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It’s taken me a while but every day I become more of a believer in SaaS (Software as a Service), at least for small businesses.
No worrying about hardware failing
If you have ever done any system admin work for small businesses, you know the worst possible thing that could ever happen is a hardware failure. Usually if you have a hardware failing on a server, you have to diagnose the problem and figure out the best way to fix this problem. Usually it takes at least a day to get the part you need. During this time your server is down and anything on it is inaccessible.
No worrying about updating software
With SaaS you don’t have to update any software. No OS updates, OS components updates or program updates to do. Not a huge deal but updates can cause problems sometimes.
Don’t have to worry about backups
I’m not saying you don’t have to do backups, I would still backup your SaaS data. However there isn’t as much of a worry for it. You don’t have to deal with real complex backups, just backup your data nightly and you are fine.
Of course SaaS doesn’t only have positives, with SaaS you have to pay monthly usually and you’re not in total control. I think that the positives outweigh the negatives, at least for me. I would much rather focus on growing rather than working on the maintenance of my systems where I would never make money.
Tagged as:
saas
by Keith on June 19, 2009
Here are some pictures I took today from the HGTV Change the World Start at Home event. You can find more information about this event here.
HGTV getting set up before the kick off
View from Above
St. Louis Rams cheerleaders and the band getting ready
The kickoff has started
Some of the crowd watching
Monica Pedersen with the band
Scott Mosby from Mosby Building Arts discussing the patio
Construction on the Front Porch begins
The living room is being painted
Landscaping going in
Painting the built in bookshelves
Tagged as:
hgtv
by Keith on June 15, 2009
Flash flood in front of the office in Kirkwood, MO
by Keith on June 11, 2009
This is something I have been putting up with forever. Firefox on OS X is just horrible. It is either using 99% CPU or else it is just running slow all together.
Yes I do use plugins however disabling them really doesn’t help. Even if it did, what would be the point? The only reason I am still using Firefox is because of the plugins.
I was happy when Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 beta, hoping that would fix the problem but no it didn’t.
I’m really hoping that either Safari or Chrome allows for plugins to be created in the future.
Tagged as:
apple,
firefox
by Keith on June 11, 2009
rTorrent is a very cool torrent client used in *nix based systems. I have been using it on my Apple TV now for a few weeks with very good results.
Recently the weather here in St. Louis has been stormy and it knocked out my electricity. When the power came back on, I couldn’t get rTorrent started and I was getting this error:
rtorrent: Could not lock session directory: “/Users/frontrow/.rtorrent_session/”, held by “appletv:+189″.
The fix was pretty easy, I went into the .rtorrent_session directory and removed the rtorrent.lock file.
cd ~/.rtorrent_session/
rm -f rtorrent.lock
That was all there was to it, once I removed the lock file I was able to start rTorrent.
Tagged as:
apple tv,
rtorrent
by Keith on June 10, 2009
I discovered a problem on a Gateway laptop running Windows XP. As soon as I would log in, the laptop would automatically log me off. It did it in Safe Mode and normal mode.
I ended up discovering the Userinit.exe file was completely missing from the c:\windows\system32 directory. I eventually found out the machine had a virus which probably infected the userinit.exe file and antivirus removed it.
All I ended up doing was I popped in the Windows XP CD. Started recovery mode and copied the file back to the c:\windows\system32 directory by doing:
cd d:\i386 (cd rom drive)
expand userinit.ex_ c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe
If the userinit.exe file already exists
There could be a situation where the userinit.exe file is already in c:\windows\system32. If that is the case then there is probably a messed up registry key. The key can be found in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. The key is named Userinit and should contain this value:
c:\windows\system32\Userinit.exe,
Yes the comma at the end should be there. The easiest way to access the registry without being able to access the system is to use BartPE. Once you boot off a BartPE CD, you can load the SOFTWARE hive right into the registry and edit it.
Tagged as:
windows xp
If you’ve ever heard a clicking noise coming from your computer, chances are it’s the hard drive and it has either failed or is about ready to.
Datacent has a very cool page on their site where you can hear the different noises that a hard drive makes and what is wrong with it.
Check it out
Tagged as:
hard drive,
IT
I have been looking for a good project management tool for web designers/developers. I have tested Basecamp and actually have a full license for Active Collab. I still wasn’t happy with either of them. They give you a lot of customization and you can use them however you want but for some reason they just seem clunky and slow to me. So I have been on the search for a different project management tool and I think I have found one.
One thing I noticed with most online project management tools was that all of their user interface’s were very similar. Well 5pm took a different approach:
Everything is very neatly laid out. The left side is a list of your projects and tasks and the right side is the activity window. It is not cluttered with a lot of unnecessary stuff that you don’t use. For each task you can add a message, file or a progress note. Once thing that killed me about ActiveCollab is how slow it was. 5pm is very fast, it is all based on ajax and everything loads very quickly.
Even though it is a simple, slick interface there are still tons of features. You can email tasks or projects right from your email client to it. You can also integrate the project information into your desktop calendar.
It is a very simple project management tool and I suggest if you are in the market for one to give it a try. They have a free demo and if you decide to try it beyond the demo they give you a free 14 day account without the need of entering a credit card.
Go to 5pm’s website and check it out
Tagged as:
pm,
web dev
