22 July 2008
23:34
That which only exists on one disk, you do not truly possess
Recently, the very cool video side Vimeo announced that they would no longer be allowing videos which were just samples of the gameplay of video games. Needless to say, howling and gnashing of teeth followed. I don’t have a strong opinion on it either way (except that Vimeo is completely right and the people complaining can go hang), but one of the repeated comments baffled me. To wit, “Well, how long do I have before they are deleted? I need to back them up.”
Excuse me? The only copy of something that you presumably valued, since you were willing to take the time to record it and upload it to a video site so that we could all be bothered by it, exists only on some third-party video site?
Really?
Then I encourage Vimeo to delete all of those movies now, as an object lesson in proper digital asset management. Harsh, yes, but sometimes, that kind of lesson is the only one that sticks.
23:21
A friend of mine once bought a $200 beater car. On the way to a very, very important job interview, this $200 car broke down on the freeway. My friend blamed this on “bad luck.”
Needless to say, this was not truly bad luck.
A server failing is not “bad luck.” Computers fail. All the time. Bad luck is a meteor hitting the data center, or Godzilla rampaging through an Internet connection facility. A single, un-backed-up server losing its single, non-RAID disk is not “bad luck.” Depending on how prepared you are, it is either as boring as a kitchen light bulb burning out, or as disastrous as my friend’s experience. It is, however, something that you will have to confront sooner or later if you have any kind of public web presence.
Before you pick a $9.95 a month hosting plan, you might want to reflect on that.
21 July 2008
10:44
If a service is available to the general public, it is not in “beta.” It has been deployed. Excusing problems by slapping a “beta” on it is simply immature.
20 July 2008
17:17
From a demo of PostGIS:
Presenter: “Of course, this is all fake data.”
Audience member: “I would have thought that the use of Godzilla would have indicated that it was all fake data.”
15:19
From the PostgreSQL day today at OSCON:
Q: “What did XML get you (in this design)?”
A: “XML got us pain.”
16 July 2008
11:01
Never for a moment thinking it would be accepted, I sent in a proposal to the 4D Summit in October to give a talk about credit card processing using 4th Dimension. And, yet, it was accepted, so I guess I actually have to prepare something now. I’ll blog here about the presentation as it comes together.
12 July 2008
19:25
The iPhone developer program is now officially uncool, since they let me in. I guess I have to upgrade to Leopard now.
8 July 2008
10:40
And I’m back, restarting the blog. This was, in part, just an exercise in writing a WordPress theme from scratch. I’d like to thank Big Contrarian for the inspiration for the design, and Eric Meyer for the “reset” CSS style sheet.