Converting caffeine to code, shooting pics, and cruising the roads of life.

Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Dealing with Domain Name Parkers

Friday, July 7th, 2006

Well I guess I’ll finally go ahead and make the annoucement of what my new “Web 2.0″ site was suppose to be called, Theed. Over the past few days, I have been trying my darnedest to work with the guy who has it parked. He’s trying to sell it as theED.com (the erectile disfunction for those not familiar with spam). This guy is on his fourth year of trying to sell it.

I emailed him and offered $50 for the one domain name, which he just renewed and pointed out that he would still be making a profit on it. ($8 * 4 = $32). He then comes back with a personal attack on my “IQ” level. I’ll let the following emails speak for themselves:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Are you interested in selling this domain name? I know it is going on it’s 4th
year for sale. What are you asking for it?

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HI CODY

I BUY AND SELL DOMAINS GLOBALLY…AND I HAVE MORE THAN 9200 DOMAINS..
MOST OF MY DOMAINS ARE ON AUTO RENEW.

I HAVE…THE FOLLOWING DOMAINS..

*THEERECTILEDYSFUNCTION.COM*
*THEED.COM*

I CAN MAKE A SACRIFICE IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT.

I SHALL SETTLE FOR *$900*

THANKS.

RAVI

THE*ED * ALSO CAN BE USED FOR EDUCATION.

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
I really only want theed.com, but I’m not paying $900 for it knowing what you just payed last week for it.
The most I would be willing to pay is $50. Would you be willing to sell it for that? It is still almost $30 profit.

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HOW MUCH DID U PAY FOR

CODYMAYS.NET

AND WHAT IS YOUR
ASKING PRICE

RAVI4321@AOL.COM

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
It is not for sale.
Do you or do you not agree to the price I offered in the last email?

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
WHILE
THEED.COM
IS NOT FOR SALE FOR $50…
WWW.CODYMAYS.COM
IS FOR SALE …

RAVI4321@AOL.COM

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Sir, I hate to break it to you, but it’s definitely not for sale. There is no way I am paying
$900 for one domain name that was purchased for about $8. Right now, you are the only
one at a loss here. I have nothing to lose, but you do because you have renewed the domain
for four years now.

If you accept the $50 payment for it, you will come out ahead, but if you don’t, you’ll stay in the
hole. No one else, obviously, wants this domain name because this is your 4th year of attempting
to sell it.

His response and the beginning personal attack. Notice the above email has no attack on him.

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HI

I BUY AND SELL DOMAINS GLOBALLY.
I DO NOT WANT TO WASTE MY TIME TRYING
TO GAUGE YOUR “IQ”. I LEAVE IT AT THAT.

RAVI

My final email before this post:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Okay, you’re going to gauge my IQ as lower than your own because I pointed out basic
business logic to you?

Well if we’re judging IQ here, you better get reading a grammar book, because you are
flunking English 101 right now. You see the key marked Caps Lock? Press it so the light
turns off. That will get you started. Hope you have fun in the coming days.

Now, I become another person to ask the international blogosphere for some help here. I know the blogosphere has been pretty powerful with Comcast and AOL over the past few weeks, so I figured I would try it as a last resort. As of right now, my partners and I are very set on this name and really want the domain. Is there anyway we could still go about getting it? Any help would be appreciated.

Note:
We do not want to harm Mr. Ravi. All email addresses provided here are for reference only. Do not attempt to spam him by email or phone number from a whois lookup of theed.com

Crazy

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

As of last Monday, I have travelled to the Dark Side. I am taking a 4 week class on Java. (Not the coffee) The class starts at 12pm and gets out at 4pm, but we can leave earlier if we finish the day’s project. I think I got a pretty good deal on it. The class only costs $20 and it covers one semester of AP Java in 2 weeks, then the last 2 weeks we focus on game development. To top that off, the class is taught by the college’s computer science professor, so we get a knowledgable instructor that can answer our questions.

So far, I haven’t learned to much. I have learned a few things I could have picked up from a Google search in less than five minutes, but that’s about it so far. It is nice to be attending the class with a friend though. My neighbor was the one who found out about this program and the one I’m taking it with.

These last few weeks have not been all good though. My grandfather Prince “Tex” Moon passed away Father’s Day night. They tried to administer an I.V. at the nursing home, but couldn’t get it done properly, so they shipped him to a hospital. Shortly after they arrived they told us to get down there. Not too long after, he passed away when his breathing stopped.

Apparently, he had some kind of infection (high white blood cell count) and was extremely dehydrated. It is amazing what the human body can withstand though. On the paper they gave us that lists the problems he had, he had 21 medical issues, including Parkinson’s Disease, pneumonia, and Insomnia. So, tomorrow I’ll be heading to his funeral.

Since I’ve been slacking on posting for a few days, I would just like to get a thought out that came up a few days ago on TechCrunch, in one of the largest flame wars I have seen on their site. This battle was mainly between the TechCrunch users, Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield, and Zooomr’s Kris Tate in this post. If you read the comments, you see an interesting thing that really hasn’t come up in “Web 2.0″ yet. Should user’s data be open to everyone, including competitors or should it be locked away?

Most people agree that Web 2.0 includes openness of data via API’s and other various methods, but not once do you hear about where the line should be drawn when running a business based on these ideas. I personally think it would be a better world if all of this data was open to competitors, as long as they do not damage, edit, steal, or delete any of my data, but this is a hard thing to trust random people on the internet to do. If a site can move your data over to their’s and then delete it on competitor FooBar Inc…what’s stopping them?

Valleyschwag came!

Sunday, June 4th, 2006

I finally got my Valley Schwag. I didn’t get any of the rare items, but there is still some pretty decent things. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about Valley Schwag yet, they have only been live for about 2 months now. Anyway, I finally got around to uploading the pictures. You can click them for fullsize.

ValleySchwag2 goatse sightings RubyRed Labs

Songbird Technorati Laughing Squid

EFF abazab perplexcity

dogster and catster

OSX and the APC battle

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

So over the period of a week, I’ve been helping Alpaca get a MAMP (The setup, not the prepackaged deal) setup going off and on. So starts a huge adventure.

We first started looking at darwin ports, but we soon realised that it did everything we didn’t want it to. Disabled most PHP modules, disabled pear and pecl, and just flat out didn’t work for what we needed. The only thing that did work was the MySQL port…

So we went over to the MAMP camp. We thought we had it. There it was, a prepacked installer with Mysql 5, PHP5, apache, and all the PHP extensions required but two pecl ones. Little did we know… So the first task at hand was to disable eAccelerator. This was easily done in a control panel, but the rest wasn’t. MAMP doesn’t add any of the binaries to your shell’s PATH, so we had to do that so we could use pecl.

From there, we tried to install APC and so the trouble began. We were loaded up with errors about Apache’s APXS and config_vars.mk. I quickly solved the APXS file issues, but the config_vars.mk was a stumper. We could not make it work, even putty an old one there, since MAMP doesn’t have one.

So now, we’re going hardcore. I’m just going to tell him how to compile them from source so we don’t lose anymore time, because this one day job has taken WAY too long to do.

P.S. I’m still working on that new design, just a bit preoccupied at the moment. I also have an APC/Memcached article 75% finished.

Managing the load

Sunday, May 21st, 2006

After yesterday’s little brainstorm about PHP memory caches and optimizations, you can guess what I did today. I had to drop memcached for now because I could not get it to compile at all. The config files for autogen had a bunch of binary crap in them so the resulting configure script would not run. That is not to say that good did not come from it though. I ended up downgrading to PHP5 and installing APC.

APC is very nice. The API is definitely the simplest out of all of the PHP memory caches I have looked at, but it lacks the ability to be distributed across different servers like memcached. I have run into some problems though. According to the documentation for APC, apc_load_constants() should return true on success and false on failure, but from everything I have tried tonight, that has not been the case. It has always been false, even when the constants loaded are working, which signifies to me that it actually worked.

I have also moved my new sites management system from Bugzilla to Basecamp. Basecamp is one of the many very idollized Web 2.0 sites from 37signals. The software is just amazing. The use of AJAX is very nice, it’s always were you want it and never where you don’t. Plus, the actual tools the software provides is great, even at the free level. You get very dynamic to-do lists, milestones (work kind of like deadlines), user management, asset stuff, and a whole slew of things I haven’t even played with yet.

My server rack page has also gotten some official recognition in my book. The man behind http://rack.modzone.dk found my project page today and linked to me from his site. Thanks, I really appreciate it!

If anyone has been wondering how to design a website efficiently, I would check out this article. That is pretty much the method I use, except I suck at coming up with such a pretty layout, but I’m definitely getting better with photoshop.