Happy Holidays!

On behalft of the Metadot team I wish you a Merry Christmas and a fantastic new year.  Everything has been great in 2008 (minus this little thing called the economy) and we are preparing some great things to make 2009 an equally exciting year. We thank you for your ongoing support. 

Watch this: a computer-controlled Christmas light arrangement of 70 thousand bulbs!

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Metadot Rails December update

We are glad to release Metadot Rails 7.4.0. The update includes an up-to-ten times increase page rendering speed as well as other goodies such as an upgraded image library that allows registered users to upload images, a setting to prevent oversized image upload, and a 'send this page to a friend' liquid tag.

Check Metadot out at www.metadot.com or wiki.metadot.net.

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Mojo Helpdesk December Upgrade

We are glad to announce the upgrade of our Mojo Helpdesk application. There has been a lot of work put into this new release and we hope you are going to like it as much as we do. We created a video to summarize all the changes:

• http://mojowiki.metadot.net/whats-new
  

Here are the improvements:


Redesigned user interface

Smarter use of screen space and less clicks to achieve most tasks:

• Revamp of unassigned ticket screen
  
• Redesigned helpdesk management screen
  
• Revamp of ticket listings
  
• Reassigning a ticket can now be done in the ticket view
  
• The search is now available on every page
  

A new customer portal

The helpdesk landing page is now The Customer Portal that includes a customizable home page. Go to manage> Configure Mojo Helpdesk to change it.


Improved branding customization

Mojo Helpdesk now also all plans to customize logos and helpdesk pages.


Guest request revamp

• Unregistered users can create new tickets w/o you having to create accounts. We removed the 'request and account' feature since user accounts are created automatically when an unregistered user create a request.
• Custom ticket fields are now present in the guest request 

We also fixed few annoying bugs.

As we develop most features based on customer input please don't hesitate to contact us with your suggestions.

You can  Mojo Helpdesk for free at 

 www.mojohelpdesk.com

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More great awards and press for Das Keyboard

We are glad to announce more press coverage and awards for our keyboard. The one thing most people seem to agree on is the addictive nature of the Das Keyboard tactile feedback. Check that out.

• Businesss Week: Das Keyboard Ultimate
• Wired: hands-on with the Das Keybaord III
• The Tech Loung: must-have hardward award
• Computer times: Editor's Choice Award

Read more buzz here.

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Das Keyboard Wins Computer Times Editor's Choice Award

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Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue.

The other day we got a message from a Das Keyboard customer saying that his PC did not recognize the keyboard. The error message was 

• "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue" 
  

Seriously, who is in charge of writing this stuff? Is this an official body governing the BIOS specifications? Can any one ping them about this?

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3G iPhone: The ideal product for math idiots

Chip Rosenthal who helped develop MojoHelpdesk says on his Twitter: "3G iPhone. $100 cheaper up front. $10 more expensive/month. It's the ideal product for math idiots".  

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Introducting Das Keyboard Professional and Ultimate

It's official! The third generation of Das Keyboard is now available for pre-order at www.daskeyboard.com. The new Das Keyboard is a complete redesign that focuses on providing the best typing experience. I think we succeeded but our users will have the final word on this.

The new Das keyboard comes in two models:

• Das Keyboard Ultimate: the blank mechanical keyboard
• Das Keyboard Professional: with inscriptions

Here are some feature highlights:

• Mechanical key switches
• USB hub
• Blue LEDs
• Glossy black enclosure
• extra long USB cable

Check it out at www.daskeyboard.com.

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Google is the new IBM.

After few weeks of beta testing, Google App Engine has opened their signup to everyone. This is significant for several reasons: It makes hosting your web app really simple, cheap and scalable.

If you think at all the steps it takes to host a web app and all the knowledge required to make it work, it is a fairly complicated and slow process.

What we need from a hosting company to host a database backed website:

• Simple, affordable and quick setup
• Enough CPU cycle when the app needs it
• Good tech support

The painful reality includes the following steps:

• Buy a domain name
• Choose a hosting company
• Log in using the web hosting proprietary and sometimes not easy-to-use control panel
• Setup users, passwords
• Create a database
• Zip your web app on your PC and upload it on your server via FTP
• Transfer the domain name to point to your hosted server
• getting upset with the bad support of your hosting company
  
• get enough CPU cycles for your app to run smoothly

With Google App Engine it’s incredibly easy:

• Register your app
• Run the deploy script from your development environment (yes, this is the only step!)

Done(!)

What you get on top of it:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email

and also...

• It’s free for small scale hosting and reasonably cheap for bigger scale requirements.
• The application life cycle management is included: Google App Engine allows you to roll back to any previous version of your app at any time.
• Automatic database schema update: no need to mess with phpMyAdmin. Your app will talk to Google and the database schema is managed automatically.

Google App Engine provides an ultra simple web app hosting solution that is more efficient, cheaper and dead easy to us. It’s only available in the Python language at this point but Google plans to rollout other languages shortly. This means 90% of all standard web apps could use this service and they probably will because it only requires running the ‘deploy’ command to send your app to Google.

Did you hear about the computing grid that is as pervasive and invisible as the electricity grid? I thought IBM would make it available to the world like they did it for the Personal Computer but Google made it a reality for all of us.

Google is the new IBM.

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Pre-announcing Das Keyboard III

We are glad to pre-announce the all new Das Keyboard III. It is a entire new design, slick and shiny. The Das Keyboard III sports mechanical key switches, a USB hub, and blue LEDs and n-key rollover. The tactile feel of Das Keyboard III is just incredible. It is not available for sale at this point and we hope it will be in few weeks. We'll be show some pictures shortly so stay tuned.

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Please call the helpdesk

IT support at its best...




How do you know your tech staff is not acting like this? With Mojo Helpdesk, each ticket is rated by your customers, so you know if your tech staff is doing a good job or not!.

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Handy gadget for Das Keyboard users

The world typing speed record is 212 wpm (words per minute). A fast hunt-and-peck typist will be at 25 wpm, a slow touch-typist at 50 wpm. Most Das Keyboard users are above 50 wpm. How fast can you type? Check your speed and monitor your touch-typing daily work out with this USB speedometer.

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Be dense: Edward Tufte about the iPhone interface

"Pack it to the max" would be a good summary of the iPhone efficient interface. But it could be better according to Edward Tufte. Watch the iPhone interface explained in this video.

"The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information--too often leaving users with "Where am I?" puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time."

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Rackspace fanatical support dropped below four nines

As many other companies offering high availability online applications to their customers, we provide Mojo Helpdesk and Montastic to tens of thousands organizations around the world. And since we want the best hosting experience we host our production servers at Rackspace. It has been a great experience until the last 2 years. Finally, Rackspace recent outages in November and December have propelled them below the 99.99% of availability, which is, by today's standards, just terrible. Here is a table showing what downtime percentages truly means:

Availability %	Downtime per year	Downtime per month*	Downtime per week
90%	36.5 days	72 hours	16.8 hours
95%	18.25 days	36 hours	8.4 hours
98%	7.30 days	14.4 hours	3.36 hours
99%	3.65 days	7.20 hours	1.68 hours
99.5%	1.83 days	3.60 hours	50.4 min
99.8%	17.52 hours	86.23 min	20.16 min
99.9%	8.76 hours	43.2 min	10.1 min
99.95%	4.38 hours	21.56 min	5.04 min
99.99%	52.6 min	4.32 min	1.01 min
99.999%	5.26 min	25.9 s	6.05 s
99.9999%	31.5 s	2.59 s	0.605 s

I am pretty sure I could host some server under my own desk and achieve a decent four nines with a little UPS. Rackpace downtimes, which the longest was 2 hours 30 minutes (!!!) place them below four nines. Interestingly enough their web states: "100% Network Uptime Isn't Wishful Thinking, It's A Guaranteed Reality". And... that's more nines they can afford.

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The history of operating systems powered by Metadot!

Reading Wikipedia's article on the history of computer operating system is fascinating, but a picture is worth a 1000 words. Here is it, in picture, on a site powered by Metadot Portal Server:

• www.oshistory.net
  

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How-to: DIY Das Keyboard for free

If you haven't got a Das Keyboard II with mechanical key switches for Christmans, don't be discouraged: you can have one for free (excluding sweat) if you dedicate a weekend building it:
Here is how from SaneAsylum.com:

• How-to: DIY Das Keyboard from SaneAsylum.com
  

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