two-pot screamer dot com

I used to get really excited about PC hardware. I mean really excited. I recently found an old piece of paper from high school. It was labelled “My Dream System”. Other people might have had a dream house or a dream car; I had a dream computer.

I had outlined the specifications in exacting detail. It was going to be the best computer ever. Top of the range. So good I would never have to buy another one. The list started: 486dx2-66, 192MB of RAM…you can guess the rest.

These days I have no interest in the sort of computer that lives on the desktop. It’s a tool to do a job, and I’ll hang onto it for as long as possible. The days of 2 year upgrade cycles are long over. I don’t play games anymore and I haven’t upgraded my operating system since 2000. I’ve even reversed my position on motherboards that have everything onboard. I haven’t had to upgrade anything except RAM or storage since the days of the Voodoo2. I even walk away from conversations about desktop PC hardware unless someone makes a really stupid assertion (got to preserve alpha geek status somehow).

So, having given you the background on how I feel about computers, you can imagine it was with bad grace that I finally decided that it was time I blow a small amount of money on a rapidly depreciating asset in an attempt to wring another couple of years of useful life out of it.

What would have been a fun task for me as a 15 year old was a huge pain in the arse for someone with better things to do with their time. My motherboard manual was missing all sorts of key information (like how big a hard drive it could address) and, in the years since I’ve been paying attention, the industry had invented a whole bunch of new busses and acronyms I didn’t know how to pronounce. Not to mention all the misleading marketing bullshit - my favourite one was an IDE harddrive rack that advertised itself as hot-swappable (yeah, if you don’t mind hosing your file system).

I now have slightly more sympathy for members of the general public when they are buying technology.

I generally don’t bother going to trade shows anymore (if you want to schmooze me, buy me dinner or invite me to your Christmas party), but my favourite thing about them was always the little logo-covered gimicks that the companies would have at their booths so that people would remember their name.

Before I decided I didn’t want to live as a pack-rat any longer, I used to collect them. I would come home with a bag full of dodgy pens, dorky caps, ugly t-shirts, coffee mugs, mini-mascots, free software, and random objects made out of foam. The only really useful things I ever picked up were a 16MB USB key and a USB phone charger.

The intelligent companies had asked themselves “what object might someone keep long enough to see our logo the next time they need our product or service”. The ones who answered “ugly merchandise” or “foam stuff with our logo on it” were clearly delusional about whether they were really a smart company.

The reason this comes up now is that the company I work for has a booth at a trade show, and they have purchased two large boxes of coloured foam balls with the company name on them. A choice selection of yellow, orange, red and blue balls are sitting in a clear glass bowl that, presumably, will be at the front of the stand for people to take a ball from. I predict that most of the balls will still be in the bowl at the end of the trade show, and that the boxes will sit around the office (most likely under my desk) for as long as the company continues to exist.

My suggestion that (to continue the obvious clown theme) the staff manning the booth be made to wear big floppy shoes and revolving bow ties was not a popular one.

Update: The trade show is over and 90% of the foam balls are gone. People are morons.

I love vendors…in that totally sarcastic meaning of the word “love”, so frequently used by the world’s teenagers.

At work I have a problem with Vendor 1’s product. Their R&D team is fixing the product but timeframes are tight, so I call Vendor 2 so that they can do a proof of concept for us.

A sales guy and a technical guy arrive on site and install their product. It doesn’t work either. “It’s okay, we have a patch for this problem,” says the technical guy, “or, if that doesn’t work, we can get our R&D department to have a look at the problem.”

Great! (There’s that sarcastic teenager again). Not only do we still have a problem, but now we have the option of dealing with two different R&D teams.

What really annoys me is that Vendor 2 “knows” that their product is a more appropriate solution than Vendor 1’s product…even though they haven’t used the competing product and don’t even know its feature set.

This is something you might expect from a salesweasel, but not from a technical guy. The Vendor 2 technical expert offered (I imagine to bolster his technical credentials) that he had once used a product by Vendor 1…but it was a totally different product!

Well, that was a productive use of a morning. For the rest of the afternoon I think I will be painting my cubicle black and hanging up band posters.

I hate using Internet cafes. I mean really hate using them. Using an Internet cafe is like using one of the portable toilets at the end of a hot day at a large music festival. You prefer to just hold on as long as you can, but sometimes you just have to … download a … big … batch … of email.

Keyboards stained brown with dead skin cells and grease don’t worry me. Studies that show that the average toilet seat is cleaner than the average computer mouse don’t faze me. The thing that makes my skin crawl is that moment when I have to type my passwords into a strange computer.

Last week I met a girl who did all her Internet banking in Internet cafes. I commented that she was probably reasonably safe because she wouldn’t have enabled electronic transfers, and getting that feature enabled was a paper-based process that involved the postal system. She replied that of course she had electronic transfers enabled, what use would it be otherwise? I think the groan and forehead clutching tipped her off that something was wrong. By the end of the conversation she was thoroughly (and justifiably) paranoid. I’m not sure that the concept of “untrusted client” really sunk in though. She will probably just restrict her financial transactions to her spyware-infested home computer.

The more you know about how computers work the less likely you are to trust them. Cryptography and computer security expert Bruce Schneier doesn’t do any financial transactions with a PC. I’m happy to use my firewalled, patched, and locked down home computer for financial transactions, but I wouldn’t use any other computer. And millions of innocents are more than happy to hand their passwords over to anyone who cares to run a keystroke logger on a public Internet terminal.

I’ve had a few problems with my Virtual Hosting company. Here are the ones I can remember off the top of my head…

Access to CPanel disabled due to lack of disk space.
This was the first ticket I raised with my provider. They thanked me politely for informing them of the problem and promptly fixed it. The turn-around time on this ticket was around 2 hours. I was pleased with their excellent support but a little worried that they clearly had no tools which would automatically inform them when disk space was running low on a server. I have used several commercial tools that do this, and I am sure that there are some free ones available.

All files missing from website.
I started getting 404 errors on my website, so I logging in via FTP to see what was wrong. Every single file and directory was gone. It was pure virgin webspace. I logged into CPanel and found that my addon domains and all the email accounts I had set up were also gone.

Still buzzing from that “oh fuck” shot of adrenaline, I raised a ticket saying that all my files and settings seemed to have been deleted, and could they restore them from their backups.

They wrote back that I must have given my password to someone who had deleted all my files. They ignored the “please restore my site from backups”; I suspect that they do not keep any.

I was a little annoyed by this stage, so I decided to do some detective work. I eventually worked out that my domain name was pointing to a new IP address. All my files were still on the original server. I raised another ticket telling them that the A record for my domain name had been modified on their name servers (moving me to a new server without telling me?). They changed the record back reasonably promptly once they knew what they had to do.

File permissions changed causing server 500 errors.
Several sites that I manage were running Movable Type (which is a well known resource hog when it rebuilds pages, which it does every time anyone leaves a comment). The first I knew of a problem was when people started complaining about server 500 errors on certain pages. I investigated and found that several of the mt-comments.cgi files had somehow lost their execute attributes. I changed the file permissions back, and everything was working again. The same problem happened a couple of days later. I tried to change the file permissions back, but I found that the files were no longer owned by me.

I raised a ticket asking that the file permissions be changed back and ownership of the files be reverted to my account. I also pointed out that it was inappropriate for administrators to be casually breaking customers’ websites. The files were fixed, but I got no comment on their unprofessional conduct. If they have a problem with certain applications being run on their servers they should note it in their terms of service or stipulate an acceptable level of resource utilisation per customer. I suspect that the admin may have just chmoded any file he could find, because at the time none of the websites were getting more than a couple of comments per day, so they could not have been thrashing the servers.

HTML files with file size of 0 bytes.
One website started returning a blank page when the front page was requested. I had a look at the file system and there were several files with a file size of 0. After my last experience I suspected that an incompetent admin may have been over-writing large files to try to save some disk space or something.

I raised a ticket and asked what was going on. The support people said that the server had run out of disk space earlier in the day and, since these static html files were created automatically by a Perl script, the generation of the files will have failed.

I selected the option to rebuild all the blogs and the problem was fixed, but the hosting company clearly hadn’t learnt anything about managing their servers.

Addon domains missing.
One day all my addon domains (domain names that point to a directory under my master domain) disappeared. The files were still there, but the domains were just giving 404 errors.

I tried to re-create the addon domains, but CPanel returned an error about not being able to find the name servers listed in the DNS record. I could successfully do a name lookup using them through CPanel (on the same server), so I knew that the name servers were running and could be connected to from my server.

I raised a ticket, and support created the addon domains for me, but offered no explanation as to why it was not working.

lynx disappears
I decided that I wanted to import an RSS feed for the front of my blog. With Movable Type, the imported RSS feed would be updated every time I posted in my blog or when someone left a comment and the front page was regenerated. Given that my blog was spectacularly unpopular and I wasn’t going to post or regenerate a couple of times a day just to keep a feed current, I decided to have it automatically rebuild itself every 6 hours.

This should have been easy to set up. Someone had written a Perl script to regenerate Movable Type blogs, and it is a simple matter to set up a cron job to run the script any time I liked.

The first hurdle I ran into was that I couldn’t find Perl anywhere. It certainly wasn’t in #!/usr/bin/perl and looking for it was a little painful as shell access was disabled, so every time I wanted to run a command, I would set up a cron job in CPanel and have it email me the output.

I eventually concluded that maybe they just didn’t have Perl installed and put the script in my public_html directory and ran it with my web browser (at this stage I didn’t care about the security risk). I automated the rebuilding of my front page by invoking lynx (a text based web browser) on the server with my cron job and pointing it at the Perl script.

This worked fine for several weeks until the administrators removed lynx…which is fair enough, but once again they are making changes to their servers that impact other people. They get a big fat F for change management.

Overall, this is not a company I would recommend. It’s not just that they are bad at managing the technical details of good web host, their customer service is also poor. I have had tickets (that required a 5 minute action on the part of support) changed to in-progress and then left sitting for more than 24 hours (do you think that someone’s Key Performance Indicator had something to do with the number of unhandled tickets?). When I wrote a letter of complaint I received no reply, and my ticket history (audit trail) disappeared.

Something this company is extremely good at thought, is taking your money. Perhaps they should find an industry where they could focus on what they do best without having to provide any actual service…like sending Nigerian scam emails or something.

Update (January 14th, 2005)

Now that this website uses dynamically generated pages that hit the database each time a page is requested, I am noticing that the database server falls over more than a one-legged man on a bender.

I’ve had to put together this error page. Bonus points if you can pick the source of the image.

Error establishing a database connection!

This probably means that the database server is down (again).
You can try again in a few minutes or, if you need the information right now…

• Check the Google cache, or
• Try the Wayback Machine

If you are still having problems after a couple of hours, let me know by emailing stuart at twopotscreamer dot com.

I installed new blogging software today, giving Movable Type the flick in favour of Word Press.

Word Press is a little less polished, but it is free of overly restrictive licensing requirements and it should be a little easier to modify how the software works given that it is written in PHP instead of Perl (this is not a “Perl is executable line noise” troll, I just have a couple of orders of magnitude more experience in PHP. Incidentally, if you want to annoy a PHP fanboy, start comparing the relative maturity of CPAN and PEAR).

I was a little curious as to how many people had either not bothered to remove the default first posting, or had installed the software and then abandoned it. A Google search for “Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!” returns just under 10 000 results.

At least Word Press randomly generates a password for the default account, unlike Movable Type. I wonder how many blogs you can still log into with Melody/Nelson.