It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and is personally affected by what you say.

From A real person, a lot like you

Probably the biggest problem with communicating online is the lack of context. When online you can’t see facial expressions, hear the tone on their voice, or anything. All you get is a blurb of text.

I know I can be difficult for others to read at times, because I can be quite short and terse. And I’ve certainly had encounters like Derek Sivers pointed out in his post with doing support.

Since reading that post, I’ve tried to remain more conscious of that when working with others. But it is also important to keep it in mind when you receive emails, IMs, comments, or other messages. It can be easier for them to come off the wrong way and you just need to realize it might not actually be meant how it sounds.

AT&T is slowly killing the iPhone. Its like an open wound.

I switched both my wife and I over from our iPhones to Droids. The biggest reason is we were tired of AT&T, and our contracts were up. It really does suck when you get poor coverage in your own home. Ironically, AT&T had announced a “100 day plan” in December, but we’ve just seen an influx of dropped calls and poor quality since then. The niceties of the phone are rather overshadowed when you don’t get service. This pain was mainly felt by my wife, who uses the phone functions far more than me.

After spending a week with the Droid, I am very please though. The open-ness of the platform is welcoming. Don’t like the home screen? You can replace it. Don’t like the dialer app? Replace it. And it is all just seamless. Don’t like an app you bought? I heard you can even return an app within 24 hours. The email app’s combined inbox is nice as well, since I have 3 mail accounts and like to look at all in a glance. I also got the Android 2.1 before weekend and was very pleased with the updates.

A few observations:

• Android apps don’t have as “nice” an interface as iPhone apps. I don’t understand why. They seem more boxy.
• Somebody please fix the IMAP unread bug! My Exchange account and Gmail accounts over IMAP are fine, but with SmarterMail all messages are always unread. Was saddened to see 2.1 didn’t fix it. Did some network sniffing and narrowing down the cause.
• The screen is nice and crisp. Text just looks better on it than my iPhone.
• Turn by turn navigation… do I need my Garmin anymore? (maybe only where I don’t get cell coverage for maps)
• Love the Weather app in 2.1… love that I can see the temperature/rain chances over time. Want to know the weather at 11:34am? No prob.
• Love the notification bar
• Love the multitasking, but with the “task killer” apps, its a flashback to old Windows Mobile PDA days.
• I love how the Android browser re-wraps the text when you zoom into an area. Makes it so the font size is nice and text is wrapped to so it fits.
• The battery info is awesome. Shows you exactly what apps have been sucking up your battery.
• I don’t like the duality between “Email” and “Gmail”. I added my Gmail account as an IMAP account, since having “Email” app for Exchange/IMAP and the “Gmail” app for Gmail accounts feels to segregated for no reason. You lose out on the combined inbox then, and the Gmail app doesn’t look as nice as the Email app.
• Thought I had more negatives for the phone, but really don’t.

Now of course after I got my Droid, Apple announces an announcement about iPhone OS 4 for Thursday. I don’t think I will be missing the iPhone though. The truth is, unless they’re announcing the phone on Verizon, I won’t regret it. I won’t purchase another iPhone until it is on Verizon. No sense having a phone and having trouble placing calls.

But when thinking about if it was something I’d regret, it made me realize a few things about how I use my phone and ultimately prompted me to get an iPad. When I thought about what I used my phone for, it came down to web surfing, Twitter, and email. Nothing that requires a “phone” and nothing specific to the iPhone. On top of that, a phone overall isn’t the best platform for something like web surfing. Try reading code or technical blog posts in that form factor? It sucks. I’d often flag pages/posts for me to read later on my desktop or laptop. Additionally, I am not out or traveling very often. Most of my usage is around the house… laying in bed in the morning, eating breakfast, downstairs when watching TV, *ahem*bathroom*ahem*.

The iPad really is a nice trade off in mobility and experience. I don’t need something ultra mobile in my pocket, just something I can carry around the house. And I want a rich experience so I don’t need a full system by me to get what I need. When I do travel, the iPad will still be an excellent companion. Willing to bet watching movies in flight on it is better than the iPhone (bigger screen!). Can take books with me much more easily (with the iBooks/Kindle app, why get an ebook reader?). Its basically multi-purpose. I look forward to much more book reading.

So I sold my old iPhone 3G to my brother-in-law, had a special to sell a VPS for a year for $500, and bam, iPad and tax paid for. The old iPhone 2G my wife had is now being used by Nick to entertain him while going potty (trying to potty train).

For me, the iPad is an excellent fit between a laptop and a phone. Mobility while having an excellent experience. I also plan on getting another iPad for my wife to replace her aging laptop. For her, it is the perfect full system replacement as it does everything she needs a computer for.

Now the problem… I’m about 45 minutes away from my servers. On all my own servers, one thing I had decided is an absolute must to have the remote management cards (DRAC5 in my 1950s) which supports remote console and virtual media. This is awesome for remotely reinstalling an operating system, but not so good when it asks you for an additional driver by removable media… and of course, when it is your network card driver.

I don’t quite recall how I got through it last time, though it involved a fair amount of coursing, particularly because the installer asks for the .fw file when it really just wants the .deb.

This time around, I found a nicely prepared ISO with the deb on it, however the DRAC only support one virtual CDROM, and it didn’t seem to find it if I unmounted the installation media and mounted the ISO with the deb on it.

There was also some information about PXE booting with the driver, but that sounded like an overly complicated solution.

My route? If it can’t find it on the virtual cdrom, try the virtual floppy! The deb is only 102kb, so just fire up Magic ISO, create a new floppy image, copy it in, and save it. Mount it to the virtual floppy and problem solved.

Encounter the same issue? Download my floppy image!

"Telligent, a leader in community, collaboration and social analytics software, today announced the availability of version 5.0 of Telligent Community (previously Community Server) and version 2.0 of Telligent Enterprise (previously Community Server Evolution). The latest versions of Telligent’s community and collaboration software represent the company’s ongoing commitment to innovation and enterprise collaboration."

Finally, after months of feverish development, we’ve reached the point of a release for what is probably our biggest release in history. Our v5.0 is unlike any of our previous major releases. We have a completely new permissions system, revamped groups, new search, new email templating, and new widget based theming.

Soon I’ll be having a series of posts going over some of the bigger technical points in some of my areas of expertise. In particular with this release, I’d worked on the search implementation and the new email templating.

In previous versions of CS, we had two implementations of search, the default Search Barrel and the more powerful Enterprise Search, which was built on Lucene.Net. Now, we’ve changed the search to be much easier to extend and change out. Previously, search was tightly coupled to the index. You couldn’t easily add new types to Enterprise Search or index additional fields.

Our new search is comprised of a series of mappers, which define how to convert an object into a searchable document, and define your own content handlers, which are used to grab objects that need to be indexed, have them mapped, and passed over to the index. You can easily build on top of existing mappers, create mappers for new types, and add new content handlers to the search process. Additionally, the search is broken out into indexing and search, allowing you to easily create your own implementations. Our included implementation is now based on Solr. Why Solr? A better question is why not Solr? It did everything we wanted and then some. It is feature packed, high performance, and super reliable. With it, we were also able to easily build in thread collapsing. Tired of the search results all being messages from the same thread? Now we can collapse down the results, combining all the posts from a single thread into just one result.

What’s new with emails? Over time, we found the old email templates to be too limiting. We had one big XML file containing all the emails, people often ran into confusion when editing HTML emails (since they had to be XML escaped), and the default tokens were limiting depending on the types of customizations you’d want to make. Our new emails are entirely based on nVelocity. If you are familiar at all with the theming in Graffiti, you will be right at home in the new email templates. The templates produce the mime documents that get sent out, allowing you do manipulate the message headers, attachments, and body content. Instead of providing a fixed set of tokens like [PostDate], you get the actual objects. You can now use $post.PostDate, or call $post.PostDate.ToString() and pass in a custom formatter. Want to do more? Can easily create Chalk modules to add new macros, or TemplateModules to manipulate the nVelocity context before templating, or the processed mime object after processing (useful for adding binary attachments and such).

Want to know more? Keep posted.

Today, Citrix announced that XenServer will now be free, and that Citrix is now focusing on building tools… but not just for Xen, but also for Hyper-V.

Additionally, today RedHat unveiled some of its virtualization plans. They have some big plans for its acquisition of Qumranet, developers of KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine), last September. Its plans include in elimination of Xen and migration to being a strong contender with KVM.

It looks like 2009 will be a pretty big year for virtualization. In reading online, a lot of general opinion is that for open source server virtualization, people will be dropping Xen in favor of KVM. When RedHat acquired Qumranet, their intent was obvious. Since then, Fedora has also dropped Xen from its standard support, as well as Ubuntu 8.10, which seems to be focusing on KVM now as well. If the major distros are dropping mainline Xen support, and Citrix is making XenSource free, what will drive innovation with Xen? Citrix will be focusing on tools. They can let Microsoft innovate on Hyper-V and then they just need to do the tools. One of the main confidence boosters for people is that KVM is already in the Linux kernel, making almost all distributions instantly compatible, while Xen has struggled to get into the kernel.

A few weeks ago, I’d installed Proxmox Virtual Environment and was quite impressed with it. Proxmox is a free packaged system that supports KVM virtualization. I didn’t really benchmark its Windows guest performance, but it fired up and ran quite smoothly. Had virtual environment installed and running VMs in only 15 minutes.

For me, I’m somewhat unsure about the Xen vs KVM debate. XenServer is fairly nice and has a rich API to go along with it and a pretty decent management app. KVM is less mature, but gaining a lot of momentum. Virtualization is a market I’m always interested in and like to dabble with each release that comes out of VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, though KVM is certain catching my eye.

Currently, I’m looking for a few additional customers. I don’t actively recruit, however looking to fill some extra capacity I have.

Some information:

• Windows Server 2008 or any linux distro available.
• Virtualization with XenServer 5.
• Low load servers, not oversold or overcommitted.
• Top quality bandwidth. I don’t like crappy connectivity. Currently get bandwidth through XO and Verizon, soon moving to a new datacenter with Level3 and XO.
• Hardware firewall and hosted anti-spam solution.
• Shared SQL Server 2005 (soon to be moved to 2008) server
• Manage your sites with DotNetPanel, email with SmarterMail
• All servers are Dell PowerEdge 1950s, 2x quad core processors, 8-16gb RAM (upgrading all to 16gb soon)

Some other important points:

• Your virtual server is your own responsibility. You break IIS, you fix it!
• No set limits for number of domains/email accounts, but be reasonable.

I usually cater to a more technical crowd. Developers can appreciate the quality, understand they get what they pay for, and are pretty much self-managing. My current users really don’t come to me for that much.

Plans are either:

• 512mb RAM
• 20gb space
• 150gb bandwidth
• $50/month for Linux, $70/month for Windows

Or,

• 1024mb RAM
• 40gb space
• 300gb bandwidth
• $100/month for Linux, $120/month for Windows

Space is limited, as I only have a couple servers. I’m not buying any additional ones, so not going beyond my current capabilities. Once the space fills up, it is done.

Hosting with me is not right for everyone. If you need a lot of support, then it may be better to look elsewhere. I don’t run this as a full-on business where I cater to all the customers needs. That said, if you know what you’re doing, want a quality virtual server on quality hardware and connectivity, then I’m just what you’re looking for.

If you’re interested, please contact me directly.

From: xxx@googlemail.com
To: me
Subject: Regarding your domain name whobroke.us

Hi,

I wondered if you would be interested in buying the .COM version of your domain name whobroke.us for $195 ?
Let me know.
Shawn.

So I have this domain name, whobroke.us. Last January I went on a domain-spree and thought it could be a political domain or something like that. It is now pending expiration, since I never did anything with it. But I get this email today from someone wanting to sell me the .com version. Ok…

So I go over to GoDaddy just to look up the domain, and low-and-behold, the domain is available… I could get it for $9.99. On the offchance, I though maybe he meant whobrokeus.com, so I looked it up and it is available as well.  I sent him a reply, however I haven’t heard back yet. My guess is it is an automated script since a few hours after I emailed him, I received another message (the same one) from him again.

I guess domain resellers now are so desperate that they’ll try and sell you readily available domains at a huge mark up. Hey, someone agrees to buy it for $195, run out and buy it for $10, pocket $185!

While browsing the list of companies, I realized something interesting. A lot of these companies are the trendy web 2.0 companies where you have to squint and turn your head sideways while reading the name to see how it is pronounced. And of course, these companies are VC backed. The thing I find odd is that the VC backed ones have yet to create a revenue stream, and yet they’re dumping all this cash into their offices?

I mean, too many of them are located within San Francisco, in a high real estate area, have taken $15+ million in VC funding, and are filled with today’s latest trends in hip office furniture and desks. Is it some sort of start up street cred? They do it to attract potential employees? Impress customers? Really, I don’t get what the purpose is.

I would expect that kind of impressive office space from some of the established companies like Google, Microsoft, or Apple. You know, the ones who actually generate income. But start-ups?

Firstly, if I worked for or was looking to work for a company like that, I’d be looking at it thinking ok, they got $15 mil from a VC, they’ve yet to generate income, and are blowing their wad on offices? Does this sound like a financially stable company? Or even if they are still doing ok despite their office decisions, does this sound like the kind of company I’d work for? Is it wise use of their money? What is the ROI on trendy office space?

If I was looking at it as a customer (as I do with one of them), I’d be thinking why the hell are you blowing that chunk on office digs when you service still sucks. It would be better spent on support, improving your service, or hiring talent to transform a cool service into a sustainable business.

Not as if I was partial or anything, but I much prefer how Telligent philosophy of function over form. They have the Nerf guns and scooters all over, but that can be had at Toys’R'Us for a few hundred no problem. When it comes to the office itself, there is much more focus on being modest. I mean, for a while ago, the CTO, Jason Alexander, was sharing a conference room with 4-5 interns as his “office”.

But I’m still left with the question… to what purpose who impressive offices serve start-ups? Who exactly are they trying to impress?

Perhap I’m biased since I didn’t go to a Start-up training camp Harvard, Stanford, MIT, or any one of the Ivy league tech colleges… I wasn’t indoctrinated with the VC funded start-up mentality.

How old were you when you started programming? How did you get started in programming?

My first “programming” was probably around the 6th-7th grade. A neighbor of mine wrote a lottery program in BASIC, and I was interested, so I got my own copy of Visual Basic (2.0?). At the time, my mom had gone back to college to finish off her degree, so she bought VB for me through the college. I remember being astounded in the bookstore at the wall of software they had and the discounts.

What was your first language?

My first language was Visual Basic. I’ve moved on since.

What was the first real program you wrote?

This one probably needs a little bit of backstory. In 1994, I found the internet through Prodigy Online (ooo), after realizing it had more to offer than Prodigy, I left Prodigy for an ISP. Around then, I also discovered web design and started HTML. I created a website called Gamers Inn, which grew for a few years and was pretty good, though eventually got notified about trademark infringement as some company had that name trademarked and they wanted the domain. So I renamed it. Then I got another trademark infringement, renamed again. Then I think I got one more, and I gave up and closed the site down. Ahh, the early days of web 1.0 when companies were discovering the internet and liked to think trademarks included instant ownership of domain names. I was only like 14 at the time, so when a lawyer from AT&T contacts you about a trademark for a child company of theirs, I complied, and I also paid for my new domain name out of pocket (which was like $50/yr back then, I believe).

Anyway, during the course of working on the site, I got involved with a group of gamers who played the game Descent online (Kali/Kahn days) and they had their own player ranking schema. When I joined, it was all spreadsheet based, though I rewrite it as an automated system in Perl. Players would have a match, each would submit the results, it would compare them and then recalculate standings. At the time, I hadn’t really used SQL yet, so my “database” was a flat text file. I was also working on rewriting it in C. Web app using plain C? *shutter*

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Visual Basic, Perl, C/C++, Assembler, SQL (MySQL and MS SQL), ASP, PHP, C#, and most recently, Ruby. I can read VB.NET, but don’t write it anymore. I can read Java since it is quite close to C#, but only wrote a little towards the end of college, since they were slowly cutting out C++ and moving entirely to Java. Sadly at college, I never got exposed to .NET, I learned it on my own as I was doing ASP at my job at the time, and got into .NET from learning ASP (thinking ASP.NET was like ASP… thankfully, no). At my job though, they didn’t want to touch .NET, “we’re all J2EE” (aside from the one ASP app I worked on).

What was your first professional programming gig?

Around 1995, I was paid $150 to write a little Perl script for this hospital that one of the guys from the gaming group worked for. He was their IT Director and they needed something for making baby photos accessible online. Nurses would take pictures of newborns, FTP them to this server, then parents could give distant relatives this codephrase (a directory name) and it would display the photo and stats (from a text file) to the relatives. I don’t know if it was every actually put to use, but I just thought it was cool that I made $150.

As far as getting a paycheck, it was 2001 when I got a Student Assistant job with the CA DMV. They found out I knew how to program, so I took over maintenance and further development of this ASP application after the contractors who wrote it left. They didn’t have any staff employees who knew ASP/SQL (they were all J2EE and Cobol), so they had me take over. Of course, they couldn’t have a student assistant as the owner of this “enterprise application” on paper for higher ups, so they actually assigned it to this other guy who was taking HTML and javascript classes at the local JC, both of which were useless for the application (it did very, very little javascript). I was getting paid $8.25/hour to maintain it while the staff employee got paid ~$60k/yr and read more newspapers end-to-end a day then anyone I’ve ever known. Don’t work for the government. But it was a great learning experience, got me into .NET by starting me on ASP, and was a good example of both how to and how not to run projects.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes.

If there is one thing that you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Coding is not developing. There is far more to it than “the code”. In college, I met a number of bright people, but some of them would completely miss the mark because they only thought of the code, and not of the program. Users use the program, not the code.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Fun is hard to define. At the DMV, when the application I was working on was first going into production, it was kind of fun. I wasn’t responsible for it, so I wasn’t stressed (it was late and overbudget, of course), I was just working on some extra reporting stuff. Had a lot of fun building some of the elaborate SQL queries. I was oddly excited at my first 12 hour day (which I couldn’t get paid overtime, but my boss worked a deal so I’d get time and a half in PTO). The early days at Telligent were a lot of fun, when it was just like a half dozen of us, and I was doing stuff like the FTP and NNTP add-ons. It was fun to see Outlook Express working with content from a web site.

I’ve always enjoyed my own little hobby development. I hadn’t done much for a long time, but been doing some Ruby here and there now and like it a lot. Not doing anything groundbreaking, but just working on some stuff that I’d get to enjoy (maybe blog about it soon).

#1 – Payment Sent vs Payment Received

First, one thing it does that is completely illogical is that you don’t pick what day the payee gets paid on, you pick the day the payment gets sent. For instance, say your electric bill is $200 and is do on the 17th, it would seem entirely logical to go the screen, type in $200, pick the 17th, and click send, but NO. They have to be complicated. You pick the day it gets sent on, so if your bill is due the 17th, and it takes 2 business days to send the payment, you need to enter in the 15th. This seems completely counter intuitive, not user friendly at all, and bit me a few times the first time I started using the service.

On top of that, each payee has different time it takes to send. Your utility bill could take 2 business days, your cable bill take 3 business days, and people not in their database of payees (like my landlord) take 5 business days. So paying multiple bills takes more thought than I really want to put into it. I hate paying bills, but it is a necessity of life. They know how long it takes to send the payment. Why can’t their little computer system figure it out? “Ohh, they want it paid the 17th? This payee takes 2 days, so we’ll schedule it on the 15th”.

#2 – When they take money out of your account

I recently found out that they take the money out of your account when they send the payment, so when it posts to your account, it doesn’t mean the company got your payment, it means Wells Fargo paid the company that sends the check for them. Why does this suck? Because I pay my landlord through Wells Fargo bill pay and was seeing the money consistently taken out on the 1st/2nd. I had her on auto-pay, so never thought twice about it. Come to find out she was getting it on the 5th (close to the deadline), and I was late this month (more on the why there later).

This really irks me because traditionally, when something posts to your checking account, it is paid! Checks, ATM transactions, transfers, etc. If you have a billing dispute with a company, you may not realize it doesn’t reflect when they got their money.

Additionally, I am a stickler for my budgeting system and categorizing of transactions. I want my July rent to be withdrawn in July. I don’t want it to be in the end of June. So for me to pay my landlord sooner, I’d need to schedule the transaction earlier. Really minor, but it screws up my filing system for those bills that are due at the beginning of the month. Minor, yes, but annoying to need to alter the way I do things for this poorly designed system.

#3 – Flawed automatic payments

This builds on #1 a little bit further. The amount of extra thought you need to put into scheduling regular auto-pays just compounds the complexities mentioned before. Just follow these steps and exceptions you need to account for because they don’t do the math:

• Say your rent is due on the 1st, and late on the 2nd (my landlord isn’t a big stickler, but maybe your utility/mortgage/other company is).
• It takes 5 days to pay them.
• August 1st will be their first auto-payment, a Friday.
• Using their software, you figure you need to send the payment on Monday, July 28th.
• So now, Wells Fargo will send the check on the 28th of each month.
• But wait! It takes 5 business days. What if the first falls on a weekend or on a Monday?
• So you need to change it to send it earlier. First, they don’t exactly explain what happens if the day to send the payment falls on the weekend. Does it send it the Friday before, or the Monday after? Big thing there. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume it sends it the Friday before, so you can set it to the 26th, and if that is a weekend, it will send it the 25th (I hope).
• But wait! You haven’t out smarted the system yet! What about holidays? This was what bit me this month, Friday was the 4th of July, no mail, so my rent payment took an extra physical day. So ignoring Thanksgiving (a 2 day holiday), you need to schedule your payment earlier! Schedule it for the 25th so you can account for when there is a holiday during the time payment is sent and payment is received.
• Haha! You’ve out smarted them! Or so you thought. Remember, not all months are equal. You might be fine for a while and never even think about it, but what about time that will eventually happen where it is February and there is a weekend between the send date and the delivery date? This will make you days late, despite all your careful planning for weekends and holidays. Say February 25th is a Friday, which would make March 1st the following Tuesday. Using the careful planning we did before, your payment wouldn’t arrive until March 3rd, a full two days late.

So now you need to plan everything as if it was February, and change your bills to be sent no later than the 23rd of the month if you want them paid by the 1st. So a quick recap of all the steps just to figure out “when should it pay this bill?”:

1. When is it due?
2. What if there is a weekend?
3. What will it do when the send date is on a weekend?
4. What about a holiday?
5. What about February?

So in this day of Web 2.0/2.5/3.0, I can’t understand why I can’t tell Wells Fargo just when my bill is due and let them deal with the complex mumbo jumbo. I know banks are basically still on Web 0.5 in many cases, but I consider something like this so fundamentally flawed and confusing that it makes you wonder if the authors of the software or executives at Wells Fargo have ever actually used their own website. The first time you use it and see their little calendar pop up, you’ll be confused. And on the page to create an automatic payment, it doesn’t have the useful calendar pop-up, and no information about how things can affect the day the bill is actually paid on. Additionally, with them taking out the money early, it will give you a false sense of security that everything is paid on time and all is well.

Wells Fargo BillPay = FAIL