jared tame

i think our rackspace servers got hacked or something the other day, rackspace never really figured it out either.  a quick summary of what happened:

- tried deploying via capistrano, noticed a weird error "/bin/bash: Exec format error"

- tried to ssh in, even as root, and that wasn't working (some random errors and then getting disconnected)

- tried to login via rackspace console, had some issues there (this is when my blood pressure noticeably increased)

- rackspace did a hard password reset, console worked again -- went into rescue mode and mounted sda1 to get back into our server

- databases were nowhere to be found (and i think the site cached everything, so i didn't notice the database was missing to begin with), luckily my co-founder had a 3 day recent backup so my blood pressure plateaued there.  there were random files and users added, so at this point we think someone managed to get into the server.

- found the binary ibdata left in /var/lib/mysql and downloaded that, luckily it was untouched so we lost no data (rackspace only makes server instance backups of 2gb servers, we use 4gb on everything)

- transferred everything to another staging server, and realized the iphone v1.1 was pointing to the original production server ip, so we had to rebuild the production server from scratch.

- had lots of permission problems when we thought it was a much more serious problem, wasted time looking into mysql sockets when all we needed was to fix the mysql privs and re-configure a few things in apache's httpd.conf

- finally got everything working, and still wondering WTF just happened just before going back to sleep

all of this happened from about 3am to noon, and luckily it looks as though nothing ever happened unless you tried using the app early yesterday am ;)

just showing a few of our badges in this screenshot, but i settled on the last row. i thought about using progress bars to represent how far a person has progressed visually, but ended up sticking with just numbers for now.

i just noticed the new badges tonight on one of the user profiles at lisia. these badges are well designed and intuitive, i love them. going to redesign graffitigeo's over the next week or two, keeping simplicity above all else.

nice work listia!

just a quick response to the 37signals post, where i feel they're unfairly discrediting people who decide to take the plunge into a start up full time. that's a huge step to take.  i tend to agree with aaron patzer's stance:

i still don't think rejecting a steady paycheck is an easy thing to do. but it's a commitment to focusing on something, and i wouldn't give that up in a start up.

stumbled on what looks like a newer grooveshark logo design. this looks awesome, and definitely in my top 10 favorite applications of all time.  where's that iphone app at guys? ;)

initially, i didn't use dailybooth because i couldn't seem to get my macbook pro to work with the application.  as it turns out, the founder told me there's a hack if you're on a mac:

1) click allow when the flash permission screen comes up

2) right click -> click settings

3) click the "webcam" tab icon (should be the last one at the bottom)

4) under the drop down menu, select "USB Video Class Video"

that should fix it.  there are lots of cool people on the service, like catrific, ijustine, kassemg, and phillyd. check it out, it's more addicting than facebook and twitter!

show me your gangster face.

i found a cool story about a few mit students sending a balloon and camera 20 miles into space (although everyone has their own definition as to what distance constitutes "space").

what's interesting is that the project was done in <$150, and it was completed using stuff anyone could buy.

want to build this? here are the ingredients.

after getting some hacker news love, hndir.com is now up to 500 college hackers (i think it was around 200 earlier yesterday).

not all of us are campus tour guides. i hope the site helps address that problem, and the issue of oversized classrooms and campuses. be sure to use the ability to send messages to other people--it doesn't work if you're signing up and passively expecting people to message you!

i was getting a few e-mails from people about not being able to register on hndir.com.  as it turns out, google for some reason shut down the e-mail that was being used to send the registration confirmations.  there's probably some expiration rule in effect with this.

anyway, i registered a different account to send the e-mails.  everything should be back to normal.

if you check out jtame.com, you can see really nice rounded corners for some of the links.  i also noticed this effect used similarly on mugasha.com (a new electronic music discovery site i recently found).  this is very easy to pull off with css by using -moz-border-radius.  here is an example of a link with the class set to "round":

a.round {

-moz-border-radius:5px;

-webkit-border-radius: 5px;

background-color:#c3f06b;

color:black;

padding:4px;

text-decoration:none;

}

a.round:hover {

background-color:#F97940;

}

i've found that only using -moz-border-radius will look fine in firefox, but not in safari because safari uses webkit for its rendering.  including the -webkit-border-radius will fix this.  non-supported browsers will simply display boxes, which doesn't look bad either (ie onellama.com makes heavy use of this design style).