Rob Gonda's Blog - Generic

Happy New Year 2009

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:30:00 -0400

Yet another year flew by, and a great one to come ... stay tuned and keep an eye on my Take Me To Your Leader! blog with tons on new emerging technology, marketing trends, and special focus on social media to come this year.

Obama vs McCain in the Digital Space

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:49:00 -0400

Check out this amazing top level analysis at Take Me To Your Leader, comparing Obama's and McCain's digital efforts, including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPhone, Blogs, and Mobile.... Obama clearly dominates the digital spectrum.

Take Me To Your Leader!

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:04:00 -0400

You may have noticed the lack of activity on my blog lately, mostly because of work, but also because I'm because recently launched another blog: Take Me To Your Leader! which focuses on trend watching in consumer behaviors, digital marketing, technology, and social media. I will continue to maintain my blog for the same type of content you're used to reading here, and write more frequently on my new blog about trends, innovation, and points of view...

Some of the recent topics you might like include a full thread on Microsoft's new ad campaign (first Seinfeld ad, Microsoft explains why it's so lame, Seinfeld gets the boot, I'm a PC), or talks about invasion to privacy through deep packet inspection, interesting AIR applications, or the best youtube ads ever.

Hope you like it, and as always, feedback is always welcome.

Delicious 2.0

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:25:00 -0400

Popular social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, now delicious.com launched a brand new revived interface.

Next Generation 911 Targa 4 and 4S revealed

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:07:00 -0400

Porsche Cars North America has just released details about the new 911 Targa 4 and 4S, completing the update of the full line of 911 models. Like their 911 brethren, the Targa 4 and the sportier 4S will receive horsepower bumps to 345hp and 385hp respectively, thanks in part to a new direct injected fuel system that also promises increased fuel efficiency.

2009 Porsche 911 Targa 4S

The Targa 4 and 4S will also receive Porsche's new 7-speed double-clutch gearbox, Porsche-Doppelkupplung. As indicated by the "4" in its moniker, the Targa 4 and 4S will only be available with the Porsche Traction Management, which replaces the viscous multiple-plate clutch all-wheel drive system of the previous 911 models. According to Porsche, this package results in a more pronounced driving characteristic.

Inside the cabin, the new 911 will receive the new Porsche Communication Management 3.0, which features a touchscreen for simplified operation of the audio system as well as the optional hard-disk-drive navigation system. Also available are the new options of XM satellite radio with XM NavTraffic capability, Bluetooth connectivity, iPod port, USB port and auxiliary jack.

Unique to the 911 Targa is its 16.58-square-foot, specially tinted glass roof made up of two segments--a sliding roof at the front and a tailgate at the rear. The roof slides beneath the tailgate within 7 seconds, offering almost 5 square feet of open space above the passenger cabin when opened completely.

The 2009 911 Targa 4 and Targa 4S will be available in the United States in October at $89,500 and $100,100 respectively. [The Car Tech blog]

MySpace supports OpenID

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:14:00 -0400

OpenID allows a user to create a single identity profile that can be used across the Web at participating sites. This negates the need to fill out the same information on multiple sites, and then need to remember those login details for each individual account.

OpenID has already been embraced by nearly 8,000 sites, including Yahoo (the largest supporter in terms of users), Plaxo, Wetpaint, Technorati, and LiveJournal. But MySpace is the second largest site to join the network to date, and will nearly double the amount of OpenID accounts to a half-billion.

Popular social networking site MySpace said Tuesday it will join the open source authentication platform OpenID, further bolstering the idea of a unified system to carry online identities between Web sites. But for now, MySpace's OpenID accounts cannot be used elsewhere. [brought by betanews]

Any good CFers in LA?

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:38:00 -0400

Do I have a job for you, must work FT on site. Leave a comment.

Amazon AWS s3 ec2 / Google App Engine / Media Temple / Mosso CloudFS Comparison

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:54:00 -0400

	AWS s3 ec2	Google App Engine	Media Temple gs	Mosso CouldFS
Scalability	Upgrade ECU or Deploy new instances	Pay extras
OS	Any	Python - Universal	Linux	Linux / Windows
Other uses / extensibility	Complete flexibility Requires additional deployments	Requires Python and GQL	Easy to install additional applications
Resources	$0.10 - Small Instance (Default): 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform	Free for 500Mb of data and 5MM views/month	100 GBs of premium storage 1 TB of short-path bandwidth 100 unique sites / alternate domains 64MB Ruby/Mongrel container 1,000 GPUs 100 databases 1,000 email addresses	$50 Gb of SAN storage 500 Gb 10,000 compute cycles
Pricing	Storage $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used Data Transfer $0.100 per GB - all data transfer in $0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out Requests $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, POST, or LIST requests $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests* * No charge for delete requests Computing $0.10 per CPU hour SimpleDB $1.50/Gb/month	$0.10-0.12 per cpu cycle $0.15-0.18 in BigTable Gb/month $0.09-0.13 transfer Gb/month	Base: $20/month $2.56 per additional transfer GB $0.10 per additional GPU	Base: $100/month $0.25 per transfer GB $0.50 per storage GB $0.01 per CPU cycle MS-SQL $5/100Mb/month
Practical Rating (1-10)	7	5	8	9

Google protocol buffers: Open-source Data Exchange Language

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:27:00 -0400

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases.

"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Protocol buffers are three to 10 times smaller and 20 to 100 times faster than XML, according to Google.

Google has prepared a download page that contains protocol buffer compilers for Java, C++ and Python.

iPhone 3G is official and will be available July 11th

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:45:00 -0400

[via engadget]
It's a teensy bit thicker.
A SIM ejector comes in the box, at last.
There's no dock included, just a USB power adapter.
On AT&T unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, on top of voice plans starting at $39.99 a month. Unlimited 3G data for business users will be $45 a month, on top of voice.
Apple's new MobileMe service will be coming with the iPhone 2.0 software, bringing push email and contacts for all.

Blog Redesign

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:35:00 -0400

After god knows how many years, web archive says Fed 06, and first blog post Jun 05, I finally decided to change (or even have) the design for my blog.

I always said content's first, so after 500 posts I finally got to it. I kept it simple and minimalistic. Let me know what you think, or if you find any problems. I upgraded to BlogCFC 5.9.003, implemented table-less div layouts, and carefully maintained SEO urls, keywords, descriptions, so hopefully I won't see any drops.

Thanks goes to Tom de Manincor for making it happen, and Bryan Stanley for the design and implementation.

IIS + Apache, side by side happy together

Tue, 27 May 2008 22:52:00 -0400

IIS and Apache running side by side ... why? Well, for me, because I run SVN through Apache in a Windows box. I still like IIS for web sites, especially because I like to keep it similar to my production sites... however, I blogged before about getting multiple SVN repositories working with Apache. I usually switched Apache to listen to an alternate port because IIS binds itself to all port 80 on all IPs, regardless if they are actually being used or not. Good news! I found this Microsoft support document explaining how to unbind IIS from all IPs and include only the ones you want. I know, I actually never even looked for this before, but I have IIS serving my sites and Apache server SVN in the same server, both on port 80. Of course, you can also use this for hosting Trac (easier in Apache than IIS), or even just testing ... By the way, if you don't have the Windows Server CD handy, you can download the Support Tools here.
So, after installing the Support Tools, follow these instructions from the M$ site:

To add an IP address to the IP inclusion list
1.    Click Start, and then click Run.
2.    Type cmd, and then click OK to open a command prompt.
3.    Type the following, where xxx.xxx.x.x is the IP address you want to add:
httpcfg set iplisten -i xxx.xxx.x.x
When this succeeds, Httpcfg returns the following:
HttpSetServiceConfiguration completed with 0

To view additional status codes, see the Httpcfg help.
4.    After the IP address is added, use the following command to list it:
httpcfg query iplisten
Httpcfg returns the following:
IP :xxx.xxx.x.x
5.    From the command prompt, stop the HTTP service and its dependent services. To do this, type the following string at the command prompt:
net stop http /y
6.    From the command prompt, restart the HTTP service and it dependent services. To do this, type the following string at the command prompt:
net start w3svc
Note When you start w3svc, all services that were stopped when HTTP was stopped will start.

Happy holidays from iChameleon Group 2008

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:58:00 -0400

Wow, I think this is the longest period without a single post. I've been extremely busy, but that's always good.

So in the past iChameleon Group has sent out a candy cane smackdown xmas card, a this year is a shootout, but this year no funny flash game. We had an iCG people awards this year and we projected a nice show reel in big screen which summarized most of our 2007 work... I loved it, so check it out:

(Adobe) Flash is a miracle - (Adobe) Flash saved every one of us

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:47:00 -0400

Guinness Tipping Unlocked

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:29:00 -0400

This is truly amazing; I never thought someone could unlock the entire game so quickly... Guinness launched a campaign called Guinness Tipping that consisted in an Internet scavenger hunt... They hid clues all over and required codes to unlock the game. Most people seemed to be stuck Tens of thousands of people played and someone finally unlocked it today. After you unlock the game, you can download the still unreleased new Guinness commercial and she posted it to youtube ... and here it is, check it out: