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Fun with the Kiko API and Ruby, Part 1

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Here's the first of a series of articles that introduces you to the Kiko API and also introduces the Ruby programming language for those of you who've been meaning to learn Ruby but haven't yet started.

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BusinessWeek on .mobi Domains

BusinessWeek's article, A New Wave of Web Addresses, attempts to answer this question about .mobi domains: "Who's signing up, and why?"

Steve Yegge: "Good Agile, Bad Agile"

Over at Steve Yegge's blog, there's an article titled Good Agile, Bad Agile that's been getting a lot of attention for a couple of reasons. First, there's Steve's assertion that agile methodologies aren't; second, he describes what working at Google is like, and it sounds like a developer's wonderland. Steve's writing style, which I find funny, is a bonus.

Speed bumps indeed...

I’ve received the odd mention in the press – usually some obscure point about an irrelevant Internet governance or technical policy issue. I never expected to get any attention from the hardcore IT press for anything of technical substance – good, bad or otherwise. Having recently assumed responsibility for managing the retail aspects of the Mailbank business portfolio, I guess all bets are off now…

Based on messages being sent out from Tucows, the migration process has hit several speedbumps.

- via ITworld.com.

Joel Shore, the author of the article, goes on to nail the source of of our problems square on the head. My planning process was rushed, which lead to corner cutting, which lead to mistakes and problems and a decreased focus on getting the quality equation just right. This lead to avoidable mea culpa’s on the retail network status page and our customer bulletins – which eventually lead to Joel’s article.

The good news is that the fixes are well underway and ahead of schedule. The bad news is that we could have used the time spent fixing these issues on more productive activities – not to mention completely avoided invoking the wrath of our customers and Joel’s unflattering attention.

Take the time to dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Your customers will thank you for it.

For some more detail on the issues we’ve run ourselves into, you can check out our customer blog where I’ll be posting some more information the steps we’re taking to improve our quality control processes over the coming days.

(speaking of QA, when I clicked on the link on the ITworld website to send a copy of the article to the folks here at Tucows, here’s the response I got from their webserver  – click the thumbnail for a full view)

Itworld-error

(originally posted at http://www.byte.org/blog/_archives/2006/9/27/2367434.html)