Vimeo - Downtime is a terrible, terrible thing

I'm not much of a video uploader. I didn't have a YouTube account till a few months ago. In fact, I've never uploaded a single video to YouTube - I use my account to manage playlists. But today, I wanted to share a Moocher demo video with a few friends, and I decided to try using Vimeo, a popular YouTube alternative.

Vimeo's UI is simple and clean and the player itself is minimalistic and unmarred by ugly control elements. Vimeo imposes a weekly 500 MB upload limit, which isn't an issue for me. I uploaded my H.264 video file and it nicely offered to convert the file for me and informed me that I would have to wait 15 minutes. No problem at all. Half an hour later, Vimeo still said I had a minute to go in the queue. A couple of refreshes later, Vimeo is 'out on vacation' and will be back soon. Whatwhatwhat?

I've only had web applications bail on me a couple of times, but the result has always been the same - total panic. An hour later, Vimeo is back up but logins dont work yet and my video is nowhere to be found. The moral of the story? Always back up your data - even cloud computing isn't as infallible they'd like us to believe. I just uploaded my video to YouTube as well - ugly player is better than no player at all.

Links: Vimeo

UPDATE: 2:35 PM - After 3 hours, my video is finally available for viewing

Mozilla Bespin - Code in the Clouds

When we started developing Moocher, I did my customary scan of Lifehacker archives and a Google search to see if my favorite IDE, Notepad ++, had any decent competition yet. Turns out that its still the best out there, but I did stumble upon Bespin, another diamond in the rough from Mozilla Labs. Like the Bespin of Star Wars lore, Mozilla's application floats in the (digital) cloud, and lets you manage your code projects from anywhere via a web browser.

I signed up for an account immediately and began poking around to see if this was going to become my new favorite IDE. I liked the default dark background with light font colors, but the interface felt sluggish and wasn't as seamless as expected. Now I usually rely on Dropbox to keep my project files synchronized across my devices, but I have to copy files to a local folder and fire up my IDE before I can start developing. With Bespin, I can open up Firefox, mosey on over to the website and start coding. And I did just that later that day, during my 15 minute break between meetings at the library.

After running into a couple of other bugs/issues I decided that it wasn't for me.... yet. Bespin shows great potential, and I'm sure it will rise to challenge conventional editors, especially when plugins like Firebug are ported onto its extensible framework. I'm going to keep an eye on this project in the coming months.

Links: Mozilla Bespin, Dropbox, Notepad ++