Cheerful Curmudgeon

I got a frantic email from a friend this week. One of his subcontractors went crazy and trashed several of my friend’s clients’ web sites as well as my friend’s own business site. The police have been involved but much damage has already been done. I wish I had been hosting my friend’s sites. Had I been, I could have recovered everything from backups. As it is, all I could do was sit by and fume, wishing that his hosting company had had something to offer him in the way of assistance.

I know my friend’s pain. In the 30 years that I have been doing system administration, there have been numerous times when my own bacon has been saved by backups. I have been struck by the dread BUOD error (Bad User On Device) in which a glitch sitting between the chair and the keyboard has made the computer do all kinds of hideous deeds. The worst, early in my career, idled a team of a dozen programmers for three days. Why three full days? You guessed it: no backups. At the other end of the spectrum, a member of my team recently trashed a critical configuration file on one of our servers. This, however, resulted in no downtime; we simply grabbed a copy from the backups and continued on our merry ways.

If you accidentally delete a file from your web site (or, in my friend’s case, all of the files), can you recover it? Does your hosting company provide backups and, if so, can  you recover files from their backup? In many cases, hosting companies’ backups are only for their use in cases of disk drive failure.

My company offers one (excellent, in my opinion) solution, Nest Egg Backup for Web Servers. There are many other alternatives. Do choose and implement one. When you go comparison shopping, ask the key question: How long are the backups retained? If only for one night, that means that your window of opportunity is extremely limited. If you delete a file at 10:00pm and wait until 8:00am to try to get it back, you are out of luck. You should have at least three days of retention, preferably more, preferably a lot more. Thirty days can give you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling of safety and security.

Lesson of the day: Back up your hosting accounts! And be sure to include everything (email folders, MySQL databases, PHP config files, etc. etc. etc.) The day disaster strikes is a day too late to start backing stuff up.

We have many opportunities to experience both good and bad customer service. Rarely, though, do we bump into extremes at both ends of the spectrum in the course of one technical support issue. Doing so makes both experiences all the more poignant.

I use a Garmin GPSmap 396 coupled with a hockey puck sized XM Radio receiver in my airplane. The combination gives me NEXRAD weather radar in near real-time, with my current position and course superimposed. It has proven invaluable in keeping me safe and well clear of thunderstorms. Recently, the weather got “flakey,” sometimes I would receive it and sometimes not. On an August flight back from Wisconsin, when I was flying along the front edge of a line of rain and thunderstorms, the NEXRAD radar vanished and I could not get it back. After experimenting on several follow-up flights, I determined that the problem was heat related: when the XM receiver had been on for 30-40 minutes and got hot, it stopped working.

I called Garmin and asked whether they wanted the XM receiver back with or without the GPS unit and how much it would cost to repair/replace it. The Garmin rep, for whom American English was clearly his primary language, asked what model antenna I had and I told him that it was the old, original GXM 30 and that it was almost four years old. He immediately offered to replace it with a new GXM 40 for free under warranty. (I looked it up later; the GXM 40 retails for $268.) I shipped my broken receiver to Garmin on Wednesday and had the replacement on my doorstep on Friday. That’s amazingly awesome service, Garmin. Thank you!

I just phoned XM Radio to have the old receiver removed from my account and replaced with the new receiver. I got a woman who spoke English with such a thick accent that I had trouble understanding her. She then informed me that this “service” would cost me $15. Excuse me? Garmin just replaced a very expensive piece of broken equipment at their expense and XM wants to charge me $15 to type an eight letter radio ID into their computer?!?! Talk about petty. Worse, she then tried to “up-sell” me to a lifetime music subscription for “only” $399.99. I was flabergasted but did manage to recover my voice and tell her how angry I am that, after paying them $75 per month for weather, XM has the gall to charge me  an additional $6 for music. Truly apalling.

Garmin: I have had several of your products over the years. All have performed wonderfully. This is the first time that I have had to work with your customer service and I am thoroughly impressed. You’ve got a very, very happy customer who will certainly return to purchase more of your products.

XM Radio: The aviation weather “service” that I receive from you is overpriced and the additonal charge for music is insulting. I have had to make several calls to your customer service over the last four years and every one has been, without exception, infuriating. Were there any alternative source of cockpit weather data, I would drop you in an instant.

I like to feel safe and I like to know that my family is safe. I would wager that you do, too. John Goekler has written a crystal clear piece in CounterPunch, The Most Dangerous Person in the World?, which highlights the risks to our lives. Some snippets:

A significant majority of Americans… list terrorism as one of their greatest fears. Like most of our media-inspired interests and worries, however, this one has little basis in reality. In actual fact, unless you’re serving in a war zone, the most dangerous person you’re ever likely to encounter – by several orders of magnitude – is the one you see in the mirror every morning.

and

The single greatest killer of Americans is the so-called “lifestyle disease”. Somewhere between half a million and a million of us get a short ride in a long hearse every year because of smoking, lousy diets, parking our bodies in front of the TV instead of operating them, and downing yet another six pack and / or tequila popper.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will commit suicide by cigarette this year. Another 260,000 to 470,000 will go in the ground due to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.

After the person in the mirror, the next most dangerous individual we’re ever likely to encounter is one in a white coat. Something like 200,000 of us will experience “cessation of life” due to medical errors – botched procedures, mis-prescribed drugs and “nosocomial infections”. (The really nasty ones you get from treatment in a hospital or healthcare service unit.)

Goekler’s article is a delight to read but if you are impatient or like numbers (like me), here are the Cliff’s notes: Read the rest of this entry »

I am fed up with wasting clients’ dollars “fixing” web sites so that they look good in Internet Explorer 6. IE7 has been out for 2 1/2 years. IE8 is available as a free beta. There are lots of other browsers available for free. All of these browsers work better than IE6. If you still use IE6, it’s time to get over it and move on. Upgrade for free to something better.

This web site, and the others for which I am responsible, now display a warning similar to this when visited with IE6:

Sample IE6 warning message

For more information, see Moving Past Internet Explorer 6.

I very much enjoyed the time that I got to spend with my father-in-law, Lester Start. Sadly, he was taken from this world much too soon.

My wife and her siblings have created a web site as a publishing platform for his sermons and talks. Please visit Lester Start’s Works.

Cross browser testing is always a pain to coordinate but at least it just got a lot less expensive. Amazon Web Services just released AMIs running Windows which means that you can now get Windows virtual machines for as little as $0.125 per hour. These beasties make great platforms for doing cross browser testing. The only hassle was that the default AMI only had IE7 installed on it.

I said “was” because I have created a new, public AMI with six browsers installed on it: IE7, IE6, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari 3.1, and Google Chrome 0.3. You are welcome to use it for free (well… you do have to pay Amazon their whopping 12.5 cents per hour). I hope it makes your web site testing life a bit easier.

Details at my Hen’s Teeth Network web site.

I buy a lot of music on-line and it breaks down like this:

• 1,268 completely unlocked MP3 files, easily playable on any computer or device, all purchased from eMusic.com. (Here’s a link to get 25 FREE iPod® compatible downloads from eMusic! Choose from over 2.8 Million songs! )
• 0 DRM-locked files from iTunes, Audible.com, etc.

Google released Chrome today and you will see “Google Chrome is a browser” if you visit the Chrome web page. Do not be deceived, though. Chrome is not designed to replace Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari. Chrome is designed to replace your operating system and virtually all of the software that you use every day. Chrome is the key to letting you do all of your computer stuff on the web instead of on one computer.

Think of the advantages. If you edit your grocery list on your home computer and want to print it at work, you are stuck. You cannot print that grocery list until you get home again. But if you edit your grocery list on the web, you can get to the same document and print it from any computer anywhere in the world. Similarly, if your hard disk dies, you can still get to your stuff if it is on the web. All you have to do is switch to another computer and keep on working. I could wax rhapsodic about the possibilities for way more paragraphs than you want to read but I’ll spare you.

Google wants to make this transition so easy for you that you will wonder why you did not make the switch yesterday. Chrome will take over your whole computer and hide all of the confusing gunk of Windows or OSX or Linux so you do not have to worry about it any more. You will be able to simply do your work or read your email or stare at your videos or whatever strikes your fancy. And if you are on a Mac today and on a PC tomorrow, it will not matter one bit because everything will look exactly the same.

Does this seem a bit far fetched? Take a look at how your computer appears if you use Internet Explorer to read the news. (Click on the picture to see it larger.)

That looks pretty normal. You can see that you are running IE because there is lots of IE stuff on the top and bottom of the screen and the news is in the middle. Now here is the same web page in Firefox.

That is pretty much the same experience. You can see that you are running Firefox instead of IE because the stuff at the top and bottom is different but the browser stuff is still there and the news is in the middle.

Now look at the same page in Google Chrome:

Now that looks different. Where did the browser go? It vanished in much the same way that your operating system vanishes into the background. As you are reading the article, are you really aware of whether you are using Linux or Windows or OSX? Of course not. But you see Firefox or IE or Safari all the time because it intrudes on your life so boldly.

Chrome is not a web browser. It is the platform on which your application software runs. Reuters picked this up when it reported,

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Chrome was designed to address the shift to using software from within a Web browser rather than as locally installed computer applications running inside Microsoft Windows or some other operating system.

“I think operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world,” Brin told a group of reporters after the news conference at Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters.

in Google sees new browser displacing desktop software.

Does this sound familiar? Pick your poison:

1. Microsoft Windows + Microsoft Outlook + Microsoft Exchange + Microsoft Office
2. Google Chrome + Google GMail + Google Calendar + Google Docs

Is this good or bad? That is the $64 question, of course. Google’s web-based applications carry no license fees and ought to be highly reliable. But they come with advertisements and the implicit agreement that you trust Google to manage your data properly. Naturally, Chrome will also run other applications, just like Microsoft Windows runs applications which were not written by Microsoft. But by providing one platform which runs identically across all computers, and which is written and maintained by the same Google which provides all of those whiz-bang applications, you can bet that Google is assuring a first-class user experience if you settle comfortably into the Google environment whole heartedly.

Which do you want on your computer? Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX or Linux… or Google Chrome?

LibraryThing did something amazing last Thursday: it made images of the covers of a million books available for anyone to use for free. This is way better than using Amazon.com’s book covers because you can display them without linking to Amazon. If you are a library or an independent book store, having links on your web site which can draw your patrons or customers to Amazon is not a particularly good thing. It is obviously better than a commercial book cover service because, well, it’s free.

Here is an example. I own a copy of 100 Great Fantasy Short, Short Stories. Since I am using a LibraryThing cover, I can legally link the image to the LibraryThing description (which I have done) or I could have linked it to my own LibraryThing catalog or to anything else I choose.

There are a couple of small potential problems and these prompted me to write a little caching script for the LibraryThing covers. First, you need to use your own developer key to obtain the covers from LibraryThing and there is a slight chance that you could exceed the maximum number of covers per day that LT is willing to provide to you. Second, since I am quite sure that this service will be very popular, LT’s servers could get a bit overburdened if everybody hits them for images.

The solution? Install my little LTcovers PHP script on your own web server. It is just a single file and needs a single directory in which it can store copies of the book cover images that you need. As your patrons/customers/users display covers on your web site, LTcovers will grab the images from LibraryThing and keep a local copy. Once configured, it needs no maintenance.

What do you need?

1. The ltcovers.php script. Right-click on that link and “Save As” ltcovers.php on your own web server.
2. Your own LibraryThing developer key. It’s free and you need to have your own.
3. You might want a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image as a default image, in case you request a cover which LibraryThing does not have. You can download one from here. (Use “Save As” again.)

My LTcovers script is available for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The images from LibraryThing are available under these terms, “You also agree to some very limited terms: You do not make LibraryThing cover images available to others in bulk. But you may cache bulk quantities of covers. Use does not involve or promote a LibraryThing competitor. If covers are fetched through an automatic process (eg., not by people hitting a web page), you may not fetch more than one cover per second.”

I hope that between LibraryThing and this script, you can save a few dollars (if you are now paying for a commercial book cover service) and provide a better experience for your web site visitors (if you are now linking to Amazon).

Shameless commercial plug: If you want to use LTcovers but cannot install it on your own web server, Hen’s Teeth Network will be glad to provide you with a small hosting account quite suitable for running it. We will even install LTcovers for free if you sign up for one of our hosting accounts.

The local mayor wants a raise. That got me thinking: he’s been in office only about a year and we really don’t know how well the stuff his is doing will pan out. Isn’t it a little premature to give him a raise? On the other hand, if he does a great job, shouldn’t he be properly rewarded for his contributions to the city?

Give a listen to my second podcast in which I propose a new mechanism for compensating our elected officials.

 

 Performance Bonuses for Politicians [6:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (359)