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Where did the last 4 month's blog posts go?
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5/17/2009 9:57:02
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My web host has seen fit to royally screw me over. See Adam's take and below, my version of the story.
Dear Sirs/Madams,
Good afternoon! My name is Zachary Goldberg and I have been a
Powweb customer for more than three years. It saddens me today to
write to you to say that after more than three years a situation has
arisen which is causing me great distress. I would like to explain my
current problem and implore you to help me. My main problem is that
all of the data on my powweb account has been
deleted!
Recently I was contacted by your legal department about "files in
violation of policy". I immediately responded to that email from your
legal team asking the most obvious question "Well, I have a lot of
files, which ones are in violation?". After two or three
correspondences
via your ticket system I learned that "files beginning with zi*
outside your htdocs folder" were in violation. Well, I had put no
such files there but sure enough there were more than 4,000 files with
seemingly random names beginning with zi outside my htdocs folder. I
promptly logged in with ftp and deleted all of those files. I assumed
that by doing this everything would be alright.
Three days later my friend and co-owner of the account (Adam Shefki,
CC'ed on this email) called me saying "Whats up, the website is down?
Also, can you log into the FTP?". I checked the ftp, I could log in,
but all of the files were missing!
And so, two days later and after many calls to your support department
(mostly with the "Support Supervisor" named Lester) I have received no
reason for why the files were deleted. I spent more than two hours on
the phone with Lester yesterday (Friday, 5/15). By the end of the day
though, Lester had promised the issue was being resolved and our files
would be back by the end of the day. Today I find the following two
response on my open support tickets:
Hello,
I am writing to you to follow up on the Support Ticket #6004981 . I
had requested you to get back to us with more information on your
issue, but there has been no response from you. I'd like to continue
to assist you with your issue, but unfortunately cannot do so, without
further information. At this point in time, I'm going to resolve your
Support Ticket, temporarily. If you'd like to reopen your ticket, you
can do so from your Support Console at any time.
Regards!
Archie Scott
Customer Support
and
Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for contacting support.
I regret, it will not be possible to restore the files at this point,
until our business department has looked into this issue. There is
currently an open ticket to them, but the department is closed over
the weekend, so I am not able to assist further at this point. I
apologize for the inconvenience that this may cause.
Thank You,
Jim M.
Technical Support
The first email says they tried to ask for information. I have
received no phone calls or emails or any other communication from
Powweb since I hung up with Lester yesterday. The second email
confuses me even further, Lester had already assured me the issue
would be taken care of! Also, I am very confused as to why the
business department needs to be involved.
I called your support department this evening who informed me that
there is an additional comment in the ticket system which says
something about a "Disk Space Violation" of which I have heard nothing
about!
Please, I implore you to empathize with me. The websites I administer
have been down for more than two days and I am extremely concerned
about being able to recover the data on the servers! Some of the data
would be excruciating
or even impossible to recover. I am not a spammer or a seller of
anything in appropriate, I maintain a simple personal blog for myself
and a hobbyist blog for my friend Adam.
- Hide quoted text -
Please, is there any way you can help us?
Sincerely,
A customer begging for some help,
Zachary Goldberg
-Zach Goldberg
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Fundamental Change in America, Trust
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12/19/2008 8:56:27
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Those of you who know me well know Lawrence Lessig is one of my personal heroes. As such I of course check his blog on an hourly basis and eagerly consume everything he puts there.
Today he blogged a, i'll call it version 2, of his "How we can fix America" story. I've heard all of the arguments he has made here before but every time they get more concise and more convincing. If you have never heard him talk or you have even an inkling of suspicion that American government needs improvement over its current form I highly suggest you stop by and listen. I know its long, but definitely informative and worthwhile.
-Zach Goldberg
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Dear America
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12/18/2008 9:9:30
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Alright, time for some hard truth. We're in trouble, big trouble. The economy, failing auto industries, our falling position as a world economic power (It's estimated China's GDP will surpass the USA by 2015), falling favor in international political circles (Who throws a shoe?).
Uncle Sam has already assigned Billion of the "Bank Bailout" (Which they may not be keeping very close tabs on). However, the auto bailout seems unlikely to happen as of now. I have no qualms with this, the US auto industry put themselves into this predicament and rightfully needs a good bankruptcy to reorganize and figure out how to make a good product.
So while I am comfortable with telling the big 3 to reorganize themselves, I think we have a bigger problem coming up. The US doesn't make stuff anymore, a fundamental problem if we want to claim 'energy independence' or any form of independence for that matter. Especially when it comes to batteries. So it seems we haven't yet decided to build a big battery plant ourselves. Normally I would agree that the market should be responsible for making a move here but we've seen what the US markets tend to do as far as making stuff ourselves. It's time we got somebody to actually decide 'Yes, I want to build here, in the US of A, something that will fuel American energy independence.' And if that means more government ("socialist") money to kick start it, well for once we would be putting money into our future as opposed to using it as band aides for our past failures.
Speaking of electricity, GM's Volt seems like lots of smoke and mirrors right now. Today they announced they are shutting down the plant which was set to make the Volt's engine. Yet somehow they still plan to produce the car. Call me skeptical but a car without an engine, even if its an electrical engine, will not outsell the competition.
-Zach Goldberg
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Outscooping slashdot
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12/14/2008 4:48:48
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A good friend of mine, Maarten Lankhorst, has been working hard lately on Wine64, getting native 64bit windows applications to work in Wine. In the last World Wine Newsletter (ain't the new theme pretty?) I had an article on the very same thing slashdot reported on a week later. So I guess I scooped slashdot? Sad my readership isn't that high.
-Zach Goldberg
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Long time no updates
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10/19/2008 4:35:45
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Just some small tidbits of whats been going on lately:
- I've been putting a lot of time into STWing (A science and technology program at Penn) lately. We've built a catapult, held an awesome super smash bros. tournament, are having dinner with Turing Award winner Andy Yao and more.
- Spending a bunch of time on the electric car
- Working on teaching a class in Linux. The class has had some fun assignments such as rewriting their xorg.conf, configuring their own kernel etc.
- Attended Wineconf 2008 which was a heck of a lot of fun. Still writing that newsletter! See winehq.org for those updates.
And of course between all that and class things have been busy.
-Zach Goldberg
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GNOME-Do Plugin
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4/24/2008 8:52:56
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At 2AM last night I decided I liked GNOME-Do, so much so that I was willing to stay up an extra hour late and write a plugin for MPD; because I was told writing such plugins was easy and I wanted quick access to my music.
So I did, and the results: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomeDo/Plugins/MPD (Source)
-Zach Goldberg
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The internet has failed me.
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3/31/2008 7:22:29
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I get frustrated rather quickly by 5, 6, 12 email long conversations simply trying to find a time to meet sometimes. As such I have been looking to sync my MS Outlook Calendar with something public like Google Calendar for a long time.
Well last night I tried to redo my entire scheduling routine. I figured I would go 100% syncML, a business-style standard fully supported by my phone. I wanted sunbird on my desktop and laptop, google calendar and my phone to all be in sync. The end result: Somehow in the year 2008 such a thing is. not. possible. PERIOD!
Long story short, I did a lot of digging and one of the only things (maybe the) only website I could find which serviced all these clients was scheduleworld.com. An extraordinarily promising website promising to sync everything six ways from Sunday.
Scheduleworld works... ish. I could sync most things some of the time. However, 95% of the time somewhere in the chain a duplicate would be introduced, or something would go missing, or a recurring MWF event would somehow not show up on wednesday etc. In short: It was unpredictable. I spent more than 6 hours tinkering; nada.
Thus I bit the ultimate bullet, and went back to MS Office -- which in its own right as a scheduler isn't so terrible. Its just horribly inoperable with everything else, aka it doesn't sync with GCal nicely.
However google has introduced a tool to sink a single outlook calendar with GCal. Its primitive. Outlook has folders and such and google will only pick one of them. So I had to basically wipe my 'main' calendar and redo it (10th time in the last 2 days...). Anyway, I'm now back with outlook and using Google's Calendar sync to give you: my public calendar for knowing when I'm available.
-Zach Goldberg
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What of Android Messenger?
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3/15/2008 11:23:37
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So its been a while since I've mentioned the messenger. I did go through the effort of updating the code for the most recent SDK release however I'm not going to be releasing the code for any future updates until May.
I'm not going to be entering Google's developer challenge with the code; instead the code has become the platform for a final project in the class I am TA-ing at Penn: hence why I am not releasing any of the code for a while. The project hasn't yet been given out to the students so I cannot post too much information here, however for those interested in just playing with android I will also post the writeup here for people to play with.
-Zach Goldberg
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An intellectual comment on slash?
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2/15/2008 10:39:14
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http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=455348&cid=22434838
Let me preface this comment by saying I am not an American, but an observer of American politics and culture.
It is a sad testament to the strength of anti-intellectualist tendencies in American culture that American politicians tend to have little academic expertise on the issues pertaining to the policies they espouse (e.g. Ted Stevens' "internet = series of tubes").
The benefit provided by academic expertise is not simply the number of degrees one acquires, but dialogical engagement with other experts who dedicate themselves to finding fault in arguments (via journals, conferences, etc). Thus, the arguments presented by an academic to the general public may well be bastardized (because simplified) versions of the arguments they would present within academia, but we (the public) can assure ourselves that those arguments could be elucidated in ways that stand up to some level of harsh criticism.
To put one's faith in the honesty of a politician whose views and arguments arose in an academic setting, then, is a better bet than putting one's faith in the honesty of a politician who may only be concerned with rhetorically covering up his/her true influences (e.g. pressure by lobbyists or campaign contributions). Lessig for congress is, in my eyes, a good move regardless of how much/little I may agree with him politically. This is simply because the development of his views and arguments is well documented in his books and articles, and with reference to an academic context which is accessible to anyone interested in putting the time into investigating it.
As I see it, this would be a move towards transparency in government, which is a prerequisite for true democracy.
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-Zach Goldberg
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