Well, it was pretty nice out today, so I decided today was the day. I went outside, popped open the hood locks, pulled the socket off the passenger side low beam, connected the negative battery terminal, turned them on, and stuck the volt meter in the socket. Lo and behold, it’s definitely got juice. So I pull the whole bulb-and-socket assembly out (a pain in the ass with the stupid X clip setup they have going on…even worse putting it back in), pop in a new bulb, and connect it before putting it back in the lamp housing – turn it on, and it works. Son of a bitch, that’s two bulbs at $20 each (Sylvania Silverstars – 4100k) that lasted maybe a month and a half.

So, I’m going to end up switching to HIDs as soon as I get a check in. I’ll be buying them from Retro Solutions, LLC – recommended by the vast majority of Club RSX members. Obviously, low beams will be first – I’m thinking 5000k for those, then when I do the high beams, 4300k. Eventually I’ll also do the fog lights with 3000k bulbs.

Anyway, I’m posting this here in the hope that if anyone else buys and RSX and has the same headlight issue, they’ll find this and know that the real issue is, the RSX goes through halogen low beams like underwear. Even if they’re very new bulbs, even if they both went out at the same time – at least try switching the bulbs.

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For those of you who don’t know, net neutrality is the name that (basically) the collective Internet community has given themselves in the battle against broadband ISPs. ISPs feel that they should be able to charge other service providers (most notably, website owners and/or web hosts) what basically amounts to an extortion fee in order to provide their service either at all, or at full quality.

One option that the ISP coalition tried to pass off as “fair” was that services who didn’t pay the fee would simply get dial-up level bandwidth. Yeah, real fair. They already make entirely too much money from their subscribers; they can’t be charging service providers as well and getting it from both ends.

And another thing, they don’t seem to realize that having the Internet be a freely usable trade medium is good for the world as a whole. When people spend money, it helps the economy. Not to mention everybody involved is happy; the purchaser has something he didn’t have before, and the seller has money that he didn’t have before. There’s no reason for the megacorporations to cash in on every fucking thing that happens in the country.

Anyway, here’s the link: SaveTheInternet.com. It has all sorts of resources, ranging from simple information up to a link to E-mail your senator. Check it out if you weren’t already aware; this effects you.

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Holy shit, fuck Comcast’s customer service. In a study done, they were rated lower than the IRS’s service, and now I can see why. The reps are (mostly) nice people, and are generally pretty good about providing you with at least semi-correct answers in a somewhat timely manner, but the overall service is just appalling – take a look at “Service’s Sorry State” to see what I mean. How, you ask? Well, let me tell you.

Let’s see, three Saturdays ago (May 31 as it were) I stopped receiving E-mail, for some reason. I wasn’t really sure why, at first I just talked it up to a slow Saturday evening, but then I realized I wasn’t even getting any spam. And, while my spam filters are good, they’re not perfect. Then, pretty soon, I realized I was only getting my Logwatch, crontab, and other locally-supplied E-mails (such as notifications of pingbacks on this blog).

So, come Tuesday or so, I realized there was in fact a major issue. I called up Comcast, and they told me they had blocked port 25, incoming and outgoing – which I had surmised on my own using some fancy (or, rather, very basic) nmap work. The first (and, of course, most obvious) proposal was that there is spam being sent out of my network by some spyware/adware. This is, of course, impossible, due to my lack of Microshaft and even Apple products, but they told me I could switch my outgoing port to 587 on the relay and the system would pick up on my lack of attempts to send out spam within a couple days and unblock me. I was fine with this, I figured a couple days wasn’t bad, and I could still send an E-mail to all my customers, telling them I couldn’t receive and to call me with any issues they had.

Well, a couple days went by. And it wasn’t fixing itself. So I called them up again and got a much more helpful tech – he said that I was receiving too high a volume of E-mail for residential service, so port 25 was blocked. I naturally requested a manual unblock, which they said was impossible. Long story short here, they roped me into upgrading to business class – actually a pretty good deal, $12 more per month for 24/7 priority tech support, free house calls, no blocks, and doubled upstream bandwidth. Yes, doubled upstream.

So they told me I’d have to upgrade to a business-class modem, which had a built-in router. I was alright with this, I figured I’d just put it in front of my normal WRT54G (v8, yay dd-wrt) and either do a global TCP/UDP port forward or just throw it in the DMZ. Seems simple, right? Well, let’s see, first they came out and didn’t knock loud enough, then (when I called back a few days later) claimed to have left a message on the landline telling me to reschedule. They did not, however, leave that message – apparently I was just supposed to pull this information out of the ether using my necromantic divining powers.

Anyway, I rescheduled, and figured all was well. They set me up with an emergency appointment and whatnot the next morning, since I hadn’t gotten E-mail in about two and a half weeks. Nobody shows up. They had specific instructions to call my cell phone number when in the area, but I didn’t get a call, nobody showed up, nothing. So I call them up again that afternoon, even more pissed off than before, and as it turns out they never assigned the job to a field agent. Hey, that’s cool, how about you give me one now asshole. They were real swamped and “couldn’t get anyone out till the next morning”, so he gave me an appointment for 0700-0900.

Well, he (a little old Asian dude who’s been here before – very cool guy) finally shows up at like 1530. I don’t need him to install it, of course, just to drop it off and call in to activate it. All goes well, the guy drops off an SMC8014, and I get it up and running one I make a call to activate it (had to do it myself, no big deal), so I decide to do a little poking and prodding to find out the default admin username/password (cusadmin/highspeed in case you’re looking for it) so I can do the port forwarding/DMZ deal.

Well, I find it, and try to take care of it, but it won’t do the forwarding properly. Or the DMZ. And for some reason, my internal router (the WRT54G) won’t show up in the “list of connected computers”. WTF, right? Well, I find out that the box you want to forward to has to have a static IP – and that for it to show up in the list, I’d have to set the thing to stop ignoring ICMP – forgot I’d had it set to, and it makes sense, so I did both of those. The SMC8014 defaults to a class C 10.1.10.0/255.255.255.0 network (lolwut? 10.* is supposed to be class A personal address space), with a DHCP range of .10-.199. So, I gave the router .200, figuring that would be fine, the extra space was reserved for static IPs or VPNs or something.

It didn’t work. I tried going below the DHCP range, expanding the DHCP range (which returned an error saying I was overlapping the VPN range, which was completely hidden, more on this later), and going at the top and bottom (inclusive) of the DHCP range. None of it worked. No matter what I did, this damn thing just wouldn’t do double NAT forwarding – and the DMZ was just completely nonfunctional. So I called up the 24/7 number. Again. And after running some tests, he figures the SMC8014 is probably malfunctioning. So they arrange to send out another one. Set me up with an appointment and everything.

Mind you, now my server is completely down. Websites aren’t available. DNS isn’t available. FTP isn’t even available. And, in addition, during this process they log into my new router. Yes, they have a higher-level administrative password for it. No, you don’t have complete control over the router running in your own home or office. And no, you can’t find the superuser login. Period. If you can find it, I commend you. This secret is better-guarded than the fucking holy grail, I swear.

Well, once again, no call, no show. So I call in…again. And set up an appointment…again. The guy comes and swaps it out, tells me the new one is a tech support one – another SMC8014, but they use it for diagnosis, so it should work fine, and it’s already activated. I get an IP address, and all goes well, so I try the port forwarding again. No luck. So now I figure I’ll just try putting the server behind the SMC rather than both routers. I didn’t want to do this – I wanted guests’ boxen to connect to the SMC and have myself still protected by the Linksys in case of spyware/etc. But I figured I had no choice now.

It still doesn’t forward. Port forwarding, DMZ, static routing, you name it – none of it works. So now I call them up and tell them I want a standalone modem. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it doesn’t protect me. I’m a fucking technician, I have other firewalls and security in place. So they arrange to come out today. This morning, in fact, another 0700-0900 dropoff. Well, they show up, and they tried to call the landline again. Even though I can clearly see on the receipt they left on the door, it said to call my cell phone, and included the number. So I call up again and tell them I want a fucking dropoff. Today. This is ridiculous.

They give me a 1300-1700 dropoff. The techs arrived around 1630, within the bounds, and recommended that I not do a self-install because the time I’ll spend on the phone activating it could potentially be quite horrendous. They said having them stay and activate it wouldn’t be any charge to me, so I was fine with it. Ironic, though, that they suggested activating it themselves – and you’ll see why in a minute.

They come upstairs, I give them the standard “watch your head, it’s a midget house, hey watch your head again” spiel, and as soon as they walk in my bedroom they’re moderately awed – one of them said “hey, this is my kind of room”, and the other said “hey, this looks like my room”. I lulz’d. So I hooked up the new modem, which supports both the phone service and the 16Mbps service, so my Comcast-supplied hardware won’t have to change any time in the foreseeable future. And then they call in to activate it.

For 45 minutes we sat there and shot the shit about hardware, games, you name it – again, very cool techs – while the one guy was on hold. It was, in fact, horrendous. Finally, he had the other guy call in through the front end (the same number I’d call) and 10 minutes later it was registered to my account and all I had to do was call in to do some MAC authentication so they could leave. I can’t blame them for wanting to leave, Christ, a simple dropoff turned into an hour-long ordeal.

So I called in and activated it, all went smoothly, and now I’m finally back up and running. Finally. Twenty-four fucking days without E-mail. About a week without any server capabilities at all. And that, my friends, is why I say, fuck Comcast’s customer service.

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Let me start off the body of this by saying that, since Disturbed’s Indestructible came out on June 3, I still have yet to listen to any other music. Like, at all…when I gave my only hard copy to my dad, I listened to an older mix in the car on the way home, then promptly burned another Indestructible when I got here. There’s also been a little radio here and there, but I just can’t put these new 14 songs down. Oh yeah, 14 – it’s worth noting that they released Parasite on the Japanese import special edition. That only leaves one more B-side to finally complete my collection – Midlife Crisis.

As for Munchkin – it’s been fun, but I’m starting to get tired of it. Now that everybody knows painfully well how to play, it’s nothing but rules lawyering – and that’s the reason I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering, it stopped being a game and turned into a clusterfuck of technicalities. Well, that’s what’s happening with Munchkin, and it’s the same problem. If I wanted to deal with technicalities all day long, I would’ve gone to law school and become a lawyer.

On the WoW side, I’m almost 70. A little bit past halfway. Been questing in Shadowmoon, and a lot of that’s pretty tough at 69. Also, Arena Season 4 comes out in five days, and when it does I’m buying both my season two swords. I’ll totally have better weapons than Tristan and it’s going to be funny as shit~

I also finally managed to get ahold of Kristen yesterday (actually, the other way around, she got ahold of me). Turns out, she thought I was pissed off because she didn’t want a relationship with me…which, although it’s upsetting, I can’t be pissed off at someone because of the way they feel. No, I was infuriated because she’s been leading me on for the past year. And she didn’t think she had been…so we cleared the air, and I came to grips with just being “the best friend” (god story of my fucking life, fuck you friend zone) and helped her deal with the bullshit that fuckwit’s putting her through. Looks like her eyes are opening though, here’s hoping they don’t snap shut again. For her sake.

Comcast…where do I start? How about at the beginning. A couple weeks ago, they blocked my incoming E-mail (SMTP, port 25) because I was “receiving too much for residential service”. The first CS rep I spoke to was a fucking retard, I hung up on her while she had me on hold. The second, however, was intelligent and helpful, and told me that I was blocked most likely due to spyware sending out spam. Well, that’s impossible, you need to run Microshaft’s garbage to have spyware, which I don’t.

We finally narrowed it down to a block due to incoming volume, though. I managed to get my sending capability back by connecting to the relay server on an alternate port (587 I believe), but obviously I can’t tell every fucking E-mail server in the world to connect to me on a different port just because my ISP blows cock. So, they finally roped me into upgrading to business class to have the block permanently removed by pulling the “there’s nothing we can do manually” bullshit. It’s a good deal anyway, $12 more per month and they double my upstream, give me priority tech support, etc.

So, I had to argue with them for a while to get them to not send out a tech to install the shiny new modem, charging me $99.99 in the process, because I am a god damn tech. They do, however, need to deliver the new modem (why I can’t just pick it up from the nearest Comcast office, which is like 10 minutes away, remains a mystery to me). They were supposed to be here on Monday, but apparently they fail at knocking loud enough for me to hear, so they just left me a note saying “sorry, you weren’t here, blah blah, you’re beat”.

So apparently I was supposed to call them to set up a new time, and apparently I was supposed to read their collective minds to find this out. I called today to say WTF, and they set me up for tomorrow morning. Finally, almost three fucking weeks without E-mail, wonder how much business that’s cost me. Fucking worthless assholes. If you can get FIOS or even DSL, get that and not Comcast. They fucking fail.

Anyway, it’s a short one (aside from the Comcast rant), and I just haven’t had the time to write lately. Or see/listen to/whatever anything worth reviewing. I’m planning to see The Incredible Hulk soon though, and I’ll do a review of that. Yeah I know I didn’t deliver on the Munchkin review, and I wanted to review Iron Man and Indiana Jones, but I just didn’t get the chance. I’ll be sure to do this one though.

PS: Check out the WINE 1.0 and openSuSE 11.0 releases if that’s relevant to your interests.

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To start this off, I want to say that PHP is one of the easiest programming languages out there that actually has a purpose. Visual Basic and C# are also both very easy, but unfortunately, they use the .SUCK framework, thus rapidly killing their usefulness. Any programmer who uses them for anything other than the simplest of tasks should be dragged into the street and beaten.

There are a number of very simple steps to follow when programming in PHP, and unfortunately, the majority of PHP sites whose code I see fail horribly to follow these. I’m not sure if the programmers were absent on “don’t suck at life” day in PHP class, or if they just don’t understand the concepts of “a processor has to parse and execute this”, “a network connection has to carry what this outputs”, and “other programmers will probably have to read this in the future”.

First and foremost, your code should be efficient. Most people will tell you that the golden rule is readability; well, that’s only true to an extent. Your code should be tabbed. However, your tabs should be tabs and not a bunch of spaces – four spaces takes up 4x the space that one tab takes. Double quotes (“) should NEVER EVER EVER be used. I have linked a benchmark of the various output methods in PHP (scroll down). I didn’t conduct this benchmark, so credit goes to “phpnet@i3×171um.com”.

There is no reason to use large APIs for things such as database abstraction (ADODB on PHP for instance). Code does not need to be portable when writing a custom app in PHP; it’s more than likely only ever going to be run on one server, and even if it’s run on other servers, the new one will more than likely be configured to act like the old one anyway. A good server administrator will ensure this. I digress; code does not need to be portable in PHP, and code like my example has to be parsed at every page request. It doesn’t even make your code much more portable, you’re still submitting raw queries; if you’re using MySQL, you’re still giving it MySQL code to execute, which isn’t going to work on every database engine anyway. And it doesn’t make the programmer’s life any easier, because the programmer still has to do error handling for every query, and ADODB is nothing but an added pain in the ass for the server and future programmers.

This is for both readability and efficiency. Your code should be tabbed, and your tabs should be actual tab characters, not a series of spaces. If you can’t tell what yours are, turn on your whitespace characters. If you can’t, get a different editor, AEdiX is great. If you use Linux and don’t feel like installing and configuring WINE to run AEdiX (a Windoze editor), BlueFish is also great. If your tabs are spaces, people who view whitespace have to sit there and look at a bunch of dots all over the screen, and the server has to look at (assuming a tab width of 4) 4 whitespace characters for every one it should have to look at. Oh yeah, and if your editor has “smart tabs”, do us all a favor and don’t use them. Every editor is going to deal with them differently, and only your editor is going to display them correctly. One minor thing that falls into tabs and whitespace, is do not leave any trailing whitespace at the end of your lines of code. It makes you look like a retard, and it makes the server work harder.

The server should never have to do constant math. For instance, if you need the number of seconds in a day, you should not be telling the server to use “24 * 60 * 60″. You should be telling the server to use 86400. If you don’t know the solution to your equation offhand (although as a programmer, especially a web programmer, you damn well should know that there are 86400 seconds in a day) and are incapable of a simple logic thread of basic math in your head, for the love of fuck, get a calculator. If you give the server “24 * 60 * 60″, it has to parse more than just the single number of 86400, it instead has to parse three numbers and two operators. It then has to execute these math operations, and if your server is running an x86-based platform, that’s another 2 CPU cycles per operation. Not to mention the added memory wasted by storing multiple values rather than just one. Oh yeah, plus the overhead of storage space on the server’s hard drives. Yes, servers have limited space, just like you and everyone else (moreso, in fact, because the 15000RPM+ hard drives that a server should be running are far smaller than the 5400RPM, 7200RPM, and maybe 10000RPM drive(s) that you have). For the same reasons (parsing overhead and storage requirements), the print operator should never be used; use echo instead.

Regarding MySQL queries. I don’t know if a lot of guys get wood for putting newlines in strings or what, but there is aboslutely no fucking reason that a MySQL query should look like this:

select address_id, addr1, addr2, city, state, zip1, zip2, assign_date, result_due_date, field_agent, agent_date,
contact_name, contact_phone, contact_email, contact_notes
from address
where status = 1

Absolutely no reason. I don’t know if it’s because PHP is the first language they’ve used that allows them to put newlines in strings and they’re exploring their new unbounded fucking freedom or what, but it’s entirely pointless, and places needless extra characters (newlines and tabs) inside the string, and the MySQL server has to parse these. It wastes memory by placing them in the string, wastes bandwidth between the PHP box and the MySQL box by having to send the extra characters, and then wastes memory on the MySQL box.

Additionally, still using the query from above, all MySQL keywords (in the case of the above example, “select”, “from”, and “where”) should be capitalized (SELECT, FROM, and WHERE). All identifiers (table names, database names, and row names) should be wrapped in backticks (ex. `address_id`, `address`, `status`), and the WHERE clause of the query should be wrapped in parentheses. Here is what that fucking monstrosity that some man calls a query should look like:

SELECT `address_id`, `addr1`, `addr2`, `city`, `state`, `zip1`, `zip2`, `assign_date`, `result_due_date`, `field_agent`, `agent_date`, `contact_name`, `contact_phone`, `contact_email`, `contact_notes` FROM `address` WHERE (`status` = 1)

(Your browser probably caused made that auto-wrap at the first and maybe second line, and will probably make the second one wrap twice, maybe three or four times…take my word for it that there are no newlines in that one.)

That’s all for now.

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