SmugMug came to the rescue!  Allison has been using SmugMug for her portrait photography lately, and it’s proven itself to be nothing short of awesome.  The site is very fast and responsive, the upload tools are great, slideshows work (fancy that), and the cost is reasonable.  If you want an account and want $5 off, use this referral code: sJz9wIbaT3urU

Check out my pictures at http://bensie.smugmug.com.

This isn’t the first time I’ve “taken classes” while not actually in school.  If you’re ever interested in taking a class on something that you didn’t want to take a grade on in undergrad, check out iTunes U and Academic Earth.

My first iPhone app will no doubt be very simple and probably not all that useful, but it’ll be an accomplishment.

Before I get to that, here’s the syntax:

You could set a default_scope for any number of conditions, but rder is really the only thing that makes sense to me (red flag number one) because nothing else would have fixed conditions for all database queries.

With this default_scope in place, we’re going to get an ORDER_BY ‘name’ ASC added to our SQL query when calling Person.all, Person.old, or Person.young. That’s all well and good until the query gets a little complex–what happens if we specify a different rder in the named scope or in the controller? As you might guess, the default_scope loses out to specifying a different rder in other methods.

Once your query gets complicated with includes and joins, you’ll find that suddenly the defaulted rder option does not show up in your query and all your people are completely out of order.  At that point, you’re back to square one needing to manually specify the order in a separate named_scope or in the controller logic.

The inconsistency here is intolerable, and the code also loses a lot of clarity when it is implemented since it will not work under all circumstances.  Personally, I like rder options visible in the controller (I put just about everything else in named_scopes) because the code stays clear.  Just seems to me that it’s better to leave this method out all together.

For you Mac users out there, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll find it faster and more friendly than FireFox, but give it a try for yourself.

Plus, it’s perfect for the web services that I’m continually developing.  I haven’t worked on a single project recently that doesn’t need file upload/storage in some capacity, so it just makes perfect sense to store all of this data on Amazon’s infrastructure.  I don’t have to deal with backups or bandwidth, I just set it and forget it.

As a developer, you’re really adding a substantial amount of work if you plan on setting up MogileFS, GFS, or HDFS or even NFS (yuck) to store data on your own server(s).  If you’re a startup we both know you have a lack of engineers available to manage it, and I guarantee you’ll sleep better at night with the certainty that your files and your clients’ files are safe and secure.  Plus the initial cost of setting up your own would be nothing short of outrageous.

Cost may seem like a caveat.  At $0.15/GB per month the cost can definitely become substantial, particularly if you’re just using it for personal storage (500GB = $75 / month).  But what’s it worth to know that all your family photos are stored and redundant?  Your music collection is ready for playback even if your house blows up (you never know). The files that your clients expect you to have on hand are deliverable within minutes over the Internet.

It’s not enough for me to have an external hard drive on my desk backing up my data.  My stuff is too important for that.  I’m guessing you think yours is too.

A few recommended ways to get your hands dirty with S3: try Transmit, Drop Box, or S3Fox.

And coming up in the not too distant future: ZTicket - open source helpdesk software on Rails.

While I’m not abandoning dedicated servers for everything, I’ve moved all my web hosting accounts over to Slicehost. Now I get to manage my own virtual servers (I’m obsessed with Xen and VMware) and I never have to worry about the hardware or the routing, I can upgrade it at any time in minutes, and I know I’m on a stable host with guaranteed resources that won’t be shared with other users. Data is safe, backups are automatic, pricing is reasonable, what more do you need?

So far I have a 512MB slice for my development and a 1GB slice for hosting. All I can say so far is…amazing. Servers are getting so fast these days and bandwidth is getting so cheap that it’s just not worth it to host your own boxes knowing that you won’t have to deal with the issues at the datacenter.

Not bad for server uptime…unfortunately I need to reboot…