I recently flew on Continental 23 from Dublin to Newark. This was the first flight where I experienced the new policy by Continental to only accept credit cards for drink purchases. Funny enough, I was sitting in the first row and was the first passenger to use it – and it broke. The rest of the flight, the crew had to fall back to cash only. This was troubling to some as Continental had sent out a global e-mail and twitter announcement that they were only going to take credit cards. I imagine some people probably skipped the stop at the cash machine!
Luckily I had tweeted asking and Continental had tweeted back that they still accept continental currency. So, the exclusively accepting credit card thing, wasn’t so exclusive after all. As a result, I had brought a couple of continental currency coupons and also had plenty of cash. So, I was relatively unaffected by this occurrence. Still, it lead me to ponder on my 8 hour flight from Dublin to Newark the use cases of only accepting credit cards.
I asked the flight attendant if they could run tabs. He said they could, but they generally preferred to just close out after each purchase. That better be one fast credit card machine. I also sincerely hope they don’t print a receipt each time. Thinking about this more, the entire concept just seems inefficient. Sure, it appears to solve the problem of the flight attendants always having to find change w/ cash purchases. However, it seems as though the credit card machines just create a new set of problems.
One wonders why you even need a credit card. Shouldn’t you be able to just “sign for the purchases” like you would at a hotel? When you buy your ticket, you can essentially setup an account and the final bill is paid when your flight is over. This would be incredibly convenient and would address a majority of passengers. Those that booked – not on continental.com – could still present a credit card; however, it should only need to be swiped once “to cover incidentals.” Even better yet, why would this account simply not be setup via the on-screen display? To take it a step further, why can’t I just put in my drink order via this same display?
In short, having to process a credit card for every on-board purchase seems like a nightmare and I would bet will result in diminished service.
So, wow, yeah. Just got off a chat and then a subsequent phone call with Hewlett Packard support due to an issue I was having w/ a Photosmart 8250 series printer. I received this printer as a gift from my father, brand new in the box. He had gotten it a couple of years ago, but never used it. We just had our first child and thought a photo printer would come in really handy to print out lots of baby pics for friends and family.
A week or two ago I went to unpack the printer. I installed everything and went through the entire setup process, which completed successfully, except when it printed there was little to no ink on the page. After inspecting the print cartridges it appeared that they had expired. No problem, I went down to our local computer store and picked out a brand new set of series 02 ink cartridges. These are the individual color cartridges – five of them – plus black. I brought the old cartridges to the store to ensure I got the right ones. After the purchase I tossed the old ones in the trash at the store.
Back at my office, I installed the new print cartridges. Immediately I was presented with an error “Wrong Ink Cartridges Installed” on the control panel display. A bit confused, I decided to google the issue. I found this HP knowledge base article. This page indicated:
This error normally occurs when print cartridges that did not come with the printer are installed during initial printer setup. The print cartridges that come with the printer are called introductory print cartridges . Introductory print cartridges carry special ink formulations required for printer initialization.
A bit surprised I decided to contact their support via the chat feature. What follows is a brief transcript from that chat session:
Gypsy : i would like to inform you that this message displays when the orginal cartrtidges are not being used up with the new printer JP Maxwell : I bought HP cartridges JP Maxwell : specifically for the 8250 JP Maxwell : it says so on the box Gypsy : please provide me few moents to use my resources to resolve thsi issue JP Maxwell : ok thank you Gypsy : thank you Gypsy : please let me know the date of purchase of this printer Gypsy : please let me know are you receiving my responces. Gypsy : Not to rush are you still online iwth me. Gypsy : with* JP Maxwell : it was about 36 months ago Gypsy : yes and teh warranty has been expired JP Maxwell : yes I’m sure Gypsy : and the installed cartridges were not working because you were not using the printer Gypsy : so they dried up. JP Maxwell : probably JP Maxwell : so what can I do JP Maxwell : should I just throw the printer away? Gypsy : you can go for trade in option Gypsy : and get a new printer from hp Gypsy : as we have great offers JP Maxwell : is there a way I can order new initial cartridges Gypsy : sorry JP Maxwell : so you’re telling me JP Maxwell : that because the initial cartridges didn’t work JP Maxwell : the entire printer is worthless? JP Maxwell : I mean this printer is completely uselss? Gypsy : yes, but you can go for trade in option on the printer
He offered to have his supervisor contact me to discuss the trade in options. He offered me the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless Printer for $179.99 plus a $50 rebate if I sent in my useless photosmart printer. That would be a total of $129.99. A quick search on Amazon showed the same printer brand new retailing for $91.77. Obviously the trade in wasn’t a good deal.
I then asked him about the issue w/ the photosmart printer and if I couldn’t just order the initial cartridges. He informed me that it was impossible. And he said that all cartridges that ship w/ these HP printers expire after 1 year. I asked him if that then meant that the printers effectively self-destructed after a year? So, all printers that HP ships w/ these cartridges are completely useless if they aren’t used within a year? He informed me that was correct.
So there you have it folks. Unbelievable. Because the initial ink cartridges expire after 1 year. And because they are impossible to replace. HP leaves you w/ a completely inoperable device and w/ no apologies or options beyond over paying for yet another HP printer. So in essence, all these printer ship w/ a self destruct mechanism that if they aren’t used they destroy themselves. Don’t know about you, but think I’ll be going with a different brand from here on out.
All your status belong to us! For quite a while I have been intrigued by the p2theme theme from the folks at Automattic. It also bothered me that all these status updates, were stored on twitter’s servers and at the whim of the twitterverse. This past weekend, something happened that changed everything. Wordpress decided to adopt the RSS Cloud protocol so that all word press blogs would be cloud enabled for a real time feed.
I talked to some of our developers and immediately we got to work on connecting a p2theme blog, status.jpmaxman.com, to my twitter feed. It worked brilliantly. Now, I can do all my status updates on my p2theme blog and they will instantly make it over to twitter. From there I have a conduit to facebook & friend feed. But, the origin feed, the master feed if you will, exists on my server and the content stays with me. Should twitter get acquired and start inserting massive ads or get driven into the ground, I still have my status history. In addition, as more and more services adopt the cloud feed, people can actually just subscribe to my conduit. It can be a 100% peer to peer distributed twitter. Dave Winer has been on a soap box about this for some time, and I’ve always agreed with him. The Internet is meant to be distributed!
After thinking about this some more, I realized this goes way beyond status updates. Any site – in particular news sites which we happen to run – could benefit greatly from a cloud feed conduit into other social media. This conduit could update twitter feeds, facebook profile or fan pages, etc. As stories are published to the news site they could instantly be syndicated to any number of places across the Internet. As such, I decided to register: instafeed.net and put a public face to this.
We will be setting it up as an open source project and will be soliciting any help we can get in building this out. Right now we are working on some top level architecture schemes as well as improving the core for an initial launch that will essentially just be RSS Cloud to twitter.
This is one of those projects that two weeks ago I would have never thought I’d be this deep into. But, the pieces just kept coming together and it was too tempting to not see where it lead. Contact me if you are interested in getting involved!
Often times I use this blog as a bully pulpit of sorts when companies act in a negative way. The thought is two fold that it helps to vent a bit and it also helps everyone when the public holds companies accountable. The first step in that is for people to share their experiences. It goes without saying that anything I write here is just my experience and others may have had completely different experiences.
That said, it is much easier to write a blog post when something negative has happened and much more difficult to remember and write about all the positive things that happen numerous time each day. This week I had one incident that clearly stood out and made me pause to say – now that is how customer service is done! That company, Room and Board, is somewhat known for their good customer service. We’ve been to their store in SoHo numerous times and have many pieces of their furniture in our apartment. Since moving back to Austin, there is no store so we rely on their website. Recently, we were buying some chairs for our office. These chairs happened to be on special 15% off when we ordered them.
Unfortunately, when they arrived we had ordered slightly the wrong ones. They did not have adjustable arms – something which makes a huge difference in comfort, in my opinion. The ones w/ adjustable arms were not much more and it was a simple oversight when we clicked order. And, in my mind, one of the downfalls of web shopping – had we been present we surely would have sat in, tried out and picked out the right chairs.
I called into customer service to arrange a return and hopefully to get the correct chairs sent out. When I talked to the CSR she informed me that while she’d be happy to place the order for the new chairs, she would not be able to honor he sale price as the sale had ended the day before. I understood why she couldn’t do it, but some how it just felt wrong. After some discussion, I told her to just go ahead and process the return and that we’d get the chair someplace else or another time.
After I hung up the phone I was sitting there feeling bad about the entire thing. If I had just paid more attention we would have gotten the right chairs. If Room and Board wasn’t so inflexible. etc, etc. Just then my cell phone rang. It was the Room & Board customer service rep. She explained that she had just not felt right about not being able to give us the sale price and that she’d gone and presented our case to her manager. They’d agreed that despite the policy, in this instant, it made since to go ahead and extend the sale price for the replacement chair, if I’d like to order it. Absolutely, I said…. and the rest is history.
There are a few things about this that make this customer service done right. The foremost is that a customer service rep actually looked at the situation as the unique set of events that it was and was able to step outside of the rules to make an exception. The second was that she actually used her head to make this decision instead of just blindly following the computer screen. And finally, that she actually cared enough to take the time to see if she could make things better.
It was a small effort, but it went a long way and in my mind they’ve earned serious points and they’ve earned a customer for life. Anyone looking for quality home or office furnishings should seriously check them out. Online at http://www.roomandboard.com
This is the second part to my previous post “Migrating Zimbra to Rackspace Cloud from Dedicated Rackspace Server” – I decided to put up separate posts as the first one was already pretty long. After receiving the updated instructions I uninstalled the existing installation and set out to start over. One cool thing about the cloud is when I decided to start fresh, through my control panel, I can just rebuild the machine to the fresh install. I did this and set out to migrate again. I ran into several problems along the way, but they were mostly just random things – some having to do w/ migration and some just with installing on Ubuntu. In case anyone else runs into them I’ll outline the issues and the solution:
zmprov gacf | grep -i account
And to get the ldap passwords:
zmlocalconfig -s | grep -i password
Much thanks to ZImbra support for that tip! Made things much easier.
So, I now have a successfully running mail server on the Rackspace Cloud. It will be interesting to see how this performs vs. our dedicated server. It feels much speedier already, but we’ll see how that goes as time passes. Stay tuned.
P.S. Much thanks to Santosh Rao w/ Zimbra Support for his help during this process.
Update: Whoops! One snag. Road Runner is blocking the IP address of this new server – so we can’t get e-mail to road runner accounts! http://security.rr.com/cgi-bin/block-lookup?67.23.29.240 Working w/ RackSpace to resolve this, though it is cumbersome via a chat-only support system. Wish it had a “ticket” system like classic Rackspace.
Today I began migrating our Zimbra mail server from our Rackspace dedicated server to the Rackspace cloud. This is going to be an ongoing post that I intend to update throughout the process.
Migrating from: RedHat EL 5 32 bit
To: Rackspace Cloud Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64bit
This mail server only has about a dozen users. Still, I’m going for the 2gb cloud option as I want nice performance. We rely on e-mail more than any other form of communication at Tipit. I am following the instructions here:
http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2007/10/moving-zcs-to-another-server.html
The first ting that concerns me is going from 250gb to 80gb. Sure enough after moving everything over, the drive is at 60% capacity. May need to look at bumping up the storage / increasing the server size since Rackspace cloud doesn’t let you add more than the allotted storage to the various instances.
Everything went very smoothly and being in the same data center the file move was extremely fast. The final step:
As Root: rerun the installer without the -s option
just blew up on me.
The system will be modified. Continue? [N] Y Shutting down zimbra mail Backing up the ldap database…failed. ./util/utilfunc.sh: line 1221: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory
The system will be modified. Continue? [N] Y
Shutting down zimbra mail
Backing up the ldap database…failed.
./util/utilfunc.sh: line 1221: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory
After some further testing, this file does appear to be there, though it’s a symbolic link:
ls -la /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin total 8 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 3 22:30 . drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 May 3 22:30 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slapacl -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slapadd -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slapauth -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slapcat -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slapdn -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slapindex -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slappasswd -> ../libexec/slapd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 May 3 22:30 slaptest -> ../libexec/slapd
I checked out the utilfunc.sh script and tried to run it by hand:
/opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat -f /opt/zimbra/conf/slapd.conf -b ” -l /opt/zimbra/openldap-data/ldap.bak -su: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory
Same result. Checking the dedicated RedHat original server, the structure looks identical. Permissions look identical. Symbolic link looks identical. There, taking a backup of LDAP using the same command works fine.
Alse tried:
/opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd -f /opt/zimbra/conf/slapd.conf -b ” -l /opt/zimbra/openldap-data/ldap.bak -su: /opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd: No such file or directory
Same result
Opened a support ticket with Zimbra. Rolled back and put original zimbra mail server back online.
Just received a very speedy response from Zimbra support:
Ideally you should have followed : http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Network_Edition:_Moving_from_32-bit_to_64-bit_Server I am not sure if what your are following is a very good idea if migrating between architectures. Things are bound to fail because the underlying binaries are pre compiled 32 bit binaries. It would be best if you remove the current install and do a clean install of the same version as of the old server and copy over the store,index,ldap and mysql data manually. The steps are outlined in the above wiki. Do let me know if you run into issues. Regards, Santosh Rao Zimbra Network Support
Ideally you should have followed : http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Network_Edition:_Moving_from_32-bit_to_64-bit_Server
I am not sure if what your are following is a very good idea if migrating between architectures. Things are bound to fail because the underlying binaries are pre compiled 32 bit binaries. It would be best if you remove the current install and do a clean install of the same version as of the old server and copy over the store,index,ldap and mysql data manually. The steps are outlined in the above wiki.
Do let me know if you run into issues.
Regards,
Santosh Rao Zimbra Network Support
Ok, fair enough, though the symptoms of the symbolic links not working in Ubuntu don’t seem to be a 32 bit vs 64 bit binary issue. But, sure, let’s follow the other method and see what happens.
Random thoughts on a Saturday morning. This has probably been done and it sounds like it could be a horrible emo flick. But, I was thinking it’d be fun to do an entire movie based on the stains / scratches / minor damage to an apartment / house. Maybe the setting is a random family moving out of a house that they’ve lived in for a long time. Each stain causes a flash back to some event: a party, a dinner, a fight, a visitor. Through the flash backs, by the end of the movie, a complete story unfolds.
Ok there’s the concept – now just hire the writers to do the hard work and make it an interesting story!
A couple of months ago I began evaluating web meeting services. I had used one before, I can’t remember which one it was, but it worked well. The only issue was you couldn’t host meetings on a Mac. A few of the competing services allowed you to do this so I set out to find one. I signed up for some trials and they all seemed to work ok. It kind of came down to Citrix GoToMeeting and the WebEx meeting center. They both seemed to do what I needed. Low and behold I receive this e-mail from Jeffrey Mulholland:
Tomorrow is the quarter end for WebEx. If you are interested in our core service of Meeting Center, I can offer you your first month of service for free if you sign up by tomorrow.
Great! They’re being pro-active, they want my business both good signs for a ongoing service relationship. I had him sign me up. During that first month I was in the process of moving and didn’t get chance to use it too much. During the second month I setup a handful of webex conferences. Each time, something else went wrong.
One time, my screen wouldn’t refresh for anyone viewing it unless I accessed a drop down menu. So every time I navigated to a new page I had to go up to the drop down and ask everyone on the call if they could now see the updated screen. Made for a very painful demo.
The next time the teleconferencing was horrible. There were massive delays, one person would finish and different people would hear that person at different times. Everybody was unsure of when to speak and people kept getting cut off.
Variations of these problems continued. Ok, not so great a service. It’s not good, but not the end of the world. I’ll keep using it as I shop around for an alternative.
Throughout the service it had been difficult to navigate. The meeting organization system seemed very clunky. When the usability (or lack there of) really shined though was when we got a paper invoice. That’s right, for a web service that we signed up for online they sent us a paper invoice. How annoying. And for $69. Ok, let’s go setup paperless billing and pay this w/ a credit card. After what can only be described as a process I get to the point where you have to register to be able to see / pay your invoice online. Yes, that’s right, I already have a login, am the only user aka the admin and have a complete control panel (confusing as it may be), but now I have to register. Ok, fine.
Yup. The error message says it all. After going through several web interfaces to try to get to support, I finally dig up a sign up e-mail giving me my user name that has a direct support e-mail address in it and send them an e-mail letting them know of my problem. As of starting this post, I had received no response. In the middle of writing it I got a response telling me that they had now associated my e-mail address w/ their billing system. This was 5 days later.
In the mean time, given the bad service and terrible usability of the service, I decided it was best if I just flat out cancel it. Well, this is when I really got irritated. One of the worst things a web service can do, in my opinion, is make it difficult or impossible to cancel. There is no information online that I could find on how to go about this. There was a lot that talked about MeetMeNow (their other product), but nothing for meeting center. Finally, I decided to just fill out the support form. In the middle of it, when I selected it was an “emergency,” it popped up w/ a phone number. I decided to just expedite this process and pick up the phone.
I was directed to a call center in India. The representative told me I had called support and I needed to talk to another department. Thankfully he transferred me. When the other representative was on the phone the accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. Not that it matters a lot, but in my current mood it really made the process even more unpleasant.
After telling him I wanted to cancel and after being asked telling him all the problems I’ve had with the service, he agreed to go ahead and cancel it. He then came back and said, ok, you need to give 30 days and then it extends to the end of the next billing cycle, so the soonest I can cancel the service is on July 27. Are you kidding? I responded.
No, sadly he was not kidding. So, they’re milking me for another $140 for a service that never even worked for me in the first place.
I write all this for one simple reason. If you are weighing your options and considering one of these services, heed my experience and do not use webex meeting center. I have subsequently had serveral good experiences w/ citrix go to meeting and would recommend them any day over the webex product.
Recently I’ve become more interested in the “Rackspace Cloud” as a viable solution for our clients needs. Traditionally we have maintained dedicated servers w/ traditional Rackspace and hosted our clients sites / applications on there. I have had no problems, so I have been hesitant to even take a look at other solutions. Recently, however, as we’ve begun doing more Django applications in addition to our traditional work load of ASP.NET & PHP sites, I was turned onto Sicehost. They were a perfect fit. Then, low and behold, Rackspace bought Slicehost! This seems to have evolved into what is now the Rackspace cloud. So, naturally, my curiosity was peaked. This was further spurred along by a recent friendfeed conversation.
I began to ask myself, could we realistically move away from traditional dedicated servers to virtualized servers and exist entirely in what is known as “the cloud”, while maintaining the same level of dependability that our clients have come to rely upon? If we could then certainly the sheer scalability potential and flexibility would be worth it. So, I began to take a closer look.
First, it is helpful to point out the three services that comprise the Rackspace Cloud aka Mosso:
This essentially seems to be the Mosso branding of what Slicehost offers. The main difference being the Mosso service is a more pure pay per use model. In other words you pay for the instances hourly. You pay for your bandwidth separately. Whereas with Slicehost it is a bundled offering w/ monthly charges for the servers and a set bandwidth that comes w/ the monthly fee. Only Linux flavors offered.
This service is sort of like merging a type of traditional hosting company w/ cloud computing. It promises a hybrid structure being able to deliver ASP.NET side by side w/ PHP (as an example). Given that the Cloud Servers only offers Linux flavors, this would have to be capable of hosting our ASP.NET sites.
Update: I was recently asked if you could use Cloud Sites with Django. From what I’ve read, you cannot because you don’t have access to mod_python – the python support is just CGI scripts. For more information check out this post:
The perl and python support is just generic CGI script support. So there’s no support for mod_python, and therefore you can’t run Django.
This is essentially the LimeLight CDN offered in an on-demand fashion coupled w/ the Cloud Sites / Servers offering. In other words, if you have media files that you want to push to edge servers for quicker loading by the end user, this can simply be “enabled” to provide that on a simple per-use charge.
So, given the above services, several questions popped up. Today I was able to chat w/ one of the support representatives and here are the answers:
Is there external access directly to the SQL Server 2008 database?
Yes. Given the IP address of the SQL server you can access the database directly via SQL Management Studio. Or, in our case, we have a scheduled process that runs against a SQL Server database. This could run on a dedicated server still and use the SQL Server 2008 instance while the web app runs on the Cloud Sites.
What type, if any, firewall is available ?
With Cloud Sites access is limited to HTTP and FTP(S). With the Cloud Servers only software firewalls (IPCHAINS). No hardware firewalls are offered.
When signing up for the backup service, is the database also backed up?
I forgot to ask how this is handled w/ the SQL Server 2008 – I’m sure there are backups, but can a single DB be restored if say there is data corruption for some reason? Unsure, I will ask and update this post.
With MySQL on the Cloud Servers, only file system backups take place. So, if you want to backup MYSQL in any other way that simply having the DB files backed up you’d have to put in a cron job to do MYSQL dumps so those individual DB files could be backed up from the file system. With Rackspace traditional dedicated servers there is a MySQL agent that essentially does this for you.
With the “hybrid” system can I use a .htaccess w/ mod_rewrite commands w/ an ASP.NET web app?
Here I didn’t quite understand how this “hybrid” system worked. After discussing w/ the support representative what happens is you still chose either Linux / Apache or Windows / IIS to host your web files. The difference is that Windows / IIS also has PHP / Python enabled so you can also use those tools in addition to ASP.NET. The Linux flavor doesn’t support ASP.NET. As such if you want to run ASP.NET and PHP side by side, you have to pick the Windows / IIS flavor for that domain and then you can use PHP as well. But, you wouldn’t have access to .htaccess for things like mod_rewrite which are available in the Linux / Apache world.
This ended up being a deal breaker for me as we use the Helicon Tech ISAPI Rewrite module to give our Windows / IIS based sites mod_rewrite capabilities. We use this quite extensively and simply must have the ability to put mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess files for our ASP.NET sites too. If this was available, I think we could make it work and switch completely to the cloud. Until it is, we will need to maintain our dedicated server for our ASP.NET sites.
Incidentally, if you are wondering why Amazon EC2 was not mentioned here, it is primarily because the Amazon service is ephermal which means that the instances can pop up and down. This always seemed to be a challenge when assessing it against our client needs. There is a good comparison between Amazon EC2 and Mosso Cloud Servers on the Mosso site.
Conclusion, we are going to start using the cloud for our Linux needs, but we will keep w/ dedicated servers for our Windows ASP.NET needs, for now.
My company, tipit, focuses on web production work which means we architect, design and build websites and web applications. Recently we have had some extremely satisfied clients offering wordpress as a turnkey content management solution. Recent versions are truly powerful and a few custom plugins can mold it into a system to manage whatever type of content you might need to manage for your website. In fact, this is a great, great tool for small businesses.
In the coming months, we plan to start offering this as our primary solution to help small businesses utilize the power of the Internet to market their companies. It’s great because there are already plugins available for a variety of social networking / real-time web systems allowing the business to harness its customers as a community. Scoble hits on this in a recent post. Most businesses – especially small ones – look like their website was built in the mid 90’s. It’s time for an update and using open source software like wordpress, especially if you base a design on an available theme, the business can get one powerful website w/ the ability to use a multi-tude of web marketing tools for a very reasonable price.
To further emphasize this, noupe has a post about 25 unique uses of wordpress as a CMS. The flexibility is astounding. We look forward to being able to energize main street w/ our efforts!
JpMaxMan is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
