April 2011
1 post
Bind to Route 53 transitioning
If you’re like us and have been managing your own DNS for a while, you’ve probably grown use to making changes to zone files and running “rndc reload”.  Well, we’ve transitioned to using Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service which allows us to leave the nameserving up to Amazon’s global presence of nameservers.    Transitioning to Route 53 is a little bit tricky,...
Apr 15th
June 2010
1 post
Wireframing
We’ve been doing quite a bit of information architecture lately with the design and development of http://www.fitterwith.com and our forthcoming lucyphone.com version 2 launch.  After stumbling through OmniGraffle, Visio, and various cheap drawing applications, we’ve been pretty impressed with how Balsamiq makes wireframing ideas really easy.  It’s an Adobe AIR app, so...
Jun 27th
February 2010
1 post
Thinking Sphinx... and feeling jinxed
After some time working with Thinking Sphinx for a client, I figured I should share some of the gotchas I worked through.  I didn’t find the TS documentation to be all that bad at first glance.  It all seemed fairly comprehensive.  But after working with TS in practice, here are a few things I would have liked to know: 1.  How to get around Delta indexing troubles on Passenger The...
Feb 18th
1 note
November 2009
1 post
WatchWatch
Here’s a short video which shows the Lucyphone.com experience.  We’re seeing customer service complaints at an all-time high, and there’s a real opportunity to streamline the call center process, and minimize aggravation.  Right now our objective is to proselytize the service to customer service managers, so that their CSR are familiar with the Lucyphone brand.  By being...
Nov 16th
October 2009
1 post
The Quest for Unmetered Bandwidth
It’s an auspicious day - a beautiful fall morning in Richmond, and I’ve taken the train from Manhattan to meet my brother for our kickoff meeting and to jump into the remaining items before we launch the beta of our first product, LucyPhone.com We’re still kicking around various beyond-beta business models, and in the process of moving our asterisk instances off the Amazon EC2...
Oct 6th