Network Solutions sucks ballz

February 21, 2008 – 2:28 am

My habit of using Network Solutions to check the availability of domain names then jumping over to GoDaddy to buy them will have to stop. Whenever I get an idea for a site I brainstorm a bunch of domain names by checking availability/similar names through Network Solutions because, despite their outrageous prices, they have the best interface for doing so.

However for the second post in a row I must declare shenanigans.

The other day it was Mosso’s ‘new’ hosting service that was really their old service downgraded and repackaged. Today it’s Network Solutions new practice of holding any domain you search for through their system ransom for five days. “Front Running” (registering a domain someone is searching for) is one of the dirtiest tricks on the intertubes. I wouldn’t be half as pissed if Network Solutions didn’t charge more than three times what GoDaddy does. If NS had lowered there prices instead of implementing this system I might have switched because as I mentioned they have a better interface than other registrars, now I’ll never use them.

See for yourself do a whois on networksolutionssucksballz.com and you’ll see it’s held for five days and can only be bought through NS.

Apparently it’s been going on for about a month now and the natives aren’t too happy about it.

Domain Registrar Network Solutions Front Running On Whois Searches
Network Solutions Holding Domain Names Ransom
Network Solutions PR Damage Control

Shenanigans!

[UPDATE] A safe way to lookup domains http://support.suso.org/dns/saferdomainlookup.php

By Alastair | Posted in Misc. | Comments (2)

Mosso offers ‘new’ cloud hosting

February 19, 2008 – 9:01 am

I got all excited this morning reading TechCrunch with their post about Rackspace Offerering Cloud Computing with Mosso. Once I clicked through to investigate further it seems the ‘new’ cloud hosting is just their old hosting plan with 30GB of storage slashed off (down to 50GB) so they can charge you 0.50/GB a month for any overage.

It’s the deal of the century!? a bonus $15/month to get back to their old limit of 80GB. Still no shell access, and still $25-85/month per Rails site.

I had high hopes for Mosso and Rails but after trying them I felt I was being nickeled and dimed, the lack of SSH didn’t bother me as they’re good about installing stuff for you, the kicker was $20/month if you wanted to add SSL. I also didn’t see marked speed improvements over shared (or grid) hosts like Media Temple (who host this blog, but not on the grid on a VPS).

All my Rails sites continue to be hosted on SliceHost, actually my secret recipe is a combo of Media Temple for email, FTP, and static stuff then either DNS trickery or .htaccess rewrites to apps on SliceHost. The best of both worlds.

Anyway I call shenanigans on Mosso.

By Alastair | Posted in Media Temple, Mosso, Ruby on Rails, SliceHost | Comments (3)

Interesting Links: Rails and BlazeDS, Yahoo! map components for AS3

February 11, 2008 – 8:09 am

Derek shows how to push AMF encoded messages from the server with Rails through BlazeDS.

Ted introduces the Yahoo! map components for AS3.

Combine the two and you could build a Flex/Rails app that tracks someone’s position in real time.

By Alastair | Posted in ActionScript, BlazeDS, Flash Remoting, Flex, Ruby on Rails | Comments (0)

Looking for Flex work in SoCal?

February 8, 2008 – 9:00 am

FarHeap hosted the Orange County Flex user group meeting last night and they’re looking for four full-time Flex developers.

By Alastair | Posted in Flex | Comments (3)

Blogging for Dollars

February 6, 2008 – 2:27 pm

Entrepreneur magazine has an interesting article on John Chow who has a blog on making money with a blog, whatever he’s doing must be working as he makes $25,000 a month!

Chow has also assembled his income-earning techniques into a 59-page web book downloadable at johnchow.com. Make Money Online is free, but it still makes money for Chow, thanks to its active web links that drive traffic to his site. It’s not a bad read, either; even if you don’t make blogging your career, there’s plenty there to help monetize your business blog.

I downloaded the booklet and it’s a mix of useful links and Tony Robbinsesque passages like the following.

Everyone has dreams and goals. The only difference between a goal and a dream is a goal is a
dream with action. We all have dreams; becoming financially independent, having a family,
helping charities, etc. However, how many of you have made a goal to achieve your dreams? If
you have, did you place a time limit on it, or did you just say “I’ll do it someday” or “I hope it
will happen”.

That reminds me of when I used to go every second weekend to stay at my Dad’s place in Richmond, BC (home of John Chow) and my Step-Mother would have my brother and I write down our long and short term goals, which is noteworthy only in the fact that we were three and six years old at the time.

Anyways I just implemented John’s tip about being more personal, in future posts I’ll delve into my brief addiction to Children’s Tylenol and why I have to sit down to pee.

I want my two dollars.

By Alastair | Posted in Misc. | Comments (1)

Adobe Compares Flex and Ajax

February 6, 2008 – 9:12 am

The comparison is coming from one of the horses mouths so take it with a grain a salt. That said I think Adobe tried not to step on some Ajax toes and didn’t make a strong enough case for Flex.

It’s a good basic overview but there are a couple of things I disagree with;

Why use ColdFusion for all the examples? A shrinking minority still use it but all the ColdFusion guys I know switched to either PHP or Rails over the last two years. I think it’s best to use PHP for comparisons like this as everyone has used it and can easily translate PHP to their favorite language.

Even though Adobe won’t admit it the reason they’re doing the comparison is to show off that Flex does Ajax like things. At the end of the article they break down the pros and cons of each, and if I were an Ajax developer I’m not sure I would be convinced to try Flex. Their pros for Flex are that it’s easier to develop with because of an IDE, which is true but there are Ajax IDEs now (which the author mentions later), the other is performance which ends up a tie because Ajax in a browser can handle large amounts of text better.

If I were writing it my pro Flex arguments would have included;

Consistent results No matter your browser Flash is Flash so Flex is Flex. Except for extremely rare circumstances your app is going to behave as expected.

Class Mapping Flash Remoting can map server side classes. Objects don’t need to be converted into XML first to go over the wire and they arrive as native objects ready to use (no need to parse and convert them back again).

Not only Remoting If you do want to consume XML Flex can do that too, or JSON, or REST services etc. If you already have some kind of service set up Flex could slide in and replace Ajax so you could make use of it’s…

Advanced Multimedia Features Video, Audio, and Vector Animation are things you just cant do with JavaScript, it’s the way content on the Intertubes are moving and a big reason to use Flex.

My pro Ajax arguments would include;

Frameworks The sheer number of Ajax frameworks dwarfs anything Flex has right now.

User Base The Flex community is growing but the JavaScript community is huge, you’re much more likely to find help getting started or solving a problem with Ajax.

By Alastair | Posted in Ajax, Flash Remoting, Flex, RIA | Comments (1)

Vote!

February 5, 2008 – 12:26 am

The choice is yours, but if you’re on the fence that Obama fellow seems alright.

Why? Scarlett likes him…

Scarlett Johansson

So does Bobby…

Deniro Taxi Driver

OK seriously, Why Obama Matters.

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

He’s the best for our industry (see Net Neutrality) …

He is staunchly in favor of net neutrality, and has promised to make it a priority to reinstate it in his first year in office. He has proposed intelligent programs for increasing technology education and access to children. He doesn’t believe the FCC went far enough in their proposed rules for opening up the 700MHz spectrum auctions. He wants to see increases in the number of H1-B visas given out each year. He strongly supports research into renewable energy sources and he has a realistic, market based approach to capping carbon emissions.

By Alastair | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

LiteSpeed adds a Rails staging environment

February 4, 2008 – 11:54 pm

Via Dark as Light, the easy way to deploy Rails adds a staging environment.

Here are the LiteSpeed update instructions:

1. Click ‘update’ in the LiteSpeed administration console
2. There is no step 2
3. see #2

Why more people don’t use LiteSpeed is beyond me. Hosting a Rails app takes only a couple more steps with no mongrel_clusters or load balancing shenanigans.

By Alastair | Posted in LiteSpeed, Mongrel, Ruby on Rails | Comments (1)

Zazzle cancels my order

February 4, 2008 – 6:40 pm

I thought I might be able to sneak this design through but no luck as it uses the Firefox logo. Too bad it would have made a pretty sweet shirt.

USSR Shirt

It’s derivative of the old USSR Coat of Arms for those of you born in the late eighties.

By Alastair | Posted in Misc. | Comments (0)

Flex, Flash, and Ruby hourly billing rates

February 2, 2008 – 2:27 pm

HotGigs has a feature where they collect and aggregate the hourly bill rates of the consultants on their site. Here are the average hourly bill rates for Flex, Flash, and Ruby, surprisingly they have sub-categories for Flash all the way down to Flash Remoting but there’s just one category for Ruby with no Rails sub-category.

For the Rails rate I’d guess that Rails is to Ruby as Flex is to ActionScript. I threw PHP in there as well to mix it up.

ActionScript hourly bill rates
ActionScript bill rate (low): $50.00
ActionScript bill rate (high): $75.00
ActionScript pay rate (low): $32.50
ActionScript pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Adobe Flex hourly bill rates
Adobe Flex bill rate (low): $75.00
Adobe Flex bill rate (high): $125.00
Adobe Flex pay rate (low): $48.75
Adobe Flex pay rate (high): $81.25
Average hourly bill rate: $100.00

Flash hourly bill rates
Flash bill rate (low): $50.00
Flash bill rate (high): $75.00
Flash pay rate (low): $32.50
Flash pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Flash Design (no full data but this was the average)
Average hourly bill rate: $50

Flash Remoting hourly bill rates
Flash Remoting bill rate (low): $60.00
Flash Remoting bill rate (high): $80.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (low): $39.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (high): $52.00
Average hourly bill rate: $70.00

Ruby hourly bill rates
Ruby bill rate (low): $75.00
Ruby bill rate (high): $95.00
Ruby pay rate (low): $48.75
Ruby pay rate (high): $61.75
Average hourly bill rate: $85.00

PHP hourly bill rates
PHP bill rate (low): $70.00
PHP bill rate (high): $90.00
PHP pay rate (low): $45.50
PHP pay rate (high): $58.50
Average hourly bill rate: $80.00

Flex had an average hourly bill rate of $70 a couple of months ago so it’s on the move (what recession?), if you’re an ActionScript Developer still doing Flash work get on the Flex train and raise those rates!

The rates seem about right to me (actually remoting seems low), what do you think?

By Alastair | Posted in ActionScript, Flash, Flash Remoting, Flex, PHP, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | Comments (2)