Elementalidad » James

Consumerism in America

James — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:25:38 +0000

Women are the key influencers in about 80% of all consumer product sales in the United States. (Source: Why She Buys – Amazon)

Alaska coastline

James — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:28:37 +0000

More than half of the coastline of the entire United States is in Alaska. Related Posts B Consumerism in America

Surfing the world wide couch.

James — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:31:27 +0000

An excellent short video about Couch Surfing from a Berkeley journalism student and new CS Member, Alba Mora.

Surfing the world wide couch. from Alba Mora on Vimeo.

Dreamhost satisfied customer

James — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:38:46 +0000

While DreamHost certainly has its problems, I prefer them over a host of other web hosting providers for a variety of reasons, but it mainly boils down to turn around time. A colleague of mine, Matt Keith, had emailed me asking why I prefer DreamHost over Verve hosting, and my response got so long I decided to just turn it into a blog post. It ended up not so much being a DreamHost versus verve comparison, but a statement on why I prefer to roll with DH.

Disclaimer: I’m part of the DreamHost affiliate program and if you end up registering after clicking one of my links, then I get a credit for the referral.

I normally get my webmastering tasks done in a timely fashion with DreamHost, but when clients go with other shared website hosting service providers like Media Temple, Verve or Bluehost, I increasingly find myself confused and end up wasting time due to their quirky setups. Certainly these unique setups are part of the nature of shared server hosting and something you have to deal with between each different host, as there is no de-facto or even industry standard way to provide affordable, shared services. Hosting servers configurations vary from the very bottom, up… starting at the hardware and OS version, and all the way up to the web server software (eg Apache) configurations and limitations, database configurations, and — perhaps most importantly — the control panel interface. Its cumbersome to administer client sites spread across various providers where the features, terminology, and navigation systems vary widely in structure, presentation and function. Sometimes functionality that I take as a ‘given’ (like administering ftp and ssh accounts), one company provides as standard while another requires a tech support request. Its sad to realize this only after having scourged through the entire panel to find the functionality doesn exist.

Well, here’s an up-close and personal look at some of the things I particularly like about DreamHost:

1) Less confusion… faster turn around.

I think when picking a hosting provider to go with, especially if you expect to be managing a lot of client sites, its best to pick and stick with one hosting provider. I like DH because their account setups are logical, stuff just works, and I have a history with them now and am used to their system. I know exactly what services and technologies DH provides, and know how to deal with their tech support, which is both email based and you can see the support history online as well. If you have multiple clients on various hosting accounts at DH you can “see” them all from your control panel. At the end of the day, I’d prefer to have clients unified in one place to lessen confusion.

2) Best control panel ever.

Its quite possible that you could do a technical comparison of the services provided between Verve and DH and possibly come to the conclusion that Verve is better. But to me, the real tangible selling point is that DH has the most intelligent, useful, and all-encompasing control panel in the industry, period.

The Dreamhost Control Panel

The control panel setup is more logical and friendly from a linux-system-admin-slash-web-developer point of view on DH than on any other host I’ve ever seen. They pay attention to their clients’ feedback and feature requests. DreamHost is constantly rolling out new and often complex panel features that really save webmasters lots of time and they keep their software packages up-to-date.

Test drive the Dreamhost Demo Control Panel for yourself:
http://demo.dreamhost.com/
Web ID: demo
Password: demo

3) Dreamhost has a huge user base.

There are tons of people using DreamHost and therefore developers and sys admins can find lots of contributed solutions for non-standard configurations or cutting edge technologies that do not come “pre-installed”. DreamHost provides an excellent but suometimes dated knowledge base and an even better community-driven wiki.

The wiki provides both employee contributions as well as officially approved and some unofficial/unsupported community contributed solutions to MANY problems you encounter in your life as a shared hosting client. If you cant find it on the wiki, a web search for any issues that turns up during development and server configuration can be refined by adding the word ‘dreamhost‘ to your Google search terms. You’ll be surprised to find the number of results — typically from programmers’ and web developers’ personal blogs — for just about any situation or error message imaginable. You’ll often get the solution as well as some comments from other users encountering the same.

4) “Beyond” shared hosting…?

One thing I have NOT had a chance to try out yet are the virtual private servers (Dreamhost PS). Its a relatively new offering from Dreamhost and I’m reluctant to take the plung for live sites that are doing just fine on their regular hosting. On the other hand, its nice to know that if a client’s site is setup at Dreamhost and it becomes hugely popular, you have the chance to transparently migrate to Dreamhost PS and then tweak your settings, mainly RAM, to justify the demands of the site.

For big clients that need super-duper response time / dedicated / managed servers, and can pay the premium associated with that, I currently like and recommend CarpathiaHost.net. They rock but are expensive. In the end you pay for what you get there.

5) And now the kool-aid killer…

Not to purposefully end on a bad note, I thought it would be important to mention that DH does have its problems. One of the downfalls that I have experienced are occasionally slow responses to a support request. They have a 24 hour policy for the shared hosting which they do occasionally break if they are flooded with support requests. You can, however, pay extra if you need a phone call support response. I really dont have support requests very often as I can usually figure out my problems through the intelligent suggestions they provide while going through their ticket submission system, or by browsing the wiki and/or knowledge base.

Another hiccup that sometimes happens is you get bad luck when you register and they set you up on a machine that makes your site run just plain slow. This is usually caused by either getting setup on an older/slow machine, or more often, due to the fact that MySQL databases do not sit on the same server as the Apache web server. Your fellow DH customers sharing your database server are bogging down the shared resources and you might even end up seeing dropped db connections. I’ve had this problem twice with customer accounts but I’ve never had a problem requesting a move to another MySQL or hosting server (where your files live). Its a transparent and non-interruptive process and has always resolved the site slowness issues.

6) A word on Verve hosting.

To be frank, I do not have THAT much experience with Verve. I’ve managed the accounts that another colleague, Michael Tucker, has with them, and the things that I DONT like with the minimal experience I’ve had include:

their control panel feels really basic, just another system to ‘figure out’.
each account you are in control of has its own isolated panel, theres not an apparent way to setup various accounts and manage them all / or switch between them easily that i could see directly.
their default filesystem structure for multiple domains under one account is waaay wacky (you have one ‘main’ domain and the rest of the domains sit inside and thus are accessible from the web of main domain)

To elaborate on that last point a little bit, what you end up getting on your browser is essentially this:

http://maindomain.com/sub.domain.com/ <==> http://sub.domain.com/.

Some might argue that this kinda setup a good idea as backup / mock-up system while developing sites or something. But I think having this the default setup is odd. I could do this if I needed to easily on dreamhost as will with a symlink.

On a last positive note about Verve, I was actually able to get what I needed to get done fairly quickly in the verve panel, even though its kinda clunky at times, and it took me a little bit of time to get familiar with the setup/layout/organization/link titles/terminology. In fact, I’d say the turn around was much faster than for learning the Media Temple and Bluehost panels. I also should mention dont have any long term experience with Verve hosting’s technical support or with trying to install non-standard technologies, so cant really offer a comparison there.

Ecuador strives to keep the dollar circulating

James — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 15:51:13 +0000

The Sacajawea Dollar coin - popular in Ecuador.

Within the past month, a lot has been going on here in Ecuador. President Correa has imposed a new tax levy on a large number of imports in order to develop and stir interest in buying local goods, and to vaccinate the country against the effects of the downturned global economy. This move will doubtless affect a major sector of the middle and upper class who build their businesses around selling imported goods in Ecuador.

The government has imposed a tax of 30% on various luxury goods like imported alcohol, perfume, clothing, and up to a surprising 200% for other products from places like China and the USA. Add that to the typical 40% that local stores mark up their imported goods and the price extended to the consumer is a full 70% markup of the normal retail price found in the States.

The truth is, Ecuador doesn’t have infrastructure and technology to “setup shop” over night to replace the demand for many of the industrialized imports from China and the USA. In some cases, the local industry exists but the quality and technology is years behind that of the imported products.

On the other hand, companies like the Cuenca based Cerámica Andina, who produce local ceramic plate-ware and specialize in printed designs on their ceramics, are likely to feel the response of these new tax hikes in a positive way. Restaurants, hotels and retail stores alike will be looking for more economic alternatives for cups, mugs, and plates. Some people however are worried that the new spikes in local interest will keep many companies scrambling to keep up with demand.

Its arguably a good measure to attempt to insulate the tiny produce and petrol based economy, with a move like this when prices are falling around the globe. An over-night tax hike of 30% is indeed a bit drastic, and we’ll just have to wait and see if it turns out as President Correa has planed.

Carpathia Premium web hosting

James — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:14:14 +0000

Anyone looking for premium web hosting services, Carpathia is an absolute joy to work with. http://carpathiahost.com

Disclaimer, I’m in no way affiliated with the host; just a very satisfied customer.

The History of teh Internets

James — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:31:45 +0000

Teh internets play a big role in business, and personal communications. How did we get to where we are today? It all started in 1957….

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

See also, the definition of teh internets on Urban Dictionary.

Ecuador’s “Historic Victory” Gives Explicit Rights to Nature

James — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:21:23 +0000

The exit polls of the September 28th election showed a wide margin of support for approval of the new Ecuadorian constitution, in what President Rafael Correa claimed as an “historic victory”. There are indeed a handful of interesting chapters of the constitution that not only reform Ecuadorian’s state institutions and personal rights, but also rights for nature to run its course. There are clauses for State supported programs to deter human exploitation of non-renewable resources, destruction of ecosystems, and giving explicit rights to nature for an “integral restoration”. It also states that any person can demand to any governmental agency that these rights be upheld, and may be arbitrated in a court of law.

Cuenca to Bahia Ecuador

James — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Fellow expat Gary Scott has an intriguing article about investing in the excellent beach area known as Bahia, just north of huge port town of Manta.

Unfortunately, AFAIK right now Bahia is pretty much the farthest beach area to reach in Ecuador from Cuenca. It **should** be soon remedied when neighboring Manta gets improved airport connections…. but untill then, it takes two flights from Cuenca to Manta and the peak travel time (aka weekend flights) cannot really be considered “connecting” flights in that you have to stay overnight in Guayaquil or Quito. A drive to Bahia by private car is about 7-10 hours depending on roads and traffic, add a few hours if going by bus. For fellow North Carolinians, its analogous to driving to The Outer Banks from Asheville along HWY 64 in 1960.

That being said, Bahia ROCKS! Its clean, calm and picture perfect. Its the first coastal city that is more or less “environmentally aware” with hosts of sustainable horticulture, agriculture, and other ecolodge / projects going on in that region. Across the bay in neighboring and burgeoning Canoa, the surf and sun is right for a tranquil getaway that’s hip with the backpackers and surfer crowd. Its much more low key than Montañita to the south.

I truly hope the purported growth of nearby Manta and the new bridge being built across the bay are not too detrimental to the pristine environment in the Bahia de Caraquez, but continual pollution as Ecuador grows is almost inevitable.

Steven Wright Aphorisms

James — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:28:43 +0000

For fun today I learned how to run a bash script from PHP, and implemented everybody’s favorite command line utility: fortune! The script takes advantage of php’s exec() command, and ended up looking something like this:


exec ("/opt/local/bin/fortune -s", $lines_of_output, $error_code);
if (!$error_code) {
	foreach ($lines_of_output as $line) {
		print $line."\n";
	}
} else {
	print "script failed with exit code $error_code, see http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exitcodes.html";
}

Check out the two beta versions I’ve created here (Hit refresh in your browser to get a new fortune).

These are meant to be part of a larger project intended to expose these quotes via RSS to incorporate them into some dynamically created “signature” lines, which is part of some new Gmail functionality available from Google Labs.