Lost!

Alfresco CEO, John Powell, just announced that they are having DNS type issues due to their Domain Registrar, 123-reg.

Anyone attempting to visit the site needs to use the following directions sent out by Powell:

To access the web sites, please use the following URLs:

* www.alfresco.com - please use http://88.208.218.102/
* customers.alfresco.com and partners.alfresco.com - please use http://88.208.200.70/alfresco/
* forums.alfresco.com - please use http://217.174.252.22/

If you want to reach anyone in Alfresco by email, you can do so by using [email address]@alfresco.org instead of [email address]@alfresco.com.

This is hot on the heals of a news report saying, quote, “UK domain registrar 123-Reg crashes and burns, taking its customers with it”. CNet UK even mentions Alfresco in that blog posting. Basically, some are saying it’s a DOS attack while others are guessing it’s 123-reg’s screw up.

While Amazon S3 is making headlines, they have an internal service called Dynamo to run their SQL farm. It’s true that S3 can be utilized as an SQL server, it’s not as reliable as it should be for most web applications. It has issues with data sets not being updated in a Write before Read situation.

For instance: If you have a form and a user updates their data, when the form is submitted and the data is queried again to show them what is listed, your data may or may not be Continue reading…

While it wasn’t surprising to learn that someone hacked an application using the OpenSocial framework, it was surprising to learn that it had happened again, by the same individual that did it the first time. On top of this craziness, it seems that this “hacker” is a novice. While we all know it was hacked and the larger blogs are complaining and talking about it, there is another issue.

What the real question here is, should one framework rule them all? With Google spending time on other projects and releasing this one very quickly, why should OpenSocial be blindly used by companies, especially when it seems to be prone to security issues?

Some may cry fowl at this news, however, that the applications are insecure and it’s not OpenSocial’s fault. Truth be told, I’m pretty much one of those types of people, but I also blame Google on this aspect. It was released too quickly and no one really had a chance to learn about it.

This is really like a new car - you don’t go out and buy the first year of any model unless you’re ready for headaches. Same goes for software, web or not. Unless you’re willing to handle the issues that come about, don’t install it.

For any web developers that are hurting from this issue, I do not feel sorry for you one bit. You should know better than to release half-assed, bug riddled…crap.

If you’re viewing through RSS, you might want to click on this story. I’ve updated Lost to include a new Web 2.0 comment system so that you can register in one place and comment anywhere it’s installed. It’s a new system called Intense Debate. On top of the 1 registration to control them all feature, there are several others as well. Your profile allows you to show several other profiles (Facebook, MySpace, etc), has a comment rating system built in (reputation/comment vote), an RSS feed for your comments and a heck of a lot more.

At this time, Intense Debate natively supports several blogging systems and several others through a javascript snippet. If you’re running WordPress from your own site, it’s the same as the WordPress.org button, otherwise you’ll have to manually place your javascript snippet instead of installing a plugin - not fun. For native support, you insert your blog details and it gives you a file to download. For WP, it was one PHP file that installed as a normal plugin. After that, I had to go to my blog options, hit Import and let it run for a few minutes. While it was running, their system started emailing me on comments that needed to be moderated - odd because it marked all my comments for moderation even though it wasn’t supposed to.

While installing and such, their site was a tad slow. From what I’m seeing in my mailbox, they’re getting hit with people installing the service, so things should start to pick up soon.

Registration is pretty easy if you’re just registering for a profile. Other than that, it’s the standard test and retest of getting your old comments exported and tweaking the system to do what you want.

Anyway, you can see the newer comment list on the sidebar and the newer comment section below. I’m sure it’ll update over the next few days since it’s listed as “Beta-ish”.

Problems that I see right now:

• No incoming link tracking (Trackbacks). The amount of comments that didn’t show up at first worried me until I found out it was all Trackbacks.
• The ability to limit the last X posts in the sidebar. Right now it’s 10 comments and wowzers, if they don’t change it, I may need to pull the widget or change themes to a double sidebar.
• UI Issues with text over an image.

I use to pride myself on being up to date, but lately, I’ve started noticing more and more that I don’t really “surf” anymore. I tend to stay on specific sites or inside my RSS feeds. Well, today, I learned about PlentyOfFish.com. For those that don’t know, it’s a free dating site. Whats interesting is that the site creator was pretty much the single employee, single coder, single everything until very recently when he hired his second employee. It gets really interesting to know how he started the site.

Markus Frind (Blog) started out in the Web bubble bust by deciding to switch from ASP to ASP.Net while hopping jobs during the downturn of the bubble. He would code in the evening since he’s more of a “learn as I go” programmer (like myself) and started hosting from his home computer and internet connection. After he saturated his DSL line, he decided to upgrade and thats the crazy part. Around this time, AdSense rolled out and he started making a few thousand dollars a month. Today, he’s making around $30,000 a day in Ad revenue from Google’s AdSense. Continue reading…