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Giving Thanks (a very abbreviated list)

Well, it is 4:30AM and I'm completely awake - bright and bleary-eyed This has been a tough few weeks, with both kids getting the flu (or something like it) - and they got it consecutively - first Melody, which knocked her out for a week, now Noah, who is busy snoring away in the swing because that's the only place where he gets any rest. Poor bugger, he can't even blow his own nose yet, so he's just plain uncomfortable.

This leads me to something I've been thinking a lot about lately, especially given the holiday season, and that is giving thanks. I learned a long time ago that having an attitude of gratitude is by far the most healthy thing for me, and especially in these somewhat difficult times of newborn bliss, giving thanks is a great way to remeber just how lucky and blessed I am. I was hoping to get this out for Thanksgiving, but better late than never, and as anyone who knows me well knows, time management isn't my strongest quality. :-)

So here goes. In no particular order.

  • My wife and kids, just for being great.
  • The rest of my family, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, everybody.  Thanks for your love and support.
  • All the folks at Sputnik - Dave, Art, Kathy, Scott, Tom, Bryan, Tony, Jeff - Kudos guys.
  • All the folks at Technorati - Dan, Kevin, Mike, Kriszti, Louis, Brendyn, Theresa - you folks rock.
  • Dan Gillmor, one of the few voices in mainstream journalism who consistently does great reporting on technology, media, and civil liberties issues
  • Steve Gillmor, tireless supporter for metadata and new journalism business models
  • Dave Winer and the folks at Userland for setting up weblogs.com, the granddaddy of the pinger sites.
  • Not to mention all the standards backed up by real money (and bandwidth) that Dave provides. Thanks, man.
  • Doc Searls - a constant voice of sanity, wisdom, and good judgement. And the best knack for writing weblog/article titles I've seen.
  • Jason DeFillippo and his wonderful Blogrolling service.
  • Ben and Mena Trott for producing great tools
  • The USA.  Yeah, even though this country isn't perfect (and right now, we're going through one of those periods of collective insanity), it is still a great country, and I'm grateful to be living here - only by accident of birth - rather than in one of dozens of incredibly repressive, war-torn, or dirt-poor countries.
  • Evan, Steve, Jason, and the folks at Blogger
  • Linus and the hordes of open source programmers out there adding to the collective codebase.  Thanks.
  • The EFF, for its tireless work and fight for our civil rights in cyberspace
  • Larry Lessig and the folks at Creative Commons, fighting to preserve the public domain and our collective heritage
  • Brewster Kahle and the folks at the Internet Archive, adding a Library of Congress every few months can get wearing after a while, thanks for doing it.
  • All you bloggers - who (a) help inspire and inform me, and (b) help make my current business possible.  There is a rebirth of civics going on, and you guys are making it happen (as well as posting great kitten photos)
  • Yahoo, Google, the New York Times, AOL, the Mozilla Project, the Apache project, the list goes on and on. Thanks.

This just starts to scratch the surface of the list. I am so lucky to be alive and to be right here, right now.

Sputnik-Claus is Coming to Town

Just in time for the holidays, a new promotion from Sputnik: the Sputnik Quick Start Kit (buy). The program runs from now until the end of the year. A perfect stocking stuffer for that hot spot on your holiday shopping list!Sputnik Quick Start Kit - includes:

  • 2 Sputnik AP 120s
  • 1 Sputnik Central Control License for 2 APs
Sputnik Holiday Promotional Price - $455 (normally $1,265) - less than the price of some high-end APs whose names I won't mention! If you want to upgrade to the full 20-AP license (normally $895) you can do that later, for $485 more - a 25% discount. All of the details are up at: http://www.sputnik.com/products/promo.html

Sputnik Launches!

I'm extremely proud to herald the launch of Sputnik's newest product set, Sputnik Central Control 2.2 and the award-winning AP 120 WiFi Access Point. These products have made it to the light of day after thousands of man-hours of testing and real-world use, bugs and bug-fixes, dozens of deployments, new feature enhancements, and hundreds of hours spent listening and working with customers and partners.These products make it easy for Wireless ISPs, Hotspot operators, and IT Services companies to roll out managed, authenticated wireless access. At $185 per AP, the Sputnik AP 120 (buy) is one half to one fifth the price of wireless Access Points with equivalent features. The Access Point is completely managable centrally - everything from initial provisioning to ongoing maintenance and firmware upgrades, can be done centrally. Sputnik Central Control (buy) acts as the centralized management console, and the $895 price includes a software license to manage up to 20 Access Points. Additional licensing packs are available as well. Add it all up, and the complete Sputnik system is at least one half to one tenth the price of similar solutions. Sputnik even offers completely free licensing for community wireless groups - making it easy to start and manage a community wireless network. Here's what some customers are saying:

Chad M. Smith of Washington Broadband, Inc: I want to thank you for your support and providing such an excellent solution. We have researched for months for a solution like yours. I have even attempted developing our own with little success. Since the database and cgi is "open" we will have no problems integrating Sputnik into our billing system. We will definitely be purchasing your products in the short term.
Craig Fine, director of sales for Softmatrix: It would have been really difficult without Sputnik because there's not really a solution that lets you manage multiple hot spots with one server.

How do they do that?

Here's the scoop: Sputnik Central Control and the AP120 were built from the ground up with the conviction that you could have commodity hardware pricing and enterprise-class management. And because Sputnik built itself up organically, without Venture Capitalist funding, we are able to offer the products at a radically lower price point than our competitors. Everyone said "It can't be done." But we put our heads together and came up with a completely different approach from everyone else in the industry - and we have happy customers who are using the system every day. Here's what the architecture looks like: Don't just take my word for it - LinuxDevices took a thorough look at the system, and came away impressed:

The Sputnik Agent provides all of the manageability hooks that enable automatic configuration, dynamic firewalling, multiple captive portal redirects, policy routing, centralized management, and end-user tracking.

Wi-Fi Networking News, the leading trade publication covering Wi-Fi and IEEE 802.11 standards liked what they saw:

With Sputnik's server software and access points (APs) that include Sputnik edge software, operators get centralized network management functions with usage analysis, security, AP provisioning, and an end user interface.

All this adds up to secure, managed wireless networking with lower capital costs, lower operating costs and greater flexibility than any alternative. See how people are using Sputnik technology in a variety of situations, like WISPs and Hot Spot Providers. Sputnik is talking with select VARs and System Integrators. If you're interested in reselling the Sputnik system, send an email to partners@sputnik.com, but you'd better hurry - we're getting overwhelmed with requests. I'm incredibly honored to have worked with the talented team of industry veterans at Sputnik. Everyone has worked their butts off to create a system built around user requests - an inexpensive, centrally managed, plug-and-play Wi-Fi system that provides group policy and access control - and one that could be plugged directly into a corporate LAN - no need for special VLANs or convoluted network architecture, just a dynamic firewall at each ingress/egress point in your network, all acting in unison, as part of a "hive mind".

Vive la France!

I got a ping last night from some folks at U-blog, one of the leading French weblog companies, asking for a friendlier interface for all the blogging frogs out there. Best of all, they sent over all the internationalized HTML I needed to convert the pages for them. So, now you can see the French homepage with top 100 french language weblogs - seems like the French aren't using the high-priority indexer much yet, so only a few major weblog services are currently represented. I'm sure that that will change over time. Note to weblog developers: There's an XML-RPC interface and instructions on how to use it available as well.

To say thanks to the u-blog folks, I put up a special u-blog top 100 just for them. Kudos guys - working code is always the easiest way to my heart. Thanks Loic, for pulling it all together.

Technorati Growing Pains

These past weeks have been a pretty busy one for me and the growing Technorati team. Before I get too far in this post, I've got a mea culpa - Technorati hasn't been very responsive lately. Fact is, we've been getting a lot of attention and new searches, and the blogosphere seems to be growing at a pretty steep rate as well. This double whammy has caused our current infrastructure to buckle, and has caused some service outages.I'm sorry. Here's what we're doing to fix it: I've got a new, much more scalable infrastructure designed and currently being built. I'm committed to having it up and running by the end of the month, just in time for Technorati's first anniversary. This will be the third generation of our infrastructure, each designed to be more scalable and flexible than the last. After stability, the next priority is response time - we're gunning for a response time of under 1 second. Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds. So, for those of you who have written to me wondering about the recent outages, again, I'm sorry. Keep the feedback coming, btw - we really appreciate it. And if you have written lately and no one has responded, we haven't stopped caring - we've just been really busy fighting fires and getting the new infrastructure built. Don't hesitate to drop me a line if you want to express something privately.

Hack your Metabolism

Salon has an article about Hackers on Atkins, and in a shameless display of self-aggrandizement, yours truly is featured in the company of uber-bloggers Cory Doctorow and Doc Searls. As my brother smirked to me in an email response after reading the article, "four overweight guys lose weight! stop the presses!", my response was to quote from Cory in the article:

"Maybe it will make us all grow third arms and go blind in 20 years," quips Doctorow. "It's sort of hard to tell. It represents a kind of hacker's approach, grounded as it is in jack-legged engineering rather than science."

The only other thing that I want to make clear about Atkins is that it clearly isn't for everybody. It is a radical change in eating habits, not well-suited for everyone, especially vegetarians. I can only speak from my own personal experience that it works for me.

Note: This article is curently available only to Salon Premium subscribers, so you'll have to view a short Ad to see the article if you're not currently a subscriber...