ugh, i just spent more time than i care to admit debugging a problem. the issue is that i had the wrong understanding of what the empty() function does in PHP. i always wondered where there are empty() and isset() functions in PHP, but never bothered to look up the differences.
it turns out:
$var=0;
if (empty($var)) {
print "this is empty";
}
will print “this is empty”.
why? because empty() considers many things like an empty string, 0 (as an integer or string), NULL, FALSE, array(), and a declared variable as empty. the cases that i have a beef with is 0. if i set something to 0, it isn’t empty, it’s value is 0! i guess that’s why i should have used isset() instead. lesson learned.
though the official report is not out yet, it appears that everydns’s DNS service is under DDoS attack rendering their services useless for the time being. this is not the first time that these servers have been attacked and there is an outage in the service, but this is the first time that there’s been some kind of customer support.
what makes this particular DDoS attack of note is that everydns was recently acquired by dyn inc. the outage appeared to occur sometime around 7AM PST. no word from the folks of everydns (which really seems like it is really just @davidu) or dyn inc for hours about an update of what was going on.
because the outage crossed my threshold for acceptable downtime, i eventually moved my domains from everydns to my registrar’s free DNS service. this got me up and running and then i forgot about it.
what surprised me is that a few hours later (presumably after the appropriate people got wind of what was happening), there was a flood of twitter activity from everydns and DynInc.
@everydns announced that they are fighting a DDoS attack and what surprised me is that at the same time @cvonwallenstein (VP, product management of dyn inc.) started reaching out to individual users on twitter to help resolve their DNS issues. this, on a weekend during NFL playoffs where arizona is getting killed by new orleans.
it appears that @cvonwallenstein is single-handedly taking care of the twitter users who are reporting everydns outages by giving out free subscriptions of dyn.com’s paid custom DNS service. he took care of me and from the sound of other people’s tweets, he has been taking care of other people affected with the problem.
as far as i can tell, this is just one man trying to handle all the twitter chatter and trying to impress on the everydns users that dyn.com cares. the fact that someone is taking action is impressive and it shows (at least to me) that DynInc cares and wants me to be happy.
bravo, guys, you changed me from a skeptical everydns user to an impressed dyn user.
looks like everydns’s dns service went down earlier today. i’ve been reluctant to switch from them because i always wanted my DNS solution portable and not tied to the registrar, but after today’s outage, i finally decided to move to my registrar’s free DNS service.
setup of godaddy’s total DNS service was easy and painless. dardy called me this morning to let me know that the server was down, and upon further investigation, it turned out that it was DNS failure.
cinch simulates windows 7’s window snap feature where you can make a window half the width of the screen. i don’t really use it a whole lot in win7, but some people love the feature.
i’m not pushing a lot of bandwidth through this server, but it is interesting to note that after i had started to host dardy’s blog, there was a significant, predictable jump in bandwidth consumed.
after i added cindy’s blog and my blog, the traffic has been erratic ever since. this must mean that cindy and i get a lot of random visitors to our blogs, whereas dardy has a dedicated group of loyal followers.
so it turns out now that i got networking to work that the laptop had a few more issues that needed to be worked out.
so here’s the final list of things needed to get snow leopard to work on the asus g51j-a1:
empire efi boot disk – this is where the magic all started. burn this onto a disk, boot, and then load up the retail disk.
netkas’ nvidia injector to get 1920×1080 resolution working on the LCD.
10.6.2 ComboUpdate from apple. the kernel that comes with 10.6.2 supports the i7 CPU.
VoodooPS2, VoodooHDA for keyboard/trackpad and audio functionality. the audio turned out to have a lot of static that i didn’t hear until i started to stream some video.
superhai’s VoodooBattery to get the battery meter to work.
netkas’ fakeSMC to get istat menus’s CPU temperature monitor to work.
once i swapped the intel wifi 1000 bgn wireless card with the dell 1510, wireless worked out of the box. bluetooth also worked out of the box. reboot works, but i am still having some trouble with sleep and shutdown.
i just installed chameleon boot loader 2.0-RC4 and replaced the annoying theme that the empire EFI boot disc installs with something a little less painful to look at.
win7 boots fine in vmware. what i wasn’t sure about was whether or not a VM that i installed on the win7 partition would boot up from OSX, but after NTFS-3G was installed for read/write access to the win7 drive, the VM boots up just fine. talk about great re-use of hard drive space on the laptop.
one unexpected thing is that istat menus’ bandwidth meter does not work. i ended up installing both istat menus and menu meters to get all of the meters i wanted in the menu bar.
when ebay first hit the scene years ago, i was scared to buy something from the auction site. what guarantees did i have that whatever i won would get to me? what guarantee was there that it was what was described? it felt like online shopping all over again.
after ebay purchased paypal, their guarantee of dispute resolution felt safer.
and now, within the last few months, i have become a big ebay shopper. i don’t hesitate anymore to make purchases on ebay and it is one of the first places i go to look for things. the things that i look for on ebay do tend to be smaller things, though. they usually do end up being much cheaper than what i can find at other places.
it’s a good thing that i only go to ebay to find stuff that i’m already looking to buy instead of going to ebay to find stuff to buy. that’s how people end up with toothpick collections.
general ramblings | wilco | 
January 24, 2010 10:00 pm | 
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