Takumi's Blog

Google Apps for Your Domain Name has been talked about a lot this past year, I’ve been using it for 11 months now, and the features just keep piling up (prior to today’s announcment, they added the ability to purchase domains). Today they formally released it as Google Apps. There are two versions, the free one, and the Premier one. The premier one has these features

• 10GB of storage
• API’s to for the system to have a unified login, directory syncronization, mail gateway, etc.
• 24/7 support
• New control panel, Gmail, gtalk, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Page Creator, and customizable Start Page.
• All for only $50/user

The free version doesn’t include the API’s, 24/7 support, and only has 2GB of storage. All beta users now have the free versions of Google Apps. (I wish they would have just let us have the Premier version for the accounts that are already set up )

There’s always the issue of privacy when you used a hosted solution for your email. Since most of us already have a Gmail account, (or some form of other free hosted email), using it for private uses probably wont be a problem, it’s the corporate customers that will need to decide whether or not to trust Google with their data.

Google is targeting the Premier version to Small Businesses and the Enterprise, and the free version to Educational institutions, families, and organizations.

When I first got my web hosting, it was through iPowerWeb. Their hosting back in 2003 was good for it’s price, and the customer service then was also great. Something like 10GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth, with 3 mysql databases, 5 subdomains, and 1 domain. Now, they have 200GB of storage, 2TB of bandwidth, and well, the customer service sucks…

Since they had an easy way to setup a reseller account, back then I thought it was the best thing around. I could manage my clients hosting through it, without the clients having to deal with hosting. During 2005, all the hosting companies started upgrading their accounts, and that’s when I started looking at other hosting companies again.

I first tried midPhase, which was offering ‘unlimited bandwidth’, but after 3 days of using it, I felt like it just wasn’t right, and I took advantage of their moneyback guarantee. I looked at 1&1, bluehost, etc. but they just seemed like a corporation wanting to make money.

So, I had a problem. No hosting. The very next day, I stumbled upon DreamHost’s website, the design was different from what it is now, it really looked like a company that had lots of friendly employees and friendly customers. (They have the Website of the Month, community forums, etc.)

I bought the 2 year Code Monster plan, which is $15.95/mo. It used to be something like 60GB of storage and 600GB of bandwidth, and then last year they upped it to something like 400GB storage and 2TB bandwidth. (Now they’ve been slowly bringing it down, until their sales decline).

Key points:

• I admit I’ve had a few times where my server was down/unresponsive, every time customer support was great. They emailed me back within 2 hours, and even kept me up to date on the situation. (it ended up that another use on my server was abusing the resources), so overall I’m happy with their service (especially since it’s been getting more reliable now).
• They have one-click installs for a lot of software (to name a few, WordPress, Joomla, ZenCart, etc.), Shell access, Jabber chat server, PHP4 and PHP5, and the list just goes on!
• Even though the storage has been going down lately, when you buy an account, the storage starts going up for as long as you have the account!
• They offer their own ‘version’ of dedicated hosting (It’s the same as the Strictly Business plan, but you are put on a server for yourself, not a shared server).
• For each file you download off of your shared server, it can provide up to 500kb/s for each file!

A few things I wish:

• Redesign the control panel. There are a lot of dead links in the menu, and it’s sometimes really slow (I think the slowness has to do with how it handles cookies, because when I reset my cookies, it loads hella fast).
• Better Webmail. Whenever I get a domain that I’m going to be using email with, I always setup a Google Apps For Your Domain for that domain. I can’t stand DreamHost’s webmail.

Even with those two downsides, I still highly recommend DreamHost for cheap, good quality hosting.

All of us have events we want to share with others in our lives, and since everyone is already sharing their life with each other (myspace, facebook, blogging, etc.), why not make a time line out of it? That’s what dandelife did.

It’s really easy to get used to the structure of dandelife. Why? Because it’s like one large blogging network. You post your entries, and your entries get organized by date. Nothing else, no categories, tags, or whatever, just dates.

How do you view all the content then? Especially if there’s thousands of people writing entries? Well, they made a nice AJAX timeline that lets you zoom in on dates, and view about 25 entries at a glance.

Like any other social network, it wont succeed without the community, so go ahead and give it a try! (Don’t forget to add me as a friend!)

DNS servers are what make domain names possible. Every internet-connected computer has an IP address, but remembering those are difficult, which is one of the reasons why domain names are much more useful. But in order for the domains to work, there needs to be a way to tell the client computer that the domain www.apple.com points to the IP address 17.254.3.183.

This is where DNS servers come in. These servers have huge databases that store the information that the client needs to connect to the web server. Probably all ISP’s use their own DNS servers to help speed up the queries, but when those DNS servers don’t know what IP address the domain points to, it asks one of the 13 root servers.

Depending on where you are, and where the DNS servers are, the time taken to find the IP address of a domain can vary. To speed up the process, there’s a service called OpenDNS.

Two things make OpenDNS faster than similar services. First, OpenDNS runs a really big, smart cache, so every OpenDNS user benefits from the activities of the broader OpenDNS user base. Second, OpenDNS runs a high-performance network which is geographically distributed and serviced by several redundant connections. OpenDNS responds to your query from the nearest location. That means we’re very fast (and extremely reliable, to boot).

Not only does OpenDNS speed up your internet performance, it also helps prevent phishing and fixes typos when you type in a domain (eg. apple.cm gets redirected to apple.com). Their service is easy to setup (all you need to do is set your router/computers DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220).

A lot of us use Google Analytics, it’s easy to use, and easy to add accounts that can view the data also. I personally like it because the servers are nearly always up and running, and thus doesn’t slow down your page loads. (I’ve used other statistic sites but whenever the site goes down, the page load becomes rediculously long).

I’m open to new things, and when I got a random invite (that I never signed up for) to a private beta for ReInvigorate, I thought I’d give it a try.

The layout is though out nicely, you can put sites into groups of your choosing, helping you keep track of personal, business, or client stats. It gives basically all the same info as Analytics does, but with a bit more customizibility. For the graphs, you can set the trending order, cubic spline interpolation (all of which I have no idea what they mean, but they make the graph look cool )

So far, I think it beats all the other free statistics websites out there, and it comes close to Google’s Analytics.

RISK is a fun game, I love it. So do my friends, and my friends friends. But sometimes I’d like something with a bit more strategy. I’ve played StarCraft online for at least a couple hundred hours, and it’s great. But it can get tiring. Board games are great for after a long computer game/video game.

War on Terror: The Board Game looks like it’ll be able to do just that. Can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of it.