Alex Pooley's Blog

I remember Bill Gates once said that the press adore Google, but Microsoft is ignored. I agree with the big G on that one, and here’s a good example why.

I received a neat little ‘post card’ inside my Entrepreneur magazine yesterday (May 2006 issue - we’re a little behind in Australia). The post card was from Microsoft. Reading the back they said they could get me a *free* web site including domain name, hosting, email, web stats, “and more”. So I checked out the site:”http://www.officelive.com” for details.

Scanning the feature list I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.
* Email is hosted through Hotmail with 2Gb storage per account (GMail is still 1Gb yeh?).
* Hosting offers 10Gb bandwidth! With 30Mb storage.
* Can’t afford site design? Easy, use the integrated site designer complete with ready made templates.

They look to have an awesome offering there. I had not heard much about this offer previously despite reading a fair waft of stuff online every day.

The offering is still in beta and I suspect the MS PR machine will speed up once the beta is over. Still, to me at least, this highlights the incredibly incestuous nature of the press, blogs, and networks in general.

I remember reading about a music study once where two groups of people had to rank a selection of music from best to worst. The first group made their rankings and then the second group. The second group though, was provided the rankings of the first group. Suprise suprise, the second groups rankings had a stronger correlation than the first group.

OK, so it was only one study. Still, there’s no denying the lemming nature.

Finally! Everything seems to be working fine now on the new server. It only took two patches to Ruby On Rails, and some modifications to “AssetPackager”:http://synthesis.sbecker.net/articles/2006/06/19/assetpackager-released but I’m _finally_ there.

Well, not _there_ _there_, just at the point where I can invite more people to the system. I’ll kick the system around tomorrow and if all is good then I’ll send out invites.

So far so good with the new hosting at ev1servers. I ditched “Apache”:http://httpd.apache.org/ and “fastcgi”:http://fastcgi.com in favour of “pound”:http://www.apsis.ch/pound/ and “mongrel”http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/.

I experienced issues with the apache/fastcgi combination at both dreamhost and site5. Issues that translated in to significant down time. Down time is just not acceptable for a web application so I had to find a better way.

It turns out that all the cool kids are using mongrel as a “runner” instead of other solutions such as cgi, scgi, fastcgi. The idea is that you create a cluster/pool of mongrels that essentially contain your ruby application and proxy HTTP requests that arrive at the box to the cluster. It’s a really nice, fast, and best of all, simple solution.

So what’s the go with msgpad now? Well, It’s maturing. Once I can verify that the hosting migration has succeeded, I will invite more beta testers. I’m mindful of the perpetual beta and rest assured, I am cautiously but surely navigating my way through :)

Interesting point of note: while reading about my webserver/runner options on the web I came across “rimuhosting”:http://rimuhosting.com. It’s apparantly the host of choice for quite a few.