Over the last couple days my various web sites have seen far more downtime than normal. My hosting provide, Radical Vision has apparently been having issues with the MySQL server that powers not only this blog, but even their support system.
Yep, you heard me right, the support system that you have to use to contact them about any issues relies on MySQL, the very same instance that everybody else uses. The same one that was down for several hours today. What’s the point of a support system if you can’t report issues?
Yesterday’s outage was blamed on a bad script being ran by another user, as for today, I’ve yet to hear a word.
When I opened my account with RadicalV almost three years ago, you could simply email a support address and expect a response within a couple of minutes. Then, “to provide better support” they disabled this simple support system and replaced it with a web page. Now, this is easy to use, and I’m sure that it makes their lives easier, but what about the life of the customers on days like today?
Now, I still firmly believe that RadicalV is the best hosting service I’ve used, and I’m still impressed with the support. Where many hosting services respond to support questions within a day, RadicalV typically responds within an hour or two. I guess like all good companies, they grow up and change focus. The days of the 5 minute support response are over.
It’s too bad, and if the downtime continues as it for the last month or two, perhaps my $35 a month will go to someone else.
After being reminded of Alex King’s excellent Tasks task management system by a Download Squad article, I decided it was high time to give it a try. I had seen the software before, but never really evaluated it to see if it would be of any real use to me. This time, I gave it a more thorough look.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading in recent weeks about time and task management; and thus I’m trying to build a better process than what I use now.
This post was imported from an old blog archive, and predates the creation of AdamCaudill.com.
Wow, the summer’s over and I’m finally home!
After spending the last five months in New York (quite a difference from my native Florida), I’ve finally made it back home. Much has happened while I’ve been away, not the least of which is the death of Imspire and a few related projects. While giving up on these dreams has been difficult, I believe the result will be for the best.
I recently became curious just how much time I had spent working on content for this site, which led me to an idea: it would be great to have a page that listed some useful data about the content, and how much effort was put into it. I had some hope that I could pull some of this directly out of Hugo, though unfortunately it didn’t expose the information I wanted (and certainly not in an efficient way).
Primum non nocere (first, do no harm) – an iconic phrase in modern medicine, yet also applicable to many other fields. This is something I wish more people would think about, developers especially – and primarily when writing new APIs. In general, developers don’t have an impressive history with security – quite frankly, developers suck. Seeing as I consider myself a developer, that’s painful to admit.
Chris Andrè Dale posted an interesting article some time ago that got me thinking: Why it’s easy being a hacker: A SQL injection case study – Chris pointed out the problems with educational material that developers are using, and just how bad the examples are.
When Intel and various industry partners started talking about “ultra-books” as competition against Apple and tablets, I was more than a little skeptical. Ultra-books are small and light weight – but not cheap (average price being around $1,000) and rather underpowered compared to what you can get for the same money with a more traditional laptop (they are basically MacBook Air knock-offs). I had written them off almost as soon as they were announced.
