Mike Cohen

Expected downtime

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It looks like all of my sites will be down Friday night until early Saturday morning. DreamHost sez:

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center, we will be moving all central DreamHost functions as well as the “spunkyâ€? cluster to one of our newer data centers. This move will begin Friday, March 21st, at 9PM PDT, and is expected to last up to 12 hours, until Saturday, March 22nd, 9AM PST.

Central services include panel.dreamhost.com, dreamhost.com, dreambook.com, files.dreamhost.com, media.dreamhost.com, wiki.dreamhost.com, discussion.dreamhost.com, basically everything but secondary DNS and this status blog. Primary and tertiary DNS will be going down as well, but will have a more limited downtime window of only 2-3 hours. For spunky, all web servers, mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the randy cluster will be unreachable.

The last time they did a big move like that, it was a major fiasco, which resulted in over 24 hours of downtime.

Filing bug reports for iPhone SDK

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Rogue Amoeba has filed bug reports for many of the iPhone SDK’s limitations, including:

  • Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
  • Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
  • A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
  • Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
  • Allow iPhone applications to access the host computer when docking
  • Allow iPhone applications to access the docking port

I filed one myself requesting the ability to run in the background, which is a critical requirement for the product I plan to develop. Since it spends most of its time sleeping until it gets a timer event, it uses no CPU time at all until it wakes up every few hours to check in with a server and then goes back to sleep (Apple is concerned that background apps would waste CPU time and shorten the battery life).

What I want the next President of the United States to do

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I know there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that most of these will happen, but I can wish for them.

  1. Stop using the threat of terrorism as a political weapon to maintain control.
  2. Bring the troops home.
  3. Eliminate the use of torture to interrogate prisoners.
  4. Eliminate all domestic spying.
  5. Eliminate the TSA and DHS in their current form.
  6. Maintain separation of church and state.
  7. Don’t interfere with scientific research.
  8. Restore the balance of the three branches of government and reverse Bush’s power grab for the Executive branch.

Sadly, Ron Paul is the one candidate who would come closest. Clinton & McCain are the least likely to do any of these things. This country is no longer the “land of the free and home of the brave” thanks to Bush’s fear tactics. Let’s try to restore it.

Picture of the day

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Bird
I happened to see this bird sitting on a chair in my garden. He stayed long enough for me to get my camera and take this picture. When I tried to get closer since I’m using my 50mm prime lens, he finally flew away.

@Feed Plugin

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I’ve installed the @feed plugin, which adds a digital fingerprint & copyright notice to my RSS feed. It can also identify stolen content using the digital fingerprint. Hopefully this will cut down on the content scrapers.

/dev/random 203A ©Feed 2014 WordPress
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Content Scrapers

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I just checked my Akismet moderation queue and found that no less than 5 splogs republished an item I posted less than two hours ago. I bet this item will also be scraped and republished. If you’re reading this anyplace other than mcdevzone.com, this post was illegally republished.

Evil Software

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I don’t pay much attention to Windows shareware & freeware, so I haven’t heard of G-Archiver until I read this item at Coding Horror.

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search I came across G-Archiver, I figured what the heck I’ll give it a try.

It didn’t really have the functionality I was looking for, but being a programmer myself I used Reflector to take a peek at the source code. What I came across was quite shocking. John Terry, the apparent creator, hard coded his username and password to his gmail account in source code. All right, not the smartest thing in the world to do, but then I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box! Having just entered my own information I became concerned.

Actually it’s very easy to back up your Gmail account to a local drive by simply downloading your email via POP3 or IMAP.