It pays to be nice.

(I am not an employee of DreamHost and whilst I mention them many times, I in no way represent them, their owners, employees, pets, small fuzzy things that grow under the refridgerator or even the high lord, Josh Jones. I’m just a customer.)

I hang around in #dreamhost on freenode. It’s a very nice channel, full of wonderful people. Like.. rlparker, ameyer, Raws, mostly, xkhan, mandingo.. the list goes on. It’s a great place.

Now, #dreamhost is also a channel about the company, DreamHost. A web hosting company, through whom, this blog is published. (At a great price, too!). Now, someone came into this channel today. A user by the name of Neoteric, who, based on what he said, was a Tim Ball, who worked for the Center for American Progress.

His hostmask and IP seemed to confirm this, coming as he was from a block of IPs that also contained the IP for CAP’s mailserver. Still, in the interest of full disclosure, I cannot say 100% that it was this person.

However, this person claimed to be Mr. Ball and was, to put it bluntly, extremely rude. Not only was he demanding many things from DreamHost (in an unofficial DreamHost channel no less), he was rude to many of the users, including myself whom he told to ‘go fuck yourself’ (sic).

Now, I am sure it is not just me, but if you came into a public forum such as this, posited yourself as a representative of your employers and proceeded to act in a manner which is wholly unprofessional.. well, surely you can agree, it’s not very good.

I emailed his superiors and provided full logs and I hope that they can make him see that being courteous in the future is in his best interests.

Of Design Ripoffery

Reading this over at Hacker News made me a little.. irked, at the guys over at 37Signals. And it made me wonder, just how fast could I mock up a design using only the barest of glances at theirs, and look similar, but.. funky in my own way.

I did this in two hours, inbetween eating chili. The colors need tweaks and the layout.. but it’s a healthy start. Maybe I should make a webapp :O

Theme PNG is after the jump! And if anyone wants to steal this, go ahead. I release it to the public domain!

Read the rest of this entry »

DreamHost Email Issues

It was a dark and stormy n.. okay, fine. It was an ordinary evening. I’d just placed a pizza order and I awaited my confirmation email. Nothing.. nothing.. I hit the Send/Receive button.. huh. My password doesn’t work. Okay, Outlook does this occasionally. *re-enters*

Nothing. Wait, two email accounts aren’t working. Okay, lets log into the panel.. *click click* *sets new password* *waits* *checks again*.. nothing D:!

So I send in a support ticket to DreamHost at 9:55pm EST. And.. well, it’s now 6:53pm EST the next day and no response.
Nothing on the blogs, or the dreamhost status blog. Requests in IRC have gone unresponsive, even when one DH staffer on IRC even took my ticket ID and said he’d check! ;_;

Now, I heard that DH are apparently ‘doing stuff’. Stuff, being reworking things so that shell users cannot be email users. (This could mean, no more reading your email with mutt or pine. Sorry!) To ease load. Now, supposedly, they’re not doing anything to EXISTING accounts and yet.. email is broken for many people (not just myself, check IRC or the DreamHost Forum.

I guess the time has come to move my email to Google Apps and perhaps seek a new hosting provider. Any suggestions?

Update: Oh, they JUST posted an update. See it here. Took them almost 24 hours. And, it’s affecting more than they say. They’re reporting it as being a spunky cluster outage, but it’s affecting the swarthy cluster too.

How Bizarre!

And no, not the OMC song. I found out that.. at least two people actually read this thing. Shocking!

I haven’t really done anything in the.. day.. since I updated. I missed the new episode of Numb3rs tonight, unfortunately.

I’ve been experimenting, cooking-wise too. I made a spicy lemon chicken last night. Used a little too much lemon. But it was delicious! Tonight will be Beef Curry with Fragrant Rice. More deliciousness.

I need to cook more with alcohol. My Vodka Chicken is pretty good!

In tech news, I am looking forward to the possibility of FiOS soon. And failing that, DOCSIS 3.0 goodness from Comcast.

I do wonder why no-one is, in metropolitan areas, offering up some competition to the traditional providers. Purchase many gigabits from Level3 or Cogent or someone. Cable up places like apartment complexes and such. Offer ala carte internet access by the megabit.

Unrestricted, unmetered, no contention. Wouldn’t be as cheap as cable, but.. hey. No worries about being cut off for torrenting too much. ANd you’d get great upstream!

..Oops.

I promised myself when I re-did my blog, that I would update it more regularly.

As you can see, that plainly hasn’t happened. My bad.

Suffice it to say, not much happened, bar a small vacation. We went up to New York for five days. Spent it with a friend. Good times, good people.

I’m spending a lot of my time yakking with people from Hacker News. Great people there.

I’m working on a few things too, one of which you can see a demo of here.

And that’s all for now.

Oh! I’ve also started to twitter again.

EC2 and Anonymity: Throwaway Instances?

I’ve been pondering uses for Amazon’s EC2 lately. Namely, what use could you have for it from a privacy or anonymity oriented standpoint?

My first thought was virtual private networks. Could these function well in an EC2 setup? Boot one up, dynamically configure it, and start routing through it. When you’re done, it’s thrown away.

Infact, you could do something similar with websites. If you create a partition in memory, disable swap and such on an instance. Then on boot, it loads an encrypted filesystem into memory and grabs a key that’s temporarily stored (Perhaps in Amazon’s SQS?) and uses that to unlock it. Then when you’re done, you can re-encrypt and re-store the data, ready for when you want to bring it up again.

And as it’s all in memory, there’s no tracability. Good for a site like WikiLeaks or something similar, perhaps? Infact, there could be many uses for EC2 in this field, and in many others.

Ignoring for a moment the scability of EC2, the simple fact that you can bring up and down instances easily and move data to and from S3, SQS, SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services, means you can do things which would not usually be easily possible.

Anything from.. high-intensity natural language processing, to running simulators, even something as simple as a throw-away remote shell.

The possibilities are, whilst not endless, perhaps immense.

You’re Peeing On My Leg

A most hilarious video by Whitest Kids U Know, a NYC comedy troupe. Pip pip!
Read the rest of this entry »

UNICEF Says: Make Imagination Illegal

I read over at Kotaku, that UNICEF are campaigning in Japan to help put a stop to ‘Virtual Child Pornography’.

To those of you who aren’t sure what this means, let me say it clear. This means, if you just draw some lolicon or shotacon art.. or if you like pretending to be 15 on SecondLife, all the way down to anthropomorphic art of completely indeterminable age… this means you.

(And this isn’t including other things like.. wearing schoolgirl uniforms and making pornography, even if you’re a legal adult).

Really, doesn’t UNICEF have better things to do with it’s time and money, like.. actually helping children?

An Ideas Factory

It occured to me, last night, that what I am really good at, is thinking.

I was yakking away with someone in a group on Chatterous and he had a quandry. He wanted to get into a certain market, but it’s saturated and there was no new ways of doing things. After thinking for a few minutes, I had come up with a unique and novel way to run things.

And he loved it and took it. And proceeded to tell me, that I could actually sell ideas like these.

Which is an intriguing thought. But how do you go about this? Does anyone know?

Shockingly Offensive

Today, I received what was to me, one of the most hilarious 419 scams that have ever existed. I received it today, and you can see the email itself in it’s entirity, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »