Alyn Family

The New York Times is running a fluff story about Honesty Box today (something I’ve done a little work on ). The short piece by Joanne Kaufman, touches briefly on some of the important questions surrounding anonymity online but doesn’t get into anything substantive around policy or moral and ethical considerations. It does however give a nice background on what Honesty Box is.

Rackspace, the less than fantastic, albeit fanatical, web hosting provider is trying to buy support. They have had an incredibly bad last few months. Recently a major datacenter outage in November took many customers offline. Additionally, very public technology failures for sites like 37signals and Tumblr are causing a mass exodus. I’ve never hosted anything there myself, but nishnash.com was hosted there while I worked on it and so I still have an account linked to their customer portal. Generally, Rackspace’s prices are high for the service rendered (a recent proposal had them 30-40% more than comparable hosting providers). (more…)

Some folks will recall back in November I wrote how OpenSocial was irrelevant as a platform for social networking applications. I’ve been working with it for the last three days on MySpace and have to say, over the last few months the folks at MySpace have been working hard to bring OpenSocial to a usable reality. I’ve had some time this week to experiment with it and I must say - while certainly not “done” it’s come a VERY long way. Warning: This is going to get kinda lame for those who don’t care about Social Networks and application development. (more…)

LAMP, for those who don’t know, is a software architecture commonly deployed for high availability web applications. It’s entirely open source (meaning free to use) and is very inexpensive to get started with (some hosting plans offer LAMP for as little as $2-3/mo). I’ve worked with a number of websites running on LAMP and find as a developer I think very little about what’s going on under the hood. Recently I had a horrible experience (fortunately one that was reversible) deploying a site onto FreeBSD — afterall, there’s a reason this is called LAMP and not FAMP. (more…)

Honesty Box has been, up until recently, hosted at a company called ThePlanet who’s incompetence is absolutely amazing. During the 6 months that we hosted our application there, I encountered some of the worst technical support I have ever seen. The last request thread went something like this - due to copyright restrictions, I need to paraphrase the actual conversations. This is just one of a dozen similar interactions with their support department. I would like to say thank you to all of the tech support folks who handled our requests, I understand the nonsense isn’t your fault, but instead expectations of IT departments everywhere - your spread too thin and asked to do too much. If this type of thing interests you read on - otherwise, this is mostly geek. To summarize, don’t host your website with them.
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Last week Vince and Jan came for a brief visit before heading on to see Christopher. We checked out Mayo and the downtown subway. The kids were ecstatic to see them. We had a nice visit and celebrated their 10th anniversary at Michaels on Thursday. The house is almost back together after the holiday and it’s getting back to life as usual here in MN. I bottled the MrBeer homebrew last Saturday. Sunday while Gretchen nursed a cold, Oskar and I worked on a photo booth for taking macro photographs of stuff for eBay and I caught up for dinner with Joe Rinehart on Sunday. I’ve been working too much this week, pulling 16 hours Monday and probably 12 by the end of today and was able to have Joe over to the house for dinner. I guess the end of the month makes it all worth it. Last but not least, we converted Kathy to Mac… so Kevin and Rachel - your the last stand for PC.

It only took 6 short hours to re-install Windows Vista on my Mac. I recommend you backup any virtual disk images for Parallels you have now - because that took FOREVER! It was an oversight of mine from the hard drive failure. There was nothing important as far as “data” on the volume, but man, what a pain… Install XP, Upgrade to Vista, patch Vista, Install Supporting Apps (like Flash/Firefox etc). I’m creating an archive and copying it off to the backup disk now…

For those of you who don’t know, for the last 6-7 months I’ve been working on a Facebook application called Honesty Box. Honesty Box lets users on Facebook send each other anonymous messages and replies knowing that there’s a level of protection built in that reduces the likely-hood of spam because of the close nature of the social network. Dan Peguine, a co-founder, hired me to assist him and his partner in June with the explosive growth of the application and I’ve been working on it ever since. Adonomics is currently the benchmark by which applications can guestimate their worth in the marketplace. Of course this estimate and finding a buyer are two different things, but it’s an important gauge of the applications value. We have been tracking our “worth” through Adonomics for a while and have seen some interesting phenomena. Today when I checked our valuation, we were at $6.2 Million! (more…)

TechCrunch broke this to me this evening. I am very excited about a pay per drink service for relational databases. Amazon has released a product called SimpleDB and it’s going to shake the small to mid-level web hosting realm to it’s roots. During my time at NWF, we were payed a huge licensing cost for Microsoft SQL Server and now in my freelance world, I’m constantly at odds with keeping MySQL running efficiently and learning the nuances of query tuning. The reason this is earth shattering is because you can “fire your DBA”, because that’s just not true, you’ll still require someone who understands data modeling, database normalization and all of that stuff and how to make sense of it as it comes back out of your RDBMS. However, this does remove a huge barrier to entry for small companies in capital expenses. Now for just a few dollars per month a company can create a database, put it online, populate it and run a business off of that data without worrying about scaleability. Considering Amazon now lets you virtualize your entire IT infrastructure utilizing storage and compute clouds, small businesses — with the assistance of a good consultant — can literally grow infrastructure on demand. I for one am looking forward to seeing how performance actually plays out on this and how the $0.14 per machine hour gets billed. The Compute Cloud charges per instance hour, so even an idle machine costs about $75/month. If it follows a similar billing model, it’s $100/month, which doesn’t help cottage industries but is still viable for startups and other small businesses who are already running dedicated server equipment.

 Yesterday I had the need to host a conference call. Being a one person shop, it’s cost prohibitive for me to pay money to have an on demand conference bridge (especially when most of my clients have their own.) Back to my problem, I needed to speak with another small company yesterday and there were four of us that needed to be on the call. I can bridge two calls together with my Vonage service, or even just using my cellphone, but four - that’s one too many. So I tried FreeConference.com and was very pleased with the results. The base offering is free (you’ll pay toll charges to the dial-in line, MN for me - go figure) and they have a $0.10/minute plan for toll free numbers and will even record the call. After the call ended, I received a report of who was on the call and for how long, even what numbers they called in from.