It’s been a year since I moved back to the East Coast and Jason over at GreenhornConnect asked me to put my thoughts together on some of the differences I’ve noticed between the startup worlds in Boston and Silicon Valley.

For some it’s a touchy subject - hundreds of thousands of words have been penned on “what makes Silicon Valley special?” and “is it possible to replicate?” and, most aggressively, “can [insert locale here] ever compare?” Not only is this not of interest to me, it’s unproductive. Every community is impacted by so many different variables, most of them entirely outside their or anyone’s control, that it leads to over-simplified analysis and hypotheticals. That said, there are some very real differences between Boston and Silicon Valley that deserve to be surfaced.

These don’t make one place better than the other, just different. And to succeed anywhere, I think it’s pretty important to understand the ecosystem you’re in. Continued…

I’ve already gotten a lot of great feedback on the post and would love to hear yours as well. You can find the whole thing here: http://greenhornconnect.com/blog/observations-boston-entrepreneur-ecosystem-year-boston-startup-scene-jeff-seibert

Have you ever tried to use Valgrind on OpenSuSE and run into this strange message:

valgrind:  Fatal error at startup: a function redirection
valgrind:  which is mandatory for this platform-tool combination
valgrind:  cannot be set up.  Details of the redirection are:
valgrind:  
valgrind:  A must-be-redirected function
valgrind:  whose name matches the pattern:      strlen
valgrind:  in an object with soname matching:   ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
valgrind:  was not found whilst processing
valgrind:  symbols from the object with soname: ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
valgrind:  
valgrind:  Possible fixes: (1, short term): install glibc's debuginfo
valgrind:  package on this machine.  (2, longer term): ask the packagers
valgrind:  for your Linux distribution to please in future ship a non-
valgrind:  stripped ld.so (or whatever the dynamic linker .so is called)
valgrind:  that exports the above-named function using the standard
valgrind:  calling conventions for this platform.
valgrind:  
valgrind:  Cannot continue -- exiting now.  Sorry.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. All you need is the correct debuginfo package for your version of glibc:

sudo zypper install http://download.opensuse.org/debug/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/suse/x86_64/glibc-debuginfo-2.10.1-10.4.x86_64.rpm

Take care to adjust the above line if you’re not running x86-64.