The world is abuzz with talk of the next big thing in computing, the cloud. Well this week my experiences have told me one thing, the cloud sucks, it is the biggest pile of BS since the bailout of the banks.

First, Google Mail (gmail for the US) failed. Leaving customers both on hosted and the standard accounts, then my favourite hosting provider of nearly 5 years fails on me, there (gs) or GridService. The cloud based shared hosting system, which I decided to put some of my clients on to allow rapid scaling or as it has turned out rapid failing.

The storage cluster of which my server is a part has failed, in a whale like fashion - Spewing its entrails all over the server. Thankfully my managerie of dedicated servers are still up and running, but I hadn't transferred the remainder of the sites out of the (gs). Meaning the biggest of all my sites is no down for the count, and has been down for over 24hrs.

I love (mt) mediatemple, and there support staff are not doubt taking flak from every corner. But, I would really appreciate it if I could edit my DNS entries so I can get something up to explain to customers what the hell is going on, and no we haven't gone bankrupt.

I would like to add, that I still would recommend mediatemple to anyone, but just not the (gs). If you want cloud Amazon EC2 or mediatemple (cs) when its out is what you want.

MediaTemple Cluster2 Status

TechCruch GFail

Microsoft has offered $44.6billion to buy Yahoo! At least if Microsoft does by Yahoo!, Live! search becomes half decent and there are some real brains in the web division, it could also go the other way and Yahoo! becomes what Live! is now. 

Even with the combined forces of Microsoft & Yahoo there will still be a long way to go before, they can topple the impressive lead Google has over them both. Only time will tell. 

In the beginning, the iPod let you listen to every CD you owned, even when you were stuck on the Red Line. Then Steve Jobs said, "Let there be video," and lo and behold, you could watch "Lost" die a slow, overwritten death on a two-inch screen. But while people seem content to load their little devices with as many songs and TV shows as possible, podcasts (think of them as radio programs that you download) tend to be neglected.
Listen and Learn With Podcasts - washingtonpost.com

The Answer = Not anytime soon
Why? it all falls down to the mentality of the person learning and the fact that listening to a podcast is a passive occupation, were as good learning will always be active.

Increasing technology use within schools, colleges and university's can do nothing but help the way we learn and consume that learning materials. Being able to access course materials 24/7 is a great resource to have but you don't remember the stuff you do aswell as you would from a classroom.

I think there will inevitably be some invention that takes podcasting and vidcasting out of the passive domain into the interactive and maybe then we can consider replacing the classroom. Until then I think classrooms are safe.

I am amazed at ThinkFree Office it is exactly what a web app should be and the learning curve is 0 cos it looks just like office on you desktop. Wel done guys, and ThinkFree Office is my default Office of choice.

And I got this from 5 minutes using it.

http://blog.thinkfree.com/

And as you will probably see as you browse around there is some nice AJAX improvements that K2 brings to WordPress. I am still working on some finishing touches but I am very pleased with the new theme since I now have got it to work by deleting all the K2 records from the options database.

"You cannot be everything to everybody"

As much as Tesco is excelling at what it does it is diversifying too much, look at Apple mid 90s. As much as Human Nature says do everything, you should really stick to what your good at before branching out. Tesco has only one asset if it all goes wrong, they have the money so they will have likely lost very little money on it.

I am also working on subtle changes, but they all add up to make a big difference or at least I hope.

Also if you see error messages I am sorry its me tinkering with the site, I hope to be done by Sunday Morning. I never thought i would miss my windows machine, but now I have no development server, oh well. Stick around for some more updates.

With the web becoming a self-purpetuating cloud of buzz words and ways for us to communicate for free, could we live without it. Simple answer is; NO, we just couldn't live without the resoruce that is the web.

So why is this? Well a biased look at myself might be a place to start so: I sit a my mac far too long and have often been told to get a life, but every bit of information I could ever want is at hand be it current affairs, or historical information or maybe just what did I put in that e-mail yesterday - its all there, and it even follows me around.

So what of the generation that is not of the internet age, i.e. my parents. So theres my mum who buys and sells on eBay, my dad uses a Powerbook to do the photography stuff he enjoys and casually surfs the net.
My sister is sucked into the IM revolution, the fact I only get messages saying "jack my computers broke how do I fix it?" I don't really bother with it.

My sister doesn't have a mySpace account and neither do I, and this is where my problem begins with web 2.0 I like having access to all the breadth of information but I arent interested in the social networking rubbish. We are already to dependant on Computers, and people are getting Fatter and Fatter, but there is, nothing like a face to face conversation with somebody, you can correspond with somebody via e-mail (this is espescially true in business) and like what you hear, but when you actually see the person you don't after having a face to face conversation, doing everything online cuts out this judgement.

I only see mySpace as a collecting pot for the popular and the unpopular and the people in the middle of the scale just dont fit in with the way the system works, we then have the inherent problems with such a online network which have been widely published but no-one has come up with a solution that works. The actual solution is quite simple, do it in the real world.

Moving on from my rant on mySpace, and on to broader things. The internet is starting to populate every little facet of out lives, I don't go a morning without checking my emails and reading the latest news online, but also its going further there are fridges that will do your shopping online for you, all you have to do is zap the barcode on the way out from the fridge.

Are we becoming the masters of our on destruction, putting all our things online centralizing everything we are certainly already more at risk to ID theft and fraud. Do we need to become more aware of the security of our details? and should we constantly be thinking online we are at risk?

On the flip side, we benefit in areas putting everything online, by having having everything within reach at any web access point, I can sit down in town and tell my iMac at home to record a film on that night with a click. My phone can alert me when that important e-mail drops in my inbox. Overall I would say I am the worst organized person I know, but having multiple ways to access my data I have so far managed to keep everything going and on-time, especially with college stuff.

I think overall we shouldn't get paranoid but, we should be ever more aware about how much about us we put online and how many databases we are in and what that data does when it is no longer used. Is it wrong to ask a company like google to remove all you details from there databases (think google Accounts) when you no longer use there service anymore and is there a procedure for this, the UKs data protection act says not, but other countries aren't so controlling in this regard; just this morning i got 4 e-mails from lycos even though I said remove my details from there database.

Do we need a universal law, on data protection and use on the internet? Would you sleep easier at night?

I think its weird that I didn't think of it sooner, but seen as I use google almost exclusively its slightly understandable, but by that logic also if you advertise with Yahoos equivalent of AdWords are you going to get less results than using AdWords. This is once again Googles biggest asset slapping me around the face, the Brand.

I could give a history - but that would be boring - What I can say is how the web has changed the way a consume media and also become a creator of sorts.

I wake up in the morning, wake up my iMac, and Google Reader is there to great me; all the news I could ever want tech, entertainment, current affairs, you name it I can have it there. Usually at least 4 different slants on the same topic, there's nothing like having all the sides of the argument. Then to the mail, for most people this is were it would go wrong, SPAM, but surprisingly I get very little, and what I do get goes to the bin by itself.
eMail, I get a few offer updates from the myriad of tech sites I am a member of, I also get work eMails, and a couple of mailing list filter in. So in two applications I have got my fingertips in a number different information streams, I also can communicate with anybody around the world.

So on to what the internet should grow into; Mainly a trend already started for the web to become more social but not only that, everybody needs access to it. Yes, I mean everybody, developing countries are full of people who could thrive online, creativity is often increased by not having contact with the technology that the invention is based i.e. interweb. Also we need to see an end to SPAM viruses, cons and the general nastiness that the web fosters; its just simply not what it is all about.

Links
http://www.onewebday.org/action/

While this is a step in the right direction and something I support entirely, there is still a missing link, its alright having this information given to kids at school but there are very few schools that haven't got censoring and monitoring on their internet connection so in theory they cant access potentially dangerous at school.

But at home? This missing link is the Parents, in most households the children would be seen as the most tech savvy so do the parents know about all the filtering and stuff they need to? I am also against filtering of the internet, in an interview with somebody from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) on the news this morning said "the internet is just to big" To which my response was thank god somebody gets it, hopefully this will start filtering in to Kids and parents alike and we should all become more web aware because of it.

Links
http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk
Think U Know Campaign Video
http://www.ceop.gov.uk/

I will hopefully finished and quashed any problems caused be me updating the theme.

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Problem 1: My schwag is late.Everyone wants their project to be cheap, fast, and good, but as anyone in web development knows you can only get two of ‘em. We want to keep valleyschwag cheap (ten bucks plus shipping! cheap!) and we want it to be good (more schwag! cool packaging!)

The Chronicles of Valleyschwag » Blog Archive » We’re back! And a Valleyschwag4 Update

I am still waiting for my first parcel from valleyschwag, but i only just sunscribe to it so i cant really moan that much.

-anyway to the point of this post-

I totally agree with the sentiment that, if its good it doesn't matter how long it takes, within reason obviously.

I am no awaiting the delivery of my schwag, and it should be good.

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So far i am impressed with the iPhoto intergration, I haven't uploaded a great deal or used the standalone app but it is simple and a few click afair and does exactly what it says on the tin

"Parents, please be aware. Don't let your child be alone in a bedroom with a webcam and a computer with Internet access unsupervised," said Alberta Integrated Child Exploitation Unit Det. Kevin Fald.

edmontonsun.com - Edmonton News - 'Don't let your child have a webcam'

This isnt the exact quote i wanted but it was along the same lines "what do expect when yur child has the latest technology ... they shouldnt have it" Why shouldnt have a child have access to the internet and the latest technology, just because somebody might take advantage. The problem is not with the technology or the web services available it is the fact that parents aren't of the web generation and aren't giving guidelines to there children.

I am 100% totally against censorship and parental controls as it isnt the answer to the problem in question. As a species we are curious and if boundaries are put there we will break them. An example of this at my old school they had a friendly censornet system which was far to sensitive, it is ok filtering the nasty but images from Hiroshima and the Holocaust are also nasty, were does the filter stop and who says what is ok? The internet is full of rubbish and to somebody this blog will be rubbish and to another it will be valuable information and opinion. By setting up universal rules for children to follow, they are more likely to stay safe only, i am more inclined to say go onto the web and find out what is out there but if you see something that you dont know what it is then close it, now we come onto the Instant Messaging revolution, see this is a simple one only have on your contacts list who you know if you don't know them dont have them on your contacts list, IM is between friends and family. As you get older you are more inclined to have the barriers and let more people onto your contacts list, but at this point you should know a dodgy character, and not be so gullible.

The US has passed legislation which controls what website operators are allowed to put in their site meta tags. The law bans the use of words which might lead anyone to obscene content.

Newsvine - Meta tag abusers face 20 years in prison

Then onto another not all that dissimilar subject, the US trying to police the web. A mean how are they going to make this one stick and it may be tied to certain things, but what is to stop apple suing me for having a higher rank than them when searching from apple (not that it will ever happen) America is willing itself into a position were it can oversea the internet, but the internet is designed to be a collective of different ideas, not one mass of grey boring information. America designed the inter-network when the phone system was just starting to be used, it was designed so any place on the earth could be contacted even if there were places bombed and cables cut. Tim Burners-Lee created the internet as we now know it to share information, the basis of which any sharing can take place being self-censored not by government but by the user who says, that is the line and i arent going to cross it. This way the internet can meet all its users needs.

Sorry for the sort of rant it had to be done.

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So a perfect website would be nice to look at, some cool features and plenty of good content. In that statement i opened another can of worms what is good design, for me it would be functional and looks simple.

"99% of the internet is rubbish" -unkown "the internet is a series of tubes" - Ted Stevens

I have used the unsleepable from openswitch with a few mods and hacks to get it doing what i want. I am also re-organising the collection of .mac sites and flickr accounts i have and making them easy to access through this site.

For the most part the site is in a near complete stage, however the about page has no content.