I read today that CouchSurfing has closed. CouchSurfing was a site that allowed people to offer their homes for free accommodation to travellers. It was three years old and had some 90,000 members.

It closed due to catastrophic failures in some of the operational aspects of the site:

• a hard drive crash that was avoidable
• incorrectly executed incremental backups

I used to work for a company that didn’t have proper backup procedures – not only for itself, but also for its major product. In both cases, checks weren’t performed to ensure that it was possible to recover from backup.

Backups are rarely seen as a necessity in small businesses and few organisations are committed to the time and effort necessary to ensure that its complete and correct. It’s essential and critical. Because, as the CouchSurfing experience demonstrates, if something goes wrong it can close your business.

We’re unlike most businesses. We have an implicit advantage in that we develop locally and deploy to remote servers. In a sense that’s an automatic backup, although that doesn’t give us the ability to rollback. And we rely on the owners of those servers to back them up in accordance with their terms of service. Service availability and backups are less than ideal, but commensurate with the expectations of our customers. Even so, the more we use other companies, the more we are coming to realise that one day we will need to do it all ourselves.

We use Subversion to commit and manage changes to our work, on our local servers. Thus, our servers have the entire lifetime of each project, with individual employee’s computers retaining just the local ongoing work.

But that’s not all. We also backup our servers. A custom-developed automated process uses the internet not only to ensure that we have both an incremental backup, but that we also have an off-site backup. This gives us, in total, three or four distinct places that our work is stored.

Yes, it’s been tested, and yes, it’s saved our business.

I mentioned a little while ago that Emm Gryner has a new website. Despite the lovely design, it’s implemented in Flash. Regular readers will know my views about using Flash for an entire website. Don’t do it. Ever.

Presuming that I can persuade Firefox not to cache the Flash, it takes me four minutes on dialup to discover that there is no new news.

And what of Emm’s abandoned RSS feed?

Well, if you click on the Journal link on the site, you get directed to the Emmbassy. A completely different site, which appears to be Emm’s personal site, more like the site she used to have. It’s completely non-Flash, and yes, there is an RSS feed for the news entries. Which is what I was looking for in the first place, except it’s a dismal badly engineered feed that contains no information apart from the news titles.

Furthermore, I now have a dilemma. If I want to get the latest about Emm, and in particular when and how I can pre-order The Summer of High Hopes, do I just rely on the news feed or do I have to do the Flash hoop jumping too whenever I remember to do it? Or perhaps I should read the RSS feed for Emm’s own journal entries too? What a mess.

There’s a discussion in the U.S. regarding the future of multichannel television. Certain consumer groups are lobbying for a change in the rules about how multichannel packages are sold. At present when you buy a package, you get a preselected group of channels. This is the same in the UK. These consumer groups want the packaging of channels to be dropped, in favour of allowing customers to select exactly the specific channels they want to subscribe to.

Some people that run religious broadcasting channels aren’t happy with this proposal because it means that the public will not be able to stumble upon such channels when they are “in need”. They are also concerned that fewer people will view their channels because fewer people will make an explicit choice to subscribe to them.

But, other religious broadcasters aren’t happy with the current situation either, because they find it abhorrent to be packaged alongside those channels that they consider depraved or corrupting.

Mark made a comment to one of my recent posts, referring to the God Channel. Ever since I subscribed to Sky, back in the early 1990’s, there’s been such a channel. Prior to Sky’s recent channel reorganisation, I stumbled across it a couple of times a day in my absent-minded flick through the stations. With the recent renumbering of the channels, the God Channel has now disappeared into the 700’s. The result? I never see it.

My good friend and business partner Mark, has a blog. When it first got started I seriously wondered if he was losing his marbles, because his experiences were no where near what other worshippers seemed to experience. But, over two years later, I still read his posts, because his views and testimonies are as much about community, people and doing Good Things, as they are about God. At least, that’s what I think. Now, when I read Mark’s posts, I often think “wow!”, “cool”. And remember, I’m a predominantly secular guy.

I continue to wonder how many of those that attend church just do it out of convention and social expectation. I also wonder how many of these people have the same experiences as Mark and his family does, or those described in related and connected blogs.

Because, I feel that if the answer to this latter question is “not many”, then religion has merely become a social club. And that’s simply not good enough. It’s probably no coincidence that as I write this post, Mark relates this quote:

If you Christians really believed just one tenth of what you profess, then you’d be at least ten times more excited than you are.

..and then comes up with this view, which is fantastic, brave, and which I completely agree with. And remember, I’m a predominantly secular guy.

One of the things I have learnt in the past few years is to be passionate about everything I do. And I want everyone else to be passionate about what they do. Do I ever see church leaders really excited? No. More often, they’ll spout some political rhetoric then disappear off my TV screen. Worship programmes are confined to Sunday mornings, often dumbing down obvious social issues and giving them a thin religious coating. It’s all so timid; so intellectual. So, you religious guys, where’s the passion gone?

Consider, for a moment, that church leaders are salesmen. They sell a product that can change lives and save people. But people aren’t buying it. In any conventional business, they’d get fired. And there’s no use blaming the product, because there’s nothing wrong with the product.

So, what prompted me to write this? To be honest, it’s been brooding for some months, but I saw an advertisement in the Ottawa Citizen last Saturday that surprised me and spurred me on. This newspaper has a couple of churches advertising, in a predictably subdued fashion, but near the front of the newspaper comes this:

That’s the “buy this, or else!” approach. Mmm.. that’ll work.

Recently, I’ve been astonished by the amount of time and effort some people spend doing things that could be done equally well by spending a little money. A simple example having someone cut your lawn rather than spending time cutting it yourself. Traditionally, my dad cut our lawn, so when I moved into my first house I did the same. Even though I hated doing it. I’d leave it until the grass had grown long at it took me three hours to wade through it.

That’s when I worked out how much money my time was worth. But, more importantly, that’s when I started trying to devise optimum solutions to situations I found myself in. Optimum solutions tend to save time and lead to a better quality of life.

This is why all my music is on iTunes, and I no longer rely on using CDs as a basis of listening. With the size of collection of my music, I had too many CDs, in spontaneous disorganised gatherings. It often took me a long time to find the music I wanted to hear, thus losing the inspiration or ‘moment’. With iTunes, I found an easy way of automatically organising and recalling my music. With the Mac mini and some extra hard disks, I found the perfect listening solution. And I’ve now built on this set-up to provide some other cool ways to enjoy my music.

The problem that lies within my opening observation is that many people are incapable of analysing and formulating workable solutions to a situation. As soon as one potential hurdle is found, the whole solution fails. Few can think outside of their self-imposed constraints, or have the courage to ask for advice.

Remember that WinFS was going to be part of Vista, then later got deferred to a subsequent Vista update? Well, it seems that Microsoft has now binned the idea of WinFS forever. It’s being rolled into SQL Server. An interesting way of sidestepping the issue that something else promised in Vista won’t make it, and diluting the promise and potential market of WinFS. Perhaps.

Robert Scoble’s post was one of those that helped publicise the news about WinFS. The comments made on the post are interesting, because people are discussing file systems, databases and more importantly Everything Online.

By ‘productizing’ the WinFS technology into SQL Server, Microsoft hopes to build on their share of the web server market, envisioning this future.