Pooya Karimian

My server hosted with 1and1 was down for more than 16 hours yesterday. I have a three year free package from them which I'm quite happy with its features. But yesterday's outage was very long and I didn't receive any response to my support requests at all. When they claim a 99.9% uptime, it means that it should not suffer more than 365*24*0.001=8.76 hours of downtime. But my server was down for more than 32hours last year, which is like three to four times 1and1's guaranteed value. I guess the situation should be better for paid customers.

- www.1and1.com
- About 1and1 and 99.9% Uptime
- Ehsan's review on 1and1 dedicated servers

Update: I just received an email from 1and1 apologizing for down time and that it took them 4 hours to solve the problem, which probably means they didn't know about the server being down for the other 12 hours. It is good anyway that they respond to non-paying customers.

Update 2 (Nov 20, 2005): 1and1 miscalculated my bandwidth usage and they are not answering my support emails for the last days. Check Snook's review on the same issue too.

Update 3: Problems seem to be fixed and everything works fine.

For listening to Iranian traditional music and not getting depression, I use PaceMaker plug-in for winamp. It changes the tempo of any kind of file playable with winamp (movie, music) easily and without distorting the original frequencies and tones, so that you don't even feel that it is not the original speed. It is also good for listening to podcasts or news if you don't have time or even for seniors who can't tolerate the high energy songs. There are plugins with the same functionality avaiable for other players too.

Not much new to write about this week. I was playing with Catalyst which is a Perl implementation of Ruby on Rails, or better say, an MVC style web framework written in Perl. Having the power of being backed by CPAN modules that can be used for everything you can think of, it seems to be a good thing to learn. But it has its own problems, like installation and the overhead especially in CGI mode. Check out the following article at Perl.com on how to make a sample application using Catalyst:

- Perl.com: Catalyst
- Catalyst
- Model-View-Controller
- Ruby on Rails
- Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

Chris de Burgh was playing with many others yesterday in Live 8 in Berlin. I recorded it from the AOL stream. They say that they will put all of performances online on June 5, but before that you can download it from here:
- Chris de Burgh, Live 8 in Berlin [42MB]
- A smaller low quality version [8.6MB]

Update: All the performances are online now.
- All the Live 8 performances
- Chris de Burgh