Screw Your Sucky Service, EHost.NET and ValetHosting!

For several years I'd coasted on cheap hosting by buying shared servers through eBay. They usually offered "unlimited" bandwidth and space, plus CPanel support and all the necessary CGI and PHP scripts, for just 10 dollars a YEAR.

The problem with these sites are they're run by guys like me who thought to make a quick buck by buying a bunch of server space that they could rent out themselves. As such, the tech support was pretty spotty, and if there was ever any downtime, their response always used to take forever.

I admit that I got what I paid for with these services, and I never complained too much. But the first really frustrating experience was with ValetHosting, essentially run by someone named Donovan Stewart from Washington state. One day his hosting service just went up and left, not giving me any access to my data, and as such I couldn't make a backup. I tried to get Paypal and eBay to intervene but I'd already left positive feedback and since the service was a subscription, I wasn't allowed to get a refund. Let it be known, Donovan Stewart is a shifty guy with whom one should not do business. This is after over a year of being his customer.

Luckily the company who hosted his server was very nice and were able to send me a semi-recent backup that let me set myself up at another place. But even they talked about how this guy just up and left (the number I'd found for him was the same number they had, which was the number he was not answering).

That place was eHost, which was another 10 bucks a year service, run by a guy named Cyrus Chow, also apparently from Washington state. I needed a server fast after ValetHosting went down and luckily I had bought this server for a client that fell through, so I just took it over.

These guys' service was even worse than ValetHosting's, and they would cop an attitude whenever I demanded my quick service (I admit I'd become quite verbal with these companies before, since they seem to act so lax with regards to tech support). Their website boasted 24/7 chat support, but even during normal business hours (for any US time zone), I never got anybody to answer on the other side. Worse, their servers would go down at a frequency that I found unacceptable, especially since I was using my email through their server.

The last straw that broke the camel's back, however, was when I suddenly got a form email from them saying that they would no longer be taking on new customers and were moving their servers to another company. This was after my site was down for almost a week with no proper response from them explaining why.

When I received access to my site again after a while I quickly made a full backup and moved to another server. I'll let you know about them in a future post, but rest assured I'm ditching these eBay guys forever.

As a final lesson, be wary of these guys' respectable feedback ratings. They are usually not too bad because people leave feedback less than a month after they pay for their server. I must admit setup was really simple through these guys. As such, by they time people realize how crappy the service was, it was already too late, and they had already left positive feedback.

FINALLY, though, from the looks of it Valethosting is now owned by someone else other than Donovan Stewart. I can't vouch for these new guys, but they probably could do without the previous company's baggage. As far as EHost is concerned, their website seems to be back up and they're still serving customers, and for those people I bid good luck.

Rant: Not Showing Message Content in "You've got a message" Emails

I just wanted to let off a bit of steam on a minor thing that I'm sure you all can relate to.

How annoying is it to receive emails that say things like "You've got a new message in your inbox" or "someone wrote on your wall" or "such and such has left a comment to your photo/video" but the email never actually shows what the message is?

I know it's supposed to be an incentive for you to log into your Facebook or Youtube or whatever accounts in order to actually read the message, but in the end my email inbox is just cluttered with notifier messages that serve no other purpose.

Facebook got part of the message with showing the contents of private messages inside the emails themselves, but haven't gotten around to showing what people wrote on my wall, or comments on photos (as far as I remember), etc. Why not? It's the same damn thing.

So if anybody in charge of those services hear me, we are all sick and tired of these fake-mysterious notifications of received comments! Show us the content in the emails!

Better Alt-Tab Replacements Showdown Part 2 of 2: WinFlip

Yesterday I reviewed another ALT-Tab window switch alternative called Taskswitch XP Pro, and it passed with a generally good score, with the exception of it being almost too full-featured, and requiring a system tray icon being always visible (i.e. you can't hide it). Today I'll be reviewing yet another ALT-Tab option, called WinFlip.

WinFlip mimics the 3d Alt-Tab feature of Windows Vista, which is cool for those like me who like Vista's visual improvements but not its resource intensiveness and general bugginess (and have thus stuck with Windows XP).

(Image courtesy of the official Winflip website)

Pros: WinFlip comes in a zipped folder that, once unzipped, works immediately. I.E. NO INSTALL NEEDED. Even better, that means if you want to uninstall it, just delete the folder. I love this, and wish all programs were this easy to install and uninstall. You'd still need to put the folder somewhere convenient (probably still the Program Files folder), and add a shortcut to the Start menu's Startup folder so it'll start up with Windows, however.

Winflip miraculously also only requires around 1.8 megabytes of RAM most of the time, HOWEVER I have seen it jump to almost 10. I don't know why it did this, but it seemed to be a one-time occurence. While it can't ever trump Taskswitch's 0.8-1.2 MB RAM consumption, I have heard that Winflip uses far less RAM than the comparable feature in Windows Vista.

Winflip also offers options for window size, anti-aliasing, texture quality, and change of hotkeys. It's set to default for WIN-Tab, which made it convenient to compare it back and forth with Taskswitch.

And of course, it's pretty.

Cons: First of all, Winflip does require a system tray icon, but thankfully it remains functional even with the icon set to hidden.

Unfortunately, for some reason Winflip would not overlay with my wallpaper showing, like it seems to be able to do in the screenshots I've seen (including the one I've posted here, which is not of my desktop). I assume it's because of my use of Ultramon to handle multiple monitors. It's not that big of a deal but it does take away some of its visual flair.

Finally however, Winflip seems to have problems rendering OpenOffice documents and other programs that use the GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) engine for creating GUI. The author of Winflip has acknowledged this as a problem but claims it's a GTK bug, not Winflip. I find it hard to believe GTK will fix this anytime soon, and in response to Winflip.

Overall: If you don't use OpenOffice and Ultramon, Winflip is yet another lightweight solution to Vista-fy your XP machine without committing all the way. Unfortunately, the visuals are bogged down with the rendering bugs that I encountered. I suggest you try it yourself and see if it works perfectly for you. And if you don't like it, it's very easy to get rid of.


FINAL:
So what option am I gonna go with? Surprisingly (at least to me), I've decided to go back to Microsoft's own Alt-Tab Powertoy, which was the first Alt-Tab replacement tool I featured almost two months ago.

Why? because it worked perfectly with no bugs as soon as I installed it, it was lightweight enough, and did not require a system tray icon. For a function that I don't use too often (I don't know who does), visual flair will never overcome bugs and lost productivity.

Better Alt-Tab Replacements Showdown Part 1 of 2: Taskswitch Pro

A month ago I featured the Windows XP powertoy Alt-Tab Replacement, which replaced the Alt-Tab display of just the row of icons and window names with icons, window names, PLUS thumbnail previews of the windows themselves.

A few days ago a commenter turned me on to Taskswitch XP, which he claimed did the same things Alt-Tab Replacement did, but much more. I wasn't in huge need of augmenting my Alt-Tab function even more, so I didn't jump at the chance of installing yet another program.




But now here we are. Taskswitch XP's own official site describes the program's features better than I can:

TaskSwitchXP is an advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off. It provides the same functionality, and adds visual styles to the dialog and also enhances it by displaying thumbnail preview of the application that will be switched to.

TaskSwitchXP also has a powerful process and window management capability that allows you quickly to close/minimize applications and their groups. The unique capabilities of TaskSwitchXP make it useful for tracking down multitudinous windows, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

TaskSwitchXP supports a few built-in interface schemes. It dynamically adapts to the selected Windows XP theme, provides customizable font and color settings for each user in the system. You can also choose preview and list styles, appearance effects, opacity of the switcher window and more. You can make your everyday environment to look whichever you want!

So how does it compare with Alt-Tab Replacement?

Pros: Taskswitch does exactly the same thing that Alt-Tab Replacement does, but much more. It has options for multiple themes, including matching whatever theme you currently use (as such, it worked as well as Alt-Tab Replacement at matching my Zune desktop theme).

You can even set it to be transparent, and can even smoothly fade in and fade out. I currently have it set to be slightly transparent and fade in and out in 100 ms (from the default 250, which took too long).

It also has options for customizing hotkeys, language, font and color, and size of the previewed window. In fact, it's basically overflowing with customizable features for a program whose function is so simple.

Finally, Taskswitch takes only 800 kilobytes of RAM in passive mode, and only takes 2 megabytes while actually holding ALT-Tab (I had to keep the Task Manager open first, and then hold ALT-Tab to see the RAM usage spike). This is better than Alt-Tab Replacement's 1.8 MB of RAM passively (I hadn't checked it while invoking the ALT-Tab feature, but it was certainly never enough to slow my computer down).

Cons: I definitely do not like Taskswitch running an icon in my system tray, where I only keep at most 6 icons running at all times. However, I understand that there wouldn't be an elegant way of accessing all the multitudes of features Taskswitch offers without this.

And so, I immediately set windows to always hide the Taskswitch system tray icon. Suddenly, Taskswitch stopped working! When I unhid the icon, it resumed functioning. But to make it perfectly clear, in my instance, Taskswitch will only work when the system tray icon is visible.

And honestly, Taskswitch's multitude of features is pretty overwhelming. Alt-Tab Replacement installed and just immediately worked. I use Alt-Tab for just a few seconds at most several times a week, it's not very much worth it to spend time customizing a program for longer than you'll use it.

Overall: Despite that last point, Taskswitch does work right out of the box, at least in a way that looked exactly like Alt-Tab Replacement. The extra features are available for those who care to tweak their settings (which you must be in a way, if you're reading this blog), but you don't need to bother if you don't want to. It's just icing on the cake that it uses less RAM than Alt-Tab Replacement.

However, the need for a persistent system tray icon is really annoying. An overcrowded system tray is one of my biggest pet peeves, so this is something I'll need to get a better feel for before I decide one way or another.

Now, come back tomorrow for a review of yet another Alt-Tab tool, and I'll compare it with Taskswitch, and we'll see what I end up using in the end.

AfterEffects Quick Tip: Double Click to Work in a Pre-Comp

Time for another quick tip that I had just learned for Adobe AfterEffects by watching the awesome tutorials by Andrew Kramer.

One thing I always found odd was why when I had a composition (we'll call it "Comp 1" to avoid confusion) nested inside another composition (we'll call it "Comp 2"), I couldn't just double click on Comp 1 on the Comp 2 timeline in order to open it up and work within it. Instead, I'd been having to go to the project window and finding the comp there, where I could double click on it to open it up.

TURNS OUT, you needed to hold down the ALT key while double clicking on Comp 1 in order to open it up and work inside.

Yet another small but useful tip for those people like me who were too smart and had too little time to read the entire manual :).

And don't forget to check out the first shortcut I'd featured, which were the keyboard shortcuts for Next/Previous frame in AfterEffects.

Does Firefox Preloader Really Speed Firefox Up For You?

Tony Williams over at One Tip a Day recently blogged about Firefox Preloader, a program that's supposed to speed up loading Firefox by preloading parts of it at startup, so parts of it would be available in the RAM before you actually need it.

There's logic in what it's advocating, but I tried it and found no real significant speed increase from what I'd already had, which was Firefox loading within 3 seconds. And I certainly am not all that crazy about having more programs running at startup.

I suggest you try it yourself especially if you use Firefox a lot and your computer's not the top of the line, but make sure to weigh the speed advantage to your startup times and RAM usage as well. Your mileage might vary.

Try to Fix a Dead Pixel with KillDeadPixel!

I got my first LCD monitor back in 2003 when I won grand prize at the University of Southern California's Webfest web design contest for the old design of my portfolio site, Greasy Pig Studios (I then got 1st place in the Communication category in 2006 for my animated webcomic journal, aLiveJournal).

The monitor was a 17 inch NEC monitor that I still use today (it's my secondary display where I keep Thunderbird almost always displayed). Anyway, when I got it it had one dead pixel, bright green in the bottom right quarter of the screen. I've tried fixing it by rubbing it really hard with my thumb, but it didn't work.

When I heard about KillDeadPixel, I was cautiously optimistic. It works by having an animated gif of what essentially looks like static, and you can drag it over the area where the dead pixel is. It's supposed to kinda flush the dead pixel back to life.

Well, I tried it on there for several hours, and unfortunately it did not work for me. But I would certainly recommend you try it for yourself. I've read testimonials from happy customers online, so it may well be worthwhile for you.