HN user
May be not on the London side but article says "HKEX, whose main shareholder is the Hong Kong government, .... ". With Hong Kong now being part of China, I am not sure if this would have some political implications.
Congratulations. Not sure if this will work for you or not but this is what I did -
* Make sure you have a good health insurance plan.
* 529 account - the day my kids were born I started a recurring deposit 100 with some extra deposit on events like tax refund/bonus etc. I want to have enough to support public college tution.
* whatever I have left after mortgage and monthly expenses, I contribute to each of my accounts in specified order, going to next account only when I reach max limit for that account
- Checking account (limit 2 months of expenses)
- Online savings account for emergencies (limit 6 months of expenses)
- Roth IRA for both my wife and me (limit IRS prescribed limit around 6K per year)
- Retirement accounts (Robo advisors : regular investment account/IRA)Well MFC C++(mostly C) and .Net are as similar as C++ and Java. MFC C++(mostly C) is unmanaged legacy code and .Net is managed code.
Go with what the team is familiar with. If team is familar with MS stack, you can keep web layer in ASP.Net MVC/IIS/Windows. This will keep dev team very productive using Visual Studio/Windows combination and use open source products on linux in other layers like HA proxy for load balancer, varnish for reverse proxy, postgres/mongodb on linux for database/nosql. Stack overflow has had good success using similar approach.
For my side projects I use Visual Studio express editions (free) and use postgres (local) for one and mongodb (hosted at mongolab) for another for storing data. I host both of them on 1 VPS with single core and 1 GB of RAM. So All I am paying extra is 2$ a month for a windows vps instead of a linux vps, and I think that 2$ extra that I am paying is well justified.
It reduces chances of calculation mistakes as it calculates total amount for you whereas you would need to do it manually in a document template.
.Net is not just for desktop, mobile/tablet and xbox. In these areas it definitely has lost some momentum but ASP.Net and Xamarin (not from MS but still .Net) seem to be doing good.
Its good to see a good set of custom widgets coming out for bootstrap. Bootstrap become a really good framework to bootstrap a web app. http://jhollingworth.github.com/bootstrap-wysihtml5/ is another rich text editor I came across. Its based on wysihtml5.
I agree. There are some micro ORMs in .Net world that do exactly this and lately I have started using Dapper http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ that came out of stackoverflow and I really enjoy using this over nhibernate.
I am not sure what is enterprisey about .Net. I am working on Live Post http://livepost.in using ASP.Net MVC/jQuery/jQuery Mobile/MySQL/MongoDB/Dapper(ORM). Just replace ASP.Net MVC/Dapper with django and it will become a common stack used by alot of startups these days. Also from cost point of view the difference is very minimal - I am running it on a 1GB VPS which at my host costs just 2.95$ extra per month compared to a linux VPS with similar specs. I use Visual Web Developer 2010 express edition IDE for development which is pretty good in terms of features and is free. So its just a matter of perception nothing else.
I use it to host http://livepost.in since last month. Pingdom reported some small downtimes but other than that it was ok. You get what you pay for, but I think burst.net is value for money.
I second it. It should be on the home page.
I would suggest something like Twilio where you host your own xml at a specified url that twilio calls when it receives a call/sms for you. Similarly grove api consumers can specify a url that can be called by grove when a message is received in a channel and api consumers can respond ina predefined json.
SNMP actually.
picksie.com is trying to do something similar for things to do around you. Its coming out in closed beta and more data points soon.