When I spam comments for my site, at least I try and write a comment that’s on-topic and adds something to the conversation.

In the mean time, whenever we have to get people together to figure out some issue, Mumble’s our go-to app for internet conference calls. It’s amazing how productive you can be when you don’t have to sit around and type what you’re thinking (I type at a mediocre 95wpm according to TypeRacer, and I can assure you I think much faster than that).

NameCoin still doesn’t work on FreeBSD – I can’t manage to build a working binary and my linux_base has too old a libg++ for it to work, so I went ahead and set it up on a Debian VM to get things going.

Once I had it up and running, it didn’t take long at all to download the blockchain (stark contrast to Bitcoin proper, which seems to take an eternity), and before long I was up and registered with a few domains. The name_firstupdate command takes a bit to actually show up in the blockchain (12 confirmations after name_new) but it doesn’t take long with merged mining blowing up.

The downside is that as yet, there’s not much in the way of usability for NameCoin domains. The only two public nameservers advertised on the Wiki both appear to be broken, the public whois service appears to be broken (despite the webserver on it advertising otherwise).

I thought about setting up my own DNS server, but so far all the scripts I can find to do it involve weird PHP hackery to scrape the entire domain space and create bind zones for each one. I don’t really think I’m prepared to descend to that level of hackery, and I suspect that’s why the public nameservers are busted.

I’m thinking about writing my own DNS server for it in Python, with a caching bind server in front of it (only public for .bit domains) but I’m not sure if I’ll get around to doing it or not. It sounds like a fun project, but I’ve got so many projects going as it is.

I’d also considered setting up a .bit registrar, simply because it seems like once I’ve done this there won’t be too much work involved in it – but I am not entirely sure how to secure it. It seems like the whole system relies on having the private keys on a box someplace, and I don’t particularly like the idea of a system where one box gets rooted and every domain you’ve ever registered can be taken.

Last night, after the DSL guy came out and ended up replacing a card in our DSLAM, our DSL blinked on and off for about a half hour, before finally going down completely for 10 minutes. This caused me no small amount of rage, but when it came back up we were back on “fast” data path, with our full 6mbps downstream rate. A quick speedtest confirms where we’re at workable speeds (though by no means “broadband”, but that’s a “#firstworldproblems” scenario), so I set about setting up our permanent rate-limiting/QoS stuff.

While the DSL guy was at the central office, I pulled all the crap out of our wiring closet (though in retrospect I should have swept or vacuumed it while I was in there). I pulled out three computer cabinets, two routers (which we’re using as switches and that’s it), five DSL modems, a fax machine, and an SGI Indigo2. When the poor guy got here it was a rabbit warren of cables and stuff that almost looked like a rat king if DSL modems were rats.

So anyway, so far so good – it looks like we’re back to having a reliable service and we’ve staved off the bandwidth goons for at least a few months.

Since I personally think it odd that the main companies “cracking down” on “bandwidth hogs” (read: habitual streaming video users) are the ones that also offer some type of TV service, we ended up going with EarthLink for DSL service instead. The EarthLink sales guy told me that the order for DSL couldn’t go through until after we’d cancelled with AT&T – so I decided to wait on doing that until after the modem got here (in case our AT&T modem was no good for it). Well, AT&T up and cancelled our old DSL sunday night, leaving us without internet access until Tuesday.

So not only were we unable to watch any streaming video, or do anything that might spend any more bandwidth so we’re charged to the tune of $10 for 50GB (which is rough on a rather large family that all but has engravable plaques that say “Netflix: most content consumed, 2010″), but now we’re dead in the water as far as working goes.

We finally got it up and running this morning, but unfortunately it’s going slow. Really slow. 1/4 to 1/3rd the speed it’s supposed to be slow – which is crap, because we’re only a few hundred feet wire-length from the CO according to AT&T. Oh, which brings me to my next point…

… I don’t think our stint on Earthlink will be very long, because if I’m not mistaken, it looks like they simply resell AT&T out here. So I can’t imagine AT&T are going to lose a bunch of “bandwidth hogs” from paying them directly, but still keep them on their network and take it laying down. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

I comment on blogs for the back-links to MumbleDog a lot, so I know the tricks. I try to avoid spamming, and only comment if I actually have something to add to the conversation. I don’t check PR either – either I have something to add to the conversation or not, and usually by the time I’ve figured out what to say it seems a waste to throw the comment away simply because the blog doesn’t have any pagerank. I figure it’ll all add up, and it’s entirely possible that blog may blow up one day and suddenly become really authoritative in Google’s eyes.

So anyway, even though I don’t really partake in it…I know what’s up. But this new stuff they’re doing is just scandalous. Sabriena’s got a few comments on her blog that are uhh… mean? They’ll basically say things like “all you do is whine” or something like that (and let’s be realistic, most of us who do blog purely as a form of release, a lot of what we do is whining), and you’re sitting there thinking “wow, why would you say that to a complete stranger?” Then you don’t even realize it’s a spam comment until you check the comment out, and notice that the URL/anchor text is for something like “car title loans North Carolina” and it hits you.

I theorize that they’re preying on people’s ego – you perceive that someone feels something bad about you, and you want to explain yourself. It looks vague and passive aggressive to simply write another entry without showing the comment, so you leave it up – and Bam! They’ve got their back-link.

Basically you can run a separate script almost like a module for your Murmur server, and have it trap various events that go on, and then the script can react to them. You can do it in your favorite language as long as it has Ice bindings – C++, Python, PHP, Ruby and Java are all supported (and I might have missed a couple). I’m doing it in Python, because while I’m pretty terrible at Python, and I’m more comfortable with PHP, realistically I’m equally terrible at PHP and I think Python is more elegant all in all (though whitespace having syntactic meaning causes me no end of rage).

We had a client approach us a while back about an idea for a site she had, and I started messing around to see whether it was doable. Using the callbacks, I’ve discovered all manner of neat stuff that’s possible. When asking for an example of setting the ACLs up in Python, a guy on IRC handed me a copy of a complete authenticator for EVE Online, which dynamically creates channels and groups based on the corporation you’re in.

We’ve been messing around with the contextual creation of channels, which would be great for a gaming community or maybe voice chat for a free online dating site (especially when coupled with an in-browser client that a few people have been working on, but thus far nothing is usable). MumbleDog (and I, personally) took ownership of a patch a while back to make callbacks for text messages, allowing you to write server-side IRC-style bots and let you do text message control over the server – again, all based off the ACLs that are in place.

I don’t know whether the client is going to go ahead with their project or not, but even if they don’t I had a lot of fun and learned a lot (and stumbled upon a few minor bugs in Murmur we can fix later on) and working on my Python skills is always a plus.

I’ve sold some Steam games, and now it’s my chance to win some too. MetaCoin is gearing up to do Groupon (I think, I’ve never used Groupon) style promotions with Bitcoin merchants every day (they’ve already done some, sparsely). We were thinking about doing it for MumbleDog, but I just don’t think it’d be a good fit with the way we require a USD payment first.

Anyway, as I understand it, you “buy” whatever offer MetaCoin has up for the day, and then when the minimum number of people buy in to the group deal, the merchant works with you via a voucher/coupon or whatever and you save quite a bit.

Trading Bitcoins for other people’s shit is about the best thing you can do with them – besides holding onto them, hurrr – it means you don’t gotta deal with possibly shady exchanges, or getting ripped off by someone with Paypal. Plus you’ll have a novelty item: “check out these cool socks I bought with internet money I made myself!”

My problem is I have a huge issue ignoring it. The XKCD comic “Duty Calls“? That’s me. I lost contact with a “friend” I’ve had for about a decade and a half, due to her chronic inability to shut the hell up on matters of religion. I don’t generally go around posting my dirty laundry with the world’s organized religions, but I’m not going to be bombarded with why yours is the greatest and everyone else is “evil” without saying something.

Of these, the one I’m most hopeful for from the regular developers is support for SRV records – which will allow us to use vanity hostnames without assigning people dedicated IP addresses. Because IPv4 addresses are dwindling, and so far none of our providers except the one I IRC from (and I’m not entirely thrilled about their network for anything other than IRC, honestly) support IPv6 – so SRV records are a fantastic way for people to have an easy to remember Murmur address.

MumbleDog still hasn’t upgraded yet – we’ve been running a 1.2.3 development server for ages though. We support recording, priority speakers, and a whole bunch of other good stuff already, so it’s not like we need to pull the trigger now. I’m still in the process of testing stuff out – I’d rather we sit on the git version a while instead of upgrading and having something go wrong.

While it mightn’t look like much to clients, I’ve been spending a lot of time personally on Mumble to make sure everything goes as smooth as can be. Some of it involves doing nothing but using our test servers… so naturally it involves some games of Team Fortress 2 and whatnot (a hard life, I know) but other parts involve a lot of nasty trouble shooting, reading backtraces and suchlike.

In the coming week or so, I’m probably going to need lots of coffee, some eye wrinkle cream and a week’s bed-rest. Until then, I’ll keep “slaving” away.