We are just back from our trip to Buenos Aires.  We went there to meet with our developers, do a little team building, some one-on-one work and deliver iPads and laptops to the team.  Despite the story I’m about to tell here, the trip was extremely successful.  It was truly great to see our team there and to get to better know people that we work remotely with on a daily basis.  We’ve been down before, so this wasn’t the first time meeting most of them, but it had been a while and was long over due.  The trip started off on a bit of a sour note as Continental forced me to check my carry-on bag.  This bag had lenovo laptops, iPads, a drobo storage system as well as other electronics.  Luckily, I talked the gate agent into only checking it to Houston and not all the way to Buenos Aires (knowing there would be plenty of room on the larger 767 we were on from Houston to Buenos Aires).   After an inspection in Houston, I determined everything was in good order.  On to BA!

Upon our arrival Manuel and Juan (two of our team members) picked us up from the airport.  We went promptly to the loft apartment we’d rented for the week in Palermo Soho – a very nice neighborhood in Buenos Aires and fairly popular with tourists, ex-pats and tech entrepreneurs.  As is standard, we paid for the apartment in cash upon arrival and everything seemed to be in good shape.  The place was a bit more run down than the pictures on the listing had lead us to believe, but that is somewhat expected.

The loft was nice – it was on the 4th (top) floor and had three levels itself.  Per the listing it  had two of our main requirements: equal size bedrooms w/ full size beds in each & decent Internet w/ an office space to work from.   As is standard in Buenos Aires there was a keyed front door entrance to get into the building and then a keyed door to the apartment.  All doors lock when shut.

So far so good.  We unloaded all our bags, got settled in then went over to Manuel’s office to work for the day.  After work we went and met everyone at a local restaurant / pub ( Bangalore ).  Had a great time seeing the team and getting caught up with everyone.  After a few beers, we were thoroughly exhausted from all the travel and we decided to call it a night.  Juan dropped us back off at the apartment on his way home.

The next day started slowly.  I went to the super market to get some basic supplies.  It was a gorgeous day in Buenos Aires – clear, breezy, mid 70’s.   Perfect.   We opened the windows and proceeded to get settled in on our laptops.  I setup at the office upstairs and Jimmy setup on the ground floor at the kitchen table.  Both of us were responding to e-mails and taking care of various work duties.

The next thing Jimmy knows, a hand slaps him on the shoulder.  He turns around – stunned – and the person is putting his finger to his mouth “sshhhhhh” telling Jimmy to be quiet.  Jimmy exclaims and the guy starts telling him “Piso! Piso!” in English “Floor! Floor!”.  Jimmy started to resist and the person reached in his pocket as if to pull out a weapon.  At that point Jimmy got down on the floor.  There were a total of three guys in their twenties.  They began to pick up any and all electronics.  Jimmy’s mac book pro.  Two lenovo laptops.  an iPhone.  a flip HD cam.  along with the chargers, Jimmy’s notebook bag and a few other random things.   These guys were completely silent and had entered the apartment without making a sound.  At some point during this I noticed something was up.  I looked downstairs and glimpsed a stranger.  I picked up the phone upstairs to try to call the police, but it wasn’t working.  I then thought I would IM one of our team members and have them call – probably better anyway as it would be silent and they are native spanish speakers.  By the time I was about to do this, they had gone.  I went down stairs to find Jimmy shaken, but otherwise unharmed.

Upon inspection, they had gotten away with most everything.   Strangely enough they had left an iPad that was brand new in the box sitting right there.  An even stranger thing is that they brought with them and left behind cheap toys.   I swear I saw this in a movie or something.  Sound familiar to anyone? Really weird. We were wondering if they were the “toy gang” or something.

After we pulled ourselves together we contacted Juan and Manuel who drove over immediately.  We also contacted the owner of the apartment and the administrator who handled the letting.  She also came over an hour or two later.  We went down to the local police station and they took our statements and gave us a police report.  It was pretty standard for them I suppose – and they were pretty much all business, not surprised.  Afterwards we went back to the apartment and decided that we were going to move to a hotel.  We still had a fair amount of electronics and when the robbers left they’d taken a set of keys with them.  Even though the administrator was going to change the locks that day – it still didn’t feel safe.

The biggest mystery to me is how these people gained access to the apartment so silently.   In retrospect it felt very organized, targeted and professional.  I’m not sure if we were specifically setup or if they just knew that tourists often stayed in this apartment and we were the unlucky ones.  It is possible someone from the park simply saw us enter the apartment w/ our laptop bags. But it still doesn’t explain the easy entrance.  There were no forced doors / locks / anything.

To the owners credit, he agreed to give us our money back.  Still his attitude about the event was “we should expect things like this” and that “there was nothing he could do.”   I found that a little disingenuous.   Below is an e-mail I sent to him:

Dear Owner:

I almost hesitate to send this to you.  But, I wanted to follow up.  We checked into a hotel and are doing well.  It is obviously much more secure w/ a 24 hour front desk attendant and keyed entrances to the elevator and hotel room.   You asked me, what more you could do?  Well, I wanted to give you some suggestions:

1. The apartment is across the street from Armenia Plaza Park, so there is ample opportunity to observe the comings and goings of the people staying there.  It was probably pretty clear seeing two people get dropped off w/ laptop bags that we had some valuable computer equipment.   You have done very well for yourself in marketing your apartment.  It comes up reasonably well in the search engines and it has a nice page on vbro.com.  It also touts the Internet as a nice feature of the apartment.  As such, I imagine and Patricia confirmed that many people staying there usually do have iPhones, Computers, etc.   As such, it seemed just a matter of time that this would happen.  The apartment across the hall (#3) appeared to have much better locks on the door.  Given that you have so many people staying at that apartment and that you are catering to a more “high tech” crowd, I think it is reasonable that you put a more sophisticated – possibly electronic – locking mechanism in place on the front and apartment door. This way keys could be issued to the tenants and access rights taken away when they are finished with their stay.
2. I know that the policia aren’t terribly aggressive in going after this type of crime.  However, it would have helped tremendously if there was some sort of picture of the perpetrators.  Installing a camera at the top of the stairs that monitors the comings and goings from the apartment and records it to a computer hard drive (possibly even uploading it to a server) would be really easy and effective.   You might have a look at this: www.vitamindinc.com
3. It occurs to me that for the amount of computers they stole from us, it would be highly cost effective if someone rented out your place for a few days, made copies of the keys and then were able to wait until a suitable target appeared.  The people entered the apartment completely silently.  My associate was sitting at the kitchen table down stairs w/ his back turned to the door.  He did not hear a sound until someone grabbed him on the shoulder and told him to be quiet and get on the floor.  I barely heard anything sitting at the desk upstairs.  These people clearly had access to the building or were excellent at picking locks quickly and silently.  In addition, it is pretty easy to see when people would be staying in your place if you can access your listing and look at the calendar.   Maybe these people were not that sophisticated, but the intrusion felt planned, organized and targeted to me.  You are marketing your apartment at the high end of the market.  Typically we stay in an apartment in palermo hollywoodt, but we have had many problems w/ the Internet there in the past.  Thus we decided to give your place a try.   This particular apartment has a gate, a front door and then the apartment door – with very modern locks in place throughout.  It is about half the price of what you are charging.  We stayed in your place this time because we wanted to take a step up and stay in a nicer place w/ solid Internet as we wee planning to work out of the apartment much of the time.   Given that you charge this premium, I think the security of your apartment most certainly needs to be improved.

I hope that this doesn’t happen to future guests of your apartment.  I will say that I was very happy that you were agreeable to refunding our money.  And that you had the locks immediately changed.  This speaks to your character and I am not going to link to your listing when I blog about this incident.  But, I hope you heed this warning and beef things up on your end.

So that about sums it up.  I’d like to emphasize again that this was one incident out of an otherwise wonderful and productive time.  But, it did affect our entire trip.  We ended up in a hotel which was less than ideal as we would have liked to have more space to work.  Jimmy, in particular, was extremely inconvenienced as he had to finish the duration of the trip without a laptop or iPhone.  It was certainly a handicap from the get go.  Still getting to work w/ the team, getting to know everybody better and spend time with them was well worth it.  Next time we will certainly be a lot more cautious.   Lesson learned.

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.

Bad Service

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.

Bad Usability

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.

Bad Support

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:

Cloud Servers

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.

Cloud Sites

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.

Cloud Files

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!

Alex Wilhelm has a great post encouraging the government to invest in startups instead of funding insolvent mega corporations.  Small business aka main street is the backbone of America and it can be the phonix that rises from the ashes and spurs the recovery.