codestream

The GoDaddy Experience

Phil — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:50:27 +0000

wreck below the cliffs lands end by lovestruck

Over the last couple of years I’ve been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy because they’ve received quite a bit of negative press relating to poor customer service and arbitrary site takedowns. There are still a handful of domains that I have with GoDaddy though, and yesterday I was shocked into moving them away as well.

The domain for Claire’s site, loobylu.com was set to expire yesterday, and it was set to auto-renew. When GoDaddy attempted to auto-renew it though, the credit card transaction was declined. They sent me an email letting me know this, and when I got it I went to their site, put in the details for another card, and renewed it directly.

I later found out though that for the 9 hours between when the auto-renew transaction failed and when I renewed it manually, GoDaddy had modified the DNS settings for the domain so that people visiting Claire’s site landed on GoDaddy parking page full of advertisments, indicating that the domain was now for sale. Because it was a DNS flip, some people are still seeing the parking page. I’m still kind of stunned at that behavior, and I hope the promotion and adsense clicks they got from showing their landing page make up for the fact that I won’t be using them again, ever.

Happy Pi Day!

Phil — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:09:40 +0000

Data Portability Red Herrings

Phil — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:43:12 +0000

I think what’s interesting about the whole scoble facebook, plaxo issue is that it shows how much of a red herring the idea of data portability is when applied to the social graph. Of course you want to be able to take your data and move it to another provider, but when ‘your’ data intercepts with mine, there are pretty significant privacy hurdles that arise. The whole thing gets complex and falls in a heap. I pretty much agree with Loren Feldman; for any friends on Facebook that I’ve made by letting them scan my email contacts, I still have all of that data and don’t need to run a screen scraper to get it. For any other friends, Facebook provides that to me as part of their service. I can access it freely when I need to, but I can’t export it wholesale. For me, that’s a completely acceptable trade-off.

Also, honestly, signing on to the idea of data portability once you’ve been nabbed is a little disingenuous. Substitute Scoble in this scenario with someone who’s just adding Facebook friends in order to put together a huge list of email addresses. That’s not ‘data portability’; it’s spam.

Revver on Ning

Phil — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:24:17 +0000

Revver has a new social network on Ning. Cool!

Free Facebook app hosting from Joyent

Phil — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:37:17 +0000

Joyent is partnering with Facebook to offer free Facebook app hosting for a year with their Facebook Developer Accelerator offering. The service normally starts at $45/month, and the free service provides the equivalent of their $75/month offering. You get root access on a virtual machine that’s set up for Rails, PHP and Python. There’s some fine print though: “Any Facebook application sitting on a Joyent Accelerator that is dormant for more than 60 days will be re-claimed and given to another Facebook developer.” Ouch!

Shimo - a replacement for Cisco’s VPN client on OS X

Phil — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:45:10 +0000

Paul pointed me to Shimo, a fantastic interface replacement for Cisco’s VPN client. After dropping it in my Applications folder and starting it up, it found my existing Cisco VPN entries and connecting to one of them is as simple as choosing it from the list in the menu bar. Has growl integration too. Very nice.

Excuse me while I adjust my tinfoil hat

Phil — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:32:37 +0000

I can’t tell if this is just a weird coincidence, or if facebook is somehow censoring anti-facebook items that appear in people’s news feeds. Here’s how my recent tweets look on twitter:

Note the one in the middle.

And here’s how they look via the twitter app in facebook:

Defang Facebook

Phil — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:41:00 +0000

I’ve been enjoying using Facebook, but the new advertising system, beacon, which essentially follows you as you surf and inserts things that you’re doing into you fb activity stream, is a brutal invasion of privacy. I know I can choose not to show these things, but I’m more concerned at the fact that facebook is collecting them, regardless of whether or not they appear on my profile. I could just deactivate my account, but I actually like using facebook, so I implemented this hack from the Idea Shower, which uses the blocksite extension for Firefox to block requests for the beacon code.

It works well and means I don’t need to abandon facebook altogether.

svn-time-lapse-view

Phil — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:20:22 +0000

Jon has written an awesome tool in Java for doing time lapse views of a single file in a subversion repository. Super handy!

The eMusic Remote

Phil — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:58:43 +0000

eMusic recently got rid of their clunky old downloader and replaced it with a branded and heavily customized version of Firefox. The new app (dubbed the eMusic Remote) is cross platform and has built in syncing with iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player. For me the iTunes integration is particularly welcome because it removes the need to import things you’ve downloaded to your iTunes library. The best bit of course is that you can add extensions to it.