Vonage sucks. Right now April 19th, 2007 vonage has experienced 5hrs of a self described "network upgrade" to "improve service". It seems that current levels of service are "none" to "bullshit". This includes 911 service. Which put all their customers out of touch with emergency services via the vonage network. The Ts&Cs shouldn't indemnify Vonage Holdings (LLC) of putting their customers in danger.

Of course they could be verizon trouble too. Or they are the target of a DDoS attack. Perhaps some evil villain is using this downtime to rob poor aunt May of all her (what brands does aunt carry?) See Spiderman 3 to find out that and more... (sponsored by vonage our shares aren't worth crap)

[Vonage is done. All your Vonage are belong to Verizon. Consumer VOIP always seemed kinda DOA to me, and I think the industry has finally just nailed that coffin shut, at least for the time being.

Fuck it, i roll all-cell all-the-time now, and it's great. -k]

Vonage - A better phone service for less

And let's just ban television, because there's no reason that we should tolerate a world where kids can turn on Cinamax at 10:30pm on a Saturday night and watch erotic trillers. Ahhh Skinamax... you gave me the porn before the Internet did...

Of course, violence is fine. That's not TV or internet, but the fault of video games.

CP80's solution would apply to the US only, of course, and their plan for dealing with international pornographers (who are unlikely to move to another port dictated by the US) is a simple but draconian one: consumers would ask ISPs to "simply block all IP addresses originating from a non-compliant country." Problem solved!

Grand. Utah, meet the humble Ostrich.

Fucking Utah.

My favorite Utah quote :
"How the Mormon settlers looked upon this valley and felt that it was the promised land is beyond me. I don't know, maybe it looked different back then." --Stevo, SLC Punk

Utah wants Congress to make port 80 porn-free

Legal experts say the main points of contention also include how much knowledge the Internet companies have of specific examples of infringement. Viacom in its suit contends it can be impossible to look at YouTube without seeing specific examples of infringement, copyright video clips uploaded by users.

I'm kind of sidestepping the larger issues here to respond to just this statement, but i can say for certain that I frequently click through a half dozen YouTube clips without seeing anything that appears to be infringing. I would never argue that infringement doesn't happen, but I think it's equally absurd to claim that one CAN NOT use the site without encountering it.

As for the whole thing, I think the result will be far reaching and I wonder if the target state argues in favor of compulsory licensing. I see no good way to allow the content owners to maintain their iron fist approach to content control without absolutely stifling technological innovation. I don't see it.

Viacom vs Google, or: How the DMCA stopped being something only 1337 hackers and pinko lawyers cared about.

Joel really demonstrates his qualities here... This is quite simply an awesome post.

Having worked in tech support in a variety of capacities, all of this sounds familiar and I'm gratified to see some of the stuff I did (and do) corroborated.

I take the blame, diffuse people's fury and invent clever (if I may) ways to get people to do what I know they have to do, but which they are reluctant to do out of pride, laziness or frustration.

I've made up all kinds of stories about static electricity and magnetic resonance and god knows what garbage in order to get people to do what I needed them to do. It's easy to be upset at such people for being so dense, but (and I know, coming from me, this sounds a bit strange) being infuriated by your customers doesn't make you feel better. I was happiest when treating the whole thing like a game -- Manuipulate the Human.

All of that being said, even being awesome isn't going to prevent you from getting one or two really unmanageable customers. It's good that Fog Creek seems not to have any, but I have. People for whom no answer was sufficient, and who needed to yell for their own sake. I'm going to break from what Joel would probably advise and state outright that I refuse to let people verbally abuse me over the phone. I will not be called a "fucking idiot" or "dipshit" (which has happened) and continue pretending that we're having a civil dialogue. If I'm being berated and can't get a word in, I'll hang up. This will make the customer even more angry in the short term. He'll call back even more furious, but that's good in this case because he'll be sputtering and have more trouble keeping up the pace. He'll demand to know why you hung up on him and thereby actually let you say a word or two. Of the two times I've had to hang up on a customer, one eventually apologized and ended up chagrined but pleased with the results. The other one demanded to speak to my boss, and her boss, and eventually was reined in, but was probably never happy. Then, I figure that guy was probably never happy for more than 5 minutes, regardless of the circumstances. Some people really are just broken. -k]

Seven steps to remarkable customer service - Joel on Software

God's view on LISP, and Perl.

Perfect... i love "oh, God, it's full of 'car's"... LOL.

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Comparison of dynamic web frameworks to J2EE/JSPs.

[ Very interesting and informative. One of the guys in my team at work has been struggling, for months now, with a totally convoluted J2EE/JSP/Beans application (with a SAS backend, the part he's expert at). I've had to step in and help a bit just because I have a greater understanding of java and some of the XML garbage, but it sucks. We also don't have the source, so that's even more fun.

Meantime, i'm developing a personal project in Rails and found it pretty nice. I didn't go through a long exploration process, but it sounded good so I figured I'd give it a shot. So far, so good.

I will note that this vid must've been produced before Rails added support for what they call Migrations, which is a Ruby-based data modelling mechanism. You still have to run one SQL command at the beginning of your project, but from that point on, you just specify the data model in a simple ruby way and run the migration. It versions your migrations too, so if you create a table, or add some fields, that you don't actually want, you can roll it back to a previous version. Anyway, that feature brings rails a bit closer to the others, i guess. -k]

Better Web Application Framework - Google Video

"It's a 19th-century invention that was perfected in the 20th century," he said. "That's part of the evolution of all inventions."

Calling fluorescent lights the "perfection" of lighting technology is like calling a fucking Unicycle the perfection of transit technology.

Don't get me wrong, I'm into saving power... I like that the lights in the common areas of government workplace go off automatically after a set time if no one's moving and I'm even the little gnome who goes around and turns off the desk and office lights of people who leave them on when they leave.

But!
I
HATE
FLUORESCENT
LIGHTING

I can't convey how much I hate it. I can't work effectively bathed in that flat, dimensionless glare; I absolutely feel the effects on my mood and motivation. I feel like I'm suffocating in some oppressive cell if I have to have the fluorescents on. In the halls it's fine (as long as there's no flickering, which is a whole other issue), but in my workspace, it kills me. I was saved in my old building by being in a window cube where the natural light tempered the F-effect, and in my current one by getting an office where I have two, yes, incandescent lamps which I frequently use singly because the light is SOOOOO much more pleasant. I'd rather work in the dark than under fluorescents. I'd rather work with chains on my body and perpetually sticky fingers. Fuck fluorescent lighting 100%.

I see some hope on the horizon in the form of tunable LED lighting which can emit a warmer color spectrum while still being more energy efficient than fluorescent. I don't know that they're available yet, but got I hope they get here before someone demands that I remove my incandescents. I will lose my damn mind.

P.S. Assemblymember* Levine is right when he says

Electricity-saving technologies may not be glamorous, especially when compared with the idea of a shiny new power plant, but the facts are that there are hundreds of electricity-saving innovations now on the market that if fully used throughout the United States, would significantly decrease the electricity the country now uses,

but I don't care if the result is me feeling like shit all the time. Start with weather stripping and insulation and tankless hot water heaters... you'll have to pry my incandescents from my cold, dead fingers.

P.P.S *WTF, seriously. I'm just PC enough to allow that using Assemblymembers to refer to a mixed group of Assemblymen and Assemblywomen is ok, even if it does violate my linguistic sensibilities as unwieldy. Fine, I'll survive. But on his own page? Why, I ask? Why? Who's being offended when I call an Assemblyman an Assemblyman?

Lights out on Edison's bulb?

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.

...

Think Sun's Grid computing, only cheaper, with virtualized machine images. I've got an immense project needing lots of CPU power and RAM but it should only last a few weeks if I do it right. This might be the ticket.

Neat.

I like the following line from the guide :

"You can also terminate your instances by logging onto the instances with your ssh tool and running the "shutdown -h" command. Don't forget the "-h", otherwise you will put your instance into single user mode. You will find the latter quite useless."

Indeed, though I wonder how many people there are that are writing applications requiring multi-image distributed computation that don't already know the shutdown -h now command...

Amazon - EC2

How to build a sword-wielding, tennis-playing, WiiMote-controlled, friendly robot

Damn!

[ That's fucking ill. I want one!

Of course, I'd settle for the damn wii, or even ONE WIIMOTE to be in stores too. alas. -k]

WiiBot

Modafinil is just the first of a wave of new lifestyle drugs that promise to do for sleep what the contraceptive pill did for sex - unshackle it from nature. Since time immemorial, humans have structured their lives around sleep. In the near future, we will, for the first time, be able to significantly structure the way we sleep to suit our lifestyles.

"The more we understand about the body's 24-hour clock the more we will be able to override it," says Russell Foster, a circadian biologist at Imperial College London. "In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off.

Interesting article...don't know whether to be horrified or excited about the prospects of working on my thesis 24 hours a day:)

[ I'm horrified. As much excitement I feel for the prospect of having the time to do all the various personal projects on my mind, the reality is that the 40 hour work week would probably begin to expand naturally. Pretty soon, not sleeping would be the way you get ahead of the competition, and people would be expected (socially i mean) to put in that effort. I already chafe under the existing US system of 40 hour work weeks and 2 weeks off per year... if i had to work more hours, I'd be pretty unhappy.

On top of which, I'm skeptical. Sleep seems pretty fundamental. I'm not in any way convinced that we can ever really do away with it and not face very serious repercussions. -k]

Get ready for 24-hour living