Year: 2012

I have mixed feelings about the new office.

Upside: Shower after ultimate.
Downside: The commute to the ultimate field will no longer be 90 seconds.

Of course one of the motivations for moving into our current office is its proximity to the ultimate field. This time around, the new office had a different set of priorities. I guess you can’t win ’em all.

I was working late this evening, as usual, and when I finished up I was poking around the internet a bit. I found a site I’d bookmarked long ago and checked to see if it was still there. Sure enough. It has hundreds of old Apple II games… the games that were on 5.25″ floppy disks. Classics that I played as a kid, like Lode Runner, Taipan, Night Mission Pinball, and of course Thom’s favorite, Black Magic.

I downloaded the disk images and the emulator necessary to run it. Reading some documentation, it seems like the emulator has even been ported to iOS so you can run these classic games on your iPhone or iPad. Since I have neither, I had to figure out how to run it under Linux. There’s a Windows version of the emulator, and of course it’s possible to run (some) Windows programs on a Linux system using Wine.

Off I went. I downloaded the latest source code for Wine and compiled it, then installed it on my desktop. The games sort of worked– Lode Runner came up in all it’s two-color glory, but the keyboard wasn’t working quite right. And yes, I actually still remember the keys to move the guy in Lode Runner!

I wondered if maybe Wine was the problem, so I looked for some old Windows programs to see if I could run them. I chuckled when I found an old copy of Netscape 4.8. I have newer versions, of course, but it seems like testing something from the mid-90’s would be a great idea. I ran the installer and voila! there it was: Netscape 4.8, running beautifully on my KDE Linux desktop.

Just for kicks I went to this blog site. Wow, it works!

The font styling leaves something to be desired (I think this version of Netscape was before CSS really existed) but hey, it’s not too shabby. It probably helps that I wrote the code for this blog a long time ago and it’s not using a lot of the CSS tricks that “modern” sites use.

It’s funny to remember those fond days of using Netscape Mail. Now if I can figure out what’s going on with the Apple II emulator, I can remember the even fonder days of Lode Runner…

I was looking at a web site this evening, and noticed some text on the page was blinking. Strange. No one does that any more… not since about 1994. But out of morbid curiosity I checked the HTML source:

Wow. The fabled blink tag. The one web programmers mock. I didn’t know it was even supported in modern browsers! Amazing.

So I’m looking online for a nice big conference table for the new office. I found something that looked promising but when I clicked the link to see it…

So it’s not available– which is kind of annoying but oh well– and the site’s other recommended items I “may be interested in” include hubcaps and SUV window pillars.

Uhh…

Alex was in the kitchen tonight with Laralee. He mentioned to her that the shampoo bottle in his shower was empty, and there wasn’t any more under the bathroom sink. She shrugged and said he could just use Kyra’s shampoo for a few days.

He was aghast. “But then my hair will smell like gummi bears!“

Well, Zing is certainly evolving.

About a year ago, there were three of us. Now there are seven, and I’m considering an eighth. We’re about to move into a sweet new office. Our client list continues to grow. Somehow we all continue to be busy.

It’s been an interesting ride over the past year. The dynamics of the team have changed quite a bit, for everything from playing foosball to going out to lunch together. Right now we’re all squeezed into an office that’s comfortable for four but most certainly cramped for seven. I think all of us are excited to get a bigger space where almost all of us (except the New Guys) will have private offices. It’ll be fun to see what happens with that, and how much more changes over the course of the year.

Onward and upward!

As a domain reseller, I often purchase domains on behalf of customers. When the domain is due to expire (typically annually), those customers receive automated email messages warning them of the impending expiration so they have time to contact me and renew the domain. These messages are sent 90 days before expiration, then 60 days, then 30, 15, 5, and 1. In other words, there’s plenty of warning.

One of my customers ignored those warnings for months, and contacted me a few weeks ago wondering why his web site was down. I explained that the domain had expired, I hadn’t renewed it, and now no one on the internet could find him. He decided he wanted to go ahead and renew it, but it had been too long and the domain had entered what’s called the “redemption period”. There are strange rules about expired domains– the general intent is to prevent competitors from seizing a domain that’s accidentally expired and bad-mouthing a company or whatever. Anyway, late in that period (which usually lasts around 45 days) the domain enters a special phase where no one, including the original owner, can purchase it. You simply have to wait until the redemption period ends, and then buy it as if it was new.

Strangely enough, registrars don’t always know exactly when a domain will become available. The global registry, run by ICANN, has internal policies that aren’t very transparent. Long story. Interestingly, this has led to the rise of registrars who offer special services to pounce on a specific domain as soon as it becomes available by essentially requesting to register it every few hours until the magic (and unknown) redemption period ends.

Long story short: some Japanese company did exactly that and purchased the domain that had belonged to my customer. It was legitimate, although sort of confusing since the domain was pretty specific to this customer’s business. In any case, they put up their new web site and the word awesome doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Since I’m not fluent in Japanese, I ran this page through Google Translate and was pleased to discover that the web site is advertising…

wait for it…

an armpit hair removal system. If you wonder why the woman is so shiny and happy, it’s apparently because she has smooth, bare pits. And look at the way the little anime boy just adores his armpit-hair-less girlfriend. Amazing.

Unfortunately for my customer, his only recourse is to approach this company and ask politely if they’d be willing to sell the domain back to him. Good luck with that.

Look out, static rat!

I just sealed the envelopes and dropped them in the mailbox. My tax returns are officially on the way to the Gov.

Every year I just want to scream, Why is our tax code so complicated? I have to spend $50 for software each year because the rules are so complex that I literally need a computer to ask me all of the questions and fill in the numbers. And I have no idea– until I actually finish the paperwork– how much I’m going to owe each year. I read about corporations with tens of billions of dollars in profit each year, who pay no tax whatsoever. It’s so very frustrating.

Give me a flat tax any day, so I know exactly how much I’ll owe no matter how much I make or spend. Or even a straight sales tax, where everything I earn sits quietly in the bank until I actually use it to buy something.

If I was in charge…

SSH is pretty awesome.

I’m working at home today (of course) and I need to test some web pages that will be accessing a remote database server. For security reasons, that remote server only allows access from the office IP address. That means I can’t test any of this from home because the database will refuse my requests.

After a few minutes of thought, I set up an SSH tunnel between my house and the office. Now when I open the web page on my browser here, it’s actually sending the HTTP traffic to the server at the office, which routes it to a second server at the office, which connects to the remote database server to pull the information I need. From where I’m sitting, it’s completely transparent and the browser acts exactly as it would if I was sitting at the office.

Now that’s handy!