While I was sleeping last night, Amazon launched a new Relational Database cloud service in response to many people not wanting to utilize SimpleDB, their first attempt at a cloud-based database service. I took a look at it more in-depth and as in most cloud computing offerings, it sounds cooler than it actually is.
Like most IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud offerings these days, it's just a VPS with a MySQL template pre-installed and a slightly fancy provisioning wrapper. It doesn't do anything great like expand resources or shift around load when your application is getting hammered.
I've been wrestling with calling our offering cloud computing since we've been doing the same thing for years now, long before this overhyped term came about. Unfortunately, I think the decision to advertise as cloud computing has been made and it's something all VPS providers have to do now or risk losing customers switching to the exact same thing without knowing it.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Lifehack: The 30/15
My wife and I are huge television fans. We like nothing more than to just relax in front of the TV and watch our favorite shows. The problem is we can't just do that all day long. There's work to be done, especially around the house. Like the Buddha says, the answers are not found with any extreme. If you work all weekend you feel like you didn't get to relax. If you relax all weekend but your house looks like crap, you feel lazy. There is a better way, the Middle Way if you will. My wife gets full credit for this method that has made a big impact in our lives. At the end of the day's where we followed the 30/15 (or his brother the 40/20,) we always accomplished, relaxed and content.
It's really simple. We watch an episode of TV for a half hour (actually a little less minus commercials), set a timer for 15 minutes and then go gangbusters until the timer goes off, repeat.
I couldn't recommend this method enough, it really leaves you feeling great.
Tech Valley Code Camp
ActiveHost is proud to sponsor Tech Valley Code Camp '09, taking place on November 7th at SUNY Albany. ActiveHost will be there to let people know how Microsoft's BizSpark and WebsiteSpark programs can help startups and web businesses bootstrap their operations with some of the best tools available.
I really wanted to do a session on cloud computing this year, but unfortunately the new products and offerings I'm working on combined with all the work we're doing on the house has left me with little time to come up with a real presentation.
If you are interested in programming and are in the Albany, NY area, come check out the Tech Valley Code Camp.
I really wanted to do a session on cloud computing this year, but unfortunately the new products and offerings I'm working on combined with all the work we're doing on the house has left me with little time to come up with a real presentation.
If you are interested in programming and are in the Albany, NY area, come check out the Tech Valley Code Camp.
My time with the HTC Hero
Those who know me know that I change cell phones like parents change a newborn's diaper. Recently, I had a little spat with AT&T's customer service that drove me to take a look at other providers. The phone that's out right now that caught my eye was the HTC Hero on Sprint. There were two things that drew me to this phone:
1) It's the best Android-based phone on the market right now (at least for the next couple of weeks.)
2) Sprint recently changed their plans to include unlimited mobile to mobile calling on any network, which is essentially unlimited calling for me.
I ended up going to the official Sprint store in the mall and got the 450 Minute plan with unlimited data, unlimited mobile to mobile calling and unlimited text messages for $69.99/month. That's about a $30/month savings off my current iPhone bill for the same features.
Upon taking it home, I was really impressed with the phone. I enjoy Android and I firmly believe that in a few years, it is going to be a great platform with a fantastic developer ecosystem. The changes that HTC added in the Sense UI really made the phone a pleasure to use. In addition, I really dug the on-screen keyboard with the haptic touchback and its ability to be calibrated to exactly how you type.
By the end of the first full day however, I came across a big problem: my battery life was simply awful. It was almost dead around 7 PM after light/moderate use. Later on, I hit up Google to see what other Hero owners were experiencing and found that everybody else was having the same problem I was. This confused many people because the HTC Hero was released in Europe earlier and it happens to have the best battery life of any Android phone. A couple of genius's figured out what the issue was: the built in SMS application had some kind of bad code in it that stopped the phone from ever fully going into a rest state. The fix, while one wasn't available or even acknowledged by HTC or Sprint on their website, was simple enough: download a 3rd party SMS application and turn off the built-in one. This solution ended up working like a charm and my battery life was even better than my iPhone 3GS.
After a few more days of use, I discovered another issue that ultimately made me return it. The phone application lags....a lot. It would sometimes take 3-4 seconds after I swipe or pressed a button to do anything and it would also start dialing #'s on its own while I was trying to complete some other task within the application.
If you can put up with some fairly large annoyances, I'm pretty sure that the issues I experienced will be fixed in the next firmware update, turning it into a really great phone.
Right now, I'm back to the iPhone and I have to say, while Android has a lot of great things about it, so does the iPhone. The fact that there is no lag at all when navigating through the phone is something so simple but hard to find in other smart phones.
In two weeks I will most likely be picking up the Verizon Droid. It really looks like a bad ass phone and the most serious competitor to the iPhone yet.
1) It's the best Android-based phone on the market right now (at least for the next couple of weeks.)
2) Sprint recently changed their plans to include unlimited mobile to mobile calling on any network, which is essentially unlimited calling for me.
I ended up going to the official Sprint store in the mall and got the 450 Minute plan with unlimited data, unlimited mobile to mobile calling and unlimited text messages for $69.99/month. That's about a $30/month savings off my current iPhone bill for the same features.
Upon taking it home, I was really impressed with the phone. I enjoy Android and I firmly believe that in a few years, it is going to be a great platform with a fantastic developer ecosystem. The changes that HTC added in the Sense UI really made the phone a pleasure to use. In addition, I really dug the on-screen keyboard with the haptic touchback and its ability to be calibrated to exactly how you type.
By the end of the first full day however, I came across a big problem: my battery life was simply awful. It was almost dead around 7 PM after light/moderate use. Later on, I hit up Google to see what other Hero owners were experiencing and found that everybody else was having the same problem I was. This confused many people because the HTC Hero was released in Europe earlier and it happens to have the best battery life of any Android phone. A couple of genius's figured out what the issue was: the built in SMS application had some kind of bad code in it that stopped the phone from ever fully going into a rest state. The fix, while one wasn't available or even acknowledged by HTC or Sprint on their website, was simple enough: download a 3rd party SMS application and turn off the built-in one. This solution ended up working like a charm and my battery life was even better than my iPhone 3GS.
After a few more days of use, I discovered another issue that ultimately made me return it. The phone application lags....a lot. It would sometimes take 3-4 seconds after I swipe or pressed a button to do anything and it would also start dialing #'s on its own while I was trying to complete some other task within the application.
If you can put up with some fairly large annoyances, I'm pretty sure that the issues I experienced will be fixed in the next firmware update, turning it into a really great phone.
Right now, I'm back to the iPhone and I have to say, while Android has a lot of great things about it, so does the iPhone. The fact that there is no lag at all when navigating through the phone is something so simple but hard to find in other smart phones.
In two weeks I will most likely be picking up the Verizon Droid. It really looks like a bad ass phone and the most serious competitor to the iPhone yet.
Drive Snapshot - A+ Disaster Recovery
I’ve recently been playing around with the demo of a program called Drive Snapshot. It is a utility that takes an exact copy of your entire Windows system, bit by bit, giving you an exact copy of your system. What is miraculous about this tool isn’t what it does, plenty of other tools do the same thing. What’s amazing is that it accomplishes this task with remarkably low resource usage. On top of that, it’s the quickest backup program I’ve ever used before. It includes its own driver that it loads dynamically that allows it to back up files in use or it can use Microsoft’s volume shadow copy service, which allows it to take backups of things that are VSS aware, such as SQL Server 2005 databases.
If you want to restore a file or directory, you can just load up snapshot, open the backup file and just mount the whole backup file as a drive with a couple clicks. If you want to restore a whole partition, you can do that. Hell, if you want to restore your whole windows installation, you can do that too, just boot up with a Windows PE bootdisk. BartPE actually includes a plugin for the program in a default installation.
In their most recent version, they even added the ability to inject a mass storage driver (RAID, SATA Controller, etc…) to a system after the Windows partition is restored. This has a variety of uses, such as restoring a system onto new hardware or into a virtualized environment such as Hyper-V or VMWare.
I couldn’t recommend this program highly enough. Well worth the money.
The Ultimate Office - 5 Essential Tools for Mobile Note/Document Productivity
I’m in the process of doing the due dilligence on a potential startup. This phase involves weeks and weeks of thinking, analysis and planning. During this phase my brain is moving constantly and if something hits me, I need to write it down quick. The only device I have on me 24x7 is my iPhone, so it made sense to me to take notes on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the Notes application is very bare bones and offers no sync. This sent me off on a journey to find the best combination of technologies to get done what I wanted.
Tool #1 - Google Docs - FREE - Man do I love Google. Truthfully, I would pay a great deal of money to use most of Google’s services. I place a high value on their products. Google Docs is great, and with their Google Gears, I could even work on the documents offline and sync when I am back online. Personally though, I like Microsoft Office. I’ve used it for years and years and know exactly how to do what I want. The power that Google Docs brings in terms of document collaboration (important when I bring others into my project) can’t be beat though, and I like the centralized storage.
Tool #2 - Offisync - FREE - Downloadable from offisync.com - Offisync is a toolbar that installs into Office 2003 and 2007 that allows you to create, open, edit and save Google Docs through Office. It works very well despite being in beta and I was able to make some fairly complicated changes to my documents.
Tool #3 - GDocBackup - FREE - Downloadable fromhttp://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup - This free tool alleviates the major issue I have with cloud storage - No local copy of my work in case of a disaster on their side. GDocBackup is a simple tool that allows me to put in my Username and password and it connects to Google and downloads copies of all my documents and saves them in the format of my choice (including Microsoft Office.) I now have backups of all my files that I also backup to Mosso’s CloudFiles via JungleDisk just in case.
Tool #4 - Google Mobile for iPhone - FREE- Using Google’s Mobile Website, I can perform a quick edit of any document or spreadsheet on the go. While the way it edits documents isn’t the best, it’ll do in a pinch. I use Google Docs for my budgeting, so being able to hop on and make an adjustment on the fly is very useful.
Tool #5 - NoteMaster for the iPhone - $4.99 - Notemaster is the best application I’ve found for taking notes on the iPhone. The product has been getting better and better with each version and now offers exactly what I needed - Syncronization with Google Docs. I setup a subfolder for my Notes in Google Docs and NoteMaster uses that folder as a base for its syncronization. I can now edit my notes directly on my iPhone, through a web browser via Google Docs or in Microsoft Office via Offisync.
By combining all of these tools, I now have a fully functional and backed up document solution that combines the best of all worlds.
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