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Stefan Didak

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You are here: Home / Personal / Rant

Berkeley City Council – Too afraid to have their lies corrected on the record!

September 12, 2014 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
berkeley-city-hell

We went to the Berkeley City Council meeting on September 9th (the day after we got home from Ontario, CA. where we were to attend some meetings and ECC) to set the record straight after the city council and our opponents (the body parts people such as the American Lung Association, American Heart Association, Tobacco Free Kids, etc. and the various other tobacco control groups) had done a hostile and violent bashing job on electronic cigarettes and vapor products at their previous meeting on the same topic on July the 8th. At the time only two people were present to oppose the ordinance. We had no reasonable expectation to “win” (in short; “because it’s Berkeley”) but needed to address it regardless. For about a month I put out the word and request to join us at the next council meeting, in various places including several specific to vapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had not expected a huge turn out but what we got was beyond disappointing. But let me get into that a little later in this report and start off with out strategy and what transpired.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Personal, Rant, Very Lengthy Tagged With: Ban, Berkeley, California, City Council, Electronic Cigarettes, Gordon Wozniak, Ignorance, Maxwell Anderson, Ordinance, Politics, Prohibition, Vapers, Vaping

Ignorance and laziness prevails in Oakley, CA over electronic cigarettes

February 9, 2014 by Stefan Didak 3 Comments
itaste

Mr. Galstan, could you please list and describe the “known carcinogens” present in electronic cigarettes (or the e-Juice used in such)? The American Lung Association has repeatedly failed to do so, so why are you parroting them? Do you have any clue at all what is generally used in electronic cigarettes (or e-Juice)? I do. Many others do as well. And none of them are carcinogens. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that nicotine itself is not known nor has it ever been listed as a known carcinogen. If you are going to be a mouthpiece of an organization that has direct financial interests that are at total odds of people giving up smoking (after all, the association would no longer have a source of funding nor would they be able to pressure companies into handing them money for their “programs” which as a lot of us see it is not too different from mobster like extortion) then please be ready to back up your statements and claims with actual facts and substantiate them. Perhaps you may need to inquire at the American Lung Association so they can provide you with a canned statement that will, as per usual, not really answer the question.

Filed Under: Personal, Rant, Very Lengthy Tagged With: California, CASAA, City Council, e-cigs, e-juice, Electronic Cigarettes, Oakley, Ordinance, Smoking, Wendy Escamilla, William Galstan

Dreamhost compromised by hackers AGAIN!

June 21, 2013 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
dreamhost-problems, compromised by hackers once again

n other words, the people who configured the Dreamhost network were a bunch of incompetent fools that didn’t know what they were doing. And I believe most of Dreamhost is still in the same frame of expertise these days. Instead of resolving an external MX record they used local DNS (cached perhaps, I don’t know, but certainly fully internal in a way it should have NEVER BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE) and mail would go to any domain that was perceived to be local whether it was TRUE OR NOT. I outlined everything in detail, my findings, my repeated tests, and the full proof in the e-mail to them (because they couldn’t be bothered to take a call for which I offered to pay myself) and the response I got was that they COULD NOT FIX IT. In fact, let me just dig this up for the record because Dreamhost deserves some public shaming for this. “Jeff” responded back to me on January 5th 2007 saying…

Filed Under: Personal, Rant, Very Lengthy Tagged With: Dreamhost, Email, Hackers, Hacking, Infection, Malware, Problems, WordPress

My “real developer” presentation at the East Bay WordPress Meetup

June 16, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
A real developer

I’m pleased to announced that I’ve recently acquired the domain for arealdeveloper.com. Details on its content and my future plans for that domain will be revealed later. Possibly quite a bit later. I’ve always thought it was a great domain name so you have no idea how happy I am that I’ve now got it. Most of you KNOW that I am NOT a “web developer”. I am, however, setting up a large scale SaaS project that happens to be web-based (what a surprise!). I frequently encounter people who say they are web developers and yet have never heard of basic things like XDebug, Profiling with XHProf, SASS, LESS, versioning, virtualization and local development servers, etc. So what happens when “arealdeveloper” enters the world of web development? You start looking for the right tools, buying the right hardware and software, invest some time in learning how to make best use of them, and before you know it you’re doing a presentation at the Easy Bay WordPress Meetup in Oakland, CA about developer tools. You can download the 69 slide presentation here.

Filed Under: Apple Software, Rant, Software Development, The Web, Windows Software Tagged With: Development, Easy Bay, PHP, Presentation, Slides, Tools, Web, WordPress

The DEATH of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry

March 2, 2013 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
The Death of the VFX industry

Over the past many years, going back at least as far as the past decade, I have been hearing and seeing the hurt and imminent death throes of the VFX (visual effects) industry and its many great artists that made it the industry that it has become over the past several decades. Even thought I have not been an actual “artist” (if I ever was one, since I considered myself always more of a “crazy scientist developer annex artist”, which most of us were back in the founding days before there even WAS a VFX “industry” to speak of) in this field since the very late 80’s, or early 90’s at best, I have most certainly not failed to noticed the direction things have been heading in for a very long time. And I am sad to say that many of the things I saw coming have been coming to a pass in a very rapid pace the past 2 to 3 years. It does appear, however, things are in an even more hyper-accelerated way the past year.

Filed Under: Lengthy, Rant Tagged With: 3D Animation, Computer Graphics, Hollywood, Visual Effects

A serious bloggable delay, powering down!

July 25, 2011 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
KLM

No matter how well you plan something and how much detail you put into it, there are always things that can throw things off. While most of the detail planning of the new office is still valid, the general timing is going to be way off thanks to an unforeseen relocation to a new location. A new location that at the time of writing has not been found yet, I should add. Recent discoveries about our place in California has left us no other option than to find a more suitable location. I’ll spare you all the details regarding the sub-standard piss-poor third-world electrical wiring. Instead, let me just tell you there’s no way in seven hells I’d consider hooking up a ton of expensive computer equipment to the electrical network as it is. And the required overhaul is not what I would ever consider spending on a rental. We had several electricians check things out and provide quotes for the kind of overhaul required to bring the place up to snuff.

Filed Under: Home Office, Personal, Rant Tagged With: California, El Cerrito, Electrical, Electricity, Fire Hazard, Fuses, Inspection, Panel, Third World, Wiring

Do not host with WorldStream! Thanks BREIN!

February 22, 2011 by Stefan Didak Leave a Comment
Stefan Didak Home Office Version 5

That, dear WorldStream, is what got you knocked off my shortlist. You have shown that you can’t be trusted to host anything, much less the important corporate data and development systems I might have otherwise chosen you to host for me. Needless to say, I am recommending to everyone else not to use this company for any hosting activities because it should be clear that your data and continuation of business might be at risk if a company is this negligent about its responsibilities towards its customers. Oh, and BREIN, thank you for breaking the law and showing yourself as ordinary criminals. If you had not done so I would have potentially picked StreamWorld as my new host.

Filed Under: Personal, Rant, The Web Tagged With: Dedicated, Hosting, Internet, Servers, WorldStream

Adaptive Infinity trying to intimidate a blogger over a comment?

September 4, 2010 by Stefan Didak 1 Comment
Outrage!

I just learned that John P. (you know, the founder of HTMLHelp.com and a person instrumental to the early development of HTML and CSS) has received a rather intimidating letter from Adaptive Infinity in which they are threatening John with a legal suit over a comment that someone left on his blog while at the same time showing a different, less threatening face, on John’s blog by leaving the following comments. Clearly using his blog for their own PR and marketing purposes and perhaps as a means to perform some kind of amateurish corporate damage control.

Filed Under: Rant, The Web Tagged With: Blogging, Comments, Corporate, Criticism, Legal, Threats, Website

Reddit’ing My Site can CRASH Servers at Dreamhost

August 6, 2008 by Stefan Didak 5 Comments
Web Server

I’m contemplating whether to find myself a host that doesn’t buckle under the pressure (of what I don’t believe to be excessive traffic) and would be able to cap the requests-per-second instead of just DISABLING AN ENTIRE SITE! Since this is just my personal site I’m not too concerned right this minute but I would have to conclude that hosting a website for your BUSINESS at Dreamhost is probably a VERY BAD idea. I’m open to suggestions for reliable hosting companies that do not have to resort to disabling entire sites when there are a mere 14.800 visitors in the span of 8 hours!

Filed Under: Personal, Rant, The Web Tagged With: Bandwidth, Home Office, Hosting, Images, Pictures, Server, Traffic, Visitors, Website

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