Engine Yard Down: Over-reliance on inexpensive ASPs?

We launched another project today - and luckily it's running well and doesn't require patches right now. Engine Yard is down today - it's a hosting company for GitHub.com (our source code management ASP) and Lighthouse (our ticket management ASP). Ouch. At least I can still blog ... 

GitHub does have a source code deployment workaround if needed.

MnDaily Launches NewsCloud-powered Facebook Application

As part of our social media research geared at engaging young people in news in social networks, the University of Minnesota student news publication, MnDaily, and NewsCloud launched MnDaily on Facebook today. Read more: U of M researchers using Facebook application to engage youth in new and The Daily on Facebook. This project is generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

 

More iPhone Quotes

"I love the iPhone, it's like having a computer and a telegraph in your pocket!" - inspired when an important business voice mail reached me 5 hours late, bad me for wandering to the perimeter of my "coverage zone"

I read that there are more class action lawsuits emerging against Apple and AT&T for false advertising of the speeds and reliability of the AT&T 3G network. Godspeed trial attorneys. Godspeed.

Creepy PayPal Messages

"Did you know? Our records show that you have money in your PayPal account." 

This is an actual message PayPal checkout gives you when you try to pay by credit card. So, a year from now if you wonder why Google Checkout has won... you will know.

PayPal to customers: adapt to our business model, not what's best for you. 

MySQL: How to count the number of items in a column, TEXT or BLOB field

If you want to count the number of comma separated values stored in a MySQL column (perhaps a BLOB or TEXT field), this is a handy method:

SELECT  (LENGTH(item) - LENGTH(REPLACE(item, ',', ''))) as numInnerItems FROM MyTable;

Taken from Nabble: How to count # of occurrences of a char in a string?

Should mother's breast-feed their children?

It's worked for thousands of years, but it's suspect track-record leads Newsvine to ask "Should mother's breast-feed their children?"

Kind of reminds me of Jon Stewart mocking a tv-reporter calling Bernie Madoff's 150 year sentence a death sentence for this 70 year old man. To which Stewart replied, 150 years is probably a death sentence for all of us.

Making use of (and fun of) Amazon Remembers for iPhone

Amazon Remembers is part of the new Amazon Mobile for iPhone application that lets you take photos of items, looks them up on the Amazon site and emails them to you.At first, I found it an extremely efficient way to list used books and products for sale on the Amazon Marketplace. Just use Amazon Remembers to take a photo of a book or item, then wait a minute to receive the email link to the product at Amazon and click "sell yours here". I've found this works about as well as using an iSight as a bar code scanner, but more convenient - given that I carry my iPhone around almost everywhere.

The service performs quite quickly and accurately at recognizing books. I thought they might be using some kind of recognition system, but it appears that they are using their Mechanical Turk service. It's kind of fun to take pictures of random things and see what Amazon's online worker-bees (wherever they are) come back with.

Here are a few examples:

 All the books I took photos of worked perfectly. The Onion book linked right to Homeland Insecurity: The Onion Complete News Archives, Volume 17 (Onion Ad Nauseam)

Some electronics worked well, others did not. This Aliph Jawbone headset worked exactly Aliph Jawbone Noise Shield Bluetooth Headset (Red) while my old iMac linked to a new iMac Apple iMac MB323LL/A 20-inch Desktop PC (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD SuperDrive).

  My Viking Immersion Blender linked to another Amazon model: Dualit 88860 500-Watt Immersion Hand Blender with Pulse, Chrome Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible

 Mr. Potato Head Spider Man in black (aka Spider Fisk) linked to Hasbro Mr. Potato Head Spider-Man & Friends Spider Spud but in red.

 My cat linked to  Bergan Turbo Scratcher Cat Toy (Colors May Vary)

 

 And a bowl of yoghurt and berries linked to Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible

Related Stories:

• Amazon Proves It Remembers Mechanical Turk (Wired)

• Amazon Mobile for the iPhone shops and remembers (Ars Technica)

Levi is free

Sarah Palin's handlers have freed Levi. 

Oh, the stuff you can win: Hot Dish Action Team Rewards

There are some amazing prizes for 16 - 25 year old U.S. residents in the Hot Dish Action Team. Please pass Hot Dish along to your younger Facebook friends (and your older ones - everyone gets free downloadable endangered species ringtones from the Center for Biological Diversity).

iGoogle Using YUI

One of our Hot Dish developers amused us with his discovery today that Google uses Yahoo's YUI user interface library for it's iGoogle drag and drop home page grid. Apparently, he's not the first to notice: here and here among others. He'd been looking for a good open source dashboard library when he happened to notice familiarity in the iGoogle code with our own backend management console. Looks like Google's even started hosting YUI in its shared AJAX libraries (which has provided a great first time user performance boost for NewsCloud).