Barry is blogging some of our experiences with bringing online another DC. The search for another solid infrastructure partner has been very educational and made me appreciate how good LayeredTech actually is.
Category Archives: Personal
Sun Followup
In the past few days since I wrote the post on my experience with Sun there has been a lot of interesting discussion spawned, and as much about Jonathan Schwartz’s response as my post. Mr Schwartz rightly got a ton of kudos in the blogosphere for his honest and personable response. Two others shared their experience trying to get boxes from Sun: Alex Muse applied for a different program and was rejected, but it sounds like he got pretty prompt responses on everything; Stephen O’Grady had no problem getting in Startup Essentials, but had a fairly bad experience with their store and suggests that they outsource that functionality to Ebay or Amazon. (I’m fairly surprised I didn’t hear from anyone else in the SE program.) François Schiettecatte shared a story from his experience at Sun while at Feedster, and why they made the decision they did for their systems.
The entry also drew in some interesting comments some of which seemed to conflate the issue I was talking about, namely the disconnect between the promises and follow-up in the Startup Essentials program, and questions of Sun’s financials, direction, technology, and more. To clarify, I have no opinion on the business side of Sun beyond what I’ve dealt with directly, and on the technical side they seem to be kicking butt lately and tackling truly hard problems. Their evangelism of such is the whole reason why I gave my info to the SE program in the first place. (Plus the overwhelmingly positive in-person interaction I’ve had with folks that work at Sun and at Startup Camp.) Their marketing is great — it created the desire — just the fulfillment was frustrating.
At one point in the Scoble interview Jonathan Schwartz says something to the effect of their startup program targets folks with more time than money, where their enterprise customers usually value time over money. I think this might represent a fundamental misunderstanding. While I think this argument could be made for the motivation of some segment of Open Source communities, the situation in startups is even worse — time and money are both scarce.
Where does that leave Automattic now? We just brought 20 new HP/Debian boxes online. David Comay followed up his comment with an email requesting to get together, and since he’s a kernel hacker and not a sales guy I’m very open to that. Likewise with Jeff Barr from Amazon, though their web services are so beautifully self-service I wonder what we’ll chat about. Another chance for Sun? Time will tell. For us it’s a pragmatic issue, not a religious one. If nothing else, I’m hopeful that the discussions spawned will help put Sun’s nascent startup efforts back on track.
Star Wars 2.0
Wii Tennis
We’ve been taking breaks at night here in La Paz by playing a bit of Wii Tennis, which is one of the best multiplayer games ever. Barry decided to organize a double-elimination tournament where everyone had to link to the winner. That ended up being me and so they’ve requested this post so they can properly pingback their entries to this one.
MT MySQL Grid
Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID. “A number of these users came running to (mt) Media Temple with the promise that their applications, despite all of their deficiencies, would be accepted and not turned off. These users are radically different, by orders of magnitude, from anything we had previously analyzed or benchmarked.”
Bikeshed
Is it important, or is it the color of the bikeshed?
Twenty-three
Another day, another year! One step at a time, I seem to have found myself another year older. 2006 was a great, I’m just amazed at how quickly it went by. Time flies when you’re having fun. 🙂 Previously: 22, 21, 20, 19. (Have I really been blogging that long?)
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.
In defense of simplicity
Disconnect
One thing I’ve found in the past year is there is sometimes a huge disconnect between people who make noise on blogs, or might have impressive blogs themselves, and productivity in the real world. It’s unfortunate, because it makes it that much harder to find good folks.
Net Income Show
Tomorrow I’m going to be on the web radio show Net Income. That entry mentions my Wikipedia page, which oh-my-goodness has an awful picture.
From Within
Michel Camilo & Tomatito – From Within, from a fantastic CD given to me by Luis Rull when I was in Spain. It starts off slow and then becomes really intense, a beautiful song.
Static File Web Server
Philip Greenspun asks What’s the best web server program for a lot of static files?
ALA Style Guide
The A List Apart Style Guide is fantastic, a nice concise refresher for anyone who writes to be read.
Dojo Offline Toolkit
Resolution Recap
Like Tantek, I found I didn’t seem to make any public resolutions in 2006, so because of my awful memory I don’t have any idea what I hoped to accomplish last year. Anyway I thought it would be interesting to make a progress report on the resolutions I made two years ago.
- Build up piano chops — This pretty much tanked. I got an upright piano for my living room and started taking piano lessons from someone I found on Craig’s List. However right before I left CNET I got this awful pain in my hand, particularly my thumb, that was pretty crippling and I ended up with my left hand in a cast for a bit. The only thing that had changed in my routine was that I was practicing a lot of piano at the time (probably too much) and the doctor recommended I stop. I lost touch with my teacher, and basically haven’t done much with it since. Mainly I use the piano these days to keep my ear up by transcribing parts of music I enjoy. (Did you know Timberlake’s Lovestoned is all pentatonic?)
- Read more — I’ve done pretty well on this one, mostly thanks to travelling about 20x more than I used to. I’m a little bit addicted to computers, so I rarely read at home, but when forced offline I tend to tear through books. I usually carry a book in my bag to grab moments for cafes/parks, which doesn’t happen very often, but is worth having the book for the once every month or so it does.
- Release more — This has been yes and no. WordPress.com is the epitome of release more, with pushes sometimes dozens of times a day, but the space between WordPress 2.0 and 2.1 is way, way too long. (2.0 is over 1.5 million downloads now.) We’re trying an experiment after 2.1 to encourage more frequent release, since the codebase is pretty much “stable” all the time since it runs live on WP.com. I’ve heard about book writers who have to stop blogging to work on their book, so similarly maybe I should take a break to get some of my unreleased software out the door. On the bright side, I feel like everything currently released, from bbPress to Akismet, is getting all the tender loving care it needs, so nothing is really neglected. (Which is a bad feeling.)
- No more mental roadblocks — This is a little ambiguous. I still procrastinate sometimes. I think what I was referring to was assuming certain resources were needed before doing something and a fear of failure. One thing I’ve certainly learned in the two years since making that resolution is that there is no causation between resources, especially money, and success. I really believe with committment and elbow grease, you can make almost anything happen.
Now to start thinking about resolutions for 2007, hopefully things a little more measurable.
John Mayer
John Mayer’s blog is good, but someone tell his personal ninja to hook him up with permalinks.
2006 Predictions
Thomas Hawk takes a look at all the predictions people made for 2006 and how right or wrong they were. I don’t know why, but I love prediction posts because they get people’s imaginations going.
Focusing on Market Share
IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE — “[A] study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.”
Performancing and PayPerPost
PayPerPost, a company I still consider highly distasteful (when you’re forced to change a core aspect of your business because of the FTC, that’s a bad thing) has bought Performancing Metrics. On the bright side, Performancing’s ad and Firefox products were not part of the deal.