Category: –

Time to change ISP

Last Thursday one of our servers, hosted with an ISP in the Bay Area, suddenly disappeared from the Internet.

Turns out we were among the many victims of the cable cuts down in San Jose, as we found out hours later.
I’m not happy with how our ISP handled this incident. It’s not just for the outage, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that shit simply happens and sometimes there’s not much you can do about it.
I could also probably live with the fact that nobody on my team was able to reach tech support on the phone for hours.
I could live with the fact that they were so badly effected, that even their websites and email services were down.
I could live with the fact that they didn’t put an alert in their voicemail message, the only form of contact from the company, describing what was happening.
I could live with the total lack of feedback on their twitter account.
I could also live with the fact that we only got a message from them after the network was back on line, nine hours later.
What I cannot live with is the fact that the in the post mortem message I received after the incident, the company CEO was blaming “vandals/terrorists” for what happened.
Using the “t word” as an excuse is simply ridiculous. Time to find a new ISP.

BlogLiguria – Il Secolo XIX

Last week we opened a new site based on PagesPlus: BlogLiguria.

The site is run by the staff of Il Secolo XIX, one of the most important Italian local newspapers very pupular in Genoa and the Liguria region. They are using our aggregator with a slightly different twist, letting anybody subscribe to the service and republishing automatically all subscribers’ posts, mixing them with content generated by the editorial staff and content gathered from public sources.

Il Secolo XIX-1.jpgA new PagesPlus feature which was introduced with this project is geotagging support: the aggregator is now able to decode the most used standards for geographical data tagging of contents, consequently next to the traditional “river of news” and “tag cloud” navigation, you can also browse the aggregator using a map.

Il Secolo XIX-2.jpg

Early adopters

Today I installed again PhotoShop on my MacBook Air (painfully going trough a reactivation process on the phone since I had forgotten deactivating it on the old MacBook).

Back in 1989, my father started importing in Italy a little boxy scanner for 35mm slides called Barney Scan. It was the first scanner to use fiber optics to backlight slides.
But by far the most interesting feature of this scanner was the software that came with it. It allowed to do some very cool effects using multiple channels, something I had never seen before and immediately fall in love with. 
That summer I was working with movie director Dante Majorana on the special effects of a movie titled “Orlando Sei“, and I remember flying back and forth to Rome taking with me the NuBus card of that scanner, without which the software would not work.
The same software was later licensed to Adobe, they renamed it PhotoShop and the rest is history.
Apparently only 200 Barney Scan scanners were sold.
Which means that I’m one of the first 200 PhotoShop users. 20 years ago. <sigh>

It’s spring

Our plum tree is the most optimistic tree of the garden: as soon as it starts getting a bit warmer, it explodes in a storm of blossom. Every morning we get this stunning view from our windows.

Then one day the Bora start blowing and all flowers fly away. It’s spring.

Next Saturday I’ll wake up in San Francisco.

Poets in the clouds

This morning I followed this fantastic document by Dave, and in less than 30 minutes I had my virtual server up and running in Amazon’s cloud.

Of course I knew it could be done, but I had never really found the time (and the courage) to try doing it until I got to this page which provides all answers in a simple step by step guide.
I think that the fact that a regular user can start his own server in the cloud has some of very relevant consequences.
I was exposed to the concept of “desktop web server” by Dave back in the Frontier and then Radio days. I have always thought that being able to run your own server on your own computer is a very powerful concept. 
Since back then “our own computer” was the personal computer we were working on, it made sense to run server software on it. Unfortunately a personal computer quite often is not the ideal environment to run server stuff which needs maintenance, support, backup, and all the stuff that system administrators do.
But now, everybody can own any number of virtual computers in the cloud and run all kind of services. Easy, cheap, powerful, safe and somebody else is making sure that all system work. Brilliant.
The other very interesting concept of this experiment is that I didn’t start just a random Windows server on EC2. I started Dave’s server, with the software and services that Dave had installed on them, and this, of course, can make software distribution and entirely different business.

Not enough air

For the last year I have been quite comfortable with my MacBook Pro + MacBook Air set-up. I would basically take the thin Air on the road and move the heavier Pro only when it was really needed. I tried to do my best to keep the Air “light” in every sense: running everything in a browser (no Office, no PhotoShop, no additional apps) and bought a very little bag for it (no big backpack and no external drives, adapters, headphones and other stuff). It has been a huge relief for my back and it works pretty well while on the road.

A couple of weeks ago, at the office we needed an additional MacBook Pro quickly, and I decided to give up mine: after all I thought I could live just with the Air.

I was wrong.

airCpu.pngThe MacBook Air is the perfect second computer: it’s light, thin, beautiful, but it hasn’t enough power to run modern (albeit bloated) applications. Even watching a video with a flash-based player, with only one browser open, after a while becomes too much for the little machine. 2Gb of Ram should be plenty, but today it means running Skype, a browser… and maybe another app before running out of memory, and since the HD is quite small and slow, on this machine you really want to avoid swapping at all costs. And I haven’t even tried to install PhotoShop.

Well… I guess it’s time to start thinking about my next “unibody” MacBook Pro :-)

Social Media Influence 09

Last Tuesday I joined Lee Bryant, Andy Hobsbawm and Robin Hamman on a panel titled “Enterprise 2.0” at the Social Media Influence conference in London.

It was very interesting going back to a conference in London almost five years after the Social Tools for the Enterprise Symposium.
Five years ago we believed that we were at the beginning of a major change in all dynamics of communication within companies and between companies and their clients. Well… it looks like today we still think that we are at the beginning of a major change in all dynamics of communication within companies and between companies and their clients.

P1030654

What did change in is that today a huge number of people is using social tools in their everyday life (quite often the very same people working in those same companies). Sooner or later companies will have to follow.
I guess that one of the main challenges companies face today is that they still consider communication with their clients an activity separated from the rest of their workflow, managed by those weirdos at the marketing division; expensive efforts structured in campaigns which last only few months, that must be creative and innovative, and bring sales in the very short term.
At the same time while the “rest of us”, on this side of that communication activity, might be more or less entertained and amused by these activities, what we really want is be able to communicate with simple and effective tools, allowing us to get in touch with real people inside organizations who can help us when we need them.
So while it is nice that agencies come up every day with innovative ways to exploit the fact that more and more people spend their time on social media sites, I guess that we should try harder to get companies to understand how to use these tools in the simplest way: to let people interact with other people.

The ultimate tool: email

A few years ago many of us declared email bankruptcy, we all had in-boxes full of all types of crap and it was almost impossible to find the few useful messages in the sea of spam.

Progressively we moved our communication to other channels: blogs, twitter, facebook, various IM clients, other social networks, where we thought we could manage our communication better.

In the last few weeks I have missed a whole bunch of important messages which arrived on these channels: as a Skype chat (but I was away from my desk and didn’t notice it for a few days), as a Twitter direct message (I don’t check them very often) as a message on Facebook (I check those even less).

Meanwhile, my mailbox has started working again. With several layer of spam protection (before reaching me any email message has to go trough Spam Assassin, Greylist, Gmail filters Mail.app spam filters) most of the stuff I get in my mailbox is actually interesting, directed to me, and something I can manage pretty well with the tools I have (MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, more Macs at home, iPhone, etc).

Curiously this morning Loïc is declaring Twitter bankrupcy.

PS: of course, as soon as I posted this, gmail died.

Faces

I’ve been playing a little with iPhoto 09 Faces feature. It took almost 3 hours for my home dual processor G5 to go trough 15000 pictures and find all faces, but then it only took it a few minutes to learn how I look like and find me in several hundred pictures.

Me, me, me, me, me....

I don’t know how algorithms used in iPhoto compare to the ones used by security systems to track people in surveillance feeds. If they are somehow similar, we are kinda safe: while iPhoto did find a lot of matches, it’s probably less than 10% of the actual number of pictures with my face in them. It will probably improve in time by leveraging a larger number of models, but it still require quite a few human work.

What the software is very good at doing is recognizing that some groups of pixels are actually human faces. I lile the way iPhoto comes up with facewalls of faces, all cropped at the same size.

Hard not to wonder when Google will start running this type of code on their picture search site. With just a little “mechanical turk” contribution the precision will be stunning, and we will have to kiss another piece of our privacy goodbye.

PS: David Orban notes that google does have some basic face tools.

Sub-zero routing

To host our servers (and our clients’ sites) we have always tried to get as much quality as possible, choosing the best facilities in Europe and the US.

But when it comes to our office connectivity, some time ago we decided to go for quantity over quality: at more or less the same price we could have had a super-safe 2mbps DSL connection, backed up on ISDN lines and with “serious” Cisco router, or a very fast 10mbps ADSL+ line, with a cheap leased router (the type that feels cheap and empty when you hold it, probably only because Cisco puts some useless iron as ballast in their boxes). We went for the fast line and we have been very happy with it for the last six months.

Until last week, when the little cheap router decided to forget its configuration and die. The ISP first blamed the DSL line, then (after waiting for 24 hours the visit of a Telecom Italia guy who said that the line was fine) offered to send us another router… in a few days.

Luckily we had a spare cheap router in the office which we plugged in to keep us afloat, we kept having problems, the router would restart every few minutes, making our life miserable.

So we borrowed another router from a local shop, a cool Linksys box, and I wasted 3 hours trying to set it up with the help of our ISP. No way. It would simply not work with our configuration (we have a bunch of IP addresses to host some dev servers).

Somebody suggested that the cheap self-restarting router could have had a heating issue, so last night I found some longer Ethernet cables and moved the router outside the server room window.

sub-zero

When this morning on the radio I heard that the temperature in Gorizia had fallen to -3C°, I thought that the little router should have been perfectly happy and pretty cool. But as soon as we started making IP traffic this morning, the line started dropping again.

Finally we borrowed yet another router, this time a Netgear, and in only 10 minutes we were up and running again.

No traces of the new router from the ISP yet.

Anathem

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s latest book, Anathem. I like Stephenson: Snowcrash and Diamon Age are classics and Cryptonomicon is one of my favourite novels ever. Things started to get a bit complicated with the Baroque Cicle, and Anathem is even more… uh…  intense.

Stephenson’s novels have a strange effect on the way I think. It’s not strictly related to the stories (actually in the first 140 pages of Anathem are more about setting the stage then telling a story), but they way arguments are treated is triggering all sorts of lateral thinking, in particular related to software architecture design. Don’t ask me why… it just happens. If you are developing software, you should give it a try.

Also the name of our company is related to a Stephenson’s book: I read a few times the term “vectors” (I think it was in Cryptonomicon) and back then every company had a “e-” in their name, hence: evectors.

Anathem is set in a different world, with a different history, different traditions and its own dictionary. Everything is different, yet everything sounds very familiar.

One of my favourite terms from “the dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000“, is:

Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early
Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp.
knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more
technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not
necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient
vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges
to create the impression that something has been said. (3) According to
the Knights of Saunt Halikaarn, a radical order of the 2nd Millennium
A.R., all speech and writings of the ancient Sphenics; the Mystagogues
of the Old Mathic Age; Praxic Age commercial and political
institutions; and, since the Reconstitution, anyone they deemed to have
been infected by Procian thinking. Their frequent and loud use of this
word to interrupt lectures, dialogs, private conversations, etc.,
exacerbated the divide between Procian and Halikaarnian orders that
characterized the mathic world in the years leading up to the Third
Sack. Shortly before the Third Sack, all of the Knights of Saunt
Halikaarn were Thrown Back, so little more is known about them (their
frequent appearance in Sæcular entertainments results from confusion
between them and the Incanters).

Back to blogging

Scoble writes:

When I go back and look at my blog back in 2004, for instance, it looks a whole lot like Twitter. Short item with a link.

It’s true for me as well, looking at my first posts, most of them were one sentence, pretty much what we do today with twitter. Back then posts had no titles and were organized by days.

This was what Radio UserLand was offering, this was the way Dave was blogging, and we were all following. Now, almost 7 years later, I spent the last 2 weeks in the Bay Area meeting old friends, some of the smartest people I know, and maybe not surprisingly quite a few of them were Radio users in those early days.

While it is true that microblogging has found other tools and spaces, I am realizing that I’m missing a space for longer posts, that take a little more thinking (but that require more time to write). Even if I am not been writing on this blog for a while, I still compose posts all the time in my mind, so I guess the time is right to try to get back to blogging.

Thanks to one of the 25 nicest people of the web ;->

On my way back

I’m at the airport, too early as usual, on my way back from Reboot10.

It’s almost trite, but it’s worth repeating: Reboot is fantastic experience. It’s not only the great talks (unfortunately some work related issues forced me to sit in a corner of the public spaces if not in my hotel room for quite some time and I have lost some very interesting ones), most of all it’s the people.

This conference attracts a crowd with an incredible percentage of very, very smart people. It’s exciting and humbling, a great experience. It’s definitely the best event of the year.

The list of interesting people I met is just too long to report (I would forget too many names), and the best part is that it’s not only the usual suspects, I have met for the first time a whole bunch of persons that I’m really looking forward to meet again.

Thanks everybody for these extraordinary days.

Reeplay.it

Reeplay.it is a company I have been working with for a while, we presented the concept last year at Le Web 3.0, and finally last week we opened to the general public: now everybody can subscribe and use it.

Here’s a short introductory video:

The basic idea is simple: bookmark your favorite videos and play them back on any device. We’ll take care of storing, transcoding, distributing, sharing, etc.
 
There’s a ton of additional features in the pipeline, but feature-wise I think we have reached critical mass: it’s useful enough to get the first users on board and start collecting feedback.

Hello World

Welcome to this new blog.

All my old stuff has been saved and it continues to be available at the old urls (well… at least this is what I’m trying to do).

But from this post on I’m continuing with a new tool, a new template and hopefully some new ideas.

I wonder if there’s still anybody out there.

:-)