"Michael Bay does not understand what a robot is" from the funny & spoiler-laden Transformers 2 review here: http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009... via @cw
Pour out a 40 of Mountain Dew for Homesite. Homesite was really a nice bit of software. For years I kept a PC around almost solely because there wasn't anything close on the Mac. I do a lot less coding these days but Coda from Panic is the closest it comes to Homesite and I wouldn't mind if it borrowed a little more from it in the future.
- Jason Shellen
When forced to use a Micron PC from 1999-2000, HomeSite wasn't that bad. I still prefer BBEdit on Mac, though.
- Louis Gray
Mike Herf is talking about the Holy Grail of data backup and sync. Make it so...someone.
- Jason Shellen
I'm actually pretty happy with FolderShare (now known as Windows Live Sync). It has basically solved my music/pictures/etc syncing/backup problems.
- Alex Carobus
Guess is that Live Sync has a short runway with Mesh coming onboard. FolderShare/Sync is a much clearer, user-focused product, but the 20,000 limit per folder pair actually prevents my using it for photos (I have 180,000 locally).
- Michael Herf
Apparently I now take my musical recommendations from my favorite cyclist @lancearmstrong . The new Spoon EP *is* great, minus track 2.
hmmm, if you mean managed hosting or shared hosting, yes, it is optimized for php, because it's what the consumers wants. However, those are for the little guy or for people that don't really know what they are doing. Real innovation comes from companys who can manage theirs own servers, thus being able to install whatever stack they want.
- Diego Sana
As some have mentioned, the PHP is actually optimized for the world of web hosting. While true, it's not so fun for someone trying to run Rails or Python and abstract the application management piece.
- Jason Shellen
Apache could do a lot better here. mod_python is awful, and Apache could easily include fastCGI or some evolution of it, to spawn off a smaller number of "heavy" processes that could be RAM-bound and persistent, and do a threaded or async "lightweight" frontend for http to handle hundreds of connections. (At least, this is why I'm running nginx instead of Apache right now.)
- Michael Herf
If you want to run Python, AppEngine is a good option. There are Rails specialists too, eg Engine yard
- Kevin Marks
Apache and mod_python are painful enought that I don't get why folks don't use nginx and fastcgi -- much more flexibility and speed with none of the Apache bloat (edited to hopefully make sense and not smell to bad grammar -wise)
- Mike Taylor
Lots of reasons not to use Appengine. We do use it in places for simple stuff. But reasons it won't work for us for starters: Django is an older version, authentication is through Google or through a Google Apps domain, and sockets are disabled through Appengine - all non-starters for us. Sub-processes, threading and some third-party libraries are not available either. :(
- Jason Shellen
The web is optimized for HTML. Use google web toolkit to code in java, and output platform agnostic javascript and HTML.
- Dan Douglass
via Nambu
"web hosting is optimized for PHP", yes, because the great majority of "hosted" web sites simply do not need (at all) a difficult-to-mantain stack like J2EE or .NET. The mininum required to run a site is PHP, MySQL and a CMS. There's nothing wrong with that... to move on, you need to "shake the foundation", remove Apache, stateless HTTP and begin from scratch by another paradigm.
- Claudio Cicali
Python's caught in no-mans-land there, a bit. It doesn't have the wide support of PHP, or the specialist providers like Ruby/.NET/Java. Is that a factor of popularity?
- Nick Lothian
The advent of passenger (mod_rails) has bought Rails hosting to the shared hosting world. Systems like Heroku are providing amazing free services in the Rails space as well. For more specific requirements, you can get a good-enough-for-development "slice" from Linode or Slicehost for next to nothing.
- Toby Hede
Working late at the office with @cw. @ashellen calls and helpfully reminds me to come home so I can call it "tomorrow" when I come back.
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
@herf Good point on the root cause, but Red Hat never offered us excellent support so I feel that I should better engage with those that *did*. e.g. Rackspace. Also, I'm of such a weird temperament that I seem to prefer the "not yelling" and "more asking" options, if available. My yelling sounds like a fiercely mad Eeyore, which no one takes seriously.
- Chris Wetherell