meJoe.com

Goosh.org - “not an official google product”

Wow, these guys are going through a really tough time. I can’t believe the severity of it:

On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

The entire data center is down, including DNS services, customer portal, and who knows what else.

I’ve been calling my number and it does not ring. The website is also down. It seems this is not their first outage. I’m afraid I’m a bit overconfident about Google’s ability to maintain their services.

You’d think they could at least get a basic website up to tell us what is going on.

Here are some links to notes from varios presentation that caught my interest at SXSW 2008.

• Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons
• Lessons Learned at 37 Signals
• 20 Ways to Woo Users
• Zuckerburg Keynote
• Social Design Strategies

By free, I mean open source. I found this great article, Alternatives to the top 50 proprietary programs (or something like that). The article has put me well on my way to finding some great solutions for a cheap MF.

• Ubuntu - Because I’m bored with Windows and don’t want to spend my money on a Mac. Guess that means I’ll be using OpenOffice and Gimp too. I’m not sure I’m too fond of Gimp.
• Miro - Replacement for media player. Nice interface and lots of TV channels. Oh, BitTorrent access?
• PDFCreator - I don’t have to make printable documents very often, but when I do, I know where I’ll go.
• Filezilla - I’ve been using WinSCP, and am glad to switch. It is the most feature packed, least usable program I have ever come across. I loathe it!!
• Amanda - A backup tool. It sounds pretty robust, not sure if I need that much, worth exploring.
• K3b for DVD burning.

I’ve already been using Firefox, Pidgin, TuxPaint (daughter), and Thunderbird (dropped for Gmail).

Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids

At 7, I think my daughter is a little too young for it.  I intend to purchase it within the next 2 years.

It seems the godfathers of Ruby and Rails thought we should learn to use our text editors to comment code. Sorry if I break any conventions:


=begin
def sendEmail
# This is a single line comment
fred = fred
end
=end


In the example above, the single line comment is like PHP, use the number symbol “#”. For more than one line of code, use “=begin” before the first line and “=end” after the last one. Do not use any indentation.

Whats my deal? I am using the wrong terms to do my searches? This is the second time today that I have had trouble finding something on the web.

After a number of annoying fruitless searches on the web, I’ve decided to add my own contribution. Hopefully this will help others.

# psql -U username -W -d database_name -h 192.168.0.1 -p 5432

• -U is the postgres username for the database server
• -W tells psql to prompt you for a password
• -d is the database to use on the postgres server
• -h is the host (you can use IP or domain)
• -p port. This defaults to 5432.

Additional Reading

• Some useful Postgres command-line arguments.
• Using SQL with PostgreSQL
• PSQL cheatsheet

Tier1Research wrote this the other day about MyRackspace.com:

Rackspace’s customer portal goes mobile
Rackspace made enhancements to its customer portal, MyRackspace, with the addition of mobile capabilities. Customers will be able to receive mobile notifications about their infrastructure, and they will be allowed to create and manage support tickets. The capabilities are available for most popular mobile devices, with BlackBerry and iPhone being specifically named.

It’s a nice step on the part of Rackspace, extending its trademark Fanatical Support to the mobile world. Being able to access and manage hosted infrastructure is imperative in this increasingly mobile world and will be of particularly strong interest to mid-sized businesses (a large constituency in Rackspace’s customer base), which often don’t have dedicated in-house IT staff on location to take care of hosting and infrastructure issues.

The customer portal has seen major upgrades on a bi-monthly basis, some recent updates being enhanced firewall management, a suggestions center and an ability to attach documents to support tickets. Future updates in the works include access to historical availability monitoring data and managed backup threshold alerts, to warn when critical backup capacity usage is reached.

The Rackspace customer portal is what I spend my days testing for quality assurance. It’s nice to get recognized.