• A brilliant viral get-out-the-vote video (from MoveOn.org, actually, not the Obama campaign as I first thought). What was so innovative about it was the personalization inside the video. This is one to learn from in your own business.
• Obama campaign successes and failures at local targeting (that one also has links to a number of other posts on technology-in-the-campaign).
• Two appallingly dishonest site-specific search boxes.

I’m also writing over there about what I think the Obama Administration should do with respect to technology policy. First up is a ringing recommendation of Charles Rossotti for CIO/CTO. More to follow.

I have 20-some odd domains registered, all with NameCheap. When moving servers, it was necessary to change the DNS listings for all of them. There are three ways to do this in the NameCheap interface. For some domains, an option comes up to type or paste DNS entries directly. For some, there’s a different sidebar, but that sidebar gives a “Make Like Another Domain” option. (I have no idea why NameCheap’s UI is inconsistent in that regard.) And there’s also a mass update capability, for a page of results (about 9) on the Manage Domains listing.

I started by changing a single domain (DBMS2.com). Then I noticed the mass change option, and tried it. However, I was told it might take the changes up to an hour go through. (9 freaking transactional updates? An hour?? What are you thinking, NameCheap?) I also found that when I tried the DNS management option, on the sidebars that showed it, I frequently got busy server error messages. (C’mon, NameCheap — just how busy can your core servers be on the weekend? Or do you have such terrible backup practices that they are fatally slowed when being backed up?)

My websites broke right and left during the move, and nslookup indicated DNS problems. When I went back to look at NameCheap, and was able to ascertain the DNS settings, sometimes I found NO ENTRIES AT ALL. Even the first one I changed — DBMS2.com — eventually had its entries nulled out.

Eventually, with mutiple tries, I seem to have gotten all the DNS entries right. But I have to say that the NameCheap system is one of the most error-prone database applications it has even been my misfortune to contend with.

dbms2.com email — which is what most of you use — is down at the moment. monash.com email, which is hosted by Google, seems just fine.

I’ll get this all sorted out soon. And then I’ll catch up on some monashadvantage.com access I owe.

1. I need a mail host that can stand up under the kind of mailbomb/DDOS attacks that shut me down twice in the past year.
2. Similarly, I want to diversify my email addresses among two providers, rather than leaving them all with my general web hosting company.
3. David Ferris first wrote up Google Mail outsourcing, with a favorable view, last July. And some of his criticisms (e.g., lack of IMAP support) have already been rectified.
4. What’s more — as I remarked last night, David and his associate Richi Jennings have been voting with their feet, and moving their own email to Google. That’s an impressive endorsement. Ferris Research is a serious rival to Gartner as an analyst firm covering email, and Richi — who evidently LOVES Gmail — has also carved out a non-trivial identity as an expert in his own right.
5. Free sounds good, compared with the alternatives.

Now that I’ve gone ahead with the move to Google Mail, here are some scattered thoughts:

• Some terminology: Technically, Google Mail is part of the Google Apps service. And the terms “Google Mail” and “Gmail” are pretty interchangeable (you even have two choices of server name when setting up POP3 access).
• Google’s UI to get started can be a bit confusing. But googling on Google Apps will get you to the right place, namely this link.
• Particularly confusing is dealing with the MX records. My domain registrar didn’t seem to offer a way to redirect them at all. The cpanel interface for redirecting MX at my hosting company wasn’t very good; Google asks for about 7 entries of declining priority, but cpanel only makes it easy to enter 1. (I wound up asking my hosting company’s support to make sure all the entries were listed that should be.)
• If there’s a way to sort messages by subject or sender in Gmail online, I haven’t found it. That’s a major oversight if it can’t be done, or a minor one if it’s merely too hard to figure out how to do it.
• Setting up POP3 access has some steps that aren’t present in, say, setting up POP3 via a typical hosting company. You need to go into “Settings” and explicitly enable POP3 access. You also need to explicitly enable SSL in your mail client (on Eudora, the default setting did NOT work). Basically, you need to open this page or something similar, and actually look at the steps for your client. Chances are one or two will be non-obvious.

That’s about it for now. In particular, I haven’t done anything yet with Google Mail’s search capabilities. More on that down the road, perhaps.

Anne Truitt Zelenka writes of her need for a web hosting service that cares about its customers. Well, I have one to recommend: Dimension Servers.

Web hosting companies typically go through the following stages:

1. Early days, when the tech-knowledgeable CEO personally takes care of customers’ problems.

2. Healthy growth, in which a small staff watches over customers with almost the same care as the CEO would.

3. Growing pains, when the tech-knowledgeable CEO takes care of a few customers’ problems after the too-new staff botches them.

4. Impersonal success.

Dimension Servers is still very much in Stage 1. So far as I can tell, they only manage two servers (possibly at two different data centers). And the only reliable support comes from CEO Jon McAllister, who also has a day job. But that’s enough. He’s available long hours by IM or cell phone. And when he isn’t, a cell phone page usually snags him.

Best of all, “they” — i.e., Jon — go way above and beyond the call of duty in service. Moving files? Installing software? Repairing a database? It doesn’t matter whose fault the problem is — if I’m in need, he takes care of me. And no doubt he’d do the same for anybody else. Writing this review — without even a paid referral program (sigh) — is really the first favor I’ve ever done him.

If you play games of this sort, it’s surely obvious to you why you should care. But if you don’t, maybe you should be interested anyway. After all, Guild Wars is a graphics-intensive SaaS offering that easily supports 100,000 simultaneous users, while managing a gig or so of fat client even over dial-up speeds. Every user is a potential hacker, whether for fun or actual real-world cash profit, although we didn’t actually talk about security very much. And ArenaNet provides all this on a relatively shoestring budget; in particular, Guild Wars subscription fees are precisely $0.

Note: If you’re familiar with video RPGs but not MMORPGs, please just read on; the main salient difference is that in an MMORPG lots of people play at once. If you’re familiar with other MMORPGs but not Guild Wars, there’s one GW-specific design feature you should know of – Guild Wars is instanced. That is, a group of 1-24 players will get their own private copy of the game world. Any changes to the environment (e.g. player movement, monster-killing) are made only by them.

And if you’re not familiar with video RPGs at all, I suggest you stop working quite so hard and go play.

Here are some of the technical highlights I managed to glean in a brief half-hour conversation:

• The client doesn’t do much except graphical presentation and input preparation (including encryption). This is a deliberate security choice. They assume the game client is infinitely hackable, and hence limit its power to sending a small number of well-defined messages.

• Their servers run on blades – originally all IBM, now more varied. Generally these are 2.8 gigahertz dual-processor Xeon IBM blades with 2.5 gigs of RAM.

• There are a number of different categories of servers. These include: Authorization/log-in, game update download, actual gameplay, database cache, DBMS, several secondary game functions (e.g. guild membership, tournaments), and watchdogs overseeing the rest.

• Gameplay servers can support 2500-3500 users each, with the main limitation being addressable memory. (They run on 32-bit Microsoft Windows.) 3500 users is a bit uncomfortable. This matches well against the fact that character records are several 10s of kilobytes, for reasons I explain in this companion post on Guild Wars data management.

• There are 4 ½ million total lines of code.

• Their connectivity design goal is .0045 megabits/sec/user, and they’re close to achieving it. Dial-up is a fairly realistic way to play. (That said, as a player I can tell you it creates some lags that make a dial-up user less than idea to be partnered with.)

• Reliability is not just a nice thing for users, but an actual game integrity concern. There are possible exploits in MMORPGs that involve deliberately crashing a server when a goods-trade transaction is partway through. ArenaNet fights this both by focusing on transaction integrity (but not in the way you may think; I refer you again to the database-focused companion post) and by generally trying to make their database cache servers extremely reliable. Database cache servers typically stay up 150-200+ days at a time.

*Note: There is a high level of motivation for cheating in MMORPGs. One of the biggest is that professionals in low-wage but well-wired countries acquire fictional gold, so that they can sell it for real money. Gold sellers are a huge concern to ArenaNet.

That’s just some of what I heard. For more on the technology of Guild Wars, please see my companion post on the database technology of Guild Wars and Guild Wars game notes. This interview is also just one of several I plan with game and virtual world companies, so I hope to in the future address other kinds of issues, such as rules and AI.

*Uh, Matt, can you do anything about increasing the 150 capacity limit of the Akismet spam quarantine? I run over it all the time, often in less than 24 hours.

Suppose it were still the case that spammers could get search engine ranking boosts from blog comment spam. Don’t you think they would be motivated to craft subject-specific comments that are very hard to distinguish from the real things? Search engine ranking algorithms are taking ever more accounting of the topics of pages that link to sites, the topics of the pages that link to THOSE pages, the topic of the text around the link, and so on. Few forms of search engine optimization are more valuable than “good” links. A comment that stayed up on a popular and topic-relevant blog would be of high SEO value — think $25-$250 in perceived value as a super-rough estimate — and great efforts would be devoted to getting them. The whole blogosphere might be corrupted in the process.

Blog software’s adoption of the NoFollow tag is a VERY good thing.

Now, maybe Second Life has a very small number of active members, almost all of whom average many hours online per day. In that case, Carr’s comparison may have some validity, especially when we also consider the power expended by client PCs.

Then again, maybe he’s off by, say, an order of magnitude. Given that he cited 10-15,000 concurrent users half a year after Linden Labs was reported to have 250,000 or so registered users, I’d make that more than a “maybe.” What’s more, while his point is cute, even if accurate it wouldn’t prove much, since Second Life is a notorious processing power hog anyway.

The contents of your online communications, as well as other information about you as an AOL Network user, may be accessed and disclosed in response to legal process (for example, a court order, search warrant or subpoena); in other circumstances in which AOL believes the AOL Network is being used in the commission of a crime; when we have a good faith belief that there is an emergency that poses a threat to the safety of you or another person; or when necessary either to protect the rights or property of AOL, the AOL Network or its affiliated providers, or for us to render the service you have requested.

We consider your use of the Service, including the content of your communications, to be private. We do not routinely monitor your communications or disclose information about your communications to anyone. However, we may monitor your communications and disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, if we consider it necessary to: (1) comply with the law or to respond to legal process; (2) ensure your compliance with this contract; or (3) protect the rights, property, or interests of Microsoft, its employees, its customers, or the public.

EDIT: I can’t find anything at all about content privacy on the Yahoo! Messenger privacy page.