HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

Finally, I’m off from Malaysia’s No. 1 incompetent web host… and very happy to do so. In a way, those dimwits has dented my “Malaysia Boleh” faith… but whatever, life goes on.

I’ve migrated HTNet and my company’s webby. It’s been a year since I last used a cPanel based hosting package, and after being tortured by the annoyances of Plesk… I treasure the change. Not to mention the availability of ssh, which makes my life much easier by just updating my sites using wget, cvs or svn. Life is such so much easier now!

Anyway, my real beef with Mercumaya is that there was a time when their server was down. Well, shit happens, I can accept that… I was a support engineer myself once. But the unacceptable part was that none of their staff had the common courtesy of informing me, a customer, about this issue. Not by email, not by phone… and we’re in the same country. When I called, the person answering said that the hard disks were busted… and they might take 3-4 hours to “fix” it (which I assumed actually means replacing it and restoring from backup).

Well, that 3-4 hours turned to 3-4 days. On the fourth day, my friend Omar, who’s hosting his site, as well as some customers on Mercumaya too, gave me a call and said that he contacted Mercumaya and they informed him that the server is now up again. However, they totally fscked our data. Yeah, daily backups my ass.

All in all, I just know that they’ll go bust soon anyway. Idiots who treat their customers that way, usually won’t make it far. For me, it’s just a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.

The Xfce development team is glad to announce Xfce 4.2.2, a maintenance and bug fix release of Xfce 4.2 (current latest stable branch of Xfce). The changelog is available here.

As usual, source and binary packages are available from Xfce.org and all the usual mirrors. os-cillation will usually release the excellent Xfce installer for this version soon.

New gaim packages are available for Slackware 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, and -current to fix several security issues. Sites that use GAIM should upgrade to the new version.

Here are the details from the Slackware 10.1 ChangeLog:

+————————–+
patches/packages/gaim-1.3.0-i486-1.tgz: Upgraded to gaim-1.3.0. This fixes a
few bugs which could be used by a remote attacker to annoy a GAIM user by
crashing GAIM and creating a denial of service.
(* Security fix *)
+————————–+

For others like me, who uses Slackware-current, the long awaited upgrade of glibc to include NPTL support is finally over! Read the Slackware-current changelog for more information. However, it will take a while for all mirrors to synch… so be patient.

You can upgrade necessary packages by manually downloading the packages. Or use automated updating tools such as Swaret or slapt-get.

My company will be conducting a free senior management seminar this Tuesday (17 May) as well as on June the 2nd.

Seats for the 17th May appointment is very limited, so if you’re in middle to senior management positions, and is available on the dates stated above, feel free to register online to confirm your seat(s).

This seminar will be a great opportunity to network with the who’s who of Corporate Johor. Looking forward to see you there.

As reported by C|Net and discussed on OSNews… the monopoly from Redmond has again, showed their acumen for illogical and exploitive business decisions.

However, to be fair to Microsoft, the press release for XP Starter Edition already contains the following information:

Starting in October 2004, Windows XP Starter Edition will ship on new, low-cost desktop PCs available through PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Microsoft OEM distributors in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Language versions will be available in Thai, Malay and Indonesian.

However, it would be kinda dumb to actually use a manufacturer-crippled OS when there are other perfectly viable alternatives available which are the real deal.