Bogdan Pop : Web development , Photography , Dj

Ok, it is almost 7 PM here in Romania, and I am preparing for shutting down electronic equipment in about one hour or so. For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, the Earth’s hour wiki article is very long and has tons of useful information.

The event has been initiated and is promoted by WWF. What is bad about this event is that it is not as popular in Romania, as it is in Australia’s Sydney for example. But I hope we will also get by next year somewhere close to that amount of participation for this event. As of now, only 4 cities in Romania have announced that they participate in this event: Lugoj, Baia Mare, Timisoara and Sighetu Marmatiei (all four located either northern part of the country, or western. We all know that the smartest civilized Romanians are there).

What’s nice is that there aren’t any clouds on the sky, so that I could find something to do, relax etc. Here comes the pizza delivery …

Cheers!

So, few weeks ago I said how poor the support service of ModernBill is, and how badly their software (latest version) works. I must say in advance that ModernBill has been acquired by Parallels (formerly SWsoft).

I said above, in advance, as the official announcement is due to be posted only tomorrow, 27th of March, 2008.

Now, SWsoft specializes in virtualization, especially applications used in the hosting industry. I speak about the Virtuozzo VPS environments. What can I say? The experience of Parallels in the web hosting business will definitely make ModernBill a better product. At least I hope so. Hopefully, soon ModernBill will do more, and better on a hosting environment.

Cheers!

Ok. So back here in Romania, we have a little bit of an issue. Apple is present only by the means of it’s authorized resellers. Further more, the Iphone was released only in UK. Lots of my friends were eager to by Iphones. Most of them didn’t, a few did. Other were looking for other new Nokia smartphones, which unfortunately haven’t yet been released in Romania.

So, these days one of them sent me a link to imobileplaza. Imobile Plaza seems a great website, but I need a thorough review. The first thing that poped into my web dev eyes was hacker’s safe logo, placed right next to their own. I think it is a little to much. It could have well been on the footer, and somewhere in sight while checking out for payments etc.

They have that strangest effect for showing the mobile phones. They are somewhat grey shaded until you hover them, when they loose that effect and you can see their natural color. Clicking on each cellphone will get to a full description page, just as any other similar page on other site, with link to buy the cellphone etc.

It doesn’t seem much, but my friends wouldn’t have recommended it if they weren’t satisfied about it. So I guess they deserve some feedback. If I have them, I’ll soon post a review just like on Web Interntional Awards.

Cheers!

01 | Sofa King [mark Mendes rmx] - Acquaviva & Giacomotto - Definitive Recordings
02 | Altocumulus Floccus - Kaiser Souzai - Yellow Tail
03 | Swimming with Sharks[NOIR rmx] - a2z - Blufin
04 | La Sirena[Chris Liebing rmx] - John Acquaviva & Andrea Doria - Blufin
05 | Tommy Deathrow - Heads & Tails - Electro Plastic
06 | Green Frisbees[dub] - Hatiras-Hatrax - Hatrax
07 | Orogeortyp - Natalie Konan - Carbon 14
08 | Deep Rush[jacq edit] - Jan van Lier - Definitive Recordings
09 | Flip It - Kid Dub - Definitive Recordings
10 | Hardener - Ahmet Sendil - Bosphorous
11 | Tripped Out - Mark Mendes - Starter
12 | Space Invaders [andomat 3000 rmx] - Luke Solomon - Luke Solomon - Pekids

One word, or ok, two. John Acquaviva. His latest podcast is amazing (March 2008 episode), with intro track fabulous. A first track signed by Acquaviva and Giacomotto, which was number one in the charts of 2007.

Cheers!

It has been some time since I tuned in to Clamaran’s show on Radio FG. What can I do if I was on the road mainly all previous 10 Friday nights. Today I found some time to check out some of his early spring shows, and my god. The performance on 1st of March is outstanding.

I can’t even remember when I listened to such a great set coming from Antoine. I mean yes, most of his sets are cool, nice and smooth, but this one really kicks you hard if you don’t get on the dancefloor.

If it means something to you, the set has some great tunes, such as: DJ Leo Meo & Witaz - Giv me Luv, which is the intro,  and goes on with a cool bootleg: Denis The Menace & Big World - Fired Up Vs Billie jean “BOOTLEG”.

The last 20 minutes of the set, right after the oldie but goldie “Caliente Tambores” (signed by Clamaran himself) are purely electrifying!

I will post the full playlist as soon as I get my hands on all the tracks.

Download now

I should start this by saying that I really recommend my company for web development, including hosting services, right? Well, yes. And this is what I recommend you all. Apart from that, I look all the time on the net for websites that deal with reviewing web hosts. This is because sometime it is best to have a world wide (web) look before you sign up with any hosting company.

I suggest this as most of the time, you will not hear on public places the good things about a host, so the task for you is to find the host with the less bad reputation.

However, when my company switched datacenters, our new provider, didn’t have bad reputation at all (Softlayer). The company that does on site managing of the servers had some, but not too ugly.

A few hours ago, a friend of mine in US wanted a huge shared hosting plan. Those 1 Tb hosting plans that cost as much as a Macdonald’s cheesburger. So, I said to him to go on and look for offers, and when he is done, to let me know of the provider he chose. He chose Host Monster. But who wouldn’t choose them for shared services?

I then searched the web for related, linking sites to Host Monster and any other ways I could come up with bad information on Host Monster. I have found hundreds of web hosting reviews, articles and few interesting topics like “stay away from Host Monster” on ozzu. What can I say, Host Monster is as popular as Lindsay Lohan. Kiddin. You find them anywhere. So, perhaps they are really good when it comes to shared services, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been so many people to say how bad they are.

So, hypothetically, with 15% of customers complaining, there are hundreds of thousands of happy customers with Host Monster. You could be one of them.

Of course, Host Monster is just one example. Based on this idea, you can check you current host, or the ones you plan to move too. Or perhaps you can test like this any other service you benefit from.

Just remember, that the more complain, the more satisfied are there too. Take one corporate example: Microsoft. Not my favorite, but god to others.

Cheers!

Few weeks ago, I have posted an article regarding a complaint filed at European Commission against Microsoft by the Opera community, to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its Web browser, Internet Explorer. (Will Microsoft be forced to make IE standard compliant?)

It turns out after the press release 5 days ago, that Microsoft’s new version of IE will be standard compliant. I really can’t wait to see it live kicking in action. This is not because I will use it, because I won’t, this is because I hope that this will make my work, and any other web developer’s work a lot easier, as building a cross-browser website will be more efficient and less time consuming, so our productivity will instantly rise a bit.

Cheers!

Why do I say the above. Well, it is because of Google’s pagerank algorithm. This article is perhaps the next chapter within my personal study of Google’s pagerank algorithm and how it manifests itself nowadays. If you care to read the previous article, you should then read the article about Google doing pageranks manually.

In that article I have covered a few issues that were very popular back then, especially the one with the reporting tool for webmasters, which could easily report their competition as of having paid posts, links etc, on their websites.

Now, I am really convinced that Google’s algorithm for pageranks is very smart. Why? Well, since that article, my pagerank has dropped to 3, many pages have N/A for pagerank. The most interesting fact is that one small post of mine, which is by far, not the most searched topic nowadays, got a pr 2. It has no backlinks, no nothing. Just a few words, which I didn’t even spend time to choose them wisely. In fact, that post is a brief message to let everyone know about my open source mathematical basis converter and calculator, which I had released back then on math.bogdanpop.info .

Soon after I launched it, it came upon top on Google SERPs, but now, it has disappeared, while it’s pagerank has jumped to pr 2. This is probably because that app has become quite popular. I get tons of hits from EDU networks, so I assume it is used for calculus in colleges, universities and alike.

So, why did Google push that page high up in the SERPs, why is it gone now, and why does it now have a pr 2 out of nothing? My guess would be that Google somehow knows that app is useful, so the pagerank assigned to it is something else than what you get with every new page on  a site, which is normally zero. ( The math converter / calculator article. )

How many of you are in this box? I think there’s thousands of ModernBill users, which since few years ago, when they started using their services, have gone mad over and over because of the poor support, buggy web applications and so on.

Ooops, did I say poor support? I mean, inexistent support! You actually get to there support ticketing department, and they redirect you to their FAQs or knowledge base, which is badly written, with dead links, describing features that are not where they are described to be and so on.

Now, assuming that you are really stuck in the tracks, and there is not a single user who has experienced your same issue, and to “show and tell” it on their official forum, you are pretty much doomed. What is stupid, but funny, about their forums, is that they state it loud and clear that the forums are NON-SUPPORT (with allcaps). However, having said that, I must add that there is no other place where you can get actual support!

Let me brief you regarding my company’s experience with ModernBill. We started using MB back in 2005 if I recall it correctly. I haven’t had many issues. I ordered, paid, got my license, installed it, and everything worked smooth. Yes, there were some small exceptions, minor things easily sorted out with some support (which replied after days), and their forums. Thank God for those forums. If it weren’t for these forums, their support technician replies would have been dust in the eyes.

Now, serious issues started to rise when we switched datacenters, back in November last year. Imagine that we have carefully backed up everything. As any smart, normal man would do it anyway. We restored the account on the new server in the new DC. Everything worked fine, except ModernBill, which worked, but banned people from logging in. In fact, for correct username/password you got a blank page, but if inputed incorrectly, you knew that from their fancy error system.

I tried over and over to search for an answer on the forums, no luck. In fact, there were a lot of others like me. So, eventually I had to renew my support subscription (at ModernBill you pay to get stupid answers 48 hours after you ask the question). I had to pay for the support I wouldn’t have needed. They needed my server access details to fix this serious issue themselves, which of course they couldn’t so they had to tell me, upgrade!

So I upgraded to their latest version of the software. As their upgrade scripts were faulty, corrupting hosting plans, client information etc, I had to drop everything, start again from scrap and input all the information manually. Just as a head-up, their app uses 215 SQL tables. Yeeeeey!

After I finished this, I started using it. It worked very much ok! Until things started to go wrong, and they keep going wrong. It all started around 22nd of February when I realized that I had some overdue invoices, and their application was not sending out notification of overdue invoices which will trigger client account suspensions etc.

I contacted support, got some “valuable” reply 3 days later. The actual solution came on 3rd of March, from Blake, one of MB developers. However, it was not such great as they updated custom email templates. This actually means that all emails which will now be sent will be in English, not Romanian, the language of my customers.Great! Once again, modify them all manually. Yeeeeey!

Then, there are no notification mails sent what so ever, even as I am writting this post, the issue is not solved. Moreover, the ordering process sometimes creates duplicate entries. One orders one package, but I get 3 duplicate orders in the database. Yeeey!

Finally, one order few hours ago, everything ran smoothly, but when the automated scripts attempted to create the package on the server, I got a “username” too long error. Their service is configured to use 8 letters from the domain name for the username, and replace/remove some if there can be duplicates. Then, why the username too long issue.

So, it is 6th of March, 15 days since first contact for this issues, no real good solution. In fact their last reply (which was Blake’s reply) was 3 days ago. Yeeeey!

So, if you are looking for a hosting management system that works when it works, uses a lot of RAM, is filled with bugs, has unfinished features (by this I mean stuff like create some config and being unable to modify, reverse it, delete it etc, if you do not know SQL and MB database, so that you can perform it by queries), if you are looking for poor down to no support, you want your heart to spike up, and are eager to pay big $ for it, go ahead, buy ModernBill.

But perhaps you should buy a holiday in Mali, or any other exotic place for the change.

Cheers!

My company, Raptor Design, has just got a contract to develop a financial consultation company’s website. What they do is this. They have contracts with different banks, here in Romania, they gather information regarding what type of credits, checking or saving accounts each bank has to offer, and then they create all the documents you need so that you are sure you get what you want, and most importantly, at the best rate for you.

Among the site, we need to create a marketing campaign for this company, media documents and so on. This is why few days ago I started looking for related websites, or checking out ads on local TV, newspapers and so on.

This is why I have come upon this website which offers cd rates, from banks in US. Of course, their website is completely different from what I expected such a website to be. It is very much of a information portal, as opposed to a company’s website, which presents it’s services. When I first found it on Google, I thought I found the second type website, the one which my company needs to build too.

However, they are quite good. They show a bunch, and by a bunch I mean a lot, of saving account, checking or cd accounts offers, with their yields right next to it, links to reviews, which are written by clients that have opted for those offers and so on.

Just think of this similarly to those tourism reviews sites. You always check them out before you go on vacation. The same you should do in this domain, before going for a savings account for example. Perhaps this way you will find an offer twice as good as the one you were about to take.

Their website has a few visual artifacts, but I suppose that is due because I am on Macintosh. What I was surprised to see is that their site has partial XHTML, partial HTML sources, so I guess they began a nice and smooth transition to modern technologies, which is great!

So, before going to the bank, or to a credit union, check them out. The information is very useful, or at least it was for me.

Cheers!