Monthly Archives: December 2006

Still having a blast!

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I cannot believe it’s already been a month since I started my new job. Guess the old adage about time flying when you are having fun is true. I am having a blast at my new job and it is an awesome place to work. In addition to truly loving what you do at work and your co-workers, having a view like this really helps make it an awesome place to work.

View from my desk

The view from my desk overlooks Lake Michigan, Discovery World and the SummerFest grounds which host the World’s Largest Music Festival.

By the way, we are hiring developers. If you’re interested in learning more, drop me an email using the contact form on this blog and I can fill you in and provide additional details.

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Carbonite Rocks – Backups Made Easy

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Update (Oct 6, 2007): I have stopped using Carbonite and switched to Mozy for a while now. I’ve had numerous problems with Carbonite and their customer service was crappy. So I decided to give up on Carbonite even though I had already pre-paid for 2 years – I guess it’s better to lose $80.00 than all your data. Mozy rocks and I haven’t any any problems with them and EMC just bought them and so they are now part of a much larger storage company. I think this will be great news for all Mozy users. Mozy is at http://www.mozy.com/

I’ve been using Carbonite in addition to my local backups to external drives and Carbonite really works great. Carbonite is basically Windows backup software tied to an online automatic backup service that uploads and backups your data over your broadband connection. Your data is encrypted and stored in their remote data center and can be restored using the same broadband connection.

The nice thing about Carbonite is the set-it-and-forget-it nature of the software. Once you decide what items you want to backup, you just forget about Carbonite and it backs up your data. You can back up unlimited amounts of data for $5.00 per month or buy a yearly subscription for $49.00. I purchased a 2 year subscription and just finished up backing over 90 GB to the Carbonite servers. Carbonite typically backs up about 2 GB a day and then slows down to .5GB per day once you have backed up 50GB of data.

Carbonite Backup

The only issue I’ve seen so far with Carbonite is the lack of Windows Vista support. While Carbonite was backing up my system, I upgraded my box to Windows Vista and Carbonite continued to work. But I am not sure I am going to be able to restore things correctly and it’s not Carbonite’s fault. It’s another stupid thing Microsoft did in Vista where all of the user settings documents were moved from "C:Documents and settings" to C:users to make it look more like MAC OSX. My Documents become Documents and My Music became Music. Why – No one knows? I am working with Carbonite support and they hope to have an update to their software for Vista and I hope they have a fix for this issue.

If you are interested in trying Carbonite free for 15 days, click this [link deleted].

Here’s to third place!

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I found a really interesting article in The New Yorker magazine via Matt’s blog. The article is a must-read but here’s the article in a nutshell: Focus on profitability and not market share as market share doesn’t always lead to profitability. The article looks at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo and how Sony rules the video game marketplace with the Play Station and Microsoft is closing in with the XBox. Nintendo is languishing in third place but its stock is up 65% this year and because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence and actually make money. Microsoft’s game division is losing money while Sony is barely making any money. Here is an edited quote from the article:

Companies that adopt what they call "competitor-oriented objectives" actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focuses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business.

There are lot of companies out there that should play to their strengths while recognizing their limitations instead of trying to be everything for everybody.

Daily del.icio.us for Dec 26, 2006

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Daily del.icio.us for Dec 24, 2006

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Red Hat to Oracle (and market) – Oh No You Didn’t!

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Red Hat shares jumped about 25% after they reported a quarterly profit and outlook that topped Wall Street forecasts. After the close, the stock is still going up in after-hours trading. Kudos to Red Hat whose stock had been hammered after Oracle announced that they were going to redistribute Red Hat’s Linux under the name Oracle Unbreakable Linux and include complete support for cheaper than Red Hat at Oracle World. Here is Red Hat’s stock chart over the last 3 months.

Hopefully Red Hat will send Larry Ellison one of those cool Unfakeable Linux T-shirts 🙂