Jason’s Random Thoughts

With all the competition in the web hosting market, you’d think that companies would be working tirelessly to maintain a 99.9% uptime and offering superior services for rock bottom prices. However, for reasons I can’t understand, most hosting companies lean more towards offering sub-par services for premium prices. Luckily, there are some companies that recognize the importance of the service-to-price ratio. Canadian Webhosting is just one example of this.

Before going too far, I should tell you that Canadian Webhosting has asked me to review their site and, after a quick glance at their offerings, I’m quite happy to promote a Canadian business. Although I am Canadian, my web server is located in Chicago. Why? Because Canadian hosting companies are notorious for overcharging their customers. If I were to host my sites on a server within my home country, it would be 60-150% more expensive than the American competition. However, it seems that Canadian Webhosting is not like the home-grown competition … they can actually compete with the world.

Verifiable Uptime

Uptime can make or break a website, which means that this alone should be the top consideration. Price is pointless if your site has fallen off the internet, as are other benefits such as storage space, data transfer, databases and subdomains. Customers need to pay close attention to uptime guarantees and verify any sales pitch that sounds too good to be true. Some hosting companies will promise a 99.9% uptime, but fail to tell us that uptime is defined as “a server is running.” If the server is functional, but it can’t access the internet, the site is down. Period. Canadian Webhosting understands this.

I’ve checked around for reports of downtime with this company, but there isn’t one negative word about them. You’d think there’d be one complaint after ten years of business, yet there isn’t a peep. This alone sounds too good to be true but, when a company has great people, machines rarely have major problems.

Service-to-Price Ratios

As with any business, the cost of a service and value-add options can make or break you. Most of the better quality providers online are currently offering decent starter packages in the $8/month range, and Canadian Webhosting is no different. What is different, though, is the package detail.

For $8.95 CDN a month (when prepaying for 2+ years), site owners can host an unlimited number of websites, MySQL databases, and subdomains. Email packages come equipped with spam filtering at no extra charge, and can be accessed via your preferred POP3/IMAP client, or online through a web client of your choice. To sweeten the deal, you receive a $25 Google credit, and access to 50+ preinstalled scripts. This makes setting up new sites a snap for anyone that might not have extensive knowledge setting up a PHP/MySQL site “the hard way.”

Of course, cheaper plans are available but, for the sake of a few dollars a month, customers have a Terabyte of transfer every month, and 125 Gigs of storage available. If you opt for a bigger package, you get 3.5 Terabytes of transfer, 300 Gig of storage, a dedicated IP and support for Ruby on Rails.

Want something a little more Microsoft? They have Windows Server-based solutions available as well. I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the different offerings. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.

Home Field Advantage

The .ca extension isn’t too popular for obvious reasons, but it seems to be incredibly difficult to obtain when working with a foreign web host. I have several .ca sites, and I can say with absolute certainty that most ordinary people will not go through the hassle of buying one and setting it up unless it’s part of a package deal. Luckily, the great people at Canadian Webhosting can do this for us.

To be completely honest, I’m really impressed with Canadian Webhosting. This is a Canadian company that is actually able to compete with web hosts in other nations. Considering the number of sites I have with .ca extensions, and how many more I’ll likely have by the end of this year, I’d be daft to ignore this company. They do offer free site transferring, which would be a great time saver if it means I don’t have to transfer MX records and upload 18 gigabytes of data across 12 websites and 19 subdomains.

If you’re looking for a great webhost, want something hosted in Canada, or some combination of the two, be sure to give Canadian Webhosting a go.

This site is back online! After suffering nearly 8 hours of downtime over the last few days. What was the reason for this downtime? An unnecessary upgrade.

I’ve been monitoring the progress of WordPress 2.5 for the last little bit and it’s been pretty good. I must say that it’s quite a stable release and, quite possibly, one of the most visually appealing versions of the blogging platform I’ve ever had the opportunity to use. That said, I’m not too happy about how much work I had to do in order to make it accept my website, nor am I happy with the new rules in place when I’m submitting a post. To save others the hassle of upgrading from one of the previous versions of WordPress, I’ll list some of the issues that I’ve faced.

Issue One - The Database

The database was the biggest area of concern for me. I’m using a heavily modified version of a previous WordPress installation and, because of such, I did not go through the transfering pains involved when version 2.3 was released. Although it should have been relatively straight-forward, I spent a small amount of time updating the database to the new schema, and then a great deal of time going through previous posts and correcting the weird characters that had appeared for some unknown reason. Suffice to say, it was not fun. All of the Japanese characters that I had in my posts and sidebar were converted to something completely unreadable and I had to get it fixed pronto.

If I wasn’t such a nit-picker for consistency, this probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much.

Issue Two - The Admin Interface

This was something I thought was going to be resolved by using the Fluency admin theme. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts to modify the CSS to handle some of my plugins, it just did not want to work properly with FireStats. Anything that does not work with FireStats, does not work on my website, as this is my stats package of choice. I’ll admit that I was getting a little tired of looking at the older theme from the early 2.x series, however, I’m happy to be back to it after trying to work through some of the usability issues that I faced.

Of course, one thing that I did like about the admin interface was how clean it looked.  The Recent Comments box and Incoming Links section was nice and smooth, and it’s something that I’ll look at customizing my current admin theme to show as well.  Heck, this might just be a great reason for me to work on an admin theme for WordPress 2.0.0 to 2.3.3 that will work in FireFox and Opera.  It seems that most of the other admin themes just don’t like anything but FF.

Issue Three - Writing Posts

I write my posts through the web interface. I know that I can use applications like Windows Live Writer and a host of others, as I’ve written about them before, but I was not happy with the fact that I still could not write a blog entry from Opera and, after firing up FireFox to write the post, I could not easily add images and format them the way I could with previous versions of the software.

Image handling in WordPress 2.5 has got to be the worst I’ve ever seen, despite all the eye-candy that is in place. I didn’t like the upload screen greying out the rest of the page and showing up with it’s broken CSS layout, nor did I like the fact that when I wanted to change the attributes of the picture after it was in my post, I had to do it through the HTML screen because the Visual Editor didn’t realize that I was talking about the selected picture. If I tried to edit any image on the screen with the on-screen tools, the picture would disappear as though it was never there in the first place.

My apologies go out to any developer that had worked hard on that area of WordPress, but with all the different issues between Opera and FireFox on that one screen, I just couldn’t bring myself to “get used to it.”

The layout of the different functions in the write screens was another bone of contention. I edit my timestamps constantly. Sometimes to have posts publish themselves in the future, other times to back date them a few hours for a nice round posting time. Although the current theme doesn’t show it, all of my blog posts have a time stamp of midnight, noon or six pm. I would explain why, but my oddities are a topic for later discussion.

Issue Four - Plugin Handling

I don’t think there has been a single prime release of WordPress without a large group of people complaining about plugins and how they just won’t work under the new platform. This was also the case with me, where each and every single plugin needed to be updated before it could work. In some cases, this meant that I had to shut some plugins right off because they just would’t work with 2.5. The biggest disappointments were the TLA and LinkWorth plugins that failed to work after the update. Although I don’t make a lot of money with these things, it’d be nice if such simple plugins wouldn’t be killed just because the developers decided to change the name of some functions.

Plugin longevity is the biggest hinderance to the mass adoption of WordPress as the blogging platform of choice. Every three months, plugins need to be re-written. I’ll admit that this is true for perhaps 30% of the extensions out there, but 30% is still a pretty large number. Although the community can certainly appreciate the power and potential of the WordPress platform, it’s next to impossible to take the software seriously when everything someone has done before is rendered obsolete before their work is even a year old.

People complained about Microsoft doing stuff like this every three to six years with the big changes between 2000, XP and Vista … why does Automattic think they can do this without any real consequences?

Of course, they don’t make these changes without the negative reactions from the community, but it’s something that needs to be addressed more. If Matt really wants this software to be taken seriously, then he needs to stop writing 4 word blog posts and be a bit more serious about maintaining compatibility. Perhaps, like Windows, plugins could have a compatibility mode and run “as though in version 2.3.3.”

Conclusion

WordPress 2.5 is a great platform if you’re just starting out and use the very same browsers as the people that wrote the software. However, if you’ve been blogging for a while and have everything set up just the way you like it, do yourself a favor and keep using what you’re using. If you’re worried about security patches, just remember that the people at WordPress promised us to continue releasing security fixes for the 2.1.x and 2.2.x line for some time. Whether they’re actually doing that or not, though, is another matter.

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.5, yet?  What do you think of the changes that have been made?

It’s a common occurrence: a younger generation grows up listening to a type of music their parents consider to be noise, senseless rambling, or shameless self-promotion. Then, as that younger audience gets older, their definition of “good music” tends to take on the same stagnation that their parents faced. My father stopped listening to a lot of new music in the 1980’s, while I gave up on pulp music around 1998 or 1999. It seems that since these pivotal years, 95% of everything we hear on the radio, TV or in movies has sucked harder than an industrial-grade vacuum.

If English “music” continues on this downward spiral, BMG just might sign me a record deal and I’ll have the opportunity to win the “best second-language lesson” category at the Juno’s.

One exception, though, has been Japanese pop music. Rather than the 19:1 ratio of crap-to-music we see in North America and Europe, we see something closer to 4:1.

So what is the reason behind this drastic difference in lyrical quality? Is it the fact I’ve only listened to J-Pop for 10 years? Is it the fact I’m not fluent in Japanese, so my appreciation of the culture and language has not yet diminished? Is it the fact that I’ve grown tired of hearing about English “artists” talk about themselves, their drug/alcohol habits, their wealth, their grievances and their endless sex orgies?

Perhaps, but there’s a bit more to it.

A Little Rhythm Goes a Long Way

It seems that, regardless of genre, most English lyrics have been put to, essentially, the same beat. There is no variation to the endless bass riffs, tweets and expected pauses. On top of that, we see nothing but an endless parade of Dr. Dre wannabe’s or boy bands full of metro-sexual-posing dolts. Most solo male singers whine about losing women, and most solo female artists complain about lazy men who whine or their desire to go clubbing and “hooking up” with something at the end of the night.

What happened to the songs that could make us laugh? What happened to the songs that made us feel good? What happened to the songs that told a story? And, by story, I don’t mean listening to how someone scored some “sweet ass” at the club in L.A., then flew to the Caribbean on a private jet to engage in various lustrous acts on a $20-million yacht.

I guess that content doesn’t matter anymore.

Alternative Music Is Not Alternative, It’s Pop

A while back I started looking for something new and found a few other languages with a suck-to-song (s2s) ratio of under 10:1. In the event you’re in the market, you might want to lend your ear to some of these languages.

Jamaican Music (9:1 Suck-to-Song Ratio)

Although most Jamaican music we hear is (technically) in English, the accent and regional dialect is unique enough for me to consider it another language for the purposes of this article (just like how English and French are regional dialects of Latin).

The primary themes in this genre include enjoying family, friends, sports, marijuana, or some combination thereof. Naturally, other topics such as politics, humanity, freedom and personal loss are also covered, where the artist often inflects a good deal of emotion into the work as they have likely experienced the situation.
The often repetitive beat can get boring pretty quick, however, there’s nothing better than a little reggae or soul in the summer heat.

Recommended Artists:

• Dennis Brown
• Calibe Thompson

French Music (8:1 Suck-to-Song Ratio)

When I sat down and worked it out, the French s2s ratio really surprised me. I thought it would be higher.

Like most other languages, the main topics are love, family, loss and aspirations. The best part of French music has got to be the way lyrics blend with the music. Unlike English pop music, spoken-word lyrics are not common.

Recommended Artists:

• Sanseverino
• Edith Piaf

Arabic Music (5:1 Suck-to-Song Ratio)

I’ll admit that my Arabic is pretty weak, but from what little I do know, some of the popular music coming out of Saudi Arabia is pretty good. The most popular songs tell about good times with family, friends, and working hard to earn a living.

Though it’s a very lyrical language to begin with, the fusion of Arabic and instruments is something to be admired. There are quite a few artists around the world that have been able to take the best qualities from Saudi music and blend it with their own.

Recommended Artists:

• Abdul Majeed Abdullah
• Rabeh Saqer

Japanese Music (4:1 Suck-to-Song Ratio)

Oddly enough, Japan has the least amount of sucky music. Considering how many songs on the radio and on TV are either really childish, super cute or just plain off-beat, there is a remarkable amount of good music covering the usual topics of love, rejection, desire, family and friends. On top of this, several artists sing about accomplishment or stories that we can relate to.

Of course, Japanese music isn’t for everyone. Quite a bit of it is repetitive, but every artist brings their own unique sound to the matter. The only exception, however, would be the boy bands and girl bands. It seems that these pop groups all have the same songs, themes and faces. The only exception would be SMAP, who managed to create a unique niche for themselves as they continued to be popular past 25.

Recommended Artists:

• Utada Hikaru
• Thelma Aoyama

Perhaps It’s Just Age

What is it that causes us to stop enjoying new music as time goes on and is it reversible? Then again, does the reason for our suspension of musical taste even matter?

What do you think of today’s pop music? Has it degraded to the point that we can no longer enjoy it, or has it become better with the “freedom” of expression that we see in so many Western-style musings? If you listen to non-English music, who are some of your favourite artists?

Edit: It appears that I misunderstood the addional domain assignment process through MidPhase’s cPanel. The customer service team was not aware of my upgrade request because the system said that I didn’t need the particular upgrade I thought I had needed after clicking “Add More” domains. That said, after a few emails with the very helpful billing manager, I managed to figure out what I needed to do, and got it done just fine. Thanks go out to Jasmin for shedding some light on my own stupidity
Why do some companies insist on making it difficult for customers to give them money?

For business days ago I put in a request for an upgrade with my host, MidPhase. I’m venturing into a few new areas and need greater control over my account and its resources. All in all, it will cost an extra $24.95 USD per year, not including any fees they might collect when I register new domain names. Depending on the success of these ventures, I’ll need to spend a bit more to handle all the streaming media and storage space requirements. So, assuming MidPhase wants to make things easier for me and process the application I needlessly had to fill out last weekend, I’ll be sure to give them a bit more business.

But this does raise the question: Why is it taking so long to “process” an upgrade request? Wouldn’t this just be a simple matter of taking a couple of bucks from my credit card and changing a setting on my account? Heck, why isn’t this a completely automated process?

Excessive Lag Reaching Timeout

I’ve been pretty patient with MidPhase for the most part, tolerating unacceptable amounts of downtime, slow support through the forums and a change of hands (they’re now owned by a UK media group), but with so much time on my hands, I’ve had the opportunity to look at some of the competing offers from other vendors. This might have just made MidPhase’s price structure obsolete in this customer’s eyes.

Three companies I’ve heard lots of positive feedback for are BlueHost, MediaTemple and Webhosting Pad. Comparing thier packages and prices to what I pay and receive now, it’s clear that I could save money within 14 months by purchasing a package through another company.

I really don’t ask for much from a web host. Just the following things:

• 99.9% active and verifiable net connectivity time (just because the server is running while the net connection is down does not mean my server has 99.9% uptime)
• PHP & MySQL (or access to a MS SQL Server 2000 or better database)
• affordable (no more than $12 a month)
• FTP and SSH
• POP email accounts
• Multiple Domain and Sub-Domain hosting on the same account
• 500+ Gig of transfer
• 50+ Gig of storage space
• rapid support through forums or email (6 hour turnaround time)
• PayPal payments

If all of this is met and I have the option of having a shell account that permits eggdrop bots all with the same account, then I’d really hop on board.

But, of course, if I wanted to have absolutely everything, then I’d need to host my own server. It’s a shame that Japanese ISPs filter out port 80 just like their Canadian counterparts. I’d have no qualms with hosting my own server from home on some ancient Pentium 3 500.

All this said, let’s take a quick look at the three companies that I examined.

BlueHost

BlueHost was one of the companies I had considered back in 2006 before going with with MidPhase. They were well priced and had packages comparable to what I found elsewhere. However, because a prominent WordPress developer had sung praises for MidPhase, I had decided to go there.

BlueHost currently offers a nice 1,500 GB of storage with 15 TB (yes, TeraBytes) of data transfer. They allow for unlimited domains (including international addresses) and meet all of my criteria. They even have SSH Shell access, but there’s no word on whether they permit eggdrops on the server. Probably not, but this is definately a company I’ll give due consideration to. Some of my plans will rely heavily on PHP, Ruby and networks capable of streaming dozens of videos simultaneously. Nothing like YouTube or other video sites, but there is certainly potential for heavy bandwidth usage.

A complete list of their features can be found on their “Tell Me More” page, and it is a great list for anyone that wants to have the option to do anything with their websites.

MediaTemple

MediaTemple has perhaps one of the most robust packages available. Rather than having you share a single server with a bunch of other customers, you’re sharing the total processing power of all the webservers in the building. This means that if your site is hit hard by Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon all at the same time, the server will not grind to a halt and choke. While most of my plans will likely not have much of an impact on the social media sites, it would be nice to know the site would be up and active should those massive bursts of traffic arrive.

Like BlueHost, they offer much of what I’m looking for. 100 Gig of storage with 1 TB of bandwidth is reasonable, and they have great Ruby support and the ability to host 100 individual sites from a single account. I doubt I’d be exceeding this amount in the next few years, but it’s nice to know the expansion is there if I need it. At $20 a month, they’re the most expensive of the three options but, thanks to their grid computing, you can certainly get quite a bit of power for your dollar should it be necessary.

Webhosting Pad

The name was an instant turn-off for me but, like the old saying goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Webhosting Pad offers a great deal of features for a minimal price tag and they’re looking like the clear leader in my quest for a new host. With 17 Gig of storage, 17 TB of transfer and a price tag under $5, it’s hard to say no. Like BlueHost, they have everything I’m asking for from a webhost except the SSH Shell access, but this is something I can live without.

What really grabs my attention with Webhosting Pad over the other offers is the amount of unlimited features that come with the basic package. While I doubt I would ever need unlimited POP, IMAP, Parked Domains, Subdomains and MySQL databases, it’s certainly nice to know the flexibility is there should I wish to expand in every direction but down. The fact they advertize Dual Xeon servers also piques my attention, as I’ve had nothing but solid reliability from everything Xeon-based.

The Winner Is … ?

Each one of these hosting companies has a strength over the competition and it will be hard to decide which one to go with in the future. One thing is certain, though. If MidPhase can’t get back to me regarding simple things like account upgrades, then I’d be afraid to think what would happen if my server caught fire and died. Sure, it might never happen, but you never know
Do you have any experience with these hosts? Do you know of another that offers just as much but for a better price? I’d be interested to know your take on the subject.

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for close to 4 months now and, I’ve got to tell ya, it’s not something I want to use full time anymore.

While it was great in the start, the honeymoon has ended and I’m seeing more limitations than benefits with the human-friendly flavour of *nix. I’ve compiled a list of 8 things that aggravate me the most, not all of which are the fault of the Ubuntu team.

8. The Constant Updates
Enough, already! Don’t tell me every single day that updates exist. I don’t want to update every 24-hours, nor should people find this constant release cycle tolerable. I’ll admit that it’s great that so many people are working hard to make Ubuntu better, but if people bitch and moan about a regular Windows update every Tuesday, then a daily update cycle should be tolerated even less.

Sure, Windows updates are just for Windows itself, while the Ubuntu updates are for every application you might have installed, but it should still be staggered a little better. Heck, a staggered release would probably afford the testers more time to bug hunt.

On that note, before you tell me to change the update schedule to something longer, it’s not just the frequency of the updates, but the amount of updates. I can appreciate the amount of time and effort that the developers put into their work, but seeing so many itty-bitty updates here and there just screams “work in progress”. If Ubuntu wants to be taken seriously as a contending OS, they should at least try to tone down the appearance of WIP-development.

7. The Shoddy Multi-Display Support
If I want to connect my notebook to the TV via the 15-pin D-Sub connection and watch a movie, I need to boot Windows or live with a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio with low quality. I’ve followed every instruction on the Ubuntu Forums regarding modification of the display driver’s resolutions, but I still can’t get the darned display to look right. On top of that, adding a display is hardly one of those Plug-and-Play situations like you’d have with Windows. I’m always forced to restart just to get the 2nd monitor displaying properly.

6. Poor Wireless Network Utilities, Ugly Interfaces
Yes, there are some decent 3rd-Party network utilities for Ubuntu, but when the default Windows wireless network screens look better, you know you’re going to run into trouble with the non-savvy crowd. I wanted to have my entire family switch to Ubuntu because of the “ease of use” and security it offered. But with such confusing screens such as the network connection drop-down, my in-laws will not be able to make heads or tails of the default screens unless I’m there to do it for them.

5. Poor Application Designs
Is it just me, or is every application for Ubuntu ugly as sin? This was supposed to be the human-friendly OS that I could sell to my in-laws to get them to switch from Windows rather than complain about viruses, missing files, and slow start times. On top of that, it would have afforded me the ability to repair any one of their problems remotely, even when they can’t log in to the system. Instead, they’re seeing the poorly crafted screens on graphics packages, video editing packages, word processing and spreadsheet files, as well as personal finance apps. I didn’t even want to show them how ugly some of the utility programs were after seeing their less-than-impressed expressions for their “full time” apps.

4. Inaccurate Battery Readings
While I’ve been impressed with the ability to squeeze a full two hours out of my 5 year old battery, I’m still not impressed with the poor battery life meter. It’s consistently wrong and should be revamped to take into account past run-down cycles. In my less-than-professional opinion, this is the only way to get around the problem of differing battery configurations and life expectancies.

3. 120+ Second Startup Cycle
The first month of using Ubuntu saw my system boot up and be ready for use in less than 30 seconds. Now it’s over 60 seconds before my background appears, and a full 60 seconds afterwards before the first applications can be opened. Aside from the occasional update, I’ve installed no software and haven’t messed with the configurations in over two months. What the heck is causing this slowdown? The repository checks? Some background fsck? Either way, it’s not cool when Windows Vista can boot faster on a notebook than Linux.

2. No Major Applications
While not a fault of the Ubuntu team, there are absolutely no professional applications available to help ease the transition from Windows to Ubuntu. Adobe Photoshop and Premier, Quicken, ActiveSync and a plethora of smaller applications will not be ported to *nix anytime soon, leaving us to use the ugly apps I had briefly mentioned earlier. If I could get my hands on some Linux-flavoured major apps, then it would be much easier to get others on board with an OS switch. Instead, I’m left fighting with Wine on any system that happens to need something only found on Windows, anfor the masses, or d no two PCs are the same. On top of this, the crap I need to do just to get the major applications working not only voids any warranty that I might have had when buying the software, but makes the program less reliable.

And the number 1 reason Ubuntu aggravates me …

1. The 3-Month Slow Down Is Not Going Away
When I press Alt+Tab, I expect instant results. Not a 2 second delay. When I’m scrolling through HTML-heavy emails, regardless of whether HTML should be used in email or not, I don’t tolerate display lag. When I click the button to launch the Opera or FireFox browsers, I don’t like waiting 15+ seconds. When I’m loading Evolution mail, why am I waiting 30 seconds? All of these things took less than an instant when I first started using the programs back in October. There is no excuse for such a blatant decrease in performance and quality.

If I wanted this kind of disappointment while working at home, I’d use WindowsME.

So there’s my list. Flame away if you must. But with all these problems standing in my way, and with my need to get some .NET and SQL programming done in the next few weeks, it looks like I’ll be ditching Ubuntu and going back to Windows XP. I may not be a fan of Microsoft’s recent practices, but at least I know what the heck to expect after using the system for any amount of time. That, and there’s much less resistance from the locals to use it, regardless of the interface language.

It’s a shame, too. I had such high hopes for the penguin.