IT Thoughts

How Do I Get More Gmail Storage Space?

Jun 1st

Posted by Jeremy Wright in IT Thoughts

8 comments

I’m starting to get really, really frustrated…

Every week, I need to empty my gmail spam, my gmail storage, delete all my b5 notification emails, delete all wordpress notification… just to be able to keep using my email.

What I want is more space. And the 1% bi-weekly increases just aren’t enough to keep up with how much I use email. What I want is to pay 50-250$/year for like 10GB (with the 1% bi-weekly increases).

What Google allows me to do is to move all of b5 to Google stuff and pay those rates. But I just want my own Gmail to be upgraded. Anyone know a way to do that?

What Powers Your Company?

Feb 26th

Posted by Jeremy Wright in b5media

2 comments

Pingdom recently ran a survey of 7 massive sites to see what they used behind the firewall.

I find a lot of this fascinating. For example, that TechCrunch only runs on 2 servers. I’d be scared crapless of running what is effectively a million-dollar/year business on anything less than 5 servers (2 web, 2 DB, 1 other) for fear that it’d go down. I mean, if you’re doing a million dollars a year in revenue, then every hour of downtime costs you about 150$. To me, a handful of servers is worth it to alleviate that risk.

By and large, though, most of these larger sites:

1. Run on Apache, PHP and MySQL 2. Use clustering of the webservers and database servers to avoid downtime 3. Most would seem to prefer to scale the hardware vs tuning extensively

Personally I think it’d be fantastically interesting to see how other blog media companies structure their server infrastructure. Not just blog networks, but companies like 9rules and such as well. Not to say “oh we’re better” (I’m an old school enterprise IT guy, so our server infrastructure is almost overkill), but just because we all face such similar challenges and looking at how everyone solves those challenges would probably mean everyone would learn a bit.

I’ve pinged David Krug at 901am to see if he’s interested in doing this (as I think having an impartial person run it would be better than one of the blog media companies). We’ll see if he answers.

Even if nobody else is game, I might ping Aaron later on this week to see if he wants to effectively do a version of the Pingdom survey based on b5′s infrastructure (to give a view into what runs the network).

Of course the irony of this is that we got absolutely slammed traffic-wise today (a dozen different things happened, and we went 50% over our capacity (which has 50% spare capacity vs what we normally use) and were down for an hour or two. I figure if you’re going to go down, going down because an extra few hundred thousand folk are trying to hit the sites is a pretty good reason ;-)

I’m not sure Aaron found it as entertaining as I did when the network went down. Which is good, since it’s his job to keep it up, heh.

Windows Home Porn Server

Jan 8th

Posted by Jeremy Wright in From My Life

4 comments

Okay, the name “Windows Home Server” didn’t really instill any excitement in me. But the features really did:

1. Centralized store of files 2. Backups computers on your network automatically 3. Monitors health of network 4. Controlled via a console from any computer 5. Up/down access from anywhere on the planet

As I was watching the on10 video, the line “and you can use user accounts so dad can access his files, but the kids can’t”… Why is it that I immediately thought of porn?

Yeah, that’s just what we need. Centralized, totally protected, available-anywhere porn (and, yes, I’m being sarcastic).

*sigh*

Thanks Microsoft.

For the record, the product actually sounds really, really cool. Makes me actually want to pay for Vista, in fact.

Downloaded: IE7 RC1

Aug 24th

Posted by Jeremy Wright in From My Life

3 comments

IE7 is finally nearing release. Release Candidate 1 just dropped today, and I’m downloading it now. The good news? No need to uninstall previous IE7 betas.

List of IE7 CSS Bug Fixes

Aug 23rd

Posted by Jeremy Wright in IT Thoughts

2 comments

A note more for myself than anything, but here is a list of bug fixes in IE7:

established since IE6.  

Here is the list of CSS features and changes for IE7:

Bugs we fixed

Details on some of the other bugs (from sources other than the positioniseverything.net list) that we fixed:

  • Overflow now works correctly! (That means boxes do not automatically grow any more.)
  • Parser bugs: * html, _property and /**/ comment bug 
  • Select control: CSS style-able and not always on top
  • Auto-sizing of absolute positioned element with width:auto and right & left (great for 3 column layouts)
  • Addressed many relative positioning issues
  • Addressed many absolute positioned issues
  • % calculations for height/width for abs positioned elements http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=191182
  • <?xml> prolog no longer causes quirks mode
  • HTML element truly independent of the Body (now gets its own width, height etc.)
  • 1 px dotted borders no longer render as dashed
  • Bottom margin bug on hover does not collapse margins
  • Several negative margin issues fixed
  • Recalc issues including relative positioning and/or negative margins are fixed now
  • CLSID attribute of <object> tag no longer limited to 128 characters
  • :first-letter whitespace bug described in http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/02/460115.aspx fixed
  • Descendant selector now works properly for grand children when combined with other selectors
  • First-line and first-letter now applies when there is no space between word :first-line and opening brace {
  • Pseudo-classes now are working as expected if selector is excluded
  • The :link selector works now for anchor tag with href set to bookmark
  • Addressed !important issues
  • PositionIsEverything piefecta-rigid.htm now works
  • List-item whitespace bug fixed
  • Fixed Absolutely Buggy II
  • Absolute positioned elements now use always correct containing block for positioning and size information
  • Nested block elements now respect all overflow declarations (hidden, scroll, etc)
  • Fixed the opposing offset problem (absolute positioned element whit all four top, bottom left and right are present)
  • <a> tags nested within LI elements will no longer add extra bottom margin when hover occurs
  • We no longer lose the image aspect ratio on refresh
  • Cleaned up our ident parsing according to CSS2.1 rules
  • Fixed parsing bugs for multi- class selectors and class selectors that are combined with id selectors
  • And many more

We also extended our existing implementations to comply with W3C specifications:

  • Enable :hover on all elements not just on <a>
  • Background-attachment: fixed works on all elements – so Eric Meyer’s complexspiral demo works
  • Improved <object> fallback

Finally, we added new features from CSS2.1:

  • Min/max width/height support (also for images, which did not work in IE7b2)
  • Transparent borders
  • Fixed positioning support
  • Selectors: first-child, adjacent, attribute, child
    • A couple of CSS 3 attribute selectors: prefix, suffix and substring since we were working already in the code base (also the general sibling selector)
  • Alpha channel PNG support (Not a CSS feature but too important for designers to not call it out J)

Better Standards Support…But as we’ve been continually reminded, better standards support in IE also means some pages break.  As we struggle to balance the needs of our user customers with the desires of web developers, we need your help.  The only way for us to continue to improve our standards support is to get your help in changing your sites for IE7. We have provided a set of documentation and tools to help you transition your pages to IE7:

Obviously not perfect, but a good step forward. The positioning stuff, rendering issues, border issues and margin issues will solve a whack of the problems developers run into on a normal basis. Of course, chopping off the bigger issues means there’re even more smaller issues that people will become aware of. While this means they won’t hit full compliance, the biggest change for me?

They’ve decided it’s okay to break older pages to actually implement standards. This is, obviously, needed. Otherwise things stagnate (ahem, like they hadn’t enough already). This really means that future standards fixes will be easier and faster. If the team is actually still planning to do yearly releases (as they hinted at), we could well see full standards support by mid next year. Well, full CSS support anyways.

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