Yesterday, nearly 150 indie Mac developers participated in a promotion to raise money for Haiti.

I’m pleased to report that the project was an outstanding success. I will not be surprised if the total money raised exceeds $100K.

As for Red Sweater, we contributed a not too shabby $2,300 to Partners In Health.

Way to pull off an amazing charity drive, everybody. Now, let’s get back to work!

My friend Justin Williams teamed up with Garrett Murray to organize an incredible charity software drive: Indie Relief.

Nearly 150 developers are participating, and have pledged to donate the proceeds from today’s software sales to a variety of charities benefiting earthquake-stricken Haiti.

One of the unfortunate bits of confusion to arise out of the program is the question of which time zone the “January 20” sales should apply to. To help alleviate confusion on my store, I’ve modified the main store page and the checkout page, to each contain a prominent header near the top of the page. You’ll know your payment to Red Sweater is actually going to Haiti, by the presence of this banner on the page.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to buy Mac software, and wouldn’t mind if that money went to help folks who are struggling through a tough tragedy, please consider buying software from myself and the other participants today.

Dave Dribin offers a couple really handy tips for modifying the behavior of the “sudo” command-line tool, which allows ordinary admin users to acquire superuser powers for editing files, changing permissions, etc.

Handy Sudo Settings – Dave Dribin’s Blog

I knew about the ability to change the sudo timeout, but have never gotten around to looking into exactly how it’s done. Now, I’ll be annoyed a lot less often when I’m in an “administrative” frame of work.

Dave’s post inspired me to finally do a little more research into sudo and the configuration options. For starters, now that I’ve upped my timeout value to something longer than the default 5 minutes, I might want to occasionally “logout” of my sudo authenticated session. The “kill” option does just this, putting you back in a “password required” state:

% sudo -k

As for the options Dave described, they and many others like them are described in the “sudoers” man page:

% man 5 sudoers

Hmm. What’s this option called insults? I turned it on, but Apple appears to have “cleaned up” this option in Mac OS X. It doesn’t do anything. On the Linux installation that runs red-sweater.com, I turned on the option to see what would happen:

yarn% sudo ls
daniel's password: 
... and it used to be so popular...
daniel's password: 
You do that again and see what happens...
daniel's password: 
It's only your word against mine.
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts

One of the things I love about UNIX heritage is the sense of humor that pervades most of the software. The Mac used to have much more of this itself. I guess we traded it in for a greater sense of professionalism and solidity, but I still miss the corny humor sometimes.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that I’m pretty excited about what I like to call the “indie software business”. On Windows and other platforms this segment of the market is often referred to as “MicroISV.” Leave it to Mac developers to have a prettier name for it ;) but basically these terms refer to the same thing: small, usually 1-5 people software development shops, often based out of homes or other non-conventional office spaces. We fall somewhere in between the hobbyists and the full-fledged venture startups. Our ambitions range from self-sufficiency to funding a small staff, but we’re usually putting our own savings on the line. We’re bootstrapping our way into the hearts and minds of customers.

One of the challenges therein is getting the word out to … everybody. The customers, the press, other developers. The more people who know about you, the more likely they are to tell other people. You know, the whole viral thing, except Mac developers haven’t yet come up with a term for it that doesn’t sound like a sickness.

When I put on the One Finger Discount promotion last year, I was trying to tackle this problem on a small scale, and it worked. The excitement of the 20% discount, and the feeling of all this great software clumped together in one place inspired customers to check out lots of new things which had previous fallen beneath their radar.

But it was nonetheless on a small scale.

I’m excited to learn that Macworld Expo is taking the indie developer community to heart with this year’s show-floor offerings. A new $1250 entry-level exhibitor’s place gets you a spot at a kiosk with other indie developers, where you will be exposed to the thousands of enthusiasts and hundreds of members of the press who are expected to visit the show.

But Macworld has also taken a page from the One Finger Discount playbook, offering a free level of participation that closely mirrors the One Finger Discount model. The Indie Developer Spotlight invites developers from around the world to put their apps on sale for 20% off during the week of Macworld. In exchange, they get to be part of the virtual community and have their stuff listed on Macworld’s indie developer spotlight page.

I spoke with Paul Kent, Macworld Expo’s organizer, a few weeks ago. I tried to express on behalf of the indie community what we need from a trade-show like Macworld. Well, it’s not much different from what any business needs: maximum exposure for minimal cost. In our case, very minimal cost ;) Space on the show floor at an event like Macworld will never be dirt cheap. I have to imagine there are too many expenses in renting the space, paying for insurance, union laborers, etc. So $1250 feels like a very compelling price to me.

If you can’t afford that, or can’t make the travel work with your schedule this year, at least you can get in with the free, online community.