Technology

Todd Hoff on the High Scalability site writes:

Amazon's EC2 sounds good, but how do you make use of all that throbbing CPU power?

Clearly Todd has only read about EC2, not used it. Don't get me wrong, EC2 is great. But throbbing CPU power?

Do you have any idea how many server instances you have to fire up before you even get a pulse?

No such thing.

Speaking of customer service, I returned some faulty headphones at Micro Anvika last week.

Normally, I'd do everything I could to not shop there - I can't stand the stores, due to their appalling sales service. No one in the store is interested in helping you, and they certainly don't know their products. (They are, however, better than Currys.)

However, I got some vouchers as a gift about almost a year ago, and so had used them to buy some headphones. The right headphone wasn't working, however, so I took them back.

I have to say, I was really impressed. Sure, it took 20 minutes for them to locate a new set, but they swapped them over without a word of complaint (or the usual expected accusations that I wouldn't know if the thing was broken or not), and they issued me with a receipt for another 12 month warranty.

Now, that's how it should be.

So, day two of the Future of Web Apps!

Mark Anders kicked things off with a demo of Flex Builder 2. That was actually pretty cool, I thought. I'm not much of a UI person (okay, I have no interest in UI design at all, beyond enjoying someone else's nice UI) but it seemed like a pretty awesome way to create a Flash application. Mark also talked about how great ECMA will be in the future (nice) and also gave a quick demo of Apollo.

Next up Chris Wilson from Microsoft talked about IE7.

Khoi Vinh from NYTimes.com talked about site design. This was a great presentation, with lots of interesting things to note:

• It's Web 2.0, baby. Even the big boys at NYTimes.com don't do it the old way, anymore. It used to be that new sites were based on "news delivery." Now, it's all about "news centric interactivity."
• Features are bad. If you look at users, they fit the bell curve. There's a few beginners, there's a few experts, but most people are the run-of-the-mill intermediate users. However, all of your fancy features are aimed at the experts. That means for most people, there's a lot of "feature noise" that they have to tune out.
• Should that be there? "For every single thing of importance, there should be multiple reasons."
• Settings and preferences? That's just a "dumping ground" for design issues that you couldn't solve, and that's not good.
• Do user testing. If you show it to your boss, that's not user testing, that's "executive testing". (Or, usability testing vs. acceptance testing.)

Simon Willison talked about OpenID. Hopefully people will take his advice, now that the war is won, and soon we will be able to enjoy everyone's sites supporting OpenID!

Jonathan Rochelle from Google talked about the lessons learned from creating Google Docs & Spreadsheets. His advice complemented Khoi's nicely, I thought:

• Get UI help early on, because UI innovation is key to success these days, and lots of your front end code will depend on what the UI does - so the sooner you know what your UI will do, the better.
• Speed is critical. Kill those features, and make the important stuff fast. If it's not fast, and you don't have time to make it fast, dump it.
• Get user feedback - not manager feedback.
• Users cannot always see innovation - so sometimes, you have to innovate and create features that your users don't know that they want (yet).
• User data is sacred. Protect it at all costs.
• Use test harnesses, automate your tests, and perform benchmark testing.

Finally, the boys from Moo got up and spoke. The product sounds, and looks great. If only they didn't have to go down the innocent path. There are few things that annoy me more than companies that think they are "cute". Fun, I can deal with. Funny, I like. Energetic? Sure. Fresh and funky? Great. But "cute" is just annoying.

Tara Hunt's presentation on Building Online Communities is now up on her site.

I'm back at work today helping out a client, and I didn't have a chance to write up day two last night, but hopefully I'll get a chance to do that tonight!

The Future of Web Apps conference started today, and I'm lucky enough to be going along to all three days. Here's my thoughts on day one.

Mike Arrington from TechCrunch kicked off the day with his thoughts on The Future of Start-Ups and Web Companies. However, he started his presentation with the caveat that he's paid to think about start-ups and so on, but most of the great start-ups have ignored his ideas, so I don't really know what we were meant to take home from his presentation . Still, the obvious points - you need a good idea, you need great people, and you need to get people into it - were worth mentioning, I guess. I did also notice that Mike thinks Apollo is the best thing since sliced bread.

Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency gave an interesting talk on Building Online Communities. There wasn't much in the presentation that you couldn't guess that you would need to do if you want to involve people in your product/site and build a community; but it was still interesting to see the common features of their case study of different healthy communities. The presentation was very dense on the content side, so hopefully I'll be able to update this article soon with a link to the slides.

Danny Rimer was, alas, unable to make it, so Ben Holmes from Index Ventures stepped in to talk about Everything you need to know about Funding. This isn't something that has any immediate impact on me at the moment, but it was interesting to hear him talk about when not to get investment, what VC companies are looking for - a product, not an idea; and great people - and what they will want from you in return for investment (ie. their share of the stock, representation, reverse vesting, and veto on the exit strategy).

Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia gave the stand-out presentation of the day, talking about Lessons from Building the World's Largest Social Music Platform. The presentation really gave an insight into how being open with their community helped them grow. This meant being open in terms of making the API open so that developers could get involved, and also so that people would be willing to share their attention data with last.fm, because the open API meant that the attention data wasn't "owned" by last.fm, as users could get their data out of the system if they wanted it - and when they did, it was worth more than when it went in, because last.fm had added value by performing collaberative filtering on the data.

Being open also meant being open in terms of process, and letting their community know about the good and the bad - Matt mentioned that he thought it was odd that in the early days, when the hardware crashed, they would actually get more donations from users immediately afterward, because the open approach meant people were engaged and involved in what was going on with their service.

Anil also talked about processes, and how last.fm are trying to ensure that their communications and processes are as light weight as possible, so that while information is shared - as it needs to be - the processes don't get in the way of doing their development. I gather from talking to Anil (we used to work together) that the idea of agile processes is something that he's enjoyed bringing to last.fm from how we do it at Openads.

Werner Vogels from Amazon (I can't bring myself to link to Amazon) ran through the Amazon S3 and EC2 service offerings, but didn't really say anything that I didn't already know.

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! talked about, well, basically Pipes. It's a cool idea for the future of web applications, and I'm keen to see where this can go. In question time, Bradley mentioned that Y! are obviously concerned about people using web site scraping as a source of data for Pipes, and the content and copyright stuff that goes with that, so it will be interesting to see if this becomes a real problem for them, or just a problem a la YouTube.

Kevin Rose from Digg talked about some of the problems they deal with at Digg, as well as features planned for the future. He announced that Digg will be joining the ranks of sites that support OpenID, so I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's talk on OpenID. There was a question about splitting Digg into different social groups that got a big cheer - but I'll talk about that more in depth in another post soon!

I've recently moved over to using GMail and Google Calendar for work, for one reason or another. While I've been using Google Calendar personally for some time now, the transition to GMail has been interesting, to say the least. It's hardly a great application. Sure, it does the job, but the email threading is terrible, and the lack of good support for managing your archived email isn't great. Not to mention the fact that occasionally, there are contacts I cannot edit - I have to delete the contact and re-create it if I want to make a change.

However, it's not all bad. I've also started using Google Notebook via Anil's recommendation, and it's great. So is the Browser Sync. Really handy.

Mark Jeftovic from EasyDNS has posted a comment in response to my musings on their recent DDoS problems, and EasyDNS have also updated their blog since my first post on the subject. Looks like that trackback system works!

With regards to the setup at work, we've actually pulled the EasyDNS nameservers from our zone for the time being, and we're running on nameservers provided other providers. (Hey, that's why we pay more than one company to do the same thing.)

But why pull the EasyDNS nameservers? We had this discussion today about DNS - the idea is that, if one nameserver doesn't work, well, then you try the next one, and if that doesn't work, the next one, and so on, until you find a nameserver that does work. The problem we have at work is that all of our clients want things to load now. That means that, unfortunately, even when our domain is delegated to all 6 of the EasyDNS nameservers (as well as the other provider's nameservers), while the DDoS is going on, and EasyDNS has 2, or 3, or 4 nameservers with either slow response times, or timing out, then the DNS resolution is sometimes "slow" for our clients, when they happen to get those 2 or 3 or 4 servers in a row, and when that happens, they aren't satisfied.

Obviously, there will be times when nameservers go down. That's life, and you have to deal with it. Our clients also have to deal with the fact that, sometimes, that will mean slightly slower DNS resolution times from "normal". But it's a pain when a big provider like EasyDNS has such a widespread outage. No one can blame EasyDNS for it, but it would be nice if there was an easier way to deal with this than noting that there is a problem with your upstream nameservers (we noticed before EasyDNS first announced on the blog yesterday), and then manually removing the slow/non-responding nameservers for the period of the outage.

Is there an easier way?

From the EasyDNS blog:

"This morning's DOS attack was directed against ns1.easydns.com ... [the] rest of the nameservers ... are unaffected, overall DNS availability was not affected by this attack".

I'm sure it's not intentional, but nevertheless, that's not the truth. Yesterday, we saw their DNS service affected on more than just that one name server. Today, at times, it's been even worse than yesterday.

As an aside, has anyone else noticed that when a company decides to use a blog to disseminate information about mission critical services, the blog is the last thing to be looked at when there's trouble? It's been over 24 hours since the last update from EasyDNS; meanwhile, the DDoS on their DNS service continues without any word from them on what's happening, what they are doing to resolve the issue, or when we can expect normal service to resume.

It doesn't seem to have made it to the mainstream media, though, so maybe it's not being seen elsewhere...

Speaking of the LinuxSA mailing list, I just saw a review on Nokia's 770 on that list, which reminded me: Does anyone else think that it's an affront that Microsoft's Origami Project has no folding involved?