Between the ISS and Shuttle sightings, I was further transfixed by the sight of another three bright objects moving at a similar speed to the ISS and Shuttle. They seemed to be in a higher orbit and were on an approximate NE to SE track. I know viewing satellites is not unusual but I admit to being transfixed by the sight of 5 spacecraft flying over my house in 15 minutes.

Photo opportunities were limited and hampered by our resident and particularly ferocious mosquitoes. Despite their best attempts, I managed to get a shot of the ISS and shortly afterwards, Endeavour passing over our house [click thumbnails to enlarge]:

It was awkward high fives and self conscious fist pumps all round at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center today. A roomful of Apple fanboys and girls, media hacks and some serious developers tried to get excited about an updated product line up, including refreshed 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro, iPhone 3.0 software, Snow Leopard and a new iPhone, the 3GS.

Also announced is the new pricing for the current 8 Gb iPhone, now available for $99 in the US.

The iPhone 3GS includes an updated 3 megapixel camera with video capture and editing, an integrated digital compass and increased storage capacity up to 32 Gb.

Despite rumours to the contrary, Steve Jobs didn’t show to treat the audience to a ‘one more thing’ moment, predicted by some to be the release of an Apple netbook/tablet. He is, however, expected to return to work at the end of June.

It was a another keynote of evolution rather than revolution for Apple, which in the current climate is probably the best the Apple faithful can hope for.

Today, Anthony Steen, a Tory grandee announced he was resigning his seat after claiming £87,729, “including payments for tree surgery, guarding his shrubs against rabbits, maintaining a separate cottage and overhauling his private sewage system” according to The Telegraph. This comes after Douglas Hogg announced he was standing down after being caught claiming £2,000 towards the cost of clearing his moat.

But is justice seen to be done when these affluent and aging gentlemen decide to take early retirement? I think not. The fact that they have chosen to walk off into the sunset, returning to their part taxpayer-funded mansions after years of excessive expense claims rather adds insult to injury. More equitable would be a requirement for MPs guilty of claiming more than was necessary to repay those amounts claimed in full with interest and carry out say 1000 hours of community service in their constituencies, before being stripped of their generous final salary pensions.

While party leaders are falling over themselves to assure voters that they will never again be naughty little piggies, none of them have so far suggested how taxpayers can be fairly compensated for their losses. Without such a scheme, the resignation of an MP caught with his or her snout in the trough is nothing more than an easy way out.

Anyone listening to Lembit Opik defending his attempt to claim for a £2500 television may be forgiven for wondering what planet some of these people are living on. Or Douglas Hogg, who “never asked” for the cost of clearing his moat to be paid by the taxpayer (and was thoroughly outraged by the suggestion) but after careful consideration has decided to repay the claim anyway. Lest we forget Hazel Blears who has generously decided to pay £13,332 in capital gains tax that she absolutely insists is not due on the sale of her taxpayer funded second home.

The excuses come thick and fast:

• “The expenditure was approved by the Fees Office”
• “The system is confusing and needs reform”
• “My eye was off the ball”
• “It was an oversight”
• “I was very busy at the time”
• “Necessary for family life”
• “The claim was perfectly reasonable”

And so it goes on. Those MPs obviously caught exploiting a system they created for themselves, in utter denial regarding their culpability, trotting out excuses that would be laughed out of Court were we to be afforded the privilege of prosecuting a serving MP. And to do so at a time when the UK is facing a period of financial instability unheard of since the 1920s adds insult to injury.

Until those responsible for making inflated, excessive and in some cases fraudulent claims are held to account, Parliament will be tainted by the corrupt and self serving actions of these petty crooks. Nothing short of a comprehensive overhaul of the expenses system, a new Speaker and at least 15 by-elections will satisfy the electorate that our parliamentarians can once again be addressed as Honourable Members.

Although VPS provides for a reserved allocation of system resources, I was still unhappy with the potential performance bottlenecks presented by only 512 Mb of RAM and the lack of flexibility this provides for sites with a potential for traffic spikes. With this in mind, I have been testing dedicated hardware based at The Planet to host those sites that would benefit from more enterprisey architecture.

In summary, the pros and cons of VPS v Dedicated are listed below.

The case for dedicated at The Planet

• Command line (SSH) flexibility offers granular control of your server and you learn more about configuration than you ever would using cPanel/Plesk
• Ping times and general latency are improved, particularly with a 100 Mbs port
• Support response times at The Planet are significantly better than Media Temple
• Uptime has been 100% (as it was at Media Temple, although not for everyone)
• Network performance has been strong whereas Media Temple had periodic ‘upstream’ issues
• Hardware pricing is now very competitive
• RAID disk protection
• Integrated backup solution

The case for (dv) at Media Temple:

• Command line admin has a reasonably steep learning curve
• Budget dedicated servers are still at least twice the price of a VPS
• DNS zone admin not to be undertaken lightly
• Apache/PHP set up is labour intensive and you will need to apply patches and updates
• Technical support is geared for power users
• Most dedicated hosting is billed in USD. Bad for Canadian customers (at the time of writing)
• Risks of hardware failure probably higher – cloud based architecture inherently safer

Worth mentioning alongside Media Temple and The Planet is Slicehost. The Slicehost architecture is advanced and they are well funded as part of Rackspace. We have run several in house projects and dev sites at Slicehost and have been very impressed. The interface is command line only and you will need to build your own LAMP stack. For the uninitiated, this is easier than it sounds.

Slicehost’s support articles are particularly well written and so far, the hardware and network have been 100%. Slicehost is positioned as a scalable solution aimed at developers rather than a prdocution environment but from what we have seen, they are just as reliable if not more so than the average VPS host. It remains to be seen whether or not they want to enter into the mass market and personally, I hope they don’t.

In summary, if you are reselling hosting or have site(s) that attract more than a few hundred users a day, VPS may prove limiting unless you invest in a top of the line package. You can secure a reasonable low end dedicated box from around $80 a month and this is likely to provide you with at least 1Mb of RAM which is the very least you will need in order to support WordPress/Expression Engine/Drupal or run Ruby or Django frameworks. If you spend $150, you should be able to secure 2Mb of RAM, a better front side bus and faster disks. If you know how to configure RAID, then you will be able to incorporate a level of protection that is absent in most VPS systems. However, if you are running a small business site, a personal blog or for whatever reason you don’t have the time or inclination to be your own server admin, then Media Temple is still the way to go.

Update May 13th 2009: Well, the AT&T kiss of death has been applied to SlingPlayer for iPhone. According to their statement, AT&T accuse SlingPlayer of creating “congestion and potentially preventing other customers from using the network”. So, the $30 app is limited to WiFi only, a huge disappointment to the Sling user community. It seems mobile network providers were eager to promote the myth that their expensive  2.5G and 3G services would change the way we communicate and connect, with a new generation of converged devices. Except, if we want to use those devices, their network will go down like a…well you know what I mean. None of the participants here come out of this looking good. AT&T’s flaky network, Apple’s exclusive distribution deal and SlingMedia’s expensive solution.

Cutting to the chase, I am very happy with the performance of my (dv) server since I moved up from (gs). The performance data from my Pingdom monitoring service is shown below. There are several domains hosted on the (dv).

Media Temple (dv) availability at 100%

The period monitored is from 20/11/2008 - 03/01/2009. 100% availability is hard to come by in a shared hosting environment so I am pretty happy with the results. I know (dv) isn’t strictly shared in the same way as Bluehost’s or Dreamhost’s base offerings but it still isn’t dedicated hosting either so, on balance, I am completely satisfied.

Response times are significantly better on (dv) than (gs) (for Wordpress) – static performance is pretty much the same. Below is the response time chart for the same period. Ideally, I’d like to see under a second across the board but the sites are returning between 1.0 and 2.5 seconds. Bear in mind that Pingdom’s servers are located all over the world, so North American response times taken as a more representative sample will obviously be better. However, the internet is global, not local, so worldwide monitoring makes sense for most applications.

Media Temple (dv) response times

I still have a site running on the (gs). The response times are 2-4 seconds although availability is also 100% (testament to Media Temple’s bulletproof network) but illustrates the limitations of the cloud when it comes to sites requiring significant database calls.

In the last month, I have set up a second (dv) for a client and had cause to deal with Media Temple over the phone for the first time. I know I was buying from them but they were pretty great to deal with and provisioning of the new server took minutes. The all round quality of their offering is, for now, second to none. Joyent and Mosso come close, but Mosso is a little overpriced in my view and Joyent’s offering is confusing and again rather expensive. Slicehost is an alternative, high performance, no frills offering but its command line only administration is beyond the average VPS user.

I am running close to 20 sites on my (dv) and although I haven’t come close to using all the system resources, I would be happier to have no more than 10. I have a dedicated box in testing so will be running some comparisons between dedicated and (dv) over the next few weeks.

I have chosen 10 leading, Canadian websites that need significant improvement. They are listed below in no particular order. The rest of the 50 worst websites will be decided by your nomination in the comments section. I will close the comments as soon as there are 50 suitably good (should that be bad?) nominations. The criteria are accessibility, usability, content and visual appeal.

Include the URL of the site and the reasons why you consider the site to be deficient. Your nomination doesn’t have to fail in all of the criteria but if you want it to make the list, it better be pretty bad.

My Nominations

Government of Canada

http://canada.gc.ca/home.html

I didn’t expect this site to fail so badly but a quick look suggests something is very wrong. The Government of Canada site failed all of my criteria. It has invalid markup, a confusing layout, uses images without ‘Alt’ tags for navigation and generally looks like it was designed in 1997. Which it probably was. In fairness, it’s not all bad and those running the Government’s sites have a hard job to organize all of the nonsense that Federal sites have to contain but they could and should do much better.

kijiji

http://kijiji.ca

Kijiji means village in Swahili but in means ‘packed full of validation errors’ in Canadian. This site manages to pack over 200 validation errors into its home page and a similar number of categories for its classified ads. Not exactly easy to navigate. You can resize text in the browser without breaking the layout but the user forums fail 508 Standards for accessibility which isn’t good enough for a such a popular site.

TD Canada Trust

http://www.tdcanadatrust.com

I think they are a nice bank (as banks go) but this Canadian institution really needs to take a long hard look at its website. Accessibility for those with visual impairment is poor. Green on green navigation? Come on people. There are validation errors galore and the site is a 508 Standards fail.

Rogers

http://www.rogers.ca

I wanted the Rogers’ site to fail more badly than it did. It has only mildly invalid markup and scrapes through the 508 Standard tests. It is still a visual mess and navigation is compromised by layout on the homepage. There are some unusual colour choices like light grey on even lighter grey for navigation which is likely to frustrate visually impaired users (if they could see it).

CBC

http://www.cbc.ca

Media outlets always struggle with their portals. Balancing different types of content (news, entertainment, radio, sport) with intuitive navigation is not easy. However, writing standards compliant and accessible code has nothing to do with the challenges of complex navigation and CBC.ca fails in both areas. Ads have been shoehorned into the layout at the expense of usability and primary and secondary navigation elements are confusing and inconsistent. If you are going to play with public money, you really need to try harder.

Future Shop

http://www.futureshop.ca

The Future Shop site is a strong contender for the worst built site in Canada. There are a shocking 484 validation failures on the homepage and the site fails 508 Standards comprehensively. Image based text is widespread, as are tiny fonts and bloated drop down boxes, packed with randomly ordered items.

MLS

http://www.mls.ca

Inexplicably legislated into existence, the MLS is the self appointed gateway to home listings. When the splash page renders incorrectly in Firefox, you know there are problems ahead. The subsequent page is the generic search which home buyers will be familiar with. For some reason, an intrusive dialogue box pops up telling users not to use the map search tool but instead to use the conventional search. Fine. So I tried to close the dialogue box by clicking the little ‘X’ in the corner, right? No. It doesn’t close, forcing you to use the map search tool instead. From this point on, validation and Section 508 standards are out of the window. Privately run property portals elsewhere are doing this stuff so much better. It’s amazing what competition can do.

Ed Stelmach

http://www.premier.alberta.ca

Strictly, Ed’s site is a spin off from Alberta.ca but he gets a special mention here. Just visit the home page and before you know it, an animated mini-Ed walks over your screen and starts talking at you. The frequently asked questions provide video only responses, hence limiting the devices that can view the content and reducing the accessibility for visually/hearing impaired users. A list of speeches and news items is, well, just that – a long list with no categories or grouping of any kind. As with my other nominations, code errors abound and the site fails Section 508. Evidently, Alberta’s surplus is not being spent on designing with web standards.

Canwest Publishing Inc

http://canada.com

There is really limitless badness here. Catastrophic code and Section 508 fails abound but it is in usability and findability where this site really loses its way. From the 4 level horizontal navigation bar to the action packed ‘Jump to’ drop down menu. This site just tries to do too many things and does them all so very badly. Advertising blocks are intrusive and distracting and consequently, probably ignored by users.

CTV

http://www.ctv.ca

Although the CTV site is as technically challenged as the other sites listed here, it makes the list thought its sheer ugliness. CTV’s dated branding doesn’t help matters but neither does the appalling typography and clumsy, staccato paragraphs in the ‘News’ section. I don’t know who writes this stuff but whoever it is could do with rewriting Journalism 101. Or even Basic Grammar 101. Oh so bad. Navigation elements are confusing and inconsistent. There are major accessibility issues too.