Below is the actual tech support I received from ipowerweb. They are bloody H O P E L E S S with their tech support.
Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Max T.'
Max T.: Thank you for contacting IPOWER Live Chat. How can I help you?
Me: host120 is down
Me: what's going on ??
Me: can't view my website at all
Me: See Incident: XXXXXX-XXXXXX
Max T.: I'll be happy to assist you.
Max T.: We do apologize for the inconvenience faced by you.
Max T.: Admins are aware of your server problem and there is some network issues. They are working on it.
Max T.: We have been advised that the problem has been isolated and that the issue would be solved soon. For quality's sake, our admins tend to spend a slightly longer time investigating the root cause of an issue to completely fix it, rather than merely applying a temporary/unsafe fix, we've taken every possible step to ensure that this does not happen again. <-- copy and paste response (what lazy asses)
Me: it was fixed now it's down again
Me: yeah right I've seen that reply before
Me: please spare me the copy and paste effort :P
Me: it was fixed 3 hours ago and now it's down again so what gives
Max T.: Yes I understand.
Me: so what's going on? There's 50 other websites hosted on that server, and I can tell you they won't be happy
Max T.: I understand.
Me: and ?? What are you going to do about it??
Max T.: I apologize.
Me: please don't patronise me, just fix the thing
Max T.: It is being worked upon.
Me: how long is this so called "fix" going to take, if it was fixed before then why is it not working now ???
Max T.: I'm sorry for the delay. I'll be right with you.
Me: just look into what's going on!
Max T.: I will be right with you.
Max T.: Thank you for waiting. I'll be with you in just a moment.
Me: ...
Me: just fix the problem!
Max T.: Yes, It will be soon.
Me: how soon??
Max T.: I'm sorry but right now I'm having no ETA for the same.
Max T.: But please be assured that it is been looked into and will be resolved very soon.
Me: no ETA but soon??
Max T.: It will be up soon
Me: what 1 hour soon, 2 hours, 3? 24 hours?
Max T.: NO ETA
Me: soon but no ETA, looks like you guys have no clue what you're doing
Max T.: Please understand it is being looked .
Max T.: We do not have any ETA at the moment
Max T.: I cannot confirm the same
Me: then how can you confirm SOON? If you don't know, then just say you don't know!
Max T.: Thank you for waiting. I'll be with you in just a moment.
Max T.: I'm sorry for the delay. I'll be right with you.
Max T.: I will be right with you.
Max T.: I will be right with you.
Me: forget it, just go fix the problem. spare me your auto replies, and by the way look up the dictionary on the definition "SOON" because you misunderstood its meanining
Max T does not understand the word "soon" and is a total incompetent fool! I can't believe the employ such "technically gifted" people. I have to say another time, they needlessly modified a .htaccess file on my website and caused it to be down for hours. What morons...
Then again a lot of tech support's pretty damn hopeless. The only tech support which I found that was ever good was a technician on dodo internet but their customer service was plain stupid.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
No money to pay
I found out from one of my close friends that one of the people working for the startup has no revenue! So people who are working for them aren't getting paid at all for the moment. That's shocking. For obvious reasons I won't name the startup, they are getting people to invest in it but they have no revenue at all. So essentially people working for them now are working for free. Perhaps that is why the HR manager has not gotten back to me yet... even though she said she was going to 2 weeks ago. I found out today they only just hired the VP of engineering.. who I am supposed to talk to, last week.
That reaaally puts me off from joining them. I didn't believe in their product in the first place. Frankly I wouldn't understand, nor anyone who I have talked to, the need for that kind of product. In some ways I hope it suffers and dies a tragic death, but on the other hand if they offer me insane pay I'll join them but not if they're not paying me.
On to something totally irrelevant, here's a short article on what Bill Gates wish he'd known
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/03/01/8370302/index.htm
And on to something else, my business is sort of plateauing. To be honest I have done as much as I can on my own, and it has been really hard work. The growth rate of my business is shown here
2002 - baseline
2003 - 158.42%
2004 - 144.96%
2005 - 142.53%
2006 - To be determined
I really need a partner to market my software. Growth has been significant over the last couple of years. But then again that's not very hard to achieve considering the small amount I was making before. (Before 2002 I don't even want to talk about how much I was making then, but it was very very very little.)
You don't realise how much work you have to do from developing a product, marketing it, handling customer email, developing the website, looking at competing products, and more. The best thing is, I learnt all of this on my own with zero academic knowledge applied. I didn't even take up any so called entreprenuership courses. Is university really that useful? All my friends are now working for people making them richer and I'm making money on my own. Would you hire me for a greater sum of money than them? (By the way my grades are also within the top 1% of the university) I applied for a position with Accenture recently I wonder if they will even reply or feel threatened with my background. Frankly I feel sometimes if you are too ambitious the company won't hire you.
Time for bed.
That reaaally puts me off from joining them. I didn't believe in their product in the first place. Frankly I wouldn't understand, nor anyone who I have talked to, the need for that kind of product. In some ways I hope it suffers and dies a tragic death, but on the other hand if they offer me insane pay I'll join them but not if they're not paying me.
On to something totally irrelevant, here's a short article on what Bill Gates wish he'd known
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/03/01/8370302/index.htm
And on to something else, my business is sort of plateauing. To be honest I have done as much as I can on my own, and it has been really hard work. The growth rate of my business is shown here
2002 - baseline
2003 - 158.42%
2004 - 144.96%
2005 - 142.53%
2006 - To be determined
I really need a partner to market my software. Growth has been significant over the last couple of years. But then again that's not very hard to achieve considering the small amount I was making before. (Before 2002 I don't even want to talk about how much I was making then, but it was very very very little.)
You don't realise how much work you have to do from developing a product, marketing it, handling customer email, developing the website, looking at competing products, and more. The best thing is, I learnt all of this on my own with zero academic knowledge applied. I didn't even take up any so called entreprenuership courses. Is university really that useful? All my friends are now working for people making them richer and I'm making money on my own. Would you hire me for a greater sum of money than them? (By the way my grades are also within the top 1% of the university) I applied for a position with Accenture recently I wonder if they will even reply or feel threatened with my background. Frankly I feel sometimes if you are too ambitious the company won't hire you.
Time for bed.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Name Your Price.. Need Suggestions!
Well the french guy today asked me how the tutorial was going, I think he's going to be disappointed if I say oh not much I'm still working on it. He also asked me to name my price for the position (which has no formal title yet by the way) in France. I'm assuming this would be development work, and other kind of work as well that I do not know yet of. The company's got no name either, it's new. Any suggestions ? (To whoever is reading this??) I'm thinking 96K EUD per annum. I don't think that's an unreasonable amount. It costs almost 4 euros for a big mac in France. If the price isn't right I'm not going to do it, simple as that.
Maybe I should work on the tutorial first.. which isn't a real tutorial by the way.
One of my resellers, SHI is selling my software for me which is great. They also resell Microsoft, Adobe, McAfee, etc software and other hardware as well. Company profile available at http://www.florida.shi.com/Global/Content/About/about.asp. They only sold a copy of my software before this, but all their sales are large sales compared to what I'm used to. I wonder how much they are actually profiting as their purchase price is exactly the same as my retail price, I am sure they are making money from this. My other seller, SoftwareCasa's also sells software for me and they're based somewhere in Europe. There's also the one in France, Avanquest. And there's Kreis I&C in South Korea which has only sold one copy for me since March. These aren't as good as they could be but they should improve over time. Why I'm doing this is because I hate to rely on google and search traffic for people to find out about my products. Need others to sell my software for me without me breaking into a panicky sweat. I always worry about each month's sales.
Maybe I should work on the tutorial first.. which isn't a real tutorial by the way.
One of my resellers, SHI is selling my software for me which is great. They also resell Microsoft, Adobe, McAfee, etc software and other hardware as well. Company profile available at http://www.florida.shi.com/Global/Content/About/about.asp. They only sold a copy of my software before this, but all their sales are large sales compared to what I'm used to. I wonder how much they are actually profiting as their purchase price is exactly the same as my retail price, I am sure they are making money from this. My other seller, SoftwareCasa's also sells software for me and they're based somewhere in Europe. There's also the one in France, Avanquest. And there's Kreis I&C in South Korea which has only sold one copy for me since March. These aren't as good as they could be but they should improve over time. Why I'm doing this is because I hate to rely on google and search traffic for people to find out about my products. Need others to sell my software for me without me breaking into a panicky sweat. I always worry about each month's sales.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
WWDC 2006 and reverse engineering
I went to WWDC last month, can't believe it's been more than a month already. To be honest I wasn't hyped by the keynote. Sure, spaces is useful, and the chat thing with moving backgronds is cool, but nothing revolutionary. Time machine looks great but's nothing new. And why all the jokes being poked at Microsoft? Found it ironic that the Mac crashed while time machine was being used. Many people cheered and clapped as if it's were God speaking during that keynote and many other presentations. It almost seemed like it's a cult. Of course people would say great things about the company that they're working at, especially if you're the CEO, VP of Engineering, etc. They are *paid* to do this sort of thing. If they went on to another rival company, do you think they would still sing praises of their former company?
The plus side? I got a cheap laptop bag, talked to the CEO of santimage, got some good chocolates, and a former yahoo group director who shall be unnamed but is heading a startup. I might go join them but I'm still waiting. I have enough money to survive for now and I'm not really in a rush to join anyone, not for the right price. San Francisco was expensive and I met some really strange people. Clam chowder was good though. :-)
Today, Codelock, a so-called PHP and HTML encrypter was reverse engineered by moi. It can be found at www.codelock.co.nz and I stumbled across it after finding out a script that was "protected" by this program. I find it funny how they say you can use it to "protect" your HTML files (in addition to PHP) using obfuscation. First of all it would be stupid to encrypt HTML as search engine robots would be unable to decipher any of the resulting obfuscated code, resulting in zero web traffic from any search engines. Secondly it would result in a total mess if you wanted to make changes and tried to edit the HTML directly and not feasible for maintenance. Lastly why would anyone steal HTML code is beyond me. The funny thing is the authors themselves didn't use the application to protect their own HTML but yet cite the software as a tool which can be used to protect HTML... perhaps they only use it to protect their PHP files.
But on to the software itself, Codelock uses a decrypter file to decrypt your "protected files". The only problem is, the decrypter itself can be relatively easy to reverse engineer, with some trickery. The decrypter stores information such as checking of expiry dates of scripts and things like that. However once the decrypter's source is revealed, you can remove these checks such that even if an encrypted script does say to check for expiration, the expiration check can be bypassed directly by editing the decrypter's source code (which has very strange variable names I have to say, probably to confuse the heck out of whoever's reading it). Once the source code is obtained, it is also relatively easy (to me anyway) to deconstruct any encrypted scripts and output the source to plaintext. Sort of like a master key to any protected house. The result? The php script that was "encrypted" using CodeLock was fully decrypted and its source code exposed, after which I made some changes to remove the limitations that were present in the script.
The website itself says :
Well off to bed!
The plus side? I got a cheap laptop bag, talked to the CEO of santimage, got some good chocolates, and a former yahoo group director who shall be unnamed but is heading a startup. I might go join them but I'm still waiting. I have enough money to survive for now and I'm not really in a rush to join anyone, not for the right price. San Francisco was expensive and I met some really strange people. Clam chowder was good though. :-)
Today, Codelock, a so-called PHP and HTML encrypter was reverse engineered by moi. It can be found at www.codelock.co.nz and I stumbled across it after finding out a script that was "protected" by this program. I find it funny how they say you can use it to "protect" your HTML files (in addition to PHP) using obfuscation. First of all it would be stupid to encrypt HTML as search engine robots would be unable to decipher any of the resulting obfuscated code, resulting in zero web traffic from any search engines. Secondly it would result in a total mess if you wanted to make changes and tried to edit the HTML directly and not feasible for maintenance. Lastly why would anyone steal HTML code is beyond me. The funny thing is the authors themselves didn't use the application to protect their own HTML but yet cite the software as a tool which can be used to protect HTML... perhaps they only use it to protect their PHP files.
But on to the software itself, Codelock uses a decrypter file to decrypt your "protected files". The only problem is, the decrypter itself can be relatively easy to reverse engineer, with some trickery. The decrypter stores information such as checking of expiry dates of scripts and things like that. However once the decrypter's source is revealed, you can remove these checks such that even if an encrypted script does say to check for expiration, the expiration check can be bypassed directly by editing the decrypter's source code (which has very strange variable names I have to say, probably to confuse the heck out of whoever's reading it). Once the source code is obtained, it is also relatively easy (to me anyway) to deconstruct any encrypted scripts and output the source to plaintext. Sort of like a master key to any protected house. The result? The php script that was "encrypted" using CodeLock was fully decrypted and its source code exposed, after which I made some changes to remove the limitations that were present in the script.
The website itself says :
Codelock for PHP is a strong deterrent. Most end users will not be able to decipher your code and will have a difficult time working through the 24 levels of encryption used by the software (V1.5). It will take more than the average programmer to decipher your scripts. The fact is, any PHP encryption program does needs to decrypt the file at some time, so the code will theoretically be available to experienced crackers during its execution. However, it would take considerable expertise, a lot of time and a rewrite of some of the core PHP decode engine (codelock.php) to get at it. Note: The Decryptor file (codelock.php) is also Encrypted. As well as all this, it would be a violation of our reverse engineering policy.
Sort of like giving a locked treasure chest along with the key, except that the key is initially a jigsaw puzzle. The "violation of our reverse engineering" seemed like a last ditch effort to persuade the consumer to part with their money, knowing that if all else fails, it's against their policy! Ehhh... so what?? It wasn't a strong enough deterrent for me and I don't really consider myself a super coder other than armed with insight, common sense and some limited knowledge of encryption. In fact, PHP isn't even my specialty. Perhaps this experienced cracking thing only applies to their latest versions. Admittingly I have no idea what version the one I was working on but it was released as a commercial version and distributed with a "protected" php script.Well off to bed!
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