Addicted To 1’s and 0’s

Well, apparently HP’s foray into the online storage market via a service appropriately named “Upline” has been rather short-lived. If you try to log-in or even attempt to create a new account you are greeted with a simple: “The HP Upline Service is temporarily unavailable” graphic (as pictured above). Also temporarily down is their online customer service “Chat” feature.

Going to the main website - www.upline.com would not make you think anything was wrong with the service, as there is no mention of it until you either click buy now or try to log in. I’m sure that only adds to the frustration of anyone who was using it as a backup service, especially if they find themselves desperately needing to perform any type of operating system re-install.

WebWorkerDaily reports that an email from HP was sent out two days ago stating that, “we fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.”
I am going to have to share their commentary on this one in saying that just how soon the service will be re-activated seems to be up to anyones guess.

As per my recent posting on this recent addition to the file-sharing service market, HP was attempting to enter a market already saturated with not only old CDN (Content Delivery Network) competitors, but also a gaggle of brand new ventures taking advantage of the recent “Cloud-Computing” trend.

No news yet on why the service is down, but it should serve as a lesson that it’s better to offer a product that is dependable than rush out a beta version with hopes of keeping up with the competition.

Hewlett-Packard just officially announced the release of HP Upline, an online storage service that serves as both a personal back-up source as well as a way to share files with friends. Not only that but it starts at only $4.99/month for unlimited data transfer & storage, making it ridiculously affordable compared to alternative large-scale backup methods. This announcement comes shortly after the successful launch of two similar services, Sugarsync and DropBox. The apparent need for a one-stop service provider that allows for data-backup, file-sharing, and cross-platform syncing has finally hit Enterprise level it seems. SugarSync service boasts the ability to synch not only your mac and pc, but also any mobile device that you may have as well. On top of that it would serve as a backup for your files should something happen to your equipment. The demand for the service was so high (their 45 day Free Trial may have something to do with it) that it actually crashed their service two days ago, resulting in a blog posting from their CEO Gibu Thomas explaining the situation and their progress towards fixing it. DropBox is currently still in a closed beta, but utilizes Amazon’s “cloud” based S3 service to do the same thing as what HP’s Upline is promoting - a virtualized synch/backup service that works on all platforms as well as can be used to share files with friends.

Speaking of Amazon, who so far has been the undeniable leader in Web Services, they too experienced a similar outage when their S3 service suddenly went down for a few hours a few weeks ago - leaving developers stranded as the entire purpose of using this service was to replace the need for any localized storage of data. The difference was that no one from Amazon has come forward to apologize or even acknowledge the error officially, the only mention was via a tech support representative after their forums were flooded with a battery of irate users reporting the error and asking why there wasn’t some sort of monitoring software/services in place (good question). Apparently Amazon either didn’t know about the outage, or simply didn’t send out some form of communication letting them know of the problem.

For a company to tout themselves as the replacement to purchasing/maintaining localized hardware to service enterprise level applications, this type of outage is simply unacceptable in my mind. Then the lack of response regarding the issue becomes an added slap in the face. Their complete lack of communication with the developers who relied on them was well documented across the web via the blogsphere but I sadly did not find it anywhere in the press. Why should it have been you might be asking? After all, it’s just some web-service. Their cloud services are currently being used to house large ammounts of critical data in applications that range from credit card processing portals to health-care based applications used in hospitals. Three hours of down-time with no explanation, warning, or even corporate outreach could have been catastrophic, even deadly. A great explanation of the incident can be found in a ZDNET article written by Michael Krisman where he even points out one worried developers plea, “But what do I tell my clients?” For a different perspective, I suggest you check-out what Bob Lozano had to say about the early-morning incident in his Appistry Blog (which also has a few other great articles on cloud/cluster based services if you’re interested in learning more about the service). S3 being down for any amount of time crippled a few companies who relied on it for data management…. and if you read the forums posts on Amazon’s site you can see the wide range of firms/industries who were helpless until the issue was resolved.

Since then there still hasn’t been any news from Amazon other than a small message explaining that the problem has been fixed. That doesn’t give me much confidence in the reliability of their other services, particularly their just recently announced launch of “Elastic IPs - Static IPs for Dynamic Cloud Computing,” This recent development would mean that you could not only use their virtualization/cloud services to store, manage, and transfer your database driven info but could also host the application that uses it through them as well. Throw in their Fulfillment Services and you have yourself a fully operational virtual company! An interesting thought was brought up on Brian “Krow” Aker’s blog (one of the smart ones who had a hand mysql + slashdot “back in the day”) comparing what I used to have running on a beat-up developement box in college and all these new offerings:

LAMP ->
Linux -> EC2
Mysql/Memcached -> S3/SimpleDB/Queue
Apache/Asterisk -> HTTP/Mechanical Turk
PHP/Perl/Python -> REST

Not to mention Google also has been aiming at getting in on a piece of the action. At last night’s Campfire One Google announced that they are now offering hosting for enterprise level web applications via a new tool called App Engine. Rumor is they also are partnering up with Salesforce (who have their own Appexchange service) in the upcoming week as well. Currently Google is giving away access/hosting for FREE to a limited 10,000 developers . I was lucky enough to snag an invitation, and although I have only had a few brief moments to tinker around with the site, it looks extremely promising at first glance. It currently only supports the Python language, however they are working on adding additional platforms soon-enough (i.e Ruby on Rails, or at least I hope seeing how it would be a perfect back-end for a cloud-based application of this magnitude).

According to their Google App Blog - the development environment provided is based off of how they themselves manage all the services/data, just rolled up into a more scalable (as in down-scale) commodity that they could then sell. This includes being powered by Bigtable and GFS - two services that have enabled Google’s search engines to run as fast as they do while parsing through petabytes of data to find you whatever it is you are searching for.

Soon the days of having to beg VC’s for startup capital to fund server farms will be replaced by virtualized data-flow…. I can tell you this much at least, all of these services give you the tools necessary to build whatever application you think might be the “Golden Ticket” - And It’d be a lot easier to get that $400 Million in funding by letting your potential investors actually use the product you want them to buy into. You then are selling them on the experience itself, leaving you free from having to dress in a suit to show off some slides of just how the experience “might look like.” And we all know that death by powerpoint is never a fun experience……

Introducing SocialThing, the latest in social-media site aggregators.
It’s still in beta mode, but as of 12:45pm EST the invite code: “techcrunch” still worked.

Interesting site. Instead of just asking for the location of all of your public feeds like FriendFeed does, it actually has you enter in your login and password to each of the social sites it pulls information from. This is what makes SocialThing different than FriendFeed (and other similar services) - It uses the various API’s, including OAuth with each site so that you can interact with the various feeds as if you were on the site itself. For example, If someone were to send me a message via twitter, I wouldn’t have to leave SocialThing’s site in order to respond. The same goes for the rest of the sites they currently aggregate (Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, and Vimeo).

The purpose of the site is to “Get your digital life together.” And once they start adding more social sites, this should kick services like friendfeed in the rear as it will allow you to actually use this site as a one-stop-shop for your social-networking needs, whereas other social aggregators tend to be just pretty representations of all your RSS feeds. Needless to say this could turn out to be a very useful tool, especially if they were to create some sort of application that could interactive with it (perhaps using Adobe AIR?), a la what twitter + pownce have done.

Taken from their site, it allows you to:
“See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!

Socialthing! makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.”

Now lets just see if this thing can actually take off, it seems like every day a new social-feed aggregator is released….I guess that goes to show you how its never good to be first in the sandbox… all it means is that the next killer app to come out in your genre will just incorporate all your positive innovations and most likely learn from your mistakes.

A big problem with the iPhone is that every time Apple releases a software update, those that have unlocked or used some sort of Jailbreak software on it find themselves with an expensive phone that no longer works. A combination of this and the recent release of the iPhone SDK had me thinking about whether or not it would be possible to run multiple versions of the system software so that if an update (or an application I might be testing) were to ruin the phone, there still would be another, working copy available.

This would prevent me from having to do a full-reset anytime I screw up, and/or find myself with a dead phone…… the question then becomes, is it possible to dual-boot an iPhone?

YES

I came across an article last night which tells you exactly how to be able to dual-boot your iPhone in different versions of the system software.
A word of warning though, this is no easy task and primarily involves using the command line, so I would not suggest this for the novice user.

The article was written in part by Jonathan “NerveGas” Zdziarski, a programmer notorious for his iPhone hacks as well as author to recently released book, iPhone Open Application Development. Zdziarski was also the creative mind behind a whole gamut of other iPhone innovations - everything from a Nintendo Emulator to even developing an initial technique that would enable the usage of SSH in your iPhone apps. You can find his blog here - www.zdziarski.com/ but if you really want the most up-to-date scoop on iPhone enhancements/hacks, head on over to their irc channel - #iPhone.

In case you just upgraded your iPhone’s firmware to 1.1.4, here’s a post regarding how to jailbreak it from cre.ations.net, or you can go directly to the source and download ZiPhone.

[original source - iPhone Atlas -- photo credit: the Boy Genius Report]

Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, their first Rails-based web-app that enables you to share your location with other users/services in a variety of ways. It’s still in “beta” mode, but they were smart and came up with a clever way for you to instantly get an invite - By using an already-made mashup incorporating the instant updates. In this case, they chose to use Twitter to interact w/ their api. And after looking at the sample code, it’s pretty easy to setup too. In order to get an instant invite to check-out this beta-release for yourself:

1) First you must have a twitter account (which if you’re reading this blog i’m assuming you already do, even if it was only used once to see what the whole “Twitter” thing was about), you will then need to “follow” DangerDay. That can be done by clicking on the follow link in his profile page or by simply twittering “follow dangerday”
Danger Day will then immediately return the favor by following your twitter account as well, thus enabling you to be able to direct message each other.

2) Now that you’re following DangerDay, you need to get an invite, so next up is direct messaging dangerday with the word “invite”. Once again, this can be done by twittering “d dangerday invite”
DangerDay will then respond with a link for you to follow, enabling you to sign-up on the FireEagle page for an account…what a nice guy

3) Now once you’ve got your account squared away, why not test it out with dangerday? In order to update him as well as the entire Fire Eagle Service as to your location, all you need to do is direct message him again with “u location_here”.. for example: “d dangerday u Atlanta, GA” - that will let dangerday AND Fire Eagle know that I’m currently in Atlanta, GA.

This service, like all other social-dependent ones, will live or die based on whether or not developers get involved and come up with interesting mashups. Right now there are already popular sites that could benefit from being able to twitter or IM an updated location (or be automatically fed coordinates via GPS enabled phones), a good example would be the social travel site Dopplr. This dependency on developers adopting their free Yahoo service isn’t something that I feel is lost on the guys behind this project either - they’re using standardized, open-source tools like OAuth that coders are already familiar with. If they make it easy to incorporate, then they’ve got a better chance of someone using it in their application, even if just for fun. If it was incorporated into a web-app, just using the user’s IP would result in knowing their location and being able to update the service….so the possibilities are endless.

It’s already been incorporated into Facebook so that you can easily stalk follow your friends, I’m sure they’re always just dying to know where I am at all times. Although I will say this - A service like this could come in handy if you were part of a big group trying to meet-up in a crowded location (i.e. somewhere in Austin this weekend for SXSW). One SMS sent to Fire Eagle and then all your buddies would know where you were (i.e. “Already at the bar waiting for you guys to get here!”). And if your phone has GPS enabled, I wouldn’t have even had to send the text, Fire Eagle gives you the option of letting your phone auto-update their service with your whereabouts. Now to find out where another user is, you would only have to use something as simple as the twitter or AIM example from above. So to show you how this works, let’s go back to our good friend dangerday. Direct message him with “q brentter” and it’ll respond with my most recent location (for you non-twitters, that means you’d type: “d dangerday q brentter” but without the quotes).

With the recent release of the iPhone SDK, I can only imagine this service being experimented with alongside the new framework - Erica Sadun in fact has already released an application for your iPhone called firefindme that does just that but without using GPS. Instead she uses another Yahoo service called Zone Tag, which was initially released as a way to geo-tag your Flickr photos based on specific “location tags” that you would assign them (or if you had a phone w/ built-in GPS, it would automatically do it for you).

So far the Developer section of the Fire Eagle site has been steadily growing, with it currently showcasing quick starts, examples api code (right now though only in javascript, php, perl, python, and ruby), and options on various open-source ways to authenticate user sessions. It also looks like they’re hoping to build an application gallery/showcase into the site.

This has some pretty good potential, although personally I feel it’s somewhat of a stretch for it to be utilized in anything major.
And i’m not even going to get into how privacy goes through the window if your phone is sending a webservice updates on where you are. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb shares similar concerns about the idea of allowing others to track your every movement (You are given the option of it not automatically pinging your GPS enabled phone to update your location, but just like when Facebook announced their new “mini-feed service,” it just gives give me a the creeps)

[source for some of this information came from Jesse Newland's Blog - SoylentFoo]