Portlanders and those of you nearby, I’d like to introduce a conference coming up called Open Source Bridge.

If you are a Network Redux customer we can issue a $100 discount of the $250 registration. As one of the three sponsoring groups with commiter status we also have a couple of free passes reserved for the first two customers of ours to ask.

I will be speaking at a business focused seminar on the 17th called Bridging the Developer and the Datacenter. Huge bonus points for the Network Redux customers who attend the session!

There is quite a large array of fantastic sessions to attend. The first two customers to inquire will get the free passes!

Cheers

Thomas

A couple app failures from yesterday. The Dell one gets old, they can make it difficult to buy product sometimes. The openoffice one wasn’t as annoying in that I rarely use it. Admittingly I prefer Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac…

Perusing an article discussing a civil suite against facebook by a Florida librarian and privacy advocate and came across the following:

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt wrote in an e-mail to CNET News. “He’s not going to get it but we promise to refund all the money he paid to use Facebook. Seriously, we’re glad to know how important Facebook is to Mr. Karantsalis but his account was not disabled, is currently active, and he is using it, so I’m not sure what the problem is.”

Bonus points to Barry for sliding in the reference to free services.

Again an excellent reminder: all of these services are provided free of charge.

No thanks.

A brief history…

First generation iPhone user. Loved it. Bought the 3G and became a victim of the 10+ dropped calls per day club. Went through the motions with the patches and still dealt with spotty 3G service in Portland so I switched back to a Blackberry 8830.

This is a great device but I have definitely missed the applications available for my 3G iPhone.

Here comes the Blackberry App Store. It is currently useless. The first application I tried to use which seemed somewhat interesting required that I navigate through the ridiculously painful blackberry browser in order to register an account with their service. No thanks.

The reviews of the most downloaded applications alone are indicative of a weak service. Add to that in order to purchase an application, RIM has integrated the store with Paypal.

RIM is risking losing that enterprise edge with this store — integrating it with a consumer level purchasing platform like Paypal shows the Blackberry users that RIM was either not sophisticated enough, or too impatient to implement a more streamlined purchasing platform.

A cross post from inside.networkredux.com…

Our Portland clients and colleagues may already be aware, but a local establishment (Cube Space) which provides excellent services to technologists in the Portland community is in need of help.

We have pledged and donated $500 to help them reach their goal. More information on this situation can be found here:

http://savecubespacepdx.com

This type of grass roots effort to help out fellow entrepreneurs in the Portland area is one of the reasons we are proud to own and operate a business in this fine city.

Cheers, and good luck to our colleagues at Cube Space.

This is more like a weekend of studying rather than reading poolside…

I’ve been meaning to post this for a few months. Feeling lazy so I will just paste my review posted on Amazon regarding this read:

First and foremost, chapter 10 should be an Appendix. This was a horrible ending to what seemed to be a promising discussion on horizontal scaling for any system/network engineer or astute systems engineer.

Clear and concise, then incoherent and grammatically challenged, this book requires constant read backs leaving the reader with a sense of a diminished level of reading comprehension.

Fortunately there are some very good real world discussions on horizontal scaling, distributed caching, and eliminating single points of failure in your design.

Unfortunately the book was a long documentary on the author’s Spread utility/program/solution and the last chapter is dedicated to writing a module for Spread. Completely out of band with regards to actual high performance clustered environments where the author’s solution is likely scarce in popularity.

I do appreciate his coverage of logging. Despite my rating, I don’t regret the first nine chapters.

Not in the general term of our mail servers and spam filters accepting and processing messages, but widely accepting this nuisance as a cost of doing business in a connected world?

I get a quite a bit of spam…

This is my personal spam trap after about 2.5 months since I last cleared it out. The filtering is incredibly accurate and effective, but this doesn’t mitigate the fact that our mail servers had to process ~31,000 junk messages for a single user in our organization over a short period of time.

The last time I conducted a non-scientific study of our hosting assets I was able to conclude that approximately 70% of the messages destined for a domain on our network were being flagged as spam. Incredible. Email is the #1 issue we deal with on a day to day basis.

From a server resource perspective, disk IO is historically a hosting companies largest bottle neck. From a customer support perspective, email is is without question the most discussed topic.

Back to the original question — why do we tolerate it? Furthermore, why do we spend as much as we do combating it through spam filtering technologies and server resources? And before I forget, why do we give these idiots an opportunity to profit from the innocent?

I’m very irritated about this and at the same time likely to do nothing about it. We’ll push on as is for now.