Sat 23 Feb 2008
Moving sucks. You have to find a bunch of boxes, throw all of your possessions in said boxes, rent a crappy truck, bribe your friends with beer (still cheap labor), put the cat somewhere for a couple hours– the list goes on. There must be a better way.
This video from StreetFilms shows how some Brooklyn residents made moving more fun by using bicycles–and a rickshaw–to eliminate the need for a crappy, rented moving van:
Fri 15 Feb 2008
Amazon’s S3 Service went dark for a time today. This, of course, effectively shuttered the businesses (or parts thereof) that rely on S3 for online storage. It seems that things are returning to normal, but some customers are upset–and rightfully so. Amazon touted this storage as being pretty much bulletproof; widespread, unscheduled downtime does not live up to that promise.
In Amazon’s defense, this is the first major S3 outage, so their track record is pretty damn good. I’ve been an advocate of S3 for some time, and will continue to be so long as outages like this one do not become commonplace.
This just serves as a reminder that functions relying on web services should fail gracefully. This may be a tall order, if not impossible, for some applications. But, compensating for these sorts of failures should be a major design consideration for developers of applications that consume web services.
Wed 13 Feb 2008
I upgraded my Mac Book to 10.5.2 today. Everything went swimmingly, but I noticed that everyone I know had suddenly moved their birthday to Wednesday the 13th at 15:00 EST–according to my calendar anyway.
My fix for this was to go into the iCal preferences and uncheck the Show Birthdays Calendar checkbox, then recheck it. This put everybody’s birthday back where it was supposed to be.
Update 2008-05-29: This birthday calendar weirdness happened again with the 10.5.3 update. Although, only three birthdays got screwed up. Once again, unchecking and then checking the Show Birthdays Calendar fixed the calendars.