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bluehost.com ignores customer complaints on database downtime

I gave bluehost more than two months to fix their issues, or even simply notify their customers of ongoing problems and make some sort of gesture to make up for the downtime. They have done neither, while the server that hosts this blog (box 12 at bluehost) continues to have constant database downtime.
I’ve included [...]

Cordarounds - sweet pants, sweeter customer service

I recently had a great experience with Cordarounds, an independent clothing company run by Chris Lindland. I stumbled upon the website I believe through del.icio.us, and found it to be a fun, quirky place that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
I ordered some pants and a blazer from them, and while I really dug the pants, [...]

Does Mysql really need occasional restarts?

You may have seen my blog occasionally go down due to database problems. I have been constantly on email and phone with bluehost support to try to figure this out. The responses I’ve gotten always seem completely ignorant of bigger issues. Ranging from “we didn’t see a problem” to “we killed the threads so everything [...]

We cannot receive your email at this time

I submitted an inquiry to B&H Photo, an online Photo Store that has a cute habit of ‘closing’. Evidently these people didn’t get the message that online stores don’t have hours or off days. But here’s the kicker, I emailed their customer service for an inquiry, and this is the response:

We regret that we cannot [...]

Elastic Server now with Passenger (mod_rails)

We’ve added Passenger support to our Rails 2.0 Elastic Server Portal, so that you can now create both Mongrel and Passenger servers and compare them. If you’re happy with what you’ve built, create it in EC2 format and deploy it to the cloud! Read more at the Elastic Server Blog

Useful git commands and quirks

Things I’ve learned from my first git experiences. First of all, git is inconsistent as hell. Every command has its own quirks and syntax, so I’m attempting to catalog some of them here. We’ve been using git svn at Planypus as a way to maintain local developer branches and still push to our svn as [...]

The security of working at a startup

I recently had an interesting conversation with my grandfather, who was concerned about the economic downturn (recession?) and the impact it may have on my having a job. As I tried to explain to him why I choose to work in startups over big companies, I came to realize that I feel there’s a certain [...]

del.icio.us is social search

I find myself more often turning to tag search on del.icio.us when I’m looking for ‘best of’ type searches. For example, if I’m shopping for a camera strap or looking for free icons, I turn to del.icio.us because I don’t want to sort through thousands of results based on relevancy determined by an algorithm; I [...]

Rails moves to Lighthouse

In a series of dev infrastructure changes, the Rails team is moving to Lighthouse as its bugtracking system. I wrote about Lighthouse more than a year ago as an application to watch in the bugtracking space, and now they’re coming into the limelight with official support from the Rails team.
I’m really happy to see [...]

Rails moves to GitHub; Git is the new black

Rails has officially moved to GitHub. The GitHub guys have done an awesome job capitalizing on the growing trend of git usage, especially in the Rails community, and of course getting ‘official blessing’ from the Rails core team themselves means that many more projects are sure to follow.
I’ve been using git-svn to work on a [...]