Technology Kills

Let me start by saying I am a long-time and major fan of Dropbox. Initially I didn’t get why it was so great, but then I started using it more and now I can’t get by without it. I think of it as my own personal cloud for all my stuff.

But that means you have to change the settings of every single application whose data files you want to keep synced so that it stores them in the Dropbox folder. What about applications which don’t allow you to change their data file location? Creating symbolic links in Windows (easiest in Windows Vista or Windows 7) is one way, but you’ll quickly find you need to move the real files into your Dropbox folder and link them to their original location. This is backwards and doesn’t seem like a very great idea.

So a few of my applications are synced with Dropbox (Trillian logs, Website-Watcher data, MyLife Organized data, etc) and the rest are somewhere else–usually in my Application Data folder. The situation was not ideal.

Enter SugarSync–I found it while reading a comparison article in which Dropbox was named the clear winner. I wanted to see for myself, however, so yesterday I gave it a try.

Just hours after investigating SugarSync, I became a Premium member and upgraded to 30 GB and I cannot imagine going back to Dropbox.

There are several reasons for this:

• Out of the box, with almost no configuration, it does exactly what Dropbox does (admittedly, with a few extra dialogs than Dropbox has). You can move everything from My Dropbox into the Magic Briefcase folder and you’re all set.
• You can sync any folders you want from any of your registered computers with SygarSync, and you can choose which other computers should get that data and where it should be stored.
• You have a Web Archive–basically online storage that is not automatically synced down to your computers, but is available anytime.
• There is a mobile app for Android (and iPhone, Blackberry, etc) which gives you online access to your files as well as syncs your mobile camera pictures to your account (which are then made available on all of your computers).

It’s stunning what difference the ability to sync any folders makes. Here are some of the things I’m doing with SygarSync now:

• Sync all of my PC game profiles and saves. It works like SteamCloud but for literally any game.
• Sync my Benubird library so I have my organized documents available anywhere Benubird is installed.
• Created a new sync directory called Apps in which I installed the PortableApps.com platform and have been filling it up with portable apps. Now most of the apps I use (and likewise their data files) are synced between my PCs and available from the simple PortableApps.com menu system.
• Sync my pictures, videos, and other media files without having to move them somewhere else first and lose Windows’ integration with those files.

There is a lot more I haven’t discovered yet–but I have uploaded over 16 GB of synced data in the past 24 hours and I am simply amazed at how well it is all working.

From what I understand, they have a fairly agile development cycle and are making frequent fixes and additions, and generally get new features up faster than Dropbox.

I have no less love for Dropbox, but that love is overshadowed by my new infatuation with SugarSync. To the cloud!

No need to inform me about the following server issues, which I apologize in advance for:

• CPU time to generate some WordPress and Drupal pages is surpassing 30 seconds. I am actively looking into this and suspect it’s some sort of VPS issue with queue times. This is my top priority.
• Caching is not working properly. No pages are being cached on most of my sites. The pages are still working fine, but because of the above performance issue this can become excruciating. I will have caching working properly by the time the previous issue is resolved.
• Our CDN is not set up correctly. We are using SimpleCDN to host many of our static assets, for performance reasons. It is correctly pulling most assets automatically, however you will notice some pictures in our posts are broken, and other links may not work quite right yet. This is being worked on actively as well.

If you have noticed anything other than these three problems, please let me know so I can work on those as well. I am assessing the entire Digital Empire infrastructure which is why things are taking longer than they otherwise would, but the end result should be a more stable, much faster network.

As a user and lover of both an Android phone and the Mint.com website, I long for the day when I will be able to use the two seamlessly together (without needing to resort to viewing the full heavy-weight website on my phone).

iPhone users have had a Mint.com app for a while, and all indications are that it’s top-notch. Word on the grape vine is that Mint.com are internally testing a new Android application for their service. A full release is likely coming at the end of Q1 2010, but we will be eagerly awaiting more information from the Mint.com developers to confirm or deny that rumor.

As you have likely noticed, my blog is now running on http://technologykills.com.

Links pointing to the old URL of http://blog.benmcclure.com will still work, but will all forward to the http://technologykills.com homepage. To fix, simply change your links to point to http://technologykills.com instead, and they will work like they did before.

If you notice any quirks or issues with the site running in its new location, let me know and I will work to resolve it immediately.

Thanks for sticking with me during this transition!

In a further effort to make all sites and services in the DE network stable and ensure the highest uptime, we have deployed a full-scale monitoring server at an off-site location in Germany.

This means that we can get a full picture of our network and service status at a glance at any time. It also means we are notified when anything goes down, is running slowly, or becomes unresponsive. In addition, we have the ability to automatically bring things back online and resolve some issues without having to wait for me to fix them.

This is a big jump forward for our network infrastructure, and this means we are now running four full network servers in four different datacenters spanning three countries to provide our sites and services under the highest quality and most ideal circumstances.

Let me know what you think! Have you noticed a difference in any of our sites and services? Is there anything you’d like to see, or any changes you’d like made? We’d love to hear from you!