AlexHopmann.com

I heard an interview on NPR a couple of days ago with Franklin Foer, the editor of the New Republic which has apparently just had a big redesign. Part of the redesign is moving to less frequent publication, with longer articles and photos in the print version and more of their former content moving to the web.

On the one hand I think its great that they are adapting to the web and agree that there really are appropriate ways to divide content between the web and print. But the way he described stuff that made sense for the print edition really missed the mark on some key points. He described the stuff for the print edition as being content of longer-term interest. I get putting longer articles in print (which they do also) since often that is a more satisfying format to sit down and do a relaxed extended read. But content that is going to be relevant for years is the worst thing to put into print vs. the web. A month from now the print edition will be in landfills and hopefully recycling centers (maybe this is too painful of a truth for the editor to grapple with?) and Google will just be getting around to featuring your online content. Online is the perfect place to put something that everyone will want years from now.

This feels like a classic case of old-media people not fully understanding the intricacies of modern “new media”, the importance of the search engines to bringing in traffic, and the life-cycle of content on the web. It is easy to think of the web as like publishing a serial magazine except you can publish a new issue every day inexpensively. Old content then gets filed away into your archive of “old issues”. That of courses misses most of the powerful techniques that people have been developing to expand their audience and reach.

The pricing is out for the July ‘07 CPU refresh from Intel. $1172 for the high end quad-core 3ghz model, but buy one step down and $744 gets you quad-core 2.66ghz with the faster 1333 MHz bus (which I’d assume is going to be important for these bandwidth hungry cpus).

So far I’ve been really happy with my Tyan 1U server barebones which looks like its about $800. Add a little RAM and for about $2500 you can have a server with 21ghz worth of CPU cycles for computationally intensive tasks. If you need storage it looks like $3500 will get you a 4TB machine, and add a bit more RAM, run XenServer and you have an incredible amount of resources split into different virtual machines all in a 1U slot. Pretty amazing.

When I got my first server for the data center I thought the next step would be to upgrade it. I probably will put some extra disks in it (not that CalendarData needs the storage space) but I’ll probably buy a 2nd machine before I upgrade the CPUs in the first one. That way I can have two machines and when I need to upgrade one I can move the VMs to the other one. In theory this also means that if I have a hardware issue my downtime can be fairly small too.

Some updates- I got Adobe Reader to install with no problems on another Vista computer. That one has UAC turned on, I wonder if somehow they have a bug with machines where UAC is disabled?

Also, Media Center recordings seem to be fixed now. I guess it took a few days for it to sort it out or something.

On my earlier reports of some strange low AdSense results- pretty much the day after I complained about it, my average results doubled and they had been pretty consistently twice the earlier revenue since until yesterday. Yesterday it was 8x the previous numbers, with no real explanation I could find- the traffic analysis and total traffic hasn’t changed that much (growing nicely, but slowly). I guess its just one of those things that has a natural high variance.