After waiting a week for the “losing” domain registrar to relinquish their hold on a domain I am transferring, I was able to take the next step in migrating from my old host to my new one.
Domain fraud is apparently a real issue, as all the registrars have elaborate safety checks and balances built in to almost any transaction. While this a good it is a bit cumbersome at times. In order to move the And If You Did Know? domain I had to request a password from the old registrar and provide that to the new registrar as a way of establishing my bona fides. What I didn’t anticipate, although in hindsight this made perfect sense, was that I would be prevented from altering the name server information once the transfer process was underway. Had I added the new name servers to the list before initiating the transfer, I would have been done. By initiating the transfer I was locked out from updating the name servers.
The losing registrar held the transfer in limbo for a five days before actually releasing the domain. I was contacted and given a chance to refute the transfer request on the off chance that someone was trying to steal my domain registration. While I appreciated the care being taken to protect me, I found myself chaffing a bit as I had to wait.
This morning a quick dig of the domain showed that the old name server information was gone. I was able to complete the transfer process at the new registrar, and now am in the process of linking that domain to the source folder on my new server. Hopefully the site will be up and running by the time you read this posting.
Only two tasks remain to complete the migration: moving zanshin.net to its new home and establishing a domain for Sibylle’s profession site and transferring her site to its new home. With a long weekend coming up I am hoping to have everything moved and on the new server by early next week.
Last night I took the first major step towards moving all the sites I own or manage to Blue Host. Having learned from my first attempt at signing up, that the account name would be composed of characters from the initial domain name, I was faced with a bit of an issue. Of the three domains I wanted to move or create at Blue Host, none decomposed into an account name I was happy with.
So I created a new domain. I am now the proud owner of markhnichols.com.
When I first registered zanshin.net, nearly twelve years ago, I had toyed with the idea of a domain using my name. Now, I have a true vanity site. For now that site will be an online copy of my professional resume.
Now that I have an account at Blue Host it is time to start migrating the sites from Pair.com to their new home. The hidden advantage to creating a new site as the first under the account is that moving existing ones can be done leisurely. I can copy the contents and set everything up well before transferring the domain and updating the name server records. As a result, there shouldn’t be any down time as the sites move.
NB: There is nothing wrong with Pair in my view. I have been very happy with their services for a long time. My site has never been down, and on those few occasions that I needed help, they were prompt and courteous. My reasons for moving are purely monetary. I can host four sites (and more) at Blue Host for a year, for roughly what 6 month’s hosting at Pair cost.
It seems that the furor over the Beacon advertising framework in Facebook as finally reached a tipping point. Reversing an earlier statement, Mark Zuckerberg has apologized and Facebook now allows members to completely opt out of the Beacon “feature.”
I’m not sure if this is enough given the negative attention this has brought the service.
The new “opt out” settings only determine whether information collected by Beacon is displayed on Facebook, not whether that information is collected. In other words, your activities on participating sites is still collected and sent to Facebook’s servers. Facebook hasn’t jumped the shark at all, they are about to be devoured by a shark of their own creation.
I’m out and I intended to stay out.
Today marked the start of the 2007-2008 Car Hockey Season here in Kansas City. Freezing rain followed by a few inches of snow fall start this morning. By the time I left work at two o’clock, the roads were slick if not icy. Most people on the highway were driving a cautious 25 or 30 miles per hour. Not members of the Idiot Squad.
The Idiot Squad are all driving 4x4s or SUVs. (NB: Not all owners of urban Panzers are members of the Idiot Squad, and there are a few dunderheads in regular cars too.) What the pilots of these behemoth vehicles seems to have forgotten is that no matter how fancy their anti-skid, variable-assist-traction-controlled, anti-lock brake systems are, there is a finite limit to their adhesion on the road.
Sure, four-wheel drive gets you going faster than two. And being higher than most vehicles gets you about the spray of semi-frozen slush being tossed out from under neighboring cars tires. So you drive faster, slaloming through traffic with imagined impunity.
Until you need to stop, that is.
Then you discover, too late, that once you exceed the amount of traction you vehicle has, nothing in the world will stop you. Except other cars, the cement barrier in between you and on coming traffic, or the ditch off to the side of the road.
The only accident I saw on my commute home today was a large 4x4 pickup that lost traction and t-boned the center divider.
Do the rest of us a favor and slow down.
The first step in my site migration project is to backup all my data, all my content, everything. Since my hosting platform is Linux based, this was surprisingly easy.
First I issued this command:
$ tar cvf archive.tar *Next I compressed this archive using gzip. Like so:
$ gzip archive.tarThe resulting file, archive.tar.gzip, was then copied to my local computer.
Some parts of this site, and parts of the other sites I have hosted over the years at Pair, have made use of MySQL databases; I’ve used various referrer and site monitoring tools that all required relational databases for support. Before leaving Pair I want to back up the contents and structure of these data stores.
Using MySQL on my laptop I can issue a command in this format:
$ mysqldump --add-drop-table -h <hostname> -u <username> -p <databasename> | bzip2 -c database_yyyymmdd.bak.sql.bz2Once all 10 MySQL databases were dumped and compressed using this command I had a complete back up of my site: the presentation (HTML/CSS) files in the public_html directory and the underlying databases that feed the various sites their content.
My current assignment at work involves a large scale project that will ultimately effect how we create software. A small team has been crafting a new methodology, and has been making presentation of various aspects of the new life-cycle to a larger team comprised of managers. Due to the tight schedule for delivery of the new methodology, and the tight schedules of the parties involved, we have resorted to meeting over lunch, as that is the only time the quorum of parties is available.
The lunches have been catered, but with no announcement or menu provided to the participants. As a lifetime picky eater, going into a situation where I don’t have control over my food choice is uncomfortable at best. At worst it is acutely embarrassing for me. All the childhood feelings of not being the same as everyone else come roaring back to the surface and it takes considerable effort on my part to not feel like a kid caught playing grownup.
When the lunches have been some form of sandwich, with some extras, like chips or a cookie, I’ve been relatively comfortable. Today’s lunch was a salad, with a few scraps of meat, some croutons, and a tub of salad dressing. Ick.
So I sat through the rest of the meeting, mutely embarrassed by the untouched salad in front of me. There were some cookies provided as dessert so not all was lost.
My employer has a parking garage under the main building for associates. Unfortunately the company has grown so much in the past couple of years that there is no long sufficient room for everyone to park in this facility. My employer’s parent company has a number of real estate holdings in the downtown area, and one of those includes a large, multi-story parking garage more or less across the street from the building where I work. The associate overflow parks in this detached garage.
There is a waiting list for spaces in the underground garage. When I started last winter I was number 107 on this list. Meaning that 106 eligible associates would get a space in the building before it would be my turn. The company has been going through some reorganizations, moving associates between the two downtown locations, and there has been some attrition.
This week one of the web developers with whom I am acquainted is moving on to a new opportunity, creating an opening in the garage. A quick visit to the employee intranet to view the parking lot waiting list revealed that I have been moving up in the world. No longer am I number 107 on the list.
Now I’m number 77.
This morning I ran across this PC World article, where a researcher discovered that sites participating in the Beacon ad service with Facebook where transmitting details of transactions conducted even when the user clicked the ’no’ option and even when they were logged out of Facebook altogether.
Disturbing to say the least.
I have augmented my earlier Facebook scrubbing by removing all the cookies (there were several) that Facebook had left behind on my computer. If the Beacon service causes transaction data to be sent from participating sites regardless of whether I am signed in to Facebook or not, just deactivating the account isn’t enough.
Obviously the sites participating in the Beacon service are able to find and utilize the Facebook cookies to track customers activities, and then report on them to Facebook.
Having been active on the Internet for more than dozen years, and on BBS before that, I know fully well that my privacy is tenuous at best, that it is up to me to protect it. Facebook and Beacon are neither the first, not will they be the last, to stretch the limits of what is acceptable on the digital frontier. That they have reversed their position on what Beacon is or isn’t may make them less polished than other offenders, but no less intrusive.
Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling a rueful smile and gently shaking his head.
About three months ago, through one of Sibylle’s sons, I was introduced to Facebook. I am not the social network type, but it was interesting to be involved in something that was so popular. Unfortunately, as recent stories have shown, Facebook is perhaps not the safest place to have a digital representation of oneself.
Neither, as it turns out, is it the easiest place to exit. I spent roughly thirty minutes this morning unchecking or removing all the information I could. Some pieces of information couldn’t be removed. My birth date for example. Once you put that year in, it’s locked and cannot be changed. The month and the day are mutable and have been altered.
Part of the difficulty in removing yourself from Facebook is that so many of its features intertwine you with other members of the service. All the messages you posted, all the applications you installed, all the interactions with your friends leave a trace of you elsewhere.
I was able to eradicate most of my presence on the site, simply because I hadn’t participated in its many offerings. The final step was to “deactivate” my account. Facebook assumes that you will want to return some day, so you can’t (to my knowledge) delete your account. As near as I can tell, the only pieces of information left in my account are my email address, my name, and the year of my birth.
Last night I tried to create an account at Blue Host. While I was successful in creating an account, the process left a lot to be desired and as a result I almost immediately canceled the account.
In signing up you are presented with a page, where you input your name, email address, mailing address, and credit card information. Nowhere on the screen are you given any indication what your account name (ID) will be. At the bottom of the screen are two buttons: Next and Cancel.
Like most people who have interacted with web-based signup forms, I took the “Next” button to mean that there was an additional step to complete before the transaction was complete. Perhaps establishing the account name. I was wrong. Clicking next transmits your credit card information and, once the transaction is approved, you are presented with a “Welcome to your Account” page. In a few minutes you get an email with your account information, included a generated account name.
In my case I have two established domains I wish to move, and a new one I need to create. I decided to move the less active domain first. The account name that Blue Host created for me was the first eight characters of the domain name I provided. I was extremely unhappy with this choice. Using their 24/7 online chat help I asked if that could be changed. The answer was no.
I was directed to their online help desk, where I created a ticket asking for my account to be deleted. That page also gave a toll-free number to call for assistance. Upon calling I was fortunate enough to catch someone with the authority to cancel my account immediately, rather than having to wait until the next business day. Even so it will take five days for my credit to appear on the credit card. (That I can spend money in twelve seconds but not get refunded for five days is the subject of another post.)
Now I must reevaluate Blue Host. Do I want to continue with them? Or should I go elsewhere. That a process as simple as creating an account should be handled in such a way as to be upsetting to me, doesn’t bode well for future interactions with them. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for Blue Host, there are many, many choices in the domain hosting market space.