Haven't blog for a long time.

Still remember I used to blog and write regularly during the days in high school. However since started working on my startups, I can no longer keep the habit of blogging.

Since I have been doing most of my emails on iPhone, maybe I can try if I can blog more if I... encourage myself to blog by iPhone too? (With the simple yet fantastic Posterous iPhone apps)

Maybe write a short blog few times a week during commute?

Let's see how this experiment goes...

Three years after I moved to an apartment in Mongkok, my families started throwing my old stuffs in my room -- well that's kind of sad... anyway. Tonight I saw some of those old stuffs get packed together, and that brings me the good old memory of how I fall in love with computer, learnt coding, and doing a business in Web now... 

This CD is actually not really "old", when I was Year 3 in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, we have organized, probably the first advocacy group on free culture in Hong Kong, namely "Intellectual Property Issues Watch". One thing we did is Rick translated the OpenCD project into Chinese, we made 3000 CD, and managed to ship it with the computers purchased in the Student Notebook Programme of CUHK.

RUNPC was one of the best Chinese Computer Magazine you can find at that time -- I guess I was addicted to it around 1998 - 1999.

(download)

Click here to download:

how-i-fall-in-love-with-computer-when-i-was-young-EuIhFtDIGthoqAEpuwak.zip (5.75 MB)

電腦教育 (Computer Education) is definitely the most geeky computer magazine I've ever seen in Hong Kong! It was around 1995, 1996, I was still a primary school students. It features some kind of tutorial (e.g. How a 24 bit VGA card works?) or some news (New features of DOS 6.0) in every issues; and the magazine is always full of codes (mostly in QBasic, Turbo C and Pascal). From something as simple as how to list the directory, as academic as very simple characters recognition, or as crazy as a well developed Chinese Chess Game!

Students soaked in these kind of magazines are meant to be good developers (hehe), I might not understand all of it when I was a primary school students, but I do remember I learnt a lot from these articles...

I got this box of C++ Builder 4 when I need it for one of my earliest freelance project -- I built a simple CRM software with it. I remember it cost ~ HKD 4k, sometimes even I can't really imagine the price of freelance work was so good (compare with today...) in some sense I'm just repeating myself -- at Oursky we are planning to build another CRM product now... sigh.

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** UPDATE: Rackspace representative explain that what happened here is not supposed to be their standard process, see my latest comments below. Wish they will be more transparent on these issues in future **

This is a story about a web startup provide simple form / survey creation services, and it get totally shutdown by Rackspace Cloud since they "think" one of our user's form is phishing, and this may happen on your startup too! Some background information first...

Some Background

We run a web startup (PandaForm), which is a simple forms creation services which integrate with a CRM for small businesses to handle their customer's forms such as who signed up to what events, who ordered which products, etc. We were self-funded by doing web consultation aside. We have a few thousands users right now, and we have 10 servers on Rackspace CloudServer (and a Rackspace Cloudsites), Slicehost and Amazon Web services for our consultation clients and the web service.

I always love Rackspace Cloud over others due to it's price and performance, but I can never imagine this happens to me..

Time Line

This is 2010 Sep 1, 1:11am HKT, after 2 hours of down time, exhausted for apologize to my clients.... and this is what happened in brief (in Hong Kong Time):

• Aug 31, 9:57pm - An email sent from Rackspace Cloud, saying a ticket is created so I have to respond immediately. (I didn't pick this email up yet)
• Aug 31, 10:42pm - 2 servers running our service was taken down as reported by pingdom.
• Aug 31, 10:50pm - I read the email sent to me at 9:57pm on my iPhone, and shocked when I clicked on the ticket and read the content (see below) on my Safari.  (The ticket didn't highlight my servers were taken down and the ticket system didn't work on my iPhone Safari browser anyway). I added a comment as a respond to the ticket immediately. Tried to explain that I run a web service and if one of my users is phishing I will be investigating, request to take my servers back online immediately.
• Between 10:50pm - 11:15pm:
  • Tried to talk with support on live chat, it didn't work and they asked me to call their hotline;
  • Talk on the hotline for 15minutes (was put on hold for 10 mins);
  • They asked me to fix the server within 3 hours, and I insist that I need 12 hours.
• 12:01am - Server back online finally. I have a chance to look at the subdomain they're complaining (nothing special about it for me), and clicked the "Disable" button on our administrative panel painfully. Apologize and explain to my clients on email and phone.
• 12:54am - Got another email from Rackspace, saying "If we received 1 more complaint we will have to terminate the client account per our AUP policy and per legal policy. " Great! Now they force me to move my servers to other services provider (see the full message below)

Why am I so annoyed with it?

Fellows web startups founders -- imagine one day your users uploaded content got a phishing / copyright complain, and your server was taken down without notice within 1 hour -- all these things happened during mid-night and you got no explaination of what is the complain, who filed the complaint, etc.

I'm definitely willing to be responsible and to investigate when there are complaint to our users, but I think I deserve a better notice with more information, and more time to do the investigation. But not taken down your server in a hour during mid-night.

And why infrastructure provider have such a great power to terminate their client's servers? Isn't that the phishing complaint should be forwarded to the services provider? Is the infrustrature provider the best people to judge what's phishing or violated copyright and what's not?

At the end, thanks to those support people who help me and make me speak to the right people.

Lesson Learnt?

Now I've 12 hours to resolve the "issues", I've disabled the user's account but I don't know what will happen since they've warned with 1 more complaint they will take out my whole rackspace account. I will have to move all of my servers (including my customer's dedicated servers on the same account) to somewhere else, I don't wanna risk losing all of my servers so suggestions are welcomed.

So with Rackspace Cloud taking down my servers, I'm trying to ask all major cloud servers providers how they handle these incident before doing the migration, I will keep updating this table after I heard their feedback.

Now I wish I don't have to wake up my whole team for this incident, but they wake up and trying to backup everything now on the servers... god bless us til tomorrow morning when we start migrating the servers!

How Rackspace notify me in their ticket system....

Hello,

We have been notified that there is a phishing site located on your server.

(http://[xxxxxx].pandaform.com/pub/[xxxxxxx]/new)

A phishing site is set up to steal personal information from unsuspecting consumers to use in instances such as identity theft. I am forwarding this to a member of your support team to disable at this time. Please contact us immediately so that we can resolve this issue.

Sincerely,
Renee Graves
Rackspace AUP

How Rackspace follow up...

Ben,

Thank you for calling in and raising concern about the phishing site on your server. I do understand that you are upset and dissatisfied with our customer support however we are responsible for thousands of other customers on our network and we have legal responsibilities as well.

I conferred with our AUP department and they confirmed that the customer who has a phishing site must take immediate action. If we received 1 more complaint we will have to terminate the client account per our AUP policy and per legal policy.

Again, I do apologize for the short notice however those are the terms and conditions you agreed to when you chose to host with the Rackspace Cloud.

Regards,
Harris Collins
Account Manager

Interesting...

1. Ability to edit Google Docs / Better iWorks -- I found that although I'm using iPad mostly at home but when i want to do some works... I really need to access and edit documents easily. iWorks on iPad is lacking some critical features for me such as presenter note in Keynote, or good table support in Pages. The USD $7.99 Office2 HD from AppStore just cannot open Document created by new version of Google Docs. These things really annoyed me. Surprisingly, typing on iPad is getting much better now with the official iPad case I bought which help makes iPad stand on my desk in typing position. I no longer have a problem on how to hold the iPad and even forgot to buy a bluetooth keyboard now. 2. Multi-tasking -- i know iPhone OS4 might be able to solve it but it just not there yet. It is really annoying when u want to switch between IM and works frequently or want to listen to KKBOX / YouTube when u are replying emails.

3. Traditional Chinese Input support -- this one don't bother me much.

4. Tweetie on iPad -- Tweetie is still my fav twitter client. Twitterific is okay but sometime I just miss Tweetie's simplicity and usability.

5. More memory for Safari -- since I use iPad as net book replacement, so my old habit of opening a lot of tabs on web browsers appears on iPad too! And I guess due to memory limitation, Safari just don't keep my old tabs and have to reload between each tabs when i have more than 3 - 4 tabs open.

So here is it. Anyway I'm pretty happy with my iPad most of the time. Appreciate Apple for creating such a great product!

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/chpapa
Blog: http://www.bencheng.net
Photo: http://core.stepcase.com/chpapa

Why?

A. Facebook have a bad privacy track record, either it is Facebook Beacon, or the Facebook silently changes it's privacy (The Facebook Great Betrayal)

B. Yesterday, when I logged into Facebook, it keeps asking me to link all my profiles to Pages and website, the interface is designed in a way that it is very difficult to opt-out, and if I choose not to link any pages, it threaten to EMPTY MY PROFILE.

And what if you say yes to the links? It quietly warn you that they are public!

So I decided to empty it myself. 

Facebook is not respecting their users, they keep trying to force people to go public with their private profile and personal data. 

No! I'm not going to give Facebook another chance, I've enough. 

I strongly encourage you to do so, quit Facebook today. Maybe the world will changes so that no one care about privacy and respect their users anymore, might be some day the law-makers will know they should stand and do something. Before that happens, let's try to change the world by market force -- we vote by our foots (or clicks).

With an A grade from the course, I thought I am pretty good at it already -- think about a business model, with a specific and targeted customer group... While jumping into the web 2.0 startup scenes, with a real problem to solve, we at Oursky.com started to develop Pandaform.com.

And the story begin -- I didn't aware I missed the most important part of the game -- u have to explain your product to others.

From a full feature workflow builder, we found that our original assumption that workflow application is complicated is wrong, the problem is most small business just dun have the concept of "business process"...

Okay, and than we try to simplify it by saying it is a Form Builder instead of workflow engine, we thought it is simple enough but than people ask: Form builder of what?

Okay so a lot of forms created by our pilot tester are just application form, so we further simplify it as a Application Form Software, and we are still working on it...

Today one of us say... What our clients need might be just something like, they can import a Google Spreadsheet, make it into a form, and send the forms to a list of people in the spreadsheet like the "mail merge" feature in Word and Excel, and the submitted data will be sync back into the spreadsheet...

This... Makes perfect sense, and sounds like a simple product.

OMG, product design...

I was so "high" by listening to all those new / old songs of LMF tonight, it reminds me of my childhood and teenage...

The song in the youtube video above is the first song I heard from them, I keep listening to it days and nights when i was a teenager, I mean... With all those love songs flooding the market, they are the only alternative if I want sth different. And you know what, I am just as lazy as they described in the song, I keep telling people my philosophy of life is as the song said -- get a lazy life which I can do nothing (sleep till 3pm), dun have to care how others think about me (messy hair and never wear a proper suit).

Frankly I keep these habits till today -- I still work / think at night instead of day time, I never dress properly in my office...

So after all these years (damn I am 25 now, almost no excuse to act as lazy as I wish), after LMF have been almost forgotten, they... CAME BACK!

Their new song 揸�中指 (hold your middle finger, translate by my poor English), keep fffuuuucccckkkking the conservatives and asking why HK became a city people start forgot justices, liberty and freedom. I have became more social / politically aware as i grow and it seems so do LMF, again LMF hit my heart with their song... It just feels like I belong to a "LMF generation".

So if anyone tell me LMF is bad becoz of their use of foul language in the music, I will just say try to read listen and read their lyric, or fuck off.

And they even put up their song on their website for download! Would be more appreciate if they put the song in Creative Commons license. :-)

I wish I could have write this blog with Chinese but I can't do it on iPad... Sigh.....