News Flash: Ad dollars are moving online

According to The Economist, more than a quarter of advertising spending in the UK was spent on online ads in 2009. We aren't that far behind in Canada.

The growth is really staggering - This is one of the biggest reasons printed newspapers are going bankrupt or moving exclusively online.

This is hitting where it hurts at my company too - Printed advertising is a significant revenue stream at Canada Post.

The Economist

Losing Control with Social Media: Alexis Ohanian from Reddit at TED

I just saw this interesting TED talk linked from reddit (obviously)

Grow up, Norton and HP

These should not be the only options.

3D in pure CSS

This is interesting web programming - Román Cortés has developed a 3D technique using only HTML and CSS - No JavaScript, Flash, or anything else.

Although this is a bit writing a book without using the letter 'e', I the use of constraints pretty interesting. It looks great. and although it's far from elegant behind the scenes (he wrote heaps of code using hover pseudo style), it's an terrific way of pushing the limits of CSS.



(Click the picture to see the site)

iPhone cost breakdown

I saw this amazing graphic on GigaOM this morning.

The cost breakdown of components is particularly interesting. I was surprised to learn that the wholesale cost for the touch screen was $16 and the GPS transceiver was $2.25.

The market share breakdown for RIM, Nokia, and the others is interesting too.



At the subsidized price, Apple makes $371 profit per phone.

Apple sold 5.2 Million iPhones in Q3 '09. That makes for $1,929,200,000 in one quarter.

This is why off-site backups are a good idea

So Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com are experiencing "100% Data Loss"

Here is Jeff Atwood's twitter feed:

"looks like 100% data loss. thanks.. crystaltech.. :("
"you sort of assume your hosting company is competent. That's not a safe assumption in my experience."
"looks like it's 100% internet search caches for recovery. Any tips on recovering images, which typically aren't cached?"
"I had backups, mind you, but they were on the virtual machine itself :( I am OK on post-text, getting the post images is much harder.."

If it's on the same machine, it's not a backup. They should not have been on the VMs.

Oh, and my guess on the cause? SQL Injection

I like Jeff Atwood. I've been reading coding horror for years, and I've learned some great stuff. Unfortunatley, some readers may be feeling a little bit of schadenfreude right now, and here's why: There was a post on coding horror once that warned specifically against not having off-site backups.

It may not be his fault - His host may have told him there was a backup. However, it is a bit ironic.

What's Your Backup Strategy?

One thing's for sure: until you have a backup strategy of some kind, you're screwed, you just don't know it yet. If backing up your data sounds like a hassle, that's because it is. Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

Update:

Looks like I was wrong on the SQL Injection cause!

ugh, server failure at CrystalTech. And apparently their normal backup process silently fails at backing up VM images.

I wonder was else was on the physical VM server besides the SO blog and Coding Horror. Also, it's curious as to why the VMs wouldn't have failovers.

Update II:

Jeff has posted an awesome summary of events with some lessons learned. I'm meeting with the virtualization guys where I work on Thursday to discuss this (among other things)

Great use of Google Maps: Sharks off Bondi Beach

I saw this link from the Australian Coastal Watch website this morning. It's a great use of Google Maps to show a massive school of unidentified sharks cruising just metres from swimmers.