Outsourced Clue Blog

Long story short, I have ditched Bloglines and currently only use NetnewsWire for my RSS reader.

I have been using Bloglines as long as I can remember using RSS. I loved their web interface and stability. When I switched to the Mac platform full time from Linux, I start using NetNewsWire which had excellent integration with Bloglines (you can subscribe to your Blogline feeds and it would keep the read/unread status in sync).

Over the last year, Bloglines has had some major issues I tried to ignore initially. First, their API (which Netnewswire uses to sync feeds) has been very unstable. I often get prompted for my Bloglines password from Netnewswire (which is caused by an API issue on the Bloglines), and Netnewswire is stupid in that it will keep prompting you and with over 500 feeds, you can imagine how annoying that is.

The second (and by far the largest issue) is that Bloglines has “forgotten” the read status of my feeds. I.e. I will get 500 new items from each feed, as if I had never read them. So I have to mark all those read while trying to keep up on the items I really haven’t read. That happened about 2 months ago. It just happened again yesterday, which was the last straw. So I exported my bloglines list as an OPML file, deleted all my feeds in Netnewswire, and imported the OPML, so I subscribe directly to the feeds.

Will Bloglines miss me? Nah, I wasn’t their ideal customer as I didn’t use their web interface, but it is a bummer as I have been a long time user (near the beginning of when they first launched). Oh well, bummer.

I came across this problem in Growl .75, and it appears not to be fixed in .76 either. The Growl developers added a new option “Inbox Only” that is supposed to only notify you if the new mail is only in your Inbox. Problem is, it doesn’t work, you get notified on any new mail (i.e. I auto filer mail to various sub-folders using procmail on the server side).

Not sure if it’s a problem with how the various mail servers handle namespaces or what, but what I have to do is install Growl .76, but then download the old Growl .74 DMG file and ONLY install GrowlMail from that.

Here is the link to the old version:

http://growl.info/files/Growl-0.7.4.dmg

Update: - This has been fixed in Growl 1.1.

I upgraded this blog to Wordpres 2.2. The theme I used to use isn’t 2.2 compatible yet, so I reverted back to the default for now.

Catchy title eh? I have decided that all of the issues of global warming can be attributed to programmers. Lazy programmers. “What is he talking about?” I hear shouted from the fourth row. I am talking about the extremely common mantra of “just throw hardware at the problem”. Instead of spending time to actually plan and optimize software, people throw up a quick piece of crap, and hope that it scales. When it doesn’t, they just buy bigger and more hardware. Problem solved.

I spoke about “How can see many people outgrow their data centers” before, this is really a follow up to that entry. The gist of it is that there is a LOT of electricity being wasted by half-ass solutions. This wasted electricity in turn releases carbon in the atmosphere, which causes global warming (this is of course a very watered down scientific analysis of global warming, but I am simple man that thinks in simple terms).

I was at the San Jose NANOG conference a few months ago, and sat in on a interesting panel titled Hot Time in the Big IDC: Power, cooling, and the data center. It was a round table discussion about what can be done about the severe lack of power and cooling that is affecting data centers around the world. This shortage affects their customers all too often (speaking from experience as well as talking to buddies who have similar challenges). It has become a nightmare to get sufficient power in data centers. Most will make you commit to a full cage if you need more breakers than are allocated for a single rack. Anyways, back to the panel. There were some pretty influential representatives from some large organizations, Cisco, Sun and Switch and Data (which purchased PAIX), to name a few. These individuals discussed some of the challenges facing IDC’s these days, and ways to solve them. The hardware people discussed how they are working to develop faster machines that draw less electricity and need less cooling. The data center/exchange people discussed some of their plans for bringing in more advanced cooling solutions. All of the topics were definitely paths they should take, but NO one touched on the most logical way to alleviate the problem. I wanted to stand up and yell “Hey Chuckos! If programmers and systems engineers just spent more time designing a proper system, then you would have AT LEAST a 50% reduction in cooling and capacity needs”. I say at least cause there is no hard numbers or facts I can point at to come up with a truly accurate number.

I can tell you from experience, I am amazed at some applications I have seen and how poorly they scale. Sometimes it’s as simple as slapping an index on column properly (I have seen an application that ran for years with the main sales report taking 4-5 minutes to run. A single index was placed on the proper column, and the time went down to 2 seconds. Larger database systems were purchased for this customer just so the system wouldn’t be “so slow”). This is an all too common issue that I know some of the more astute readers of this entry (if there are any readers of this entry) come across often.

So what do we do you ask? To help yourself and to help the world (give a man a fish and he eats for a day, show a man how to fish, and he eats forever or something like that), just sit down and think before your project starts where the bottlenecks could be, and how you can alleviate them. Then, understand how a computer and network actually work. Armed with this information, you should be able to design and develop a scalable system that doesn’t require 10 web servers, 5 database servers, and 5 application servers. And that my friends, would help save the world.

UPDATE: - Dan Prichett, from eBay, takes the discussion a step further.

I bought PGP Desktop 9.0 for MacOSX last year, and it worked great for awhile. When I got my new Macbook Pro, I realized PGP Desktop wasn’t a Univeral binary, so it wouldn’t run on my new machine (it was PowerPC only). So I waited. And I waited. And I kept waiting for them to port it to the new Apple notebooks and computers. So here we are, over a year later and they FINALLY release a version that supports Intel Mac’s. But guess what? It will cost me $59.95 to upgrade. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? To finally be able to use THEIR broken product, I have to pay money. No way. See ya PGP.com. GPGMail and gnupg work better anyways.

[tags]pgp,macosx,apple[/tags]

A few months ago, Bert Hubert of PowerDNS fame (he is the primary developer) sent a message to the PowerDNS developers list asking to review his WG proposal to combat DNS Spoofing. You can read it here. Anyways, I had suggested some related information that he should read to include in the document. Today, I saw a post on the Namedroppers list (one of the big list for DNS implementors) about the latest version. I read his latest, and low and behold, there I am in the Acknowledgements section:

10.  Acknowledgements

   Although any mistakes remain our own, the authors gratefully
   acknowledge the help and contributions of:

      Stephane Bortzmeyer,

      Sean Leach,

      Norbert Sendetzky

Thanks for the props Bert, even if it was a very minor contribution to your overall document!

I wanted a logo for Mahope, so on a recommendation from a friend, I went with Logoworks. Mahope has been around for about 6 years now, but I never had an official logo for business cards (which I now have), stationary, or even my website and proposals.

All I can say is I have been extremely happy with the result. I got unlimited comps and revisions (with good turnaround), and when it was done, got all the original assets as well as a box of business cards. All for $600. HIGHLY recommended to anyone. You can see a copy of the logo on the main Mahope homepage, or here it is as well:

Mail.App had/has this extremely annoying bug where if you mark a message as Read using IMAP, it will magically become unread again. No amount of forcefully marking that message as read will fix the problem. 10.4.7 should have fixed it. It didn’t. I posted on the Apple Discussion forums criticizing Apple over this, and they deleted my post. Here it is for posterity:

Unread Messages in Mail.app Problem NOT FIXED
Posted: 27-Jun-2006 4:19 PM

So long Mail.app.

What a joke. I was actually preparing a “Why I would never switch from OSX” blog post…grrrr.

UPDATE: - I had a hunch, and I was right. It was GPGMail that is doing it. I switched to GPGMail when I got my MacBook Pro as PGP Desktop at the time wasn’t Universal. From the GPGMail FAQ:

Q: Since I installed GPGMail, some read messages have their ‘read’ status come back to ‘unread’. What’s happening?
A: It’s is a bug in GPGMail that I’ve been unable to fix yet. The only workaround that works for most people (but not all) is to disable automatic decryption/verification of emails.

Double grrrr….(on a side note, I apologize to Apple for blaming this on them )

Technorati Tags:
macosx, apple

This weekend I set up my new virtual hosting mail server. I purchased a LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 RAID card and a pair of Maxtor 250GB SATA drives. During the CentOS setup (using the 4.3 Server CD), it would hang on formatting the /boot partition. I tried this a few times, always hanging on the same spot. So just for fun, I tried the 4.2 Server CD, and it worked perfectly. I then updated to 4.3 no problem. I have no idea why simply formatting the /boot partition would hang the 4.3 installer. I have installed 4.3 on several machines. Oh well.

Technorati Tags:
linux, raid, centos

After several months, I finally finished up the signup process and pushed File Shed live. What is File Shed you ask? Here is the excerpt from the homepage:

FileShed is the most easy to use, secure and robust online file sharing and transfer application available. It securely and simply allows you to upload files and share those files with your employees, customers, vendors, whomever. Files can also be encrypted on the file system for an extra layer of security.

Simply put - if you need to securely share documents between employees, vendors, customers or anyone else, File Shed may be what you are looking for. Now I need to start marketing it. Check it out at:

www.fileshed.com

[tags]File sharing,File management,Secure files[/tags]