Mike Nichols - Son Of Nun Technology : General

Responsibility And Disaster

Michael Nichols — Wed, 12 May 2010 03:50:00 GMT

There is an interesting discussion going on over at a site that is discussing a web host provider that attempted a migration and made and epic fail. Consequently, there are reportedly multiple developers who have lost lots of money and professional credibility.

I went through this “migration” which would have been better performed by geese, but didn’t lose any money. I also work for a firm producing in-house apps and do a little side work.

It seems odd to me to place the entire weight of something like reputation or (reasonable) availability for apparently mission-critical apps on a web hosting provider, particularly if we are talking about shared hosting plans.

However, maybe I am naive.

Like I said, the side work I have done has been for small corporate sites – if they were down for a bit I couldn’t say my client was losing $200,000. If that was at stake, I would probably opt for a different hosting solution or at minimum have a path to follow in the event of disaster.

My take on these gripes is this:

Introducing a hosting provider brings in a new dependency and it seems like it is up to the developer to make clear who is the owner of that dependency. This at least should include good layman’s documentation if the client doesn’t want to pay for support of the site and the developer shouldn’t be so unwitting as to how the app is deployed as to be speechless when a failure occurs. The time to discover about domain registrations and DNS pointers is before the client is “losing money” on a website, I’d think. No matter who is responsible for what, it seems like a backup plan for applications which are so important (and those that may not be) should at least include a general guideline to redeploy to another provider. They aren’t really that different.

In one comment the complainant was just discovering what is involved in the transfer of domains and DNS records; he seemed to rely on the client to set all that up and never bothered to document retroactively. This kind of situation seems like an exposure of incomplete work to me, but I am willing to be wrong.

I’d really be interested in hearing others’ comments on this…

Replacing Notepad with Notepad++ on Vista after SP1

Michael Nichols — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:14:26 GMT

Since updating to SP1 on Vista my notepad replacement was copied over and re-replaced with the ghetto notepad offering in Windows.

So I went back to this site and got the directions again for copying the Notepad replacement exe you can find here into my Windows directory.

One thing I make a note for my future reference here is to remember to not only change the owner on the notepad.exe in C:\Windows and C:\Windows\system32 but you must also change the permissions settings on 'Administrators' to 'Full Control' or else the copy operation into the OS directory will not succeed.

Howdy

Michael Nichols — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:55:35 GMT

So here's my first post over at devlicio.us. I won't go into my resume or anything (you can read my profile if you are interested in that) but just a brief mention what I prefer to blog about.

I typically am only concerned with technology here. Our family and my personal blog are here.

For me, the blog is like a scratch pad where I publish solutions to various problems I encounter or overcome through the course of my work. These might be little bugs that I had to contend with or perhaps major architectural 'a-ha's that I finally understand. I especially try to hit on topics that I had difficulty finding through google or user groups.

A major reason I blog is because I like to help people along as far as I can in solving various questions or quandaries that I have wrangled with thus far. Being self-taught and working alone has been a challenge for a variety of reasons, but blogs have helped me tremendously so I try to return the love. I am confused on things sometimes but I try to remain humble and am always wanting to learn.

My work right now is primarily split between WebForms and Monorail on ASP.NET, but I also have completed Ruby on Rails projects over the last year, so my posts will reflect these frameworks mostly. Topics I find myself posting on are:

NHibernate discoveries or best practices
Domain Driven Design implementation ideas
Design Patterns applied
Castle Project - Monorail discoveries and tips
Various Bandaids used to deal with the open wound that is WebForms

I'll try not to waste your time. I'm not real interested in slinging mud and prefer to generate more light than heat, nor will I waste time with 'meta-blogging'. I'd rather see code and actual product so I'll do my best to output as much of that as I can.

Thanks to devlicio.us for having me !