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What Does It Mean @ryankanno?

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There is something there, but what is it? It can’t be pure coincidence. Something kismet is at work trying to tell me something. What is it that Ryan Kanno is trying to tell me?

All his messages came in a burst of a week. A tofu katsu. Then seeing Mr. Kanno’s coworkers and running into acquaintance, @parkrat. Next day, another inference with @worldwideed and his VH07V gear. The day after I was wearing gear from Threadless which by the way, Ryan introduced me to.  So it didn’t faze me when the week ended walking around Kanno’s alma mater.

All this while I was attending a Microsoft SharePoint developers class. Hmmm… then this tweet.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/ryankanno/status/193538222616363008″]
And then it was clear. I had no idea what his tweet meant. Zip. Nada, and I didn’t care about developer tools. There was the message – I’m no developer. It’s not my passion. Visual Studio, Git, MonoDevelop, my eyes glaze over. If you want to talk athletes and their shoes then I come alive, and that’s all Ryan Kanno was trying to tell me. Stick with your passions, let them guide you, and don’t be something you’re not.

Thanks, Mr. Kanno. You do work in mysterious ways. 😉

CloudFlare Clouding Pulpconnection?

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So when Dreamhost and CloudFlare announced their partnership, it seemed too good to be true. A content delivery network (CDN), an optimizer, extra security, analytics all for free? I had to try it out, and I did.

A few days after the announcement, CloudFlare seemed to be living up to its promises. But in the following week, strange things began to happen. Pulpconnection responded slowly, not necessarily bombing out as with past outages, but something wasn’t right. Then came the 502 Bad Gateway errors off and on.

Google searches brought up similar complaints after moving to CloudFlare. To help alleviate the complaints, there is this CloudFlare support wiki entry with some performance suggestions. I installed the CloudFlare plugin with database optimizer function, but that hasn’t seemed to help.

Because of slower performance, I noticed a drop in traffic over the past week starting around April 20.

I’m not sure if the service is simply overwhelmed with an influx of DreamHost customers. While I want to continue using this service, right now it just feels too unstable. It’s up, it’s down. It’s working, it’s not working. Sometimes, performance is excellent, but at many other times, even I can’t stand the sluggishness.

Do I keep CloudFlare, hoping their service scales and stabilizes? I’ll give it a few more days before making a decision.

Don’t Try This

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Using Lion’s new Recovery partition and its pre-installed tools, don’t try to erase the main hard disk of a MacBook Pro. You can’t do it. The drive won’t unmount to perform the partition or erase commands in Disk Utility.

It’s because the Recovery partition is “part” of that main hard disk and therefore the hard disk is technically in use. Disk Utility won’t let you partition or erase a disk that’s in use.

Here’s a word of caution about this. OWC blogs about this issue of cloning Lion-based hard disks due to the Recovery partition. Seems like the best bet is to create a bootable USB Flash drive, start from it, and perform the Disk Utility actions.

Weekend Slowdown

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Noticed a big drop in traffic over the weekend. This coincided with extremely slow site performance for unknown reasons. Pulpconnection wouldn’t error out as in the past but took over 30 seconds for a page to load.

I’m wondering if this was related to a service issue with CloudFlare. Now that this issue has been fixed, performance is good but I still don’t know the cause.

This web stuff sure can get complicated.

Loving iCloud Backup and Restore

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I never really paid attention to iCloud’s Backup and Restore features before. I had enabled this feature since it sounded like the thing to do but never really understood the ramifications. I found out today.

After fighting with an unresponsive home button on my iPhone 4 for some time, I took it to Apple’s Genius Bar twice this week. First, my phone’s OS and firmware were reloaded. That helped a little bit, but there would be times I had to jam the home button 2-3 times before anything happened.

So today when I went back, Apple replaced my iPhone 4 with a new refurbished unit. Cool. The old phone had automatically backed up to iCloud this morning so after configuring this replacement phone, I said to restore from iCloud. Within 20 minutes over the Apple’s Store Wifi connection, all my settings, folders, and iCloud data was restored. The apps started reinstalling themselves too but this took longer, understandably.

So the iCloud backup isn’t just for contacts and calendars but for everything! Read more about iCloud’s Backup and Restore.

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