You Just Can’t Keep a Good Nerd Down.

So for those of you who either have been following my tweets over the last little while, or have been trying to reach this page, you’ll know it’s been down. Why? Well the short version is that I was changing hosting providers. The full story is far more entertaining (read: exhausting) however.

At the start of the week, I upgraded Apache on the server, a fairly innocuous task, or so I thought. However the upgrade seemed to break Apache somehow, so I disabled all its modules, and still nothing. Eventually I decided to reboot the server. However when this happened, I was unable to SSH in, even as root. I rebooted again out of desperation and was able to log in, however I did a df -h to see how much disk space was free and was greeted by invalid values. This set off some alarms for me so I immediately did an fsck to see if there were any errors, fsck refused to start and spat out a bad superblock error. In layman’s terms, I rebooted the server and it was entirely corrupted. fun. I then proceeded to contact VPSLink’s support team, who told me that if I wanted to restore from a backup, it would cost me $50, and they might not even have a recent one.

Now, as you may or may not know, I myself WORK for a hosting company. We provide VPS hosting, much like VPSLink. We also make NIGHTLY backups of EVERY VPS ON OUR NETWORK. In addition to this, we don’t charge needless amounts of money to restore one from backup, in fact, we don’t charge ANYTHING to restore a VPS from a backup. Why? because such a process is so trivial that it only requires one SSH to the NAS that the backup is stored on and execute a single command to start the restoration.

Needless to say I was loathe to fork over the money for the restoration. Eventually, I managed to coerce VPSLink into just dumping a backup into my server once I reformatted it. At this point, I thought all was saved, my data just needed to be migrated…this was sadly not the case, as all the MySQL databases used for the sites I had been running on the VPS (including this blog) were entirely corrupt. Then, while mumbling curses to myself and bemoaning VPSLink’s shoddy service on the Revision3 IRC chat rooms, a stroke of genius came on the part of one of the IRC users, he suggested I try to dig up cached versions of the site using Google Cache. Sure enough, I managed to salvage about 95% of the information on this blog. My other sites weren’t so lucky. However, this presented an opportunity to rethink and redesign both those sites, and this blog. And thus, here I am now, with a brand-spanking-new layout for THIS site, and a new layout for the Revision3 IRC Web Portal courtesy of Travis Lopes, a regular on the IRC chat and eager contributor to the Revision3 user community on the whole.

Dunno about you, but to me this just goes to show that at the end of the day, you just can’t keep a good nerd down.

Aftermath

In the wake of the Revision3 Layoff Snafu, I would just like to put my own, final, short note to the whole mess.

To Sarah Lane, Martin Sargent, Glenn McElhose, Damon Berger, Heather Frank, Moujan Zolfaghari (sorry if I spelled your last name wrong, Moujan) and everyone else who got caught up in this. What happened sucks, it sucks a LOT. You were handed your careers to date on a silver platter and then had them smashed in your face like so many pies. It was sudden, it was harsh, and from where I sit, it was disrespectfully mishandled as well.

Finger-wagging and vitriol aside. You are all of you, extremely talented, creative, funny, personable individuals. I can tell this of you, and outside of a few passing IRC/Twitter conversations with many of you, I don’t even know you.

What I’m trying to say is, as Christian Bale says in The Dark Knight “The night is darkest just before the dawn”. You have all accomplished much with Revision3, and this will only reflect even more positively on your career in the future. Also, just because you are no longer employed by Revision3, does not mean all (or some) of you can’t combine those wonderful, creative minds of yours and come up with more awesome content for us to watch, read and wholeheartedly enjoy. It was you who made those shows what they were, and you can do it again, if you so desire.

Good luck to all of you, I’ll keep followin’ ya on Twitter, and you’re always welcome on the IRC channels.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

Muxtape announced today that they would be returning. When I first heard this, I was overjoyed. For once, the little guy had won, triumphed over the goliath of big media and their rabid cerberus-hound-like legal teams.

But then I read Justin’s write-up on the situation.

Muxtape IS coming back…but in a capacity that I’m not sure I would find relevant.

The site will be relaunched with a new methodology. Bands will now have their own muxtape pages, akin to myspace, iMeem, et al. However, normal everyday listeners like you and me will no longer be able to create muxtape playlists, upload content, or do anything but watch from the sidelines.

To me, this is a complete gutting of what muxtape is about. It’s supposed to be about mixtapes, hence the name. Instead, it will likely turn into yet another one-way service. Another portal for shitty indie rock bands to pedal their mediocre arthouse wankfests to sycophantic scenesters.

I’m sorry Justin, you tried, valiantly. Your site was something remarkable, noble, and wonderful for music lovers like me. Now it’s just another one-way content delivery service that will only attract people who can exploit it for commercial purposes and further the Music Industry’s xenophobic, counterproductive, megalomaniacal eandeavours to regain control over aspects of the industry that they have no business being a part of anymore.

Muxtape is dead, may it rest in peace, but not die in vain.

Chromefox?

So, Google’s new Browser, Chrome, launched this week to mixed reviews. I personally HAVE tried the browser, and while I do understand that it IS still in beta, I will definitely not be switching away from good ol’ Firefox any time soon. That’s not to say that I don’t think Chrome is worth anything at all; On the contrary, I think Chrome brings a lot to the table. The browser itself on the surface may seem shallow, incomplete and pointless, but its all of the little things Google has done in the background that make (or will, as certain bugs are weeded out) all the difference.

All this being said, one other question on everyone’s minds is, Where does this leave Firefox? Google has championed Firefox and the rest of the Mozilla project almost since day one; they’ve been their largest investor. So why then would they seemingly not just give the Mozilla crew a leg up and help them develop Firefox to be everything they want Chrome to be? This I unfortunately cannot answer you. I can only but speculate on Google’s intent with this project. What I can do however, is postulate what I think are some very possible or even probable outcomes of this new venture.

1. Google intends to eventually start stealing from the Firefox cookie jar and incorporating bits of what has made Firefox so great over the years. (i.e. XUL/XPI extensions) If you haven’t already noticed, they already cloned the “Awesome Bar” and have incorporated OpenSearch into Chrome.
2. The reverse of this will happen, and Mozilla will yank the carpet from under Google’s feet and start using Webkit as well as Chrome’s new JavaScript engine and memory management hotness in Firefox (Call me a fanboy if you must, but I would far prefer this outcome)
3. Chrome will become yet another irrelevant and forgotten Google application, like Google Talk or Google Video.
4. Google will outright purchase Mozilla, and the two projects, Firefox and Chrome, will merge codebases and we will then have Chromefox. (This also wouldn’t be so bad…I kinda like the sound of the name “chromefox”, don’t you?) If this outcome does indeed come to pass, The future of Thunderbird might be an interesting one too.

Whatever the outcome though, it’s not hard to see, that Chrome is an extremely ambitious and controversial project that is already (in a small way, at the moment) doing what I think Google REALLY set out to do, turn the web browser market on its head and give it a good shake. It will be interesting for sure to see how this all plays out a year from now, and which, if any of my little predictions come to pass.

Thoughts on the 2008 Summer Olympics

Before the Olympics started, I was totally against the idea of holding the Games in a country as corrupt as China has become. I would tell people “It’s like someone gave Lenin and Stalin a medal for killing the Cossacks”. And when you look at China’s Human Rights records, it’s not hard to see my point. The controversial issues surrounding China’s Human Rights policies are so many, that they actually have their own Wikipedia page.

The argument has been made that the Olympics might be good for China, for various reasons. Some say it will open the rest of the world up to a country that until now, has been the subject of myth and speculation due to its laundry list of controversial practices. Some who are more adamant in their belief of China as a corrupt, despotic nation believe that perhaps by some miracle, hosting the Olympics will bring about a change of heart regarding Human Rights within the Chinese government. As well, others believe that this will stimulate China’s economy and thus somehow improve them socially.

I will tell you now, that this is where I stand. I do not believe that there will be any social change in China as a result of hosting the Olympic games. The moment everyone packs up and leaves, they will slaughter every last Tibetan citizen, wipe Falun Gong off the face of the planet, and monitor even closer any information exchanged within their country. However, I do think it will stimulate their economy. This much is almost a fact, and you only need to take a look at the economic standing of any given country directly before and after they have hosted the Olympics to see that this is quite true.

All this said, I will say that when the Olympics started, I refused to watch them, or have anything to do with them. I thought it was disgusting and wrong. However now, I see the Olympics, as they are held in China, to be more like a really great party that has had the unfortunate happenstance of being hosted by someone you really just can’t stand. You know your friends will be there, and there’ll be free food and beer, but the host just happens to be a completely insufferable jackass.

…I’ve seen the future baby, it is twitter.

Years ago, in the very beginning of the Web 2.0 zeitgeist, blogging was new and exciting. People flocked to services like LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger, and others to get in on the action. Everyone wanted to make their voices heard.

Fast forward to a few years later, and Web 2.0 has brought us the wonderful, wacky world of Social Networking. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, Virb, Friendster, et al. Begin surfacing and giving the masses a new way of sharing information, and this time, it’s more community driven.

Fast forward another year or so, and we have Twitter. At first, no one paid attention to twitter, it was largely disregarded outside of a small in-crowd. But now, A trend is forming amongst the San Francisco web-hipster trendsetter crowd. Less and less people are using “monolithic” social networking sites such as facebook, and fewer people than ever have personal blogs. Everyone is seemingly moving to small, niche-driven services such as Twitter, Flickr, Plurk, muxtape, and others. These sites all cater to very specific purposes, stay within their respective niches, and build on them.

So what then, does the future hold for personal blogs and monolithic social networking sites? Here’s how I see it…

Blogs will continue to flourish, however as we have seen, the only ones that succeed are the ones that aren’t simply an outlet for people to tell you what they ate for breakfast that morning. (unless of course that’s the point of the blog, but in any case I’m assuming you get my point.) However I see Social Networking sites becoming content aggregators for smaller niche services. Facebook will just become a sort of portal for Twitter, Flickr, muxtape, BrightKite, del.icio.us, digg and others. I see this happening for “personal blogs” as well. In fact it has already started, just look around at some of your friends, colleagues, and co-workers’ blogs, guaranteed they have either begun using Tumblr, Pownce or Vox instead of Wordpress or another more robust platform.

Many people would say this sort of trend-shift signals the death knell for Facebook-ish sites and personal blogs, I am not one of those people. I simply think that like many things, they will simply be repurposed.

Read to me, Mr. Evil Robot man.

So today I happened upon a new online service called Odiogo. Odiogo is a sort of text-to-speech service that reads the RSS feed for a given blog to you, almost like a podcast.

I say almost, because their “near-human” synth voice sounds like a strange French-Canadian robot love child mutant clone of Christopher Walken, Sean Penn (circa Ridgemont High) and the Moviefone guy.

That being said, it’s not entirely a bad service, once you get past the few silly flubs in the text-to-speech technology. Such as words being written in ALL CAPS for emphasis and randomly being pronounced letter by letter instead of phonetically, or possessive apostrophes being neglected (ie. “he’s” being pronounced “he s”).

And as you can probably see, in a sort of meta-ironic twist, I’ve added the Odiogo Wordpress plugin to my blog. Before reading this, I actually had a few of my posts read back to me by the plugin. It was a bit odd, but also strangely made me smirk a little listening to my random musings read back by a robot.

In any case, if any of you are interested, check out Odiogo.com for more info on the platform. It’s free, and easy enough to get running on your blog.

Lying Liars that Lie (aka Canadian Telcos)

I have a huge problem with Telecom companies here in Canada. My biggest beef is with Rogers Communications.

Approximately two months ago, Rogers instituted tiered bandwidth caps for all of its broadband users. The plan I’m on gives me a monthly quota of 60GB on a 7Mbit down connection for $40/month. If this draconian quota weren’t bad enough, it would seem Rogers have trouble with basic mathematic skills. As today, I received a notice from them saying I had reached 75% of my monthly quota. As any fifth grader could tell you, 75% of 60 is 45.

Now I run stringent bandwidth monitors to ensure I don’t go over this amount, and currently, my monthly bandwidth usage as of this very second, is 9.410 Gigabytes.

I think it goes without saying then, that this is pretty shoddy business practice from the company planning to play host to the iPhone very soon.

All this aside, where this kind of behaviour hurts me the most, is the fact that my job requires that I telecommute. What happens then, when Rogers decides to hold my connection for ransom because they can’t properly manage bandwidth?

Those of you in the States are probably wondering why this is such a problem for me, “Why don’t you just switch companies?” is what you are probably thinking to yourselves. The answer is simple, there is no viable alternative. The only other telecom provider in Ontario, is Bell Canada. Their prices are approximately $10/month more for the same service, and they also have instituted bandwidth caps.

So at this point, I have really only two options, move to British Columbia so that I can subscribe to Telus instead, or wait until next year when Verizon brings their business up here, and hope that they do not subscribe to the same gouge and screw business practices.

Howto: Firefox 3.0 Extension Compatibility Hack

Ahh Firefox, wonderful little browser isn’t it, with it’s plethora of handy extensions…but what happens when an upgrade renders every single extension incompatible? Things break, Greasemonkey and Adblock Plus aren’t there to save you from annoying websites, Tab Mix Plus can’t save your tabs, chaos and pandemonium ensue, dogs and cats living together, it’s mass hysteria!

That is until you learn this little trick.

Firefox extensions are XPI files, and XPIs are just zip files with a different file extension. Sooo…Download the latest version of the extension, unzip the XPI and open the file labelled install.rdf

Install.rdf is an XML file that passes parameters to Firefox regarding how this extension should be managed, when it should be updated, where it should be updated from, who the creator of the extension is, and, most importantly for our purposes, what versions of Firefox it’s compatible with.

Within install.rdf, you’ll find a tag called <em:maxVersion>. this tag defines the latest version of Firefox that the extension is compatible with, so…just change it to your browser version, save the file, zip everything back up as an XPI file, drag it into an open Firefox window, and it should install.

So to recap the entire process:

1. Download the latest version of the extension
2. Unzip the XPI
3. Open install.rdf
4. Modify <em:maxVersion> to fit your browser version
5. Zip the extension’s source code back up into an XPI
6. Drag the XPI into an open browser window
7. ???
8. Profit.

One caveat here, and it’s a big one…this CAN screw up and/or entirely break not only your extension, but your firefox user profile as well. So, some “play it safe” tips are in order:

1. Only do this on extensions that are maybe a full version behind at the very most.
2. More complex extensions, like DownThemAll! or Greasemonkey might seem to work when you first do this…but check the update logs for that extension to see what changes have been made.
3. Like with anything possibly destructive, make a backup of your user profile as it is BEFORE installing the hacked extension.
4. And of course…don’t say I didn’t warn you

All that said, this is actually not all THAT dangerous providing you do it on extensions that don’t tie into essential browser functionality like tabbed browsing.

If anyone has any success stories (or tales of epic fail) with this, leave me a comment or shoot me an email (ryan [dot] draga [at] tuxotaku [dot] com)

Have fun and happy hacking!

New pet project.

So my brother’s girlfriend showed up on my doorstep today, arms full of bags and boxes of old computer parts. Apparently she was trying to get rid of some clutter, and decided “what better person to give this stuff to than my boyfriend’s geeky older brother”. So, altogether, her little “care package” consisted of an unidentified Pentium 3 Motherboard and CPU, an ATX Power Supply, a USB 1.0 PCI card, an old ATI Rage 128 graphics card from 1998, a spare CPU fan, and a floppy drive. Sounds like a lot of worthless junk, I know…however, in the hands of a nerd like me, this old junk could become a new pet project…

The project is this, I’m going to build a router.

I have all the parts I need, save a few things:

1. CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter
2. 4GB CompactFlash card
3. Five PCI NICs (Three wired, one wireless)

The implementation is simple enough:

1. Download and install a Linux distribution designed for use as a Firewall/Router (I’m currently looking at four such distributions: IPCop, m0n0wall, Smoothwall, and ClarkConnect)
2. Use the CF Card as a replacement for a hard drive (the reasons for this are that it’s cheaper than a hard drive, and it’s faster.)
3. Install said Linux distro to the CF Card
4. ???
5. Profit.

With the motherboard I have, I should have enough PCI slots for three LAN connections (two wired, one wireless) and a WAN connection (which will go out to the cable modem). The free slot will be used temporarily for a video card until post installation, when I’ll just pop the fifth NIC in there.

Altogether, I shouldn’t need to spend more than $40-50 CAD for the whole project. And the end result will be essentially an enterprise-grade router….I love open source.