Dan Grossman | 2007 March

Forgetting the Details

March 29, 2007

For a couple minutes, I just couldn’t figure out why this site had slowed to a crawl. After eliminating more serious potential causes (compromised server, DoS of some sort, etc), and taking a look at the bandwidth graphs, it finally dawned on me. This new server was maxing out its 10mbps port because I [...]

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Record High Fraud Rate

March 28, 2007

This isn’t the kind of record I want to be setting: My credit card chargeback rate for March is now at 13%; higher than August 2006’s 10% and over 11% higher than my yearly average for 2006. After talking to most of the card holders personally, they not only didn’t place the orders their [...]

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There’s more to Vista than Flip3D

March 24, 2007

I just finished reading Windows Vista: more than just a pretty face, the first part of ars technica’s Vista review. It’s a very interesting article if you’re curious about why Vista really took so long to complete and what it offers beyond semi-transparent window borders.

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Where’s My FiOS?

March 22, 2007

My cable internet has been up and down (99% down) for more than a day now. I’ve been using my email client refreshing every minute to tell when the connection is up for the few minutes each hour to submit assignments and download final exam study guides. Comcast has nothing to say about the [...]

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Whoa. Authorize.net has a recurring billing API?

March 20, 2007

I was days away from signing up for a new payment gateway, maybe a new merchant account to get access to it, for a recurring payment API. The credit card subscriptions for W3Counter are a mess because it’s all done manually — Authorize.net didn’t have an API for their recurring billing feature, and I [...]

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Choosing a Car GPS

March 20, 2007

I need to buy one of those GPS units for your car that provide driving directions. I plan to buy one this week, because I’m horrible with directions. I never mastered the roads where I grew up, I rarely go more than a few blocks from my apartment in Philadelphia where the roads are [...]

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Time To Rewrite a Few Million Pieces of Software

March 19, 2007

This isn’t exactly news, but I just read about it today on another blog. Someone managed to get patent #7028023 for “a computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences”.

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Dedicated Server Setup Checklist

March 18, 2007

You’ve outgrown shared hosting and decided to start renting a server of your own. Since you’re still on a tight budget, you want an unmanaged server, where full responsibility for configuring and managing the server is yours. These are the steps I go through every time I set up a new server for web [...]

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If You Can See This…

March 17, 2007

It means the DNS change for this domain has propogated to your ISP. The move of all my sites from two servers at NAC and one at LayeredTech to two brand-new servers at SoftLayer is under way. As is the process of putting all 40+ websites under version control at a third location. Read [...]

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