Gabriel Radic

Here are a few enhancement requests that would make the iPhone more useful and enjoyable:

- Add the option to Remind me in 5, 10 or 30 minutes on calendar event alerts.

- Sync with the Mac OS Keychain so iPhone Safari can use it. 1Password doesn’t cut it.

- Add a Missed Notifications app to list all new emails, missed calls, new SMSs, missed calendar or clock alerts and other things. SonyEricsson phones have something like this and I found it very useful.

- Add tiny and discreet led light on the face of the phone to indicate the status. I.e.

+ Green if i have new mail or if a calendar event occurred. Pulsing green light if I missed a call or SMS.
+ Red light if the battery is dying.

Maybe the Pre does it already.

Pic not related.

A friend asked my opinion on the 5 key factors for the success of a casual games web site. This is what I said, out of the top of my head:

1. Plug into an existing user base. It won’t be easy to start a brand new service with zero credibility and no eye-ball capital. So you better partner with the facebooks, yahoos, netflixes or googles out there.

2. All online. Use Flash and DHML, don’t even bother trying to install a client application.

3. Multiplayer. The games themselves must be multiplayer, and ideally coop. Make public score boards, profiles, contact lists and other social features part of the games.

4. Free. Start with a fully free service, move to freemium quickly. Make it worth the extra $3/month, don’t rely on advertising.

5. APIs. Allow for integration with Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Start with the single sign-on, then build ways to publish the high scores, play times, screenshots, challenges and relationship to those services. Also, make and easy to use SDK so it’ll be easy for others to do the work for you.

DISCLAIMER: This stuff is really off of the top of my head. Maybe if I give it some thought, those five points will change.

There’s something scary about being responsible for the security and privacy of thousands of people’s data. It’s the reasons why I tried to stay away from getting my own web server for so long. My customers usually already have a hosting provider; when they don’t, I advise them to get a fully managed solution. It all worked out well until last week…

Filiera.fr is one my biggest Drupal sites. It was hosted on shared Dreamhost account since 2004. With time, it grew to tens of thousands of members and many times that number of page views. For the past year, the Dreamhost server was crawling under the weight, and the site was offline at least once every day.

I started looking for a fully-managed VPS service. I signed up for an account on a few of them and got a good feeling of how it would work. Unfortunately, a VPS tends to be as complex as a dedicated server, is not always well automated and is often quite expensive. Next I tried the more popular social-network ASP services like Ning or Grou.ps, but those proved insufficient, despite all the feature and comfort they provide.

It Was Time. My first dedicated server.

Moving the Drupal site was easier than expected. I did it all via SSH and CLI, like a big boy, and it went surprisingly smooth. Once the hosting was set up, I had a few issues with the DNS settings for the .FR domain, but those are now almost sorted out.

Then I was in for a reality-check cold shower. Once I’ve opened the doors on the new site, it started falling apart as more than a few dozen users logged in. Mostly a memory issue. I struggled with the situation for a few days, googling for information and learning as much as I could about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Drupal optimization… with no success. It was time to ask for help.

Enter Lehel Valics from GrafX Software. With his guidance over IM, I managed to tune up the site to the point where the home page loads as fast as Google’s. I was blown away. The difference in performance is beyond anything I thought possible.

IT WAS WORTH IT!

I’ve been with Dreamhost for the past 4 years, and my hosting happiness has steadily deteriorated. This is mostly due to:

1. DH’s service level being less and less reliable. E.g. a WP home page with little traffic often takes more than 5 seconds to load.

2. One of my sites growing beyond what may be fashionable for a shared hosting service.

I decided to change things.

My question is: will moving to a PS server change things significantly? I need better MySQL and PHP response time. Or, should I start moving elsewhere all the I have piled up on The Panel?