Tag Archives: technology

Why I Use a Test Mule

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One good reason not to load beta operating system software on a computer with real data on it.

Today, while working with a certain beta operating system, I managed to lock myself out of my user account.

Well, I didn’t do the locking. The computer did. An error occurred as I was logging in, right after disabling its heavy-duty file security feature. It decided it didn’t like my password, and although it liked the master password I entered for the computer, it didn’t like the idea of me changing mine to one that would work.

Result: I couldn’t log in as an administrator, so I couldn’t do much of anything with the operating system — including accessing my files.

This brought my entire workday grinding to a halt. Thank heaven I pulled those screenshots off before I clicked that button. They’d be goners.

Now if this were my main production machine, I’d be going bonkers right about now. I’d be freaking out. I’d be so glad I’ve been faithfully backing up all my important files all over the place. But I’d be really POed that I had to reinstall everything from scratch.

But it isn’t so bad when you’re dealing with a test mule. That’s a computer that exists solely to run software in a test environment.

Like beta operating system software.

The computer has hardly anything on it, so losing the hard disk contents isn’t a big deal. Just reformat and reinstall. I’ve already installed betas three times for this book and I’m sure I’ll be doing it again before the software is finalized. Not a big deal.

As I write this, the installation DVD is starting up the computer. I had to fool it into booting from that disc, since I’d normally need to enter my password to restart with the boot disk inserted. (I got to use that Option key trick I wrote about earlier today in an emergency situation.) I figure that just before bedtime, the installation will be complete.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick up where I left off.

I Don’t Like Being Seriously Dugg

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The activity finally winds down — I think.

In yesterday’s post, “Getting Seriously Dugg,” I reported the history of a blog post that rose quickly to stardom in the world of Digg users. But that report was done early in the day, before the shit hit the fan (so to speak).

The Heat is On

The Digg count continued to rise throughout the day. And the hits kept coming. All morning long, there were at least 100 visitors online at my site at once. This is not normal here. And it was rather frightening. I kept expecting something to break.

But it wasn’t just the popular Digg post that was getting hits. It was the post about getting Dugg, too. Soon, it had more hits than the dugg post — even though it wasn’t dug by anyone at all. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Things came to a head at 11:15 AM when I got an e-mail message from my ISP:

Our Hosting Operations Admins have alerted us to an issue with your hosting account. The account has overutilized resources within the shared environment. As a result, the account has been moved to an isolated server for Terms of Service violators. You have 30 days to research and resolve this issue. After this time, the account will be evaluated again. If the issue is resolved, the account will be migrated back to the shared environment. If it persists, you will need to move to a full Dedicated server.

I got on the phone immediately and called my ISP. To my knowledge, I hadn’t violated any terms of service by getting hits. My plan allows 2,000 GB of bandwidth per month. The billing month starts on the third — that day. So far, in all the years I’ve hosted there, I’ve never exceeded 6% of my monthly allowance. Just because I was getting 30 times the usual number of hits I get in a day, it was still not much more than I’d get in a total month. So there was no way I’d even come close to 10% of the monthly allowance — let alone exceed it.

The guy who answered the phone was extremely polite but equally clueless. He had to talk to Advanced Hosting. He couldn’t let me talk to them. They gave him a song and dance about too many domain names pointing to the same site. He attempted to hand the same thing to me. I told him that that shouldn’t matter since none of those domain names were advertised anywhere. Besides, there were only about a dozen of them pointing to one site and maybe 15 pointing to another. I wasn’t aware of any limitation.

“I’ve been dugg,” I told him. When I got no answer, I asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” he said.

I explained that it meant that one of my blog’s posts had become very popular and that people were flocking to my site to read it. I told him this was a temporary thing and that it should be back to normal by the end of the day. I hoped.

He told me that if I continued to get so many hits to my site, I’d have to get a dedicated server. I told him I’d evaluate after I’d seen my stats for the day. (My account is updated daily in the middle of the night.)

We hung up.

A Brief Intermission

I went flying. I took a couple from Virginia on an hour-long helicopter tour in the Wickenburg area. I showed them mine sites and canyons from the air. We saw a lot of cows, too. Afterward, I goofed off at the airport, chatting with two jet pilots who’d come in and were waiting for passengers. Then I went shopping for dinner. I got home and had a snack. Then I looked at Digg. It was 4 PM.

What Happened in Five Hours

The post that had started it all now had more than 1,200 diggs. It had been viewed almost 30,000 times. The post about that post, which hadn’t been dugg at all, had been viewed more than 40,000 times.

But thankfully, there were only 33 people online. So the flood had begun to subside.

On the Digg Technology page, my dugg post was listed near the bottom, under newly popular. (Ironically, on the same page, near the top, was a post about how Digg was losing popularity. That had more than 1,200 diggs, too.)

The Morning After

It’s the next day. I can now look back objectively on my blog’s day with a Digg Top 10 Tech post by studying some of the stats for the day and how the differ from other days.

My ISP reports that for the first day of my billing period — yesterday — I used up .55% (that’s just over half a percent, folks) of my monthly bandwidth. That means that if every day was like yesterday, I’d still come in at less than 20% allowable bandwidth. So I don’t know what “terms of service violation” they were whining about.

W3Counter, which I use to track page hits and visits, says I got just over 27,000 page hits yesterday. Look at the chart below; it makes my site look flat-line dead before yesterday. Honestly — it wasn’t that dead.

Hits

Today’s hits are about 3 times a normal day. Nice, but I’m willing to bet it drops down to normal within the next few days.

W3Counter also sent me an e-mail message warning me that their free service doesn’t cover sites that get more than 5,000 hits a day.They say I need to upgrade to a pro account for $4.95/month. We’ll see how long before they disable my current account — I’m not paying them to tell me how many hits I get when I can easily set up some stat software with a free WordPress plugin. (ShortStats, which we wrote about in our WordPress book, comes to mind.)

(I have not been able to reconcile page hits as reported by W3Counter with article reads as reported by a WordPress plugin. I have a sneaking suspicion that the WordPress plugin counts bots.)

Digg, as a source of hits, kicked Google out of the top spot on my site. Google used to account for 54% of my visitors. Now, for the 14-day period tracked by W3Counter, Digg is the big source. Google doesn’t even make the list any more, with all the different Digg URLs people used to find my site. So my sources stat is completely skewed and pretty much useless for the next 13 days. And 93% of the hits in the past 14 days have been to the 18-year-old mouse story.

Meanwhile, WP-UserOnline reports that yesterday saw the most users online at once on this site: 375. I don’t think this site will ever see that many concurrent users again.

My RSS feed subscriptions have more than doubled. That’s great. (If you’re a new subscriber, thanks for tuning in. And don’t worry — I don’t write about Digg every day.) It’ll be interesting to see if that number continues to climb or if I manage to scare all the new folks off by failing to provide more Diggable content on a daily basis.

My Google AdSense revenue for yesterday was right in line with an average high day. When you consider that I got about 20 times my normal number of page hits yesterday, you might think that I’d get 20 times the revenue. I didn’t. Obviously, Digg users don’t click Google ads.

The last I checked, the 18-year-old mouse story got just over 1,357 Diggs. I think that I actually encouraged the extra Diggs by placing the Digg icon at the top of the post. I’ve since taken it away from all posts.

I’ve realized that I don’t want to be seriously Dugg. Other than the surge in new RSS subscribers, there really isn’t any benefit to it.

What do you think?

Have you been slammed by being dugg? How did it affect your hosting account or other services? Use the Comments link or form to let the rest of us know.

The iPhone is Just a SmartPhone

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Yes, it’s cool, but there are other options. And is coolness really a reason to wait on line?

iPhoneI’ve been reading, with great interest, the articles about iPhone hype and reviews of the iPhone by people who have actually used one for a few weeks. The interest is twofold:

  • I think the iPhone may turn out to be the best-designed smartphone to date. And I’m not just talking about looks. I’m talking about usability.
  • As someone who has always been interested in marketing, I’m amazed at the level of hype for this new product.

Before I go any further, let me make two things clear: I’m a loyal Apple computer user and have been so since 1989. I’d like very much to have an iPhone because everything I’ve seen so far indicates that it will be a great product. I’m also an Apple stockholder.

That said, what is the big deal? The iPhone is just another smartphone. Yes, it’s got a great design and yes, it’s hot. But there are several smartphones already on the market that do just about everything that the iPhone will do.

Another option

My Treo 700p comes to mind. It’s got a touch screen. It does e-mail and Web browsing and lets me send and receive text messages. It syncs with my Mac so I can take my entire address book and calendar with me wherever I go. It takes still photos and video and saves them on the phone or e-mails them to someone else. It plays MP3s (although I still prefer using my iPod for that). GoogleMaps for Palm OS gives the Treo the same Map feature the iPhone offers at no extra cost. With the addition of relatively inexpensive software, the Treo can also do handwriting recognition and voice dialing. And software — did I mention that there are hundreds of third-party software products that can extend the functionality of my Treo?

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you buy a Treo instead of an iPhone.

I’m just pointing out that there are other products out there that do what the iPhone does. And I’m pretty sure that all of them are cheaper and available with calling plans that are cheaper. So you can do the same thing for less money.

It’s all about design.

The main difference I see, however, is design. The iPhone looks cool and I know the interface is going to be a heck of a lot more intuitive than the relatively confusing interface of the Treo. (I can do standard tasks with the Treo, but have a hell of a time setting configuration options, which don’t seem to be centralized in a logical place.) If there’s one thing that Apple excels at, it’s design — from its product packaging to its advertisements to its stores to its hardware and software products.

But since when does good design warrant the kind of attention and consumer demand the iPhone is getting?

People have been using and raving about poorly designed products for years. (I won’t get specific here because I don’t want to set set myself up for the fanboys to bash.) Why, all of a sudden, has a potentially well-designed product become the center of attention?

Or is it?

Could it simply be the “cool factor”?

I remember when the Motorola Razr came out. My husband just had to get one the day they became available. He came home to show it off. Sure, it was sleek and small. But compared to my 3-year-old Motorola flip phone, it wasn’t very comfortable to hold and the buttons were difficult to push. I wasn’t terribly impressed. But I saw the reaction of others when he whipped out his phone to answer a call in front of friends and work associates. They were really impressed.

Could that be why people want the iPhone badly enough to wait in line for four days? Or to pay someone else to wait in line for them?

Is anyone out there saying “duh-uh”? Or is this a revelation to some of you?

Is the iPhone craze just another example of our skewed sense of values? Looks that way to me.

The survey says…

Meanwhile, the poll on this site indicates that of the 352 people who have voted, 28% of them claim they want an iPhone badly enough to wait on line to get one. Another 34% say they expect to get one within the next 6 months. Only 13% say they don’t want one at all. I realize that this isn’t the most scientific poll — after all, the people who found it online are the ones obviously interested in the iPhone. Here’s a more objective poll.

As for me, I don’t do lines. (Take that any way you like.) I won’t even wait 20 minutes for a table at a restaurant. (And I like to eat.)

Take a seat on the bleachers with me.

So I continue to watch the excitement with great interest from a safe position on the sidelines. Would love to get comments from other spectators.