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Stephen Pickering

Author: Stephen Pickering

  • More Cloud Site Hosting Questions Answered

    As some of you may or may not know, I’m reselling Rackspace’s Cloud Sites product. Here are the plan details. From time to time, I publish recent questions I get by email concerning the product, so that I can build up an FAQ page that is here.

    Q: I assume the name servers use the rackspace name?

    A: The nameservers for Cloud Sites are dns1.stabletransit.com and dns2.stabletransit.com

    Q: If things go well, is it possible to move this to my own Rackspacecloud Sites account?

    A: He can start up his own Cloud Sites account, however we do not have any migration tools to simply move all his sites to his new account. So the sites would actually need to be deleted from your account and then recreated on the new account. So there would be downtime in the process.

    Q: Sadly, I am developing a .net app to interface to the account and have to use microsoft asp and MSSQL. I assume there is no problem with that apart from paying for the MSSQL per 100M? (What do you charge, BTW?)

    A: That’s correct. It’s $6 per month per 100M of storage space

    Q: Also need an IP for certificate for SSL. Any issues?

    A: No, that won’t be an issue either. When you install an SSL certificate on a Cloud Site, your site will be provisioned to it’s own IP address

    Q:How do I pay for things?

    A: Paypal. They take credit cards as well, and I can set it up so that after you’ve approved it, it’ll just auto bill you once a month so that you don’t have to worry about taking the time each month to make the payment.

    Q: How have you found the service? I used it for a project when it was mosso and it all worked pretty well.

    A: I’ve found it very well for the WordPress blogs that I run. I have 8 other clients who seem to like it as well. I’m not sure what application they are running. I think the main benefit of Cloud Sites is that it is as easy to use as a shared managed host, as easy to set up a site or blog on, and yet you get the benefit of advanced technology, load balancing and elasticity, all the benefits of being in the ‘Cloud.’

  • The iPhone Could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (9).

    Update 10/07/10 – It definitely could be just a bad USB port causing it. That same port that was causing this error for me is also crapping out every few seconds when I plug in a mouse. So that’s definitely what it was for me. I don’t know why or how USB ports can go “bad” or what to do about them, but I see that it can happen.

    Update 9/20/10: Well I just successfully updated to 4.1 without a hitch (But not without some fraying nerves, mind you!) so in this case it looks to be like solution 1 below, simply changing the USB port that the phones chord is connected to is the ticket. I learned this from Joseph Thornton @jtjdt on Twitter, so if you run into further problems you might try to contact him. Which begs the question: Why isn’t such a simple solution not mentioned on Apple’s website? And what’s the difference between one USB port and another that would cause this problem to begin with?

    If this situation happens to you try:

    1. Simply hook your USB chord to another USB port. Simple as it sounds this solution worked for me for the 4.02 update, and I assume it would have worked for the 4.01 update a month ago, but I didn’t know about it.
    2. If that doesn’t work, try the solution mentioned in this MacRumor’s forum post. This is what I did when I initially had problems with my 4.01 update, and it did work.
    3. Before you Update your iPhone always make sure that copies of your photos, notes, videos etc. have been transferred over to your desktop. Because by the time you get this error message, although you will be able to fix it with one of the solutions above, all data is wiped out on your phone. You’ll have to restore from the most recent sync.

    Days, after I got my iPhone 4 in July, Apple came out with an update 4.01. So, while the phones is tethered to iTunes on the Mac, I click the button to update. It goes through the process, everything’s looking fine. The little meters that show progress are humming along. The Apple Logo comes on the phones screen, then the white update meter on the phone is updating. Then when everything’s almost finished, it stops and in iTunes a pop up message says, “The iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (9).

    So then your phone gives you an image like so:

    Then it says that because of this error I needed to restore the phone from its last good backup. But trouble was, when I attempted this, the identical thing happened. It gets almost to the end and says the same thing, “Unknown Error (9).”

    So there I was, first day I’ve got my iPhone and the thing is bricked with seemingly no way out.

    Well, I googled and found a solution in a forum that worked for me. Ah, it was a MacRumors forum. Here’s the link to the solution that worked for me in unbricking and successfully installing 4.01 onto my new iPhone 4: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=969080

    Now the only bummer is that I lost all the photos and videos I’d taken on the new phone because I hadn’t transfered them over to the desktop. It was only a few, because I literally had only had the phone a day, but still, just enough to get under your skin. So definitely lesson 1 is to never update your iPhone before you’ve transferred all your media to your desktop.

    I think this also highlights a weakness Apple has around data. They’re just not good with data. They don’t treat your data with the kind of respect it needs to be treated. This is an advantage that Google/Android has.

    So fast forward to last week. New 4.02 update after the Apple announcement. Every time I plugged my phone into my computer I became wary. There was a pain in my stomach. Didn’t want to do the update. Felt like something bad would happen.

    Anyway, I felt like since I had downloaded the RecBoot to solve my first upgrade problem that that same program would keep me immune from another one. Still, I made sure that I copied all my phone’s photos and videos over to the desktop before I did.

    Sure enough the same problem and error message happened again. And sure enough I wasn’t even able to restore it. AGAIN!. GRRRRRRR!

    So I Google,  but I couldn’t find that same solution that I had found a month before.

    I had tweeted the solution, feeling like I was being a good ‘netizen’ to all the other souls with the same problem who may be searching for it in ‘real time’ on twitter.

    But here’s a good lesson when it comes to social media. I’d been better off blogging that information. Because with Twitter, I couldn’t find the tweet through a search. If I’d blogged it, inane as the post may have been for those who read blogs expecting original content, it would have been in my own repository of information that I could have easily retrieved (with the search function in WordPress and I assume that’s also in all the other blog platforms.)

    Twitter doesn’t treat your data with much care either. Although they are coming on strong with new features, and I’ve heard that searching your data base of tweets is one of those features coming. Still, you can never completely trust a third party with your data. You need your own copy of your data at your fingertips at all times. And the blog is the best solution for that. Also the blog has two more salutary effects: Writing about something helps you learn more about the topic, expand on it, and so become more educated in general. Writing, in fact, ironically, is more important to learning than it is for teaching, for broadcasting a message of sorts.

    Then of course, when you blog about a solution. Its searchable in Google to others looking for said solution and you also can create more links, images, meta information around it and also have a place where folks can comment and contribute to the conversation.

    So I’d say, score one for the blog. Of course you can tweet it too, but make sure blogging it is your first priority.

    After the post is done, then you can tweet the post itself. Remember Twitter, Social Media in general, are yesterdays newspapers, and your tweets are like ads in those papers.

    Oh, anyway, back to my 4.02 adventure. How did I resolve it. I had seen in my initial searches that some had solved this problem simply by changing USB ports. At first I thought that sounded too simple, but then after I had tweeted about my problem using the hash tag #iphone an Apple employee reached out to me and advised that solution.

    Turns out it worked. So I’d definitely try that first before downloading some software like BootRec. And I was pleasantly surprised that 4 or 5 knowledgeable people reached out to me on Twitter. I had almost gone into a phase, like Leo Laporte that Twitter had become a vast echo chamber and no one was listening, certainly not personally engaging.

    Also, I was pleasantly surprised that not only an Apple employee reached out to me, concerned about my problem, but that an Apple employee was even on Twitter itself, seeing how the company seems to feel about Social Media in general.

    Well my phone did get updated to 4.02, and I didn’t lose data because I took precautions, but the state of the phone was not the same. All kinds of apps weren’t on it that had previously been on it, etc. So it was still unnerving. Of course, I simply had to drag those apps over from iTunes onto the phone again. But still my folders structures that I had spent time setting up were gone. Stuff like that. Just a pain. And unnerving that your data can so easily, and quite often does, disappear, as well as “meta” data such as your folders, etc.

  • A New Original Poem: “There’s something dark…”

    [audio:http://www.stephenpickering.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Theres-Something-Dark.mp3]

    There’s something dark about this town.
    It’s made my heart all broken sore.
    The stars upstairs they hear a sound.
    The dark hair girl she’s at the door.
    I want to go somewhere and weep.
    She hurts me with her darkest stares.
    Through her I walk the lonely street
    Of silent dreams and cold nightmares.
    The scars of vice in Central Park
    Arrest the man the news had lost.
    He waltzes girls back to the dark
    Who think of nothing nor what it costs.
    These folks who tell their dreams goodbye,
    Build towers up to cut the sky.

    These flowers bloom and the night goes on
    The T.V. tells us what’s right from wrong.

    _____________________________________________________________

    *Notes: I’ve been experimenting with different sized ‘feet’ than pentameter. So, the above poem is just like a sonnet in its structure, except its in iambic ‘quadrameter’ or four iambic feet. I don’t know why. Just to try something different. I did another in iambic tetrameter. Oh actually I posted that a few days ago, I think. Oh yes, in this lot of three poems, it’s the first: http://www.stephenpickering.com/2010/08/28/saturday-reading-three-new-poems/

    I’ve also been working with some that have varying lengths. I think the best bet in the long run for me, is to let the line speak for itself, in the sense that, however it hits me, whatever length that is, just go with that. And then I think you get to a point where you don’t really need to fit the line into a structure if it doesn’t come to you that way, which naturally is free verse.

    So I guess, one of the points of writing within structure, is almost like exercise. You do that (or this) for a while, then your brain feels strong enough, confident enough, if you will, to walk out on the “limbs” alone.

    ©2010 Stephen Pickering

  • The Web Ain’t Dead. Blekko.com Has Come to Save It.

    This is  a VERY cool, and very paradigm shifting new site: Blekko.com. I caught this on John Battelle’s Searchblog tonight, got a beta invite, played with if for a few minutes, caught on quick and already found tons of new cool things that I wouldn’t have found before based on my interests and the ability to filter the searches to give me more accented, tailored, specific results.

    Example:

    My favorite musician, Josh Rouse. Now with a simple / “slash” I can search for Josh Rouse say only on blogs like so: Josh Rouse/blogs or only in forums like this: Josh Rouse/forums (Click those links to see the results of said searches. I also just Tweeted a link to those results. You get the picture, and that’s just scratching the surface.

    New interesting information which is valuable to me as a fan, as an aficionado of said artist, immediately begin popping up at the top, based on my filters.

    This is making me feel that giddy, ‘irrationally exuberant’ feeling I initially felt when I tried Google for the first time back in 2000. I felt I had the World at my fingertips back then.


    But some kind of sludge in search has slowly happened. Some have blamed it on SEO/SEMs gaming the system so much that the results have slowly deteriorated.

    I have no doubt that’s part of it, but shouldn’t Google have been innovating like mad to keep up with the onslaught of deterioration?

    I’ll be the first to say that I LOVE so many of Google’s additional services, Gmail, Docs, Voice, all their wonky, data, cloud stuff (not their social) and that to say they shouldn’t have extended their reach beyond search would be like saying Amazon shouldn’t have extended its own reach beyond books, but it does sort of seem like, especially in the last three years of the Social Media threat, that Google has not innovated enough on their main product. It’s kind of like Microsoft jealously chasing everyone else’s success so much, they dropped the ball on their Golden Goose. (They did rally and sell 200m copies of Windows7, but still, no one would deny the mindshare, at least in the U.S. lost to Apple.)

    I mean filtered searches seem like such a no brainer that you would have thought Google would have had them in right from the beginning. (Well actually they do, but no one can figure out how to use them, and usually the results come back blank for some reason as if the data base and or code running it act like you’ve done something wrong. It’s like when a car back fires, and you hear what you think is an explosion. Except this explosion is not a band, but a ‘whimper.’

    Remember the movie “The Fugitive” with Harrison Ford? One of the best Movies ever. Remember that scene in the Hospital when he’s searching the database for records of people who’ve received prosthetic arms? His first search delivers hundreds, maybe thousands of results. Then he keeps narrowing the search by filters (I can’t remember what the exact filters were, dates other types of subsets) and finally gets down to a manageable number of results, and more importantly, results that have meaning.

    Granted it was a movie, but still, that was 1994! People understood even back then before the internet was mainstream, that one of the most valuable automations of computers was search, and that one of the most important features of search were filters.
    It’s mind blowing Google hasn’t at least already initiated these kind of easy filters for its flagship product. I assume they will soon and or buy Blekko.

    I’ve only used Blekko for a few minutes. I want to use it lots more in coming days, but it already has such polish, and it feels silky smooth and fast, the kind of silky smooth quickness I haven’t experienced since FriendFeed, which for the life of me I can’t figure out why no one can duplicate, not even Facebook itself, which purchased FriendFeed and has one of its founders as its new CTO, Brett Taylor.

    Remember how last week Wired published a story about how the Web was dead? Well I didn’t buy it. Thought it was link-baity gibberish for the most part, but it did have some valid points. Steve Jobs didn’t leave out flash because flash was dated. Steve Jobs left out flash to close off, to a large extent, the media distribution ability of the Open Web.
    More and more stuff is happening through apps and other such ‘silos’ which does tend to negate the open web.

    Well, although Boing Boing had a great rebuttal to the Wired piece, I do believe that if there is a sort of , how shall we say, ‘jaded’ feeling for the Web itself, I do believe a large part of the problem is this lessening of the ability to find the really interesting, cool, exciting stuff. It’s out there, but for some reason our discovery engines, the main one being Google, have somehow become clogged and stale.

    I think Blekko, for one, can be like Roto Rooter to this clogged drain. These filtered searches are going to re-invigorate the joy of discovering on the open web, and in turn re assert the open web’s, if not dominance, at least equal importance to “apps” in this ever evolving, every life changing, and ever standard-of-living-increasing thing we call the Communications Revolution.

    Google said their mission statement was to uncover the Worlds information, or something to that effect. Well they are doing a lot of other good things, but their eye, at least lately, has been off that ball at least in the long tail stuff, which are the hidden treasures. Maybe its time for a new leader. Maybe Blekko’s it.

    Oh, I’ve got 5 invites. Just email, tweet, or leave a comment, if you would like one.

    Update 9/2/10 From my incoming traffic I found this page that is loaded with good information about Blekko over the last few days. Links to 10-15 stories written about it in blogs and a ton of ‘real time’ reactions based on the hash tag #blekko. I wish I could just copy and paste everything from this page and post here, but I wouldn’t feel right. Here is the full URL:

    http://www.skrenta.com/2010/09/blekko_coverage_and_twitter_gl.html

    You know I was just thinking, I wonder if you could create a cool page like that in Paper.li or really just using Blekko.com itself using the “/” syntax.

    Yeah you can. Just check this out:  http://beta.blekko.com/ws/blekko+/twitter

    Oh here’s a Paper.li I just created for the hashtag #Blekko. Pretty cool, although not filled with as much content as I would have expected.

  • What is Social Media?

    Well it can be a lot of different things. Which is one reason it is so exciting and presumably so valuable. From the point of view of a business or an individual who has their own personal website or blog, one thing that Social Media is, is advertising. In the 90's I owned and ran a retail furnishings store. We advertised mostly in the local newspaper and to some extent on local television and radio. In the webspace, to a private website owner, the simplest way I can describe Social Media is that it is like new media's version of the local paper. And your blog or website is like your 'store' if you will.
    Simply put, social media is exposure, a way to extend your web presence to a larger audience with the scaling help of automation (electrons) and the virtues of the communications' revolution itself (photons).
    Translation: A little bit of intent and pushing a few buttons equals a ton of leverage and distribution. You pay for this exposure, not with money, but with content. You and the rest of the network of members are providing the social media site its content, and in return it is providing you with exposure and extending your reach, along with a platform for making new connections. On Google's algorithmic, non-human network your website or business is passive, and the prospective customer, if you will, is active. Actively searching for something that you or some other site or business may have. On the human, social network, you the business, website, or promoter, if you will, is the one being active. And the prospective consumer is in a passive mode, using the network as a river to dip in and out of, as entertainment, news, communication, emotional outlet, or just plain fun. I think there is not only room, but a need for both types of networks, and that the rise of Facebook and Twitter doesn't mean at all the demise of Google. There are times when we want our network to be flowing, serendipitous, and fun, and there are other times when we are in a more deliberative, utilitarian mode. We need (or want) answers, and we need them now. Except with Social Media you are not selling your wares directly. You are indirectly selling your self as a real person, a genuine person with real interests. It's a way to scale your 'legitimacy.' Trust is one of the biggest factors in making a sale. And social media is a way to scale the communication of your trust. From a business standpoint or even just a human friendship standpoint, one's activity in Social Media is comparable to the "Opening of the Sale" where the goal is to talk about anything except business. In sales this is what is known as the "Schmoozing" process. But before you start thinking how creepy it is to think in these terms, "Schmoozing" only really works if you are truly interested from a sincere standpoint in the subject you are "schmoozing" about. Any insincerity in this process, either in real life or in the venue of Social Media, and one would have been better not signing up for Twitter or any other such service. So one way to look at Social Media, is as an advertising medium, a free way to extend your reach and your message. But in social media the message is your personality, your real point of view, and what you are selling is your integrity, your trust. Let's take one example that I remember coming up recently. Lisa Bettany (@MostlyLisa) is a professional photographer. She posts much of her work on Flickr, the most popular Photography Social Media site. She doesn't post her work there with each caption screaming "Buy This Now Because I'm Great and I Need Money!" along with a Paypal link. She posts there because she loves photography and loves sharing her work and the tips behind her work with others. Such actions build trust and integrity. She feeds the site with its content. The popularity of the site feeds her with exposure. She recently told the story of how this photo, which she posted on flickr over a year ago for no money, was recently purchased unexpectedly by Penguin, the book publisher, for use as the artwork for a book cover. Penguin only found the photo because it was on Flickr. They knew flickr to be the most popular photography sharing site. So they went there to search for the right potential content for their project. If the photo was only posted on her private website, it would not have been found. No transaction would have been made. So, the Social Network, in the virtual world, is like the Commons or Marketplace of a University or City in the 'real' World. It extended her personal work's reach into the public sphere for consumption, enjoyment, and productivity. That's one example of the Social Network's virtuous cycle. The users provide the content for free. And the network provides the user with free exposure. This is just one thing that a Social Network is from the decided point of view of the business/website/blog owner, or anyone using the internet itself to scale a message. Ads that you pay real money for are the ones for direct selling, talking about your product, its Features, Advantages, and Benefits. Social Media is like hob nobbing at the Country Club or local Charity Fundraiser but without having to get into your monkey suit and drive down to the venue. Still, you need to be truthfully interested in that person you are chatting with, and really care about that charity you are raising 'funds' for, and not be in it just for you or the 'sale.' I think most would agree that's a more fun way to live anyway.

  • Saturday Reading: Three New Poems

    That is the temple there.
    The symbol that they stole.
    A border thin as hair
    Between Bob Frost’s two roads.

    But we’re not here to fight.
    We dance a certain beat.
    Incorrigable night
    Will glide upon our feet.

    The way it crowns is good
    Her charms decide it all.
    She guides us to the wood,
    And bares the fertile wall.

    This vision she will keep.
    Eternal in her sleep.