fwaggle.org

Entrecard Drop list

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:23:15 -0500

I've been trying to come up with an easy way to fulfill my Entrecard dropping responsibilities, and until now I couldn't figure out a way that reconciled fairness with my absolute laziness. So I decided to create an Entrecard drop list.

It's not as neato as Matthias', in that it doesn't check for widgets. I figure I'll just manually ban people from it if I go to their site and they don't have a widget. What I do is have a script that checks my drop list periodically, and then adds an entry when someone drops.

Then when I go to the drop list page, it organizes the list by the number of times each user has dropped on me in the last 30 days. That way I'm dropping on the folks who religiously drop on me first, instead of using the toolbar which neglects some really fanatical droppers if they should wait until after I've done my run to drop on my site.

Previous to this, I was using the toolbar to drop (because it's faster than dropping from the EC website, which is heinously slow these days). I was putting people who drop a lot into my favourites, but maintaining that system was time consuming, so I neglected it. I get the feeling that I might have been dropping on some people daily who weren't reciprocating, I was just dragging people around like dead weight in Delsey luggage.

So yeah, that's my grand plan #2 to organize my drops. Previous mentioned rules will of course land people in the drop slammer.

Homebrew Security Systems?

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:40:36 -0500

So I've been tossing around this idea for a while now. Our house is pretty big, and basically no one is downstairs at night once the last person is done watching TV, and the doors downstairs aren't exactly the greatest in security (someone with simple tools could easily pry them open).

So I've been thinking about trying to get a security system from a yard sale or whatever and installing it, but the problem is that I can't find any. Then there's the fact that most alarm systems probably won't do entirely what I want to anyway, and in true hungry hacker fashion I've been jotting down notes to try and build my own.

I don't have an oscilloscope any more, and I haven't done any research into the way that motion sensors and whatnot communicate with the control module - I think they're just either normally open or normally closed, and that's all there is to it. So I'm toying with the idea of writing a controller using an MSP430, and coming up with some kind of a concentrator system to allow me to fix many different detectors to a simple bus.

I think the cool thing about building my own would be that I don't always want the alarm to sound if something happens. For instance, it might be nice just to have the system beep if the door opens during the day, or what have you. Rolling my own system would let me figure out all the things I want to do. I could even build an intercom and doorbell system into it as well, and have the whole thing have different operating modes for when people are here and/or asleep.

The possibilities associated with this project are pretty exciting, and I think I can build the whole thing much cheaper than going and buying a system. I smell an article coming in the future, hehe.

Winter Photography

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:24:14 -0500

We had our first "snow" today. It's not going to stick on the ground, but it came down, a sure indicator that winter's well on it's way. The weather this year has been really strange here, with the way things were acting in October I really thought we were going to have an early winter, but for all the show, mother nature's been really easy on us so far.

I went back and edited my christmas list, because I realised I neglected to put a camera tripod on there. Photography is something of a hobby of mine - sort of, but not really. I mean I enjoy it, I'm just not particularly good at it and I don't really do it enough to call it a hobby I suppose. Probably more of an "interest" I guess?

We've been through three digital cameras so far, each one better than the last, and the last one was actually brand new. You can see from browsing my flickr that I'm not fantastic at it but I've definitely been getting better.

One of the things I would like to do this winter is get out and take some really dramatic shots of the woods when there's snow all over. I've seen some people take fantastic shots and doing weird things with the composition and truthfully I have no idea how to do any of it - but I'm hoping to learn. I just need to find the motivation to get out and actually take some photos when it's about 10F out.

The Great Room Resolution

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:04:33 -0500

We've started making New Year's resolutions early this year, because no one seems to stick to their resolutions anyway, so why not make them a little more realistic. My wife and I were sitting with her Mom in the "great room" (no really, that's what it's called on the deed!) staring up at all the holes in the ancient plaster, and we resolved that this winter would be the winter that we rennovate the great room.

The first step is to finish the wiring. I need to split the great room onto it's own breaker, because it shares a breaker with the kitchen, so if you were to plug a space heater in there (which we don't do any more, but I am not comfortable not having the option), and someone is using the Microwave, and the fridge compressor cuts on, you lose all power. This is, honestly, about the only thing that causes charmander.fwaggle.org to ever lose uptime.

We also need to run the ceiling wiring for the second fan. The room is quite long (it's probably pushing 30 feet?) so we decided that one light fixture wouldn't be enough, so we're going to have two ceiling fans with modest lights, and then four sconces on the walls. That's the first priority, because it's a whole lot easier to do wiring when you can smash holes in the plaster willy nilly because it's going to be replaced.

After that, I need to tear out the arch way to the original shape. That won't be much work, and actually sounds like a whole lot of fun provided I can sucker one of the kids into doing the cleaning up when I'm done.

Next up will be doing sheetrock, which is going to be expensive, time consuming, and tiring. Lifting sheets of sheetrock up to "ten foot" (quoted because at that time they were never exactly ten feet) ceilings sounds like hard work, this will likely be where my motivation will be tested.

Then comes taping, mudding, and painting. We still haven't decided on the color, but I'm sure that will prove to be fun. I enjoy arguing. No really.

After that, it's time to move onto lighting. We want two ceiling fans, because in the summer it's quite a warm room, and in the winter the fans will help circulate the warmth from the stove. However, we want the room to be a "period" room, so we're looking for some fans that will match some sconces, and that all look that "old style", sort of like the stuff that maxim lighting makes.

My eventual goal is to get a projector, and then hide all the home theater equipment in an old tube radio cabinet, so that when the system is off it is barely noticeable and everything looks like it's from about 50 or more years ago. I think it's gonna look great.

For pictures of the current progress, look at the photos tagged Great Room on my flickr.

My Christmas Wish List

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:21:33 -0500

My darling wife Sabriena is absolutely sick of hearing about the things I "want" for Christmas, but I thought I'd list a few things here anyway, for my family's reference.

Up to about a week ago, the number one thing I wanted this Christmas was a Playstation 3. I'm a Sony fanboy - though not rabid, I can actually see the flaws in their systems, it just happens that I favor them more than the competitors.. speaking of which my wife, when she gets mad at me, often threatens to buy me an Xbox 360 for Christmas, citing the lower price and "I thought you said you wanted one."

Anyway, that changed recently, when one of the lower items on my list, Left4Dead, was released in demo form, and I learned that my computer won't play it.

So now I've decided to strip anything above about $20 off my list, people can buy me these things if they wish, and then I'll wait patiently until after christmas and build a new PC. Maybe.

Some of the smaller things I would like?

A Nokia CA-42 data cable, so I can put ringtones on my crappy little cell phone.

A Karambit Knife, something cheap but not too cheap (the Smith + Wesson hindged variety look pretty nice).

I would love a camera tripod. Anything cheap, I don't even care if it's not full height (but that would be nice) as long as it keeps the camera stable.

A 4GB+ Memory Stick Pro Duo, because it would be nice to actually use my PSP as an MP3 player, since I can't really afford games for it... unless...

You want to buy me a PSP game! I don't want much, pretty well anything will keep me occupied for a little while, so something cheap like HotShots Golf, the Madden games, Ape Escape, Death Jr or SOCOM (*squeals*) all of which can be had for around five bucks.

Finally, though I can't seem to find them on eBay... I would greatly appreciate a few extra MSP 430 Target boards, for the MSP430EZ kit. They're cheap too, if you're looking at something that's above about $15 for three of them you're looking at the wrong thing. I don't even know why I mentioned this because probably none of my family members will know where to buy them from.

WHG Blog release

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:50:18 -0500

If you've been following my entries here, you'd know that I'm an internet kind of guy. Web hosting and web development is what I do, and even if I couldn't make money doing it I'd still do it as a hobby - I've enjoyed solving problems ever since I was a little kid, hacking away in BASIC on my family's C64.

I read all the latest industry news, trawl forums, spend countless hours conversing with other administrators, all trying to keep ahead of the curve. I'll bookmark the odd site when it contains pertinent information that's updated, particularly when it comes to things like optimizations. WHG have added a blog to their website, which looks as though as time goes by it'll become increasingly relevant.

I've ranted time and time before about people shopping for hosting looking purely at megabytes and gigabytes and ignoring other factors, and how important it is to make an informed decision. If you're new to the industry, a site like WHG can be a godsend to help you compare services from different companies, and their web hosting blog can give you some insight into the industry, and perhaps even teach you a thing or two you didn't know.

As an example, one of their recent entries "Do you really need a .com domain?", basically reiterates what I was explaining to a pro bono client I have. Basically I was saying how people will associate "company name dot com" in their brain, and will more or less forget about other TLDs, so when naming your new venture it's important to take this into consideration. The only way you can learn things like this is through experience, and gaining your own experience is costly - you're much better off to learn through other people's experience.

FreeBSD, don't let me down now. :(

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:58:00 -0500

This morning sometime, Sabrienix's primary server appears to have discovered a rather obscure bug in FreeBSD 7.0.

I've begun the painstaking process of diagnosing it - being friends with a developer never hurts of course - but I don't really have enough information yet to figure it out. It's quite probably it's one of a host of teeny bugs that's already been fixed and will likely not exist in 7.1-R, and I have my own rather uneducated ideas of what might have caused a machine that was stable for 35 days to suddenly head south, but I positively hate the feeling of not having complete and utter faith in the reliability of my machines.

So here's hoping we resolve this quickly. Oh and oops at making a typo that prevented Apache from starting on boot, which meant our downtime was greater than the 3 minutes it should have been.

Teamspeak gogogo!

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:54:51 -0500

Today, Sabrienix began the process for becoming an Authorized Teamspeak Hosting Partner. I've emailed sales a few times back and forth before, because I had some concerns - mainly that I don't wish to be charged back-rent for running my Clan server on the same IP that I'm now registering for our hosting company. I understand I'll have to pay for those slots from this point on, but I don't want to pay 6 months in arrears because I haven't made any money off that server.

I don't particularly care for the Teamspeak2 software, so I'm going to play it by ear in the future. Ventrilo software is much nicer, but their authorized hosting program is also substantially harder to get started in. TS3 is coming and looks to be really exciting, but it's been "coming" for quite some time now and software that's "coming" doesn't really do me any good.

My plan at this point is to try to grow the Teamspeak services as much as I can, and when I reach over 1000 slots, to apply for Ventrilo licensing, then offer to move people over to that unless they expressly wish to stay on Teamspeak, and then grow both from there.

If Ventrilo's licensing program were a little easier, it would make my decision a whole lot simpler. Sometimes it seems like you're buying into small business franchise, with how many hoops they want you to jump through. They want me to be a registered business, but their language is actually somewhat ambiguous here, I do hope they don't expect me to get Sabrienix incorporated, because at this point that's not something I wish to do. Hopefully a registered DBA at the county level will suffice.

Or Teamspeak3 could come through with all the promises it's made, and blow Ventrilo out of the water. That would be cool too. BRB, holding my breath.

Time to be morbid for a bit

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:32:22 -0500

The subject of mortality has come up around me a surprising amount lately, much to my wife's dismay. The very breath of terms like "living will", "term life insurance", "cremation" is enough to bring tears in my poor wife's eyes, but these are important things to think about.

The first thing to touch it off was a thread on our gaming forum about what happens after you die, at which point I reiterated my view on the subject - much to the depression of the people around me. I don't get it, why is the thought of there being no afterlife so terrifying for people? I think it's liberating, but at the same time it rams home the tremendous responsibility we have to enjoy what we're given now, instead of hoping it'll all be better after we croak.

Then my thoughts moved to considering what will happen when I die, which is a double edged sword because of the fact that I can control much of it. "Life support", "Code", etc are all phrases that bring with them hard questions. Personally, I don't want life support unless there's a clear light at the end of the tunnel. Why lengthen the grieving process with machines, when there's clearly no hope? Let my family start the process immediately by dispensing with as much of the machinery as possible - if I'm braindead, let the rest of me go too.

I made the decision to be an organ donor, though I don't presently carry any form of identification of that fact (Australian licenses do not have an organ donor field, and I don't have my Red Cross card any more) my wife knows my wishes. I also try to donate blood when I can, but the blood bank refuse to send me that card either.

As far as disposal of what's left, hey, whatever's cheapest. When my grandfather on my mother's side passed away, he had long prior requested a sailor's burial. For those that don't know what that entails, it's when they wrap you in a sail, typically with something heavy, then it's roped around and dropped off the ship. It's terribly expensive, and harder than hell to get permission for if you're not actively in the military. The compromise was made to have him cremated and spread the ashes at sea, so I'm making sure to be intentially ambiguous so there's plenty of options for my family.

Whether there's an afterlife or not it's perfectly clear that we're done with the body when we die, I see no point in fancy coffins or anything of that nature. Cremation's cool, it doesn't waste space in the earth and it's typically cheaper than a burial plot. If someone feels compelled to keep the burnt up bits, let them, otherwise just dump the pot in the pacific ocean so I can float between the USA and Australia as I please, if that's what you believe happens.

Now I'm done being morbid for a while.

Ugh, cPanel.

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:43:33 -0500

Man, I can't stand this software.

I admit that for a while there, I was a little biased - my last experience of cPanel was quite some time ago (2003, if memory serves correctly) and it was patently retarded. To be honest, in my opinion, not a lot has changed. At Sabrienix, we typically market ourselves to people who want a little hand-holding, so we generally don't use control panels of any sort and simply administer the machines the old-fashioned way.

It's become increasingly clearer though that we're losing a few clients who would like a "reseller" style account that they can help themselves using something like cPanel/WHM to administer their websites themselves, without our help. I don't particularly want to turn away any potential customers, so I decided to spend the next two weeks learning as much as I can about cPanel (because that's how long the trial license lasts).

Well that would all be well and good, if I could get the thing to install. I'm not sure if FreeBSD is listed as a supported OS or not, but I had a terrible time of it. First of all, the documentation states that you want a minimal install, but it also gives you a positively idiotic "recommended" partition scheme. That's fine, so I install FreeBSD 7.0 on a VM and start the cPanel installer. "PERL is required". Ohhh-kay, I guess the PERL included in base FBSD isn't sufficient, so I install the package from ports, and try the installer again.

What follows next is a train wreck of failed dependencies and insufficient error handling the likes of which I've never seen. I have no idea if it's because the VM "only" had 256MB RAM or something silly like that, but it was a nightmare. I had to manually install p5-DBD-mysql, and several other things that the installer somehow misplaced. My default Apache + PHP configuration files weren't created, and neither were the keys/certificates for SSL.

After tracking down and fixing every possible error I could find, abusing /scripts/upcp --force several times, it was finally listening on the cPanel port. Hurrah! ... or not. I get nothing but a blank page, and I can't find any errors anywhere. The installer's crapped all over an otherwise pristine directory hierarchy with complete and utter disregard for where everything should go, and to make matters worse it's only installed Apache 1.x. I decided to trash that VM and try again with CentOS, and the cPanel installer is running now, so far without a hitch. CentOS bothers me slightly because I have substantially less experience administering it. FreeBSD is my stomping ground. I can keep CentOS up to date, sure - who the heck couldn't? But when things go wrong, I have no idea where to start looking, particularly if the machines are going to have cPanel on them.

I'm almost tempted to try and write a control panel from scratch, with a goal of having it be as non-invasive to the underlying OS as possible, something that appears to be lost on cPanel - the recommended uninstall procedure is a format + reinstall. I know that most "reseller" customers are looking for a certain experience that cPanel (as ubiquitous as it is) provides, but a competent administrator shouldn't have to fight with a piece of software to get the job done.

The Grumpy Blue House

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:14:33 -0400

We never seem to make ground with regards this damn house. Don't get me wrong - I love it, it's huge, it's old and it's comfortable, everyone has more than enough room to spread out. But man I'd just like to for once have it so that it didn't look derelict if someone were to come visit.

The entire house needs resided, and probably re-roofed - that can wait though, I've been patching the holes up. But it seems like birds keep busting more holes through the decrepit wood that sits over the last foot or so under the eves - the asbestos only goes up to that point, it doesn't cover the entire house (I haven't figured out if that's a good thing or not yet).

As a result of countless small holes, the house is drafty. Try as I might, I can't stop all the drafts... It's getting better each year, but when you reach a certain point in an otherwise warmish room and there's a huge breeze and chill, you kind of wonder what you've wasted all year doing.

Another issue is the fence - or lack thereof. In Indiana, it would appear as though they don't believe in fences or something, because there's maybe 1% of houses will actually have one. Well we're residential segregationists, we want our privacy, and plus I'd like to be able to let my dogs out the back door and not have to worry about them running out in the street.

My wife likes the look of those pvc fence installation kits, but not the price. Personally what I'm leaning towards is just putting up some horse fence around the property (the large square cyclone variety), and then letting a hedge or some other kind of bush grow up in front of it for looks.

If you've been following my home improvement photos on Flickr, you'd know we'd done some work on the driveway - but it still needs more gravel, and it could do with some kind of an edge as well. The garden (what little parts of it I've done) are coming along, but again it just seems overwhelming.

The dining room is almost completed, and it looks fantastic, but the living room (directly adjacent) looks awful with holes in the plaster and everything, and it's the first room you see when you walk in. It's our goal to get that room completed over the winter, but we'll see.

At least I got the chimney swept before we needed the fireplace, but man I would like to feel like I'm getting somewhere.

... and the "Carolina Denim" has still got to go.

"They won't search me, I'm white and have nothing to hide"

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:57:30 -0400

The complacency of a populace never ceases to amaze me. In the USA, you have one group of people who don't seem to care that the second amendment's being eroded because they "don't like guns", and other groups of people who are more than happy to tread on the freedom of religion rights of others, because they're convinced their religion is right. The violation of yet other rights seems to be a bi-partisan effort.

Now most people don't seem to be too troubled about the "Constitution Free Zone", because they don't seem to think it's going to happen to them.

What no one seems to realize is you don't need to be of middle eastern descent to have your rights violated, all it takes is for the person in immediate charge of passing you through to take any sort of dislike to you. If the all-powerful customs agent or border patrol agent decides they don't like the look of you, they can take a screwdriver to your Rimowa and bust it open with virtually nothing in the way of justification. Your shiny new laptop? They can rifle through that if they feel so inclined, looking for absolutely anything that the agent thinks - purely by looking at you - you might have.

The oft-referred poem by Martin Niemoller seems to be coming true in the USA, people seem to be complacent enough to think they have nothing to hide and therefore shouldn't be concerned - the founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves.

I'll leave the following as an exercise to the reader. If you are an American, with a few hours to spare this weekend, search Google for Washington's final address. Read it, I mean really read it. It's long, and it's filled with language not often used these days so it'll take you a little while to digest it. But read it, and if you have more time, read some of the other manuscripts of the time, if you're from the religious right, specifically read some of Jefferson's work.

Now contrast all the things that the founding fathers had forewarned that could go wrong with a free country, and compare these things to goings on today. If you are a political type, forget comparing the actions of the party you dislike, compare the actions of the party you like, the party you support, to the warnings of the founding fathers.

I'd be lying if I said it would make your job easier this November 4th.

Tracfwned

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:45:11 -0400

"1999 called, they want their e-commerce exploit back"

This is a class of vulnerability that really shouldn't exist these days. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but around 1999 to 2000, when e-commerce was still in it's infancy, there were many "e-tailers" who were ripped off blind by people modifying the contents of forms and URLs to alter the prices of things like laptops to a buck - pay the shipping and save several hundred bucks.

E-commerce programmers these days should be smarter than to trust data which goes out to userland and comes back, but that's exactly what I discovered Tracfone were doing a couple of weeks ago - when purchasing minutes, the dollar amount and the number of units were sent out in a form and then sent back in a GET request. Spotting this what I thought was a trivial, useless information disclosure, I tried opening the URL in a new tab and modifying the price from 19.99 to 1.99. The next page still kept the correct price so I thought "bah, I've found nothing."

I closed the tampered tab and went back to my original, what I thought to be legitimate purchase tab, and completed the process. I almost didn't notice, but my total for the transaction was $2.33. It should be stressed that even if I thought it was going to work, I wouldn't have completed the transaction - I had no intention to commit fraud. Not only was their system vulnerable to manipulation, it was pretty adamant after the manipulation that it knew what it was doing. The only way I can think that this worked is either the server side session information is updated from the GET request, or a cookie's set. I didn't bother exploring why, because I wanted my account straightened out, I use the Tracfone as an emergency contact for my wife's company - I didn't want it shut off because of a billing snafu.

So I called Tracfone, and they were insisting it was a legitimate transaction, that their system showed I was charged the correct amount and blah blah blah. I had a hard time making this lady understand the implications of this system, the conversation at one point went something like this:

<fwaggle> You don't seem to understand, I could go on your website right now and buy lifetime double minutes, and a 400 minute card, for about two bucks.
<Tech Support> So what I am understanding is that you purchased the 60 minute card, but wish to instead purchase the 400 minute card?

Yeah, she seriously responded to it with that. Eventually I asked to put me through to a supervisor, and she instructed that they were all busy, and one would call me back in 24 hours. No such luck.

I waited until Monday, and I emailed a security email address I'd found on a website someplace while googling. I told them the situation, but didn't describe the bug, and I also told them that I'd wait exactly 30 days before disclosing this publicly. I told them if they cooperated I would be happy to sit on the disclosure for a little longer. Nothing. Wednesday, the "contact us" form on their website was working so I tried to use that, again describing the situation but not the bug. By this time I'm getting sick of dealing with it, so I told them they had until Friday to respond in some fashion or I'd disclose it on Friday. I received an email back in a few hours stating that they thanked me for bringing it to their attention and that their website was secure.

With the exception of trying to explain it to the level 1 customer support lady, I'd never actually described the bug to them, but they're claiming - somewhat ambiguously - that it's fixed, so I'm disclosing it now.

It might still be possible to do it, or it might be possible to change the number of units in the URL and see what happens - truthfully I can't be bothered checking it and don't want another "fraudulent" transaction on my phone. They claim their website's secure, so I think I'm okay disclosing this. They don't appear to have any interest in correcting the charge to my card, I guess I get to keep those 120 minutes (haha double minutes coupon) that I paid $2.33 for as a door prize.

Disclosure History (including creepy time correlations)

Sunday, October 12th 2008
4:33pm Transaction pending for $2.33
4:48pm Called to report findings, spoke with level 1 tech support who was less than helpful. Escalated to supervisor, but they will have to call me back within 24 hours.

Monday, October 13th 2008
4:30pm - Emailed Tracfone Security address regarding vulnerability. No call yet.

Friday, October 17th 2008
4:32pm - Filled in "contact us" form on website, alerting vendor of my intention to disclose publicly.

Saturday, October 18th 2008
4:31pm - Received email from Customer Service, saying "Please be informed that our website is secured."

Thursday, October 23rd 2008
12:30pm - Public disclosure.

Note well: I am not responsible for anything any viewer does with this information. Please be aware that knowingly modifying prices of items on e-commerce websites could be considered wire fraud depending on your jurisdiction. You've been warned.

Sabrienix won't be doing cloud computing any time soon :(

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:43:27 -0400

Cloud computing.. it's the new industry buzzword and it's something that I'd really like to play with. The basic idea is that you write your application so that it can scale transparently across computers, and then you put it on a cloud computing grid and you pay for the amount of resources you actually use. The cloud might have several thousand machines connected to it, at any one time you might only use a portion of one machine, but because you're on the cloud if your site suddenly gets hammered (eg, slashdotted) you can spread out to as many machines as you need, instantly.

You don't need to suffer the downtime while you provision more machines for the cluster, and when the traffic burst is over, you don't need to be paying for those machines while they sit idle. You only pay for what you actually use.

Sounds great right? Well, given that I run a hosting company my immediate thought is man, I'd like to play with that. What does one need to start a cloud/grid/utility hosting company? Servers. Lots and lots of servers, the majority of which will sit idle. A good, stable cloud hosting company will probably need few hundred servers before they even get a paying client, because the whole attraction to cloud hosting is that the client's app should never run out of resources. You don't want to be a victim of your own success so you need to have the servers sitting there, provisioned and ready to go.

So it's all a pipe-dream for me. I don't have anywhere near the kind of money necessary to invest in a good cloud computing platform, and if I did I'd probably invest it in some property or go looking for franchise opportunities or something substantially more safer than some technology that Amazon and Google are gonna own at.

If you comment too much, it makes your comments worth less

nospam@example.com (fwagglechop) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:34:01 -0400

Well it looks like I almost have the spammers licked on Hungry Hacker Industries. I've had a couple of messages that look like they might have been trying, but it also somewhat looks like they could be legitimate messages - some kid got his myspace url in the subject line, and I'll add a check for that at a later date.

I'm having some trouble with spammers in my comments on this website too. I don't understand what's so hard about it, if I wanted a link for "What is zyban", "Phentermine review", or something else on my website, then I'll put it there.

In a surprise twist, my wife and I both decided to ban an entrecarder from posting their URL in the comments sections of our websites, after they spammed an identical, completely irrelevant comment on about 5 websites that we manage. Don't be a comment whore, comment when you really have something to say. A good rule of thumb is this: if you wouldn't leave a comment if I'd disabled link-backs, then you shouldn't leave a comment even though I allow them. That's not so hard is it?