Omar's Blog

I haven’t been writing much lately because I’ve been keeping busy starting a new company. If you follow my twitter account, you probably already know what I’m talking about: MarketBeat.

Two years ago one of my best buddies came to me with an idea, and wanted to know if could be done using the Internet. I was pretty sure it could be done, but didn’t realize yet how we were going to do it. In true entrepreneur fashion I said, “Sure, let’s do it!”.

Two years, a lot of money, and a couple employees later, we have a company on our hands. The original dream has morphed into a beast of an idea with the potential to become something really huge. An idea that is not terribly new, except for the way we approached the problem and the solution we designed for it. The potential marketplace that can be built on our platform. It has all the key factors for success.

Can we pull it off? Can we turn this product, this idea, this company into something huge? Time will tell. In the meantime we’re focused on making a truly great product, and keeping our customers very happy. Every day, it seems, we ad something new to the product that makes it even better, or that opens up a door to a vast new line of development and ideas. I really love my job!

Oh, and I’m very happy to announce that our product is built on Open Source tools. Ubuntu, Apache, PHP, MySQL. Even our developers run Ubuntu. Well, I kind of forced them to try it out on the computers that we bought for the company. Now, they love it so much, they wiped Windows off of their home computers and installed Ubuntu there too. I feel happy that I’ve helped these guys be more productive. Not only for our company, but for them as well.. and wherever the future takes them, I’m pretty sure they’ll keep on using Linux, now that they’ve seen the light.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years, apart from running the family footwear business… and that’s what been keeping me away from my blog. I love that I still get comments to a few posts I’ve done in the past, and I plan to do a few more. How-to’s and Open Source Product recommendations seem to be the way to go, so expect more posts about that in the future.

Time to go now and be productive! See you all.

Waking up in Panama, originally uploaded by oegan72.

The Panama skyline is very different than my last visit here 9 years ago. Panama feels like a very modern Miami!

Panama is growing like crazy.. this is the view from my hotel room this morning. There are cranes littering the skyline.. and new buildings are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. The fad now is for construction companies to buy entire blocks of residential houses and build skyscrapers there. The city is very different than my last visit here (almost 9 years ago).

Good morning panama, originally uploaded by oegan72.

Woke up and ready to have another productive day in Panama.

En reunión con Robby, originally uploaded by oegan72.

Those who’ve been following my blog and my Tweets and my Pownce updates know that I’ve been using Ubuntu at work for the past few months. Today, though, I decided to log into Windows because I wanted to sync up my Treo with the Palm Desktop application (I haven’t done that in a very long time) and I wanted to install a few new programs on my Treo that I’ve found on the web.

I do want to be clear on the fact that I CAN install stuff on the Treo from within Linux, but I just haven’t gotten around to figuring out how to do that just yet (I have a few HOW-TO’s to read). And besides, I have Windows on this computer, so why not boot up, quickly do my business and log back out into Ubuntu?

I’ll tell you why not!

I log into Windows… a process that takes over 6 minutes by the way… we’re talking 6 minutes of the hard drive going crazy, and not being able to use the computer because, for some reason or another, every single Windows program needs to run at boot time and leave some sort of fast-loader application loaded in the task-bar.

Finally the hard drive light starts to flicker down, and my mouse and keyboard start responding to my commands. So I fire up my e-mail program and my browser. It’s been so long since I’ve booted into Windows that Firefox quickly downloads its updates and asks me to restart it. I do, and continue working (Don’t you just love how Open Source stuff just seems to work right). I then decide that I want to listen to some music while I’m working, so I fire up iTunes, which asks me that it needs to download a new version… after the beautiful experience of updating Firefox I figured it’s probably a good idea to have the latest version of iTunes installed, so I clicked on the yes button. While that is going on I download and install the latest version of Pidgin as well… which works beautifully.

Now, here’s the kicker… iTunes finally finishes updating itself and asks me to reboot my machine.

REBOOT MY MACHINE?

Why?

What the hell does iTunes do to my Windows, that it need to reboot it?

You mean the price of upgrading to the latest version of iTunes is 6 minutes worth of “Windows is Shutting Down, please wait…” plus another 6 minutes of “Windows is starting up, please wait…” hell? You’ve got to be kidding me? The sad part of this ordeal is that I’ve noticed that pretty much 70% of all software updates I do on Windows require a System reboot!

What kind of a Micky Mouse, Fischer Price operating system is this? (No offense to those companies which, now that I think about it, have totally kick-ass products that are in no way comparable to the crap that Microsoft sells!). I mean, the only time you have to reboot on Linux is when you update the Kernel, and you can always choose to install the updates and reboot at a later time (like at midnight)… and Linux won’t keep bugging you to reboot every 10 or 15 minutes… it respects your decision to not reboot right away! In the Windows world… if you say, please don’t reboot right now… you get an annoying pop-up every 10 or so minutes asking you to reboot. If you’re in the middle of typing something important, you can easily hit the space bar when the dang thing pops up sending your machine into a reboot… and usually losing all your work.

Why does 90% of the world’s population put up with this sort of lackluster performance from Windows? How come this piece of very badly designed, expensive crap has such a big market share? Why do people now expect their computer systems to fail regularly and stop complaining? I mean you’re paying for the software… it’s not like it’s free… It’s perhaps the most expensive part of any new computer system, yet people have somehow learned to put up with its crap?

Microsoft, you need to get your act together soon… STOP SELLING CRAP. I, for one, am completely fed up with it. That’s right… I’m moving on to better things.

From now on I’m 100% Ubuntu. When people come to me to ask for advice I will tout Ubuntu and other Linuxes as their best option for increased productivity. Not only will they save money, but also time. They’ll see an immediate productivity boost!

It’s interesting to note that using Linux almost exclusively for a coupe of months has made me realize what a piece of crap Windows really is. Maybe that’s why so many people are running to the Mac and to Apple’s offerings. For those people, I only have this to say: Keep your eyes open guys! Use your beautiful Mac products but be sure to keep a copy Ubuntu on your dual-boot systems (Boot-camps or whatever you want to call it), because you never know when Apple will start to act like bullies and start to make dumb decisions regarding their OS similarly to what they’ve done with the iPhone and the AppleTV.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I see MacOS ruling the home, Linux ruling the corporate environment… and Windows, thank goodness, will start to fade into oblivion as people realize that they really don’t have to put up with it’s crap anymore.

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Finally made it to a gas station, originally uploaded by oegan72.

I was starting to get worried there. Traffic from here on out looks less complicated… it’s just very reassuring to have gas in the tank!

Stuck in traffic, originally uploaded by oegan72.

On my way to work. None of these cars are moving. Looks like I’m going to be late… Oh yeah, also running low on gas. Yippie!

The new home for the “La Charamusca” Podcast is now LIVE. After a couple of days of non-stop work, the guys at Web-Informática did a great job of integrating a very cool custom homepage with our tried and true wordpress blog. I must say it looks amazing!

Working with Raul from Web-Informática was a blast, and the growth projects that we have in mind for the next modules we want to integrate will be very innovative. I can hardly wait to get started on the new and exciting modules we want to develop for the La Charamusca site.

Please go check out the site, by following the link above, and leave us your comments!

My SVMedios webpage is finally up and running. For those of you who are wondering what the hell is this SVMedios stuff about… It’s an audio/video production company that I’m starting. I’ve grouped the podcasts that I’ve been working on for over a year now into a production company called SVMedios. I plan to start selling production services to companies that want to start their own podcasts or vidcasts.

At this time I’m in talks with a pretty big company here in El Salvador about covering one of their product launches. I’m working on a proposal for the video project, which will be hosted on their web site. For the project I’m considering hiring a very beautiful TV pro to host the event… to give the production a NEWS REPORT type of feel.

To learn more about that project and all the other cool things that I plan to do with SVMedios, be sure to check out the official site.