Well, it looks like Ubuntu 12.04 is finally there for me. Two things I have noticed: it is quick as hell on my system. Some people have complained about boot times being slower than 11.10, but for me they are much quicker. Still not quite as good as 10.04, the last LTS release, but considering all the new functionality; I’d say 20-30 seconds boot on a HDD ain’t too shabby.

It is also stable. I’ve only encountered tiny little issues here and there, but nothing critical at all. Compared to 11.10 it is like night and day. One of the biggest changes with 11.10 (and debian 6, really) was a modification to the networking stacks to supposedly “make them easier” to use. Quite frankly I hated the change and it made it really difficult to use. For me at least, 12.04 fixes those issues for the most part.

I’ll go out on a limb and also say I like Unity. Some hate it – some love it – but I don’t mind it in the least bit. It reminds me of OS X, and at least it isn’t a complete shift to a full touch friendly interface like Windows 8 Metro (yuck!). The one bit that annoys the hell out of me is you can’t click on an icon and have it hide all the windows for the application – sort of like the OS  X dock or Windows 7 launchbar. From looking at various forums it looks like the devs aren’t interested in implementing that idea – but there’s also hundreds of people asking for it… so who knows what’ll happen there.

All in all I really like this release – and I’ve slowly been switching over to it as my main Desktop system. Just last night I setup a windows 7 VM in VirtualBox to run various Adobe apps, QuickBooks, and a few other programs that I need on a daily basis (Wine sucks, always has, always will…. I’m sorry! VM all the way!). Of course I will keep windows 7 installed as well, for my Oblivion & Skyrim addictions.

The interesting thing will be when I move Windows over to my slower HDDs and move Ubuntu onto my nice fast 750 gig drive. It runs really well on my crap old seagate ones… and I can’t wait to get it onto a drive that is almost  twice as fast (100 mbyte/s vs 60 mbyte/s. Haven’t yet switched to SSDs… but maybe one of these days I will.

My scorecard for Ubuntu 12.04 looks like this:

• Stability – 9/10 – It’s Linux.
• Ease of use – 7/10 – Damn Linux driver issues are annoying, but everything else is great!
• Compatibility – 7/10 – Damn driver issues
• Apps – 6/10 – It doesn’t support many commercial apps (Adobe, QuickBooks, Office, etc) natively, but the free/cheap apps on the store are pretty good.
• Security – 10/10 – It’s Linux.
• Overall – 9/10 – It’s a free OS that works really well.

I’ve personally used Linux on and off for over 10 years now, and compared to 10 years ago it has really come a long way. I can’t wait to see where it is at in another 5-10 years… especially with Apple going completely insane (I’m a fan boy… but even I’ll admit they are annoying the eff out of me), and Microsoft making love to their new touch interface. Due to those risky consumer-orientated changes, I honestly believe there’s a huge subset of the population… the pro users… who will push to have more commercial grade apps brought to Linux in the next few years.

If you don’t believe me – just ask any pro user or IT guy  what they think about Windows 8 Metro, or Mountain Lion (or Apple’s inability to update their mac lines). I bet  you will find nearly unanimous disgust for them.

Web Developer

Web developers are the masters of code. They may do a bit of design, but in my experience it’s best to get a dedicated designer for that. Developers may code the front-end, back-end, or perhaps both. They must know their way around HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and any languages that the application uses (Ruby, PHP, etc).

Developers ultimately control how well an application/site works, how secure it is, and how scalable it is. In many cases even with a bad design a project may succeed – but a bad coder will destroy even the best of ideas.

Web Designer

Designers are just that… they design. They may also code – but generally they are the ones who create the look and feel of an application or website. Designers have to be immensely creative; they must be able to take “I want a website theme with blue, red, and purple” (??) and turn it into something beautiful, usable, and appealing to the masses.

Designers may also code using HTML, CSS, and occasionally JavaScript. In some occasions they may perform PSD to HTML or PSD to CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc) conversions. Really good designers will understand more developer-orientated concepts such as creating standards-based and cross-browser code, and they’ll know the limitations of current web technologies.

Oh and yep, I took the background pics. Gotta love Letchworth State Park in CNY.

While  fancy code editors make life easier, they are rarely a requirement to do the job. Whether you are developing the next facebook, or an entire operating system, you can almost always code it using nothing more than a command line interface and a text editor.

During my years of working on web applications I have collaborated with many other developers. Some of them are geniuses, some of them can’t code their way out a paper bag (??). The one truth I have learned during these experiences is that the good developers can literally write code on a piece of paper. Not pseudo-code mind you –  real functioning code. However,  the bad developers are always too reliant upon fancy auto completion and pop up tips. Without those tools, they simply can’t function.

What that tells me is they don’t have a deep understanding of how their code interacts with the computer. It also tells me their code will be more prone to bugs (auto completion isn’t always accurate), more prone to security holes (the editor doesn’t know what a SQL injection is), and overall it will be lacking in quality.

Now I’m not saying those tools are bad – but I am saying you should never fully rely upon them.

Every 3 months I archive my clients’ emails to keep my imap mailbox nice and clean. A couple of weeks ago was that 3 month mark. “Ok, so what’s the big deal?” you may be wondering. Well, I deleted my emails without first checking the archive to make sure they were backed up! The archive was empty!

Even though I’ve had mostly good clients, I still like to keep an archive of all emails for the “just in case” scenario – so I instantly panicked. I use imap for all my email accounts so the first thing was to try and grab the emails off a mail client that hadn’t yet deleted them. After a half hour of trying to get the emails I gave up – it would have taken hours to extract the needed data from the mbox files.

And then – a sudden stroke of genius – I keep backups of my websites… duh! I opened the tar file, went to the mbox folder for my email account, uploaded all of the missing emails back to my server and ta-da – the emails were back. Hooray – thank goodness those backups were good.

The only annoying bug with this “fix” is the timestamps are now off on my email clients. An easy enough problem to fix… but eh… I’m too lazy for that.

So there you go. While it is important to backup your data it is just as important to check your backups! Also, remember that having multiple backups is key!

“RIM isn’t cool”

“Blackberry is for old people”

Yeah, we’ve heard all those quotes over and over the past years. Unfortunately it’s all true – RIM isn’t doing too hot because they’ve made some major mistakes since Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007. It’s all part of the circle of (business) life, however. First you start the company, then you get a hot product, the product takes over the market, then someone else comes along and makes a new company or an existing company creates a *better* product, and you become irrelevant. There’s a few exceptions to that – but it’s a good generalization. Nothing lasts forever.

Every time a major company starts to sink I can’t help but look at their situation and find some valuable business lessons. RIM is no exception – here are 3 valuable lessons that we can learn from RIM’s current financial situation:

The Status Quo

While many business scholars believe it is a mistake to change a successful product – I truly believe it is a mistake to not change. There is a thing in this world called evolution. Time shifts, people change, and markets move. It just happens and there’s no way to stop it. To put it simply: RIM has not changed in the past many years.

A blackberry today is hardly different from a blackberry of five years ago. Sure they have a simple (bs) app store, better email support, slightly better design, etc – but for all intents and purposes they haven’t changed much. This, unfortunately, is RIM’s #1 mistake: believing the status quo is good.

Being Afraid To Embrace New Technology

Could you imagine what the market would look like these days if RIM stopped all internal software development for mobile devices and simply switched to Android when it first came out all those years ago? They would have instantly gone from creating the “old man’s phone” to creating a hip phone that everyone wanted. The fact is companies who ignore perfectly good 3rd party technologies are the ones who fail. Always. Even Apple and Google utilize 3rd party technology in their most successful products (or nowadays they just buy out the 3rd party, but that’s another story).

I truly believe RIM was afraid to make such a drastic move for one big reason: alienating their existing market. However, they were too stupid to realize by following the status quo (see above) they were already alienating their users. It’s becoming increasingly rare these days to see a business person carry a blackberry – most of them use iPhones or Androids.

Why? Because that’s the world we live in nowadays – and it will be that way until some other company comes along with the next hot mobile device.

Know When To Change

It took RIM a good 4 years after the iPhone launch to finally start competing on a more head-to-head basis. I cannot imagine it took them that long to develop the products they have been releasing lately. Their leadership over the past half decade simply hasn’t had a good feel for when to change – and that has led them to their current situation. They waited too long and missed the boat.

The sad part is I bet if you asked their old CEO about their financial woes he would make up some lame-ass excuse about the economy. The real excuse is “we fucked up” – not “oh well the economy is bad”. If that were true please explain to me how apple is now one of the most valuable companies in the world and still growing. They are in the same market these days – if Apple (and Google, actually) could achieve such success in the mobile space then why couldn’t RIM.

It’s because they had no idea they needed to change. Plain and simple.

(Ignore the cat5e cables)

Unfortunately, it has become old and worn out. The paint on it is so rough that I literally have to scrub the board to erase it. Plus it has screw holes in it (I hate using the hanging kits that come with these things, they are cheap and break easily. So I screw it to the wall, much more sturdy )

Luckily there are many ways to fix this problem:

• Buy a new whiteboard – $25-$40+
• Repaint it – $13-$25+
• Fix it the poor man’s way – $5

In this day and age saving money is ultra important – so of course I will be using the poor man’s method of restoring a whiteboard:

Supplies

You will need an adhesive. I used a glue stick for the edges and a can of spray adhesive for the middle. A cheap 99 cent glue stick from the dollar store will get the job done on its own, however.

You will also need enough sheets of dry erase poster board to cover your existing whiteboard. I found mine at my local Joann Craft store for $2 a sheet.

Step 1) Measure & Cut

Measure out your poster board and cut it. I used scissors, but a good straight edge and x-acto knife would have worked better.

I am very fortunate in that my whiteboard has a very small (1 or 2 mm) gap around the entire thing – so I could cut the poster board larger than needed and fit it into the gap in the frame. If yours does not have a gap try to be as accurate as possible!

Step 2) Glue It!

Make sure your whiteboard is clean and dry. Put the glue all over where the first sheet of poster board will go. Be VERY careful, however, or you may cause discoloration if you put too much in one spot:

Rub it to keep it from popping up, and hold it

Step 3) Repeat

If you need multiple sheets to cover your board (like me), simply repeat the last steps. I overlapped mine quite a bit. If you overlap them, be sure not to spray the adhesive too close to where the edge will be – or you may ruin the visible drawing area on the sheet underneath it. I used my glue stick to get the edges to avoid that problem.

Done!

And now you are done! Is this a perfect fix? No – it won’t be as durable as a regular whiteboard, it isn’t as bright, and you will have lines where the sheets overlap, but it is much cheaper than buying a brand new whiteboard or buying expensive whiteboard paint.

Tips:

• You can even attach the poster board to a wall or cork board with a few thumb tacks. That’s a super-poor man’s whiteboard
• If you have a business, the poster board may be a tax writeoff
• Don’t use harsh cleaners on the new surface, to avoid damaging the poster board. They may work, but personally I wouldn’t want to try it.
• If you use spray adhesive, don’t over spray one area (see above)
• If you use spray, don’t get high off it. Seriously, that stuff is potent!

Then click on “Allow a program or feature through Windows firewall”

Then under the “Home/Work” column (for the Internet connection) click the box next to both Bonjour services. Also make sure iTunes is check too.

And that’s it!

Just wanted to let you know I updated the frame buster wp plugin. No major changes – just a fix to a critical bug that caused issues between www and non-www domains. I have also confirmed it to work on wp 3.3

 You can download it here.

Thanks!

Here’s a few questions your should ask your new webhost before you sign the contact:

Do You Have Direct Control Over The Servers And Customer Support?

Many, but not all terrible web hosts either co-locate their servers and hire a 3rd party to take care of them, they rent servers from other providers and let them manage it, or they are simple resellers. A good host will always need to have some sort of direct control over their servers – and a good host will never hire out to a 3rd party for the bulk of their server administration.

While hiring 3rd party contractors can be good for some industries – I’ve learned over the years that 3rd party support services always suck. Plain and simple. They suck.

This is especially true in the hosting industry – if they don’t directly manage the administrators then there is always going to be an extra layer of complexity to take care of issues. Tickets won’t be escalated as fast, admins will be overworked, and it makes it more difficult for knowledgeable customers to get in touch with the admins.

Here’s an example for you: when I first got a VPS I went with a provider that I’ve seen many people recommend – one of the most important things I look for. When I first got the vps I noticed they didn’t have a reverse IP DNS record properly setup – which is needed to be able to send emails to many ISPs. Unfortunately this supposedly “good company” actually cheaped out their support and hired a 3rd party company based out of Toronto. They were a nightmare to deal with – and for what should have been a simple adjustment for an admin took 2 days to get resolved.

The only reason it got resolved was because I found the host’s CEO’s phone # and requested him to escalate it directly or I’d want a refund. He got it straight to an in-house server admin who fixed in instantly. I later found out how messed up their support system actually was – they outsourced most of their admins and their phone support – and they had a single in-house admin who actually repaired/setup the physical VPS nodes. The outsourced support took care of the software.

How messed up is that.

So needless to say – I now always ask if they have total in-house server and customer support. If they say no – I look elsewhere.

Will You Let Me Change Hosting Packages Or Payment Intervals After Signing Up?

A good host will always let you change your hosting plan or payment interval after signing up. Whether your going from gold to bronze or from yearly to monthly – they should have no problem with the switch. Not all of them actively advertise that they allow plan changes – so it is something you may have to ask.

About 7 years ago I signed up with a company and stupidly payed for 3 months in advance… They let me upgrade from monthly to 3 months, but their support went downhill during that quarter. I asked to switch back to monthly at the end of the contract and they refused – and said I had to stay quarterly.

So I left. Enough of that.

Do You Actually Give Back Credit For Downtime That Is Your [The Webhost's] Fault?

Shortly after having that “you can’t downgrade” host, I found a new one – who had a great sale going on for yearly contracts. Half off. I knew someone who had been with them and loved them and trusted them – so I gave it a shot (hey, $40 instead of $80 aint a bad deal). It was a big mistake. Their servers were down constantly – as in at least 10% of the day.

The funny thing is – when I signed up they had a customer guarantee in case of downtime. They prorated your next bill by the % of downtime.  Apparently they had a bunch of people ask for credit – because that clause was removed from their site shortly after my server issues started. I kept a copy of the Terms of Service (which is a contract, btw) from when I signed up and demanded a credit. They refused – so I switched hosts and ate the cost.

It wasn’t worth it to goto court over $40, I made much more than that in the same period of time.

Rumors has it a few months later a bigger host came along and bought them out, and fired their CEO and support managers. So they got what they had coming to them, anyway.

Conclusion

And there you have it. A few quick questions that any good webhost will have no problem answering. There’s probably a dozen or more that I could come up with – but these are a good starting point.

So what do you think? Can you think of any other good pre-sale questions? Leave a comment below!