My minority opinion is that a mountain of code is the worst thing that can befall a person, a team, a company. I believe that code weight wrecks projects and companies, that it forces rewrites after a certain size, and that smart teams will do everything in their power to keep their code base from becoming a mountain. Tools or no tools. That's what I believe.
On Friday, July 18, 2008 (2008-07-18) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.
If Apple can have an outage that lasts nearly a week because of an "issue with one of our servers," then they have the worst Ops team in the history of the internet.
MobileMe Chat Support Transcript - Do Not Reply To This Message
General Info
Chat start time
Jul 21, 2008 2:24:45 PM EST
Chat end time
Jul 21, 2008 3:02:33 PM EST
Duration (actual chatting time)
00:37:48
Operator
Amy
Chat Transcript
info: queue_cmd:23:14:37 info: queue_cmd:21:12:49 info: queue_cmd:18:8:48 info: queue_cmd:15:7:27 info: queue_cmd:15:6:37 info: queue_cmd:14:6:11 info: queue_cmd:9:5:56 info: queue_cmd:6:3:49 info: queue_cmd:3:1:19 info: Hi, my name is Amy. Welcome to Apple! Me: Hi Amy. Amy: Hi Dr. Dozier Amy: How may I assist you today? Me: My last access to my primary email was 9:57AM PDT last Friday. Amy: Unfortunately, you are being affected by a current outage that isn't allowing some customers to access their mail. Our maintenance team is working on fixing this issue as soon as possible. Amy: You can check the system status at: Me: This is all the information Apple can provide after a 3 day outage? Amy:http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme Amy: (left hand pane) Amy: I am so sorry, I do not have a time to provide. I can assure you that we are working to complete this maintenance as quickly as possible with the immediate intent to restore your services.I am unable to answer that with certainty. I can provide that it is not our intent to have this maintenance prolong past 24 hours. Amy: I am so sorry I don't have any estimated time. I understand how crucial it is to access your email. Amy: I wish there was more I could do for you from my end. Me: Since the MobileMess "upgrade" I have been without email about 5 of the 11 days. Me: It also broke our calendar synching as subscribed calendars no longer work. Me: Some transparency and communication would help. It feels like getting info about the Soviet space program Amy: I truly apologize about that. Amy: We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped. Amy: We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks. Me: I got that email. Don't bother repeating it. Me: I have been a .Mac subscriber since it was free. I've continued the service for years, waiting for it to be worth the $. I'm still waiting. Amy: I really apologize. Me: I already have to use 3rd party solutions because the so-called "Family Pack" doesn't really include and "family" functionality (shared read/write calendars, for instance). If we can't depend onthe webservices being reliable, we'll have to just go all-3rd party. Me: The terse and uninformative (and never-changing) blurbs on support/mobileme are totally insufficient. Me: Even an airline gives more info than this. Me: Do you have an ETA? Me: Do you even have an ETA for when you will have an ETA? Me: That kind of information is needed. Me: At this point, further apologies are useless Me: If you have no more to offer than that, I won't take more of your time Amy: I'm sorry for the delay. I'll be right with you. Amy: I'm sorry - I don't have an ETA at this time. Amy: You can submit feedback at: Amy:http://www.apple.com/feedback/mac/tm.html Me: Thanks. This has not been Apple's best moment. Amy: I agree.
It appears that Apple just tried to do too much at once. Last weekend, they launched the iPhone AppStore, MobileMe (the updated .Mac service) and the new iPhone 2.0 OS.
I've had a moderately good time using the new iPhone software, though the initial offerings in the AppStore were somewhat overrated (the games look fun, but I don't have time for them), but OK. However, the MobileMe transition has been a complete snafu so far.
We have had a Family Pack .Mac account for the past few years. It has been useable, but a disappointment. There were glaringly obvious missing features for family use:
There's a "Shared" directory on the main account's iDisk. There's no way for this to be automatically synched for the rest of the family members. If they want to use it, they have to settle for glacially slow WEBDAV access. This also means no offline use.
You can share calendars, but with read-only access. We would rather have shared calendars that my wife & I can both edit.
You can share address books with read/write access, but it's buggy. We'd rather have a single address book that my wife & I can both read and write to. The Mac OS X AddressBook sharing just doesn't work well for read/write access.
We worked around these problems and had a fairly robust and useable system.
We created a "master" login on all of our Macs that synched the primary iDisk. We used this account to enable us to do stuff with shared data like Quicken, tax returns, etc.
We used to keep all of our shared calendars on the "master" account and subscribe to them from the other accounts. This was a pain, as we had to log in as "master" to make any changes to the calendars. Eventually, I installed Darwin Calendar Server on our main machine and opened a port in our firewall so that it could be accessed from outside via https. All of the calendars were served from there and subscribed with read/write access from all accounts on all Macs. This has worked great. I could even subscribe from work and this worked fine with our iPhones.
For a long time, we kept our common address book on this account and shared it in the standard way, but this was terribly buggy and we eventually found Address Book Server. We run this on one Mac that is always on with all 3 logins (the "master," me and my wife) always logged in. The standard .Mac synching for each account keeps all the other Macs up-to-date, while ABS synchs between accounts. We shouldn't need 3rd party software to have this capability, but at least it works more reliably than the standard Mac OS X Address Book sharing.
Enter MobileMe. It was promised to provide "push" updates for all this and email, too. The initial transition came with 2 days of downtime instead of the announced 6 hours. The "push" functionality was overpromised and Apple has given everyone a free month to make up for it. A day or two after, I noticed that there was no calendar information on my iPhone.
It turned out that subscribed calendars will not synch to iPhones with the new 2.0 software. Bleh.
After some hours of work, I've set up one of our domains with Google Apps and I'm trying out SpanningSync to see if it's improved since I tried it a year or so ago and found it unusable. So now we're using more 3rd party software to fill a void that shouldn't exist. If it works, I may be able to use it to synch contacts, too and stop using ABS, though.
That's not the end of the fun! It's now been 36 hours since the last time I could access my primary email. Desktop clients can't connect and web access produces a completely blank page: no error message, nothing. Apple has been completely silent about why this has happened or how long it will take to fix.
With our 30-day extension, we'll have to decide in 3-4 months if we want to keep this service. At the moment, I'd say no.
And if the solid, experienced national security expert who's been in Congress forever is what you're looking for in a vice president... why do you not want it as president on the other side of the aisle?
I've ordered his book after hearing him on Steve Brown'spodcast (which is really good, btw). This talk is about 35 minutes + some questions and is terrific.
Finally, once W comes to his senses and wants to finally press the case for exploiting domestic oil reserves. What is the Democrats' response? Nationalize the refineries!
The biblical criteria are simple: (1) Confess faith in Christ the Lord who is risen (2) Be a baptized follower of the Savior in the fellowship of his Church. Since none of us lives the life of Christ with even the remotest perfection then all such standards should be jettisoned by people of real charity. Wright, by these and many other standards, is my brother. I do not agree with him at times, as I have noted, but then I don't agree with a lot of my brothers and sisters about a lot of things.
This all comes down to charity, true Christian charity. You can dislike the man's statements, you can accuse him as you wish, but don't be surprised when you meet him in the presence of Christ someday.
Is it possible that we could agree on this much? In conservative white America I doubt it. The well is so poisoned by hate, and by vicious hate speech, that we do not care who might actually be our brothers and sisters. And yet we wonder why the younger generation is leaving the church in droves.
He later links to this article, that in turn links to this one. The two articles are whitewashes of Wright and Trinity UCC that conveniently fail to mention Hamas in the church bulletin, Wright's ties to the Nation of Islam and the trading in blood libel conspiracy theories.
I've said lots of terrible things and believed and argued for things I now know were lies. I'm willing to stipulate that we're all bozos on this bus and I'm not going to sit in judgement over the state of Jeremiah Wright's (or anyone else's) soul. However, none of that changes the fact that Wright is a race-baiting, anti-American crackpot. He may well by my brother, but he's also a nut.
after hearing him on