I really have nothing to add.

Visualize a future with hippie-smacking, club-wielding juveniles. What happened next makes Kent State look like a love-in.

Reading Brian's account of his hosting woes, I couldn't help feeling good about my recent decision to dump Hosting Matters. I went to them for hosting back in 2002, when I'd seen how many of the bigger players were using them. I figured if they could handle the traffic generated by blogs like LGF and Instapundit, there shouldn't be much problem with a pissant little operation like You Bitch.

At first, everything seemed great. I had SSH access, though not root, and the machine was pretty quick. I could dick around with my .htaccess files all I wanted, and was generally pretty happy with the whole thing. So, I ordered a reseller account, and began getting friends and customers to do their hosting through me, at Hosting Matters.

And then, I stopped getting emails. I only realized it at first because I hadn't gotten spam in a day or two. Spam is sort of like a distributed, SMTP-only version of Nagio; it reminds you every now and then that you've got an email server running somewhere. So, I tried sending myself emails, and received neither errors nor emails; they just vanished into the bit bucket with nary a peep. I opened a trouble ticket, and received a reply a few hours later that my account was over its quota. As it turned out, all new email addresses were created with a 10MB maximum size. So, shrugging, I upped my quota in the control panel and went on with my life.

In the meantime, of course, all my customers were having the same problem, they just didn't know it. Unless you realize you're missing something, you'll never know that your mailbox is full. And if you're running IMAP, that 10MB is gone with the first batch of cat pictures your mom sends you. Any further emails that get sent your way will just be unceremoniously re-routed to /dev/null. Hosting Matters will summarily delete your data, plain and simple.

Administrators should do everythiing they can to ensure that one thing never happens: Data loss. That's really what 90% of administration boils down to. Data loss or, relatedly, data compromise through security or connectivity issues, is the definition of failure for admins, but at Hosting Matters, it's company policy.

Mail cannot be delivered when quotas have been reached. Quotas be can be removed by setting the quota value to 0.

Of course, that's only half the story. Maybe mail can't be delivered, but it most certainly can be bounced. It's what SMTP error codes were invented for. So, I ditched them and got myself a (quasi-) dedicated server where I'm the admin. And I brought all my customers and buddies with me.

Despite the fact that they have very capable support people, and good prices, I would never recommend Hosting Matters to anyone. And it's simply because they deleted my data for no reason, and without even having the courtesy to tell me they were doing it. Because really, not deleting my shit isn't too much to ask for in a hosting company.

Now, I've said before that this or that video is the awesomest video ever. I may have even believed it at the time. But this, without doubt, is the awesomest video ever.

I can't imagine how many times I'd sit through Bowling for Columbine if Charlton Heston had done that. I get stiff nipples just thinking about it. Hard as little rocks.

via Screw Loose Change

Apple's updated iWeb, their web publishing, blogging, and podcasting tool. It actually has comments in the blog part now. Before, it was absolutely worthless, but, in typically Apple fashion, they've waited until the comments were done right before doing them at all.

First off, you create a blog post like this one. Then, you enable comments in iWeb's inspector, rather confusingly under the 'RSS' tab.

And voila! Users will get an Add Comment thingamabob on the blog entry, complete with captcha. You can even allow users to upload attachments with their comments, but I've never really missed that feature before, so I think I'll ignore it. Although it could be very cool for things like asking for grainy cell-phone pictures of your readers' tits. For example.

Nice looking, that. Oddly, user comments aren't scanned for spam, as far as I can tell; and, unlike with most other blog systems, you won't be notified per email. What you will get is a dock notification in iWeb in the vein of Mail's notification.

At which point, you can go into iWeb and read comments or delete spam. Somebody really needs to make a Growl plugin to take care of this, though, as most people don't have iWeb open 24/7.

All in all, a great update for iWeb. It still not probably not suitable for a power blogger, since it lacks features like, oh, seeing your hits and stuff, but it's not bad for just throwing something out there.

The new MacBooks are here:

Downsides: I HATE GLOSSY LAPTOP SCREENS!!!1. Really. They reflect your fingers when you're typing, and it's annoying as hell. And if you happen to be playing Doom 3, you'll scare a dot in your panties when you reach to adjust the screen, since it looks like a big hairy flesh-covered spider is jumping right at your face. If you've got hairy fingers like I do, at least.

Everything else? Goal! Intel Duo Core, widescreen format, choice of black or white; it's all good. Notably, the black one will cost you $200 more than the white one. I'm not sure why, but they're probably figuring it'll be the new hotness. I'd be just as happy with a white one, personally.

Apple continues to push the iSight into every Mac user's hands. Ubiquitous, integrated video conferencing will be one of the Mac's big selling points, and it works (insanely easily) today.

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Actually, since I'm poor as a church mouse, I guess it's just another reason to hate my slacker nature.