Chris Wetherell › Comments

Which product? Mosso? Slicehost? Or their Managed hosting? Is it the installation aspect they're not supporting? - Mark Trapp

Mark - This is with their dedicated managed servers. We have been happy Slicehost customers for our staging environment pre-acquisition. - Jason Shellen

Jason, that's interesting: we've been able to install all manner of custom software, including newer versions of Python, on our dedicated managed servers. We had to compile and install the software ourselves, but it didn't void things like managed support or managed backup. The packages they use are tied to the version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux they run, which always sacrifices newness for stability. - Mark Trapp

This has been a good lesson about setting a user's expectations since it seems reasonable for the claim of "fanatical" support to include some guidance in supporting a user's desire to work with a nearly year-old upgrade to a popular language. (The RHEL support tools could run alongside an installation of 2.6, for example, and dependency conflicts of new modules could be resolved by the Rackspace team.) - Chris Wetherell

That's weird. We are also able to install/upgrade anything we want on our Slices. What do you mean by support? - Chip Ramsey

To clear up any confusion we use Slicehost and Rackspace. The problem is not with our Slice. It's with Python (and for that matter Rails and Java) not being "supported platforms". :( - Jason Shellen

Jason: I am working on getting you an answer, sorry about this. - Robert Scoble

Thank you Robert. - Jason Shellen

This really seems like Redhat dropping the ball -- http://serverfault.com/questio... and http://serverfault.com/questio... / Can't you escalate this to "yell at Redhat" instead of "yell at Rackspace"? Would be useful for all of us then! - Michael Herf

Yup, that's exactly the case. They added Qik and Kyte just a week or so ago. I'll have to dig out the email of the team and bring this one to their attention. - Robert Scoble

Additionally, another way is to use a source that's already approved. (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, Soapbox, Blip.tv, Metacafe, MySpace, and others...) but this mainly works best for video. - Chris Wetherell

I've got a new feature of SocialToo I'd like to show them and get whitelisted. If you know how I can get in touch with them or get it on the whitelist I'd love to know. - Jesse Stay via twhirl

Any news on this? I too have a video platform that needs to get on the Google whitelist. Any contact info to assist with that would be much appreciated. - Ian D. Miller

Ian, I've never had Google Reader respond to me on anything - no word yet. - Jesse Stay

I thought Dewitt Clinton was a Reader guy, but I could be wrong. He is a friendfeeder too. - Rob Diana

DeWitt works on Chrome. - Louis Gray

A few months ago we set up a form to collect embed whitelist requests: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewfor... - Mihai Parparita

Thanks Mihai! - Jesse Stay

My only comment is, I think this will all lead to reinvention of the wheel. JSON is becoming like XML circa '99, where things started off simple, but people keep adding to it. There'll be 2-3 different 'schema' specs for JSON by the time we're done, 2-3 RPC specs, and so on. It seems like every 10 years, we're going to go through such a cycle, just like with SGML->HTML->XML->XHTML->Tag Soup - Ray Cromwell

I think it goes hand in hand with Ola's 'languages should die' post recently. As systems mature, they lose their simplicity, as interconnections grow, complexity goes up, and the specs grow to accommodate and manage this, eventually people desire simplicity again and cast off the old. What will OpenID/OAuth look like if they survive 5 years? A lot more complex and bloated than they are now. - Ray Cromwell

Heh. Comment, Like, Hide, More... but where is the Related button or at least a Minority Report UI where I can excitedly wave my arms until I come across the old Atom topic I'm looking for? :) http://friendfeed.com/e... - Tracy

When 20 lines of python or bash just won't satisfy the craving for big web 2.0 buttons... - Bill Strathearn

Oh! I never saw this post. I have *got* to get out more. Thanks, Louis, that was awfully nice. Follow-up: It was a fun, tiny experiment and a few thousand non-spam lists were created. (And to Bill: I tried to get my mom to install python but she's waiting until 3.1 is out of alpha. She's like that.) - Chris Wetherell

Wine and coding is an impressive combination, Bret! - Prolific Programmer

If its true that alcohol lowers your inhibitions then maybe coding while drinking results in groundbreaking stuff that you may not have had the cojones (for lack of a better word) to do while not drinking. - EricaJoy

I'm not sure good code is often groundbreaking, though. Mostly it is just mechanical execution over stuff you knew how to do before you started (and do better with practice), and the hardest bits have usually been solved by others before you, so better preparation (research) is 1000x more valuable than inspiration. But +1 to the coffee/wine in any case. - DeWitt Clinton

Coffee *and* red wine for me. Off-menu item at Starbucks. Ask for a "Pinotcchino". - Chris Wetherell

I often find that moderate amounts of wine are very conducive to debugging, especially when under a bit of duress. I once had a bunch of servers start crashing constantly while I was in a SF hotel with my wife. At first I was stressed out, cranked up the laptop, and started trying to fix the problem. When my wife fed me a couple of glasses of wine, I calmed down and solved the problem easily. - Joel Webber

coffee++ - Wally Punsapy

I find that I'm more productive at coding after five or six shots of whiskey. I think it prevents me from overthinking every problem, and it makes it easier to focus for some reason. - Jim Norris

Wine doesn't work for me anymore. Just makes me snoozey, that is why I quit :) - Dion Almaer

I drink a lot more water while programming. If I ever stop programming I'll probably be less healthy. - Bruce Lewis via fftogo

diet coke, green tea do it for me, I ration the DC. - susan mernit

Note to FriendFeed: Please implement this. It is the perfect layout model for this site. Kthnkxbye. - Bill Strathearn

Non great for mobile browsers. (Also non great: the floating sidebar used by massless' main page, or nytimes' stupid socialbar.) - ⓞnor

This was part of my design for Reader 2.0. It would be great to see if we can get it polished enough for FF. - Kevin Fox

I actually implemented this on ff a few months ago, but it seemed like most people (internally) didn't really like it. - Paul Buchheit

If it didn't feel so artificial and awkward in the browser, I'd support this concept more. Slashdot comments are particularly off-putting. The page just feels slower / less responsive. - Christopher Galtenberg