Unable to Verify Server Information Error Connecting Your iPhone to mail.microsoftonline.com
I was hitting my head against the wall trying to connect my iPhone to Hosted Exchange – found the answer in this forum post. Here are the correct steps for making a successful connection:
- Click on Settings
- Select “Mail, Contacts, Calendar”
- Click on “Add Account…”
- Select Microsoft Exchange
- Enter your username, password and email, leave the domain blank (unless you specifically need to use it)
- Click on Next at the top right
- A server field will appear – if you are in North America, your first instinct will be to add the following URL as indicated in the documentation “https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com” (if you are not in North America, you can find your server here). If you do, you’ll repeatedly get the “Unable to Verify Server Information” error.
- The correct server URL to use with the iPhone is “Red001.mail.microsoftonline.com”. It’s critical that you omit the “https://” and Red001 starts with a capital R (as documented here).
Good luck!
Read MoreChief Technology Officer at Digiflare
I’m excited to announce I’ll be moving to Toronto & taking on the role of Chief Technology Officer at Digiflare (http://www.digiflare.com) starting February 1st. I’ll be putting on two hats – supporting the technology efforts within the company for an amazing roster of clients (http://digiflare.com/work), along with bringing new products to market for consumers.
I’d like to thank Bradley Wing, Matthieu Houle, Stephane Marceau and Nicolas Gaudreau for hiring me on to work as a Senior Manager in the kickass YellowAPI and mobile team at Yellow Pages Canada – it was a fantastic & valuable experience, I’m truly grateful. I’ll miss working with everyone in Montreal! Keep an eye on YellowAPI, lots of exciting things to come this year: http://www.yellowapi.com
Note – I’ll be in town for the next two weeks (my last day at YPG is January 27th) and flying out to Toronto on January 31st.
Read MoreSerendipity vs Personalization
I’ve noticed that many new startups try to include an element of serendipity in their products. If you look at Wikipedia, the current definition of serendipity is “a happy accident or pleasant surprise; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it”. My good friend Lenny Ratchitsky did a great talk at TEDxCondordia entitled “Losing Serendipity” which explains how serendipity is important in our daily lives, and how he integrated elements of discovery and chance in Localmind (you can view his presentation on YouTube here).
With this in mind, there are two different approaches you can take with a product:
- The Serendipity approach, in which you can surface useful information that your users are not expecting. A good example of this is Foursquare’s Explore feature. It shows you interesting locations around you ranked by your friends checkins and tips. Using explore, you can discover an interesting restaurant or cafe based on recommendations.
- The Personalization approach. Using this approach, you can profile the user and determine his/her likes and dislikes. Using these signals, you then provide information that is the most contextually appropriate for the user. Hunch (which was recently acquired by Ebay) is an example of a recommendation engine which statistically looks at your likes/dislikes and provides tailored recommendations. Another example, Facebook made changes to their News Feed a while back to display only “Friends and pages you interact with most” (which was partially rectified with the recent Timeline update).
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The Secret Origins of Jean-Luc
In the early 1990′s, I got the opportunity to meet Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (she also did the voice of the Federation computer, which inspired Google to create Project Majel – a Siri like interface for Android). I introduced myself to Majel by saying – “Hi, my name is Jean-Luc”, in which she replied: “Uh-oh, copyright violation.” After a few laughs, I asked her how Gene invented my namesake, Jean-Luc Picard. What’s a little known fact is that Gene admired sea explorer & ecologist Jacques Cousteau and wanted to create a “Jacques Cousteau of the stars”. However, calling the character Jacques would have been too obvious; so he took inspiration from his love of French film, took the name “Jean-Luc” from filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and did a “mash up” with the Cousteau character.
Soon after, I asked my parents where they got the idea to call me Jean-Luc. Let’s just say my dad decided to take art film classes after I was born. The title of this blog is “Make It So!”, a wink and a nod to my fictional counterpart.
Update – here is the signature from Majel Barrett-Roddenberry to yours truly:
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What is the Most Scalable Development Platform?
One of the questions I get asked a lot is what developer platform is the most scalable. Some people seem to believe it’s Java or .NET, others feel it’s Python or PHP. There also seems to be a misconception that Ruby doesn’t scale well. A definitive answer to this trick question? They all scale – up to a point (*when your infrastructure has millions of users & transactions – then you have to rely on in-memory databases, content delivery networks, caching servers, x64 servers, ect to keep things snappy). To illustrate this, I’ll delve into the architecture of some of the most popular social networks out there. Let’s take a look at a few key examples:
Foursquare
Dodgeball (the precursor to Foursquare) started out as an ASP site running on an Access database. Founder Dennis Crowley (who was not a coder) created the site using a “Learn ASP in 30 days!” type of book. Later, Dodgeball was rewritten in PHP and MySQL. Foursquare.com was likewise originally written using PHP/MySQL on Apache. When Harry Heymann joined Foursquare (he was the last employee from Dodgeball after the Google acquisition), he helped the company scale up using Scala and the Lift Web Framework. Foursquare is compiled into Java bytecode and mostly runs on Jetty (Jetty project page). Foursquare also runs in MongoDB (MongoDB project page). Here is a fantastic deck explaining the process of migrating Foursquare.com from PHP to Scala/Lift. On a side note – Foursquare also uses Apache Hadoop, and Apache Hive in combination with a custom data server (built in Ruby), all running in Amazon EC2 to do analytics on their data (here is a Foursquare engineering blog post about it) – I also had the privilege of seeing the system in action when I visited Foursquare’s Cooper Square HQ in 2011.
In 2006, when Facebook was opened to the public (anyone over 13 with a valid email address could join), Facebook was built using open-source software including PHP/MySQL on Apache (some of the front end PHP code got leaked in 2007 – you can get interesting insights here). Facebook used memcached (project site) to help the site stay responsive for 12M active users. Facebook employees also used a combination of Python/Perl/Java/g++ and Boost managed using Subversion and git – you can read a detailed account on the Facebook site. Today, Facebook has over 800 million active users and as you can imagine, the infrastructure to support the load has become way more complex. The front end uses PHP converted into C++ using HipHop, the business logic is built using Thrift and persistence is managed using a combination of MySQL, Memcached, Cassandra & Hadoop. All of this is running on what’s estimated to be 60,000+ servers! You can learn more on this Quora thread.
Twitter started as a hack project at a company called ODEO, which was initially focused on RSS syndicated audio & video. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (one of the ODEO engineers at the time) was really interested in status and tried to find some way to make it easier for people to share what they were doing. The Twitter project was initially written on Ruby on Rails (which was the backbone of ODEO) and evolved from there. Raffi Krikorian (Director of Twitter’s Application Service) has a really excellent OSCON talk which describes Twitter’s current infrastructure. According to Raffi, Twitter is ”the largest Ruby on Rails website on the planet“). Twitter is currently active in rewriting their infrastructure to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Scala, Thrift and Clojure. Here is a deck on Slideshare with the gory details on the migration. Raffi’s advice – “One thing we want to emphasize to start ups out there is that switching to Java doesn’t imply that we think that Ruby is a mistake. Ruby got us fundamentally where we are today. We are somewhere between the 9th and 5th largest site on the internet…we have some of the best world class product engineers who can write code in Ruby faster than anyone I’ve seen…And we think that’s really important…and pivotal.”
YouTube
According to this documentation dating back to 2008 (and this YouTube architecture video from the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability), YouTube was originally built using a combination of Apache, Python, Linux (SuSe) and MySQL. The YouTube engineering team also used psyco (dynamic python->C compiler) and lighttpd (for video instead of Apache). This architecture was at the time supporting over 100 million video views per day. Few details are known about the back end infrastructure today, however you can use the YouTube Direct platform to host your mini-customized version of YouTube on Google AppEngine (via the YouTube API).
Moral of the story
Java, PHP, Ruby or Python – they are all suitable languages/technology stacks for a startup & will scale enough to make your product a success. The real question you should be asking – which one of these platforms will make your developers as productive as possible?
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