Stikipad doesn’t spell doom for all cloud services (1)

My rant about how Stikipad founders has screwed their customers attracted this comment from reader Verity, which I figure warrants a proper reply, not just a comment:

It proves that it will be a long time before we dispense with the desktop
apps. I for one only used stikipad as and when I wasn’t at my own computer
and needed to collect info/data as and when for later.

While I am obviously miffled about losing my data, I disagree with that sentiment. However, the Stikipad fiasco does prove that cloud services can be as fickle as the physical hardware we rely on today. And yet, even after several harddisk failures, we continue to store our data on harddisks.

The ultimate reality is that I am the one who should’ve been keeping a backup of my data - just as if I had the data on my local machine. Having my data stored somewhere in the cloud doesn’t free me from that responsibility. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any real, usable solutions for doing that kind of backups - a dormant business opportunity, perhaps?

Stikipad disappearing from the net and taking my and everybody elses data with it is unfortunate, but doesn’t prove anything general about other services.

It does turn out, though, that the cloud of tomorrow isn’t all that different from the physical hardware of today.

Software, Technology , 1 comments

She said “yes” :)) (9)

Bestest day ever!

Life , 9 comments

StikiPad - When software in the cloud goes sour (14)

For a long time I have been using a wiki service called Stikipad to jot down things I wanted to save for later; like business ideas, drafts for blog posts and presentations, stuff like that.

Unfortunately Stikipad has looked like this the last 2 weeks or so:

This essentially means I cannot get at my data and have not been able to for weeks now. As if that isn’t bad enough in itself, I don’t know squat about what is happening, why a data center move is taking weeks to complete, or when I might see my data again.

The sound of silence

The owners of Stikipad, Jonathan George and Matthew DeWaal, appear to have hid themselves behind a wall of silence which is even scarier - not to mention disrespectful to their customers.

While I can understand the sticky situation they might be finding themselves in, they need to pull their heads out their butts for a second and provide information to their customers. They haven’t answered emails, they don’t reply to comments, and their support site is down.

At least a thousand people used to have public wikis hosted with Stikipad and are now left with only a non-informative “We are moving data centers”. Fine, move data centers all you want, I really don’t care. But I do care about my data, which you are currently keeping away from me.

And to add insult to injury, Stikipad is apparently charging their customers for a non existant service.

If you’re using web applications…

There a couple of lessons to be learned here - both as a consumer and a producer of “cloud services”. To the consumers out there looking for the next new thing to make their online life easier, I say

• Don’t sign up for a service that doesn’t allow you to get your data out of the system in a structured way. To Stikipads credit, they did provide that feature, and I do have a fairly recent backup, so this is probably not a total disaster for me.
• Use that backup/export feature! Use it regularly and not only when you want to cancel your account - I did not, shame on me.

If you’re producing web applications…

The most important lesson for producers of web applications that deal with other peoples data - and I sure hope the Stikipad guys are taking notes here so they don’t end up accidentally screwing more people over - is that you need to always communicate. Especially in times of trouble. Set up a blog on one of the numerous blogging services or hook your company up with Get Satisfaction.

I don’t care how you do it, just don’t shut the fuck up.

Software , 14 comments

Poor mans Javascript console (2)

Quick and dirty way of testing Javascript live on a website in browsers without Firebug:

<form onsubmit="try {
    $('output').innerHTML = $F('input') + ' => ' + eval($F('input'));
  } catch (e) {
    alert(e)
  }
  return false">
  <div id="output"></div>
  <input id="input" name="input" value="" on="" />
</form>

Requires Prototype, but could probably be rewritten as pure Javascript pretty easily. Could also be turned into a bookmarklet, I guess.

Technology , 2 comments

Podcast recommendations (2)

I am a big fan of podcasts. I have roughly one hour of daily bicycling to and from work, and roughly the same amount of walking the dog, both of which are perfect time to listen to podcasts.

My brother recently asked me for podcast recommendations and I figured I might as well share my podcast playlist with him, you, and the rest of the world.

Audio only

General tech

• TWiT
• MacBreak Weekly
• The MacCast

Business stuff

• Freelance Radio
• Venture Voice
• The Web 2.0 Show

Development/programming

• The Ruby on Rails Podcast
• Railsenvy
• Hanselminutes

Humour

• You look nice today
• Maniacal Rage

Video

Some time ago we bought a Mac Mini for our living room, and since then, video podcasts have been one of - if not the - main source of media intake in our daily lives. The stuff we see:

• Diggnation - also recommendable in the audio version
• Totally Rad Show
• Tekzilla
• Mahalo Daily
• Hound TV
• The Guild

Your recommendations

Please, let me know in the comments if there are any obvious podcasts I am missing.

Life , 2 comments

Rails project launcher (1)

Jesper asked on the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade mailing list what scripts and tricks use to launch their environment when developing Rails projects on OS X.

iTerm shell script

A bunch of people pointed to this handy iTerm shortcut, which uses Applescript invoked from a shell script to start the environment. I use roughly the same approach, however it’s wrapped in an Automator workflow, which I launch using Quicksilver.

Automator workflow

Basically what the workflow does is ask me to pick a project, then it fetches the most recent version of the application, runs any missing migrations, starts script/server and autotest, launches TextMate with the project source, and iTerm with the most recent commit messages, the test log and the development log. This saves me so many keypresses.

It’s a modified version of a workflow I found somewhere on the net. Unfortunately I cannot find the original source now, so I cannot even give credit where it’s due. Download it here.

View it in action

You can see it in action below (the text is terribly hard to read unfortunately, but it shows how the process looks at least):

Launch Rails project from Jakob Skjerning on Vimeo.

Copenhagen.rb, Programming , 1 comments

Podcasts as marketing vehicles (1)

Apple, please make it easier for us to consume Steve…

Why is there not a single podcast I can subscribe to, so the HD versions of the most recent Apple keynote, iPhone SDK announcement, or any other reality-distortion-field-spreading event automagically appears on my media center Mac, iPod or iPhone?

As it is now, I have to wait for the video to appear on the website, then open iTunes, then find the podcast, then fetch the single episode, and then wait for that to download. And finally I can view it on my TV. If they instead provided a proper podcast, the iPhone SDK presentation would’ve been waiting for me when I got up this morning.

Apple has probably the biggest podcast aggregator in the world with the iTunes Store. They have near-ultimate dominans on the market for portable audio and/or video players. They have one of the most loyal and fanatic fanbases in the world. They provide high quality videos of their special events and the fanbase is slurping it up. Their marketing machine is highly effective at creating buzz.

They already have all the pieces of the puzzle, they just need to put it together.

They could even provide a podcast of their ads and people would subscribe. It’s free advertising directly to the computer, living room, or pockets of interested customers.

Business, Technology, Usability , 1 comments

Launch: Børn i byen (2)

This is probably one of those posts, that I ought to in Danish, oh well…

The recent weekend marked the launch of Børn i byen (that’s “Children in the city” for you danishly-challenged readers) - a user-driven guide to Copenhagen focusing solely on parents and their children.

People are already blogging about it and judging by the comments, people are liking it.

Since December I have been part of the Børn i byen team. Even though I have no kids, I was added to the project - on recommendation from Lars to assist the original developer and the rest of the team get a launchable product out the virtual door.

On the technical side of things, it’s all Ruby on Rails, using Blueprint for the CSS, Capistrano for deployment, Comatose for a lightweight CMS, Geokit for the Google Map stuff, and Carolines espresso machine for fuel.

Projects , 2 comments

Double u double u double huh? (9)

It’s about time we kill the “www”. I don’t mean the World Wide Web, obviously, but the three letters that appear at the beginning of a plethora of website addresses.

Seen from a human perspective they serve very little purpose these days. Sure, many people believe they are required - and in some cases they are due to technical oversights - and will happily enter them in the address bar.

It could be argued that they make it easy to recognize a website address. I agree, everybody recognizes “www.example.com” as a website address. However, my guess is that people are just as likely to recognize “example.com”. The dot and the 2-4 letters following it are what makes a website address - both on a technical level, but also in peoples minds.

Why it’s bad

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.
– Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

• It’s superfluous. It serves no technical nor human purpose, and just takes up space on your billboards, business cards and everywhere else. It’s fluff, and fluff must die. Theoretically you might even save a little bandwidth ;)
• Have you ever tried to tell someone a website address with www in it? It’s the longest possible three letter acronym to spell out and pronounce in the English language and it’s a tongue twister. Think of the tongues!
• It’s limiting. The name and address of del.icio.us wouldn’t be nearly as cool if it was www.del.icio.us, would it? And we.changehealthcare.com is a much more powerful statement than www.changehealthcare.com

When to use www

There is, however, at least one situation where you want to put the www in front of your domain name: When writing website addresses in an email or online forum or anywhere you can’t or won’t manually create a link.

The abbreviation provides an excellent hook for text to HTML parsers to grab on to and turn your address into an actual link. The alternative is using “http://” in front of the domain name and frankly, and while computers might love that, it’s ugly and not terribly friendly to your fellow human beings.

Obviously websites should still respond when there’s a www in the domain name, but they should never require it.

For all intents and purposes, just forget that www ever existed in your domain name. Only use it when there’s a benefit, and in a year or so, think back on all the keystrokes you’ve saved, and remember where you heard it first; on mentalized.net.

Browsers, Usability, Webdesign , 9 comments

BarCamp Copenhagen (0)

I am going to BarCamp Copenhagen on Friday. This being my first encounter with the BarCamp concept I have pretty much no clue what I am going into, and I am both excited and a tad nervous - I mean, it’s not every day one looses ones BarCamp virginity.

Looking over the list of attendees I can’t help but notice that quite a few Ruby developers - many from the jolly Copenhagen Ruby Brigade crew - are attending; we’re making up 10% of the attendees.

I probably won’t be giving a talk there unless I am hit by a massive amount of inspiration particles before then, but seeing that Casper is presenting I am sure the good word of Ruby will be spread. I will make sure to contribute in some other way at the event, though - in accordance with the rules of BarCamp

I am looking forward to it - and it’s probably a good idea to read up on the whole concept before Friday.

Copenhagen.rb, Life, Technology , 0 comments