Get a Piece of the Thinking Rock

Thinking Rock website has been suspended... y'all "slashdotted" their site!!  I did manage to get the .dmg downloaded, but it wouldn't open.  OSX said it was unrecognizable.



[Yeah, we've heard (from a zillion people) that the site was suspended. Their ISP said we'd generated more traffic than the server could handle, and that once the request rate slowed down, they'd reactivate the site. -Joe]

> [Yeah, we've heard (from a zillion people) that the site was suspended. Their
> ISP said we'd generated more traffic than the server could handle, and that
> once the request rate slowed down, they'd reactivate the site. -Joe]

But the Thinking Rock people themselves told a completely different story
(they said the site was hacked and the hosters prevaricated about this), so
let's just say it's not clear what really happened. m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matttidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide - Second Edition!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102119
Take Control of Word 2004, Tiger, and more -
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/tiger-customizing.html
Subscribe to TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com/

Will "TidBITted" become a verb? The link to
ThinkingRock.com.au returns an account suspended
page of the sort that usually accompanies a
slashdotting.


--
Joe Germuska
JoeGermuska.com * http://blog.germuska.com

"The truth is that we learned from Joćo forever to be out of tune."
        -- Caetano Veloso

 5. Re: Get a Piece of the Thinking Rock

> Will "TidBITted" become a verb? The link to
> ThinkingRock.com.au returns an account suspended
> page of the sort that usually accompanies a
> slashdotting.

I let Thinking Rock know they'd been 'TidBitted' via their online
feedback form shortly after reading the review at around 11am GMT. I
got a reply saying, 'Ah, that explains the 4.6Gb worth of download
traffic....'

It might be a good idea for TidBits reviewers to let the makers of a
reviewed product (especially the smaller ones like Thinking Rock) know
 their product is to be reveiewed and hence prepare for a bit of a
'bump' in traffic. Or TidBits staff themselves as the reviewer may not
know exactly when their article will appear. Or would that be breaking
editorial policy?

Regards,

GAM

On 11 Oct 2006, at 13:54 , Glen McAllister wrote:
> 5. Re: Get a Piece of the Thinking Rock
>> Will "TidBITted" become a verb? The link to
>> ThinkingRock.com.au returns an account suspended
>> page of the sort that usually accompanies a
>> slashdotting.
>
> I let Thinking Rock know they'd been 'TidBitted' via their online
> feedback form shortly after reading the review at around 11am GMT. I
> got a reply saying, 'Ah, that explains the 4.6Gb worth of download
> traffic....'
>
> It might be a good idea for TidBits reviewers to let the makers of a
> reviewed product (especially the smaller ones like Thinking Rock) know
> their product is to be reveiewed and hence prepare for a bit of a
> 'bump' in traffic. Or TidBits staff themselves as the reviewer may not
> know exactly when their article will appear. Or would that be breaking
> editorial policy?

The other suggestion for makers would be to use a service like
Amazons virtual disk to store their actual downloads on. It's far
cheaper than paying overage fees to your hosting provider and far
cheaper than losing all the page-looks from people who are curious
about your product.


--
It's better to burn out than it is to rust
   -- Neil Young as quoted by Kurt Cobain

On or about 10/11/06 12:54 PM, thus spake "Glen McAllister"
<glen.mcallistergmail.com>:

> I let Thinking Rock know they'd been 'TidBitted' via their online
> feedback form shortly after reading the review at around 11am GMT. I
> got a reply saying, 'Ah, that explains the 4.6Gb worth of download
> traffic....'
>
> It might be a good idea for TidBits reviewers to let the makers of a
> reviewed product (especially the smaller ones like Thinking Rock) know
> their product is to be reveiewed and hence prepare for a bit of a
> 'bump' in traffic. Or TidBits staff themselves as the reviewer may not
> know exactly when their article will appear. Or would that be breaking
> editorial policy?

At a typical hosting company (dreamhost), for $8/month you get one TB of
monthly bandwidth - and that's just for starters (it rises by 16GB each
week). 4.6GB of download traffic is a flyspeck. I don't believe my review
was remotely comparable to slashdotting, and I don't believe it caused the
outage. If it did, the Thinking Rock folks need a better host. m.

--
matt neuburg, phd = matttidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt/
pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei
AppleScript: the Definitive Guide - Second Edition!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102119
Take Control of Word 2004, Tiger, and more -
http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/tiger-customizing.html
Subscribe to TidBITS! It's free and smart. http://www.tidbits.com/

On 12 Oct 2006, at 07:46, Matt Neuburg wrote:

> At a typical hosting company (dreamhost), for $8/month you get one
> TB of
> monthly bandwidth - and that's just for starters (it rises by 16GB
> each
> week). 4.6GB of download traffic is a flyspeck. I don't believe my
> review
> was remotely comparable to slashdotting, and I don't believe it
> caused the
> outage. If it did, the Thinking Rock folks need a better host. m.

At the moment, Dreamhost could hardly be considered to be a better
host than - well, just about anything, really.

Their current headline offer costs $8/month. For this, you're allowed
200GB of storage and 2TB of transfer - this is NOT buyable for $8/
month and their model only works as long as most customers don't use
anything like that much.

Lately they've been having severe problems and a reasonable guess
would be that they're just trying to do too much with too little.

So, maybe the Thinking Rock people DO need a better host, but
Dreamhost would IMO certainly not be on the short list.



Niall

> Message #6: Re: Get a Piece of the Thinking Rock
> Posted by: Matt Neuburg Date: Oct 11, 2006.

> At a typical hosting company (dreamhost), for $8/month you get one TB of
> monthly bandwidth - and that's just for starters (it rises by 16GB each
> week). 4.6GB of download traffic is a flyspeck. I don't believe my review
> was remotely comparable to slashdotting, and I don't believe it caused the
> outage. If it did, the Thinking Rock folks need a better host. m.
>

I didn't say they said there was an outage. They just expressed thanks
of an explanation for a bump in traffic. You and the previous poster
(with the great Kurt Cobain quote) are probably right in that it
wouldnt've caused a problem, if they're using the hosting provider I
think they are (netspace.net.au).

Regards,

GAM

On Oct 11, 2006, at 11:46 PM, Matt Neuburg wrote:

> At a typical hosting company (dreamhost), for $8/month you get one
> TB of
> monthly bandwidth - and that's just for starters (it rises by 16GB
> each
> week). 4.6GB of download traffic is a flyspeck. I don't believe my
> review
> was remotely comparable to slashdotting, and I don't believe it
> caused the
> outage. If it did, the Thinking Rock folks need a better host. m.

However, some places also look at peaks, which could well be what
happened here. On a shared machine (which $8 per month sounds like
in your example), the hosting company has to try to take care of the
other sites on the same machine.

That doesn't argue against your point that Thinking Rock might want
to change how they host. And indeed, keeping the downloads in a
separate place from the information pages would help a lot--it's hard
to imagine your review kicking up enough traffic that quickly just
with people reading about the product to cause the hosting company to
notice, much less react.

   --John

I've been using DreamHost for a few years and overall I've been
fairly happy with them. Yes, they are having trouble now, but they're
completely honest about it and keep us posted at all times about the
situation. The problems aren't anywhere close to what I've seen with
other hosting companies. Except one time, caused by LA's power
outage, the problems never persist for more than an hour or so. Other
hosting companies I've used in the past never explained their
downtime or other problems even when it persists more than a day.

I just want to let you know that our host is not netspace.net.au (they are our ADSL provider). I don't want them to get bad press out of this.

I am not sure why our website was suspended (I was not even aware of this until now). Someone contacted us to inform us it was slow on the 9th/10th of October. The hack episode happened on the 2nd of October (coincidently when we released v1.2.2) but only home page and forum home page were affected.

Currently we are having problems with the email services of the host (reason why we removed the contact and feedback forms until it is resolved). You can guess we are not very happy with them currently. But we are working on the next release and spending a few days transferring everything to another host is not possible at the moment.

But I will look at the Amazons virtual disk mentioned above. The mac version can also be downloaded for the macupdate website.

Claire ThinkingRock Business Analyst and Tester

I downloaded and tried out Thinking Rock (before the servers went down I guess), and while I didn't find its lack of an elegant user interface to be much of a problem, I found that I could not open the PDF documents that the program exports, and this is the only way that users are apparently able to print from the program.

So I looked up Kinkless GTD for use on OmniOutliner (Matt mentions this in his article). Though I've only been using it for about four days, I like the integration between project and action lists. Looking at the action list on-screen is appealing enough that I may simply not print out the task list at all. I have also experienced the intergration between Kinkless GTD and iCal to be very reliable (much better than Circus Ponies' integration with iCal--which I had been using for several months).

I really like the way Midnight Beep's Inbox looks, and it looks promising as a GTD solution. But at the moment it isn't stable enough to even consider using. It keeps crashing on me, and when it finds 20 emails it only displays 8 of them. Same sort of thing for all the other categories that it searches. Calendar events are even stranger. At first I thought it was only looking for items in one calendar, but it turns out that it's not. It seems like it is only displaying one calendar effectively, (my wife's Google Calendar that I'm subscribed to). That said, if they get it working well, (and faster I hope) then it will be *very* handy (and I'd pay for it in a heartbeat). It can automatically collect items from all over the place such as iCal, Mail, Finder, etc.(some of them just don't seem to work at all for me yet, such as Safari bookmarks, and some work, but not consistently).

There's my 2 cents.

I have gone through the same gyrations as you. Thinking Rock is
definitely the closest but I just can't stand the look, the feel, the
"oh, it ain't even close to a mac app" feeling.

I have settled on Omicron Software's "To Do X".

Simple, elegant, brilliant. Yeah. It ain't GTD but I find I get way
more done with it than without it. It is also more productive than
any of the GTD attempts to date.

I was impressed by the passionate attachment of users at Thinking
Rock's forum, so I've been giving it a try, along with iGTD and
OmniFocus. TR is up to Version 2.0 'epsilon'--i.e. a late beta.
iGTD and OmniFocus are much slicker at moving things around, but
each shows too much on the screen. Although, like Matt I've found
TR's interface to be annoying, I find it addicting. I actually -
think- about thoughts and actions. As Matt emphasizes, TR allows
plenty of space for thoughts-and for their notes. Each 'add thought'
window takes up a big chunk of the screen. I find myself turning out
one after another and taking notes about each, its sequence and
relation to one another. In contrast, the 'In Boxes' in iGTD and
OmniFocus are multi-item affairs, and each item's line is small and
trivialized. There's too much eye candy, and the multi-pane windows
distract. For now TR is a keeper.

Steve Samuels