PIPA and SOPA

If you run a little backwater website (like a friend and I do) that still gets some viewers, take a moment and put up a banner noting your opposition to SOPA and PIPA. The superficial victories we've seen recently aren't permanent.

Reddit and Wikipedia are going dark on Jan 18th in protest. I think shutting off entirely is a move better suited to sites with clout, but it sure can't hurt for any site to put up a notice. It's better than just standing on the sidelines and cheering on Wikipedia and Reddit.

No one will see this post, because I fucked up my DNS entries when I changed DNS providers. But I know it's here.

Hosting, DNS, and Domain Name Regstration

I'm moving from my n00b setup of using my domain name registrar's DNS servers to a third party. This way, my registrar, authoritative DNS servers, and web hosting will all be run by separate companies. This makes it less troublesome to change any one of them. (Separating web host and registrar is probably the most important, as your web host is most exposed to your actions, and therefore probably most likely to cut you off. But as long as they don't control your DNS or your domain name, you can swap them out in a matter of hours.)

I'm completely ignorant of the general situation among DNS hosts, but it seems like a pretty straightforward business. Unlike registrars and web hosts, there don't seem to be that many large players here. (Perhaps because the space between people who use their registrar, and people who run their own DNS servers isn't that big? I desperately don't want to be in the business of babysitting BIND, though, so I want someone else to run this stuff or me.) The general pricing scheme seems to be price-per-zone + price-per-X-queries. Seems completely reasonable.

Setup I'm looking at right now:
Registrar: name.com
DNS: Amazon Route 53
Hosting: Google Apps
HTTP redirection: Google Apps (for naked domain/zone apex to subdomain)

I don't have a replacement for my previous host's more-flexible redirection.

Of course, I don't actually *need* any of this bureaucratic fault-tolerance, but it's a nice exercise in paranoia.

For more options, I found this comparison page here, which is mostly useful as an enumeration of options to evaluate. There's also an anemic thread on /r/sysadmin.

Things I Have Learned to Understand After Moving to the East Coast

Context: I moved from San Diego (where there is no cold) to New York (where there is; [shut up, Midwest]) two years ago.

• Hot drinks. When it's cold outside, drinking anything hot is very satisfying.
• Hot showers. When it was cold yesterday and you think it will be cold today, hot showers are a great relief.
• Scarves. Not just for the French anymore.
• Gloves. When I was in San Diego, I always silently judged people who wore gloves. After being out in the snow during a Massachusetts winter and discovering my own gloves were inadequate and I in fact needed stronger gloves, I've changed my mind.
• Long underwear. Only in extreme circumstances. They make regular pants into super pants.
  

Software RAID in Linux with mdadm

I run a RAID 1 (mirroring) with 2 disks. Cheap and simple. (And I don't have to fuck around with RAID card support under Linux.)

I just had 1 disk fail, so I'm about to replace it:

• Cheat sheet on mdadm: http://www.ducea.com/2009/03/08/mdadm-cheat-sheet/
• HOWTO on replacing a failed drive: http://www.howtoforge.com/replacing_hard_disks_in_a_raid1_array

Hold on to your asses everyone. Reminder to self: pull the right disk.

[Edit: Success!]

Google Reader -> Del.icio.us

I guess del.icio.us isn't called del.icio.us since Yahoo! bought it, but whatevs.

Google Reader, which has been slowly dying for several years now, just got dismantled a little bit, when its "Share" feature went away in favor of Google+.

The good news is that it's extremely easy to export your shared items. There's the nice export page here: http://www.google.com/reader/settings?display=import.

There is also an Atom feed available from http://www.google.com/reader/shared/: click "Atom feed" on the right, then change "reading-list" at the end of the URL (it'll be preceded by a "%2F") to "broadcast?n=10000" (or substitute any suitably large number for n).

Someone wrote a procedure and (naturally) a Perl script for converting your Google Reader shared items to a bookmark file that things like del.icio.us can read.

Cheers.

Hide All YouTube Comments with Greasemonkey Script

The Greasemonkey script "No YouNoobs" claims to remove all YouTube comments -- unfortunately, the versions I've found were out of date, so I updated it: http://pastebin.com/eru2LVqp

Save it as anything.user.js (".user.js" is important), and open it in Firefox -- Gresemonkey will offer to install it.

You need the Greasemonkey extensions for Firefox installed (perhaps obviously). I haven't looked into it for Chrome.

Installing Firefox 4 and Making it Usable

I installed Firefox 4 today. It's not in Ubuntu's repository yet, but you can get it from a mozilla repository:


$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install firefox


Hurray!

browser.tabs.tabMinWidth has been removed in favor of making people write a userChrome.css file. Create userChrome.css in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{profilename}/chrome. ({profilename} is a random string followed by a dot and the visible profile name. If you have multiple profiles, make sure you're inside the right one.) There should already be a userChrome-example.css file in there. Your userChrome.css file should look like this:


@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

.tabbrowser-tab:not([pinned]) {
  min-width: 40px !important;
  max-width: 250px !important;
}


(If the @namespace part gets wrapped, make sure it's a single line.)

Set min-width and max-width to whatever you want. The defaults are 140px and 250px, respectively. Just adding that breaks tab resizing when closing windows, though, unless you disable animation. Open the magic about:config URL, find browser.tabs.animate, and set it to false.

Restart firefox for changes to take effect.