WebCalendar One-Click Install!

It’s not much, but it is a web calendar.

Okay, it’s not Gallery 2 but it is a pretty highly voted-on suggestion.

Give it a try at our “Goodies > One-Click Installs” area right now!

Amazon’s Mechanical Jerk

Amazon is playing a trick on the world!

Amazon has a new service (still heavily in beta.. based on how many page errors I get trying to use it) called Mechanical Turk with the tag line “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.”

The name is a reference to a “chess-playing automaton” built in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, which looked like a robot that could play chess and went around beating a lot of really good chess players, including one guy now on the hundred dollar bill! This was a pretty amazing feat for 1769, and in fact would still have been amazing for 1869, 1969, or even 1999.. if not for the fact the Mechanical Turk turned out to have, just like R2D2, a tiny little human enclosed inside it! And like R2D2, that little dude was really good at playing chess.

Amazon’s new service is sort of like the mechanical turk… for the Internet. You submit a problem you want solved (along with how much you’d pay for the answer), and they display it to real live humans who answer it for the money (minus Amazon’s cut). There’s an API for it, so as long as you’re willing to pay (and wait a few hours), you can now have a program solve problems that computers can’t solve!

Right now, it seems there aren’t too many applications for this outside of the realm of image processing… in fact as far as I can see the ONLY people who’re actually using it so far are Amazon themselves! They’re currently paying people three cents an image to help populate their maps.a9.com BlockView service with clear pictures of the front of businesses.

(It’s kind of funny going through some of their BlockView images. You see, they just drive a van around town and take pictures out of the window every few feet or so, then tie them to the gps location of the van and create an online film-strip of city blocks in major cities. Going through the mechanical turk thing you’re provided with a string of like eight adjacent images and the name of a business they think should be in one of the pictures. You just have to click the image that best shows that business (or none of the above), and they’ll pay you three cents. I figured going super-fast I can make about $5.40/hour doing this. Which isn’t worth my time, but considering you’re reading this, is probably worth yours! After doing it for a while I started thinking some of the completely random photographs were a little bit artsy so I saved a couple.

Professional art critic, I am not.)

Anyway, this is sort of an interesting service, and it got me thinking:

IF you could develop a program that can do something no other program in the world (or at least no program at Amazon) has been able to, you could set it to work at mturk.com and make a bunch of money automatically!

Of course, if you can develop a program that can do something no other program in the world can do, you’re probably already doing pretty well for yourself.

IF there’s no way for a computer to do what these humans are doing, how do you automatically verify that the solutions people are putting in aren’t just random garbage (possibly even generated by a computer!)

The solution Amazon came up with is just that the person who submitted the request has to approve the solution in order for you to get paid. Which to me seems like missing half the point. I mean, if the task is simple for humans but difficult for computers, you’d think that just verifying a solution is going to take nearly as long as solving the problem in the first place!

I’m not sure a good way to solve that problem, besides maybe submitting the request to lots of people and then taking some sort of “average” answer. But then the issue is, how much do you pay everybody? Would the reward be split among all the people who submitted a correct response? People wouldn’t be too keen on answering questions when they didn’t kno how much they were going to get paid to provide a correct response!

Nonetheless, there must be a few good applications for this sort of thing.. one I can think of off the top of my head that we’d love to have work somehow is technical support!

You see, support is a huuuuge cost in web hosting. For us, our monthly support team costs are over three times as much as our entire data center (including bandwidth)! Put another way, the breakdown of our ongoing cost to provide web hosting with support is about 25% the web hosting and 75% the support.

So, anything that cuts down on support (or the cost of handling support) is verrry interesting to us! I think it was about six years ago when I first started dreaming “If only there were some way to get our customers answering each other!” We’d be happy to pay them fairly for satisfactory answers too, it’d just be nice to have less overhead and scheduling and possibly even better support when we have a talent pool of the whole world.

There were a lot of issues with trying something like this though.

Without any access to sensitive customer data, they would only be able to answer the easiest of support messages. The fact that they don’t really work for us would at best bring up quality issues, and at worse scams against naive customers. Also, if people were paid to answer support messages, would they figure out a way to game the system and submit false messages for themselves to answer? What if our competitors start answering all our messages with nasty swear words?!

In the end, we never really came up with very good answers to these questions, and so the idea never came to fruition. If only we’d thrown the idea around a little more and made a service like Amazon has, we could have taken the profits and just spent it on more tech support employees!

Oh, and by the way, by reading this article, you just wasted $1.38 you could have made by simply clicking images!

Hee hee!

Heh.

Announcing the “Lets’s Save Our Environment” Remix Contest WINNERS!!!

The winner of the “Let’s Save Our Environment” remix contest is:

Michael Baumgarten of pixelsmoke.com with his super cool syncopated roboty voice remix. Congratulations.

Second place goes to:

Thomas of cherry-style.com with his super funny remix to the “I’m Too Sexy Song” (my uncle thought this was the funniest.)

Third place goes to:

Jacob Humphrey of www.herorpg.net with his disco themed remix.

Fourth place goes to:

sisforawsome of sisforawesome.com with their super glitchy and freaky Drum’n'Bass remix.

Well done everyone. Like we said, first place gets a lifetime free CDI plan. Second place get a 4 year CDI, third place a 3 year CDI, fourth place gets a 2 year CDI and everyone else who entered gets a 1 year CDI plan!

CONGRATULATIONS EVERYONE!!!! To get your prizes email the link of the comment in which you posted your remix to lsoeremix@tav.dreamhost.com with some other form identification, ideally you will send the email from an account which is listed in the comment or from the domain hosting your remix. If you are already a dreamhost customer and just want the credit applied to your exising account please say so.

Packet Piggy Back Ride

Every wonder the route a packet takes around the DreamHost Datacenter ? Well I piggy backed on a few packets the other day and got some video. The movie starts out on our journey in through a fiber GigE uplink, through the core router and then through the myriad maze of servers. ( This is not a realistic path in any sense, I just ran around the datacenter following wires and stuff .)

OpenSRS-less!

I thought this day would never come.

We’re finally done with OpenSRS.. all (er, except for about 50, but they’ll be gone soon) the domain registrations we had with them have finally been transferred over to our real ICANN-accredited registrar accounts!

You probably don’t understand how big this is, nor know how long in the coming it’s been.

It’s BIG, and it’s been a Long Time Coming.

Waaay back when, probably around 1999-ish, we signed up with OpenSRS, a then-new service from Tucows to resell the registration of domain names. We were too small (and too disorganized) to get a real ICANN-accredited registrar account back then, and Tucows’ system offered a way for us to start providing registration services to go along with our web hosting.

We actually have about ZERO interest in the domain registration business, and its related offshoots (domain reselling, back-ordering, parked pages with adsense, etc..), but just like airlines have to serve something like food, a web host pretty much has to offer domain registrations. Up until that point, we’d just been registering people’s domains for them with network solutions (and I believe we tried register.com for a little while too).

There were two good things about OpenSRS… they were cheap for the time ($10/domain year), and they had an API we could use to create our own registration management interface built right in to our web panel.

And two things only.

There were numerous idiosyncrocies with their system.

For one, international characters in whois information seemed to break everything.
We had to work around this by doing our own stripping of all accented characters submitted from our web panel.

For two, they required sending some emails of their own to the end-users (though you could customize the message). This was annoying because we already had our own email reminder system that we liked better, but we couldn’t stop them from also sending their reminder to our customers.

For three, you needed to assign a username and password for every domain registered to allow the end-user to manage it from OpenSRS’s control panel.
We decided for simplicity, and since we didn’t want our end-users to use OpenSRS’s control panel anyway, that we’d just use the same username and password for all domains we registered. This was fine until one day everything stopped working! It turned out Tucows had changed their API and passwords with a “#” in them were no longer valid. Ours happened to have a # in it. Eventually we discovered this was the problem and asked support to just remove the # from the password on the 30,000 domains we had at the time, and we’d update the password in our code. They said they couldn’t do this, and the only way to change the password for a domain was to log into their control panel and change it manually.. for EACH one! I asked them if they realized we had over 30,000 domains with them, to which their only solution was to “use macro express”.

(“Macro Express” is an application for windows that can use a spreadsheet to automate various programs, including Internet Explorer. I finally realized this was the only option they were going to give me, so I set up a macro to connect to their control panel over and over and over again, changing that password again and again and again. Each connection took several seconds and for a period of 3 days my laptop was dedicated to running this CRAZY thing. CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY! Eventually it finished, but ever since that day there have been a few random domains that still have the old nasty “#” password.)

For four, if your account balance ever hit zero, EVERYTHING broke immediately.. even if say, you were one of their largest resellers, and had say, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with them in the past, and say, had had this happened to you many times before. No matter what, you could NOT get so much as a $10 loan in their system. They even accepted credit card for payment and yet couldn’t just automatically rebill you when your funds got low!

All in all, they weren’t really that bad though.

It just comes with the territory.. the more intermediaries you have in any transaction, the more chances for problems. When was the last time you used a travel agent, now that you can just buy your tickets directly from any airline via their website?

By connecting to OpenSRS to connect to VeriSign we had twice as many APIs that could break, twice as many servers involved, twice as many support teams, and twice as long a communication chain than if we were just connecting directly to VeriSign ourselves.

Which is why we eventually got ICANN-accredited and became an honest-to-goodness registrar ourselves. It wasn’t the $3 we saved per domain. It was never having to run Macro Express for three straight days again.

Once we became ICANN-accredited we immediately set to work transferring our existing OpenSRS domains over to our new account. At first, we thought this would be a simple one-time operation.. but it turned out the bulk transfer process ICANN has is only for the cases where an ENTIRE registrar’s domain base is moving to another one. Since we weren’t exactly buying OpenSRS out, we couldn’t use the registry-side bulk transfer we thought we could at first.

As it turned out, what we had to do instead was just 30,000 regular registrar transfers of the domains. That doesn’t seem like much of a problem, except that doing a transfer like this also renews the domain for a year. Since we didn’t want to spend $200,000+ renewing all of our customers domains when they weren’t even expiring, we decided to instead do a “sneaky transfer/renewal” (my term!) Basically, we set up our system so whenever somebody requested to renew an OpenSRS domain, we silently transferred it to us!

To make the process all ninja, we’d first modify their admin email contact to be a special email address we had that automatically parsed and approved any OpenSRS transfer request emails it received. Then we’d submit the transfer request, and once it was transferred over, we’d change the admin email contact back, optionally renew it for any extra years (if it was like a two year renewal), and then send the “renewal success” email. It was a CRAZY system, but it more or less worked. Unfortunately, this process took a few days, so if somebody didn’t renew their domain until right before it expired, we had no choice but to renew for another year with OpenSRS.

It looked like we’d never be free of them!

But finally, a little while ago we got to the point where there were few enough domains left with OpenSRS (a couple thousand) that I decided it was just worth it to be done with them forever, and we just “sneaky transfer/renewed” the remaining domains, extra cost by darned! Of course, they didn’t all succeed, for various reasons (some domains had somehow gotten an entirely different OpenSRS password so we couldn’t manage them at all, some other domains were “registrar-locked” and so couldn’t be transferred), but after trying over and over again, finally TODAY we look like we’re down to only some random useless domains (old fraudulent accounts, people who left our service years ago and never transferred their registration, etc..).

We’ll be contacting Tucows Monday and officially closing our account. And then the real fun begins!

I get to delete thousands of lines of some of our oldest, nastiest code from CVS!

Ahhhhhhhh.