The most interesting technical aspect of the project was creating a high level overview of all the empty equipment in the system. Our developers used Google maps to create an easy to use interface for finding and selecting containers.

We asked Andy Park, the lead front-end developer for the project to talk about Google maps and the Capacity Connection project. Here he is in his ArcStone Tech Talk debut…

The snippets of wisdom in the picture are from the swag bag handed out at the 99% Conference Lisa and I attended in NYC last week. The conference is all about how to make ideas happen in the real world, setting goals and achieving them. The name “99 %” (which now has a bit of a branding problem) is based on the famous Edison quote, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99 % perspiration.” We had a great time and were inspired by the speakers telling us about their successes and failures.

Here are three of my favorite pearls of wisdom…

1.  Alexis Ohanian – co-founder of Reddit

“No one wants to to use your site. (Except maybe your mom.)”

If you are building a web application, you have to earn every user. You have to design it “like you give a damn.”  Think of a chef who makes food but doesn’t taste it as he goes. Do you think it will be any good? How is he going to know if it has too much salt, unless he tries it?  If you aren’t using your web application, is it reasonable to think others will? Use it, every day. If you’re not, try the following exercise to determine what you should be doing.

2. Jason Goldberg – CEO Fab.com

This is not a quote, but an image to think about -

The scanned drawing above is my sketch of the actual napkin doodle Goldberg used when he decided to abandon fabulous.com. He and his business partner made the decision to quit two days after raising $2 million in venture funds for their site – pretty gutsy.  Fabulous.com was a social networking site they had built in 2010 which targeted the gay and lesbian community. They were finding it difficult to gain any real traction.  They used the diagram above to help them decide to pivot their business and change from a social networking site to something else. They went on to create fab.com – the very cool and successful eCommerce site which has gone from 0 to four million members and $100 million in sales in the last 18 months.

They found their sweet spot trifecta: 1 – a big market (everyone who appreciates cool stuff), 2 – their passion (cool design), and 3 – what they could be best at.

3. Keith Yamashita – Chairman SYPartners

You can choose to meet anyone / anything / any situation with fear, or love.

You make this choice hundreds of times every day, whether you’re aware of it or not.

This is perhaps a little more philosophical than I intended to get, but I think it is a profound statement. There is a moment in every situation when you can catch yourself making the decision – fear or love. Being aware of this open moment is one of the indicators that you’re truly paying attention to life. This awareness gives you an edge. Think about it.

A growing list of internet powerhouses including WikiPedia, Reddit, Craigslist, Mozilla, and WordPress, are coordinating an online protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act. Thousands of sites are already displaying an alert bulletin about SOPA and PROTECT IP, and starting at midnight on January 18th, many sites will display a message about the bills in lieu of their regular content.

SOPA and PROTECT IP are United States legislation designed to give the Department of Justice the ability to pursue and shut down websites that are believed to be involved in illegal activities. Opponents say that the overreaching nature of the bills will place an unreasonable burden on legitimate websites, inhibit free speech, and cripple innovation, all while failing to impact the illegal activity it was designed to prevent. Search engines would be forced to block rogue sites when notified of potentially illegal content, and could also be punished for unknowingly linking to illegal content. Hosting providers, social networks, and content aggregators would be required to constantly review the data their users place on their sites and servers, or face being charged as an accessory to piracy. As Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing wrote,

“Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages. … If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.”

After weeks of pressure from tech giants like Microsoft and Google, the White House has indicated it will not the support the bills as they are currently written. However, most sites involved in the protest say the fight is far from over. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the WikiMedia Foundation, hopes that their blackout will raise awareness of a larger issue. Gardner states,

“The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.”

For a complete list of sites going dark on January 18th, visit SOPA Strike.

Sounds a little like email, right?

I get about 200 messages per day to roll back up the hill. If you know it’s going to go on forever, you may as well get good at it.

For ArcStone’s weekly staff meeting, I assembled a few tricks that I’ve been using to help me roll-up my inbox. Here are the eight tactics I shared to help ease the pain of email purgatory…

1. Adopt a habit of “Inbox Zero”. Inbox Zero is an email practice of reducing your inbox to zero messages on a regular (read daily) basis. The main set of tactics are to immediately to: do it, delegate it, defer it, delete it, or file it. The strategy is simple – but the practice takes practice. A cool new plug-in (if you use gmail) is the email game – it teaches good email habits in a fun, funny way. Also check out David Allen’s Getting Things Done for his inbox clearing strategies.
2. Only check your email at designated times with full awareness. Once or twice per day if you can get away with it. Hourly if you must. But don’t do it all the time and fracture your focus.
3. Use a to-do list for your tasks – not your email inbox. There will be fewer dropped balls and less clutter in your inbox.
4. Use the subject line smartly. Start informational emails with FYI: (Subject) and actionable items with Action: (Subject).
5. Be concise. Three lines max if possible. Email is meant to convey short messages. Think about the long six or seven paragraph emails you get versus the short ones – which do you actually thoroughly read? Save your readers’ time – go for concise, punchy messages.
6. List actions first and also number them. Don’t put a big block of text first and then put the tasks at the bottom – put the actionable stuff up top. Don’t assume people with 200 + messages per day are going to scroll down, they’re gonna be scanning.
7. Don’t “Reply All” unless everyone needs to truly see it. This will save your team members a lot of time and insure that they read your messages when you send them.
8. Never, ever send emails with a lot of emotional content. No angry, contentious or hurt emails – ever, ever. Emotionally fraught emails tend to create additional rounds of long, angry, hurtful, legally damaging, time sucking email. Seriously, don’t send emotional emails unless you like to painfully waste your time.

Any other tips? Please comment!

Let’s Answer The Question: What is Cloud Computing?
Buzzwords and acronyms are a mixed blessing. On one hand, they are a very useful shorthand for those who are ‘in the know’. However, for those who have no idea what it means, a phrase like “Web 2.0″ or an acronym like “SEO” can be a barrier to understanding, and for those who are too ashamed of their ignorance to ask, they risk using these terms incorrectly.

One of the newer phrases being bandied about is “Cloud Computing”. In order to take the mystery out of the term (and allow us to use the term correctly), let’s answer that question: What is Cloud Computing?

Getting Virtual With Your Servers
To understand Cloud Computing, first you have to understand the concept of Virtualization. Virtualization is the ability to run several standalone disk images on the same server. Being able to create an image of your machine is technology that we’ve been using for years. A typical machine backup involves making an image of the machine and pushing it to another server. Then, when you need to restore your data, you can simply load the disk image onto your new hard drive.

Virtualization is just like this, except you take this disk image and you run it. It’s like having an OS inside of another OS. So you might have a Linux machine that is running several different Virtual machines, disk images that were created and loaded onto the server and assigned an IP address so that you can hit that virtual machine directly.

A Traditional Server Is A Great Big Desktop Computer On Steroids
A traditional server is a great big desktop computer on steroids, with hundreds or even thousands of different websites running on it. They usually will share a single SQL server, run under the same OS, and everything on the server rises and falls together. So if Site A has a big day and receives a hundred thousand requests, it can impact the performance of Site B because Site B resides on the same server and shares resources with Site A (and about a hundred other sites).

There are notable downsides to this traditional approach, namely:

• Hardware Expense- When hardware breaks or gets old and obsolete, you’re going to reinvest in the server that’s been purchased.
• Inefficiency- Of the 100 sites on a server, do all of them really need access to 16GB of RAM? You’re usually increasing your server resources to account for 1 or 2 very busy/intensive sites on a server.
• Shared Risk- When the hard drive of your server fails, every site on the server is going to suffer. When the OS encounters a “blue screen of death” sort of error, it’s going to bring down the entire server. Why should 99 sites suffer for the failure caused by a single site?

There Is A Better Way Up In The Clouds
“There’s got to be a better way!” cries our paid sponsor, and there is. Virtualization offers us the ability to grant every site its very own server, at a fraction of the cost. The hardware doesn’t really matter, because you’re only going to allocate a small portion of system resources to each virtual machine. So even though the server might have 16GB of RAM available, “Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site” might only need a max of 256MB of RAM to run smoothly. If we need to ‘scale up’ and provide extra system resources for Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site, we can do that easily and tell our server to allocate 512MB of RAM to the server instead.

This resolves the issue of shared risk, since if Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site encounters a horrible error that requires a restart, you’re only restarting the Virtual Machine that runs on the server, rather than the entire server itself. Service Interruption for a single client, rather than everyone on the server.

This also resolves the issues of efficiency and hardware expense, because at a more granular level you can assess the resource requirements of a site and limit a site to only using the resources it needs, rather than infringing on the resources needed by a more resource-intensive site.

With these advantages, it is no wonder so many companies are moving apps into “the cloud”. Cloud providers like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace offer a very tempting proposal: Create as many servers as you want for a fraction of the cost of doing things “the old way”. Backups and maintenance on the hardware are handled already by the cloud providers, all that a web hosting company has to do is make sure that everything is running smoothly within the virtual machine itself.

Cloud Computing Offers An Inexpensive & Hassle-free Solution
Hopefully this has de-mystified some of the questions regarding Cloud Computing. ArcStone has been using this capability for some time in managing our own servers, and after all of the advantages provided to using this method, it’s hard for us to imagine ever going back.

Of course, this solution is not the right one for all situations, and you should first evaluate the pros and cons of hosting a physical server of your own versus utilizing a cloud computing strategy. In most web apps, however, cloud computing offers an inexpensive and hassle-free solution for your hosting needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about ArcStone’s hosting options see our email and web hosting services page.

Previous versions of Railo (including the promising but ultimately not CF8-compliant and buggy 3.0) have been known to provide phenomenal speed increases, but without the ability to fully support the CF standard there have been compatibility issues with web software firms attempting to make a move to Railo. This, combined with a lack of true enterprise capabilities led many to dub the platform unready for prime time. Railo 3.1 is about to change all of that, at least once it is finally out of beta.

I have not yet had time to play with Railo 3.1 too much, but they provide an express install that isn’t really an install, so it has been very easy. Just extract to a folder, double click the ‘start’ script to start the application/web server, and then you can immediately browse to it at http://localhost:8888. Drop code into the Railo webroot folder, and you can start testing existing apps against Railo. The administrator for Railo 3.0 was very sparse compared to the CF administrator that ColdFusion developers know and love. Not so with Railo 3.1. The server adminstrator which manages the more global settings has a separate password from the web administrator, and there are numerous settings available, many specifically tailored towards compatibility with CF8, but there are also enhancements beyond what Adobe provides. Additional enhanced selections within the administrator, such as “convert 0000-00-00 MySQL dates to NULL” seem like a sensible upgrade to the default behavior of CF, others probably depend on the needs of your application. Missing at this point in the release is the much ballyhooed cfvideo tag, a cluster scope (though Railo supports J2EE sessions at this point), and clustered caching. With a CF license costs no longer at issue, expect Railo’s clustering functionality to get a full workout in the coming months.

Installing extensions, and restarting the cf service are available within the administrator as well. Things like Galleon forums, the Mach-II framework, and other open source CF goodies. Additional providers can be added via the server, too, (this works very similarly to how plugin providers are added via the Eclipse IDE) and updating the server software is also possible within the Railo admin itself. One of the weirdest things for anyone that has restarted a ColdFusion service before is that Railo’s cf restart is darned-near instantaneous. Everyone gets logged out on the server, as sessions and other scopes are cleared, but other than that, there is no painful delay waiting for the service to kick in while site visitors are crashing into technical looking 500 server error screens as is so often the case with a typical ColdFusion restart. It’s…eerie. It is also a distinct improvement, but performance has always been Railo’s most promising and consistent offering in their platform.

You can bet that many people across the internets have been tinkering with Railo 3.1 lately, especially in tandem with Amazon’s EC2 or similar cloud service, in order to provide things like open source load-balanced J2EE session-scoped cluster farms. Suddenly, stunningly, ColdFusion developers are now enjoying something that PHP developers have been able to enjoy for years. I welcome an open CF8 standard (whether Adobe has created or simply joined the CF standard is unclear) and a fully-featured open source ColdFusion application server. It is clear that this can only mean good things for CFML and ColdFusion developers in the future.

What is not so clear, however, is how Railo’s other open source competitor Blue Dragon has fared, but with many members of the Blue Dragon team leaving (and some of them joining the Railo team), chances are that it will not fare very well. Equally unclear is Adobe’s opinion on Railo, and how its official release might come to affect its bottom line. Whatever the case, the cat is out of the bag now. We’ve seen the future, and the future is open source.

Viva la Revolucion!

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example – the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

This week Sun Microsystems announced an agreement to acquire MySQL, makers of the most popular open source database platform. This comes much to the dismay of open source zealots and sweaty nerds everywhere, who are afraid their beloved dolphin may end up in Sun’s enterprise tuna salad.

Sun has had a rocky past with the open source community, and tends to garner mixed reviews when they attempt to make inroads into open source.

Continue reading for more insight into Sun’s past open source shenanigans and what this deal might mean for the future of web developer’s favorite database platform.

Could Something Sinister Be Afoot?
Sun is a company after my own heart. They make great hardware, have arguably one of the best operating systems in existence, and Java is a joy to program with. Now they have acquired my favorite database. This all sounds swell, but could something sinister be afoot?

For years developers clamored for Sun to open source Java. While many key libraries were already open, Sun still hesitated, content to tease the developer community.

Having Java’s Source Is Great, But Sun Still Acts Just Like It Did When The Source Was Closed
Finally, in 2006 Java was fully open-sourced and released under a GPL license, although Sun still kept some keycomponents under wraps. To me, however, the real benefit of the open source model is the ability for the community to contribute and steer development, which still seems to be missing from Sun’s open source plans.

Having Java’s source is great, but Sun still acts just like it did when the source was closed, choosing to plot their own course with little feedback from individual developers.

Hopefully Sun won’t take MySQL down the same path as Java. Right now MySQL enjoys the benefits of an extremely strong developer community. This community has been crucial to improving the product, proliferating it across every platform imaginable, and creating high quality companion tools.

Right now it’s unclear if Sun sees the communities hard work as an asset or not. Most likely Sun has snapped up MySQL in order to roll it into their enterprise software offerings, which was missing a database platform. Companies like Sun much prefer to sell hardware bundled with a large amount of software called a stack.

When the entire software stack (OS, network server, application server, database) is made up of a company’s own products, support is easier, margins are maximized, and it’s much more likely that the buyer will become forever dependent on their vendor’s stack.

If This Happens, The MySQL We Know and Love Will Become Stagnant
I don’t think MySQL as it exists today is in much danger. However, I could easily see Sun making some huge improvements in future versions that depend on other parts of their stack. If this happens, the MySQL we know and love will become stagnant, and eventually see a sharp decline in use as its features become antiquated.

My hope is Sun finally sees the value in a truly open development process, and isn’t just attempting to use MySQL as a way to suck people into their other software offerings.

If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

Why Set Up A Start Page
The reasoning behind a start page may elude some people, so let me explain. A start page provides a dashboard to your web world. Similar to the dashboard in a car, a software based dashboard shows an array of information with an emphasis on what is happening right now.

You may elect to put the current weather, latest posts from your favorite blogs, RSS feeds, or Google calendar on your dashboard. When all of these elements reside in one place you can quickly scan the information and only visit the individual resource when something peeks your interest or new items have been added.

What A Start Page Can Do For You
Start pages are about a lot more than simple data aggregation. They help you make connections between disparate information sources, capture fleeting ideas, and stay on top of the constant flow if new information that bombards us every day.

Many Popular Sites Can Be Tightly Integrated Into Your Start Page
There is also a key time saving feature inherent in a start up page. Instead of visiting several web sites many times a day to check for new information, you can quickly scan a list of RSS feeds from each site and determine if anything is new and worth a visit to the site.

Also, many popular sites (gMail, Google Calendar, FaceBook) can be tightly integrated into your start page, providing a subset of the full site’s functionality. For example, you can view your FaceBook friends’ updates along side your Google calendar. If a friend has a birthday coming up you can quickly make note of it on your calendar, add a to-do for buying them a gift, and search Google for gift ideas without leaving your start page.

Welcome To Netvibes – The Ultimate Start Page
Netvibes is one of many start page systems, but in my opinion the best one out there. Netvibes is intuitive, well designed, and comes fully stocked with tons of useful widgets.

Nearly Everything In Netvibes Is Customizable To Your Preference
Its amazing what Netvibes lets you accomplish in a single screen, and when more than one dashboard is needed you can add additional tabs along the top that provide more space to work with. Nearly everything in Netvibes is customizable to your preference. The number of columns, each widgets height and width, colors and fonts can all be tweaked to your liking.

Another big boon Netvibes has over it’s competitors is the highly organized and searchable library of widgets. The library contains many high quality first party widgets and quite a few user submitted ones. You can also add RSS feeds (even secure ones), just about any web page, Flash files, and mini applications from a slew of web 2.0 sites like Flickr and Facebook to your display.

I encourage you to dive in and give Netvibes a try, even if you already have a start page setup with another site. You don’t even need to sign up for an account to get started.

Post a comment after you have experienced Netvibes and let me know what you thought.