I am not the founder of InfoWorld

There’s an article about what we’re doing at Yahoo! in the UK Guardian today that is worth reading (“Search for a fresher taste“), but there’s one thing factually wrong with this sentence (and also one stylistic tweak):

Through a series of hires and acquisitions, Yahoo is clearly assembling a squad of innovators and forward thinkers. Schachter joins a list of employees including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, the founder of technology news service Infoworld, Chad Dickerson, and blogging technology academics such as Danah Boyd and Cameron Marlow.

Though I would claim it with utter pride if it was true, I am not the founder of InfoWorld. Had I founded InfoWorld in 1979, many child labor laws would have been violated, I’m sure (I was seven at the time). InfoWorld’s 25th anniversary issue was published in late 2003. That being said, I am honored to be mentioned at all in the company of people like Caterina, danah (yes, lowercase — that’s the stylistic tweak) and Cameron, both of whom are far more than mere “blogging technology academics.” Nothing like working with brilliant people who are also a lot of fun.

Update: Look in the comments for one from Bobbie at the Guardian — they are going to correct the error. These things happen. I am impressed with the thoughtful follow-up and remain proud of my association with InfoWorld and the work I did there as CTO.

Some old systems (almost) never die

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Solaris running on Oracle (having long since moved over to Linux/MySQL for most things), but I was recently contacted by the VP of Technology at one of my old employers with a question about an Oracle database I had set up there about six and a half years ago. They were migrating to a new server from the server I had set up and had a minor problem in the process. I was offline for most of the day yesterday, so by the time I got back to them, they had solved the problem. As far as I know, the old server had been running fairly problem-free for six and a half years since I set it up (and I was an amateur Oracle DBA at best — absolutely no credit is due to me).

Say what you want about Solaris or Oracle, but from a pure technology standpoint, it’s a pretty problem-free combo in my experience. I’m not saying I’m recommending that combo now, but it definitely works (at least that old version).

Now, back to your regularly scheduled Linux / MySQL program. . . .

Browser breakdown and other stats for my blog

I’ve never paid much attention to browser usage on my blog, but I just looked and it breaks down like this according to Measure Map (from November 5 to the present):

Firefox: 48%
MSIE: 35%
Safari: 13%
Other: 4%

According to Measure Map, my readership is 71% U.S., 5% Australia, 5% Canada, 4% UK, 2% Germany, and 2% India. Overall, I had visitors from 59 countries.

I would like to thank the 2 visitors each from South Africa and Brazil. Also, thanks to the 1 visitor from Tunisia — please stop by and visit again sometime.

Pimp my 24" Dell widescreen monitor

If it seems like I’m writing a lot about products these days. . . well, I am. It’s the holiday season, so it’s a good time to be thinking about such things. I have been doing a lot of experimenting with my home computer setup in the past few weeks. I’ve seen a number of people write about the 24″ widescreen Dell monitors (aka Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD monitor) and how great they are purely as monitors, but that’s only half the story. In relative terms, this is a pretty cheap monitor (do a search for “dell coupons” and you’re likely to find a big discount somewhere — I got mine for less than $900 including tax and shipping), but the price belies that fact that you can solve more problems with it than just having a big screen for your computer. I bought one recently and I have pimped it out well beyond my original intentions of just having a big monitor.

Here’s what I have hooked into the five monitor inputs:

my work laptop using the VGA connector
a G5 using the DVI connection
a DirecTivo satellite TV tuner hooked into the S-Video connection
an XBOX (the old model, not the 360) using the composite connection
nothing in the composite input yet

The switch on the front of the monitor allows me to switch easily across all these devices, so I can use the monitor for the computer, a satellite TV stream via my DirecTivo, the XBOX, or my work laptop without messing around with cables or other switches. It’s really convenient.

The coolest thing, though (and something that doesn’t seem to be heavily mentioned in what I’ve read about the Dell widescreen) is the picture-in-picture capability. What this means in practical terms is that I can keep a little TV window on my computer desktop while I’m working. I’m a big college basketball fan and during college basketball season, I keep up with the games and spend a lot of time at the computer looking at stats and scores. Now that can be combined on the same screen. Yay.

(I know what some people are thinking — “I don’t watch TV.” Well, this isn’t for you then! An aside on this matter: I hear a lot of people say, “I don’t watch TV — I only watch DVDs of movies and TV shows.” To me, that’s kind of like saying, “I’m a vegetarian, but I eat chicken” — something I’ve heard more than once. Ahem. In this vein, I recommend checking out “Five things (besides a television) that you could constantly remind people you won’t use” on the excellent 5ives.com site by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame.)

Here’s a shot of the picture-in-picture capability with my OS X desktop and CNN running in the bottom corner:

Another really nice thing about the Dell monitor is the built-in card reader that sits unobtrusively on the side of the monitor — if you weren’t looking for the card slots, you would hardly even notice them. I use a camera with an SD card, so this feature allowed me to unhook the ugly USB SD card reader device I had hanging off my computer. It doesn’t just do SD cards, though — it can read 8 other types of cards. The monitor also has a USB hub with 4 ports hanging off of it. I threw my old USB hub in a drawer when I got the Dell and the connections on my desk are much cleaner now.

Some people give Dell grief for ripping off the form factor of the new Apple Cinema Displays, but I think this monitor innovates beyond what Apple has done (and I’m no fan of Dell). None of the innovations are rocket science (the SD card reader, the multiple independent inputs including VGA), but they are small touches that make the whole monitor much greater than the sum of its parts. (see the Dell specs vs. the Apple Cinema Display specs for a comparison). Granted, this isn’t necessarily more simple than the Apple product, but it offers more features, and features that I actually needed. (Full disclosure: I don’t have access to a current Cinema Display, so let me know if I’m missing something feature-wise.)

The only (understandable) downside to the Dell monitor is that with all those video sources pumping into the screen, you need a way to handle the audio. The computer audio is easy — just use the speakers you already have hooked up to your computer. To get audio for your TV tuner and/or XBOX, you need to put a stereo receiver in the stack and run the audio output for them through it. This is kind of a drag since your computer audio will be separate.

I tried to figure out a good way to run the audio from my DirecTivo through the Mac, but just couldn’t figure it out. I’m not a total amateur at such things, so I’m surprised it didn’t work. When I ran audio out from the DirecTivo’s optical out into the G5’s optical in, the Sound control panel showed that I was getting audio levels, but the speakers wouldn’t output the audio. If anyone has any tips on how to make this happen, let me know. For now, I have my computer speakers and some regular JBL speakers hooked into a stereo receiver for the DirecTivo and the XBOX.

Despite the minor annoyance of having two sets of speakers, my new setup totally rocks. I highly recommend the Dell if you want a nice monitor — but don’t forget to check out all the other nice benefits beyond the huge display.

ecto for Windows (alternate title: Windows install dependencies suck)

About a year and a half ago (in what seems like another life now), I wrote about my first (good) impressions using ecto for OS X. It was a different job, a different blog platform (Movable Type), and a different OS. Now that I’m doing Windows again at work (still OS X at home), I decided to try ecto for Windows against a WordPress blog.

I downloaded ecto for Windows (zip file, ~3.9MB) and was slightly annoyed when the readme told me I needed to download something else, Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SP1, which is about 10.5MB. I downloaded it anyway, but got this error message when I tried to install it on my stock Yahoo-issued laptop (which has been rock-solid since I got it just over three months ago):

The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch.

Oh well. I noticed on the .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 page that there was a link to .NET Framework 2.0, so I downloaded that (almost 23MB!) My first thought was, “if this thing installs, there is absolutely no way I’m going to get away without a reboot.” My second thought was “there should be backwards compatibility — maybe it will work.” It installed — with no reboot required. Wow.

Then I tried to install ecto again and got this message:

Microsoft .NET Framework v1.1 SP1 is not installed. Please visit Microsoft website to download and install the framework before installing ecto.

For the heck of it, I tried installing v1.1 again, and got this message again:

The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch.

Deciding that the .NET Framework 2.0 was of no use to me, I went to Add/Remove Programs to remove it and got this message: “Uninstalling Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 might cause other programs to stop working correctly. Are you sure you want to uninstall Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0?” Ugh. What “other programs” are we talking about? I didn’t really feel like blowing up my laptop, so I stopped right there. The ecto for Windows FAQ addresses this requirement: “Q2: Is the .Net Framework really necessary? ecto for Windows is developed entirely in Visual Studio .Net 2003 using C#. This allow rapid development of new features and debugging.”

My verdict on ecto for Windows is simple: making it easy to get past the install process relatively painlessly would be a nice start. I never got past the first dependency. I shouldn’t have veered off the script and upgraded to .NET Framework 2.0 for the heck of it, but should it really be this painful and require a secondary download that is 3x larger than the software itself to get going? I loved ecto for OS X. I guess I’ll have to wait to see how it works for Windows until ecto works with .NET Framework 2.0.

Update: for those of you who don’t read the comments, Alex writes in with the following excellent news (and barely ten minutes after I posted!):

Support for .Net 2.0 in the installer will be added soon. ecto is .Net 2.0 compatible, it is just that the installer needs to be updated to check for that. A maintainance update will be released this weekend to include .Net 2.0 compatibility.

As a matter of fact, the next major update will require .Net 2.0 framework.

I’ll write more about ecto itself when I get it installed. . . but I certainly admire the rapid response.

Update 11/28/05: Alex Hung e-mailed me on Thursday to let me know that ecto had been updated to include .Net 2.0 compatibility. I just installed the new version of ecto with no problems and am using to update this blog post. Thanks, Alex!

Scaling: still hard

I think one of the most stubborn myths of our times is that it’s “easy” to build a web company because servers, bandwidth, etc. are so cheap. I’m not so sure. Yes, it is “easy” — until you need to scale. Scaling is still hard.

I was reminded of this when I read Mena Trott’s post about Typepad’s recent problems, in which Mena writes about the pain they are going through and what they are buying to fix it:

Over the next week you should see significant improvement in performance as we get extra equipment on line and finish moving data off of heavily loaded servers. By the end of the move we will have five times the bandwidth we had before, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars of new equipment, and room and power to add more equipment as needed.

Scaling is hard — and often expensive. Cheaper than it used to be, but still not cheap.

This also reminded me of Dave Winer’s sale of weblogs.com to Verisign, in which he wrote:

The bootstrap of weblogs.com is something a bigco should not attempt, it’s hard to make it go, and most bootstraps don’t, and it requires trust, something an individual is more likely able to inspire than a big company. On the other hand, running a serivce that other bigco’s depend on (like Google, and Microsoft, to name two) is not something a person like myself should attempt [stuff snipped here]. . . I’m good at digging holes, I have to pass off to others to make the trains run on time when the service grows as big as weblogs.com has.

Judging from this post, Dave understood the difficulty of scaling and smartly chose to sell weblogs.com before he hit the wall with it.

I think scaling issues are going to separate the men from the boys in the coming months. I think that many of the Web 2.0 “Flickr-wannabe, flip-it-quick” companies (as Russ describes them quite well and with good humor) have no idea how to scale (PHP and MySQL are fast. . . let’s just write the code!) and when they get popular enough to warrant interest from larger companies, they may be on the verge of being crushed (or already crushed) from a scaling standpoint. The ones who figure out how to scale on the backend while they are blinding the world with AJAX wizardry on the frontend will do very well, I think.

Bonus link: Flickr ops main man John Allspaw recently posted his Hardware Layouts for LAMP Installations presentation from the PHP/Zend conference. Following some of John’s hard-earned advice is a good way to get those scaling issues in order (and it’s still not easy).

The Y2K that wasn't

For reasons I would rather not go into (hint: my idea of Friday night entertainment is tending towards the geriatric and my girlfriend was in Milwaukee hanging out with famous movie directors anyway), I decided that tonight was going to be the night that I sorted through my stack of old VHS tapes with the hopes of tossing 99% of them. Digging through the pile, I found one tape labeled “Y2K worldwide collapse in 2000”:

Y2K collapse VHS tape

The redundant nature of the label is amusing to me by itself, but there’s a story behind this tape that I had forgotten. During the crazy housing boom (which I believe has ended, or at least subsided), I often wondered how I got such a good deal on my house back in 1999, but this tape reminds me. The man who sold the house to me was divesting of his Bay Area real estate at the time. While I was in the process of completing the purchase, he was fortifying a house he had bought in Sacramento in the final days of 1999. My memory is a bit hazy, but I remember talk of generators, tanks of drinking water, and stockpiles of canned food. I think that I was handed this tape during one of those conversations (a cursory viewing tonight showed preachers Stan Johnson and Mark Andrews of the Prophecy Club forecasting the doom that would come upon us all when we flipped over to January 1, 2000). I probably nodded, said, “thanks,” and never viewed the tape.

I do remember that I ran into the guy who sold me the house a couple of days after Y2K proved to be a non-event. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head: “Oh well.”

My advice: take out a mortgage in a doomsday scenario if you get the chance. If the doomsday doesn’t come to pass, you’ll be happy you took the plunge. If the world ends, there will be no one left to collect on the mortgage. You can’t lose.

The law of modern shipping

Here it is, personally witnessed enough times now that I have promoted it from simple theory to law:

If you order something to be delivered to your house on your work-at-home day, it will be delivered a day late, you will be at work, and you will get stuck in the loop of multiple delivery attempts. The carrier will max out on re-delivery attempts before your next work-at-home day, and you will be hauling yourself down to a distribution center on the edge of town to pick up your package. If you order something to be delivered to your workplace on a day you will be there, it will be delivered to your workplace on your work-at-home day.

(I’m working in Berkeley today and the big monitor I ordered to make myself more productive is sitting at Yahoo! HQ, delivered a day earlier than expected. Sigh.)

How to make a kegerator

For those who only know me very casually, you might not know this: through serendipity and some poor man’s search engine optimization, when hordes of males wake up on a Saturday morning and think “this is the weekend that I’m going to finally build the kegerator I’ve always dreamed of,” they often come to me for advice. I have lived the dream, my friends.

If you search for “how to make a kegerator” on Yahoo! my “how to build a kegerator” page is the #1 result (I’m on the first page of results for the same query at Google, just not #1. . . hey, I’m working on it).

I get quite a bit of e-mail about the anxieties of kegerator construction, so I decided to put up a Kegerator FAQ at my oft-neglected blog, HomeBrewBlog.com. It’s the best way I know to serve the kind kegerator community that has showered me with e-mails like the ones below:

“I really enjoyed your pictorial how to build a kegerator from a Sanyo 4910. In fact I found it quite inspirational, so much so I’d like to build one of my own.” — Benjamin D.

“Thanks for the great pictures of the construction process. They are a real help!” — Brad B.

“Just wanted to say thanks for putting up such a great documentation of your own build – it made mine go significantly less scary as I started drilling holes in the thing today. Great site!” — Bobby M.

“Great kegerator!!” — Terry G.

“Thanks for the step-by-step instructions of the kegerator. By far the best on the web. ” — Tim D.

“BRAVO! That’s a really nice piece of work.” — Travis R.

“Great job! Yours looks better than the ‘professional’ ones I’ve seen in stores.” — Earl S.

The pleasure is mine, Benjamin, Brad, Bobby, Terry, Tim, Travis, and Earl. Keep spreadin’ the kegerator love. May your kegs never run dry.

Bonus kegerator links:

Top 20 IT mistakes: Fark additions

A couple of my colleagues back at InfoWorld (including IT Director Kevin Railsback) IM’ed me today to say that a story I wrote about a year ago is featured today on Fark.com and is currently driving a ton of traffic to InfoWorld.com. The story is “Top 20 IT Mistakes,” and some are pretty general (“1. Botching your outsourcing strategy“) while others are pretty darn specific (“18. Underestimating PHP“). All in all, I think the list holds up pretty well after a year.

The comments on Fark are entertaining and include a few suggestions beyond my original 20, gathered here for your enjoyment. My personal favorites are “Planning your IT approach via idiotic online lists” and “Feeling more informed and enlightened after reading an InfoWorld top 20 mistake list.”

Some other favorites:

not blocking Fark at the Firewall
Hiring non-technical managers who think they understand technology [offered as a corrolary to my #7, “Promoting the wrong people” -CD]
Forgetting to delete your name off the list of employees that spend their work hours surfing the internet for porn
Forgetting to put your bosses name on the same list
Ever getting a job in IT to begin with [I include this one because this reflects a lot of the sentiment in the rest of the comments. -CD]
Volunteering for being ‘Temporary Oncall’ with temporary = forever.
Making IT employees pay for their coffee (oh yes, they actually make us buy the coffee and they are in food distribution) and then taking away the coffee machine. [The horror! That would never happen at Yahoo! -CD]
Do not hire anyone who thinks that it is funny that they “don’t know anything about computers”.
Don’t spill soda on your keyboard.

Add your own here.