Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07

• Lunch with Tony decorates their bathroom with framed images of other famous Tonys. http://twitpic.com/11869k #
• http://twitpic.com/11kzb0 – PSA: change your air filters. #
• just started a 7GB rsync…it's going at 81kB/s. this might take a while… #
• rsync backup 5.1GB out of 7GB done after 18 hours. looks like it'll be done tomorrow sometime. #
• kyden now seems to routinely cry in my arms for minutes on end, but as soon as i hand him over to mommy, he stops! #

PSA: change your air filters!

before and after photos of the air filters that i changed today. man, it really was time to change them.

the future of everydns & dyn.com

so as a long-time everydns.com user, i’ve been relatively happy with the service that i’ve received from them. i think that i have experienced two major outages that i can recall, the most recent one occurring a few weeks ago shortly after dyn.com announced that they had acquired everydns.

recently, i was emailed an announcement about what’s next for everydns users. to be fair, i have never donated to everydns and so i really shouldn’t have such high expectations from a service provider that is giving me something for free.

Leeching Using their services has been great for me, and sure, it wouldn’t have hurt me to donate some money to the cause. but there’s a reason why i didn’t donate: i could have gotten the same free service through my registrar.

so why use everydns anyway, then? i wanted the freedom to be able to move my DNS seamlessly if i decided to change registrars. that luxury seemed nice, though i haven’t switched from godaddy.com since i have gotten there.

the latest announcement from dyn.com says that anyone who has donated to the everydns will get grandfathered into free lifetime subscriptions of the custom dns product. but that statement begs the question: what about people who haven’t donated to everydns?

i get that dyn.com is a company (one with terrific customer support, by the way) and they need to make money, but acquiring a service provider of free DNS and then charging people for service just feels wrong to me. i was trying to figure out how dyn.com would generate revenue from this acquisition, but i always assumed that they would just upsell services.

they haven’t explicitly said that if you haven’t donated in the past, you’re going to be out of luck, but reading between the lines, that’s the sense that i get. and if that is the way that it is moving, i gotta say, it was great while everydns lasted, but i guess it’s really time to move on.

my DNS is already hosted at my registrar, so i’m not really impacted terribly by this, but it’s a sad state of affairs to see the spirit of such a great free service die.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-01

• i haven't watched smallville in a long time, but saw kristin kreuk on chuck tonight. it's been too long since she's been on tv. #
• Krispy Kreme is getting into the valentine spirit. http://twitpic.com/zwa09 #
• Just had Mongolian beef at chef lee, but it tasted more like Mongolian onion with a beef garnish. #
• Bed bath and beyond sells everything! http://twitpic.com/10kmrb #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-24

• i think i am hallucinating. i keep seeing a bug flying around in the corner of my eye, but whenever i turn my head to look, it's not there. #
• after 3 failed H1N1 shot attempts, i'm finally getting mine tomorrow. too little too late? maybe, but better safe than sorry? #
• Bbbbbbbbbb #
• V #
• lesson of the day: do not leave your twitter client open on your phone in your pocket…with your hand in your pocket. #
• The kids in front of me got an H1N1 "shot", but it was administered through a nasal spray instead. I don't think adults have that option. #
• man, they did not give me the option to get the H1N1 shot via nasal spray and now, i'm sure it's just my imagination, but my arm tingles! #
• camera gear #
• tired of looking at code. how to break the monotony? laundry. exciting weekend, eh? #
• still writing code, but the football game is about to start! ugh. #
• The antenna I'm using to watch HDTV OTA is 2" tall and 9" wide fully extended. http://twitpic.com/zljhl #
• nice option pass by brad smith out of the wildcat to jerricho cotchery. NYJ are all about big plays. #
• adrian peterson is willing his team to lose. it's time to stop giving him the ball. he's fumbled 3 times already? favre, all the way! #
• live and die by the favre, man. at least this game is exciting. #

php – empty()

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.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-17

• Visited Warren, Viki, and Isaac over the weekend. http://yfrog.com/au7fwkj #
• I swear I don't hear him when he cries at night. But he always looks so sweet in the morning. http://twitpic.com/xpeke #
• The Baker's Edge guarantees at least two edges per piece. It is a fantastic brownie pan. http://twitpic.com/xqg1v #
• Miso cute? What will they think of next? http://twitpic.com/xxw9x #
• This light has been red for a long time and I'm starting to run out of ways to amuse myself. http://twitpic.com/y4792 #
• ugh, everydns is down. this takes out all of my sites. maybe it's time to look for alternatives. #
• tim hightower, you stud. 1st play of the game and ARI scores a touchdown on a running play. #NFL #
• just migrated to my registrar's (godaddy) free dns hosting service, due to the prolonged #everydns outage. #
• i have to say @cvonwallenstein's (from @DynInc) one man effort to help out those affected by #everydns outage is impressive, though. #
• How Dyn Inc. impressed me with how they handled everydns's outage due to DDoS. http://blog.ocliw.com/2010/01/16/how-dyn-com-impressed-me/ #
• brett favre, you stud. man, minnesota is just killing dallas today. #

how dyn.com impressed me

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.

everydns down

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.

windows 7 snap in mac os – cinch

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.