January 2009 Archives

Recovering ma.gnolia bookmarks

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UPDATE: 3 days later, ma.gnolia launches http://recovery.ma.gnolia.com. It just re-formats FriendFeed's feed into CSV and Bookmarks HTML. The big problem with this is the loss of tags so it'd be better if they could recover from some backups ...

So I'm extremely weary at the use of the term "cloud" in reference to anything other than the fluffy white marshmallows of the sky, and today's ma.gnolia.com outage is a timely reminder for everyone to keep backups of their data. But its not exactly the end of the world.

Yes I have a few private bookmarks that might be lost (but hey, who knows what ma.gnolia may recover), but for the most part all the stuff that was shared has been mirrored into the 3,178,983 social aggregators out there.

For example, FriendFeed has my entire collection of public ma.gnolia bookmarks, conveniently in a parseable format.

And because FriendFeed feeds into my Facebook, there's a second copy there. Oh and also in MyBlogLog. Free backups = win.

DreamHost and Media Temple are both very well known web hosts. No link love for either.

DreamHost's claim to fame is their super-cheap plan offering ridiculous amounts of disk space and bandwidth, and a very flexible control panel -- it is probably the best control panel I've encountered over the last 8 years that I've been dabbling with shared web hosting. However they have two huge problems.

Frequent down time is the first - there's absolutely no (public) recognition that their services were ever down. I monitored my sites with a number of 3rd party monitoring services and they would frequently alert, a lot more so than would be anticipated via the info on dreamhoststatus.com.

Overselling is my other beef. They provide huuuuge limits which you're realistically never allowed to reach, as you're not to use the space for storing any non-public files; and I'm sure its not helping their stability any, judging by the frequent outages. If nothing else, overselling is just a big fat lie. To be fair, they're not the only clowns overselling with cohorts such as BlueHost, HostGator and hell even Yahoo! Web Hosting.

Even in closing my account DreamHost are still pitching their ridiculous limits:

Remember too, as long as you keep your account open your features increase at a rate of 2048 MB disk and 40 GB bandwidth a week! (Your account currently allows a grand total of 418776 MB disk and 8376 GB bandwidth!)

So this fool was suckered in by their ever rising limits but after all the downtime decided it was time to find a more stable host.

Media Temple looked really attractive. Double the cost of DreamHost but with a clustered architecture, more reasonable limits (100GB disk, 1TB transfer), and a strong reputation amongst the blog crowd, it seemed like they might actually deliver.

(aside: in searching for appropriate images for this post I searched for "dreamhost down" on Flickr. Amusingly the accompanying (mt) image came up as one of the search results indicating the number of folks who, like myself, had moved from DreamHost to (mt) hoping for a better host!)

I was wrong - the same problems exist at (mt) as they do at DreamHost. The upside is that the (mt) staff are really communicative so they tell you all about their outages. But therein lies the rub - the outages are too frequent! Additionally, monitoring showed that the average response time of the (mt) services is in the order of 600-700ms for a completely static page. To put things into perspective, the simplest Apache server running on a 486 could serve such a page in sub-100ms so I don't see why their super-duper clustered architecture performed so badly for such a simple request. I did start a thread about this on their forums but it seems that either they don't know the cause, don't care, or don't want to spend the money to fix it as several users have acknowledged the same observations yet there has been no improvement for months.

What I learnt out of these experiences is that in the shared hosting business you really do get what you pay for. I'm now with apisnetworks.com thanks to a SomethingAwful recommendation and the owner, Matt, seems both cluey & dedicated. The architecture is dead simple - single machines running RAID1, and the pricing is set at a level that discourages overselling. Hopefully the service stays good for a long time as I'm really sick of moving hosts.

As mentioned previously I've been playing a fair bit of Team Fortress 2 of late, around 2 hours every night. Besides being a really fun teamwork FPS its also a really interesting set of communities to observe. Within the wider Aussie TF2 player base its well recognised that there are distinct groups of personalities that dominate on various servers.

Internode's games.on.net tends to have more team-oriented players. By this I mean the sorts of players who will play whatever class helps their team best - whether its as a medic or engineer, and you generally don't get a massive class imbalance as you find on some other servers. Class balance is critical to team success as having too many, or too few, of any particular class typically makes it hard if not impossible to win. A lack of medics is a typical hallmark of the fail team.

Teamwork
Teamwork thanks to macropoulos

GameArena is Telstra BigPond's gaming service. In contrast to the more team-oriented play found on Internode, GA players tend to play for themselves. They care about their personal kill-to-death ratios, and getting frags more so than the team's objectives. I wouldn't say these players are stupid, even though its sometimes extremely frustrating playing with them but at the same time its pretty clear they either don't understand the game objectives, or simply don't care.

Use of communications via the in-game text chat, and voice chat, also clearly distinguishes the above two communities Use of voice chat on GameArena servers is typically to boast about individual achievements, such as "oh I face-stabbed XXX so many times, I'm gonna make him rage quit". As voice chat can only be heard by one's own team, text chat which is viewable by all is typically used to accuse enemy players of hacking (typically using an auto-aim bot, or wall hacks that allows players to see through walls). In contrast, voice chat on more co-operative servers tends to be used more for co-ordination, and text chat is sometimes even used to congratulate enemy players for a series of sweet shots.

Some of the best games I've been involved with have been over on the New Zealand servers run by Clearnet, a subsidiary of Telstra. For whatever reasons the kiwis in general seem to be far more team-oriented players than Aussies, or maybe I just haven't found the Kiwi equivalent of our GameArena cesspool. :)

One question that tickles my curiosity is how the various server communities have formed. Why is it that GameArena servers are dominated by hero players? Was it always that way, or is it because there happened to be a higher percentage of such players there originally that team players decided to go elsewhere?

If there are any budding sociologists out there gaming communities are a rich source for study of human behaviour. And maybe you can answer my questions. :)

Charity & kiva.org

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When I began working in 2001 the combination of living with the parents and working full-time led to the accumulation of more money than I knew what to do with. Thanks to Sal, then my boss, asking me to re-build parts of Yahoo! AU&NZ Finance, I read up about shares and the sharemarket and dabbled a bit on that front. But I also thought it would be nice to give some of that money to charity as I'd never had that much money before, and I certainly didn't need all of it.

I began by donating to the usual suspects - The Cancer Council, the Starlight Foundation and other big names. I honestly regret doing that as that landed my name onto various donor lists and I get endless amounts of spam from all sorts of charities that I have never dealt with. It also greatly annoys me the amount of marketing crap some charities send. Its 2009 and there's this thing called the internet where you can put up a website, and send emails for almost nothing - there's no need to send glossy newsletters by post.

Thanks to these wasteful behaviours I started looking a little more closely at various charitable organisations and today I support only two on a regular basis. MSF, and kiva.org.

Today, in the latest Kiva newsletter, there is this enlightening video:


I really dig the micro-finance concept as it does away with the "hand out" mentality, and as a donor I like the idea that I can keep re-lending money (if it does come back) which is nice considering I'm not exactly financially wealthy. I started out with a plan - I was donating $50/month to MSF, and I thought I'd do the same with kiva.org. My aim was to lend US$50 via kiva.org each month, eventually reaching a point where my account would become self-sustaining as existing borrowers repaid their loans. Most loans on Kiva run for about 12-18 months so it would take roughly that long to reach that point.

The table below details my Kiva stats. I've put in US$1,225 over the last 23 months but lent out $1850 as $650 of the first "round" of loans have been repaid. I lost $30 when one of the MFIs went bankrupt.

$1,850 in loans over 23 months
More on my lender page.


The default rate might seem high but from a donor's perspective 5% is still better than the 100% disappearance rate when you donate to a regular charity, and I really like being able to vaguely target how my money is spent. And should I fall on rough times, I can opt to pull money back out as it's repaid. So go on, lend some money today.

I've been searching around for reviews of various monitors lately, as I'm looking to buy a 24" LCD. I haven't been able to find a dedicated monitor review site so have resorted to searching various forums, as well as general web search.

There is a big problem with web search. If for example you are interested in the LG L246WHX monitor, searching for "L246WHX review" returns loads of results, very few of which are actually reviews. The problem is that there are too many shopping sites that create a template "review" page for every damned product in their catalogue regardless of whether they actually have a review. I'm sure they think its effective SEO but they are just pissing off users like me. I think of those shops as spammers, and will try to avoid doing business with them.

A more effective search is "bought L246WHX" which turns up more blog & forum postings. Because everyone is copying Amazon nowadays, you may also wish to add a -"customers who bought this also bought".

BTW, don't buy the L246WHX. It is the replacement for the older model L246WH-BN but it has a poorer 160/160 viewing angle compared to the old model's 170/170.



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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from January 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

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