The new Betahouse will be twice the size and appropriate for teams of up to 6 people (depending on how they’d use the space, of course).

via Jon Pierce (Betahouse is Expanding (Hopefully)!).

It addresses how to let go of things that can end up causing lots of wasted time and energy in our lives. It’s another practical, wonderful post.

“Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.” ~Dalai Lama

via Letting Go of Attachment, from A to Zen | Zen Habits.

The unexpected lesson: about 4 to 5 months after quitting my job I was already ROI positive in terms of networking, learning and satisfaction.

In just a few months I felt completely confident that if the startup went splat on someone’s windshield, I’d be able to find a more interesting and higher paying job that I had before. Also, compared to an MBA, doing a startup felt like an amazing deal: On one hand, an MBA (tuition alone) might run about $85,000 whereas the startup has cost me only $5,000. The salary was the same ($0) but the learning and networking with the startup was much, much greater than with the MBA.

In retrospect, jumping into the startup led to some immediate and unexpected benefits that, at least for me, far outweighed the forgone salary of my previous job and positioned me better for my future. Quitting turned out to be a zero risk move.

via » Unexpected Startup Lesson #1: Quitting the day job – Currently Obsessed.

via TechStars Graduate Localytics Raises $700K For Mobile App Analytics Suite.

These guys are doing some great work – I definitely recommend checking them out if you’re doing mobile app development.

Lean Into Spring with Lean Startup Circle Boston – Lean Startup Circle Boston (Cambridge, MA) – Meetup.com.

Here’s a link to a slide share by Eric Reis on Lean Startups — this will give you some background an what the leanstartup idea is all about.

TIMESTAMP columns are identical to DATETIME columns with one important exception — they can be set to take the current time value when a row is created or updated.

You can define more than one TIMESTAMP colum in a table — however, only ONE TIMESTAMP column in a table can be configured for Auto-Update or Auto-Initialization.

(For that reason, I usually make a practice of setting other columns to ‘DATETIME’ so there’s only one ‘TIMESTAMP’ column per table.)

There are four options when using TIMESTAMP, they are:

• Auto-initialization and auto-update:

  ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

• Auto-initialization only:

  ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

• Auto-update only:

  ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT 0 ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

• Neither:

  ts TIMESTAMP DEFAULT 0

Here’s an example of a complete ‘CREATE TABLE’ statement that shows how it all works:

CREATE TABLE `foo`.`timestamp_example` (
`id`                  INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT,
`some_text_field`     VARCHAR(20),
`updated_at`          TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
`created_at`          DATETIME DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

Note that only one of the fields can be TIMESTAMP, that’s a limitation of MySQL.

The choice to use the TIMESTAMP on the ‘updated_at’ field was random in this example. Choose whatever makes sense for your application.

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Moreover, each can be signed or unsigned. If your value can’t ever be negative (for example, for an index), then you should probably make your values unsigned.

DROP TABLE `foo`.`example_03`;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `foo`.`example_03` (
 f_01  TINYINT,           -- from -128 to 127
 f_02  TINYINT UNSIGNED,  -- from 0 to 256
 f_03  SMALLINT,          -- from -32,768 to 32,767
 f_04  SMALLINT UNSIGNED, -- from 0 to 65,535
 f_05  MEDIUMINT,         -- from -8,388,608 to 8,388,607
 f_06  MEDIUMINT UNSIGNED, -- from 0 to 16,777,215
 f_07  INT,               -- from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647
 f_08  INT UNSIGNED,      -- from 0 to 4,294,967,295
 f_09  BIGINT,
              -- from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808
              -- to  9,223,372,036,854,775,807
 f_10  BIGINT UNSIGNED    -- from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615
);

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