Facebook IPO: Reality check

Maybe there's hope for the investment world after all!

Not seeing this hyped up 'its the next google' IPO take an undeserved raise makes me feel all happy inside.

Time to re-think your business plan, and guess what? It will get ugly. Next MySpace anyone?



Here's how I'm going to wager it will pan out:

1. FB will re-evaluate their money making scheme
2. Only logical answer is more aggressive advertising and data dumping.
3. Over time, marketing will get too aggressive
4. Hello MySpace 2.0
5. Mass emigration - to Google+ 

We'll see though.

But headlines like these bring a smile to my day:

Where are Facebook's friends?
Facebook Shares Fall Below IPO Offering Price
OK, Facebook is Embarrassing


I think what makes this so sweet is that it's a more official rejection of Facebook's real purpose on the internet, not just some angry security geeks.

Also - I should add: Facebook does add a lot of value and unique things to the IT/scalability scene, but just because Hell is a warm place in the winter doesn't mean you want to go there...

Rackspace and 'fanatical support' - so fanatical...

Working on a server migration to AWS from Rackspace for a client.

I can see that they have an input on a management tab on their web interface to enter your 'root password' to keep their support staff informed of what it is.

Stored. In a database with at most reversible encryption on their end.

Yeaaa, I'll pass. And this isn't old news.

/sigh

Worthy of distribution: Google vs. Facebook - paid ads

This is certainly no surprise to me; Not only is Facebook less economical from initial impressions, the performance is a dead giveaway.

Here's a sweet and to the point rundown of how they bat heads.

If you had to pick one to dump money into, it should always be Google (for the time being); unless you've got a lot of cash to drop, then maybe a less-than-double-digit percentage of your online advertisement funds should go on Facebook.

(This is not to say Facebook, if leveraged right is an economical choice for customer relations!)

NoSQL: stretttcch - pop!

You know the noise you hear when something is stretched close to it's breaking point, like a balloon? In the context of the NoSQL bandwagon bubble: here's some of that noise.

A detailed account of jumping on a bandwagon with an immature scene of products.

Although admittedly I have my eye on MongoDB, I still can't believe the utter lack of ACL control these "databases"/"document stores" have. Tisk!

Another factoid: Netflix uses NoSQL... and most of their data in it is Tomcat logs.

Zend Studio + PHPUnit upgrade: A faster method

As a counterpart and refinement of my previous how-to, this update shows how to update the PHPUnit library faster than using the symlink method:

View in HD!

Mercurial (hg) checkstyle hook, at last!

As far as I can tell, there's not much in the lane of check style hooks for Mercurial.

There's a lot of hits for git and SVN, but not much for Mercurial.


Check it out in my 'hg-checkstyle-hook' bitbucket repo.

I thought I'd share my (imperfect) rendition of a Mercurial checkstyle hook. It's meant to be setup for a pretxnchangegroup event.

Basically it does this:

• Find what files have changed from the beginning of the changegroup to the tip
• Copy those files to a staging directory in /tmp
• Run PHPCS ( PHP_CodeSniffer, a PHP checkstyle command) on those files specifically
• Provide a report on any violations resulting in a non 0 exit code.
• The script should be configurable for any checkstyle command, as long as it takes a space delimited list of files at the end of it's arguments.