Jackson Whelan » Uncategorized

Why You Shouldn’t Use Google Apps Enterprise

Jackson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:53:42 +0000

Recently, a client wanted just 1 jumbo mailbox for their domain, larger than what I can provide on my hosting platform. Google Apps Enterprise seemed like the perfect fit. 25 Gigs for a reasonable price on the familiar and popular Gmail platform. Perfect right… yes, until you have a question or need support.

Google’s monolith provides no phone number for support, just online forms where you fire your query off and hope for a timely response or resolution.

It has taken Google Enterprise support – 3 weeks to address my issue. That’s right 3 weeks to troubleshoot an email delivery issue. This is the poorest of poor support/service. For a paid service this is unacceptable.

Bottom line, don’t host anything other than personal email with Google Apps. They are not up to the task when it comes to supporting users who depend on reliable email. There are a ton of reputable hosting companies that do excellent email hosting and -gasp- actually have a phone number you can call for support when things go wrong.

Oh and the best part is the issue still isn’t solved and I must continue waiting for replies to emails.

Reset MySQL Auto Increment Value

Jackson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:27:50 +0000

ALTER TABLE `tablename` AUTO_INCREMENT =0

Will reset the auto_increment to the lowest value in the table.

Show Hidden Files on Your Mac

Jackson — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:51:40 +0000

Here’s a nifty little application that saves you from the drudgery of interfacing with the terminal on your Mac to show hidden files. Sure you can open Terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
and then:
killall FINDER
Enter again.

However, you can drag this app to your dock and do this with just a few clicks. For those of us that need to locate .htaccess files, but don’t want to look at .DS_Store files all day – this is a great productivity enhancer.

“If you are a webmaster, software developer, or advanced user, you may find yourself having to frequently switch between SHOW ALL FILES and HIDE HIDDEN FILES on your Mac. This can be done with a few lines in UNIX… but why not save yourself the time and use this free desktop application.”

http://gotoes.org/sales/ShowHiddenFilesMacOSX/How_To_Show_Hidden_Files.php

Better Tab Management for Firefox

Jackson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:33:51 +0000

This is a great add-on for Firefox which makes organizing many tabs a breeze. If you’re like me sometimes you have 30 tabs open. With this installed you can display your tabs as a nested list on the left or right.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

Media Temple (GS) Sputtering Back to Life

Jackson — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:56:12 +0000

As previously mentioned here – I have a client who is unfortunate enough to have 30+ sites hosted on Media Temple’s Grid Service (GS).

This outage began Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm EST, so right now that’s 39 HOURS of DOWNTIME!

Freakin’ unbelievable. I reccommend MOSSO – tell them jwhelan sent you for a sweet discount on your first month.

Media Temple Gives You What You Pay For

Jackson — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:28:32 +0000

For $20 a month, why anyone expects different I’ll never know. But now for the second time in as many months, Media Temple has completely crapped out. I’m fortunate not to have any eggs in their basket, but have a client who’s hosted there.

mt Media Temple » Weblog » #754 gs Grid-Service Cluster.02 Web availability.

Their last big outage in March was 36+ hours for many customers. This outage now going on well over 12 hours. Sites don’t load and return 403 errors.

I wonder how many more of these outages MT can have before there’s no customers left.

Update : Going on 24 hours, my client’s sites are still down. We’re migrating them as fast as possible, and he’ll learn from this and ditch Media Temple like a hot stinky potato.

Another interesting post: http://mtcustomers.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/cluster-2-back-customer-care-migration-recap/

Why logo design does not cost $5.00

Jackson — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:01:32 +0000

Great article by Jacob Cass that says…

Logo design in today’s world is totally under rated. People do not understand how important a good logo is and how valuable it is to their business and this is why I am going to outline some very important facts telling you exactly why logo design should not cost $5 and why your logo is not something you should take lightly.

via Why logo design does not cost $5.00.

Download Vector Logos of Major Brands

Jackson — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:13:54 +0000

Sometimes you need a good clean logo of a major brand, for completely legit usage. Maybe the local Ford dealership is sponsoring a local event, and the organizers are having you create a flyer that needs the Ford logo on it. Calling Ford’s marketing department for clean artwork will probably get you nowhere, and chances are the dealership won’t know an EPS file from a hole in the ground. So what do you do?

Here’s a Web site stocked with clean vector artwork of major brands, all available for download : http://www.brandsoftheworld.com