Tomorrow, I head off to use the bulk of the prize.

In case you’re interested, here’s a little bit of background of how it worked.  They took $100,000 and put it in an account with a Travel agent and I was allowed to use it towards any service the travel agency could provide.  The only real restriction was I had to book any travel within one year.

We ended up splitting it into 3 different trips.  For the first, my wife and I headed off to Las Vegas for a week.  We had a really great time.  We saw some shows, did some gambling, and took in the sights.  We even took a day trip out to Zion national park and got to see a bit of Utah along the way.

Then, in June, me, my wife, and 7 other family members all went down to Mexico for a week and stayed at a great all inclusive resort.  Most of the family members had never been anywhere like that and it went really well.  I’m really glad the prize was structured in a way that we could share it with them like this.

Tomorrow, my wife and I head out at 4:30am in the morning to catch a flight to LA, we have most of the day there so we’ll be able to see some of the city.  After that we’re off to New Zealand.

We’ll be spending four nights at the Sofitel in Queenstown.  During that we’ve got a 12 hour long tour planned one day, and a helicopter tour of Milford sound the next.

From there we fly down to Christchurch and spend three nights at the George.  The first day we have a tour of the town, and the next we have a train/atv/boat excursion planned.

From there we fly over to Sydney, Australia where we have two nights at the Observatory Hotel.  While there we’ll explore the Blue Mountains and have a day in the city.  (We’re really not city-folk, so a day is enough for us)

Next, we head over to Ayer’s Rock (or Uluru depending on who’s describing it).  While there, we have a helicopter ride over the rock, an evening BBQ dinner at the Olgas, a sunrise camel ride (my wife booked that before I even knew!) to the rock, and a night time dinner under the stars in the outback. I think this is the leg of the trip I’m looking forward to the most.

Next we head up to Cairns and spend a few nights at the Silky Oaks Lodge & Spa. It’s in the Daintree rain forest with hiking trails and nature-ey things to do.

For the last leg of the trip we head out to an Island on the barrier reef and stay at the Paradise Bay Eco Escape.  I guess this place only has 16 guests at a time or something so it should be interesting.  We spend a few days on the beach, snorkeling, sailing, and then fly back to Brisbane -> LA -> and finally back home to Boston.

It should be an amazing three weeks.

I’d like to send out a big thank-you to Adobe, the judges of that AIR derby, and everyone who has downloaded, emailed about, or purchased AgileAgenda.

Since it’s been a year, I promise to stop talking about the derby after this post Time to look to the future instead of remembering the past again.

Obviously there’s a few problems with that.

1. 99.95% isn’t the best uptime.  I would have liked to have seen at least 99.99%  But for many applications, it probably will be an acceptable amount of downtime.  Add the fact that you have the possibility of hosting in multiple availability zones, and you can mitigate the risk fairly effectively.
2. You either have to be a customer for an entire year before you get any redress for 99.95%.  OR they have to have such terrible uptime that it becomes statisitcally impossible for them to hit 99.95% for that year. A per-month SLA would have been better.
3. A 10% credit is pretty meager.  But at least it’s for the entire period and not for the downtime amount.  This means if I spend $200 a month for a year, they hit 99.94% uptime, I get a $240 credit. But that’s it.  If they’re at 90% uptime I get the same credit. 

I think this SLA will help with convincing business folks that EC2 is a viable service, but probably not so much to actually help mitigate damages.

Compared to the google apps SLA, it’s a lot better.  It’ll be interesting to see how the Google App Engine SLA turns compares when they implement one.

If you’ve never heard of XRay before, it’s this amazing tool to inspect swfs while they run.  You can see visual objects, runtime tracing, and even manipulate some of that to see how things look.

XRay Viewer is a simple application that hosts the XRay connector and loads a swf that you can look at through XRay.  It’s a no-code-change way of using XRay.

If you want the source for XRay Viewer, you should be able to just install it, right click and select “View Source”… but that doesn’t seem to work with the latest version of it.  Someday I’ll fix that but for now, here you go:

XRayViewer-src.zip

It’s really nothing special, but it can make working with swfs from designers easier. If you just want to install, there is an AIR install badge on the XRayViewer page that makes it easier than building.

My only wish is that it supported openID and it would have been even easier.  Of course they have their own uservoice forum, and I was able to go vote for it.

If nothing else, I suppose these extra things are a strong resume builder.

In short, whenever the HTML control gets redirected somewhere, it loads that page twice instead of once like it should.  That will likely break more than just OpenID. Hell, imagine submitting a form twice or something because of this.  Luckily forms don’t usually do a redirect to submit, unluckily OpenID relies on redirects to work.

The specific problem arises when an OpenID provider redirects the user back to the website requesting authentication.  The website loads, but then it loads again.  Per the OpenID specification, that second load must be rejected by the website because it contains the same openid.response_nonce as the load that happened immiedately before it.  So now we have a failure condition and authentication stops.  The reason the specification states that, is because a malicious user could use a replay attack to use the same authentication token from someone else over and over again.

Please, go vote on that bug so we can get this fixed.

Luckily, it works fine on Windows and Linux (yeah, AIR in Linux rocks!)

I kind of like it.  OpenID is a great concept and it’d be great if more people used it.  This gives anyone wanting to sign up to that site incentive to use their OpenID, or if they don’t have one, go get one.

That got me thinking.  I’m working on a commercial website.  I can’t afford to turn away users because they’re confused at what OpenID is, or if they don’t want the hassle.  But how could I make OpenID the preferred way of authenticating instead of the “alternate” way?  I’m going to have to brainstorm on the kind of UI design that could help accomplish that goal.

This one is whiz-bang with features.  Even sets itself to the atomic clock automatically.  I don’t even have to worry about daylight savings time.  Yay.

It’s got a “nap” feature.  If you press the “nap” button, it goes into nap mode.  So after a specified amount of time, from 10 minutes to 2 hours, the alarm will go off.  Pretty handy!  Two problems.  That nap button is right near the set-alarm button.  There’s no way to turn it off.  Or at least not that I’ve found.  Way too frequenlty I reach over to set my alarm for the next morning and accidently press that.  My only recourse is to set it to it’s minimum time (10 minutes), wait for the alarm, and turn the alarm off.  Several times now I’ve spent the entire 10 minutes trying to figure out how to turn it off.

My new plan is to remove that button.

Edit: Update -

I did it again.  This time I unplugged the damn thing instead of waiting for it.  I found out 20 minutes later that it’s got a battery backup for the alarm!  /sigh

Feel free to email me a resume or ask for more details if you’re interested.

And I’ll leave you with this… I had a phone interview go bad today.  The poor guy wasn’t able to answer a single question about Flex that I had.  The end of it went something like this…

me: “This isn’t going very well”
him: “Yeah, I wasn’t very prepared”
me “Should I call back another time?”
him “No, I don’t think I could answer your questions even with more time.”

While I appreciated the honesty at the end, honesty with the “2.5 years of flex experience” would have been appreciated in the beginning.

Update: This is a position on site in Boston, MA USA.  Sorry for not mentioning that.

Here is the download link I mention in the talk with the example sources.

So if you’re in the Boston area, come on down!

(If you’ve seen my previous BFAIG talk, you’ve already seen about half of this. )

The cool thing about it is how easy it is to create one of these.  Just paste in a URL and click the button.  Bamn, you got something to start with.  No login, no signup.  You can tweak some settings after that if you like.  And you can save it just as easily.

After my intial tinkering I’m to the point where with a couple keystrokes, I can start up an instance of a virtual machine anytime I want.  It can range from a "good" machine to an insanse server with copius amounts of CPU and RAM.  So far I’ve only been using the smallest instance type since that beats out my current dedicated server box by a good margin. 

I’m about 90% sure I’ll be switching my hosting over to this.  Here’s my short analysis that I did while deciding.

Right now I have a dedicated server.  It’s a Celeron 2ghz with a 1GB ram and a single 160GB hard disk.  A comparison between that and EC2 yields the following:

Pros:

Reliability - Right now I’m one hardware fault away from a weekend rebuild of the server.  I’ve got plenty of backups and wouldn’t lose any data, but there would be a royal pain in the ass in reconfiguring a new server.  Under EC2, I’d be one command line away from launching a brand new instance that has the exact configuration as the original server.  The EBS storage is on a more reliable, redundant, platform than the current single-disk configuration that I have.  And even if that were to fail I have the same level of backups that my stand-alone server has.  So worse-case, I have to launch a new instance and restore some databases.

Performance - The smallest EC2 instance has more ram and more CPU power than my dedicated server.  The largest EC2 instance is equivalent to about 15x of my current server which means I can scale quite a bit without even thinking about clustering, which leads to…

Scalability and scaling speed- Imagine I get on the front page of some very busy site and have a traffic explosion.  With EC2, In 20 minutes I could provision a much beefier machine to act as my server.  With the stand-alone option, I’m looking at ordering a new server, waiting for it to become available, configuring it, moving data over, waiting for DNS to propogate to it, that’s probably a few days at the least.  Beyond that, with EC2, I believe I could set up a cluster in a weekend instead of who knows how long.  But more importantly, EC2 allows me to scale back down just as easily when the traffic dies down so I’m not stuck paying for the peak possible usage forever.   This is the "Elastic" part of "Elastic compute cloud"

Cons:

What if EC2 or EBS becomes unavailable for some reason?  Amazon had an S3 outage last month and it could happen to these services.  I have no good answer here.   Amazon doesn’t have an SLA for EC2 yet, I assume they will eventually. The only solutions for a problem like this are:

1. Create an instance in a different EC2 availability zone (Each AV is supposedly seperate and hopefully outages own’t span them).  Unfortunately the EBS volumes aren’t shared across zones, so I’d have to restore a DB from a backup.
2. Boot up virtualization software, such as VMWare, on a dedicated standalone server and run it on there.

What if Amazon discontinued EC2?  Luckily, the images can be converted to other virtual machine formats.  So I could go to another hosting cloud provider or get a dedicated server running VMWare and boot up my server on it.

Cost-wise, with EC2, I’ll be spending about $10 less a month than I do now for a dedicated server.  (Sounds like a "Pro", huh?)  But, I’ll be on metered bandwidth so that cost will raise over time whereas the dedicated server had the first 1500GB free so it’ll cost more eventually (assuming my traffic continues to grow).  But then again, the per-gig cost of Amazon is lower than my hosting provider.  So if I started to break the 1500GB barrier (unlikely for the foreseeable future), EC2 would start to win again.  

Conclusion:

For me, the reliability is the tipping point one way or another.  I have more confidence in Amazon’s datacenter than I do in a single stand alone dedicated server so I believe it’ll be more reliable.  But I have no way of knowing that for sure. 

Either way I need a decent disaster recovery plan.  With EC2, that plan can be a couple steps from really-easy (starting a new EC2 instnce), to a medium ground (Starting an new EC2 instance and restoring a database), to fairly difficult (provisioning a physical stand alone server and configuring it).  With a stand alone server, that plan is a single step jumping right to the "configure a new server" stage.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=pe_2170_10160930?node=689343011

This new EBS system for E2C just made the whole compute-cloud offering from Amazon an easy port from a regular web app to an Amazon hosted app.  Before, all your persistent data storage had to go to S3 which had a specific API you had to develop for.  Now, it can go to EBS which acts like a block device.  In other words, a virtual disk.  So just about any application should “just work” instead of needing modifications.

I had stayed away from EC2 because I didn’t want to tie my apps to Amazon services.  But perhaps this fixes that problem.  I’ll have to play with it sometime soon.

Now, I have no idea if this next statement is actually true since I haven’t done extensive research.  But TimeLiner XE may be the first AIR app to ship.  And by “ship” I mean the more traditional meaning of the word, from a warehouse, on a CD, in a box.

This is a product that I’m really proud of.  We had a really rocky start in the development process, but I ended up taking the lead of most of the project and we were able to deliver something that I hope will really help kids out in school pretty close to the originally planned ship date.  It’s probably the most complex product I’ve ever worked on, and is definitely the biggest project I’ve managed.

For a little background, I work at an educational software company that sells directly to schools.  Because of the market, we generally need to produce our products on a CD, in a box, and with a (gasp) printed manual.  Sounds old fasion, doesn’t it?

It’s worth reflecting on the physical manifestation of software… It’s amazing how much satisfaction you can get from actually holding that beautifully designed box that is meant to contain your work.  Just to know that it was someone else’s job to go through iteration after iteration of design, and then someone else’s job to put ink on a piece of cardboard, and someone else’s job to assemble that cardboard.  All so the piece of software YOU worked on can be delivered to the customer in style.

The box is also great for those times when relatives ask what you do, and you can just point to that on your shelf and say “I made that.”  Then they can look at the pretty pictures on the box, or even crack the manual to see more pretty pictures.  It’s a lot easier to explain than giving out a URL to an AIR install badge or even giving a quick demo.

Unfortunately, there’s also an impending feeling of doom when you realize that you don’t get to update that software for a long time.  What if you missed some critical bug?  You lie awake at night wondering if you remembered to take out that September 1st expiration date that the Beta’s had and you wonder if QA ever tested that.   Those CD’s will last a long time and you can’t just throw up a new version of a web page and make all of the old versions disappear.  Sure we can do downloadble patches, and sure we’ll have a 1.1 version someday. But there is a certain feeling of permanency to the whole process.  I mean a major screwup means pressing new CD’s and packing them, and paying for postage.  That could be thousands of dollars.

I’m not sure if I dare to go check that expiration thing now…