Software Regret

Alex Payne of Twit­ter (the social net­work every­one but me uses) has posted a well struc­tured list of soft­ware he's paid for but no longer users. I am in a sim­i­lar boat thanks to sites like Mac­Zot, where I have licenses for shit I will never, ever use again or for appli­ca­tions whose func­tion­al­ity was replaced by some­thing bet­ter later on.

Through Mac­Zot

  • Audio­book Builder
    This came with some sort of bun­dle that I pur­chased, and appar­ently I kept no records of it. I never used it, and I don't know that I'd ever want to, but I did tech­ni­cally pay for it.
  • Disco
    Some­how Austin moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner horn-swaggled me again and took $10 of my money to con­tribute towards his inabil­ity to get a fuck­ing hair cut. What was I think­ing? Why did I buy this when Burn does all of this shit for free using the same pub­licly avail­able OS X frame­works and with none of the lame bull­shit UI?
  • Hawk­eye, rooSwitch, KIT (now called Together)
    Hawk­eye suf­fers from one a pretty com­mon prob­lem in OS X, in that it wraps open source soft­ware in a cocoa front-end and then charges you money for it. Since I don't give a fuck about DVD mas­ter­ing, it was an unused license. rooSwitch swaps pref­er­ences. Neat trick, but use­less for me. How­ever, in that same bun­dle I got Together (then called K.I.T., or Keep It Together), which has actu­ally been a pretty handy tool for sort­ing and man­ag­ing the sheer vol­ume of inci­den­tal fluff I seem to invari­ably accumulate.
  • Data Guardian
    This seemed handy at the time, worked and looked like shit when I paid for it, and now I can­not get the insanely over-complicated license man­ager on the site to rec­og­nize that I ever paid for it. High regret over the money I wasted on this Epic Fail application.
  • Direct Mail!
    Came in another bun­dle (maybe the one with Audio­book Builder?) and it's another appli­ca­tion which does some­thing I just don't give a fuck about.

    Con­tinue Reading →

Comments { 0 }

Hosting control panels

For about 6 years I've pon­dered the nature of web host­ing con­trol pan­els. When I ran a web host, I played with CPanel, Plesk, and Direc­tAd­min. I've since dab­bled in the open source waters of Web­min and User­min, and of late I've even poked at VHCS and Open­Panel. I have, to date, not seen a sin­gle con­trol panel that is pre­cisely what I want (with Direc­tAd­min com­ing clos­est, and almost being a win­ner if not for its tiered reseller model aaaaannnd price tag). The real stick­ing points come down to the fact that I want:

  • The con­trol panel to write human-readable, rea­son­able con­fig­u­ra­tion files: This is where Web­min falls down on the job. The con­fig files are valid, but god are they awful to read.

  • No men­tion or hint of reseller any­thing: I just want admin­is­tra­tive accounts run­ning the show and hosted accounts with domains linked to them. Maybe some way for the hosted to mon­key with the non-essentials of their own accounts. So on the grounds of overkill, pretty much every com­mer­cial panel fails my sim­ple needs.

  • Email sup­port for some­thing that's not anti­quated: some pan­els use qmail (or some ver­sion therein, which hasn't had a proper update in years), some use send­mail (which is older than dirt and half as secure), and some use what­ever the fla­vor of the month is (read: what­ever ships on the sup­ported OS dis­tro). Me? I'm a post­fix guy. I'm not wed­ded to it per se, but it's updated, fea­ture packed, works well and its con­fig­u­ra­tion is only mod­estly arcane (qmail, by the way, fails due to hav­ing an arcane con­fig­u­ra­tion file struc­ture that doesn't plug into antivirus or spam very easily).

    Regard­ing IMAP and POP sup­port, I find that these pan­els often use their own "ques­tion­able" clients, or rely on courier. There isn't really any­thing wrong with that, I just like dove­cot more (to be fair, Direc­tAd­min sup­ports dove­cot last I checked).

    I don't want to even get started with autho­rized SMTP sup­port from these pack­ages. God, the hor­ror.

  • No byzan­tine depen­den­cies: Don't tell me that I need some god awful fos­silized encryp­tion library or ldap to make this sys­tem work.

    "Lis­ten here, Mr. Con­trol Panel, I don't use LDAP, and unless that is what you're using as a back­ing store for your host­ing infor­ma­tion, nei­ther should you."

To that end, I've begun play­ing with Ruby and Thor to whip up some sim­ple add/delete scripts (with ini­tial suc­cess!), and the biggest stum­bling block I've encoun­tered so far is just pars­ing out the accounts that exist.

The Apache con­fig­u­ra­tion file for­mat is… archaic in its own right, being nei­ther XML nor attribute: value pairs. It's read­able, but there is a rea­son that an entire perl pack­age (HTTPD::Config, which may or may not exist any­more) was pro­duced just to scrape httpd.conf files.

I fear that with­out step­ping back a lit­tle and engi­neer­ing a proper solu­tion I'm just going to wind up reim­ple­ment­ing what I encoun­tered when I did overnight sup­port for Real­ity Check Net­works (no link pro­vided, because, well, you know. Those dudes…).

Comments { 0 }

fuck you, austin sarner

Matt Ball has posted a siz­able write-up which neatly sums up the ris­ing tide of back­lash against the so-called "Deli­cious Gen­er­a­tion" of soft­ware devel­op­ers cur­rently bilk­ing milk­ing aban­don­ing their installed base every 6-to-8 months.

I had been work­ing on some­thing sim­i­lar, though admit­tedly much, much less details when this dropped. My inter­est in this was strictly per­sonal, as I've been bit­ten by Austin Moth­er­fuck­ing Sarner twice now: I am a recov­er­ing license holder for Cat­a­log and Disco.

Con­tinue Reading →

Comments { 0 }

CSSEdit & TextMate = L-O-V-E

I don't know if I've ever per­son­ally men­tioned this and I know I'm years late to the party, but it bears repeat­ing that CSSEdit and Text­Mate are two of the only appli­ca­tions I miss when I'm on a Linux machine. One could argue that there is always (re: eter­nally) going to be vi/vim or emacs, but in my opin­ion there is no beat­ing the com­bi­na­tion of these two appli­ca­tions for web devel­op­ment or lay­out work.

Con­tinue Reading →

Comments { 0 }