09:04 – If you’ve been having trouble getting to this site, you’re not alone. Apparently, there are some network issues. I did a traceroute this morning and was able to get to Dreamhost, after which the pings disappeared into a black hole. I have no idea how long this has been going on, other than that everything was working as of about 2200 ET last night. I checked the Dreamhost status page, which mentions no problems.
This is not the first time this has happened. I’m not particularly happy with Dreamhost, but I suspect they’re probably as good as most commercial hosting services and better than most. It’s just hard to get used to this much lower level of service and reliability after having been hosted for a decade by Greg and Brian, who often went from one year to the next without even a minor glitch. Or at least none that I could see; I suspect Greg and Brian spent lots of time and effort dealing with problems behind the scenes so they didn’t turn into our problems.
11:53 – Another word for zero-tolerance is zero-judgment. As we increasingly become a zero-judgment society, the gross injustices become increasingly clear.
Here we have a case where several Georgia boys are to be changed with multiple felonies: manufacturing and possessing destructive devices. Their parents are being charged with Georgia’s equivalent of disorderly conduct because the parents knew what the boys were doing but considered it just “harmless fun”.
Which it was. These boys had no intention of harming anyone, and what they were producing were not destructive devices by any meaningful definition of that term. They were putting aluminum foil and sodium hydroxide (lye) solution in plastic water bottles. The reaction of the hydroxide and aluminum produces hydrogen gas, which eventually reaches a pressure sufficient to rupture the plastic bottle with a loud bang. In other words, these kids were just messing around, having fun.
I’ve written about these hydroxide-aluminum “bombs” before. A year or so ago, someone in this area was leaving these “bombs” for people to find and pick up. It’s quite possible that they could have caused severe injuries or even deaths, not just from the high-pressure rupture of the bottle, but from sodium hydroxide solution spattering all over the place. (Even relatively dilute sodium hydroxide solutions can permanently blind someone in literally seconds.) But that was an entirely different situation. Someone who was literally a terrorist was placing devices intended to hurt or kill people. What these kids were doing in their backyard was stupid and dangerous to themselves, but there was no intent to commit a crime. It used to be that actions were only criminal if they were performed with criminal intent. We no longer make that distinction, because that would require someone to make a judgment, and making judgments is not Politically Correct. The result is that some innocent teenage boys may be convicted of violent felonies, possibly face jail time and certainly have their lives ruined. All because they were having some innocent fun.
This has to stop. When I was a teenager, the cop who showed up would have told me to knock it off and told me that what I was doing was extremely dangerous to myself. But it wouldn’t even have occurred to him to charge me, let alone my parents, with a crime. (Conversely, being a sensible cop, if he’d caught terrorist punks leaving these things for people to find, he’d have arrested the punks and probably beaten the shit out of them before he hauled them down to jail.) That’s the difference between now and 40 years ago. Back then, people (including government employees) were generally sensible. Nowadays, they’re not allowed to be.
For large hosting services, Dreamhost is the one I’ve heard the most good things about. Your site is probably one of a thousand all sharing the same server. That’s the only way they can really keep it profitable when they have to keep hosting fees low because there’s so much competition in the industry.
You have to be careful with hosting. A lot of hosts are simply reselling hosting plans from other large hosting companies. Large hosting companies typically have huge affiliate/referral programs allowing people to rebrand and resell their hosting services. Most customers have no idea. There is a similar, but smaller, problem with domain name registrars. Beware the resellers.
There are some more advanced hosts like Rackspace and Slicehost where you basically pay for part of a server and you can do whatever you want with it (host 1 site or 50).
Yes, that was the situation with Greg and Brian running zidane, a dedicated server at IIRC Rackspace.
I seem to remember that Greg was paying something like $125/month for the dedicated server, which is about how much I’m paying a year for hosting with Dreamhost. Now, I wouldn’t expect them to have only 12 users on a shared server, but having hundreds or even thousands does seem excessive. I suspect most of these places use generic Intel boxes, so a headless server costs very little. Say $250, with an expected service life of four years. Call it $60/year or $5/month for the server. I’m sure it costs more to manage multiple servers, but I suspect it doesn’t cost all that much more to manage 1,000 servers than it does 100. When one dies, they could just do what Google does, and leave the dead server in place after migrating everything to a new server.
So, having 50 or 100 users on a server would be fine, but having several hundred to several thousand is just ridiculous.
An interesting paper has been brought to my attention. Thought the people here would find it interesting.
http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
Zero tolerance policies have ruined schools, also. If a grade schooler takes a plastic knife to lunch, instantly expelled. Probably sent to another school. A Principal can’t even say “he/she just made a mistake” and drive on. No, instantly expelled. I now think Principals love these policies since they don’t even have to get involved. Just sit there and tell parents “sorry, zero tolerance, expelled for life”. I carried a pocket knife all through high school. Today, I’d be on a terrorist list.
Yuck. I’m pretty sure we had one of the co-authors of that paper for dinner the other night. Had we but known…
Geez, when I was in high school guys used to bring their new deer rifles to school to show their friends (not to mention teachers, the principal, etc.) It would never have occurred to anyone that this presented any danger whatsoever, mainly because (back then) it didn’t.
Local boy discovered a pocket knife in his pocket. He did what he thought was proper and went to the office and gave them the knife. He was expelled, the same treatment as if he had just kept quiet and been caught. He learned a valuable lesson in trying to do what is right, the officials will screw you anyway. Doubt he will ever try and do what is right again.
Another case at a local elementary school. They were studying WWII. The child put together a small battle scene complete with little toy soldiers. When he opened the box in class the teacher reported him as having weapons on school property (the toy soldiers had little tiny rifles). The school went into lockdown, SWAT and all manner of local police were called along with four ambulances and the local news outfits. Phone calls were made to parents informing them of a weapon on school property so the parents panicked and jammed the road around the school blocking all traffic. The boy was expelled and sent to alternative school for the remainder of the year.
The parents were livid and rightly so. The zeor tolerance policy had reached the level of insanity. The parents complained to the school board but the school board, not wanting to admit to their stupidity, affirmed the schools decision.
The final straw was the local law enforcement sent the parents a bill for the cost of the response, several thousand dollars. The court ruled they did not have to pay because because the school called the authorities, not the parents so the parents where not involved in the response decision.
Yeh, stupidity at it’s highest level.
I go to the local football games to take pictures. I have in my pocket a small pocket knife about 2 inches long. Legally I could be charged with a felony for bringing a weapon on school property. And this being redneck country I suspect that most of the male parents and a high percentage of the female parents have significantly bigger knives on their person.
You know, there used to be an important principle in law called “reasonable man”. In deciding issues, the yardstick was what a “reasonable man” would have done faced with the situation. Disregarding radical feminists, or even renaming the principle “reasonable woman” to bring the principle into accord with modern sensibilities, this should still be a fundamental principle. Unfortunately, it is not.
We were watching an episode of Castle the other night, about a murder that had occurred on the set of a soap opera. Castle’s mother is/was an actress who’d been a cast member of that soap many years previous. One of the older male cast members ended up the prime suspect in the murder. Castle and Beckett (his police friend) discover that the suspect had gone to see Castle’s mother. When they arrive, they overhear the suspect threatening his mother and her begging for her life. They barge in, guns drawn, and find the suspect holding his mother with a knife to her throat.
In that situation, a reasonable man (or woman) might shoot to kill. As it turned out, the suspect wasn’t guilty and he and Castle’s mother were just playing out a scene from a screenplay. But a reasonable man would have taken the situation at face value and shot and killed the (innocent) suspect. Under that principle, he’d be guilt of no crime, despite killing an innocent man. We really need to get this principle re-established as a fundamental pillar of our legal system. Doing otherwise results in such injustices as I just described.
Any zero-tolerance policy is by definition insanity.
Are you sure that you are not, hmmm?
There is a university in K-town, and one of the students had bought a paint ball gun to show to a friend in the trunk of his car, and the cops came and busted him for the crime of having an object that looked like a firearm. They confiscated and destroyed the paintball gun. The student was reprimanded by the Dean and was placed on “probation”. Laws unto themselves. And think, the student is an adult paying customer, not a subject. Or so I thought, anyway.
Also recently, they locked down a middle and high school and searched the neighborhood for a “man with a gun” that turned out to be an octogenarian out for a stroll with his cane.
Jumping at shadows. What a fearful society we are breeding.
Geez, when I was in high school guys used to bring their new deer rifles to school to show their friends (not to mention teachers, the principal, etc.)
I actually fired a rifle in school when we were rehearsing for the school play. Part of my role in the play was to fire a rifle. I used a starters blank. Bad idea in a rifle as it produces a significant plume of flame out the front.
My total punishment by the principal was to remove the firing pin so he could keep it in his office.
No one ever batted an eye when I carried the rifle on the bus or in the school hallway. All the boys had knives in their pockets with at least a 10 cm blade and they were damned sharp (a bragging point). No one ever thought to use the knife on another person.
The only thing I did in school that I did not brag about was the fuse incident. Had about six feet of slow burn blasting fuse. Had no idea what to do with it so I just clamped it in the (always empty) paper towel holder in the bathroom. I let the fuse and walked away. About two minutes later the fire alarms went off. Uh-oh. But what in the bathroom was flammable?
Nothing as it turned out. It seems that my little prank was mistaken for a bomb with a burning fuse attached. That thought never occurred to me and it was certainly a valid (if wrong) conclusion given the situation. Lots of law enforcement showed up along with the bomb squad from another town about 20 miles away. Not good I thought to myself. So that little prank was never divulged until 20 years later at the class reunion when were discussing high school pranks.
When I was a senior in high-school, Maren Morgan, my girlfriend at the time, wanted to audition for a play. It was called Summertree and was basically a protest against the Viet Nam war. She dragged me along to the audition, and she and the director convinced me to audition as well. She didn’t get a role. I ended up being cast as one of the buddies of the lead character (who ended up being played by Mark Klinger, the teacher/director, because the student actor got sick or wimped out or something). At some point during rehearsals, Mark asked if anyone had a realistic military-looking rifle. I’d just bought a WWII-era sniper rifle (a 6.5mm Type 97 Arisaka with original optics) from a friend of mine, so I volunteered to arm myself with it.
Our high school auditorium seated, IIRC, about 2,000 people, and on opening night (well, the only night…) it was crammed full of parents and students. And there I was, down on stage, with that Japanese sniper rifle. No one even asked me if it was loaded. (It wasn’t.)
But the real bummer came when I happened to see the notes that Mark had made as all the students were auditioning. He’d made detailed notes on many of them, a paragraph or more. For me, he’d written only “Good for comedy.” Geez.
When my niece was in the third grade she was suspended for two weeks for unbending a paperclip, because then it could be used as a weapon. However, this same school did nothing when my third grader came home with bruises up and down his legs where one of the kids kept kicking him.
Well, the good side of all this is that we’re teaching our kids that government is arbitrary and capricious and can’t be trusted. That’s an important lesson.
unbending a paperclip, because then it could be used as a weapon.
Shh, don’t tell the TSA.
Microsoft employees allegedly left “in droves” during Ballmer’s company meeting speech
http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-employees-allegedly-left-in-droves-during-ballmers-company-meeting-speech/
You could host in the UK, but I suspect most of your audience wouldn’t like the delay of crossing the pond. Many UK websites host in the US for cheaper prices tho.
I use a £6/month (under $10) virtual server plan here in the UK, where you basically get root access to a shared Linux box running a Parallels product that gives you your own server. Then I run my own mail server (postfix) and web (apache) and other stuff to my liking. Its been very reliable and performs very well.
The company has installations in TX, and CA – but it does mean working at the SSH command line to Linux, not an issue for our host, but it might be for some 🙂
I consider comedy far harder to pull off, than drama. You should have considered it a compliment.
I might have, except that was I was auditioning for a deadly-serious role.
I’ve never seen so many politicians smiling so much on route to a train wreck.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-29/german-parliament-backs-enhanced-bailout-fund/3050678?section=world
Thanks for the kind words about our hosting.
We started out on ev1, who were bought out by The Planet. They were great, but when Zidane 1’s hardware started failing, we jumped ship to Softlayer based on price and their reputation, and they were simply the best colo/dedicated provider I’ve ever worked with.
I don’t think we had an unplanned outage of longer than a few minutes the entire 4+ years we were with them, and even those could be counted on one hand.
Rackspace has a good rep too, but I’ve never dealt with them personally.
Sorry you had trouble with Dreamhost. They are good folks and they try hard.
I’m sure they are. In fact, when Brian told me he was going with Dreamhost, I didn’t even bother to look at any other hosting companies.
Oh, and we were paying $139/mo, so you aren’t far off.
Softlayer uses quality hardware, which obviously contributed to our uptime. They use Supermicro motherboards, which have fantastic KVM over IP and monitoring+control features. We could connect to the server over their VPN (every server has a public nic and a nic on the private VPN, which you can use to connect multiple servers within their infrastructure via VLAN, even if it is in a different datacenter) and directly access the keyboard and serial console, even if we fat-fingered a firewall rule.
Ev1/The Planet used cheap hardware, and we had several instances of failure with them. A mobo went. Our RAM was bad when we first got Rocket. Rocket’s HDD failed which led us to migrating to Zidane 1. (Zidane 2 was at Softlayer.) I think it is silly to buy crappy hardware. Sure good stuff is more expensive, but the support costs eliminate that savings many times over.
If you need good colo, cloud or dedicated hosting, I can strongly recommend Softlayer. They bought out The Planet recently, so maybe they will change TP’s policy of cheap hardware. 🙂