Theo - Tech News, Reviews & Guides

Quite frankly, I am shocked at the lack of support for Google’s Apps series of products, aimed at people who would like to use Google’s excellent Mail, Calendar, Docs and Pages products in conjunction with their existing domain. Features are usually delivered late to the Apps platform - if at all. For example, Google constructed an excellent operating system for mobile devices (Android), but the only Android phone on the market today, T-Mobile G1, does not support Apps accounts. This means that any Google Apps user will need to setup their mailbox to sync via IMAP and forefeit any kind of calendar or contacts syncing.

It astounds me that such a feature-rich platform hasn’t been setup to work with a mobile operating system, of which one of the key features is push email. This company operates a webmail system which has an excellent interface, and innovates daily to add features that were previously unheard of to its platform. I’m sure many companies would, if Android synced with Apps, transfer their email facilities to Google from BlackBerry Enterprise Server  and Exchange systems. Adding to this, organisations use the Google Apps system to deliver emails to thousands of employees every day, yet the company added a ’system status’ page recently after downtime which caused havoc amongst users.

So, what tempted me to move, and where did I go? After having a go with the T-Mobile/HTC G1 today, I must say that it is impressive. As a result of this, I’ve switched my email and other Google facilities over to Gmail and have setup forwarders to allow my personal email address which I have used on my domain for years to remain. Despite the recently announced HTC Magic being incredibly tempting, to my knowledge it will be launched on the dreaded Vodafone - a company which charges £4/Mb for overseas data in Europe. In contrast, T-Mobile charges £1.50/Mb, so whilst Vodafone may have a stronger network and a nicer phone, I’m still firmly convinced that T-Mobile is the way to go.

I was at Odeon Guildford the other night seeing ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’. Yes, it was a good film - but that isn’t the point. After walking into the cinema, I realised that the two blank spaces in front of me were where my seats were meant to be. Fortunately, the adjacent seats weren’t occupied….

Up until recently, I’ve always used Firefox as my chosen web browser thanks to it’s incredible plugins and extendability. It performed well, and thanks to the vast array of addons that anyone can download in a couple of clicks via a website, I managed to mould my browser into something which I could use to access anything from Web 2.0 services to FTP clients and code inspectors. However, following the recent announcement of a revised version of Safari (version 4 beta), I have switched once again. In comparison, Safari is a lot more lightweight, the screen isn’t cluttered with junk, but it’s uses are fairly limited as I don’t have  a great choice of addons and extensions which I can use to improve my browsing experience.

First up was the RSS - Safari possesses an excellent RSS reader, but the latest version seemingly lacks the ability to notify you of recent feed updates. As a result of this, I have switched my RSS feeds from the trusty Firefox Plugin, Sage, to Google Reader. That way, I can access my feeds almost anywhere, not limited to which computer has the plugin and is syncing with my Foxmarks account. I wasn’t an RSS fan boy until a few months ago, and I must say that it has become central to my web browsing experience. Currently, I’m subscribed to over 50 feeds, and manage to read some of the around 200 posts I get daily from sites like TechCrunch and Personal Blogs. To be honest, Google Reader’s new UI is far more pleasant than Feedly or Sage, and so, in my opinion, it’s a reasonable switch.

The huge amount of data that was recently lost at Magnolia really stunned me. Bookmarks mean so much to me, and I’ve always had to use the horrendous Foxmarks plugin that frequently crashes my browser just to sync my 1400+ bookmarks. Now, with Safari, I bookmark many of my favorite sites with Delicious and have got used to Digging decent news articles. I’ve always had accounts on both of those sites, yet I’ve only used them occasionally. I’ve uploaded all of my existing bookmarks to Delicious, and intend to use it instead of adding a site to my favorites folder in my browser, which is already far too crowded. I just hope that all of my 1428 bookmarks remain safe and online, which is something that everyone should demand given the fate of Magnolia.

Finally, to manage my social networking, I use AlertThingy. Quite frankly, I couldn’t do without it - I can share and view information from my Twitter, Flickr and Digg accounts without typing in a URL. It discretely shows a pop-up which fades in and out of the corner of your screen in a few seconds to announce that someone has updated their status to something that is completely irrelevant.

I really hope that the startups and companies that I have trusted with my data survive and remain online. Social networking, bookmarking and cloud services are all based around trust - data protection, security and backup is key to maintaining a good user base. My wish in a sentence - I hope that my data doesn’t suffer the same fate as Magnolia users experienced.

For those of you who don’t know what Wakoopa is, here is an explanation. Wakoopa consists of an application which you download to your computer, which tracks your usage and uploads it to the Wakoopa system, and the Wakoopa website where you can view your usage, other people’s usage, software recommendations and reviews. Like Twitter and other social networking platforms, you can track each other’s usage, or join groups.

After a few weeks of using Wakoopa, I decided to take a look at this week’s results. They can only be described as shocking, and I must admit that I never realised that Facebook could be so counterproductive. I think the lure attraction of having a link to the addictive social networking site in my bookmarks bar and constant service emails being sent to my mailbox would be the reason for the collossal amount of time that I spent trawling through profile pages, applications, various walls and uploading photos. So, using this information, I began to change my usage habits and increase my productivity.

For me, Wakoopa is a great idea - firstly, I can find out how I waste my free time, and secondly, I can change the way I live and work and then see my usageon their statistics website. It’s a great tool, and besides all of this, I can receive software recommendations and take a look at reviews of software that I am interested in. Unlike most applications set to start up automatically on my computer, I haven’t yet found a reason to remove the Wakoopa utility - it doesn’t consume a large chunk of my system resources like many other applications, and it does a good job.

However, one of the biggest woes is one of Wakoopa’s new features - the ability to track web applications and your usage of them. Sure, it counts the ones that I use correctly - Facebook usage still astonishes me to this day, yet when I visit a web application’s website, it logs it as if I am using it. In many of these cases, I could simply be taking a look at a site to see if it would be worth registering at, yet my usage is counted as if I am using the web application. Picky, I know, but I dislike being told that I’ve used Livejournal when in fact I haven’t.

If you’re looking to shock yourself, or just want to get to know the ‘internet you’ then why not give it a try? Take a look at their website.

Moving away from BT, the UK’s dominant telephone provider, feels strange. They’ve been unhelpful on the phone, given me horrendous bills and incorrectly charged me over the years. Leaving their dire practises makes me feel like I’m moving house or leaving an old friend.

My decision was prompted for several reasons - first and foremost, BT was increasing its line rental prices to £12.50/month, and seeing as my calling package was delivered by Sky Talk over what’s known to telecoms experts as Carrier Pre-Select, I have decided to combine my telecoms with one provider. Plus, Sky charges just £10/month for line rental - a saving of £30/year.

To top all of this, I cancelled my BT broadband 18 months ago. Guess what? They’d only cancelled some of my broadband services, and I was still getting charged extra every quarter for a service that I wasn’t using. It wasn’t much, but £50 in erroneous charges slipping out of your bank account doesn’t really put you in a good mood, especially during a so-called credit crunch.

If you’re considering doing the same, the first move is to be a demanding customer. If you use BT, dial 150, and then randomly pick one of the various options to speak to someone. Behind all of these providers (mobile, Satellite/Cable, phone and usually broadband), there is a Customer Options Team. In other words, they’re the team which deals with annoyed customers who want to leave them unless they get a better deal. So, when you finally get through to someone, ask to speak to them. It’s at this point that you should explain about the offer with another provider and try to get them to sweeten your package with them. It’s alright - you can behave like a child, make demands. After all, they’re the ones that are scared of losing you!

BT were going to offer me lower daytime mobile call rates, the usual raft of features, plus the free Unlimited calling package (to 01/02/03 numbered landlines), and I weighed this up against Sky’s slightly more expensive offer giving me unlimited calls to 20 international destinations, and cheaper evening and weekend mobile calls. On top of this, BT expected me to enter a 12-month contract - something that Sky never asked for. Weigh up the two offers that you have been given and take your time - don’t be pressured, and then make your decision.

To switch in the UK, you simply have to call up your new provider’s sales line and ask to switch to them - usually, they’ll write to your existing provider and ask for them to cancel. Don’t go and call your existing provider unless you are required to do so, as you could end up having your line disconnected. Before you give the go-ahead, make sure you check if there are any fees for switching back to your original provider in case you aren’t satisfied, and then go ahead with the switch.

To summarise, get demanding and get the person on the other end of the phone grovelling. Enjoy it - I’m sure you’ve had to get down on your knees once or twice before, and this time, they’ll have to do it to you.

Have you ever had an ‘upgrade moment’ with WordPress? I’m talking one of those irritating messages asking you to provide just about every last detail in order for WordPress to access your web hosting account and update a plugin. Most probably, as in my case, just days ago you simply clicked a button and everything would be taken care of, and then suddenly you had to update your install via FTP. In my case, this didn’t work most of the time, and I found the whole process incredibly tedious and frustrating.

Well, I got tired of this, and by the looks of it, plenty of other people did. I had, like many others who have WordPress blogs, checked my file permissions, kept my installation up-to-date, emailed my web host and when I first encountered the problem, I posted on a forum. The other day, I got sick and tired of this, and so I tried a Google search again after WordPress had some kind of allergic reaction when upgrading to 2.7.1 automatically. It was at this point that I found it - over at ‘Yoast‘, there is a neat little plugin that WordPress users can download to fix their blog’s woes.

According to the blog, this was the cause of the problem:

There’s a patch in there that makes it work, but might cause issues for some other users. Luckily, DD32 proposed a solution in the last comment: a plugin that makes sure “direct” is returned as the filesystem_method.

Well, in plain and simple terms, there’s a fix that is now available as a plugin until the guys at WordPress bother to do something about the bug. Check that your /wp-content/plugins and /wp-content/upgrades folders have the correct permissions first, then proceed to download and install the plugin (link at end of post). If all of this doesn’t sort the mini hullabaloo, then contact someone who might be able to do something about this - in my case, I usually try and blame the server provider or web host.

When you’re ready, go here to download the plugin. Whilst you’re at it, if you’re partial to a little RSS once and a while, then go subscribe - Yoast is an excellent blog.

After the world’s love affair with computers and the Internet began, more and more content has been made available online. I shop, communicate, share and even do most of my work online, courtesy of a super fast Internet connection and the concept of ‘Cloud Computing’. However, the internet and computers - the very things that are meant to help us have the ability to turn against us. Yes, it’s the thing that us Internet-aholics live in fear of - downtime. In my case, this usually results in plenty of unnecessary language and the occasional complaint, and when things return to normal, I am able to visit my inbox or a support site and send a strongly worded document across to the party that I would deem as responsible instead of sending a letter via ’snail mail’.

Pingdom, a site monitoring service that I know, use and love, has managed to compile a fascinating report on this very subject - titled ‘Social Network Downtime in 2008′, this document highlights the moments when many people’s communication over the Internet ground to a halt, most likely due to some kind of fault in between them and a data centre hundreds of miles away. The report produced some of the expected results, with Twitter topping the charts in terms of unreliability. It’s worst month was May, with 21.4 hours (almost a day) of downtime occouring. Thankfully, Facebook fared far better, enabling me to satisfy my addiction far more of the time (yet whilst I type, their site seems to have gone down!). Those of you who are interested in reading a little more of this report, why not click here?

If you’re one of the unfortunate people who managed to lose their bookmarks as a result of the database system failure on Magnolia, you should know all too well as to what can happen to these newfangled Web 2.0 services. It scares me when many of my friends entrust their memories and communications to the realms of Facebook and other popular social networks, and sometimes fail to retain copies of their photos and videos on their own computers. Thanks to a video interview, many of us now know what Magnolia was running on - a couple of Xserves and four Mac Minis which hosted a high-profile social bookmarking site with millions of users. The trouble is you can’t usually find out what these sites do to backup files for their users, and what hardware that they are running on - and thus you can’t make an effective decision on if you should entrust your data to them.

So, the moral of this is never to entrust your online life (and your privacy) to online services when there is no guarantee that your data will be safe, and no notice saying where and how your data will be stored. Old Magnolia users affected by this outage can use various recovery tools to retrieve their bookmarks via the company’s website.

Over the past few weeks, there has been great speculation across the Web Hosting community regarding the future of Myriad Network, a top-rated hosting company. Through a series of events involving poor support, system changes and the shut down of the company’s forums, many concerns have been raised by clients and onlookers asking if the company has indeed been sold to EMC Telecommunications. This is currently speculation, however there has been considerable evidence that has mounted up over the past few days showing, at the very least, close ties to EMC.

Strange Incidents

Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the Myriad domain has been transferred to EMC Telecommunications, which also acts as the company’s primary domain contact. However, one single event set the alarm bells ringing - the company’s VPS clients received poorly worded emails (if they received them at all), instructing them of a major data centre move and informing them of their newly designated IP addresses. The coordination of this move was poor, with many clients receiving just a few hours of notice prior to being transferred, resulting in anger, frustration and downtime.

Interestingly, the new IP addresses are no longer assigned to the company’s “owner” - SecurityMinded Technologies. Instead, they are designated to (yes, you guessed it) EMC Telecommunications, the company that also controls the Myriad domain. On the previously open Myriad forums, a large number of questions arrived in a topic that was later deleted, and another was created. The company’s response to the sudden change of IP addresses was due to the company’s owners running out of their own IP space, and thus they were using addresses designated to EMC.

Support changes, forum closures

Customers noticed that the Myriad support website’s ticketing system had been moved to SupportCenter.tv, EMC’s support domain. The company announced that the move away from their Cerebus-based system was due to the convenience and appeal of a Kayako eSupport installation. According to members on Web Hosting Talk, the quality of support has degraded considerably, with technicians failing to identify issues and providing unprofessional responses.

Days after the flood of questions from angry customers had appeared on the Myriad forums, the boards were (and still are) closed, with a message asking members to leave a support ticket if they need assistance. This could have been done on the basis of PR - customer complaints can damage brands, especially if they are listed on the own company’s website. Nevertheless, Myriad has managed to disable one of the things that evidently mattered to it’s customers - the ability for clients to communicate their experiences, opinions and suggestions to the company and other people.

Opinions on EMC

EMC and Myriad clients certainly have a word or two to say about the way about the way that they have been treated along with some thoughts on the suspected new owner, and their words aren’t positive.

EMC………..WOW they could not have made a worst decision where there customers were concerned. My experience with EMC was horrible and I have absolutely no respect for any VPS provider who oversells beyond a “reasonable” amount. With EMC my VPS on virtuozzo was already running 400% cpu load at times before I even had a chance to upload my files to there box. EMC did admit the box was “apparently” oversold and after talking with other VPS customers of EMC I found this was not uncommon but merely how they conduct business.

If anyone got moved to EMC I would highly consider looking elsewhere immediately.

Ultimately, if you’re hosting with a company that either A.) Lies about their company being sold or B.) Handles a hardware failure in such a manner, they’re obviously not the kind of company you should depend on for providing a trustworthy and quality service. At least from this point on forward, you should let history be the benchmark and expect more of the same quality of service.

I never received any email from them about any server move. They completely botched the move because they didn’t correctly change Apache ports for my sites, so my sites went down. Furthermore, I secured my ssh to bind to a specific IP address–which, of course, they didn’t change. So I couldn’t ssh in.

I opened a support ticket, but didn’t hear from them for hours. They don’t have any phone support. In the meantime, I figured out my new IP addresses and discovered they changed my root password. I had to open another ticket to get that.

Last week I wasn’t sure if I was being too fast to cancel, but now I’m certain it was the right thing to do. I’m just hoping to get my last backup out of my VPS.

Interested or Affected?

If you’d like to take a look at the thread at WebHostingTalk, then click here.

I’m still amazed at the way that a top-10 highly rated host on HostJury, an unbiased hosting review blog, and a company with countless positive reviews from multiple customers can treat it’s clients like this. Quite frankly, it’s shocking.

Cloudo is yet another WebOS designed to make people’s lives easier by offering a ‘virtual operating system’ that can be accessed from a number of Internet-enabled devices. This concept has been tried and tested over many years by a number of commercial and open-source projects, including EyeOS. Quite simply, you customise your ‘virtual desktop’, add files to your ‘virtual hard drive’ and add or purchase a number of applications for your installation. Before I start to condemn or compliment Cloudo, I would like to say that the service is still in Beta and therefore it is still subject to change.

This platform is another web-based service designed to take advantage of fast Internet connections, but it has one huge advantage over previous developments. Seeing as Cloudo accounts are hosted by a company, it can be turned into a community - unlike EyeOS, there is only one installation, and add-ons can be installed in a small number of clicks without the need to download PHP and Javascript files, then upload them to a personal installation. This small advantage is great for developers - you can write an application encompassing the Cloudo system architecture and distribute it across the platform via an ‘application installer’. From what I can see, this is what Cloudo expects - instead of the company having to build a wide range of applications for users to enjoy, developers can add to the community and Cloudo simply maintains the system and Web OS itself. However, there is a massive drawback in this; the system requires a developer’s desire to create applications for this new platform.

Currently, Cloudo comes with a few basic applications, with the option to install a small number of additional programs to your ‘virtual space’. You can connect to your storage via WebDAV and use it as a virtual drive to upload files stored locally and then edit them via your virtual environment or download them to the computer you use next. However, this functionality is already readily available for businesses and individuals to use in the form of Google Apps and Google Docs, and the only ‘new’ thing that I can see there is that you can view your files in a customised environment. Yes, you can share documents between Cloudo accounts, and yes, most document types will be supported. Currently, there isn’t a big enough difference to make me switch from the range of online services that I currently use.

There is one huge positive about this service, which has to be it’s cross-platform compatibility. Very much like Live Mesh, it can be accessed and synchronised with other computers and accessed via a number of mobile devices, most noticeably the iPhone. With 3G and HSDPA becoming widespread on mobile devices and networks in developed countries, this level of convenience finally has some potential.

Whilst I may have seemingly condemned the Cloudo service throughout this post, I must say that the platform’s developers have certainly laid a strong foundation for people to easily and effectively expand, collaborate and access the system whenever and wherever they want. It’s certainly worth taking a look….

I’ve been working on the new Cactus Internet website for quite some time now, which included multiple website compliance checks. Yes, the site will be fully compliant with the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard, and has been checked against WCAG and Section 508, and agrees with most of its key points. In other words, for those who aren’t in the know about all of these cryptic terms, the site should load in almost any modern web browser correctly. When I construct a site I usually give myself a generous amount of time to check each additional error that shows up as a result of Internet Explorer’s poor rendering.

(more…)