I have been really good with backing up my data lately… I would say that I’m on my longest streak of being all the way protected that I have ever had. My webserver automagically pushes compressed backups to another server from another host in a whole other part of the country. All data on my laptop is most-nightly put onto a FireWire drive via Data Backup. This drive is normally kept in a fire proof locked box, but I’ve had some recent trouble with said box (namely the lock breaking).

Why does it feel like such a chore doing regular backups? Having a current backup after a disaster is the most comforting feeling possible. Even with paying for another server and buying a tiny FireWire drive, keeping current backups is a cheap insurance policy. The downtime I would have from losing either my server or laptop would be enormous.

It looks like Amazon is testing a new design–I see it from only FireFox, likely there is a cookie set for the new design. The big deal with the design is that is pretty much does away with tabs (see screenshots below). I think it works well because there were just too many tabs before. Amazon popularized the use of tabs which makes this change ironic.

Amazon’s A9 websearch is also shown right at the top.

Between screen caps 1 and 2 all I did was move my mouse to the second tab, "See all 31 product categories." I did not click–it’s on the mouse over state.

This AP piece sums it up:

Young
people are now the savviest of the tech-savvy, as likely to demand a
speedy broadband connection as to download music onto an iPod, or
upload digital photos to their Web logs. The Internet has shaped the way they work, relax and even date.

I am part of this generation. Not having always on internet access is abnormal to me. I often answer email faster than voicemail. I talk to several business partners exclusively online (concerning my online career), sometimes having never met them. I met my girlfriend online and yea I post videos and pictures from cell phones without thinking about it.

I think another point about this tech-centric generation is there are no physical boundries. From not using telco phones with long distance limits (cell phone and Vonage, long distance extra fee free all the time) to international commerce with tools like PayPal, we’re fully globalized with no extra work. I can just as easily do business with someone half way across the world as someone across the street.

It’s a fun time to be online.

Last night around 7:30pm I registered a domain name for my little brother (we’re getting him started early!) and hooked it into my dedicated server around 8:30pm.The site was working just four hours after the zone files were pushed at the host. That’s speedy! This usually takes 24-48 hours and sometimes even longer. The stars must have aligned.

I’ve been looking into Amazon Web Services for use on MobileTracker and it looks like Version 4.0 still ignores rebates. This isn’t bad for books or CDs, but nearly every phone on Amazon has a large rebate. Displaying through AWS makes the phones look pricey.

Example - $299

Real Amazon - Free

Any ideas of how to get around this?

A few weeks ago, I posted about some email problems, namely that my client was slowing down. Mailsmith used to keep me happy, but it couldn’t deal with volume–deleting a few thousand spam messages took 5 minutes. 10K and it would freeze. Yesterday I got 600+ spam messages and decided that I was either going to find something new or not do email. I need email to work so I found something new.

I tried Microsoft Entourage, but yea it’s Entourage. Ick.

Thunderbird version .9 has a lot of improvements over some of the older versions I have used. It’s lightning quick which is keeping me happy.

I’m also a FireFox (now 1.0!!!) user, so Thunderbird makes me feel right at home.

If I ever meet the guy who started the recent rolex spam craze, God help me. They seem to sneak through Spam Sieve without much trouble.

I think I need a new client… Mailsmith is slowing down for me. What do you use? How much mail do you have?

I have about 40K messages, and doing anything, especially deleting spam and marking messages as non spam in a search results list take forever. And I just looked and it is using 150MB of RAM, that is real memory not VM.

I use Spam Sieve for spam protection, and for the most part it does great. It has a hard time with some virus emails, but is pretty accurate.

Via the server logs I have seen a few people starting to use my DrudgeReport Mobile page. I use it fairly often, but it’s a pain to load the images.

Does anyone out there know a way for the server to auto-resize the images down (Opera makes them smaller but the phone loads the full image prior to this). I simply do not know how. Ideally the images could be resized down by a factor of at least 2, saving 75% of file space. It would probably make sense to cache these images.

This is a free page that probably breaks copyright somehow, so I’m not sure I am willing to pay for the code. But if you are willing to let me know how, or even write it, I’ll give you credit.

Dreamhost is celebrating 7-years of being a webhost by giving away hosting for 77¢ a month. It’s their lower plan (normally $9.95 a month) but comes with 800MB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth. You can even host 3 domains off the plan.

I currently host MobileTracker with Dreamhost, but I am changing to Pair in the very near future. The reason for the change is I like Pair’s customer support more (I can call them). Pair costs more though, so it makes sense.

[thanks Chris]