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Anti-Green ISP Conspiracy Theory?

Posted by Steve on October 15, 2009

4 comments

The local power plant helping me download my fill...A bit of background...

In Australia, "Where the women glow and the men plunder", an ISP (Internet Service Provider) generally offers you Internet connection packages with data quota limits. If you are a heavy user, you generally either:

  • Consume your quota of data within a month and pay extra to keep downloading and using the Internet, or;
  • Consume your quota of data within a month and have your download speed hacked down to something like 64Kb/s.

As a side note, Australian 'wired' broadband ADSL generally caps out at 1.5Mb/s. you can get theoretical 8Mb/s - but unless you living above your local Telecommunications Exchange you will not get too close to that speed, you might average half. Oh we also have ADSL 2+ ... in selected suburbs ... and this offers theoretical 20-25Mb/s ... again, theoretical. High tech.

Anyway! ... To my point.

So *my* Mr. ISP offers both Peak and Off-Peak periods within a day in which you can download data.

  • Peak = 12pm to 2am ... 12GB downlaod quota
  • Off-peak = 2am to 12pm (*yawn*) ... 60GB download quota

Simply put: with so many people using download software clients like uTorrent with sweet plugins like the download Scheduler... Mr. ISP must get absolutely hammered my customers at 2am when all of their Schedule download programs suddenly come online and download furiously until switching off at 12pm for downtime. I know mine gives them a good run for their money (or my money?).

After thinking very hard about this it suddenly occurred to me how anti-green Mr. ISP is! After every full day of workers, at-home-lay-abouts and online-self-made-celebrities pounding away at their keyboards sucking sweet power from their outlets and into their life sustaining computers - Mr. ISP then has the hide to encourage people to leave their still power-hungry computers running all through the night so that they can download everything they can possibly think of just to avoid coming near their Peak period cap. Never mind also that where people simply *can*, they will.

Therefore, I've decided that Mr. ISP is definitely at fault and should just resort to unlimited download quotas whereby customers will simply not be able to think of anything more to download after a solid week and everything will even itself out.

Computers will finally be able to sleep and the Earth and all it's inhabitants will be saved.

World Peace.

Listen: "Land Down Under" by Men at Work (read lyrics here)

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Web Hosting with Gearworx = regretful

Posted by Steve on October 06, 2009

6 comments

Gearworx, or Gearbroke?

I've unfortunately found out just how nasty cheap website hosting can be: enter gearworx.net

Some reasons I went with Gearworx:

  • they supported ColdFusion development
  • they were cheap with a price-freeze policy
  • they supported, on average, more ColdFusion tags and functions than other similarly priced packages with other companies - CFRegistry, CFExecute and CreateObject(COM and JAVA)
  • during the sign-up phase the responsiveness was great from their support team - very helpful.

Once I finally agreed to give it a go, paying for 12 months up front (as you do), I started to notice the cracks.

Plesk Panel was bulky and slow. But aside from this I found that after all the back and forward confirmations I'd insisted on before purchasing the package, they had still managed to mess up my account settings. My quotas and limits were wrong. I couldn't add domains, datasources ... I really couldn't do anything. Plus, Plesk was so slow!

Luckily this was resolved and I was able to get this site up and running... 5 days later.

Being inexperienced with shared hosting I was then very disappointed to realise that there was no way for me to access any generated ColdFusion site specific log files. Of course there are ways to get around this so it's not such a loss after all.

Next came the straw that broke the camel's back.

Completing the initial requirements for a site for a  friend's new business venture I obviously thought it logical to launch the new site under my hosting account with the appropriate domain name. This should be simple - especially since my highly featured 'Starter' package has the options for me to add a bunch of new domains and databases without having to worry about hitting my quota.

But no.

Registering a ticket to support on July 20, 2009, briefly describing that I had been receiving quota related errors when attempting to add a new domain, I received one reply from support requesting my control panel username (which seemed odd as I thought my ticket should have been tied to all those details in their system). Then silence. I cancelled this ticket and started a new one with a much more detailed description of the error I was receiving - on July23, 2009.

I have now been chasing a resolution for this ticket from July 23 till now (coming close to 2.5 months). Aside from this, their support ticketing system has this neat feature whereby if you do not keep your own ticket active yourself it auto closes after 72 hours! I have had to go in every 72 hours or so for the last 2 and a half month just to keep my ticket active so that they might notice it and pay it some attention. Sometimes I'll come in after a weekend away and realise that it's been closed, so of course it must be re-opened. It's endless.

Out of desperation my last resort was to join Twitter and see if I could follow Gearworx on there and find out if there was a possibility that my ticket might have a look-in one day. Another waste of time.

All they tweet about is system/hardware upgrades - none of which I have been able to notice (although I have noticed Plesk is now running faster yesterday. Big w00p.) Other than that, just about every Tweet directed at them is negative and a complaint - to which they usually reply with sarcasm or dismissal. I honestly don't know why some companies expose themselves on Twitter - it's a social network, people are going to talk socially about their experience with the company and express their frustration in any way they feel comfortable - gearworx for some reason thinks that it is the victim and that they have a wonderful support system in place.

Any support responses I have ever received from them are signed by "Will" - is it a one-man-company?? If so, no wonder the company gives their customers the silent treatment, he probably cannot keep up with it all!

Anyways, this is enough of a rant - I think you get the point. I am officially NOT RECOMMENDING gearworx as a quality website hosting experience. If you do have a Twitter account, do a search for "gearworx" and let me know if you find one Tweet praising the company's services.

PS. @gearworx: A support phone number or multiple avenues of contact for support *might* be a good business move as far as customer service goals go. Unanswered support tickets and a rude Twitter rep. just don't cut it.

Edit [24 Feb 2010]: Received a lovely email today from Gearworx stating: "Please remove the Gearworx logo from your blog. You have not been authorized to modify our logo without approval.". They also thought it important enough to contact my new Hosing Provider and urge them to force me to pull the image down - before I'd even had a chance to respond to them and let them know I would. It makes me laugh, but this is so typical of their behaviour and treatment of people that I experienced while with them. I'd bet they would not request an image be pulled down if this post showed them in a positive light. Feels like I've received more attention from Gearworx since writing this post than I did when I was their paying customer!

 

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TweetTicker: read Twitter Atom/RSS with NewsTicker and ColdFusion

Posted by Steve on July 03, 2009

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TweetTicker The other day at work I decided see what could be done with Twitter Atom/RSS feeds. I wanted to be able to have a scrolling vertical 'ticker' of Tweets, but without having to use Twitter's developer API.

I did a quick Google search to see what pre-built tools I might be able to pull together and use  and came across NewsTicker, a Javascript tool based on the MooTools Javascript framework. It was being used for News items, hence the name, but had the same functionality I had been looking for to display Tweet items.

So, using NewsTicker and ColdFusion's <CFFEED/> tag to easily grab my Twitter feed I was quickly and easily able to put something together in no time.

To make sure this post does not go into too unnecessary detail, I've provided a link to both a demo and and ZIP archive at the bottom of this post incase anyone would like to modify it for their own needs. My example is of course fairly basic and simply an experiment so I'm sure you can make it more advanced without any trouble :-).

Some things worth noting:

Since I am in Australia, I had to convert the date/time values retrieved from the Atom/RSS feed to a relative time reference based on my time zone.

<!--- Set Locale: --->
<cfset setLocale("English (Australian)") />
<!--- Apply timezone offset of hours: --->
<cfset pubDateTime = DateAdd("h",-GetTimeZoneInfo().UTCHourOffset,pubDateTime) />

I then needed to format my date/time value to show a value relative to 'now'. I used Ray Camden's Relative Time UDF:

<cfscript>
function relativeTime(pastdate) {
var delta = dateDiff("s", pastDate, now());
if(delta < 60) {
return "less than a minute ago";
} else if(delta < 120) {
return "about a minute ago";
} else if(delta < (45*60)) {
return round(delta/60) & " minutes ago";
} else if(delta < (90*60)) {
return "about an hour ago";
} else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
return round(delta/3600) & " hours ago";
} else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
return "1 day ago";
} else {
return round(delta/86400) & " days ago";
}
}
</cfscript>

To get the feed from Twitter I used:

<!--- Default the Twitter user you would like to use: --->
<cfparam name="url.twitterUser" default="nothingwithyou" />
<!--- Set Twitter Atom/RSS feed URL: --->
<cfset feedurl="http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=#url.twitterUser#" />
<!--- Get Twitter RSS feed for the intended user: --->
<cffeed
source="#feedurl#"
properties="feedmeta"
query="feeditems" />

It is quite easy to choose either the Atom or RSS feed to read, by simple changing part of the URL string from "search.atom" to "search.rss".

Anyway, check out the demo and source and see how it goes. When viewing the demo, if you have a Twitter account or know of one you like, try adding:

?twitterUser={twitter_account_name_here}

to see the reader pick up that account's feed.

View Demo | Download Source

Note: I am running ColdFusion 8

Note: Functionality for refreshing Tweet items in the Demo and Source Code has been removed.

Edit:

Additional Twitter API search examples (ensure URL encoding):

  • Containing a word: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=twitter
  • From a user: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from%3Aal3x
  • Replying to a user (tweet starts with @mzsanford): http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=to%3Amzsanford
  • Mentioning a user (tweet contains @biz): http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40biz
  • Containing a hashtag (up to 16 characters): http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23haiku
  • Combine any of the operators together: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?phrase=happy+hour&until=2009-03-24
  • Originating from an application: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=landing+source:tweetie

There is so much you can do via the API's search function (additional parameters, boolean operators, Curl/ JSON response formating), check it out here: Twitter API Wiki: Search Method

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