My brother-in-law, Adam popped round earlier today, and we got talking about work and business. I used to run a successful web hosting business with him a few years back, and we have always talked about business and work. While I've always been a hands-on kind of guy, Adam can be quite the opposite. However, we still both enjoy and love the thrill of running a business.

These days, I'm doing quite well as a freelance web developer, and building up Codaset into my next full time business. Adam is now a qualified financial advisor, and also doing well. We're both good at what we do.

However, Adam is getting a little bored and frustrated with working for someone else. He wants to run a business; any business. It doesn't matter what it is. The point is, he enjoys the process and task or running a business, no matter what it is.

So I tried to help him get fired up about finding a new business idea, and the best way to start it, all while still maintaining his day job. I suggested he borrow a book that I had just read, which I felt would really help him. "Crush It" by WineLibraryTV's Gary Vaynerchuck is a great little book, and really cemented a few ideas that I already had in my head. Adam took the book, but he left the conversation still in a different mindset, and thinking that he needed to start a business by buying a franchise or some other existing company.

Of course, he could very well do that, but I see two big things wrong with that:

• He needs a large amount of cash up front
• There is a higher amount of risk involved

I then realised why he was looking at this way of starting a business. It's because his primary goal is to make money. He wants to run a successful business because a successful business makes money. But that is the completely wrong way to go about running a business.

I have a passion!

I love the internet. I love developing web apps for the internet, and I love the endless possibilities that it gives me, with very little overheads or costs involved. The internet allows anyone who has a passion, to build that passion into an enjoyable business. It just so happens, that my passion is the internet.

We all have a passion. Some of you will already know what that passion is, and some of you may not have yet found your passion. Regardless of who you are, you have something that you enjoy doing, and that enjoyment can very easily turn into a passion.

Ok, so what am I getting at here?

Anything that you are passionate about will end up being something of quality. You will spend endless hours, and very, very late nights (and early mornings) being passionate about your passion. And you will do it well.

My point is, that when you run a business, it should be all about your passion, and not about the money. You should be doing it because you enjoy doing it regardless of how much money you make, if at all. My bet, is that if you truly love what you are doing, you will try you hardest to make sure that it is bloody good, and of the highest quality. And that is what makes a good business.

So follow your passion trail, and NOT the money trail. If you do, your passion will turn into money.

A little off topic here for a moment, but I was just browsing through some of the latest movie trailers via Front Row on my Mac, when I started to notice something. Some movies have really badly implemented posters! What I mean by that is that some movie posters look like a two year old drew them up on his PC! I tell ya; some of these images make the supposed movie stars look deformed. Just take a look at these that I found...

What's with J-lo's hand?

Someone got a little slap happy with the eraser tool in Photoshop, and rubbed out half of Jennifer's right side (your left).

Is no one else a little concerned that the back of John Travolta's head is exploding?!

What the crap is with this guys eye brows? And his nose is twice as long as it really is!

And of course there is this one, which most of you probably know about. Forgot your gun Nick, or just have a weird hand problem?

Anyone else know any other dodgy photoshop jobs on movie posters?

So I've been working with Sphinx a lot over the last few months for several different projects, including Codaset. It's an amazing piece of software, and solves the myriad of problems when trying to implement any kind of full text or intensive searches.

But, it's still not had a final release yet, as we are at 0.9.9. Which means that there may be some things missing or incomplete from the API. One thing I was missing was a way to find or add weight to exact matches. I can do phrase matching by enclosing the search string in quotes. But that returns all docs which include any or all of that phrase, which is fine, as I want to see all of them. But what I want to do is make sure that the exact matches are listed first, or are given increased weighting. And right now, that is not the case.

So I had a think, and came up with the idea of including a new SELECT item in my Sphinx index. So we have something like this:

SELECT CONCAT('__START__ ', my_field, ' __END__') AS exact_matched_field FROM table;

And now I can run the following Sphinx search, which will match my full and exact search string:

  @exact_matched_field "__START__ my value __END__"

I'm sure most of you have already heard of Node.js, and have probably been blown away by what it can do, and it's possibilities. But do you really know how fast it can be?

# node.js on freenode
spoob: technoweenie; seriously, you should look up how fast nodejs is... :)
technoweenie: yea i was getting about 5k r/s, pretty impressive
spoob: you should be getting around 20k r/s?
technoweenie: really?
technoweenie: oh wait i only ran 5k requests

# twitter
technoweenie: sample node.js server is *extremely* slow, am i missing something? i'm just trying the example app on nodejs.org  
technoweenie: oh i see, the demo app sets a 2s timeout, haha  
lifo: classic
technoweenie: hey that's a great way to start off a new web framework, simulate rails cgi speeds

I am sure Technoweenie wouldn't mind me posting this, but I think it's hilarious.

I'm out! ;)