I’m pissed.
Happy Cogs recently did some work on the admin upgrade for WordPress 2.5. Through them, I found the hosting company Media Template. The pitch was appealing. They seemed professional, personal, all the things you’d want from a hosting company. That is, until I started digging.
One of their virtual server products costs $150 per month, and includes 2Tb of bandwidth. Excess bandwidth is charged, per Gb, at $2.56. Or, if you pre-purchase 1Tb, at half that price, $1.28 per Gb. That means that your first 2Tb cost $150, while your next 1Tb would cost $1′310.72, or 17.5 times more than your first 2Tb (1′748% to be precise).
Astounded by this absurdity I contacted their sales team. I was expecting the response to be in line with their website. Intelligent, considered, rational. I was sadly disappointed. It felt like the typical, corporate, monkey follow order, response you’d expect from Hewlett Packard or some other Indian outsourced outfit.
Not content to let matters lie, I have started a campaign. I have described my outrage at GetSatisfaction. Then I posted it to digg. Now I’m posting it here. Then I’m going to email all the links to the CEO and see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an intelligent response. Otherwise, I’ll publicise the fact that their ticket system allows you to view the email addresses of people who contact them.
Spotted this on Guy’s blog. Cisco made a presentation in India. There were 3 people on stage. One in India. Two in San Jose, onstage via live, holographic, 3d, video conferencing. Awesome! Check out the explanation and video.
I published the Real Global Terms and the SH Global Posts plugins today. It’s code I’ve had running for ages and have been promising to publish but never quite gotten round to it. Now it’s out, let the madness ensue… 
You can follow the mars landing on Twitter. Ain’t that awesome?
Twitter really has become ubiquitous technology. Everyone’s on it. If only they could come out with a revenue model, make some money, hire some more brains, and sort out their reliability issues. On a plus note, they’re recently blogging about failures or outages, which is nice.
I’ve spent a lot of this week fighting with svn. Things that should have been simple, somehow kept failing. I was merging changes from a read-only http repo into a local working copy, which is checked out from an https repo. For some reason, that doesn’t work. Normally it does, but on this large merge, it just borked.
Thankfully the remote repo is also available over https. That solved the first problem. I merged, tidied up, and was ready to commit. Then the commit failed because svn was trying to do something fancy with the merge-from repo. I don’t know what or why, but it wouldn’t commit the files. So then I spent hours and hours trying various things. In the end I reverted all the newly created files, then added them back to the working copy, and finally it would commit.
What a pain in the ass.
I’m planning to explore bazaar for all my own version control needs, and if it works well, I’ll switch all our projects over. I’m hoping, like Ubuntu, it just works.
I had some challenges with Zend Studio so I’m posting this for anyone with the same problems (and for my own records). I found the solution here. The issue is related to compiz. Additionally, Sun’s java5 needs to be the default java (set with `sudo update-java-alternatives`).
I have installed Ubuntu. It all seems to be running quite smoothly. VMWare is working, which is nice. I had some initial sound issues with Skype but it looks like it was a volume issue, sorted now. Waiting for Zend studio to download, hopefully that will be an easy install.
Overall, the process was rather painless. I’m loving synaptic package management. It really is much better than RPM. The desktop effects are taking a bit of getting used to. I can’t drag / drop windows onto the workspaces, but that’s not too big a deal.
So far, I’m pleased with the switch. For all you visual people, here’s a wee screenshot of the workspace switcher.
Some things that impressed me:
- Media buttons “just work”, I can play / pause / forward / etc music, beautiful.
- Installing copyright “questionable” plugins (MP3s, divx, etc) was painless and granny easy.
- The windows key does stuff, out of the box, not very useful stuff, but still stuff!
- I could import my pidgin, Evolution and something else data from Fedora. Nice.
- Desktop effects are enabled out of the box (compiz for the techies).
- Stuff prompts for configuration during install, for example ddclient. Handy.
I’m pleased I’ve switched over to Ubuntu. I’m a little wary that the #ubuntu channel is quite busy. Ubuntu seems to be popular with new linux users so there seem to be a lot of “newby” questions on there. Good they’re being answered, but it can be a pain for more experienced users.
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