Shanti’s Dispatches

Examining several site uptime monitoring services has led to disappointment over the past several weeks.

Many seem like they were thrown together buy some kid who wanted to practice out his newfound ASP.Net skills — OR — are sold by some BigCo charging $395 a pop for software to, basically, ping your website.

Sorry, Charlie, no thanks on either count!

Wormly stands out from the rest. They offer an intuitive AJAX interface, and a pricing model that won’t break the bank. And of course they’ll send SMS alerts to your cell phone or any email-enabled phone/wireless device.

Go ahead, give em a try!

If you value your productivity, I would highly advise against renting the first few DVDs of the hit show 24.

I feel a bit like that guy in high-school who was the last one to discover Dave Matthews Band, only because everyone else was so into him, you wondered what the big deal was all about.

Well, I finally get it re: 24. Last night I was up until 4am watching 3 full DVDs from the first season, or, hours 4am - 12noon on the first day of the saga.

I went to sleep half-twitching, dreaming about the 10am Blockbuster open time for when I could get my next 24 fix.

Next up: the last 3 DVDs from Season 1, and the first one from Season 2. (just in case BB was closed and I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms in the middle of the night)

Calculating Time Lost Due to Watching 24

Each Season, insofar as I understand it, has a full 24 hours each, minus ~20min per hour of commercials = 960 minutes per season or 16 fully viewable hours (~ 2 working days) of unmitigated viewing pleasure per season.

5 Seasons * 960 minutes each = 4800 minutes or 80 hours (~ 10 working days)

Consider yourself warned.

Why 24?

I’ve seen just about every halfway decent film. Television is obviously where it’s at these days.

Who wants to pay $9.50 for a movie ticket, $5.50 for a beverage, then sit through 25 minutes of commercials, just for the privilege of seeing something on a big screen? (that, really doesn’t seem all that big of a deal compared to HD)

Production/broadcast companies like Fox can make gobs off advertisers during the first-run tv broadcasts, not to mention re-run rights.

Then you’ve got guys like me who just discover the show and go out and rent (or buy) all of the seasons on DVD to watch commercially uninterrupted.

Producers like Brian Grazer (24) and Jerry Bruckheimer (CSI) are into the TV production game now, so you ostensibly get movie-quality production value in a television series. (that was definitely NOT happening 10-20 years ago)

Tim O’Reilly hacks book sales data to glean information about various platforms’ popularity:

There were no books about Ruby on Rails in the first quarter of last year, so there was a choice of representing the growth as either infinite, or zero.

Given that one book about Ruby on Rails is delivering nearly the same unit sales as the 20 books that make up the JSP category, nearly one-fifth of the sales of the 61 books in the ASP category, and one-sixth of the 52 books in the PHP category, one would have to conclude that RoR is hot. And of course, there are many more books on the way.

Pretty impressive stuff. And don’t give me any of that “well MY language is so easy we don’t even need to buy books” crap! I have a whole stack of PHP, ASP, and RoR books sitting on my shelf.