New Trampolinees Needed!

We're hiring! Oh yes indeedy - techies are needed at Trampoline, with experience of some or all of these :

Java, Hibernate, Spring framework, JMS, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Transactions, Asynchronous systems, Transactional messaging, SQL, MySQL, Oracle, Linux sysadmin, Windows sysadmin

But far more important than that is that they just fit. Come help us drag the enterprise market kicking and screaming into the 2.0 / 3.0 / buzzword-of-your-choice world. It's fun! It's hard work, but it's fun.

"Will Code For Equity" - sound like anyone you know?

A friend of mine has an old CF/Fusebox site based around moving house, and finding companies to help you do that. She wants to completely revamp it and bring it in to the 2.0 era with user feedback, recommendations and reputations, etc, and she needs a developer.

Trouble is, although her existing site has been supporting her for two years, she doesn't have much money up front for a dev to revamp and relaunch it.

So the deal she's offering is, basically, take charge of the site and get free reign to do whatever you think is a good idea, in return for a decent chunk of equity and a corresponding share of the profits.

I'm not taking on any side work, I've got my hands more than full with Trampoline, but I told her I'd ask around, so if this sounds like anyone you know (and, crucially, you'd be happy to recommend them - she is a friend, after all, and I don't want to see her get ripped off) please give me a shout. Email address is in the "Other Links" section on the right, just under my gurning fizzog**

Sheesh. Coding for equity - does this sound like Bubble 2.0 to anyone else....?

**Translation for non-Northern people: grinning face

Finally, I Can Say It!

Phew, at last I can say what's been going on, why I haven't been blogging much recently, etc etc - it's because we've been working so hard to close THIS: Trampoline Systems receives £3 million funding. YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!! We did it!!! Woo and Yay and quite possibly Hoopla aswell! It's going to make a huge difference to the business, and let us step up a level or two in scale and approach.

I can also reveal that Dante was wrong. There is an eighth circle of hell - it's called "Due Diligence" and is full of lawyers. Lots of lawyers asking lots of questions that make you feel like you're being gradually eaten away by a swarm of bees, and make you want to stick your face in a deep fat fryer just to be rid of them.

But you'd have to make sure you kept paper copies, in triplicate, of the license agreement from the fryer company that gave you explicit permission to use it for face-boiling purposes, and prove that you complied with every letter of the fryer license in distributing the bits of hot fat around the room...

So here's a bit of advice. If you think that there's even the slightest possibility of your company ever getting outside investment, or being taken over, or floated in an IPO, make DAMN SURE that you :

• Keep a record of all open-source software you use, whether you redistribute it or not


• keep copies of the license agreements for ANY open-source software that you use, whether you distribute it or not


• keep proof that anything you re-distribute has been distributed in accordance with the terms of the license
  - i.e. if it's an MIT license, you have to provide a copy of the license and copyright notices along with any redistribution, so just keep a copy of what you provide to anyone else


• read and understand the license terms before you redistribute!
  - this is important, really! For instance, if you provide anyone with a copy of, say, the Oracle OCI client driver, pay close attention to the documentation requirements that it puts on you, and the implicit permission that gives Oracle to audit you at any time.

It's quite straightforward to do this whenever you download some open-source stuff. Just keep a directory somewhere that you can dump license agreements and copyright notices, and keep, say, a Google doc spreadsheet that just records the name of the library, the URL to download it, and the type of license it is under.

If you keep these up to date as and when you download OSS, it only takes a few minutes each time. If, like us, and I'm sure, most people, you didn't think to do it as you went along and waited till you were asked for all the information on everything, right now - then you're in for an awfully long slog of awfully tedious work. A little bit of diligence now saves a massive amount of retro-diligence in future.

Now, where's those Trampoline-branded space hoppers, baths full of champagne, and toilet roll stock option dispensers ? Boo.com 2.0, here we come.....

Irish Donkey Sex Case Brings Down Galway First

I'm speechless - there are so many things to love about this story I don't even know where to start, right down to the name of the receptionist and the guy's claim that it was a "super-rabbit"... and is there really such a thing as the "Unlawful Accommodation of Donkeys Act"?

Irish Donkey Sex Case Shocks Net

Was there really so much dubious accomodation of donkeys going on in 1837 that they felt the need to pass a specific law against it?

[OT] [Rant] That's it, that's the last straw

That's it - we can't pretend any more, it's finally undeniable - Hollywood has officially run out of ideas completely.

Honestly, in the last couple of years we've had execrable remakes of classic Asian films like The Ring, Ju-on (aka The Grudge) and The Eye, and now they're even plundering Battle Royale. I'm not even going to mention the appalling crime against humanity that was the remake of The Wicker Man.

I give up. I really do. Satire has become the new truth. You can't even satirize anymore, there's no point - reality has become the ultimate ironic piss-take of itself. Just take a look at this article from The Onion - U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past' dated 1997, and try to tell me it hasn't actually come to pass.

The saddest thing is that most westeners will only see the remakes, and so they'll associate the titles of these fantastic movies with the watered-down, over-produced, bastardised Hollywood interpretations that are (as far as I can see) mediocre at best, rather than the classic originals.

Honestly, can anyone give me one original idea that Hollywood has produced in the last couple of years? And yet, it's undoubtedly piracy that's causing declining revenues, oh yes - not the fact that virtually everything they put out these days is utter shite, oh no. It's them evil pirates, yes sir...

*sigh* I need coffee.