General

The site was down for a while (since August 21) due to network issues where the previous server was located.  I found it easier to just move the site to another server than to investigate the issue (I'd have to work out a time to go to the 'colocation center'  -- my friend's dorm room).  I've been meaning to move the site to this server anyways, so I guess it all worked out, despite the mega downtime.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and welcome back .

My site has disappeared from Google's listings, and I initially blamed the cause on my site going down for a long period of time a while back. After finally getting back online, I decided to start using Google Sitemaps. After trying to add my site, though, I ran into a problem; Google claimed my site was inaccessible! I could browse the site fine so I figured it was a temporary problem on Google's end. After trying multiple times over a course of a month or so, I decided to investigate. What I found was a bit surprising: freedns.afraid.org (my dynamic DNS provider) blocks all requests from Google! I couldn't believe it!

A bit pissed, I emailed Joshua Anderson (the maintainer of FreeDNS) about it. He asked for my domain name and stated that Google can now access my site. He didn't respond to the portion of my email asking why Google is blocked in the first place.

Well, Google is now able to download my sitemap, but I will have to wait a LOOONG time before I show up in Google again. It took me a while the first time, and I'm basically starting again as if I'm reborn.

I also enlisted in a secondary DNS service, EditDNS.net, just in case there are some other surprises in afraid.org's services. Hopefully if any queries to afraid.org's servers fail, EditDNS will come through successfully.

Isn't blocking Google such a bad idea? I wonder what the reasoning behind it is. I don't see freedns.afraid.org having any trouble getting listed by Google.

UPDATE: FreeDNS has updated their FAQ to address the Google issue. Here's an excerpt:

For the past few years that I've had a cell phone, I've been known to be very bad at checking my voicemails. It's so clumsy, and if not checked soon enough, they pile and pile. If someone calls and there is a voicemail that you just must listen to, you have to go through ALL previous voicemails first. This is the same way voicemail was checked years ago, and I think it's time for a change. I'm glad others agree with me.

There are now services that can take over as your voicemail service. When you miss someone's call, the caller is redirected to your new voicemail service instead of your service provider's.

For a while, I was using Privatephone.com. PrivatePhone gives you your own local phone number that is intended for use as a personal number that you give out for spam-style offers online, or to people you meet randomly that ask for your number while you really don't want to give it out. I found a useful link at Howard Forums that details how to enable call forwarding on T-Mobile (my provider) phones, and I went ahead and gave it a shot. Months later, I was satisfied with my decision.

With PrivatePhone, I was able to check my voicemails through my phone like before, through email, or through a web-based email-like interface. I had .wav of each voicemail emailed to me, so I was notified immediately by Thunderbird as soon as an email arrived. In addition, PrivatePhone sent me a text message telling me a voicemail was left, with the caller's number. The text message only showed the caller's number (along with a short PrivatePhone message), even if the caller was in my PrivatePhone addressbook.

I then stumbled upon YouMail. YouMail did everything PrivatePhone failed to do. It not only is a third-party voicemail service, but it also has excellent features such as custom voicemail greetings for each caller, text messages with the caller's number, name (if the caller is not in your contact list, it shows the caller ID name), and length of the voicemail. In addition, the emailed copies of the voicemails were sent in .mp3 as opposed to the .wav of PrivatePhone; I had bad luck with VLC and .wav files for some reason. The only drawbacks to YouMail are that you don't get your own private number (everyone uses the same voicemail number; your voicemail is handled based on the number that forwards the call to them), and that you can't currently set caller groups. It would be nice to have friends, family, work, etc., be greeted with different voicemail messages, but not have to individually set the message for each individual caller. Still, this service to me far exceeds what PrivatePhone could offer me, and I am still using it today.

If you have multiple phones or need a number you can comfortably give out to near-strangers, you might want to try GrandCentral. If a caller dials your GrandCentral number, GrandCentral can have multiple phones ring at the same time. Think of this as phone redundancy when you have service problems with your phone(s). GrandCentral used to offer ringback tones (where callers are greeted by music or whatever you decide to upload), but since being bought by Google, that feature has disappeared (for copyright reasons I'm sure). Still, there is a library of ringback tones you can choose, but none of them are anything special. I suggest you give this a shot, I'm sure you'll like it

UPDATE: YouMail has recently made tons of changes to the site, and it appears to be getting better every week.  I strongly advise you check it out.  Whenever I think of a possible improvement, I end up seeing it implemented shortly after.  I'm quite impressed with the service.  Let me know what you think about it in the comments.

UPDATE:  Privatephone.com will be ending their service on December 31, 2007.  FreeDigits was the closest replacement I could find to Privatephone, but they now no longer offer dedicated phone numbers; they instead make you use a "short code" which is the same as an extension.  My guess is that they didn't want to pay for more phone numbers.  If you're still interested in that service, they offer it through a sister site, ringtonumber.com.

Okay, I think I've learned my lesson. I've tried a few "unlimited" webhosting offers from eBay and typically start off happy, but after a few months, sometimes only a few weeks, I run into problems. ameir.net was down for a while--and thus received no updates--because the webhost suddenly deleted my account without warning and did not respond to any of my messages. They "accidentally" did so a few times before and recreated my account after some yelling, but the most recent time just didn't work out. It took me so long to bring the site back online because I was wary of getting another super-cheap host, I didn't know of any trustworthy, reliable, and ad-free free webhosts, and I was also very busy with school. Anyways, I resorted to hosting my own server for now, so hopefully that will take care of the plethora of problems I've encountered. I'll try to update the site regularly. Keep checking the site for updates.

Sniping services:
myibay
Gixen Snipe Tool
eStEaL
JustSnipe
Auction Stealer

(to be updated)

Name	Space	Attachment Size	POP/IMAP/SMTP	Comments
www.inbox.com	5GB	20MB	Yes/No/Yes	Very nice interface, strong filtering ability, fast navigation, yet slow to compose messages.
www.gawab.com	2GB	50MB	Yes/No/Yes	Comments
www.lycos.com	3GB	Unlimited	No/No/No	Comments
www.aim.com	2GB	50MB	Yes/Yes/Yes	Comments
www.walla.com	5GB	10MB	No/No/No	Comments
www.goowy.com	2GB	50MB	No/No/No	Comments
www.30gigs.com	30GB	50MB	No/No/No	Comments
www.gmail.com	2.8GB	20MB	Yes/No/Yes	Comments
www.jlmail.com	Unlimited	?MB	Yes/Yes/Yes	Comments
www.icmail.net	1GB	10MB	Yes/Yes/Yes	Comments

Last week we had some really bad thunderstorms in our area. This led to power interruptions everywhere, including my house. The thing that sucks is that it kept messing with me. During thunderstorms, I usually don't bother to turn my computers off, because from experience, I've had no problems. I know many people think that it's very stupid of me to keep them on, but my computers have always come back to life when power is restored. Last week, this wasn't exactly the case. The only computer that got hurt during this storm was basically the most important computer in the house. I've been working on it for a year or so, gradually configuring some things. I had it perfectly setup for LDAP authentication from other clients, NFS, Samba using LDAP, network printing, Ravencore (a cool webhosting control panel), and a bunch of other things. All of that took a good bit of time. The thing that sucked about the storm is that power would go out...then on...then out...then on. My brothers depend on that computer for LDAP authentication and NFS for the computers in their rooms, so the computer has to stay on. Each time the power would go out, I'd turn that server back on when power was available. At the end of all that mess, the computer started acting funny. SSH no longer worked, the command "shutdown -h now" or "reboot" did nothing, and other weird things kept happening. To "fix" this, I decided to try fsck. A few things were apparently fixed, but this didn't solve any of my issues. I did a hard reboot and the problems persisted. My Debian machine has a grub entry for "recovery mode." I entered this mode and then tried fsck--it didn't look good. I got errors all over the place. I knew it wasn't a good sign, and I pretty much knew from then on that if I finished with fsck, my hard drive would be finished as well. Something made me continue on. After a million or so entries (I had to put a mass on the 'y' key), it was done. The ext3 filesystem was turned into ext2 because the journal was deleted. I tried a reboot, and that's all I got. Grub wouldn't load and everything from there on out is a mess. I have since formatted that hard drive and installed a fresh new copy of Debian Sarge. I'll have to spend countless hours bringing it back to what it was before. Luckily, no user folders were damaged because they were on a separate partition. I wonder if these fsck errors were because the root partition was mounted, but if so, why did fsck not produce so many errors when not in "recovery mode"?


Moral of the story: get a UPS and keep regular backups.

p.s. By my server "dying," it really didn't die. Only the data on the hard disk was hurt. The computer's hardware seems perfectly fine.

My host all of a sudden deleted my account "because of mp3 files" which I apparently had. I uploaded a 40kb ringtone to test a script, and my account gets deleted. Lesson learned: always make backups! I had just moved to this host so I didn't expect it to kill me so soon; I thought I had enough time before worrying about backups. Guess I was wrong. I'll be posting some stuff up as time passes on some things I use to make backups.