Ok, I visit Astronomy Picture of the Day on fairly regular basis (one could quantify it as daily). It’s always got something great to see. Today’s picture is just flipping gorgeous. I had to know more. I emailed the photographer Larry Landolfi. I was fairly sure he would be deluged with mail, and mine would go unnoticed. Not the case! He replied rather quickly with a lot of useful information. Nice guy. And I visited his site. This guy is a really great photographer, and not just of astronomical phenomena. You need to check this out, JoesRoom.com. He also mentioned in a few days his official site will be LandolfiPhoto.com, so when that goes live I’ll linkify that one.

Well, now that I’m on better hosting, I enabled “fancy urls”, or queryless URLs. When you click a blog link, it takes you to urls that look like this: http://burntelectrons.org/item/90 rather than http://burntelectrons.org/index.php?item=90. This makes it more Google friendly, possibly easier to remember URLs too, and looks cleaner. Also, down on the right by the “Valid X” buttons is a button and link to Nucleus.org. I use Nucleus here, as does Tristor (in the linklist), and other folks I know. I really like it. It’s small, fast, flexible, and in PHP. It’s surprisingly easy to extend with plugins, or even just to edit the rather well designed PHP code, even for folks with minimal coding experience.

I’ll get the Annoyed Contributor’s Network back up soon too. It died in the move, but I wanted to work on it more anyway.

If you see anything broken on the site, let me know with a comment here.

MightyMu is hosted there. mconnor is hosted there. Jesse Ruderman is hosted there. But I prefer month-to-month plans usually, and DreamHost charges a $50 set up fee for monthly accounts. Setup fees went out with $70 domain names and useful information at GeoCities. Everything else there was tops, great bandwidth, great storage, great features. But they seem to like the setup fee (so much so you still have to pay it if you change from a yearly setup-fee-free plan to a monthly plan), so I never switched. Until now.

I used to be at Total Choice Hosting (TCH for short), which was great at the time. Unlimited email addresses, unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited MySQL databases, etc. It started at $4 a month, with no setup fees. Support was great. Everything was groovy. but recently I’ve seen an uptick in my site’s popularity, which is cool, but in March my bandwidth came within a few megs of the limit. So I bumped up a buck to the $5 plan to get 850MB of storage and 20GB of transfer a month. In April, the growth rate kept up, I used 14GB with a general trend showing each day increasing over the last. In May I would have hit probably 20GB, and would have had to upgrade again, or start pulling content. I hate to pull content off, because then what’s the point of having a site?

Then Jesse mentioned DreamHost was having a sale back in December. They were celebrating 7 years of business, and had a promotional code to get a discount. It made the price 77 cents per month for 12 months, for a one year total of $9.24. How could I pass that up? Turns out they throw in a domain name with each plan, and it was good on this offer also. Well, it became no contest. Despite TCH being a great host, one I’d recommended before, I couldn’t pass this up with all that bandwidth to spare. So now I’m hosted here at DreamHost. Thanks, Jesse. And everyone who loves my Shared Media directory thanks you too. (It’ll look better soon too, as I’ll be playing with Apache tools to spruce up this stuff.)

Update:I forgot to mention, the site seems a lot faster now too. The server I was on at TCH was getting a little crowded, with ~90% memory in use, high load averages, etc. But here it’s zippy all the time, so added bonus! Woo!

And some days the bear gets you. Boy did he get me today. Twice. I had to leave my car at a local store parking lot last month when the front brakes were too bad to drive, the pads wore put and tore into the rotors. I told the manager I’d have it removed in a day or two, and they said that was ok. But apparently she failed to tell the next manager, as the car was towed the next morning. I didn’t even know until the following day. That was about $200 unexpectedly. Then the front brakes still needed fixed, so that was another $250. And a couple months before the rear drum brakes needed replaced. Another $200. And today I found out my registration had already lapsed. I mistakenly thought it was good through May. Nope. Now I can’t drive the car I’ve sunk almost $700 into in a short time, and have to get new registration.

And I lost a customer somehow. I created a site for him last year, and just got the domain renewal notices for it. Somehow he went from happy to not happy without any warning or interaction. I was flabbergasted at this. I’m always upset to lose a client for any reason, but usually something happens that isn’t resolved, or a competitor has a more attractive offer. I’m not really sure what happened here, and hate the idea of him going away uphappy.

So, it’s been a crappy, costly day.

Ok, I hate to get into blogwars on minutiae, but this ridiculous. This guy, who I believe is a QA guy for Opera, replied to this post by Asa. Of course Asa is biased, so am I, and so are most Firefox users. We use it because we prefer it. But Asa doesn’t have blinders on. He’s one of those people who can generally acknowledge flaws in Firefox despite being so close to it. And despite Haavard recognizing that “bloggers love to spin things in certain ways,” he still does it himself to a horrible degree. I’m going to address, point by point, his post. When he’s right, I’ll say so, when he’s wrong, I’ll say so. Since it’s a long one, you’ll need to click the “Read More” link for the whole post.
» Continue reading “Opera’s QA Fails Truth-Test”

I live in Pennsylvania. While we do have a good Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, we sadly got stuck with Rick Santorum. The guy is a tool. I don’t know if he even realizes how much of a puppet he is. First off he hates gays and old people. Elderly Americans don’t deserve Social Security according to the ultra-right wing agenda he’s part of (“hey hey ho ho, Social Security has got to go!” chant Young Republicans); in 2000, he was videoed at a rally saying “Living a quarter of your life on Social Security? I don’t think so!” about raising the minimum age to 70. He equates homosexuality with beastiality and pedophilia. He’s against giving homosexuals the basic civil rights and equality that black Americans fought for 50 years ago (they had to fight the Republicans for their rights too, seems the right doesn’t want anyone different to be seen as people, eh?). And now he’s been bought off by commercial weather bureaus to ban free access to publicly paid-for weather data, such as the NOAA website. And the bill he introduced is so vaguely worded that it’s unclear what exactly would be left.

So, if you’re gay, old, or want to know if it’s raining, Rick Santorum wants to outlaw you. I can’t wait till he turns 60 and comes out of the closet.

I just really don’t know what else to say about the latest Opera marketing initiative. Wait, yeah, I do.

Opera – The Browser of Choice For Hitchhiking Cosplay Power Rangers.

Thanks to the MoZine Forums for this gem.

Pope John Paul II died about 40 minutes ago. I’ve been watching CNN almost non stop this week, hoping against hope that an 84 year old man with advanced Parkinson’s disease would beat the odds, if just for a while. He’s gone to deliver his message to God in person, now. I’m Catholic, so I doubt I’ll post anything else today or tomorrow. He was elected just about 6 months after I was born. He’s done a lot of great things for the world and the Church. They’re already saying he might well be known as John Paul the Great, in the history books. He deserves it.

I’m shocked. Here’s the story. What more can I say?

This article at ZDnet.co.uk on the forthcoming third version of the General Public License is quite interesting. It mentions that there is the spectre of licence-incompatible forks of various GPL licensed projects like the Linux kernel. Now, I humbly ask the greater Mozilla community some questions. What do we know about GPL3 that might be incompatible with GPL2? What is Mozilla.org’s current stance (if any) on GPL3 and moving to it (relative to the current trilicense using GPL2)? What are your opinions on it so far, and why do you hold those opinions? And if three years from now we do move to include GPL3 instead of GPL2, what issues do we face?

Hmm?