In doing a bit of background research, I happened across a Canadian Heritage parody done by none other than Rick Mercer -- video after the jump. To summarize -- Canada -- Gouging consumers since the advent of the telegraph.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ZGkqQvAVw

I’m a self-professed tech guy, and I literally have spent the last 10 years of my life building / working on the web.  I also find things like network stacks / transmission interesting, so I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic.  So, armed with all that knowledge, I’ve been following this UBB  scandal with some significant interest.  I should also mention that in my house, we have Netflix and make liberal use of the Boxee box that Tania bought me.  With Tania being home / on mat leave -- we can pull anywhere from 3 GB -- 40 GB in a day.  Fortunately we’re signed up with a smaller ISP (Acanac) who are awesome and provide us unlimited bandwidth over cable for less than Rogers was screwing charging us.

Now, what does all that have to do with UBB -- well, lets say I was still paying Rogers (for their terrible service / low bandwidth caps) -- I’d be paying around $60 / month ($46.99 + modem rental + tax) for 60GB of bandwidth with $2 / GB of overage beyond 60GB.  Well, doing some quick math, average usage for my house is 450GB / month -- making my monthly bill from Rogers $840 / month.

Am I a “bandwidth hog”, I wouldn’t consider myself one, if I’m paying for 10mbit service, I expect to be able to use that 10mbit whenever and however I want.  If I decide I want to use 10mbit for an entire month, I’d better be able to pull down 2.5ish TB in a month without incurring overages.

Now, why am I writing all this -- because I do believe in UBB, go ahead and charge me for my usage, I really don’t have a problem with that.  The problem I have is with “what” they’re charging me.  Instead of charging me $2.00 / GB over a set limit, why not charge me a reasonable markup on what they pay for bandwidth.  If it costs them $0.05 / GB (which is what most people are estimating it actually costs Bell / Rogers), then they’d better not charge me more than $0.10 / GB -- plus a flat monthly fee for the connection (something like $20 / month seems reasonable).

So, if the CRTC decides to make Canadian ISP billing into a more utility based billing, they’d better damn well put limits on the markup ISPs can charge.  Of course all this is just me speculating -- Bell / Rogers owns the CRTC, and in the end will get what they want.

In other news I had an awesome family day weekend up in Sauble, and while Nathan decided not to sleep at night, it was still somewhat restful and relaxing. I got some starcraft 2 in with Forrest and realized exactly how much I suck, but we still had a good time. We also decided to make an iOS game, so I’m likely going to make a page for it here. I have my doubts I’ll actually finish it, but who knows.

Now, that being said, I did come up with a way of dealing with resource fork creation – while its not exactly elegant, it works. It just so happens that all my servers are unix based, so to deal with resource fork cleanup, I just added a cronjob to my crontab. This will delete all of OS X’s resource fork files in a specific folder (and subfolders).

0 */1 * * * find /var/www/ -name ‘._*’ -print0 | xargs -t0 rm > /dev/null 2>&1

Note, if you’re going to use this, change the path (/var/www/) to whatever path you want to cleanup.

Also – I take no responsibility for this, make sure you have your data backed up, and all that jazz before you use it.

Well, I’m hoping to finally break the cycle. I just grabbed the new iPhone app for wordpress and am hoping to be able to post quick things happeing in my life, and save the longer posts for when I have time.

memcached as singleton in symfony « ESL Developer Blog.

You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.

So, I figured out a quick workaround – simply change the shutdown order, such that Open-ISCSI is shut down after the filesystems have been unmounted.

cd /etc/rc0.d
sudo mv K25open-iscsi S80open-iscsi

Your rc0.d folder should look something like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2009-11-12 10:27 K20sysstat -> ../init.d/sysstat
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 09:28 K25hwclock.sh -> ../init.d/hwclock.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 2009-11-12 09:28 K59mountoverflowtmp -> ../init.d/mountoverflowtmp
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 355 2009-01-23 10:01 README
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-12 09:29 S15wpa-ifupdown -> ../init.d/wpa-ifupdown
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-11-12 09:28 S20sendsigs -> ../init.d/sendsigs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2009-11-12 09:28 S30urandom -> ../init.d/urandom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-12 09:28 S31umountnfs.sh -> ../init.d/umountnfs.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-11-12 09:28 S40umountfs -> ../init.d/umountfs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 09:28 S60umountroot -> ../init.d/umountroot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 10:28 S80open-iscsi -> ../init.d/open-iscsi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-11-12 09:28 S90halt -> ../init.d/halt

Then, next time you reboot, it should unmount the disks and then stop open-iscsi.

—Insert Apple Rant here

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rant about Apple – they brought out this awesome device called the AppleTV, I was super excited by it, has a really nice interface, easy to use, tied to iTunes, and was supposed to make life easier when streaming media to my TV.  Then I found out that they want you to only use the media format they use, which kind of screws anyone with any significant amount of digital video thats not in mp4 format.  Unfortunately I fall into that category, with somewhere around 1.2TB of TV recorded for viewing at my leisure.  To re-encode all of that, I’d a. have to have a ton of extra hard drive space, and b. way too much time on my hands.  So, really, Apple, get with the times already, just include the codecs in the next AppleTV update and allow me to mount my Samba share on it and I think a lot more people will buy your device.

—End Apple Rant

Even if Apple does include these features – which they won’t – I still think a Boxee box is just what the industry needs to jump-start it.  A lot of other companies have tried to bring out media center boxes, but they all suffer from one critical flaw or another; poor ui, no networking support, poor codec support.  So, I’m putting my money towards a Boxee box when they come out – looking forward to finding more details on December 7th during the Boxee Beta release.

Boxee Blog » a Boxee Box is coming!.

So, the simple answer to everyone’s question – how’s married life – I think can be summed up as, the same as life before the wedding (minus all the wedding planning).  For anyone out there looking to get married to their long time significant other, I would offer this one piece of advice, don’t expect radical changes to your relationship post-wedding.

And thats all the wedding advise I’ll offer, promise.

After a bit of searching around, it seems as though its actually possible to completely disable the mail() function from PHP, however, that was only a temporary solution. This is simply a matter of adding

disable_functions "mail"

to the php.ini file and reloading the apache configs.

While I searched for an actual solution to the problem, I came up with the idea of attempting to use a php_admin_value flag value to disable e-mail for a specific virtual host inside the htaccess files until I was able to determine which was the offending site. Again – brick wall – PHP doesn’t support setting disable_functions in the php_admin_value flag.

So, after a bit of searching, I decided to just add the following to each site’s .htaccess files:

php_admin_value sendmail_path "/dev/null"

Essentially sending all e-mail to /dev/null for that particular site. Perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it was effective, as we are no longer sending e-mail through a broken form and I was able to alert the affected client that they had a problem.