5tags » 2006 » August
Aug 18

When you purchase a hosting plan you generally think that they will block the obious spam emails but not Media Temple. They would rather see their server’s tubes get clogged with spam and force their customers to pay $3 per month for spam protection. I just switched to (mt) and have already got hundreds of spam messages. I guess I could use desktop software to filter out the spam messagges but that would still entail me to download all of the useless messages.

I can’t even use my Gmail trick that routes the mail to Gmail and sends it back. (mt) has no options for something like that. I guess I will just have to pay the $36 a year to get no spam. I would expect the I get 0 spams if I have to pay for protection.

I also could change the mail server to somewhere else but I want to get the most out of (mt). Whatever, I guess I will just suck it up and pay for the spam protection.

I am currently at the accounts page and have selected the option for spam protection but since I have paid for the next two years I have to pay for the spam protection for the whole two years. I will have to contact Media Temple and ask them if I can get a shorter term, just in case. Say 3 months.

So I have to add another thing to my (mt) support list:

  • Enable SSH
  • Buy Spam Protection for less than 1 year.
Aug 18
CSS3 Preview
icon1 Sean | icon2 General | icon4 08 18th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

I have really got into CSS again recently and will be redesiging this website soon. But until then you can see some of the amazing and cool new CSS3 features that will be available with CSS3! Check them out here.

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Aug 18
Ruby On Rails: Day 0
icon1 Sean | icon2 General | icon4 08 18th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

I just got my books that I talked about in the last post. They basically took four days to get here, which is very good for free shipping. Now that I have my Ruby On Rails book I can begin learning ROR and can hopefully develop something cool very soon. I have a major project in mind, look out.

If anybody is a Ruby on Rails programmer and would like to join the MAJOR project please contact me.

Aug 17

Last week I knew that I would be going to the Chapters bookstore. Prior to my visit I went online to Chapters.ca and found the books that I wanted. Agile Web Development with Rails & Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook. The Ruby on Rails book was supposed to be around $50 and was 33% off so was on sale for $32.79. Dan Cederholm’s web standards book was also listed at 33% off and was supposed to be $26.46. I was very happy and was planning on buying these two books on my trip. All day at work I was excited to get these books and get my dip my feet into some Ruby on Rails programming and also read up on web standards.

I went to the store and after 10 minutes of searching around the computer section I finally found the two books that I was looking for. I just assumed that the books were 33% off. You would think that the online store has the same deals as the actual stores. I took the two books up to the computer only to find that they were full price. I thought that maybe the sale ended the night before. I called over a manger and found out the Chapters.ca is separate from the in store, thus the prices are different. The retail store also does not match the prices of the online store. The manager told me that the online store is in direct competition with Amazon, that’s why the prices are different. That makes sense but you would think that the retail store could match the price if somebody tells them to. Most stores match the price of competitors and Chapters won’t even match the price of their own store!

When I finally got home I went to Chapters.ca and saw that the books were the same old sale price with the 33% off. I went to Amazon and found out that they were actually cheaper. Instead of taking 33% off, they took 34% off. Talk about competition. I sent my order only to find out that I would receive my books in MID SEPTEMBER! I quickly canceled that order and went to Chapters.ca (unfortunately). I ordered the books and they were said to arrive in 3 - 10 days. That was Thursday night at 11PM. The next day I opened my shipment tracker and they were shipped and at the Vancouver packing facility and scheduled to arrive on Tuesday (yesterday). I just checked the tracker and the books are only 40 minutes away from my house. My guess is that they will arrive tomorrow afternoon. Look forward to Ruby on Rails and web standards posts to come.

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Aug 17

Media Temple is one of the highest quality hosts available today. They offer competitive plans at very reasonable prices. In the hosting world “you get what you pay for�. The less money you spend, the lower the uptime and the lower quality of the server. Media Temple uses the best best of the best hardware wise.

Unlike other top hosts (mt) MediaTemple uses ISP class servers from HP specifically designed for web hosting.
• HP ProLiant rack-chasis, G4 platform
• Dual 3.6 GHz Processors w/ 2MB L2 cache
• 800 MHz Front Side Bus
• Intel EM64T and HyperThreading technology
• 4GBs of DDR2 400MHz Memory
• Fiber-optically connected SAN storage
• Redundant power supplies, redundant fans

Currently (mt) does has some restricting limitations but the new version of their system is currently in beta mode. The new system, called ss6, will include Ruby on Rails support, PHP 4/5 support, upgraded MySQL & New PostgreSQL Support, more disk space and bandwidth, new email and control panel services, multiple website hosting, and the best thing of all (mt) cluster technology. The new cluster technology should help ease the strain from the digg effect.

Since (mt) currently only uses MySQL 3 I will have to do some tweaking to get the database to transfer. Currently, as of August 16, 2006, I am still using the Dreamhost database but am hosting the files from the (mt) servers.

I really want to upgrade to ss 6.0 this week. I just sent a request to (mt), hopefully I will get into the beta. I apologize that all of the comments are lost. A few are still there, for some reason.

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Aug 15

Joe had an amazing way of taking advantage of Firefox’s class and sex appeal:

“I began a ‘Firefox for Prom Queen’ campaign at my school. Though well-received by voters, the prom queen election officials informed us that web browsers, no matter how awesome they are, are not eligible for prom queen. I’ll just have to try again next year.�

-Joe

Joe launched a massive advertising campaign around his school, with posters, flyers, t-shirts, and a blog to generate more buzz. Too bad Firefox couldn’t have gotten elected; for now we’re just going to have to settle for converting one high school at a time.

And while we’re still on summer break, just check out these photos and get ideas for your own campaign!

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Aug 15

Today the Pirate Party of Sweden launched a new Internet service that allows any user to send and receive files and data over the internet without the fear of being monitored or logged. This non monitored network is called a “darknet�.

Why would you want an anonymous internet? “There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,� says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. “If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void.�

“But there are much more fundamental values at stake here than copyright,� Rickard Falkvinge says. “The new technology has brought society to a crossroads. The only way to enforce today’s unbalanced copyright laws is to monitor all private communications over the Internet. Today’s copyright regime cannot coexist with an open society that guarantees the right to private communication.�

“Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect the citizens from the effects of the current routine surveillance,� Falkvinge continues. “This is our technical means to do just that.�

The service is provided by the Swedish high-tech company Relakks, which offers a neutral IP on top of your existing ISP service through a strongly encrypted VPN connection. Basically, this gives users the advantage of a Swedish IP address from anywhere in the world.

The cost of the service is 5 euros per month, and it is available now at www.relakks.com. A portion of the subscription fees will go towards the Pirate Party’s work in changing the copyright and privacy laws and making the service obsolete.

Aug 15
Threadless Sale On
icon1 Sean | icon2 General | icon4 08 15th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

Threadless has just released 6 t-shirts for back to school and the best part is that they are only $10! You can buy them at Threadless.com. Here are some of the designs:

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Aug 14
Windows Live Writer
icon1 Sean | icon2 General | icon4 08 14th, 2006| icon3No Comments »

This blog is powered by Wordpress but I really don’t like writing on the default form in “/wp-admin/post.php�. By default there is no spell check. I recently install an AJAX plugin to deal with spell checking but it did not seem to work very well. I went ahead and began to use the new Microsoft Office 2007 to blog and would just copy and paste it into post.php. It seemed to take a lot longer to post and paragraphs would be out of place.

Today Microsoft released “Windows Live Writer� which is a blogging word processor that works just like Word but only has the essentials. Live Writer can post to your blog from right in the application and works with several different types of blogging platforms like Wordpress, Moveable Type, and Blogger.

Aug 13

You have been using your Gmail account for some time now and take a look in the spam folder. What do you see? Most users will see hundreds, if not thousands of useless spam messages and no mail that is actually needed. For the most part Google has built a solid spam filter that does not put “real� mail in the spam folder. Gmail has build this wonderful filter but you don’t really want to change your email address to gmail.com. What do you do? Well, you can actually use Gmail has your spam filter. Essentially you forward your mail to Gmail and then Gmail forwards the messages back, minus the spams. Procedure: We are going to assume that your Gmail address is “name@gmail.com� and your domain’s is “name@domain.com�.

  1. Setup a new Gmail.com account. The account must only be used for this.
  2. In Gmail go to settings > Forwarding and POP. Set Gmail to forward a copy to your regular email address (name@domain.com) and to save a copy. Once this is set all of the incoming mail to name@gmail.com will be spam filtered and then sent to name@domain.com.
  3. To get the mail to the Gmail account we need to create a server side filter. We need it is send to name@gmail.com if the header is not: X-Forwarded-For: name@gmail.com name@domain.com
  4. In English, the filter would be written: “Any mail that does not contain ‘X-Forwarded-For: name@gmail.com name@domain.com’ in the mail header should be forwarded to name@gmail.com�.

When this is all set only filtered mail will show up on name@domain.com. You should periodically check the Gmail account to see if it is filtering “too much� and you are not receiving “real� email.

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