think I griped and bitched and complained enough that the former
webhoster is going to give me a full refund. Lets see, didnt
meet the 99.9% uptime promise for the year in a little under
three weeks. Lost all the daily backups. Never made a tape
backup. Had a server compromised because the machine
was out of date (probably pisses me off slightly more than
most folks…). No notification of the outage. Whined like
a 5 year old when I asked about the server status. I
think that adds up to a full refund.

Code backport hit a few snags.

Japan Air show on Saturday at Humble Pie. Everyone
should go. All the cool kids are doing it. Theres going
to be balloons and face painting. And cranes. And
all the fruit rollups you can eat before you vomit.

Argh, I cant belive I’ve got to write that content
for the third time.

attempting to move www.japanairband.com to the third web host now.
This is such fun. Currently signed up for a month at three different
web hosters. Playing the field so to speak.

More weird code merges. This time backporting new features to
old code bases. I think I got lucky and was able to move
to an almost up to date code base for the backport. So at least
it’s not weird chunks of new code kluged into the old ugly
code base.

grumble. The webhosters are still being
dumbasses. Awesome.

And I need to find a new apartment and move. In
the next three months or so. Kind of tired
of apartment complexes, and dont really want to
go though the hassle of a condo/townhouse/house.

Somewhere relatively close to NCSU would be
preferred, but far enough away to be away from
students ;-> Any one know of a cool place to
live?

ARGGGH.

In two months time, I’ve had two different servers I was using to web
host die on me, and lose weeks of work and site updates.

First a drive on www.gimp.org died, taking 2 months worth
of updates with it (www.japanairband.com was vhosted on
that box).

So then I decide to move to a commercial web provider.
(www.alwayswebhosting.com if you want to know who
to avoid).

Un fucking beliveable. Apparently the
guys running the site were complete fucking morons,
and the box got compromised. And the last good backup
was a month ago aka, before I moved the site there.
Un fucking beliveable. So, basically, all those
changes I made in the last month are gone. The
daily backups arent available because the server
was compromised and the colo want allow
the box to be brought backup (which is
relatively sane, but still… mount the disk
read-only on an admin box somewhere and let
me try to rescue my content off of it)

So, basically, expect the site to be
down for a week or so, as I move to different
providers, and wait for DNS to propagate again.
The fucking morons running the site were running
a known exploitable printer server on that machine.
Why the fuck they were running a print server on
a fucking dedicated webhosting box I have no idea.
And to make it even more annoying, if they had
just used the damn software I work on every
fucking day to keep the box up to date, it wouldnt
of happened.

And of course, I’m a huge fucking moron
and didnt have local backups of the updated
content and web apps. Not to mention not
thinking about checking to see if they
were complete fucking retards and were running
LPR with a fucking year old known exploit.

I cant belive I’m going to have to go and recreate
that fucking mess again. Argh.

List of open source debuggers, decompilers,
executable viewers, etc

I have fairly limited understanding of binary formats and the like, but find
the concept of tools to aid reverse engineering fascinating. Tools to
do it well have to do several interesting things, not the least of which
is presenting a huge amount of information in a useful and meaningful
fashion. There is also a certain amount of “magic” in creating something
from nothing (in these cases, source code from bins, or creating symbol
tables from stripped binaries, etc).

I’ve been using a new hosting provider for all of about three weeks now,
and they have already been down for most of today. So much for
4 9’s. Awesome.

Started reading “Neverwhere” last night. Suppose I need to finish
it tonight, otherwise I’ll lose interest and never finish it. First
Neil Gaiman I’ve read, but after having approximately everyone
I know suggest I read something of his, I finally caved.

Got to go up to Viginia to help my sister move this weekend.
If history repeats itself it will be 90-100F outside like the last
5 or 6 times. Should be um, fun.

well, I got a new scanner. What the heck. It even seems to work
under linux pretty well. Took about 15 minutes from opening the
box to doing decent color scans. Not bad. A epson Perfiction 1650 Photo
if anyone is curious.

So, heres the first fruits of the new scanner. A scan of
a doofle from a 4 hour meeting.

So it was a productive meeting after all.

artbots.org
Neat.

National Novel Writing Month

A “challenge” to write a novel in a month. Sounds like fun. I even already
know what my opening line is going to be:

It was the best of dark and stormy nights, it was the worse of dark and
stormy nights...

Almost forgot the weirdest bit of the weekend. Watching the
“promotional video” for a Winston-Salem band
Smash Alley Underground

It is truly bizarre, as a quick browse of the website would indicate. Basically,
it’s a hair metal band intent on fame. They created this bizarre promo
video in their basement with the intent of getting signed. It’s like
a cross between driver 23,
Jesco: The Dancing Outlaw,
and a bit of Spinal Tap.

I would never believe it was true except for I know people who know the
guy the video focus on, and some of the Winston shots are recognizable.

Bizarre.