Over six months ago, everyone’s favorite online marketing “radio” station switched their content delivery to Akamai. They gave various public reasons for the switch, but the reality was that Limelight was sucking at it. I’m not sure how it can be that hard to stream out the 3-4 listeners that WMR has, but apparently Limelight couldn’t hack it.

So they switched to the #1 fastest growing tech company who also happens to be the #1 content delivery company in the world. Akamai basically invented the CDN and they do a god damn good job at it. So good are they that Amazon, MTV, Apple, Fox, Clear Channel, IBSYS, Adobe and countless others use Akamai. Apparently they aren’t good enough to figure out how to stream to 3 or 4 listeners for Webmaster Radio.

Since the day of the switch, all Mac and Linux users, and PC users who use Winamp were unable to listen to Webmaster radio. At first WMR claimed they were working on it. Then they started to blame Akamai saying that support wasn’t helping them. They even issued a press release asking for users to help figure out their issues. Now they’ve gone so far as to run commercials on their own shows begging people to tell them what is wrong. Now it seems they’ve switched to some no-name company called Mediacast1, yet they run a commercial touting that they use “AKAMAAAAI”.

When you have to run a commercial begging your users to help you fix your stuff, you suck.

Listen you idiots. You were streaming Windows Media 9 streams. Macs don’t support Windows Media. Neither does Linux, or winamp. All along, it was your fault, and I tried to tell you that but you didn’t want to listen.

You guys aren’t that big, in fact its probably much better that you switched from Akamai. They’re too big for YOU half-wits to figure out. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to host your own content in-house. I know how many listeners you have, and its not many. All you need is a $60/mo hosting machine.

Stop acting like you’re Clear Channel and fix your system. You have the head start, but your competitors are going to decimate you.

This thing in Virginia is an absolute fucking atrocity. It shouldn’t have happened; it shouldn’t happen. Thing is, it did. Unless we’re completely unwilling to accept reality, it will happen again. It has gone down in schools, shopping malls and post offices. The only thing we can do to is learn from the failure here.

The massive and atrocious failure here is the failure to uphold our 2nd amendment rights. Yes, I’m talking about those rights. The rights that let us keep and bear arms. I absolutely, unequivocally believe that the death toll would have been nowhere near 30+ people if there had been a tiny percentage of students with CCW permits and a weapon. There are about 28k students at VT. Lets call it 30k people for a nice round number. In states with shall-issue permit laws, an average of 1-5% of the population have permits. Had the campus not banned guns for all students (we can clearly see the positive effect that had), we could assume that 1% of students would have a CCW permit. Since college kids are usually in a delusional dream-world of safety and security, its probably generous to assume 1% might carry. Maybe things like this will change that. This guy went into no less than 4 classrooms with probably 30 students in each. In at least ONE of those classrooms (with 1% CCW penetration), there would have been an armed civilian who could have put a stop to this insanity. One kid had the presence of mind to fashion a tourniquet out of an electrical cord. Thats heads up thinking. That kid, armed with a CCW could have ended all of this. Maybe not before it started. Maybe not before 5 deaths. Certainly before 30+.

I’ll be surprised if this event doesn’t turn into an all-out attack on guns. People will use this tragedy as an example of how evil guns are and how more guns = more violence. Unfortunately thats absolutely the opposite of how we should be looking at this. No one stood up to stop this guy. He managed to shoot 60 people with no resistance. Its pretty hard to fight back against a gunman with a textbook, but at least if all these victims hadn’t been disarmed someone would have been able to fight back on an even playing field.

Lets say tonight I find a magic lamp. I rub the lamp and a genie pops out. The genie says “Listen, I’m going to offer you something. I’ll make all the guns in the United States disappear. No gun will be able to enter the US without vanishing. The only place you’ll be able to shoot a gun is at a shooting range for entertainment only.” What would I do? I’d have to say I could maybe get on board with that. Except that over here in the REAL WORLD its not going to happen. Bans guns, and only bad people will have them. Then deranged people like Cho Senghwhogivesashit will be able to carry out a massacre like this, with 100% certainty that the victims won’t be armed.

A few years ago I was involved in a project to develop an anti-spam email appliance. This was right before Barracuda came out with their spam firewall, and the market was ripe for such a device. Kinda goes without saying that it never went anywhere, woe is the company with little funding.

During that time we spent a LOT of time discussing the myriad of options you have when you’re filtering spam. Should we throw away known spam? What about false positives? Should we implement a sender-verification system? What do we do with foreign language spam? The list of design decisions with such a device is long and painful. If you’ve ever had the age-old discussion of where to price a new product, think that times 1000.

One of the things we talked about at the time was sender verification. I vehemently (and sometimes violently) protested against this. I won. Unfortunately the rest of the world doesn’t follow my lead. Sender verification works by holding a questionable message in a queue and firing off an email to the sender. The email requests that you take some action like replying or clicking a link to verify that you are human and the message is real.

I have always hated this system for spam prevention but I hadn’t realized the 2 biggest reasons why it is a completely broken system. As of the launch of AuctionAds I’ve been keeping my eye on the tech support bucket. When you sign up for the service, we send you a welcome email. Guess what stupid spam-arrest does? Yup, sends a verification email requesting a click. Fortunately its a monitored account, so we’re not losing any users to their stupid email filtering system. Remember, the user signed up at our site. We’re not spamming them. A legit email is getting blocked with NO way for the user to know about it. SYSTEM BROKEN. So this is enough reason to drop it for me, but today I came across the ultimate reason not to use this garbage:

Assunto: Your AuctionAds account is now activated!

Para que sua mensagem seja liberada em nosso sistema antispam e encaminhada ao
destinatario, apenas responda a essa confirmacao (sem alterar o campo assunto).

Obs.: Essa confirmacao somente sera necessaria uma unica vez.

Do you know what action to take to confirm that email? I only have a vague idea because I speak Italian fluently and I can piece together the Portugese.

This is a broken system. If you’re using something like this, please, please stop. I don’t use any of this sillyness and I only get 2-3 spams a day that make it into my inbox with 0 false positives. All I’m using is SpamAssassin with SARE rules and FuzzyOCR for the stock/image spam.

This, and the comments that follow it, are all the reasoning you need.

If you’re building web sites or applications, and you’re not using memcached yet, you should be. Hogan showed me memcache a while back, and I literally implemented it the same day. Even if your site isn’t high traffic it hopefully will be in the future. When that time comes you’re going to wish you had made some better architecture choices. Don’t make not having used memcached one of them. memcached has allowed me to do things that would be completely impractical without it. Just recently I re-implemented a caching system using memcache, and I the system can handle several orders of magnitude more traffic. Not only that, but the code was actually cleaner and simpler. memcached’s automatic expiration of unused cache objects is superb for caching dynamic content.

So, like SEO Blackhat said: if you’re not using memcached yet, don’t wait until you need it or get around to it. Do it fucking now.