We are a 2 person start-up and have been through exactly the same mental re-adjustment. We started by defining success as 6 figure investment and 7 figure exit. We're now happy to define it as a positive trend: maybe 5 figure investment - or bootstrap sales - and a sustainable business or 6 figure exit. This adjustment comes from seeing how hard it really is to sell a product, no matter how good, and a belief that what really matters is the trend not absolute outcomes, so long as you are constantly learning along the way.
In so far as search engines go it's certainly worth playing around with Lucene. It's well implemented and you'll learn a lot of what really matters when it comes to indexing and retrieval.
For the text processing (classification, data extraction) side It may also be worth brushing up on your stats (a good excuse to learn R) and checking out Mahout http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/
I never understood why people actually get so angry when they take offence to something.
Consider what happens to someone who is offended, absolutely nothing. If your offended by something, it's not as is something really bad has actually happened. It's not as if you've physically been hurt, or someone you know has been hurt. The world is still exactly the same place it was before you took offence.
We so need an open & portable way of managing our social information online. I use OpenID to manage online authentication across different sites, and am pleased with this. I have a choice of providers, or I can manage it myself. But, it is limited to managing basic authentication, and is a long way from a repository for all the other types of social data that are needed for a full online identify.
Surely there is a market opportunity here? And whatever happened to opensocial?
I have suffered from RSI repeatedly over the years. I use an ergonomic microsoft keyboard, and this really helps. However what made the biggest difference was when I started using a Logitech Mouseman Marble mouse. The pain in my right arm/wrist vanished. I will never use a normal mouse again.
I agree with the sentiments echoed in this article. For me, tablets, although useful, are not the revolutionary devices they are made out to be. As I see it they are not the gateway for new types of applications, anything you can do on a tablet, you can do on laptop (personally I like the idea of a laptop with a detachable screen).
I wholly agree with the comments about Kindle too. I can see the benefit in having a Kindle, it offers a relaxing and focussed environment on which to catch up on the one thing I never have enough time - or am to distracted by web/mail/chat - to do, and that is READ.
On the topic of Java, anyone know what's happening with the Java app store? No doubt it will fail to reach critical mass with the public, but it's a shame. Had Java had a more presentable front end and Sun been more commercial they could have started the trend for apps many years back.
Secondly, I don't appear to be able to search for or find existing uploaded mixes, is this intentional or have I missed something?