May

23

Shoutcast streams on the iPhone

Filed Under Shoutcast, Stream, iPhone | Leave a Comment

So Hamed and I were talking about streaming RJ to an iPhone when we realized that there wasn’t much out there to do it outside of a php script or two that sort-of worked.  Today I made progress on a POC (.net app) that streams (choppy) audio from a Shoutcast stream to an iPhone for about 30 seconds before crapping out. I’ll try to find some time to fix it up next week and throw it out there. It’ll be a single user single stream sort of thing, for now, since it’s much easier to deal with. I need to get over this whole 30 seconds then croak business, make it so it gracefully recovers from client disconnects, and optimize its performance a bit (choppy audio is useless). Hopefully I can finish it sometime next weekend as I’ll be busy this weekend.

May

16

Failed to teach this at GaTech..

Filed Under infinite monkey theorem | Leave a Comment

Behold, the infinite monkey theorem!

May

6

AMChat for AppEngine?

Filed Under ajax, ajx, amchat, appcelerator, appengine | Leave a Comment

I just received my AppEngine invite and wanted to give it a whirl, so I threw together a web-based AMChat using the AppEngine backend for Appcelerator that Mark Luffel wrote.  I came up with this.

May

5

A Windows Back Door?

Filed Under Back door, Microsoft | Leave a Comment

Surprise!  Not really.  The real surprise, if the allegation is true, is how this was not already found.  It’s interesting because the question then becomes does Apple do the same thing?  Does the OS “hide” the data from traffic monitoring tools on the local machine?  Even if that’s the case, how could those who monitored traffic at another layer in the network (say at a router level) not have noticed it for so many years?

May

3

Microsoft pulls its bid for Yahoo!

Filed Under Google, Merger, Microsoft, Yahoo! | Leave a Comment

That’s right — no Microhoo in any of our futures. I’ll bet Google and Yahoo! will pull some sort of partnership out of the hat and make things even more interesting.

May

2

This is brilliant

Filed Under Other | Leave a Comment

2007: Just read it — it’ll make your head hurt.  I’m surprised no one noticed this story.

May

1

AMChat is free

Filed Under Freeware, amchat | Leave a Comment

Due to a lack of VC investment (inside joke from work ;)), AMChat is now free.  Grab a copy here — let me know if you need the jars for a *nix system.

May

1

Site5 Comes Through

Filed Under site5 | Leave a Comment

So after a drawn out support ticket to Site5, someone finally listened. Huge thanks to Jessica, Tom, and Laurey at Site5. They are crediting the remainder of my money toward new service, waiving a “setup” fee and giving me 20% off my first 3 months of hosting. I’m pleased with that. The stability of the new server remains to be seen but at least now I know that it’s incredibly simple to migrate forums, etc. if I need to in the future. I just finished all of that (migration) so let me know if something’s messed up. Some older blog posts might be missing images, etc. but I think I’m just going to let that go, at this point.

Apr

28

down again..

Filed Under site5 | Leave a Comment

More downtime.  ”robert.bush” claims Site5 will now look into it.

Apr

27

The Pains of Shared Hosting

Filed Under site5, web host | Leave a Comment

So up to this point, I’ve been very pleased with my hosting provider, Site5.  Recently the quality of service (qos — not to be confused with the networking term) has taken a nose dive into the proverbial crapper.  I started on a server (nocsmasher) getting my three 9s of service, happy as can be because it was reasonably cheap and only down here and there.  Since I was happy, I prepaid for two years of service. Now, I understand that for shared hosting to make sense to a provider, they have to cram a lot of people onto a machine.  I also understand that since a lot of people are crammed on a machine, said machine is more likely to have problems providing decent service to all of the users who have sites on it.  What I don’t understand is why a red flag isn’t raised when this happens:

I’m a pretty patient guy and (imo) pretty reasonable too, but why can’t my provider get the hint that something could physically be wrong with the server?  I’ve opened five tickets in less than two months and for each ticket, Site5 just rebooted the machine — they never fixed the problem, which is likely either a massive oversell or hardware issue.  The number of tickets doesn’t reflect the number of times I used their online support and didn’t bother with a ticket or even the time I emailed their CEO and received no answer (not surprising, the guy’s probably busy and couldn’t give two craps about a shared hosting customer).
Now what? Am I screwed out of a year’s worth of service?  Who should I switch to?  Media Temple?  I only pay about 9 bucks a month right now and I suppose I could swing another 11 dollars if the service is good.
Suggestions?


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