Halffull.org

I’m a programmer by trade. I read a lot of tech-related and programming sites, both for the good tips and the horror stories. We’ve all heard about the IT guy who forgot to backup the production server (oops!) or the janitor who unplugged the AC in the server room (ouch!). All kinds of fun in the world of corporate IT.

We’ve even heard about some commercial software with heinous errors. Games with no sound. Security software that steals your resources. Sony installing rootkits. Microsoft software.

Eve Online, however, has just gone one step beyond. If you installed their new expansion, Trinity, on opening day, it deleted your boot.ini file. You can no longer boot Windows.

Even a rootkit leaves your computer working for a little while.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Eve Online is a space combat MMORPG. There are somewhere around 300,000 subscribers, and 30,000 people online on an average night. Tens of thousands of potential victims.

Of course, there was no warning that this would happen. They did not send out any kind of alert until a day later - today at 5:45pm EST. If you happened to reboot or shut down your system in that time, and you’re not running Linux (my saving grace), you’d be greeted with a unusable computer.

This is simply inexcusable. CCP, the developer of Eve, and whose slogan is “We Care More, We Work Harder,” is a professional software development firm. They should have tested what they’re putting on your computer. My God, you’d think making a computer inoperable would make one of their QA people say “Hmmm… that can’t be right.” There is no conceivable reason for the game installer to even touch the boot.ini file, forget about deleting it.

Continue Reading »

Over the years, a few pieces of software have really impressed me. They’re not just refined, they go a step beyond their competitors to produce a more elegant experience. Here is my short list.

Vim - if I were stuck on a desert island with only one program, it’d be Vim. At least I could write the rest of the applications I’d need in a good editor.

Zsh - Bash’s big brother. Better completion, more customizable, great builtins, just as fast.

Ruby - An elegant, expressive programming language, suitable for almost any purpose. They hype is justified. And please, look at it separately from Rails.

Linux kernel - If you ask me, this Unix clone has surpassed its master. A free, stable, modular kernel with a huge support base, what more could you ask for?

Gentoo Linux - A remarkable way to package an OS. Gentoo gives you the flexibility and power to turn the Linux kernel into a full, beautiful environment without the worries of many other distributions.

Amarok - I keep discovering more thoughtful features of this music player. It can move audio files to your collection with any naming format you choose. It has great dynamic playlisting, podcasting, and net radio support. I couldn’t begin to list everything, but it still doesn’t feel bloated.

Firefox - No other browser to this day has given developers such a good platform for improving the client-side web experience. Since the web might actually move us towards the “thin client” dreams of old, this is increasingly important. Specific addons I couldn’t live without - Adblock, Noscript, Firebug. And then there’s Greasemonkey, a platform on a platform for a platform. You could call it web³.

All free software.

The Problem

An older post about asmallorange said that I was happy with their web hosting. Support tickets were resolved quickly, the team was courteous and friendly, and I really got a sense of professional respect.

Unfortunately, I can no longer give that recommendation. Several problems surfaced over the two years in which Halffull was hosted at asmallorange.

First - persistent server slows and downtime. At first, pages loaded quickly and reliably. This lasted from about August 2005 to May 2006, with one exception in December 2005. From June 2006 to May 2007, my sites had repeated and consistent downtime. Any site on the server having a spike in bandwidth would cause the whole server to choke due to poor capacity management.

Second - lack of communication. The server status forums dried up and we were left with no way of knowing why the site was down. There were no status feeds or emails. In combination with support issues, this meant that we had no recourse until the site came back up. Frustrating.

Third, and most important - deteriorating support. In two years, I submitted 20 support tickets. The majority of these were in the early days when I was still dealing with setup issues. From July 2005 to June 2006, tickets were handled fairly well, including ones for the early cases of downtime. From June 2006 to May 2007, however, I started having to pass through several layers of indirection and poorly-qualified technicians to come to any kind of a solution, and it was usually a poor one.

Continue Reading »