You know how florists sell cacti in closed pots so that you’ll eventually overwater them ?

Next time also ask them how often you should water them, and they’ll tell you to throw in double the amount than what a cactus needs.

Then again there are accidents where you and your siblings think that the plant is underwatered and you end up choking it with love.

Now now, if you just overdid it, there is a fix. Just take some kitchen paper, roll it and stick it to one side of your pot. In the photo below I have 4 sheets of paper, left in for 24 hours.

Repeat until humidity returns to normal.

Generally speaking, for cacti, if a piece of paper can suck out water, then that water has to go.

The details on the 3rd public release of Skydrive are out. I consider Live’s online storage service extremely important due to the shape of things that are coming. Both from a user and a developer standpoint.

So let’s see what we’re getting.

Hits

• 25 GBs of storage space. Since no one was using the ginormous 5GBs that were previously available they though they could ramp it up anyway. That’s only good. In fact it’s crushing every single paid service I know of.
• Better photos. You can now download straight to the Live Gallery, or download a folder as a zipped file. Awesome !
• Photos can be seen in fantastic Flash or Silverlight slideshows. It also syncs with Live Photogallery’s tags for people etc. The thumbnails are huge blah blah blah. If this was a standalone photo service, it would be great, but it’s actually more.
• Integration with the new Live Home page that we’ve only seen in the Connect programme. It’s awesome, I promise.
• Sync your Internet Explorer bookmarks among machines.

Misses

• 25GBs of space that are separated from the Live Mesh service. No comment.
• Better photos that actually antagonize the photo service found in Live Spaces.
• Sync your Internet Explorer Favorites, but not with favorites.live.com . WTF ?!

And let’s see the user survery results that were taken back in March. This is what users were asking:

• Allowing multiple downloads at once.
• Displaying how many times a file has been downloaded.
• Supporting file synchronization from the desktop.
• Providing an API for storing and retrieving files.
• Adding SkyDrive access from Windows Explorer.

NONE OF THESE IS IMPLEMENTED ! And it remains to see how the fuck they will plug the Live Sync service in this.

What happened to the Live teams being feedback driven ?

To the people that are whining again over Windows 7 copying OSX's dock:

1. look at how the Dock copied the Taskbar in the first place. OS Classic users need to think what they had before that.
2. the simple fact that 7’s taskbar has only 3 things in common with the Dock:
   1. the use of icons instead of descriptions, which is inevitable for multitaskers and makes sense in a touch enabled OS.
   2. the ability to reorder things, which was a longtime request of users
   3. the ability to mix launchers with instance switching. Launchers such as the Dock's stacks existed in Windows since the shell 95

And the reason I'm bitching about this, is that now that the macsexuals have started bitching, I'm bound to hear shit like : "Why do you use a copycat OS ?" AGAIN.

Thing is, OSX has systematically ripped off every bit of Windows they found interesting, JUST like Microsoft has.

Simple yet all inclusive presentation. Almost like a cheat sheet.

One of the best speeches I’ve seen in my life.

This has got to be the oldest VC entrepreneurial pitch in the history of mankind

Look at this market. It’s huge ! If only we could have just 1% of that, we’d be sooo successful !

The thing is, thought that these are just numbers. They mean nothing. The pitch is designed to create a feeling of euphoria and hope.

While it’s true that 1% of a huge market is profitable, the other guys that will take out 10% or 40% or 80% will eventually drive you out, cause you’ll be just noise to them.

I remember sth O’Reilly mentioned during the breakfast that Nikan org’ed: In the past we had 3% success with a drug and it was a failure. After we understand why it worked though, we’ll be able to claim 100% success for 3% of the population.

I think that it’s ok to be in a niche market. It’s just not ok to be a smalltime player in any market. There should be better uses of your time.

While designing your dream garden, there come moments when you ponder: would it be better if I removed anything or added anything ?

• Removing stuff takes bravery or neurosis. You have to take out things that you toiled to add in the first place.
• Adding stuff takes toil. You need to buy a chair, stand back and look at the result and decide if you have to remove it after all.

That goes to say that both Minimalism and Feature packing as goals are problematic.

Don’t put more buttons on the product than benefit the product and don’t remove the buttons that will be useful to the majority of use cases.

Finally, maybe you need two gardens. Or more. Certainly not more than you need to have. Each garden needs different kind of care and you can’t blame the seed maker when you fuck up on maintaining a garden you haven’t visited for years.

Chatting with a sales operator with a ‘cloud computing’ company.

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Will'
Will: Hi
Will: Welcome to Mosso
Will: How can I help you?
you: hi, Im looking at the feature list on your product and wanted to ask what you mean by 'automatic scaling'
you: does it mean that my virtual machine image gets moved to a more powerful server or that it gets copied across machines or .. ?
Will: It means that there are no limits to how large your account can be, for example if you have a spike of people in your website we can scale up your account dynamically so that you will receive no down time or loss in performance
you: yes ok, but does this mean that I have to write my application in some way or relying on libraries that you provide ?
Will: Not at all
Will: You don't have to do any thing special to your website
Will: we just mirror the data and put it on multiple machines
you: aah I see, so the architecture again presumes that there's only one machine with the master database yes ?
Will: correct
you: ok thanks bye
Will: your welcome

Since when are Application Delivery Networks (and in this instance single-location ADNs) stuff that provides ‘automatic scaling’ ?

Even in the case of Twitter for example, the bottleneck is apparently on the database.

I’m perplexed.

Over the past couple of weeks the OpenCoffee people had their eyes fixed on the Stream 08 unconference. This is one of the most private (secrecy through obscurity) events, organized and executed by wpp.

Originally noticed by Dimitris Athanasiadis via Twitter, it eventually dragged in the whole OC Athens group. So let’s see who we met:

Jeff Pulver

I first met Jeff at the Stream. He was with Dror Gill, heading to Athens and looking for a ride. He was very stressed about keeping us waiting (he must have apologized like 3-4 times for that, really kind). While we thought that he was an accomplished blogger, later on in Tziralis’ stuffy car we learned that he’s actually a greatly accomplished developer, serial (seeeerial) entrepreneur, even wrote the Pulver law and apparently a multimilionaire (which made things pretty awkward after I learned it).

Leaving the Stream venue, we got for a walk at the Acropolis, which turned out to be rather fun.

and later had lunch during which I was a complete zombie due to sleep deprivation, but anyway…

Another notable mention is Pablo a very cool hacker/ intellectual property worker, whose surname no one seems to know. Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot about Pablo in the near future.

Jason Calacanis

The one and only Calacanis, second most influential twitterer.

Ok so seriously I don’t know what to say. We asked (kudos to Tziralis) him to come and give a psych-up speech at our OpenCoffee meeting, and Jason came and overperformed. Bigtime.

Thanks Jason ! :)

Actually of all the people at Stream, I noticed that he and Tim O'Reilly alone had what I call the Jesus effect. It's a borderline-disturbing glamour attack where the speaker has people sitting on the flour around him literally feeding on his words as they come out of his mouth.

Tim O’Reilly

actually we didn’t get to talk to Tim very much. We were glad to have him observe/comment/place questions on our presentation at stream.

But ! Later on Nikos Anagnostou (kudos) organized a bloggers’ breakfast with him where we got to chat about emerging tech mostly.

An unfortunate detail is that we were too kind to interrupt Tim, which we later learned he interpreted as a lack of questions (while we were really bursting with such) and tried to fill the gap by giving a speech essentially.

The last breakfast. Jesus at the center (the pale skinned guy).

Me and Tim. Best friends forever… I wish :D .

Panaghiotis Vryonis also has the video scoop from the meeting with O'Reilly

Get to his blog to see the second part

The greatest advancement from meeting these people was that now we have a very clear picture of what we need to do with OpenCoffee Greece. They mainly confirmed our ideas, but also pitched in quite a few ideas which had worked for them in the past

We feel wiser now.

Seriously.

We ended up replacing the parts of the equation from this presenation at Stream 08 with something less inflamatory.

This replaces about 90 lines of code

For Each item In _source
    If Not (From control In Controls Where _
        TryCast(control, ISource) IsNot Nothing AndAlso _
        TryCast(control, ISource).Source Is item).Any Then
        Dim viewcontrol = FormsStore.Present(item, _mode, GetType(Control), _
                                             GetType(Control)).Transform(item)

        Controls.Add(viewcontrol)
    End If
Next

The andalso is a shortcircuit boolean. It prevents the runtime from rearranging the expression evaluations or branching them on different execution paths.

Visual Basic 9 is so compact o_O !

that’s what I think at least

In Europe and Americas we have to look after each unit to make sure their efficiency doesn’t drop. It’s about empowering the unit. Lean and mean human constructs push productivity. It’s important for the huma to lives long and well.

In BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) it’s about the mass. It’s unclear weather the full potential of any individual will ever be unfolded, and it’s unclear if that’s even needed. There is less specialization, less power in the unit, but numbers outdo quality wrt significance.

After a 3 month plan I terminated my hosting account with the Dotnetpark service.

Let me enumerate the problems I’ve had with the service:

• The first email I received with the confirmation and account details had holes in it, especially the MS SQL server details.
• Support is outsourced to India, with whatever that means to anyone who cares.
• The MSSQL itself never worked. I could never connect to it using the web interface, or the addresses they provided me with.
• There is no way to attach your IIS console to the server. You need to manage everything over their horrible control panel.
• Since day 1 the panel said I was being hosted in asp.net 1 mode. If I changed that eveything stopped working. One magic day, my sites stop working and apparently I should have been in mode 2 all along. FFS.
• Forget about backing up your stuff. Their file manager panel times out when creating large zip files. There is no other backup facility though. You just need to download the entire site from time to time.
• You get no indication that the zip files you get are corrupted. They even validate on Winzip. They caused me troubled though when I considered them as clean backups. They’re fucked up.
• After installing Frontpage extensions in one app (which installed it for the entire site and overwrote files of mine btw) file permissions got messed up all over the site.
• Over the time, I’ve had random files disappearing. Mostly files with great transaction volume such as flash and videos. Naturally though I can’t prove they deleted anything, and therefore can’t blame them.
• When you grant an application write privileges in their panel, you get to have it for the entire application only. Hello ? Malicious users, crackers, hackers unite !
• When I asked them to install Umbraco CMS for me, they said I should just copy paste and run it. Umbraco can’t be installed that way though.
• I asked them to install Graffiti CMS which needs to run an installer too,and mentioned that they say on their front page they’d install it for me. After some pressure they did it, although not using the MySQL database I had set up, but the embedded one. Oh well. It’s of not that they said they’d have it done in 20 minutes (after 40 in wait) and it got done some 12 hours later.
• Only the primary user gets an FTP account. The others get one too, but it doesn’t work anyway. If you have collaborations going on you’re screwed security wise, cause you can’t adjust their rights anyway.
• Their panel supposedly lets you create and delete databases and users on MSSQL. However when I tried to delete users or database I got a ‘-1’ error. Consistently.
• The web panel supposedly lets me create Sharepoint sites. Guess what doesn’t work ? Everything.
• The web panel supposedly lets me install outdated free software such as Dotnetnuke and PhpBB. Same here.
• The DOWNTIME IS HORRIBLE AND SO WAS THE SPEED !
• They dont admit they have downtime or speed issues.
• When I asked them to delete my account, they asked me for a document I never received, and after that for my username/password combination. I’m still waiting for them to sort it through their ‘financial dept’.

If you think I’m nuts, read the actual mail correspondence. It’s here.

Until now, I haven’t had any issues with my new host, DiscountASP.net . Any problems I had have been responded to and solved in less than 20 minutes each.

Για να κατανοήσετε το χιούμορ από τα αποκόματα στο τέλος βοηθάει πολύ να είστε φοιτητής του τμήματος Πληροφορικής ΑΠΘ