Varud

It seems that Sprint-Nextel has de-peered from Cogent.  This kind of thing has happened a few times over the past few years.  Is this a sign of the future.  Nobody seems to be talking about cyberwarfare and the balkanization of the Internet in a serious way.  There are some solid books out there but where is the mainstream media on this very important issue?

I’m not sure if anybody noticed, but the site was taken down for a few days because somebody defaced it.  I kind of liked the music that they put on my homepage, but after listening to the song, I had to go about fixing it.  What did I learn?

1. Don’t use shared hosts.  In this day and age, unless you are super poor, do not use a shared host.  If you are not technically savvy, use services for specific tasks (i.e. blogger.com for a blog) so you don’t have to think about the technology/maintenance.  If you are technically savvy and you have needs that are not basic, get a server where you have root access.  AWS ec2 is awesome for this.  The cost is $75 a month though so it may be too expensive for some people (although if you can set one up – I can probably find a gig for you to make enough money to pay that $75/month – just drop me a line).
2. Dreamhost.com, while pretty good and having good customer service, just isn’t what I need.  People have recommended gandi.net for name services and hosting if you need the cheap option for hosting.  I haven’t used it personally but knowledgeable people love them.

Oh, I don’t think I’ve done an update on platform choices either.  Here is where I stand now:

1. MySQL 5.0.45 (I’m still contemplating PostgreSQL)
2. Python 2.5.1
3. Apache 2.2.9
4. Fedora 8 (I like the Fedora/Red Hat series – Debian/Ubuntu was giving me grief).
5. Django 1.0
6. Pinax trunk

That was fun!  I feel very excited about the Python community.  It’s a smaller group but it’s growing fast and it has solid support out there.  In addition, it’s a rock solid language with full unicode support – I love that.

I’m not sure when LinkedIn launched it, but it now has an Answers section.  This is pretty neat.  First off, they bring the user in by putting the questions that people ask on the right bar next to people’s profiles.  I haven’t played around with it enough to see how well the questions are chosen based on the profile, but I presume that algorithm will improve over time.

What the system allows users to do is simply to ask questions and then have people answer them.  People who contribute more get higher rankings on the system as experts.  It looks like, for now, experts are those who are top contributors for the week.  This reduces the incentive for bots to do fake contributions since they’ll only succeed for a week and probably get little response anyway.

Cool tool that everybody should check out.

It’s been a tough couple of days.  Well, I went to Providence, RI for the weekend, which isn’t tough.  However, today and Friday, Patrick and I worked on some deeper technology issues and came to some conclusions:

1. We will use Debian Lenny.  Lenny is just about to be declared stable and Etch is simply too old for what we need.
2. We will use pretty much the defaults on Lenny although Django will be version 1.0
3. We will use Amazon Web Services as previously mentioned.
4. The use of Django leads to another open issue – will we use Django at all?  Ruby/Merb is still in the running because HAML and SASS look so exciting.
5. JQuery.

So, we still have a competition between Ruby and Python.

This week has been a fun one.  We all moved to the Rose Tech Ventures Incubator, Spark Space NY.  This is a great place to work – a really good vibe, lots of interesting people doing web 2.0 work, and generally a better location (all those sirens in midtown can start to wear on you).  Anyway, one of my mantras is that small is better, and minimal is best.  What was best about the move was that I only had Mac Minis.  These things are the love of my life.  Two of them are still half the size of a normal desktop.  I only wish they would be updated and support dual monitor configurations

Recently, I’ve begun the painful process of actually deciding what core languages and frameworks will be used for the application.  Some things are kind of obvious for everybody, and leads to my favorite phrase from my days of studying for the SAT – PoE (Process of Elimination).

One dimension to start eliminating on is the breadth of the network supporting that technology over the coming 2-3 years.  Perl is a language that is great, rock solid, and also drifting into obsolesence.  I feel bad for Perl but what are you going to do?  This also leaves out old versions of languages like PHP 4.

Another issue is licensing and money.  That cuts out Microsoft products right off the bat as well as some of the supported platforms like WebSphere.  I haven’t been a Microsoft guy for years although they’re still the only game in town for word processing and spreadsheets.

At this point, there are some things that just go along with what I’ve done before.  I’ll most certainly use a Linux flavor for the OS – either Ubuntu (which I’ve never used in production) or CentOS (which is the same as Red Hat but is free).  After having some frustrating days trying to deal with a font installation problem (of all things) on an Ubuntu server, I’m starting to consider CentOS.  Either way, it’s not much of a difference, either will do.

This operating system needs to be on a machine of some sort.  I don’t want to buy a machine and grow out of it though – I’d prefer to rent.  That leads to a slew of hosting options.  One of the big guys is Dreamhost.  I’ve worked with them on some minor projects and they’re great in alot of ways.  However, I need full control, root access, the ability to create an entirely new instance, etc…  Dreamhost won’t do.  It’s time to take advantage of the cloud so I’ve been experimenting with Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS ec2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).  For about $72/month, I can have a dedicated ’server’ on a premium network (Amazon’s) with access to S3 which allows for such things as snapshots (backups) and getting data into a solid storage space.

This post will have to be continued – I can’t nearly finish this work so quickly.  Does anybody have thoughts?  Here’s the current plan:

• Amazon Web Services ec2,S3, etc…
• Linux (Ubuntu or CentOS)
• Apache (I hadn’t really thought about anything else, possibly lighttpd)
• Python or Ruby (PHP feels passe and there’s really no other option)
• If Python, Django or Turbogears (probably Django because Google App Engine is using that)
• If Ruby, Rails or Merb

I could still be convinced on alot of fronts – this is hard