Blackdirt Blog

Today I came across two articles that I found really disturbing.

The first is from The Hill,  Dick Morris wrote an article “Obama vs. Freedom” about possibly subsidizing news media.  Now I can’t think of anytime in the last 4 years that I have known about Dick Morris that I have agreed with him, but on this point I will.  I think government tied into financially with news outlets to against everything I believe in.  If you are liberal minded, take a look at the comments – they are unbelievable [thanks to a Drudge link].  You have to read between the lines, but fundamentally the story seems to be logical.  Journalism and government do not mix.

Then my buddy Milo sent me a link to an article on TechCrunch by Paul Carr “A Death of A Thousand Hacks: New Forbes Editorial Genius In Bold Plan to Kill Forbes”.  Read the article, it will scare the hell out of you.  Going with what seems like a scattershot approach to journalism.  Take thousands of terrible articles and hope that one is good.  It is all about SEO and page views – whether they are useful or not.

Today I am very depressed about the news media – when NYT goes paywall it will be the last nail in the coffin.

A friend just sent me a link to MySQL Cluster Sandbox and it looks pretty interesting.  I work on a site that is in the middle of needing bleeding edge database architecture and a good run-of-the-mill redundant system.  Historically we have simply thrown more hardware at the problem, but it seems like we have hit our limit.

While the system is far more read intensive than write – the writes are starting to grow.  Replication is fine and general caching is working to some degree, but it is not solving our problems.  Memcached is being considered, but I am not really sure that is going to solve all of our issues, especially with our projected growth.

I ramble – to tired and have a big presentation in the morning…

On the Official Google Blog today they announce Freeze frame, which allows users to create their own background images.  The samples given look remarkably like Bing [sample here].  I don’t know about you, but one of the things I like about Google is the lack of this sort of thing.

This does lead me to believe that Google may be nervous about Bing’s growth.

Smokescreen (preview) is an open source solution to the Flash question.  I am no fan of Flash, never have been, but I am also a text only email kind of guy, so take that with a grain of salt.

So in this fight between Apple and Adobe I tend to fall on the Apple side, but only to a point.  There is real value in using Flash for certain functionality and/or look and feel.  What I really don’t like is locking Flash out from all sorts of popular devices.  It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I don’t like any company to have that much power over another.

As an iPhone user [maybe iPad some day],  I really do not like being locked out from sites that utilize Flash, whatever the reason might be.   There is nothing worse than being greeted by that little blue cube when I am looking for information on a site.

Then there is advertising – a lot of ads are delivered using Flash and as someone who works with companies where a dominant portion of their revenue comes from online ads [and thus my paycheck] I get a little irked knowing that the little blue cube at the top is lost revenue.

The couple of demos I sat through seemed a little slow and it looks like there might be a few browser issues that need to be worked out, but it does look promising.  I would seriously consider looking into this if your site uses flash for any ‘mission critical’ tasks as navigation or call to action.  It would be a lot cheaper than rebuilding your entire site.

Thanks to Boagworld for tweeting this wonderful Pines Notify jQuery Plugin.

It seems to have a whole bunch of features I could employ [although a little too late] into a current project:

I don’t have much experience with jQuery, but I am really liking a lot of the plugins that I have been seeing lately.

Here is a nice, short – and to the point – post about A/B testing and the results it yielded.

I know in most projects I have worked on recently A/B testing has not gone beyond internal back-and-forth.  Something I hope to change moving forward.  It we could only budget the time to do so.

Over the last few weeks a discussion at work has revolved around the use of  ‘name brand’ [read: Dell, HP, Compaq, etc] vs. ‘Nameless’ [read: custom configurations without a logo] for servers.  These servers will be used for a variety of tasks, but mostly web and database work.

For the last 4 years or so we have using the Nameless types – and in general they have preformed quite well.  However, lately we have been having a succession of failures.  Power supplies, unexplained shut downs, poor performance under stress and generally poor throughput.  Now this could be due to application changes, the fact that we have had to expand greatly in capacity and our architecture does not scale as hoped – or our hardware is crap.

Of late – the thinking is we should go out and spend the extra money on some name brand servers from companies with quality reputations [I will skip over the capacitor issues of Dell that cost us weeks of downtime in the past].  Now in this economic climate – this is a rather big decision.  I am sure we could waddle through our needs with our past methods of purchase, but maybe we could do more with less – better hardware = better capacity?

I am wondering if anyone out there has a strong opinion – either way – on this subject.  What have you done in the past – what are you doing now?  Was the money worth the performance?  Was there a performance difference?

Well there is a lot I would like to do on this blog – but I haven’t gotten to step one.  I would like to change the icon – or maybe the theme altogether, but no – no progress.

I am still trying to figure out what I am going to write about, but work keeps getting in the way.  Six or more projects that each require my attention, but none get the attention that they need.

Be patient – at some point I will get my act together and will start talking about UI, SEO and content management systems like I had planned to.

Maybe at some point there will be something of interest here, but for now I am only experimenting.  The source of this blog came from a conversation about how if you work on the web you should have a blog.  I am not the sort to actually place everything out on the web – so I won’t.  This blog will touch on subjects that I will come across in both my work and sometimes my personal life.

There will be nothing juicy – just items that I am thinking about in what spare time I have.  If I ever get followers I am hoping to ask questions and develop some converstations – if not it will serve as a way to flesh out concepts and maybe test development of the WordPress system.  I have only installed about a dozen of them and I am constantly changing how they work – of course to a point where I cannot upgrade them due to breaking functionality for components modified for a previous system.  I will try not to do that here.

This is just the beginning – so be patient – I will try to find my voice quickly.