ScottSchulz.us » Rants

Carmike Cinemas – Having a Bad Day

Scott — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 19:33:24 +0000

Thinking I might like to order a gift certificate for my mother for her birthday, I headed to the Carmike Cinemas website to see if I could get her movie tickets for a show or two. Unfortunately, it seems someone on their admin staff left his pager at the office and hasn’t gotten the notification that their entire site is down because they’ve run out of disk space. Either that, or perhaps those torrents finally finished downloading.

More Twitter Downtime

Scott — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:06:54 +0000

Twitter has been down most of the day, or at least under such loads that none of the apps I use to interact with it will work. . . Not good, and certainly not a glowing recommendation for Ruby on Rails.

Verizonage: Will Vonage fold into Verizon

Scott — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:08:24 +0000

Now that Verizon has seemingly won the court battles over the Vonage patent infringement suits, and has won an injunction against Vonage to prevent the use of the infringing technology, one has to wonder if Verizon and Vonage will end up simply merging as part of some settlement.

Yes, I look forward to the possibility of half the service at twice the price under Verizon.

Comment Spam

Scott — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:20:47 +0000

One question which continues to perplex me is: How do all of these spammers make money? I understand that they have customers / advertisers / bottomfeeders who pay them to advertise their wares via the tons of email and comment spam posted daily to sites such as this one. But does anyone actually click on those links? I certainly would never purchase any medication — regardless how inexpensively advertised — from a company whose advertising campaign has the names of the medications misspelled.

Even were one to overlook the misspellings as simple errors, does anyone buy things from an unsolicited email, or through a clearly misplaced advertisement in the comment section of a blog?

Calling Microsoft

Scott — Wed, 24 May 2006 00:51:48 +0000

Hello… Microsoft… Is this thing on? So here I am trying to install a VMware copy of Windows XP to test the new Office 2007 beta, and as soon as I get to the part of the patch process where it installs service pack 2, everything stopped. Now I cannot get to microsoft.com (or the akadns.net servers which actually serve the data).

They’ve now been down a half hour: I know, I’ve had to watch that dull monstrosity American Idol while waiting for MS to come back online. Damn difficult to get anything done at this rate… Lord knows it takes an hour or more just to perform the SP2 install anyway.

Blog Spam (Splog)

Scott — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:58:34 +0000

What is it with blog spammers? How much money do they actually make doing that stuff? I was working on some web stuff today and while trying to get a mod_rewrite rule working correctly I was multitail‘ing a log file. I started noticing a bunch of posts (not unusual) coming in to sequential blog posts (unusual), so I paid a bit closer attention.

As all of the posts were coming from within a relatively small range of IPs, mostly in the 85.255.113.x range, I added that /24 to the firewall. Ten minutes later, they started coming from the 85.255.114.x range. Into the bucket with those too…

For now, they’ve stopped, though I have the command waiting to add inhoster.com’s entire range: 85.255.112.0/20. At this point, I’m waiting to see if they’ll tell me how many they’ve given out to the apparent spamhaus fwebhost.com.

Jabber… Coulda Been

Scott — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:23:42 +0000

Jabber is an amazing almost-was.

Certainly it has amazing potential, but unfortunately every time I return to it I find it has yet to live up to anywhere near its full potential, though sites like Mimir and Jobble are among those helping it along.

I just installed the server software for two sites, and I must say the installation process has certainly gotten much easier. Unfortunately, however, there is still a long way to go. The documentation is sparse, at best, and the question regarding the docs I posted to the admin list has gone unanswered. On the other site, I used a feature which has been around awhile (DNS SRV), but now I find that one of the largest Jabber sites jabber.org has yet to upgrade to support it.

On other fronts, the most popular Jabber client, Psi seems to have undergone much development to add a variety of items, but it still does not support starting encrypted connections via the STARTTLS mechanism. Of course, neither does Kopete, KDE’s IM client. Also, neither seems to support DNS SRV.

On a brighter note, the most amazing client I have come across is Pandion. This is a good looking client, with plenty of features. Even complete beginners are able to download the client, install it, and be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Of course, since Google has released their jabber-based Google Talk client, jabber has begun to get a little more time in the limelight, especially since they recently enabled to feature for their users to connect with users of more standard jabber servers.

Maybe the notoriety will help propel the development of better standards support in some of these areas.

Yahoo Groups

Scott — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 23:30:11 +0000

I’ve been a member of many Yahoo Groups e-mail lists for quite awhile now, and I continue to search for new ones as my interests in subjects wax and wane, but there are several things about searching for lists that really annoy me:

Why is there no option to sort the list by member count?
Why is there no option to filter those lists which have had no activity in X days?
Why is there no ability to do any filtering at all (other than by search term)?

Who designed the interface? And who left the these features out of both the original designs, and the brand new design? For a company competing with Google during every waking moment of its life, it sure has a lot to learn about usability; nothing is more frustrating than searching for a term/phrase, getting 900+ lists returned, and finding that one has to snoop through them ten-at-a-time to try to find the decent ones..