My useless thoughts on Microsoft GitHub

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A lot has been written about the impending buyout of GitHub by Microsoft. As a regular user of the former and not much of a user of the latter, people would probably expect me to be against this happening, but my feelings on it are largely positive.

And this comes from someone who used to refer to them as “M$!” (All I can say is I’ve grown a lot since the 90s.)

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Site updates

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Wow, another silly meta update about this new site, go figure. I should probably come up with something more substantial to say, but this is pretty much all I have to talk about right now.

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My Dreamhost exit survey

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This feels like the end of an era, after I spent so long recommending them and trying to make the best of their services even over the last few years.

RIP, my Dreamhost hosting plan (June 2007—June 2018).

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The Return of the Flickr Random Image Generatr

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So, it’s not that the Flickr Random Image Generatr had actually gone anywhere, but when I migrated all my stuff to new hosting it broke, and while it was easy to get the old, crappy, written-in-Perl-in-two-hours-ten-years-ago version working again, I decided to rewrite it.

First off, the original purpose was for finding random images to post to forums, and as such I had a bunch of stuff to make it easy to do that. That was no longer a use case I want to overtly support, however, and I only keep the FLRIG up because I like using it to get random inspiration for settings and drawings and the like.

Another problem, though, is that the old version was directly parsing the RSS feed, which only provided limited information about the image; notably, it had no useful information about copyright in it, and every now and then I get an annoyed message from a photo’s owner claiming that I wasn’t properly attributing things or that I was stealing their images or the like. I had a standard response about how it’s just reformatting the Flickr public RSS feed, which didn’t provide any useful copyright information for me to display. Well, their Atom feed actually does provide license information, so I am better able to provide that information.

Since I was going to switch to the Atom feed, I figured I’d might as well switch to a proper feed parser, and if I was going to do that I’d might as well rewrite it in Python (which has a pretty good feed parsing library) and Flask.

Most of the code is actually in the Jinja template, and the way it filters stuff out of the description tag is incredibly shoddy, and the formatting could be better in general, but overall I think this is an improvement which will make the photographers happier.

Domain registrar recommendations?

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So hey, I’m working on migrating all my hosting and registrations away from Dreamhost. As far as hosting goes I’m just going to host everything on my Linode server for now, since that’s paid up for the next two years or so and it has plenty of capacity available.

But I’m also using Dreamhost as my registrar and DNS provider at the moment, and I’d like to move those as well. (Not only do I not trust them at this point, but their DNS management tools are abysmal and geared only towards people using their hosting.)

What registrars do people recommend, and what DNS hosts do people recommend? In my ideal world they’d be one and the same, although I’m fine with doing a mix-and-match if it makes sense.

My hard requirement is having WHOIS privacy, and a very high priority is having DNS hosting included. Right now my three frontrunners are Hover, Namecheap, and Gandi. Here’s my impressions of them:

  • Hover:
    • Plus: Their DNS hosting is easy to work with, and supports wildcard records
    • Plus: WHOIS privacy is included
    • Minus: Their domain pricing isn’t the cheapest (.biz costs $15.99/year)
  • Namecheap:
    • Plus: They have the cheapest pricing for registrations (.biz costs $12.88/year)
    • Plus: Their DNS hosting looks pretty okay from their docs; it’s definitely better than Dreamhost’s, anyway!
    • Minus: They charge extra for WHOIS privacy ($2.88/year). Or maybe they don’t. Their site keeps flip-flopping on this.
    • Minus: I used them for HTTPS in the past (before LetsEncrypt was available) and they were difficult to work with and felt kinda sketchy/bait-and-switchy
  • Gandi:
    • Plus: Geeks love them
    • Plus: WHOIS privacy is included
    • Minus: Registrations are quite expensive (.biz costs $18.78)

So, it seems like Namecheap is my best bet, but I have misgivings about them based on my prior experiences with them and with how their WHOIS guard thing can’t decide whether it’s free or not…

Has anyone reading this formed an opinion about these three companies? Is there another one I really should look into?

Also, Linode supports DNS hosting as well, although the management tools are kind of crude/low-level and I’d also have to do all the DNS hosting transfer stuff if I were to change hosting providers, so if I’m going to bundle my DNS hosting with something I’d rather bundle it with the registrar. (Although for now I’ve transferred all of my DNS hosting over to Linode which worked well enough. I guess any time I change hosting providers DNS is going to be a pain anyway, so.)

Update: Looks like the reason the back-and-forth was going on with Namecheap’s WhoisGuard pricing was because I happened to be checking their site while they were rolling out an update — they just officially announced that WhoisGuard is now “Free for life.” Well, that certainly makes my decision easier!

Time marches on

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So, this is my first new blog entry on my brand new website, my first (relatively) clean start since the last accretion disc began in early 2003. I realize that the current blog template has none of the old template’s charm; don’t worry, I’ll be bringing the plaid look back eventually.

Here are some ruminations, brought on by me spending all evening going through my old blog trying to find things worth saving. There were a few useful articles here and there, which I have more fully-integrated into the rest of my site, but I’m finding that most of my old “blog content” is just not worth the hassle of preserving.

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Wii don’t fit into molds

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So, the inspiration for the Wii Fit comic is that, after about a week of daily weigh-ins, I started to feel like Garfield in his Sisyphean struggles against the talking bathroom scale. I have a feeling that Nintendo’s designers really weren’t thinking things through when they designed the daily body test component.

The big problem with it stems from that it uses BMI’s ridiculous classification system (which is good for a casual statistical clustering of body types but is not in and of itself a useful diagnostic tool), and that it disregards progress and only tells you how you’re doing based on where you are in the BMI.

I measure in the upper end of the “overweight” category on BMI. I could certainly stand to lose some fat, but I could also stand to gain some muscle. So far my weight has stayed about the same, but even in the past week I’ve definitely built up some muscle. Muscle is of course denser than fat, so even if I were to never lose a single pound I’d be happy if it meant getting much stronger.

Of course, Wii Fit just looks at BMI and knows nothing about my skeleton (and being of Eastern European descent I’ve already got a naturally stocky build, nothing like the lithe Japanese creatures I’m sure Nintendo used as their references). So, okay, at first it was a bit funny how it drew me as a Mario Batali-esque fatass, which seemed like a humorous bit of gentle encouragement, but after a week of this, it gets pretty old.

When I step on the balance board, it actually does go, “Oh!” as if it’s surprised by my mass (sometimes it does say “Great!” if I step on more slowly), and after it weighs me, it actually does say, “That’s overweight!” And, of course, every day, weight fluctuates a bit. I’ve had days where I’ve lost a couple pounds (and it doesn’t congratulate me), and then I’ve had days where some of it has come back (and it demands that I select the reason why I haven’t lost weight that day, with choices like “I eat snacks” and “Not getting enough exercise” — which is particularly funny because it knows exactly how much exercise I am getting!).

I do like the weight-tracking portion of it, but it really needs a way to disable the BMI bullshit, and a way to have it just draw my Mii in a more realistically-proportioned manner.

Positive encouragement is absolutely vital for staying on any sort of diet/exercise plan, and while parts of Wii Fit do give you that encouragement (the minigames are designed pretty well in that regard, and the yoga components are excellent), the primary interface aspects (the daily body test and how you’re displayed in the “Wii Fit Plaza”) are right in your face.

So far, I tolerate the daily body test simply because tracking my weight and balance are important enough to me that I can look past how it continually insults me, but if after only a week of this I’m feeling annoyed enough to rant about it, I’m not sure how I’ll feel in three months when I’ve (hopefully) lost a lot of weight and it’s still insulting me. I do understand, appreciate, and in some ways live by the Japanese ethic of Kaizen (continuous improvement), but this is not Kaizen. The Kaizen approach would be for Wii Fit to say, “Let’s try to lose even more weight.” This feels more like continuous admonishment. How long before I decide to give up and imbibe an entire can of whipped cream?