The PutPlace Blog

A burglar broke into Alex Botsios’ apartment and threatened him with a baseball bat. Botsios willingly gave up his wallet and guitars, but balked when it came to his laptop:

Then the robber made the mistake that ultimately landed him in the hospital — he went for the laptop. According to Botsios, he said “Dude, no — please, no! I have all my case notes…that’s four months of work!” Saucedo, obviously underestimating the fury of an overstressed, overworked first-year, was unsympathetic. That’s when Botsios could take no more.

Wrestling Saucdeo to the floor, Botsios separated the bat from the thief and repeatedly punched him in the face. When it was all over, police had to get Saucedo stitched up before charging him with armed robbery and kidnapping, while Botsios only suffered some scrapes and a bruised knuckle. Most importantly, at least to the student, is that his laptop, which he called “his baby,” escaped unharmed.

Of course, if Mr. Botsios had backed up his laptop somewhere remotely (hint, hint), he might not have worried so much about it getting stolen.

This is the second in an occasional series of audio interviews we’re doing with tech gurus and alpha geeks. We’ll be talking to them about how they manage their digital life, where they store all of their virtual stuff and related geekery. Photo by Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

You can listen to the interview, or read the transcription below:

• Interview with Vanessa Fox (17:59, 16.9 MB)

Darren: This is Darren Barefoot talking today for PutPlace about backing up your digital life. Today we’re talking to Vanessa Fox. Hello, Vanessa.

Vanessa: Hi. How’s it going?

Darren: It’s going well. How’s it going with you?

Vanessa: Wonderful.

Darren: Excellent. And tell us who you are.

Vanessa: Oh. My goodness. That’s a very good question. Well, I do a number of things online, I guess. I probably am mostly known for what I’ve done in the search industry. I used to work at Google and built Webmaster Central for them. Now, I’m actually launching a new site called Nine by Blue where I’m going to just try to talk about a lot of different things involved in acquiring more visitors through things such as search and social media.

Darren: And so this is the number nine by blue dot com?

Vanessa: Yes, so I’m going to try and make sure to have both it spelled out and the number redirecting to the same place.

Darren: Yes. That makes sense. And why that domain?

Vanessa: You know, it’s very hard to come up with names. I think people who do naming are very skilled. They have a talent that I don’t have. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it and what I really just sort of wanted to convey was the idea that there actually is a lot of data out there about your customers, about your potential customers, and so you can take all those numbers and sort of turn them into something more, something that’s actually an engagement as opposed to just the numbers. ‘Cause there’s just tons of numbers and it’s hard to find what’s actionable. So, you know, really aggregating that stuff in a useful way. Just sort of, numbers into something else. And I just like blue. I like the water.

Darren: Sure. It could have been any color. You went with blue.

Vanessa: Could have been anything. Yeah.

Darren: Maybe you got a spot in this whole — Hopefully, if you’re really successful you can spawn an imitation site which is “Seven By Indigo” or something like that.

Vanessa: Yes, exactly.

Darren: I’m going to go register actually all the other numbers and all the other colors right now just so I can own –

Vanessa: Oh no!

Darren: So somebody’s like “Oh, what was that website? Nine by pink?” Anyway. Actually, that’s a fun way to slice a bunch of domains is by having colors associated with given, kind of, topic set.

Vanessa: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Darren: Not to use a stereotype, but if you had a blog about gay lifestyle it could be “X By Pink” or something.

Vanessa: Uh-huh.

Read the rest of this entry »

PutPlace is an avid user of Amazon web services applications. Yesterday, in London, we got an opportunity to talk about how we use Amazon here at PutPlace.

Key takeaways for me from listening to the other speakers were,

• Using Amazon doesn’t insulate you from failures
• Lots of people using S3 and EC2, not so many on SimpleDB and SQS
• The per-transaction fees can really start to hurt if you start to get traction
• SimpleDB is a cool place to store your grid topology dynamically especially if you use another provider alongside Amazon
• EC2 nodes come up really quickly compared to other grid providers
• Lots of people use Nagios with EC2 for monitoring

The Amazon guys (Simone and Adam with a later appearance by Werner) gave strong hints that we would see all the following features in 2009,

• EC2 hosting in Europe
• An Amazon supported Content Distribution Network
• Integrated Load balancing and Monitoring

The sad story of Jimmy and Tamala Lapointe was featured on the front page of Vancouver’s tabloid, The Province, today. They had their laptop stolen from their car. The laptop had the only copy of irreplaceable baby photos–”the birthing room, his first time breastfeeding, everything”:

Thieves got into the car and nabbed a backpack. Inside was a white Apple MacBook laptop loaded with all Rykr’s photos. “I kept on thinking, ‘I should get that backed up,’ but we knew we were going to make a photo album,” said Jimmy. “It was dumb that we didn’t have a backup.”

Theirs is a cautionary tale. We’re hoping the thief has a heart, and that they get their baby photos back. Don’t let this happen to you–back up today.

This is the first in an occasional series of audio interviews we’re doing with tech gurus and alpha geeks. We’ll be talking to them about how they manage their digital life, where they store all of their virtual stuff and related geekery.

You can listen to the interview, or read the transcription below:

• Interview with Chris Pirillo (14:33, 27 MB)
  

Darren: So we’re talking today for PutPlace. We’re recording a series of conversations with tech gurus and productivity types about how they backup and manage their digital life and tonight we have Chris Pirillo. Chris, tell us who you are and what you do.

Chris: Well I think the easiest way to explain it is if you go to Google and you type in the word “Chris” I should be the first one there at least at this moment in time. I’ve been online since 1992 in one sense, well, except when I sleep but that’s not very often. So, I enjoy the world of psychology and creating content and sharing information with the world.

Darren: And we can watch you right now at Live.Pirillo.com, right?

Chris: Yeah, it’s kinda scary, I’m doing life-casting so all the time it’s always on and I’ve set it up so that even if I’m there I’ve got chat room, and the chat room’s always lively and interactive and you know just a bunch of geeks hanging out.

Darren: Aren’t you ever worried that someone might see you picking your nose?

Chris: Uh, no, although they definitely caught some interesting moments.

(Darren laughs.)

Chris: Uh, yeah… uh, yeah (Chris laughs.)

A Very Complicated Digital Life

Darren: Uh, OK, well uh, we wanted to talk you obviously because I know you and you’ve obviously been online for a long time and have alot of technology and you have probably a very complicated digital life– (Following overlaps with Chris’ comment below:] so… how many computers do you currently - have?

Chris: - No, not really…

Darren: — No…? How many computers do you currently have?

Chris: Well I do have alot of computers but, you know, I tend to be a minimalist as far as my digital lifestyle is concerned. I don’t want to you know be overwhelmed and that’s what can happen really easily. So if you ask me how many computers I have I don’t know if I can name them all. For me it’s been trying to find the right grooves so that everything integrates and it’s been difficult. Especially in relation to content, whether it’s my own content or consuming other people’s content. For years I had to rely on tradition media means and mechanism and I don’t really want to rely on tradition channels and delivery anymore so I‘ve been looking for ways to integrate that older type of consumer lifestyle with the digital world with whether I am today and the way content is distributed today. So… it’s… when you ask how many computers I have… I think I’ve got alot but they wouldn’t necessarily be termed as PC or Mac but anything that could be connected to the internet I would consider a computer these days. Read the rest of this entry »

PutPlace is delighted to nominated in the category “Best New Web Application/Service“. There are some excellent competitors out there.

The other nominees are,

• Pix.ie
• Locle
• Mortgages and Loans
• Nooked
• Our Memory Of
• BookMeetingRoom.com
• Next Action
• Url.ie
• LouderVoice
• Twitterfone
• Zignals
• eWrite
• Album Shopper
• Edenbee
• PropertySwap.ie
• Poll Daddy
• Decisions For Heroes

I personally use several of these applications so I look forward to finding out the winner.

This particular award is Sponsored by InterTrade Ireland and their Seedcorn Competition.

All the other categories and nominees can be found at the Official Irish Web Awards web site.

Load Balancer is up and we are back in service. Apologies for the interruption.

Joe

CTO PutPlace.com

We got two nice writeups in Russian by the same author, Alexander Plyuschev which led to a lot of signups from the .ru domain. However it turns out our Unicode processing was faulty and didn’t properly parse the Russian directory names when people were uploading.

We have now fixed this problem, so welcome to PutPlace, Russia.

In Russian (via Google Translate)

Мы получили два хорошо writeups в русском же автор, Александр Plyuschev, которые привели к много регистраций с. Домена Ru. Однако выясняется, наши Unicode обработка ошибок и не надлежащим образом разобрать Российской имена каталогов, когда люди были загрузкой.
Мы сейчас эту проблему фиксированной, так что добро пожаловать в PutPlace, Россия.

I was recently doing some research on Flickr, looking for photos of melted, damaged and destroyed hardware storage devices (after all, that’s what we help you recover from–sign up today and get 2 GB of online storage free). As it turns out, I hit the mother lode. I expected to find a few ruined laptops and dropped iPhones, but the carnage goes on and on. Here’s a bunch of my favourites, presented without comment:

Read the rest of this entry »

PutPlace is hosted on Amazon’s Grid (called EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud, C squared, geddit!). We store all our user data on the Amazon storage service S3 (Simple Storage Service), as they can offer us unlimited secure storage at a wholesale price of around $0.10 per GB per month. They also make it very cheap to move storage between our grid and our S3 store.

Each EC2 node comes with 250GB of local storage, but that storage springs to life when the node is created and disappears when the node is shutdown or crashes (although we have only had one node die on us in the 12 months we have been using EC2).

This is okay for user data e.g. the files you backup, as we don’t mark those as secure until they have been written to stable storage on the S3 grid. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for our database (Postgres) which expects to have stable local storage directly attached to the node and visible as a local disk device. So until now we have had to bake in a bunch of safety code to ensure that if the database node crashed we could recover sensibly and quickly.

However this week Amazon has announced Elastic Block Storage. Elastic block storage combines the safety of S3 with the utility of a local disk. You can create an EBS volume of up to 1 terabyte in size and attach it to any Amazon EC2. It just looks like a local disk to that node, but if the EC2 instance dies the disk survives.

So we can now attach two EBS nodes and store our log and data on two stable devices either of which can be used to recover the other.

It gets better though. You can take snapshots of your disk and write them to S3. These snapshots can be used to backup your disk in order to copy it to a new EBS instance. Better still when creating a new instance the snapshot can be loaded lazily into the instance so you don’t have to wait to stream a whole terabyte of data into the EBS instance.

So what’s the catch? why wouldn’t you just EBS for everything and ignore S3? Well for one thing you have to allocate all the space on an EBS disk at once so you pay up front for the storage as opposed to paying for it as you use it in the S3 case.  The other problem is each EBS instance is tied to a single EC2 node so if you want to share content between nodes you need to utilise something like S3 and/or SQS (Simple Queueing Service) to provide shared storage.

A big step in right direction for Amazon though and something we have been asking for for quite a while.