Tag: Technology

I just thinned out the categories and eliminated all the #tags from my blog.

It had gotten to be a pain in the ass to keep track of something like 250 distinct items to categorize the posts.

So I eliminated a ton of stuff.

I spent some time re-categorizing a lot of posts that ended up in the “General” area. No doubt I’ll be continuing the process over the next weeks.

I think I’m going to see if I can pare the list down some more, but my eyes are about to fall out.

This should make it easier for me down the road if I decide to make some more major changes to the blog.

Hopefully I haven’t destabilized anything.

Over the past year, Hostgator has become increasingly more difficult and their staff is becoming increasingly arrogant.

Case in point. I have a client whose web site was suddenly just, ‘gone’.

I’d received no notifications of any billing that was due, and neither had they.

So I go digging through all the invoices I have on my account and couldn’t find any evidence that I’d fronted the money for the domain name. The client also couldn’t find any evidence that they’d paid for the domain name.

In checking through my invoices I ran across one invoice that said it was a bill for two domains but neither of the domain names was listed.

Weird…

So After waiting 50 minutes on hold, I get connected to a snotty person in billing. This person tries to make the problem about me and my mismanagement of the domain. Uhhh NO! And this guy keeps cutting me off mid sentence as I’m trying to answer his question about if I’d properly entered the DNS information. Uhhh yeah I guess I did since the site has been up for 3 freaking years!

I was talking to my client at the same time I had this guy from Hostgator on the phone. Yes, it was a bit of a ploy. I could have muted my mic or put the Hostgator rep on hold. I didn’t because I wanted him to hear exactly what I was saying.

“Well, this guy I’m talking to has yet to provide any information about this mystery invoice, and can’t seem to find any invoice with your domain name on it.”

The guy at Hostgator got a little excited about that. Then asks to place me on hold.

After a few minutes he comes back and say that the mystery invoice is in fact the invoice for the two domains that have been suspended. (The original invoice was for 3 years beginning in 2012, which means that it expired in 2015.)

Since the invoice and the associated domains were apparently somehow botched up in Hostgators billing system, it meant that the Hostgator systems never sent a billing notice, generated a request for payment, or notified anyone that these domains were due for renewal.

Uhhh how is this my fault?

After a brief pause suddenly the Hostgator rep is very interested in getting this resolved.

Point is, with one notable exception, every time I’ve contacted Hostgator in the recent past they’ve been snotty and arrogant and pretty much unhelpful until I’ve held their feet to the fire.

In other words they’ve begun to behave like typical IT people in large companies.

There’s a reason most employees bring their own shit into a company. It’s because the IT people are such assholes that nobody wants to deal with them.

IT people often forget that they exist to serve their clients not the other way around.

One Hostgator rep was very helpful a couple of weeks ago. He told me that my website had malware.

“Okay,” I said, “Which of the 10 sites that I host are your referring to?”

“You should have malware protection on your sites.”

“Dude, not at a cost of 9.99 or 19.99 per month per site! And by the way, aren’t you supposed to be monitoring for that kind of stuff? Why did I have to ask you if there was something going on with a particular site? Why did one of your colleagues just tell me that they found no evidence of malware? Are you just trying to sell me a rather expensive service?”

Suddenly, that representative went silent.

Regarding malware protection on sites, I wouldn’t mind paying for a service if it protected my main site and all the sites I host. Just scan the whole tree say up to 25 individual domains, once a day. That would be fine and it would be a worth while expense.

Ahh suddenly the domains are associated with my account. I’ve even got an invoice. Yippee! Paid it just now, but the site isn’t up yet.

Looks like all the DNS info is correct although it’s curious why some of my DNS entries point to one server and some of them point to another. I’d have thought that all my sites would be hosted on the same server as my main umbrella site.

Why do I feel like I’m peeling an onion?

I’ll give it a couple more hours then if the sites are still not back we’ll have another conversation with Hostgator.

I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something else going on. I wonder if they switched the server that my stuff is hosted on and that has caused a bunch of weird little problems.

It’s probably worth my time to get it straightened out, since I’m going to be with them for another couple of years. However, based on what I’m seeing I think the next couple years I’ll be shopping and comparing Hosting providers.

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Update:

After waiting 48 hours, my client’s website still wasn’t up. I called Hostgator once again.

This time, I got hold of someone from the Old Hostgator. That Texas drawl was somehow comforting and he got right on the situation. No nonsense, no bullshit. It was, “I see, well let me check on that.”

A moment or two later he said that’s strange, then a couple of moments later, he was asking for my client’s website address again. Then he said, “There it is.” and started describing the site. I checked it on my end and there the client site was.

“Sometimes the DNS propagation takes time and the occasional kick in the pants.”

I swear if I could talk to that guy every time I needed something I’d be a seriously happy camper.

Trouble is, I know that it’s catch as catch can, and the next time I call them it’s likely I’ll be talking to someone not from Texas. They may be in Texas, but they’re not from Texas, there’s a big difference.

For the moment, everything is up and running. It only took two phone calls and one online chat session to get the issue resolved.

There was a large (2GB) update this morning to El Capitan, and Xcode.

My computer notified me of this right after Sophos Anti Virus (Which is a great AV program, by the way) told me that there was a trojan virus of some kind on my machine.

Lovely!

The trojan was in an email and had been sent to the Junk folder, in addition to Sophos quarantining it. I love it when software does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

For those of you who may be interested, the mail containing the virus looks like it’s a zipped invoice. The text is terse and looks for all the world like someone is sending you a copy of an invoice that you either need to pay or that you’ve already paid.

In other words it looks innocent and as busy as we are this time of year I could see any of us opening the thing, thinking it was something to do with a gift.

I have to admit, I have a grudging respect for whoever created this little bit of nastiness. It’s simple and innocuous. No logos, or florid attempts to fool anyone into believing anything. It’s simply, “Here is your invoice, thank you for your business.”

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The Xcode update was also 2GB.

My computer was a busy little camper!

Apple says the OS X update is about security and stability improvements. I can say that it “feels” snappier.

My system is currently backing up 12GB of changes, apparently caused by the updates so obviously I’m not going anywhere for a little while.

Anticipating a big backup, I connected my computer via hardline to the network. Gigabit Ethernet should make this a little bit quicker than WiFi. Even so, the time estimate is about 2 hours.

Well off to work on Job applications. If just one application is on the Taleo site, two hours should be just about right. Then I’ll see what other trouble I can get into today.

Sometimes even the best of systems gets hoisted by its own petard.

I was using my computer the other day and moved from one room to the other. I got distracted and my computer went to sleep. Situation normal, this chain of events happens all the time.

Except when I came back woke my computer and tried to fire up a program that I use off & on almost every day.

Then my computer said

“This program is damaged and can’t be opened. Delete the program and download it again from the App Store.”

I tried another program,

“Licensing Error. A license was found but it does not appear to be for this computer.”

And another program,

“This program was purchased on another computer. Please enter your ID to authorize this program for use with this computer.”

Whoa! Something is seriously wrong.

OK

Rebooting!

Same problem, and then I realize the issue is only with programs that I’ve  purchased from the Apple App Store. Okay, I re-enter my app store ID, then I’m told that’s not the right ID. I power down the machine and try again. It shouldn’t have mattered and it didn’t, but I wanted a pristine system to begin troubleshooting.

After a few more minutes, I get the App Store to accept my ID by specifically telling the App Store to log me out then logging back in. Progress!

I still can’t get any programs from the App Store to work. I pick one that doesn’t store a lot of data, for example a utility instead of my checkbook program, then delete it.

The App Store shows that the program is available for download / installation.

I download it and try to execute it.

“This program is damaged and can’t be opened. Delete the program and download it again from the App Store.”

OK WTF?

I call Apple.

After fighting through their “Helpful voice prompt with genuine people personality” I get hold of someone in iTunes support. Because guess what? There doesn’t seem to be a selection that Mr. Roboto understands as needing help with the Application Store.

You’d think that would be one of the options they offer at a top level menu… You’d be dead wrong!

Anyhow, I get transferred to a nice person who works in the app store help department and after walking through all the steps that I tried on my own he’s really confused too.

I pick another program and delete it while he’s on the line, then I re-download this one and whadaya know? It works.

I ask if there’s something going on in the App Store. He checks and says, “Nope, nothing amiss for the past 8 hours.”

Okay…

I delete and reinstall every program I’ve purchased from the App Store. ALL but one is working again. The one I’m having problems with is a problem with that piece of software and the company admits they’ve got a problem they’re working to resolve on their website.

I go on with my day and think, “That was damn strange.”

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This morning I see an article in Computerworld, Lapsed Apple certificate triggers massive Mac app fiasco. I read the article and think… “No Shit?”

There’s always been a slight tightness in the pit of my stomach about using cloud application stores.

I categorically refuse to use the Adobe cloud mostly because the cost is prohibitively high.

I do use the Microsoft Office cloud based suite because it’s cheap and efficient. Even if it can’t “phone home” for a while the programs still work and then degrade gracefully.

I never in my wildest dreams thought about programs not only refusing to launch, but also giving completely erroneous information about what the heck their problem was because of a lapsed security certificate.  

Apple could have, and should have given a message that specifically said the certificate was expired. Then when they fixed the certificate everything should have been updated and we’d have been inconvenienced, but at least the customers wouldn’t have been wasting time deleting and reinstalling software.

I like the opening paragraphs of the Computerworld article.

“A lapsed Apple digital certificate today triggered a massive app fiasco that prevented Mac users from running software they’d purchased from the Mac App Store.

“Whenever you download an app from the Mac App Store, the app provides a cryptographically-signed receipt,” explained Paul Haddad, a co-founder of Tapbots, the company behind the popular Tweetbot Twitter client, in an email reply to questions today. “These receipts are signed with various certificates with different expiration dates. One of those is the ‘Mac App Store Receipt Signing;’ that expires every two years. That certificate expired on ‘Nov 11 21:58:01 2015 GMT,’ which caused most existing App Store receipts to no longer be considered valid.”

Whoops.

The result: Bedlam.”

Understatement, but Bedlam is a great word that isn’t used much these days.

It does make me rethink using the App Store. Perhaps, I’d be better off going back to the old way of doing things.

On the one hand the App store means that I only have my credit card registered on one site, the old way I’d have my card spread around the internet like a $2 whore.

Maybe software vendors could start using Bitcoin, so we don’t have to expose our credit card info?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA!  

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath…