The recent news of how Microsoft-Danger managed to lose T Mobile Sidekick phone subscriber data raise the question on the reliability of cloud data storage.

Any storage system can and will fail at some point of time. The trick is to have redundancy so that not all of your data disappear when a storage system fail. Often, you call this process “backup”.

The problem is Sidekick is that, it stores data on volatile memory. This means anytime you switch the phone off  or remove the battery, the data disappear from the device. The argument is that if the data is ever gone from the device, it can easily sync back the data from the “cloud” backup.

Think about it for a moment. The device is designed to rely on the backup. This is a poor design for a modern device. Flash memory is cheap nowadays. If Sidekick were to use flash memory for its storage, it can retain data even if you take out the battery – just like any modern smartphone.

This also means that the cloud backup is not a backup after all but rather Sidekick’s primary storage. When the cloud failed, user has no way to restore the data easily by themselves. No data redundancy means no backup.

Brownie points for those who recognize the reference

Even though most of Sidekick user data will be recovered, this does not excuse Microsoft from this fiasco. The data resides on their data center and I expect them to have better disaster recovery plan than this. However, this raises a question that if a company as large as Microsoft cannot store our data properly, why should we trust our data to them?

I see an analogy in banking industry. Why should we trust bank to store our hard earned money? Security and convenience. Bank is more secure than your average mattresses and the network of ATM allows you to get your money anywhere.

While it may not seem so with the recent Sidekick incident, the economy of scale argument of cloud storage provider is appealing. In the long run, Google and Amazon should know how to store and secure your data better than you yourself. Chances are, if you are using one of those free web email like Gmail or yahoo, your data is already stored in the cloud. Just like you can check your web email from anywhere, you can access your cloud stored data anywhere too.

I see cloud service industry is like banking industry when they start. Regulation provides security and stability in banking system. In the far future, I believe cloud service industry will be regulated like banking to protect our data and privacy.

Until that happen, you can use encryption to protect your privacy. Make sure you have redundant copy of your data no matter where you stored it.

Have you backed up your data today?

Page load times have become an increasingly discussed topics among web developers in the past few years, and for a good reason, it is directly tied to user experience – something we care deeply about.

There is a good reason why people still prefer reading printed magazines rather than just reading them online – pages in a magazine load instantly. Imagine if you need to wait for two seconds before the next page shows up every time you flip a page in a book – wouldn’t you be annoyed?

The two web giants today, Google and Yahoo both understood the importance of delivering content to end users as quickly as possible. Google Search is one of the most minimalist page on the web today (and it keeps getting smaller) and Yahoo is one of the pioneers of web performance research.

Many websites have discussed various ways in which you can implement best practices in speeding up websites but I find that most of them are lacking in thoroughness and are quite hard for a beginner sys admin to follow so I will try to make this as painless as possible.

One of the lowest hanging fruits in speeding up your website is to enable compression on text based files (HTML, CSS, JS). You can easily cut down the load time of these files by around 70%. Here’s how you would do it on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron (assuming you already have Apache 2 & PHP already set up correctly).

Step 1: enable mod_deflate and reload Apache (do this on your web server):

sudo a2enmod deflate && sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Step 2: tell Apache to compress text based files. Put these at the beginning of .htaccess in you DocumentRoot (create one if you don’t already have it). The default DocumentRoot in Ubuntu is located at “/var/www”:

#Deflate the files
IfModule mod_deflate.c

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

Step 3: now check if your css and JS files are compressed. Visit this page and enter the URL of your website, CSS and JS files to see if they are indeed compressed.

Easy enough, right?

We are told that we should not judge a book by its cover, but that’s what people do. Numerous studies indicate that people judge website credibility on its design. Consistency of elements, typography, color and style affects how your clients perceive your product and company.

I do not know how great Fontcase product is, but it sure makes a good impression

The great thing about web presence is that you are putting your “company face” on the cheapest communication medium. A one time design investment initially plus small monthly fee allows you to shape worldwide audience on the quality of your products and services.