tensixtyone

After a few days of thinking i’ve decided it’s time to move away from Textdrive onto GMail and my own hosting. Why? Well lets have a quick overview.

1. Memory allocation on shared servers

Recently i’ve been dogged with Mephisto spitting feathers after a few page requests, saying it’s hit its memory limit and the MySQL lib can’t run a command. This is a new change that happend on the TxD servers which i’m not impressed about, especially how the process never seems to tick over the acceptable limits for ruby processes.

2. Joyent

Joyent, the Gmail replacement, or so I thought. Over the last few months its suffered from developer time being concentrated on the wrong areas. Want to make a mail alias for your Joyent account? No you cant, but you can make spiffy lists…

If the guys at Joyent actually worked on features that are needed and not what they want to develop then its quite possible that i’d stick with it. Another fantastic example is that you can’t mark mail as read/unread, even simple webmail clients have this feature but it seems to escape Joyent.

3. Mish-mash of solutions

Textdrive shared hosting run via Webmin, Mail via Joyent or Webmin however you want to do it, Billing related changes via another control panel, Storage space via another panel.

I can understand that Textdrive/Strongspace/Joyent are three products that have been thrown together into the all encompassing “Joyent Core” but they should of worked on the integration before they announced it.

4. All or nothing

I like Strongspace, I like the idea, but now i’ve got to have Textdrive hosting and Joyent mail with it as well, all i want is Strongspace, nothing more. integration is a good thing but why an’t we allowed to buy seperate services? I could go for Bingodisk but that doesnt support rsync. After a quick investigation it seems that S3 is my best bet, and probably a bit cheaper.

So, theres a quick run down of my dealbreakers, the issues i’ve been living with for the last few months. I currently pay around £15 for a low powered dedicated server in London which I hardly make use of, due to the traffic I get to my sites it seems like a good candidate. I’ll use Google Apps for Domains for my mail and related stuff, and S3 for backup. Now, the long trawl of migration…

I’ve finally got a invite to Pownce after a few days of waiting. So, what is it? To me it seems like a mash of several tools already in existance, like Twitter and various others.

Personally I like it, don’t know why, and i’ve not used it enough to give a full rundown of it but initally it seems quick and easy to use. The only disappointment is that the desktop tools use Adobe Air which doesn’t support Linux, yet. In the FAQ they mention it’ll be sorted as soon as Flash Core is sorted, which I guess wont be that long.

Check out my Pownce profile if your bored.

Today I was reading the followup to the Wifi farce that shown on Panorama a few weeks ago, the backlash by the public has been unbelivable. I read a few comments on their feedback section to come across the following post

So Prof. Sperrin & Co are happy for our children to be used as guinea pigs…just who has given him that divine right?

Cllr Sylvia Wright, S Staffordshire

Councillor? People who know me know that I have a semi-hatred for ignorant councillors so I decided to investigate further. Putting her name into Google throws up hundreds of hits all regarding mobile phones and children, I was pleased to see a few pages of her campaigning for her local area and saving of a post office. Her posts regarding mobiles and wifi just show her in bad light, another councillor mouthing off about a area they have no expertise in. Whats even worse, she seems to be lobbying the papers to make these sort of stories!

Then I spotted she’s a Lib Dem.

I support the Lib Dem, but i refuse to support people like her, bias, refusing to listen to rational arguments, and generally helping the party a bad reputation. Her online rap sheet is enough to condem her and thinking that online media wont come back to haunt you is a stupid asumption.

President George Bush made his first public statement on Iran’s detention of 15 British sailors and marines on Saturday, nine days after the affair began. Iran’s action was “inexcusable behaviour,” he said, calling on Iran to “give back the hostages.”

Bush, get off our lawn.

It seems that Jobs is winning his campaign against DRM, and his inital warcry wasn’t just a shallow attempt to gain supporters. EMI have finally dropped the DRM deadlock, they will still continue to offer DRM versions of songs at a discounted rate but the DRM-free version are available without restrictions, in AAC format, and at a higher bitrate. How much? Just 30 pence more…

So is it worth it? Checking EMI’s current signed list i’d say its worth it just for the Beastie Boys and Queen. EMI’s move is interesting to the community, others speculate that no other lables will follow this move and EMI only commited to this due to their ever falling stock price. All we can do is wait and see…

I’m looking for a specific episode of The Culture Show, shown on 12th May 2005 and has a feature about ARGs and Perplex City, the segment stars our very own Joanne talking about some ARG termnology…

If you have the ep, please contact me.

The Sky/Virgin row continues, Virgin Media allow a section to express your opinions but the option to add a post has disappered, seems wise of Virgin especially since most of the 14 pages are full with anti-virgin messages…

At midnight the channels went silent, “Sky” have followed through with their threats of removing channels from Virgin Media, and with good cause in my view. Sky is under no enforced condition to supply the channels, the only ones they have to provide are ones they offer on Freeview and Premium channels such as Sky Sports and Sky Movies. Sky essentially removed all the channels they could and the various commets over the last few days show that its Virgin who are the aggressors.

When Virgin Media was formed earlier this month they started a massive advertising campaign mentioning how they have all the Sky channels for cheaper than Sky, openenly throwing mud in their faces. Industry people mentioned that this would hard the contract renewal in Feburary but it was passed off as mindless speculation.

Inital discussions at the renewal didn’t go well, and Virgin held their ground and said they wouldn’t pay over the odds for Sky’s services, Sky had “hiked2 the renewal price due to “heavy investment in premium programmes” such as 24 and Lost. I follow these two programmes, and while 24 is a regular on the Sky network Lost is a new addition, and a expensive one at that. Other programs not mentioned deserve some notery, such as Stargate SG-1 which is currently premeiring on Sky One, we’re currently ahead of the states on this one which is a first for SG-1.

Discussions continued for some days but the stalemate was never broken, Sky started advertising on Sky One for Virgin customers to take action, but this was only met by complaints and a ASA investigation. A campaign of bickering ensued from both sides of the fence

Sky’s CTO and Virgin’s CCO had a little head-to-head on BBC Breakfast News’ business segment, Sky had previously offer to take all broadcasting operations away from Virgin and run them in-house, shaving the costs of operating the channels for Virgin and giving Sky more direct control of their own channels. Virgin refused. I guess that the idea of Sky having direct access to the network is sending shivers down highend managers spines.

Now the channels have been shut down, Virgin have to have the last word. “Sky have took their ball and gone home” is the annoucement on the previously Sky Two channel. Immaturty at this stage is not going to help them at all.

A while ago we (myself and my other half) decided that NTL was far too expensive and decided to move over to Bulldog Broadband, at the time this was an excellent idea as Bulldog promised a £1 installation fee for a new line, as the current house didn’t have a BT line we took them up on this offer. We had phone and broadband and all was good.

Fast forward 12 months, Bulldog have serious issues setting up a direct debit and we’re £500 in arrears with them, we cancel and organise a payment plan with them to get rid of the final balance of the account. Now that the account is disconnected we move back to NTL (now Virgin Media) and have spent 6 months on their books.

Virgin have now caused some upset with the removal of Sky channels from the lineup, As we’re heavy SkyOne viewers we decided that going onto Sky would be the better option. Sky offer a nice broadband package if your a Sky subscriber of just £10/pm for their unlimited 8mb, and excellent deal when compaired with the current ISPs. The only downside was that I needed a BT line, as my Bulldog line was fitted by a BT Tech I assumed that I could return the Bulldog line back to BT.

I was wrong…

Turns out that Bulldog have their own network, they just lease the use of exchange space to place their own telecoms equipment, normal BT lines are just switched and rerouted to Bulldog’s equipment were as a new line is wired directly to them. No pass go, no collect £200. BT now want £120 to install yet another line into my house (making it a grand total of 3 phone lines). My only options are to stay with NTL/VirginMedia for my broadband or risk returning to Bulldog, that is, unless anyone else has any better ideas?

Jack Thompson is heading over to the U.K

I feel a resurge in the “video nasties” coming soon, Jack is coming over here to protest about the summer release of Manhunt 2, accordingly he was asked to come over by a few people, personally, i’d like to find these people and give them a slap across the head.

The last thing I want is further policing of video games, it’s already bad enough with the recent issues in the news and the “nanny state” that is here to stay.

I’ll be the first to signup to a petition to get his visa revoked…