Apple had the first iPhone commercial out tonight, which was mainly a teaser that played during the Oscars. I only watched the Oscars for the commercial that was rumored to be shown. Thankfully, they showed it early in the program so I didn’t have to listen to Ellen mouth off for terribly long.

I uploaded the commercial for all to see. Hope you enjoy it. Goodbye.

It is old news now, but I posted earlier of the fact the iPhone was coming and I was holding out for one. Disappointed it wasn’t available for immediate sale since I had lost my phone and was waiting for a replacement. The good news, I found my phone and all is good, well, okay… until the iPhone comes my way. Sure glad I went with Cingular AT&T.

Well, not even two months ago, I posted my upgraded Internet speed tests. RoadRunner upgraded my speeds again and they improved the upload speed significantly. Very nice indeed.

I have been reading a lot about Solar Power lately. Not sure why exactly. Where I live, the cost of electricity is not more than the cost to operate a Solar Power system for your home, so the upfront cost to pay off your upfront investment could not be realized for 15-20 years, if that. But, I still decided to give it a try on a smaller scale as an alternative energy source for whatever reason. I bought a solar panel (portable) that folds up. I got it in, plugged in my cell phone which was totally dead, and about 2 hours (or less), it was fully charged, all from the sun.


The down side, if this was only method of electricity, these overcast winter days don’t provide enough juice, only when the sun came out from behind the clouds did the phone power up and start charging.

The one I got outputs about 26 watts, at the max output. Of course, the sun is a big factor in its performance. You can string three of these suckers together for 78 watts. You could easily power a laptop computer with that setup, possibly even with two, depending on your laptop’s power needs. I plan on picking up a portable battery pack that will power up to 600 watts that could be charged by the solar panel. While it would take an entire sunny day (or more) to charge the battery pack, if the electricity went out for a long time, I could operate some smaller, essential items almost anywhere.

Maybe I could build an electronic “recharging” station that the solar panel could hook up too, and I could charge most of my devices using the sun. That would be green! (granted, I’m not a green person, no tree hugging here).

It’s the snicker you hear when someone tells another who is unaware to run such a command. When used correctly, the command in and of itself is very useful. But, when you forget what directory your in and run it in your primary production database data directory, the snicker turns into disaster. So my friends, don’t rm -Rf in the wrong directory or your friends blog you host, will be toast.

Update: I managed to find a year old database backup of his data. So, while I did erase 1 year of his life, I can confirm you didn’t miss much.

Believe it or not, I managed to get sick again. It was nasty. The whole family got it, I was last to get it, as usual, and it was so bad, I lost 9 lbs in 24 hours. I’m sure you can figure out how. It’s a two step approach.

I am starting to get settled into my new roles and responsibilities working from home. It is quite enjoyable, but at the same time it can be a little odd. I have kicked around the idea of getting office space to work out of vs. working at home. There are benefits to each and in the end, it comes down to which is best for me to work in. Sure, other factors of cost and family factor into it, but if I can’t work, I can’t work at home. Simple as that. As such, I believe I can stay home for the time being as I set up my home office to be more like my environment to be less “cool” and more practical.

I’m a little late on posting this, but I did want to wish everyone the best in 2007. It will be interesting to watch and see what this year holds, not only for our personal lives, but for the country and the world. We have new leadership in Congress, a President that is back peddling, a world calling for “Peace and Safety”, Iran seeking nuclear weapons and calling for the Mahdi, Christians watching diligently, are we entering the 70th week of Daniel? Is a man of peace about to rise up, out of the EU, United Nations or perhaps, the Middle East? Will Aliens come and take us away? Do they even exist? Will the USA be victim to another terrorist attack?

Can’t wait to see what it holds! Can you?

Well, aside from being sick, I lost my mobile phone. I used it, went home, and never saw it again. No clue where it is, where I put it, if I sat it down, or someone took it. I am now a proud owner of a $29 GoPhone to get me by until I find out if indeed Apple is going to release a mobile phone, and if so when, as I will have my sights set on it, assuming it has features I want.

Jeff sent this over to me, very funny. Got a great laugh. In all honesty, this is what you typically see “between the lines” when on various hosting sites and all that they have to offer.

http://www.nouptime.com/

I recently took advantage of a $9.95/month upgrade to my RoadRunner speeds. While the increase is about 3 additional MB downwind, the upwind speed leaves much to be desired. 768 kbps would be much better, but I will live. Although, here it is the end of 2006 and back in 2001 I had around the same download speed, with a 980 kbps upload speed with the short lived Sprint ION service.

I finally did it. It is what my idle thoughts at times where consumed with. A low-cost, yet highly available hot fail over solution for my web sites. Until the release of MySQL 5.x came along, the perfect setup, just wasn’t possible.

Today, I brought online a server located in Europe. It provides everything I imagined. Geo-distant replication of both web and database. Talk about sweet. Not only do I get the ideal fail-over solution should my US based server become unavailable, but I also provide a server on the other side of the globe for my users closer to that server to connect too. Which means, much faster and in some cases, 2-3 times faster access to data from my sites, improving overall user experience all over the globe.

In addition, since my “fail-over” is really a secondary live site, it fails over to the US based server should it become unavailable. If that wasn’t enough, the entire setup provides a sudo-load balancing situation. While, replication between the dual-master setups means that data from both servers is being written to both servers, it does spread out the read loads on the databases and the web servers themselves. During high traffic times, both servers can be put into DNS to distribute traffic evenly, independent of IP origin.

Last, but not least… I am working an a static mirror or representation of my sites, should the database go down (on both active servers) then traffic will either be sent to another server with a static representation of the site, or to the active servers themselves with this data. I haven’t decided on that entire detail yet.

UPDATE: (11/21/06) – This whole setup works better than I ever dreamed. It has kicked in on numerous occasions (mainly self induced issues) and works like a champ.

I have been using the Sprint PCS phone network for 9-10 years, ever since the first towers went up in Kansas City. All these years and I’ve been given corporate phones with little or nothing to brag about. Having ditched Sprint for a more Mac friendly service; I got my hands on the Sony Ericsson W600i. This phone ROCKS. It syncs with iSync on my Mac via Bluetooth. In a matter of seconds, nearly 100+ contacts in sync. Adding contacts to my phone directly, updates my AddressBook on the computer. You can use the phone as a remote control, and control things like, your mouse on the screen with it. You can browse the device, copy images, songs, ringers to and fro. It includes a digital camera and video camera. While I have seen better pictures on other phones, it is still just fine. Has 1000000% more features than any other phone camera. Heck, you even hold it and it looks like a camera when your taking them. It includes a very bright flash, night photos, and just overall kicks butt. Panoramic photos? Photoshop not near you? No problem! The most awesome implementation of Panoramic imagery on this crazy little phone. Never seen anything like it. Rocking, it does, play your MP3/ACC (although not iTunes), and includes the loudest speakers. The party is not over if your stereo quits, just turn it on and your set. Tired of your MP3s? Turn on the FM radio! YES FOLKS… FM radio. Get this, it includes different setting profiles. You can have a “work” profile and have a different set of ringers, and settings, from when your at home, or in the car. Whether your using a Bluetooth headset, based on a profile. Includes mail software for setting up an IMAP mail client (yes that kicks butt) and you can use the phone as a high speed modem over Bluetooth or USB. I bet it even does more than I talked about, I have yet to break open the manual.

While it might seem that my promotion of this phone is simply because of my horrible taste in my mouth called Sprint, it is truly awesome and even if I still had Sprint, I’d write the same review. No wait, that is not true, if I still had Sprint, I wouldn’t have this awesome phone.

About 2-3 weeks ago I made the decision to discontinue web hosting for clients due to the changes going on in my life, it was time to turn a new page. As a pioneer in the web hosting world, I think I fall into that category since I have been doing it since 1995, it has always been a side interest to me. When everyone and their brother’s kid and grandma are providing web hosting services, which has clearly been the trend for the last 3-4 years, I think it is time to move on. Plus, with vulnerabilities growing at an alarming rate and people bored to tears to take advantage of those vulnerabilities, running a web hosting business, other than full-time was like leaving your car door unlocked and windows down on the bad side of town. You can’t properly lock down servers which serve multiple purposes and must be accessible from anywhere leaving yourself exposed. Granted, you can take steps to do away with 75% of those vulnerabilities, but even that 25% is time-consuming and introduces unneeded stress to keep your customer online and have a life too. Most customers have been migrated to a different company, and only a handful is left to move over the next few weeks. Today I get to focus on the future, rather than being concerned about the past. (i.e. backing up customer data)

Since I no longer have loyalty to Sprint (as they show no loyalty to me) as my phone carrier of choice, I am moving to Cingular since they clearly realize that Mac users do exist, unlike Sprint. The ability to use iSync to sync my phone, use total integration of Bluetooth technology with my PCS phone are things I only dreamed as a Sprint customer. While I have yet to make the switch it is only a matter of days. Of course, I seem to have lost the ability to hold a conversation at my house without dropping calls or even hearing 10% of the conversation in the last month or so. I figure, I’ll go with the company that is raising the bar, not lowering it.