October 27th, 2009 Comments Off
Seriously.
People keep saying it. What I do know is that its great for voice. But for data? Do they have any kind of device that really hits the data portion of their network as hard as millions of iPhones? Nope.
All that it is, is one big untested theory. If Verizon gets the iPhone — or another smartphone with iPhone like volumn — and the rubber meets the road, until then, we should stop supposing about Verizon’s supposed superior network.
October 24th, 2009 Comments Off
I really like the new cloud hosting providers out there now. First there was Amazon EC2 when they added persistent storage, and MediaTemple’s Grid Service, now Rackspace Cloud has come forward in a big way.
All these systems promise the capabilities of infinite bandwidth, infinite scalability, and best of all, the ability not to have to manage tons of individual servers.
There are several downsides to these systems though. MediaTemple is running pretty old versions of MySQL and Postgresql, and is kind of slow. Rackspace Cloud does not support Ruby on Rails (even with mod_rails available), and Amazon EC2, you still have to spin up a virtual instance, attach dedicated storage, and setup an image to have any kind of persistence — too much work. In addition, none of these services have figured out any good way to scale a database, and besides amazon, there are no key/value stores such as memcache, redis, or others available on these systems, other than Amazon’s Simple Queue system which is a queue and not a KV store.
Of all the three, Rackspace Cloud seems the most promising, and I think goes a long way to help out my self-imposed mandate of coding more with PHP.
For now though, there is generally some pressing downside in all of these services that won’t cause me to move from the 9 services I manage at our friends at ServerBeach.
October 24th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve been coding in both for a pretty long time now. I have sites up in both, and think very highly of both. Ruby on rails since version 1.x and PHP since version 2.x.
However, I’m thinking for new projects, I’m gonna be using a bit more PHP.
Thing is, I’ve gradually built up a decent framework that matches a lot of the good bits of Rails that I like. And PHP for most web-side tasks is generally faster. The framework mirrors things like rails, the directory structures are the same, it has pretty much the same classes, that operate quite similarly to the ones in rails. I’ve duplicated some things as well, like ActionMailer, which there is no analogue in PHP.
No doubt the framework has some bugs, but I find that I keep correcting them, and for every project it gets better and better.
I still like to use Ruby for things like writing spiders and other console tasks, and I still will create the occasional site in Rails. But I’m going to significantly up my use of PHP from around 20% now, to closer to 50% in new projects.
Besides, I want to take advantage of Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting services 
October 24th, 2009 § 1
I’ve always been a believer in SEO. And over the last year or so, I’ve built sites to primarily focus on getting listed in the engines. My URL’s have been friendly, there are proper tags on the pages, meta information is correctly filled out.
However, in the latest thing i’m building, i’ve re-focused on building the site for the users.
Yeah, I still do the fundamentals as a nod of respect to google. But this time its all about the users. I’m realized that I no longer obsessively log in to Google Analytics every day now. If anything I mainly just check Adsense revenues, once a day, at the end of the day. That’s it.
And you know what? I feel better, and more relaxed. I can tweak the sites once or twice a week here or there, or focus on some new feature that makes sense to the users, and at the same time bring us more revenues.
All I’m saying, is that the driving force is no longer SEO. Its about getting users excited about the various products. Excited users will link to you, and you don’t have to do anything spectacular or groundbreaking SEO-wise, beyond that.
October 24th, 2009 Comments Off
It’s bittersweet, but I’m finally coming home to my kid and my dog. I loved Koh Samui, Thailand, and it was great here. The detox program was absolutely fab. And it was my first time in Thailand.
But I missed home. Despite all the downsides of living in the USA — crappy health system (the one in Thailand rocks), dysfunctional government, and all of that. We have a lot going for us — great internet (I can’t overstate that), a democracy, and a lot of creature comforts.
And yes, I cleared my head to the extent that I finally quit my job and will concentrate full-time on web publishing. So now I can work all the time from home for just a few hours per day (yeah!).
All in all, this trip has opened up a lot for me. I visited asia for the first time, made some dramatic personal changes, and met a really nice Thai woman. What’s not to love?
October 20th, 2009 Comments Off
Well, all the “iconic” ones anyway.
But you know the ones I’m talking about. The ones that the “badasses” ride, the ones that deafen you passing at 10 miles per hour. The ones that have 400 pound half naked men with big boots, overpriced HD t-shirts and leather chaps riding them. UGH.
Here are some real bikes: Kawazaki Ninja 1000
Ducati 1198:
October 19th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve been listening to Joe Frank now for years on NPR, and now his archived collection of monologues, drama and reality pieces on his website. My favorites: “Just an ordinary man”, “Love Prisoner”, “At the end of the bar”. Joe is the precursor to people like This American Life and Jonathan Goldstein’s Wiretap, but is different. Joe’s monologues are intelligent, darkly humorous, entertainingly rambling, and filled with little snippets of wisdom that you hear for the first time every time you listen.
Taken from his facebook page today:
There’s a silver lining in every cloud, a bright side to every dark side. For every pauper there’s a prince. For every illness there’s remission. There’s always something auspicious about something malignant. If life deals you a lemon, then make an enema out of it…
Yes, every door is both an entrance and an exit. For every gain there is a bleeding. For every moment of joy, a transit of terror. Life is yin and yang, sweet and bitter, cosmic expansion and spiritual implosion.
So you must lift yourself by the weight of your own ball and chain and levitate by the very shackles that hold you down. Instead of thrashing against the waves, inhale the water, for to get beyond drowning is forever not to drown, and to cease to fight against the dying of the light is to go gentle into that good night, and to turn the vat of acid into the bottle of vintage wine, the road kill into the lovely fawn, heartbreak into triumph…
We have got to look at the bright side. For example, if we have lost our health, it only means we can regain it. If we have suffered from financial reversal, it only suggests the possibility of getting rich. If we have been abandoned by the person we love, then we can look forward to finding someone without all those nagging faults. There’s enough suffering without adding to it.
So pick yourself up, dust yourself off, take a deep breath, square your shoulders, look toward the horizon, and move on, and even if it starts to rain, you can dance between the raindrops and make your smile into an umbrella.
Highly recommended to get a membership on his website so you can listen to both old and new performances. My only quibble is why not have this catalog on iTunes or Audible? Because then I could buy them and loadup my iPod. I so much love Joe Frank that I don’t even care if they are copy protected.
October 19th, 2009 Comments Off
The staff at the detox resort caught a small Komodo dragon a few days ago. I filmed it with the Canon SX 200 IS in 720p HD. Here’s the video:
October 19th, 2009 Comments Off
Internet here is truly spotty. In the day its fine, but in the day we’re pretty much tied up with the program. And at night, the internet pretty much dies until around midnight or so, at which time I’m generally fast asleep. Will post more about the whole detox regimen. I just cant wait to get home.
October 3rd, 2009 Comments Off
21 Gruelling hours of flight from Miami to Thailand. But its 6:15am here in Koh Samui, and its a pretty cool place. I’m here for a 21 day retreat of fasting, detox, meditation and other “new agey” things. I’ll try to publish something every day on how this whole process is going.
October 1st, 2009 Comments Off
From Lisa Hoover on GigaOm
” Although quanp isn’t open source, it was developed in Ruby, a programming language that some say is coming back into vogue.”
When writing about Quanp which is written using Ruby on Rails. Funny stuff!
September 28th, 2009 Comments Off
Always worth checking Jakob Neilsen’s stuff from time to time. Some very good links and tips for writing for the web.