Have you ever wanted to clear all your tweets without deleting your account and losing all your follows and followers? It’s a bit cumbersome for people that have massive tweet histories, but you can use TwitterClear to remove all your tweets. TwitterClear will remove up to 100 messages per hour, a restriction that Twitter has on their API. This restriction may be lifted if Twitter sees an obvious use for TwitterClear, but I haven’t thought to contact them yet since my own tweet history was only about 200 entries.
November 7th 2008
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I came across Derek Powazek’s superbly simplistic DePo Clean theme a couple days ago and finally got around to installing it. It needs the flickrRSS plugin to run. I do not use flickr for my photo storage–Zenfolio was my prime choice after reviewing a variety of services. Unfortunately, flickrRSS does not work with Zenfolio. I could not find an alternative so I used Dave Kellam’s flickrRSS as a model to create a plugin called ZenfolioRSS. You can see the results above.
Update [11/5/2007]: I’ve placed a download link for the plugin below. You should use the flickrRSS CSS styles to customize the look, making this a drop-in replacement for flickrRSS. To install, place the zenfoliorss.php file in the wp-content/plugins folder. You need to enable the plugin through the Plugins interface in the WordPress admin site and then configure the plugin by going to Options > ZenfolioRSS-the main option you need to include is the base URL to your Zenfolio site (e.g. http://vibolhou.com). In your theme, add “<?php get_ZenfolioRSS(); ?>” without the quotes where you want to see the pictures. If you’re replacing flickrRSS, replace the “get_flickrRSS()” text with “get_ZenfolioRSS()” in your code.
Download Link: ZenfolioRSS Homepage
November 1st 2007
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My how time flies. It happened with little fanfare, but KC turned seven on April 1st, 2007. I’m quite amazed it has made it so far for so long. Kudos goes to everyone who made it possible, especially the members! The next iteration of KC has been in the works for several years now, and each year has yielded a different set of goals. I think I’ve finally come to a satisfactory and achievable set of goals for the next phase of the website. It has been a slow and painful process, but I am thankful for everyone’s continued support and patience.
April 2nd 2007
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I’m in San Jose at the moment for the 360Flex conference at eBay’s headquarters. The event is going to run from Monday through Wednesday. NPOWR is going to be looking for Flex/Flash talent, so make sure to say hello!
March 5th 2007
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I found out last night that my company, NPOWR Digital Media, has won an Emmy! It’s great to finally see that the technology I’ve been pouring blood, sweat, and tears into for the past year has finally received recognition and validation. The company itself has been building the idea for at least five years now, but only in the last year have we started bringing the ideas into fruition.
We were nominated a couple months ago, but the entries we were competing against were major guns that included ABC, AOL, GameTap, Revver, and VONGO. The award is for Outstanding Innovation and Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for Best Use of “On Demand” Technology Over the Public (open) Internet. Quite a mouthful of words there, but an Emmy nonetheless against great odds. The link to the nominations is here, and the link to the winners is here.
I’ll link our press release when it is ready (we didn’t think we were going to win, so we didn’t have a press release ready). Here are some low quality shots off my Samsung i320n:
January 9th 2007
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A week after moving KhmerConnection to Lunarpages, we started experiencing major problems. It turns out we were moved to an over saturated server (constant loads of 6-12 on a dual CPU system) and they blamed KC for consuming excessive resources (5% CPU/Memory, their “maximum allowed” is 1% CPU/Memory which is ridiculous given the amount of bandwidth and disk space they provide, just downloading files will run that figure beyond 1%). Now that KC is off their servers, the load is still high.
Last Friday, Lunarpages moved KC off onto another server without notifying me and broke a handful of important parked domains that were major entry points to the site (i.e. khmer.cc). Come Saturday, they moved KC back onto its original server and renaming the .htaccess file which exposed a fair amount of KC’s code. That action broke KC for several hours. They also failed to restore my access to the control panel, so I was forced to call their technical support and waste over two hours working to get everything back in order. Not only that, they failed to copy the DB back to the original server, so we lost roughly 1000 posts from the 24 hour period before.
After half an hour on the phone they managed to finally give me access to the account, after which point I quickly fixed the gaping security issue with exposed PHP code. I don’t really get why the admin that pointed KC back to the original server didn’t check to see if the site was functional; at the very least he/she could have just gone to the URL to verify it–very novice. Unfortunately, I gained zero traction on the phone with their technical support guy on restoring data from the server they had moved us to; he had to forward the request to a higher level admin, but all the admins had gone home for the day. He wouldn’t even give me access to the account on the temporary server.
As such, I faced the dilemma of keeping the site down for another day so their tech support guys could finally give me access to the temporary server database, or restore the database from a pre-move backup that I had from the day before and let it run. At this point, I had lost complete faith in Lunarpages’ support team to follow up on anything. They had done things without so much as asking nor notifying me of any change until after the action was completed, at which point they notified me by e-mail which is not acceptable for a site of this size and activity. They had also deliberately broken the site and failed to check to see if it was still working and had egregiously exposed mission critical code.
I decided to restore the day’s old backup to a new server I had just installed the night before at stimTV’s datacenter on my way back home and pointed all critical DNS entries to the server. Unfortunately for me, it took the better part of Saturday evening to setup and configure the server from scratch but everything worked well after the DNS finished propagating. However, this turned out to be a great choice because Lunarpages did not contact me on Sunday as promised. Instead they called me Monday to inquire about the site, though by this time, all that needed doing had been done. Even if they could restore the lost data, there were already inconsistencies between the current and old database (some 400 new posts already). As upset as I was, I decided to just let it go and instructed the support guy to note that I would be discontinuing the service.
For anyone interested, the server is running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS with Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5, Postfix, Postgrey, and Dovecot. The most non-trivial portion of the setup had to do with Postfix and Dovecot since there weren’t any documents readily available for configuring Postfix and Dovecot with virtual domains; they’re both setup to use MySQL as an authentication layer. I think I’ll spend some time to put together a HOWTO on that when I have some time.
In closing, I absolutely do not recommend Lunarpages to anyone. The way they handled the KC account was very irresponsible and lacked the quality of an experienced service provider. A good service provider will contact the client before any changes are made, especially if urgent. There are dozens of variables that need to be considered before any major moves take place. I should have gleaned from my initial e-mails with their technical support staff during the setup and configuration of KC that quality was lacking since they avoided a number of my questions. Their technical support is difficult to get a hold of on weekends (I was on hold for 20 minutes before someone got to me), and their escalation procedures don’t exist beyond technical support–tickets have to be filed even in urgent situations to get the attention of a system administrator, and if it’s past business hours, you’re SOL until the next day. Their primary mode of communication is e-mail, even when site e-mail is down. They will not call you before they decide to make major changes to your site (such as moving it), so if you have any custom work done, especially with regard to .htaccess files, be warned that they may mess things up.
Naturally, others using Lunarpages likely have better experiences. However, you will never know the quality of a provider until something goes wrong. It didn’t take me long to find that out.
January 9th 2007
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Some of you might have noticed that KC was down for a couple hours over the recent holiday. This is because I have moved KC to a new host. After much searching, evaluation, and comparison, Lunarpages came out on top as the better hosting provider. They do regular nightly backups of all their servers and is a small enough operation at this time that service continues to be personal. Their servers run cPanel for management, which is the same management software KC has used in the past.
If you’re in the market for hosting, I recommend that you give Lunarpages a try. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee on their services and will move a site for you if you are already hosted elsewhere. Their support forums are also a great place to discuss hosting-related issues and problems.
January 2nd 2007
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It seems there have been a number of search and rescue stories lately. Many of you have probably heard of the sorrowful story of James Kim and his family. Now there’s another search and rescue operation in Oregon in which three climbers have become lost in the mountains of Oregon.
In both cases, cell phone signals have been used to focus search areas. I’m rather curious to know how they’re making use of this cell phone technology. Would it be possible to move one of those emergency portable mobile phone cell sites into the area to strengthen phone signals? Furthermore, if this can be done to acquire a phone signal, wouldn’t it be a good idea to constantly text message the phone in regular intervals to attempt to acquire it’s location while it has a signal? I remember this is how James Kim’s family was found.
I’ve seen these portable cell sites used in disaster situations to bring wireless service into areas where cell site towers have become disabled. It’s likely they can’t get these huge trucks into the regions where the rescuers are working. Or maybe they just haven’t thought about doing this?
This could be a great reason to invest in a portable cell site that can be housed in say a helicopter. The helicopter can hover over areas looking for a cell phone signal and help direct search efforts into focused areas.
December 13th 2006
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