In general, I have the belief that most ethics courses whether they be medical ethics or business ethics tend to be taught from too theoretical of a standpoint.  Scenarios are often defined to have black and white answers, and thus the students never actually deal with true moral dilemmas until they are actually on the job.  This is especially true for those who spend their lives in consulting and/or academia, with no real understanding of the pressures that actually happen in an operational environment.  Having gone through some particularly stressful board meetings, I was quite excited when I heard about a new PBS production that will attempt to showcase some of the moral complexity involved:

Everyday we hear about business people who gamble on ethics to meet business goals. The ongoing stream of scandals begs the question, “Why does this keep happening?” From an Emmy-winning team of producers, “In Search of the Good Corporate Citizen” weaves together expert panel discussions with personal accounts from real-life white-collar criminals and whistleblowers.

Unable to catch the show on the air, I contacted Light On Production to try and get a copy of the DVD. After several phone calls, Denny Swenson, the producer of the show sent me a *free* copy of their first show, “Hitting the Numbers”!

I think the show is quite well done, and the stories that they showed were truly remarkable. The show leveraged a small panel to discuss each story after they were presented.   The panel was moderated by Thomas Donaldson from the Wharton School of Business and was composed of:

• William W. George, the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic
• Ben Heineman, General Counsel of General Electric
• Donna C. Boehme, former chief compliance officer of BP

Given the show was filmed in 2008, one can reasonably assume that Boehme did not lose her job over the oil scandal.  However, just from the body language of the panelists, it was quite obvious that they were quite dismissive of the idea of having a chief compliance officer and frankly I am as well.  Perhaps such a role is indeed necessary in many large institutions, but it was not clear from the panel discussions how a CCO as described by Boehme would have in anyway contributed to ethical behaviors in an organization.  What was truly disappointing with this panel was that they never really acknowledged how much pressure there was in middle management and how sometimes the decisions are actually not that black and white.  Even with Donaldson offering up truly gray and realistic scenarios, the panel always converged on black and white solutions.  I would assume that the panelists themselves were at least somewhat worried about their professional image if they had mention doubts.  Perhaps true ethical discussions involving business executive can never happen in front of a camera?

Once in a while, I catch the startup bug due to people like Sean Burgess.  So this post is based on hours of frustration that I had from setting up multiple osx machines to deploy rails.  Much of this is for my own reference and borrows heavily from these sites and my own attempts on 4 different macs:

1. http://www.frederico-araujo.com/2010/08/19/installing-rails-enviroment-on-snow-leopard-with-macports-mysql-and-modrails-passenger/
2. http://2tbsp.com/content/install_apache_2_and_php_5_macports
3. https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/MAMP

1. Preparing System

In general, just easiest to start from scratch if you haven’t used ports in a while (or have never used it). Also make sure that web sharing is OFF under System Preferences as we are going to install the apache version from macports instead.

sudo rm -rf \
    /opt/local \
    /Applications/DarwinPorts \
    /Applications/MacPorts \
    /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
    /Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
    /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
    /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
    /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
    /Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
    ~/.macports

1.1 Download and Install Xcode & Macports

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/xcode.html

Download Page: http://www.macports.org/install.php

1.3.1 Update macports

sudo port -v selfupdate
port upgrade outdated

2. Apache, php5, mysql & PhpMyAdmin

2.1 Install Apache, php5, PhpMyAdmin and misc

sudo port -v install phpmyadmin php5 php5-mysql apache2 mysql5-server mysql5 memcached libmemcached wget sqlite3 +apache2 +pear

2.2 Make apache, mysql autoload on startup

sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db5
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.apache2.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist
sudo port load memcached

2.3 Activating PHP5

cd /opt/local/apache2/modules
sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs -a -e -n "php5" libphp5.so

2.4 Add index.php to the dir_module directive

Open /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf in your favorite text editor.

<IfModule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
</IfModule>

2.5 Add mod_php and phpmyadmin

Also, at the end of the httpd.conf file, add the following lines so that Apache includes the mod_php and phpmyadmin file

#Include PHP configurations
Include conf/extra/mod_php.conf

# Local access to phpmyadmin installation
Include conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf

Set up your PHP configuration files

cd /opt/local/etc/php5
sudo cp php.ini-development php.ini

Setup the MySQL default socket to use the CentOS MySQL socket location by editing php.ini

pdo_mysql.default_socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
mysql.default_socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

2.6 Building my.cnf and changing the MySQL default socket to conform to CentOS (optional)

Open /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf in your favorite text editor. Add a new mimetype so that Apache will direct files ending in .php to the PHP module for processing. Add the following within the block. Without this, all you’ll see is the text of your PHP scripts

sudo cp /opt/local/share/mysql5/mysql/my-medium.cnf /etc/my.cnf
sudo mkdir /var/lib/mysql/
sudo chown -R _mysql:_mysql /var/lib/mysql

Change the TWO lines in /etc/my.cnf that says

socket = /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock

to

socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

2.7 Create the phpmyadmin configuration file

create a file /opt/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf containing this text:

AliasMatch ^/phpmyadmin(?:/)?(/.*)?$ "/opt/local/www/phpmyadmin$1"

<Directory "/opt/local/www/phpmyadmin">
  Options -Indexes
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all

  LanguagePriority en de es fr ja ko pt-br ru
  ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback
</Directory>

2.8 Setup aliases to control the two services

sudo  ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apache2
sudo ln -s /opt/local/share/mysql5/mysql/mysql.server /usr/sbin/mysql.server
sudo apache2 restart
sudo mysql.server restart

2.9 Setup the mysql root password

Set the MySQL root password. Where is your new desired root password. You will be prompted for your existing password (“Enter password:”); since it’s empty, just press Return.

mysqladmin5 -u root -p password <new-password>

Then log into the mysql connection and use these commands (replacing your root password of course) to update all the root accoutns

shell> mysql -u root -p
mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = PASSWORD('newpwd')
    ->     WHERE User = 'root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

2.10 Test the PHP server

Make an index.php in /opt/local/apache2/htdocs and put the following in it:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

2.11 Install and Test phpmyadmin

First make these changes in /opt/local/www/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = WHATEVER YOU WANT THIS TO BE

You should see quite a bit of information regarding your php installation.

3. Ruby, Rubygems, Rails, other gems

3.1 Install Ruby from macports

sudo port -v install ruby

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-08-08 patchlevel 302) [x86_64-darwin10]

3.2 download rubygems from http://rubygems.org/pages/download

cd /tmp
wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
tar -xvf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.7
sudo ruby setup.rb

3.3 Install rails, rake, rspec etc.

sudo gem install rake rails thin tzinfo capistrano ruby-debug rspec mysql sqlite3-ruby

4. ImageMagick, Rmagick and mini_magick (Optional)

lets install ImageMagick with support for JPEG, TIFF, WMF, PDF, and PNG images, and for Postscript and TrueType fonts.

sudo port -v install tiff -macosx imagemagick +q8 +gs +wmf

sudo gem install mini_magick rmagick

Test rmagick

$ irb -rubygems -r RMagick
>> puts Magick::Long_version
This is RMagick 2.13.1 ($Date: 2009/12/20 02:33:33 $) Copyright (C) 2009 by Timothy P. Hunter
Built with ImageMagick 6.6.3-0 2010-08-19 Q8 http://www.imagemagick.org
Built for ruby 1.8.7
Web page: http://rmagick.rubyforge.org
Email: rmagick@rubyforge.org
=> nil

5. Passenger

5.1 Install Passenger gem

sudo gem install passenger

5.2 Check Passenger path

passenger-config --root

 -> /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15

5.3 Build passenger for apache

and don’t worry about the other steps, we will cover them directly in the guide

sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

5.4 Enable Passenger on apache:

create /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-passenger.conf and change wherever necessary for your directories.

LoadModule passenger_module /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /opt/local/bin/ruby
PassengerMaxPoolSize 6  # maximum global rails servers
PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 2  # maximum rails servers per application
RailsFrameworkSpawnerIdleTime 1800
RailsAppSpawnerIdleTime 600
PassengerPoolIdleTime 600
PassengerMaxRequests 1000  # after 1000 requests will restart server, to skip memory leak  

# Enabling NameBased Virtualhost
NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80

# my rails app virtual host 1
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
    ServerName my-rails-app.local
    DocumentRoot "/Users/jackpo/rails/my-rails-app/public" # change this to match your folder
    RailsEnv "development"
   <Directory /Users/jackpo/rails/my-rails-app/public>
        # change this to match your folder
        # MultiViews must be turned off
        Options -MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
    # logs are optional, change this to match your folder
    CustomLog  "/Users/jackpo/rails/my-rails-app/log/access_log" combined
    ErrorLog   "/Users/jackpo/rails/my-rails-app/log/error_log"
</VirtualHost>

5.5 Enable Virtual host on apache:

Edit /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and add this new line at the bottom:

# Include Passenger ModRails config file
Include conf/extra/httpd-passenger.conf

5.6 Add your .local domain to /etc/hosts/

edit /etc/hosts and Add this line to that file and change to the name of your choosen application

You might add as many as you want, each line for each that ServerName on your VirtualHost blocks

127.0.0.1 my-rails-app.local
127.0.0.1 myapp-xyz.local

5.6 Restart Apache

sudo apache2 restart

6. Final

go to your browser and open the url of your application http://my-rails-app.local

If it works, congratulations. If it didn’t.. uh.. try and google. I maybe able to help, but I don’t have that much time!

The Human Genome project was completed at the start of the last decade, and only in the last two years have we really begun to reap the fruits of the immense undertaking. I talk about some of commercial players and legal issues surrounding the wide spread adoption of personal genomic technology in medicine at the First AMA-IEEE Conference on Individualized Healthcare blog.

Incidentally, I’m also on the organizing committee for the conference mentioned above. Consider attending the conference if you are interested in Individualized Healthcare!

First AMA-IEEE EMBS Medical Technology Conference on Individualized Health Care
23-23 March 2010, Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC

The Harvard Business Review recently published their article on the Top 100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World. It’s probably not a surprise to many that Steve Jobs is #1 on the list (Apple, Pixar) or that there is only one woman (#8 – Meg Whitman of eBay) on the top 100. I am however, surprised by which woman they picked. Meg Whitman practically ran eBay into the ground. Indra Nooyi of Pepsico would have been a much better choice.

After glancing at a few of their selections, I decided to crunch some of the numbers given to see if there are any interesting trends. First, we can clearly see that HBR has a bias towards western CEOs (specifically, the US and UK).

The industries are pretty much what one expects, with energy and financial services leading the way.

Contrary to the prevalent white knight CEO myth, most good CEOs tend to be insiders, and do not hold MBA degrees. An MBA only seems to be important IF you want to be a white knight CEO.

Though if you do want to try and be a white knight CEO, USA and UK are about the only countries that really has that type of culture.

There’s a lot more analysis that you could run on the data if you want. I’m going to save you some effort in screen scraping and just give you the excel sheet that I used here.

So this concludes my first blog entry in the new decade! As some of you might have noticed, I’ve also completely revamped the website. If you have any comments, (constructive or hateful ones), please let me know! Happy New Year!

Wow, I’m really impressed with the disastrous state of economy. I don’t really have much to say about it except that I am expecting these companies to fail within the next year or so:

• Citigroup
• GM
• Ford
• Chrysler
• Goldman Sachs
• Yahoo
• Citadel

Let’s see what actually happens….

In the process of managing non-profits and startups, I’ve used many different online tools to better enable collaboration and communication in organizations. Through the years, I’ve tried many different tools, and now think I have a pretty good list. Please bear in mind that the three dimensions I’m optimizing across are ease of use, reliability, and cost. I am still looking for solutions in two major areas, and would love suggestions if anyone has them.

Website Registration: I’ve used GoDaddy and Namecheap in the past and they are both really good. If you have to be anonymous, try International Alliance Privacy Services.

Website Hosting: I’ve tried self hosting, as well as many different online hosts. If you have a good technical person on board, and REALLY have the need for something advanced (cron jobs, RoR, significant processing needs), try either dedicated hosting or colocation. For dedicated hosting, I really like Softlayer. For NYC based colocation, I really like Pilosoft. For most website hosting needs, all you need is a good shared hosting provider. I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech. They are extraordinarily cheap for low traffic websites, and I have yet to see them go down. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy, or NameCheap for web hosting.

DNS Hosting: Normally I just use my domain registrant, or my webhost, for DNS hosting. However, if I really need to be anonymous, I will use FreeDNS.

Email Needs: I used to use my own mail servers, but now, I completely rely on Google Apps. If you are a registered 501-c3 organization, you can also get GoogleApps Education and Google Checkout for free. Therefore you get the hyped up version of Google Apps, as well as free payment processing!

Actual Website:: I am now a total WordPress convert. It started as a blogging software, but has grown to become a very very stable content management system. I’ve tried other CMS like Joomla and Drupal, but they are really really complicated to work with.

Internal Website: Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is great for internal websites. Any member can just click on edit and then add or remove information. I’ve tried other wiki installations, but none are easier to maintain than MediaWiki.

UPDATE 1: I’ve since tried out “Google Sites”, an app that’s part of the ever expanding Google Apps, and found it even superior to Mediawiki. Here you’ll also be able to easily manage spreadsheets and files!

Phone Service: For those who simply need a phone number, but don’t necessarily want to answer it all the time, I highly recommend the currently freeGrandCentral if you can secure an invitation. If you can’t secure an invitation, you can use RingCentral.

Fax Service: For a great fax to email service, definitely try RingCentral.

Conference Call Service: Unless you really need a toll-free number, I highly recommend FreeConferenceCall. There is a short message in the beginning of the call saying this is a service provided by freeconferencecall.com, but do you really mind?!

Forms, Spreadsheets and Documents: I really like GoogleDocs (part of Google Apps mentioned above) for simple spreadsheets that are shared between multiple people, i.e. financial projections between executive committee members. However, if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just collected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

Business Banking: I am starting to really like Chase Business banking. They have a pretty high monthly service charge, but one that can be waived if you open a business credit card and charge any amount on it each month. So simply have your credit card make 1 dollar monthly payment onto Paypal.

Newsletter: I’ve tried out Constant Contact and they are a great service provider. Unfortunately, they are also decently expensive (15 dollars a month) for organizations starting out. I’ve tried open source solutions like Dadamail and Phplist and they are both too difficult to use for any normal human being. If anyone knows of any good newsletter provider, hosted or not, I would LOVE to know.

Project Management This is an area I’ve tried many tools and just can’t quite get used to any of them. BaseCamp seems to be the best at the moment, but they are REALLY expensive. Also, I STILL don’t know the difference between milestones and tasks. Ever since Activecollab betrayed the open source community, it has started to really suck even as a tool. I have found Collabtive to be a really good imitation of BaseCamp, but not nearly as polished. So if someone knows of a good project management tool, I would love to know.

So there you go, my years of trying out different tools boiled down onto one blog post!

In the interest of anti-stealth, I’m going to publicly announce one of the for profit ventures that I am currently working on. Incidentally, what exactly happened to the NextNY anti-stealth movement? There was a lot of activity at the end of October, and then the whole movement seemingly collapsed.

Anyway, a friend and I have started exploring the idea of a new campus based venture. Many of you who are students are probably familiar with the few awkward minutes that you spend every few hours in an elevator traveling to and from class. While you are in the elevator, wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice LCD displaying current campus events that might be of interest to you, or perhaps an ad telling you about the discounted food at Chipotle down the block this week?

Our idea is exactly that, we would like to create a network of LCDs in campus elevators that would stream both campus events as well as advertisements. A well established player, Captivate Network, currently does this in the office building market. We would like to stay away from office buildings at the moment, and focus purely on college campuses (Facebook vs LinkedIn analogy?).

Since both of us are current Columbia students, in fact both BME PhD students, we have decided to use Columbia University as a pilot site. I haven’t had time to put together a powerpoint presentation yet, but I will definitely post it in the next few days. For now we are tackling several thorny issues:

• Is it even possible to do it in NY? We are currently checking the New York Fire Code. Safety code for elevators and escalators : an American national standard by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers will be our guide. Looks like I won’t need sleeping pills tonight.
• We have done some back of the envelope calculations to see whether the idea is sustainable and scalable. If we intend to get more funding, we will have to produce a full financial projection. The projection itself is of course of no great importance to either investors or us, since reality almost always deviate significantly from the projections. Though it’s important to have one anyway, if nothing else than to show that due diligence was performed.
• To start campus based businesses that depend so much on campus infrastructure, we are clearly going to need a faculty champion. We have started approaching various members of the engineering faculty, the business school faculty, as well as Columbia’s Science and Technology Ventures group to begin soliciting feedback and buy-ins. We’ve had a lot of success getting people excited about the concept, but haven’t found a champion of the project yet. If you know of a Columbia faculty who might be interested, please let me know!
• I will also begin to approach NYU and CCNY about the idea as well, in case Columbia falls through as a pilot site.
• We will clearly need a powerpoint presentation down the line. I’ll put up version 1.0 of the presentation in a few days.

Since we are still very early in our planning stages, we are open to all suggestions and ideas. Let me know if any of you have any feedback or have seen existing implementations on college campuses! If you happen to be a college student / faculty, and are interested in joining our team, shoot me an email: mail @ jackpo dot org.

All of us in the startup community have been debating whether the bubble is once again upon us. It is my strong opinion that indeed it has

Dmitry sent me this video when I told him I will be teaching Entrepreneurship next semester, check it out!

As many of you know by now, my team and I launched PeerDecision recently. The site intends to facilitate high school seniors’ college admissions process. We have included a lot of features that we think would have been useful when we applied to colleges ourselves.. but that was quite a while ago. For any HS students who chance upon this site, go check out PeerDecision and tell me what you think! I’d love to hear any feedback that you have (jack at peerdecision.com).

Now back to the main topic of this post. As I was researching for a blog post for PD, I came upon Princeton Review’s financial statements. Many would probably assume that they make money hands over fist from their books being pimped everywhere, and their classes costing a ridiculous amount of money. It turns out that in fact the opposite is happening! Princeton Review is in fact hemorrhaging money!

Above is a chart showing Princeton Review’s operating results per quarter since the beginning of 2002. The darker color bar is the result for the quarter, and the lighter color bar is the cumulative result since 1st quarter 2002. You’ll notice that in the first quarter of 2004, Princeton Review took a massive charge of 30 million dollars and can’t seem to get its act together ever since…. The reason for the 30 million dollar charge? This is from their official press release:

• An impairment charge of $8.2 million to write down the goodwill associated with the Company’s 2001 acquisition of Embark.com, Inc.; and
• A valuation allowance against the Company’s deferred tax asset in the full amount of the asset, which is $22.1 million.

So, essentially a REALLY bad acquisition at the height of the dot com, and delinquent taxes… Talk about a messed up organization! It’s my hope that peerdecision will never end up like that

If you use the internet regularly, I’m sure you’ve mistyped a URL at least once or twice, and come across a webpage with nothing but useless links. This is actually a phenomenon called “domain squatting”. Almost every single domain name that remotely sounds like a word, or even the combination of two words have now been squatted on. These scum of the earth assholes’ are actually making fortunes abusing the open internet model.

The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type — into the air. He’s seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It’s the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it’s a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

…

That’s right, the guy makes HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars contributing absolutely NOTHING to society. In fact, he actually affects society negatively. As an internet entrepreneur, we often find our prospective domains squatted on. Not only is he filling the internet with junk, he’s preventing others from contributing to the internet. For a bloody spammer, he sure seems awfully concerned about his own privacy:

Registrant
KEVINHAM.COM
c/o Whois IDentity Shield
142-757 W. Hastings St., Suite #777
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6C 1A1

Someone should find his real address, and give him a serious beating.