Rumors our building that governor Sarah Palin may be gearing up for a run at the White House in four short years. All I can say to that is go for it Sarah, you continue to energize not only the Republican party for the Democrats.
I, like many others aren’t thrilled with Amazon Web Services at the moment. Amazon’s storage system (S3) was down most of the day Sunday, and brought down many sites alongside. Amazon has stated that they will investigate the cause of the outage and report back to the community. Over 24 hours later, there is no real update. What we have learned from Amazon is that their cloud communication protocol entitled gossip broke and that their system administrators were forced to restart and rebuild gossip to restore communications.
Amazon obviously needs to fix what’s broken, but more importantly introduce additional layers of redundancy. Simply restarting services and hoping for the best won’t solve the underlining problem. We are all lucky that S3 is still up and running especially since the fix was restarting the server and not making a single fix. I know cloud computing is the future and would be willing to pay the extra amount for that additional layer of redundancy.
I recently purchased an AT&T USBConnect 881 device, allowing me to connect my Macbook Air to the internet on AT&T’s 3G BroadbandConnect and EDGE networks. The service provided by AT&T in Phoenix was pretty decent, no complaints.
On the other hand the USB device has a huge battery. Help me understand - why does a USB device need a battery the size of a credit card? I’d rather pay AT&T to tether my iphone to my Macbook Air. That would provide a smaller and more affordable solution. And we know the technology is there, as hacked iPhones have the ability to be tethered.
4 days later, I returned the device.
What a pain, “Every iPhone 3G will have to be activated in the store at the time of purchase, and all buyers will have to sign a two-year contract to boot, before it can be taken home.”
Is CNN turning into TMZ again?
Nearly every web site has their logo in the header of their website, aligned to the left. Take a look at Twitter, Facebook, CNN - all which follow this unspoken rule by having their site’s logo in the header, aligned to the left. The majority of the sites on the internet (again, Twitter, Facebook, and CNN, just to name a few) also have the site’s logo linked to the site’s landing page. Take note: This is both good practice and expected by the majority of users.
Now, I wouldn’t be writing about this if I hadn’t found some sites in “violation.” The MLB and the BBC websites, for example, don’t follow this generally applied practice, leaving their user’s frustrated on a daily basis. The power of a single link is amazing.
With no assigned link, clicking on either the BBC or MLB header image has no effect. So remember, when building web sites, without question, always link the header image.
