qgyen.net

Site has moved!

Ken — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 06:41:13 GMT

After my post yesterday, I think I came up with a domain name that I like: invalidlogic.com

You got to look at it as a bit of a play on words. It could be invalid logic, or the way I have the title, In Valid Logic.

I think I'll stick with it. Better than some of the other ones I was considering. At any rate, hop on over to the new site, and don't forget to update your subscription!

As of now, I will no longer be blogging on qgyen.net. It has been a good run.

All my old content will remain live though.

Finding a new domain is so hard

Ken — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:18:12 GMT

One thing I've been trying to do for a long time is to find a new domain name to move my blog too. One that is catchy, easy easy to remember, short, .com, et all. It is way harder than it sounds, really.

Qgyen is kind of old and out dated. It has all my Google juice, but that is mainly because I've had it for ~8-9 years. But it is just a word I made up. No one knows how to pronounce it, I don't give it out to people via word-of-mouth since it sounds dumb when I say it, and no one can spell it. Looking at my Google Analytics, often times people get to my blog by going to Google and searching for "ken robertson". Even Rich Mercer has told me he gets to my site by Googling for my name.

If people you know (friends/coworkers) get to your site by Googling your name, you need an easier domain!

But finding a good domain these days isn't easy. First, my name is too long, and even then, the .com is taken (I have the .name though, but who uses .name?). I had thought of a few others, but when thinking about the names later, they sounded too corny, or just didn't seem fitting.

The two main contenders I came up with were linkedlabs.com and explosivethoughts.com. Linked Labs just sounded kinda catchy, but I am not a lab. I'm not linked to any labs. But they sound good together. Then I got explosivethoughts.com... it sounded catchy at the time. Kind of like "this idea is so hot, it'll explode" or the tagline I came up with and put on the stub site was "lighting the fuse on bright ideas", or if I wrote some program I posted, could make the credits as saying "an explosive thought"... this domain was basically the result of staying up too late one weekend watching the movie Accepted where it had the guy who wanted to learn how to blow stuff up with his mind (hence, explosive thoughts). I looked up the domain and got it, but then a day or so later, was thinking that maybe I wouldn't want my blog/site correlated with word explosive.

Still trying to come up with something.

Google App Engine and its impact

Ken — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:50:26 GMT

I've been doing some reading about Google's announcement of their "App Engine" platform for hosting scalable applications. Some of the reactions so far are pretty interesting. Partially of note, I see a number of places saying it will be the "Amazon killer", or "hosting killer", and even that it is "Geocities 2.0". In my opinion, all of them are wrong.

Google isn't going to kill anything. The hosting market is very vast, with diverse offerings, new consumers every day, and players always coming and going. They'll add a new dynamic for sure, but they'll be perfect for some, and won't be a good fit for others.

Easy scalability is now an issue. Up until recently, sites that needed to scale usually followed this (or a similar route): come up with idea, start site, begins to catch on, get VC (or money from somewhere), build (or pay someone for) a scalable infrastructure. Now, a super small (even single developer) can build an application that goes from zero to hero in mere weeks, especially with the advent of sites like Facebook.

Google vs. Hosting Companies

Google's target is different than your average hosting company. Google's specifically called out they're targeting developers and scalable web applications. At your regular $3.95/mo hosting company like GoDaddy, Dreamhost, or other small companies, this isn't something their customers are after. Sure, Google has some nice offerings for free, but many of them are not developers with those kind of needs. Many of the customers aren't developers, or have more generic needs like wanting a small site, blog, forum, etc. Google could make it easier for them to deploy, but I don't foresee Google targeting this. Common hosting is often high support and low profit. They don't really need BigTable, cloud computing, or anything like that.

Then there are your larger scale hosts who do big deployments, managed support, etc. Places like Rackspace, OrcsWeb, Engine Yard, or BitPusher (the main ones I know of). Often times the people who go to them are larger scale sites who might benefit from what Google offers, but they could also be turned off by the restrictions or need functionality outside of them. Some of the constraints like no direct disk access, no background processing, locked into BigTable/GQL, etc., could be too much. Google understandably places restrictions, since that is how they will offer the cloud they are, but any time you place a restriction, you eliminate some people who can use it. It is a game of give and take. High end managed hosting will still thrive. Often, their biggest asset is the level of personal support they can offer, especially when they do targeted expertise (OrcsWeb does Windows, Engine Yard primarily does Ruby). I don't see Google being able to match that.

Google vs. Amazon

Some people have said Google App Engine could kill Amazon EC2/SimpleDB/etc, but the reality is they focus on different markets. There is some cross over, both have their own restrictions, but one fills needs the other can't. Google is only web apps and specifically says they aren't offering virtual machines or grid computing. Amazon offers virtual machines and can do web app hosting, but does have restrictions on guaranteed availability and storage. Google promises simple web apps, Amazon doesn't, but you get a full system with Amazon. Companies that need background processing will definitely still use Amazon, and that likely represents a good portion of their usage. Companies like SmugMug offload a lot of their image processing to EC2, and something like that could not be solved by GAE. With Amazon's recent availability zones and elastic IPs, it is certainly possible to have high availability web apps. Google is more technically restrictive, while Amazon has a higher technical barrier. Additionally, Amazon is more diverse, with EC2, S3, Simple DB, and SQS. They can be used together, or separate.

Someone in a blog comment claimed uptime with Google would be better, but that is pure speculation. All systems fail, in one way or another. Making uptime claims for GAE when it is out less than 24 hours is very optimistic. EC2 has its issues, but Amazon makes that clear, and well designed systems on EC2 should adapt just fine. GAE will almost certainly, at one point or another, have an issue, degraded performance, momentary outage, etc.

On going impact

Probably the most powerful offering with GAE that hopefully develops further is their database. Scaling the database is often the biggest issue for large sites. The web tier almost never the bottle neck, but the database. Scaling a database can be very costly, especially with traditional RDBMs. In the future, we'll likely see much more with BigTable and products targeting distributed scalable databases made easy. Microsoft recently announce SQL Server Data Services, but I expect much more to be coming.

There will likely be other "cloud computing" offerings coming from others. Some speculate Microsoft will be, others have thought HP. I think there will still be more to come.

ASP.NET MVC in Meow Mix

Ken — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:05:27 GMT

I hate databind, I hate postback, MVC please deliver.

Alright, it doesn't exactly have rhythm, but it popped in my head after wrestling a little databind/postback related bug this morning.

Quick thoughts on the iPhone SDK

Ken — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:45:22 GMT

I know the iPhone SDK is basically old news now, but having recently got my iPhone, I have a few thoughts of my own.

First, I have downloaded it, however I haven't used it other than messing with the simulator for web development. Initially, I was disappointed with the lack of the interface builder, though they did recently update it with interface builder support. Hopefully some of the sample code gets updated to show how to do it that way. I've done interfaces-by-code and it is not really fun. My experience was with Qt in C++ on Linux back around 2000/2001.

What I really think will make a difference is the iTunes App Store. There have been a lot of complains about it, and about the application process, the $99 fee, and their somewhat selective approvals of applicants. The blog posts I've read about it pointed mostly to the processes for approval and such still being put into place, so the initial 'rejections' were more of a postponement. The $99 sucks, true, but I don't think it is that bad. Compared to the development tools I've bough on my own before, it isn't bad, and its cost can get made up with the benefits of the iTunes App Store.

So what makes the store so awesome? Have you ever tried to find and download applications for a mobile device before?

I hadn't downloaded much on my Blackberry, but back when I had various Windows Mobile/Smartphone devices, it was painful. Really, mobile applications are in a sad state for distribution. Sure, you can easily install them with with ActiveSync, but I'd find a lot of the programs by digging around various forums sites, sometimes with the latest version buried on page 24 of a thread that spans a year or so. Others were on websites that looked like crap and didn't inspire trust in putting this app on your phone. And there was a lot of old material, such as application list sites put together by someone a year ago, littered with Adsense trying to make some dough. On many developers sites, would find out dated, abandoned programs, not updated for the latest version, or maybe designed for one device vs another, since devices vary so much (ie, XV6700 vs Moto Q).

When I purchased my iPhone recently, I had another glimpse of this when looking around for information on iPhone apps. I was mostly looking for iPhone web applications, and there were a bunch of iPhone application list sites, some with pretty old apps and links that no longer worked, etc. I also was researching exactly what Jailbreaking did, but was spread across forums/blogs linking to each other.

It sucks. It is not customer friendly. The App Store changes all that. All applications are located in one central places, easy to find, plainly simple to deploy. There is an entrance fee (the $99), so yo know the developers are likely more serious. The 30% cut on sales does suck, yes, but you can still have free applications, so there is still a market for hobbyists.

Companies that actually want to make money off the applications get a great tool as well. It provides several crucial things to them. It helps their potential customers find their programs by acting as a directory. It serves as a deployment and notification system by handling the installation and upgrades for them (ie, push the new version to iTunes and everyone gets it). And finally, it solves e-commerce for them. Yes, 30% sounds like a lot, and is a little on the big side, but the App Store will eliminate the need for their own store/shopping cart system, credit card processing, merchant account, or need to go through someone else for that. Additionally, customers would be much more trusting as I'd expect Apple to handle billing them.

Overall, I hope there is more progress like this in the mobile arena.

Nick the cook

Ken — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:27:00 GMT

Adorable photo of Nick we got back today. Yup, my son is a looker. Gotta run, he is on my lap, desperately reaching for the keyboard.

Graffiti on the iPhone

Ken — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:17:05 GMT

More exciting things will be coming... after initially showing this to Jason, Scott, and Rob, they're already wanting to see more. And who am I to deny them that? <smile>

whatisdat?

Ken — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:07:00 GMT

A quick little pet project from over the holiday weekend might see some light of day later tonight.

Customer service asking for your password?

Ken — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:16:58 GMT

A while ago, I had signed up for just receiving an electronic copy of my cell phone bill. So earlier this evening, I had been trying to log onto my Verizon Wireless account to look at last month's bill and was having some trouble logging. Basically, I'd login but would get a "System Failure" message right when I log in and basically would be stuck.

So I call them and the customer support rep is walking me through logging in and they just weren't understanding what I was saying. It went kind of like this:

Me: When I log in, it takes me to this 'System Failure' message
Them: Well, when you first log in, do you see the sidebar which shows your phone?
Me: No, I'm at a 'System Failure' message, their is no side bar
Repeat above
Them: Well, log out and close your Internet Explorer (note: I didn't want to confuse them even more by being on a Mac)
Repeat from beginning
Them: Well, it shows our site is up and working, so it must be a problem with your server (note: I really hate when non-technical people say that kind of thing)

So eventually, they got the bright idea and wanted to try and log in as me, so they asked me for my username, which I gave, and then asked me for my password. I was like "Excuse me? I am not giving that to you.".

Had they never heard of phishing? I was shocked that they even asked. How many times have I read security notice emails about "we will never ask you for your password"? Shouldn't that kind of thing be at the top of any customer service rep's DON'T list these days?

Developer in training

Ken — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:42:00 GMT