“The site made the front page of CNN.”

Suffice it to say, we had to upgrade the server.

I’m so envious of the guys who got to work on this project.

You may notice that I’m now running this blog on WordPress. I got tired of waiting for Perl to execute, and since I’m on a shared host it meant I couldn’t blog in the morning.

Next step: find a theme that doesn’t suck ass.

Notorious Apple-defender John Gruber is at it again.

He just can’t accept any other music service. I mean how can you not see through phrases like There’s very high “it just works” factor here. or Music is easy to find, easy to buy, and easy to download once you have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed.

When will they stop distorting the truth with such knee-jerk reactions as, I can’t see why anyone would buy DRM-restricted music from iTunes that’s available from Amazon.

Sheesh.

SCO thinks it won’t survive the legal mess it started.

Just think, if they hadn’t tried to assert ludicrous claims about owning intellectual property they didn’t own, they might have been able to focus on making their crappy products better and have a story like Apple’s, who abandoned suing their way into profitability for innovation. Now Apple is worth half of Microsoft, and SCO, well, this time next week you could probably buy SCO with the change you find in your couch.

I recently read a rant on a non-profit mailing list about how vendors were out to screw the little guy by “overcharging for hosting and hiding it by bundling it with maintenance hours.” It pissed me off.

Here’s the scenario I get from various alleged do-gooders: “Hey, we went and hosted on FlyByNight Webhosts, and then someone on the board said their kid knew computers pretty well and he went to change things on the server and now your application we paid $50,000 for is broken! So fix it!”

First: if you cheap out on hosting, you will get what you pay for. How people have $50,000 to spend on custom development (and trust me, trying to get them to compromise on the tiniest point often gets, “But we’re small and don’t have much money and we want just a little thing, and it helps the children. You don’t hate the children, do you?”) but only $60/year for ongoing hosting blows my mind. That’s like spending $250,000 on a Ferrari and deciding to go to a shade-tree mechanic and putting Bubba-Bo-Bob’s Retreads on it.

Second: the scenario above is a frequent occurrence. Face it: you probably don’t know anything about hosting a website. Unless you’re prepared to pay someone who does to take care of that for you, you’re probably going to be as successful as if I tried to file IRS paperwork for your nonprofit. I might get lucky, but probably you’ll be in Deep Doodoo.

Third: even if you do know how to handle the server or can afford someone who does on a reliable host, custom software is highly complex and routine security upgrades can break things. So yes, you’ll probably need a software developer who can fix things for you when that happens. And even if you don’t, there are some changes you’ll discover you need because the environment you’re operating in changes between the time you had the software developed and now. Again, you’ll want a developer’s help. Also, you may break things when you use the software in novel and unexpected ways. Or you may find bugs that weren’t caught in the preceding two years, even if you exhaustively tested the application on receiving it.

But most importantly: You paid for my time (and knowledge) to develop software to behave exactly the way you wanted it. But it’s no more fair to ask me to provide more of that work for free later because you didn’t catch something in testing (in 15,000 lines of code, there are likely to be several areas that behave in ways you didn’t anticipate in edge cases, even if it’s not technically a bug–and let’s see you write a 150,000 word book in three months, edit it, come back two years later and guarantee it will have no typos or grammatical errors or inept phrases) than it is for your grantor to ask you to do more work for the original grant two years down the line because something you set up didn’t sustain itself as well as you’d hoped without providing you any more funding.

Believe it or not, we’re not sitting around on piles of cash, occasionally working for a non-profit and screwing them out of money when we’re bored. Consulting is not a rich man’s game, and usually has thin margins. If we don’t have money being given to us for our work, we’re going to go out of business. So it’s just not possible–even if we wanted to–to provide a lifetime guarantee that our products will never be defective, even if you break them. No one else in your life will do that: not your grantors, not your clients (if you do direct service), not your cooperators, not the electric utility, not the government, not the realtor, not the bank, and not even the kid who cuts your lawn.

So why do you think when you paid me to do some work, you bought me?

I get this question just often enough to merit a post: “What CMS/Framework should I use for my apps?” The key is “apps”–that tells me the questioner hasn’t thought through his or her problem enough. There is no one answer, but there are several considerations you should keep in mind when deciding at what level you should build a website or web application: CMS, framework, or a custom application.

Frameworks, CMSes, and ground-up custom apps have their places. But they all involve tradeoffs. The key is figuring out what aspects are key for your project and living with or taking strategies to mitigate the tradeoffs you have to make once you pick. Let’s look at them one by one.

Continue reading →

If you’re wondering where your favorite internet radio station went this morning, that’s because today is the “Day of Silence” for internet radio.

To administer rights for songs played on the radio (you didn’t think it was free, did you?), Congress created a group called SoundExchange to collect and distribute royalties. With online sales increasing while traditional CDs decline, the RIAA’s members decided they wanted more money to promote their music. So SoundExchange changed the way they count listeners and increased their fees.

The result? Internet radio is now several times more expensive per listener than regular over-the-air radio. This means that public radio stations who rely on a mix of donations and government funding to operate will see dramatic cost increases and have to shut down if you, the taxpayer or you, the donor doesn’t step up to the plate. It’s even worse for niche internet radio stations. Many of them operate at break-even or a slight loss as is and will simply have to go off the air.

The worst part of it is that they made the changes retroactive to 2006, meaning that even though the stations have been assuming their songs cost them a certain amount for the past year and a half, it will now cost them several times more and the bill will be due July 15.

More information at SaveNetRadio.org. Let’s see if the Democrats were serious about standing up for the little guy.

I’m going to give you the secret to going from a techno-dud to a techno-stud, suddenly understanding computers and being able to be regarded as intelligent by the computer trogs at work. It’s a big secret we keep from the rest of you, but heedless of my own safety, I’m going to break ranks and share it with you.

Are you ready?

Can you handle The Big Secret??

Do you want to know!?!?!!?

Read English.

WTF? Yeah, I know. You think you can do this already, but here’s the secret: even though you can, you probably don’t. Many instructions and warnings and labels go by on the computer all the time, and if you don’t read them, it gets very mysterious. Some are extra mysterious–like the idiots who simply give an internal code number as if that’s supposed to tell you anything.

But I can’t count the number of times somebody has told me that they got “an error” and provided no explanation, like I had psychic powers to extract the truth directly from their brains. Hint: if there’s an error, it probably has text associated with it. And most of the time, it’s going to be in English. Even if you don’t know all the big words, you can probably figure a lot of it out if you actually just look at it, read it, and think about it.

At first, sure, you’re going to see lots of unfamiliar terms. But frequently inserting the error message into Google will get you a big discussion of it. And over time you’ll figure out “duh, I need to plug in my drive,” or “hey, this is just a notice, not an error,” or even, “Oh, it tells me if I don’t want Bad Thing X to happen, I shouldn’t do what I just did, and it’s giving me an option to not do it.”

That’s it–that’s the sole difference between me and you: I take the time to read what’s on my screen and figure it out. That’s really all there is to it.

Now, go forth and use your newfound power to fear the machines no more.

And wink at the trogs. They still haven’t figured out human faces yet.