KevinGH

SOPA Is Censorship

For the past 7+ years, I have had zero problems with GoDaddy. I did not care about their marketing campaigns or the comments made about GoDaddy. Business is business and GoDaddy was and is good at what they do. With the recent improvement they have made to their user interface, this makes this even harder.

Like many others, I have and am in the process of moving my last domains from GoDaddy. Their stance on SOPA is pretty clear cut. They apparently helped co-author the bill, and are specifically exempt from its ill effects.

It is also pretty frightening that politicians are ignoring professional advice from many important service providers. What is even more terrifying is that they completely ignore the obvious consequences of the bill, which is censorship.

It is very naïve to think that they either do not know or will not abuse the power the SOPA bill will provide. It does not take a smart man to know this fact. Every bill in the name of protecting anything has always been abused. Just take a look at the United State’s history of passing those bills, The “Patriot” Act chief among them.

Setting Up Eclipse 3.7 with Marketplace and PDT

I have been having issues getting Eclipse 3.7 with PDT to work with the Marketplace client. I wanted to install it so I could install the Lion fullscreen plugin, but the instructions should work on any other OS.

• Download and install Eclipse 3.7 Classic
• Go to Help > Install New Software
• Under Work with, select Indigo
• In the filter box, type Marketplace and install the Marketplace client
• Go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace
• Under Find, type Lion and install the Lion fullscreen plugin
• Go to Help > Install New Software
• Under Work with, select Indigo
• In the filter box, type PHP and install PHP Development Toolkit under General Purpose Tools

You’re done.

Budgeting RAM on MediaTemple’s (ve) Product

If you take a look at my portfolio right now, you will notice that it’s pretty barren.

I decided to switch from WordPress.com to MediaTemple (mt) because of the lack of control I had over my own website. Having experience using WordPress on multiple private hosts, I had trouble stomaching being nickel-and-dimed to death. That, and advertisements on a portfolio did not look very professional to me.

Originally, I used MediaTemple’s (gs) product. I was not very happy with the performance, and I figured I could save $20 a month by moving to free solutions (like WordPress.com). After having experimented with that for a few months, I decided to jump ship and switch back to (mt). However, this time I decided to try their new (ve) product.

I love everything about (ve), except for the amount of memory available. I am paying $30 for 512GB of RAM, which is all I can afford at the moment. This isn’t a knock on MediaTemple, since this is about on par for the price. First attempt at setting up my website was a success, until I tried running Redmine using Unicorn. That chewed through so much RAM, I had to convince myself it wasn’t worth running.

I also had to fine tune Nginx, MySQL, and PHP FPM to run fewer workers in order to compensate for the low availability of RAM. So if you decide to get a virtual private server, make sure you can afford at least 1GB of RAM. The higher quantity of traffic you get, the more RAM you’ll need to have server daemon workers running in standby. Otherwise you’ll have clients getting dropped or waiting in long queues.

Google to Facebook

As I wrote my last post, I realized something, which should have been obvious to me.

There is a very fundamental difference between Google+ and Facebook.

Facebook is oriented around establishing and maintaining associations with other people.  This means that contact information is exchanged through profiles, videos and photos are shared between friends/family/associates, and people can converse with each other through wall posts or (instant) messages.

Facebook is for your common person.

Google+ is oriented around sharing content.  Unfortunately, that’s all there is to it.  Talking to one another is “unnatural” since you have to hijack a comment thread for some shared item.  Hangouts are great for when you care to have face-to-face conversations, but that’s rarely the case with many people.

Google+ is not for your common person.

I think this is why Google+ will never be a competitor to Facebook, and will be abandoned by Google, in the future, like so many other projects that flopped.  Google+ will never gain the kind of moment Facebook did because it’s not fun to use for common people.  Sure there’s games to keep you entertained, but social networking isn’t about games.

Sharing content is a superset of social networking, not the other way around.

There needs to be a true Facebook competitor, oriented around people and not content.  Personally, I’m hoping that Diaspora can help me break free from Facebook.  I would love to share some aspects of my life with family, friends, and strangers online, but I want to do it in such a way where I have full control over it.  Facebook makes me nervous as they continue to push the boundaries of the definition of privacy.

Google+ Needs To Catch Up

Updated: My comment about submitting photos through the web UI was incomplete. I meant using my webcam to submit pictures.

After having used Google+ for about two days, I can safely say I would really enjoy it were it not lacking some basic functionality.

• The ability to 
  • mute individual people
  • mute a whole circle
  • mute GIFs posts
  • create a custom stream
  • submit photos directly through the web UI using my webcam
  • change submission visibility after submitting
  • hide submissions shared by an individual person
  • share directly with another person
    • This is something that is already offered by Facebook. It’s basically just leaving a wall post on somebody else’s wall.

These are not features.  Features are extras on top of an already usable service.  Functionality is something basic required to make the service usable.  When I have an entire stream plastered with animated GIFs, Google+ no longer becomes usable.  There will always be one or two people who you want to maintain an association with, but have no desire to see their submissions.  Others just decide to share too much.

As for features, here are a few that I hope Google will implement:

• Filter out submission types from a person
• Vanity URL
• Twitter and Facebook integration
• Share items straight from Google Reader

Also, there happens to be a problem with the Android and iOS apps for Google Apps members.  The one I have personally experienced is the iOS one.  The app will go through the login process, but then state that you need an invitation to use Google+.  As a result, I cannot share anything easily using my phone.

If anything of the things I mentioned have already been done, Google has not made it easy to find or use.  Not even a Google search helped.