From a blanket spam email I (and probably a good portion of the rails community just received)

“I have a direct client who is seeking a strong Programmer who posses experience with Rudy on Rails. If you are qualified and interested, please send me your most current resume in a word.doc format to..”

Yes, Rudy was actually put in bold, just to place even more emphasis on the spelling error.

Check this out. Council Expenses (robford.ca)

Following some links last week I ended up on jungledisk.com. All of 30 secs later I had the client downloaded and started backing up my hard drive.

What is it ? It’s a collection of clients for the 3 majors (Windows, OS X, Linux) that essentially mount up an S3 storage bucket as a separate volume. You purchase the jungledisk client for $20 after a trial period, then get an S3 account with Amazon.com and settle your bill with them, based on exactly how much transfer and disk space you use. Set the whole lot up, and bingo you have an online volume, that (one would hope) is near infallible.

Over the past week I’ve had a mac connected up, and an xp box, to the same S3 account. I’m in the process of slowly backing up all of my very precious photos etc. You do need a fat pipe to go and store all this stuff online but that comes with the territory. The beauty of this system is it appears just as another volume, and with cross platform clients, it means you can have your data storage off in some other place, without worrying about it.

The cost.. well, hardly anything to get worked up around. So far I’ve spent a princely sum this month of $0.16USD with Amazon for ~1gb transfer, and 300mb storage.

I’m stoked. No iffy external hard drives, or optical media to get damaged. Of anyone I expect Amazon to be the most reliable service, much more than anyone could acheive with a SOHO RAID storage device, for a fraction of the cost.

Very tidy solution, and well worth a look at.

Oh the humanity of it all! On my way to work this morning I was stopped in my tracks by two Ariel Atoms parked outfront of an events place just round the corner. Instant parallel thought trains rocked through my mind, how the hell are they road legal in Canada ? and how the hell do I get myself in the passenger seat ?. Then a 360 Modena rocks up, along with a Porker. What’s going on ? Finally I look out of my Atom induced haze to see the XBox 360 signage everywhere. Aha. Makes sense…Project Gotham Racing 4.

Righto so I rock back to the office. Get dressed so I look more professional than bike courier, rock back and start talking to various people. 5 mins later I’d managed to wangle a potential ride later in the day after telling my true tale of woe that I left New Zealand when an Atom track day was going down and missed out on the drive of my life. The clock strikes 4 (after hearing the Ferrari opening it up many times during the afternoon… Torture! Torture I tell you…). I jump up, grab camera, rock round the corner. “Oh No”

The Police. (with a heavy weighting on the period there)

Who would’ve thought that would’ve happened? No cars were going anywhere. Period. However the silver lining is at least I’m on the list for a track day for next summer, which gives me a good 10 months to work out how to justify the money for it to my S.O.

Okay, I’m not one to publicly rant but really, I’ve given up with the performance of MediaTemple’s GridServer implementation. More to the point the marketing and statements simply do not measure up to what actually has happened with this blog at Mediatemple. It’s not high load at all, never been dugg, slashdotted or anything else that might bring ill fate to a web site, however it’s been subject to outages last week and weekend. Maybe someone had tried deploying a facebook app using the same grid server cluster my site was on ? Who knows. But whatever happened to the “no single point of failure” and “rapid scaling”… ?

My particular favourite piece of copy is the “Guaranteed Resources” bit. Couple that with a sub par customer support response and the plug was pulled.

I do know personally of one other with a media temple account (who I had recommended MT), he’s serving static pages only and experiencing no troubles, so credit where credit is due. If you’re backing it with a database, be prepared…

Of course, now I’ve setup Murphy to come bit me in the ass with his law on my new host!.

[Announcement] Rowan Hick Consulting, Canada and Ron Hanley of Fastmount LTD, New Zealand are pleased to annouce that their new Rails/Flex/MySQL eCommerce application will be released to the community under an Open Source license. The application, is a successor to a PHP/MySQL based application developed by Rowan Hick and James McGlinn of Nerdsinc Ltd New Zealand.

After nearly 2 years in production, with the advent of Rails, Flex, and the rapidly growing business needs of Fastmount, the current application no longer meets the business needs of Fastmount. We made the decision early this year to re-write a new application and have been developing requirements for the application as well as evaluating technologies.

The application is a business to business eCommerce system. Allowing a marine manufacturing company in New Zealand to service it’s agents, distributors and customers world wide. The existing application facilitates order management from creation through to shipping tracking, along with customer management and some reporting elements.

Why are we open sourcing ?

For all the Canadians out there wanting this book (at time of writing) my order from chapters.indigo.ca just shipped, so there must be a few of them in stock - go get your order in quick !

Whereas amazon.ca is currently out of stock, and chapters two weeks ago were out of stock, and O’Reilly is/was of stock when I tried a couple of days ago to order.

An overexcited brit can lower the tone on any web app. Todays race in the Americas Cup with ETNZ (go boys!!!) vs Alinghi saw some dramatic action. All of the amazing graphics and real time communication does nothing to convey the sheer drama of the event. One of the text commentators got a little excited in the commentary, it’s amazing how much atmosphere can be generated with a few random characters. Click the thumbnail link and look at the text at the bottom to see what I mean. What a race (oh and we won!!)

I’m looking forward to the web 2.bomb era to be over. Every man and his dog is building yet another social networking, api enabled, ajaxified, beta tag wearing application and waiting for the VC money to flow in. Just follow techcrunch.com and yawn every morning at the yasu* of the day.

Outside of the VC crazed crowd some interesting things are happening. Adobe’s announcement on HD content deployed using the Flash Player is very interesting indeed, not so much from the feature set, but what it’s actually doing technically. We now have a cross platform web delivered piece of code that is utilizing the GPU. I think this has been lost on a few people.

The boys over at 37signals have put the danger flag up over the following words. Need, Must, Can’t, Easy, Just, Only, Fast.

The following comments thread has been an interesting read. But it does highlight what to do about when you hear these words, and whether they necessarily are bad. I tend to think of them as helping you, the business analyst, or developer, to extract exactly what the client wants to acheive. Harking back to the general philosophy that a client/user (be it a your paying client, your designer, your developer) just wants to get things done, when they can’t the frustration level can start to increase and you start to see these words - by the time you personally get involved things might be getting a little heated…

So, what do they really mean ? And how do we deal with it ?