a day in the life

FUCK AT&T.

Quoted from Reddit:

From what I can tell, this is only a confirmed issue in Southern California at the moment, but seems to be wider than just a regional problem. Those who have contacted AT&T representatives were told that the site is in fact blocked, so this isn’t a technical problem, and all the other 4chan subdomains work fine.

Moot is aware

It’s come to our attention that AT&T is filtering/blocking img.4chan.org (/b/ & /r9k/) for many of their customers. There is no remedy at this time.

If you’ve been affected, I would advise you call or write customer support and corporate immediately.

xkcd’s comment is my favorite:

What IP blocks do their corporate offices have? If they’re really cutting off my trashy time-wasting web entertainment, I’m cutting off theirs.

As many people have been saying, this very well could be the begeniniung of the end of the Internet as we know it. And considering the 4chan crowd, AT&T should be ready to battle. The shit is really going to hit the fan now. Too bad for AT&T. HA.

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I created these graphics. Please feel free to use them for yourself.

Has anyone been having trouble with their Blackberry devices? I’ve been getting these messages for the past few days. I’m on AT&T using a Bold 9000.

I’m working on a research project involving Context-Aware RFID Driven Web Applications and came across these videos.

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

Wireless in the world from timo on Vimeo.

Making an RFID cross-section from timo on Vimeo.

Experiments in Field Drawing from timo on Vimeo.

These are just for fun

Volume I from timo on Vimeo.

Volume III from timo on Vimeo.

Something that has been on my task list for the last 4 months, and pissing me off royally the entire time, has been to figure out why Group Policy settings for Proxy Settings have not been applying to Internet Explorer 7 clients. The policy has worked fine in Internet Explorer 6 but after upgrading to Internet Explorer 7, the function ceased to work. Apparently, this has been an issue for a lot of users:

• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=223293&start=0
• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-7343-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=276924
• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-7343-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=264665
• http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-1035-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=262676
• As well as many many Experts-Exchange posts.

SOLUTION!
While some users had luck after checking Proxy Exceptions to make sure no invalid characters were included, many were still faced with the initial problem. After months of looking for a solution to this problem, the big M$ decided to FINALLY address the issue with a knowledge base article (which was only posted THIS WEEK on March 10, 2009). According to Microsoft, the issue is related to Internet Explorer 7 no longer supporting the Gopher protocol. As a result, if you customize a GPO to include Internet Explorer Proxy Settings, you MUST NOT INCLUDE GOPHER. Simply leave the field blank, close the GPO and refresh the settings on the client computer. Like MAGIC the settings now appear! Woohoo. Check below for a short guide.

Guide:

1. Open the Group Policy Management Console and navigate to the GPO holding the settings.
2. Navigate to the Proxy Configuration Settings located at User Configuration/Windows Settings/Internet Explorer Maintenance/Connection and configure the Proxy Settings field.
   
3. In this example, every field is set to the same server and port. Do not use the option "Use the same proxy server for all addresses."
   
   
4. Simply delete the entries on the Gopher Field, click Apply and then Ok.
   
5. From the Client machine, open a command prompt and run "gpupdate /force".
   
   
6. Check your IE settings. The proxy configuration should now be applied!

Let me know if this works for you!

I have to say, I’m pretty impressed. I just upgraded my Comcast internet service from the 8 Meg service to the 16Meg and went from 16033 kbps (2004.1 KB/sec transfer rate) to 21448 kbps (2681 KB/sec transfer rate). Both tests were run against Chicago. Not too shabby!

To Frank Potter @ Loopt for helping make this geo-tagging experience possible!

I’ve put together a short video (~ 6min) about how to create ringtones for a Blackberry using GarageBand on your mac. Soon to come are Quicktime Pro & iPhone variants.

[display_podcast]

YouTube Version

I’m using the iPhone/iPod touch WordPress client. Not too shabby if you ask me!

I have gone ahead and posted all of the Adobe Flex 3 projects I worked on during the Fall 2008 semester at Oakland University. The course focused on Human Computer Interaction and User Interface. Check out the demos!

Well now that AT&T services have been successfully restored, its comforting to find that the source of a massive service outage, covering approximately 5 states worth of subscribers, can be traced back to a single power failure in my hometown of Bloomfield, MI. How exciting. For the record, a majority of residents in Bloomfield & the surrounding areas are still without power.

WTF MATE

The Tikitag first kit has arrived! Check out the unboxing pictures below! The box and packaging is very minimal and the tags are very, very small.

The tag is about the width of a small paperclip.

Had to take it apart

Once upon a time, many a year ago, the internet was born. And with that came the need for web hosting companies (web-hosts). Soon the land was filled with hosts, some dedicated and others just resellers of the more expensive services.
On a nice Winter day in 2001, I purchased my very first domain name for ten years! Not being familiar with how the domain names and hosting worked, it took me about a week to figure out that I needed to pay for hosting in addition to buying the domain name. This is where my web hosting adventure begins.

While I can’t remember the name of my first webhost, I do recall they were limited to static HTML pages with no included database technologies and cost me about $5/month. At the time, that was a lot of money to me. That web host worked out very well for me, considering my site was statically generated using Microsoft Frontpage 2000. Unfortunately, that web-host went out of business and decided to transfer all their customers to their "parent". I use the term parent loosely because they were really just the wholesale distributor of hosting service. It was this experience that opened my eyes to some of the real workings web-hosting online. Any Joe Schmo can buy hosting in bulk from a larger company and resell it in smaller packs. Not a bad idea on paper, but obviously not the best for the customer either. This was the end of my experience with my first hosting company.

As I went back to the tubes to try and find another host company, I found it hard to gauge wether or not a web-host had their own servers or was just reselling for another company. Since the prices for dedicated hosting were astronomical compared to that of shared/resold hosting, I decided to narrow my search down to something within my price range. After doing a bit of research, I decided on a company called based Reyox, out of Seattle, Washington. At $9.95/month I thought it was a pretty fair deal. At the time, I selected Windows hosting (not really knowing anything different) and I continued to use Frontpage to build static sites. It wasn’t until I started to build more dynamic sites that I became frustrated with Reyox. At one point all of the Reyox sites got hacked my some hackers in Hungary. My entire site was destroyed along with some of my friend’s sites that I had recommended to Reyox. During my time with Reyox, I always thought it was interesting that when I contacted the support people, I would always be dealing with the same person, Asher Saeed. It wasn’t until after I left Reyox that I realized he owned Reyox and was the only person running the show.

My next stop in the web-hosting world was a company called MediaTemple. I was referred to them by a friend who had raved about their exceptional service, customer service and automated tools. At $20 a month, MediaTemple was more expensive compared to Reyox, but I needed a reliable host with no BS. During my first year of service with MediaTemple, I was relatively happy with their service. They offer all the services you would expect from any Linux provider: PHP, Apache, MySQL, ssh acces, etc. It wasn’t until after my first year that I really started to experience problems. The problems started with the MySQL and PHP simply flaking out at any time up for up to 10 minutes at a time. When I first contacted the support team at (mt), they told me it was because there was a heavy load on my sites. At first I just accepted their explanation, but when it started to happen on a daily basis, and especially when I was working on web projects for my classes I couldn’t stand it anymore. As you can see from the MediaTemple , the issues were originally documented by (mt) at the end of February and continued all the way through May 14, 2008. If you ask me, that is unacceptable for any host. I was giving a presentation for one of my academic projects and the web app completely crapped out. It was right then that I decided Media Temple had to go.

I’m now on a new host. One that is owned called Mosso. They pride themselves on offering both Apache/IIS 7 and everything you would expect from both of those. At $100 a month, it is the most expensive host I have ever used, but it definitely has paid off. I have been on them for 3 months now and from a service standpoint, I have been really happy with the performance of the sites, databases and server side scripting processing. In my opinions, the only thing missing in Mosso is SSH shell access, but I hear it’s on the way. Mosso also has one of the best Reseller interfaces available from any host I’ve used, especially for web developers who handle everything for their customers.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with Mosso and I would recommend their service to anyone looking for excellent web hosting. I know the price is a bit steep, so if anyone is interested just post a comment and we can work something out with the reseller interface.

This is the complaint I sent to MediaTemple about their lack of service:

 

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Attn: Media Temple Customer Service