pedrovera.com
Pedro is the author of The Insomniac Coder and is also Pedro Javier's dad. He is a web programmer and aspiring novelist stuck somewhere around the DC metropolitan area.
Jul 1st, 2009 @ 9:26 am
Hosting product consolidation
We are moving all our hosting to the US, the India hosting plans are now obsolete. The new pricing structure includes the previously announced email pricing as part of the host pricing, so this price includes an unlimited amount of 1GB mailboxes. WIndows and Linux hosting prices are identical.
Another cool thing: $50 of free Yahoo ad credit!
This also marks the end of our original cpanel hosting, which is no longer offered to new customers.
May 28th, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
Feb 4th, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
1 Year of Surpass Hosting, $1
Only February 14-16, and you have to bring your own domain. This is the company that I use for one of my hosting companies, it is where I host veraperez.com. Notice that their regular price applies after the one-year mark.@ 10:02 am
Christians Bailing on GoDaddy Due to 'Immoral' Advertising
This is truly despicable behavior by GoDaddy. I can assure you that GoPedro.net has never, and will probably never 1, resort to cheap antics like that in order to sell our very affordable domains.
We sell most domain names for under $10 per year, with no strings attached, no hidden charges and no registrar transfer locks2. And no immoral TV ads.3
*1 Tough economy, I won’t promise we won’t go the sex sells route if things get too tough.
*2 You can’t transfer a domain that is less than 60 days old. Except fot that, there is nothing keeping you from moving your domain elsewhere at the end of your first year.
*3 We can’t afford them, duh.
Jan 16th, 2009 @ 8:35 pm
Special Wordpress hosting package
For a limited time only, we are offering the following hosting package:
1. Full Cpanel access (so shell access, sorry).
2. No hard limits for parked or add-on domains, subdomains or number of MySQL databases.
3. 10GB/month traffic.
4. 1GB disk space.
5. You are free to install anything that can run on a standard Cpanel.
6. Your choice of (a) free .net/.com/.org domain or (b) .net/.com/.net transfter + renewal upon creation of account. If you would like to renew after the first year, the renewal for this domain is always included.
I am offering a limited number of accounts for $50/year. This package is NOT available through http://gopedro.net, you will need to contact me directly in order to purchase.
Dec 18th, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
New Pricing List
Thanks to the greedy bastards at Internic, it is once again time to tweak the pricing table for http://gopedro.net .
The good news:
Almost every TLD went down in price.
The bad bews:
.COM/.NET/.ORG went up slightly.
This pricing change affects both customers and resellers.
Dec 9th, 2008 @ 6:37 am
Xbox 360 v. AppleTV as a streaming platform
RIght as I was planning on writing this article, I ran into that rare Slashdot thread that sucked me into posting. Three times.
The posts pretty much summarize our current experience at home with the two Xbox 360s and the two AppleTVs. While it would be nice if Apple officially supported Netflix streaming, it is not a deal breaker, and the Xbox 360 is doing the job already perfectly.
For a while I was concerned that the ability to stream from the Mac to the 360 would render the AppleTVs obsolete, but it is only a matter of convenience. And by convenience I mean being able to watch something RIGHT THE HELL NOW instead of having to wait until the content is transcoded so the AppleTV can see it. If you can wait until the transcode, then the AppleTV wins.
Why?
1. Parental controls. The AppleTV will ask for a PIN if the content is rated above your threshold.This means that if PJ decides to park at my office and watch AppleTV, he’ll be watching his movies, not ours.
2. Content organization. The only thing you can do with the 360 streaming is put your content in folders. With the AppleTV, it will render all of your content tags, album art, etc. This means that you can navigate by title, subject, or just browse by looking at the covers. The 360 can’t do that yet.
The transcoding thing pisses me off because I have a hardware h.264 encoder dongle, which promised to be the ultimate solution. And it is a piece of shit. If it works, the best I get is barely faster than 1:1. If it doesn’t, it screws up the output by either pixelating the video, or losing audio sync. Both are aggravating as hell.
Even more humiliating is that handbrake is free and at its very worst it can transcode at 1:1 without using the stupid dongle. And it never screws up the output.
Nov 13th, 2008 @ 11:50 am
Parallels 4 clashes with VS.net 2005
There is a problem with the way that Parallels 4 does documents folder synchronization. What it does is to point to your home folder on the OS X side with an UNC path. It works great as long as the windows programs that look for that folder understand UNC.
Visual Studio 2005 is not one of these. The first thing that caught me cost me two long miserable hours of troubleshooting. I was installing Subsonic and it would not see the add-in. After all of this misery I realized that the problem was not that Subsonic was broken, instead it was because VS couldn’t see the folder where Subsonic installed the add-in.
Turned off home folder and desktop sync, now everything works.
Like I said, the problem here is Windows (XP), not Parallels.
Oct 18th, 2008 @ 8:06 pm
Perception of time in programmers
It is interesting how wildly the time seems to vary when you are writing code. I would think that after programming for more than twenty years, close to ten years of that professionally, I still feel like time stands still for certain projects, while others just eat the hours without barely a blink.
Between yesterday and today rewrote one of our applications from scratch, with brand new workflows, interfaces, the works. I wrote it in two stretches, and I can’t remember much from either. There is nothing broken, and as far as I can tell I don’t owe the customer anything significant.The damn thing is even open-ended and flexible, which is amazing if taking into account how little time I put into it.
At the same time, I have a couple of projects that just drag out forever. Not only that, but just the act of opening the project seems to suck my soul away. Maybe the whole time perception thing is related to the degree of satisfaction when working at a given project.
Oct 12th, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
Amazon Kindle
Reading or or two books per week can be a hassle when you own the books and you don’t take into account storage. Two books per week is over a hundred books a year. If each book is one inch thick, you are eating over 100 inches of bookshelf in just a year.
Now imagine that you are married, and your wife (14 years and going) also reads two books per week. Oh, and you live in a 1,000 square feet condominium. Where the hell are you going to store 14 years’ worth of books? Even if you re-read, it is still an insane amount of books, enough to convert a room into a library.
That only takes into account space. But what about organization? How the hell do you find a book that you want to re-read? Do you keep his and hers bookshelves? Alpha? By year? Genre?
Then there’s more: Upkeep: Books get dirty and attract bugs. You have to pull them out of the shelf every few months to make sure everything is clean. Who has time to do this for thousands of books? Also, books break. Paperbacks fall apart after the third or fourth re-read unless you are very careful. Over the years I have replaced every Tom Clancy and W.E.B. Griffin book that I have purchased at least twice. Sometimes I bought multiple copies of the same Clancy book.
When I learned about the Amazon Kindle, I was not blown over by the gadget appeal, the ease of read, electronic ink, etc. Those are nice things, but the one thing that I noticed on the spot is that it would solve many of my long term concerns:
- The device, by default, holds about 200 books.
- The device has a SD slot, which means that storage capacity is measured in thousands of volumes.
- Purchased media can be re-downloaded as many times as you wish. No need to back up DRM’ed media, as long as the Amazon content servers don’t shut down.
- Instant gratification, I can buy books directly from the device.
- Try before buying. I can download a sample, then if I like it I can pay to read the full book.
- I would always have extra material to read. I spent years carrying an extra book in my bag in case I finished my current read halfway through a trip. There is nothing as frustrating as finishing your book on the first 10 minutes of a 2-hour bus+train commute.
- I don’t have to pay Amazon to publish my books for sale on the Kindle. Publishing is free, they take a cut of the sale price.
Ivette reads as much as I do, so these issues benefit her too. I purchased our first Kindle in August, and I expect to pick up a second unit around Christmas.
The Kindle is far from perfect, but the current model shows the potential to turn into the iPod for books. If you compare the original iPod to the current iPod touch, the changes are mind boggling. That doesn’t make the original iPod a piece of shit, it still holds itself pretty well.
The Kindle is the same. It is an awesome piece of engineering, and if Amazon doesn’t drop the ball it is destined for greatness. The prepaid wireless connectivity is pure genius: the device costs more, but there is no monthly service fee. You can even surf the web with it, if you don’t mind the rudimentary browser.
Eventually people are going to write extra software for it. Amazon would be stupid to not plan for an open API, all they have to do is see how the iPhone and iPod Touch are doing.
So far I have purchased four books, and downloaded a ton of freebies. Purchasing has so far been painless, and I have never had to wait 5 minutes for the purchased book to show up in my Kindle. The longest book I have read so far was 1008 pages when it came out as a paperback, probably twice as heavy as the Kindle!
What I don’t like:
- The case is shaped weird.
- Too easy to hit the previous/next buttons by accident.
- It is slow when you have a few hundred books in the device.
- The back cover falls off too easily.
- The binder is too difficult to secure properly.
No show stoppers there. I am very happy with mine, and Ivette is looking forward to getting hers for Christmas.
