The Dan Gaul Weblog

I typically don’t like writing posts like this, but today I’m compelled to write this post about Limelight Networks in hopes to enlighten other people of Digital Trends’ horrible and ongoing experience with them.

When we decided to start creating our own videos, we decided to use Limelight Networks for our streaming service provider. Their rates were extremely competitive, their staff seemed knowledgeable and they offered Flash 8 and Windows Media streaming.

However, we always seemed to experience random buffering issues with both Windows Media and Flash. We first thought it was just our network at the office, but we started getting reports from users of the site from all over the US, Canada and other parts of the world.

We would submit tickets, but the issue always seemed to “resolve” themselves before tech support could really dig in.

Then November of 2006 happened. Our streams went down for over 3 weeks. I spent much of my own time working with a dedicated support technician at LimeLight Networks not only during the day, but into the evenings and into the early mornings helping them debug the issue.

You would think 3 weeks of network outage would bring up red flags, and they did. But what really got me worried was when a tech support technician told me they only had 2 windows certified technicians. Finding out that they had a hardware firewall AND the old piece of crap Microsoft firewall running on the servers didn’t help. Nor did the fact that because of the Microsoft firewall, requests coming in wound being re-requested by the server two or three times, in essence doubling and tripling our bandwidth usage.

Not only that, but at the same time there were apparently huge issues with AT&T upstream, and we were the only client complaining, but all windows media clients were effected.

Despite these huge issues, no matter how real or not they were, our videos finally began streaming again. However, in the bill for that month, we got billed triple our normal rate (see above for the reason). We never paid it and contested it immediately. The technicians backed me up, and the whole month of November was supposed to be credited back (removed from the bill) along with the half the month of October due to the double/triple bandwidth issue.

It is now July of 2007, and guess what? We are still waiting for the credit. It’s unbelievable. In fact, the previous Director of Client Services at Limelight thought it was unbelievable that we hadn’t been credited. He expressed it every time I called, which happened to be every month when I got the bill. I told him each time we aren’t paying anything including valid charged until we get the credit, which he agreed was completely acceptable. Calling the single billing person (you heard that right, their whole billing department is one poor guy…) results in the same thing every time; being told that the credit has been approved and they are just waiting for it to make it through the system. What type of system is Limelight using? The snail in my backyard moves faster!

We ended up leaving Limelight networks about 4 months ago, and we haven’t looked back. We are now using Internap for our needs. They have their own issues, but we’ve never had any problems with buffering or the servers going down completely. The price is right, and we are happy with them.

I recommend that if you are looking to for a CDN (content delivery network) and have Limelight on your list to take into consideration our experience with them. If you have any questions please feel free to send them to Digital Trends’ feedback form.

As for us, we’ll move on. I’m just thankful we never paid the overage bill with the hopes of getting future credit, because it would have never happened.

I switched over to an Intel Mac from my PPC one about 2 months ago. I use Zend Studio for my PHP IDE, and it worked just fine on the PPC, including studio server and being able to debug. There were always issues with some memory leaks, but they were minor annoyances more than anything else. All I had to do was save the project and restart Zend.

Switching to an Intel Mac has been an extremely positive experience. I can now run Parallels and check things in IE6, IE7, run some windows programs I’m missing on the Mac, etc. However, the move to Intel has been a pain in the ass for developing using Zend Studio. I can’t install Studio Sever, which is needed for debugging in the environment I’m in. The memory leaks seem worse, where I frequently have to KILL Studio instead of just saving the project, closing and relaunching it. Sometimes I dont notice Studio is acting right away, and my changes aren’t saved even though I’m using the keyboard shortcuts to try to save.

You see, Zend Studio and Studio Server are not officially supported on Intel Macs, yet. Boo on me you might say? Yes, I agree somewhat. Zend is a Java applications, so it’s supposed to be cross platform. Zend Studio Server uses Apache, so releasing a versions for Intel and PPC should technically not be that different. Especially since the thing that server dies on is not the install, but the initialization of Studio Server, where the apache module fails to load. However, Zend’s lack of response to just release an updated Studio Server is inexcusible. Many comments in their forums shows that many people are unhappy to the point of switching to a different IDEs. I myself tried out Komodo, which I thought was pretty good but I missed some things in Zend Studio that Komodo doesnt have, plus we here at Digital Trends have forked out a ton of $ for Zend Studio licenses. I dont want to go spend even more money for a pro license of Komodo when it’s not in my development budget.

I submitted a ticket a couple months ago to Zend about this problem, and their response was that a new version of Studio should be out within a month. That time has come and gone, and still no new version, no support for Intel Macs.

If this is how Zend supports customers, I’m not inclined to renew our licenses with them when they expire near the end of the year.

So we got Zimbra installed. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a group collaboration and email suite. Their webmail is using AJAX and is pretty nice. They have shared calendaring, and will have shared folders & contacts. However, if I remember correctly you have to buy a license to get access to some of the collaboration tools. That’s OK though since there is a free version, which is the one we are running for testing right now.

I do have some comments though. There needs to be an IMAP/user account migration tool, so you can migration your existing users over. Luckily I was able to find a tool in their forums called imapsync which did a great job of moving over emails. The draw back is you have to know the users email password to do so. Not very secure, but I guess you could setup a webpage so that users could run it themselves.

Anyways, I would love to get our company a license, but I’m a little wary since Zimbra is still in beta, and many features worth paying for are not implemented. It would be nice if they offered pricing on their site, and also a discount for early adopters. I’d sign up if they could offer a lifetime discount for migrating to their software before it’s gold. Especially since I have to pay our sysadmin to trouble shoot anything that goes wrong, including with the software install (which did happen.)

Many of you may not know, but I’m currently the lone developer for Designtechnica. We do have a graphic designer, but I do all the coding. As Designtechnica grows the work that keeps piling up on my plate grows exponentially. We launched the new site earlier this year, and there are still bugs that I havent had time to go back and fix because of higher priority features.

Hopefully that will change soon, at least the “lone dev” part. I’m going to be looking for some part time helpers, but I need to setup a dev environment that is beneficial to all who participate. My setup right now is not the best environment. I have a linux server here at home that acts as my host environment for testing, and also storing all the code. My actual dev machine is a Windows XP machine. There is no versioning control system, since I’m the only guy editing/creating new files. I had good intentions to use CVS, I swear! I just never got around to it since I had a gazillion other things to worry about. So, I’ve done some research, and I’m going to convert one of our older live servers to a developer/test box. The best versioning control system I’ve seen so far from the quick research I did was Subversion. I’ve used Bugzilla for a while at my previous job at RealNetworks, and it worked excellent, so I plan on installing that as well.

With a dev/test server up with Subversion and Bugzilla installed will not only allow better control of source, but it makes the task of hiring part-time devs easier. How? By having the environment setup for them already. I wont have to open up my home server to the net, and I dont have to keep it on 24 hours a day, which I can’t currently do anyways due to the ol’ wife.

So here are some questions for you more informed people out there:
What are your thoughts on Subversion, especially versus good old CVS?
Is there another versioning control system I’ve overlooked that is on par or better than Subversion and CVS?
What are the setups of some other web development people?

What is this thing, and who is this Dan Gaul character?

This is my blog. It will contain my rants, things I think are interesting, work issues, my love for hockey, coding, and anything else I find relevant. As for who I am, I’m a husband and father of two boys (5 years and 3 months respectively as of this writing.) I’ve done many things in my life so far; I started skateboarding when I was in 6th grade. I stopped when I was 28 when I broke my back (burst fracture of the L1, but that’s a different story.) Some people call me a computer geek, even though I dont necessarily think so. I started toying with computers on a Commadore 128, teaching myself BASIC, using it to create basic forms and draw. I upgraded to an Amiga, but the parts for it were so expensive, and being in 8th grade when I got the Amiga, it basically sat and colltected dust. Fast forward to when I was in college, and my interest in computers got rekindled on a Macintosh computer. I dont even remember the model, but I upgraded to a 386, then a 8500/120 Mac, then a 486. To keep a long story short, I went to community college at first like lots of other kids. I didnt know what I wanted to do, and by the time I did, I had run out of money (I was paying my own way from money I received from an automobile accident.) I was going to University of Washington at the time. When I started looking for a job so I could save up to go back, I ended up at Microsoft as a contractor for two years. I left Microsoft and went to Clarus Corp, then to RealNetworks for 5 years. I eventually left to focus full time on Designtechnica with Ian, and I haven’t looked back.

Well, this is probably more history than most people would want to know about me. Feel free to contact me and ask questions: dangaul AT designtechnica.com