a view from afar

I got my first two text messages today - one for this blog and one for www.patchspace.co.uk. I've got the polling resolution set to five minutes and to alert after 30 minutes' downtime, so I was pretty confident it was a power cut (and I was right). It's the second we've had lately, the last was in the middle of the night, before I subscribed to Pingdom.

I guess I was wrong in my last post - the real weak spot in my setup is being on a residential power grid. But then, it's not like I'm not hosting paid-for clients' sites from my home server, so the worst it does it make me look like a fool when nobody can access my blog.

Next step: buy a UPS. (A generator seems a bit excessive.)

As part of starting my own business I've decided it's about time I get some essentials done right - namely backups, uptime monitoring, DNS hosting and email hosting. I'll also detail some of the other software and hardware I use. Nothing ground-breaking - but some of these services may be new and/or useful to my readers (24 now!!!).

UPDATE: Many Ayromlou wrote a blog post about setting Google Apps up with easyDNS, which is exactly what I've done.

UPDATE: apparently the inconsiderate bastard claiming ownership of my ADSL pipe is, in fact, quite entitled to do so - it's my ISP, Tiscali. Their bandwidth throttling is apparently a bit over-zealous. The Reg has more details on it - it's unusual of me to not follow their RSS feed but work has kept me busy lately. Suffice to say I won't be with Tiscali much longer.

Previous article follows...

I came across this the other day on Kevin Rutherford's blog: a network for agile developers called We Vouch For. I'm not sure I like the name, but the idea is very worthwhile. (Think LinkedIn but for agile peer certification.) This was a topic that came up in the Q&A session at the end of Agile North 2007, and it was clear from the amount of discussion that the problem is far from solved.

...Mephisto. This is my folksr.de vote for the poll What is your favourite blogging engine or site?.

Vitalist. This is my folksr.de vote for the poll What electronic system do you use to Get Things Done? I just created.

I've actually tried a few GTD systems to one extent or another, and all of them have advantages and disadvantages. Vitalist doesn't work perfectly for me, but it does have some really useful features.

I will probably review the system I use every year or so - I was astonished how many new online systems there are around that I'd never heard about. You might want to check out the poll and see if it throws up some new ones you haven't seen (I didn't label which ones are web and which are desktop, though).

This article is nothing new. I first published it on November 7th, 2006. The site it went up on is no longer running, but it seemed a shame to let it disappear. I imagine the ActiveRecord codebase has moved on significantly enough that the patch would be very difficult to apply now.

There were quite a few comments to the original post (not preserved here) expressing interest in CTI. Unfortunately, there were none from any of the ActiveRecord team, but then, DHH doesn't even like foreign keys, so expecting interest in CTI would be downright naive.