While I think this story has wide appeal, a working knowledge of the Sherlock stories and an appreciation of their themes, devices, and the character of Sherlock will allow the reader to absorb additional context and deepen their appreciation of this modern remix married to a classic gaslight mystery. It read like a mashup of a classic Holmes tale an Dan Brown novel.

Reading medium: Kindle
Rating: Enjoyed
My categorization: Historical Mystery/Modern Mashup

The only other fault I had with the book was too much “telling” of the emotions and feelings of others through the main character. It started to feel as though they were projecting and, frankly, being petty. But this wasn’t enough to tear me out of the flow of the story and may have simply been an accurate portrayal of the character’s thought process.

Reading medium: Kindle
Rating: Enjoyed
My categorization: Historical Mystery

Hover has extremely simple offerings, and an equally simple (but easy to use) control panel. They don’t pass the All Under One Roof test (they don’t offer SSL certificates, which isn’t too big of a deal), but they do what they do well. I would definitely recommend them to anyone looking for a domain registrar.

1. Yes, that is an affiliate link. ⏎

No mat­ter how you explain the world around you, your expla­na­tion is the nucleus and ker­nel of how you explain your­self.

It’s also very ugly, using some kind of horrible Java swing UI framework, but with features like these, I couldn’t care less.

It really is ugly. But he’s right, it sports some amazing features that Xcode could use.

QuickPick is being kicked out of the App Store.
It doesn’t matter that QuickPick existed years before Launchpad.
Rejected.
Period.

This is upsetting.

While I personally don’t like it, I can understand Apple’s stance on rejecting applications that too closely mirror built-in functionality. But to approve an app and then pull it later is ludicrous. It doesn’t help the fact that the MAS opened just a short while ago. If they wanted to reject it, they should have done so then.

I feel that, while far from optimal, rejecting applications at the time of submission is far more acceptable than removing them after the fact. If Apple wants to Sherlock someone, fine. But at least let them continue to sell their product to those who find the built-in functionality less satisfying.

It’s no secret that the Mac App Store is a terrific new distribution channel for developers. Apple also provides plenty of documentation on how to prepare your app for submission.

Unfortunately, there’s not much information on how to create a product that can also be distributed through more traditional channels, such as your own product website. This guide will help you update your Xcode projects to make it as simple as possible to create products for both channels simultaneously.

He always offers sound advice.

Now, I realize that to have already written almost 600 words may seem like a lot to simply describe the awkwardness of trying to keep a podcast up to date. But: (a) I think we’ve all figured out by now that I have an affinity for writing about these types of things in detail; and (b) I’m trying to paint a picture for why I hardly ever listened to podcasts — up until a few weeks ago there was just no simple way to keep up with them.

Shawn gives a great review of Instacast, an iOS app that has greatly improved my podcast consumption in nearly every way. It has completely replaced iTunes’ podcast functionality for me. Finding and subscribing to the shows I enjoy is delightfully easy and the ability to keep up-to-date and download new content without having to sync has reignited my love for a good podcast. My backlog had grown to nearly a month of playtime in untouched shows. Now I’ve declared Podcast Bankruptcy and enjoy new content on a daily basis.

I should also plug a few of the great shows I enjoy:

• 5by5 — All of Dan Benjamin & Co.’s broadcasts.
• Core Intuition — Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece’s Mac Development podcast.
• iDeveloper Live — Scotty’s reincarnation of the MDN Show.
• The B&B Podcast — A tech show hosted by Ben Brooks and Shawn himself.

Trion Worlds, with the rest of the world, has been following the unprecedented events in Japan. We hope that you and your family are safe and well. We understand that, at this time, you may have more immediate priorities than playing RIFT, so we have credited your Trion Worlds account with an additional thirty (30) days of RIFT game time.

Trion Worlds sends the message that a company can still be human.

Pause while you read up…
Alright! Welcome back.

At the end of their post, they provide a downloadable Java application that they built to perform the test. It queries for the DNS for the top 1000 Alexa sites worldwide via Google’s DNS, OpenDNS, and whatever local DNS you specify. It runs the test three times.

Here are my results from just outside New York City using Optimum Online:

Test 1: Google
45164 ms for 1000 records
Test 2: Google
40363 ms for 1000 records
Test 3: Google
35965 ms for 1000 records
Test 1: OpenDNS
98885 ms for 1000 records
Test 2: OpenDNS
26778 ms for 1000 records
Test 3: OpenDNS
17898 ms for 1000 records
Test 1: Your DNS
79021 ms for 1000 records
Test 2: Your DNS
71502 ms for 1000 records
Test 3: Your DNS
58576 ms for 1000 records

Now right off the bat, I see the Google isn’t at impressive as I thought it would be. That said, my Google results are still about twice as fast as BrowserMob’s. OpenDNS once again had the slowest response of all with their first test, but quickly made a comeback. In fact, in terms of the fastest results OpenDNS takes the cake. Looking on, I think the most important piece of information lies in the Optimum Online results. They were slower than Google every time, and much slower than OpenDNS with the rather obvious exception.

BrowserMob came to the conclusion that while OpenDNS provides nice features, and Google claims to be cutting down on DNS query times, their local ISP was still the best option. This was true in their case, but very wrong in mine. Logically, it takes less network hops to get to my own ISP’s servers than either Google or OpenDNS. So why so slow? I really couldn’t tell you, but looking over the comments on BrowserMob’s blog there’s a good mix of results like theirs and results similar to my own.

I think that when choosing which DNS service to use (something that most computer users will never even think about) a test like this proves beneficial. You can’t just make a broad statement that Google is better due to their web presence or that OpenDNS is better due to their experience in the field (though they do have nice features that Google doesn’t yet). Some will find that their tried-and-true provider’s DNS may be best. For me, I don’t know which I’ll stick with yet. I don’t use very many of OpenDNS’ features but their horrific first test and Google’s slower average leaves some food for thought.

Aside from cost, performance was the most important criteria for me when selecting a provider for was it up?. 5 different benchmarks were carried out every 3 hours over a week, leading to 56 runs each. The slowest system used up to 3 hours to complete all 5 benchmarks. Weeklong benchmarking was used to account for variance in host load during the day/night and week. I speculated that the host systems could be more utilizied on weekdays when people in the US were awake (all providers under test were US based). At the end of this article you’ll find a table summarizing the averages and standard deviations of the 5 benchmarks on all providers.

In the end, Linode won out with both their 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Much more in-depth performance reports that nicely support my previous VPS comparison.

A while back on the macsb mailing list there was some discussion about hosting and which VPS provider was the best for a developer’s typical needs. The two competitors that rose out of the discussion were Linode and Slicehost. I’ve used both and decided it would be good of me to post a more comprehensive guide, this is the result.

In essence, the difference between these two companies is their feel.

If you like to tinker, Linode gives you everything you need. If you rather a defined, slick experience, Slicehost is for you.

Location

Server location doesn’t matter as much as it used to, at least when you’re discussing US-based traffic. So while this is a largely unnecessary area of their services, it does matter to some and for that reason I’ve included it.

From what I saw, Slicehost provides no way to choose where your Slice (that is, the VPS) is provisioned. Linode, on the other hand, let’s you choose when first setting up the Node (that’s what Linode calls them). Linode also lists their current availability on their website.

Both companies will move your VPS via a support request.

Distributions

Almost all VPS hosts provide a variety of Linux distributions to choose from, it’s just a matter of selection.

Slicehost now offers RedHat EL (currently 5.3) for a monthly charge. This is a huge step-up over Linode for users who require RH Enterprise Support.

Linode also allows you to (somewhat) easily install any custom system, that is really powerful.

[Addendum] – Something I forgot to put in here, but I noticed when Slicehost announced it. Both providers offer kernel select from within their respective managers.

32 or 64-bit? Does it matter?

On the same track as distributions, I should point out that Linode offers both i386 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) versions of their distributions while Slicehost only offers the latter. This doesn’t make much of a difference, but on a smaller VPS setup (with less RAM), it could be an issue. For the fully skinny on how this might affect you, check out this awesome article by David Welton.

Bandwidth, IP addresses, and High-Availability

Bandwidth obviously varies by pricing plan, which will be looked at later. But generally speaking, when comparing Slicehost and Linode plans side-by-side, Linode offers more bandwidth of Slicehost at equivalent pricing tiers.

Both Linode and Slicehost give 1 dedicated IP address for each VPS, with more purchasable. (You must provide proper justification when applicable.)

Both parties offer private IP addresses for unmetered bandwidth (in the same data-center). Linode offers this immediately upon setting up your Node, Slicehost will accommodate you receiving a support request.

Both companies offer in-depth guides to achieving high-availability / IP-failover.

Want to grow?

Growth typically leads to one of two desires when dealing with a VPS. Either make more of them or make it bigger.

Both providers offer a service where you just “click a button” and their systems will take your VPS down, make a larger one, and copy it over in the same exact state. You simply have to pay the higher price.

Both services providers allow you to “clone” existing systems to create additional copies.

Mission Control

Linode has a rather advanced control panel compared to Slicehost’s SliceManager. It just comes down to how fine-tuned you want your setup to be.

With Slicehost, you are given a premade box with a swap, a disk (based on plan), and the OS installed and setup.

Linode takes a more technical approach. While they do provide a wizard that will automate the deployment process, you actually can make multiple boot profiles, and cut up and setup your disk space into however many images you like. This can be quite powerful and even allows you to install a custom OS if you want to get your hands dirty.

Lish

Linode also offers another method on control.

Lish is a shell that you can SSH into that gives you complete control over your server. It’s primary tool is to give you console access to your node (rather than an Ajax page)… but you can do much, much more. It can essentially give you all the essential tools that you normally have to go to the web panel for, in one concise tool.

To really realize how handy this is, you should just view the documentation.

Rescue 911!

We’ve all reached that point where we realize we shouldn’t have entered that command, or changed that network configuration, or done whatever it was that crashed your box. The point is, it happens. Being able to recover from such a situation is what matters.

Linode has this nice little shutdown “watchdog” named Lassie (Linode Autonomous System Shutdown Intelligent rEbooter) who will automatically reboot your server if it died unexpectedly (that is, you don’t set a proper shutdown via Lish or the control panel). This could make or break your day (or night) while you’re away from your computer.

Both companies offer recovery consoles to allow you to control the server directly in case of emergency.

Price point

For some people, it really comes down to this… a pricing comparison. I should point out that Linode has many more pricing tiers, but Slicehost has larger options.

As you can see, Linode typically gives you more for your money - though I am unable to gain concrete information regarding their private “high-end” dealings.

And finally…

The Community.

Both companies having thriving communities surrounding them, though Linode is generally less mainstream and therefore less known.

Slicehost has a nice-sized IRC channel as well as a Campfire chat room. You can hear people discussing Slicehost on Twitter often enough and many well known services run off Slicehost.

Linode is more tight-knit in my experience. They have an IRC channel hosted on OFTC which is lively throughout the day. There are a lot of regulars there that will help anyone who has a problem, or just geek out with you.

In Summary

It all comes back to the feel. Linode can offer you more if you like to pull the levers and push the buttons, but Slicehost will offer you a more controlled experience, which is quite enjoyable. In the end, I’d say it’s mostly a matter of preference.

The one-line summary: push into a remote repository that has a detached work tree, and a post-receive hook that runs git checkout -f.

Great how-to for putting a website under the control of git and avoiding some of the issues that can pop up when using git pull from your server is not an option.