#“Holy Crap, Paul Carr re-invents patronage”

#“Good response from the LastPass guys to their outage”

#“I could honestly listen to Anssi Vanjoki speak all day.”

#“The web tools we can’t live without in LouderVoice”

It took it quite a long time to put together a “web toolkit” that works well for our business. To save you some of the same hassle, here are the some of important things our site/applications/OpsTeam use:

• Amazon AWS including EC2, S3, EBS and EIP - It’s not about hosting cost, it’s about enterprise features like snapshots 
• Rightscale - For some AWS management
• Ubuntu Linux - Our server OS and also used on some development machines
• Django - Our apps and API are all built using this framework
• Python - The language Django is written in
• Wordpress - All blogs and the business information site (plus approx 30 plugins)
• NGINX - Front-end web-server and load balancer
• Apache - Using mod_wsgi for apps and mod_php for Wordpress
• MySQL - Our DB server
• JQuery - For building a big chunk of our Widget
• Solr - Search Engine functionality
• Putty - To access our EC2 instances
• AuthSMTP - For sending email from EC2
• DNSMadeEasy - 100% uptime DNS provider
• Akismet - For anti-spam
• Memcache - For API performance
• Komodo - Great cross-platform code editor that can edit files using SFTP on your EC2 servers
• Eclipse - For building our Android application 
• Jungledisk - Extra backup to S3
• Dropbox - File sharing
• Gravity Forms - For Forms
• PayPal - For getting paid :-)
• Zoho CRM - Customer Contact Management
• Chrome - For non-Firefox browsing
• Internet Explorer ⁷⁄₈ - For test only
• Yuuguu - For conference call desktop sharing to potential customers/partners
• Pidgin - IM
• Google Apps - For all our e-mail, calendar, GTalk and Goog Docs
• Google Docs - Docs and Spreadsheets great, Sites Wiki poor
• Remember The Milk - All of our To-Dos
• Inkscape - Vector images on site
• Gimp - Bitmap images on site
• Filezilla - FTP/SFTP
• Git - hateful source control
• Unfuddle - Problem tickets, Git source control, Dev Notes
• Firefox - To run 
  • Elasticfox
  • Firebug
  • YSlow
  • Poster
  • S3Fox
  • ColorZilla
  • MeasureIt
  • Live HTTP Headers
  • Screengrab
  • Web Developer Toolbar

More as I think of them since I’m sure I’ve forgotten something important. What can’t you live without?

#“How do you get your Irish web business news?”

Just had a conversation with our VP of Sales (to be announced soon :-)) about how people in Ireland working in web-related businesses get their industry business news. So not the latest web-app announcement or gadget but the business side of things. Who is selling what where. Who is doing new marketing campaigns. Who is doing deals with who. But specific to Ireland.

Is it still the business and technology sections of newspapers? Are there niche publications? Or has it all moved online? If you have a sec, can you let me know below? I figure this information is useful to us all.

Hmm, doesn’t look like I can embed a Polldaddy poll here, so a link will have to do.

http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2744484/

#“Huge mistake by Google with Earth on Android”

Today Google released Google Earth on Android and it sounds impressive. But they have made a huge error of judgement in the release. It only runs on one phone, the Google Nexus One. 

I have just tried it on a G1 with OpenEclair (a community version of Android 2.1 which runs on the Nexus One). It installs but refuses to run. The only app of 30+ that I have tried which has failed to do so.

Quite apart from compounding the negative message they are sending to other Android phone vendors with the Nexus One launch itself, it looks like they are repeating all the mistakes of J2ME.

Android was supposed to be the realisation of the “write once, run anywhere” promise made by Sun for Java in 1995. Fragmentation of J2ME on mobile turned it into an unmanageable mess with software vendors having to generate potentially hundreds of variations of their apps for different phones. The alternative was to create lowest-common-denominator apps that worked everywhere but were totally hamstrung and ugly as hell.

Now here we are 16 months after the first Android phone and it is happening all over again. Millions of G1, Hero, Galaxy and other Android devices were sold in 2009. All of them run Android v1.x software. None of them can run Earth. None of them can run the mobile browser version of Buzz.

Google will tell you that it’s the handset vendors job to keep the firmware up to date. I’m a punter, I remember what it’s like to wait for the Vodafone branded version of my Nokia N70 software, months after Nokia released it. It was annoying as hell with the operators then, it is just as annoying with handset vendors now. 

If I buy an iPhone, my apps just work. Ok, they may not have any smut in them, but they work. If I buy a DVD, it works. If I buy almost any Windows application, it will run on W2K, XP, Vista and Win7. That’s OSes spread over an 12 year period. 

If I install Google Earth on a Motorola Droid I bought in December, it won’t run.

Of course OSes have to improve and evolve but Android has both backwards and forwards compatibility breakage. Apps written for v1.5 may not run on v2.0 and apps written for v2.1 won’t run on v1.5.

This is a really really serious problem. Fix it Google or you will hit a brick wall in 6 months time when there are 40 handsets running 400 different firmwares and app developers and punters head back to the stable predictable iPhone platform.

I know I have re-considered my next Android device. Whilst Google might be happy that I would now default to the Nexus One since I know it will get the most support (as the G1 did before it), it does not bode well for other manufacturers supporting Android. With Samsung launching Bada and Sony Ericsson trying to support Android, WiMo and Symbian, it’ll be a brave person who buys their Android phones.

#“P-O-I-N-T N-U-M-B-E-R O-N-E”

via dilbert.com

How many man years of my life will I never get back, sitting watching someone read the text off their slides to me in a conference room?

Just had a fab thought. Maybe when someone like that is giving a presentation, the victim should be in control of the clicker? Average meeting time would plummet as you lash through a 60-slide deck in 5 minutes flat.

#“AndroidSPIN | Google Earth Debuts On Android”

#“Moonlight - Needed for Digital Media Awards Web-site”

#“MPs urge government to stop NHS funding, and MHRA licensing, of homeopathy”