Like Hammer for Chocolate

Holiday Gift Exchange

We had our yearly holiday gift exchange at the ‘meat on a skewer’ place in Covina, CA. Here is the video of what everyone got. I say the S word 4 times in the video so cover your impressionable childrens’ ears if they are watching this. This video was taken BEFORE Lissa came to visit but Bret was faster at posting the pics. And for those of you who will be commenting to the effect of “why don’t you guys stop having all that fun and fix my server” . . .

Lissa Explains it All!

Look at me! I’m standing next to an INTERNET SUPERSTAR.

This is Lissa! She’s one of our oldest customers and she found time during her busy vacation to Los Angeles to stop by our offices today to say hello! Hello Lissa!

Lissa’s got a super-popular site, Lissa Explains it All, and it’s one of the Internet’s most well-known places for beginners learning HTML. She made it when she was just a wee lass, but as you can see she’s no longer wee!

Massive DDOS Attack

In case you are having problems accessing your site or email right now, all our uplinks to the net are currently saturated by a massive distributed denial of service attack.

We’re working hard to get it under control.. please visit http://status.dreamhost.com/ (bookmark that page.. it’s our off-network status page for just such emergencies) for all updates from here on out!

Bleah..

We want our SPAM Back!

This may be the first time you’ve ever heard anyone ask for spam but that’s what I’m doing. We’re so committed to fighting spam originating on our servers that we’re willing to open up the floodgates and invite everyone to send us our spam back. Don’t start just forwarding us your spam willy-nilly, though. I’ll explain more about this later.

This whole idea started with AOL. No matter what you think about AOL, they are actually doing something real to reduce the amount of spam you receive every day. We still have a somewhat mixed relationship with them when it comes to email but at the end of the day I think the way they handle spam coming into their network is effective and I want the rest of the big email providers to do the same thing.

AOL has primarily put the control over what email is allowed to enter their network into the hands of their users. If their users report enough spam originating from a specific server or computer, AOL will temporarily block it, refusing all email for a relatively short period of time. DreamHost has been on the receiving end of that many times and it is annoying to a company in our position, but it has also motivated us to work on reducing spam. Not being able to send email to one of the largest blocks of email users in the world will have that effect!

When we first realized this was how AOL was doing things, we were honestly a bit appalled. “Oh, no! AOL users have the power to blacklist us?”

In addition to using user-powered email blacklists, AOL also sends us copies of every tagged spam they receive from our network. That’s what’s really good about their system and what I want everyone else to emulate. They send us the spams in a specific format to a specific address and we have developed an automated parsing system for them. As soon as we get the spams sent back to us we have cataloged them in a database for later analysis. We then use that data to determine where in our system spam is coming from and automatically stop new spam before it leaves our network, thereby reducing the amount of spam flowing over the Internet.

If the other major email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) would all do this same thing DreamHost would be able to nearly eliminate all sources of spam on our network. If everyone sent back all spam they received to the originating network and every email provider processed their returned spam automatically like we do, spam itself could be nearly eliminated.

That, in short, is how AOL is reducing the amount of spam you receive little by little. That also explains why we’re asking for our own spam back. If you are a sizable email provider and you would like to join in the fun, contact me and we’ll get started. If you are an invidivual and would like to be involved, tell your email provider to get in touch with us.

Push It

Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby
Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby

I started a little tradition here a while ago, one I’m pretty proud up.

It has to do with Salt-N-Pepa.

You see, when we’re writing code and making changes to our website, we do it in a test environment… because unbelievably, we don’t always get everything exactly right the first time. Some might even say we don’t get everything right the second or third time, some might say never.

Anyway, once we’ve got our code the least bit correct, we gently cast it out of our test environment and into the real world. Then, two hundred Happy DreamHost Customers immediately find all kinds of things wrong with it, and proceed to loudly let us know.

We call this process “pushing out” or “doing a push out”… because we have one script we run that takes all our code in CVS and “pushes” it to all the live servers that need it (about 14 at last count!)

Because of the BIG SCARY nature of taking brand-new, lightly-tested code and all of the sudden making it 100% live in front of tens of thousands of customers, we try and make sure everybody at the company knows when a push out is happening. It’s a big event.
And we wouldn’t want anybody caught unawares.

To do this, the push out script sends (or at least is supposed to send) an email to all when it’s finished indicating when the push out was, what files changed, and who pushed it out. Which is ostensibly a pretty good way to notify people.

But *I* felt it WASN’T ENOUGH!

Which is what led me to the idea a few months ago of playing Salt-N-Pepa’s song “Push It” on infinite repeat at top volume from my computer speakers the entire duration of the process. That way, anybody in the office, or even walking by in the hallway has is TATTOOED on their BRAIN that:

Ah, push it
Ah, push it

Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby
Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby

Get up on this!

Ow! Baby!
Salt and Pepa’s here!

[Now wait a minute, y'all
This dance ain't for everybody
Only the sexy people
So all you fly mothers, get on out there and dance
Dance, I said!]

Salt and Pepa’s here, and we’re in effect
Want you to push it, babe
Coolin’ by day then at night working up a sweat
C’mon girls, let’s go show the guys that we know
How to become number one in a hot party show
Now push it

Ah, push it – push it good
Ah, push it – push it real good
Ah, push it – push it good
Ah, push it – p-push it real good

Hey! Ow!
Push it good!

Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby
Oooh, baby, baby
Baby, baby

Yo, yo, yo, yo, baby-pop
Yeah, you come here, gimme a kiss
Better make it fast or else I’m gonna get pissed
Can’t you hear the music’s pumpin’ hard like I wish you would?
Now push it

Push it good
P-push it real good

Ah, push it
Get up on this!

Boy, you really got me going
You got me so I don’t know what I’m doing

Ah, push it

(… and that we’re doing a push out.)

It’s a pretty short song, and pushing out takes about 30-40 minutes these days, so we all get to listen to it a good dozen times!

By now I’d reckon we’re the “Push It” experts.

Amazingly, it’s worked wonders with our internal corporate communication… which is why I hereby officially recommend that Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” become the Internationally recognized “song of pushing out” for developers everywhere!

Give it a shot, you won’t be disappointed.

(An interesting aside. Sunday morning at 9:15 am I was in my car… and what to my wondering ears should appear on the radio? You guessed it!

I immediately whipped our my EVDO laptop and performed our first ever vehicular push out.)

Too Much Turkey!

I guess I ate too much turkey this year, because my fat ass broke my trusty old Aeron. It happened last night. It’s a terrible way to spend $900.

I sat on the front of the seat (pretty hard, I guess!) and cracked the back of it real good. It’s completely useless now.

As Dallas suggested, I might replace it with a treadmill!