Programming Classroom is the result of this effort.

Rex is well known throughout the programming community, especially in the standards world. He is also highly regarded for his live programming seminars where he teaches classes in C, C++, C# and more.

We thought it would be a great service to offer the seminars that Rex uses in his live classroom teachings to the general public in electronic format. These are the exact same materials from documentation to example source code. It is just that it is at a much lower cost than a classroom setting because it is self-paced learning. You will find seminars on C#, C++, Java, Visual Basic, and C. You will also find some freebies like sample chapters and tips.

So check out ProgrammingClassroom.com and let us know what you think. Needless to say, I am very excited while very nervous at the same time.

It was actually a tough choice. I was weighing many options. Do I just go with the well-known leaders (by customer base), such as Mozy or Carbonite? Do I go with a provider that offers me a finite quantity of backup space per subscription, but allows me to backup unlimited computers, such as SpiderOak?

Obviously, the answers to these questions were “No”; so here is why I went with Backblaze:

• Good communication – Backblaze communicated with me via Twitter and answered my pre-sales questions via email. SpiderOak was also very good in its email communication with me. Carbonite, iDrive, Mozy, Safecopy also communicated with me satisfactorily as well.
• Let me into the Mac beta trial — While very late into the party (they publicly released for the Mac a week later), Backblaze gave me an invitation to try their Mac service before it went public.
• Ease of Use / Function Offering Ratio Balance — It was very easy to set up the client on my MacBook Pro and get to backing up. An icon sits in my menu bar and allows me quick access to see what and how much is being backed up. But just because it is easy to use, doesn’t mean they skimped on the functionality. I can throttle my backup bandwidth; choose file types and folders to exclude; set my own encryption key; and set basic scheduling options.
• Price — My choice came down to BackBlaze and SpiderOak. At retail, SpiderOak would have cost me $100/yr. Backblaze $50/yr. Like many people, I am doing my best to try to conserve some money, make appropriate purchase decisions. And while I really believe SpiderOak is a player in this space, a lot of my decision, maybe sadly, was based upon cost. Backblaze is a legitimate player and the cost was right — especially after the 10% Chris Pirillo discount, which sealed the deal for me. (To be fair, you can find 10% discounts for SpiderOak and there are even some 20% discounts out there if you are resourceful)
• Allows me to backup external drives — As I write this, I am backing up content on an external firewire drive connected to my MacBook Pro. This drive is partitioned 3 ways, holding my Time Machine backups, SuperDuper backups and data that I just didn’t want taking up space on my primary 120GB MacBook Pro drive (e.g., videos). Backblaze does not allow you to backup your Time Machine data (seems reasonable), but I am backing up about 42 GB of data. I am 7GB into that process, which, probably expectedly, is taking just a tad longer than the primary hard drive.
• Backup speed — The throttling mechanism is very useful and seems to work. With various degrees of throttling used in the 8 days, average 12 hours/day time it took me to backup 42.5 GB of data on my MacBook Pro, I average about 0.45 GB (450 MB) per hour. That seems pretty good to me.
• Restore — I tested restore just a little bit. Seemed straightforward and easy. You log into the website. Enter your private encryption key if you decided to use it. Choose what directories/files you want. Then click Restore. An email comes to you really quickly saying a zip file with all the files you chose is ready to be downloaded. If you need a bunch of your stuff urgently, and can’t wait for download, you can also order, at extra cost, an overnight shipped DVD or USB drive of your data (see below why this could be an issue, though).

All that said, I do not believe Backblaze is perfect. Here are some items I think need improvement:

• Multiple Computer Support — Backblaze would be near perfect if it allowed multiple computer support on one subscription a la SpiderOak and others. While 95% of my time is spent on my MacBook Pro (because I can run both OS X and Windows), I do have another HP laptop. It would be nice if I could just add that computer to current subscription. But, while I can add the HP to my current Backblaze account, I would have to pay another $50/yr. So instead, if I want to backup items from that machine, I use an intermediary like DropBox or SpiderOak (which both offers 2GB of space free) and then access those items from my MacBook Pro to be backed up on BackBlaze.
• Unencrypted Data on Their Media Restore — Sort of a good cop, bad cop here. It is actually very cool that Backblaze offers the option to get your data on hard media, overnight. But the problem is that your data comes to you *unencrypted*. Me, I would be a little bit apprehensive of FedEx having a drive that has all my data readily accessible. I believe BackBlaze is working on a solution to alleviate this issue, but nothing has been announced publicly. That said, most providers don’t offer this capability anyway, so it is a nice-to-have feature. And most people restore their data through download anyway.

So in summary, I believe Backblaze, while imperfect and a relatively new service (especially on the Mac support front) provides a great service. It offers great functionality at a very good price. And I have seen no major issues with the service thus far. And, they seem willing to communicate with you if needed. I have signed up for a year commitment. SpiderOak was a very close second, and, in the end, primarily came down to financials as to why I chose Backblaze over them. I think they are pretty even on all other aspects as for what I require in an online backup provider.

Now I just hope that I am a paid user and they have lured me in, they still won’t mind the occasional Tweet every now and then

[Update 3: After tweeting Backblaze about me not being able to use their service because of no Mac support -- I get a reply inviting me to their private beta. Thanks Backblaze! But now my decision is that much harder ]

[Update 2: I just realized that Backblaze does not currently have a publicly available Mac version. That rules them out, for now]

[Update: I have received two more candidate possibilities from Twitter of all places. ScottBourne of Mac fame recommended BackJack which looks interesting, but maybe a bit overkill for me. SpiderOak_Inc must have seen my posts and recommended SpiderOak, and, while I was wary and had never heard of them, their service is quite compelling, especially the zero knowledge policy. And here I thought I had almost made my decision].

Back in December, I wrote about my desire to choose an online backup service. Since then, I am still without a true service (I am doing some hodgepodge things right now to give me some semblance of offsite backup; but nothing very formal).

The desire to choose one is still there; and for whatever reason, I really wanting to choose one like right now.

I have narrowed my choices down to 4:

• Carbonite (they finally have a Mac client; plus I can support Leo Laporte and TWiT since Carbonite sponsors Leo’s awesome and free podcasts)
• Backblaze (they are less known, but get great reviews; plus their front page “ad” is kinda cool —- Mac version currently closed to public, but I have beta invite)
• SafeCopy (I believe they are quite new, but people have given them thumbs up; but are they too new??)
• DropBox (There free service is actually quite compelling; I use it….but I think they are the costliest of the bunch here when it comes to getting more storage)

[Mozy -- you are out because you still cannot handle encrypted files from what I understand -- prove me wrong!]

Let me give you my current thought process:

Use the free version of DropBox to share files between my Windows laptop and my MacBook Pro, and then use Carbonite to backup offsite. I would need DropBox because Carbonite and many others only allow you to register one computer for backup, so I would use DropBox to move files I want backed up from my Windows computer over to the Mac (which will be my primary, registered computer). But, something like a SafeCopy would allow me to have unlimited computers registered because their pricing is based on storage.

So help me out. I would appreciate it. I would especially appreciate any representatives from the above companies coming by and selling me on their service.

Thanks!

A friend of mine is looking for a host for his website. His website is old school, with a bit of original ASP and, now, SQL Server 2005 (it was….gasp….SQL 7 until I converted it).

Anyway, his requirements are light. Not a lot of traffic. Not a lot of size needs (e.g., the database is < 100 MB). But given there is a data need for inventory management and entry, I need to be diligent on helping him choosing the proper host.

I think for my friend, a shared host will work just fine. Other than the possible security benefits and control, I cannot justify the cost of going VPS (and certainly not dedicated).

But it is a jungle out there trying to choose the best web host. Trust me, I had a lot of heartache choosing my current host.

How do you know which one to choose? Reputation is actually my number one factor, even over cost (well, to be fair, I know when the cost is outrageous). The problem comes when there are multiple companies with good reputations. Then how do you pick?

Here is my short list of possible hosts:

• DiscountASP.net
• SoftSys Hosting
• CrystalTech
• Server Intellect
• ReliableSite.Net
• Arvixe

I actually have put one of those ahead of the other 5, and am planning to try them out. I won’t say yet who that is because I want to give them a whirl first.

But, I would appreciate any recommendations from you on who to choose or avoid, especially from my list above. Anecdotal evidence would be most welcomed. First hand accounts are the best aides to decision making.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance

In my seemingly never ending quest to find comparable applications on the Mac that I have on my Windows PC, I searched for a personal finance package that could replace Microsoft Money.

It was actually a harder task than I thought, and I can’t definitively say that any of the software I looked at blew Microsoft Money out of the water.

As I have said before, I am looking for a program that:

1. Allows for online download of transactions from institutions
2. Keeps track of both bank and investments accounts
3. Looks like a genuine Mac application (not a Windows port)
4. Can generate simple invoices for business and keep track of accounts receivable (for my company Twin Roots).

But below are my findings. I didn’t have a ton of time to do an exhaustive check and review of financial applications for the Mac, so first impressions became *very* important.

Winner

• iBank 3.3.2: Well, this is the best of the bunch in my opinion. Not perfect by any stretch (e.g., not intuitive on manually entering securities in an investment account – have to currently use the “Move Shares” transaction, which is weird). But the interface is absolutely gorgeous in my opinion. Blows all of the other ones out of the water on that front. It handles investments. It downloads data automatically from some institutions (but not all major ones). It DOES NOT have simple business invoicing. I could get iBiz to do that if I want, and the cost would not be much more than Microsoft Money Plus Home and Business. It takes some getting used to, but this is what I consider a true Mac application.

Up and Coming

• Moneywell 1.4: From a potential curve, Moneywell wins. I love the “Envelope Budgeting” method. The interface looks nice. But, it currently cannot not track investments. No way to enter stock holdings, for example. This is coming, I think.

Mysterious

• Quicken Financial Life (QFL): Not out until Summer of 2009. And they would not allow me to be part of the beta, for whatever reason.

The Rest

• MoneyDance 2008 (build 629): I think this would do what I want it to do, but, selfishly, I did not like the user interface. It felt too “Windows-ee” on the Mac, and if I am going to go to the Mac, I want to go all out.
• Cha-Ching 1.2.3: Interface had some nice appeal, but it does not support the tracking of investments.
• Fortora Fresh Finance: Does not support investments from what I could see. The interface seemed fairly nice though.
• SplashMoney: Again, does not support investments
• Liquid Ledger 2: This actually had some potential, but I could not find a way to download transactions from banks, get quotes online for investments and there were bugs seen when deleting accounts (like this mysterious 0 folder that appeared). The interface was fair.
• GnuCash 2.2.8: I could not locate the Mac binary since their wiki was down. First impressions, remember. So I might not have given this one a fair shot, but I had to move on.
• Quicken Mac 2007: I refuse to use any software that does not give me a free trial (at least one readily available on the Quicken Website). Plus knowing that QFL is coming out, there is something just not right about using this version, which, by all accounts, people don’t like anyway.

So, in summary, iBank will be my Mac financial application, as imperfect as it may be. But it is by far the best and most complete financial software package out there for my needs (and if you include iBiz, it would match Microsoft Money in most, if not all, facets). I will wait and see what happens with Moneywell, and I am intrigued by the upcoming release Quicken Financial Life (although I am disappointed I cannot be a part of the beta).

If I am wrong about any of my impressions, I would appreciate you letting me know.

I checked to see if two Gmail user accounts were available, one with dots and one without.

For sake of illustration, let’s just say I checked the availability of:

abcdef

abc.def

Both were available

I created an account with the user name without the dots. Worked just fine.

I then went back and tried to create the username with the dots. No dice!

Apparently, dots are ignored or skipped over or treated as an empty character because Gmail is treating “abcdef” and “abc.def” the exact same (I really doubt someone else took the “abc.def” account in a matter of 20 seconds after I created the “abcdef” account).

I just found this strange.

Financial Software

I have grown a bit tired of Microsoft Money on my Windows machine. Plus they have stopped making the program, at least for 2009. I am looking for Mac financial software that:

1. Allows for online download of transactions from institutions
2. Keeps track of both bank and investments accounts
3. A great nice to have would be the generation of invoices for business

I might just have to wait for Quicken Financial Life to come out.

Blogging Software

Windows Live Writer (on which I am writing this post) is the best blog writing software available. Bar none. Find me one on the Mac that at least can be in the same discussion, please.

Anti-Virus

I am just interested in seeing if there is a good anti-virus program for the Mac. I probably wouldn’t use it permanently, but I would like to see if such a program would be able to find anything on my Mac.

… and I am still looking for a good online backup service too.