Oolite: “Retro space gaming with modern technology.” Of the ‘space trader’ genre, but where Nova relies on sprites, this renders all. Thus far, it makes docking a rather time-consuming procedure, but once the booze is out of your system, all should be well. The game’s discussion board.
(why is there not a Mir docking game?)
Chocolypse Now: Charlie don’t burp. [memepool]
Hm, it may be time for an Apocalypse Now shindig. Halloween’s coming up!
Oh, and I got that wiki working. Go me!
Review sites and hosting providers list assembled September 23, 2004. For further investigation.
Overall, I’m astounded at the way that the continued plummeting of storage cost has completely undermined the previous service-level pricing structure – pair.com, for example, has long been a standby among pros, but the pricing structure seen here is totally obsolete by comparison with the current crop. Just over a year ago, I was amazed at the pricing seen at No Hassle Hosting, but this trawl places their pricing structure solidly in the middle of the pack.
Providers
Globat.com: 2500MB Web Space, 2500 Email Accounts, 75Gig Transfer $7.95/mo. Overkill, but no apparent disabling of basic functionality such as SSI.
Infinology: 9gb basic plan, $6.95; no SSI at this level, though.
Canaca: $4.95 base, 5gb/40gb, uses spam and security as an upsell (which is bullshit), no SSH or MySQL on base plan. $9.95 mid, 10 over 80, SSH, MySQL, no Python, ecommerce(!).
No Hassle Hosting: from 30mb/1gb @ $3.50 to 1.2gb/60gb @$30.
Living Dot: from 250mb/10gb @ $9.95 to 1.5gb/25gb @$24.95. Ugly clip art included, apparently.
Typepad: 50mb/1gb @ $4.95 to 200mb/5gb @ $14.95, just blogs. No clear information about email or other services.
Bloghosts 100mb/5gb @ $3 to 1gb/25gb @ $20.
Review sites (this may be the spammiest Google topic of all time)
FindMyHosting.com: comprehensive-looking review and plan information aggregator.
epinons web hosting reviews: epinions consumer reviews.
Hosting Comparison: looks up to date. Clean site layout; looks ‘bloggy,’ but there’s little information about the site itself obviously available. Suspiciously boosterish copy.
Looking over this, I keep coming back to wondering about e-mail only. But of course, looking for hosting plans to that subject may very well eat another day of my life.
AskMe hosting and webcommerce threads. An old free hosting offer. No Hassle Hosting, part 1, part 2.
Lessee now, what are my reqs?
Email: up to five domains, low traffic, global redirects, unlimited aliases, webmail for up to five users, server-side effective spam filters, IMAP, optional whitelists.
Hosting functionality, required: multiple domains and unlimited subdomains, shell access, web-based control panel, backups, traffic analysis, PHP, MySQL, perl, no required change of registrant for domains.
Hosting functionality, desired: python, WebDAV (for direct mounting of the volume, very convenient), integrated iCal publishing would be cool but I can figure that out on my own, provider-maintained MT (or something) deployment (or go with TypePad, but I’d prefer to keep all online services through a single provider), provider maintained Gallery deployment (maybe; I think it might be easiest to keep that here, actually).
Hosting metrics, desired: 2gb storage, transfer unknown but not great. (my current footprint for non-cgi assets, not counting online photo albums and audio and movies, is 988mb).
Do I have a budget? Hm. Apple’s pricing is about right, but the storage is not acceptable and while the virtual desktop and synch features are cool, I don’t think they offer access to the server-side goodies I believe I want. Additionally, they are well known for an unpublished bandwidth limitation, so they are off the list.
I’m posting this from a copy of Windows XP that lives inside my Powerbook, as illustrated below. It’s been many years since I tried to use Virtual PC. Happily, except for fighting my way though an obtuse thicket of networking config dialogs to diagnose and correct an odd default networking setting that prevented this OS from seeing the intarweb via that OS, et al, everything’s working swimmingly.
Now, for the endless round of Windows system updates, and (naturally) Firefox. Avaunt!
I suppose, for the sake of posterity, I should go into a bit more detail about fixing the networking. VPC treats the host machine as a DHCP server, and assigns an arbitrary, fixed number to the the host on the subnet it sets up (this is an informed guess, so ymmv). That IP is the same for the gateway value and for the DNS value. Well, the DNS was not doing its’ job; reliable servers were unpingable.
I set the computer to use the same DNS that my home LAN does, and that appears to have resolved the issue.
One troubling point that undermines my ‘bad DNS’ thesis is that I was able to ping the good DNS under the default networking setup, but only once. Immediately after, on implementing the new DNS, I was unable to ping the same IP. Perhaps I was falling victim to the notoriously slow setup processes within VPC, and the connection had not yet been established. Whatever. It works now.
I only hope it doesn’t burn the CPU out downloading all the updates.
Dear pal Ken of the The Illuminated Donkey updates us on his quest to belong. It’s not going well.
Tutorials – Stencil Revolution [via MoFi] is if interest to me, as a prolific former stenciler.
Oddly, this appears to be the only example I have online. I have a satchel full of them in the closet. I used to go to rock shows without a dime, sell the stencils for a buck a pop to paint on to people’s tee shirts and jackets, and make bank, often about a hundred bucks in a night on a well-attended show.
For some reason, all day I have been wanting to be able to selectively remap my MX records to gmail, so that I’m not doing forwarding with a local copy here anymore. I realize this is probably a dumb idea.
I think it really indicates that I am ready to find outside hosting and mail for certain purposes.
Oh, the technofun just continues! Here’s a list: