'll be driving up to Yosemite tomorrow to start the hike and are planning on spending about 20 days to ...

Friday, July 31, 2009

Almost time to leave

Everything is wrapping up here nicely and I'm having no problems moving out thankfully! It was sad saying bye to my ultimate friends I've made here since yesterday was the last time I would be playing with them. I will probably miss them the most along with Siva when I leave here. Rachael asked me the other day what I would miss most and after a long while of thinking the only two things I could think of were the ...

Friday, July 24, 2009

A sad week

Just wanted to give you all a quick update so you know I'm still alive. Its been a while since I've posted. Unfortunately on Monday, my grandpa passed away so I've been pretty bummed. Of all the people reading these posts, I got by far the most feedback from him so I'm glad I was at least able to keep in contact with him during these last few months despite being on the other side of the world... I'll certainly ...

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

More birthday festivities

Today has already started out really fun and looks to only get better. Kyle slept over in my room last night so we could go to play ultimate at 6:30am. As always it was a ton of fun and also good to have another friend there!Tonight though, we're celebrating Anna's birthday! Somehow someway it coincided exactly with the premier of the Harry Potter movie which she has been dying to see. So tonight we are going to go to a ...

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Last weekend in Kerala

This past weekend Rachael, Anna, Kyle and I visited Kerala on many people's recommendations. Conveniently for us, Siva's friend Sandeep planned out a whole trip for us so all we had to do was follow along and have a good time! Siva was unfortunately unable to come, but I had met Sandeep before and knew he was a good guy so we didn't have to worry. There were 10 of us in the group total and we couldn't have had ...

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Some Pictures of Indian Food

One of the biggest differences between living here and at home is definitely the food. Apparently some foreigners at NCBS can't deal with it and end up eating a lot of cookies and bread. Luckily I find most of it quite good (except the food at B mess which I do not need to eat anymore!). One thing that is still difficult to get used to though, is eating with my hands! Some things like chappathi or pastries are of ...

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

I had a great birthday

Thanks to Rachael, Kyle, Anna, and Siva, I had a really great birthday. They took me to a nice Chinese restaurant called Red Bamboo Shoots and brought me a bunch of fun presents! Also, they got me the coolest cake ever. The text on it was: IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY.hahaha if you get that reference you are probably awesome.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

July 4th Weekend in Goa

This past weekend was quite fun. A little too short though... On Friday Anna, Kyle, Rachael, and I took a 14 hour overnight bus ride from Bangalore to Goa and arrived at about 10am. The busses had AC set to extremely cold but luckily Rachael brought a jacket and I brought a sweatshirt which we put over our faces and it was tolerable. Poor Anna and Kyle though... There were not sheets on the bus and both of them had ...

Thursday, July 2, 2009

On first impression, Posterous is cooler than Tumblr

It has no way to set custom themes or make things look pretty, but its functionality is really fun! And it is faster and much easier to use than Tumblr after playing with it for only minutes. I thin this will be my main blogging platform for now. If you are curious about the tumbler blog I tried out for a few days it was located at: http://wiscospike.tumblr.com/

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

4th update from India

So this is my first ever blog entry on my first ever blog… I feel so behind the times that I thought I would give this a shot and see what its like! There is a good chance you’ll see future blog posts from different blogging sites while I get a feel for things. I guess what made me change to updates on blogging sites instead of those mass e-mails is I’ve been quite interested in web development recently and ...

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