All things tech

I just tried the new Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin.  My experience so far has been flawless.  I shut off Pidgin, ran the Windows Installer and started Pidgin back up.  Then I created an account in Pidgin’s “manage accounts” area.  I didn’t have any trouble at all.  So far, it’s worked 100%.  I really like how it doesn’t show me my friends’ screennames, but just shows me their full (First, last, sometimes middle) name.  It’s extremely clean.  Now I don’t need to log in to Facebook to talk with certain friends, and I get to use the Pidgin interface that I love.

Note: My friend’s virusscanner picked up the installer as a virus.  I used Symantec, with the latest virus definitions (October 28, 2008 rev 4) to scan the install and it didn’t detect anything wrong.

I’d say I’m a casual eBay seller.  But somehow, everything I list ends up selling for more than the average comparable product.  My friend asked me how I do this.  Here are my tips:

• Set your initial price low.  That gets people interested.  If you set it at the price that you want, nobody will even add it to their watchlist.
• List the auction to end on Saturday or Sunday night sometime between 6pm and 11pm.  When somebody bids on it, the item gets added to their watchlist.  Saturday and Sunday nights are when people have time to watch the auction and make last minute impulse bids.
• Set the auction to go 7 days.  I’m not sure this is the best tactic, but I think it is.  This gives enough time for a lot of people to see the item and to bid but it isn’t so long that potential bidders might get disinterested.
• Make sure you have all the specifications listed.  I usually go to the product’s website and copy that.
• Be honest in what you say.  Describe the scratches and blemishes but reassure them of the functionality and quality of the product.
• Make sure you include a picture of the actual product (Not one copied off the internet).  This gives the user more comfort that they know what they’re getting.
• Make sure you answer questions quickly.  That gives potential bidders more time to bid.
• This is one of the most important things: you want the customer to have a good experience, which is why you should be completely honest in your description of what you post, ship it off promptly, and send them a congratulations/thanks email when you’ve shipped it so they know when it’ll be there.  Good reviews mean people will be a lot more willing to trust you in the future and therefore are more willing to bid.

I saw some pictures of animal USB drives on the internet and thought it would be cool to make my own with a stuffed animal and a Sandisk Cruzer 256 mb drive I had laying around.  Here is the usb drive and cow (sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the cow before I cut the seams of the head off).

USB drive before

Chick-fil-A cow before

I had to cut the seams of the head as well as a couple seams in the back towards the tail.  The cuts in the back are so the lanyard would have a place to come out.  The next step is to take out some of the stuffing and fit the usb drive inside the body.  You might need to take some of the stuffing out to make space for the drive so it doesn’t push itself out.  The stuffing in this cow was particularly stiff (unlike cotton) so it had a lot of pressure at first.  Once you get the pressure right, you’ll need to thread the lanyard through the hole in the back that you carved.

The next step is to glue the usb drive in so it doesn’t pop out.  I used hot glue–at first I was afraid that it would damage the electronic components, but it seems to be fine.  Pull the USB drive out a little bit and add a generous layer of hot glue all around the drive.  Be sure not to put the glue too high because it will stop the cap from being able to attach.  Apply the glue then push the drive down into the body and put pressure around the neck so the outsides are affixed with the glue.  Do the same with the head.

Cow body

Head with glued cap

And here’s the finished product (notice the light from the USB lights up when plugged in):

Cow plugged in

Drive turned on

My problem was that whenever I sent an email from my boogly.net email (hosted by hostgator) to my email at celiacclub.com (email managed with Google Apps for domains), the message bounced, replying with this error:

550-Verification failed for <email>

550-No Such User Here

550 Sender verify failed (state 14).

It only happened for the boogly.net-to/from-celiacclub.com connection–emails from hotmail got through successfully.  If your email isn’t working at all for communication with any email, refer to the Google Configuring MX records page and use dnstools.com to check your work.  Also, make sure your SPF record is set correctly.  At first I thought it was an issue because I’m running Google Apps for Domains.  Thought something was misconfigured on my DNS.  But it wasn’t.  It took a while before I found the Gmail Troubleshooter.  This told me that it was for sure the other host that was attempting to check that the user exists on Google Apps (This is supposed to help alleviate junk mail).

After exchanging emails with hostgator support, I found that the issue was with the hostgator servers’ configuration of localdomains/remotedomains.  In other words, boogly.net thought that celiacclub.com was a local domain so it tried to look on its own system to validate that email address.  You’ll need to modify your server’s awareness of the site.  Here is a good tutorial about how to go about changing this.  Of course, you’ll need to move from the localdomains to the remotedomains.  Depending on your host, you might not be able to modify these files–in which case, you’ll need to get on the phone with their support and have them do this process.

It’s been 11 days since I’ve had a slicehost account, so I figured I would write about my experience with it.  Slicehost is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) host that pretty much gives you webspace, an internet connection, and lets you do whatever you want with it.  It’s nice to have the control…but that also means you need to configure it all yourself.  I was nervous making the switch because it would mean more responsibility and more liability.  It’s taken a lot of time to configure my slice (almost a week), but I think it was worth it.

Since I’m not extremely experienced with Linux, it took me a while to find my way around.  You start off with a flavor of Linux installed on your slice (you can choose from Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and others).  Then you log in and need to secure your server and add the functionality you need.  I followed the tutorials at http://articles.slicehost.com and they were crystal clear.  They were the best tutorials I’ve ever seen.  I got up and running pretty fast.  The problem was customizing certain parts of my server to optimize for my site.  I also ran into some problems when I didn’t do things right.

Whenever I ran into problems, I would just go to http://chat.slicehost.com where there was always somebody there to help.  It’s some of the best tech support I’ve ever gotten.  I’d tell them my problem, then they’d usually ask me to check certain error logs, then they’d tell me what was wrong and how to solve it.  So far I’ve probably taken 20 problems there and they solved 100% of them.  That’s what I love the most about slicehost.

I still use HostGator–some of my websites can’t be transferred yet (too much hassle).  I just had an issue today with my email that I needed to talk to their support about.  I think my experience today was typical of how it’s been the past two years there.  I used their liveperson chat client.  Here’s the conversation(with boring content removed):

[hostgator]: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat, how may I assist you?

Jon: I have an email where all of the emails bounce[problem description]. here is the error:[error]

[hostgator]: Check to see if the mailbox is full.

Jon: it’s not

[hostgator]: That is an odd error. What email can I send a test to?

Jon: [email]

[hostgator]: Sent

Jon: I got your test email

[hostgator]: There has to be something wrong on the Google aps email that cant send out. On the Google aps account try repling back to me.

Jon: sent

[hostgator]: I got it. I am stumped on this. It is like that google aps account just cant send to that one account.

[hostgator]: I would suggest emailing support@hostgator.com to see if the admins can look into the email records and figure out the problem.

Jon: ok

[hostgator]: Sorry I could not help you.

[hostgator]: It confused me and I do not have access to the records.

[hostgator]: Is there anything else I can help you with?

Jon: no thats all

[hostgator]: Excellent, take care and have a great day!

[hostgator]: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat! If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says “close” in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

This support conversation was actually one of the pleasantest ones that I’ve had–others have been really bad.  Here are the things that pretty much happens every time I talk to support:

1. First off, they blame it on somebody else.  Here they blamed it on Google.  In about 60% of my calls, they blame it on me and tell me that it might go away later.

2. They don’t really understand what your problem is.  They usually always give me a “solution” that’s unrelated, which tells me that they’re telling you to do stuff before they really understand what’s going on.

3. They tell you “I can’t help you.  I don’t have access to that.  You’ll need to email support@hostgator.com”

Yea, I would always like to email support@hostgator.com first to get the support guys that actually have permissions to fix my problem.  But the problem with that is that it takes them way too long to answer them.  One time I had a huge server problem and I emailed them.  Our email conversation went through this process: [hostgator]it’s not our fault, [me]yea it is, look at the logs, [hostgator]okay I changed xxx, [me]no it still doesn’t work, [hostgator]oh, I’ll change this [me]no, it still doesn’t work, [hostgator] it’s not our fault.  That particular issue took 4 days to resolve.  Email support would respond about 5-30 hours later.  Meanwhile, I had customers calling me every hour or so.

Which is why I believe that slicehost will work a lot nicer.  I wrote this article mostly to provide the advice I wish that I had, not to get referral points or whatnot.  But if you do sign up for slicehost, I’d be appreciative if you use me as the referral by clicking this link–it won’t increase your price at all.