July 2, 2008
Awesome is spelled with The Planet in the middle
I wrote about the issues at The Planet right at the end of my first month with them. Back then I was wondering what kind of compensation will I get for the downtime. Well, this morning I found the support ticket closed with a notification informing me that I've got a full month worth of refund. Wow, one month of free service for a few days of downtime. Now that's what I call generosity!
June 25, 2008
Where the Hell is Matt?
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
You might know that I'm not the one to post funny videos or generally embed stuff I haven't created myself into this blog. Except when it's worth it. And the one above is definitely worth it! You might want to go to the video's Vimeo page to experience it in glorious High Definition.
June 17, 2008
Firefox 3 day
So, today is the big day! The day we'll hopefully set a record...
Keep your eyes peeled at the getfirefox.com page. And while waiting for the great download frenzy to start go pledge if you haven't already.
I feel that Firefox 3 will be a huge improvement. I've blogged about it back in April and I've been using it since on my Windows machine at home. It never crashed and the speed improvement over Firefox 2 is really impressive. So I'm one satisfied customer. Now please, I can haz Firebug for it?
June 13, 2008
Geosurprises and CDNs
A few days ago, out of sheer geek / webmaster / wannabe server administrator curiosity I installed the Flagfox add-on for Firefox which shows the flag of the country where the server that's hosting the displayed site is located.
There weren't many surprises as the flag is mostly stuck on the Star Spangled Banner but this morning I've noticed something strange. When the browser opened Netvibes, which has been my homepage for more than a year now, I've glanced at the flag and I saw Romania. What? Tracing the IP lead to the following host: a1110.b.akamai.net. Ahaaa! Akamai! So that's why Netvibes loads as if it was hosted on my LAN. Funnily enough the Romanian IP is traced over more hops (18) than the French one (13).
Another "surprise" was en.wikipedia.org resolving to an IP in the Netherlands.
Talking about CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) I remembered about an interesting article I read a few days ago: 10 Easy Steps to use Google App Engine as your own CDN. And another one I found recently: AJAX Libraries API. Google, the poor man's CDN.
June 11, 2008
Honey, someone tore our car
BMW's GINA has definitively been the news of the day. I'm still trying to collect my jaw... The way it's "eyes" open near the end of the video gave me some serious goosebumps.
June 9, 2008
Keynote frenzy passed
I missed the first hour or so because despite my morning promise I went to a bar to watch that total EPIC FAIL of a match between Romania and France. Boooring. But it seems I haven't lost anything of the keynote. It was mostly iPhone application demos and MobileMe which is $99 for a year. No thanks!
Only after I got home Steve broke the news everyone was waiting for. And the conclusion is... I'm starting to want one. A 3G iPhone that is. $199 globally? That's awfully nice of them! But I think in Romania it'll still sell at around $450... I'll believe the 200 bucks when I'll see it.
I'll wait for Google Maps to include Romania first! Now with the integrated GPS it makes even more sense. Come on Google!
Update: Actually MobileMe doesn't look that bad. I'll have a trial, please. As soon as it'll be available.
Keynote frenzy ahead
Eff the match between Romania and France!
It's liveblog refreshing time tonight at 20:00 PM EET when Steve will get on the stage and announce the toys that will get tons of people excited in the coming months. Hey, what am I talking about? Everyone's already excited to max. I'm not so keen on the main news as I'm not an iPhone owner and I don't even want one (this will instantly change the moment Google Maps will include a detailed routable map of Romania) but I'm sure there'll be other news too. And to be honest I'm geek enough to find the whole thing entertaining and I do get a kick out of finding out about the stuff as it happens.
In completely unrelated news I remembered about this "project" these days and it provided me with a healthy dose of smile again. Actually not the project announcement itself, but some comments are killers. I even made a screenshot and I archived it for ethernity. Via Digg.
June 4, 2008
Time to cash in
Big time.
I've just discovered the following mail in my Junk folder. How could I have missed it!? Such a stellar opportunity!
Hi,We've seen your website at http://www.rusiczki.net/blog/... and we love it!
We see that your traffic rank is 2070406 and your link popularity is 35.
Also, you have been online since 11/9/2003.With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.
If you're interested, read our terms from this page:
--== OBVIOUSLY REMOVED ==--Sincerely,
Nikolaos Koufakis
The --== REMOVED ==-- Network
Of course the e-mail comes from a weird looking Yahoo address but this means nothing. Serious companies always send their mails from Yahoo addresses. So truly hyped, I click the link in a hurry. A friendly female voice greets me enticing me to add those links to my site and I can win 4800 in a month. 9600 the second month. And then it get into the sci-fi territory speaking about monthly earnings that are twice the price of my car. And all this for just a few links listed on my site. Sounds too good to be true? Maybe a little.
OK. After listening to the message and being all full of quick cash adrenaline I start reading the site:
After millions of dollars invested and over 2 years in development, we've just launched the fastest growing program since Google Adwords and as viral as Hotmail.
Hm. Quite weird there was nothing about them on TechCrunch...
Over 300,000 people have visited this page in the first week and thousands are joining every day! Growing faster and faster every minute, this program propagates extremely fast.
Of course, spam e-mail is a highly effective way to attract potential victims partners.
And even if you only show our links for one month, we'll keep on paying you that $4,800 EVERY MONTH! *
Holy crap! I've almost entered an uncontrollable money frenzy at this point. But waaait a minute. There's a footnote. I see the little asterisk. Let's scroll down:
* These figures of earnings are examples to help you understand the earning potential - You can make more or less. There are no guarantees of income.
Aha. So getting past the bullshit most likely I'll get nada. Zilch. Nothing. And for this nada I give them (or their customers) valuable inbound links for 1 month. Or for however long it takes for me to realize I've been scammed. Well, thank you. I think I'll pass.
Anyway, from now on I'll sleep much sounder knowing that someone out there "loves" my website. Yey!
Boom!
Just my luck. One month after I get a dedicated server the data center that's hosting it goes boom. To be more precise:
Sunday evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
Unfortunately my server was on the first floor, where the explosion was. They got the second floor back online quite fast and then started working on the first floor (Phase 1). And so, yesterday morning my server came back online, I cheered a little, but shortly after it went down again. Boo. Cause:
This morning at approximately 2:45 a.m. CST, the temporary generator supplying power to the servers and environmental control systems located in Phase 1 of our H1 facility shut down. This was caused by some faulty current sensors in the output breaker. The sensors detected an out of balance current condition that did not exist.
Shortly after an e-mail came in saying that I could request my server to be moved to their other Houston data center. Which I did. So the computer that's serving you this very page was loaded in truck along with many others (in an update they mentioned that they had to move around 500 servers). The support ticket was updated a few short hours ago, saying that it has arrived and it's powered on. I logged in, fixed the IP address issues in Plesk, set up the DNS and here we are! ON-freakin'-LINE.
I'm just thankful that there wasn't anything mission critical on this server and I hope it wasn't too close to the explosion and the hardware isn't phisically affected. I'll back up everything in a moment but I'll still be keeping my fingers crossed for a while...
Oh, and to top everything, the following communication from them just rolled in (via a ticket):
Dear Ioan Gavril Rusiczki,On behalf of our team at The Planet, we want to thank you for choosing our company as your hosting provider. It has been thirty days since you have joined us, and we sincerely hope that you have had a fantastic experience thus far.
We have earned an excellent industry reputation for our world-class support, state-of-the art data centers, and our fast, reliable network.
Can't say it wasn't good as their support is excellent but the last few days of these 30 days were a little "bumpy". However, I think they've dealt with the situation really promptly and professionally and I can only praise the open attitude and the fact that they've kept everyone posted by frequent public updates. The worst that can happen is when a company leaves you in the dark, guessing what the Hell happened. Well, The Planet is not one of those companies.
As a conclusion I can only say: great work guys and I hope this whole incident haven't dented the business too badly.
May 30, 2008
Short URL of the year
Snipurl just spit out a funny shortened URL: http://snurl.com/2bleh. To bleh... Short URL-s are kind of like CAPTCHA-s, you stumble upon them frequently and once in a while an amusing one comes along. Or to be technically correct: an amusing one gets randomly generated.