the Spiggott

Location-based Apps Picking Up Steam

Scott Piggott — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:59:26 +0000

It seems like the location-based social media apps like Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite are finally beginning to pick up steam. Starbucks was an early adopter of Foursquare, and now I’m starting to see more and more small businesses take advantage of the opportunities that are being afforded by this new medium. In fact, the social media group at HM&P is currently working with several clients, including O2 Fitness, to roll out location-based promotions.

Here’s a great example of how it works. I went to a Durham Bulls baseball game last night. I checked in on Foursquare and was notified when I did so that there was a special nearby via a yellow callout on the checkin screen. I tapped it and was presented with the following special offer:

There are several upside to this offer. First, it’s very inexpensive (free) for the merchant – in this case Tyler’s Taproom. The only investment required is the time to claim ownership of the venue and set up the offers. Second, it’s non-intrusive for the end-user. To access this offer I wasn’t sent a text message or other form of interruption-style marketing message. I voluntarily retrieved the offer when I was notified that it was available. Because of these two factors, I expect location-based apps will be the “next big thing” much like Twitter a couple of years ago.

WWDC Sold Out

Scott Piggott — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:14:22 +0000

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference sells out for the third straight year in a record-breaking eight days. Not a good sign for Flash.

SXSW Trending on Twitter

Scott Piggott — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:37:12 +0000

Look at the rise in the term “SXSW” over the last few days on Twitter:

4G Performance, Part III: More from Austin

Scott Piggott — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:41:23 +0000

I got back to my hotel room this evening and attempted to have a video chat with my wife and kids. While fun, the video quality on my end was horrendous – which prompted me to do some more testing. I ran a test on Speedtest.net and got pretty awesome results, 7.01 Mbits up and .61 Mbits down. So then I ran the new Pingtest and their results weren’t quite as rosy. Raw throughput is okay on the Overdrive, at least at this location, but the real problem appears to be the “line quality”. I suppose the biggest issue here is the packet loss. Anyway, don’t cancel your cable Internet connection just yet – the 4G offering from Sprint still has much room for improvement.

Sierra Wireless Overdrive 3G/4G Performance, Part II

Scott Piggott — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:25:15 +0000

My first road trip with the Overdrive and I had pretty high hopes. I’m at SXSW in Austin, so I figured bandwidth would be a problem for AT&T given the number of iPhone toting geeks concentrated within a several block radius. I thought I’d be in the clear with 4G access via Sprint’s network. Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite what I’d hoped for. Here are my Speedtest results for Saturday morning:

Sierra Wireless Overdrive 3G/4G Performance

Scott Piggott — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:43:20 +0000

A couple of days ago, I ordered a Sierra Wireless Overdrive 3G/4G wireless hotspot from Sprint. I’ve only had the chance to use it a couple of times so I’m withholding judgement on performance until I’ve tried to use it in real world situations. I live in Raleigh, NC which is one of Sprint’s 4G markets, so I should get the excellent 4G speeds advertised. We’ll see if it lives up to the hype. I’ll continue to post Speedtest.net results as I accumulate them from geographically diverse locations.

4G Speedtest Results for Apex, NC

One thing I noticed as I’ve been testing the device is that Sprint’s 4G network connects to the public Internet at different locations nearly every time it establishes a 4G connection. So in the Speedtest above, the closest test server was located in Tampa, FL. It’s been different every time I’ve used 4G, even from the same location (my home, for example).

Another thing to note: it takes a long time for the Overdrive to start up and make a 4G connection. I used to use my iPhone in tethering mode for Internet access on business trips. Obviously, establishing an Internet connection with my MacBook Pro was much faster because the iPhone had already gone through it’s startup sequence and acquired a 3G connection. So, it’ll take a little getting used to the delay in starting up the Overdrive and actually being able to connect to the Internet.

Fixing SNMP in Mac OS X Server 10.5.7

Scott Piggott — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:39:48 +0000

I monitor my network with PRTG Network Monitor. After recently upgrading our Xserve from 10.5.4 to 10.5.7 (server), its status changed in PRTG to “in alarm” and was unable to connect via SNMP to collect any data. It turns out that the default configuration of the SNMP agent changed with the 10.5.7 upgrade, tightening access restrictions for the community string “public”. The fix is fairly simple. Edit line 97 of /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and restart the SNMP daemon to reload the config file.

The default SNMP configuration in 10.5.7 and above limits unauthenticated access to the system contact info as shown in lines 96 and 97 of /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf:

# We limit unauthenticated requesters to the system contact info rocommunity public default .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.4

To allow access to MIB-2 info only, edit line 97 as follows:

rocommunity public default .1.3.6.1.2.1

To allow unlimited access, edit line 97 as follows:

rocommunity public

Then restart SNMP:

sudo killall -c snmpd -HUP

NOTE: The new default configuration of SNMP in 10.5.7 is the same in Snow Leopard.

In-Depth Review of Snow Leopard

Scott Piggott — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:06:12 +0000

John Siracusa has posted an exhaustive review of Apple’s latest OS release, Snow Leopard. Great read if you really want to learn why you need to upgrade.

HM&P Launches Redesigned NutriDense.com

Scott Piggott — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:23:15 +0000

Howard, Merrell & Partners recently launched the redesigned NutriDense.com. See before and after images after the jump.

Before:

After:

Twitter Fail

Scott Piggott — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:25:50 +0000

Twitter experienced complete failure today due to a massive DDoS attack. It appears to be under attack again now as it is completely unresponsive. Kinda scary to think that web services are that vulnerable. As more and more of our lives move to the digital space (communication, banking, etc) we are becoming increasingly vulnerable and affected when outages like this occur. And they will continue to occur.