I turned on comments again for The FXScript Reference, hopefully the spammers won’t show up right away.

24 hours later… It only took four hours for the first drug spams to appear, four in 24 hours and zillions of referrer hits.

This time I’m going to try something different. Almost everything is posted to the k30fps constant, which isn’t particularly interesting, for whatever reason the spammers are pounding that page. So I’m reassigning k30fps which will change its url, I’m also and adding a custom rule to 403 that page. (otherwise they’ll bring down my 404/search page).

The vengeful part of me would love to forward the spammer’s requests to some huge file or link to their Windows Registry or something. But I’m not going to waste someone else’s bandwidth and I don’t want some innocent user to end up borking their registry because of me. Akismet, someday.

I’ve been asked to move IOP’s web and email hosting off Hosting Matters after an excess of problems. One of the biggest issues is that we always have emails flying around with large attachments, these tend to fill up the smallish space HM provides. To be fair, HM has been very good about fixing stuff when it breaks, but there’s been a lot of stuff to fix. Also, they don’t offer phone support, don’t take American Express and their billing system is a pain to use.

I host my own sites and several others on LiquidWeb, which has been excellent for the past several years. I really have nothing to complain about, except maybe that they don’t have a more recent version of MySQL installed, apparently due to a CPanel dependency.

I would move IOP over to LiquidWeb too, but I don’t want to have all the sites I’m responsible for hosted by one company. With multiple locations, I have many more options should one host suffer a catastrophic failure.

Researching web hosting is miserable. Google’s results are heavily spammed, and while sites like WebHostingTalk are helpful, they tend to be full of casual users looking for a zillion TB/month for $2.95. I was considering DreamHost after some time on those boards, but there are a lot disgruntled former-customers out there and I was troubled by DH’s CPU time metering. I’m still thinking about them simply for a cheap off-site Subversion repository and Jabber server. However their whole referral thing is actually a huge turn off for me, I’d rather their customers were genuinely fans of the service. That program makes me question the credibility of anyone advocating for DH.

I was also close to signing up with MediaTemple, but their shared hosting plans don’t include rsync. Rsync is a critical tool for local mirroring and development and a deal-breaker.

Jim Boykin ‘s page asking for web hosting advice is a nice resource. There are some good links in there and I’m looking into several of the places from his roundup.

My current shortlist is pair Networks, Swift Communications and TextDrive, wanting to lean towards TextDrive because their users seem really happy and I’ve been reading John Gruber for years, but he doesn’t host his site there (yet?).

Suggestions are welcomed, my requirements are basically:

• good email support
• PHP/MySQL
• SSH access
• rsync
• lots of storage space (>1gb)
• $20-40/month

Update

I ended up going with Swift Communications, based largely on two factors. First, they were very fast in answering my pre-sales questions. Second, they offered the best cost per gigabyte of my three finalists.

The domain is already switched over and everything seems good so far. Server response is fast and SSH/rsync worked right away. Their support continued to be excellent after opening my account. They had initially set up our account login based on my name, which wasn’t ideal since this is a company site, but this was changed within 5 minutes of me requesting it. The move seems to have gone exceptionally smoothly and I’m very happy so far.

Dave sent me a link to Bid to Lure Films Works So Well, It’s Nearly Broke, which is an exceptionally lazy piece of reporting.

But the good news for the city’s film industry is a mixed blessing for the city’s treasury. In 13 months, the city has exhausted the $50 million it had allotted for four years’ worth of tax credits for the industry, while the state has used up most of the $125 million it has allotted over five years. It is not clear if new business spurred by the program is making up the difference.

And being the New York Times, they didn’t see fit to, you know, do any actual reporting or fact-checking.

Otherwise, after two minutes of Googling and a search on the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance site, they might have learned that January 2006 NYS tax revenues were up 18.6% over the previous January with personal income tax revenue up a remarkable 28.3%. (page 2 of the January 2006 Tax Collections PDF)

One hopes our elected public servants do better than to trust the Times’ lazy reporting at face-value. Cutting the tax credits would just screw everything up again.

This is the Laffer Curve in action, again. Lower taxes lead to increased tax revenues, in different kind of taxes as state taxes or vehicles taxes like the IPVA 2018.

Please visit dccu.us for more information.

Stumbled across a rather astonishing timeline: A CHRONOLOGY OF THE COMMON ERA (the page is 1.5 MB). There’s tons there, much subsequent Googling ensued.

I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, especially trying to get a better grasp on early Europe, pre-Islamic Arabia and The Crusades. This was all largely skipped in the Western Civ classes I took in college (“we’re going to avoid too much emphasis on wars”, which now seems akin to describing a steak dinner as having too much emphasis on beef).

Though all this, I keep coming across this Shakespeare quote from Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing

Human history is a damned mess.

“The Method” was a work of Archimedes unknown in the Middle Ages, but the importance of which was realized after its discovery. Archimedes pioneered the use of infinitesimals, showing how by dividing a figure in an infinite number of infinitely small parts could be used to determine its area or volume. It was found in the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest (Παλίμψηστος του Αρχιμήδη). The ancient text was found in a rare 10th-century Byzantine Greek manuscript which is probably the oldest and most authentic copy of Archimedes’ major works to survive, and contains transcriptions of his writing on geometry and physics.

The manuscript was the only source for his treatise “On The Method of Mathematical Theorems” and the only known copy of the original Greek text of his work, “On Floating Bodies”. The manuscript also contains the text of his works “On The Measurement of the Circle”, “On the Sphere and the Cylinder”, “On Spiral Lines and On the Equilibrium of Planes”.

The volume is a palimpsest, a manuscript in which pages have been written on twice. As writing material was expensive an original text could be washed off so the parchment could be reused. The upper layer of writing on the document to be auctioned contains instructions for religious rites but underneath it contains versions of Archimedes’ most celebrated Greek texts.

Paper. The ideas weren’t important enough to preserve, the paper was.

There will be a rally supporting Denmark and Freedom of Speech and Expression in NYC today (Friday) at noon. Rallies are planned for other cities as well. The Danish Consulate is at One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, (2nd Ave @ 47th St.). Snarksmith got the ball rolling on this.

If you haven’t yet read MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism, cosigned by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salmon Rushdie and 10 others, please do so now. Note how many of the cosignatories have been forced to live under constant police protection. These are dark times.

Two quotes from Edmund Burke:

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

The weather forecast for today shows a forty degree drop over the course of the day. That’s nuts, but Saturday’s forecast low is even crazier. 65° to 17° in 24 hours? (In Celsius, that’s 18° to -8°) The snow from Sunday’s big snowstorm has pretty much melted away just in time for more winter.

Temperature extremes like this make me think of the expansion of railroad rails in heat, and, for whatever reason, an algebra problem from my first math class in college. Oh, and the temperature of the Moon ranges about 500° F during a Lunar day, I never realized how hot it got there, though it would only affect your feet since there’s no atmosphere.