Not to bump your exciting business news from top billing but it’s all your fault for getting me hooked.  And jumping in at day 5 is confusing.  Especially when we’re watching earlier days being rerun on the A&E channel the hour before tonights premier started and I have no idea which day it is or what time it started.  Yikes!  But it is a great show; however, I feel my heart racing various times throughout the shows and I’m hoping my age can handle it :)  Just kidding.

My AJAX File Uploader has turned out to be an awesome project.  As previously reported, on its first day it received 6000 unique visitors, and now 2 months later it’s still getting about 150 per day.

By popular request, I’ve added a bunch of new features since the initial launch, like support for multi-file uploads and e-mail notification of new uploads.

I end up spending quite a bit of time developing it, so although I give it away for free for personal use, I now charge a license fee of $89 for commercial use.  That’s worked out pretty well, and pretty much everyone who’s bought it has been fairly gushing about how happy they are with it.

I also have a couple clients who found the uploader one way or another, and then got in touch with me to ask about a customized version of it for their website.  So that’s brought in some business as well.  It’s been really interesting to watch this project, born strictly out of necessity and given away for free, turn into something that generates revenue for the business.

I’m currently trying to code my way around one irritating issue that some people are having with it, though.  [Update: it turned out to be an issue only on these few particular machines, and there was nothing that this script (or any script) could do to get around it.]  The whole premise of the script is that when you upload a file to a website through it, it shows you a progress bar and how much time is left before the upload is complete.  This requires that the server logs how much data has been uploaded so far, writing this data to a file or database and updating it about once per second during the course of the upload.  Then the user’s browser sends a request to the server about once per second to ask for the data from the log: how much has been sent so far?  How ’bout now?  OK, what about now?  Over and over.

The problem is that on some servers, the system is configured to do write-caching, so that when a program saves a file, it doesn’t actually get written to the hard disk right away.  Instead it’s kept in memory (RAM) until some predefined time limit has passed (say 5 minutes), and then when that time comes the server does a sync, writing all the cached data from memory to the hard disk.

Such write-caching is done to increase the server’s performance -- writing to memory is many times faster than writing to disk -- and it’s very common.  For example, that’s the reason it’s bad to turn off your computer using its power button without doing a shut-down first: some of the files that have been created/changed/saved aren’t actually really saved yet, and they won’t get saved until the next sync, which you might prevent from ever happening if you pull the plug without shutting down.

So how do you get two processes to communicate if you can’t use files to share data?  You use IPC, of course.  But InterProcess Communication has a tendency to take something simple and make it really complicated really quickly.  Once your program has to fork() a server and accept socket communication from the client and try not to bother the actual business of the upload too much, it starts getting hairy.

So I’m taking a little break to remind you that Day 5 (aka Season 5) of 24 starts tonight!  The season premiere is 4 hours, with the first 2 starting at 8 PM Eastern on Fox.  24 is one of the best things in life -- and I loathe most TV, so that’s got to tell you something -- and I’m so psyched.

Tasha has added photos to her website!  Go see at tashasphotos.com!

(I designed the layout a few months ago, which is why it’s all Autunmy.)

As if you needed more reason to host your website with Dreamhost, they have just quadrupled their storage space and octupled their bandwidth.  So where you used to get 5 GB storage space and ~120 GB bandwidth for $8/month -- which was already pretty amazing -- you now get 20 GB of space and 1 TB of bandwidth.

It used to be that although I have tons of digital photos on my website, I had to keep the full-size original ones on my home server, because there just wasn’t enough room on a hosted account.  Thanks to Dreamhost that’s no longer necessary.

Woot!

You know how all the cool people you know always have one of those hard-plastic "Nalgene" bottles to drink out of?  I recently learned why they are so cool: they are made of special plastic that doesn’t retain odors, which means they don’t get smelly and nasty over time like every other plastic drinking bottle you’ve ever had.  It also means they’re much easier to clean.

So if, like me, you are fed up with drinking water out of stinky old water bottles, you’ll want to get one of these babies soon.

Kim’s recent post about smoking reminds me that I have an anti-smoking rant that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now.

I have two questions.  Why does anyone smoke, and why is smoking legal?

The only reason that anyone smokes is because they were tricked into it when they were young and stupid, and now they are addicted.  Virtually no one starts smoking after their late teens/early twenties.  Cigarette companies know this, so they deliberately target their advertising at young people.  Who really thinks that Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man are cool, other than kids?

(Of course, some adults who smoke will claim they do it because they like it, not because they are addicted; but for the purposes of this discussion we will consider such blatant lying to be invalid evidence.)

This is an unfair and frankly predatory practice.  It’s unfair because everyone is young and stupid for a while; it’s evil to take advantage of people in that state.  And it’s predatory because their product hooks into you and kills you.

This brings us to question #2: why is smoking legal?  Why are the cigarette companies allowed to exist, to continue to make billions of dollars, and to prey on children?  The only reason is that the companies are already rich, and therefore are able to influence politicians in ways that are favorable to the cigarette companies.

It bothers me that smoking is legal not only because it’s freaking nasty and it kills tens hundreds of thousands of people annually, but also because as public policy it’s so glaringly inconsistent.  If drugs like heroin are illegal because they ruin people’s lives by causing them to be severely addicted and/or killing them, then smoking should be illegal for the exact same reasons.  The only difference is that there is a powerful political force in support of cigarettes, while there is no such support for the other currently-illegal drugs.

OK not quite, but Bob Evans is pretty good, and tonight I had a meal there which was really amazing: pot roast hash.

This is hash browns, topped with pot roast, and then topped with eggs (cooked to order, i.e. overlight) and cheddar cheese.  As I read the description, I was thinking, "Wow, this sounds really good" until I got to the eggs.  Then I thought, "Eggs?  Hmmm..." 

Nonetheless, I pressed on with my order, eggs and all.  And it turned out to be delicious.  Of course steak & eggs is a very common breakfast dish, but I’ve never gotten that, and pot roast isn’t quite the same as steak.  So it seemed like an unlikely combination of foods at first.  But they went together delectably, and I loved every bite.

I’ll probably be getting this almost every time we go to Bob Evans from now on.

I haven’t received any email at any of my @nodivisions.com accounts since about Monday.  It turns out that this is because my IP address had gotten temporarily blacklisted by my host due to spam coming from this machine.

On the contact page there is a field labeled "your email address:" which had served 2 purposes: first, it allowed me to reply to whomever was sending me a message, and second, it allowed me to send a copy of the message to the visitor himself.

But apparently some spammer noticed this, and started entering the addresses of his spam-victims into the "your email address:" field, and then typing his spam messages into the message box.  Of course the spammer didn’t care that I also got a copy of every message, and I didn’t notice because they all got transferred to my junk-mail folder automatically anyway.

So, it worked great for a while, but now the contact page here and on all my sites will no longer send a copy of the message back to its author -- that is, to the person in the "your email address:" field, which may or may not be the author.

Thanks, spammers.