Webhost4life - make it never

I put considerable time looking for a Windows host that wasn't too expensive and provided me with ASP.net and MSSQL. I decided on M6.com, but their buggy in-house control panel and my inability to access much needed IIS properties caused me to look elsewhere. Webhost4life was recommended by several people in different forums, so I decided to go with them.

Webhost4life started out great. Their control panel was superb and gave me options to automatically install some of the most popular (and up-to-date) ASP.net applications out there; however, they didn't have a blog application. My first choice for a blog was .Text, so I downloaded it and tried to set it up. After a half-hearted attempt to make it work, I tried to get support to help me through it. They offered to install it - for $20. It was then I should have known something was up. You see, in exchange for an ok price for hosting ($9.95 per month, but only with 300 mb of space and a few other restrictions), WH4L nickel and dimes their customers for any little service they want done. Want to add a domain to a subfolder? $15. Add a redirection? $5, and so on.

I chose the add redirection for my other domain. Since there was no link to pay for it, I figured it came out of my pre-paid amount. A couple of weeks later, I logged into the control panel and was faced with an annoying red box , telling me that my account would be suspended in a few days if I didn't pay them the grimy $5 NOW. I dutifully paid the $5 and figured that it was done with. The next day I get the same box, with the same message. To make a long story short, after 5 support tickets and a threat of legal action if my account was suspended in any way, WH4L finally acknowledged that they received my payment - 5 days later.

I'm going to keep this host for the next year since I pre-paid for the entire year; however, I'll certainly be looking for another, better one next year. I promised them that I would not add any more additional services since I didn't want to cause any more problems. I feel that if a hosting company is going to charge small sums for every automated little action that a majority of hosts provide for free, they should at least acknowledge that you indeed did pay for it. WH4L's sorry habit of intimidating people with threats of suspension to pay for these services right away is one of the most unprofessional things I've ever witnessed for a web host. Do you want to be a professional host or a fly-by-night operation? You can't have it both ways.

School shooter was on Prozac

'The clues were all there' / School shooter depicted as deeply disturbed, ignored teen

You know, if those kids were allowed to carry guns around, instead of having to go through metal detectors, and they all had Prozac to take as well, maybe they could have stopped this senseless shooting right when it began to happen. I mean, then it would have been a level playing field right? Alas, these gun control zealots and anti-drug proponents are putting people's lives in danger.

Looking for a few good programmers

Campaign Manager 2006 is currently looking for two types of programmers:

- 2 VB.NET programmers with at least 1.5+ years programming in VB.NET and know what a class is.

- 1 Flash programmer who is familiar with using a database with Flash and thinks they can make an interactive map.

Only SERIOUS people need apply. Please review the source code at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmpmgr (use the branch "Don" in the CVS), to decide for yourself if you would like to contribute. If you do, please contact me or Project Manager Andrew Martin.

Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy

Only so many hours in a day

It's a problem that every worthy programmer runs into - you want to learn so much, but there is only so much time. There are so many things I want to learn - the data abilities of XML, the ease of creating a site with ASP.NET, the amazing speed and coding ability of PHP and its interaction with mySQL. I have bought books on every one of these topics in the past 2 weeks, but still haven't gotten a chance to open them. I still have 2 issues of MSDN magazine that I have yet to read, and about 10 of this other IT magazine that I get free every week. I want to study and take the exam to be certified in VB.NET. There just isn't enough time though. I do have a job, and must work 40 hours per week. I have obligations with my Sourceforge projects. I want to add content and customize this website and my other one, but I also just bought a house less than a year ago and need to work on that. One day I hope we'll be able to buy books on cards and just insert them into a slot in our brain, instantly getting all the information. Only then, as T.S. Eliot says, "There will be time, there will be time".

Robert Blake - the white man's OJ

Ok, so let me get this alibi straight - forgive me for not having this down completely, I didn't watch the trial. Robert Blake goes to a restaurant with his wife and brings a gun. For some reason, this restaurant knows he's carrying a gun, and he has to give it to them to hold. On the way back to the car after the meal, Blake slaps his head and says to his wife, "gosh, I left my gun at the restaurant, wait here in the car alone in this unsafe neighborhood while I go back to get it. We aren't going to drive there, because that would make too much sense and I want to be gone long enough for something to happen." Blake comes back to the car some time later and whoops, his wife is dead!
A jury found this story believable, Robert Blake was found not guilty. Think of it as one for the white folks. A decision like this was only fair after the OJ Simpson trial. In the quest for racial fairness, Robert Blake's jury leveled the playing field for insanity. I mean, what good is a 10 million dollar defense if you're going to lose, right?
Next up...Mr. Jackson

Not too many 'oops' with Xoops

I finally got FreakingIdiot.com back up and running. As opposed to this site, FreakingIdiot is run on PHP and mySQL using Xoops. Not surprisingly, the PHP version of portal hosting is much more flexible and easier to use then its ASP.NET counter-part. Although there are still some errors floating around, they don't bring the site to a crashing halt (they also aren't handled very well code-wise either, just like .NET portals). Xoops is easy to use and customize. It also has a few hundred different add-ons and a lot of newsgroup and website forum support and information. I believe that a CMS like DotNetNuke will one day become a great product, but most of the PHP script portals certainly outshine anything that has been coded in ASP.NET. Too bad I don't know much about PHP scripting though - my knowledge in that area is weak at best.

Can't someone make an open source portal that has better error and exception handling?

Sofie is Justin's daughter!?

Only 2 episodes left for HBO's Carnivale (I know, I'm the only one who watches it). The 3/13 episode was one of the most gruesome/exciting yet, when we learned that Brother Justin raped Appy 20+ years ago, resulting in Justin's current housekeeper/wanna-be love interest Sofie. That's right, Justin wants to get it on with his own daughter (whom he doesn't know is his daughter ... YET. Only his sister does). It hardly makes sense, since we have been led to believe that Justin was a kind, simple man brought up by a priest and his wife early in his life. Any violent act such as rape is completely out of character from what we've heard of a young Justin.
Justin's rise to Usher was also not the best job of editing I've ever seen. We see Justin surprising Scudder from the back of a car, cutting off his head with a sickle. The screen then flashes this weird red color (like a bad horror movie from the 50's) and we see the Usher holding up poor Scudder's head, collecting his boon. The scene took less than 3 seconds for everything to transpire. If you got up to get a drink, you missed it. I would have liked to have seen some sort of dialog from Scudder when he had to give Justin his boon.
If you haven't ever watched Carnivale, don't turn it on next week and expect to catch up on anything that is going on. You have to rent the DVD's and watch from the first episode on - at least 2-3 times each, to even get a general idea of everything that is happening. Show mailing lists are fruitless since you will get screamed at for saying anything negative about the show. BTW, if you ever need an example of an oppressive society which regulates how you should act, think and read, don't turn to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. Head on over to the Carnivale mailing list on Yahoo and sign up. The moderators make those two look as liberal as Ted Kennedy.

Shame Shame Hillary

Just saw a picture on Drudge where Hillary Clinton is on the same podium (and not vomiting) as Rick Santorum. Has it really come to this Hillary? Are video games and television shows so bad for kids that you have to make a deal with the devil for some sort of political gain? Can you really look into satan's eyes with his amused grin and call him an advocate for anything good? Have some balls.

Here's the good news - Santorum WILL go down in 2006. No self-respecting Pennsylvanian can tell me one thing this homophobe has done for the good of his state. The guy doesn't even live in PA for Christ's sake. I lost some respect for Hillary today. It shows me she doesn't have the power to broker her own deals without having to buddy up with extreme GOP a-holes.

.Net portals too flimsy?

I'm pretty shocked at the exception handling that all of these .Net portals have (or don't have). I guess what I'm more shocked at is how a little piece of formating code could shut down a whole site. Take this for instance: I didn't like the styles that Rainbow was giving me to present my RSS feeds, so I decided to hack my own out of their pre-built ones. I got it working the way I wanted, but thought the spacing of the

tag was just too much to have in the RSS feed display, so I changed it to
. Now, I admit I have no experience and no idea how to write XML (yet), but my site threw a fit and wouldn't load the page because I didn't write the
as
. So sorry Rainbow! One mistake on one XSL stylesheet pertaining to one module on a page should not bring down the whole site.
DotNetNuke and CSK also had their share of problems with simple mistakes that were almost impossible to find with the stack trace information it displayed. Maybe it's different for web programming, but I would never let a program crash this way because of bad input by the user. It sounds like there needs to be more Try..Catch blocks.