…then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet:
Category: Geek
Categories
CCS: Coming Tomorrow!
[Cross-posted to The Farm and Tucows Developer]
First, something that Tucows resellers will “get”:
The General Acceptance release of the new Client Code Suite (CCS) will
be
released tomorrow! You’ll be able to download the CCS package and find
accompanying documentation at the CCS site then, and the CCS site will
regularly feature articles covering different aspects of CCS, including
customizing it to fit your business and its needs.
Before I go on, I’d like to show my appreciation for the development
teams in the both the Toronto and Starkville offices. You folks have
worked hard, and the end result looks great. A filet mignon on a
flaming sword to you all!
CCS? What’s That? (Or: In case you’re not a Tucows reseller or in the internet services business)
Firstly, an explanation of what Tucows does.
We’re a company that sells
internet services wholesale to our customers — internet service
providers, web hosting companies and the like — who in turn resell
them to their customers. These services include domain names, digital certificates, Blogware, email, anti-spam services, site publishing, DNS and maybe cool new things like Skydasher.
It’s been said that internet service providers and hosting services are
in an industry like the construction and home improvement contractor
industry. Rather than being an industry in which there’s one big player
with 80% of the market, another with 10% of the market and the
remainder compteting over the last 10%, there are thousands of
contractors, each of whom serve their own small segment of the market.
In that industry, there’s no “Wal-Mart plumber” who fixes 80% of
everyone’s pipes, nor is there a “Microsoft drywaller” to whom 80% of
people go when they want to finish the basement.
Our customers are in similar situation — internet service providers
and hosting services also serve their slice of the pie. If they’re like
construction contractors, we’re Home Depot: we sell them the stuff they need to serve their customers. Following this metaphor further, my job is to be Bob Vila (or Tim Allen), helping their developers customize our services to their needs.
Next, how our customers resell our services
Most of our
customers sell our services by setting up a web site where their
customers can purchase services. The site then communicates with our
servers, which then provision the service. There are two approaches to
implementing such a site:
- You can directly access our OpenSRS API.
This involves writing
your own web site completely from scratch, including all the back-end
software that talks to our OpenSRS servers. You need a dedicated and
knowledgeable developer or team of developers to do this. The people
who take this approach tend to be large ISPs serving tens of thousands
of customers.
- You can use client code.
This is pre-written software that displays the web pages for your site
and communicates with our OpenSRS servers. You’ll have to make some
customizations — some are cosmetic, such as adding your company logo
and other corporate identity elements; others are related to which
Tucows services you’re reselling, and if you’re selling services in
bundles. The people who take this approach tend to be small to medium
companies, who make the bulk of our customers. Some of our most active
customers fall into this category and are companies of one or two
people operating out of their own homes. (Gotta love the internet!)
Our current client code offering
Right now, our customers can get their hands on something called the
Reseller Client Library (RCL). There are some problems with it:
- It’s a royal pain to install.
I like to consider myself a reasonably savvy developer/techie type, and
I feel like drop-kicking my machine across the room every time I
install it.
- After you install it, you’ve got to customize it.
The RCL doesn’t give you a ready-to-face-the-world web site right “out
of the box”. It’s a skeleton on which you add your own code and
customizations in order to have a functioning web site for selling
services. This means you’ve got to know how to program in Perl and how
to fit your code in with ours.
- The installation pain is nothing compared to the upgrading pain.
When we release a new version of the RCL — typically when we make some
fizes, changes to an existing service or when we introduce a new
service — you’ve got to apply your customizations again.
- Integrating a payment gateway isn’t easy.
If you haven’t got some way to get money from your customers in
exchange for the service you’re reselling, you’re in trouble. You can
hook the RCL up to a payment gateway, but you’ve got to do it in
several places in the code. Miss one of those places, and there’s a
“hole” by which your customers could be getting those services for free.
- It’s a bit troublesome to run under Windows Server.
RCL is written in Perl, which has always been a little troublesome for
web apps hosted on Windows-based servers. You have to do some extra
work in order to get RCL to run under Windows.
Enter CCS
CCS is a vast improvement over the RCL. Where the RCL is a foundation
with which you can build a site to resell our services, CCS is a
turnkey solution — it’s a fully-functional web service storefront than
runs once you’ve installed it and run the setup wizards. If you’re
feeling lazy, you can keep your customizations to a minimum and simply
stick your company logo on it.
(If you’re really lazy, you can simply change your company name to “Your Logo Here”.)
CCS has these features:
- Easy to install and configure.
The most basic setup steps are: Download. Unzip. Run the technical
setup wizard. Run the business setup wizard. Change logo. Sell services.
- Easy to customize and upgrade.
It has a nice user interface that lets you set the prices without
having to edit configuration files. Its template system lets you change
the look and feel to match your company’s identity and keep those
changes even when we update the client code.
- Simple payment gateway integration.
Payment gateway integration with a number of gateways or via our billing service, Platypus, is much, much easier.
- It’s easy to create and sell bundles.
When used in tandem with Platypus, you can create bundles of services
— collections of services sold as a single unit. For example, it’s
easy to create a bundle containing a domain name, a Blogware blog,
email with three addresses and some web hosting space and then sell it
as a single package. You can create any number of bundles.
- It runs on Unix and Windows servers.
It’s written in PHP 5, which has good cross-platform support. I’ve seen
it run on Linux, Windows and even MacOS (some of our developers use
Macs as development boxes).
Coming tomorrow!
The release date for the 1.0 version of CCS is Thursday, August 4th. It will be available for download from the CCS site,
where you’ll find lots of extra information, hints and tips. If you’re
thinking of becoming a Tucows reseller — and especially if you already
are one and use the RCL — I think you’ll really like what CCS has to
offer.
[Cross-posted to The Farm and Tucows Developer]
I’ll let Dave
Winer’s OPML weblog do the talking:
OPML Roadshow in Toronto, August
2!
Here’s a surprise, there will be an
impromptu OPML Roadshow meetup in Toronto, Tuesday evening at
7PM.
Slakinski, co-author of the international hit — iPodderX — is the host, and
has generously offered use of their conference room. We’re still
arranging, this is very quick thing, but it should be great
fun.
The meetup should last about two hours, then
we’ll go to dinner at a local restaurant. The usual thing, what we
in NYC and
So now, Murphy-willing, the OPML Roadshow goes
international.
See you in Toronto!!
For those of you who’d be interested in catching
this meetup, Tucows is located at 96
Mowat Avenue, in the Liberty Village distriuct. Mowat is the
first street east of Dufferin off King; we’re a half-block south of
King.
Categories
Lots of Good Developer Reading at "The Farm"
If you’re a developer, I’ve got lots of good reading material and links for you at the blog I get paid to write, The Farm!
Last night was an unsuccessful round one of me versus the D-Link
wireless router belonging to my friend Leesh’s parents. Normally,
Leesh’s husband, my old University buddy George would handle this, but he lives in New York. I’m all too happy to lend a hand to my best man’s in-laws.
For the technically inclined, it keeps timing out before getting an IP
address from Rogers Cablesystems’ DHCP server. I know it’s not a
problem at Rogers’ end, because the ‘net is accessible if you simply
run cat-5 directly from the cable modem to the computer works. The
firmware in the D-Link is up-to-date, too.
Earlier this year, I hooked up a Linksys wireless router to my Mom’s
Rogers cable broadband service without any problems; it just worked. I may bring mine over to Leesh’s parents’ place this Sunday and see if it works.
By sheer coincidence, I have a free trial of Roger’s cable braodband
service at my current house. I’ve taken the D-Link home to noodle with
it in the meantime.
Speaking of cable modem difficulties, those of you who are familiar
with the nuances of swearing in Quebecois French will probably enjoy this
recording of an irate cable modem subscriber unloading much bile upon a
poor tech support rep at Quebec cable provider Videotron [576KB, MP3, language warning if you speak Quebecois French]. Even if you can’t understand a word, this guy’s mile-a-minute delivery of venom is priceless.
Categories
Ch0wnz0red! (And Thanks!)
First of all, everybody who commented or sent me an email regarding my inaccessible directory problem from the previous entry: thanks for writing in!
Secondly, give yourselves all a pat on the back for knowing it was an ownership/permissions problem.
Finally, the big prize goes to Martey Dodoo (who also has a blog, titled This is Martey Dodoo) for pointing me to what I couldn’t find — the way to call up the correct dialog box for changing the ownership of a directory.
In the Unix command line world, the chown
command, which rhymes with “clone” and not
“town”, does this (it’s also where the title to this entry comes from).
Martey’s solution was the simplest thing
that could possibly work and took all of 3 or so minutes to carry out.
It took 10 seconds of mouse clicks and 3 minutes for the hard disk to
chug to
change permissions on a buttload of files.
I’ll have to document the problem and the solution on this blog to
ensure that people who get into the same predicament will be more
likely to find it when they Google for a solution.
Once again, thank you everyone for your assistance.
Special note for Martey: Please email me your snail mail address so I can send you a little “thank you” token!
While repartitioning my home Windows XP box’s hard drive —
something I’vce done at least half a dozen times before — I have
rendered my old “My Documents” folder inaccessible to me. If you’ve
seen this before and have a suggestion, I’d appreciate it!
Here’s what happened:
- I used to have two partitions created using PartitionMagic on my 160GB drive: 120 for Windows XP, 40 for Mandrake Linux.
- I was running out of space on the Windows side, and since I do
most things Unix-y on my Mac, I decided to reclaim the 40GB that
Mandrake was using. I used PartitionMagic and set it up to delete the
Mandrake partition and then append it to the Windows partition.
- No, I didn’t make a backup. Bad move on my part. I was tired.
- PartitionMagic did its thing, reclaiming the partition. It then
rebooted the system, and on rebooting, the monitor displayed “
L 99 9999 99 99 99…” in text mode and the computer stopped. Just a little
MBR (Master Boot Record) problem; nothing I haven’t seen before and
easy to fix.
- With the MBR fixed, I was able to boot into Windows. The problem:
PartitionMagic left a program that runs on boot-up that restarts the
machine. Which boots into Windows, which then hits this program, which
reboots the machine. Which boots into Windows, which then hits this
program…
I can’t find where PartitionMagic put this program.
- I try a little trick that’s worked for me before. I reinstall
Windows XP without erasing the partition first. I get the standard
warning and reinstall Windows into a new directory, C:\WINXP (the
original is in C:\WINDOWS). The main user of the old system was
“Administrator”; the main user of the new system is “Joey deVilla”.
- I now boot into Windows. Under C:\Documents and Settings, I see
the old “Administrator” folder, the “My Documents” folder for my old
system and where all my files are stored. I try to open it, I get this:
ACCESS DENIEDWindows reports that this folder’s file size is 0.
Looking at the hard drive capacity, I see that all my old files
are still on it — about 118GB of my hard drive is already taken up
with files. I just can’t get to them.
(I’ve done this before and have always been able to get back to my old
“My Documents” folder. Damned if I can figure out why this time is
different.)
Most of what’s in this is eaither backed up of easily replaceable. What
I really want are the past few months’ photos, which I can never
replace, although having my MP3 collection would be a bonus.
Anyone know how I can get to these files? Let me know either via email or in the comments!