Shawn Sorichetti

Last night Zooomr Mark III launched. After a long week of “just a couple more hours”, “it’ll be up tomorrow”, “once this is fixed we’re done”, the highly anticipated site came back online to much fanfare. For 15 minutes.

Normally, this type of outage would be chalked up to overload of the system. The Slashdot or Digg effect. This however was not the case. After a week of database migration, the database server appears to have suffered a RAID card failure. A video of Kris Tate standing in front of the system clearly shows a hardware RAID failure. Along with a dejected Kris making a plea for better hardware.

Robert Scoble has put out a call to arms to all hardware vendors to support the little startup with a lot of heart. Other community members, have also taken up the cause, sending Tweets, blog posts, and emailing hardware vendors. I don’t think community support of Zooomr has ever been stronger.

As a single developer or “go to guy” on a number of projects my heart goes out to Kris. As a member of the Zooomr community my support for Zooomr remains solid. As a fan of the little guy, I’m cheering for you guys.

[update: Zooomr Hits take]

[update: Thomas’s post]

[update: New server on the way]

I am making my way through learning Ruby and Rails with a couple projects that I’ve always wanted to write. Rather than writing sample applications I find it a lot easier to learn if I have a need to use a tool, and these projects provide that need.

As I’m working through each one I’m discover gaps in what I have learned thus far, and have found these various tutorials helpful.

• Creating Two Models in One Form
• Creating Many Models in One Form
• Creating Variable Number of Models in One Form
• Basic User Authentication in Rails
• Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew
• Railscasts
• attachment_fu and ImageScience

This list will continue to grow as I find more useful tutorials.

Zooomr is attempting another migration to their Mark III release. The migration is planned to take 12 to 24 hours.

At the start of this migration attempt, Thomas and Kris held a bit of a launch party on ustream.tv, announcing their intentions and doing a QA.

The migration is still continuing as is the broadcast. Thomas continues updates on the migration, and has been taking questions on all kinds of photography topics. It’s not often that I have access to a photographer of Thomas’s calibre, to ask any question.

Thank you Thomas for making yourself available, and good luck on the migration to you and Kris.

UPDATE: The migration continues

I am a HUGE Heroes fan. From the very first episode, I knew it was going to be my favourite TV show (replacing a floundering Lost quite easily).

Any TV that is worth watching is recorded on our Rogers PVR in HD, shows that are just on and we happen to “watch” are on the old standard def 27″. Heroes of course must be watched off the PVR.

A little while back, NBC made a change to the time that they were showing Heroes and the Canadian network (Global) that carries Heroes moved it to Sunday nights, A full 24 hours before NBC showed it. I started to record it on Sunday nights on Global.

All was good until a couple of weeks ago. I noticed that while I was recording on the Global HDTV channel, Heroes was being shown in standard def, but still in widescreen. I figured it was just a mix up, and they’d get back to showing HD part way through (quite common for Canadian television).

The first series of commercials came on featuring the awful Bell beavers, Frank & Gordon (really please, these beavers were horrible enough during the Winter Olympics, do we have to continue to endure this punishment?), in HD. “You could be watching this show in HD if only you had Bell ExpressVu”. Wait a minute, is this beaver telling me that Global and Bell have an agreement that Heroes will only be shown in HD if I have ExpressVu? I’m paying Rogers to receive Global in HD, and this commercial is clearly in HD. I thought it must have been a coincidence. The rest of the show was shown in standard def, except for the Bell commercials.

The next week, same thing. Standard def Heroes, HD Bell beaver commercials (can someone please run them over with a truck?) telling me in order to see Heroes in HD, I have to get Bell ExpressVu.

Is this a new trend? Service providers competing with each by striking deals with networks to only show shows in HD for their customers. Is this not the type of thing that the CRTC is supposed to protect consumers against? Maybe they should focus more on what the providers and networks are doing rather than trying to protect us from the “evil American advertisers”.

Some of you may ask, why not record off of NBC HD then? Well, the CRTC has stated that if a Canadian channel and an American channel are showing the same show in the same time slot, the Canadian channel’s feed will be shown on the American channel, ensuring the “evil American advertisements” aren’t seen. So NBC HD will be showing the exact same thing as the Global “HD” channel. Stupid beavers and all.