wooba.com - for your clicky finger

Hey, it’s owned by eBay, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Ya know, besides maybe some banks, what other site besides eBay and Paypal (well, maybe Netflix) actually take the WHOLE site down EVERY week for 2-4 hours for maintenance? I really don’t think any site should ever be down, ever. Hey, at wooba, we’re never down, are we Mike?

You would think for a site as important and such a big moneymaker as Paypal would know how to upgrade their systems without screwing things up. Backup, people, backup. If your upgrade doesn’t work for five consecutive days, go back to where the system was last stable (of course, update all the transactions since the upgrade) and let your users use your service. They do about $48.8 million a day in transactions (according to 2004 2nd Qtr stats), and if they take their 2.9% cut on each of those transactions (yes, I know there’s still some ways around Paypal fees but I’m just doing these numbers for fun), that’s a loss of about $1.4 million a day. And yet, somehow I don’t know if they really pay their programmers that much a year combined. Oops…
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Despite furious repair efforts, intermittent service outages at the online payment service PayPal continued Tuesday for the fifth consecutive day, affecting payments, log-ins and account creations.

The technical glitch plaguing the eBay Inc.-owned company has affected an untold number of users, making it hard for some online sellers to complete deals, according to the eBay Web site.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/10/12/paypal.outage.ap/

Ugh, I got so sick of getting AIM System Messages (mainly from my DSL cutting out, forcing me to get another IP) that I actually went out and Googled it trying to find a solution. And wowie, there are tons of other people just as annoyed by it as me. Trillian really should have a simple solution so that you can block system messages from ever reaching you, but I guess they won’t for whatever reason.

The solution seems to be to install Spam Challenge, a plugin for Trillian that does a little check to make sure it’s a human talking to you and not just a random spammer. AIM System Message can’t pass it and so now you won’t ever get their damn message (AOL System Msg: Your screen name (*****) is now signed into AOL Instant Messenger™ in 2 locations. Click (Link: http://www.aim.com/password/routing.adp)here for more information.) ever again. Below is a link to some Russian site with Spam Challenge 1.2, for all you people that don’t have a registered version of Trillian Pro, you can’t get the latest plugin at the Trillian site without a valid license.

AIM System Message Annoyance Thread

Download Trillian Plugins

Well, dang, so you can’t name your kid @ in China all because the authorities there say that it doesn’t translate to anything. Last I checked, there is a translation of the word at in Chinese, or at least there’s some Chinese words that sound like at. Just sucks for the kid, or maybe he’s saved from a lifetime of ridicule. But it got me thinking, hey, I don’t quite like ‘At’ Wu, but what about naming my firstborn $? $ Wu… Or better yet, maybe his middle name could be 4, not ‘four’ but 4. $ 4 Wu. Short and sweet, I’m sure it’ll get over good at the DMW. Bling bling, out…
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A man in central China has been refused permission to name his son @ because it cannot be translated into Mandarin – as the law demands.

According to the Beijing Morning Post, the nomenclative dissident from Zhengzhou argued that the symbol is in common use on keyboards and therefore fair game. Mercifully for the infant in question, his dad does not live in the kind of fully-fledged democracy where parents can name their children after pretty well anything they want – including software upgrades.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/no_at_for_chinese/