Landed

Asides, Travel

Paris has the most confusing airport, although I suppose any airport is confusing if you don’t speak the language. Franck was right. I ended up chickening out and taking a taxi, and I’m not checked in and settled. First order of business: find an adapter for these weird plugs. The weather seems to have cleared up so I’m going to venture out and explore a bit.

Internet Crash

Asides

Is it just me or is half the internet seem to be down? I can’t get to extremetech.com or parts of zdnet.com, and I just got a 500 error from blogger.com when trying to leave a comment on someone’s blog. What’s interesting was the message: “Please contact the server administrator, blogger@trakken.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.” Trakken.com redirects to Neotonic, which according to its meta tag, ” Neotonic Trakken is a powerful web-based Online Customer Support system.” The domain is registered by David Jeske who has an email at Chat.net, a PHP-Nuke site that hasn’t been updated in two years. David worked at eGroups and Yahoo and then started Neotonic which signed Google as its first customer in 2001. If you dig a little deeper you can see what Trakken really is. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Blogger is just a highly customized PHP-Nuke installation and should be released under the GPL. Someone contact the FSF.

Sun Followup

Uncategorized

In the past few days since I wrote the post on my experience with Sun there has been a lot of interesting discussion spawned, and as much about Jonathan Schwartz’s response as my post. Mr Schwartz rightly got a ton of kudos in the blogosphere for his honest and personable response. Two others shared their experience trying to get boxes from Sun: Alex Muse applied for a different program and was rejected, but it sounds like he got pretty prompt responses on everything; Stephen O’Grady had no problem getting in Startup Essentials, but had a fairly bad experience with their store and suggests that they outsource that functionality to Ebay or Amazon. (I’m fairly surprised I didn’t hear from anyone else in the SE program.) François Schiettecatte shared a story from his experience at Sun while at Feedster, and why they made the decision they did for their systems.

The entry also drew in some interesting comments some of which seemed to conflate the issue I was talking about, namely the disconnect between the promises and follow-up in the Startup Essentials program, and questions of Sun’s financials, direction, technology, and more. To clarify, I have no opinion on the business side of Sun beyond what I’ve dealt with directly, and on the technical side they seem to be kicking butt lately and tackling truly hard problems. Their evangelism of such is the whole reason why I gave my info to the SE program in the first place. (Plus the overwhelmingly positive in-person interaction I’ve had with folks that work at Sun and at Startup Camp.) Their marketing is great — it created the desire — just the fulfillment was frustrating.

At one point in the Scoble interview Jonathan Schwartz says something to the effect of their startup program targets folks with more time than money, where their enterprise customers usually value time over money. I think this might represent a fundamental misunderstanding. While I think this argument could be made for the motivation of some segment of Open Source communities, the situation in startups is even worse — time and money are both scarce.

Where does that leave Automattic now? We just brought 20 new HP/Debian boxes online. David Comay followed up his comment with an email requesting to get together, and since he’s a kernel hacker and not a sales guy I’m very open to that. Likewise with Jeff Barr from Amazon, though their web services are so beautifully self-service I wonder what we’ll chat about. Another chance for Sun? Time will tell. For us it’s a pragmatic issue, not a religious one. If nothing else, I’m hopeful that the discussions spawned will help put Sun’s nascent startup efforts back on track.

Due to some distractions and mishandling of scheduled posts on my part, I broke my blogging streak. I got up to 198 days, which isn’t bad, and I’m looking forward to beating it next time. A lot of people might not know this, but if you’re on WordPress.com or run Jetpack when you start a posting streak it will give you a notification high-five every day you continue it, this was the last one I got:

Screen Shot 2015-07-18 at 9.06.19 AM

Comcast Cable

Asides

I finally got internet hooked up at my house today. I ended up going with Comcast mostly because MJ sweet talked me into it. I just ran the speed test from DSL Reports on it and it came back 3469 down and 230 up. That’s over three megabits downstream, crazy! I could get used to this. Now I can finally get start getting things done from home again. (I had internet before but it was a patchy wifi connection that wasn’t reliable.)

Unsubscribing from Newsletters

Asides

When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.

There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:

I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.


var i = 0;
function unroll_me_unsubscribe() {
// Bail if share modal (indicating free limit reached) is encountered.
if ( jQuery( '#fb-root' ).length > 0 ) { return; }
var unsub_link = jQuery( '.LetterList a.uicon-set-unsubscribe:first' );
if ( unsub_link.length > 0 ) {
document.getElementById( unsub_link.attr( 'id' ) ).click();
if ( i++ < 6000 ) { /* Upper limit in case something goes wrong. */
setTimeout( unroll_me_unsubscribe, 1500 );
}
}
}
unroll_me_unsubscribe();

view raw

gistfile1.js

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.