Potential Hurricane Irene Service Interruptions for Eyejot

A note to our customers: Numerous Eyejot services operate within Amazon's AWS cloud computing umbrella and several of our virtual servers and resources are located in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington, DC. In the event that the hurricane disrupts services for Amazon, it's possible those events will cascade and also impact Eyejot. We will continue to monitor our services and report accordingly.

OS X Lion and Flash - allowing Eyejot to use your camera and mic

Some users have experienced problems configuring Adobe Flash to allow the use of their camera and mic with Eyejot (and other sites) under OS X Lion. One possible solution to this problem is to use the new Adobe Flash System Preferences panel to configure a site-specific override.

To get started, click on System Preferences in the Apple menu on your Mac. Then, locate and click on the Flash Player icon. It will likely be on the last row, labeled Other. If you don't see this icon be sure to upgrade your version of Adobe Flash to the latest version. Click here for more information.

To add a site-override setting so that Eyejot can use the camera and mic on your computer click the button labeled Camera and Microphone Settings by Site... and then, in the new window, add eyejot.com and www.eyejot.com.

Eyejot Migration Planned for May 18, 2011

Several months ago we advised our customers that Eyejot would be moving its computing resources into the cloud in order to better meet client demand and support scaling and future growth.

We're now ready to begin that transition and will be doing so today, Wednesday evening May 18, 2011 starting at 6PM PDT (GMT -7). During our maintenance window the site will remain operational. However, some details are important to note:

1. Customers are discouraged from creating and sending new Eyejot messages between 4PM PDT on May 18 and 10PM PDT on May 18
2. Messages sent before 6PM PDT on May 18th may take up to 24 hours to migrate to the new siteWe have been planning for this transition for quite some time.

While we anticipate it being performed successfully, there's always a remote chance something will cause us to suspend the migration.

We will post updates here as often as events dictate. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach our support team. You can find email links on our contact page. 

Eyejot systems operational

Our emergency maintenance work following an unexpected loss of both primary and backup power has been completed and the Eyejot systems have been restored to their operational state. Beside the inconvenience to you, our customer, we were disappointed that the power failure broke some records of ours. Some of servers had been operating, non-stop, for more than three (3) years!

Our data center is located in downtown Seattle in the Westin building - one of the major "meet-me" points for data traffic in the Pacific NW. The failures were a result of the building electrical systems going through tests that, unfortunately, caused a cascading error that resulted in our co-location provider's uninteruptable power supply (UPS) failing - taking down not only our site, but many others.

We hope to have our entire platform moved over to cloud resources managed by Amazon within the next few weeks. We're eager to complete this important migration so that we can introduce our mobile applications and increase capacity for all users.

Power outage impacting site

The building in downtown Seattle which houses our data center, and many other data centers, was performing electrical tests this evening. The testing didn't go as planned and took out the UPS that services the floor where our servers are located.

The Eyejot site is currently down. System recovery efforts have been initiated.

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you and will do our best to restore service as quickly as possible.

Google Voice and Video Service Conflicts for OS X

We've heard reports from some Mac OS X users that Eyejot stopped working for them. Specifically, that they were unable to see themselves using their built-in USB webcam. The problem may be related to some incompatibilities between Google's voice and video tools and Adobe's Flash.

Symptoms have included users no longer seeing their USB webcam device (indentified in 10.6 as "built-in iSight") in their list of video devices or it, simply, not working.

A conversation thread on the Apple discussion and support site describes the problem and offers a solution. We've observed the problem and discovered that by running Google's own uninstaller for these programs that the problem is quickly rectified.

Here's a short set of steps to follow to try this out (note: this may interfere with Google's voice and video tools operating properly - but we're here to talk about Eyejot!):

1. Close any open web browsers
2. Open up a Finder window
3. Press SHIFT + COMMAND + G (this is the goto directory command)
4. Enter in the directory: /Library/Application Support/Google
5. Double-click on the uninstaller program found in that folder

That should uninstall the conflicting resources. Our testing showed that no reboot was required and that proper use of the webcam by Adobe Flash and Eyejot was immediately restored.

We're trying out a new support tool

As Eyejot has grown, so too have our support requirements. To better address the needs of our users, we're trying out a new support management platform called Tender Support. So far, we like how easy it's been to set it up. Of course, it's our users that will be the true arbiters of whether or not we've been successful by promptly addressing their support needs. If you're an Eyejot customer in need of help, drop us an email addressed to support at eyejot.com.

New Terms of Service

We've posted new Terms of Service for Eyejot that took effect September 26, 2009. We encourage all our users to examine and read the online document. We have also replaced the link to our privacy policy that appeared at the bottom of all our web site pages with one to the new Terms of Service. You can now reach the privacy policy document through the TOS.

MP4 downloading issue resolved

An alert user told us that they had been having problems downloading videos from their Eyejot inbox and we traced it to a bug we introduced a while ago. Suffice it to say, we've found and fixed the bug and everyone should be able save selected videos from their inbox to their computer. If you're not familiar with this feature, you can learn more about it here.

Although we test things out extensively and try to find and fix bugs before you see them, that's not always possible so we're grateful to those of you that take the time to alert us to any anomalies you discover.

Email to Comcast users not getting delivered

We've heard from some of our customers that notification messages destined for their Comcast mailboxes are not being delivered. We also heard from our friends at Amazon that they were having similar problems. And then additional confirmation came from the good folks at WhatCounts (one of the leading email service providers) that Comcast was using new filtering software from Cloudmark and was running into all sorts of problems.

For the sake of our customers we hope Comcast is able to improve their Cloudmark resources quickly. We'll continue to monitor things here. If you have any additional information or feedback you'd like to share with us, please send it to our support team through our contact page.