Posted 1 year ago

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Bind to Route 53 transitioning

If you’re like us and have been managing your own DNS for a while, you’ve probably grown use to making changes to zone files and running “rndc reload”.  Well, we’ve transitioned to using Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service which allows us to leave the nameserving up to Amazon’s global presence of nameservers.   

Transitioning to Route 53 is a little bit tricky, especially for existing domains/zones.  So we put together a script to make it easier to sync your BIND-style zone files to an AWS zone.  

There are a few other similar utilities out there, including ones that Amazon directly references on the Route 53 developer page, but none of them really fit the bill for what we needed.

Let us know what you think and if you see anything better out there.

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Posted 1 year ago

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Wireframing

We’ve been doing quite a bit of information architecture lately with the design and development of www.fitterwith.com and our forthcoming lucyphone.com version 2 launch.  After stumbling through OmniGraffle, Visio, and various cheap drawing applications, we’ve been pretty impressed with how Balsamiq makes wireframing ideas really easy.  It’s an Adobe AIR app, so we’ve been able to use it on a Linux Netbook as easily as on Mac OSX, and the files are stored as plain xml. 

Posted 2 years ago

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Thinking Sphinx… and feeling jinxed

After some time working with Thinking Sphinx for a client, I figured I should share some of the gotchas I worked through.  I didn’t find the TS documentation to be all that bad at first glance.  It all seemed fairly comprehensive.  But after working with TS in practice, here are a few things I would have liked to know:

1.  How to get around Delta indexing troubles on Passenger

The documentation actually explicitly addresses this issue but it didn’t solve my problem.

Continue reading…

Posted 2 years ago

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Here’s a short video which shows the Lucyphone.com experience.  We’re seeing customer service complaints at an all-time high, and there’s a real opportunity to streamline the call center process, and minimize aggravation.  Right now our objective is to proselytize the service to customer service managers, so that their CSR are familiar with the Lucyphone brand.  By being lucyphone-friendly, CSRs are starting their customer interactions with happier customers, so it’s a win-win for companies and consumers.  Give it a go with the “FLYCUB” beta invite, and let us know how your next customer-service call goes!

Posted 2 years ago

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The Quest for Unmetered Bandwidth

It’s an auspicious day - a beautiful fall morning in Richmond, and I’ve taken the train from Manhattan to meet my brother for our kickoff meeting and to jump into the remaining items before we launch the beta of our first product, LucyPhone.com

We’re still kicking around various beyond-beta business models, and in the process of moving our asterisk instances off the Amazon EC2 cloud and onto a dedicated VPS with unmetered bandwidth.  Anyone have experience with iWeb’s service?  It seems there aren’t many hosts that will offer unmetered bandwidth, but it’s a must-have for us, as each of our calls is taking roughly 400kbps, and we’ll be incurring way too much cost on the Amazon cloud.

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