These are just paragraphs selected at random and pasted into google.

Just testing something

(PS: Hi work folks)

As almost anyone who’s watched the news in the last year or so - World Youth Day (which is actually FIVE days. Talk about not being able to count.) is in Sydney this year.

Our fine State Government has decided in all it’s wisdom to implement Extraordinary Powers to Police. These include the authority to arrest and/or fine people for “causing annoyance” to World Youth Day participants.

EXTRAORDINARY new powers will allow police to arrest and fine people for “causing annoyance” to World Youth Day participants and permit partial strip searches at hundreds of Sydney sites, beginning today.

The laws, which operate until the end of July, have the potential to make a crime of wearing a T-shirt with a message on it, undertaking a Chaser-style stunt, handing out condoms at protests, riding a skateboard or even playing music, critics say.

Police and volunteers from the State Emergency Service and Rural Fire Service will be able to direct people to cease engaging in conduct that “causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.

People who fail to comply will be subject to a $5500 fine.

– Source: SMH, “Thou shalt not annoy on Youth Day”, July 1 2008. Jano Gibson, Linda Morris and Joel Gibson.

Yep, a $5500 fine for doing anything which might annoy someone (read: Catholic) in various places around Sydney for the whole of July.

I thought we were supposed to have separation of Church and State in this country?

When the Dalai Lama visits, I don’t see any laws banning anything which might cause offence to Bhudists. But, hey, some old guy in long robes, with a pointy hat and a huge amount of money decides to inconvenience a City with throngs of his followers? Hey, lets arrest/fine anyone who says something that might offend them!

I wonder if this extends to also talking about Science in public? I mean, that’s deeply offensive to most religious people - the idea that many of the core concepts of their religion are based on lies.

Well?

With databases in many organisations, there’s a rule that’s carved in stone:

Thou shalt use Stored Procedures for all table access.

Regardless of your position on this, some clients just don’t give us any other option. The application is never given direct table access, and anything that doesn’t go through a stored procedure just generates errors.  This could be because they’re enforcing access control on the data to a finer level than just table level, or because they need to ensure records are kept of all confidential information.

The picture for LINQ to SQL with this situation appears at first to be rather rosy, through two things:

1. You can assign sprocs that handle inserts, updates, and deletes against your tables.
2. You can directly execute sprocs as methods in your application. So, you can select data out of tables via this method.

Both of these things, are true. However, what doesn’t get mentioned is that LINQ to SQL will still perform reads (using dynamic SQL) from your database if you (for example) try to access children of a relationship, or insert/update rows**. That is: You can’t stop additional queries against the database.

So, as far as I can tell - this means LINQ to SQL, as it stands, cannot be used for these situations. Ofcourse, this doesn’t prevent me from using LINQ to XML, LINQ to Entities, etc - it just means that our ways of executing SQL still have not advanced.

There’s a possible way I think this could be fixed, but it really requires a bit of a rethink as to how LINQ to SQL works - perhaps this could be done as a third party LINQ provider, but really it should be done by Microsoft in LINQ to SQL v.Next.

The way I’d like to see it fixed, would be for someone to create an analysis tool that runs at publish time, that generates Stored Procedures for all the LINQ statements in your code, and then forces the compiled LINQ commands to map through these sprocs.

This would have the benefit of rapid prototyping/development, and being able to still enforce access through sprocs. 

* = Well, there might be a way, but I’ve not yet found it.
** = It does select’s to get the updated column values from, for example, computed columns.

Last week I went to Microsoft’s “Heroes Happen {Here} 2008″ launch of the 2008 series of products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008.

As part of the ‘goodies bag’ given away, I got a complementary copy of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. Having read very good things about it, and being rather impressed - I installed it on my work desktop machine. (Rather risky, I know).

I would highly recommend anyone considering this to read Vijayshinva Karnure’s blog post on how to configure it properly. Once done, it looks and “feels” just like Windows Vista. (Only, significantly faster).

However - the first thing I would recommend you do is to turn off the Enhanced Security settings for Internet Explorer. Microsoft have changed the way this is done from Windows Server 2003, so it can take some hunting to find how to change it.

The frustrating thing is that it’s right infront of you. No, really - The Server Manager console that shows on first login has the option right there, but “helpfully” disguises it in acronym form.

Click on that link, and turn off IE ESC for both Admins and Users.

We killed Twitter, again.

This time it was from an excess of Love - Of the less-than-three (”<3") variety.

My screen was filled with hundreds of messages like these two:

For the non-Twitter’ers out there, the Twitter folks added a way to send a special type of tweet. By entering “@username <3" - it would transform the ordinary tweet, into this special type of message.

It also results in that person getting a "Do you love (sender)?" prompt, with a button to quickly reply.

This novelty, combined with the easy reply, lead to a major increase in the number of Tweets for valentines day, and thus Twitter slowing down / refusing to respond for many people (including me).

Edit: Here's a better screenshot of what was/is going on (read from bottom up)

So, here’s my tale of trying (and so far failing) to get Internet access on at my new apartment.

(with apologies to Dreamhost for nicking their headline AND public domain photo)

December 13th: I get the word from the real estate agent that I’ve got the unit. Immediately sign up on the iiNet website for Naked DSL.

December 19th: iiNet respond to my application with the message “Service Address Not Found”.  I contact iiNet and ask what that means, turns out they need a phone number.

December 21-22nd: I move in.

December 24th: I finally go back to my apartment, plug in a phone and find out the number. I give that to iiNet, they re-submit.

December 28th: I get an email from iiNet with “Service Address Not Found” again. I call, they do some quick tests - the number doesn’t show up in their access to Telstra’s provisioning systems.
I call Telstra to get the phone connected, it’ll take several days because as it turns out, it’s on the Optus cable network. Appointment made for January 4th.

January 4th: No Telstra guy.

January 8th: I get a call from a Telstra guy: “Umm,I’m at the premesis now…” me: “Well, you wern’t 4 days ago when I was there…”

January 9th: Telstra call back to reschedule, and say has to be all day. I ask for Saturday timeslot if that’s the case, sure - January 19th. Ugh.

January 19th: Line connected. But after the Tech leaves, I find out the line is a Silent line, and 12722123 to find out my number doesn’t work.

January 21st and 22nd: Too busy at work to call Telstra before their Sales centres close at 5pm.

January 23rd: Call Telstra, get my line number. Go sign up again at iiNet.

January 30th: Email from iiNet: DSL Connection will be on Feb 5th, but I don’t need to be home (because provisioned line).

Feb 5th: No line sync. iiNet connection email says might take a few more days.

Feb 7th: Still no line sync. Call iiNet, on hold for ~30mins (on my mobile) - Guy says it looks like my entire DSLAM is down. But, (good news for me) they work on Saturdays (9th)- so, give a call then or Monday.

Feb 9th: (Still no line sync) Call iiNet, on hold for another 30mins, guy says Telstra have to fix it, and they don’t work on weekends, but should know more Monday (11th)

Feb 11th: (Still no line sync) Call iiNet, on hold for ~45mins. Guy says they’ve added my name to a list to send to Visionstream, and they’ll call to let me know when it’ll be fixed.

Today (Feb 13th): Visionstream calls me at about 10 am  -

VS: “We’re calling to make an appointment for your ADSL Installation”
me: “err.. don’t you mean fault repair?”
VS: “Oh, I don’t know… So, will Friday (15th) be ok?”
me: “Uhm, What time?” 
VS: “You’ll have to be there All day”
me: “Oh, no, that’s really not possible, any chance for a shorter time period?”
VS: “No, sorry - you can leave a key with a friend family member and they can be there instead”
Me: “Err, no, I really can’t.”
VS: “Okay, well, we’ll send this back to iiNet then”
Me: “Fine, I’ll call them” 

I call iiNet, left on hold for 45mins.  I explain the situation,

“Well, you’ll have to be home then”
me: “But I understood the issue to be with your DSLAM, not with my line - everyone else on the exchange was down”.
“No, that’s been rectified, you’ll have to be at home for them to fix the issue”.
me: “Well, that’s just not an option for me at the moment.”
“Let me talk to a senior, see what we can do”
Me: “okay”
(5mins hold)
“We’ll try rebuilding the port, but, that might not help”

I get home tonight, and, well… they’re right, it didn’t help.

So, ~3hrs in total of calls on my mobile, and I’m still no closer to having proper internet access on. I’ve sent a ’support form’ in telling them that if they can’t narrow down the appointment timeslot to 3-4 hours, then just to cancel my account.

I suppose if they go ahead and cancel, I’ll be able to get the line reconnected (and if necessary, do it on a Saturday), then I’ll get normal ADSL2+ with someone else. Which has far less chance of f’cking up.

Seriously sucks.

Addendum: I’m not blaming iiNet that they can’t fix something when I’m not home - I’m just saying that the whole process of getting internet access is a disaster. It’s now over 2 months, for something that should have been fairly simple.  If the Telcos stopped playing bullshit politics, we’d all be in a much better situation.

Someone asked me recently what my opinion of Dreamhost was. They knew I use Dreamhost for a variety of sites, and were looking to sign up.

The short answer is that Dreamhost are “variable”.

I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for about 3 years now, and I’ve seen some pretty wild thing happen.

They’ve had several major power outages which took down their entire datacentre. They’ve had significant network issues for a period of months. They had a major data security breach where someone managed to get several thousand usernames and passwords. And, to top it all off - they recently overcharged about half of their customers by several million US peso dollars. (It would have been up around 10 million, if it wern’t for a bug in their software).

Oh, and it’s probably worth mentioning that as I write this, all my sites are down, because the servers they’re on are being driven from one side of LA to the other.

Given all of the above, most ordinary, sane people would probably be shouting “run for the hills!” at the top of their lungs. And, in many cases people would be  quite justified to run as far as they could from Dreamhost.

Here’s the thing, however - apart from the power issues (and the scheduled cluster move mentioned) my sites have worked just fine for the most part. 

Yeah, there’s been times when a server has been down, or when some sort of glitch has slowed things down - but lets look at the big picture here for a second.

Dreamhost’s business is to sell reasonable quality webhosting, with large gobs of disk space and bandwidth, at a very cheap rate.  I pay something like USD$20/month (on the old plans) for my Dreamhost service. 

What do I get for that USD$20/month?  I get to host 30-something sites, occupying 20GB of disk space, and transferring about 150GB per month. No, that’s not the limit, that’s what I’m actually using. This month. Dreamhost have absolutely no issue with me using a lot more than that - even if I went to TWENTY times that, I’d still be well under the limits of my account.

I also get the security that someone else will take care of the servers, and keep them patched and secure. In the event that something goes wrong, I can lodge a ticket and have someone else fix it at 3am.

So, does that mean I’d recommend Dreamhost to everyone? Heck no - there’s heaps of situations where I wouldn’t recommend Dreamhost.

Any time you answer “yes” or even “maybe” to the question “Will this being unavailable impact my business?”, you need to be looking at a managed hosting solution with a proper contract/service level agreement.  Don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, and definitely don’t try reselling this to your customers.

Dreamhost are also not suitable for a variety of “big” applications/sites - despite the label saying you can get 5TB of bandwidth and 500GB of disk space, actually using all of it is possible only under very specific conditions. Most of the time, anyone running a site that is that popular is going to be using so much of the resources on their server that they’re going to be causing issues for other users on the same server.

It’s like the speedo on your car, if you’re actually hitting 240KPH or 30,000RPM, something is going very very wrong, or is about to.

So, with that out of the way - I am actually starting to look for some dedicated server options - not because I don’t like Dreamhost (I do) - but simply because I want to do other things that I simply can’t do with Dreamhost.

My options are limited, because I want to be able to manage the server myself, I need a reasonably large amount of disk space and bandwidth quota, and I need to run Windows.

What are your experiences with Dreamhost, and/or dedicated hosting?

I hope everyone is well and relaxing during the Christmas / New Years break.

I was busy over the weekend moving into my new appartment. Having to carry all your posessions up 3 flights of stairs gives you a whole new understanding of how much stuff you have. A very big thankyou to Mitch (my uncle) for helping me move.

For Christmas I’ve been back up in Toronto, and heading back to Sydney sometime Boxing Day.

In other news: Congrats to Ian on getting engaged a few weeks back. Great news

Catch y’all later.