Comments on: The personal service management console

By: Andy C

Andy C — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:56:08 +0000

I saw a hint on the BH forums that suggested changing/adding

AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi

to .htaccess which fixed my Django app.

By: Andy C

Andy C — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:46:03 +0000

Interesting. My Django site on bluehost has suddenly stopped working. Now I know why.

By: Fred Leo

Fred Leo — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:06:42 +0000

Speaking of banks, I was stunned recently to learn that when I paid my mortgage (word derivation — gauge of death) with my bank’s online bill paying function, there really wasn’t much “online” about the actual transfer of funds. It turns out the mortgage company only accepts mailed checks, which I only realized when the process had hit a roadblock, causing a snippy call from my mortgage company. True this is a consumer example, but it’s even more important to avoid these issues at the business-to-business level because of the scope of consequences. A customer or a consumer works on the assumption that things function. If things don’t function, and there’s no notification, that relationship is in jeopardy. So I think your idea is clearly in the necessity category.

By: Tessa Lau

Tessa Lau — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:35:40 +0000

We’ve thought about this is a future direction for the CoScripter project. What if you could subscribe to feeds that notify you of events of interest, such as a service going down, or a process getting stuck? Right now, if you’re lucky, you get an email notification from your bank that your check did not clear. If you’re not lucky, that state could pass unnoticed until months down the line when the credit company comes knocking at your door asking why you haven’t made your payment.

A few years ago I did some work on this topic, trying to model common processes such as the process of buying an item from Amazon. I was motivated by an incident that happened one Christmas: of the dozen or so gifts I ordered online, one never arrived, a fact which escaped my attention until February. By looking at the automatically-generated email from the vendor, and comparing the email flow from a healthy process versus a wedged process, a smart agent might be able to detect that something has gone wrong in the process and notify the user to take action. http://tlau.org/research/papers/kushmerick-iui05.pdf

One interesting problem is then how to gather all of your various notifications into a single common format so that they can be processed by such a system. For example, your bank notificataions may be only accessible by logging in to your bank website. Maybe we can use something like CoScripter to let end users define how to extract this information automatically for each of their services of interest.

By: bernardlunn

bernardlunn — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:24:30 +0000

I think you are right that this is a real problem for millions of people and not just an early adopter issue. Have you looked at what Doc Searls and others are doing related to Vendor Relationship Management:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page

I have been following it and there is certainly a huge problem to solve. It looks currently too broad. I am looking for that one neat must have feature that gets this idea off the ground.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:54:00 +0000

“In general, until every upgrade is 100 percent backward compatible”

i.e. never

“you will have to track down and adjust to changes”

Agreed. It would be helpful, at least, to be able subscribe to streams of operational event data from your providers, at varying levels of verbosity, so you’d have a better idea of what changes are occurring.

Of course providers should tell you. It’s usually not automatic. But it could be. Might the sort of operational transparency that characterizes open source projects become a differentiator for some commercial services?

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:43:54 +0000

“Would you trust the console to keep your passwords?”

Well I wouldn’t want to use passwords, I’d want to use information cards. But I don’t want to present one one a per-provider basis. So maybe as part of setting up a relationship with a provider I authorize it to write notifications into a cloud-based store that I control and where I access all providers’ data with a single use of my card.

By: Jim Yates

Jim Yates — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:13:07 +0000

In general, until every upgrade is 100 percent backward compatible and everyone adheres to every standard (most of which do not currently exist) you will have to track down and adjust to changes completely out of your control and unknown to the activity causing the problem. It is the reason for years we did not apply Digital Equipment’s upgrades to their OS because each one would cause work which took more time than there was between upgrades. Sometimes it is amazing that the industry has gotten as far as it has. Only expectations of enormous gains in productivity and capability can drive such a system. Or maybe just a lot of people with too much time on their hands to play ;-)

By: Paul Morriss

Paul Morriss — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:07:32 +0000

I investigated “checking if your website is working” companies recently, though I haven’t seen a hoster offer it. Perhaps because it implies that there’s a chance that they might not have 100% full working uptime.

By: Jim Menard

Jim Menard — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:54:28 +0000

Fascinating idea. How would you like password management to work? Would you trust the console to keep your passwords? You could use a master password for them to encrypt all the others, but then you’d either have to (A) trust them with the master or (B) use the password every time the console checks your services.