Dear Mockingbird customers,

Mockingbird’s taking flight

We’re excited to announce that Mockingbird will launch on August 15, 2010 — with multi-user collaboration!

Details on the paid plans:

	Active Projects	Users	Price/month
Personal	2	Unlimited	$9
Team	10	Unlimited	$20
Pro	25	Unlimited	$40
Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	$85

There will also be a free account available that allows 1 project with 3 pages.

You can archive finished projects, which won’t count toward your active project limit. You won’t be charged for months during which you have no projects active.

What you need to do

Projects made with beta accounts will be automatically archived and will not be accessible after August 15, 2010. Customers who choose to upgrade to a paid plan may re-activate beta projects, but free accounts will not be able to access old beta projects, so please make sure to log into your Mockingbird account to export PNG or PDF versions of any projects you need.

Beta discount

Your feedback has made Mockingbird better, and we’d like to thank you by offering a coupon for 25% off the first three months of any paid plan. Keep your eye out on your inbox for the coupon code when Mockingbird launches.

Questions or comments?

If you’ve got questions about the transition out of beta or want to get in touch with us for any other reason, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at contact@gomockingbird.com.

Thanks for all your support, and we look forward to continuing to help you make great wireframes.
- The Mockingbird Team

In a nut shell they are saying thanks for testing, all projects are now archived so export them. If you want your old projects back, pay us. Wow.. Awesome. Thanks!

I jumped on Twitter, first off I never use Twitter but I figured it might be worth a try.

Wow. Didn’t expect that.

I guess I just have to tweet a complaint to get my projects extended, so everyone else that is in the same boat as me has to ask? What’s the harm in letting your free beta testers to keep their current projects? Oh… right.. Mockingbird doesn’t want casual users that could see the benefits of a quick HTML5 mockup tool so they won’t eventually become paid users and tell friends and colleagues alike how great of an application it is.

My project is exported.. who knows what they will do in the future but don’t consider your projects safe with this startup.

namebench DNS Benchmark Results

Like me, you’ve probably read all sorts of great things about the public DNS service OpenDNS, but one thing you should find out for yourself is how it will impact the speed of your web browsing.

After using OpenDNS name servers for months at work I started to notice that page load times at home (on a much slower connection) were considerably more “snappy” with my ISP provided DNS servers. A quick Google brought up the comprehensive Open Source namebench DNS benchmark tool.

A run of namebench resulted in a pretty html file with numbers and graphs that confirmed my suspicions. My ISP’s (Comcast) DNS servers were 174.4% faster than OpenDNS on average, with Google’s Public DNS coming in a close second place.

It should be noted that namebench is rather smart and it riffles through your browser history in order to compile a personalized set of domains for its testing, so my results are potentially unique – and this is just one test (actually I did three, I also used Alexa top domains for a source to avoid DNS caching – and the results were all similar), at one location. Although once I switched to my ISP’s DNS servers I experienced a noticeable difference in page load times.  Not to mention that my results may change in the future due to server load, poor caching, etc. But with OpenDNS, there was always a slight wait before a page would even start to load, and now that wait is gone. And that’s on a 36Mbps downstream connection.

My points are simple:

1. Switching to OpenDNS (or any other DNS service) may be a bad thing.
2. Your DNS server does matter.
3. namebench is awesome.

It may be a matter of milliseconds but it all adds up, many large websites require dozens of DNS queries for ads, images, scripts and more. Do your own testing before believing the hype.

Regardless, OpenDNS is still a great service: if I ever have the need for a basic content filtering system I will turn to OpenDNS.

Download namebench (for Windows, Mac, or Linux/Unix) and see for yourself how your current DNS stacks up.

So, its 4:00 AM and I’m in the lab finishing up my Ghost disk-to-disk imaging on the remailing machines: total time to break remaining boxes and yank HDs + Ghost imaging time = 30 mins, time wasted to get to this point = 3 hours.

If anyone can prove me wrong concerning the shortcomings of Clonezilla, please do (and comment, duh).

BOOBS!

Yeah, that’s my Twitter avatar (and my Twitter username is embeded in the img tags’ title and alt attributes – making it viewable on hover) and yours could show up next.

This is a total breech of privacy, now everyone gets the chance to jump to conclusions and think I’m a freakin’ pervert – just because I viewed an image (which could have been from a link, with me having no prior knowledge of the the contents).

So TweetPhoto’s recently viewed feature is cute and all but MAYBE EVERYONE DOESN’T WANT TO BE TRACKED?

The fact that there isn’t even a setting to turn off user tracking is even worse, did they not realize that people like anonymity?

Just thought I’d share this great “feature” before someones wife accuses them of cheating or something even cooler.

Have a super day!

Click for full view of HP Refusal Letter

Ok ok, so I could understand if there was a big nasty cockroach sprawled on the motherboard, I would be pretty grossed out too… but I would still pick it up (maybe with some gloves), throw it in the trash, and do the warranty work on the computer – because, after all, that’s why we sent it to HP in the first place.

Anyway, this is the menace that kept HP from their work:

Click for full view

Click for full view

So, this guy was so small we didn’t even see him before we sent it off, and even after we got it back we had trouble locating him. After a thorough search we couldn’t find any of his friends, in fact, except for the dead passenger, the case was pretty darn clean.

To clarify, there was one very small bug in this computer, which was enough for HP Service to refuse to replace the motherboard under warranty.

And after removing the offending creature, calling HP Support, explaining the situation, going through over-phone-diagnostics for the fourth time, and generally wasting our day, the HP Support technician informed my boss that according to his documentation, the warranty for this computer was completely VOID due to INSECT INFESTATION.

Because of one small dead insect ( < 1/4″ x 1/4″ x 14/” ) the warranty for this HP Pavilion desktop computer was completely void. After many days of 2+ hour long phone calls, a week for the RMA box to show, another week for the computer to be returned, and another 2 hours on the phone, we finally receive conclusive evidence that HP just doesn’t give a shit.