I couldn’t help but take this picture at lunch today.

I know this contradicts my recent anti-printer/paper post… I found myself needing small pieces of paper with my social coordinates on them. I tried offering to beam a vCard. Don’t ask me why… it just isn’t socially acceptable or in most cases even possible. So, I needed some cards.

I spent quite a bit of effort researching different styles and formats. There are some amazing custom cards out there. I didn’t want to break the bank or wait six months to have them made. I did want something unique and fun. I found the perfect thing; MOO cards. Apparently they have been all the rage in Europe and among trendy start-ups. I couldn’t help giving them a try.

The entire MOO card experience was first class all the way. It started at the website. The interface was clean, easy to understand and simple to use. You can import your pictures from Flickr or upload them one at a time. For twenty dollars you get 100 cards and each card can be unique. The only downside is that they are currently only printed in Europe. Standard shipping to the US costs seven dollars and take a couple of weeks. Once they arrived, I was delighted with the quality. The paper weight and print finish compliment the format nicely. They are packed in a hefty plastic box (made from post-consumer material) and the marketing material is pure genius.

If you find yourself needing or maybe even wanting these little pieces of paper, give MOO cards a try.

“The business card is the single most successful networking tool of all time, predating cellphones, the internet, and PDAs by some 300 years. Not bad for a bit of paper.”

http://moo.com
Flickr Group – MOO MiniCards

No my site isn’t broken…

Today I am observing CSS Naked Day to help promote web standards. Not that I am completely compliant, but who really is when you have browsers that don’t want to play nice.

The topic of CSS for me always brings up the great debate of CSS vs tables. You will notice that I use a mixture on this site. That is because I absolutely hate absolute positioning in css. Another thing (that is gone with no css) are my sprites. They are great to cut down on requests and improve site performance. Here is what you are missing:

Now that I am looking at my site without css, maybe we should start an advertising naked day to show how cool our sites would be without them.

Fore more reading take a look at: What are web standards and why should I use them?

Why do we print things on 8.5×11″ pieces of amalgamated fibers? It’s a valid question these days. We have trained ourselves over thousands of years to cling to something physical or tangible. I just call it stuff. The digital age has brought about new adaptation challenges and the bad habits that come with them. Printing on paper is just one of them.

What makes us convert that index-able, indefinitely achievable, extensible digital file to a physical, fragile and perishable paper format anyway? The first answers that come to mind is portability and well… just plain habit. We want to take that information with us; in the car, to a meeting, or for later use. It is convenient (for the most part) to print something in expectation of needing it in the future. It is so common to want to hold onto that physical representation of information, it has become habit. But think about it… is printing really the best solution. Maybe in isolated cases, but for the most part there are much better options. The Internet for one is extremely portable and convenient. Do yourself a favor, keep those digital files… they aren’t going anywhere (as long as you have a backup strategy). Your mobile phone or portable computer most likely can (or will very soon) allow you access to ALL your files.

Another reason printing it is a bad habit is the stress it causes. For me it has always been a nightmare. Before the affordable laser printer; dot-matrix and ink jet were the norm. Paper jams, head cleaning, calibration or just running out of ink where daily occurrences. I currently have a HP-1020 that for the most part has served me well (aside from the early vista driver issues). Most of what is printed is single use, never to be looked at again. The paper ends up in a stack and ultimately gets in you way. It takes tremendous amounts of time to sort papers. This is where the duplex scanner comes in, but why print on the paper it in the first place? If you really need to “print” it for an archive, try doPDF.

I am sure you have heard about the paperless movement. It’s just another reason to ditch the printer. It sounds great, but we are just on the edge of making it a reality. I am no-where near paperless, but like most of us, have already started the process. Most of my bills are now paperless. I recently changed my car insurance policy with Progressive, they even offered to plant a tree in a National forest if I went paperless! The incentives for businesses are huge. I think the individual/consumer has yet to see or feel the full value. Everyone wants less junk mail, but what about the other benefits. Getting rid of or reducing your printing is a big part of the equation and should be a motivator. It definitely is for me.

Next time you print something, ask yourself… “do I really need this on a piece of paper?” Do yourself and the world a favor… break the habit.

Print this page

Photo by “yoppy”

Just as the news that the Microsoft Xbox 360 external HD DVD drive was declared extinct, I found a use for it: load up my new Asus Eee with Windows XP. It is hopefully the last OS that has to be loaded from an optical drive and lets not forget about the F6 floppy driver loading routine (thankfully not needed for the Eee).

I was going to use a Bytecc IDE to USB with an old drive I had laying around. But why not let this already defunct technology marvel go out with a bang. It worked great.

Anyway, I loaded up the Eee with an nlite-ed version of XP for a mere 480mb footprint. I followed this great tutorial over at i64X.com, thanks Jason!

My first impressions of the Asus Eee are very good. I am finding all sorts of uses for it. I already voided the Newegg warranty by installing a gig of Geil RAM, we’ll see about voiding the Asus warranty and installing some hardware hacks (maybe GPS, bluetooth and 3G?). I promise, this isn’t going to turn into a Eee blog, but I will have more on it soon. This thing is amazing!

You have undoubtedly heard about this outstanding book/movie. Well if you haven’t seen the movie yet, the consumer copy is being released on March 4th. This is a must see (and/or physically own if your primitive squirrel instincts are in overdrive).

I will warn you; when I saw this movie in the theater this past fall, it inspired me to do all sorts of things, including selling all my DVDs/CDs on half.com. With that said, the link to the right is to the Amazon Unboxed pre-order.

This is one you can’t miss.

I just installed Windows Vista SP1 and so far have noticed quite a performance improvement. Nothing scientific here… just “click of the mouse” impressions. But everything seems more responsive and smooth. One tangible difference is network file transfers. While moving files, pre-SP1 to a network drive I would get consistently 25mb/sec. Now the same transfer is moving along at 32mb/sec. Again, nothing concrete, but that is a 28% improvement. This is just one of the notable changes in SP1.

I have always enjoyed vista. There are a lot of XP die hards out there, understandably not wanting to upgrade. I built a new computer when I migrated to vista, so I didn’t feel the impact as much. The benefits have been great; environment is pleasurable and reliability has been top notch. I picture the trade offs like this…. sure windows 98se was faster than XP on the same hardware . It’s only natural that XPsp2 will be faster than Vista on the same hardware. Every OS has it’s issue, even the prim and proper Apple got slammed for Leopard bugs. Change always brings new issues, but it also bring good.

I have to thank Microsoft for this service pack. Yes, I know… they technically fixed something that was “broken”. But, it isn’t often that you see this noticeable of a performance gain without upgrading hardware or bumping your vcore.

Installation was flawless, 32 minutes on my system. (i twitter-logged it)

I downloaded the stand-alone update via MSDN. Microsoft is expected to push the release date up to late February as apposed to mid March. If you wait for automatic updates to kick in, you won’t get it until mid April.

I am quite happy.

“A study conducted by IDC determined that only 41% of small companies and 35% of large organizations monitor Internet DNS response times.”

“DNS failures account for as much as 29% of system downtime costing companies millions of dollars.”

The Domain Name System (DNS) is arguably the single most important part of the internet. Just think: If websites only had a numerical lookup… our Rolodex’s would be massively confusing. Why don’t webmasters/hosts treat DNS with the same priority? DNS servers carry such a high importance. Without them, no internet. They are often the target of massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. Are your DNS records configured properly and secure?

DNS Performance & Security Enhancements

Most of the Internet is run on Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) based servers. There have been a lot of failed attempts to create a BIND alternative (GnuDIP, MooDNS, Dents, OakDNS, CustomDNS and dproxy). A couple of active projects are PowerDNS, NSD, djdns and MaraDNS. All boast better security and performance improvements in different environments. If you are hosting your own DNS, you owe it to yourself/network to review your options.

Another performance and security innovation that is becoming increasing popular across many stateless services on the internet is IP anycast networks. It is a network addressing and routing scheme where data is routed to the nearest or best destination. It helps provide higher availability and load balancing. Many of the TLD servers name servers are already running on anycast networks. In fact these servers survived the massive DDOS attack last year. UtraDNS, Netriplex and DNS Made Easy are among the few providers to deliver DNS over an anycast network. I imagine many more fill follow suit.

Minimizing down-time with TTL

Most of us have been effected by DNS outages. There is not much you can do when a record gets out of whack or a server goes down. You can flush your local cache, maybe even try to resolve against a different server, but the only real cure is time. That is because each DNS record has a setting called Time to Live (TTL). This is how long the record should persist. Once this time expires, a new record is fetched. Also, if the servers aren’t available, you don’t get a record.

A good rule of thumb when setting your TTL is to use your average visitor time. For example, if the average visitor spends five minutes on your site (check your analytics), you should set your TTL to 300 (in seconds). The idea is; in the event of a failover, it has the least impact on visitors and doesn’t require a performance hit for numerous DNS lookups. Some DNS providers won’t allow a TTL setting this low. A lower TTL mean more DNS queries and ultimately more expense.

Should I outsource my DNS?

A lot of network architects will actually advise webmasters to host their own DNS records. The route/latency will be the same as HTTP traffic, thus making lookup time approximately the same as a web requests. It also reduces the risk of outages caused solely by DNS. If they are hosted on the same subnet, routing glitches are minimized. If they are on the same server as your website, it will even further reduce the risk of DNS only outages.

However, if you don’t have the time/experience to monitor, review logs and maintain your DNS servers, outsourcing is a great option. But beware, all DNS networks/servers are not created equally. If you are hosting your records with a budget registrar, chances are you are at risk. They are often the target of DDOS attacks, endure lengthy outages/maintenance and have congested networks. Security by obscurity; in the last two years I have had clients with DNS outages lasting greater than 6 hours at two of the major registrars.

The Cadillac of DNS currently is NeuStar’s UltraDNS. They have a globally redundant/optimized network with proprietary DNS software powered by Oracle replication. However, they charge by the query, so if you have a busy site, it will get expensive in a hurry. Another high-end service is Netriplex. For small to mid size company’s the only way to afford either of these services is to increase unfortunately to your TTL.

The best budget priced service with high-end features/support I have found so far is DNS Made Easy. They have a great feature-set, excellent and knowledgeable staff all at a great price.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There have been reports of falling Search Engine Results Placements (SERPs) taking drastic drops soon after a DNS change. Changing just the IP address has not caused any notable problems. It is domain contact and name server changes that have have caused the speculation. Many claim it resets the sites Google “trust points”. There are many influences on SERPs and SEO is always a moving target, so take this warning with a grain for salt. But I thought it was worth mentioning.

For More Information

DNS Wiki – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system
DNS Forum – http://member.dnsstuff.com/forums/
Web-based DNS Tools – http://www.dnstools.com/
DNS Surveys – http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/dns/surveys/

Welcome.

If you are reading this post, the migration is complete. As promised, an all new site, with all new content.

With this much needed upgrade, I chose Linode.com as a host. They have many distros to choose from and a great management console. I am also partial to hosting facilities located in Texas for the geographic advantages. In the migration, I implemented Amazon S3 storage for all my static files. I have also scratch built a wordpress theme with minimalist styling and speed in mind. I still have a lot of tweaking to go, but it was time for launch.

More to follow…

‘Tis the season for some of the most awful music. Thanks to The Matches, it’s not all bad. This song has been a favorite since the first time i heard it on radio wazee. I was also fortunate to hear them live at the Masquerade in Atlanta, GA.

Who doesn’t like live music? To me it is one of the purest forms of art. It used to be the only way you take it in was, well to go to a concert. That is unless you happened to find a mono cassette copy or got really lucky and scored a soundboard recording. Most bands know for their live creativity have an open taping policy. This is great for people who only get out a couple times a year to take in a show. With a good stereo or set of headphones, you can enjoy a concert while you relax at home.

Recording technology has come a long way. Just a couple of years ago, the only way to get your hands on live recordings was to network/trade with tapers/collectors or request blanks and postage (B&P) exchanges. Most taping policies do not allow recordings to be bought or sold. B&Ps are a great way to get started, friendly collectors (or people who accidentally burned two copies) would offer up shows. All you had to do was send blank media with a return mailer. This was how I got started with my collection.

I haven’t traded for almost 4 years now. You can see my collection at http://db.etree.org/mrmatt57. I still have most of these shows. If you want one, drop me a line, I’d be happy to do a trade or B&P.Collectors started of with analog recordings, then DATs/CDs, now it’s all lossless digital. Two popular formats are Shorten (shn) and Free Lossless Audio Codec (flac). Over the years flac has grown to be the defacto-standard. Unless you are streaming audio over the internet, live recordings should never be archived or stored in compressed codecs, like MP3.

Many websites are poping up hosting BitTorrents and archives of shows. The largest collection by far is archive.org. This is the same website that brought us the way back machine. Take a look, your favorite band just might be listed.Much of this is only possible because a dedicated few that make the journeys to the shows and lug around their equipment. Much thanks goes out to all the tapers!

Although music is the main reason most of us go to shows, the energy and visual experience of being there in person can not be understated. Nothing truly replaces physically being there. But there is something to be said about listening to a concert at 9am in the morning. I enjoy listening to shows with headphones. My favorite phones are Sennheiser HD580′s. It takes ample volume to bring you that true concert sound. If you find your headphones aren’t loud enough, pickup or build a cMoy pocket amp, you won’t regret it (disclaimer: not responsible for any hearing loss/damage). So, next time you are jonesing for a concert, check out the new digital world of live music.