KRKeegan

After our trip to Peru a year and a half ago we decided that we wanted to do another Jungle/Adventure trip but at the same time we wanted to have the opportunity to relax and sun ourselves a bit.

We ended up choosing Belize because of its proximity to the US and the varied experiences it offered.  We planned out a two week trip which included a week in the jungle and a week at Ambergris Caye.

Based on our research the peak travel season to Belize is late December to early January. So we planned our trip for December 27 - January 10.

Our general itinerary was as follows:

Overview of CallBack System

A CallBack system requires three parts.  Part A is the CallBack Service itself, Part B is the originating participant (you), and Part C is the destination participant (the person you wish to call).

A phone call is initiated by you informing the CallBack Service that you want to make a phone call.  The initiation can be accomplished through a phone call, web page, sms text, email, or other supported mechanism.  The CallBack System then calls you back at a specified phone number.  Finally, you are then able to initiate a phone call to the person you wish to call through this connection.

The benefit of this system is that as the initiating caller you only need to make a brief outgoing phone call, or possibly no outgoing calls.  The majority of your conversation is handled as an incoming call.  This is really handy when you have free incoming calls.  Another benefit is more reasonable calling rates. 

My Search for a CallBack Provider

During our recent trip to Belize I wanted to have a way to call the United States.  I discovered that phone cards the rates were rather expensive.  Plus most hotel rooms, even the really nice ones, do not have phones in Belize.

High Density Networks ("HDN") which listed itself as the "premier provider of wireless communication services for multi-dwelling units" appears to have gone belly-up.  HDN provides internet services for many apartment buildings in California, including may properties managed by Scott Properties. In addition, HDN provides satellite TV service and in some cases VOIP telephone service.  Generally this service was cheaper than similar service through larger companies.  In my case my internet service cost $29.99 a month on a month-to-month contract.

HDN's business model typically involved entering contracts with owners of multi-dwelling units to install a network infrastructure and to provide wireless internet to the building's residents.  HDN appears to have done this with varying success.  From personal experience I can say that the internet service provided by HDN was never stellar.  Similar to other shared networks, such as cable internet, the service provided is greatly affected by the number of users in your building using the internet concurrently.

Many people have reported headaches and problems with HDN.  Some users vehemently disliked HDN as evidenced by this entry in the Davis Wiki.  Recently HDN made some alterations to its network infrastructure which in my experience increased speeds but greatly decreased the usability of the network by barring all incoming connections.

It appears that last Wednesday, October 14, 2009, all service provided by HDN came to an end.

I really hate complaining about Dreamhost, I know it may seem like I enjoy it, but I really don't.

This is probably no surprise to some of you.  But remember the custom .procmail setups I wrote about a few months back.  To catch you up, no one can create a mail user with shell access on Dreamhost anymore.  This means that custom .procmail setups cannot be done anymore.(There may be a work around to this, but it has not been accomplished yet)  Dreamhost previously told us that anyone who had an email address with shell access would be grandfathered in and would be able to keep it.

Well not anymore.  I have received warnings from other Dreamhost users that once your account is "upgraded" in the upcoming migration process, you will lose all custom .procmail setups and all mail accounts will lose their shell access.  All of this has happened with NO WARNING for a number of users.

This means you may wake up in the morning and find that your custom filtering no longer works.  More and more it looks like Dreamhost no longer wants to host email.

I looked quickly and did not see any code out there to determine the nth occurrence of a specific day of the week in a month.  For example Thanksgiving is the 4th Thursday in November.  So I designed the following

<?php
$year = 2012; //Pick your year
$interval = 4; //Week number, in this case the 4th week
$dayofweek = 4; //Day of week 0=Sun, 1=Mon. . .
$month = 11; //Month 1=Jan, 2=Feb

$firstday = jddayofweek(gregoriantojd($month, 1, $year), 0);
if($firstday <= $dayofweek){
  $date = (($interval * 7)-6) + ($dayofweek - $firstday);
}
else{
  $date = (($interval * 7)-1) + (6 - $firstday);
}
echo date("n/j/Y", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $date, $year));
?>

It looks a little messy, but it works perfectly

Sorry I don't have much time at the moment to write up a whole entry about this, but I am very excited about this.

I am a big fan of roundcube but I have always wanted the ability to integrate some instant messaging into it.  Well google finally released a gtalk gadget that allows you to integrate gtalk/gchat into any page you want.  Although, google has done a very poor job of announcing this and I don't think most people know about it.

Anyways, it is a very simple single line <iframe> code.  I just quickly added it to the roundcube template and made a few changes to the CSS code and it works perfectly.

Click the image above to see a larger screen shot.  I will write up the code for this later when I have some free time.

Well it has been a year since I moved my site to Dreamhost.  It has certainly been a turbulent ride. My biggest complaint is that the company is run in a very unprofessional manner.  But there are numerous other problems as well.

The semi good news is that after a year of service I can now report on the uptime provided by Dreamhost.  In the end I received 99.886% uptime.  Which sounds good at first, but in the end this amounts to over 10 hours of downtime.  Nearly half a day!  Luckily, I really only rely on Dreamhost for email, however with their recent suggestion that Dreamhost will no longer offer email, I am a little uneasy about continuing with them.

But, I have a few months of free service creditted to me for all the crap I have put up with.  So I will be researching other hosting options over the next few months.

Full breakdown of the downtime is available after the jump.

Admittedly I have been very annoyed with Dreamhost since they announced that users would no longer be able to use procmail.  I still feel that my complaints are valid.  Dreamhost handled the removal of this feature in a very poor manner.  For a while, it did not seem like they recognized how serious this actually was.  Notably, Josh in a blog entry joked that Dreamhost no longer wanted to host email.

After that post, a firestorm among clients ensued with over 100 comments.  And it seems like they may have taken a few steps back and reconsidered their position.  A later comment by Dallas seems to suggest that Dreamhost is trying to quickly remedy the absence of procmail. 

Sidenote

As a side note, we seem to have been given a slight glimpse into the balance of personalities at the core of Dreamhost.  Josh has always been the more vocal of the two.  But, Josh has also been very unprofessional at times.  In this most recent post, it seems likely that while Josh may be more vocal, Dallas is the professional face of Dreamhost and the person truley in charge. 

How to get procmail Back

Back to the point of this article, after reading the most recent entry I realized that it is possible to still use both procmail and spamassassin.  However, this solution is not elegant.

Associated Press excerpt ------------------------

President Bush stated on Monday that, "[he] understand[s] American's pain at the pump" and has suggested a possible fix for rising gas prices. The Bush administration notorious for suggesting unorthodox solutions to problems, is now advocating a switch to the metric system as a means to solve rising gas prices. Such unconventional ideas are not without precedent, in the past the Bush administration has extended Daylight Saving Time, in The Energy Policy Act of 2005, as a means to cut back on oil consumption.

I have noticed a bug in javax.microedition.pim.RepeatRule, when I tried to set a an event to repeat every second sunday of may I would get an event that repeated every second sunday of april. I determined that this was being caused by MONTH_OF_YEAR being deincremented by 1 month after the event was committed.

I worked around the problem by setting the value one month forward. However obviously, this does not work for december. I tried increasing the value of the MONTH_OF_YEAR setting, however java balks at any unknown value. Currently I am unable to set an event to occur on the second sunday in december. If anyone figures out a work around I would be greatful.

RIM has recognized that this is a bug, but who knows when the bug will be fixed. I attached a copy of the email I received from RIM:

As promised I made significant improvements to the Funambol Blackberry Client, while the improvements are geared towards better functionality with ScheduleWorld.com, they should benefit individuals who use other SyncML servers as well.

The Improvements in 3.0.8.4 include:

• Ignore milliseconds in date, fixes duplication on slowsync
• Properly display entities such as quotes and ampersands
• Allday events now show up on week and month view
• Multiday Allday events are no longer short one day
• All day events no longer duplicate on SlowSync
• Accept basic ISO 8061 dates
• Fixed error message that popped up whenever sending an email
• Removed configuration section relating to email since Schedule World does not support email
• Altered default settings in configuration to match Schedule World settings
• Added AutoSync Feature - The client will query the server for changes every X hours.

You can no longer create a shell account with a custom SpamAssassin install on Dreamhost anymore.

Why am I so upset about this? Because this was one of my main reasons for using Dreamhost. A custom install of SpamAssassin(SA) allows me to use custom rulesets, ClamAssassin(Virus Checker), DCC, pyzor, Razor, and much more. Without a custom install I am left with the default Junk Mail filterig provided by Dreamhost. This Junk Mail filter is based on an UNCUSTOMIZABLE install of a very old version of SA. The end result is a poor Spam Filter.

And honestly a poor Spam Filter is basically worthless.

1. Dreamhost Advertised a Custom SpamAssassin Install when I Puchased my one year Contract.

Yup, in fact they still promiss it on their Hosting Features page. They also provided instructions and support for how to use it here, here, and here. Additionally, they have provided continual service for this over the years. You will note that each of those pages contains a warning that this feature is no longer available. I had to fight to get that warning admitted to the wiki, more on that later.

At no point did Dreamhost ever say that procmail support may be deleted at anytime. Nor did they give any indication that procmail support would be revoked at any point in time.

Those of us without a Blackberry Enterprise Server cannot automatically synchronize our calendar and contacts with our PC without directly pluging the Blackberry directly into the PC with a USB cable. This is where Funambol and ScheduleWorld come in. ScheduleWorld is a SyncML server, basically a Calendar and Contacts server. Funambol is an open source SyncML client for the blackberry. By using both of these programs you can sync your calendar and contacts to your PC over the air, without directly connecting your Blackberry to your PC. There are numerous tutorials for how to set this sytem up so I won't waste your time discussing it here.

However, the Funambol ScheduleWorld setup has had one main issue for over a year. The problem stems from the fact that Funambol also allows for the synchronization of email while ScheduleWorld does not. Funambol allows users to unselect mail from synchronization. But even with mail unchecked Funambol still does some check of the mail which causes an error. Currently users will get the following error when sending an email:

Sorry you can't synchronize "mail", because the name of 
the Remote Mail in the Funambol configuration panel 
mismatches the corresponding name on the server.

Users then had to select "resend" to force their email to send. Needless to say the whole process was very annoying. Funambol is an open source project so I decided to take a look.

RIM has never fully supported IMAP servers in their Blackberry Internet Service(BIS) formerly Blackberry Web Client(BWC). Notably BIS does not recognize the NAMESPACE command from IMAP servers. The vast majority of IMAP servers place all user folders in a single parent folder(usually INBOX) therefore the Sent and Trash folders are actually INBOX.Sent and INBOX.Trash. Unfortunately BIS only recognizes Sent and Trash in the base directory.

This script sits between the BIS and your IMAP server. The proxy then makes INBOX.Sent and INBOX.Trash appear to be Sent and Trash. This enables BIS to save a copy of your sent emails into INBOX.Sent properly and a copy of deleted emails into INBOX.Trash properly.

Additionally this script allows you to use a non standard folder as your inbox as well.

TiVo Central Online is pretty cool, it allows you to program your TiVo to record an upcoming show or season pass from the interent. I wanted to be able to access TiVo Central anywhere I went, unfortunately TiVo Central is not available for Mobile devices. So I decided to whip up a quick PHP script to parse TCO and repaginate it into a mobile friendly html site. This is all accomplished in 480 lines of php code. The script allows for searching of upcoming shows by title, description, or cast members. After searching you can select the specific showing and record it using a one time or season pass recording. Additionally the script allows access to all advanced recording options and will send you an email to confirm the recording.