Category: Technology

Hotel connectivity, with click tracking by SuperClick

I’m enjoying my stay this weekend, but the Big Cedar Resort uses click tracking software, which is unethical and unnecessary. Some details of this “superclick” tracking system are on nerdblog and swiK. There is much discussion of the system on SlashDot.

My take on this is that “don’t be evil” is good policy, and not only for Google. In addition to a very healthy room rate, this place charges $10 for every 24 hours of connectivity – a rate of $300 per month! That should be enough – they should not also sell me out for a system that “allows hoteliers and conference center managers to leverage the investment they have made in their IP infrastructure to create advertising revenue, deliver targeted marketing and brand messages to guests and users on their network.”

Big Cedar and SuperClick: I do not want to be leveraged. I do not want to be targeted. I do want to stay at a nice resort, with access to problem-free and spy-free internet connectivity.

Update: In addition to the issues above, this remarkably bad system also breaks the back button on many web sites.

Lots of TextDrive downtime

I apologize for the site downtime today, to my huge audience of loyal readers (er… both of you). It turns out that my new ISP, TextDrive, has been having a lot of downtime on the shared hosting machine my sites are on… frequent freezes/crashes, exacerbated by long delays in noticing and recovering. Apparently it is most likely some oddball problem with some particular site belonging to one of the many customers on that machine… but unclear which one. Hopefully they will locate the trouble soon and return to the high quality of service they were previously known for.

Update: Another 1+ hour downtime on Jan. 17.

Update: Another ~1 hour downtime on Jan. 25. There were some short downtimes in the last few days also.

Update: What a surprise, another ~1 hour downtime on Jan. 27

Update: Another short downtime on Jan. 28

Update: ~2 hour downtime on Jan. 29. Seeing a pattern yet?

Update: 2.5 hour downtime on Jan. 30. This time with a kernel update.

Update: TextDrive says they have a major update coming soon, that will fix all these issues; but no specific timetable.

Update: ~1.5 hours downtime in the early overnight hours of Feb. 4. Not mentioned on the issue tracker site.

Update: ~1 hour downtime on Feb. 7, during the morning part of the workday. Maybe didn’t really want customer after all.

Update: ~1.5 hour downtime on Feb. 8, during morning part of the workday.

Update: Ah, it seems the TextDrive crew is quite busy pushing the envelope for high-end Rails hosting (via Tim Bray). It is quite impressive, but it’s also disappointing – I’d rather they had spent that brainpower making their existing hosted sites stay up. Plus… a 5-10 minutes downtime while I was trying to post this update. TextDrive considers frequent short downtimes normal, for “Apache restarts”. On several other hosts where I have had shared hosting accounts, I have not experienced this at all; so it seems to be something about how TextDrive works.

Update: After a month of stability (aside from a few short downtimes every day for “apache restarts”), ~1.5 hours downtime on March 12.

I have seen the future, and it runs OSX

iPhone: Wow

It’s a phone. It’s a PDA. It’s an iPod. It’s a widescreen video iPod. It has zero physical buttons, rather the whole front is a multi-touch-screen. I’ll leave the rest of the raving to the many other sites doing a great job of that.

The real innovation of this new device is the OS. Apple has an answer to PalmOS and Windows Mobile (CE): run their real desktop/server OSX, with Unix inside, on the phone. Today’s handhelds have much more computing power and storage than desktop PCs of a decade ago, and there are enormous benefits to running a real, common OS on such a device. I’d been saying since I bought my first Palm (a Handspring, actually) than within a decade the handheld OS’s would go away.

Apple has gone first. How soon will Microsoft follow? Will Palm and RIM make to the new era at all?

(Update: Yes, the title of this post is slightly in jest. I’m serious about real OSs in handheld devices, and the iPhone looks fantastic, but Apple is very unlikely to dominate the phone market in the way the iPod dominates the tiny-media-player market.)

Math Drill – for your 1st..4th grader

Here is a simple piece of software I wrote to help my children practice basic arithmetic facts. Of course there are no doubt already a thousand or more similar programs out there; but in a few minutes of searching I didn’t find one that did quite what I wanted. I ended up tinkering with this for several hours, and even wrote documentation and made an installer. Free download and screenshot below.

MathDrillSetup.exe (free)

Math Drill screen shot

I’ve also published the source code over on Github: http://github.com/kylecordes/mathdrill/tree/master

This software is written in Delphi, and though there is some chance that I am the only developer anywhere using both Delphi and git, hopefully this will be wrong, and someone will fork and offer their improvements.

$200 -> Rubinius

I’ve been using Ruby sporadically for some time, including in a bit of production code (in which it is running well), but the apparent lack of progress toward a more modern VM for Ruby makes it harder to get more deeply involved. On the one hand, today’s Ruby interpreter/runtime is sufficiently good to build very successful services on (37Signal’s Rails-based services, for exampel); but in my own testing for the kinds of higher volume data handling I often need to do, it’s among the slowest I’d used. That matters little for populating a web page, but matters a lot for things like OLAP ETL.

So today I joined Geoffrey Grosenbach in supporting Evan Phoenix’s rubinius project, by sending $200 to help sponsor the work. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I believe in “putting your money where your mouth is”.

This isn’t the first time I mentioned Geoff; earlier this year I took him to task for his choice of music for the Ruby on Rails podcast, which has changed since then to something more suitable.

Published in 1987

Rummaging through old books (giving many away, selling others, discarding others) in an attempt to lighten the load I carry through life, I came across a rather weak book from 1987:

… in which I appeared in print for the first time. One short (1.5 page) chapter therein is from a submission I wrote for a contest for Compute! magazine at the age of 13. I didn’t make it in to the magazine, but was included it in this compendium, for which I earned total royalties of around $1. Some editing error (on their end) caused a few lines of text to be dropped from the middle. Click on the book above, to enjoy my 1.5 pages of fame.