Site Moved

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(If you’re reading this, then you’re on the new site. Congratulations. 😉 )

After hosting my websites with Total Choice Hosting (TCH from here on) for more than eight years, I’ve been forced to move them. The issue: lost e-mails.

A few months ago, a friend of mine called to ask if I’d gotten his e-mails. I hadn’t. When we ran some tests, his e-mails got through to me with no problem, so I dismissed it as a fluke.

Last week, one of the developers I work with asked me about a case that he’d assigned me the day before. The company’s case management software normally sends me an e-mail notification when a case is assigned to me. We tested it, and none of its notification messages are getting through.

I went through TCH’s ticket system, but after a week, the problem still wasn’t resolved. Worse, I discovered that messages from the billing company I use weren’t getting through either. I was already late on one bill payment because of that, so now I owed a late fee in addition to the time I’d already lost to this problem.

I’ve been relatively happy with TCH for all this time, and I realize that e-mail problems are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot, but an e-mail account that can’t receive messages is useless to me. I would rather have hundreds of spam messages get through than have one valid message blocked.

TCH will fix the problem eventually, and once they do I’ll be happy to recommend them again, but I can’t wait for them any longer. I spent this morning moving the site to its new host, and now I’m just be waiting for the DNS records to be updated (which should be done in a couple days). I may come back to TCH in the future, because for the most part I’ve had very good experiences with them, but for now I’m outta here.

“Final Destination 5”

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I keep seeing ads for Final Destination 5. Could someone explain to me the appeal of the Final Destination movies? Because I just don’t get it.

After the first one, audiences must have known that essentially everyone was going to die by the end of the movie, with absolutely no way to save themselves or even attempt to fight back. Are people still actually identifying with the characters despite that?

In a way, I can kind of understand it. A lot of people feel that they’re subject to massive forces that will just steamroller over them without even noticing. Wall Street, multinational corporations, governments and bureaucrats, rising prices, falling currencies, failing job markets… even Mother Nature’s full fury doesn’t seem all that threatening by comparison. In such a world, maybe identifying with a character who you know is going to die in some gruesome and excruciating way in the next couple hours is no big deal.

More likely it’s just that the young always think that they’re immortal. I wish you luck with that, kids, it hasn’t worked out for anyone yet. Maybe you’ll be the fortunate ones.

In the mean time, I’ll give the Final Destination movies a pass, if it’s all the same to you. I just don’t find them interesting.

“Riots, wild markets: Did space storms drive us mad?”

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OMG, mind control rays… from the SUN! 😉

Okay, not really. At worst, the solar storms only added some additional impetus, the basic reasons for both the riots and the market fluctuations were already there. But I find it very interesting that research has linked solar storms to pessimism and depression. Our local star may play a far more active role in our activities than we thought.

(If the initial line of this post hasn’t been used in some cheesy science-fiction story already, I’d be VERY surprised.)

“Security flaw found in feds’ digital radios”

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This, my friends, is what happens when you try to design something securely without talking to security experts.

I’m surprised that the manufacturer of the radios involved hasn’t sued the security researchers to keep them silent, in the belief that if the researchers don’t tell anybody about the problems, they effectively don’t exist (known derisively as “security by obscurity” in security circles). It has happened at least four times in the last few years, and those are just the ones that I heard of.

Thing is, “security by obscurity” doesn’t work: less ethical researchers can find out the same things, and sell the information directly to interested groups for huge sums. There are already a number of computer vulnerability researchers selling the fruits of their labor to the NSA and other legitimate governmental security organizations, and they’re taking in tens of thousands of dollars for useful ones. Presumably less-legitimate groups with an interest — like computer criminals — bid even higher for them.

EDIT: more (and somewhat more technical) information here.

From the You’ve-Gotta-Be-Kidding-Me Department…

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GoddessJ and I went to see Cowboys and Aliens a couple days ago. I have to say, it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen in the western-slash-science-fiction category. Of course, as GoddessJ puts it, that’s like being able to claim the title of best bullfighter in Alaska. 😉 Seriously though, it’s a pretty good SF story.

But before the movie, we saw a trailer for… wait for it… Battleship, The Movie.

Yeah, based on Battleship, the Board Game. Which is barely evolved from Battleship, the paper-and-pencil game from the World War I era.

Really, can the oft-rumored Pong, the Movie be far behind?

“This Island Earth”

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GoddessJ and I enjoy watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, a series that shows old movies while three hecklers toss in humorous comments. We’ve got quite a few episodes on DVD. But the thing that got GoddessJ interested was when I convinced her to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which mocked a classic 1950s science fiction movie called This Island Earth. We have that one on VHS tape, and we’ve watched it dozens of times over the years.

While watching MST3K episodes, I’m often shocked and appalled at how bad the original movies are. Bad editing is common: one of the characters randomly appears — not walks onto the set, but just appears, between one frame and the next — in the middle of a scene in Girl in Gold Boots (and that one is not science fiction!). Bad acting is more common that good: in The Cave Dwellers, a woman gets shot in the upper chest with an arrow, and suddenly starts limping. Bad costuming is the butt of many jokes: Space Mutiny seems to have been costumed primarily using high school marching band uniforms and exercise leotards (it’s also famous for a scene where a woman who was just killed is shown still sitting at her desk, working away). And if you think that the TV-show representations of technology are bad these days, you should see The Wild World of Batwoman (and no, it has nothing to do with the DC Comics character of the same name).

But the worst thing is the writing. A drunken baboon could often write better scripts! The painful part is, many of these scripts could have been good, if everyone involved had just been a little more careful. You can usually see the bones of a good story there, under all the crap piled onto it.

And thus we get back to This Island Earth. I could see that there was a good story hiding beneath the painful execution. I wanted to know more. So a couple weeks ago I picked up a copy of the book of the same name, and I’ve recently finished it.

I expected something very different.

The movie has Cal Meacham and Ruth Adams as two of the main characters, with Joe Wilson as a supporting character at the beginning. So does the book. The movie has a plane that’s flown by remote control, and a mysterious device called an interocitor, which Cal has to build to prove he’s worthy of joining a group with advanced technology. So does the book. In the movie, the group turns out to be led by human-looking aliens fighting a far-away war. Again, like the book.

That’s where the similarity ends. Essentially everything beyond those few facts is different. The entire story is different, completely and utterly. It was very disconcerting to see glimpses of scenes from the movie in pieces of the book, only to have things take a wildly different turn in the very next paragraph.

They’re both interesting stories, and the book is (in my opinion) a much stronger one than the movie. But I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the sources of any more old movie scripts. It messes with my head too much.

(Well, okay. Maybe just one more. 😉 )

“In Defense of Hard: When Easier Isn’t Better”

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Before I sold it, Project Badger was ugly. Almost painfully ugly. It wasn’t a deliberate decision — I’d have made it pretty if I’d had the time — but our customers wanted what it did, not how it looked.

When BigCo bought it, the first thing they did was slap a new name on it and hire a guy to build a new interface for it. I wasn’t enamored of the “new name” idea, because it had a good reputation and a following of thousands of customers under its original name, but I was all for a nicer interface.

After six months, the guy had built a very pretty interface. Unfortunately, it was crap. It only really worked at 1024×768, the resolution that that developer preferred (I was stuck at 800×600 on one of my machines at that point, as many people were, and it was all but unusable at that resolution). It simplified some options to the point of uselessness. But worst of all, under the hood, the guy had taken so many shortcuts that fixing its shortcomings would have required completely rewriting it from scratch.

Many customers who tried both preferred to use the original interface, despite its ugliness — a damning indictment.

Easy isn’t always the best answer. The original program was complex, and required the person using it to study the options available and make choices; simplifying it reduced the choices and made it easier to use, but also destroyed a good portion of its usefulness. And as another facet, by taking so many “easy” shortcuts in the new interface’s design, the developer had made it all but impossible to improve it.

There are trade-offs in everything. An oak tree takes a long time to grow, but its wood is dense; a pine tree can grow quickly by not spending so much energy on its structure. Furniture made of pine is much lighter, easier to build, easier to move, and less expensive, but furniture made of oak lasts. You’ll notice that oak furniture is still around.

There’s a reason why doing something the hard way is often preferable.