The house behind us has a large “shade” tree. It has an enormous quantity of fern like foliage that does a good job cutting the sun that beats down on our back yard.
All good right?
Except that when it loses its foliage, it dumps an incredible amount into our pool. How much? I have to skim and scoop two or three times a day, and still the filter gets jammed.
In December, we had a cold stretch. Lots of my plants died (never to come back to life). Another neighbor had a large tree completely die. I crossed my fingers hoping that this messy tree would be dead as a dodo. Alas, it was not to be. Today I see the first signs of spring on it and it is beginning to grow. Crap.
There are many valid reasons to hate GoDaddy web hosting, from their soft-porn advertisements, to their owner’s proclivity to go big game hunting in Africa, to the barrage of pushy marketing of their goods and services (no, I don’t want to add domains today). Today though, I will be complaining about their support and their absolutely shitty hosting platform.
Until Friday, March 22, 2013, the few times I needed support, I received quick, accurate, and insightful help. Leading up to the Friday a website that I run for a local non-profit, Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption, had been sluggish in loading for a week or so. I noticed it taking a minute to respond to the original URL request. and similarly on the back end (we had a fundraising event on Wednesday, so I was doing daily tweaks to keep the excitement up) it was a pig, taking minutes to load.
But starting Friday morning, it was pretty much unreachable. It would time out, or present the default Apache 500 series error. I could ping the server, I could FTP to it, I could SSH to it, but the Apache/MySql system seemed completely broken. I head on over to the support area, and log a ticket. They estimated that it would take 11 hours to get a response (in the past it had always been less than 2 hours), and the status noted that Friday Evening they would be doing maintenance on their 4GH platform (where my linux hosting is) to fix some resource allocation issues. But no real details.
I also went to their customer forums, and noted that there was a long stream of other people with similar comments/complaints. I posted there as well, and got a prompt response from one of their support droids, telling me that the upgrade/maintenance to the 4GH platform will resolve the issue. But also 4 other people commented on my post that they were experiencing the exact same thing.
Groan.
Saturday morning, and things are back up, but still sluggish. Feels like there is some delays in their system. 20 hours after opening the ticket, I get an email response. Instead of mentioning anything at all about their problems, I get a list of unhelpful suggestions:
Support Staff Response
Dear Geoffrey,Thank you for contacting Online Support. You can make modifications to your site that improve performance. Some of these changes are easy to manage while others might take some time to figure out.
Here are four things you can do to speed up your site:
GZIP Compression
Smaller pages load faster, regardless of your Internet connection speed. You can make your pages smaller by compressing them with GZIP. (GZIP is only available on our Linux Hosting plans.) For more information about GZIP and our hosting, see Compressing Web Pages for Faster Load Times.
Image Sizes
If you use HTML to make large images small, a site visitor still needs to download the larger version. If you need a small image, don’t use HTML to do it—shrink it in an image-editing program instead.
Scripting
You can edit to say more with less. A good programmer does the same thing with code. If the code on your site is inefficient, it impacts your site’s performance. There isn’t a quick fix for bloated code, but if you’re using GZIP and you’ve reduced your image sizes, analyze your code to make your site even faster. One way to make a database-driven site faster is to use a database index to improve the speed of data retrieval.
CSS
Cascading style sheets are great for formatting the look and feel of your website. If your style sheet contains a lot of styles that aren’t being used, you are forcing browsers to download things they don’t need. If you’re trying to maximize performance, trim your CSS files and remove anything that’s unnecessary.
Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.
For the record, GZIP compression was enabled, I run the site on Joomla, I make sure that all the images are 640 pixels wide or less (and set thumbnails to 200×200 pixel png’s for speed), and really? want me to rewrite the Joomla core to use less PHP scripting? I already have a pretty clean CSS.
So basically, they flipped me the bird, told me that the problem was mine, not theirs, and closed the case. Oh, and in the header of the email they were trying to sell me more domains.
Fucktards. I am now preparing to move the site and domains to my personal hosting provider, the awesome folks over at Media Temple. I will abandon a year of prepaid Go Daddy hosting to get away from those scumbags.
A recent post I mentioned that I would follow up with my irritation with Arizona cyclists. In that post I mentioned the insane practice that is widespread of cycling on the sidewalks, that greatly increases the hazards to people walking.
Today, I am going to grumble about cyclists who are unfamiliar with the rules of the road.
First, I grew up in California, at a time when the schools were well funded (that is, before Proposition 13), and we all learned to use hand signals properly. Just like in a car, you use your left arm to signal intent. Up for right turn,straight out for left turn, and down for stop. Easy peasy, except here in Arizona, people seem to use their right arms to signal right turns, their left arm to signal left turns, and some other hand-wavy things that make no sense.
Second, I continue to see cyclists completely ignore stop signs. As a cyclist, I sometimes slow to an “almost” stop, then move on, and I feel bad about that. But here, I see cyclists not even making an effort to stop. They look to whether there is cross traffic, make the decision to just blow through it, and do it. Crazy.
And you wonder why many car drivers get pissed off at cyclists.
No secret is the fact that I moved from Tucson to Chandler last summer. So far, the experience has been great. Roads are better maintained, there are streetlights, and most of the neighborhoods are well planned, and laid out with plenty of green space. My wife and I compare it to “Sunnyvale” where no dangerous critters are allowed. Cool so far.
However, there is a problem. It appears that people think it is OK to ride their bikes on the sidewalks. Apart from young children (say, less than 8 years old), all people should be riding in the street and obeying the rules of the road. But that appears to be missing in Arizona. Today, at lunch, I was walking (for exercise) and was almost creamed by a cyclist riding very fast on the sidewalk. I have been out with my dogs, walking on the sidewalk, and again, almost taken clean out. On a busy road (Gilbert Road).
Da fuq is up with that?
Later: Do they not teach kids here how to use hand signals?
A week and a half ago, my Wife bought gas at a Quick Trip in Tucson. Apparently, some shitball skimmer had jacked the pump she used, and lifted her credit card information.
We came back from a short holiday in San Diego, checked out bank account, and found some sleazeball had used Western Union to wire $969 our of our checking account.
Fuck. Call the bank, put a hold on the charge (it went through), call western union, who professes ignorance, call the police and complain.
Apparently, this is the common MO. They lift the card info, they use western union, who lets people wire money with just a credit card number and expiration date. They send a value around $1000, and pocket the transfer.
So, we have barely $100 until payday (9 days away), unless we hit our savings.
Just had an ambush call. (that is when Sales invites you on a call, but “forgets” to clue you in on what is to be discussed). Needless to say, some pretty deep hip waders were needed.
The whole premise was that we failed to accomplish some performance goals in a demo. We make high end, scientific instruments. Part of the analyses we do, required you to “find” a region of interest. We, our competitors, and indeed all products on the market like ours uses a similar design. A video camera, a microscope objective/or telescope, and a real time window on the UI to see the sample/instrument.
The problem is that they are looking at SRAM cells, that are 45nm in dimension. And they kept harping on the “magnification”. If only we made the image look bigger, we would see the features.
Uh, no. The classic difference between resolution and magnification. A rule of thumb is that the limit of resolution is proportional to wavelength/(2 * NA). There is a constant, but it really can be ignored or assumed to be 1. If you have broad spectrum white light, your central wavelength is 540nm (a “green” color), and you use that to calculate resolution.
For a super high resolution system your NA can be as high as 0.95 in air (> 1 if you can do oil immersion). But since we have lots of hardware in the way, we need a much longer working distance. 50 or so millimeters of WD. The best commercially available optics at this range will give a NA of 0.15 or so. Thus, we become diffraction limited at about 1.8um. Since they want to find features that are 0.045um in dimension, the resolution limit is going to be equivalent to 40 cells. That means that there is no hope to see the features they want.
Of course, they didn’t understand this, and kept repeating the “more magnification” mantra. FML.
*NA = Numerical Aperture – a measure of the light gathering capability of an optical system.
A wicked american piece of heavy metal, a real muscle car, the Mustang 302 Boss. A bitchen car from 1969 and 1970 has been re-introduced. A worthy successor. However, it is a fucking crime against humanity to defenestrate such an awesome machine with a pussy automatic transmission, I saw one today. I hung my head in shame. It wasn’t even a chick driving it.
I have long thought that us “geeks” who spend a large fraction of our existence working with, and trying to improve technology were a cut above. Both emotionally and mentally.
This belief has been shattered. Two threads on Slashdot recently showed me that the geek community is as susceptible and gullible to false claims, and just plain incorrect urban legends.
First was the discussion around the Stanford study that showed Organic foods are not nutritionally better than conventional agribusiness farmed/raised products. It was truly astounding how many people attacked the study, and waved their belief that Organic produce is grown without pesticides (not true, usually they use non-synthetic pesticides, that are often much more harmful than the synthetics). They also weighed in that “organic” farming was more sustainable, and could feed the world’s population. Both are dubious to completely wrong (reduced crop yeields, leads to more land under cultivation to produce the same food, and the energy expenditure is likewise increased.
Not to be outdone, a couple days later, there is a thread about the hazards of High Frequency Trading (HFT). In the middle of this thread a battle about how shorting stocks should be outlawed because it is fraudulent. Alas, all attempts to dispell this with facts, and the reason why shorting is and should be allowed seemed to fall on deaf ears.
Truth is, idiocy and ideology exists in all walks of life, geeks being no better at all. Sigh. I will not be diving into the next “Global Warming” thread on Slashdot. That brings out the worst.
I have recently changed jobs, and as part of my standard kit when I joined was a brand new HP Elitebook 8460p. Not a bad system, a pretty peppy Intel Core i5, and a Sandy Bridge chipset.
It came with 4G of Ram, and our standard Win 7 x64 image.
SHould be fine, right? But from day one, the perfomance has been crappy. Lots of weirdness, long lags, and losing responsiveness. I was about to toss it into Support hell to complain, then I noticed an odd fact.
This laptop comes with 4G by default. But instead of it being two 2G SODIMMS, it is one 4G SODIMM. Anybody with half a brain knows that to effectively achieve system performance, you need both banks of memory populated.
I can understand why they do this. Most people would just buy the second 4G SODIMM, and be done with it. But, to save $20 (I paid $20.90 for a second SODIMM) it seems like a bad decision. On a laptop that retails for $1500 (it is a business class system with support), this is really annoying.
Geoff’s new rules:
Thou shalt not ship a computer without the SODIMMS to complete an interleaved memory bank. Just don’t do it.
Thou shalt not ship an x64 OS without a minimum of 8G ram. This really needs to become the standard. Win 7 is MUCh happier with 8G (or even better 16G).
I rarely complain about regulations. I know that many, if not most of them are really for the best. We know what happens when there isn’t any oversight at all. But once in a while, I have a real WTF moment.
RoHS, or Reduction of Hazardous Substances is in general a “good thing”. It means to not use chemicals or components that are toxic, or hazardous to the environment. Whether this is removing lead from solder in electronics, or not using hexavalent chromium (google it – nasty shit). But sometimes it goes too far.
Case in point. Many microscope objectives fail. They use optical elements made from leaded glass. They use these components and materials because adding lead to glass increases the refractive index, and improves the performance of the optic. Fine, I get it that there is nasty lead in these parts.
But the risk is so low that any of this lead will ever be released into the environment. It would require that the glass be removed from the objective, vaporized, and then, and only then would a couple micrograms of lead be released into the environment.
Common sense would tell you that this is such a small risk of exposure that microscope objectives provide would lead to an exemption. No such luck. So, you get to go to a design with crappy performance and resolution that costs nearly 2X what the standard objectives would provide. Groan.
