On Telecom, Hosting

So I had a problem with my provider yesterday - Slicehost.

Update:: They have been having quite a bit of trouble the past few days.

I got started with slicehost a few months back and have been amazed by their low prices, developer friendly community and their ability to embrace new media strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. I have been recommending others to use them, and even sending my own clients to them.

First lets talk about what they do right:

* Their site is simple, and you know within less than a minute what they are all about.

* They use the same communities we do. (I started receiving twitters to my phone that their network was down.)

* They have a blog that talks about meaningful things in their system (as opposed to shrouding their technology)

* Strong Education Focus: Their articles section on their site is unmatched. I didnt even have to think about how I would setup my Nginx reverse proxy, I just read the article. Seriously, more providers should have an article/wiki section. Note: Having an article section does not cut into your consulting hours, it gets you a client that might have gone to a slicehost

* The all powerful community: The forums are actually used. We all help each other out, offer pointers, ask for help and talk about whatever. I have yet to see a business really build a community like they have. I will be sad that I have to go.(see further down)

* Sysadmins available via campfire chat and IRC: this has been a great way to get in touch with staff and have quick questions answered.

*Prices and Services Listed…. Note to all the small minded local providers with a “call us” logo in every place we (consumers) are looking for relevant information, so that we won’t “shop you”. We *are* shopping you, We *don’t* want to talk to you, and by hiding the info we want from us you basically lose any chance you had to do business with us in the first place. I’m looking at you Fiberpipe and Spro..

* Speaking of Prices, Slicehost has great prices..

* Management Console: Is top notch. I can’t lock myself out.. I can reboot my server with my phone if on the road, they empower me to do my job with as little contact with them as possible.

Where they got it wrong:

* Who you gonna call? Not Slicehost. Not even if your servers are down, not even if the clients you recommended to sign up paid for 2 years in advance to get a slice in “Less than a Week” and had not heard from Slicehost in a month.

* Who Cares? Not Slicehost… When asked over and over what I could tell my clients that had noticed the shall we say discrepancy between “Less than a week” and “About a month”, they only responded with short one liners about how they didn’t know when they would get their slice.

* Lack of SLA, which I thought was almost kind of cool and upfront at first. It appears the SLA is another web 1.0 thing that should not be done away with. Honestly unless you are just running a staging server, who can afford to have their site down these days???

In truth all the automation and community in the world will never make up for poor customer service. If you had simply added great service, expressed the slightest amount of care that my clients had put their good faith in you, and offered a way to make it right, you would still have me as a customer and would have been the greatest provider I have ever worked with.

Its funny to me that you can do so many things so right, and in the end do one thing so wrong, effectively canceling out all good.

Ciao Slicehost, You have a good system but I cant afford to pay you while you work out the kinks at my clients expense. Best of luck

On tardiness…

Holas,

I can’t seem to post reliably these past few weeks/months. So I thought I would do a quick multipurpose post.

1. Be on the lookout for a couple social communities i’m hoping to have a hand in launching. I’ll post the links here.

2. Anyone interested in a local Django group? I’m kind of fed up with ruby/rails for the moment and jython/python/django looks sweet! Are there any python groups here locally?

3. A friend sent me this link last night, have a laugh on me, or her as it were…

On Humility

Feeling very humble.. Very

One CMS to rule them all….

I have been thinking about writing my own CMS lately. The reason being is that in a veritable sea of Content Managment Systems and blog tools none exist that have a decent MVC structure and an ORM. These things are important because at some point you will want to add on clean loosely coupled modules in an intuitive fashion.

I have been looking long and hard at a couple of frameworks:

Django: Appears to be a slick Python framework with a lot of built in tools for handling content. It also has a nice auto-generated admin interface. It’s wicked fast and the API seems documented VERY well. Hats off to these guys really. The real kicker for me here is that I would have to learn python, which would be doable of course but, I would like something sooner than later.

Rails: So… Is there anything rails cant do? MVC, ORM, Migrations Oh my! REST out of the box.. Come on. My downside here is that I would pretty much have to write this alone as I don’t know many rails developers (ok, free rails developers) and I really like non-island coding. As much as I pine for the days of being 23 and coding alone all night long… I don’t appear to be cut out for that type of lifestyle anymore.

CakePHP: What I can say about CakePHP is that for most developers with any PHP background its the most sensible. They have Object->Relation Mapping. They have the same MVC structure as ruby on rails and there is even migrations that have been written from a contributer.

When looking at the final framework (CakePHP) I saw an Article That Intrigued Me.

A few minutes later I found This Article.

I thought to myself “Wow Somebody actually gets it!” In short the Mambo team has chosen to use CakePHP as their framework which is an idea nothing short of revolutionary. I don’t understand why joomla or drupal didn’t get around to doing something like this choosing instead to write a brand new framework from scratch (without an ORM) . But whatever the reasons no one else did, its now been done.

Some benefits Mambo will get out of CakePHP are:

• The same MVC structure that is used to power Basecamp, 43 things and CakePHP.org. (Thousands of developers are now familiar with this file structure. The uniformity alone is going to make things like writing new modules/components or even fixing bugs easy as cake… *smirk*
• Object->Relation Management.
• Framework Code Base that is in production in hundreds of Cake sites.
• Well documented Framework from the start. (The Cake manual and cheat sheet is documentation on par or better than even that of Django). This will allow developers to hit the ground running when developing apps for the new Mambo.
• User system, ACL’s, RSS generators, ActsAsX, Plugin Architecture, Migrations, Validations and Caching.
• A large group of developers already using and familiar with Cake code base.

In short I don’t think they could have made a better move. I know that I for one will be happy not to write my own CMS from scratch.

RE: MySpace, Second Life & Twitter are doomed.

So I got this message in an IM tonight:

“just skimmed the first page.. but so far seems to be a douche…

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2145408,00.asp”

Well, I have to agree. The premise of the article is basically:

Stop using MySpace and twitter because they are ugly, and that they are most likely going to fail anyways.

I would urge you to read the article and then come back and read the rest of the blog which is my reply

My Response:

You read distopian novels don’t you?
I looked at your other columns, they all seem to be FUD. (What gives?)
Why would we stop using any of these things? Nothing lasts forever why is that any kind of excuse to give up on what works now? You will probably buy 3 more laptops in a decade,, might as well throw the one you currently have out?

You go on to talk about the aesthetics of a given MySpace page, and cite aesthetics for the first sites going away, and the reason why MySpace will implode…

I submit to you that the first batch went away because easier ways came out that included the ability to socialize and reach out in ways people never could before.

People will always want to express themselves… the reason you cited as the downfall of myspace is the reason they beat Friendster and a host of others… They actually let the people make ugly sites to express themselves… (they are not all ugly btw, in fact some are quite nice) Its a conversation piece, its individuality.

People and technology do not go backwards for the most part… It will not be the removal of content that makes the internet better,, instead it will be new mediums to present information to end users more intuitively, it will be the refinement of existing search algorithms or the discovery of new ones. It will be finding better ways to organize what is out there. It will be things like XML, REST and the Semantic web making it easier for programs to parse, assimilate and present data. There are nothing but good things in store for the internet, And the credit will be due in no small part to the innovators behind things like myspace and twitter trying out ideas, seeing what works,, having their proverbial 15 minutes and then stepping aside to make way for new innovation. The free information age is here,, we have a new uprising of the proletariat overthrowing the current establishment with free social media. If you want to spread FUD at least do some thought and ask the right questions.

Where will the money come from?

The only problem I can see with twitter is: with a medium setup in such a way that you don’t have to view the page you cant really effectively advertise. In addition to that, if you go to twitters site, you will see there is no advertising? How are they monetizing the site?

With MySpace the questions are little different, there are banners and rotating banners everywhere. Will the people continue to use it? Are they monetizing too much? Should they be exploring other means of monetization than advertising?

Three things are for certain.

1. Nothing remains forever.

2. Using new things now, improve the things we have now, and the things to come by giving us a feel for things that work and things that do not work

3. Innovation and Ideas will live on and continue to feed new ideas and innovation far past their point of effective monetization.
Such is the system development life cycle, and most everything else in life for that matter.

The Future is bright where the web is concerned…

The girl that mocked me

I had an interesting experience tonight and thought I would share it.
I went to albertsons to wander around for dinner (my schedule hadn’t permitted me to have it yet, and it was 9:45 or so).

After circumnavigating the store for 20 minutes or so I decided on:
1. a mango,
2. a box of crayons

As I was standing in line casually going over the day/weeks events in my head, I heard the cashier mention that they now had Rockstar in large bottles with a closable cap and that brought me back to reality. (I drink more sugar free rockstar then anyone I have ever met)

So I went to go look for it (with the aid of said “cashier”) and came back empty handed.. no big deal. She proceeded to tell me she was sure they usually have it because her and her friends use it in mixed drinks all the time. (Sidenote:Vodka and Rockstar IS tasty….)

So.. We get back and she looks in my cart and says “A mango and some crowns?,, Looks *fun*”.. and rolls her eyes…..

I wanted to defend myself, saying that I found this Cool Blog Post and that in it,, this very awesomely talented person brought some new light (and color) to the boring part of my job that is system design…

And that I was uber excited to give it the ol college try

But how do you explain system design, or keeping stale parts of your career alive and fresh to an albertsons cashier?

I dunno,, I suspect I should have got all alpha male and said something like “Well I bought all my tough/hot/interesting guy stuff last night at another store…”

I do know this… Its a good thing I forgot to pick up a copy of this months Sunset magazine! That might have really tripped her out….

I guess there’s always tomorrow, and I should really get to that mango now

Cheers,
Rich
Spartan, Professional Stick Fighter

Get Off My Land!!!!

“…Everything restrains man, but nothing stops him. He overcomes limits by jumping over them. The impossible is a perpetually receding frontier….” - Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, 1866

I really enjoy economics. Really. One thing that fascinates me about economics is that it is every bit as much of a study of people as it is numbers. When markets are left to themselves and people are free to choose what they want, you can casually observe all you never wanted to know about human nature. Here are a few things I have observed in our (mostly) free market.

1. We don’t go backwards easily

2. Neither does our technology

3. Neither does our information

In our never ending quest for more, more, more we actually achieve it. I’m not putting a negative or positive spin on this.. Interpret it how you will..

If you read my last blog, you might remember how the video cited that information is doubling about every two years and that this pace continues to grow exponentially.

One thing information does well is lower the barrier of entry to just about every pursuit, especially business. We witnessed this in the dotcom days where at first only large telephone companies were able to offer internet service. Then books were written,, people talked.. people created webpages and all of the sudden everyone owned an ISP. Shortly thereafter dialup internet access and some forms of broadband were completely commoditized and on top of that competition had pushed the price of service down so low it was hard to make much of a profit. Fast forward a few short years and nearly every coffee shop you go to just gives away wireless internet.

Well, here we are again. This has been called the “Free Information Age”. Fuelled, by the internet, blogs and social communities, content is becoming the new commodity. I think we will see a time very shortly where you wont be able to sell content, at least not for much. The fact is, everyone is a content creator these days. With content, the internet and information growing at such an exponential rate, I think it is safe to say that traditional content selling is dead or at the very least soon will be.

Message to paid newspapers and news networks:

The masses have caught up to you!

How will you adapt?

How will you kick it up a notch?

How will you provide value?

How will you “Overcome your limits”?

Why should we pay?

I submit to you that in the not so distant future, the money will not be made in providing content, but in searching and organizing the content. Personalizing the content. Sharing it. Providing a means to discuss it with others. Making it available via more mediums than it currently is.  Finding ways to get the it to us without being intrusive.

My two cents,, OK more like a quarter at this point…

Shift Happens

Not sure why I’m obsessed with these silly informational YouTube videos lately, but here is another one full of fun facts….

Resistance is Futile

While I was out browsing around the other day I found this video done by an anthropologist of sorts that documents the web and the acquisition of information in this digital age. Give it a watch if you have not already…

Rails, Flex, RIA. Oh My!

Hey Guys,

I found a PDF Book available on the internet called “Flexible Rails”. The book is about integrating the ever popular “Ruby on Rails” framework with the Flex SDK. I browsed the table of contents and found it nothing short of brilliant and purchased the book for a nominal fee of $20. The author proposes that Rails and Flex are a natural fit. I tend to agree. Everyone (who has not been living under a rock in the last year or two) knows that Rails is an incredibly elegant and fast way to develop web applications. The Flex builder will bring those same qualities to designing and building interfaces for your application.

I wholeheartedly recommend checking this book out and buying it if you are at all interested in developing Web 2.0 applications. You can find the book at: http://www.flexiblerails.com/

Thanks

-Rich

P.S.
http://flexiblerails.com/ — You know you wanna check out the flexonrails goodness