REPOST: Should I Work For Free?

by Jessica Hische (via swissmiss), now here for your pleasure:

Problems with working for free:

• you spoil the market, people think what you do come easy and expect the industry to deliver for ridiculous ‘prices’
• people take advantage and keep coming back for more
• you devalue your work. Or if you look at it another way you over-value your work to the point of ‘priceless-ness’
• because your ‘clients’ keep coming back you compromise on the time spent on paid work
• sometimes the accounts don’t tally. Oftentimes you don’t get paid for your consultation time, the meetings you go into, your transportation, costs of supplies/material
• sometimes you don’t even have creative freedom, or work gets shot down
• you still get ridiculous timelines
• you may not appear to be taking your work/business seriously
• little business-to-business relationship building. Think about it, once you cannot offer the free service any longer, you could pushed aside for someone ‘affordable’

This was originally posted here, but every time I get a request to do "work-for-free" I get the urge to pop back over to the chart to confirm the churning in my gut.

VirtualThinking Upgrades Billing System

Dear Clients,

First of all, allow me to thank you for your support of VirtualThinking.  You know that we value your business and desire to treat each of business relationships as unique and special.

We have been, over the last few months working on a number of great projects that we hope will benefit you, if not now, sometime in the near future.

It is my hope that in coming weeks we will get to share this with you.

One of the things we have been working on has been e-billing.

We are a great advocate of the cloud and cloud-based technologies.  We believe that in coming days, the cloud will break down traditional computing norms, and we will see a shift in the way organizations of all sizes literally change the way they work, and reap productivity gains measured in orders of magnitude.

Our shift to e-billing is not just, in my view, a desire to be productive, but also a way to be effective.  It also puts our beliefs squarely in line with our support of the cloud.

For those clients that receive regular billing, please do not be alarmed at our "new" billing format.  Frankly, I think the new layouts are "fresh" and exciting.

We are also offering new ways to track, view, manage, and even pay bills.

I have heard what our clients have been asking for, and we now officially offer PayPal payments.  In support of this, we will not charge additional merchant fees either!  Those charges will be borne by us through to the end of 2011.

Even our suppliers will benefit from this change.  If you are currently our supplier please be sure to check out the FreshBooks service.  Just like the Governments around the world, you can also bill us electronically and enjoy the same benefits of viewing, tracking and managing your invoices to us.

All in all, we hope that everybody enjoys the upgrade.

Installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu 9.10 Server (Guest)

Virtualization continues to amaze me.  It really was not that long ago when thinking of emulating a computer in software sounded great on paper, but simply didn't work in practice -- too slow, too many crashes, the list goes on.

Then cut to 2009/2010: it's all the rage.  Big service providers like Rackspace build entire business models around virtualized systems, and we consumers love it.  At least I do.

I used to have about 3, maybe 4 servers running at home to provide for a number of applications, services, and just isolation in some cases.  It was a noisy, messy affair with KVMs and cabling and switches all over the place.

These days, I have one box, under my desk running all those servers.

I salute VMware for making VMware Server available to the masses.  For that matter I salute all the open source efforts (like virtualbox) for making virtualization available to the world at large -- and not just some anaemic faulty versions, but solid industrial strength virtualization.

Anyway, I've been mucking around with Ubuntu 9.10 Server of late and thought that it would be helpful to post the procedure I used to get it working with VMware Tools.  If you've done this before you already know that it's messier than the Windows install :).

I did this after running "sudo bash" to get me a long-lived privileged session after logging in to the administrator's account in Ubuntu.  Not sure about best practice, but it saves me a whole bunch of sudo's.

This guide assumes that you have a clean, fresh install of Ubuntu.

Step 1: Install Basic Headers, Sources and Dependencies

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install build-essential libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev psmisc linux-headers-`uname -r` libicu-dev libglib2.0-dev libfuse-dev

Step 2: Uninstall any instances of Open VM Tools or VMware Tools

apt-get remove open-vm-tools
perl /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

Step 3: Get VMware Tools tarball from VMware Virtual CD/ISO

It needs to be made available by selecting "Install VMware Tools" from the VMware Server "Host" menu.  The command chain below will create a build directory, mount the CD-ROM, grab the file, and unmount the CD-ROM.  Yes, I'm anal that way.

mkdir /build && cd /build && mount /media/cdrom && cp /media/cdrom/VMwareTools-*.tar.gz /build && umount /media/cdrom

Step 4: Build VMware tools and configure modules as needed

cd /build
tar xzvf VMwareTools-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-tools*/
perl ./vmware-install.pl

You will be bombarded by configuration questions.  For the most part all the defaults will work just fine.  Building the modules seems to be a problem for me using the VMware Tools tarball from VMware 1.0.8, but you might get better results from a VMware 2+ install, in any case the startup and shutdown controls work fine.

Welcome!

Welcome to the VirtualThinking Community blog! We set up this blog to create a place where we could share our ideas with our clients, clients to be, friends, colleagues around the world and interested parties.

This community blog is intended to be a place of dialogue about the state of technology, it's uses, potential, and how it applies to ourselves and perhaps the organisations we work, live and play within and around.

While we have topics that are close to our heart, we would like to see feedback and ideas come from as many places as possible about topics that you would like to see, that are, hopefully, somewhere within our (or our contributors) realm of expertise.

In the coming weeks our plan is to put up tutorials on some of the Community Commons software we have released, comment on highly productive and cost effective solutions for businesses looking to maximise their IT budgets, pontificate on some of the experiences we have learned over the years in the form of client case studies, and maybe throw in some miscellaneous thoughts from time to time.

With some luck, at least some of it will be able to add value to you and yours :).