Is there food?

For the past week I’ve been trying to get Dreamhost to give me an account. I paid through Google Checkout, and - for some bizarre reason - they’ve not handed any money over to Dreamhost yet.

Dreamhost think it’s Google’s fault, Google think it’s Dreamhost’s fault. Dreamhost won’t cancel the whole process and let me start from scratch. Google keep saying they’ll talk to Dreamhost.

It’s an impossible position, and incredibly frustrating. I thought I’d give Dreamhost the benefit of the doubt (after reading many negative comments online, but also many positives), but I’m starting to think it was a bad idea.

Regarding Media Temple - or (MT) as they like to be called - I’m impressed with every single aspect of their Grid service bar one: GPU.

After a month of running my Wordpress blog (this Wordpress blog here, the humble Is There Food) which gets a very modest amount of traffic, I’d eaten half of my monthly GPU allowance. Combine that with the fact that I hadn’t yet moved Gary’s Menori across, and that I have some future projects that will consume even more CPU time, and I’m a bit worried that I’ll soon be sailing over my 1000 GPU limit.

The GPU section of (MT)’s control panel is currently offline. According to the site, they’re making it more accurate; which should resolve many of the concerns that customers have with the GPU system. They can’t find out what’s eating their precious CPU time, so it makes optimisation a very difficult task indeed.

So, we’ll see what happens. If Google and Dreamhost can resolve whatever crazy issue they’ve got, maybe I’ll be able to dip my toe in that pool. And if (MT) sort out their GPU panel, I might be able to stick around for a bit.

More news as and when I have it.

And if someone from either Google Checkout or Dreamhost should happen to read this (fat chance, eh?): “HELP!”

And if someone from (MT) reads it: “What’s the deal with the new GPU panel?”

I mentioned Stuart a while back (in the “New Bloggers” post), but I’m going to give him another plug; largely because he’s not really “blogging” over at his website, he’s using it to share his music. So a “New Bloggers” post doesn’t really do him justice.

There are two sites you need to have a look at: his MySpace page, and his personal site.

The MySpace page has samples of a few instrumental tracks from his new album Mother’s Thinking Bath:_ _”The Ambassador”, “The God of Sleep”, “Will Beckett’s March”, and “Trip to Mars”. The album will be available soon, and I hope to feature a review on this site and Blogcritics once I’ve got a copy.

Stuart’s personal site contains much more music, and full recordings of a variety of tracks (both covers and Stuart’s original songs); a recent favourite of mine being [Cuckoo’s Nest](http://stuartestell.co.uk/2007/04/27 /download-cuckoos-nest/). Better still, the site’s RSS feed is now set up as a podcast, so if you subscribe you can have all of Stuart’s music delivered conveniently to your computer. Or, if podcasts aren’t your thing, subscribe to the feed anyway and manually download new music as he posts it.

I hope you enjoy Stuart’s work, and please post a comment here and on Stuart’s site letting us know what you think.

1) New Transformers Trailer: Oh. My. God. See it here.

2) Ken Robinson talks about the future. See it here. Sir Ken is one of the best speakers I’ve seen in a long time.

Both very, very different. Both well worth watching.

ITF just got some Wordpress 2.2 “love”, and reacted badly.

Initially I couldn’t log in, and when I finally resolved that little problem all my sidebar widget content had disappeared. Which is, frankly, bloody annoying.

It’s great that Automattic released the Widget functionality way back when. It’s great that the Wordpress community decided to run with that, and create their own plugins. What’s not great, is that the latest Wordpress release essentially ignored all the Widget work I’d done, broke the key Widget plugin I used, and left me having to rebuild everything.

With 2.2, Wordpress bundles the Widget functionality in its “core”, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. But if a fundamental change like that is going to be made, you expect a slightly better upgrade path. Particularly as Automattic created the original Widget plugin themselves!

The 2.3 release promises to pull tagging into the Wordpress core. Which almost certainly means it will introduce a whole raft of similar upgrade problems. Has the time come to move ITF away from Wordpress? Maybe…

I’ve just noticed, while making that last post, that the 2.2 has killed the “default category” functionality, and that clicking “publish” didn’t actually publish my post. I wonder if this will have the same problem.

Edit: Nope, this one published OK. Maybe it’s something to do with the autosave? Grr…

Given that Flickr are not on my Christmas card list at the moment (more on that later), my thoughts turn back to Zooomr. I like the idea of Zooomr, but it always looked a little…um…nasty…

All that is about to change. Mk3 is about to launch. I’ve just been watching a live video of Kristopher and (I think) Thomas in the build up to Zooomr’s launch. I’ve wished them good luck with the launch (how cool is that? I can actually wish them luck using the power of the interwebs) and now I’m going to go to bed.

When I wake up, I hope the face of Internet photo sharing has been changed forever. Kristopher seems to think it will, and the demonstration video on their site certainly looks massively impressive.

So, in the morning, we shall see. Maybe I’ll be uploading my son’s second birthday photos to Zooomr, and not Flickr…

While I wait for Zooomr to launch, I thought I’d see if I can make my Gmail inbox a nicer place to be.

A quick Google search later, and I’ve got some hints and tips to look at. One of which is “Use a search term like ‘before:2007/01/01 label:sent’ to find everything before a certain date”. Which is great - I could destroy all mail before the beginning of this year. But that’s not really what Gmail is about, is it?

I’m currently using half of Gmail’s limit, so I’m not in danger of running out of space, but despite that it pains me to see such an untidy repository. I’d like to purge all the crap I don’t need, but I don’t know how best to sort the crap from the things I want to hold on to. I’d quite like to create a Google Apps for Domains Premiere account and use that, but there’s no client-based mobile access for GAfD. Yet.

I think I’m just going to have to start deleting anything I don’t want as it comes in, but be lenient with the “don’t want” classification. I just don’t seem to be able to find an ideal way to tidy up Gmail…

[This](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-ways-to-use-gmail- filters.html#more-3328) is very cool. As is this. Hopefully I can harness the awesome power of these two links and clean up the sewer that is my Gmail mailbox…

Over at the Zooomr.tv chat room (where all the cool, and mildly compulsive obsessive kids hang out) Thomas Hawk just asked for a set of blog links. I posted mine (natch) but here are the others:

Bryan, Nik, Girl- InChoate, Phill, Er… , Yup, Ben, Georg, AcmePhoto, Jim, DB, Thomas

So there we go. FYI: Zooomr hasn’t launched yet, but it will do. Soon.

Last night, after months of hard work, Zooomr Mark 3 launched.

Kris Tate’s been working all week under the scrutiny of the community via a webcast at Ustream.tv to try to get the site launched. After a server crash earlier in the week things were looking good. At one point I suggested I was going to go to bed and Kris insisted that I stay up; I’d been there all night, he wanted me to see the launch. His enthusiasm and passion at that moment, minutes before he knew he’d be in a position to launch Zooomr, was a joy to see.

A few hours later, Zooomr launched. I wasn’t around to see it, but for about fifteen minutes the site was online and from what I hear, things were looking great.

And then…their database server died. You can see Kris’s broadcast from their server room here. It looks like their RAID controller has died. They don’t have any spare hardware, or massive amounts of fault tolerant equipment, because they’re just two guys trying to create an awesome site.

Kris’s desperately trying to remain optimistic in that video, but the difference between him here, and when he realised he was going to be able to launch are night and day.

What Zooomr now need are servers. [Scoble](http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/29 /an-evangelism-opportunity/)’s put the word out, and Kris has asked everyone to blog [about ](http://dave.stufftoread.net/2007/05/30/zooomr-needs-your- help/)their predicament. I’d echo what Scoble’s got to say: this is a great opportunity for someone to get some positive PR. He mentioned last night that he was trying to convince Sun to give Zooomr some Blade servers. In the grand scheme of things, a few Blades from Sun isn’t going to cost them very much and in the eyes of the Zooomr community, and potentially the rest of the online community, it would be a great PR move.

It would make all the difference to [Kris](http://blog.zooomr.com/2007/05/29 /zooomr-the-little-photo-sharing-site-that-could/) right now.

So, come on someone: be a hero. Save the photo-sharing site, save the world?