Alyn Family

UPS just dropped off our Nintendo Wii. Happy to say it appears fully functional once again - now where can I hid this thing so Xavier can’t get to it?

Yesterday I posted about an email I received from Rackspace regarding their $600 referral promotion. Surprisingly alynfamily.com had a real spike in traffic as a result. I guess they spend more time keeping up with their brand than they do their customers? Did this really warrant 21 visits? (more…)

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…)

In an effort to cache in on the latest and greatest Social Networking craze, sites are using weirder and weirder methods to get folks to use their tools. I stumbled onto this one from a Photojojo article today. The site MagMyPic has a number of photo magazines they’ve cropped out that you can insert your photos into. I figured I’d check it out and found they had a link to post it directly to Facebook - only to find out they wanted me to add the application (probably followed by some invites and so on) so I decided to grab the photo and let everyone just see the result here instead. The idea is cute even if their viral marketing is draconian. It reminds me of the Photo Cutout Tool developed by Cate Sia at NWF many moons ago (2004). Apparently NWF was ahead of their time - they should bring it back. Oskar was in the training video - although he probably didn’t realized it at the time.

Two weeks ago Xavier decided that he could double his fun by inserting an extra disk into the Nintendo Wii - in effect doubling his fun right? Well, it turns out that the slot load drive isn’t a big fan of dual discs and the drive was rendered incapacitated. Two weeks later, I finally got around to calling Nintendo Support to inquire about costs for replacing the drive. As it turns out, repairs (for drives anyway) are about $50! An additional shipping fee (via FedEx) is $7.50. All in all much cheaper than trying to replace one of these highly sought after systems. Today we’ll finish packing it up and drop it into the FedEx drop box for delivery. Nintendo said 7-10 days and we should have it back. So I backed up our saved game data and Mii’s onto the Wiimote and a SD Card I had here and hopefully it comes back with the data on it. I was surprised by the apparent lack of capacity of the card (32Mb) only holds about 250 blocks of game/channel info. I expect it to hold more.

If I could offer some advice to folks who are curious, do not put two discs into your Wii as it appears to break it. I’ve heard water also has a negative effect but that is as of yet untested and unconfirmed.

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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Happy New Year! Here we are, the dawn of a new year - the dawn of a new era. While most people I know have cable or that other dish thing the few choice folks who wish to watch TV the old fashioned way (over the air) can now get their $40 coupon from NTIA. Uncle Sam is subsidizing the cost of the digital revolution. The coupons are first come first served (I ordered mine, so now I can tell you about it) and are limited to 2 per household. Don’t forget in February of 2009 - planned obsolescence strikes and all the old TV’s become junk. Get your coupon today by calling in or using the website. I called and was very impressed with the voice recognition software they used to get address and name. While you can’t actually use the coupons - because there’s nothing you can buy - it’s a first step. Devices are expected to be available in February of this year. It’s certainly cheaper than buying a new digital TV right - perhaps I can give cable the old heave ho? Oh wait - I need it for the internet

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…