Rain City Story » Site Matters

The Pug Gets 15 More Minutes

Michael — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:24:33 +0000

My little pug movie is apparently still a hit on the 'net. I was watching on of my favorite technology podcasts , CommandN on my I-pod in bed last night and was surprised when they mentioned RCS. Check it out (10 minutes and 50 seconds in to the show):

Last week, RCS was featured on Leo Laport's blog HERE. I've been a fan of his for years and years and was floored when I started getting a ton if traffic from his site.

I've been averaging about 20,000 hits per day and pushing north of 30 GB per day. All because of one little pug...

I’m Bored.

Michael — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 23:30:50 +0000

Things are gonna change around here.

Back To Civilization

Michael — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 04:03:51 +0000

After some very expensive power outages (lost work days) and a 5 day Comcast outage, I'm back online at 7:31 pm PST. Sorry everyone for not answering e-mails but I'll get to those as soon as possible.

The Spam Offensive

Michael — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:49:35 +0000

Ok, it looks like maybe I'm not so crazy after all. Excluding the cluster this site resides on, I manage 13 Unix/Linux servers all of which process mail and since the end of September, spam has been going through the roof. I mean through THE ROOF. I am not alone. In a normal day, my Spam Assassin installations catch anywhere from 10,000-20,000 pieces of spam. Though I'm able to keep it out of people's mail boxes, spam has a real cost.

For one, CPU power- it takes a bunch to perform bayesian analysis on each message and drop it into the appropriate bucket. Two, disk space. Most of my customers don't want to see spam but I must leave every message on the server for at least 30 days in case the filter gets overzealous or they think they might have missed something.

Just on this blog alone, I've seen a huge explosion of comment spam. Where I normally get 100 spam messages a day, I'm now getting 350-500. Thank god for Askimet! or this site would have been shuddered long ago.

I wonder what the end game is for this situation as it cannot keep growing at this pace. Something's gotta give...

Pics To Self

Michael — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 08:33:32 +0000

Back when this site was called "Note To Self" (2001-2003), I had a user account on Textamerica to upload some of my cell phone pics. I was a beta tester for AT&T Wireless and had one of the first camera phones on the market so I already had the hardware. Some good memories here:

Highlights:

Me at T-Moble- Damn, I was DA BOMB!

My elevator reservation at the Harbor Steps. Bittersweet memories here but cool nonetheless.

Lake Washington from United Flight 493 from Chicago

Another shot of Lake Washington from the plane, this time with the 520 and I-90 bridges clearly visible

The boss

Grace is not pleased with the amount of time I'm spending on the computer working on this lame website. (sadly, this look has not changed in 3 1/2 years)

Bentley is not pleased that I didn't run this photo op through his agent first especially after the incident with the paparazzi just last week...

Cannon Beach from Ecola Park

My T-Mobile and for a short time office mate, Malai. We now work together again (yay).

You can see the whole Pics To Self gallery here (newest pics are first). Maybe I'll start using this once I get a phone with a better camera. Stay tuned...

(via Tiff)

Moving Again

Michael — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:59:37 +0000

After touting their new Grid Server on multiple posts here on RCS and various Linux forums, I'm forced to leave Media Temple. Already. I have some serious reservations with their architecture (namely MySQL) and they have obviously underestimated the demand for what their marketing team cooked up. Two table MySQL queries are taking 15-25 seconds on the command line and have been for several days so obviously there's a problem. Media Temple support has failed to even acknowledge support tickets and e-mails and I'm not the only one.

Looks like it's gonna be another long weekend...

[UPDATE]: Things have obviously stabilized if you can read this page and MT managements has been responsive via e-mail. I'll give them another week and I still have time before I move all my other customers over here.

RCS Server Move Complete

Michael — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 06:18:18 +0000

If you're reading this post, that means raincitystory.com is on it's new server. Well, not really A server but a cluster. Specifically, Media Temple's GS (Grid Server Product). So instead of a single physical box, my site (along with thousands of others) resides on a cluster or group of servers. Sure, it's shared hosting and I don't have root (I'm learning and liking the giving up of control in all aspects of my life) but the trade off is more than worth it. I do get shell access which makes the administration of this little site A LOT easier.

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm getting out of the web hosting business. But not out of blogging. Instead of managing the servers 24x7 (outages, security upgrades, it goes on and on forever, etc) and paying almost $600 a month for colocation space and bandwidth, I'm gonna let the pros at Media Temple handle it. For $20 a month, I get 100 GB of disk space and a terabyte of bandwidth, plus peace the piece of mind that I won't be getting paged at 4 am because mod_security is breaking some girl's form being linked off MySpace. The days of running a site(or even worse, a bunch of sites) on a single machine are over. The grid is the revolution that definitely won't be televised or noticed by most people.

Anyway, I'm half way done moving my customers so may not post much for the next few days.

Oh and in case you're a geek like me, you may ask yourself "how does he know he's really posting this on the new server?" Well, I logged in via the shell, called up mysql and did a SQL insert containing this text into the database itself.

WordPress 2.05 Released

Michael — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 07:16:33 +0000

Of course, since I just got done installing WordPress 2.04 for 13 different customers today, the WordPress gang has released 2.05 which contains security and bug fixes. You can find more complete release notes on Mark's blog.

Anti-spam and sanity savior Askimet was also updated with this release.

As for the highly anticipated 2.1 release date, the developers and I are still trying to coordinate the time in which I will upgrade a bunch of sites and they will release code hours later that will break everything I had just done.
Guess what I'll be doing tomorrow?

[Edit]: Fellow Ohioan Brian over at the codevave and WordPress uber coder has released a list of the top 5 reasons to upgrade. Thanks Brian!

Losing My Religion

Michael — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:03:16 +0000

So, while the new site design was a great exercise in procrastination, it violates everything I hold near and dear regarding UI (user interface) design. Interfaces (even non-interactive like a simple web page) should be simple and intuitive. Greg also brings up a good point about the browser issue. Though it's certainly within my right to force a specific browser down someone's throat, it's just not smart when the market reality doesn't support it. While I'm not running a business (no ads ever on RCS!), I need to practice what I preach. Even though I personally advocate the use of Opera and Firefox, I should design my page so it can be enjoyed (ok, I'm being pretentious here) by anyone with any browser. Ahh, a new marketing slogan: "Raincitystory.com. The first corss-platform blog."
Hence, this gaudy design will be replaced in the next few days with something simpler. Stay tuned.

Heavy Lifting

Michael — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 21:50:08 +0000

Instead of doing the things I should be doing like working on my resume and searching for jobs, I decided to rebuild RCS. Significant changes on the back end code and the design. One thing that has been buggin' the bejezus out of me was the people who were using Microsoft Internet Explorer were seeing a very jacked up version of my site. Not because I'm a poor designer but because their browser wasn't standards compliant and incorrectly rendered the css and html that I had painstaking crafted. Unfortunately, all of my family back home in Ohio still uses IE despite my pleas to get them to use Firefox. Not only does Firefox and/or Opera render properly but they're faster, safer (MUCH!) and just easier to use. But change is hard. So now, you IE users will be presented with a rude box at the top informing you that you're missing something. Come on peeps. Let's take the plunge and start using a new browser. They're free.

1) Firefox
2) Opera (what I use)

Also, if you're using one of those correct browsers and have Javascript enabled (94.67% of my viewers do), you can change the look of this site by clicking one of the squares in the upper left hand corner.

My personal favorite background is the blades of grass. Leave a comment if you can't figure it out. The design is pretty far along but I'm not done yet so please where a hard hat while viewing.

Thanks for reading,
Michael