Must...stop...looking at...stats...

I've been too tired today to do any actual work, so I've spent much of the day camping out on the Wesabe site stats. It's terribly exciting having so many people hitting your site and so many signing up (almost 1/3 of our unique visitors have created accounts). The site has been humming along beautifully, too--major props goes out my colleague Coda Hale for his Apache/Mongrel/Pen prowess.

Anyway, I just wanted to share one of the more interesting stats from our analytics (Mint--very tasty):



That's a lovely thing to see. Granted, these are largely very tech-savvy, early-adopter people at this stage, but it's heartening to see IE getting the beatdown.

Wesabe Launches

The reason I've had my head in the sand for the last six months is that I've been working on a new startup, and we've finally launched publicly. Check us out. Here's a screencast demo of the service:

Let me know what you think. (Or better yet, send your thoughts to support@wesabe.com.)

Still here

No, I haven't abandoned this site. I've just been working my butt off at a new startup. I'll try to get some content up soon, but in the meantime, enjoy some pictures of the newest member of our family.

Productivity in Java vs. Rails

I am far more productive when writing Rails code than when writing Java. I just realized that one of the reasons for my lower productivity in Java is the need to recompile every time a make a change to a page on the site. In the 15 seconds or so it takes to recompile and redeploy to Tomcat, I get bored and am apt to go check my new favorite news site, popurls, or my RSS feeds, or (less likely) post to my blog. Suddenly those 15 seconds have become 5 minutes. And this happens many times throughout the day.

With Rails, I make a change, refresh my browser, and there it is. On to the next step.

HTTP Authorization with Apache/FastCGI

It took me forever to figure this one out, but if you want HTTP Authentication to work with Apache 2 and mod_fastcgi, you need this in your apache conf file:

FastCgiConfig -pass-header Authorization

FastCGI doesn't pass the Authorization header by default for some reason.

Processes, Threads, and Ruby

While researching the best way to handle calling an external program from Ruby (and capturing stdout & stderr), I came across this post, which is a good review of how processes and threads work:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/65155#75363

I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to do this, but I'll post it here when I figure it out. Ruby has a few different ways of opening and communicating with processes, but all seem to be lacking in some way or another. IO.popen lets you write to the process' stdin, and read from its stdout, but you can't get stderr without jumping through serious hoops (like redirecting stderr to a file and then reading the file...ugh). Open3.popen3 (brilliant naming) gives you stdin, stdout, and stderr, but the subprocess runs as a grandchild, so there seems to be no way to wait for it to finish.

Database War Stories

There's an interesting series of posts over at O'Reilly Radar. Tim O'Reilly asked people how they were using databases in their "Web 2.0" applications (although I think the Web 2.0 part of it is for the most part irrelevant). The responses so far have made for interesting reading. So far we've heard from Second Life, Bloglines and Memeorandum, Flickr, NASA World Wind, and craigslist. One of the lessons learned is that with a high-traffic site, at some point you have to break your database up so that the "hot" data is spread across a number of boxes. This got me thinking. It should be possible to build a tool that analyzes your database usage and, given a number of slave boxes to configure as it sees fit, automatically configures masters and slaves and distributes your data across those boxes as necessary. This would not be a one-time only process either; it would continue to monitor usage and performance and adjust accordingly. Certainly not an easy task, but should be doable.

Bad UI in iTunes

I use iTunes both on a Mac and Windows. In OS X, Command-H hides an app, something I do so often I just do it without thinking. However, in iTunes on Windows, Control-H (aka backspace) deletes whatever object you're on, with no undo. I just deleted a playlist I had spent a long time working on and I see no way to get it back.

Why don't I at least have the option to undo? Terrible UI. Surprising that Apple of all companies made such a basic mistake.

Windows #2

Windows #2

Originally uploaded by bgreenlee.

Just discovered that you can blog your photos directly from Flickr, so I thought I'd test it out. Gives me an excuse to post something anyway...it's been way too long.

This is a photo of a building along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. I put up another shot from a different angle as I couldn't decide which I liked better. This one probably, but let me know what you think.

Amazon's new S3 Storage Service

Amazon just launched a new service, S3 - Simple Storage Service. It is a web service that allows you to store as much data as you like, with file sizes up to 5GB, and you just pay for the storage you use and the data transferred. Rates are very reasonable, too -- $0.15/GB/month of storage, and $0.20/GB in data transferred.

This is pretty interesting. It gives developers the ability to create applications requiring significant storage space without having to make a huge upfront investment in equipment and expertise. Want to write your own Flickr? Go for it. Granted, it's risky relying on a third party for a core part of your business, but you only need them until you get your million users and can get enough funding to build your own storage backend.

Google is apparently working on their own storage backend, Google Drive. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Nothing but good news for aspiring entrepreneurs, though.

via TechCrunch

Multi-Touch Touch Screen

One of the most exciting new technologies I've seen in a long time: a multi-touch touch screen. The video says it all.

Your next ISP: Google

John C. Dvorak has a good piece at pcmag.com about speculations that Google is going to be creating their own network (see the "Google is the Internet" scenario from the article linked in my previous post). I certainly hope they do, as telcos have been dragging their feet on broadband for a long time, and acting like the Mafia whenever someone encroaches on "their" territory.

More articles on the subject:

• 
  Rumours mount over Google's internet plan
  


• 
  Google to Telcos: Who Needs You?
  

Imagining the Google Future

Great article from Business 2.0 describing four future scenarios for Google:

Imagining the Google Future

RIP IM Smarter

My imsmarter proxy stopped working last week, and I just got around to going to their site to see what was up. Looks like they've shut down. A bit of a pity; I thought it was a useful service. I use IM on four different machines and it made finding something from a past conversation a lot easier. Actually, though, what I used most often was its reminder feature. I could send it an IM saying "Remind me in 2 hours to check the car" and it would do just that, saving me many parking tickets. I imagine there are other services like that out there; I should check around. Actually, that would be a pretty trival thing to implement myself. Hmmm.

Your Dwindling Privacy

Your phone records are for sale
"The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts."

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

Although this raises some serious privacy concerns, what I found more interesting about this article was how relatively easy it is now to take data from all kinds of publicly available sources and use them to produce something like a map showing the locations of all the readers (or in this case, desire-ers) of a particular book.

(Both of these links via Bruce Schneier's Blog.)



Technorati Tags: privacy, security

Business Blogging

Chris Anderson of Wired / The Long Tail has started a wiki page to track public blogs by Fortune 500 companies. The list isn't terribly long yet, but I'm sure it will be growing, both as more people discover existing company blogs and as more companies jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, we've jumped on the bandwagon ourselves at Triporama. The Triporama Blog isn't yet linked in from the main site (it will be soon), but Wendell has already posted a great piece about the origins of Triporama.

Happy New Year!