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A few days ago I talked about hyperconnection. I claimed that it could be considered an addiction.

So, when my internet at home cut out this morning, I laughed.

I felt very… disconnected. It was strange, and I felt frustrated. I called up Time Warner and they have said a technician will not be able to make it out until at least tomorrow.

Then I did what an addict has to do, I found a fix somewhere else. I drove to RIT to make sure I have the internet. I have been here for a few hours now, and I am just trying to get everything done that I usually do during the day. There is a comfort in staying connected. Usually I rely on my phone to handle lapses in internet connectivity, but knowing that I won’t have the connection for a prolonged time is, well, scary.

It almost makes you wonder what would happen if a larger scale loss of internet occurred. How many people would feel like I do? What would the reaction be?

I am an addict. Of course, I am also really not that ashamed.

*buzz*

Off goes my cell phone again with another text message.

I have an addiction. My addiction is to data, to communication, to the internet, to technology. This is not uncommon for people that are in the computing industry. The real question is how dangerous is this addiction? The ways we socially interact have changed. We connect in a virtual space, on a virtual medium all the time now. I am not sure if this is good or bad, but it is what it is.

I am apart of the iGeneration. We are wired, connected, and on the tubes constantly. I got into a discussion with my mother the other day about packing. I basically told her that the only things I must make sure I bring on a trip are my wallet, my cell phone, my keys, and my laptop bag.

To be fair, a quick glance inside my laptop bag includes these items:

• Wacom intuos tablet
• Garmin nuvi 350 GPS
• PowerShot SD630
• Thinkpad T60p
• A bunch of power adapters

This is what I consider essential to my being. Notice how I didn’t mention clothing. That was not a mistake. While having clothes is nice - I don’t feel that I need to have them packed, since I can purchase them if I forget anything. Yes. I travel with clothes, I just don’t get worked up if I forget a pair of socks or a shirt. The point I guess is that more then half of what I really care about when traveling is technology… ways to stay connected.

This is hyperconnection. A reliance on the technologies that keep the world connected. As a people, our world has changed, and some of us have latched on to all the technology and can’t let go. We must have our instant gratification technologies… We tweet, we facebook, we instant message, we subscribe, we text. We do all of these things and this is what life is for us: Technology, Communication and Information.

Try this: How many times do you check your cell phone a day? How many times do you check social network? How often do you check your Google Reader? E-mail?

How do you feel when you are without one or all of your technologies? Do you feel like something is missing? Do you feel perfectly fine? If the former, you might be hyperconnected. Don’t worry. Being hyperconnected isn’t necessarily a bad thing. By it’s nature you are accustom to digesting massive amounts of information quickly. You tend to be more in tune with recent happenings of your areas of interest. You are also usually in touch with more people in your social network then others. The quality of the relationship may not be as great, but you are certainly more aware of recent updates then others.

What do we lose when we are hyperconnected? The short of the answer is fullness. We become masters of the connection, but not the node. While we might be able to accept more information in a shorter time, we have less time to really process all of that information. Think wider not deeper. While still connected to your social network - how much value is in every relationship you have? I try hard to keep meaningful relationships with everyone that is in my social network, but the truth is I only have a few good friends, but hundreds of acquaintances. Sure - if I run into someone at a party, I’ll be able to make conversation, but I won’t be able to hold much more then that. Of course, if someone asks me about someone in my social network - I might have a remarkable amount of information about that connection.

This concept has been running through my head for years now, and I hope that I will find more time to write about it. I gave a talk at BarCampRochester3 and received a lot of feedback talking about just the differences in the generation gap between e-mail and instant messaging. This topic is ripe for discussion, and I hope to continue it. Let me know!

Are you Hyperconnected?

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to be able to attend BarCamp3 here at RIT. While I really do want to write a lot about how it went, I didn’t exactly take great notes. Here are the few things I really want to say:

jQuery is cool. Sure, I know everyone else already knew this, but now I am a believer. John Resig gave a nice presentation just demonstrating the basics of the library, and I was sold. I have already started working with it for my XML Transformation class’ web projects.

Discussion is cool. One of the best parts of BarCamp is just meeting up with a bunch of intelligent people, and having chats. My presentation time was used doing just that. I put up the topic of “Social Implications of Technology” and I got about 10 participants, ranging from college age to much older, and the discussion was GREAT. The chat bounced around a few central ideas, which included communication etiquette, hyperconnection, and personalized expectation of behavior. Really interesting stuff.

Meeting people is cool. I met a lot of people yesterday, and even got some business cards to maintain professional contact. Very exciting stuff. Of course, now I have an incredible urge to build my own personal brand so I can make personal business cards. We’ll see if that happens any time soon.

All in all, it was a very long day, but it was a lot of fun. Thanks to the organizers, and I look forward to attending next year.

This past quarter, I was taking a class in which I got to play with web services. I developed a web service in Java and used the latest application server, Glassfish, to deploy it. To consume the service, I was going to write a C# desktop application, and a Flash Lite mobile app. I thought it would be very exciting, and a lot of fun.

I was wrong.

The C# app was nothing remarkable. In fact, I was very impressed at how easy Microsoft has made web services. Just point Visual Studio at the auto generated (more on this later) WSDL file, and you can make the calls easily.

The flash application was…. more of a problem. So, in an attempt to explain why it was a problem, let me make a nice broad claim…

Flash will not work with Glassfish.

Random Yokel: But Dave! Isn’t the point of web services interoperability?
Dave: Why yes! Which is why I don’t know who to be more mad at…. Adobe or Sun!

So, Lets discuss what is wrong!

Using Glassfish, you automatically generate a WSDL based off of your Java code. The WSDL itself is valid XML, and a valid WSDL. However, when I pointed my little flash mobile test application at the WSDL, it failed. The error that Flash Lite 3.0 gave me was:

There are no valid services/ports in the WSDL file!

Weird. Especially because there definitely is a single, valid service and port in the WSDL… but that’s ok. I tried to turn it into a standard Flash application (rather than a Flash Lite 3.0). I removed the little bit of ‘mobile only’ code, and ran it again as a Flash 9 app (but the code was still ActionScript 2.0). It loads… so I try to execute my helloWorld() method (just returns the String “Hello World!”), and it fails:

Element tns:helloWorldResponse not resolvable

Strange. However, at least it appeared to get farther this time. Now, this error message gave me a little bit of a headache for a while… and then I found out the Flash does not support xsd:import. So, because the WSDL file that Glassfish will automatically generate (I suppose I should have guessed it would cause me problems), includes an import to an external schema defining your data types, Flash will choke. Ok. Let’s get around that. So, I took the WSDL that was generated by Glassfish and merged in the schema file. Simple enough, no problems. Run the code, pointing to the new WSDL which I hosted on my server (so: http://localhost/newWSDL.xml, rather then Glassfish app server: http://localhost:8080/Path/File?wsdl)… New error:

Unable to connect to endpoint: <PortURL>

Damn it. Nothing appears to be wrong with my code, C# and PHP can easily connect to my service. I was able to find this document, which basically says that Axis (another Sun app server) is sending poorly formed SOAP packets, and the solution is purchasing Flash Remoting. Right. I believe that. If the packets were poorly formed, I should be getting errors in other languages. Besides, my helloWorld() method is only returning a String! Personally, I want to think that it is some Flash sand-boxing issue, but I truly can not figure it out. Why this is so difficult? My final conclusion on this project was that Flash can not connect to a Glassfish app server (at least, out of the box). If someone has figured out how to make the two play nice, I would love to hear it.

This is bad news for Sun and Adobe. The point of web services is interoperability between systems. If you can’t deploy a simple application using Glassfish (which is the new Sun App Server…) that can be consumed by a simple Flash app… what is the point? Sure. I could go the Microsoft route, but what if I don’t want to? What if I can’t?

DreamHost fucked up. Big time.

However, I am not nearly as mad as (seemingly) every other customer. Sure, I got the several hundred dollar charge, and yes, I was confused.

What happend:

DreamHost had an automated system that billed customers. A detailed account can be found on the DreamHost blog, but essentially what happened was they had an issue with their billing system. It was not charging customers on recently upgraded servers. While investigating they found the problem to be a 64-bit incompatibility issue and corrected it. They then went back to start billing the accounts. Starting from now backwards. For example, 1-16-2008, 1-15-2008, … 12-31-2008… and there was the problem. The biller, although robust, had the feature/flaw of billing up to future dates. All their customers were then billed for the entire year.

Yeah. Big fuck up.

Why am I not mad?

Well, in my experience as a developer, I have realized that “Shit Happens”. I still remember the feeling of when I accidentally sent out a non-approved blatantly “test” version of an e-mail to all of a Xerox mailing list. Wow. I thought for sure I would be fired. Was I? No. Now, was that a $7.5 million dollar screw up? No. Definitely not.

DreamHost has guaranteed to refund the money (I still can’t see that I have even been charged yet, maybe in a few days), and also requested that anyone who has incurred additional fees contact them, implying they will also refund those. For me, everything is fine. I have a high enough limit on my credit card, and plenty of money in reserve that this does not affect me nearly as much as some.

Others however, are furious. They have sworn to leave DreamHost, and are furious at the ‘mildly comical’ blog entry that DreamHost posted explaining what happened.

For anyone that has been a member of DreamHost for any period of time, you learn quickly that they are light hearted and silly in ALL of their customer correspondence. This is one of the reasons why I like them so much. I know that there is actually human beings that are working there, and chances are I wouldn’t mind having a beer or two with them (Although, I suspect after the other day they are likely going to be ingesting lots of beers). Why was this serious topic presented with a light hearted humor injected? Because that is how they communicate with their customers. It’s that simple.

They strive to be transparent when something goes wrong. I much prefer to read about what happened, and what they have done to fix it over a generic “There has been a billing error, it will be corrected shortly and you will be refunded” that I would expect from other hosts (and companies) that we usually encounter in today’s hush hush business world. Other companies would not tell us what went wrong, and surely would not tell us why it went wrong. They would merely state that a problem occurred and it will be corrected.

I hate companies like that.

So I ask these questions:

Did DreamHost screw up? Yes.
Did DreamHost fess up to the screw up? Yes
Did DreamHost explain what happened to cause the problem? Yes.
Is DreamHost correcting their mistake? Yes.
Is DreamHost going to do their best to make everything right? I believe so.
Is DreamHost going to lose a lot of money in lost customers and bank fees? Oh dear god, Yes.

I feel bad for the situation that DreamHost is in right now. You can not mess with someone’s money and come out unscathed. I can’t imagine the feeling that Josh (the person who hit the button) has. I am not mad at DreamHost for this. I know screw ups like this happen all the time - they just hit the jackpot of when and what to screw up. I am not leaving DreamHost anytime soon… although I do recommend they start putting more sanity checks on their internal software.

Lots more sanity checks.

Something interesting happened tonight, between the hours of 3:00am and 4:00am (can you tell I haven’t been getting sleep?). The interesting thing that happened is that I trying to find plug-ins for WordPress that would allow easy sharing of articles that I write with facebook, digg, slashdot, etc…

I found one that seemed promising called obsocialbookmarker. He had a new release out, so I figured I would give it a whirl and see if I liked it… because I really didn’t feel like writing something custom that I knew someone out there had already done.

It didn’t work!

I was frustrated to say the least, but I was able to at least get some of the error messages to display to me. The errors were not WordPress errors, but actually PHP errors from the plug-in code. I thought “Damnit this guy must suck”. Then I realized what the error actually meant… The plug-in tries to figure out if it is out of date. Fair enough. The problem is that my server does not take to kindly to PHP trying to call fopen() on a remote server via URL (a security setting I cannot change, since allow_url_fopen is disabled… although this does give me more motivation to try to get around that).

So what was I to do? I suppose anyone that wasn’t a programmer wouldn’t have even got this far and would have moved on to another plug-in, but I saw some of the other ones and I thought they sucked. So, I did was most programmers like to do, and hack. Sure, the hack was only removal of the version checker, but it was still something kind of neat.

1. Something didn’t work.
2. I wanted it to.
3. I made it work.
4. I posted a comment on his blog to let him know.

Sure. This isn’t anything huge, and I have been a programmer long enough to know that this happens all the time! I think tonight something was just different about it. When I was learning how to code, I used to talk about how being a programmer was akin to being god-like. It kind of motivated me to learn. You can create things, destroy things, do good, do evil. This kinda just touched me again to think about that concept… what kind of power a programmer has.. Sure, for me just now, it is as simple as making something work that will put little icons on every post I make. The bigger thought perhaps, is what makes the idea interesting.